By Design?

     

        

           The economic hardship that is hitting the ordinary people, more or less across the globe, receives lots of explanations, from pandemic, supply chain break down, to the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia. You can take you pick or pick and mix, but are you getting to the heart of the problem? Perhaps we can dismiss all these supposed reason and listen to top US economists and certain government officials, who seem to lay the blame at the workers feet, by stating wages are too high, and there is not enough unemployment. The chair of the Federal Reserve, one very rich, Jerome Powell, has openly stated that inflation is being caused by wages being too high, and economist and former Clinton aid, Larry Summers, claiming that the solution to the inflation problem is to increase unemployment to around 10%. With these guys of the financial Mafia calling the shots, don't expect austerity to disappear any time soon.
         Their answer to the aim of increasing profits is lower wages and increase unemployment. So are we here by design, incompetence by our lords and masters, or the inevitability of living with a greed driven, insane economic system that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
          Do we wish to be pawns in this economic gambling casino of the pampered parasite class. Can we hand this legacy on to our children and grand children? Surely they deserve better than this as their way of life. Their future is in our hands, we can sit back and let the leeches bleed us dry as we struggle from day to day in a perpetual spiral of increasing poverty. Or we can organise within our communities and workplaces to take control of our lives, and shape society to our desires of seeing to the needs of all our people. We have the ability, imagination and numbers to build that better society based on equality, free association, sustainability and mutual aid, a society where the world is our village and its population our brothers and sister, not our competitors.

          An American guy named Jefferson, you may have heard of him, once wrote, "when the government assaults the very liberties it was hired to protect, it is time to alter or abolish it." I would go for abolish as a start.

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

Uncle Willie.

My Uncle Willie.

         To those who know me there will be no doubt in their minds about my hatred of the economic system we bleed under. In my eighties now, I have seen this system destroy individuals, tear families apart, and in its voracious greed for profit and power, it has murdered and maimed countless millions in its endless wars. Each individual destroyed, each family torn apart, each war grave, and each veterans hospital are all indictments against a system where people are sacrificed to keep the system functioning for the benefit of a small cabal of over privileged parasites. You would think that our humanity would demand that the system should be altered, modified and shaped to meet the needs of the the people, not the other way round.
        As we look at this society we can see all around us, those unfortunate individuals whose lives are deeply scarred by a system that uses people to perpetuate its greed driven machinations. It is so easy to encapsulate the ruthless viciousness of the system in one person's life, to me my uncle Willie is such a person. To the system, a nobody, a human being of no significance, but to those around him, a father, a son, a brother, a husband and an uncle.
        My uncle Willie was my mother's younger brother, naturally I didn't know him in his early years, but I heard the stories. Willie, like the rest of my family, lived in Garngad, a Glasgow slum in the north of the city. A young man in his 20’s, he was married and had three kids, and like so many of that era, unemployed. It seems that Willie was a family man and loved his kids, he could be seen most days walking with them along the waste ground off Charles Street at the back of Glenconner Park, usually two kids running in front and the youngest on his shoulders. It seems he was an excellent snooker/billiards player, and that is where he supplemented his income, by playing round the many snooker halls in Glasgow. However to the system, he was superfluous to requirements, so could scrape a living in the slums of Glasgow as best he could. 

 

       Then, suddenly, he is a valuable asset to the system, 1939, WWII starts, and Willie is scooped up and shipped out to Egypt. We no nothing of his experiences there, but after three years there and later his demob, he returned home with malaria, this is when I got to know him, just a little. His shaking hands, the troubled look in his eyes. His return to civilian life didn't get off to a good start, on returning home to his family, of wife and three kids, he discovered that he now had five kids. This was the end of his marriage, the family broke up, and Willie moved from job to job, and his drinking got worse and he eventually couldn't hold a job, he was now an alcoholic and homeless. Moving from homeless hostel to homeless hostel, occasionally staying with family, but his alcoholism made that an ever decreasing possibility.
       I remember my mother, a church goer and anti-drink woman, on many an occasion, looking out the window and saying, “Oh here's Willie coming”, then a pause, then, “he doesn't look too drunk”. He would sit and chat to his big sister and myself, my mother would make him something to eat and give a cup of tea. Though it was never a full cup of tea, his hands were shaking so bad it would have been all over him, she only quarter filled the cup and kept topping it up, it was his troubled eyes that have stuck with me all these years, as he was leaving, my mother would slip a 10 shilling note into his hand. 

 

       Willie spent the rest of his years moving around hostels for the homeless, eventually dying in one down in Ardrossan in his fifties. To me, my uncle Willie epitomises this stinking system, you're a worthless entity, left to rot unless the system needs you, either to make its profits, or to fight its imperialist wars, and your reward for either of these activities, if anything at all, is never anything grand, usually nothing or suffering.

 

The Warmth of a Dream.

 

He lay in a dark doorway, dreamed of home,

night frost locked his joints

morning rain chilled the marrow of his bones.

In the dream there was a sister, 

a pram in a garden, a crowd of youngsters

who called him "mister", a time of little pain.

Are these youngsters the same young men, who

now laugh at him, throw beer cans, 

piss on him as he lies drunk in some dark lane?

When was that first step to no forgiveness.

No will to rise to beg for food,

numbness kills the pain.

The dream brings a warmth that feels good,

dark fog shades out consciousness,

an ambulance carries off a body washed in rain.

 

 

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

Tax Money.

       Covid19 might be a stressful period for most ordinary people, but to the government and large companies it’s an opportunity to shift taxpayers money into the corporate coffers. March this year our financial wizard, Chancellor Rishi Sunak, came up with, Covid Corporate Financial Facility, CCFF for short, a scheme to help what he considered large companies that were important to the UK economy, small companies were not included, just the big rich mob. This handout was given with minimum conditions. 

 

       While receiving billions from the taxpayers, through the CCFF scheme, these rich companies saw fit to pay out approximately £11.5 billion to shareholders and investors, and in gratitude for this taxpayers handout, they paid off thousands of employees. It is reckoned that of 26 companies involved in this CCFF taxpayers gift to big rich companies, have paid of approximately 43,000 workers.
       While this money plundering was going on the NHS was desperately crying out for PPE, struggling with staff shortages and lack of equipment. Care home residents and the staff were being denied testing facilities and left to suffer and die. This is capitalism, the economy is sacred, the corporate is valued above the well-being of the people. Every penny of the billions spent by the government in handouts to big business will have to be paid back to the financial mafia by you and I, the taxpayer. We will pay for it with unemployment, severe cuts to social services and the selling of public assets.

 

         No doubt, bumbling Boris and his rich coterie will be shouting about investing in massive infrastructure projects, to get the economy growing, what this translates as, is handing more billions of taxpayers money to large corporate very rich companies to build a host of showpiece entities that will be of little or no use to the ordinary people. HS2 springs to mind. 

 

      Surely if people look at how the system works they must draw the conclusion that this has to stop, this insane economic system of greed that feeds a small clique of parasites to the detriment of the many, has to be destroyed.

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

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

People Power,

        Civid19 has woven a strange new world, the worst of it has yet to unfold. Unemployment, poverty, slashing of social services, cutting back on working conditions, increase in zero hours contracts and part-time jobs. All siting on the near horizon. Sorry if I depress you, but I don't see an alternative, unless we smash the existing system and think again but building one fit for purpose, of seeing to the needs of all our people, with fairness and justice. As long as we tolerate pampered privilege based on wealth and hereditary status, having all the power, we are going to repeat the viciousness of this economic system inequality and injustice.

We Have The Power.

Empty streets,with empty shops,
queues forming at the job centre,
doorway beds and hungry children,
watched over by mean eyed cops,
Food-banks growing by the hour.

City razzle-dazzle just rusty remnants,
shopping malls now empty caverns,
home to starlings, pigeons, magpies,
zero hours, part-time workers, live in
homes where ambition fails to flower.
Shiny politicians peddling illusions,
grin and bear it, there’s pie in the sky,
follow the Messiah, he’ll get you there,
quietly swallow their empty promises,
so they can live in their ivory towers.
This world exists by our acceptance,
blindly following their biased rule-book,
failing to realise that we the people,
builders of the world by sweat and pain,
are the ones who really hold the power.

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

Capitalism A Failed System.

 

       There are lots of methods by which you can asses that capitalism is a failed system. Probably the greatest indictment against the system is its continuous wars, wars are just an ongoing aspect of capitalism. It is always there in some form or other in some part of the world, with all its attendant features of misery, trauma, death, destruction, and massive profits to the corporate world. 

       Another measure of its failure is its gross inequality, from state to state, you have opulence and deprivation living side by side. In this insane system, since money is the main ingredient in the quality of your life, you have to prostitute yourself as a productive unit to some corporate body, or live in poverty. However even here they system fails, by being unable to to allow everybody the necessity of being a productive unit, it functions by leaving a pool of individuals with no means of survival except charity or some form of miserable state hand out.

      The EU is one of the worlds most developed capitalist power blocks, but even here, unemployment is rife, which in turn means poverty and deprivation are endemic. The EU is a rich capitalist enclave of 511.8 million people, with the vast majority of its members states having unemployment above 13%, the EU average is 7.3%, that is approximately 40 million people excluded from the possibility of a decent standard of living in the midst of a very rich enclave.

       More than 117 million people across EU member countries (or 23.4% of the population) were living at risk of poverty in 2016, according to the Eurostat statistics agency.

     Of course the unemployment average doesn't tell the true story. Looking at figures in individual member states, you start to see the real horror of being dumped as "surplus to requirements".

        Greece leads the field in having the largest percentage of unemployed with a staggering 20.7% of its population dumped as "surplus to requirements", Spain following close behind with 16.4%, Cyprus 11.3%, and Italy 10.8%, and so it goes on.

       If you happen to be among the youth of this very rich bastion of capitalism, the EU, then you are in an even more precarious state than the population at large. The EU average for youth unemployment is 16.1%. If we look at individual states within the EU, then we see the real plight of the youth of this vast rich corporate body. Once again, leading the charge at destroying the next generation by killing off their potential, Greece is at the front with 40.8% of its youth dumped in that "surplus to requirements" category. Spain next with 36.8%, Italy with 32.2%, Cyprus 25%, Croatia 24.5%, France 22.3%, Portugal 22.1%, Finland 19.9%, and on it goes. That is 8 countries in the very rich EU, with approximately a quarter or more of the youth population unemployed, a quarter of its youth population facing daily poverty and deprivation and a monumental struggle to survive. Unless otherwise stated, all the above figures are for 2017.

     Surely that is cause enough to state unequivocally that capitalism has failed and failed miserable to see to the needs of the people. It is a destructive, unfair, unjust, corrupt, exploitative system that grossly over benefits a small army of parasites to the great disadvantage of the many. Its total destruction is the only way to resolve the problems it has created.

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

Universal Credits And The Cull Of The Poor.

        An excellent article by Libcom, on "Universal Credits", is well worth reading in full. It charts the devious road of the state trying to appease the discontent that poverty nurtures, callously trying to keep the lid on things, while it gets on with the usual capitalist exploitation. 

        The official line is that universal credit is being introduced to make things easier, simpler, gather a multitude of payments together to benefit people generally. As if fine-tuning bourgeois bureaucracy is a matter for anyone apart from itself and those it serves. The reality for those on the receiving-end is catastrophic to say the least.
       Right from the start the scheme as a whole failed its own timetable time after time. For anyone relying on state benefits, especially new claimants, the system has become increasingly erratic, unfathomable and more and more subject to the arbitrary whims of individual bureaucrats. A sociologist might tell us that the delivery of a service, its timeliness and serviceability, are less important than the self-aggrandising machinations of bureaucrats and ministers and their staffs. Of more significance to us, however, is what it tells us about the state of capitalism in the so-called advanced world today.
       Despite its name, the universal credit project runs completely against the professed ideal of the post-war welfare state: that a wage worker who becomes unemployed should be compensated with an income adequate for subsistence as a right, i.e. without means testing. Even if the 1946 National Insurance Act didn’t exactly see things in terms of basic human rights – it was conceived as an insurance scheme run by the state where the pay-outs would come from a fund based on the sizeable fraction deducted from workers’ wage packets. Anyone who had been earning a wage [well, at any rate adult males and single women] was entitled to ‘the dole’ simply by registering as unemployed. (Though this in itself was not always without stigma and unconditional payments for “interruption of earnings” did not last beyond six months or a year.) This is not a small point. The end of means testing was a key part of the post-war vision of Britain outlined in Beveridge’s famous 1942 report which gave the state responsibility for eliminating the five giant evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The Beveridge Report was not just discussed by bureaucrats in some obscure parliamentary committee. Thousands of copies and summaries of it were published and widely distributed to reach a working class audience – including amongst serving soldiers and sailors. Hence the prospect of a benign welfare state capitalism in place of mass unemployment, poverty and the workhouse, became a key part of government propaganda to keep the working class committed to “the war effort”.
       And so what Margaret Thatcher later called “the nanny state” came about, though it never fully matched Beveridge’s paternalistic vision. It didn’t last of course. But the reason is economic. The heyday of state-funded provision for the welfare of all citizens coincides with the period of post-war reconstruction and boom. The return of capitalism’s inbuilt structural crisis at the beginning of the 1970s undermined Keynesian economic theory and the state welfare policies that went with it. On the employment front, a more or less manageable situation of “full employment” (defined as a situation with no more than 2-3% of the work force unemployed) quickly gave way to mass unemployment on a par with the 1920s as industry after industry was restructured, dismantled and production ‘outsourced’ to cheap-labour economies in the rest of the world. This, coupled with rampant inflation [over 25% by the mid-1970s] which quickly undermined the value of unemployment benefit, put an end to any idea that national insurance could cover the cost of maintaining the unemployed, especially as many workers faced long term unemployment and could hardly be considered as ‘between jobs’. To this day, despite all the fiddling with official figures and measures to disguise it, unemployment and under-employment are intrinsic to the UK economy as in all the capitalist heartlands, as the table Unemployment and Insecurity in the UK Labour Market from the Centre for Social Investigation, Nuffield College, Oxford at the top of this article shows.
         The old ‘family wage’ is long gone. Minimum wage or not, for decades now the take-home pay of a growing portion of the workforce has not been enough to live on without some form of additional state ‘benefits’. Today more people in a job than without a job are officially classified as ‘poor’. Together they make up well over a sixth of the workforce. (5.8 million out of a work-age population of 38 million people.) For decades too the state has been trying to disguise and manage the situation. Not always successfully. In 2011 riots of the dispossessed in various London districts echoed events in Toxteth and Brixton of thirty years earlier. No government dare withdraw the state support cushion altogether but nowadays nobody who loses their job is entitled to income adequate to live as a right, no matter how much national insurance they have paid. Instead a sophisticated form of means testing and monitoring by state agencies of people’s personal circumstances has become the norm.
        The whole panoply of benefits, allowances, credits claimable/available to individuals and/or families on low pay, to ‘jobseekers’, invalids, disabled … at the discretion of a state bureaucrat … has mushroomed out of the National Assistance scheme that was originally set up in 1948. Basically this was a bureaucratic afterthought to cater for a minority of people with “abnormal needs” not covered by national insurance. Anyone with an ‘abnormal need’ would have to undergo a means test. In 1966 National Assistance morphed into Supplementary Benefits. In 1988 Supplementary Benefits became Income Support. Since the introduction of ‘austerity’ following the financial crash a decade ago, the various Tory-led governments have been working on the introduction of Universal Credit.

Read the full article HERE:

It closes with the statement:

         All of this needs to be set against the continuing capitalist crisis. Capital always has to find ways to ease its own pains even if it causes misery and more to the working class. All of these measures have been a way to impose new rules on those with little. The British capitalist class and its uncivil servants have placed a new name at the head of a new set of rules designed to force people into a situation where it “pays” to work longer hours for less – the capitalist ideal! The Tories have been shown on a regular basis to be incompetent, callous, unprepared and heartless. Well, nothing new there! But the solution for the working class is not the very same system managed by pious Labour technocrats – there is no comfort zone – the solution lies in recognising that we have to get rid of capitalism, wage labour and its corollary, unemployment altogether.

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

Our Struggle Must Be Multi-Pronged.

        Greece is a country that seems to have dropped out of fashion as far as that babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media is concerned. That doesn't mean that nothing is happening there, the people of Greece have been put through the shredder of the capitalist system by its bully-boys, the financial Mafia. You will get the odd report about the 50% youth unemployment, 25% unemployment nationally, other facts like massive rise in suicides, families sleeping rough, disintegrating health service, collapsing eduction system, and unprecedented rise in home repossessions, will slip through as not that relevant.

       However, the people of Greece are not sitting back weeping and waiting for the "good times" to return. Across the country there are bitter struggles taking place, occupations, self-help, autonomous spaces, strikes, and constant attacks on the institutions of the corporate world and the festering edifice that is the Greek state. Anarchists in Greece are many, and varied in their approach to bring about the demise of the economic system that has, plundered their land and brutally assaulted its people, and continues to do so. 

       One group in Greece that has constantly been at the forefront of the struggle to break the yoke of the cancerous system of capitalism, is "Revolutionary Struggle", they have just produced  a paper giving some extracts from letters, texts and communiques, from the last three years. Well worth a read.

Download it free HERE:

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

 

"I Wont Pay".

 

       No doubt Greece will once again gain a little space in the babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media. The reason, well Greece has enough money to last until July, then it runs out. So another shuffling of billions through the various banks is necessary to keep the illusion of progress going, but for the people of Greece there is no progress. That band of robber barons that make up the "Troika", (IMF, International Mankind Fuckers, EC, European Conmen, ECB, European Criminal Bastards) are having their own problems. They can't agree on how to handle the mountain of gambling debt they have allowed to amass in Greece.  Each one of the three gambling organisations that make up that band of robbers is aware that their money, to a degree is lost, their squabble is about who has to take the biggest hit. The IMF is trying to look compassionate in saying that Greece can't make the conditions placed on it, and the debt has to be re-structured or written down. While the European wing of this criminal gambling organisation is adamant the Greece stick to the punitive policy already in place, as any change would mean that they, The European mob, would have to take the biggest hit.   

Protesters preventing a lawyer from presenting a case for repossession.

        Meanwhile, the people of Greece are experiencing ever falling living standards. The education system is in tatters, the health service has all but collapsed, unemployment is still running at around 24%, with youth unemployment at around 50%. Poverty is endemic, suicide is on a rapid increase, homelessness is at a level that no civilised country can accept, evictions are a daily occurrence. Of course the people of Greece are not sitting down and wringing their hands, they are fighting back in lots of ways. Squats, community feeding schemes, voluntary health centres and more. On the matter of Greek evictions, the group "I Wont Pay" is growing in strength and confidence. Much like the Glasgow 1915 rent strike, where the people in great masses, prevented Sheriff Officers from serving eviction notices, the "I Wont Pay" movement are cramming into the courts where landlords are attempting to get eviction orders, and making the court unworkable. They have had several successes, this we hope will give them greater numbers and greater confidence.

      While the billionaire robber barons of the financial Mafia, gamble and shuffle their ill gotten gains, we the people suffer, so that their gambling losses are recouped. How long will we put up with this blatant system of robbing the people to enrich the few. The choice is ours, do we sit and wring our hands, or do we organise to bring this festering cesspool of greed to and end?  

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

Some Laugh, While Most Cry.

      The Greek parliament failed to elect a new president, at the third attempt, in spite of bribery and corruption to swing the vote. Now Greece is heading for a snap election, where it is expected that the left party Syriza will win an overall majority. This will of course see the big money leaving the Greek stage in lorry loads. Expect trouble as the die-hard establishment indulge in the usual array of dirty tricks to discredit and destroy the Syriza government if the do win. In the words of the song, "There may be trouble ahead---".

       Greece has suffered years of "austerity" destroying social services, its health service is practically defunct, its education system is in tatters, unemployment is in the stratosphere at 26%, with the youth of the country living with 50% unemployment. Twenty first century European capitalism at work.

      It is all part of the "restructuring" plan, which means destroying labour organisation, and creating a population that will be grateful for any job at any wage. Of course it is not just Greece that is getting the financial Mafia's "austerity" ideology shoved down its throat, Italy is heading down the same road, and Spain is well on the way to join Greece in the new Europe sweatshop economy. It is all just a matter of pace, but the direction is the same for the whole of Europe, UK included, or are you foolish enough to think that they will make an exception in our case?

      Meanwhile, the suits with their unearned wealth, are laughing all the way to the bank, and clinking their Champagne glasses in celebration of their wonderful "austerity" plan.

     This from arrezafe, though in Spanish, I think you'll get the general drift of the Video.

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

Time For politicians And Bankers To Leave.

 

    I recently read an open letter by the leader of the Portuguese dockers union, to Passos, the Prime minister of that country, and published in Xpressed. Though I don't agree with the entire content, I agree with the feelings and the sentiments expressed in the letter, particularly the last couple of paragraphs. The last paragraph could equally apply here or for that matter, to any other country.

        The fury with which you take forward your ideological agenda is so radical that you are unable to look at the consequences for people’s lives. In the Lisbon Port, for example, which is the reality I know better, the irrationality of port law, which you have approved against everything and everyone, has led to 47 dockers being unfairly fired, when their job was crucial for the performance of the port. The bosses have recognised this and have committed to reinstate them all, but nothing erases the suffering of being jobless for one year. Do you have any idea what that means? I know well that you only care about the performance of exports –a reality you have hindered– but let me tell you that your intransigency has a tremendous impact in people’s lives. Unemployment is almost always to blame for other avatars, from divorce to depression, from giving up on having children to losing the house, from the lack of horizons to the illusionary escape of emigrating.

      Passos, listen… we are tired of seeing our relatives, rights and dreams emigrate and we will keep fighting so that you understand quickly that the best for everyone is that you, your government and your bankers leave. Nobody will shed a tear when you sail off. This trip today is a condition for people to have hope in a better future tomorrow. It’s not enough surely, but everything will begin again in that day, whole and clean.

President of the Dockers Union , Traffic workers and Maritime Clerks of the Centre and South of Portugal.

Read the full letter HERE:

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

UK, --Mended!!

          The Cameron millionaire cabal, are crowing about the UK recovery, they repeat their little ditty, “unemployment down”, “growth figures up”, and proceed to clink their champagne glasses. One factor that has helped the government's unemployment figures has been the massive increase in “self-employed”. According to a study done by the Resolution Foundation, over the last five years of recession self-employment has risen by approximately 650,000, and now accounts for 15% of the total workforce, a staggering 4.5 million. Self-employment, though lauded by the millionaire cabal, is not the guaranteed road to the good life, with more than a quarter of self employed living on poor incomes. Nor is self-employment the desired option, in lots of cases it was the only option to survival. The growth of self-employed is greatest in the areas of high unemployment, in London where there are well paid jobs, it is at its lowest. The study also shows that the average weekly income of someone self employed, is 20% lower than it was in 2008, and that a typical self-employed worker now earns 40% that of a typical employee. Self-employment is a precarious road to walk, for a very large proportion, the grim economic truth of self-employment is one of an uncertain future, with difficulties in getting mortgages and personal credit and no growing pension pot. 

 

Photo from A World To Win.

         Another factor that blows a hole in the Cameron Millionaire cabal's glowing picture of a mended Britain is the fact that according to official Eurostat figures, some areas of the UK are poorer than some poor countries from former communist Eastern Europe. According to their findings people in the Welsh Valleys and in Cornwall are worse off that those from Lithuania and Estonia. It also states that people from Durham and the Tees valley are poorer that those from the wealthiest regions of two of Europe's poorest countries Bulgaria and Romania. It also shows that London is the richest place in Europe.

 

"We must continue austerity, it's the only way to fix things."

 

       So the new fixed Britain is one of vast swaths of low incomes and an uncertain future, massive discrepancies in wealth between different areas, some of the poorest regions in Europe, and their policy is more of the same. Austerity is the new way of life for the ordinary people, while the millionaire parasites continue to increase their wealth. Britain is certainly fixed for the corporate class, and it is you and I that are paying for that fix. 

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

On The Road To A Sweatshop Economy.

     Yesterday saw the launch of Iain Duncan Smith's, ( I. D. S. Idiot Dickhead Smith.) Help To Work scheme. The idea is to help 2.3 million unemployed into approximately 500,000 vacancies, that works out at approximately 5 people chasing every job, of course it varies from area to area. In high unemployment areas the figure is much worse. How is IDS going to shove those 2.3 million into those 500,000 vacancies? Well by forcing people to work for six months doing community work, for no wages, if they refuse, stop their jobseekers allowance for 4 weeks, and if the refuse again, then stop their allowance for 13 weeks, so it's deprivation, or work for nothing. Another of I D S's ideas is to get longterm unemployed to sign on every day, can you imagine the queues at job centres, or will he employ extra staff at the centres, that might help bring done unemployment.

     If you are sentenced by a court for an offence, say assault, the maximum community service you would do, would be 300 hours, but those unemployed will be forced to do more than twice this, 780 hours. Obviously in this society, to be unemployed is worse than assaulting somebody.

        Whichever measure is used, there are nowhere near enough vacancies to enable everyone currently looking for a job to find one. Of course that doesn't matter, the idea is to get people used to working for nothing, then they might be extremely grateful when they are offered a crap job with crap wages. It is all part of the plan to create a sweatshop UK. The UK corporate bosses love Idiot Dickhead Smith.

        The fact that they have launched their “Flagship” policy, doesn't mean that it will work, as usual it will be ill thought out, ill prepared, under funded, under manned, and result in chaos, as well as heaping stress on enormous numbers of people. From ATOS, to Workfare, to the bedroom tax, to Help To Work, it is all about co-ercing people to accept the unacceptable, a low wage economy, and big bucks for employers.

        It seems that the lauch has, as predicted, has seen chaos on its first day. This from The Void: 

       Despite wildly optimistic claims from the DWP, today’s launch of mass workfare seems to be in chaos behind the scenes.  With barely any information yet available on the scheme it appears that the flagship Help To Work programme has no-one actually running it, no guidance for companies involved and no real plan to deal with the huge influx of claimants to Jobcentres from daily signing.

Read the full article HERE:

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The Troika's Answer To Unemployment - Pay Off More Workers.

       Across southern Europe unemployment is at life sapping heights, Greece and Spain above 24%, in both these countries unemployment among the young is at the 60% level, while unemployment in Portugal is 16% and Italy 13%, Italy's government debt is estimated by the IMF, (International Mankind Fuckers) to be 130% of GDP. The Spanish people have been on the streets this weekend displaying their anger and disgust, at the policies being dictated by the so called Troika, (EC, European Commission, ECB, European Central Bank, IMF, International Mankind Fuckers), which are causing widespread misery and poverty. The organisers of the protests have called them “marches of dignity”, one of the many things that the ordinary people are denied in this exploitative system. In Greece, the social fabric of society is in a severe state of collapse. The health service is now third world, the education system has collapsed, the massive increase in poverty and deprivation has been matched by an equally massive increase in substance abuse, suicides and physical and mental health problems. So with unemployment and poverty destroying the present and future generations, in that plunder land, Greece, what is the Troika's answer? Why more unemployment of course.

         The rich parasite bastards that make up the Troika, sitting in their marble halls of power in Brussels, have decreed that Greece has not done enough to to satisfy their masters in the financial Mafia. So they have insisted on the Greek government cutting a further 11,000 public sector workers. (Who dictates how many public sector workers here in the UK are to be paid off???) This despite the Greek economy having shrank by 6.4% last year. This is 2014, six years of bailouts, austerity, massive unemployment, and both government debt and deficit are still lost somewhere in the stratosphere, and the misery and deprivation is also up there and rising. Of course the rest of Europe is not immune to the destruction spewed out by the Troika, who are merely the European managers for the global financial mafia, no country in Europe is an isolated island, look at Souther Europe and you're looking at a picture of Northern Europe's future, sweatshop Europe, the Western corporate dream. The system doesn't work for the people, it can't be modified to something resembling fairness. It is a system of exploitation, where wealth is created by the people and ends up in the bank accounts of self-interested parasites, that's what it is designed to do and it does it with a ruthless efficiency. Only when we control the wealth that we create, and control its distribution, can we hope for a system that will see to the needs of all our people. We don't need them, they do need us. 

Visi8t ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk