Illusions.

          A lot of people live under the illusion that we should rely on our MPs to sort out the fossil fuel use and move to green energy sources, in an attempt to avoid a climate and humanitarian crisis of unimaginable proportions, the very survival of humanity. However, a wee glance at the connections of some of our leading MPs and members of the House of Lords gives an insight to the interests and money sources of some of those in power, should make you think again, as I keep saying, they are laughing at us, for how long will we tolerate this danger to our survival?

This from The Mirror.       

Dozens of members of the House of Lords have investments worth millions of pounds and senior roles in oil and gas companies, prompting accusations of unethical conflicts of interest.They total 43 in all, including 33 who have shares worth a minimum of £50,000 in 19 oil and gas companies, and 10 who chair, direct or advise 15 fossil fuel firms.
       Research shows 23 are Conservatives, three are Labour and 17 are without political affiliations. Two peers with shares in Shell – Conservative Baroness Noakes and crossbencher Lord Burns – sit on the House of Lords’ Industry and Regulators Committee, which heard evidence on net zero climate policies last month. The figures were uncovered by investigative news website The Ferret using the official registers of interests. A trawl of MPs’ interests shows donations and gifts from fossil fuel firms and climate contrarians

This from the Guardian.

 

Oil companies, petrostates and climate contrarian thinktanks, businessmen and unions have given at least £5m to MPs over the past 10 years in the form of donations, expenses-paid trips, salaries and gifts. A trawl through parliament’s register of interests suggests Conservative politicians are far more likely to accept support from such sources. The Guardian is not suggesting MPs were paid for their votes, which is forbidden by law, but the scorecards highlight the legitimate lobbying activities of outside organisations who have most to lose from action to stop global heating.

        Nadhim Zahawi, the Conservative MP for Stratford-on-Avon, received more than £1m from fossil fuel companies, all of it declared and legitimate. Zahawi spent much of his parliamentary career working as chief strategy officer for Gulf Keystone Petroleum, which paid him £52,325 in backpay in October 2015 and a monthly salary of £20,000 from October 2015, rising to almost £30,000 a month in August 2017, and some £330,000 in bonus payments. He stopped working for the company on becoming a government minister in 2018 (at which time he received a final payment of £116,000). He also declared shareholdings in Genel Energy, an Anglo-Turkish oil and gas exploration and production company, and a donation from Amjad Bseisu, the chief executive of the UK-based oil company EnQuest. Until August 2015 the former oil exploration company Afren and the former Canadian oil company Talisman, which was a major producer from the Alberta tar sands, were clients of Zahawi & Zahawi, a business advisory service. The Guardian contacted Zahawi’s office for comment, but received no reply.
        Alan Duncan, a former Foreign Office minister, also has close ties to the petroleum industry. After leaving a post in the international development ministry, Duncan, while still an MP, registered as a non-executive chairman of Fujairah Refining in the United Arab Emirates, for which he received £8,000 a month for a job involving three weekend meetings a year. Along with a severance package, payments totalled £90,000. The majority owner of that refinery is the energy company Vitol, owned by the UK businessman Ian Taylor.
        Duncan formerly headed the Conservative Middle East Council, which arranges trips for Tory MPs with funding from businessmen with ties to Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. He has made multiple trips to Oman and Saudi Arabia as a guest of the host government or its supporters, and has received gifts of a watch or cufflinks on a number of occasions from the sultanate of Oman.
        A former employee of Royal Dutch Shell, prior to 2009 Duncan declared incomes from Arawak Energy (an undisclosed amount), a company involved in oil exploration and production, and Harcourt Consultants, a firm he established to advise clients on the oil and gas industry.
         Alistair Burt, whose 2015 register includes £5,000 income for work as a non-executive director of the oil exploration company President Energy; John Hayes, Conservative MP for South Holland and The Deepings, who has declared an expected £50,000-a-year salary from an oil firm, BB Energy; and Conor Burns, a trade minister, who has declared £10,000 per quarter since 2011 for 10 hours’ work for Trant Engineering, an oil and gas engineering firm, totalling more than £300,000.

       

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, has ignored the Conservative whip on more than 120 occasions, mostly on issues related to Europe, but he has generally followed the party line in voting 10 times against measures that would bring emissions down. He has cast doubt on the reliability of scientific forecasts and blamed “alarmism” for high energy prices.
       There are few direct donations from fossil fuel firms. Michael Gove, the current chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and former environment minister, received £10,000 from Tullow Oil in 2010.

        Do you think they want to cut out their very lucrative pocket money they grab over and above their MPs salary, which we pay? I will repeat, they are laughing at us.     

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info    

Murder By Stupidity.

        Coronavirus, yes, they got it wrong, not by accident, but by only accepting advice from one stream of advice that was available, they chose the experts to follow and ignored others well versed in this type of situation. Blindly following "the science", as if there was no other expert advice available. This is gross stupidity and that single minded stupidity is responsible for a vastly increased number of deaths. They can't just wriggle out of it and walk away, too many people have suffered and died. They must be held to account, those deaths are on their watch and on their hands. Can killing by stupidity be called murder? The public must stand up and drive this bunch of stupid single track minds from ever again being in a position to make decisions over our lives.
An extract From The Guardian:

 

  ‘On 12 March, the government alarmed public health experts by abandoning containment, community case-finding and contact-tracing would stop.’ Boris Johnson arrives at a news conference on 12 March. Photograph: Simon Dawson/PA

     ----Two months on, that anxiety has not gone, although it’s also been joined by a sense of sadness. It’s now clear that so many people have died, and so many more are desperately ill, simply because our politicians refused to listen to and act on advice. Scientists like us said lock down earlier; we said test, trace, isolate. But they decided they knew better. Am I being unfair? The government assures us that its decisions and timing are based on science, as if it is a neutral, value-free process resulting in a specific set of instructions. In reality, the science around coronavirus is in its infancy and developing daily, with researchers across the world trying to understand how the virus spreads, how the body responds – and how to treat it and control it.

Continue reading HERE:

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

Profit From Illness.

        We keep hearing our prancing political ballerinas spouting about how the National Health Service is safe in their hands, and that there are no plans to privatise the NHS. What utter bullshit, the NHS has been getting privatised slice by slice for years and it is still continuing.

From Kings Fund:

         The Department of Health and Social Care’s accounts also show that NHS providers spent £1.3 billion2 on services from non-NHS organisations in 2018/19. Data from NHS Improvement shows that NHS providers spent £271 million on outsourcing services to other providers, including the private sector, in 2018/19 – up from £221 million in 2017/18. This includes outsourcing elective hospital treatment in order to deliver waiting times targets.
         If spending on primary care services – including GPs, pharmacy, optical and dental services – is included, some have estimated that approximately 25 per cent of NHS spending goes on the private sector.

        Anybody that holds any illusions that this creeping privatising of the NHS will some how be reversed under a capitalist system is naive in the extreme. With the engineered problems in the NHS it is likely to become a galloping privatisation, with governments seeing private capital as the white knight that will rescue our struggling NHS, but also making lots of money from people's health problems, for the financial Mafia. A system of profit governing your treatment, not your needs.

       Then there is this talk of opening up the NHS to the American market, which of course will lead to an American style Health Service. The following is just one example of how the American Health Service works.

This from the Guardian: 

 'I live on the street now': how Americans fall into medical bankruptcy 

        It’s been over a dozen years since Susanne LeClair of West Palm Beach, Florida was first diagnosed with cancer and she’s been fighting ever since. Now she, like many other Americans facing life-threatening illness, is bankrupt despite having health insurance.
       Before her first cancer-related surgery, LeClair was told by the hospital they accepted her employer-based health insurance.
      “I paid my $300 copay. After the surgery, I started receiving all these invoices and came to find out the only thing covered was my bed because the hospital was out of network,” said LeClair. “My bills were hundreds of thousands of dollars, so I had no choice but to file bankruptcy.”
        LeClair is on the verge of having to file for bankruptcy a second time due to the mounting medical debt she has accrued for additional cancer-related surgeries, regular appointments, medications and supplies related to her recovery, despite having health insurance and paying as much as she can out of pocket for copays, deductibles and premiums to maintain insurance.
       “My medical bills are at $52,000. I’ve done everything from credit cards to consolidation loans, I just keep simply paying one credit card with another interest-free one until I can pay the next one,” LeClair added. “It’s the side of cancer most people don’t understand or know about and it’s never-ending. It just keeps adding up and adding up and before you know it you’re back in debt that you can’t believe again.”
       Bankruptcy can also make it difficult to find employment given that many employers will disqualify a candidate with a bankruptcy filing found from a background check.
        According to a study published in February 2019, about 530,000 bankruptcies filed annually are because of debt accrued due to a medical illness. The study found that even the Obama administration’s landmark Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare) has failed to change the proportion of bankruptcies caused by medical debts, with poor health insurance cited as one of the main culprits.

Read the full article HERE:

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

Do The Peple Of Scotland Deserve This??

 

        The UK as a whole has the highest prison population per head of population in the whole of Western Europe. However Scotland takes pride of place as the leader in incarcerating its population with the highest per head of population. We're a wee country but we're very good at locking our people up in cages.

      This from Scottish Legal News:

      Scotland has the highest prison population rate per head in Western Europe, with 150 people held in prison for every 100,000 of the population, according to a new report.
       Meanwhile, in England and Wales there were more than 140,000 admissions into prison in 2017—the highest number in western Europe, according to report Prison: the facts, which reveals that, despite the number falling in recent years, England and Wales still have over 40,000 more admissions to prison than Germany, the second-highest—which has a significantly larger national population.
     The comparative figures are taken from the latest available Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics.
       The rate of prison admissions, which accounts for the effects of differences in national populations, shows that England and Wales have a rate approximately three times that of Italy and Spain, and almost twice as high as Germany, with 238 prison admissions for every 100,000 people.
       The UK as a whole continues to be an outlier in western Europe in its use of custody, with significantly higher prison populations than other countries. Scotland’s prison population rate per head, 150 per 100,000 of the population, is closely followed by England and Wales, with 139 per 100,000. Northern Ireland by contrast imprisons 76 per 100,000.
      Scotland also has the highest proportion of probationers under supervision for “offences against persons” in all of Europe.

     While the UK and Scottish government continue to believe that we are somehow, a more criminal population than the rest of Western Europe and proceed with this ancient and barbaric practice of caging people, they refuse to consider the conditions in which they are incarcerated.  

From The Guardian: 

    Europe’s anti-torture watchdog has described conditions in Scotland’s overcrowded prisons as an emergency situation, in a damning report that highlights a rise in drug-related violence, the overuse of segregation, and inmates confined to their cells for lengthy periods of time, sometimes in less than 3m2 of living space.
    Julia Kozma, who led the delegation of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) when they visited five Scottish prisons last October, described witnessing an influx of new arrivals at HMP Grampian. She said it was “like an emergency situation” as staff searched frantically for spare mattresses.
     “We don’t see the numbers going down so the emergency is becoming more and more the norm,” she added.

CCTV shows moment prison officers laugh as they drag prison inmate down a prison corridor.

 

     The blame for this inhumane and barbaric situation lies squarely at the feet of the state and its loaded judicial system. The state oversees a system of intolerable inequalities and continues to pass legislation that ensures that this system of exploitation and inequality persists. Though its priority is to unsure that the wealth and power of the predatory class is preserved, by caging those who dare to transgress its loaded legalities that are legislated to protect that class, they in no way provide for the humane treatment of those so accused and caged.

         The report reserves its greatest criticisms for the treatment of inmates at the Cornton Vale women’s prison, where the delegation found “women who clearly were in need of urgent care and treatment in a psychiatric facility, and [who] should not have been in a prison environment”. They included one woman who had bitten through the skin and muscle of her arm down to the bone and another who set fire to her hair in her cell. Since the delegation’s visit it is understood these women have been transferred to a medium secure psychiatric facility.

     There is no democracy or justice in a society that cages humans and then heaps humiliation, degrading and often violent conditions on them. If we want a better society then we have to treat all our people as human beings. Our present economic system does not allow for that.

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

Working Class Kids And A Loaded Education System.

         Most working class families realise that their kids get a raw deal when it comes to education. Even so, it is nice to have it made clear in facts and figures, and Professor Diane Reay's book does just that. Her recent book has been reviewed in the Guardian and makes for very interesting reading.
     Diane Reay, is a Cambridge University professor of education, her background might surprise you, The daughter of a coalminer, and the eldest of eight, she grew up on a council estate and received free school meals. She then spent 20 years working as a teacher in London primary schools before moving into academia and ending up at Cambridge.

Extract from the Guardian review:

 

  Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

  -------Research suggests it is the wealth and inclination of parents, rather than the ability and efforts of the child, that have the most bearing on a child’s educational success today. “If you’re a working class child, you’re starting the race halfway round the track behind the middle class child. Middle class parents do a lot via extra resources and activities.”
       Less affluent children also get a more restrictive educational offer, she discovered. “It wasn’t until I talked to young people about their experiences that I realised how different and unequal their educations were. Because the schools that working class children mostly go to are not doing well in the league tables, there’s a lot of pressure on their teachers and heads to increase their league table position. That means they focus ruthlessly on reading, writing and arithmetic.”
      Some children in these schools talked wistfully about hardly ever doing art, drama or dance: “These children come from families where their parents can’t afford to pay for them to do those activities out of school. It almost feels criminal. It feels very unfair.”
       The difference between amounts spent on educating children privately or in the state sector is stark. She cites research from University College London that found £12,200 a year is the average spending on a privately educated primary pupil, compared with £4,800 on a state pupil. For secondary, it’s £15,000 compared with £6,200.
       “Society has got more unfair, and the gap between the rich and poor is a lot greater than it was even 30 years ago. We’ve got to move back instead of going further in the direction of austerity, which seems to be punishing the poor.”
       She believes the government’s support for academies and free schools is powerfully ideological. “It’s about opening up education to the markets. I found it particularly shocking – and I had to read some quite boring parliamentary reports to get the information – that masses of money has gone into the academy and free school programme, and it’s been taken out of the comprehensive school system.”
       Reay found that free schools receive 60% more funding per pupil than local authority primaries and secondaries, and that £96m originally intended for improving underperforming schools was redistributed to academies.
      To make things worse, an analysis of Department for Education data reveals that schools with the highest numbers of pupils on free school meals are facing the deepest funding cuts: in secondary schools with more than 40% of children on free school meals, the average loss per pupil will be £803. That’s £326 more than the average for secondary schools as a whole. And primary schools with high numbers of working class pupils are expected to lose £578 per pupil.
          Another blow being inflicted on working class children is through the way they are treated in some super-strict schools, argues Reay. She says some academies operate on the principle that working class families are chaotic and children need school to impose control. “There’s lots of lining up in silence, standing to attention when an adult comes into the room, and mantras. I think it’s about disrespecting working class young people and their families. ------

It is well worth reading the full review HERE:
      Perhaps reading these facts and figures will bring home to the ordinary people that it is not just the education system that is loaded against them, it is the ideology of the entire system, it is designed to make sure you know your place in this hierarchical system where wealth and power are the tools that load the system against the ordinary people. I have ordered the book.

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

The Insane With Devastating Power.

        The political circus that we see day in day out is really scenes from an asylum. An asylum that houses some of the most deranged individuals on earth, as well as some of the world's worst psychopaths. Entering their world is not for the fainthearted, you will hear tales of fantasy and planned deeds of brutal slaughter of the innocent. Truth is something that has disappeared from their psyche, realism is something that belongs to the ordinary people outside the walls of the asylum. Sadly, much to our detriment, we seem to have given the residents of the asylum all the tools of power.  Do you recall the brutal and deliberate massacres during the Korean war: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-korean-war-era-massacre-was-policy/ Then remember the illegal invasion of Iraq: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq and now we have two US inmates Bolton and Pompeo planning a war against Iran: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51447.htm

         And so it goes on and on, too many massacres to list, countless illegal wars and invasions, the endless slaughter of millions of innocent people. All to fulfill the insane dreams and fantasies of the deranged psychopaths of the political asylum. It is long past the time when we should have quarantined the asylum and removed all powers of destruction from the insane inmates. To leave the political asylum as it is will mean an ever escalating world of death and destruction, an ever increasing multitude of hungry and deprived, an ever increasing level of inequality. Though it would appear that we also might be insane if we tolerate this situation much longer, as humanity demands a change and time is running out.

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

Just Text Death.

 

      At the age of 84, sometimes a wave of despondency washes over me. Having spent more years than I can remember fighting against, and shouting about, the insanity and savage brutality of this economic system that controls or lives, a quick glance tells me things are worse than ever. The opulence of the few grows ever greater, the poverty and misery for the many persists and keeps growing.

      Take the Democratic Republic of Congo avast country sitting on incalculable wealth but for the people of Congo unimaginable poverty, disease and bloodshed. The reason the people of Congo suffer so much is because of the countries vast wealth, surely a sign of greed and insanity.

      Four years ago I wrote a piece on the Congo, then, 2014, the so called First African World War, had been shedding the blood of the poor for 17 years. Today the bloodshed, poverty and death continues.
From The Guardian: 

         The humanitarian situation is dire. More than 13 million Congolese need humanitarian aid, twice as many as last year, and 7.7 million face severe food insecurity, up 30% from a year ago, the United Nations said in March. Many humanitarian officials complain that global attention has been diverted to more heavily reported crises in the Middle East.
          More than 4.5 million people are displaced, the highest number in the DRC for more than 20 years, latest figures show. There are outbreaks of cholera. The fighting is, as Kapitu feared, getting worse.

        Yes, our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, has a basket of dire world crises from which to cherry-pick.

         The article I wrote four years ago, the only change has been an increase in poverty, bloodshed and death, for the ordinary people, and increase in the wealth of the corporations milking the natural resources:

         It says a lot about our present economic system when you look around the world and find that countries with the richest natural resources have some of the poorest people on our earth. The Middle East is a wash with oil, which transfers into unbelievable wealth, but you can't say its people are all very rich. This pattern is repeated across the planet, another example is the Democratic Republic of Congo. A vast country, the second largest in Africa, the 11th largest in the world. As well as having coal, oil and diamonds, it is also the richest source of cobalt in the world. That rather dull looking material produces unimaginable wealth for the corporate world, but little for the people of the that country. In fact it is the opposite, this immeasurable wealth is probably the main cause of the suffering of the people.
         Because of the economic system that prevails today, blood will be shed to get control of that wealth. Sadly that blood is shed for the end product of things like mobile phones and laptops, and these are products that the vast majority of the people who produce that raw material will never see.
        If it was just dreadful working conditions and poor pay, that would be bad enough, but we are talking about millions dying and millions more suffering unimaginable violence. Since its bitter struggle to be free from the Western colonialists, the country has been blighted by violence, and at the root of that, is the fact that it is very rich in raw materials like cobalt.
      The Second Congo War, sometimes referred to as the “African World War”, as it involved around twenty armed groups and nine other African countries started in 1998. No doubt all eager to get a slice of that wealth. Although “Peace Accords” were signed in 2003, fighting continued in the east of the country through 2007. In this region the prevalence of all manner of sexual violence and rape is often described as the worst in the world. Since 1998 this conflict has claimed the lives of more than 5.4 million people. Though this was a brutal conflict, more than 90% were not killed in combat, they died from such things as malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoea, and malnutrition, brought about by the usual companions of war, displaced populations ending up living in unsanitary, over crowed conditions, combined with lack of shelter, clean water, food and medical care. What is even more tragic, 47% of those deaths were children under five.
         The country also has great agricultural potential but this is being stifled by this conflict, which still continues. It is the struggle to control those vast mineral resources that drives this most brutal and savage conflict. Is your mobile phone worth it?
       Surely we have the imagination and the ability to devise a economic system whereby natural resources do not equate with misery, poverty, deprivation and bloodshed for the many, and unbelievable opulence for the few.

ann arky's home.

In This Society Politeness Is A Counter-Revolutionary Weapon,

         In this society politeness is posted as the necessary requisite for a civilised society. However, what if your society is not civilised, but is an exploitative, brutal, greed driven free for all, for the wealthy and powerful. Then, in dealing with that society, your politeness is no more than your display of submissiveness.  Most UK anarchists will know of Ian Bone, today, pensioner Ian is facing the corrupt might of a Qatari royal family, who have served him with an injunction. Let's make sure Ian does not fight this battle alone. Some may not like his methods, but he is always on the side of the ordinary people and deserves our solidarity, after all, like it or lump it, we are in a class war.

      Some praise for an anarchist from an unusual source, The Guardian: 

         This week the Qatari royal family is taking a pensioner who walks with a stick to court to stop him protesting outside the Shard. The Shard is owned by this family via funds held in Jersey. They also own Harrods, the Olympic village and half of One Hyde Park. They reportedly own more property in London than our own royal family.
         At the top of the Shard are 10 flats with the price tag of £50m each, and they are currently empty. This is partly what has upset the protester, who lives on his pension of £154.56 a week. The Qatar royals are taking him and “persons unknown” to the high court on Thursday and also asking him to pay costs. He was served with an injunction because of his intention to protest. He had encouraged supporters to “ask at the door to see the £50m flats”, or “make a reservation at one of the Shard restaurants and ask if you can bring your own food”. If any made it inside he suggested shouting about the injustices and the empty flats. And Grenfell.
        “We also want musicians to come down and play, sing, dance, rant,” he said. “Need yer own amps.”
        He, however, needs no amps. For the pensioner is Ian Bone of Class War who has been protesting about gentrification and social cleansing since the 80s. I adore the man. To me he is the best tabloid journalist this country has ever produced. Provocative, hilarious, scathing.
        His Class War slogans are full of bile and bite and angrily brilliant. Described by actual tabloids at times as a dangerous insurrectionary, Bone is full of life and fun, someone who monsters the pieties of the left and simply refuses to play any game that involves subservience to the right.
          The injunction that was served against him contains a statement about him from the Shard’s head of security who had contacted the Metropolitan police. They are worried about the inherent security flaws of the Shard but they are clearly more worried about Bone and his anarchy. He is described in the statement as “belligerent and uncooperative when interacting with persons of authority, such as police officers and security officers”. Amazing investigative work there! Who would have thought that the founder of Class War was a little awkward? Bone has since pointed out that he has never hit anyone with his stick and has Parkinson’s.
        Bone’s real stick is his words. His attitude. His joy at pointing to obvious wrongs and asking us which side we are on. “I hate dull lefties,” he tells me. “All the miserabilism.” He likes action and shock. And swearing. I loved all those posters that appalled all those who like to be appalled. “Eat the rich.” The one of Diana and Charles with baby William and “Another Fucking Royal Parasite”. He doesn’t do deference or respect. The banners on marches that referred to the Socialist Workers as Social Wankers. Bone’s stance has always been about having a laugh along the way to smashing it all up.
       His father was a butler. His family grew up “in service”. “So I grew up bitter and resentful with a chip on my shoulder,” he tells me gleefully. When he was 15 he wrote off to an address that he found in Punch to find out more about anarchism. “I believed in chaos,” he said. “I then panicked for weeks. I though they might send round a bearded person.” Since then, of course, he has realised that anarchists are just not that efficient.
       Underneath all the sloganeering though, Bone has been protesting about social cleansing all his life. He lived in Grenfell for two years. He knew people who were in the fire. He led “poor doors” protests in the East End in 2014. “If you grow up like I did, that gets you. The tradesman’s entrance.” He saw the developing ghost towers but he sees the working class being squeezed out everywhere. “Who wants another coffee shop or prep school?” he asks of Ladbroke Grove.
Statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett to be unveiled in April
Read more
        Now that social housing is very much on the agenda, Bone as usual doesn’t want anything to do with Labour. He doesn’t see Corbyn as different to any other Labour leader. Everything for him is about people taking over and running things for themselves.
       Whether this means inciting people to march on Boris Johnson’s house or setting up the South Norwood Tourist Board, Bone is a provocateur, incredibly funny and mostly right. If all this pardoning of suffragettes’ civil disobedience by the political class made you feel as nauseous as it did me, Bone is the antidote. If you value politeness and respectability then Class War may not be for you.
       But on Thursday, I want this anarchist grandad to shake his stick at those Qatari billionaires. He wants, as always, to “push things further”. We should help him. All power to the inimitable Mr Bone.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist

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

The Virgin Vampire Of The NHS.

 

      While we sit in a cloud of illusions, and hear the false voices of the ruling parasite class, reassure us, that the "NHS is safe in their hands", silently, surreptitiously, it is being gobbled up by the vampires of the corporate world. Despite the phoney sickening syrup sounds falling from the mouth of the health secretary whose name sounds like a term that could be used to describe him, the Right Honourable Jeremy Hunt, is presiding over the wholesale privatising of the NHS.

        Vultures, vampires and parasites of the corporate world  are feasting on the inners of the NHS, with that self centred waste of space and tax dodger Branson leading the charge for plunder.

       From The Guardian:

       Richard Branson’s Virgin Care won a record £1bn of NHS contracts last year, as £3.1bn of health services were privatised despite a government pledge to reduce the proportion of care provided by private companies.
       Overall, private firms scooped 267 – almost 70% – of the 386 clinical contracts that were put out to tender in England during 2016-17, according to a new report. They included the seven highest value contracts, worth £2.43bn between them, and 13 of the 20 most lucrative tenders.
        The £3.1bn in contracts, a big rise on the previous year’s £2.4bn, prompted concern that profit-driven companies are increasingly involved in delivering care, in a development that undermines repeated assurances by the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, that they play only a marginal role.

        Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do, our bunch of Right Honourable Gentlemen, speak with forked tongue. Not only do lots of the vampires of the corporate world who snatch large chunks of the NHS, avoid paying tax, but when the lose a contract to a public, or charitable body, the sue. How dare public bodies tender for health care contracts, don't they know that the philosophy from the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption is "privatise everything"?

        Virgin’s £1bn haul means it now has over 400 separate NHS contracts.
       Its growing role has prompted particular anger among anti-privatisation groups. It pays no tax in the UK and its ultimate parent company, Virgin Group Holdings Ltd, is based in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven.
        In addition, it came under fire for suing six clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in Surrey, NHS England and Surrey county council last year after losing an £82m contract for children’s services to a rival bid involving a local NHS trust and two social enterprises. A settlement of the action appears to have involved the six CCGs paying Virgin an undisclosed sum.

        It is naive in the extreme to believe that by lobbying those Right Honourable Gentlemen, that sit in those Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, to get them to "save our NHS" will reap any results what so ever. Most of them have friends, shares, contacts and possible future lucrative jobs in that self same privatised health care gravy train. Much better to start by closing down that cesspool of of pompous power and privilege, The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, and set about dismantling the destructive, exploitative corrupt, greed driven system of capitalism. Any attempt at reforming or modifying this cancer on the planet is doomed to repeat the injustices, poverty, deprivation and wars of the present variant. Capitalism cannot be reformed.

A Country Of Daniel Blakes.

      In this brutal world of raw capitalism, our country, like most other countries has a multitude of "Daniel Blakes", from north to south, from town to city, honest decent people are being slowly and callously killed. It is not done by bullet or knife, it is done by ideology. Their potential life is being stunted and deliberately shortened. It is planned by faceless well heeled bureaucrats, who never enter the world of the ordinary people. A deliberate policy of demoralising and destroying those surplus to the requirements of capital. For how long will we tolerate seeing our friends, neighbours and family, being deliberately treated to this insidious slow death.

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We Are Being Conned.

      As all of the competitors in the present Crooks and Liars competition, (the general election), continue to spout the need for “cuts”, which translates into cuts in our standard of living, the claim is the same, these are tough times, and we have to make sacrifices. Tough times for who, and who is doing all the sacrificing?

     Since “the crisis” of 2008, the UK's wealth has rocketed, before that “dreadful” event, to get into the UK's richest 1,000, all you needed was a paltry £15 million. Today, according to the Guardian commenting on the Sunday Times UK Rich List, to get into that club you need a personal wealth of at least £100 million. According to that list, the top 1,000 have accumulated a combined wealth of £547 billion, this is more than double what it was just ten years ago. Poor ordinary struggle millionaires just can't make it any more. The number of billionaires in the UK has risen from 104 last year to 117 this year. Since 2010, bankers salaries have risen by 35%, FTSE 100 directors have had to get by on an increase of 14%, while MPs are struggling with a modest 11% increase.

       Compare these figures with those that refer to us, the ordinary people, the people that actually create all that wealth. We have seen wages cut, frozen, or had trifling increases of 1%, like teachers and nurses. On top of this we have had rising inflation, rocketing energy prices, cuts in social spending with the inevitable destruction of social services and our standard of living. Since that excuse for austerity, “The Crisis”, we have seen our incomes fall by more than 3.5% in real terms. And proof of the pudding, we have seen food banks pass the 1 million mark.

      Now ask yourself, who is seeing the “tough times”? Who is doing the sacrificing? A bigger question is, do we NEED austerity, or is it just a dogma being forced on us, so the the rich can continue to get richer, while the poor get poorer? After all we live in a very rich country, and the figures prove that it is getting richer at an incredible rate. The problem is that it is all going in the one direction, the wrong direction, upwards. 

      Let's take control of all that wealth that we create, and spread it among our own people. We don't need, nor do we gain by increasing the number of billionaires. We don't need FTSE 100 directors, top bankers, and we certainly don't need nor do we gain, by having MPs. MPs are people that the Crooks and Liars competition proves to be the best liars in the country. They need us, we don't need them. It is a massive con perpetrated by a small bunch of exceptionally rich and greedy people, it is not an inevitable, set in tablets of stone, system. Like all man made systems, we can destroy it, we can create a fairer and more just system, one based on co-operation, sustainability and fairness, why are we waiting?

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

The Prince Of Darkness Laughed.

       2014 has hardly taken its first faltering steps and those arrogant  dinosaurs of empire are out with their megaphones spouting that WW1, was a glorious victor for democracy, a noble cause, a just war for freedom. They want to mark the centenary of the start of that event, that soaked Europe's soil in the blood of ordinary people, as a glorious part of our history. History is to be re-written, what was a greed driven squabble between the aristocratic owners of empires, that sucked in and slaughtered the best of Europe's youth, is to be lauded as something of which we the ordinary people should be proud. The massive misery, suffering and deaths of that unnecessary, avoidable carnage, is set to be used as a bandwagon, by the millionaire flag waving parasites. It will be abused and misrepresented, in an attempt to portray that crap slogan “We're all in this together”. It will be used as a pompous platform of grandeur and splendour, to take our eyes of the poverty stricken state of our present society.

       We must continue to shout the truth about that disastrous ego driven aristocratic grab for power and territories, we owe it to all those who died under those pitiful, miserable, avoidable conditions. We cannot allow their unjust slaughter to be used by a bunch of well-heeled hypocrites, to further their own political ideology. At every turn we must counter their lies with truth. There was no aim for democracy in their plans, there was no defence of freedom on their agenda, it was a thrust for power, and land grabbing, on a grand scale, and as usual in their plans, we the ordinary people were to pay the price.

The following is an extract from an excellent article in the Guardian:

       This is all preposterous nonsense. Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources.
      Germany was the rising industrial power and colonial Johnny-come-lately of the time, seeking its place in the sun from the British and French empires. The war erupted directly from the fight for imperial dominance in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary and Russia scrapped for the pickings from the crumbling Ottoman empire. All the ruling elites of Europe, tied together in a deathly quadrille of unstable alliances, shared the blame for the murderous barbarism they oversaw. The idea that Britain and its allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the rights of small nations, is simply absurd.

Read the full article HERE:

At the Cenotaph.

I saw the Prince of Darkness, with his Staff,

Standing bare-headed by the Cenotaph:

Unostentatious and respectful, there

He stood, and offered up the following prayer,

'Make them forget, O Lord, what this Memorial

Means; their discredited ideas revive;

Breed new belief that War is purgatorial

Proof of the pride and power of being alive;

Men's biologic urge to readjust

The Map of Europe, Lord of Hosts, increase;

Lift up their hearts in large destructive lust;

And crown their heads with blind vindictive Peace,'

The Prince of Darknes to the Cenotaph

Bowed. As he walked away I heard him laugh.

Siegfried Sassoon.

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The Carnage Of The Drone.

       I first came across this article in that strange world of Facebook and felt that it had to have as much publicity as possible. I have posted several pieces on "drones" and how they are becoming the weapon of choice, and how politicians and that babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, tell us how clinical and accurate they are, but we are never given any details of the carnage they cause. This extract is from an article in The Guardian, by one who has seen it all, and lays it bare.

An Elbit Systems Hermes 450 drone. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

      Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them some questions. I'd start with: "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?" And: "How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" Or even more pointedly: "How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicle] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?"
     Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.

Read the full article HERE: 

       Politicians make the decisions on war, politicians never experience war first hand. Politicians are responsible for the carnage of war but never pull the trigger. They view the wars dressed in fine suits and discuss it over a glass of fine wine, justifying their own stupidity and greed. They are among the small group that gain from the carnage of war, we the people never gain, but we pay the price.

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

The Pitchfork Protests.

       Italy, another country where the people's anger, which has been seething below the surface, is now beginning to boil over. There have been protests in Turin in the north of the country to Sicily in the south and they are spreading. This is a growing revolt against the state and its corruption, against austerity for the many, while the few bask in luxury, it is the same complaint as in every other capitalist country on the planet. Though our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media aren't exactly shouting about the swelling anger.

Turin December 14 2013.:

      These protests in Italy are grouped under what has become known as the “pitchfork” protests and they claim no affiliation to any political party. They are manual workers, low paid, unemployed and students, and are not confined to the big towns and cities but across the whole country. It is a combination of protests, marches, sit-ins and other direct action. There are large groups involved in these protests in Turin, Milan, Florence and Palermo with large protests planned for next week. This week it spread to Rome, with students clashing with police outside a university being used by government ministers as a conference centre. One of the banners read, "Our university isn't a catwalk for those who peddle austerity,". On Tuesday last, Beppe Grillo, head of Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement urged police to join protesters. 

 

Guardian photo;

   

    Italy, like the rest of the capitalist world, has been hit by “austerity”, it is also a country with 12% unemployment, which rises to above 41% for the young under 25's. Low wages and increasing poverty are driving these protests, Is Italy reaching the “enough is enough” stage? According to Danilo Calvani, a farmer and one of the protestors, “There are millions of us and we are growing by the hour___”

  Reuters photo.  

    How much longer can the various capitalist states keep the lid on the boiling pot of anger? We know they will bring out the usual brute force, telling the people, “It's for your own good” and “Law and order must be preserved”. What that translates into is that they are prepared to viciously crush the will of the people to protect their own wealth and power. They are not interested in the least in change for the benefit of the many, that's not what capitalism is about. 

 

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