With all the double dealing and underhand business of our political ballerinas, all with the aim of enhancing their personal wealth and that of their cronies, with the resulting poverty of the ordinary people, we have to be aware of what they are up to and organise against their self-seeking greed driven system. Hence the need for papers such as the Keelie it is the voice of the ordinary people of Glasgow, it helps to shine a light in those dark corners of the political sewer that sweeps through our city and further afield. So don't forget to grab your free copy of The Glasgow Keelie, No.43 it is now on the streets at pickets, demos and in pubs and cafes. You can also read it on line here.You can also contribute to its contents with you own personal grip against the injustice that surrounds us all. Or why not request a bunch to circulate among your friends, neighbours and work mates, contact the Keelie here.
So times are hard, it's a struggle to pay rent/mortgage, heating and eating. It's a worry seeing to the needs of the kids. You have a crap precarious job and your pittance of a pay fluctuates, you're never sure how much you'll get in the next pay packet. Or you could be shackled to a job seekers allowance, circumstances that will dominate your life until you are sold to some greedy employer. Like I said, these are hard times, well not for everybody, while you strain and struggle to live a half decent life, there is that other class of citizen. The pampered parasite class, the rich and wealthy that live off your sweat and toil, who prosper by your poverty. The grotesque difference in wealth distribution built into this capitalist system has now reached unimaginable proportions. While you try to sort your affairs in £s, there is that other group who shuffle their income in £-billions, a lot of it to tax havens, so that they don't have to contribute to the running of our society. The cornerstone of the capitalist system, exploit the many for the benefit of the few, syphon all the wealth created up to the few at the top, and let the rest struggle and scramble for an existence as best they can.
Some new figures on that grotesque unequal distribution of wealth that is held up as a measure of success. We live in a system whose motto is "Greed Is Good".
Jeff Bezos, president and CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post.
The world’s richest 500 people increased their collective wealth by 25% in 2019 – a stark reminder of worsening income inequality. The 500 wealthiest people held a collective net worth of $5.9t (£4.5t) – an increase of $1.2t (£917b) over 2019 alone, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Topping the list of richest peoplewere familiar names: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, followed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, French luxury group head Bernard Arnault, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The richest Briton to appear on the list was Jim Ratcliffe, the UK’s richest man and CEO of chemicals company Ineos – ranking at number 52 on the index with a total net worth of $20.8b (£15.9b). He was one of 16 people from the UK to appear on the 500-strong list. A total of 171 people on the list were from the United States. A study earlier this year found that the 400 richest people in the US owned more than the 150 million people in the bottom 60% of the country ― and that since the early 1980s, those 400 richest Americans had tripled their wealth.
There you have it, these are hard times, well only for the many and for as long as we tolerate this crime against humanity that goes under the flag of capitalism. There is an alternative, just think about it.
The Greek situation has fallen of the agenda of that babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media, their short concentration span has moved on to “the refugee crisis” to terrorism in Europe then on to that dangerous nut-case Trump. That doesn’t mean that things in Greece are fine and dandy, far from it. The people of Greece are still suffering poverty and deprivation at the hands of the financial Mafia. Some of the figures are staggering. Take the population of Greece, since the financial Mafia took dictatorial control of Greece, the population has gone from 11.1 million in 2011 to 11.0 million in 2015, for a small country, that’s a remarkable drop. Unemployment shows an equally devastating trend in the opposite direction going from 17.9% in 2011 to 25% in
2015. Looking at the volume of money the Troika, ( EC, European Commission, ECB, European Central Bank, IMF, International Mankind Fuckers) have poured into Greece, you would imagine that its problems should be sorted. Of course we all know that the money shuffling is an illusion, though they say they are giving it to Greece, it doesn’t actually stay there. Around approximately 80% goes back to the financial Mafia in interest payments, so the problem of Greece’s debt remains. In fact the amount of public debt, (state debt) has risen from 172% of GDP in 2011 to 177% of GDP in 2015.
To show how little concern the Troika have for the people of Greece you just have to look at their response to the Greek government’s meagre Christmas handout to to pensioners earning less than €800 a month. They have said that Greece has broken the conditions of its loans and they will have to look at what to do.
To grasp the reality of the situation of the people of Greece, all you need do is focus on the fact that the poorest 20% of Greece’s 11 million people have suffered a 42% drop in disposable income since 2009, and during the “Greek crisis” the country has lost over 25% of its GDP – the biggest downturn to be experienced by an advanced western economy in peacetime. All this because the European banks, mainly German, threw too much money into the gambling casino that was Greece’s “economic bubble”. It was all done to make lots of money for the financial Mafia, and when the bubble burst, the gamblers started to cry, and wanted their money back. In steps the Troika, and under the banner of austerity, it starts to stripe all the wealth out of Greece, plunging the people of that unfortunate country into poverty, deprivation, unemployment, stress and trauma, with the resultant effects such as massive increase in suicides, substances abuse, homelessness, mental and physical health problems, confounded by the collapse of social services, including health and education. This year will see more cuts to salaries and pensions in real terms, as far as the people of Greece are concerned, the storm is gathering pace. All of this is a human tragedy happening here in super rich Europe, but to our babbling brook of bullshit, it is old news and not worthy of reporting.
To compound the situation of the people of Greece, while the financial Mafia is mercilessly plundering all assets from that unfortunate country, we should remember that Greece is the main landing point of those hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the imperialists’ blood curling adventures in the Middle East. Greece is now home to thousands of refugees who are herd up like cattle and detained in concentration camps. Greece, a country because of the financial Mafia’s brutal policy of austerity and plunder, is probably the least able of the EU countries to cope with this traumatising, and avoidable human tragedy. The agony of the people in Greece is nothing short of legalised plunder and murder.
Nine months after the EU-Turkey refugee agreement and the official closing of the Balkan route towards north Europe, thousands of refugees and migrants are being forced to live indefinitely in concentration camps across Greece, in horrendous conditions, with no hope for tomorrow, being exposed to below zero temperatures, in inadequate and unacceptable dwellings or even tents. The tragic images of refugees living in tents covered with snow and barefoot toddlers in the muddy water of the camps, waiting in long queues for a plate of food under unbearable temperatures, are still fresh. Despite government claims that the measures for the protection of refugees from the adverse weather conditions have been successfully completed, the preparation for protecting migrants and refugees who are trapped in the Greek islands has failed, despite the millions of euros that have been given to prepare for the winter, which recently has been harsh even for Greek weather standards. And it’s no wonder, since the Greek government, local municipalities and NGO’s see refugees as a business opportunity. And for these reasons for many months since the initial wave of refugees coming to Greece in 2015 the government and the police -through media propaganda and arrests- managed to demonize and barred all the hundreds of volunteers that in a self organized manner were helping the thousands of refugees arriving to Greece. Then they imprisoned the refugees into camps guarded by the police, from which they are allowed out of them for few hours a day, (which is pointless in most cases since they are situated far away from villages or cities, so that contact with people and necessary services is avoided or prevented), forbidden outsiders to visit the camps, even reporters or photojournalists without supervised permission and directed all the money to NGO’s to run the camps (many of them were set up just a bit after the first refugee waves sensing the flow of money to the European entry point of Greece). There have even been situations were local authorities used the money they got to hire people to help the refugees indeed to hire employees but use them for completely different duties serving the local authorities, based on the excuse that greece is under financial crisis, thus we see these appealing conditions in camps were already to refugees have died in January.
