Solidarity Is Our Weapon For Success.

 

     We should make no mistake about it, TTIP, if it goes ahead, finally blows any illusion of democracy out of the water. Gone are any control we may have had over our water, our health service, our education, and a raft of other services essential to a civilised society. All will be controlled and shaped by the parasites in the boardrooms of the corporate greed machine. All will be shaped according to the amount of profit that can be squeezed from them, with no consideration for the end users, you and I. TTIP is the corporate boardroom dream come true, total control over every aspect of our lives, everything moulded to suit the needs of the shareholders. It will take a concerted effort by the largest of mass movements to stop it, and kill it dead, before it devours what little democracy we may have.

This from WDM:

      The campaign to stop the EU-US trade deal (TTIP) is having great effect. As a result of growing public pressure negotiations have been delayed by almost two months. If we keep up the pressure, we can stop TTIP altogether.
      The EU have now taken steps to publish some documents from the negotiations, in a desperate attempt to claim real transparency. But this is still a long way short of open and democratic negotiations.
It has been a hectic few weeks in the campaign against TTIP as the media seems to be warming up to our message. Letters were published in the Financial Times, The Independent and The Guardian and articles in the New Internationalist, Independent Voices.

       On Tuesday, our head of campaigns Polly Jones gave evidence to MPs on TTIP (here’s the Parliament TV coverage - start from 10:45:00) and our director Nick Dearden gave an interview to Russia Today TV (Preview) . The campaign is also going strong in Scotland. This weekend we spoke at the Radical independence Conference and today Liz Murray, our head of Scottish campaigns, gave evidence about TTIP to the Scottish parliament.

 

 Banner drop in Brigton last week.

       Our (self-organised) European Citizens’ Initiative is breaking records and is attracting hundreds of thousands of signatures. With your help we can reach 1 million signatures before the end of this year! If you haven’t already done so, sign it here: www.wdm.org.uk/TTIP
        Faced with the growing campaign against TTIP negotiators are preparing a huge PR offensive to promote TTIP throughout the EU promoting TTIP, offering reassurances on the NHS. Articles blaming campaigners for the woes of the negotiators are starting to appear. If anything that shows that our campaign is working and that we’ve got the EU on the back foot on TTIP.
There are a number of significant events coming up:

• This Monday, 1 December, 6pm there’s TTIP: Turning the Tide in Westminster. This mass training event, led by leading politicians and campigners, will help you learn how to pressure politicians about TTIP, make networks with other citizens and activists and develop plans for the future. A limited number of places remain available, book now if you’d like to attend. 
  • On Thursday 11 December, 7.30pm, the Trade Justice Movement are hosting a meeting TTIP Take the Power Back .
    
• We are planning a mobilisation to Brussels on late January or early February to lobby MEPs, protest against TTIP and meet civil society activists from around Europe – watch this space.
  

     Currently under way at WDM are briefings on aspects of TTIP and its expected impacts and more campaigning – with an accent on Local Authorities. Keep in touch. #NoTTIP.

Best wishes,
Guy Taylor
Trade campaigner, WDM

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

Anti-Fascist Hamburg Harbour Event.

      Each year for the last four years, The Anti-fascist Harbour Event in Hamburg, has gone from strength to strength. This year, 2014, was no exception, a well organised, interesting and informative event.

  Summary of 4th. Anti-Fascist Harbour Event "Wolf Hoffmann" in Hamburg 2014

 "Anti-militarist struggle - then and now",

      was the motto of the 4th. Anti-Fascist Harbour Event in Hamburg. The resistance of the shipyard workers, the rebuttal of the thesis: fascism = socialism, the exemplary story of the brigader Erich "Vatti" Hoffmann , and his struggle for a socialist and therefore humanistic society, were among others the focus of this weekend.

      Friday evening was the friendship and solidarity event with our comrades from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Austria, France, Spain and Sweden. The evening had a musical theme with the appearance of our Pascal (ACER) from Paris and the music group Sokugayu (Hamburg) who performed a program commemorating the poet Erich Mühsam. He was murdered by the Nazis 1934.

     The event was opened with a reading of the-----

Read the full report HERE:

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

The Barras Comes Up With The Goods.

    A handful of events the should interest the good people of Glasgow and beyond.

Hi all, These events below at the Pipe Factory in the Barras on Thursday night and Saturday afternoon may be of interest. A member of the Games Monitor is presenting on the relation between 'ruins' and deliberate urban devalorisation (disinvestment) on Saturday afternoon.

Glasgow Games Monitor 2014 http://gamesmonitor2014.org/

The Pipe Factory are hosting two new events this week as part of the curatorial project East End Transmissions, curated by Francesca Zappia.

http://www.thepipefactory.co.uk/    42 Bain st Barras/ Calton
Thursday November 27th at 7pm we will present a screening and performance by Virginia Hutchison.

PLEASE ADJUST YOUR DRESS - A film produced for Accidental Mix, 2013
 Post scriptum
Today I Learned to Jump Like a Man
 It really struck me when we were talking earlier and you said that it had been prohibitively difficult to find local footage in the BBC archive. (My mum says that’s deliberate and not really that surprising). I have to agree. I then go on to tell her that I have to write an essay on the East End foundry industry to sit alongside a text I wrote about identity. (She buries people. Mostly folk from the East End. She tells me about the cremations, about pushing the button. When she first started she went to the furnace and watched through the window. I understand this necessity.)
Saturday 29th November, from 2pm, a series of lectures with Neil Gray, Vikki McCall, Kirsteen Paton and Johnny Rodger will analyse the regeneration in the East End in the last few years, and its consequences for the future of the area.
 Programme
2pm -  Exploring the lives of people living in the East End of Glasgow
By Vikki Mc Call and Kirsteen Paton

There has been an on-going and consistent focus on the East End of Glasgow at a UK level by the media, politicians and wider powerful elites. These have applied powerful discourses and assumptions on the people living in the East End, especially in areas such as Easterhouse, Parkhead and Shettleston (Mooney, 2009; Gray and Mooney, 2011). Gray and Mooney (2011: 5) especially point out that the narratives around Commonwealth Games 2014 have been constructed around the idea that they will ‘transform the East End of Glasgow’, and will work to help address long-standing social and economic problems. But how are such assumptions being received in the East End itself? The only way to know this was to explore the voices of those living within these targeted communities, which have so far been neglected. This project explored the gaps between narrative and reality of stigmatised urban areas by looking at the perceived impact of Commonwealth Games 2014 on the lives of the people living within the East End of Glasgow.
2.45pm - All history was once in the East End of Glasgow. But now it is gone. Or is it? The appearance and disappearance of Douglas Gordon’s artwork ‘Proof’ at Glasgow Green.
By Johnny Rodger

3.30pm - Spectres of Dead Labour: The Materiality of Ruins
By Neil Gray

The study of 'Ruins' has become extremely widespread in the arts and humanities of late. One tendency has been to evoke ghostly spectres, absent presences and uncanny experience in industrial ruins. These emanations, it is argued, resist rational interpretation. While not wishing to destroy ruins as sites of imagination or pregnant liminality, Neil Gray wants to demystify this reductive hauntology by evoking the 'vampire-like' spectres of 'dead labour' in the built environment of the East End of Glasgow. In doing so, he will show how ruins are an inherent and necessary part of capital accumulation cycles and how listening to these fragmentary 'transmissions' might help us detonate the slumbering time of the present with the fractious constellations of the past.
 Speakers’ biographies

Neil Gray is a writer, researcher and sometime filmmaker. He is currently completing a PhD at the University of Glasgow on 'Neoliberal Urbanism and Class Composition in Recessionary Glasgow'. He is a member of the Strickland Distribution, is on the Variant magazine editorial group, and is co-founder of Glasgow Games Monitor 2014.
 Vikki McCall is a Lecturer in Social Policy and Housing at the University of Stirling and is passionate about researching and helping improve social policy to be more effective for those most impacted by it. Part of this work has been around bridging the gap between policy and practice.
Vikki's work has included extensive research on the role of front-line workers, users and volunteers and the policy process. This has included exploring front-line worker discretion, interpretations, activities and actions. Vikki has a broad portfolio of social science teaching and research with the University of Stirling. Expertise includes housing, volunteers, devolution, poverty, inequality, gender, social problems, urban society and the cultural sector. Vikki has experience in lecturing on and conducting social research, comparative social research, qualitative and quantitative methods.
Current projects include exploring the role of volunteers in dementia care, housing and older owner occupiers, partnership and collaboration in the cultural sector, work and learning transitions of looked after children in Glasgow and Beyond Stigma: Exploring the lives of people living in the East End of Glasgow.
Kirsteen Paton is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. Her research is situated under the broad category of urban sociology, taking in cities, urban space, class, crime and social policy. This is underpinned by a theoretical interest in the phenomenological and material relations of class within the context of urban restructuring which are explored through theories of neoliberalism, Western Marxist theory and new theoretical approaches in stratification: New Working Class Studies and Cultural Class Theorists.
Paton’s research draws from Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to understand the political project of neoliberalism and the reciprocal relationship between urban restructuring and the remaking of contemporary working-class culture. Recent research involves looking at the formation of modern patterns of consumption considered risky (drugs and gambling) in relation to class.
 Johnny Rodger is a writer and critic, and editor of the The Drouth quarterly Literary/Arts journal. He is Professor of Urban Literature at the Glasgow School of Art and his published books include Contemporary Glasgow (Rutland Press, 1999), andGillespie Kidd &Coia 1956-87 (RIAS, 2007), Tartan Pimps: Gordon Brown, Margaret Thatcher and the New Scotland (2010),The  Red Cockatoo: James Kelman and the Art of Commitment (2011).
 The Pipe Factory and curator in residency Francesca Zappia want to warmly thank all the donators and supporters on our Kickstarter fund project. We have reached the sum and we are preparing special gifts for you!

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

"Austerity", Good For Business.

A new video from The People's Assembly.

         George Osborne tells us that Austerity is working, but how are the cuts working for you? Do you have a message for him ahead of his Autumn Statement?
       The People's Assembly hit the streets and asked the public how austerity is working out for them...turns out it isn't!

     My take on it is different. What people should realise is that "austerity" is working, it is doing what it was intended to do, move wealth up to the parasite class. Forget all that crap about balancing the budget, the Cameron-Osborne duo, at the dictate of the financial Mafia, are laying the foundations of the new UK sweatshop, to give their corporate buddies the edge in the cheap labour market. Changing the Chancellor or modifying the policies, so that it doesn't hurt us quite so much, will never solve our problems. The system can't be reformed, it has to be dismantled. It is an exploitative system, it is a big business oriented system, and it is all going the right way for the corporate greed machine.

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

No Prisons, No Borders.

      It is a strange fact that as we become, supposedly, more civilised, we lock up more people than ever. That, supposed pinnacle, of Western development America, locks up more people than any other country on the planet and is responsible for a quarter of the world's prison population. The UK has one of the highest prison populations per head, in Europe. These two countries strut the globe shouting "freedom", while the holding the accolade of locking up more of their citizens than anybody else in the West.

 

      The concept of prison is outdated in any truly civilised country, it was built on a failed and false premise. Take a "bad" person, punish them and they will become good. It then was modified to take a "bad "person, lock them up and they will see the errors of their ways and reform. The fact that over the centuries we have seen the prison population grow, can only mean, it is failing, or we are becoming a more "bad" species. Of course we all know that prisons are really there to keep the population in thrall to the established power. There is no place for prisons in any free and civilised society.

An interesting article originally from MediaPart before being translated by Lena Theodoropoulou and appearing in Xpressed:

      ---“Prison was built on the principles of philanthropy: during the time of their incarceration, the offenders would reflect, would improve, would be reborn. History defeated this sad nonsense. A prison can only be constructed on the foundations of absolute spiritual cruelty; otherwise imprisonment is just based on the hope that everything will go well after it ends, hence on something completely inconceivable”. When Catherine Baker (journalist of the libertarian movement, author and supporter of the abolition of prisons) was writing these words in March of 1984, in France there were 38,600 persons held in prisons. Thirty years later this number has increased to 69,000 and the average time of incarceration is more than double (from 5.5 to more than 12 months).----

Read the full article HERE:

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

New Nukes For The Clyde.

The Herald today:

    A £37 million deal has been struck by Westminster with the US government for a dozen huge new Trident missile launchers more than a year before the UK parliament decides if the nuclear weapons system should be renewed.

They call it democracy, what would you call it?

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

They Want Your Water And Your NHS.

        There is a lot of campaigning against TTIP, and rightly so, but there is still a lot of confusion among the general public as to what it really is, and what it intends to cover. Basically it covers almost everything in our lives, it is all to the benefit of the corporate world and to the detriment of the ordinary people. That's it in a nutshell, but the detail is more complex.

      One little piece speaks volumes, it intends to take water and health, out of public hands and into private corporate hands, and all this negotiated between governments and corporate bodies, behind closed doors away from the prying eyes of the public.

 

This from Xpressed:

2. To consolidate the liberalisation of services markets. This is a euphemism that sounds great, but it starts to sound really bad when you go into the details of what is on the negotiating table:
- Privatisation of water supply, in line with both the interests of European and American multinationals [17].
- The Americans have confirmed their intention to negotiate the opening of public health and education services, taking advantage of the privatisation dementia affecting European governments.

Read the full article HERE: 

         How dangerous this TTIP is to you and I is summed up in that one small part in the long and complex set of demands by the corporate world, privatisation of our water and our health service. If agreed, it will make no difference which party you vote in to govern over you, they will be bound by international law to go down the road of private water and private health service. They call it democracy, what would you call it?

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

Who's Design?

    Saw these photos on arrezafe and felt sick, why do we tolerate such an unequal world in the midst of unbelievable wealth. They display the fruits of corporate crime, the life that these photos depict is not here by necessity, it is here by design. Who's design?

 

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

Loukanikos.

       Just as an after thought to the last post. The dog Loukanikos, that appeared in that film died recently. He probably was present at more demonstrations in Athens than any other protester, always took his stance on the side of the protesters against the police. Much loved and much missed.

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