Mutual Aid.

 

           Our Health Service and care facilities are a shambles, creaking at the seams underfunded, over worked. The reason is that they are tied to the state and capital, imagine a health service free from the constraints of state and capital. Imagine a health service run by health professionals and their patients. In a society based on mutual aid and co-operation it would all be possible. As long as we run our society on a system of profit, it will remain impossible. The choice is ours, continue being the slaves to the financial Mafia, live with broken health care, poverty and an eternal struggle for a decent life, or through solidarity and mutual aid break free from this insane, unjust system that caters for the rich and powerful. The choice seems a no brainer.

An interesting article from Anarchist News. 

         From https://www.healthautonomyconvergence.com/ Durham, North Carolina • Coming May 2023 •

        A convergence about healthcare and beyond❋
        Anti-authoritarian, abolitionist, and anarchist healthcare workers Re-imagining and undermining the medical-industrial complex together✹

Conspire with us…

        An invitation to deepen connections for health autonomy together. We invite healthcare workers, caregivers and all who are aligned with our principles to converge in Durham, North Carolina in May of 2023 to find and support one another while creating exits from exploitative medical mazes.
        Are you are a healthcare worker or caregiver who wants to share skills and knowledge, plug into an educational track, propose a discussion, screen a film or discuss something we haven’t even mentioned? Submit a proposal!
        Interested in tabling for the event? Click submit proposals. Interested in volunteering during the weekend? Register and shoot us an email.

About the convergence, What to expect…

         Three days and nights of discussion, workshops, speakers, hands on learning, films, food and fellowship!
         We seek experts in their respective experiences, fields, and communities to share skills and knowledge that may be difficult or impossible to access outside of the space we create together.
         For those looking to orient around specific fields for the weekend, we will experiment with tracks to (optionally) follow in order to foster self-organizing and reinforce long-lasting networks.
        We will create space to vent and grieve all we have lost in the last few years and will provide ample time to nourish ourselves together.
       Coming to Durham in May 2023 ❋ The Hospitals belong to the people
 

       Who we are
        We are anti-authoritarian, abolitionist, and anarchist healthcare workers re-imagining and undermining the medical-industrial complex.
        We look towards a future that prioritizes collective care over individualized exploitation. We honor expertise and undermine professionalism.
        We believe that all humans should have access to knowledge of their bodies, unmediated by the hands of state and capital.
         We work towards a future wherein all human and planetary life has intrinsic and non-exchangeable value, where we are able to live and die on our own terms.
         We look to deconstruct the lines separating patient and provider and hope to collaborate on truly shifting the way power flows in these systems.
         We are pro-autonomy, anti-individual, pro-intimacy, anti-commodification, and so joyful to be coming together to do this work.
         We are an evolving network. If these values resonate with you, we invite you to conspire with us.

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info    

Self-Organised Health Structure.

      In the district of Exarchia, in Athens, they have been building the future, in spite of the daily state violence and repressions. If we are to build that better world, it can't be done by patching up the holes left by the state's indifference to our conditions. It has to done by replacing the state's strangle hold on our lives. We can create that better world by being imaginative, daring and working outside the state's tentacles. Asking the state to be our benefactor is only tightening its grip on and control over our lives. This is an excellent example of what is possible, and where we should be aiming.

This is from Contra Info:

Exarchia Self-organized Health Structure (ADYE) —psychologist, pathologist/radiologist, special tutor–child psychologist, gynecologist, speech therapist

    The Exarchia Self-organized Health Structure is an undertaking created through a general assembly of residents, social projects and collectives that live and act in the district of Exarchia.

It’s addressed to the local community of Exarchia, doctors, psychologists, nurses, pharmacists, but also to any other resident who would like to help.

     Basic activity of the Exarchia Self-organized Health Structure is to offer free primary healthcare, immediate help and psychological support as well as to promote the concept of health for all, without any discrimination for reasons of race, skin color, origin, sexual identity or religion.

     Main political conviction of its participants is being able to provide solidarity reciprocally, rather than egoistically or philanthropically, given the fact that we are all potential migrants, homeless, unemployed, precarious workers without access to healthcare services.

     We believe that self-organized health structures are not solely a response to problems in provision of medical care, filling the gap left by the State. Therefore, what we apply in practice is the way we would like to see health in the society we are envisioning, a society of true solidarity and humanity.

     We perceive the project of the Exarchia Self-organized Health Structure as a living cell of social resistance and emancipation against contemporary barbarity, thus we collaborate with people’s assemblies and base unions.

     During the operation hours of the pathology treatment room (Wednesdays and Thursdays, 18–20pm), you are welcome to bring medications that you no longer need.

56, Arachovis Street, VOX, Exarchia Square

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

Do The Plebs Really Need An Education!!

        The Greek education system, (what's left of it) is a preview of the European education system of tomorrow. In Greece the education system has been savaged beyond all recognition, budget cuts and teacher lay-offs have seen to that. In cities across Greece teachers and students supported by parents and other workers have been taking to the streets and the latest round of sackings and transfers to other areas, have again brought them back onto the streets. 

This from Teacher Dude:


Greek educators extend strike action in protest against further spending cuts, a photo by Teacher Dude's BBQ on Flickr.

      More than 15,000 Greek teachers, students and supporters took to the streets of the northern port city of Thessaloniki today in protest against further cuts in jobs and funding for the country's beleagured educational system.
      With thousands facing lay off or enforced transfer to other districts, teachers and other public sector employees are now striking for a second days running.
      Tensions ran high when riot police units blocked roads so preventing marchers from approaching the local offices of the neo-nazi Golden Dawn party.
    After last night's fatal stabbing of left wing singer and activist Pavlos Fyssas by Golden Dawn member political passions are running high and tonight's nationwide series of anti-fascist demonstrations are likely to see clashes between protesters and the police.

    Apart from Greece's crushed education system, their health system has also been decimated and is in a state of collapse. Chemists are frequently running out of medical supplies and people can no longer afford their medication. This is in Europe, in one of the richest parts of the world, and to imagine that we and other parts of Europe are some how protected from the ravages of the ideology of the financial mafia is delusional. Finance has no loyalty to people or country, economics sees no culture but accountancy.
      What kind of system is it that in a supposed civilised society, we can't afford health care or education, while carrying on our backs parasitic billionaires, millionaires and bloated greed driven politicians, who live in the lap of luxury? This system fails on all counts, on moral, on justice, and on sanity.

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

When You're A Non-Person.

 

From The Greek Streets:

Sunday, July 28, 2013

      Mohammad Hassan, a migrant from Afghanistan, had been detained in the concentration camp of Corinth since September 2012. Despite the fact that he repeatedly complained about the pain he was suffering, his pleas were completely ignored and he received no medical help. Only on July 2, Mohammad was finally transferred to the Sismanogleio hospital in Athens. He died at the hospital on July 27.

     The doctors had diagnosed him with a respiratory infection, which would point at pneumonia or another similar infection.

ann arky's home.

A CORPORATE WORLD CONTROLLED FROM THE BOARDROOM.

       The financial Mafia's grand plan is world wide, it is in fact a world wide epidemic. It is not something that is limited to Europe, no country is immune from this destructive infection. The only real antidote to this vile infection is social justice through anarchism. 

     America, that land of freedom, democracy and opportunity!! Well just like the rest of the corporate dominated world, ordinary Americans are getting poorer and the rich Americans are getting richer. Forbes has just released the latest figures on the richest Americans, and it states that the wealthiest 400 Americans posses 13% of the total wealth of all of America. This year alone their wealth increased by 7%, making the average wealth between this 400 work out at $4.2 billion each. This puts people like the most recent Presidential contender, Mitt Romney, in the poor league, as he has to get by on a personal fortune of a mere $250 million.

       Compare this to the ordinary American, this year millions of workers have been forced into poverty, saw the pensions disappear, along with their health care. Their wages are now in lower than what they were 40 years ago, if you take into consideration the rate of inflation over that period, the average wage is 22% lower now than the average in 1972. Unemployment is high, house foreclosures almost common place, homelessness rampant, jobs almost impossible to find.

       The onslaught against the ordinary people is world wide, no country is immune from the financial Mafia's plans to drive down wages, Greece, at the moment, may be at the sharp end, but others are perilously close, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, to mention a few in Europe. There is nothing in the rule book that says that the American people can't follow the Greek people into total misery and deprivation. By the slashing social spending the corporate world will achieve two things, one, it will reduce the tax they are asked to pay, so increasing profits, and two, it will open up greater opportunities for the corporate bodies to privately supply, at a profit to themselves, those services that have been trashed by national governments. No social services, only privately provide services at a cost, and if you can't pay, then you have to go without.

       Everything must turn a profit for the corporate body, no public assets, no public spaces, no social services, just big business. A bleak, harsh and desperate world for the ordinary people, a world where if you fall on hard times, it will be up to charities to help you out, or friends and relatives, who might themselves be facing the same poverty and deprivation. This is the great austerity plan, the pinnacle of capitalism, the corporate planet controlled from the boardrooms of fat-cats, with one aim in mind, increase profit, to fatten your shareholders. We either face this world and live with it, or face it and destroy the present greed driven system and replace it with a better world driven by co-operation and mutual aid, based on sustainability with the aim of seeing to the needs of all our people.The only real

ann arky's home.

 

RIPPING UP THE CONTRACT.

           We seem to be in an era of those, who believe they are strong, ripping up contracts, no negotiation, just a take it or leave it attitude. We all entered a contract when we started work and paid national insurance and taxes. In our case that was to guarantee that we would have health care free at the point of need, social benefits when unable to work, for what ever reason, a decent pension when age told us it was time to quit working. Now "our" government is ripping up that contract, our health service is being privatised, our social benefits are being slashed, more so for the disabled, and our pensions are crap. It is not just the public sector contracts that are being ripped up, the private sector is  taking its lead from "our" government. Large firms like Balfour Beattie have torn up the contract it has with the electricians that it employs. Handed them a new un-negotiated contract with a sign it or get off the site demand. The new contract of course does not improve the conditions of the electricians, in some case it leads to a 30% wage cut. What do you do when you enter into a contract with some and they then without negotiations, decide to change the terms? I believe you have the right to break your contract with them and defend what is yours.

        On the same theme, more forcibly put from a post by Ten Bears on Polizeros.

When you break the Social Contract

Ten Bears Feb 9, 2012, 8:22 am

Forty-three years ago I got a Social Security Card and went to work on a cattle ranch a hundred miles the other side of Burns (Oregon). When I first cashed that first paycheck, I entered into a social contract with The United States Government – specifically that if I pay into the system for the next forty-five or fifty years, then after forty-five or fifty years of paying into the system the system will pay me back. I faithfully met my part of the contract, I faithfully paid into the system.

Now the government wants to take away what I’ve paid for the past forty-three years, just seven years short of honoring its end of the social contract… to steal it from me and give to the bankers, the trustfunders, and the drug/media/oil/military/industrial complex. Violate the social contract we entered into forty-three years ago. Rip me off, and give it away.

Be forewarned, take from me what I have in good faith paid into the system, and I will no longer consider myself a part of this country, nor bound to its laws, its standards or its mores. Rip me off, and I will collectively rip you a new asshole.

Who better to fight the revolution, than a dishonored Vietnam Veteran?

 ann arky's home.