I've been lucky enough to be involved in a number of projects to bring about social change. These vary from attempts to improve employment through education and training, innovation and business incubation, technical improvements in CCTV, street theatre and space design to reduce crime, targeted policing to improve estates, the employment of jailbirds to improve recidivism rates, special courts and procedures on domestic violence, various dying industry area support efforts - I'd guess Molly and I could easily fill a page. I raised somewhere between £5 and £15 million in European funding for such - nearly all misspent because of the bureaucratic system.
-- Australia currently has a Royal Commission into child sexual exploitation. In all the press hype on the UK situation I have seen no mention of this. We have an inquiry into institutional abuse here - so far the two Establishment women put up to head this have (eventually) been rejected by victims' groups as connected with probable perpetrators of the cover up. The UK inquiry is already incredibly limited. Any way forward, whether in areas like this or producing a reinvigorated economy (think Detroit or my local town) and on to world peace, seems limited to pilot projects that somehow, even when successful, never mainstream. Across many issues, we are told we are doing everything possible - from child protection to producing a super economy and ensuring we keep the terrorists under control. The weird thing is the same problems never go away and in many respects get worse. We have a niche media telling us this - think Naomi Klein, Chomsky and so on. Meanwhile, the human population has tripled, pollution and planet burning gain pace and international finance is in a state of farce. But a cup of coffee in UK main street from Starfruckers and they steal the tax you pay through accounting.
I might get £1 million from an EU 'community safeguarding initiative'. Forgetting the political-economic mainstream problems, I might get on spending this money doing good. It just ain't that simple. I'll probably need academics to work on my programme and will have to ask them to work for free. They don't like this. Any work they do is credited in my project at £85 an hour of which they get zilch. Any capital equipment I buy has to be bought through an approved supplier - these suppliers give a discount of 40% at the end of the year to the university central accounts and I also have to pay 50% to them as overhead. I really want to spend the money on people with problems, but this is nearly impossible. The only justification I can come up with is that the 10% I manage to spend on the real issue is 'better than nothing'. These projects never mainstream and in effect are subsidies to bureaucracy and sometimes criminal graft. Money paid to my project will always be late and I will have to pretend spending money before I get it in submitting to get the money (technically a crime).
Don't worry though folks - the way forward is to wait for the private sector cavalry to ride in and fix everything through market forces. Like they always have for abused kids and in providing well paid jawbs, protecting the environment ...
I would say the ways forward are all blocked - but it's realising this that we need to actually move forward. This 'negative force' is key in real change. EU funding typically runs at 50% of total project spend - so it would seem taking on a project dooms the host institution to a loss equal to the grant. In fact, one engages in dodgy accounting to make some profit from the 'half-money'. No one with any sense could invent such a system. The actual way forward would be to fund these projects with positive money using block chain technology to control the accounting.
But who knows what positive money is and what blockchain technology is? The complaint I hear all the time on any social initiative is that we can't resource it. We have to wait until the groaf-jawbs-burn-the-planet economy has grown enough for us to be able to afford it. This is actually an economy of Monopoly money created by bank debt loan money, but we don't realise that either. Spending money on social problems is always a cost in this system. All the projects I have done were doomed to failure because of this system. Once the grant runs out there is no project. The way forward would be to find a new way for funding and control of funding.
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