A Society Of Lies, More Lies, And Damned Lies.

      Most informed people in this society know it is a society of lies, more lies, and damned lies. That's how the system works, sleight of hand, fiddled figures, smoke and mirrors and wild propaganda. If the truth were told, the whole pack of cards would come crumbling down, people just would not accept the fact that  all the wealth we produce is shovelled into the coffers of the corporations and their merry band of pampered parasitic managers. 

       There are those who say the system is broken, far from it, it is doing what it is meant to do, syphon wealth upwards. One reason this robbing, plundering system survives, is the fact that the majority seem to accept the illusion that it can do the opposite.

Our Lords And Masters. (apologies to the hogs)

This from The Void:

      The body established to lie on behalf of the fraud ridden welfare-to-work industry have launched a new campaign on the back of a report so breath-takingly dishonest it would make Iain Duncan Smith blush.
     According to the Employment Related Services Association (ERSA), the floundering Work Programme has been a huge success and is set to add £18 billion to the economy.  This is based on a report which ERSA commisioned from a consultancy company called Europe Economics who have mangled the figures in an attempt to hoodwink the DWP into giving Work Programme providers like A4e and G4S even more tax payer’s cash.

Read the full article HERE:

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Class Warriors See Off ATOS.

 More photos on Glasgow Against ATOS.
 

       Friday, 30th. May, saw the last picket held by Glasgow Against ATOS, and though I couldn't make it, I think I can safely say, from all accounts, it was a large, colourful, noisy, cheerful picket, that can claim success. All of us must take our hats off to this ever growing army of class warriors, that saw injustice, got together, and stood on the line. For almost two years, month after month, in wind, rain, hail and frost, there they were, outside the ATOS offices at Corruna House in Cadogan Street in Glasgow. 

 

      The dogged determined campaign to highlight the traumatizing, intimidation, and humiliation heaped on our most vulnerable, by the profit junkies ATOS at the direction of the Cameron millionaire cabal, spread nation wide. Through the continued bad publicity being brought to the public's notice by this army of class warriors, ATOS decided to pull the plug on its despicable operation. The campaign succeeded in doing what it set out to do, getting ATOS off the backs of our disabled. 

 

    ATOS may have gone, but the millionaire vermin that sits in the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, has in no way changed its policies. They still want to remove benefits from our disabled. Their first hatchet man has gone, we can rest assured that they are already looking at what vampire squid to hand the lucrative contract to next. Will it be the ruthless, bungling G4S, or perhaps the mighty  Serco, the company that has been dogged by scandals from overcharging for prisoner tagging to allegations of sexual assault at an immigration detention centre. The choice our parasitical millionaire government has to do its dirty work, is wide and vile.

 

     So Glasgow Against ATOS, well done, you are class war heroes, but, keep your powder dry, the enemy is re-arming.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Can There Be Democratic Slavery?

      Currently this government is doing a great job in helping their millionaire corporate friends to cut their labour costs, all part of the drive for a low wage economy. The new legislation that will come into force on April 2014, will take workfare, (unpaid forced labour) to a new level of exploitation. Job centres will be able to hand out tougher community service orders than the courts. What will your crime have been? Why the heinous act of being unable to find work. They say that slavery was abolished, but what do you call being forced to work without pay, for a rich multi-national company such as G4S? The simple truth is that those who call this society a democracy are liars or fools, or perhaps both.

       This from Boycott Workfare:

       Currently EOS, Maximus, Learn Direct, Reed in Partnership, ESG, G4S (tax dodging supremos) and Interserve (they rely on prayer & financial support from Christians) are all inviting bids from voluntary sector ‘partners’ to provide Community Work Placements in a ‘real working environment’ for up to 30 weeks, for up to 30 hours per week. In other words, forced unpaid labour for people who have not found ‘sustained employment’ while on the Work Programme.

     The criteria for being sent on a Community Work Placement are ‘lack of motivation‘ (for example a reluctance to be exploited in no pay, low pay jobs) and/or ‘lack of work experience‘. Claimants will have to do these placements alongside ‘supported job search’: the exhausting and pointless process of endlessly looking for non-existent employment opportunities. As blogger Johnny Void says: “This new scheme represents 780 hours unpaid work, over two and a half times higher than the maximum community service penalty that can be handed out by the courts.  And this is just for the crime of being unable to find a job.” Read the rest of this entry »

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Canada, Land Of Immigrant Detention.

      Some countries manage to create the illusion of being a ”nice” country and keep the nasty side in low profile. Canada is one of those countries, the great outdoors and land of opportunity, but the same shit goes on there as else where in the capitalist world. Some months ago there was the student riots, which once again proved that under capitalism, anger and discontent are always simmering under the surface, ready to explode. More recently the way the Canadian government treats immigrants has been leaking out. In Canada the authorities can hold immigrants indefinitely in detention, and do. 

     According to figures released by the organisation No One is Illegal, between 2004 and 2011, the Canadian authorities locked up, 82,000 people in immigration detention, and since 2011, at least another 25,000 people have been detained. Of those detained in 2012, a staggering 289 were children, some under the age of ten. Approximately 33% of immigration detainees are held in maximum-security provincial prisons. Of course this is capitalism and immigration detention centres are big business, and in Canada that business is worth $50 million, and is run in partnership with private companies. Big international vultures like G4S and Corbel Management have their greedy hands in the pot. Recent figures show that in Toronto alone, these two companies, between 2004 and 2008, were paid $19 million of tax payers money to lock up immigrants.

      At present Canada accepts less than a quarter of all refugee claimants, and with recent legislation, immigrants are classed as “non-status people” a precarious position to be in as they are targeted in raids and detentions. To add to the difficulties of of those detained, approximately 200 immigration detainees have recently been moved from prisons in the Greater Toronto Area and sent to a maximum-security prison in Lindsay, Ontario. This has created greater difficulties for the detainees who have friends and families and adds to their desperation and isolation. Due to under staffing these immigrants now face lockdowns and in some cases are unable to leaver their cells for 18 hours a day.

    However, as always, people who are ill treated eventually try to hit back in self defence and since September 18, many detainees are on hunger strike. They are calling for better access to medical care, better food, adequate legal aid and services, cheaper phone calls, and an end to the persistent lockdowns.

      Canada, just another capitalist country, knee deep in fire tinder, waiting for the spark.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Corporate Gain From Misery.

       I recently posted an article, "No Human Being is Illegal", highlighting the desperate plight  of immigrants on hunger strike in the Netherlands. What we should remember is that this is not a new phenomena, this harsh treatment is widespread, has been going on for years and is a day and daily occurrence in country after country.  It is also big business, companies like G4S make millions from certain human beings being classified as "illegal" and herding them like cattle, depriving them of any rights. It is a sad indictment of any society that makes corporate bodies rich on the back of people's misery. This world belongs to its people, not the political and corporate institutions that at present control our lives.

       The following extract is from an old article from Tiger Beatdown, sent to me by Loam at Arrezafe. Nothing has changed in the intervening time, except that the likes of G4S have made lots more cash.

       "I am a Non Western, South American immigrant in a society that is increasingly determined to get rid of those like me. Media constantly reminds me that we are practically non human. That our rights should be eroded further in the name of safety. Politicians build careers using the rhetoric of hatred against those like me. I was punched in the face, I was elbowed in the stomach on two different occasions by two White Supremacists who objected to my looks and my speaking another language with a friend. Racial slurs were hurled. And still, I know I don’t have it as bad as others. In the grand scheme of things, I am privileged. I am a documented resident. At least, I am not one of the thousands currently in detention camps awaiting deportation. Then my life would be under the control of a corporation that actually makes a profit out off the lives of those who are dehumanized the most. If I was undocumented, my life would be in the hands of someone like this guy, featured in The New York Times this past week:

      Nick Buckles, the chief executive of G4S, would not discuss the company. But last year he told analysts how its “justice” business in the Netherlands blossomed in one week after the 2002 assassination of a politician with an anti-immigrant and law-and-order agenda.
“There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change,” Mr. Buckles said.

     That’s what undocumented immigrants are: a bit of political change. Except that the security guards working for the company that Mr. Buckles represents had a big degree of responsibility for the gruesome death of eleven asylum seekers who were awaiting deportation in a detention center at Schiphol Airport in The Netherlands on Thursday, October 27^thof 2005. Apparently, the kind of change Mr. Buckles aims for does not include preserving the wellbeing of people whose only crime was to seek an opportunity to better their lives. When detainees raised the alarm and cried for help, when flames were taking over the detention center, the guards working for Mr. Buckles’ corporation ignored them. They were left to die. Nine men and two women. Their bodies now an “opportunity for corporate growth”.

Read the full article HERE:

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SECURING WHOSE WORLD?

        With the hullabaloo about Olympic security and G4S, a little information on the Goliath corporate beast that goes by the name of G4S is perhaps welcome. This is no ordinary corporate beast, this one is the spearhead of the financial Mafia's privatisation program and in being so has made billions from tax payers money taking over security, prisons, police stations, migrant detention and a host of other parts of the state's control and repression facilities. It's tentacles reach across the world and slither into any area of repression that any state wants to privatise. All done with tax payers money at an extortionate profit to G4S.

 

This from A World to Win:

G4S - 'securing' their world, not ours

        Despite its inability to fulfil its London 2012 contract, the rise and rise of G4S is the story of the privatisation of the state and an increasing emphasis on “threats” and “security concerns” aimed at keeping people in thrall to authority.
     G4S is no ordinary corporation. It operates in more than 125 countries and has 675,000 employees. Group turnover last year was £7.5 billion, mostly derived from state contracts around the world, with 30% of revenues coming from “developing markets”. Pre-tax profits were up 2.1% to £531m.
      The self-styled “world's leading international security solutions group” has cashed in on the drive by the state to divest itself of more and more functions like prisons, crowd control and significant parts of the police service. As the company’s website declares: “In more ways than you might realise, G4S is securing your world.”
Of course, it’s not “our world” so much as their world – the rich, the bankers, the state, and the corporations that G4S helps to secure. And nowhere is “security” more on the state’s lips than in Israel, which continues to occupy Palestinian lands in defiance of countless UN resolutions.

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LAW AND ORDER,PLC.

        We should be under no illusions that the present bunch of millionaires sitting in the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption have a master plan. It is quite simply to privatise everything, and that means everything, no exemptions, all will be turned into cash cows for the corporate world, health, education, social services, police, prisons and the judiciary. There method is the same in each case, starve it of funds, forcing it to seek private money to continue functioning and waffle on about letting competition in to improve things and hey presto, you have a privatised society and we all live in a state of corporate fascism. 

This from SACC:

       You suffer a violent burglary. The scenes of crime officer who comes round is employed by G4S. Fibre samples are found, swabs taken and dispatched to G4S Forensics. The suspect resists arrest, is held overnight in police cells run by G4S, then appears before magistrates trained by the company. After serving his sentence he spends his a period of probation tagged by the company on a G4S work programme....

        John Shaw, the managing director of G4S has already held secret talks with leaders of two Scottish police forces.

Read the full article (SACC article)

        G4S provides security services to settlements and the Israeli Occupation Forces in Palestine. On 11 March 2011 it announced its exit from some contracts in the West Bank, but it continues to deliver security services to illegal settlements in the West Bank and to prisons in Israel. This includes the provision of various security systems in prisons where Palestinian are held as "security prisoners" in violation of international human rights norms.

see http://www.bdsmovement.net/2011/g4s-ends-some-5472

Privatisation of policing and justice in Scotland is unacceptable!

What You Can Do

Let your MSPs know about your concerns over any privatisation of policing and justice in Scotland. You can contact your MSPs using www.writetothem.com

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