MONETISING POVERTY

"Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X"
by Francis Bacon 1953

Someone posted a link to an article entitled: "Charities delivering DWP’s work programme 'must promise not to attack McVey'" and asked me what I thought. Ref: https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/charities-delivering-dwps-work-programme-must-promise-not-to-attack-mcvey/

Our culture is perverted - in the sense of it being turned from its natural course.  Words are changing meaning and concepts are being transmogrified.  I read a blog the other day which said "Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party should be sanctioned."  The writer appears relatively young and I guess not well read.  For me, I had to re-read it, disentangle it, and finally assess what they most likely meant it to mean.  Of course sanctioning something is to give it official legitimacy but the 'officials' have perverted the word by using it to 'sanction' their own otherwise illegitimate breach of contracts.  The word has now become synonymous with punish.  Punish is a word that simply legitimises (or sanctions) torture.

In the case of charities I don't know for how long they have been an abusive corruption of the concept of 'charity' but I suspect for thousands of years.  Recently, in the last 20 years or so, they seem to have been used quite deliberately by governments and corporations as a form of manipulation and control.

In February of last year I contacted National Debtline via their web chat:
Me: "Here's a question that I would like an answer to: As a charity, where do you get your funding. I'll pre-empt you with a guess; You get it largely from corporations and government. If I am right do you consider there may be a "conflict of interest?"
Him: "We are funded by Government and various banks and fuel companies, we can assure you that our advice is free and independent and we will always look to give you the best advice that suits your needs."
Me: "Hmm. That was predictable. I will apologise in advance if I seem a little unfriendly but I am very cynical and have spent many years seeking help in what I feel is a collapsing culture. And thank you for your frank answer regarding funding. People sometimes try to hide the underbelly of their operations."
Him: "There would be no reason for us to hide this."

I suspect he believed what he said but there is a conflict of interest and the problem with 'conflict of interest' is it's not always conscious or obvious.  It is paradigm orientated.  So the way they think of "debt" (like "sanctions" and "punishment") means something quite different to them than it might to me and yet we will appear to be speaking the same language.

I attempted to get some help from the Citizens Advice Bureau regarding rent and Council Tax some time back and I did point out that they seemed to have a conflict of interest since they are now a registered charity and get the majority of funding from the Council.  They clearly had no idea what I was talking about.  They, of course, couldn't help me because they are largely a triage operation who points people to other charities.  They pointed me to P3 (a charity helping the community or something) and I researched their funding which was primarily the Council.  But I continued along this path and the guy that came regularly to 'help' was only helping me find my way through their (the Council's) labyrinthine, bureaucratic, form filling exercises.  In other words he was helping the Council smooth out the path to whatever demonic realms lie beneath these perverted institutionalised mechanisms.  Genuine help may have included researching, and/or having knowledge about, the actual legality of Council Tax or special sub clauses that allow me to claim all my rent from the Council and/or have all my past 'debt' to the Council from unpaid Council Tax wiped from the record.  But these things were both beyond his capabilities and way outside his sphere of understanding.  He, of course, was eking a meagre living below the minimum wage and probably based on 'expenses' by doing this task which should be the responsible and professional operation of the Council.  Eventually, since I felt I was only being 'helped' to jump through the hoops of the bureaucratic circus ring for their ends and at my expense I wrote them a two page letter explaining how their conflict of interest was doing me more harm than good and pointed out that the help they offered was not the help they delivered and so they had declined to help me.  That will have been tidily filed away to no consequence and the world carries on.

When Mike, my nephew, attempted to take his own life in March last year because of the malicious nature of the DWP and their subcontracted private operators like Atos and Maximus I contacted Sue Marsh.  Sue Marsh was a protagonist in a group fighting the government over their devastating disability program and who produced the Spartacus Report which momentarily hit the headlines.  At some point she was offered a well paid job by Maximus as their Head of Customer Relations and took it.  This is a complex issue and pretty well all her thousands of supporters called her a Judas and decried her for working for the other side.  I entirely understand their perspective.  I made my position and views very clear to her and suggested I wanted to discuss these convoluted mechanism and how they work and the effective role they play in society - but most of all I wanted help for Mike.  Within less than 24 hours his benefits had been reinstated and he has since moved away and, as far as I can tell, is at least in a financially secure situation.  Sue did not take up my invitation to discuss these matters and I understand that too.  The reason I mention this is to close the gap between how charities are working within the greater construct of governments which are essentially subservient arms of the global corporations and how this extends all the way through the system to corporations actively ameliorating the harm they do.  This is, in some sense, the Neoliberal perception in the extreme.  Sue Marsh has been enrolled in a 'charitable' function within the combine harvester of the corporation to assist in reducing the attention grabbing screams of the children they slaughter.

I suspect it is impossible to do charitable work in any other way than a one to one activity nowadays.  If you acquire funds to operate a charity then you have to declare it and register as a charity.  As soon as you do that you become embroiled in the tangled web of the bureaucratic governmental establishment.  And there lies the inevitability of corruption.  They do not administer their hierarchical control at a loss - they couldn't.  And so not only does much of the money one acquires end up in the hands of the establishment, but one now has an inbuilt conflict of interest.  You might recall that the government introduced the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act in 2014 motivated by the desire to silenced the likes of the Trussell Trust and Oxfam regarding the massive increase in food banks in the UK in anticipation of the 2015 General Election.  Then there was the Anti-Advocacy Clause proposed for 2016 which I cannot establish whether it was enacted or transformed and disguised as something else but clearly a contentious piece of proposed legislation.  Now this latest obfuscated attempt to control and constrain charities into contractual straitjackets for the purposes of subcontracting what should be governmental activities in the first place.

It is far too complex and convoluted to attempt to clarify or comprehend without extensive, and probably impractical, research.  But the Government takes taxes to perform functions which it fails to perform and then manages and controls 'non-profit' (and that is virtually meaningless) 'charities', who collect more money from the public, to perform the functions for which they originally taxed the public.  To add to the complexity of this demonic fabrication the government doesn't actually 'collect' taxes it simply prints more money.  The national debt is essentially a record of the money printed and, as such, is not a 'debt' at all.

Charity is a laudable concept but organised charities are an abuse of people's good will and desire to help.  Governments manufacture poverty as a commodity they can monetise via charities they control.