State Killing.

         The present system we live under is a mish-mash of inequality and injustice, poverty in the midst of opulence, managed and administered by soulless freaks of inhumanity. In a system so riven with greed, they put in place systems that are "supposed" to catch those who, inevitably, because of the systems structure, find themselves in need. Like everything in the system, these systems are run on economic factors, never on humanity, the result being inevitable poverty, deprivation, misery and on occasions, death, these deaths should be listed as state economic killings..
        It is easy to find cases where this gross inhumanity takes your anger to boiling point, but then what? What do we do about the avoidable death of a young mother because of the system's lack of humanity? What do we do about a young child being robbed of its mother, because the system doesn't care enough? What do we do about a family buried in grief because of a system run by emotionless economists, who can't see the misery inherent in their system?
       The following case is just one of the multitude of cases of misery and deprivation spawned by this exploitative economic system of greed.
         The following report by the BBC:

 

Photo courtesy of BBC

 

        A single mother with mental health problems took a fatal overdose after failures in the benefits system, her family has claimed. Philippa Day, from Mapperley, Nottingham, applied for a new benefit last year but saw her payments cut from £228 a week to £60.
          Her family believes she took her own life over her debts and after a request for a home assessment was denied. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said it could not comment.
          Miss Day, 27, died in October last year. She had been in a coma for 10 weeks after being found collapsed at home. She had been diagnosed with emotionally unstable personality disorder, said her family. Her sister, Imogen Day, said Philippa's mental health had deteriorated with post-natal depression and she was unable to work.
         She had been receiving disabled living allowance (DLA) payments as she had type 1 diabetes. Those payments stopped after she made an application for a personal independence payment (PIP) in January 2019.
        The correct forms were not received and her payments were reduced to a standard living allowance of £60 a week, said the family. "In the months leading up to her death we only spoke about the PIP claim, we only spoke about the fact my sister had no money and she was unable to live a life with any kind of quality," said Imogen. Philippa's family say her mental health deteriorated after she was left living on £60 a week
      She said the family believed her sister's death was triggered when a request for a home assessment was rejected by the DWP. Imogen said the family was arguing that the DWP "broke Article 2 of the Human Rights Act - which is a right to life".
      "They're trying to argue they were unaware of my sister's vulnerable circumstances, which is incorrect," she said. "With all her dealings with the DWP, both her psychiatric nurses and my sister were very clear that it was impacting her mental health and was making her feel more suicidal." Imogen added: "I would like them to overhaul the entire claimant process to protect vulnerable people."
        A DWP spokesperson said: "Our condolences are with Miss Day's family. As the inquest process is ongoing it would be inappropriate to comment at this time."
        An inquest into Miss Day's death will open on 7 December.

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Tomorrow!

      Artists paint pictures, so do poets and writers, but figures can also paint a picture. So let's take some figures and try to paint a picture of what lies ahead of us in the UK after covid19 .
         Bank of England unemployment predictions, 2019 3.8%, 2020 8.6% 2021 11.0%
Another prediction:
Unemployment could hit 15 per cent in UK hit by second coronaviruswave

Dark picture even before covid19:

       March 2020 An extra 1.5 million children will have been pitched into poverty by 2021 as a consequence of the government’s austerity programme, according to a study of the impact of tax and benefit policy by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

      The EHRC study forecasts dramatic increases in poverty rates among children in lone parent and minority ethnic households, families with disabled children and households with three or more children. There are clear winners and losers from austerity tax and benefits changes since 2010, the study says. The regressive nature of the policies means that low-income families have been hit hardest: the poorest fifth will lose 10% of income by 2021, while the wealthiest fifth will see little or no change.

After covid19: 

COVID-19 Impact: 50 per cent of UK households believe they will struggle to meet their financial commitments over the next three months.
       In the first three weeks after the UK government introduced the ‘lockdown’, an estimated 7 million households (a quarter of all households in the UK) had lost either a substantial part or all of their earned income as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis. The immediate consequences of the crisis for UK households are seen in the large numbers (28 per cent) who were experiencing financial difficulties. An estimated 3.1 million households were in serious financial difficulty and a further 4.8 million households were clearly struggling to make ends meet. Anxiety about money was widespread, with half of all householders saying that thinking about their financial situation made them anxious.
Key findings:

• 3.1 million households are in serious financial difficulty
• 4.8 million households are struggling to make ends meet
• 7 million have lost a significant part of their earnings
• 7.7 million households anticipate some fall in income in the next 3 months
• 10.4 million households are potentially exposed financially
  

On housing: 

• Of those in serious financial difficulty, 64% are renting
• 31% are home owners
  

      These are some of the findings from a national COVID-19 financial impact tracker published by Standard Life Foundation, which were analysed by the University of Bristol’s Emeritus Professor Elaine Kempson, and Christian Poppe at Oslo Metropolitan university.  
      Professor Kempson will be leading the series of monthly surveys, designed to track the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 crisis on household economies. The analysis and reporting is being undertaken by Bristol in collaboration with other researchers, including academics at Oslo Metropolitan University.You can download the full report here.

      Theeconomic fallout of the pandemic could leave 1.1 million more people below the pre-Covid poverty line at year end, including a further 200,000 children, according to analysis released today (Thursday) by the IPPR think tank.

      Well there's a picture of tomorrow, do you feel that it is as it should be, or do you accept that the capitalist system has failed, as usual, to see to the needs of the ordinary people? If so, what are we going to do about its failure? Reformed is impossible, remove is the only answer.

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

Fueling Hatred.

       What makes you hate a system? I suppose we all come at it in our own way. I took to anarchism at the age of 17 as a apprentice in the shipyards, these views were reinforced after I left the yards and became a door to door salesman. Below I will relate very briefly some of the experiences that hardened that hatred of the system and done much to strengthen my love of anarchism. They are not in any chronological order, just as they come to mind. Nor are they limited to Glasgow, these scenes were repeated in other districts where I knocked on doors for a living, Coatbridge, Airdrie, Port Glasgow, Greenock, and so the dreadful scenes kept repeating themselves.

      1. Entering the "single end", I found myself in a square room with no furniture except for a wooden kitchen chair, where the woman sat tearing up waxcloth to throw on the fire to try and heat the place. I then became aware of a bundle of coats lying on the floor in the corner and noticed to little heads sleeping huddled beneath the coats.

     2. As I entered the house a voice said, "watch your feet" and I noticed that there were hardly any floorboards in the hallway, and a young boy was in the kitchen chopping them up to burn to keep warm. In the living room with a couple of chairs, there was a wire coming in the window from the house above. The electricity had been cut off and they paid the woman above a few shillings every week  so that they could have some light and the radio.

   3. A house I entered and stood in the hall while the man, trousers down below his navel, and a t-shirt well above it, displaying a blackened stomach where you could see the cleaner lines where the sweat had created little rivers. As he looked for some documentation, which was never forthcoming, my attention was drawn to a kitchen cabinet in the hall, the type with glass doors and a drop-down front. The glass had long gone, and the front was open, while looking at the bits and pieces of food lying there I also noticed maggots crawling among the scraps. Then a little white face appear looking in a puzzled manner at me, it wore nothing but a very short vest, was filthy and pale white, obviously had never seen the outside.

     My memory is filled with such visions of abject poverty and deprivation I witnessed on a daily basis. This while Glasgow was a bustling industrial city, with wealth pouring into the coffers of our lords and masters. Our politicians preaching about eliminating child poverty, all those years ago, and here we are in the 21st. century with approximately 25% of our child population living below the poverty line. Talk about hypocrisy and empty promises. When will we ever learn.

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A Desired Normal.

      It must now be obvious to most people that the system we have been living under has failed us, the people. As we scramble to save lives with a decimated health service and keep hearing the same phony platitudes from our political ballerinas, that the government is doing all it can, doing it right, and everything is falling into place. While 4 weeks into this lockdown, front-line workers are still struggling to get the right equipment. 

     An economic system that was wholly focused on profit for the millionaires and billionaires at the expense of social spending, a system that completely failed to build and maintain the structures necessary for a civilised society. A system that failed to prepare for such emergencies and allowed so many citizens to fall by the wayside, must be seen for what it is, a system that is pure and simple there to enrich those few who are already rich at the expense of the many.

     Knowing this raises the obvious question, what are we going to do about this injustice and abject failure? Mutual aid groups are spring up all over the world, as ordinary people step in to fill the void left by this failed system. People with compassion and a desire to help each other and those more vulnerable than themselves. This surely must be the blueprint for any future shaping of our society. Communities coming together and doing it themselves in co-operation with other groups and communities, with no thought of profit, just seeing to the needs of all our people. I see no reason why we should abandon this method of caring for each other, rather than meekly sitting waiting for our lords and master to get the old greed drive, failed system back up and running. 

    We can and must create that new "normal", based on mutual aid, co-operation, sustainability and seeing to the needs of all our people. 

       The following short article on mutual aid, how to build on it, where it can take us, its possibilities, its possible problems, and its possible wrong directions. There are plenty of links in the article giving a much wider discourse on the subject that will save us, mutual aid.

The following extract from Acorn:

       Mutual aid features prominently in the anarchist response to the current situation. Here is, after all, a perfect opportunity to put theory into practice and to show that acting together, by and for ourselves, is more effective and empowering than waiting passively for the state to save us.
       There is also the possibility that the self-help community networks built up now could evolve into the bases of future revolutionary activity.
      “Longstanding anarchist forms of organization and security have a lot to offer when it comes to surviving the pandemic and the panic it is causing”.
      “Within communities, mutual aid has been proven as the only way to get through the privations of lockdown and the fear of serious or fatal illness. Communities have acted quickly to share basic supplies and resources”.
       “We are seeing Mutual Aid groups spring up in local communities across the UK as crisis sparks compassion in many who want to help out and reach our most vulnerable, our isolated, the many left behind by successions of uncaring governments”.
     “Social solidarity and mutual aid pandemic care is blossoming in communities large and small”.
See also here, here and here.
     There has been occasional reflection on the limits of such an approach, asking how we can ensure that mutual aid networks do not simply turn into temporary means of helping people adapt to a situation they maybe ought not to be adapting to…
        “If our capacity to care for one another fails to be instantiated in qualitatively different forms, they may very well simply be reintegrated into novel expressions of privation, dispossession, and precaritization in whatever new legal and economic systems that may attempt to establish themselves”.

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They Failed Us.

   

     The lockdown rumbles on, the deaths keep being reported, and no end in sight. Whatever your views on this pandemic you have to lay the largest slice of blame on our various governments and their wholehearted support of the Neo-liberalism foisted on the world for the benefit of the rich and powerful. It was their policies that hollowed out the health services to breaking point, it was their deliberate actions to destroy social services, all in the aim of increasing profits to the big corporate plunderers. We can also lay the blame at their feet for their incompetent, confused, delayed and vested interests approach to the pandemic when it first raised it dangerous head.

    As the cry for seeing things back as usual increases, we would be full blown idiots if we even considered that return road to be lead by the incompetent, crew with their vested interests that brought us to our knees in the first place. There can be no place in our plans for that new normal for the crew of the institutions that through their greed and vested interests driven policies, gross incompetence and inhumanity, brought misery and death to many more families than would have been the case had the situation been handled by well funded health services and social services, co-operation between countries and done rapidly.

      No, we can't reward greed and incompetence, our new normal must in no way resemble the old corporate greed normal of the rich and powerful, that has heaped so much misery, death and poverty on vast swaths of the world's population, and at the same time creating an ecological disaster we might not be able to repair. 

The following is an extract from an article by Paul Craig Roberts

•       We are hearing from many that the world after Covid-19 will be different. The question is: Different in what way? Will it be better or worse?
        Elites are working to make it better for them, and worse for the rest of us. About that the evidence is clear. The Big Boys are being bailed out and their debts covered. Everyone else, except those already marginalized and without a recent work record and fixed address, got a month’s rent and extended unemployment benefits.
          Big Pharma sees massive profits in the virus, Government sees more power to control
          But the disparity in economic benefits is only a part of it. Powerful vested interests, such as Bill Gates and Big Pharma, are determined to vaccinate us all, and to control our movements with an internal passport called “vaccinated, health cleared” or other words to that effect. New tracking procedures and technologies are to be put in operation reminiscent of the “mark of the beast” to police the access of varous categories of people to various areas and benefits.
         Experts point out that just as we cannot be vaccinated against the common cold, except perhaps for the past year’s version we cannot be vaccinated against Covid-19 and other mutating viruses, but the experts are already being shouted down. No expert opinion is to be permitted to stand in the way of vaccination profits.
         Neither will nutrition and vitamin advocates be allowed to get in the way. Bill Sardi predicts that orchestrated scares generated by mandatory recalls of “toxic” vitamins await us (https://knowledgeofhealth.com/modern-medicine-laid-bare/). Big Pharma is determined to acquire control over vitamins and homeopathic remedies, and the FDA is Big Pharma’s likely pawn.
         Vaccination has been elevated above cure, as Big Pharma and its shills such as CNN shout down the positive experience doctors report of successful treatments with Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin, and the effectiveness of Vitamin C, Vitamin D3, and Zinc in strengthening the ability of immune systems to fight off the virus. Big Pharma-influenced medical orthodoxy cannot get out of the box it has been put into. When new thinking and experimentation are needed, those capable of thought are hasseled and even blocked by FDA regulations and dogmatism.
        The permanent government and its security agencies see in the population’s fear and confusion opportunities to put into place more tyrannical measures, more set-asides of Constitutional Rights, more impairments on free speech. The ability of freedom to resist oppression is ever diminished.
  Various descriptions of the expected dystopia are offered on the Internet. But it does not have to turn out this way. It is up to us. Demoralized and fearful, we can accept more government power as we did after 9/11. Instead, we can collectively recognize the massive failure everywhere of Western leadership and construct a more livable and sustainable society.
         The failure of leadership is an opportunity for real change
        CNN, the New York Times, and the rest of the controlled media tell us every day that President Trump represents the failure of leadership. But the failure of leadership goes beyond all the leaders of the last 30 years and resides in the system itself. Global, “self-regulating,” greed-driven, financialized, soulless capitalism cannot unite people into a sustainable community. 

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