Misery.

            It always amazes me how our government has money to throw around at making people's lives miserable or unbearable, but can't find any money to make people's lives better. There's no money to improve the quality of life for our health workers, our kids suffer because there is no money to improve the education system. It can however find money to higher a floating prison to house immigrants. The Bibby Stockholm, named after the founder of the company John Bibby, who made his money in the slave trade, is a barge designed to hold 200 and will be used by the UK government to house 500 migrants. Barge is a misnomer, prison is the correct name, as the inhabitants of this hellhole will not be allowed to walk about on the port. The government flags this up as money saving but are paying this private company a sum of £1.6 billion of our tax money, to manage this arrangement. Money to create misery

Image courtesy of Ripples.

 

         Then there is our "defence" budget, the UK government has announced it will spend an "EXTRA" £2.5 billion on army munitions, this comes on top of the £5 billion boost to our war spending. All that money will have no other purpose than to destroy other people's towns and cities and kill thousands of people we don't even know. More money to create misery.

Image courtesy of Middle East Institute.

 

         Where is the pouring of vast sums of our tax money on making the lives of the ordinary people better? We are continually faced with austerity, poverty shadows our children, our elderly, and our most vulnerable. wages stagnate or fall, living standards are continually eroded, and we are told by the wealth privileged, to "hold our nerve"
         We know there is a better way to shape our society, to one that sees to the needs of all our people. A society not based on war, exploitation and profiteering, but built on mutual aid, co-operation and sustainability. That change will not come from the wealthy and very comfortable privileged parasite class, but will only come from the people themselves. We are the ones that create all the wealth on the planet, we are the rightful beneficiaries of that produce, but we will have to stand up and take it, it will not be gifted to us. 

 

Visit ann arky at https://spiritofrevolt.info 

War, A Money Making Machine For The Few.

 

 

      To any rational person it is impossible to look at "war" and find it justifiable. To organise a group of people to go out and kill another group of people, belongs to the realms of insanity. Despite this, war is always an important part of any state's agenda, preparations for war demand a very large slice of the state's wealth. A wealth created by the very people who will be sent out to do the killing.

     In modern warfare the idea of war is even more irrational, with its unimaginable destructive power. Forget all this crap about "smart bombs", when one of our "highly sophisticated" weapons of mass carnage hits a building, we are supposed to believe that everybody in that building and in the surrounding area were "bad people" and deserved to be incinerated at the whim of some foreign power.

    Then there is the environmental cost, modern wars are among the largest culprits of CO2 producers. While we murder our environment there is the human cost, the usual destruction of a country's entire infrastructure and the ensuing deprivation, misery, displacement of people and deaths by the thousands and over time millions of innocent people. 

     If you are a capitalist accountant, you must surely have to scratch your head at the sheer cost of war. Taking America as an example, (since they are the greatest purveyors of war on the planet), the cost to the US taxpayer of that county's wars since 2001, the start of the Afghanistan illegal invasion, (figures from information Clearing House), is an eye-watering $4.76 trillion, yes, $4,760,364,004,134. To put it another way, if you had that sum in your account you could spend $1 million every hour, 24 hours a day, and you would not run out of money  for 411 years. That volume of wealth blown up in smoke, in 18 years by one nation in the pursuit of war.  

     Of course in spite of that vast outpouring of taxpayers money in smoke and death, there are those who make billions from that money burning exercise.  That is the real reason for the existence of wars, the wealthy and powerful 1% who control our lives under this capitalist system, continually grow richer on the back of wars.

      On their shoulders lies the blame for the 1,455,590 Iraqis slaughtered since the US occupation of that country. They carry the blame for the 4,801 US military personnel sacrificed to swell their fat bank balances, and the 3,430 International troops slaughtered in that illegal invasion. All in the pursuit of wealth and power for the few. 

 "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." - Madeleine K. Albright [In response to a question from Leslie Stahl, "We have heard that a half million children have died (as a result of Clinton's sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. ... is the price worth it?

Ah, the value structure of capitalism.

 

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