Capitalism And Slave Labour Camps.

       Capitalism, where is it going? I suppose we could look at the most developed capitalist country in the world and gain some idea. America, King Capitalist, the big boy in the game, the pinnacle of capitalist development, what does it show us? Over the last six years, America's wealth has grown by over $30 trillion, a staggering 60%, over roughly the same period, the number of homeless children has grown by the same staggering figure, 60%. In 2013, 2.5 million children experienced homelessness, 1 in 30. According to UNICEF, America has the highest child relative poverty rates in the developed world.
      Homelessness in America is another indicator of what capitalism brings to people, approximately 3.5 million people experience homelessness in America each year. Roughly 15% of Americans, 4.8 million, live in poverty, with 7.7 million classified as living in poor households. These are figures from the crowning glory of capitalism.
      Apart from the poverty and homelessness in America, there is a much more sinister aspect to American capitalism, the road that we are all heading down, its prison system. America incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, its recent figures stand at 2.3 million, of its citizens locked up, mostly Black and Hispanic. America has locked up half a million more people than China, which has five time the population of the US. America, with 5% of the world's population, accounts for 25% of the world's prison population.

      The prison system in America is big business, the system is highly privatised and a wonderful money maker for the corporate world. 

       “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work, lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”
     The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

        The American prison system is slave labour, with a workforce that can be paid less than a dollar a day, has no union rights or representation, never turns up late, never goes on strike, or makes demands for increase wages, and can be punished for not working hard enough. In some cases, private prison are paid by the government for the number of empty beds they have, as the government guarantees a certain occupancy rate, so logically it pays the state to fill the prisons. This of course encourages big business to build more prisons.
       The US prison business is no small-fry production unit, this is BIG business. The American prison system produces for the American market, 

     100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts pants, tents, bags and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.”
       When you can get that kind of labor for less than a dollar a day, it’s hard to see the government’s motivation for incarcerating fewer people. And it’s all done at the taxpayer’s expense.

        So let's look at America,  and see the future of capitalism, poverty, homelessness and mass slave labour camps by means of state incarceration. This is our future, unless we do something about it, and do it quick.

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

Poverty surrounded By Obscene Wealth.

      America is the shining example of how capitalism works, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, because of the tremendous wealth of that country, the difference is so very glaring. Over the past six years of the “recession”, America's wealth grew by a staggering 60%, more than $30 trillion. Capitalism, being what it is, over roughly the same period, the number of homeless children grew by 60%, and there are 16 million children on food stamps. While the pampered parasites of American capitalism have been stuffing their carpet bags with loot, the standard of living for children has plummeted.

       According to a UNICEF report, the four countries with the lowest child well-being are Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and America, America being 26 out of 29, scoring badly on all counts. The UK of course doesn't score much better being 16 in the 29 developed countries of the world. In that land of plenty, the good ol' US of A, more than half of all public school pupils are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies. Of course race also comes into the equation, almost 50% of all black children under the age of six, live in poverty. To see a country with so much wealth and so much glaring poverty, surely tells you that the system is rigged against the ordinary people. Common sense, humanity and simple decency tells you that there is more than enough to go round to give everybody a decent standard of living. However, capitalism, doesn't have common sense, humanity and simple decency, it only has greed perpetuated through exploitation. America is only unique in its quantity of wealth, not in its unfair distribution, that's part and parcel of capitalism in all countries across this capitalist world. Don't you think we could do better if we, the people, managed our own affairs and handled the distribution of the wealth, and let's not forget, we create all that welath, it is by right, ours in the first place. 

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

A VISION OF THE FUTURE???

     Sometimes you come across an article and it just slaps you in the face with its facts figures and analysis, it hits you and you don't know how to respond.  This is three excerpts from what to me was such am article. You could say that this is just a stone's throw away from what is probably the richest country in the world.

 1 "If Katrina revealed America’s third world, then the earthquake revealed the third world’s third world. Haiti is by nearly every metric one of the poorest nations on the planet—a mind-blowing 80 percent of the population live in poverty, and 54 percent live in what is called “abject poverty.” Two-thirds of the workforce have no regular employment, and, for those who do have jobs, wages hover around two dollars a day. We’re talking about a country in which half the population lack access to clean water and 60 percent lack even the most basic health care services, such as immunizations; where malnutrition is among the leading causes of death in children, and, according to UNICEF, 24 percent of 5-year-olds suffer stunted growth. In Haiti life expectancy hovers at around 60 years as compared to, say, 80 years in Canada. As the Haiti Children Project puts it:"

 2    "Never fear, though—if anything is certain it is this: There will be more Haitis. Some new catastrophe will strike our poor planet. And for a short while the Eye of Sauron that is the globe’s fickle attention span will fall upon this novel misery. More hand wringing will ensue, more obfuscatory narratives will be trotted out, more people will die. Those of us who are committed will help all we can, but most people will turn away. There will be a few, however, who, steeling themselves, will peer into the ruins for the news that we will all eventually need."

3     "One day somewhere in the world something terrible will happen, and for once we won’t look away. We will reject what Jane Anna and Lewis R. Gordon have described in Of Divine Warning as that strange moment following a catastrophe when “in our aversion to addressing disasters as signs” we refuse “to interpret and take responsibility for the kinds of collective responses that may be needed to alleviate human misery.”

      One day something terrible will happen and for once we will heed the ruins. We will begin collectively to take responsibility for the world we’re creating. Call me foolishly utopian, but I sincerely believe this will happen. I do. I just wonder how many millions of people will perish before it does."

Read the full article HERE:

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WHAT IS NATO DOING IN LYBIA?

       As the Western take over of Lybia continues with more than 6,000 NATO attacks on Tripoli so far, and the Western imperialists keep mouthing noises about doing it to protect civilians, we have to ask questions. Why not Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia etc. where civilians are being killed on a daily basis? Why did the West support this particular uprising? The information coming out of Libya doesn't show them as a democratic group. There are reports of them moving into towns and villages and  "cleansing" them of "black" Libyans. These are Libyans who found themselves there because of Libya's previous connection with the slave trade. There have also been reports of looting as they enter towns and villages. Hardly the actions of a movement driven by the desire for true democracy.

The following extract is taken from The Commune and the full article can be read HERE.

       Joe Thorne looks at the evidence, and draws some conclusions.

Libyan Proverb "The calamity of a people is beneficial to others"

             The NATO powers are not intervening in Syria or Bahrain, where pro-democracy movements are also subject to brutal suppression. They did not intervene in Gaza during Cast Lead, or in Tamil Eelam during the offensive which wiped out thousands of Tamils. While millions of dollars are spent on cruise missiles and aerial bombing, UNICEF, the same powers in their guise as protectors of children, say they are worried that because of insufficient resources to deal with famine “65,000 children in Kenya alone are at acute risk of dying.” Indeed, “Britain trained and equipped some of the Libyan special forces who inflicted such horrors on cities like Misrata. Western states continue to train Saudi forces, and this may well have much the same effect.”

We don’t need to labour the point: the NATO powers are not ‘humanitarians’, their motives are not ‘humanitarian’, and what they do has nothing to do with the defence of human life. Could it be the case that their malign motives are a given, but the objective outcome of their policy may nonetheless be welcome? It was not the case in Kosovo or Iraq. The point of reminding ourselves of NATO’s hypocrisy is not just that they are hypocrites: it is to understand how the specific, very much non-humanitarian, objectives of the NATO powers will play out in their actual policy in the coming weeks, months, and years.

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MISSILES FOR LUNCH!!!

"THERE GOES THE KIDS' LUNCHES."

      

      While the ratbag of NATO and its helpers blast away at Libya with missiles costing anything up to £800,000 each and noting that they have fired well over 100 of these in the few weeks since the No-fly zone started we should try to get this into some sort of proportion. Every year 15 million children die of hunger, for the price of one missile we could feed a school full of children with lunch for 5 years. Throughout the 90's well over 100 million children died from illness and starvation. Those deaths could have been prevented for the price of ten stealth bombers, or the equivalent of what the world spends on its military in two days. According to United Nations Food and Agriculture, one in twelve people in the world are malnourished including 160 million children under the age of 5.

         The assets of the world’s three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the planet. According to UNICEF, nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion live on less than $1 per day, while the world’s 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world’s people. To satisfy the world’s sanitation and food requirements would cost a mere US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.

      To say that poverty will always be with us is a lie, however to say that death by starvation can't be resolved is a crime against humanity.

       As long as we have a system of exploitation where the wealth produced by the many is syphoned off to a few pampered parasites, as long as we have a state system where states seek power over other states by military power, for whatever reason, we will have massive starvation and the resulting misery and deaths.

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