Please Sir, Can I Have Some More?

      I have always held the view that the EU would not tolerate any deviation from its financial masters' "austerity" plan. Since they don't really give a shit about the people of any particular country, they are quite prepared to see a people slide into total deprivation, as long as it protects their mountain of phoney money. People don't matter when you are dealing with balance sheets. For Greece to go to them to negotiate and talk about a humanitarian crisis, is simply to confuse the issue by talking a different language. All they would say to that is "what humanitarian crisis"?

       It has never been a negotiation on equal terms, Greece is the Oliver in this macabre play, they are simply going to the fat cats and asking for more please, under the illusion that people matter in these affairs. If you play the game according to the rules laid down by your adversaries, you are onto a looser.

      Where does this leave Greece? It leaves it still on a hiding to more austerity and deprivation. Time keeps rolling on, we have been treated to seven years of austerity, and more promised, nobody has said when it will all come good. Austerity is the new way of life, the longer it goes on, and they get away with it, the longer it will go on. Of course we are treated to phoney rhetoric of recovery is arriving at platform one SOON.

        Accept it, the grand plan is for a low wage economy throughout Europe, creating a sweatshop to compete with the Eastern sweatshops. In doing so protecting the loot of the Western financial Mafia. Unless of course, we all wake up and say we don't need to take this shit from a bunch of useless parasites, we don't have to play the game to their rules. Just as they change the rules to suit themselves, then so should we. Their grand plans are not to our advantage, nor are they set in tablets of stone.

An analysis on the latest Greek situation from Lenin's Tomb.

       The problem with Tsipras's speech goes further than this, however.  Not only is it deluded.  It recalibrates the government's language and goals in order to rationalise not just this thrashing but future routs.  Having said that austerity and the Memorandum are now left behind by this deal, the government shifts the goalposts and terms of future negotiations.

       And this is part of the reason why those who speak of 'buying time' are wrong.  Time is not a simple quantity that only one side gains from. The EU ruling classes have also 'bought time' and they have the resources and are on the offensive, while Syriza has retreated.  There are no grounds for thinking that Syriza's bargaining position will be better in four months time than it is now.  It has already weakened its stance, while its political position, after four months of continued austerity, will probably be worse.

      One can hardly pin most of the blame for this on Syriza.  They are in a weak position, and it is doubtful that any government could have obtained better against an EU determined to humiliate Greece.  Yet, the line of Tsipras and Varoufakis is simply untenable.  Their commitment to trying to resolve this crisis within the terms of the euro must fail.  They were simply wrong to think that they would have a single ally or interlocutor in the EU.  The southern European governments are even more fanatical than Berlin on this question.  Hollande, far from being a friendly face, told Syriza to shove it fairly early on: he made his decision on austerity some time ago.

Read the full article HERE:

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

And In France, Also Infected By Paranoia.

    Another little snippet on the paranoid state getting us to spy and snitch on each other, and how children are a threat. It is not just the UK, it is universal.
This from Lenin's Tomb:

Eight year old boy arrested for glorification of terrorism posted by Richard Seymour

      That 'free speech' again.  French press brings us news of a little boy named Ahmed who 'glorified terrorism', and was duly shopped to the police by the teacher and head of school.

     Apparently, when asked in class, on 8th January, if he was 'Charlie', he replied that he was not.  He didn't like Charlie Hebdo's cartoons, and that his feelings were with the terrorists.  "I am the terrorists, because I am against the cartoonists of the Prophet."

     The head of the school later apprehended Ahmed while he played in a sandpit, saying "stop digging in the sand, you will not find a machine gun there to kill us all with".  Subsequently, the boy's father accompanied him to school on a couple of occasions, Ahmed being rather distressed and out of sorts by the treatment he was subjected to.

    Then on 21st January, the head of the school decided to press charges against the little boy and his father.  The boy was reported to police for 'glorification of terrorism', and the father for 'trespassing' when he accompanied the boy to the school.   Both father and son were forced to report to the police station in Nice St Augustine, to answer these charges.

    This follows a series of arrests and the recent suspension of a teacher who was also referred for judicial investigation for resisting the 'moment's silence' for Charlie Hebdo.  The school rector launched a rally for "republican" values after noting the "unacceptable" failure of some teachers to comply with the moment's silence, and having launched an immediate investigation.

    Ahmed now has a lawyer, who said: "We are facing a collective hysteria. My client is 8 years old! He does not realize the scope of his words. It's insane."

     Yes, it's insane.  Thankfully, the pup-eyed Charlies who were recently beseeching hashtagged international solidarity, and rallying to the defence of free speech, will not have abandoned the fight so soon.  They, surely - and there are so many of them - will not let the Ahmeds down.  They will spring into action with the swift, passionate alacrity that we have already seen they are capable of.  Won't they?

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

I'm Not Charlie.

        You can rest assured, the state will use any and every event to tighten its grip over the people. This "Je Suis Charlie" event that is sweeping through Europe like an epidemic, will be used to attempt to turn us into some sort of homogeneous sponge, with one opinion, or your a terrorist. Fit in, say the mantra, or you are worthy of investigation by the state apparatus. To stand up and say "I'm Not Charlie", in no way diminishes the horror and revulsion felt by the barbarity of that act of pointless brutal murder. However to acquiesce, en masse, to a uniformity of response, orchestrated by the very state that represses freedom of speech, or be singled out as, against "freedom of speech", is surely a contradiction.

     This article by Richard Seymour posted in Lenin's Tomb, if true, emphasises the points made above.

     In fact (a correspondent tells me, referring to this article), the provisions of recent legislation (13.11.2014) on the monitoring and reporting of school pupils' speech and behaviour appear to have been put into effect for the first time as the names of children who failed to observe the minute's silence were reported by teachers or supervisors to the head, then to the rectorat - the regional education administration - and on to the police and prosecuting authorities, to be analysed by the intelligence services, who decide whether the facts in question are serious enough to warrant formal investigation of the pupil and his/her family and social network.  

    More widely, there are a series of arrests and sentences being handed down for "justification/gorification of terrorism", including that of a 28 year old man diagnosed with learning disabilities.

     If you are not Charlie, would you please speak up so that we can have you arrested and flung in jail, or re-educated?

Read the full article HERE: 

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