Mutual Aid, Not Charity.

         All of us with some political awareness, understand that large charities are not the answer, in this economic system, they are part of the problem. I have no doubt that some do great work, but collecting money from the people, to go and buy goods from the corporate world, is hardly anything approaching mutual aid. They help feed the banks, and big business, as well as paying fat salaries to CEO. They help oil the wheels of commerce with public money. Charities are in fact a symbol of system failure.

        When they do good work, that's a bonus, but mostly the fail miserable through a mixture of red tape, ineptitude, corruption and simply because economics is not the right tool in an emergency. 

         If the following report is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, then this must be the biggest example of that red tape, ineptitude, corruption and economic greed and madness, and further proof, that it is the entire system that has to be scrapped, and a system of true mutual aid built in its place.

This from Truth Out:

      The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.
       In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.
     Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.
      The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.
       The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.
      The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.

Read the full article HERE:

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Some Charities Are Not What They Seem.

       Continuing the week of action against workfare, we shouldn't forget that in this capitalist society so many charities are just another business where bosses get fat salaries and bonuses at the expense of the public. So today as well as the other previously mentioned let's concentrate on these vultures.

This from The Void:

 

 Groundwork boss Sir Tony Hawkhead who recently gave a speech at the annual workfare conference.

      As part of the week of action against workfare and sanctions it’s time to say enough is enough and hold these shameless bastards to account for their grotesque profiteering.  And don’t let them try claim that they aren’t doing it for the money.  Workfare and workfare contracts are two of the reasons they can afford to pay their bosses so much after all.   These so-called charities are the real benefit scroungers and the suffering they are causing is obscene.
Groundwork are on twitter @groundworkuk and facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/groundworkuk
TCV are on twitter @TCVtweets and facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/TheConservationVolunteers
YMCA are on twitter @YMCA_England and facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/YMCA.England
The Salvation Army are on twitter @salvationarmyuk and facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/salvationarmyuk
And don’t forget another so-called charity involved in mass workfare, The Shaw Trust, on twitter @Shaw_Trust and facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Shaw-Trust/221553131217597
Don’t forget to sign the petition calling for an end to all benefit sanctions without exceptions.
Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

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Can There Be Democratic Slavery?

      Currently this government is doing a great job in helping their millionaire corporate friends to cut their labour costs, all part of the drive for a low wage economy. The new legislation that will come into force on April 2014, will take workfare, (unpaid forced labour) to a new level of exploitation. Job centres will be able to hand out tougher community service orders than the courts. What will your crime have been? Why the heinous act of being unable to find work. They say that slavery was abolished, but what do you call being forced to work without pay, for a rich multi-national company such as G4S? The simple truth is that those who call this society a democracy are liars or fools, or perhaps both.

       This from Boycott Workfare:

       Currently EOS, Maximus, Learn Direct, Reed in Partnership, ESG, G4S (tax dodging supremos) and Interserve (they rely on prayer & financial support from Christians) are all inviting bids from voluntary sector ‘partners’ to provide Community Work Placements in a ‘real working environment’ for up to 30 weeks, for up to 30 hours per week. In other words, forced unpaid labour for people who have not found ‘sustained employment’ while on the Work Programme.

     The criteria for being sent on a Community Work Placement are ‘lack of motivation‘ (for example a reluctance to be exploited in no pay, low pay jobs) and/or ‘lack of work experience‘. Claimants will have to do these placements alongside ‘supported job search’: the exhausting and pointless process of endlessly looking for non-existent employment opportunities. As blogger Johnny Void says: “This new scheme represents 780 hours unpaid work, over two and a half times higher than the maximum community service penalty that can be handed out by the courts.  And this is just for the crime of being unable to find a job.” Read the rest of this entry »

Read the full article HERE:

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WORKERS KNOW YOUR HISTORY.

         We are always hearing politicians talk of eradicating poverty with this scheme and that scheme, or appealing to the general public to support various charities. The thing about charities is that we are told of all those hungry people and are asked to contribute money to help feed them. From this we can deduce that the food is there, but the greedy bastards who have all that food will not send it to the hungry until we the general public pay them some money. They obviously don't think that charity has anything to do with them, except perhaps an opportunity to make some more money. Filling cans with money and buying food will never get rid of poverty, it is built into the system of economics that we live under. Destroy the system and there is every possibility we will eradicate poverty.

         Some interesting facts and figures from Anarchist Without Content:

In our modern world, poverty is not natural, but the result of institutions that are set up to benefit a few at the expense of the many. Relief efforts are currently failing because they do not address the root causes of poverty. These causes are not mystical or hard to identify, as the most important ones are global property law, international debt, unfair trade, top-down privatization programs, corporate tax shelters, the those problems are social and political. Furthermore, there is a history to these problems, and poverty will not be addressed until this history is reversed.

HISTORY

The colonial conquest of the New World, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, by European powers set up the structure of our current economic system.

History books have done a good job depicting the brutality of this period. In many places, Europeans wiped out 99% of the native populations. In places where the natives did survive, many of them were captured and made to do hard labor. In Potosi, Bolivia, for instance, native Bolivians were forced to work silver mines that snaked deep into the earth. So many miners died, that a popular saying goes “enough silver was taken from the mine in Potosi to build a bridge to Madrid, Spain, and if the bones of the dead miners were pulled from the bowels of the mine, one could build a bridge all the way back.”

Continue READING:

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THE BIG SOCIETY???

         Before millionaire spiv Cameron's mystic vision of the “Big Society” (Oh Lord, not another Blair visionary ), we had libraries, we had swimming pools, we had nurseries, we had support groups for the vulnerable, we had the National Health Service and much more. It wasn't perfect by a long chalk but we had them and there was the possibility of improving matters, not any more. Now we have a “Big Society” bank, with assets of £200m to replace cuts of £5 billion and the “Big Society” bank will be lending out money at commercial rates. Wow, just think of the wonderful “Big Society” all that will produce. What the “Big Society” really means is a society based on everything being owned by big business and for those who can't afford the necessities of life there will be charities. These charities will be dependent on the good nature of our corporate capitalists “philanthropists”, who no doubt from time to time, to look good or to get a tax break or a contract, will donate some of their ill gotten, unearned wealth to those, so deserving poor. Is this the “Big Society” that you voted for? Is this how you see yourself, depending on some pompous parasite to drop you a few crumbs to see you through your hard times, which no doubt they will proclaim is really your own fault? Run to the ballot box and this is what you get, messianic Blair hell bent on a crusade of the brutal extermination of a people, or a mystic visionary millionaire Cameron, fawning to his millionaire friends.

     Where is our imagination, surely we can come up with a better plan than this devious smoke and mirrors of the “Big Society”. Do we need a bunch of millionaire parasites bleeding us dry as they suck up most of the wealth that we produce? Is deprivation and exploitation the only way we can think? We can create a society based on the needs of all those in that society, but we have to get rid of this gang of blood sucking parasites that sit with their grubby hands on the power levers manipulating everything to their personal benefit and to hell with the rest of you.