Osborne's 'sleight of hand' is imposing benefit cuts on those who are not able to work. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA
A tabloid recently proclaimed on its front page that 75% of people in receipt of incapacity benefits have failed a medical designed to weed out scroungers. They omitted to mention, no doubt due to a shortage of space, that this is because the new and supremely insensitive medical test is almost impossible to pass fully. Without my welfare rights adviser's good offices on my behalf I wouldn't be among the 5% of claimants who are in the protected "support group" of employment support allowance. Those who are instead placed in the "work-related activity group" will now, if they are on the "contributory element" of the benefit, be moved to jobseeker's allowance (with no specialised assistance and less money, not to mention no available jobs) after one year.
Without my adviser's time and expertise, I wouldn't be getting the rehabilitation I so desperately need. I hear that the already ruthless medicals are set to get even harder early next year. I have been summoned by my GP to help him fill in a form about my ability to work, or not. This alarms me. Why are the Department for Work and Pensions writing to him when my adviser has told them that I cannot walk, talk properly, have poor motor skills (typing this takes hours for example) as a result of a serious acquired brain injury? All his good offices on my behalf are suddenly in jeopardy thanks to George Osborne's convincing impersonation of Freddy Krueger.
Osborne recently revealed his plans to cut the welfare budget, currently at £192bn. In announcing this, to backbench cheers, he also revealed that if he hadn't been the chancellor, he could have had a career as a magician, inasmuch as he gets us to focus on one hand while the other is doing the work. In Osborne's case he allows the public to think that the lion's share of the welfare budget is taken up with benefits and the like whereas in fact the lion's share, more than 50%, goes on state pensions and benefits to pensioners, the rest being divided up between housing benefit, child benefit and working tax credit and very little – in comparison to the overall welfare budget – is actually being spent on disability and "out of work" benefits.
All this, if its impact on me weren't so serious would put me in mind of the quote after General Custer's defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn: "He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory". Because when Osborne says the country faces tough choices, I feel sure that I can't be the only one to notice the sophistry that underpins his words. Tough, certainly for those less well-off, the single parents, pensioners and the disabled. In short, anyone who was under the erroneous impression that the cradle to grave welfare system was a safety net will soon discover it is a noose.
But still, when the cabinet of millionaires says: "We're all in this together", for some reason, I think of the line from Animal Farm: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."
• Edward Lawrence, who writes under a pseudonym, is a disabled service user
Monday, 15 November 2010
Welfare reform: what choice is there for those forced off disability benefits? | Society | guardian.co.uk
AFP: Myanmar's Suu Kyi wants to use Twitter after release
Myanmar's Suu Kyi wants to use Twitter after release(AFP) – Oct 18, 2010
YANGON — Myanmar's detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi wants to start using Twitter when she is released from house arrest to communicate with people around the world, her lawyer said on Monday.
Suu Kyi, whose current term of house arrest is due to end next month, has been locked up in her lakeside home with no Internet access since 2003, long before the popular micro-blogging website was launched.
"Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has said to me that she wants to have a Twitter account to speak and discuss with the world's teenagers," her attorney Nyan Win said after visiting the Nobel Peace Prize winner. "Daw" is a term of respect in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
"She said she wanted to talk with youths as she wanted to know their opinions regarding political, economic and social issues. She said she can be in touch with them every day if she has this account."
Suu Kyi is due to be released on November 13, just days after the military-ruled country holds its first election in 20 years, although some fear the generals may find an excuse to keep her locked up.
The pro-democracy icon's party won the last election in 1990 but was never allowed to take power, and several periods of confinement mean she has spent most of the past two decades in detention.
Myanmar's Supreme Court held a hearing Monday on Suu Kyi's latest appeal against her house arrest, but did not announce a decision on whether they would agree to consider the application.
"We have to wait about two weeks for the judgement," said Nyan Win. "We are satisfied with our arguments. We're hoping they will accept the case."
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party has been dissolved by the authorities because it chose to boycott the November 7 vote, saying the rules were unfair.
Myanmar has been ruled by the military since 1962 and critics say the poll is a charade aimed at putting a veneer of legitimacy over the junta's rule.
Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
Shambhala SunSpace » Aung San Suu Kyi is free — but what happens now
by Hozan Alan Senauke
“Whatever they do to me, that’s between them and me; I can take it. What’s more important is what they are doing to the country.”— Aung San Suu Kyi, 1994
The images of Aung San Suu Kyi greeting thousands of supporters at the gates of her Rangoon compound bring me to tears. It is a great joy to see her smile and talk, wearing a beautiful flower in her hair and looking fit for the next moment of her life which is completely entwined with the future of Burma.
I know that thousands, millions of people in Burma and around the world have the same response. She has been confined to her ramshackle home under house arrest for the previous seven years and for fifteen of last twenty-one years total, with no opportunity to see her children, and little chance for engagement with society. Daw Suu has been, in one sense, an icon. But she is a living, breathing icon who will never allow herself to be an object. Aung San Suu Kyi has work to do.
For now it appears that her release is unconditional. Certainly that is Daw Suu’s firm determination. Burma’s SPDC junta and the new “government,” selected just days ago in a bogus election universally condemned by international advisers and governments around the world, may have very different intentions and conditions for her. Nonetheless, we pause to celebrate and shed tears of grief mingled with joy. Aung San Suu Kyi’s release creates a new opening for change — a gap in the apparently seamless wall of oppression through which freedom can emerge.
It is up to our worldwide community of conscience, hand in hand with Burma’s democracy activists, to use this opportunity and Daw Suu’s political skills to best advantage. There are still more than 2200 political prisoners in facing torture and long years in Burma’s prisons, including student leader Min Ko Naing, labor rights activist Su Su Nway, Saffron Revolution leader U Gambira, comedian/social critic Zargana, and many, many others. Among these political prisoners we have identified nearly 250 monks and nuns. We demand their immediate release.
There must be an honest and irreversible process of dialogue involving Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy, all the embattled ethnic groups, and the junta itself towards a clear goal of democracy and national reconciliation. Anything short of such deliberations is simply the continuation of the junta’s business as usual — the business of theft, fraud, impoverishment, and systematic violence. We cannot allow these policies to shadow the lives of our Burmese sisters and brothers.
Twenty-five hundred years ago Shakyamuni Buddha included these verses in the “Metta Sutta.”
Let no one deceive another
nor despise anyone anywhere.
Neither in anger nor hatred
should anyone wish harm to another.
Even as a mother would risk her own life
to protect her only child,
just so one should cultivate a boundless heart
towards all living beings.These are verses, too, that Burma’s Saffron Revolution monks chanted when they took to the streets in September of 2007. Twenty-five hundred years after Buddha, three years after the monks’ doomed uprising, this teaching can still be our guide. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s way is the path of active nonviolence. Her purpose is to liberate her country and protect all beings, even the junta’s generals, from the folly and destruction of hatred. We can only pray that in her newly accomplished liberty she will succeed. And we must dedicate our own action and cooperation towards that noble end. Burma will be free!
Hozan Alan Senauke is founder of the Clear View Project and vice-abbot of Berkeley Zen Center. His latest book — The Bodhisattva’s Embrace: Dispatches From Engaged Buddhism’s Front Lines — is available from Clear View Press.
See also:
- US CAMPAIGN FOR BURMA for additional information about how you can help.
- Aung San Suu Kyi Freed (November 13, 2010)
- All eyes on Burma! Is Aung San Suu Kyi’s release nearing? (Featuring links to get you caught up) (November 12, 2010)
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Times Topics: Jim Dwyer
New York City is now entering its 10th year of pouring tens of millions of dollars into arresting people for the lowest-level misdemeanor marijuana cases.
But the SoHo bouncers and the Chelsea graphic artist don’t have much to worry about, at least from the police: they are white. Even though surveys show they are part of the demographic group that makes the heaviest use of pot, white people in New York are the least likely to be arrested for it.
Last year, black New Yorkers were seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession and no more serious crime. Latinos were four times more likely.
In 2001, during his first campaign for mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg was asked by New York magazine if he had ever used marijuana. “You bet I did,” he replied. “And I enjoyed it.”
Like most white New Yorkers, he stood almost no chance of being locked up for his pot use, then being handcuffed, fingerprinted and spending a night in Central Booking.
Mr. Bloomberg may have been the first major city candidate to acknowledge using pot, but as mayor he has led a sweeping expansion of arrests, according to a recent study by Harry G. Levine, a sociology professor at Queens College.
During Mr. Bloomberg’s first two terms in office, the lowest-level marijuana arrests were up, on average, by 50 percent over when his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, was in office. Last year, Professor Levine said, the city made 40,300 such arrests — about 12 percent of arrests for all crimes. Of these, 87 percent were of blacks or Latinos.
In 2008, the police made more pot arrests “than in the 12 years of Mayor Koch, plus the four years of Mayor Dinkins, plus the first two years of Mayor Giuliani,” Mr. Levine wrote. “In other words, in one year, 2008, Bloomberg made more pot arrests than in 18 years of Koch, Dinkins and Giuliani combined.”
The mayor’s office said on Tuesday that it could not estimate the cost of such arrests. Mr. Levine, drawing on studies done in other cities, estimated that they could range from $53 million to $88 million annually.
WHATEVER the precise costs, are all these marijuana arrests — wildly disproportionate in their racial impact, and consuming the energy of thousands of police officers, the courts, prosecutors and defense lawyers — truly helping the city?
Mr. Bloomberg’s chief criminal justice aide, John Feinblatt, declined to discuss the city’s approach to marijuana arrests, or the findings of the study. But through a spokesman, he issued a statement maintaining the pot arrests have helped drive down violent crime.
“Marijuana arrests — which rarely lead to jail — are concentrated in neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of violent crime because that’s where the police focus their attention in order to reduce victimization,” Mr. Feinblatt said. “This continued focus on low-level offending has been part of the city’s effective crime-reduction strategy, which has resulted in a 35 percent decrease in crime since 2001."
In effect, Mr. Feinblatt was arguing a variation on the “broken-windows” theory of crime-fighting — that cracking down on symptoms of public disorder helps head off more serious problems.
Mr. Levine argues that such arrests drain resources needed for dealing with serious threats.
The possession of less than an ounce of marijuana was decriminalized by the State Legislature in 1977, reduced to a violation, the equivalent of a traffic ticket. “Burning” it or having it “open to public view” is a misdemeanor.
The handful of white pot smokers who do get arrested can be found in court on Mondays and Tuesdays, when they must answer tickets typically issued for smoking pot in a park. The rest of the week is taken up with blacks and Latinos, who are more likely to have spent a night in jail before court, said Edward McCarthy, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society.
“Some of the police officers, who are at the start of their careers, are apologetic when they make these arrests,” Mr. McCarthy said. “They say, ‘if my lieutenant or sergeant weren’t here, I’d let you go.’ ”
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
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