Labour Rights Activists Arrested.

An appeal from Labour Start  

        Nearly 5,000 trade unionists have already sent off protest messages - will you join them?  Please share it with others. Thank you.
       Dozens of labour rights activists in China have been arrested and need our help right now.
      Since early December, the authorities in the southern province of Guangdong have carried out a coordinated and wide-ranging crackdown on labour rights activists and labour organizations.
      More than 25 people from at least four labour organizations have been taken away and questioned by the police. At least seven of them have been criminally detained.
     The police have continued to harass and intimidate the family members and friends of the detained activists and prevented them from giving media interviews.
     The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and Globalization Monitor have launched a campaign on LabourStart calling on the Chinese authorities to release the activists and to stop suppressing labour organizations.
       We need your support today - please click here to add your name to the online campaign:

http://www.labourstart.org/go/china2015

Thank you -- and have a great new year!



Eric Lee 

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

"The Anti-Humanity" Award.

        If there was an award, perhaps we could call it "The Anti-Humanity" award, for the most destructive section of capitalism, it would be a very difficult to come to a decision as to where that award should go.    

    We have the various mining industries, including fracking, ripping apart ecosystems and poisoning the environment. We have the garment industry, cheap labour and appalling conditions in sweatshops across the world. We have the nuclear industry with its Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, to mention a few. Then there is the financial Mafia, plundering countries and devastating living standards of millions. Let's not forget the multinational forestry companies, ripping the heart out of indigenous communities in country after country. The contestants are all so devastatingly destructive to human life that it is difficult to imagine how we let it get this bad.

      This extract is from Earth First and highlights just one area where the forestry industry is destroying the environment and killing people, but the people are fighting back.

 Forestry Companies: The Ugliest Face of Capitalism in Wallmapu

      The forestry companies represent the worst aspect that Capitalism has shown to Mapuche community members in Wallmapu. Their extreme extractive activities have only generated disaster for communities, including toxic fumes, the dissapearance of rivers, brooks and streams, as well as the extinction of the natural flora and fauna of the area which serve as food and medicine for the Mapuche People. These are the main effects, among others, of the industry financed by the Chilean State through Law 701.

       Moreover, the enormous extensions of land currently held by the Forestry companies lie on stolen land from Mapuche communities. These corporate properties are directly related to the territorial plunder of the Mapuche People.

Read the full article HERE:

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

What Has Been Lost.

      Having  been a regular visitor to Greece for a number of years, what has been inflicted on the people of that country hurts me deeply. It hurts all the more because it wasn't necessary, it was all part of a deliberate policy, all part of the financial Mafia's grand plan to plunder the public purse, and they were fully aware of what the consequences would be for the ordinary people. It is now a country ripe for the corporate world to move in and set up the first of the great European sweatshops. Other European countries are on the same conveyor belt, heading in the same direction. It can only be stopped by the combined action of the people of Europe, only a move to take control of our lives and shape society the way we wish it to be. To wrestle the power from the hands of the corporate greed merchants and their accomplices, the financial Mafia.

         This article from Teacher Dude gives some idea of what has happened to the people of Greece.

What Has Been Lost

      I have been very quiet recently, at least as far as this blog is concerned. While I still tweet quite a lot about what is happening in Greece, over the last month or so I have lost the desire to go out on the streets and cover what has been happening in the city. Perhaps the fact that the end of the academic year is approaching and everyone is feeling worn out is to blame, or maybe the endless stream of bad news I hear from those around me is getting to me.

      More friends are leaving the country to escape the crisis, others are struggling on but the cost is enormous both financially and in terms of dignity. It's hard to be sanguine when so many people you know are fighting to just retain their self respect in the face of grinding poverty which seems to have no end.

    On the other hand the international press, or at least The Economist, FT, CNN and even the Guardian have decided that no matter what your eyes tell you every time you go out the worst of the crisis in Greece is over. Business confidence is up, the government's privatisation plan is finally going ahead, and the banking sector is stabilising. All of which is fine as long as your main interests are in finance and not out there in the "Real Economy"with the rest of us schmucks.

        Despite the euphoria in the mainstream media the economy is still collapsing,unemployment hasn't stopped rising, let alone dropped, the suicide rate is the highest in 50 years, 200% increase in new AIDS cases reported and just to add yet more joy to everyday life a new drug, Sisa or Shisha is doing a roaring trade in Athens.-------

Read the full article HERE:

ann arky's home.

European Sweatshops!!

       That babbling brook of bullshit, the media, has give a lot of coverage to the recent deaths of garment workers slaving away in the sweatshops housed in the  building that collapsed in Bangladesh. Of course there is rightful outcry and anger, though any tears shed by the corporate world, will be of the crocodile type, cheap labour equals bigger profits. However that same babbling brook of bullshit doesn't report on the sweatshops here in Europe, they exist here, as else where in the world, and they are on the increase in European countries being raped and plundered by the financial Mafia's austerity plans. This report is from Greece, but where else in this so called group of European developed nations are the same conditions being experienced day and daily?

This from Contra Info:

We will either raise our voices, or be forced to work ourselves to death
     Radka Nikolova, 38, was a kitchen worker in the pizza fan store in Patras. On Monday, January 14th, 2013 she was found dead at work, locked inside the store. Early estimates said the woman died due to heart failure. The story was covered up.
     It is relatively known that a heart condition alone is not enough to cause someone’s death. But yes… with a job at pizza fan, our heart does not seem to last long enough.------

Read the full article HERE:

ann arky's home.

WE ARE BEING SUCKERED.

       In 2008 we had the so called financial crash, here we are in 2013 and the November unemployment figures for the Eurozone hit a new all time high at 11.8%, youth unemployment at 14.4%, while for the whole of the European Union it is 10.7%, and youth unemployment is 23.7%. This translates into more than 26 million people unemployed across the EU. struggling to survive, not that those in work are doing that much better. According to the BBC's World Service Economic correspondent, Andrew Walker, “---- The general trend however remains upwards and it makes it even harder for the governments concerned to collect the taxes they need to stabilise their debts”
    These figures are modest by the figures in some individual European countries, Spain leading the charge with 26.6% and Greece following with 20%. The misery heaped on the young of these two countries alone, is an indictment of the capitalist system. Greece has the worst unemployment amongst the young with 57% and Spain next with 56.5% . More than half of the young population of both these countries mired in poverty and their entire life potential being stunted. That's the system we are expected to embrace.
      Of course unemployment is not an accident, it is not unavoidable, it is the direct result of government policies as they follow the instructions of the financial Mafia. Unemployment is the ugly side of that polite phrase, “structural reform” unemployment is the criminal reality of the innocent sounding “austerity cuts”. Both these phrases come together as the cornerstone of the Western corporate world's drive to become “more competitive.”, another innocent sounding phrase with a dire reality. It in fact means, lower wages, unregulated labour and a pool of unemployment. In other words, a European-wide sweatshop economy to compete with the sweatshops of the East.

                                      These are hard times.
 

        Here in the UK, under the direction of the ConDem coalition of pampered parasites, 2013 will be the year that all that talking of “austerity cuts”, starts to impact with a vengeance on the lives of most of us ordinary people. It will be the year that people will begin to realise that cuts are usually followed by bleeding. Our cuts are severe, expect severe bleeding. Meanwhile our millionaire lords and masters, living the pampered life of useless parasites, will attempt to shed a theatrical tear as they tell us how hard things are and how we will all have to do “our bit” and “we are all in this together”. They will then retreat to their mansions and prepare for a break in their Bermuda holiday home. They call it capitalism, don't you feel like a sucker?

ann arky's home.

WHO CAN LIVE ON PIE-IN-THE-SKY?

         As the “financial crisis” rumbles on and on, more and more people are becoming homeless, and in London alone there has been a 43% increase in “rough sleepers” in the year to March 2012. This is likely to be an under estimate, as it is almost impossible to get an accurate figure. Those unfortunate enough to find themselves homeless, face a multitude of problems, in spite of this, recent figures show that one in five homeless people have had their benefits cut or stopped altogether, in the first year of the government's workfare program. Will this situation be remedied any time soon?

       On Wednesday our millionaire Chancellor of the Exchequer Osborne will make his up-date statement on the economy, and according to Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, “Since the budget, the outlook for the UK economy has deteriorated and government receipts have disappointed by even more than this year's weak growth would normally suggest," so it doesn't bode well for the most vulnerable in our society. The millionaire cabal of Tories have already annouced that the “austerity” will have to continue well beyond their orginal estimate, and could run to 2018. Again this is an estimate based on pie-in-the-sky figures of growth and guess work from the banksters who gambled and lost billions, creating this “financil crisis” in the first place.

 "You have to make sacrifices to get the debt down."

      So what does the future hold if your not one of the millionaires? For starters, working longer to get your pension, which will be buttons, assuming you still have a job to cling onto. Wage cuts/freezes, or at best a wage increase lower than inflation, which is in fact a wage cut. Social benefits cut or eliminated, social spending slashed. More cuts to education, a privatised health service, an if you are working, it is more likey to be part-time and low paid. And what for? Does anybody believe that even if they annouce in 2018 that the financial crisis is over, that we will all see a dramatic improvement in our living standards? Our employers will increase our wages above inflation to get us back to where we were? Our new smiling millionaire government will pour extra money into education, social spending and re-nationalise the health service? They will also see that we all have affordable housing, and homelessness, child poverty, fuel poverty, will all be things of the past? Dream on my friend, your “austerity” is here as a way for the future. The UK will be part of that great big European sweatshop to allow our corporate masters to compete with those Eastern sweatshops. That is the grand-plan, the deficit reduction is just the smoke and mirrors. Be warned, organise, take action and resist, or humbly wallk into their scheme of things. 

ann arky's home.