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Universal Credit 2: The Failures Continue

This is my second article on my experiences as a self employed person on a low income on the government’s abysmal Universal Credit (UC) ‘social security’ programme. When writing my first article, it was even a surprise to me just how many examples of incompetence I had experienced in only around 7 months as a claimant. Perhaps, then, I shouldn’t be surprised that in the following 6 months I’ve experienced so much more incompetence that it justifies writing a second article. The main issues I have faced are due to the process of transferring from the ‘Live Service’ which I was on in Sheffield, to the new and improved ‘Full Service’ here in Oldham. Additionally, as I’ve been self employed for over a year, I have been introduced to a new kind of sanction called the ‘Minimum Income Floor’ (MIF). Transferring from the ‘Live Service’ to the ‘Full Service’ A few days before moving house in September, I had a mandatory work coach meeting at the Job Centre. I used it to explain that ...
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Wikileaks

Perhaps what Assange was attempting wasn't to try and reveal the hidden workings of states as an end in itself, but as a method of bringing the diplomatic process into the 21st century. We are in a globalized world; in the age of the internet it makes no sense for governments to undergo 'sub rosa' conversations behind closed doors, and by unveiling what they discuss, wikileaks forces states to address the open, networked world in which we now exist. If states cannot act in secret during peacetime, this presumably will mean they must attempt to engage in open and active discussions with other nations, hopefully learning from and teaching them.

Furthermore, the mass dumps of information that wikileaks sometimes undertakes could be seen as a punishment to states for their secrecy; they could be saying "If you wont be honest, then you'll have no secrets at all.". These could also be seen as "a taste of their own medicine" to governments that employ bodies such as the NSA to spy on their citizens. Foucault believed that states become powerful through in depth statistical and personal knowledge of their public; well perhaps an organisation such as wikileaks serves to rebalance this distribution of power. 

This (http://tinyurl.com/b47cdko) article talks about an asymmetric transparency relationship; i.e. we (the people) are expected to allow utter transparency to our government, with our every move and keystroke open for viewing (by the right people) through services such as raytheon riot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mcVA_D3sAg) despite our supposed rights to privacy, meanwhile individuals like Chelsea Manning are given significant jail sentences for revealing the atrocities our own governments commit such as "collateral murder" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0). 

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Universal Credit 2: The Failures Continue

This is my second article on my experiences as a self employed person on a low income on the government’s abysmal Universal Credit (UC) ‘social security’ programme. When writing my first article, it was even a surprise to me just how many examples of incompetence I had experienced in only around 7 months as a claimant. Perhaps, then, I shouldn’t be surprised that in the following 6 months I’ve experienced so much more incompetence that it justifies writing a second article. The main issues I have faced are due to the process of transferring from the ‘Live Service’ which I was on in Sheffield, to the new and improved ‘Full Service’ here in Oldham. Additionally, as I’ve been self employed for over a year, I have been introduced to a new kind of sanction called the ‘Minimum Income Floor’ (MIF). Transferring from the ‘Live Service’ to the ‘Full Service’ A few days before moving house in September, I had a mandatory work coach meeting at the Job Centre. I used it to explain that ...
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