Inequality.

         This world is awash with wealth in all shapes and forms, but it is very thinly spread on the majority of the world's population. By far the largest heap of that wealth, though created by the many, is heaped on the few. It is poured over and accumulated by the few, those who own and manage this brutal system of exploitation. Ever since the inception of capitalism, this has been so, but the efficiency of the system of production and exploitation has raced ahead at an unbelievable speed, creating wealth at an ever growing rate, but the distribution has always gone in favour of those owners and mangers of the system. The discrepancy between those few and the many has reach utterly gross and unacceptable inhumane proportions. Poverty and deprivation sprawls over our cities and towns, doorways become beds, food banks the accepted way of life for millions, and death by starvation for many, many more. Yet, within reach and plain view, we see luxury cars, private jets, grand mansions, lavish yachts and a swaggering coterie who weave the illusion that they are entitled to this life style.
        The chasm between these two groups, the many who create all that wealth, and the few who plunder it, is creating an ever growing anger and the many are starting to openly seek redress and justice. However justice will only come when this entire system of exploitation is torn asunder and replaced by a system of equality and fairness, a sustainable system freed from the cancer that is profit, a system moulded round the needs of all our people, and an end to power and privilege for the few. Though the following article is about U$A, it applies equally across the planet.

The following from Struggle-la-lucha:
 

     Almost 13 million people in the U.S. are “officially” jobless. The real number is far higher. Many haven’t received an unemployment check in weeks. Then there’s Jeff Bezos, who runs Amazon and owns the Washington Post. His stash ballooned by another $72 billion in the last six months.
       Over a million people have died of the coronavirus around the world. More than 210,000 expired in the United States of Trump. But it’s been party time for the super rich. Millions line up at food pantries and worry about being evicted or losing their home. Meanwhile, U.S. billionaires gained another $845 billion in wealth according to the Institute for Policy Studies. 
        This nearly trillion-dollar gain during the pandemic is merely dessert for these parasites. They’ve been having a feast for nearly 50 years. If workers were receiving the same share of the economy as they had in 1975, their wages would have approximately doubled by 2018. The bottom quarter of wage earners would be taking home an average of $61,000 per year instead of $33,000. Those in the middle would be making $92,000 instead of $50,000.
      These figures represent another $2.5 trillion dollars stolen every year from poor and working people by the wealthy and powerful. The study showing this “Grand Theft Payday” was commissioned by Seattle’s Fair Work Center and carried out by the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. Inequality has become so massive and repulsive that it’s obvious to RAND analysts who usually work for the military-industrial complex.
Big Capital’s counterattack
        This massive transfer of income isn’t the result of sunspots or UFOs. It’s the product of a worldwide class struggle between the rich and the rest of us. The class struggle doesn’t just include workers on strike or future union organizing drives at Amazon or Walmart. Every fightback against oppression is a class struggle.
     The Black Lives Matter movement is a class struggle. So is the struggle of the Filipino people against the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Rodrigo Duterte. Transgender people trying to survive is a class struggle.
       The height of the Black liberation struggle was in the 1960s and early 1970s. The master class was pushed back.
       The Vietnamese people defeated the Pentagon war machine. Africans in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique won independence. French workers carried out a general strike in 1968.
       Big Capital staged a counteroffensive. Dozens of Black Panther Party members were murdered by police. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller massacred the Attica prisoners. Decades before Iraq was invaded, war criminals Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were destroying anti-poverty programs for President Richard Nixon.

Read the full article HERE:

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

No Borders.

 

        Solidarity, unity, co-operation and no borders are the foundation stones of our victory over this economic system that condemns millions to a life of misery. A system that has only one aim to increase profit, wealth and power to the few. As the inequality grows so does the anger and the resistance, however, likewise the state, the corporate beast's minder, increases it repression, surveillance and brutality to meet that resistance. It is aware of the rising anger and resentment, if unchecked could bring its plundering to an end, so it will increase its viciousness and brutal repression in an attempt to hold onto its very survival and to retain its wealth, power and privileges. 

       We either accept the life of inequality, injustice, mass poverty, murderous deprivation, total surveillance, and continuous wars, that this system hands us, or we resist with all the strength we can muster, and take our anger to the streets. Our world of resistance may seem fragmented, but make no mistake, it is the same battle across all borders, a struggle for justice, equality and the right to a decent life for all. If these struggles happening across the globe, come together across all states enforced borders, our victory is assured. The alternative is unacceptable.

 

 

         A call with passion and from the heart from Berlin.

The following is from Act For Freedom Now:

International Call for Action and Discussion Days in Berlin 30.10.-01.11.2020
International Demo in Berlin 31.10.2020
UNITED WE FIGHT!
       Connect Urban Struggles – Defend Autonomous Spaces
Over the last years we experience a global resurgence of reactionary politics. State and capital, in a constant process of intensifying exploitation and expanding repression, used the global capitalist crisis, which started a decade ago, as a chance to further restructure relations of power in their advantage. Their political answer is materialized in a shift to the right, with a political alliance of neoliberal economic policies coupled with strong nationalistic narratives and repressive policies against resistance and progressive movements. The new face of authoritarianism has unleashed an all out attack against individuals it considers unnecessary or those that choose to resist and collectivize against the ruin of their lives. In our current period, states the world over used measures against Covid-19 to extend repression, policing and surveillance against societies. At the same time, the failings of neoliberal healthcare systems have led to masses of deaths and increasing inequality due to access to healthcare.
To all of this, people in different areas of the world answer with massive resistance on the streets. Movements with different perspectives have revolted, for example in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, or more recently in France and the USA. The common thread of all these movements is their distance from institutionalized and systemic politics and the choice of self-organization and horizontalism in the fight against authority.
     The movement in Germany is fighting against exploitation and oppression in the belly of the beast. Since the movement reached a climax of mobilization against Hamburg’s G20 summit in 2017, the German state intensified and broadened its repressive arsenal with the goal to suppress and isolate the movement: this has seen the biggest public manhunt since the state repression since the 1960s and 70s, widening of police measures such as preventative arrests and extrajudicial surveillance, increased penalties for crimes against police and the ban of the popular German indymedia website “linksunten”.
In the city of Berlin over the past years the movement has come under constant attack through the eviction of its infrastructure, with gentrification manifesting itself in an attack on marginalized and struggling parts of society: rising rents making life unbearable, more than 5.000 forced evictions of houses per year, increased policing of public spaces and an overall changing social geography in the city. On the one hand this destroys or displaces spaces that the movement uses to support itself. Through heavy policing and state repression, subversive lifestyles and political organization is made impossible within public spaces. On the other hand capital is given space to invest and increase profitability through real-estate, privatization of security through cameras, fences and walls, smart city developments and big public-private partnership projects.
      The struggle of self-organized spaces in Berlin has developed against this background. The eviction of the bar collective Syndikat last August, and the broad mobilization of the movement against the eviction, was only the start of the upcoming fight for our infrastructures. The anarcha-queer-feminist house project Liebig34, the autonomous youth center Potse and the bar collective Meuterei are threatened by imminent evictions. The house project Rigaer94 was again raided in July, in an attempt to use the background of the raid several vain attempts to evict squatted flats were made without any success, since all flats could be held by the people inside or taken back. This phase of evictions might become the biggest attack on the autonomous infrastructure in Berlin since the 1990s.
       These collective spaces have chosen to stay and fight back in different ways. Their struggle has rallied the movement German-wide as a fight we are all a part of: against private property and capital, against the displacement of people from their houses, against gentrification of our neighborhoods, against a patriarchal and racist system which marginalizes, silences and oppresses the voices of those being exploited or deemed expendable for the system. Against this the projects put forward self-organization and solidarity, defiance of property and confrontation with the state and a direct attack on the oppressive social structures of hetero-patriarchy, nationalism and individualism.
      We are traversing a critical period, both for society and for radical movements worldwide. Under the dogma of “law and order”, state and capital are intensifying their attack on society and trying to further their dominance of all aspects of everyday life, stopping every collective vision and claim, and every perspective of resistance and struggle.
       Recognizing Berlin as the capital of one of the most dominant capitalist countries worldwide, we aim to intensify the social struggle in the heart of the beast. Giving a strong answer and creating perspectives against one of the most unbearable states of the world, that consists a model for many countries worldwide and which through its bureaucracy and structures infiltrates all the aspects of our lives leaving no space for self organization and anti-institutional struggles, will create a legacy not only for the local movement but for every rebellious cell worldwide.
       By the end of October an official eviction date of Liebig34 may be public. We will get together to prevent this. And if it has already been evicted in the weeks prior, we will take it back!
       We need all the force we can and call for support to defend our projects. Borderless solidarity is one of our strongest weapons. We want to use this opportunity to make the anarchist perspective more visible and bring the discussion about our ideas, praxis and strategies forward. The days prior to the demonstration on 31.10. will offer space for a plenary assembly, exchange, discussions and ways of actions on our common goals, strategies, occupying ground and collective defense.
        We consider this demonstration as an opportunity to come together to create a breach in their plans and multiple moments of ragefull, dynamic and militant experiences in which we abandon the defensive role and instead take the street as an active and offensive movement.
         Thus we hope to make these days part of a continuous discourse and not yet another unconnected event with no followup.
For these reasons we call for people to take the streets and destroy their plans of evictions. Although our fights in different corners of the worlds take different characteristics as we struggle in different contexts, borderless solidarity and the bridging of our struggles has been possible in the past, and is necessary for the future. Let’s choose confrontation and resistance, and seek them in collective moments beyond borders; let’s make their plans a disaster.
        We join the call of Terra Incognita to turn this year’s October into a month dedicated to solidarity and standing up for every occupied ground threatened by repression.
Lets bring our rage together!
Berlin 30.10.-01.11.202
International Demonstration 31.10.2020
via Liebig34.

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

Tory War.

       Party political politics have never been my strong point, but I can't help take a little giggle of glee at the possibility of the coming war within the Tory party. The financial pundits of both sides are as usual clamoring to get the "national" debt under control. However that's where the split comes. The two factions are gearing up for a fight, on the one side is the bumbling buffoon Boris brigade, sailing along on his ginormous ego. Boris's election promise stated that there would be no return to austerity, he promised more jobs with massive spending on infrastructure projects and his ego demands that, come what may. Of course that requires more money, so his camp want to plunder the middle class with more taxes etc. Most financial pundits agree that to try and plunder the poor would be unpopular, but also impracticable, as there is not enough avenues there to sort out the £2trillion UK debt. The other side in this party squabble claim that a policy of plundering the middle class would damage the crumbling economy even more. Of course that last statement translates into hurting some of their friends and perhaps costing them their comfy job in parliament.

      Which ever way it goes the real financial Mafia will demand that they get back their £2trillion they loaned the UK treasury for their covid19 pantomime, no matter who the Tory party decide to screw. So you can rest assured that they will, and we the ordinary people will feel the pain, come what may. Of course decimating the middle class will more or less display what anarchists have always said, in this society there is only two classes. All this working class, middle class and upper middle class, is just an illusion based on propaganda to create that vision of the ladder you can climb to get to the top. However it is extremely difficult to climb a ladder made of illusions.

       So who is going to win, the Boris brigade plundering the middle class to pay off the debt, and at the same time, spend, spend more debt on infrastructure. Which is just another method of taking public money and handing it to their corporate buddies. Or the good old fashion die-hard Tories who see the plundering of the poor the only decent solution to their crumbling sacred economy and ever growing debt. 

     Of course we, the ordinary people, could throw a spanner in both their plans, by deciding to take control of our lives and sorting out our problems all by ourselves, without any political party's blessing.

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

Our Green Future.

        A green plan is the only way to save the planet, and of course those who have destroyed the planet, the corporate capitalists, rush forward to state that only they can be the saviour of the planet, all they need is more taxpayers money. Their propaganda machine goes into overdrive to convince us that our interests and their interests are the same, and we can trust the corporate beast to be our knight in shining armour and herald in the new beautiful green world. Of course this bullshit, sadly, is swallowed by many.

      The following article from Acorn, with lots of links to follow for further information, may help to shovel the bullshit out of our path.

Gaetano Salvemini.

        “The world nowadays teems with people who have fits of enthusiasm whenever they hear of state intervention, planned economy, five-year plans, and the end of laissez-faire. They do not care to ask who are the social groups in whose interests the state, ie. bureaucracy and the party in power, is to intervene and plan. “Yet the first question which should be asked when invoking the end of laissez-faire is precisely this: in the interests of whom should such abolition take place?”
      When Gaetano Salvemini wrote these words, he wasn’t referring to the 2020s, but he might as well have been. There are plenty of anti-capitalist comrades out there, who, even when they oppose the limited content of a Green New Deal or a New Deal for Nature, are tempted to give such schemes the benefit of the doubt in that they appear to be a step in the right direction, away from the unchecked market forces of “laissez-faire” capitalism.
      But, as Salvemini points out, we need to look carefully at who exactly is pushing these economic plans and whose interests they are designed to serve. Here, the hard work has already been done for us by investigative journalist Cory Morningstar and other writers featured on our Climate Capitalists page of links. 

     The briefest dip beneath the fake green surface of this contemporary political pond reveals it to be less a source of environmental and social hope than a rancid cesspit of private interests. We find ourselves deep within a massive global network of organisations and initiatives with names like the World Resources Institute, The B-Team, We Mean Business, Tomorrow’s Capitalism, The Natural Capital Coalition and Corporate Impact X. Here we can have the pleasure of meeting a former CEO of Unilever, the daughter of a CIA-backed Latin American president, the powerful founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum or a Silicon Valley billionaire hoping to get even richer through a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. In this strange upside-down world, in which Big Business is going to “save the planet”, we come across brave “solo” campaigners supported and promoted every inch of the way by international PR professionals, youth movements described as “grassroots” which are in fact funded and steered from above, high-profile activist “rebellions” cheered on by venture capitalists.
        We hear talk of “exponential opportunities“, “the investment of trillions of dollars“, and a “transformation unlike anything humankind has experienced before... a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres”.
      In short, as Morningstar explains, the so-called Green New Deal is being promoted “as the catalyst to unlock the 100 trillion dollars required to unleash the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. This project, of unparalleled magnitude, is the vehicle to save the failing global capitalist economic system and bring in the financialization of nature”. Having found the answer to the question recommended by Salvemini, we might reflect that it is not exactly surprising to find capitalism manoeuvring to incite state support for its money-making activities.
      It was in 1469 that the banker Lorenzo Medici observed: “Things can go badly for the rich if they don’t run the state”. It is a big mistake to fall for the capitalist lie that their world of “market forces” somehow operates independently of the existence of states. We perhaps might expect that naivety from advocates of the oxymoronic absurdity known as “anarcho-capitalism”, but it is strange to witness anti-capitalists likewise imagining that the involvement of state machineries in capitalist activities will inevitably act as some kind of brake on profiteering.
      Capitalism has always depended on the existence of a state in order to impose and enforce its domination. Indeed, we would argue that the state only exists in the first place as a tool of the wealthy elite. Its role has always been to rubber-stamp, with its self-proclaimed “authority”, the theft from the majority carried out by a greedy and self-interested minority. It is the state that announces that “property” is sacred and lawful and that any attempt to take it back amounts to “crime”. It is the state that physically protects the property and wealth of the rich by employing gangs of thugs to intimidate, attack or imprison anyone who threatens to confiscate it, by whatever means.
      It is the state that legitimises and enforces the expulsion of people from their land, that cuts them off from subsistence, from communal autonomy, and forces them into the waiting jaws of capitalist wage slavery. It is the state that raises armies and navies to conquer foreign lands so that its capitalists can plunder, cheat and exploit still further afield. It is the state that taxes the population, ostensibly in “our” interest, only to divert vast amounts of collective wealth into the pockets of capitalists, whether via their highly lucrative construction schemes (needed for “our” infrastructure), via their profitable arms dealing (needed for “our” defence) or, today, via their pseudo-green technologies (needed to save “our” planet).
      When state and capital work together in a more visible way, as with the planned “Green New Deal” and “New Deal for Nature”, this does not mean that capitalism is on the retreat. It just means that, in order to get through a period of crisis, capitalists are, once again, pretending that their interests are “our” interests, that we are all facing an “emergency situation”, that “our” future is at risk and that, therefore, trillions of dollars of public money should be stuffed, by the state, into the pockets of our capitalist saviours.
      Gaetano Salvemini book Those who persist in seeing a state-intervention version of capitalism as necessarily a step in the right direction, would do well to heed Salvemini’s study of one particular “limited planned economy deferential to capitalism”, which just happened to be the Fascist regime in Italy.
      He wrote: “Italy has never seen anything similar to the type of planning exhibited by the government of Soviet Russia. When an important branch of the banking system, or a large-scale industry which could be confused with ‘the higher interests of the nation’, has threatened to collapse, the government has stepped into the breach and prevented the breakdown by emergency measures.
      “The policies of the Italian dictatorship during these years of world crisis have been no different in their aims, methods, and results from the policies of all the governments of the capitalistic countries. The Charter of Labour says that private enterprise is responsible to the state. In actual fact, it is the state, i.e. the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. When the depression came, the government added the loss to the taxpayer’s burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social”.
       Salvemini summed up the overall impact of Fascist state intervention in the dealings of “laissez-faire” capitalism, by concluding: “The intervention of government has invariably favoured big business”. (3)
     Why would we expect things to be any different today?

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A Corporate City.

       For more than a year now, we have been told that "austerity" is over, but like all words that flow from the mouths of our politicians, they should be taken with a pinch of salt. With the supposed "austerity" over, Glasgow has to make £50 million in cuts to balance its coming budget, (Evening Times). What does that mean? Well there are lots of proposals, all of which lead to handing over more of Glasgow's public spaces to the corporate world. A process that has been going on for years and will eventually lead to a city that is privately owned, where you will only be able to access it amenities if you have a nice fat wallet.

Photo: Scotsman.

     Among the suggested money saving proposals are such things as selling off the Gallery of Modern Art. It could become an lavish hotel with expensive restaurants, or a gambling casino with fancy eateries for rich tourists and wealth citizens. Of Glasgow's six publicly owned golf courses there are proposals to lose five of them, so all you folks who use them or live next to those fine green oasis, in our dear green place, can expect to see the rise of private housing estates, theme parks or perhaps more swanky hotels.

     Libraries, those places where you go to seek out info and pleasure, well they are deemed not really necessary, with proposals to close Maryhill and Whiteinch libraries. So you could be looking at a couple of new carpet shops, car dealers or office blocks in there place. There is more, much more in the money saving proposals that the city council is considering, in carrying out the financial world's plan of a city as a profit producing centre for the corporate moneybag share holders.

     When do we stand up and so, enough is enough, we will not tolerate any longer all our pubic assets being turned to money making entities for the greed driven corporate world. We do not want to live in a world where your only access to amenities is via a fat wallet.

     This privatisation of all that is public has been going on for years and will not stop until they have gobbled up everything that can make a profit. Slice by slice our National Health Service has been hand over, and is still being handed over, to private profit seeking companies, called "service providers". Our education system is being decimated by lack of resources while private schools and private academies are fostered.

     Only we the people can stop this plundering of the poor, the grabbing of public assets, all for the purses of the wealth shareholders. However, time is running out.

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

Austerity, Nothing New!!

       Workers rights are being shredded across Europe and elsehwere, no matter the particular colour of the cabal in power, right, left, centre, centre right, centre left, the legislation is much the same. Easier to be fired, more casual, precarious and part-time jobs, longer hours, less attention to health and safety, and much more. It's called reforming working conditions, according to the corporate bosses it will boost efficiency and profitability, though nothing there to improve the living standards of the ordinary people, on the contrary, we pay for the so called boost in efficiency and profitability by deteriorating living standards.

           Though it would be foolish to think this is a phenomena of today. Far from it, it has been the pattern since the start of this insane, unjust system of capitalism first raised its ugly head. The system has always been to get as much labour and effort out of the employee for as little an outlay as possible. That is the foundation stone of capitalism. Austerity has been part and parcel of the capitalist system, it just that it has gone under different names. Its true title should be plundering the poor.

         If we look back at the trend of wages away back  in the 1800's we will see the same pattern, wages going up and then down, according to what the bosses could enforce. It has never been an ever growing improvement in our living standards. Yes, conditions have improved, but always on the back of determined struggle of those employed, not through the generosity of the boss.

Wage trends (weekly)

1836-37

1841-42

1846-47

Cotton spinners (machine)

35/-

25/-

26/-

Cotton spinners (power)

11/-

7/-

8/-

Coalminers

25/-

15/-

20/-

Bricklayers

21/-

21/-

24/-

Joiners

20/-

?

22/-

Stone masons

22/-

18/-

22/6

Handloom weavers

6/-

6/-

7/-

Railway labourers

14/-

?

15/-

Railway masons

21/-

21/-

31/-

    Looking at these rates and comparing it with my wage as a first year apprentice in the shipyards in 1950, it appears I was living in the 1800's as my princely sum was 19/- a week. 

      Our income from our selling our skills to the parasite class has stagnated, risen and then fallen, and this pattern has continued right up to today. Though I believe to day it is becoming more brutal as capitalism struggles to survive with its need for ever expanding growth in a world of finite resources.

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

Gees, What Have They Done!!!

      So after the manufactured phony excitement over the recent crooks and liars competition, our as our lords and master like to call it, the general election, the people have spoken, and the result is that we have a far right government. So for the next five years you will be expected to get your head down and in a subservient manner work your arse off, and try to remember that some multi million private yacht needs repaired. Abandon your interest in politics, you have done your bit with that little cross on that little bit of paper. Now just knuckle down and let the rich and powerful get on with their plundering of the poor. Or you could look across the seas to Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Haiti, France, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, Czech Republic, and many more areas where the people have taken to the streets saying, enough is enough, we will not be impoverished any more, we will not pay homage to the rich parasitical corporate class.

Jacob Rees-Mogg at work on a salary of £76,011, paid by you.

  

   Over the last ten years, under a less far right regime, we have seen our social services decimated, our education system crumble, our National Health service, starved to breaking point. Now with old Etonians like Jacob Rees-Mogg, personal wealth estimated at £55 million ( £150 million if you include his wife's little bundle), and his other greed driven, power crazy Etonian buddie, Boris Johnson, he who thinks the truth is an illusion, do you think that they will act with the welfare of the people at heart, or will they give free rein to their friends and cronies in  corporate exploiting and plundering machine?

    In my mind, the real people have still to speak, if they do, it will have to be loud and clear and quick.

Boris Johnson, sacked twice for lying, now Prime Minister.

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

Vicious Savegery Against The Poorest.

 

        What kind of society tolerates poverty and deprivation, then because of dogma attacks the poorest and most vulnerable of society, who are already struggling to survive on meager benefits, by removing those benefits, leaving them to starve or survive without income in a money orientated society? This is a vindictive and vicious subservience to an ideology of cutting money to social service to allow for greater tax benefits to the rich and the corporate world. These decisions are not god given, they are not the inevitable results of unavoidable circumstances. They are adherence to a dogmatic ideology of plundering the poor to maximise private wealth of the privileged few, in a corrupt system of greed and profit before humanity. This savage policy against the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, is designed and implemented by people with names, sitting in comfortable surroundings, completely out of touch and not particularly interested in, the circumstances of the needy in our society. It is how capitalism works, and we will not see a remedy to this viciousness against the poorest, until we destroy the inhumane system of capitalism.  

This from Welfare Weekly: 

Food Banks, an engineered necessity in the fifth richest country in the world.

          Charities have called for an urgent investigation into the Government’s flagship Universal Credit benefit and sanctions regime, as new figures reveal that over 250,000 people on the new benefit have seen payments slashed.
         Figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that a shocking 256,000 Universal Credit claimants were hit by adverse benefit sanction decisions between May 2016 and April 2019.
        The data also reveals that 5% of Universal Credit sanctions have been for six months or longer.
        The DWP insist that sanctions are only ever used as a “last resort” and that claimants are helped to understand what is expected of them in exchange for payments, otherwise known as ‘conditionality’.
          Benefit sanctions have been blamed for pushing the poor to foodbanks.
       However, today’s figures have led some to believe that too many sanctions are being imposed unfairly and unnecessarily.
        From February 2019 to April 2019, 84% of all Universal Credit full service decisions resulted in a sanction, up 13% from November 2018 to January 2019.
        Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) called for an investigation into the sanctions regime and a moratorium on sanctions while this is carried out.
        CAS Social Justice spokesperson Mhoraig Green said: “The Citizens Advice network in Scotland helps hundreds of thousands of people every year and we have long raised concerns about cases where people have had their benefits unfairly sanctioned, leaving them without any income for a sustained period, causing them to require crisis support including foodbank referrals.
       “Today’s statistics show a worrying trend of an increase in the proportion of people facing a sanction since the introduction of Universal Credit.
         “People should never be left with no income at all as a result of a benefits sanction, there should be an urgent independent investigation into the sanctions regime, with a moratorium on sanctions during that period.”

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

Message from Financial Mafia: Well Done Greece, You Allowed Us To Plunder Your Assets.

      Greece has received its final bailout, and the financial Mafia are saying, "Well done Greece". Of course that doesn't return Greece to a sovereign state, it is still under the hard boot of the financial Mafia. There are stipulations Greece has to adhere to. It has to show a surplus in its budget to the satisfaction of the EU, ECB, and the IMF, that means keep the austerity going. It is also instructed that it will have to "modernise labour relations and working conditions", this of course translates as giving employers the right to keep wages down and for them to attack workers conditions and also to shirk any employer responsibilities. While the financial Mafia applaud themselves for their "success" this "success" is a health service that has virtually collapsed, an education system that is in tatters, they froze hiring in  public schools in 2009, unemployment running at 18.6,  still the highest in the EU. If however your are one of those under 25s, your chance of earning money to survive is reduced considerably, with the unemployment rate at 38.5.

      So while the bankers and the rest of the financial Mafia rejoice, what they are actually saying is, "thank you, the ordinary people of Greece, by suffering more than ten years of deprivation, and allowing us to plunder your assets, you have allowed us to make up most of the money we lost gambling at the billionaires casino, the "market".   

      Like France with the tenth week of Yellow Vest protests, the streets of Greece are not quite. Primary school teachers have been out showing their anger and disgust at the Greek government doing as it was told by the financial Mafia, loosening up employment conditions by changing the hiring process of public sector workers. The protestor deserve our support.

       Over 3,000 primary school teachers clashed with police in the second week of protests over hiring reforms.Teachers in Athens demonstrated on Monday against government plans to change the hiring system for the public sector. Protesters held banners that read: "Permanent hirings now!"

         Police threw tear gas at the gathered crowds in response to some of the protesters letting off fireworks in their direction. Protesters also tried to break a police cordon near parliament.
Teachers argue schools are understaffed and want the creation of more permanent positions. The Greek government froze hiring at public schools after it was hit by an economic crisis in 2009.

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

The Public Gets Shafted, The Parasites Get Pampered.

 

       Once again we see the priorities of this parasite controlled state. While ideologically driven austerity is forcing down the living standards of most ordinary people, our lords and masters have decided to spend £4 billion doing repairs the that monument to British imperialism, The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, and as you and I know, that cost is likely to rise as time goes by. Then in the next breath, we are to spend £360 million repairing Lizzie Windsor's house in London, known as Buckingham Palace. No doubt that will rise as time goes on. I know that there is this lie being spouted that it is really Lizzie that is paying for this as the money will come from that raised by the "crown estates". However, that money is raised from parts of the UK and goes to the government for it to spend as it sees fit. It slides a portion back to Lizzie and her family to keep them in the style they don't deserve, the rest it spends as government money. So the £360 million repair money, is coming out of money that could go towards easing some social problems, of which we have many, but we know the priorities of that cabal with its fingers on the purse strings of "our" money. 

In need of urgent repair.

       So where would you like to see that £4 billion + the £360 million go, perhaps to train more teachers, or doctors, or nurses.  Perhaps sort out some of the problems in social care. Of course you know that that will not happen, as the wealth of this country is earmarked for the wealthy of this country, that's how this system of capitalism works. You can live in cold damp houses, you can struggle to feed your kids, you can watch your health service crumble before being sold off, you can see you education system come apart at the seams. However, that's your lot, it is called austerity, an ideology that never extends to that army of pompous parasites that take it for granted that they should be privileged and pandered to for their every desire.This is capitalism as it was intended to work, it has another name, it's called plundering the poor, and it's doing just fine, you get shafted, they get pampered. Ah, the wonders and beauty of capitalism.

 You're doing just fine.

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