Open Your Eyes

Copyright John Gardner 2018

Revised 2020

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

John Gardner reserves the moral right to be identified as the author of this Work.

Other books published by John Gardner:

Why 64 million Frenchmen are wrong!

The Stress belief Paradox

The Money Virus

The Conversation

The Lefirt Diaries (Diary One)

Stress -The Profit Killer

Geoffrey Bolting - Conspiracy of Fire

Geoffrey Bolting – Slaughter of the Innocents

Pleasure Mounds

Bed Time Stories

The Lord, The Manor and the Murders

The Bizznis

Be Happy

Shorties

Acknowledgments

No book is just the product of the writer’s imagination. Others need to read it to find the bad grammar, spelling errors and typos and make sure it all makes sense. In that respect I owe my good friend Kevin Jones a big thank you for reading it and making useful comments. And a special thanks to Kevin Schlosberg at Smashwords for all his help in sorting out the myriad of technical problems that plagued this manuscript.

CONTENTS

Preface

Education

Health

Work

Rights

Control

Government

European Union

Religion

Figures to make you blink

Conclusion

PREFACE



These are the thoughts of an ordinary man who spent many years in broadcasting, business consultancy and as a contributor to many business magazines. In my experience the most highly stressed and frequently least efficient people in every company were the bosses and that made me think. I looked at the UK as a business and almost immediately saw the familiar patterns of high stress levels among the bosses, managers dodging responsibility, the blame game, workers failing to perform to the best of their ability, hugely inefficient practices plus, of course, wholesale theft. Much like nicking the stationery but worse, much worse. The relatives and friends, called consultants and judges, who take extraordinarily long times to arrive at obvious conclusions, employed in quangos and special committees and all with their paws in the public purse.

The people at the top are stealing public money. Our money.

But that is not the real problem it is only a symptom of the problem. The real problem is the long list of things that no one voted for that happens every day as if we, the voters and taxpayers, don’t exist. Why, I wanted to know, if I am no one special but I can see the glaring faults, the ever-increasing inequalities why don’t those who are the products of expensive education, those paid to govern, see them? And if they can see them why have they not fixed them? Surely in a democratic society these things would not exist?

The stumbling block was the word, democracy. What is it? That became the central question. The answer is disturbing. Democracy is an idea, a concept, not a reality. Having a vote does not create democracy; it reinforces the illusion of democracy. Think about that. Does owning a gun mean you are a killer? It’s the same principle.

What became clear was that neither governments nor trade unions were democratic in any way. To find democracy we have to turn to an institution, often ridiculed but which does in fact represent the best example of democracy we have. This organisation is the Women’s Institute. A non-political voice for women that was formed in Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada on February 19th 1897 by Mrs Adelaide Hunter Hoodless a woman who grew up fatherless to face the hard work of farm life. This was an institution encouraged to be born and thrive by democratically minded men such as young farmer Erland Lee who was secretary of the Young Farmer’s Institute. The W.I. started in Britain on September 11th 1915 in Anglesey, Wales in the town of Llanfairpwll by Mrs Alfred Watt a member of a Canadian W.I. She arrived with her two sons and set about transforming the paralysed, taciturn Welsh women into an organised force.

Over the years the W.I. has fought tirelessly for basic freedoms of everyone, not just women, and taken governments to task for their failure to do the job people imagine they are there to perform such as provide freedom from hunger, reform divorce laws, provide good dental care throughout the land and ensure sufficient public transport and sewerage facilities among a long, long list of other things. I would recommend an excellent book on the subject, Jam And Jerusalem by Simon Goodenough published by Collins Sons and Company 1977.

The battle for equal pay and working conditions has never been achieved in most countries. The inequality figures, the percentage women are paid less than men in a similar job, are surprising. Germany 22%, UK 21%, Canada/USA 18.2%, France 15%, Spain 14%, Belgium 6% and Italy 5%. Spanish women think they are the most abused sector in all of Europe but the facts do not support that opinion. That there is any inequality in this, the twenty-first century despite all existing legislation, is a disgrace. But who is responsible for that? Governments and trade unions whose lawyers ensure the contracts they write to protect workers’ rights can easily be broken by employers and government, Spain being a notable example.

What other stumbling blocks are there? For the populace war, poverty and hunger are evils that should never exist. For those in power they, with many of the world’s other evils, are the children of their parents - Finance and Power. They are created, yes deliberately created, so that their parents are constantly fed. The populace are merely expendable fodder in an evil and ever increasing feeding frenzy.

This truth has been there to see, in plain sight, for thousands of years. The trick is to connect the dots, which are contained in the history books that the British Government wishes to make optional reading – for very good reason. Nothing, as you will learn, is as it seems.

The Buddha, Confucius and Socrates were born around 2,600 years ago, about 150 years apart, but they were all on the same page. They believed the route to human happiness was through compassion, wisdom, understanding, empathy and love. They were not wrong but it was around this time humans devolved from their fairly primitive working-to-survive system and split into two distinct tribes. The workers, this new tribe, were enslaved in huge numbers to work at whatever tasks were deemed necessary by the second tribe, the money tribe. They became the rulers because they had accumulated enough money to buy people to form armies to oppress everyone else. There are always those willing to break heads and kill for money. What are armies if not that? This trend continues, witness the Gulf War. It has never stopped.

This was not about the workers’ survival; this was about making money for the money tribe, using the surplus of workers’ labour to create profits. As things evolved the slave tribe was controlled by the tribe of powerful merchants, which appeared over two thousand years ago, whose creed was greed. They wanted to be the new rulers and made a positive decision to choose greed over compassion, wisdom, understanding, empathy and love. It was a straight choice. Greed over humanity. The financial ruling class was born and with it another tribe, villains. They wanted their share of the money in the rich man’s pocket and were prepared to use any means to get it. The richer those few people became the bigger the villain tribe became. It is a straight equation.

The slave tribe, although sometimes paid tiny sums of money, remained until the mid 1800s when a new breed of thinkers appeared. This was the birth of the middle class who eventually brought their intellect to bear creating a new class of slaves: The wage slaves. These slaves were paid wages, some more than others, and were free, up to a point, to choose their employer and had the right of recourse to law – in theory. The reality then, as now, was that the law was so expensive to access they could not afford it. It was a weapon of the rich and powerful whose lawyers wrote the contracts that gave birth to the greed creed.

Greed is the parent of war and this multiplied through time to create a world of suffering, murder and slaughter beyond anything they could have imagined 2,500 years ago. The industrial revolutions that happened on each continent stoked those fires. Industry and its greed creed replaced human evolution and as trade routes developed wars were fought to protect them. That was a choice, not an inevitable chain of events. Money made wars inevitable and wars made money. A neat circle. Peace did neither. And there have been no greater exponents of this philosophy than England, France, Holland and Germany. Now America has taken over. A country that by war, murder and blackmail has subjugated and impoverished hundreds of millions of people round the world – and there is no one to stop them. Except us. It is we who must make the changes. As Michael Jackson sang, I’m starting with the man in the mirror. If we don’t then we, our children, our grandchildren deserve their fate because you can’t be bothered. You’re too comfortable and, you will say, Let’s face it, we can’t win! Yes we can. We have no choice.

Look at China and India today. Neither was ever a democracy but, unfortunately, they too have adopted the greed creed and look at the results. The new tribe of money grabbers has made the lives of hundreds of millions of workers on each continent harder than ever and dangerously polluted the very air they breathe. And, they have shown no signs of stopping yet their business models are applauded as if they have done something good. They give each other awards, attend expensive functions and have their photographs on prominent business magazine covers. These are the new money men with easy smiles and smart, expensive suits backed by governments and armies filled with people willing to kill because they have been told to do so. Just as the S.S. did. You think that’s harsh? It