Springburn, Left To Rot!!

 Springburn Public Halls, left to rot before being knocked down.

       Well, well, poor old Springburn and the North of Glasgow. It seems that our city fathers, at Kremlin in George Square, don't know that our fair city has a North End. In their gigantic tax funded, corporate extravaganza, The Corporatewealth Games, they stated that it was for all the city. I have just received their latest glossy Glasgow Magazine, and being a Springburn man, I had a wee look to see how it would impact on my part of the city, but it seems the city fathers don't know where Springburn is, or perhaps they think it is outside our city, hence the lack of interest.

 Springburn Park winter gardens, yep, left to rot.

      The East End has a time trial running through it to the city centre. The Southside, has a marathon running through it to the city centre. The West End has a road race running through it to the city centre. There are games venues in the East End, the Southside, and the West End, and "live zones" in the East, the city centre, the Southside and the West End. Their wee map is festoon with little symbols indicating Glasgow Landmarks, but nothing in the North side of the city. as far as this piece of corporate plunder is concerned, Springburn is a wasteland, not worth pilfering. Our call to fame in Springburn is our poverty and deprivation, we have the country's worst child poverty and the highest number of request for child care orders. Having "cleansed" the East End of peasants, perhaps they thought that the cost of doing likewise in the North was a cost too far. At least the transport should run as normal in the North of the city. You could visit Springburn every day and not even know there was such a "Greatest Show on Earth" corporate extravaganza going on in our fair soon to be bankrupted city.

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

The Duplicity Of The State.

       When will the real truth be told on the criminal act called "The Iraq War"? When will those responsible for this long term illegal disaster be held responsible? Apart from the war veterans who today are suffering a raft of health problems, the ordinary Iraqi people to this day carry the legacy of that brutal, insane and criminal act. Their soil, water and air are contaminated, birth defects are common place, cancers are wide spread, all the direct result of the use of depleted uranium by the forces of the power hungry Western imperialists. 

Some of the birth defects attributed to the use of depleted uranium in Iraq.

         Our right holy, St. Anthony Blair, should be made to look at these pictures and view films like this on a daily basis until he enters the realms of reality and admits, he was wrong, and his act was irresponsible, criminal, brutal and inhumane, and based on duplicity.

       History can hide some dreadful events, but only if we let it, in this case we mustn't let that happen. The full, true and unadulterated story of Iraq and its aftermath, must be told and retold, as a warning of the insanity and duplicitous nature of governments and the state. The damage unleashed by the two Christian fundamentalists, Bush and Blair must be catalogued and used as a reminder of why we must never trust the state.

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No Romantic Fable.

For those who don't know; 

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."
– Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989)

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New Forms Of Workers Organisation.

     Thanks to City Strolls for this, also thanks to Glasgow Anarchist Federation, Clydeside IWW, Spirit of Revolt, and Radical Independent Bookfair for sponsoring and organising this valued discussion. A book launch and talk/discussion, by Immanuel Ness on new forms of workers organisations held in Glasgow on Wednesday 18 June at the Fred Paton Centre.

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

European Prison System At Its Worst.

        Today sees the start of a mass hunger strike by prisoners in Greek prisons. The conditions in Greek prisons are sub-human, to refer to them as “third world” would be insulting to those “third world” countries. Every prison in Greece is massively over crowded, as the government gets on with its crushing repression of any resistance to their “austerity” plans, at the dictate of the Troika, (EC European Commission, ECB European Central Bank, IMF International Mankind Fuckers).

        Forget about Golden Dawn, the present Greek government is marching along the road to fascism all by its self, and needs no lessons from that band of thugs. It has instituted mass concentration camps for immigrants, where conditions are deplorable.

          Prison hospitals in Greece are are without doubt the worst in Europe. All this is quietly accepted by the European Union, as they are fully aware that for their austerity and privatisation plans to continue, all resistance must be crushed. Greece is the experiment that is being watch carefully by the financial Mafia, if they get away with it, it could become their preferred template for the rest of Europe, if and when needed.

          It is not just the conditions that are driving the victims of the Greek prison system to take drastic action, it is a raft of new legislation that will condemn some to life in prison without hope of release. If ever there was a case for pan-European solidarity, surely this is it.

This from Contra Info:

ANNOUNCEMENT OF HUNGER STRIKE
      From June 18th, 2014, prisoners in all Greek prisons have abstained from prison meals as a way of protest against the fascist bill for type C prisons, and in defense of the right to furlough and release on parole.
      However the minister of Justice and the government insist on ignoring our protest. They have not responded in any way to our just demands, and provocatively aim to pass the bill in summer sessions of the parliament, in their attempt to prevent people’s reaction.
       Against this bill which condemns us to remain prisoners for life without rights or hope, we put our bodies and souls as a shield. This is the only thing we have left.
     From Monday, June 23rd, 2014 we start a mass hunger strike in all prisons across Greece. We claim our rights, and we fight to remain humans, instead of human shadows locked up and forgotten into despair.
We demand:
     1) The withdrawal of the fascist bill for type C prisons. We say no to the Greek Guantanamo, a prison within a prison, without furloughs, without visitations, without tomorrow…

Read the full article and the full list of demands HERE:

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

War.

     From the mouths of babes, a poem written by my then 11 year old grandson. 

War.

War is a bullet in someone's chest.

War smells like gunpowder.

War tastes like sour lemon.

War sounds like people screaming and crying.

War feels like a cold hand.

War looks like a broken picture of a family on the floor.

War lives in a box of bullets.

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ATOS Still At It.

        Well well, would you believe it, ATOS told fibs, this and the government's idiotic blindness to their failings, allowed ATOS to make millions from tax payers money, as it humiliated, harassed and stressed, our most sick and vulnerable. 

             ATOS made millions from their brutal treatment of the disabled as they carried out the government's Work Capability Assessment scheme. Eventually they had to pull out this lucrative adventure, because of all the bad publicity highlighted by such bodies as Glasgow Against ATOS, and others. Of course undaunted they set about getting their hands on another bundle of tax payers money, knowing that their buddies in The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, would overlook the brutal chaos they left in their wake, with the last contract. Just shove in a phoney tender and hey presto, another contact, in the form of Personal Independence Payments, PIPs, and another stash of tax payers money pops into your bank account.

   "Atos stated in its tender document that it had 'contractual agreements' in place with a national network of 56 NHS hospitals, 25 private hospitals and over 650 physiotherapy practices to provide assessments. This turned out not to be true.

         Will there be fraud charges to follow? I doubt it very much. The bunch of thugs in the Cameron millionaire cabal go into an apoplectic fit, when they even think of someone who may have cheated on their benefit claim, but it is just a finger wagging when corporate bodies plunder the public purse for millions.

          All this back scratching between our governing body of Oxbridge millionaires, and their buddies, corporate CEO's, at no time benefits the ordinary people, it is just a scheme for transferring public money to corporate bank accounts. Cutting benefits, traumatising the disabled, closing Remploy, getting people to work without a wage, will do nothing to improve the social fabric of our society, but it does make a lot of money for the private bodies paid by tax payers money, to carry out these policies. Isn't time we asked, “what's in it for us?”

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

In Capitalism, Oil = Blood.

       Is the root of Ukraine’s problem the fact that rich oil and gas deposits were discovered there early in 2013. So naturally, opposing imperialist camps vie for control, and once again as imperialists squabble over control of a country's rich resources, it's the people that suffer. Though oil could and probably will, transform Ukraine, it is at present one of the poorest countries in Europe. Sadly it has recently been given the kiss of death, by the usual vampire, the IMF (International Mankind Fuckers). That means it takes on a massive debt to hand to the corporations to exploit its country, and proceeds to pay back that debt, by massive cuts in social spending, and massive privatisation of public assets. It has to decimate the lives of its people and destroy what social fabric exists, in order to satisfy the blood suckers in the bank of Western imperialists, the IMF.
 

      Imperialists, of what ever shade, always manage to get workers to pick up guns against workers, they always get some to run with one flag and others to run with yet another. They manage to play the patriotic game, or the ethnic game, in an endeavour to gain control. Though they themselves are never patriotic, the sink their ill gotten wealth in any country that will pay the right dividend. You'll not see many “oligarchs” running in the streets with a Kalashnikov, They tend to be sitting with their banker guarding their thieved pile.
 

      And so it is at the moment in Ukraine, ordinary worker fighting and killing ordinary worker, to see which imperialist gets the goodies.

This from FREEDOM SOCIALIST (Voice of Revolutionary Feminism).

       The truth is Ukraine’s economy depends on both Russia and Europe. But each side wants to exclude the other. Meanwhile, Ukraine has signed its new loan deal with the IMF, accepting severe cuts to public spending, privatization of public resources, and other austerity measures. Ultra-rich oligarchs continue to loot the country.

     Volodymyr Ishchenko, an anti-capitalist sociologist in Kiev, puts it in a nutshell. “The crazy, irrational capitalist system that inevitably produces competing imperialisms … this is the root of the problem — not only for Ukraine, but for the entire world.”

Read the full article HERE:

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

All Buddies In The Same Cesspool.

          As we live in a “representative democracy”, you can rest assured as the protests against fracking grow, our government will totally ignore or try to suppress those protests. The main reason is of course, that lots of those millionaires in our “representative democracy” have vested interests in the companies involved. The millionaire Cameron cabal, have buddies in the business, and no doubt there will be the odd nod and wink, while sipping their bubbly. Little remarks dropped at those posh do's with a little nudge-nudge, you know what I mean. Big business and rich politicians all swim in the same cesspool, and quite frankly,they don't give a shit about you and I. They set their agenda and you and I have to be conned, convinced, coerced or intimidated, round to their way of thinking. It is with much thanks to a FOI request by the folks at the website InvestigatingBalcombeandCuadrilla.com that a lot of information on our millionaire “representative democracy's” policy and policing on this matter has come to light.

This from SchNews:

        In fact government is littered with executives with a pro-fracking agenda (as uncovered by Frack Off). No wonder the Tories are cheering shale gas along. But Cuadrilla recently went further, feeling confident enough to exert some political pressure of their own: They stated that unless the government changed trespass law in favour of frackers – allowing fracking under people's homes and land without permission – they would pull out of Lancashire. The changes went through.

      This summer Britain is also expected to kick off the “14th onshore licensing round”, due before the end of July. The licences will give the successful bidders drilling rights in an area covering a total of 37,000 square miles. No doubt the government are trying their hardest to assure potential frackers that operations in the UK will be all plain sailing.

Read the full article HERE:

I Will Obey!!

         Saw this on Not Buying Anything blog and thought our Lords and Masters would like it to be tattooed on all our foreheads. Gove, the education messer-upper, will soon demand that the kids at school learn it off by heart, Vince Cable, our business secretary, will insist that it be recited before each and every union meeting. The perfect formula for getting the economy going again. Now you know what to do!!!!

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

One Day All The Lies Will Collapse----.

        Another interesting and informative article from Glasgow Games Monitor 2014. This one is on, the pie-in-the-sky, "legacy" of the games. The magic phrase that is supposed to make you think that, all that public money being handed over to the corporate world, is actually for your benefit. After the "greatest show on earth" moves on, we will have a wonderful "Legacy". As Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda master said, "The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed". However, even he knew it must all come crashing down.

   From the Games Monitor article:

     However, we argue that ‘legacy’ claims are one of the primary means to legitimise, and deflect attention from, massive public expenditure on Games events. This expenditure on urban spectacle is almost always for the benefit of business; the bread and circuses of the spectacle is a great way of alienating people from the exploitative realities of land-grabbing, displacement, and gentrification. Glasgow City Council Leader, Gordon Matheson, intends to sell “two weeks of magic” to an increasingly suspicious public.

Read the full article HERE:

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

When The Price Of Greed Was Blood.

      Anybody with a grain of common sense knows that WW1 was an imperialist and aristocratic land grab, paid for by the blood of millions of ordinary innocent people. We also so know that for the ordinary people,there were no benefits. The fruits from that blood letting went to the privileged parasite classes, the misery and suffering to the common people.
      Despite this truth, the powers that be to this day, try to portray this totally unnecessary blood bath as some sort of heroic fight to defend democracy, in reality a democracy that never existed, and still to this day, doesn't exist.
      As we approach the anniversary of that tragic event, we will be seeing all the trappings of power, militarism and patriotism being displayed in an attempt to convince us, that it was all worth while, something of which to be proud. There will be bugle blowing and recruitment campaigns for the next generation to be sacrificed at the alter of the new imperialism, corporate imperialism.

 

      That's why events as this listed below are of such importance, we must counter the insane claims of the imperialists, and continue to show the First World War for what it was, a bloody greed fest, a battle between power crazy empires for land, resources and markets.

JOINT BOOK LAUNCH

‘Writings against the First World War’

with Bruce Kent and A.W. Zurbrugg

Wednesday 18th June, 7pm

Entry £3, redeemable against any purchase

Housmans Bookshop 5 Caledonian Road King's Cross , London N1 9DX,

click here for map

       Our guests present the works of those who opposed the First World War and who wrote and published in order to convince others of its horrors, with particular reference to newly published books ‘Not Our War: Writings against the First World War’ and Ernst Friedrich’s shocking photobook ‘War against War!'.

       Bruce Kent will introduce Ernst Friedrich’s photobook ‘War against War!’ (Spokesman, 2014), which conveys the brutality and human cost of WWI through a series of graphic images. Originally published in 1924, Friedrich’s work begins with an impassioned plea, addressed ‘To Human Beings in all lands’, to understand the causes of war and to take steps to prevent it.

      The photos that follow are accompanied by annotations, sometimes understated, sometimes bitterly ironic, and contrast nationalist propaganda with the appalling reality of the conflict. Friedrich’s work is a condemnation of war which remains shocking and relevant to this day.

      Anthony Zurbrugg, editor of ‘Not Our War: Writings against the First World War’ (Merlin Press, 2014), will introduce his new book. This anthology presents the diverse voices of men and women who questioned and opposed the war: liberals, radicals and pacifists, anarchists and socialists, soldiers and non-combatants.

       They asked critical questions: Was this a war for civilization? What were the forces behind the war? How might it have been prevented? The work features the writings of James Connolly, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Keir Hardie, Jean Jaurès, Louis Lecoin, V I Lenin, John Maclean, Errico Malatesta, Sylvia Pankhurst, Siegfried Sassoon and many others.

Housmans Bookshop

5 Caledonian Road

King's Cross ,

London N1 9DX,

UK

click here for map

Tel 020 7837 4473

Fax 0870 706 6035

shop@housmans.com

THE MERLIN PRESS Ltd.

www.merlinpress.co.uk

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

A Glasgow Date For Your Diary.

     If you are in or around Glasgow on Wednesday evening, 18th June, here is a date for your diary. A must if you are looking for a better world for all. 

Book Launch & Talk: 

New Forms of Worker Organisation (w. Immanuel Ness)

Wednesday 18 June at 18:45 – 21:00

Fred Paton Centre, 19 Carrington Street, G4 9AJ

Book Launch and Talk, co-hosted by

Clydeside IWW, 

Spirit of Revolt,

Glasgow AnarchistFederation,

 

RIB Project.

      Immanuel Ness, editor of 'New Forms of Worker Organisation', will present a compelling case that labour unions are at a turning point that will change the character of worker representation that was crafted in the U.S. and imperialist states in the mid-20th century.

For more on the book see: http://www.workerorganization.org/

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

When The Insane Hold Power!!

        I never thought that I would find myself nodding approvingly at comments made by that arrogant, privileged, old Etonian, ex-Bullingdon Club member the dangerous buffoon, Boris (he who ordered 3 water cannons for the people of London) Johnson. However in his latest mutterings I feel he has got it right, he refers to that madman, the most holy, St.Tony Blair as unhinged.

      In his Daily Telegraph column, he makes such remarks as, "I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad.” He goes on with truths that anybody with any reasoning ability are fully aware, such as, "In discussing the disaster of modern Iraq he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help." Well said Boris, but we have been saying it for years. Even before he steeped himself in other people's blood in Iraq. Boris continues his truths on St. Tony Blair with further comments such as, "There are more than 100,000 dead Iraqis who would be alive today if we had not gone in and created the conditions for such a conflict, to say nothing of the troops from America, Britain and other countries who have lost their lives in the shambles----.” "That is the truth, and it is time Tony Blair accepted it.” and, "We utterly blitzed the power centres of Iraq with no credible plan for the next stage - and frankly, yes, I do blame Bush and Blair for their unbelievable arrogance in thinking it would work."

       I have to hand it to Buffoon Boris when he says, Blair instinctively understood how war helps to magnify a politician. His remark, "War gives leaders a grandeur they might not otherwise possess. If you hanker after Churchillian or Thatcherian charisma, there is nothing like a victorious war." tells us a lot about our privileged political class and how they think. Boris more or less accuses St. Tony of having sent British forces into the bloody conflict in part to gain personal "grandeur".

       Well said Boris, now why not go the whole way and speak to your privileged, Oxbridge millionaire friends and get their weight behind having him charged with crimes against humanity and then committed to a hospital for the criminally insane.

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

The Corporate Money Syphon Machine.

      I suppose it can be fun, kicking a ball around with a group of people, though not my cup of tea. The World Cup, however is something else. Like all the large corporate spectacles, it is just another way of transferring public money into private bank accounts, though the mainstream media, that babbling brook of bullshit, tries to convince us all, that we, the ordinary people, get all the gains from this corporate plundering of the public purse. The London Olympics benefited lots of corporate bodies, but think how much you personally gained from all that tax payers expenditure? Glasgow's Commonwealth games is another corporate spectacular where we see millions of pounds of tax payers money just simply drain into private bank accounts. The other side of all these corporate spectacles is the repression, people have to be moved out of the way, dispersed from their local communities, to make way for the money spending tourists, and grand venues, that the locals can't afford to use. It is a short sharp manoeuvre, and then the money grabbing machine moves on to milk some other group of tax payers. Nothing to do with the local people, they are a bit of a nuisance to the smooth operation of the plundering of public assets, and long way they continue to be that nuisance.

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

Religions Speak With Forked Tongue.

       It seems that there is no end to the cruelty, and no depth of depravity to which the vile institution of the Catholic Church will sink. From sexual and physical abuse, to paedophilia, and now the discovery of over 800 bodies of babies found in a septic tank at one of the homes run by the Catholic Church. Are there any more such homes?

        Trusted by that other vile institution, the state, to look after mothers and their children, they used and abused the mothers and starved the neglected the babies, and when the babies died they were disposed of in a septic tank. All this and more form an extremely rich and powerful organisation that preaches love.  The Catholic Church, is like all religions, they speak with forked tongue. They are the enemy of free thought and progress, the creator of divisions between people, institutions of control freaks, a blight on humanity. The quicker we clear our minds and our society of their poison the greater the chances of co-operation between all people.

 

        Vicious cruelty and religion go hand in hand, not just in the Catholic Church, it is how they treat those who differ or deny their "teachings". The only restraint on their barbaric behaviour is the secular society. Over the centuries the secularists have moderated most of religions vile acts but as we see from various reports, it breaks out again and again, creating misery, suffering and bloodshed.

This from Care 2:

       For decades in Ireland, unmarried women who became pregnant were sent to state-funded "mother and baby homes." The mothers would work to atone for the "sin" of getting pregnant; their children were taken away from them. And outside the now-abandoned site of one of those homes in Galway, the remains of nearly 800 children were found in an old septic tank last week.

       In 1925, Catholic nuns took over the running of a workhouse in Tuam, Galway, turning it into a "mother and baby home." At this grim institution, which locals simply nicknamed "The Home," children were starved and neglected, often to a fatal degree. In fact, one historian estimates that a child died once a fortnight in "The Home."

And those babies weren't treated with dignity after their tragic deaths. Instead , they were tossed in a septic tank and left there to rot -- until locals discovered them again last week.

      The Catholic church has responded with prayers for the dead children's souls. But these abused, lonely orphans deserve more than that. The truth about their lives -- the whole truth -- needs to be told, so that no one can ever forget the pain and suffering they went through.

      We have to remind Ireland's officials that we won't let the past go that easily. Please sign and ask the Irish government to help fund a memorial for these babies who never had a proper funeral.

Thank you for taking action,

Kathleen J.
Care2 and ThePetitionSite

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