Thoughts.

 

     Thoughts and words, melodies and rhymes, rhythms and beats, weave patterns, paint pictures, tell stories, portray hopes and fears. 

THE HIGH AND MIGHTY.

Politicians, high priests of the holy church
of greed,
yours are the crimes from which the many
bleed.
See, vice and corruption make their
stand,
with brutal tyranny, walk hand
in hand;
your arrogant minds, lost in ambition’s
cloud,
oblivious to the suffering of the humble
crowd.
When poverty’s knife makes our people
bleed,
your cancerous power is all you ever
feed,
holding high some ego-inflating avaricious
plan
that divides, soon pits man against
man.
Now anguish and war mark your mad
career,
covering our world in the brume of
fear,
then shedding youth’s blood by cruel
deceit,
with spurious pomp, lay the guilt at
another’s feet.
As we fall heir to a plundered
land 

  you tyrants walk in manner
grand,
what must we do to make you
yield
to see our children play in a bloodless
field?
Smash and crush your dark nefarious
power
allowing love and peace to freely
flower.

THE MURMUR OF THE POOR.

Brokers, bankers, Earls and Dukes,
callous, mercenary, pirate crew
gasconading through the land
bloated, pampered, privileged few.
Striding with selfish arrogance
plundering as you go
grasping at the fruits
the common people sow.

Take heed, you swaggering fat-cats,
in our world you don’t belong,
that murmur you hear is the poor
rehearsing an angry song.

The day is fast approaching
when our chorus loud you’ll hear,
then all your greed and treachery
will surely cost you dear.

A price you’ll pay for being blind
to the hungry at your door,
oh, haste the day our angry chorus
becomes a mighty roar.

THERE WILL COME A TIME.

There will come a time when the hordes remember,
who bound our grand-parents to the yoke of oppression,
who sentenced our parents to deprivation,
who bid poverty sink its teeth into our heart,
who teach our children, greed is a noble art.
Who sent our sons through the gates of hell
to a litany of cambist brawls,
crammed coffers with blood-stained gold
while laughing in Ares’ halls.
“Who does these terrible things to us?” they will ask,
and when they remember,
they’ll bring an energy that is endless
to drive a fist that is fearless.
Then this merciless market-driven world will crumble
under an insurrection of integrity,
the poor will emerge from the dark husk of capitalism
to live in the light of social justice.
There will come a time when the hordes remember. 

 
I WANT TO BELIEVE!

I want to believe
All that is good is out there
Sleeping in hearts that live in dark valleys,
About to blossom like some magic woodland,
In spite of war, in spite of greed
The essence that is humanity struggling to be free.
All around death arrives in many guises,
Silent as the frost poverty kills,
The ruthless march of war
With every drum beat seeks God’s blessing,
While the God fearing kill the God fearing,
Slaughter in the name of the greater good.

I want to believe
All that is good is out there
Sleeping in the hearts that live in dark valleys
About to blossom like some magic woodland,
Not just as the dream of poets.

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk   

Slow Death By Avoidable Poverty.

         I know I sometimes repeat myself, but there are somethings that just build up the anger that I feel I will just keep repeating it in the hope that it might just make a little difference. I wrote the following piece about 6 years ago, now instead of just writing it I feel I should be shouting it from the rooftops, as it becomes ever more obvious that the same vicious policies are still being pursued by our greedy rich and powerful masters. However, they don't have to be our masters, we can be masters of our own destination, it's up to us.

    Some things are necessary for survival, like water, shelter and food, without any one of these basics your survival is in jeopardy, yet we tolerate a system where by if you don't have enough of that stuff called money, you can be denied these basic necessities. Probably one reason this cruel unjust system survives is because you don't die suddenly. With poverty you can be denied one or all of these basics, not enough money means cheap crap food, not enough food, and you die, rather slowly. We won't see people fall over and die in the street, they will just simply deteriorate and die young, the shock factor isn't there. Likewise the homeless, a hidden slow death by poverty, murder by shareholders. Across the world day in day out, millions of lives are shortened by not having access to clean drinking water. Why should the flow and distribution of the very basics of life be under the control of the Davos Club, that group of greedy, pampered, parasitical, millionaire shareholders?

      Under our millionaire's scheme of "debt reduction" and "austerity cuts" we are seeing more and more of our public assets being handed over to those shiny suits of the Davos Club. Soon there will be nothing that belongs to the people. In the UK they already own, among other things, our energy resources and we have seen the prices rocket, as they pursue ever greater profits. Social housing has long been under attack and is disappearing, financial institutions own our homes, and they are working hard at getting our water.

      These corporate conditions will produce a world where we will be completely at the mercy of those greedy, pampered, parasitical, millionaire shareholders of the Davos Club, for everything we need, and if you are poor, your only means of survival will be dependent on charity organisations. Of course we can take everything back, creating co-operatives and community controlled enterprises, it is happening in all sorts of places across the globe. People have seen enough of "free market", "neo-liberalism", which translates into ripping-off the people and widespread deprivation. The tide is turning, it has to, it must be our world, or it is a destroyed world of abject poverty.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

This Class Ridden Plutocracy, Our Problem.

        The UK is a class ridden society, scarred by inequality, controlled by a wealthy elite and presided over my an outdated imperialist monarchy. Yet it parades itself on the world stage as a leader of democracy. Perhaps a leader of hypocrisy would be a more accurate title. In this fog of illusion of democracy, the rich get richer, and milk the system by every means available, while the ordinary people in most cases just scrape by, while many others sink deeper into the mire of deprivation. The outdated monarchy and its parasitical hangers on, by slight of hand, exploitation and corruption, live a life of unimaginable opulence, oblivious to the needs of the vast majority.
       This situation can only survive by us, the ordinary people, being silent, docile and submissive. We are complicit in our own injustice if we don't actively take steps to destroy this brutal charade of democracy. By our inaction and turning a blind eye to the exploitation and inequality that rapes and plunders our communities, we must shoulder the blame. If we are aware of the inequalities, injustices and blatant exploitation, the only sane thing to do is to put matters right, and bring the whole stinking, rotten class ridden system crashing down. We have tried dialogue and reform for centuries, but the parasites still hold sway. Voting has only made as more compliant with the corruption inherent in the system.
         We must stop playing their game to their rules and by direct action take control in our communities and workplaces. This is the only road open to the mass of people who suffer on a daily basis under this medieval plutocracy. If you believe that you can convince the ruling wealthy parasites to take their wealth and spread it more equally among the people who actually create that wealth, you are living in a dream world of fantasy. They will merely enter into another dialogue with you for the next couple of centuries. 

 

 

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

A Failed And Doomed Species????

           The following are a few excerpts from a speech made in court  by Athena Tsakalou during the case of CCF escape trial. Deep down I can empathise with the words and feelings, perhaps that comes with an ageing mind and a feeling of weariness, however, foolishly or otherwise, I keep pushing those thoughts away and replacing them with that infernal and eternal optimism, but they are still there, lurking in the background, with the events in the world feeding them.

This from Contra Info:

          There comes a moment when you take a look back at the years in your life, and you realise you’ve left to live far fewer than the years you’ve already lived; that is, if everything goes well. And this is a strange but intense sensation, which makes me ask myself to be sincere. Not in the simple way we often think about it, but in an essential, deeper way.

I don’t like to say: where is this world going? It’s something that we – people at an older age – often do, but such a phrase conceals some sort of innocence that I refuse to accept. I prefer to ask myself: how do you yourself walk through this world?------

As a species, how do we measure our success?

Assuming that, throughout the centuries, people have intended to live, if not a life of happiness, at least a joyful life, their history to date shows that they’ve failed. History books, either the official, inspected ones, or the secret ones that it’s hard to come by, show that people have failed. It may be that the conditions for survival or living standards got better – although ‘better’ is relative, as this is not the case in some parts of the earth – but the pain, the horror of wars, of hunger and oppression continue to rise.

Of course there’s a difference; a nightmarish difference. Nowadays, death is no longer caused just by hand-to-hand combat on the battlefields where, even from a distance determined by a firearm, you’re able to see the falling body and hear the cry of pain, and regardless of how much dehumanised you’ve become, this sight and sound leaves a peculiar imprint within you that, at some point, might make you not want war anymore. On today’s battlefields, we find ourselves in the era of smart bombs, and one is able to retain ‘their innocence’ by pressing a button which brings mass death; that’s the difference.

For some time now, more than 10,000 refugee children who were travelling unaccompanied have disappeared in Europe over the past 18–24 months. There are fears that many of them have fallen victim to exploitation by organised crime networks…

The world’s 62 richest people hold as much wealth as half the population on the planet…

The earth’s products are enough to feed its entire population, yet millions of people, millions of children die of hunger.---------

Do we hold on to hope and optimism, or as a species, admit that we failed?

And it’s about time we said: after so much human blood watering the earth’s soil every day, after all this lament filling the earth’s air, if there’s no change of course for the human species, if the human mind isn’t crossed by a lightning at some point, so that we see everything differently… then indeed it’d be a brave decision if people eventually said: ‘for so many centuries, we’ve been unable to find joy; we might as well admit that as a species we aren’t capable of something like this; we might as well admit our failure and leave calmly; let us be the last of the humans; let us admit that only trees deserve life, continuity, eternity as they’re free of the instinct of war, of horror.’

Lately all I want to do is plant trees. And someone might ask me: but is this truly your deepest desire? No, I haven’t done well; I’m still determined by the ability to see as far as my eye can see, to keep my mind off things by taking pleasure in small joys; but when I open the eye of my mind to a worldwide wandering, a worldwide looking, and I see how small a share joy has in people’s lives, I say once more: if the dream doesn’t enter people’s lives, if there’s no change of course for the human species, only trees deserve continuity, life, eternity.

Athena Tsakalou

Read the full article HERE:

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

My Uncle Willie.

My Uncle Willie.

        To those who know me, there will be no doubt in their minds about my hatred of the economic system we bleed under. In my eighties now, I have seen this system destroy individuals, tear families apart, and in its voracious greed for profit and power, it has murdered and maimed countless millions in its endless wars. Each individual destroyed, each family torn apart, each war grave, and each veterans hospital are all indictments against a system where people are sacrificed to keep the system functioning for the benefit of a small cabal of over privileged parasites. You would think that our humanity would demand that the system should be altered, modified and shaped to meet the needs of the people, not the other way round.
       As we look at this society we can see all around us, those unfortunate individuals whose lives are deeply scarred by a system that uses people to perpetuate its greed driven machinations. It is so easy to encapsulate the ruthless viciousness of the system in one person's life, to me my uncle Willie is such a person. To the system, a nobody, a human being of no significance, but to those around him, a friend, a father, a son, a brother, a husband and an uncle.
       My uncle Willie was my mother's younger brother, naturally I didn't know him in his early years, but I heard the stories. Willie, like the rest of my family, lived in Garngad, a Glasgow slum in the north of the city. A young man in the 30's, he was married and had three kids, and like so many of that era, unemployed. It seems that Willie was a family man and loved his kids, he could be seen most days walking with them along the waste ground off Charles Street at the back of Glenconner Park, usually two kids running in front and the youngest on his shoulders. It seems he was an excellent snooker player, and that is where he supplemented his income, by playing round the many snooker halls in Glasgow. However to the system, he was superfluous to requirements, so could scrape a living in the slums of Glasgow as best he could.
      Then, suddenly, he is a valuable asset to the system, 1939, WWII starts, and Willie is scooped up and shipped out to Egypt. We know nothing of his experiences there, but after three years there and later his demob, he returned home with malaria, this is when I got to know him, just a little. His shaking hands, the troubled look in his eyes. His return to civilian life didn't get off to a good start, on returning home to his family, of wife and three kids, he discovered that he now had five kids. This was the end of his marriage, the family broke up, and Willie moved from job to job, and his drinking got worse and he eventually couldn't hold a job, he was now an alcoholic and homeless. Moving from homeless hostel to homeless hostel, occasionally staying with family, but his alcoholism made that an ever decreasing possibility.
       I remember my mother on many an occasion, looking out the window and saying, "Oh, here's Willie coming", then a pause, then, "he doesn't look too drunk". He would sit and chat to his big sister and myself, my mother would make him something to eat and give a cup of tea. Though, it was never a full cup of tea, his hands were shaking so bad, a full cup would have been all over him, she only quarter filled the cup and kept topping it up, it was his troubled eyes that have stuck with me all these years, as he was leaving, my mother would slip a 10 shilling note into his hand.
        Willie spent the rest of his years moving around hostels for the homeless, eventually dying in one down in Ardrossan in his fifties.
       To me, my uncle Willie epitomises this stinking system, you're a worthless entity, left to rot unless the system needs you, either to make its profits, or to fight its imperialist wars, and your reward for either of these activities, is never anything worth having. 

The Homeless.

Tenebrous spectres, they exist,    out there,

on the crumbling edge of chaos,

a father, a son, a brother,

a daughter, a sister, a mother.

Fragments of some shattered family structure;

waste products

from a society being driven to destruction

by a hurricane of greed,

living a life that wears out life,

dying,

the devious death of exhaustion from existence. 

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

1% - Superfluous To Requirements.

       The world has reached a very bizarre situation. Through human effort and ingenuity we have built up an enormous mountain of wealth, however, we have allowed 1% of the world's population to purloin 50% of that wealth. At the same time we have allowed the conditions of the other 99% to become ever more bleak. Surely any sane person must see this as unjust, unacceptable and unsustainable. Living within this mountain of wealth the world has 2.2 billion children, of which approximately 1 billion live in poverty, almost 50%. Here in the UK we have roughly 3.7 million children living in poverty, 28% of all children. To put it into context, imagine a school class room with 30 pupils, 9 of those children will be living in poverty. There is another anomaly in this capitalist system, London, one of the richest cities in the world, has the highest rates of child poverty in the UK. Opulence and deprivation live cheek by jowl in this crazy insane system of capitalist exploitation and greed. 

       Looking at the trend of greater wealth moving into ever few hands, we have to ask ourselves, will the 1% stop at owning 50% of the world's wealth, will they as a group, say, "Well we have enough now, let's reverse the trend", or will they continue their journey of grasping at ever more of that wealth, where does it stop? When do we say enough is enough, how many more children will have to sink into deprivation and poverty, before we call a halt to this plundering of the world's wealth by the greedy few?
 

      We can't rely on that 1% to reverse this trend, to abandon their desire for ever larger yachts, ever more lavish personal jets, that just will not happen. We have to decide that this system of injustice, inequality, exploitation and greed, has to be destroyed, by us. We have to start with co-operation across our communities and workplaces, at taking control of our lives and shaping things to our needs. We the ordinary people, produce everything in this world, we distribute everything in this world, the change has to be that we decide what we produce, and how it should be distributed. We don't need some over paid CEO, nor a bunch of greedy shareholders, nor the leeches of the financial Mafia, to tell us how to shape our society, to tell us who gets and who goes without. We know, that the 1% is superfluous to requirements.

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

 

A Society Built On Theft.

      Anyone who cares to take a look at the system under which we live, can see its glaring inequalities, and injustices. It is usually from this stand point of criticism that people get involved and try to "reform" the system, attempting to make it fair and just. What they fail to grasp is that it is not just an inequality and injustice of the present situation, it is the foundations on which the system was built. The inequalities arrived by coercion and plundering, theft of land, and state coercion to enforce and legitimise that theft. To reform the system we would have to return all that plundering and land theft to the people and remove the coercion of the state. There can never be equality and justice if we allow the thieves to hold onto their plunder, under the protection of the state. 

      A look at history tells us how we got here, and should make it glaringly obvious that we can't reform capitalism into something resembling equality and justice. It must be destroyed, we have to remove the plunderers and thieves and demolish the apparatus of the state that protects the wealth and power that stems from that plundering and theft.

A considerable number of libertarian commentators have remarked on the sheer scale of subsidies and protections to big business, on their structural importance to the existing form of corporate capitalism, and on the close intermeshing of corporate and state interests in the present state capitalist economy. We pay less attention, however, to the role of past state coercion, in previous centuries, in laying the structural foundations of the present system. The extent to which present-day concentrations of wealth and corporate power are the legacy of past injustice, I call the subsidy of history.

The first and probably the most important subsidy of history is land theft, by which peasant majorities were deprived of their just property rights and turned into tenants forced to pay rent based on the artificial “property” titles of state-privileged elites.

Of course, all such artificial titles not founded on appropriation by individual labor are completely illegitimate.

As Ludwig von Mises pointed out in Socialism, the normal functioning of the market never results in a state of affairs in which most of the land of a country is “owned” by a tiny class of absentee landlords and the peasant majority pay rent for the land they work. Wherever it is found, it is the result of past coercion and robbery.

Read the full article HERE:

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