Let's Hear You.

       Everybody should by now be aware that the reason the UK has more deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, than most countries in the world, was simply due to Neo-Liberal policies, orchestrated austerity to suit the financial Mafia, gross ineptitude of the government for more that a decade. The evidence is everywhere, hospitals with staff shortages, equipment shortages, shambles of a testing program, neglect of care homes, and an unbelievable chaotic system of ordering essential PPE. All this adds up to dereliction of duty resulting in untold misery and avoidable deaths, especially among the poor and vulnerable.
       I received the following from a very reliable source, for obvious reason wishing to remain anonymous. Whistle blowers can and do receive a forceful backlash from the powers that be. Front line workers are supposed to be submissive and keep silent, the opposite should be the case. Let's hear your voice.

News from the Front Line.

      As an front line NHS worker who was unfortunate enough to catch the Covid19 virus and was laid low for 4 weeks, it became obvious that the continued cuts to public health and social care over the last three decades was beginning to take its toll on the population.
      This coupled with over a decade of Tory “austerity” cuts has devastated the vulnerable, the poor and the elderly.
      The total unpreparedness of the NHS to deal with an emergency has been highlighted by the outbreak of the corona virus and the chronic under-funding of public health and social care departments has meant that staff in all sectors have been put in an impossible position of trying to care for patients and clients without the benefit of protective equipment or a lot of personal equipment that was out of date.
     And while the virus tore through the elderly in care homes (the vast majority now privatised after Thatcher’s “Care in the Community” programme, putting private profit before public health) Boris and co. sat on their collective hands, and did nothing.
     The crocodile tears of the Tory government, who don’t forget had voted and CHEERED last year about not giving public sectors a wage increase in England, beggars’ belief. Their hypocrisy of Clapping for the NHS is an absolute disgrace as they have been part of a government Cabal since the 1980s to run down Social Security and destabilise the NHS for privatisation.
     When the threat of the virus has finally taken its toll on our poorer and most vulnerable, lets again take to the streets and tell them hands off of our NHS and lay the foundations down to control our workplaces and communities.

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

Occupational Hazards.

        Anybody with two or more living brain cells should be well aware that our National Health Service is being privatised. The strategy of continual highlighting failings in the service, creates dissatisfaction and raises expectations, and calls for change, this is engineered by propaganda from our babbling brook of bullshit, and lack of funding from a government cabal of greedy millionaire private enterprise junkies. As the crescendo of complaints keeps rising, the call for change increases and from the private enterprise entrepreneurs, their call is always, private money, open the NHS to the market. You have to hand it to them for their persistence and determination, this call has been going on since the birth of the NHS, our problem is that they are more than half way there.

      The years between 1976 and 1994 saw a spate of hospital occupations, perhaps the time is right for a return to this tactic. If you want a NHS that is publicly owned and free at the point of need, you will have to do something drastic and very soon, or it will be  British National Health Service, PLC.

This is a quote from Past Tense, a very interesting, and worth reading document: 

past tense

Occupational Hazards

Occupying Hospitals:
inspirations and issues from our history

A past tense Dossier

        Between 1976 and 1994. more than twenty hospitals in the UK were occupied either wholly or partly by either staff who worked in them, or by local communities, or both; usually to prevent threats to close or merge them, cutting services and slashing jobs. Some were successful, some were not, but work-ins or occupations were a widespread and accepted tactic.
      With the looming threat of ‘re-organisations’ and further cuts and closures in the NHS looming, could occupations and work-ins be back on the agenda?
       Occupational Hazards documents some inspiring tales from the past, and asks some questions about some of the issues and problems arising from taking over a hospital.

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

The Financial Mafia Put The Boot In.

     It looks like the Greek "bailout" will go ahead, and the people of Greece will be in hawk to the financial Mafia to the tune of €86 billion. Not that the people will see much of this money, about 80% of it will find its way, very quickly, back to the bond holders behind the ECB, (European Central Bank), but what the people of Greece will see, is another massive drop in their standard of living, coming from increased taxes, lower pensions,  a higher retiring age, higher VAT, and a relaxing of health and safety conditions and other working conditions, plus a squeeze on wages. They are also expected to stand by and see €50 billion of their public assets sold off at rock bottom prices, to the corporate buddies of the financial Mafia, within the next couple of years. This is the Financial Mafia putting the boot in on the people of Greece, and the national government can go to hell in a hand cart.

     The bailout will not solve Greece's debt problem, most economic "experts" agree on this, most agree that it is unsustainable, no matter if there is another bailout after this one. What it will do, is syphon more public money up to the financial parasites who will bleed country after country dry, see the people of those countries descend into deprivation, with never a compassionate look in their direction. To them people are units to be used for profit and nothing else. 

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

Cancer Care, For Profit!!

       Even before the greed monster TTIP, has been released from the bowels of corporate voracity, onto the general public, we are seeing the NHS being sliced and diced for the corporate friends of our millionaire cabal that sits in the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption. Within that cesspool of self interest, there are over 140 Lords with business interests in private healthcare, plus at least 80 MPs with similar interests, that would benefit from the privatisation of the NHS. How do you think they will be pushing the debate?

        The paid political liars that keep spouting, "The NHS is safe in our hands", have been laughing at us, as the clink their champagne glasses with their bosom buddies, the corporate leeches, while throwing NHS contracts around for favours.   

          Behind closed doors the biggest sell-off in the NHS has been rolling along, and now it is out in the open. Staffordshire was planning a £1.2bn sell-off of cancer and end-of-life care without proper patient consultation. But now a key leaked document reveals all:

--------Not only is this the first billion-pound NHS privatisation, it is the first time that it has been deemed acceptable to put care designed to meet the needs of our most vulnerable patients on sale.
Uniquely for a privatisation on anything of this scale, there has been no public consultation, simply a series of weak “engagement” events led by paid “patient champions”. For the past year unpaid patients have not been able to have their say. Thanks to the brave person who shared the documents, now they can.
       The background is this: Staffordshire commissioners want to hand the management of all care for cancer and end-of-life patients to a private company, a “prime provider” that will take responsibility for the delivery of care, subcontracting and performance management.-------

Read the full article HERE:

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

The Defence Of Public Spaces.

    The privatisation of public spaces is an ongoing affair, in country after country. It matters not what particular party you vote into the cesspool of power, they all behave the same, public bad, private good. Of course this is not what the people want and there is a continual struggle to hold onto what public spaces we still have. In Glasgow we have seen the private encroach and gobble up, little by little our public spaces. Not so long ago, a slice of St Enoch Square was added to a shopping mall, before that a part of Pollok Park became a motorway, and the council's latest venture is to take away the Buchanan Steps, a popular meeting place, and turn it in to an addition to the Buchanan shopping mall, and so it goes on.

      However it doesn't always go the way of the money addicts, and it swells the heart with pride when the private is shown the door and the public triumph.

      On one of my visits to Athens in 2009, a story unfolded of the park in Athens that the council decide to turn into a car park, ripped up the trees with the intention of concreting the space, but the people decide otherwise, and proceeded to replant the area with trees. Thanks to the continuing effort and solidarity of the ordinary people, it is still, in 2015, a park and a meeting place for the public. We could all learn from the people involved.

From Contrainfo:

 More photos from the park HERE.

      On January 26th 2009, Athens Municipality crews on the orders of the then mayor N.Kaklamanis destroyed the park located on Kyprou Street, uprooting its perennial trees with a view to handing over the space to a private parking company.
     Its cementing was prevented thanks to the immediate mobilisation and combative resistance of local residents and people in solidarity, who put in collective efforts to regenerate the park, planting 150 new trees and shrubs, and transformed it once again into an open public green space and a focal point of social struggle.
     Six years after the park was destroyed, and despite the systematic machinations of the municipal authority and the state, we continue to resist in a collective, self-organised, anti-institutionalised and self-determined manner against its commercialisation, ghettoisation and antisocial use, and we keep defending its open, social character.
Nowadays, when the largest part of society suffers the consequences of an all-out attack by the state and the bosses, we continue to defend every focus of resistance against poverty, fear, exploitation, racism and repression, for a society of equality, solidarity and freedom.

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

THE ANGER IS GLOBAL

      What seems to be in the spotlight at the moment is the European crisis, but it is not just in Europe that the people are taking to the streets against an economic system that is now seen to be totally unjust and unable to serve the people. It is really across the globe that people are taking to the streets in an attempt to put an end to this continual exploitation of the many by a small group of parasites. What has always been seen, politically, as a quiet backwater, Canada, now has turmoil and anger on its streets. From East to West, the world is in revolt and the anger is directed at the same thing, this exploitative economic system controlled by an unelected, faceless, financial Mafia.

This from  Linchpin:

      Early on the student strike in Quebec adopted the slogan “it is a student strike, and a popular struggle” (in French, “la grève est étudiante, la lutte est populaire"). Over the course of this unprecedented strike, the slogan has become a reality, as people from all sectors of society have joined the students in opposition to the neoliberal government of Jean Charest and his Liberal party.
    As this is written, neighbourhood committees are forming in Montreal and daily protests, including the now famous casseroles (pots and pans) protests, are occurring across Quebec – including in small towns and regions not known for their militancy. The legitimacy of the government and its police force is being called into question as tens of thousands defy its “special law 78”, which criminalizes spontaneous protests among other measures. The student strike has indeed become a popular struggle. While no one could have predicted that the student strike would spill across society, this development is not entirely without a foundation in recent struggles. And this foundation is best exemplified by the Coalition Opposée a la Tarification et Privatisation des Services Publics (in English, the Coalition Against User Fees and the Privatization of Public Services).

Continue READING:

 ann arky's home.