Blog
8.13.2010 | 2 Comments
24.11.11 Again a report on ‘care’ for the vulnerable and elderly.
Basic care for the elderly in their own homes in England is so bad it breaches human rights at times, an inquiry says. The home care review by the Equality and Human Rights Commission highlights cases of physical abuse, theft, neglect and disregard for privacy and dignity in home care. May I repeat: the whole system is rotten, it is about abuse and, not least it is about severe exploitation. I have spent months trying to get my insiders complaints http://www.larsgpetersson.com/care-homes/ investigated. There is no interest. As a (former) nurse I know the care home industry in detail. I thought work conditions for care assistants couldn’t get worse. Recently I discovered I was wrong. I discovered that carers in the council sponsored (but privately run) home care are even worse off: An example is this man. He is paid minimum wage, but in reality his work day and earning look like this: his first client is at 8 am. He is there for 45 minutes. Then he has another visit at 11 am, one at around 3 pm and the final at 6pm back at the first client. This man is worse off than his female colleagues, as the agency only let him attend male clients. His female colleagues have work inbetween as well. But this man lives one hour busride from the area he cover. He has nowhere to go inbetween the visits, but is forced to do windowshopping. And, he is only paid (minimumwage) when he is actually with the client , not inbetween. Transport time between the clients are in the carers own time, not paid. This means that even for his better off female colleagues, they do not in any way reach minimumwage for the time they actually spend at work. Please calculate yourself on the example given and reflect upon your chances of making a living on that….. This is reality! These are the people who are blamed for neglect. It is not those who are really responsible.
24.5.2011 This is about a soldier who has left after 12 years in the German forces. For now, leave all that aside or read http://www.larsgpetersson.com/military-abuse/ about the sexual abuse these people are exposed to. But now he has applied to become a police officer. In his early thirties this man tells a story about standing stark naked in front of another woman doctor again pulling back his foreskin……. Sorry, I am completely fed up with all this. It is unbelievable how state santioned sexual abuse of people can be allowed to go on like this without anybody but a few ringing the alarm bell (that seems to be heard by nobody). What a world of sexual predators am I living in?
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12.5.2011 What a shame on Germany. Utterly disgusting. For years this state protected former high profile Nazis who, like Judge Filbinger, thrived in high government positions while dishonouring and smearing the memory of around 50 000 (25 000 of them executed) deserters and war resisters http://www.larsgpetersson.com/deserters/ . If they were ever lucky enough to survive the war these people lived and died in a post war Germany that saw them all as despicable traitors. Today this state (that bears the responsibility for the two major disastrous, murderous wars in the last century, including the holocaust) has the audacity to blame and sentence the (alleged) former death camp guard Demjanjuk (91) for accessory to mass murder of 28,060 people – all this without any evidence he committed a specific crime, apart from being there. Remember, even an Israeli court once freed this man, stating he was ‘the victim of mistaken identity’.
This Ukrainian man had been conscripted into the Soviet army to fight German aggression, he had been a PoW under brutal conditions (hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers – privates of course, the officers were treated differently – were left to freeze or starve to death).
As the defence attorney Ulrich Busch told the court: even if Demjanjuk did become a prison guard, he did so only because as a prisoner of war he would have either been shot by the Nazis or died of starvation.
I have no comment on whether Demjanuk was a guard or not. My comment is that it is disgusting to go for a (conscripted) man like him when all but a handful of the real Nazis and collaborators were ever taken to court. After all, Hitler and his gang were even elected into office. As long as it all went ‘well’ they were in fact quite popular…
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26.04.2011 Former President Carter travels to North Korea accompanied by former Irish President and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson I read in the newspaper this morning. I admire them both, and therefore it hurts even more when Ms Robinson is quoted saying “We believe that it is very, very important to ensure that women and children and the elderly do not suffer because of a political situation”. I hope she was misquoted. However, if that was what she said then, according to her, all human beings with exeption for males age 18 – 60 ( I think that is the line a male needs to cross for again to be reconed as “innocent”) are to be protected from suffering - but these individuals, no matter their personal history, are not.
We have a picture in our front room showing Mary Robinson and my wife at an award cermony in the Dublin presidential palace – one awarding a Red Cross prize to the other for her contributions to humanity (I am sure all humans were included) in midst of a brutal war in Somalia. I am proud of that picture. Therefore I hope: maybe Ms Robinson’s alleged comment was just a mistake, the usual misconception that all civilians are “innocent” and men of “military age” are not – though they very often are nothing but camouflaged conscripted civilians, or just that: male. At least I hope so. There are so few people left to admire. We need those who are still there – Mary Robinson included.
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17.04.11 I have complained to Sainsbury about them buying and selling products from the occupied Palestine. This was their response and below that my comments. Join me and others in putting pressure on this supermarket. They must stop making business with settlement products. Read here: http://www.larsgpetersson.com/concerns/palestine/
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‘Recognition for being the agents and pawns of a ruthless death machine that systematically butchered and tortured civilians, that rained flaming jelly gasoline and poison chemical gas on old men, women and children’ I read on top of a page of Housmans Peace Diary as I opened the week 16 page to add a future appointment.
How often have I been upset when reading the common description of ‘innocent victims of war’ as ‘women, children and old men’. Never any mention that those excluded from that list of ‘innocent’ people are young men (in Britain 16 and upwards) who in many cases have never had a chance to decide themselves what they wanted to fight for before they were drawn into mortal conflicts caused by precisely many of those ’innocent’ individuals. We, many of the old ones, might not have had much to say, but in many countries we still have had a vote. Nevertheless, in case foreign aggressors attack us we are seen as innocent victims while our young sons, no matter what they have been up to in life, are legitimate targets. Interesting, isn’t it?
So who had written that above? In fact the organisation ‘Vietnam Veterans Against the War, USA’ – representing thousands of American men (average age at the time of battle: 19) who had had their whole life ruined (if they had been ‘lucky’ enough to survive) by their own democratic country’s assault on a people a world apart. These now elderly men are now indirectly saying that they themselves and their male counterparts in Vietnam should not be seen as ‘innocent’ on pair with other brutalised victims of aggressive warfare. They had been humiliated and brutalised from the beginning in a much worse way than what I describe happens to present days Germans http://www.larsgpetersson.com/military-abuse/ and together with their Vietnamese counterparts they had lost their youth as pawns on older people’s battlefields. Still they don’t count themselves as victims. As I have seen so many times before, this is the ultimate result of military destruction of the human soul.