TAKE A 45% WAGE CUT OR GET OUT.

        I keep spouting about this "crisis" is being used by all the corporate world as an excuse to slash at wages and conditions. Obviously as the government attacks the wages and conditions of the public sector, they are not going to complain as the private sector does likewise. Balfour Beatty the big construction company is leading the attack by tearing up electricians contracts and forcing them to sign new contracts or get off the site. The new contracts of course have not been negotiated and in some cases mean a cut of up to 45% in wages and deskilling of the trade. No doubt all the other big boys in the corporate world will be waiting and watching to see how far they can go and how quickly. A sample of what the electricians  in the construction industry are up against can be seen in this extract from an article in The Commune.

Under BESNA, the current across the board hourly rate of £16.25 would be scrapped, and electricians would be graded for a rate of between £14 and £10.50. This follows a pay freeze last year, so some electricians would be 45% worse off than they were two years ago, assuming they are able to find work at all in a declining construction industry. Inevitably, deskilling would follow, along with an increase in workplace ‘accidents’.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

These type of greedy tactics are part and parcel of the corporate world, world wide, the only real answer is to get rid of the corporatism that devastates our lives and our planet, capitalism cannot be reformed, repaired or made ethical, it is a beast built on, and dependent on, exploitation. Its removal from the face of the Earth will require the some world wide solidarity and organisation by the people, as is shown by the cancer that is the corporate world.

ann arky's home.

WORLD STRIKE 2012!!!

        A number of years ago a group set about trying to convince everybody in the world to strike for a moneyless society in the year 2012. Well it seemed rather far fetched to me at the time, but here we are with 2012 almost upon us, and the conditions have changed dramatically. We have protests in cities across the world demanding an end to the financial repression that is ruining millions of lives. We have cities across the world where people have come together to occupy their city centres, again, against the financial corruption, excesses and repression, the banks have forced on the ordinary people.

         Now more than ever the answer seems to be for the people of the world to come together and have, not that national strike, but the first ever world wide strike, with the one aim, to destroy once and for all, the fanancial world, the global corporate financial beast, that dominates and devastes our lives in country after country.

         I now no longer think it is far fetched, but with today's communications a real possibility, and with the political and financial corruption all around us, it seems the best option.

ann arky's home.

OCCUPIERS, THE STATE DOESN'T LIKE YOU!!

           Occupiers, the state doesn't like you, I suppose that is a compliment. As time goes on they will rack up the brutality against you, already there have been brutal repression in Oakland and now Denver. They will tolerate you and try to discredit you, but if there is a hint that you are a growing threat to their power, they will move in against you with all the force they deem necessary. Don't allow your movement to stagnate, think of new strategies to draw in more people, to broaden your attack on the system that is responsible for all that stinks in our society.

ann arky's home.

SUNNY GOVAN -GO-GO-GO.

      One of Glasgow's indepndent local community radio broadcasters, Sunny Govan, invites you to join them at the "Stairway" on 95 Union Street on Friday 4th November 7:30pm to help launch their new CD "Turn it Up Govan" Tickets £5 at the station or on the door. Some of the 19 bands from from the album will provide the live music. "Its your station your creation, we need help to make it happen.

      Sunny Govan helps many campaigns, individuals, organisations, reach out to a wider audience - Now is the time to help sustain this vital service to our community. If you wish to make a donation. www.localgiving.com

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FIRST STEP, OCCUPY, SECOND - GENERAL STRIKE?

        A communication from "Bureau of Public Secrets" on the events following the brutal treatment of the occupiers in Oakland Calafornia. As the article says, all the occupiers should now be looking at how to take their campaign to the next level. You don't want to become a toiurist attraction in the centre of the cities around the world. A peaceful encampment might make a point but can be tolerated as long as big business can carry on as usual.

Dear Bay Area Friends,

        As most of you probably know, the police raid and destruction of the Occupy Oakland encampments last Tuesday, followed by the notorious police violence against protesters later the same day, provoked such an immense expression of outrage from thousands of people in the Bay Area and around the world that the Oakland city government was thrown completely on the defensive. The next day police were scarcely to be seen. The fence surrounding Frank Ogawa Plaza was still in place, but the occupiers calmly took it down and began reoccupying the same spot. That evening, by a vote of 1484 to 46 (with 77 abstentions), the general assembly decided to call for a General Strike in Oakland on Wednesday, November 2. You can see their declaration and other information at www.occupyoakland.org.

SOLIDARITY.

          The fact that they reoccupied the encampment less than 48 hours after it had been demolished is astonishing enough. But that they immediately shifted to the offensive with such a marvelously audacious venture leaves me almost speechless with admiration. I hope that their appeal meets with
correspondingly large-minded and supportive responses by people in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area. Occupiers in many other cities have already been venturing outside their encampments for various types of demonstrations (e.g. the marches to banks and CEO residences in New York City), but this general-strike appeal is upping the ante and moving toward a new level of active engagement with people in the whole community. Occupy Oakland people have been fanning out into the city, speaking with workers and small businesses, with teachers and students, with religious groups and all sorts of other community organizations, in order to enlist support for the strike. At this point I don't think anyone really knows what the response will actually be, but there are a number of promising indications. In addition to support from nurses' and teachers' associations and a number of other unions (see www.occupyoakland.org/strike/), the Longshoremen's Union is collaborating with Occupy Oakland to bring about a shutdown of the Port of Oakland in solidarity with striking workers elsewhere on the West Coast.

Read the full article HERE.

ann arky's home.

FAIR AND JUST CORPORATISM!!!!

         There are all sorts of pundits spouting what is wrong with the system of capitalism at the moment. Even those who support the system are still critical of the way it is functioning at present. To them the system can be fixed, it is just a bit more regulation and nice ethical CEOs at the top of the corporations, and all will be well. Poverty will disappear and we will all live in abundance. I find this belief in an ethical corporate beast as rather laughable. Corporations buy politicians, politicians move into lucrative positions in the corporate world. A quote from one of these reformers tells us something about the system: Read the full article HERE.

        Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.

Adbusters corporate flag.

        Don't for a minute think that what goes on in the American political/financial circles doesn't go on here and in every country in the developed world. Another quote from the same article perhaps should be taken seriously over here as well as in America: 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know. Of course, we will never really know, it is a duplicitous system.

I used to be a politician, but I'm in finance now.

          The basic principles of the system has no room for ethics, the rules are simple, maximise your profit margin, increase your market share and reduce your costs. How do you equate this with improving the conditions of the workforce, removing exploitation, improving the health and safety of all workers and workplaces and of course distributing the proceeds of the labour fairly? Capitalism is an inherently unfair system, those with the wealth are always in a position to exploit those without the wealth, there is nothing fair, just or ethical about that. The system can't be overhauled to eradicate these contradictions, it has to be dismantled and an alternative system created in its place. I'm sure we have the imagination and the resources to create a system that sees to the needs of all our people, based on mutual aid and co-operation, a system of fairness and justice founded on sustainability. The only problem is when, time is running out.

ann arky's home.

THE RETURN OF PAST POVERTY FOR GREECE.

        When the media reports on Greece it is all about the Greek government trying to "balance the books" which translates into "placate the IMF" (International Mankind Fuckers), with some coverage of strikes and protests. Never do they capture what is actually going on in Greece, they fail miserably to convey what it is like to be living in Greece at the moment. A country where all the ordinary workers have seen their wages cut by as much as a third, their taxes rise by by the same, and new taxes introduced. Add to that a flood of redundancies and massive cuts to health, 40%, education and all other social services. These type of cuts take a civilised country and return it to the beginning of the 1900's. Naturally the people are objecting, and rightly so. 

      There is one photographer who does capture what it is like on the streets of Greece with photographs that are each an art work in their own right. Yiannis Biliris's photographs capture not just an instant but a story, an emotion, a living period. You can see more of his work HERE.

ann arky's home.

THE ENEMY, THE CHURCH OR THE BANKERS!!!

         

         While the media try to turn the occupy London movement into a fight between protesters and the Church of England, we have to keep getting the message out that the fight is with the system under which we try to earn our daily bread. The economic system which creates unimaginable wealth for the few and deprivation for millions, is the problem, not a few old guys in fancy clothes. The media will do everything in its power to belittle the protest and keep the true agenda out of the headlines. The media is part and parcel of the system and is no more than the state's propaganda machine, and therefore part of the problem. The need for alternative media, independent of the money machine, is now more important than ever before.

SOLIDARITY.

        Just to keep you up to date on what is going on at the camp in the centre of London take a wee while and watch this live stream. You can also catch up on the latest information on the occupation, on line, from The Occupation Times.

Watch live streaming video from occupylsx at livestream.com

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STATE VIOLENCE.

         I make no excuse for showing this video which is on the same police brutality as the last post. I sincerely believe that we must show how prevalent police brutality is in the so called "free democratic" West. This type of violence is not limited to any one country, the state will always come down as hard as it thinks it can get away with, whenever it feels in any way threatened. Mass protests against the system will always be seen as a threat to its power, especially if it is a growing protest. As the protests grow, expect more brutal repression. The will of the people is not wanted here in the West. We only play lip service to it in Middle Eastern countries, with the odd NATO support if the have oil.

 

ann arky's home.

WHERE IS NATO WHEN YOU NEED THEM?

         The police wade in to clear over 1,000 peaceful protesters of the Occupy Oakland movement in Calafornia. The scenes make a mockery of the freedom loving democracy that the US is always trying bomb onto other countries. Watching these scenes I was wondering how long would it be before NATO moved in to protect civilians from brutal reprisals handed out by the state apparatus. NATO, where are you when we need you? More on this brutal act of repression HERE.

ann arky's home.

FUNDAMENTALIST UPRISING.

      Now that the Libyan regime has been replace to the satisfaction of the Western oil companies, the truth is starting to come out. At first we were lead to believe that it was a people's “uprising” against the regime and our heroic peace loving NATO stepped in to save civilian deaths. However it now seems to be that it was a fundamentalist engineered uprising and Qatar and Sudan have now stated that they sent in forces to help the “uprising”. It is also stated that Libyan al-Qaeda groups fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq return to Libya to help the “rebels”. What kind of “people's” uprising is it if it is supported by troops from at least two different countries and the force of NATO plus war hardened religious fundamentalist al-Qaeda groups and takes more than six months to overthrow the regime?  It is obvious that if NATO hadn't stepped in with its, over 10,000 strikes, the "uprising" would have fizzled out. This is in no way to condone the Gadaffi regime, but does show the lies behind the West's talk of protecting civilians in a people's uprising. The last thing the West would do is send in NATO to support is a people's uprising, especially if it was somewhere in the West.

      Already the citizens of Sirte are beginning to vent their anger at the violence that has been heaped upon them, no doubt other divisions will make themselves clear as NATO, Sudan and Qatar all withdraw and the Libyan people start to make their real voice heard.

     What the West can look forward to is profit from all that oil and all that re-construction that needs to be done after we blow the place to bits.

ann arky's home.

A FAIR DAY'S PAY---????

        Every where you look there is evidence that we are all in this together. As most of us see our standard of living nosedive, either through wage cuts/freeze, redundancy or inflation, or perhaps even a hit from at least to of these measures being forced on us by our millionaire lords and masters, it is puzzling how a certain group seem to manage quite well in spite of the “crisis”. Take the directors of the Footsie 100 companies for example, while they go on about hard times and how difficult decisions have to be made they still manage to award themselves a whopping 43% pay increase over the previous year's salary. Perhaps if we look at it as “all in this together” means US not THEM, it all begins to make sense.

 

I have to make some very difficult decisions.

       To give you some idea of how our captains of industry are suffering in these hard times, take a wee look at the earnings for last year.

Mick Davis(Xstrata) £18,426,105.

Bart Becht (Reckitt) £17,879,000.

Michael Spencer (ICAP) £13,419,619.

Sir Terry Leahy (Tesco) £12.038,303.

Tom Albanese (Rio Tinto) £11,623,162.

Sir Martin Sorrell (WPP Group) £8,949,985.

Todd Kozel (Gulf Keystone Petroleum) £8,913,223.

Don Robert (Experian) £8,601,984.

Edward Bonham Carter (Jupiter Fund Management) £8,530,871.

Dame Marjorie Scardino (Pearson) £8,003,641.

        Not a bad wee packet for a day at the coalface, and remember these are the sweaty palmed greed parasites that sit in board rooms directing plans to cut your wages and conditions, who plan to make you redundant to increase their share of the loot that they cream of your labour. This is capitalism, screw you, I'm all right Jack. It is now raw capitalism, open and blatant exploitation of unimaginable proportions. They see nothing wrong in this greed feast, as far as they are concern the system is working just fine.

ann arky's home.

WESTERN CORPORATISM'S HIT SQUAD.

         Here in the developed Western world most people look at NATO as a force for good. However it history dosn't back that up. Country after country has suffered from its military might. In truth it is no more than the Western corporate world's hit squad. The following is an extract from an intersting article which you can read HERE. 

         Like dominoes they are falling: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Even al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was taken out in a surprise ambush by US special forces at his secret hideout inside of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

           Since its first act of aggression on the territory of a sovereign state (on February 28, 1994, NATO aircraft shot down four jets in the Bosnian War) each successive NATO operation is revealing an increasingly disturbing trend: the leaders of the condemned countries are meeting violent, even barbaric ends. Has the rule of law taken a back seat in NATO's global juggernaut?

           Compare the ‘natural’ death of Slobodan Milocevic, former President of Serbia and Yugoslavia, with that of the grisly murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Shortly after the end of the Yugoslavian War, which saw a massive NATO aerial bombardment that lasted from March 24, 1999 to June 10, 1999, Milocevic was sent to The Hague to stand trial for charges of war crimes. Milocevic surprised his accusers by deciding to represent himself in the five-year trial. The case, however, abruptly ended without a verdict when the former four-term leader died of an apparent heart attack.

READ ON.

ann arky's home.

WILL A LOST GENERATION BE MEEK?

         The recent riots across a large swath of England are no longer in the headlines, the state and their propaganda machine, the media, would like to think that the public have accepted the pumped out lies that it was all down to mindless thugs and blind vandalism. The state's vengeance on those who would dare to break their sacrosanct love of property has seen over 2,000 people dragged through the courts and threatened evictions. All this done out of the spotlight and it still goes on. At no time is it mentioned that in this country there are thousands of young people with no hope of a future, no wealth of possessions, no choice of opportunities, in the midst of opulence, and greed. What the state and its millionaire cronies want is that those young people just accept their place at the bottom of the heap in this repressive and exploitative system. What they don't say is WHY.

    The following is an extract from an interesting article in Freedom Socialist.

       ---The rioters, far from being “animals,” are young people with bleak prospects. Like all over the globe, this “lost generation” is fighting for its future. Add police brutality and murder to the mix and the riots make total sense. As for “crimes,” committed during the riots, how can people respect private property when they have none of their own? How can youth respect a state where police routinely harass minorities and poor people, and are never found guilty of deaths in custody?

The real criminals are global corporations and neoliberal governments that allow banks and big businesses to amass vast fortunes while the majority of society suffers.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

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FORM A UNION, GET THE SACK???

        Corporate fascism is rampant across the world at the moment, it sees the "crisis" as a wonderful opportunity to slash at the rights and conditions of its work force. Getting people to believe that there is a "crisis" allows them to spout that they must take drastic action. Of course that drastic action is to increase profit margins at the expense of the wages and conditions of those who produce those profits. The parasites want more, and the state is right behind them ready to back them up with legislation.

       This is an appeal from IUF International Union of Food, Agriculture, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco, and Allied Workers.

         Sheraton's parent Starwood Group, owner of the Four Points, W, aloft, Luxury Collection, Le Méridien, element and Westin brands, has long set the benchmark for global hotel chain profitability, regularly delivering 16% and higher returns to investors. While investors rake in the money and Algeria's elite do their deals at the 5-star Sheraton Club des Pins in the capital Algiers, workers seeking to form a union at the hotel/resort have been dismissed by the hundreds for attempting to form a union in accordance with the law.

Algerian hotel workers have yet to see an 'Arab spring' - you can support their struggle. Click here to send a message to the local and regional corporate management, telling them to respect fundamental human and trade union rights and reinstate immediately and unconditionally all employees dismissed for exercising their rights and supporting a union!

Ron Oswald
General Secretary, IUF

International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF)

8, rampe du Pont-Rouge
1213 Petit Lancy, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 793 22 33
Fax: +41 22 793 22 38
website: www.iuf.org

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CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.

            The Battle of Fallujah in Iraq in 2005 was on of the most brutal reprisals by the Americans during the Iraq war. There were claims of white phosphorus bombs being used as well as depleted uranium weaponry, (an anti- tank type of weapon, though Fallujah had no tanks). The town was obliterated and its population decimated. Since then the area has  had an extremely high proportion of birth defects and cancers. This crime against humanity has been ignored by the Western media, even although there has been a high incidence of similar problems amongst the US personnel involved in that brutal crime.
         The most barbaric terror inflicted on any people is the terror of the state, there is no more powerful terorist organisation on the planet than the state. War is just terorism with a much bigger budget.

 

ann arky's home.

IDEOLOGICAL ATTACK ON WORKERS CONDITIONS.

       Across the country, across the world, for that matter, the corporate greed machine is going into action to reduce wages so as to increase profits. Here in the UK the corporate bosses know that they have the backing of our well manicured millionaire cabinet on their side, as they tear up national agreements on wages and conditions. Skilled workers on construction sites across the country are being told that their contracts are null and void and are presented with a new contract, which cuts their wages by as much as 30%. The message from the corporate fascists is simple, sign the new contract or get off the job. This is their brand of democracy, agreements arrived at by negotiation between the workers unions and employers can just be ripped up and a new one drawn up, with no workers or union input, take it or leave it. Work for less or go look somewhere else for you livelihood. It is happening here, it is happening in America, it is happening all across the developed world.

     This is all in line with the present government's ideology of cuts in all public spending and the bosses are backing it up with cuts in the private sector. Workers are not going to accept this type of corporate fascism and are fighting back. Electricians are walking of sites and demonstrating, public sector workers and planning mass demonstration and possible strike action.  All the unions, public sector and private sector, must come together on this one. It is not just about public sector pensions, it's all about privatising all public services, slashing living standards, decimating education, as well as privatising the National Health Service, and at the same time, creating a low wage economy at the dictate of the IMF,(International Mankind Fuckers).

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