Prepare.

 

       The Covid19 seems to be on the decline here in UK, though we should still be very cautious on how we conduct ourselves in public. However, I think we should be shifting our main focus on the aftermath. We are facing massive unemployment and that of course, will hit the ordinary people hard. The list of companies planning to pay off workers grows by the day. Yes, we will get the usual rhetoric from our bungling political ballerinas  about how they will put in place schemes to help get the unemployed back to work. This usually translates into giving big business millions of tax payers money to employ some more people. The money will be taken up, but the jobs will be minimal. 

     With the downturn in employment there is a downturn in tax revenue to the state apparatus, this added to the monumental debt that the government has run up, will mean a savage cut in government spending. You all know what that means for the ordinary people of this country. A freeze of public sector workers pay, possible cuts, or having to do more work for the same pay, as the government cuts staff levels. more zero hours contracts, decimating working conditions, there's a queue waiting to take your job, drastic cuts to all social services, closure of public facilities, libraries, swimming pools, etc. and of course more privatisation as the state farms out more services to the private sector and sells of public assets to its corporate buddies, to help raise cash. Under our economic system there will be no quick fix, we the ordinary people will have to grin and bear it for some considerable time to come.

 I'm a very rich banker, trust me!!

    Or of course, we can start to organise our communities around mutual aid, that grows independence and solidarity across our communities and at the same time frees us from the dependency of the profit making market place of capitalism. There are a multitude of ideas from swap shops, clothes, books, toys, etc. to skill sharing schemes. I'm sure our imagination and skills can come up with a catalogue of ways we can enhance our lives and at the same time, short circuit and undermine, the corporate beasts that would rather you starved than they run without a profit.

   There is a storm coming, we can prepare to defend ourselves, or we can appeal to our rich and wealthy lords and masters, to please help us and give us a wee handout.

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

Dystopian Adventure.

      Right at the very start of this pandemic I stated that it couldn't have come at a better time for the "establishment". No matter who why and where it started, it was a blessing to the big corporations, the world economy was sliding down to recession, the bond market (where the states go to borrow money) had been dying for at least the previous 4 years, the big crash was coming, and the corporate world and the financial Mafia would be looking for a big bailout of public funds.
      After 12 years of severe "austerity", (transferring public funds to the private sector), there might have been a bit of resistance from the public. Low and behold, they are getting billions perhaps trillions of money, that will eventually have to be paid back from public funds, being thrown into their coffers. What's more, because of fear the public are sitting back and in lots of case supporting this plundering public funds.There's no money for social services, but big business needs it, it gets it.
     To exacerbate that fear, and take advantage of it, the various states are introducing draconian measures on our civil liberties without any pretense of parliamentary scrutiny. It is legislation by dictate, from a small group of pampered privileged parasites who are firmly on the side of and in the pocket of, big business, the economy is sacred.
     Emergency is a wonderful excuse to bypass any form of democratic dialogue or scrutiny, and it would be naive to imagine that all those measures of gathering personal data, limiting numbers of who you can meet, and dictated instructions with threats, will all some how dissolve when the pandemic is over. Sorry, I doubt the emergency will never disappear, there will be another, and another, to make sure that the fear never really goes away, fear is a wonderful weapon to create a submissive population. We are witnessing a monumental structural change in the we we will be forced to live. That is unless we get as organised as they are, and start to create our ideas of the new normal.
     The following might be a rather long article, but I consider that it would be negligent not to make it as easy as possible to read the full article, it is from Acorn Winter Oak:

       Once terrorism, which (one will agree) had been somewhat overly abused, had used up most of its potential, so well deployed for the first fifteen years of the new century, the moment had come to move on to the next phase, as I announced in 2011 in my text From Terrorism to Despotism.
     Moreover, the counterinsurgency approach adopted immediately and everywhere in what is improperly called the “war on the virus” confirms the intentions underlying “humanitarian” operations in this war, which is being fought not against the virus, but against the rules, rights, guarantees, institutions, and peoples of the old world. I am speaking here of the world and institutions that have been established ever since the French Revolution and are now disappearing before our very eyes in the span of a few months, just as quickly in fact as the Soviet Union disappeared. The epidemic will end, but not the measures, possibilities, and consequences it has unleashed, which we are now only beginning to experience. These are the birth pangs of a new world.
      We are witnessing the decomposition and end of a world and a civilization, that of bourgeois democracy with its parliaments, its rights and powers and counter-powers. These are now completely useless, since laws and coercive measures are dictated by the executive branch without being immediately ratified by parliaments, where judicial power, and thus the power of free opinion, loses all semblance of independence and hence its function as counterbalance.
     Peoples are thus brusquely and traumatically conditioned (as Machiavelli established: “injuries should be inflicted all at once, that they be less savored.”). The citizen having long ago disappeared in favor of the consumer, the latter now finds himself reduced to the role of simple patient, over whom one has the power of life and death, upon whom one can administer any kind of treatment or withhold it, depending on age (productive or unproductive) or any other criterion, arbitrarily decided and without the right of appeal, at the discretion of the caregiver or of others. Once imprisoned at home or in the hospital, what can he do about coercion, abuse, arbitrariness?
     The Constitutional Charter has been suspended, in Italy for example, without raising the slightest objection, not even from the supposed “guarantor” of its institutions, President Mattarella. Having become mere monads, anonymous and isolated, subjects no longer have any “equality” to claim or rights to assert. Law itself will no longer be normative, but is already becoming discretionary, like life and death. We have seen that, on the pretext of the coronavirus, 13 or 14 prisoners can be killed with impunity and at the drop of a hat in Italy without so much as their names being given, or their crimes, or the circumstances, and no one seems to care. They are doing an even better job than the Germans at Stammheim Prison. They should admire us, at least for our crimes!
     The only thing people talk about any more is money. And a state like Italy is reduced to begging the necessary capital for the transition from democratic to despotic forms at the hands of the sinister and illegitimate Eurogroup 16. The same Eurogroup that in 2015 ferociously wanted to expropriate the entire public patrimony of Greece, including the Parthenon, and transfer it to a fund situated in Luxembourg under German control. Even Der Spiegel described the Eurogroup diktats as “a catalog of atrocities” for the humiliation of Greece, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote in The Telegraph that, if you wanted to assign a date to the end of the European project, this was it. So behold, the deed is done. All that remains is the Euro, and even that is highly provisional.

    Neo-liberalism has had nothing to do with antiquated class struggles, it does not even remember them, thinks it has expunged them from the dictionary itself. It believes itself to be all-powerful, which does not mean that it is not afraid of them, since it knows very well what it is preparing to inflict on the people. It is obvious that people will soon be hungry, obvious that there will be mobs of unemployed, obvious that people working under the table (4 million in Italy) will have no support at all. And those whose work is tenuous, who have nothing to lose, will start to engage in struggle and sabotage. This explains why the strategy in response to the pandemic has above all been a strategy of preventive counterinsurgency. We will see some nice examples of that in America. The FEMA camps will soon be full.
      There are thus at least two powerful reasons to impose the new despotism in the West: one is to contend with the domestic subversion it provokes and expects; the other is to prepare for foreign war with a designated enemy, which is the oldest form of despotism in history. Nothing new has been learned on that score since The Book of Lord Shang (Fourth century B.C.)—a book all strategists of the Occident should hasten to read with the greatest attention. If they have decided to attack Chinese despotism, they should begin by proving they are better on its own terrain, that is to say more effective, less costly, and better performing. In short, a superior form of despotism. But that remains to be proven.
     Thanks to the virus, the fragility of our world appears in the full light of day. The game now being played is infinitely more dangerous than the virus and will cause far more deaths. Yet contemporaries seem not to be afraid of anything but the virus …
     It would seem that the present age has been given the task of contradicting what Hegel said apropos the history of philosophy: “World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” But freedom itself exists only insofar is it is in conflict with its opposite—he adds. Where is it today? While in France and Italy people denounce those who do not obey?
     If a mere microbe sufficed to plunge our world into obedience to the most repugnant of all despotisms, this can only mean that our world was already so ready for this despotism that a mere microbe sufficed.
    Historians will call the time that is now beginning the age of Occidental Despotism.

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Tories, Party Of Welfare State.

  

        Anybody with half a brain cell knows that "austerity" was an ideological decision and not a necessity. It was a determined policy of plundering the public purse to feed the corporate tax havens. Though I have always been aware of the fact that the state feeds and supports the corporate beast with the false platitude that it helps the "economy" (the rich) and brings jobs. Although the facts were there, Somehow I never however thought of the Tory party as the party of a welfare state!!
      The article in "The Canary" explains it very clearly, well worth a read just to sort the facts out in your mind.

 

 

      An extract from The Canary article:

           The Tories run a secret welfare state for rich people that costs taxpayers up to £180bn a year

The long con

       The idea was never to shrink the welfare state. It was always to divert government investment from the human-welfare state for the many to the corporate-welfare state for the few. Imagine it like a long con.
       You create a sense of scarcity, like there just isn’t enough to go around. The coalition government did this with austerity; the Thatcher government did it with previous economic crises. Despite the 2007/8 financial crisis being caused exclusively by the private sector, and the private sector being bailed out by the government, it was reframed as a public spending crisis. And the very debt accumulated in rescuing the economy from casino banking became the excuse to rapidly cut funding for the welfare state.
       Then you begin pitting different needs against each other. Young people’s services versus elderly people’s security. People who were born here versus people who arrived here. People with jobs versus people without jobs. And thanks to the primal fear that people with little have when faced with having even less, a fight ensues. While that fight is happening, you merrily divert as much spending as possible to you and your friends. The best bit? When the scarcity you just created hits and things stop working in the human-welfare state, it just makes your case seem stronger. ‘See, we told you things were bad. This service needs more private-sector involvement to boost efficiency.’
       And so you go on. Every publicly-funded service is up for grabs – a means of siphoning taxpayer cash away from meeting public needs, and towards filling private pockets. In return, you’ve assured your post-parliament career in the revolving door of political and corporate life.

The enablers

        Perhaps the greatest enablers of the corporate-welfare-state long con are UK newspapers and media outlets. Just three corporations dominate 83% of newspaper reach in the UK. That’s just a handful of billionaires dominating the UK press. And they cannot be trusted to play fair when it comes to policies that invest in regular people rather than providing them with government subsidies or tax cuts.

Read the full article HERE: 

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

Austerity, Nothing New!!

       Workers rights are being shredded across Europe and elsehwere, no matter the particular colour of the cabal in power, right, left, centre, centre right, centre left, the legislation is much the same. Easier to be fired, more casual, precarious and part-time jobs, longer hours, less attention to health and safety, and much more. It's called reforming working conditions, according to the corporate bosses it will boost efficiency and profitability, though nothing there to improve the living standards of the ordinary people, on the contrary, we pay for the so called boost in efficiency and profitability by deteriorating living standards.

           Though it would be foolish to think this is a phenomena of today. Far from it, it has been the pattern since the start of this insane, unjust system of capitalism first raised its ugly head. The system has always been to get as much labour and effort out of the employee for as little an outlay as possible. That is the foundation stone of capitalism. Austerity has been part and parcel of the capitalist system, it just that it has gone under different names. Its true title should be plundering the poor.

         If we look back at the trend of wages away back  in the 1800's we will see the same pattern, wages going up and then down, according to what the bosses could enforce. It has never been an ever growing improvement in our living standards. Yes, conditions have improved, but always on the back of determined struggle of those employed, not through the generosity of the boss.

Wage trends (weekly)

1836-37

1841-42

1846-47

Cotton spinners (machine)

35/-

25/-

26/-

Cotton spinners (power)

11/-

7/-

8/-

Coalminers

25/-

15/-

20/-

Bricklayers

21/-

21/-

24/-

Joiners

20/-

?

22/-

Stone masons

22/-

18/-

22/6

Handloom weavers

6/-

6/-

7/-

Railway labourers

14/-

?

15/-

Railway masons

21/-

21/-

31/-

    Looking at these rates and comparing it with my wage as a first year apprentice in the shipyards in 1950, it appears I was living in the 1800's as my princely sum was 19/- a week. 

      Our income from our selling our skills to the parasite class has stagnated, risen and then fallen, and this pattern has continued right up to today. Though I believe to day it is becoming more brutal as capitalism struggles to survive with its need for ever expanding growth in a world of finite resources.

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

We've Surely Learnt Our Lesson!!

        In 2008 the "crisis" hit the world, the choice of word "crisis" was very clever. A crisis suggests an event that everybody should run to assist in helping to alleviate, but this was not a crisis for everybody, this was a crisis for the money people from the excessive gambling of the financial Mafia. However to resolve their disastrous failure in the worlds biggest gambling casino the financial Mafia demanded that the governments of the world bail them out by plundering the public purse. We all know what followed was years of "austerity" for the ordinary people, slashing of social services, attack on wages and working conditions, a vicious attack on those receiving social benefits. The financial mafia recovered, but we the people still haven't recovered to where we were in living standards in 2008.

    The leeches that make up the financial Mafia have learnt nothing from that experience, the next "crisis" looms large on the horizon. For the first time in about ten years the US Federal Reserve is forced to lend emergency cash to banks to shore up their cracking structures. In the psyche of the financial Mafia the gambling frenzy didn't go away, it is their methodology for their get rich quick ideology. Most "financial experts" clam that the world's major banks are even more concentrated, and in the category of "too big to fail" than they were in 2008, and are more likely to fail in the inevitable coming financial crunch. After more than a decade of a very limp recovery, the global economy is looking at another "crisis". The bailouts and the easy cheap money policies, in no way went to fix the structural failures inherent in the capitalist system. The cheap money policies facilitated another boom in speculation and irresponsible lending, boosting share prices without any increase in real value and building that massive debt bubble that is now about to burst. 

       When that bubble burst, and it will, and soon, the failing banks and corporations will once again turn to the governments to heap the problem on the backs of the ordinary people. Surely this time round, unlike our capitalist gamblers, we have learnt something, and we will not tolerate an other decade or more of austerity to hit our families, so that the financial Mafia can again get back its massive gambling debts. We should by now be well aware of the game they play at our expense, and should take a more revolutionary road to protect ourselves and our families from this never ending cycle of bursting bubbles that heap poverty and misery on us, while the perpetrators regain all their plundered wealth.

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

Self Defence Takes Many Shapes.

      There is no doubt that this world has beauty and pleasure in abundance to offer, but it is impossible to be blind to the violence all around us, we live in a very violent world. The inescapable fact that we should all wake up to is that states are by far the worst offenders when it comes to violence. State authorities far outstrip any individual, group, or gangster mob, in the range and depth of violence they daily administer.

        Their violence takes many shapes from the misery, poverty and early deaths from corporate exploitation, aided and abetted by the state. There is the plundering of the public purse to enrich the already wealth bedfellows of the state, which is responsible for millions living mired in deprivation. There is the state "punishment" handed out to those who would resits this deliberate, avoidable violent injustice. Of course we can never ignore the state's greatest savage, brutal violence, it is when it decides to go to war with one of its fellow states. Which of course is always founded on a false narrative, cajoling the population into following its fluttering coloured rag and sacrificing their lives for the survival and enrichment of the keepers of the state. Wars create mountains of bodies and rivers of blood, and millions of lives that remain steeped in misery for the rest of their lives. However the keepers of the state ensure that the state survives intact.

        How people respond to this violence varies, but due to the scale brutality and breadth of state violence it is difficult to fault anybody's struggles against this continuous onslaught, each of us must choose or own path of resistance, but resistance is always justifiable, it is simply a choice of self defence.

    An anonymous song from Italy depicting someone's choice of resistance, lifted from Anarchists Worldwide:

The Individualist Hymn
Before dying in the mud on the streets
we would imitate Bresci and Ravachol;
anyone who extends a hand to you, bourgeoisie,
is a person unworthy of looking at the sun.
Grinding machines tear the beggars to pieces
and their wives are forever pale and weeping,
The fields remain fallow, the miners buried
and the workers crushed forever by murder.
And to those who don’t give in, open the tombs,
prepare the bombs, sharpen the knife,
action is the ideal!
France, on the watch with the guillotine,
chops off the head of anyone who wants to punish her.
Cowardly Spain strangles with a garrote and murderous
Italy guns down those who aren’t accustomed to trembling.
Hanged in America, throats cut in Africa,
forever tortured at Montjuich in Spain,
but the individualist still knows how to strike
the sorry breed of gentleman thugs.
And to those who don’t give in, open the tombs,
prepare the bombs, sharpen the knife,
action is the ideal!
As long as we are a herd it’s appropriate that there’s
a social gang passing laws;
as long as the sun of anarchy doesn’t shine,
we will always see the slaughtering of the populace.
Be very afraid, coppers, when you hear
the dynamite exploding against the oppressors.
We are enemies of all cops and scoundrels,
And one against all, we will scatter them.
And to those who don’t give in, open the tombs,
prepare the bombs, sharpen the knife,
action is the ideal!
******
No Copyright. 100% DIY. Feel free to reproduce.

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

The UK, Land Of Monarchy And Child Poverty.

          The UK, fifth largest economy in the world, it is awash with wealth, it carries on the back of its people the imperial edifice of a pomp swamp of monarchy and all the aristocratic parasites associated with such a menagerie. Wealth flows freely, but only in certain quarters.

      Since the 2008 "crash" the UK, like lots of capitalist countries, embarked on a policy of "austerity". This was the acceptable euphemism for the scheme to allow the rich financial Mafia to regain their massive gambling loses, by plundering the public purse. Eleven years on and we are told, "austerity is over" but where do we stand?

Well has "austerity" worked? You bet it has, with UK's billionaires having seen their net worth rise by 112% from £258billion to £547 billion since 2009. The previous 12 months saw the biggest jump in the UK super rich in six years, the City of London now boasts 80 billionaires up from 72 last year, more than any other city in the world.

       Well while this "austerity" plan has worked for the super rich, how do we at the other end of this master plan fare?

     Well it is not quite the same story, we the people got clobbered. We have suffered an ever decreasing standard of living, child poverty is increasing, workers in poverty has been increasing. What has been plunder from our social services has fed the super rich as they prance around the world in their private jets and super yachts.

         Joseph Rowntree Foundation research reveals that in the UK child poverty has been rising since 2011/12. with 4.1 million children in the UK living in poverty, a rise of 500,000 in the last five years. 4 million of those in work are living in poverty, a rise of more than half a million over five years. In work poverty has been rising faster than employment, driven almost entirely by increasing poverty among working parents. Two sides of the capitalist coin.

      These appalling figures among the ordinary people of this country are not just statistics, they are lives. Lives stunted in health and well-being, the potential of our children destroyed, an increase in stress among families, the breaking up of families, people pushed to homelessness, hard working people put under strain to the detriment of their emotional and physical health. All this, not as an unavoidable set of circumstances, but by the deliberate policies of the chosen few who play the corrupt game to the advantage of their rich cronies. It is called capitalism, and any attempt at trying to turn this exploitative, profit driven system into something with a shred of humanity is doomed to failure, it is not in the nature of the beast. It has to be totally dismantled and replaced with a system of justice, fairness, co-operation and sustainability that sees to the needs of all our people, in a word, anarchism. 

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

Sanctioned, A Vindictive Act Of Intimidation.

    I always find it amazing we accept how certain words used quite liberally in this society never convey their true meaning. Words like "austerity", it can be spoken by what seems a calm unemotional fashion, concealing its real life meaning. To those who spout it most, it means being careful with money, balancing the books, being prudent. When in actual fact, in this society, it means misery, low wages, cuts in social services, deteriorating health service and education system, and much more in the way of misery for vast swaths of ordinary people.

      Another word that can be used in a seeming innocuous manner is "sanctioned". Again our political ballerinas use this word in civilised tones as if they were oblivious to its true meaning. Its true meaning being, increased poverty, deprivation, stress, homelessness, mental health problems, family break-ups, suicides and more. Not a word that should be banded about with emotionless calm.

     "Sanctioning" someone who is on benefit is a sadistic, savage, callous act of vindictive brutality, meant to intimidate and bludgeon the poor in our society, into submissiveness. All caring and civilised people in this country should be up in arms at the very idea of such a vicious, life threatening act based on "upper class" ideology that see the poor as a group that need to be punished for their poverty.

       How long will we accept the cruelty that flows freely from this ideology of the wealthy ruling cabal of parasites, an ideology that thinks in terms of rewarding the rich and punishing the poor. How long will we accept such words as "austerity and sanctions" being used with calm politeness before we take to the streets to vent our anger and disgust with this system of hypocrisy and avoidable injustice and inequality?

 This image taken from    Humanity Torbay

 

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

UK, Land Of Privilege And Poverty.

 

         Once again that clump of land, know as the UK, the forth richest country in the world, has been exposed as a class ridden, land of inequality. A land mired in poverty, strewn with destitution, where a small cabal live a life of unimaginable opulence, at the expense of the many.
        Inequality of wealth between the poorest and the richest is wider in UK than any other developed country, and is widening. 

Photo

       First, earnings of the top 10 per cent of full-time workers doubled between 1978 and 2008, whereas those of the median grew by 60 per cent and the bottom 10 per cent by just a quarter. After the financial crisis, overall earnings fell substantially over the next five years before recovering slightly, but they are falling once again. This combination of absolute decline following generations of widening inequality explains much of the current sense of unfairness.
      Second, the standard measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, shows Britain’s post-tax inequality rising strongly in the 1980s (from 28 per cent in 1978 to 41 per cent in 1990) though it has stabilised a little since (to around 37 per cent). Having once been one of the more egalitarian developed countries, the UK is now one of the least. Third, there has been an extraordinary concentration of rewards in the hands of the top 1 per cent, and within that group, the top 0.10 per cent.
     Finally, wealth inequality is greater than for incomes and is growing. In the absence of compensating wealth taxation, high earners can turn their income into assets, and the value of assets can be compounded through investment. This is then passed on as inheritance, entrenching inequality across time between generations and classes.

         Recently our political ballerinas, mostly wealthy products of the Oxbridge sausage factory, were all aghast at the audacity of the UN Rapporteur Philip Alston when he released his report on poverty in the UK. Foaming at the mouth they declared, how dare he put on display, the extent of poverty and destitution in this country. They went into convulsions when he claimed that the extreme poverty and destitution in this country was a deliberate result of government choices rather than inevitable circumstances.

Austerity
      Alston was critical of the “mentality” behind cuts and reforms introduced in the past few years that have brought misery and torn at the social fabric. “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited and callous approach …”
Universal credit
      The government’s ambitious programme to simplify the benefits system was a good idea in principle but was “fast falling into universal discredit” and should be overhauled. It was gratuitously punitive in its effects. Draconian sanctions and long payment delays drove claimants into hardship, depression and despair.

       Of course ordinary Joes, like you and I, knew all this, we didn't need a UN Rapporteur to tell us of the extreme poverty and destitution in this clump of land, nor did we need to be told that deliberate policies were the cause. We have lived with it for years, we have seen the result among our friends, family and neighbours. We are also aware of who is responsible for these policy choices that created this quagmire of despair, and we also know that to expect those wealth privileged political ballerinas to start to spread the wealth of this country more equally is fantasy from cloud cuckoo land.
       The answer is to rid ourselves of these prancing, privileged parasites, and take control of wealth and resources of this rich and wealth plot of land, and start to create a system that will spread those riches in a fair manner, seeing to the needs of all our people. We can do it without UN Rapporteurs, political ballerinas, and privileged worthless parasites. The sooner we start, the quicker we will see all that poverty, despair and destitution disappear.

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

The Viciousness Of Austerity.

       What do you call a state that deliberately and continuously administers violence on its population? Certainly the word democracy is completely out of place. The British state, like most states across the globe, rolls out policies that cause early deaths, stunts the potential of youth, throws thousands onto the homeless list, increases trauma, stress and anxiety. It pushes policies that lead to poverty, deprivation and in many cases, suicide. Creates communities where food-banks are an essential means of survival. All this takes place under the banner of the innocuous word "austerity". The true viciousness of austerity is hidden behind a flood of propaganda, misinformation and downright lies. It is also put forward as a beneficial policy to all of us, creating stability, and future prosperity. Lies, lies and more lies, but not innocent lies, vicious, deliberate lies created to hide the real extent of the cruelty of the ideology that is pursued to enrich and protect the already rich and powerful, to protect a system of greed and exploitation.  

      Leading this smokescreen of illusion and subterfuge, this tsunami of propaganda, is our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media. Peddling petty pulp, blurring the vision of the ordinary people with a web of misinformation, inane articles and sensationalizing the mediocre. Without their smoke and mirrors the illusion would be impossible.

        The viciousness of austerity may not reported or be seen in our babbling brook of bullshit, but to the vast majority of this country, it is most certainly felt. Universal Credits, and welfare cuts, silently move across the land like an invisible thief, taking years off the lives of the vulnerable, snatching the future from the young, disappearing social services, lay the fearful stifling hand of trauma, anxiety, and stress on the millions of struggling ordinary people. The silent hand of vicious austerity, in the guise of suicide, visits the homes of those broken by it incessant grinding force.

       This onslaught against the most vulnerable and the poorest in our communities under the banner of austerity, will leave a scar for generations, and it is all a deliberate pushing of an ideology of dispossessing the poor to enrich the wealthy and powerful. It will continue as long as we tolerate the present system of capitalism. To stem the flow of this viciousness against the ordinary people, we have to come together and demolish its root cause, an economic system based on greed and exploitation, that rewards the rich and powerful, we have to bring an end to capitalism, we have to wake up and see this cancerous capitalist system as humanities darkest hour.

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

A Moderniser!!

           Sitting in a bookshop café, the other day having a chat with a couple of anarchists comrades, the conversation rambled from football to travel on trains and buses, the horror of airports, and a host of other equally important subjects. Then the matter of Jeremy Corbyn came up, to which I said he was the new Messiah that would lead the people to the promised land, only to find they were back where they started in the desert. Then other UK Messiahs came up, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, and the difference between them, though I think the difference is illusionary, to my surprise one of my comrades referred to Tony Blair as a “moderniser”. The reason for my surprise is that I consider this as 100% mainstream media propaganda language. Tony Blair was one of a bunch of careerist who decided, for their own ends , to move the Labour Party even more to the right, and to blatantly admit that they would do business with large corporations and the financial Mafia, this is modernising if you are a rabid neo-con, where the previous Labour Party hid behind the illusion that it opposed such institutions, only when in power to sit down and do business with them to “grow the economy”, which is a euphemism for improving the profitability of big business and the financial Mafia. If and when Our Saviour Jeremy Corbyn, comes to power, there may be a few slices of bread thrown our way, in the shape of improvements to social services and help for the NHS. These will not even make up for the ravages of the last decade of “austerity” and “balancing the books” ideology of the present political ballerinas. I know both my comrades agree, as long as we hold to the party political system, we will live in a system where big business and the financial Mafia will continue their efforts to turn every human action and activity into a profit making endeavour. The Messiahs will come and the Messiahs will go but exploitation will continue. 

        However, I think my comrade should find another label for Holy Tony, perhaps something along the lines of arrogant, right wing, careerist, lost in an illusion of grandeur and his dream of the Phony Tony legacy, a hollow shell of a self-centred fantasising dangerous dreamer. A moderniser, never.

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There's Trouble Ahead, How Do We Solve It?

        As anybody who has had a look at how the capitalist system works, is well aware, it is a system with inherent flaws. It inevitably goes into convulsions, as those with the money look like losing lots of it. This happened in the pre thirties, giving us the hungry 30's, it happened again in 2008, giving us a decade of austerity. When these convulsions happen the way the system "corrects" itself, is by plundering the public purse, giving us bail-outs and austerity. The government hands the corporate juggernaut and the financial Mafia lots of public money in the form of "bail-outs" amassing mountains of debt, and then applying "austerity" to reduce that debt. Of course austerity only happens to the ordinary people, to those rich parasites, austerity is some kind of disease to which the ordinary people fall foul to periodically.

       Claudio Borio, the head of the BIS monetary and economic department, said a new recession could come “with a vengeance” and “the end may come to resemble more closely a financial boom gone wrong”. The BIS, which is sometimes known as the central bank for central banks and counts Bank of England Governor Mark Carney among its members, warned of trouble ahead for the world economy.

      We are not yet clear of the previous convulsion, and the gnomes of the financial Mafia are starting to shit their pants, as there appears to be warning signs that the next is about to hit them. No doubt, in their marble halls of greed and opulence, they will already be looking at how else they can plunder the public purse to retrieve their new massive gambling losses. They will be looking hard to see which part of the social fabric of the planet can they rip-off to recoup their greed gotten losses. This week Italy has been forced to bail out two of its banks to the tune of €5.2 billion, of tax payers money.

       Such luminaries as Mark Carney and other members of the BIS, (The Bank of International Settlements, sometimes referred to as the central bank of central banks. Though I like to refer to them as Bandits in Suits. ) are already ringing their alarm bells, and saying it could be worse than the last convulsion.

       While the vultures, and parasites of the financial Mafia will be preparing to grab what public assets they can get their hands on, to regain their gambling losses, what will we be doing? Will we accept another decade, or more, of "austerity", will we see ourselves pushed as far into deprivation as the people of Greece, with no end in sight? Or will we get serious about organising to bring down this flawed system of greed and exploitation, and put an end to capitalism, that is the root cause of the poverty and deprivation of millions of people across the planet?

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"Austerity", Just One Trick In Their Box.

       An excellent video that highlights the brutal effects of "austerity" on the most vulnerable in our society. It also points out that it is a class policy, since it favours the rich at the expense of the poor, it is an ideological choice and not a necessity. However, in attacking "austerity" and calling for an end to that particular ideology, they fail to grasp that any such change will still leave the same exploitative system in place, wealth generation by the many, and wealth grabbing by the few. Yes, "austerity" is a savage brutal attack on the poor, but it is just one trick in their box, just one method of wealth plundering employed by the capitalist system. Capitalism is by it very nature, an exploitative system with little or no place for compassion if it gets in the way of profit. Tinkering with the methodology of capitalism still leaves the beast alive to savage the poor and vulnerable, it still leaves us all at the mercy of the corporate juggernaut and the financial Mafia. It is not its methodology that we have to change, it is the capitalist system itself we have to destroy.  

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

We Know What You're Doing, ALL Of You, ALL Of The Time!!

       As the "Competition of Liars" sometimes called the General Election, hots up, and the various liars get their knickers in a twist about how to out spin each other, the topic of "austerity" is never far from their lips. No matter how they bandy the word about, none of them will mention the billions wasted on the attempt at total surveillance of the citizens of this country.

       Until the revelations of Edward Snowden emerged just a few years back in 2013, British citizens had no idea as to the level of state surveillance they were subjected to. The government, without due process, debate or permission installed a massive taxpayer funded spying system via its domestic agency GCHQ, to tap into internet cables and build an enormous and detailed database of the communications of every man, woman and child in the country with little to no legal oversight. An ID system is no longer relevant, they have far more information than an ID card could ever store.

        The amount of your tax money that is swallowed up in GCHQ is staggering, with the lie that it is all about protecting us from those nasty foreigners. However, the truth is that billions pounds are gobbled up peeking into the actions of your everyday life. You are permanently under their microscope, listened to, watched and profiled, all of us.

        GCHQ’s 360 degree full spectrum bulk collection data system was constructed in brazen and arrogant defiance of Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Britain’s parliament never debated or approved this massive construction programme as it would for any national infrastructure project. Every phone call, no matter the device is recorded, every image, website visited, personal details such as medical and financial records, contacts, everything private to you is no longer private.

        In this insane economic system, money means quality, hence the quality of health care, eduction, social services, etc., are all deteriorating due to the lack of money being spent on them. When we look at how much is being spent on prying into your personal affairs, you scratch your head and realise the true priorities in this state.

       Although no-one truly knows the costs of UK state surveillance systems over its own population, it is estimated that the cost to the taxpayer just for the storage of all this data exceeds £20 million a month. And whilst GCHQ’s individual budget isn’t public knowledge, its funding comes from the Single Intelligence Account (SIA), which by all accounts has now reached something in the order (£18 billion as at 2015) £20 billion plus.
     One can only guess that provision for GCHQ’s funding is exponentially increasing in an age of austerity where the NHS is in chaos, emergency services such as the fire-brigade and ambulance services to name just two are being stripped bare or privatised. People are dying at the hands of the state and yet we are told there is no money to pay for these vital services. And yet the taxpayer is still funding bank-bailouts, wars in far-off lands that pose zero threat to national security and a new architecture of state surveillance constructed that would make the East German Stasi blush three decades ago.

       £20 million a month just to store who you phoned last week, where you shopped yesterday, what pub you went to at the weekend. Think of an extra £20 million a month on mental health care?
         Is this the type of society you want? Do you honestly think any one of the political bandwagons standing in this "Competition of Liars" will demolish this insidious prying spy system? Don't be so naive, look at history, we are still struggling for equality, we are still struggling for a decent standard of living, our actions are under ever increasing surveillance, despite the fact we have had the full spectrum of political parties, each wearing the crown for varying periods. The system is loaded against us, it is the system we have to change, not the crown prince or the label on the box.  
Read the full article from Tarcoteca HERE:

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