Prepare.

      With a brutal recession most certainly coming, what should we be doing to prepare for this capitalist inevitability? Where you live and your circumstance can and will dictate a great deal of how you manage the situation, but we should always remember, mutual aid, sharing and community co-operation are key to not just surviving, but winning in this battle between survival of capitalism or a better way to live for all.  

      The covid19 pandemic taught a lot of people the benefits of mutual aid, let's not lose that knowledge, we should expand it, learn from it and take those tools with us into this battle for survival, remember, a community can grow a lot of its own food with a wee bit of co-operation and effort. When the scourge of the capitalist recession hits us, the ordinary people, it will be brutal and you can be sure the establishment's main aim will be for the survival of capitalism, no matter the cost to human health and welfare. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to reverse that plan and see to the health and welfare of all our people at the expense of capitalism. They need us, we don't need them.

     A few words of commonsense from Not Buying Anything:

 Our pantry order arrived! Not a bit of plastic. Everything is packaged in heavy paper sacks.

      We have been working on our pantry since we moved to Nova Scotia in 2014, but didn't really maximize on the space, having never had a real pantry before. We needed to get motivated. The pandemic provided us with a good kick in the butt, and this year we finally got down to business.
      When we were researching our new home area, we discovered an agri-business in the Maritimes that specializes in locally grown organic staple foods. We also found a food buying group in our community. But we had not yet connected the two.
          Enter The Virus and we had that extra bit of motivation we needed.
        We tried to order directly from the wholesaler, but were told because of the pandemic they were very busy and had to enforce a minimum order of several hundred dollars or 600 pounds of delivered weight.
         We couldn't do that. We are building a pantry, not a bunker.
      Therefore, we contacted the local food buying group, and found that they deal with the supplier! We could order whatever we wanted, in any quantity.
      They took our order by email, we paid by e-transfer, and when it came in a couple of weeks later, it was delivered right to our front door free of charge.
      As much as possible, the products are from local organic farms. All their flour is stone ground, a process which retains more fibre and nutrients than steel roller milling which causes the loss of anywhere from 20 - 30% of the good stuff.
      This is what was in our order. All of it is organic.
- 2.27 kg sesame seeds
- 2.27 kg soybeans
- 2 X 2.27 kg cornmeal
- 2.27 kg sunflower seeds
- 20 kg oatmeal
- 10 kg whole wheat flour
        I have never seen a 20 kilogram bag of rolled oats before. What a beautiful thing, if you love oats, and we do. We were buying non-organic large oats (for the same price) in 1 kg plastic bags from the store previously.
        That's 20 plastic bags we will not be using!
       Over the next few weeks we will be augmenting our progressing pantry with food from the garden. We have already made strawberry jam, and we are looking forward to drying herbs, making pesto, canning pickled beets and cucumbers, as well as tomatoes and/or salsa.
       We are also freezing things like bush and pole beans, peas, and kale.
       We have also increased some amounts of pantry items. For many things, we try to always keep 2 in stock. Now we are keeping 3 of certain items, like peanut butter. The less we have to shop, the better, and this allows us to take advantage of sales when they come up.
     Our food storage has never been this prepared before, and the timing couldn't be better. It all fits with giving up our vehicle, the pandemic, and an impending Greatest Depression.
       And who knows what else?

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

Hail The New Messiah.

      The following is an extract from an article written for anarkismo.net 

 

 

  -----To many liberals, progressives, unionists, activists of various just causes, Democrats of all stripes, democratic socialists, and concerned citizens, the problem the U.S. is facing is essentially that Donald J. Trump is president, and is backed by the Republican Party. I disagree with this widespread belief.
      It is likely that Trump will be removed from office in the next two years, whether by impeachment (unlikely due to the Senate Republicans) or by national elections (probably but not certainly). Liberals, progressives, etc., look forward to this as a glorious day. The sun will come out from behind the darkling clouds, little birds will sing again, the miasma of evil and stupidity will lift from the land, and all will be well again. Things will finally go back to “normal.”
      Alas, I do not think that things will be “normal” ever again. I too long to see the vile Trump gone. I am not cynical and have hopes for the future. Yet I do not see the replacement of Trump by a Democrat or other establishment politician as the coming of a glorious new day.-----

      Sadly this train of thought is not peculiar to the US, it is alive and well in most of what is misnamed as, "Western democracies". The thought goes, if only we could get rid of May and get Corbyn on the throne, everything would be back to the good old Halcyon days of ever lasting summers. Every so often, in an attempt to sooth their anger and dissatisfaction, the peasants are allowed to choose a new "leader". The failure of the present one has become unbearable, so to keep the system going, we are allowed to usher in a new Messiah. Blair's New Labour, Tsipras's Syriza, or what ever, but some how the dark clouds return. You would think by now we would have realised that we have changed the Messiah every five years or so for centuries but our problems are still there. By now we should realise it doesn't matter who the hell we stick on the throne, they end up shafting us. Forget the adoration of a new Messiah, forget the need to have some throne from which wisdom, justice, equality and freedom will flow. If we wish to solve our problems we will have to do it by ourselves, by coming together in communities and workplaces and taking control. We can shape our lives all by our selves, we are best placed to see what our needs are and how best to see to them. We have to ignore the "representative democracy" evangelicals who with a sack full of phony promises, are calling for you to put them in a comfortable, well paid job, where they can tell you what to do. Anarchism offers the tool that can solve most of our problems, all we have to do is become aware of the tool and learn to use it with ever increasing confidence.  

   

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

Don't Call The Cops.

 

       Perhaps cops in this country don't kill as many people as they do in America and some other countries, but they are still the authoritarian minders of an unfair, unequal, exploitative system. The powers that be try hard to present the police as your friendly neighbourhood protectors, and encourage you to call them to every neighbourhood/family crisis, incident and/or dispute. The end result quite often is violence, and someone being unnecessarily "criminalised". Perhaps we should work more at trying to resolve most of these matters in a reasonable supportive neighbourhood manner, not easy, but better than playing into the hands of those that attempt to control your every action by mass surveillance and threat.

This from Montreal Counter Information:

        In the early morning of Monday June 10th, the Montreal police shot a man. A neighbour was having a crisis. Instead of doing anything helpful, they harassed him for hours. They had guns pointed at his head. They finally shot him in the leg through hs own apartment door early monday morning. On Sunday June 17th anarchists in the St-Henri neighbourhood of Montreal put up posters reminding our neighbours to think twice before calling the cops.
       St-Henri is famously undergoing a rapid and brutal gentrification process. Gentrification is fueled by social cleansing. This means arresting and relocating people with mental health issues, the poor, drug users, sex workers, and all of us trying to get by in a cruel world. One way to resist the over-policing and gentrification of our neighbourhoods is to stop calling the goddamn cops. We made posters that name all the unarmed people who have been killed by the SPVM in the last few years, because this is fucking serious. Cops will always escalate the situation, we can’t trust them. Instead let’s build relationships of trust between neighbours — Let’s make police obsolete! Please download and share these posters — let your neighbours know that COPS KILL, and share some alternatives to calling the police, so no one else has to have their neighbours blood on their hands.

 COPS KILL (to print, 11 x 17″)

12 Things You Can Do Instead of Calling the Cops (11 x 17″)

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

Co-operation And Mutual Aid.

This from X-pressed:

       This is a collaborative ethnographic film about Skoros, an anti-consumerist collective in Exarcheia, Athens, that run a space where people could come and give, take, or give and take goods and services without any norms of reciprocity. Soon after came the Greek “Crisis”, a new kind of “here and now” focusing less on trying to do things differently and more on urgency, a need to provide solidarity to an increasing number of people that were nearing and falling below the poverty line.

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