Capitalism's Phoney Christmas.

    So that was Christmas, a period of abundance, an avalanche of gifts, a gorging of food, a tsunami of merriment. Well that's the picture our babbling brook of bullshit would have you believe is the norm, but capitalism doesn't work like that. No doubt in this crazy unjust system there were those who gave diamonds, cars and other expensive gifts, while feasting on an array of exotic foods all washed down with buckets of “the best Champagne”.
      However, there is the other side, the brutal side of capitalism, where kids go hungry and live in a gift free zone. This Christmas saw record levels of our fellow Scots being forced to seek sustenance from foodbanks. This year, according to the Trussell Trust, the week that contained Christmas saw more than 7,000 families and individuals forced to seek help from foodbanks. December was their busiest month, with the week before Christmas being the busiest of the month.

The Trussell Trust said people had been driven to rely on charity due to financial poverty, increased winter fuel bills and the absence of free school meals during the holidays. Many families have been plunged into “financial famine” over the festive period, the charity said.
One foodbank in Glasgow said it had received referrals for nearly a dozen clients in need of help on Christmas Eve.
Last year just over 14,000 people were helped by the foodbanks throughout the entire month of December – an increase of 53% on the previous year's figure of 9,263.
The total included 5,818 people who were helped in the week running up to Christmas Day - a rise of 51% on the figure of 3,842 in 2013. This year's figures dwarfted those for both 2014 and 2013.

       For many, Christmas is not only a period of hunger, but a period of homelessness. According to Alison Watson, deputy director of Shelter Scotland, "It's completely unacceptable that in the 21st Century 100,000 children across Britain will spend Christmas homeless, with nearly 5,000 of them in Scotland. "It's even more damning that in Scotland this represents a 15 per cent increase on the same statistics last year - so the problem seems to be getting worse, not better. 

         Glasgow fares worst in Scotland, with approximately one-fifth of the total, with more than 1,000 children in the city who opened their eyes on Christmas morning to a homeless world. The total of children living in temporary accommodation in Scotland, is up 13 per cent on last year. 

        So this is part of the ugly face of capitalism, poverty and homelessness, with children having their life's potential stunted at an early age, their health and physical development permanently undermined, while others gorge on abundance, they never earned. If you see this injustice and are aware of the suffering involved, then surely you must stand up and work for the destruction of this cancer that is capitalism.

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

UK, A Hungry Nation.

      While our Oxbridge millionaires, sitting in The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, mouth off about “growth” and “making the right decisions” and the blue corner waffles with the red corner with meaningless phrases and lots of “here, here's”, you and I see hunger and desperation. This is one of the richest nations on the planet, yet its people go hungry. The Trussell Trust, which has 400 food banks across the UK, states that it handed out food parcels to more than 350,000 people, between April and September this year. What makes this even more criminal is the fact that a third of these were children. The number of people relying on food banks for survival has tripled over the last year.

        Here in the UK it is not just a handful of families that are somehow in need of help. This is a national crisis caused by the deliberate actions of the bankster friendly government. This is a nation slowly being driven to deprivation by forced “austerity”. Some leading experts state that in the UK hunger has now reached the level of a “public health emergency” A recent letter to the British Medical Journal signed by a group of senior academics from two leading universities, the Medical Research Council and a group of doctors, said that the effect of Government policies on vulnerable people’s ability to afford food needed to be “urgently” monitored.

        There letter states that there has been a rapid rise in the number of people requiring emergency food aid, plus the doubling of the number of cases of malnutrition seen in hospitals, and a rapid fall in the number of calories being consumed by the public at large. They state that these are, “all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preventative action,” Research into this problem, commissioned by the Government itself, has had its publication delayed, we can only speculate that the reason is that the government may find its result embarrassing.

        This is the meaning of “austerity”, this is the ConDem's “steady growth”, this is Osborne's “right decisions”, this is the financial mafia's plans falling into place. Sweatshop Britain leading the way to sweatshop Europe. We have been told that these policies will continue until 2020, how many food banks will we need by then, how many cases of malnutrition will the hospitals handle by then? This is the promise of another 7 years of falling wages, slashing benefits and social services, and rising prices. Where will your standard of living be by then? Do you honestly believe that at that magical 2020, everything will suddenly be great, and hunger and poverty will disappear? Accept it, if you accept this present system, you accept an endless downward spiral to poverty and deprivation. Surely you want more than this.

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

Austerity And Deprivation, Two Sides Of The Same Coin.

        What does “austerity” mean, or what should it mean? You would imagine “austerity” would mean a doing without the luxuries, a little tightening of the belt, but does this financial Mafia's variety of “austerity” fit that description? This brand of “austerity” means abject poverty for families the length and breadth of the land. In England, since the 2008 “crisis”, malnutrition treated in NHS hospitals has almost doubled. Diagnoses of malnutrition in England rose from 3,161 in 2008/09 to an criminal 5,499 in 2012. This has been driven by wages being frozen/cut, while the cost of food and heating have rocketed. Add to this the various benefit cuts, bedroom tax, ATOS attack on the disabled, and it becomes very clear that this “austerity” is a vicious attack the living standards of the general population.

      Oxfam, that organisation that we see as a charity for those poor countries, stated that, in the UK, "increasing desperation to avoid starvation in one of the world’s richest and unequal countries has seen the number of visits to food banks rise to around half a million a year." The Trussell Trust, the UK's largest food bank operator, has seen the number of those receiving food parcels rise from approximately 26,000 in 2008, to more than 350,000 in the past five years. UK director of Trussell Trust has stated that, “It’s not surprising that rates of malnutrition have also increased. We see people coming to food banks who’ve gone without food for days.”

     Poverty and debt go hand in hand, as people get desperate in their struggle for survival, they are more likely to run up more debt. The average UK household debt is £54,000, that is close to twice the level of a decade ago. Personal debt in the UK's is almost 94% of the total UK economic output for 2012, a mind boggling £1.43 trillion. Lots of people are failing to manage that debt and are suffering in many ways, cutting down on food and heating. Interest rates are set to rise, when that happens, thousands more who are at the moment barely coping will start to sink into the mire of poverty and deprivation. With poverty comes health problems, both mental and physical, families and relationships start to strain and break.

        This is the true meaning of “austerity”, it is not a slight drop in your luxuries, a little bit of inconvenience, as you miss a night at the movies. It is mind crushing stress, it is malnutrition, it is health problems, it is watching your family disintegrate, it is seeing your kids future being stunted and their potential obliterated. It is living with the reality or the fear of homelessness, for what? To sort out a bunch of financial parasites' gambling mess, while they continue to live in the lap of unearned and undeserved luxury. That's capitalism. Do you want it? If not, what are we going to do about it?

Cum'awn, dae sumthin'

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

The Return Of The Hungry 30's!!

     We all know the extent to which the Troika has heaped deprivation on the people of Greece, but not everybody is aware of the extent of the poverty in which our millionaire cabal have mired the people of the UK. While the past five years have seen the costs of basic foodstuffs rocket by 35% and heating costs leap by a massive 63%, incomes over the same period have hardly moved at all. A recent statement by Mark Goldring, Chief executive of Oxfam puts it quite clearly: "The shocking reality is that hundreds of thousands of of people in the UK are turning to food aid. Cuts to social safety-nets have gone too far, leading to destitution, hardship and hunger on a large scale. It is unacceptable this is happening in the seventh wealthiest nation on the planet."

     When people start turning up at food banks you know there is hunger, and for a country which is among the top ten wealthiest nations on Earth to have over 500,000 people relying of food handouts, you know there is injustice.

     The Trussell Trust is the UK's largest organisers of food banks and has stated that last year they handed out at least three days' emergency food to almost 350,000 people, up from 130,000 the previous year. They added that due to the number of organisations handing out food aid the true figure of people receiving that aid is well over half a million.

      Though according to the Cameron/Osborne Oxbridge mentality, these people are not the nation's strivers, they are the nations skivers. When in fact they are the nations ordinary people pushed to the point of desperation and deprivation by this Old Boys network of pampered millionaire parasites, carrying out the dictate of the financial mafia.

     This food aid is going to single parents, retired workers, paid off workers, families on low income, people like you and I, your neighbours and your friends. At what figure do we stand up and say enough is enough? There is no food shortage in the UK, but there are hungry children and pensioners, there are malnurished adults trying to bring up families, why? Simply because of the deliberate ideology of a handful of well fed exceedingly rich parasites. Why watch your neighbours go hungry in the midst of plenty?

ann archy's home.