George Carlin - F D Roosevelt - H G Wells - George W Bush - Noam Chomsky - Hank Johnson - Barack Obama - Michael Moore - Benefits: Too Fat to Work TV - My Big Benefits Family TV - Benefits: 19 Kids & Counting TV - Dispatches TV - Alan Bleasdale TV - Panorama TV - Social Housing, Social Cleansing TV - I, Daniel Blake 2016 - Tonight TV - Panorama TV - Universal Credit: Inside the Welfare State TV - Bevan Boy -
Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that ... They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that. Do you know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your social security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And do you know something – they’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ’cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club. And you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the big club! By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe ... what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people ... continue – and these are people of modest means – who continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all. George Carlin, Who Really Controls America
This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens. F D Roosevelt
The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry. H G Wells, Love and Mr Lewisham, 1900
They want the federal program controlling Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program. George W Bush 2nd November 2000
The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it’s a major problem, that’s just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it. Noam Chomsky
Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat. Noam Chomsky
Defund social security. Then it’ll be in trouble. Then we’ll have to privatize it – that’s a huge bonanza for Wall Street. Noam Chomsky, lecture University of Tennessee 25th January 2011
Why is there such an intense effort – and it’s really fanatic if you look at it – to destroy social security and public education? They work pretty well … It’s of no value to rich people. Noam Chomsky, lecture Oregon 20 April 2011, ‘Global Hegemony: The Facts, The Images’
Social security and public education are based on an extremely dangerous principle: namely, that you care about other people. ibid.
Social Security is not just another government spending program. It is a promise from generation to generation. Hank Johnson
We will keep the promise of Social Security by taking the responsible steps to strengthen it – not by turning it over to Wall Street. Barack Obama
If we didn’t have Social Security, our seniors would live mostly in poverty. You’d have another 18 million people in poverty. Michael Moore
It’s not my fault that I’m like this. Benefits: Too Fat to Work, young man, Channel 5 2015
I did work so why not? ibid. fattie
They get around two grand a month in handouts. ibid. commentary
All the rats need feeding. ibid. 41-year-old Rachael
Rachael believes the bypass is the only option to get her weight down. ibid.
Benefits wedding. ibid.
Super-size disability benefits. ibid.
She hasn’t had a job for more than twenty years. ibid.
Meet the Kerrigans. Three generations of a family who all live within a stone’s throw of each other. They’ve got strong opinions. They say it how it is. And they don’t care what anyone thinks. My Big Benefits Family, Channel 5 2015
The family that claims together stays together. ibid.
Meet the mums who are bringing up babies on the dole. Benefits: 19 Kids and Counting, Channel 5 2017
The government is cracking down on benefit claims – one and a half million payments are being affected. Ministers say it’s tough love. But others say it’s tough luck. Dispatches: Britain’s Benefits Crackdown, Channel 4 2015
Supporters of sanctions say they make welfare fairer. So who benefits from Britain’s benefits crackdown? ibid.
Over twelve months more than half a million people were sanctioned. ibid.
The DWP has investigated forty-nine deaths. ibid.
‘This is our contract with the British people – to bring an end to the something for nothing culture.’ ibid. Ian Duncan Smith
Two and a half million people are on disability benefit. It costs us £13 billion a year. Now Channel 4 Dispatches has uncovered evidence that a tough regime of tests is secretly trying to push almost 90% of these claimants off the sick to look for work. Dispatches: Britain on the Sick, Channel 4 2012
The head of the mental health charity MIND stepped down from the official scrutiny panel calling the system inhumane. ibid.
It was Labour who first hired Atos. ibid.
Even losing a whole arm is not considered enough to quality for significant disability points. ibid.
The Atos assessors have targets for the number of people taken off benefits. ibid.
How much is too much? We meet the families hit by the new cap on their benefits … Who will really end up paying? Dispatches: Britain’s Benefits Families, Channel 4 2017
Nobody on the dole counts, friend. Alan Bleasdale, Boys from the Black Stuff: Jobs For the ***** Dixie Dean to benefits officer, BBC 1982
They’re after me. The whatsits. The dole. Boys from the Black Stuff: Moonlighter, wife of Dixie to friend
You are shite. You are nothing. You’re the dregs dragged here off the dole. ibid. thief to Dixie
A woman who has recently become aware of the massive and total futility of her life. Boys from the Blackstuff: Shop thy Neighbour, social security boss to officer
Mr Hughes, we’re from the social services. Alan Bleasdale, Boys from the Blackstuff: Yosser’s Story, SS bloke
Don’t come back unless you bring an army. ibid. Yosser to social services
It’s a tough new government policy for the unemployed: get a job or we’ll cut your benefits. The government says life shouldn’t be easy on state handouts. Thousands of families have had their housing benefit cut to fifty pence a week. Parents who’ve not worked for years are having their lives turned upside down. So can the benefit cap force people back to work? Panorama: The Benefits Cap: Is it Working? BBC 2017
The benefit cap is changing lives but is it working? ibid.
More than 67,000 households have been capped so far. Of those 11% have had their housing benefit cut to fifty pence a week. ibid.