Mutual Aid, Not Charity.

         All of us with some political awareness, understand that large charities are not the answer, in this economic system, they are part of the problem. I have no doubt that some do great work, but collecting money from the people, to go and buy goods from the corporate world, is hardly anything approaching mutual aid. They help feed the banks, and big business, as well as paying fat salaries to CEO. They help oil the wheels of commerce with public money. Charities are in fact a symbol of system failure.

        When they do good work, that's a bonus, but mostly the fail miserable through a mixture of red tape, ineptitude, corruption and simply because economics is not the right tool in an emergency. 

         If the following report is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, then this must be the biggest example of that red tape, ineptitude, corruption and economic greed and madness, and further proof, that it is the entire system that has to be scrapped, and a system of true mutual aid built in its place.

This from Truth Out:

      The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.
       In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.
     Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.
      The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.
       The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.
      The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.

Read the full article HERE:

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

 

Destruction Of Authority.

     Sometimes you come across something and you wish you had thought of the idea, and carried it out in your own city. From Act For Freedom Now: Swiss poster in German and French found on Ausdemherzenderfestung, 2015/05/24.

 In this world of …

… borders and States, we are forced to follow rules that we have not
written ourselves.
These rules, mostly, do nothing for us. On the contrary, they benefit
the system.

Our decisions are confiscated at every level of our lives. And rights
are only granted when they are useful to the powerful. If we want to
break free from this oppression, it is this system that must be broken
by the struggle against those who profit by it and keep it going.

It is in destroying the structures of power that we can draw the idea of
a world that would be free of them, and so begin to live in it. We want
to freely decide our lives. Far from the norms of society, borders,
laws, and their representatives.

For the self-determination of our lives – down with papers, and the
authorities.

Perhaps I could still get round to doing it?? 

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

Captivity Comes In Many Guises.

       For those who can make it, Anarchist get-together, in Athens, June 11th. in support of long term anarchist prisoners. 

 This from Contra  Info:

Anarchist gathering in the context of the International Day of Solidarity with All Longterm Anarchist Prisoners (J11 /USA) & the Month for the Earth and against the Capital (from June 5th to July 5th /Uruguay)

Thursday, June 11th 2015, at 18:30 in Voutie Park – just below a small ring road at the foot of Filopappou Hill – in Ano Petralona, Athens

The discussion will revolve around opposition to every form of captivity and against the various projects of progress and domestication, providing updates about prisoners of social war and struggles in defense of the natural world. Translation will also be available on request.

‘Parko Voutie’ is ten minutes walk from the ISAP Petralona metro station to Merkouri Square (see map). The activity will start at 18:30 and be alcohol-free. There will be printed material and vegan food; feel free to prepare and bring something along, including acoustic instruments to make musical improvisations following the discussion…

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

Stop TTIP.

       Let's not take our eyes of the dodgy double dealing devious TTIP stitch-up, that is taking place secretly, deep in the dark corridors of power. They are working hard at getting their corporate control put into binding legislation.

This from 38 Degrees:

     Caught red-handed: shady corporate lobbyists are spreading lies about TTIP. They’ve been emailing our MEPs, making false claims about widespread support for the dodgy trade deal. [1] Before MEPs start taking it seriously, let’s drown the lobbyists out.
       It’s urgent - next week, all MEPs will take part in a series of votes about TTIP. They could have the chance to vote to scrap some of the most dangerous parts of the deal, like the bit that lets big businesses sue our government if they don’t like our laws. [2] Corporate lobbyists have been telling MEPs that their colleagues support this part of the deal - but in fact, many of them don’t.
        Together, we need to make sure that in the final few days before the vote, MEPs inboxes are full of emails slamming TTIP. If thousands of us email our MEPs now, the lying lobbyist emails will soon be at the bottom of their email inbox, forgotten about.
So can you get in touch with your MEPs now to ask them to vote against TTIP next week?

Email your MEPs

       It’s clear that corporate lobbyists are worried. They’ve run out of ‘credible’ arguments and now they’re just making things up to try and get MEPs to support TTIP.
        But we’re the voters, and MEPs represent us. So we can focus on creating as much noise as possible about why TTIP is bad. When MEPs walk into the vote next week, they will know we’re backing them to vote against the worst parts of the deal.
        The other side may have money, but we’ve got people-power. Will you email your MEP now, to ask them to vote against TTIP next week?

Email your MEPs

Thanks for being involved,

Bex, Amy, Blanche and the 38 Degrees team

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

Heaven.

Heaven.

The heaven I seek holds no guarded gate

nor boasts no throne on high

has no host on bended knee

no king to call us nigh.

Death shall not be our road of entry

no trumpet blast to show the way,

has no frontier guards for man nor beast

nor some far off judgement day.

The heaven I seek is here and now,

where symbols of power crumble like sand;

standing upright all men shall brothers be,

no one privileged with high commend.

Vibrant life shall be our only passport,

the glorious morning sun our only sign,

with true love of man and beast,

we can have heaven in our time.

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

Break The Ranks.

 

       Not forgetting the UK's super prison being built in North Wales.

An interesting article and poster from Contra Info:

       Everyone should fall in line. That’s what they want, from our first to our last breath. We should be in line for the classrooms, for the checkouts of the supermarket, for work; we should queue up on the roads, in front of the counters of bureaucracy, at the polling stations… until the end of the line, in rows of tombstones.  An entire existence that drags on like this – our muscles only contract to kneel down, our hearts only beat for goods – in the safety of a prison.
      The cities are looking more and more like prisons, with every corner planned to be better surveilled, controlled, patrolled. The inhabitants are like prisoners escorted by capitalist exploitation and handcuffed by social obligations, always under the artificial eyes of security cameras. Everyone directed towards craving the consumption of feelings, carefully calculated, delivered by omnipresent screens.
This prison-society promises well-being, but delivers mostly massacres, as it is demonstrated by the drowned dreams of those who have tried to cross its moat and the bombarded bodies of those who rise up at its gates. Those who take the freedom to not beg but would rather trace their own paths, will be confronted by an army of politicians, judges, police and journalists.
     While in Brussels a new maxi-prison is being built, in Athens a special regime is being imposed on combative prisoners; while in Paris they are laying the first brick of the new Justice Palace, in Zürich and Munich other monstrous Police and Justice Centres are being planned; while powers are making agreements beyond national borders on how to carry out counter-insurgency strategies, research laboratories and surveillance industries are set up to produce social peace. And everywhere, from Spain to Greece to Italy, repression hits anyone who is tainted by the most intolerable crime: ending with obedience and inciting others to do so as well.
      However, these huge projects of repression are not only met with applauses, silences or complaints. Sometimes they crash against a hostility that is resolute and daring. It is the case, for example, of the biggest Belgian prison to date, currently under construction. A project whose path has already been studded by direct actions against those who collaborate, both public institutions and private enterprises. From paint to stones, from hammers to flames, from destruction to sabotage, it’s a constellation of attacks that completely breaks away from the penal code, political strategy or complacency with the State. If the defenders of this order want to smother this struggle, it’s because a breath of freedom can become contagious. Everywhere.
     The human being was not born to fall in line, to keep his head low, to wait for a permission to live. But by raising our heads, arming our hands and challenging power – that’s where life begins: by the destruction of all ranks.

Download the poster HERE:

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

Invaders Against Immigrants!!!

     Saw this on Arrezafe and thought it worth posting here. A native American speaks the truth to immigrants.

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

Solidarity With Spanish Anarchists.

      In recent years Franco has been reborn in Spain, the so called "representative government" of Spain has suddenly exposed its fascist credentials. Indulging in fancy sounding names, such as Operation Pandora, Operation Piñata, for form of repression, in no way can disguise their true nature, brutal state repression. The Spanish state is out to silence all resistance, to its subservient obedience to its puppet master, the financial Mafia. However, as is always, the Spanish people are not taking this lying down, they are organising to hit back. After all, self defence is no crime, something we should all remember. To struggle for a better and more just society for all, by no definition, can be classified as "terrorism". The real terrorists, are the state and capital, who try to crush its birth.

This from Anarchist News:

       The last few years have seen an increasing wave of repression against Anarchists and other radicals, here in Spain, best characterized by the police operations Pandora and Piñata. Acting in response to movements, uprisings and upheavals across the country, particularly in Cataluña, the state has arrested dozens of comrades, often under the pretext of anti-terrorism. The result has been to foster a climate of fear and in-action.
        While most of those held in pre-trial detention have been released, all still have pending charges. Now is our moment to show that their attempts to silence us will not work, and that such action will not pass by without retaliation.
       The 13th of June is a day of action and solidarity for all those facing charges, in relation to these police operations and others. On this day, in Barcelona there will be a combative demonstration, and in Madrid there will start the beginning of a campaign. We are calling for solidarity and support from international comrades, in whatever form they feel is feasible and appropriate.

Read the full article HERE:

Raise Our Whisper To A Roar.

      This so called “representative democracy” that we live under could not survive without the threat of the law and the brutal violence of imprisonment. These are the pillars on which stand this edifice of state and capital, while they drain the life blood from the people. They indulge in no subtlety as they weave their web of poverty, deprivation and savage exploitation of the citizens, nor in their brutal police repression, concentration camps for immigrants, and the rhetoric of racism against vulnerable sections of society. The social needs of the people are taken off the agenda, while, under a charade of “progress” our natural environment is savaged and damaged beyond repair.

      All this is done in the name of personal profit, wealth and power for a ruling elite. The public, should not, and will not, let this multifaceted brutality go unanswered. However, I believe we are at a critical period, one where the ideas that hold that old ruling elite in power, no longer are accepted, but we the public have not yet articulated what will take their place. A period when the anarchists must raise their voices louder than ever, where our presence should be seen and heard at every public debate, in every workplace and in all communities. When the people seek answers, ours must be on the table. Rationale and humanity will see that they are the best of answers.

 

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

Another State Murder.

       May 30th, anarchist, Spiros Dravilas, was shot dead by Greek police in an "anti-terrorist" operation. Spiros was the pilot of the helicopter used in a daring escape from Korydallos Prison in Athens, in 2006.

Visit ann arky'shome at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

First They Came For The Anarchists---?

         Some information on the Spanish fascist state's Operation Pandora and Operation Pinata, their brutal attempt to crush the anarchist movement in that country. There is good news of a kind, but there is as expected, also bad news. They will go to any lengths to try to extinguish any resistance to their tyranny.

         The Spanish state and their minders the police, are probably on par with the brutal Greek police.

  A new Amnesty Report on the freedom to protest in Spain, highlights excessive use of force and repressive legislation.

A pack of wild animals attack their prey.

From Anarchist News, the bad news:

      In worst news, the same day, the Spanish government put an embargo on the bank accounts that were opened to collect solidarity money for the lawyers, commissary expenses, and transportation expenses (for family members to visit those imprisoned) around Operation Pandora. The government continues to criminalize solidarity, following the same model it used to repress the Basque independence movement (with the difference that the anarchist movement in Spain has not killed anybody, nor among its diverse currents can support be found for the type of actions that inevitably cause collateral damage or kill and maim random people, a practice the Spanish government has had no problem with in its wars in other countries). If it is able to succeed, it will be able to prosecute sabotage as terrorism, portray the struggle against domination as terrorism, and even imprison those who write or raise money or protest in support of detainees as terrorists.

Read the full article HERE:

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

Whose Justice?

         Received this from comrade Loam at arrezafe, another example of the charade of justice under capitalism, a graphic display of representative democracy at work. Although it took place in Ireland, it is the same attitude throughout the system. A judicial code that is based on fuck the people, with the state's bully-boys doing their usual rough stuff.

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

Left Forum 2015.

            The insanity of the power crazy nuclear worshippers.  Wars fought from the office by 9 to 5 office workers, killing done as a game.

Left Forum 2015 War Normalized or Abolished

Occupy The World.

       In the past workers formed unions to protect their conditions and to try to improve them. No doubt there have been bitter struggles where the union was at the forefront of those struggles. However, now-a-days, unions are big business, multi-nationals, and though they shout for change, they don't want things to change too much. They are doing very well thank you, with their fat salaries and expense sheets, making it all the more likely that they will compromise, and sell the workers short. Because of this most workers now feel they have to fight on several fronts, and take on the might of that corrupt alliance of power and wealth, the state, the corporate world, and the big unions. New methods of organising are necessary, and are developing, at ground level, in the work place, and in the community.

Mistreated by Movistar and abandoned by their unions, telephone technicians take matters in their own hands — and occupy their employer’s headquarters.

Striking workers occupy Telefonica HQ, in Barcelona.

         Words of cynicism and distrust are repeatedly heard by activists of the country’s countless social movements, whether it is the excluded and isolated Movistar-Telefónica strikers, the powerful and popular PAH platform of indebted mortgage-holders and evictees, or just ordinary people who see the union movement as but one more player in capital-P politics — even to the extent that they form part of the hated casta, the ruling establishment.

      How nuanced, fair and widespread these sentiments are may be debatable and unknowable, but it is clear that the old high-level negotiations, the growing distance between workers and their union representatives, together with the bureaucratization and the awkward arrangements of public funding, have made people turn away from the traditional labor movement to develop alternative ways of pushing for social justice and equality.

Read the full article HERE:

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

The Rule Book Hasn't Been Written Yet.

       The babbling brook of bullshit that is our mainstream media, always frames any discussion on our future in the language of economics. As long as we accept that frame of reference, we have lost the argument. If we desire a society of justice, freedom and equality of opportunity, we will not find it in balance sheets, we will not find it in a set of calculations devised by accountants. We have to step out of their frame of references and start our calculations based on humanity and the needs of each other. The rule book of their normality must be shredded, we have to move forward creating our own normality and it will always be a transient normality, as our humanity and needs evolve. Our normality must never become a "tradition". It must always be alive, evolving, untrammelled, flowing, guided only by our humanity and justice. We can't assume the right to lay down the rules for future generations, that is their job and their job alone.

The following is a short extract from an article in Inter Arma, though it is referring to the situation in Greece, it equally applies anywhere in the capitalist world:

--------There, then, where some see an opportunity, because of the economic crisis, we see a trap. A trap of sinking in the swamp of confusion, of fantasies about the social “good” deriving from Marxist analysis, of certainties about revolutionary subjects, of economism.
First of all, the global crisis we are experiencing today is not just a crisis of numbers, financial figures and mathematics, but part of the overall crisis of values ​​and conscience in the world of authority. It is the cannibalistic crisis of western lifestyle which after it grew big consuming blood and oil from the “underdeveloped”, it now feeds from the flesh. Today, the “developed world” not only lives in the grip of economic tyranny, but also in the desert of spiritual and emotional bankruptcy.
       Unlike the Marxists and their “anarchist” great-grandchildren, who want to interpret life with the rationality of mathematics, we seek our liberation inside the blasts of a permanent existential revolt of relations, situations, values, morals, and everyday life.
        Even the economy, which is the center of the tedious analysis of the communists, for us it is not a series of ordered numbers leading to the equation of the class struggle. Instead, the economy is, first and foremost, a hierarchical social relationship that speaks the language of money. Money is a symbol of accumulated power. It is a property title that owns objects, land, time, admiration, relationships, people. The anarchist challenge, then, cannot be trapped in the demand for “better wages”, “lower taxes”, “economic equality”… One cannot destroy the morality of property by making it equal and uniform to all.
        The experiment of communist totalitarian regimes spawned monsters, dictatorships of the proletariat and obedient subjects. One cannot exorcise ugliness with a new ugliness, simply by changing the name to something more “social” and imagining that through the “anti-imperialist struggle”, the country won’t become a “modern colony “.

Read the full article HERE:

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

Free Film Show, Glasgow, Red Skirts.

        Just a reminder of a great free event taking place in Glasgow on Thursday June 4th. In co-operation with the showing of the Red Skirts film at the Pearce Institute in Govan Road, The Fairfield Heritage Museum will be staying open from 6pm to 7pm. The museum is just three minutes walk from the Pearce Institute and is well worth a visit. Pop in and see a wee bit of Govan's history before making your way to see this excellent film Red Skirts, about the 1915 rent strikes. Details of the Film event can be found HERE:

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