The Invisible.

         A few words for those millions that suffer poverty and deprivation in this system of inequality and greed. For the migrants fleeing death and destruction with just the clothes on their back. For the homeless, the marginalised, for those invisible to the arrogant, greedy masters of this economic system of injustice, inequality and exploitation. For those cast aside for plunder and profit, a price will be paid for your pain.

 The Invisible.

We live there— yes— there
A little bit above the dead
But quite a bit below the living
Where poverty is a dream
Deprivation a reality
Our daily bread an illusion
We sigh--we weep—
As ruthless poverty
With its cold claws
Tears the heart from our children
We ask—WHY?
Surrounded by opulence
Invisible to arrogant greed
Anger simmers beneath the surface
We seek justice
We will have equality
If blood is the price
So be it.

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Failed System.

      We have never had to look far to see glaring evidence that the capitalist economic system has failed the people of this world. There has been those continuing wars all for resources, wealth and power for the few. Poverty is endemic in large swaths of the planet, abject poverty and deprivation are part and parcel of the lives of millions of families and individuals. Now with this pandemic it is obvious that the capitalist system had in no way prepared for such an event, even although the experts in that field had been warning for years that it was an absolute necessity. I suppose they hadn't worked out how quite to turn into a money making exercise since it had a social service aspect.

      Now the predicted pandemic has truck and the abysmal handling of it by forewarned but unprepared states across the globe is obvious. The result being a flood of avoidable deaths and a steep rise in poverty across the world. On top of the pain and stress of losing loved ones, no country will escape the rise in poverty and deprivation. There is no doubt that the disastrous outcome of this pandemic can be laid at the feet of the economic system that puts the economy and profit for the few ahead of the health and well-being of the people. The only reason for continuing this greed driven exploitative economic system can only be insanity, sanity surely must prevail and bring an end to this cancerous economic system that blights large swaths of humanity.

The following extracts are from AP News:

      -----With the virus and its restrictions, up to 100 million more people globally could fall into the bitter existence of living on just $1.90 a day, according to the World Bank. That’s “well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty wrote this year. And it comes on top of the 736 million people already there, half of them in just five countries: Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Congo and Bangladesh.------
      ----India is struggling with one of the world’s largest virus caseloads and the effects of a lockdown so abrupt and punishing that Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the poor to forgive him. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, has surpassed India with the most people in extreme poverty — roughly half its citizens. And Congo remains one of the world’s most crisis-ridden countries, with outbreaks of Ebola and measles smoldering.-----

• – The Latest: Confirmed coronavirus cases reach 20 million
• – Schools mull outdoor classes amid virus, ventilation worries
• – Pandemic wrecks global Class of 2020's hopes for first job
  

      Even China, Indonesia and South Africa are expected to have more than 1 million people each fall into extreme poverty, the World Bank says.
     “It’s a huge, huge setback for the entire world,” Gayle Smith, president of the ONE Campaign to end extreme poverty, told The Associated Press. Smith, a former administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, called the global response to the crisis “stunningly meager.”------

Read the full article HERE: 

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Our Mistakes.

         History is never dead, it tells us how we got where we are, it lets us see where we went wrong, it should teach us how not to make the same mistakes again. Sadly we don't always see those mistakes and also the powers that be will do what they can to conceal, distort or destroy those parts of history that might point to ways and means of getting rid of their power and privileges. The true history of the ordinary people is a history of perpetual struggle for justice and equality, a struggle that still continues today. Let's learn and spread our history so that we don't again repeat those mistakes.

The following is an extract from Orgrad, Organic Radicals:

       The spring of 1649 was a time of unprecedented hope for the people of England. Civil war had turned to revolution, King Charles I had lost his head and a republic had been declared.
      The victorious “roundhead” parliamentary army which had defeated the royalist “cavaliers” was heavily imbued with the radical ideas of the Levellers and at St George’s Hill in Surrey a little group of rural rebels were setting out to reclaim the land as a “common treasury for all”. (1)
        But the hope did not last and the moment turned out to be the high water mark of popular revolt. The agitators of the New Model Army were crushed at Burford by Oliver Cromwell’s cronies, the Diggers were attacked and evicted from their squatted land and “law and order” were restored. Eventually, of course, the monarchy came back as well, albeit in “constitutional” guise.
        Instead of becoming a country of free men and women, growing their own food and deciding their own destinies, England became the birthplace of liberal capitalism.
         The tyranny of privilege maintained by the old Stuart regime had not been ended, simply transferred into new hands.
     Popular anger against feudal hierarchy had been harnessed by the entrepreneurial and banking classes to get rid of all those inconvenient old-fashioned barriers to trade and money-making.
        Once the people had played their revolutionary role, and the old regime was gone, they became the enemy within and had to be quickly be put back in their place before things went too far.
        The essence of this commercial coup d’état is nicely symbolised by the fact that a lavish feast was laid on for Cromwell by the City of London to celebrate his crushing of the radicals at Burford. (2)
        By the first decades of the next century, Merrie England had already been replaced by the kind of society that is all too familiar today.

The Bank of England.

Read the full article HERE:

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Raw Capitalism.

         I'm always surprised when people are shocked when companies take every opportunity to cut wage bills and increase profit margins. After all, that is the basic mechanism of capitalism. Increase market share, reduce costs and increase profit margins, its what they do. We should all have seen the wonderful opportunity that large companies would have through Copvid19 crisis. It would be a case of gloves off and get tore into raw capitalism. Grasping every opportunity to reduce wages and slash working conditions, and say with sad eyes, as if they cared about the staff that they have milked for years, how difficult these decisions are. Basically they don't give a shit about their workers and would gladly dump the lot if they could mechanise all their operations.

The following extract is from a BBC news article:

       British Airways staff who have accepted voluntary redundancy say they had felt "forced" into it. BA wants to cut 12,000 job roles and says 6,000 staff have volunteered.
       Carol - not her real name - said BA had told her if she did not accept the offer of voluntary redundancy she would have to apply for a job and if she did not get it she would only receive a statutory redundancy payout. She says the airline's conduct was "a slap in the face".
      Carol, who had worked for BA for 23 years, told the BBC: "They [BA] said 'If you don't take the offer, you'll go into the fire-and-rehire phase', but if we aren't hired, we'll get only statutory redundancy."
      Those BA cabin crew who did reapply for their jobs on a new contract are expected to find out later on Friday whether or not they lose their jobs. Carol, who worked on the long-haul fleet, said it was a foregone conclusion that the airline would not re-hire older cabin crew members.
      "Even before I had accepted the voluntary redundancy offer, I had a message on my roster from BA: 'Thank you for your service. Good luck'. That is all I got from them after 23 years.
       "It's a slap in the face, but it shows they knew who they were getting rid of," she said. She says she will be forced to sell her home since her redundancy payment won't cover her mortgage. "It's actually age discrimination, we were forced out."

Read the full article HERE:
       I have every sympathy for those who find themselves moving along on the end of a corporate boot, it's called capitalism.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Why Vote.

          Anarchists have always made it clear that to vote in this society is to perpetuate the injustices, inequalities and exploitation of capitalist economic system. You may modify slightly a piece of legislation here and a working condition there, but the same basic structure of exploitation, inequality and injustice will remain firmly in place. Voting in a capitalist state system guarantees the status-quo.

          Spirit of Revolt  has a wealth of pamphlets, booklets and leaflets, etc.  explaining this basic principle of anarchism. One of our previous "Read of the Month" posts, helps explain this position, a pamphlet by Glasgow anarchists Bobby Lynn, Vote: What For.

Read on line HERE

         Again explaining in more detail our position of not voting, the following is an extract from Anarchist News

   --------As anarchists we simply think that our policy should be the destruction of the State rather than looking to work with it. We believe this stance is essential if we are to be able to promote anarchism, and if we are going to mark a divide between others and ourselves, and place ourselves firmly outside the activity and the political games of all the other parties. We believe this is essential so as not to be seen as another bunch of leftists after votes, and to avoid being tainted by the inevitable failure of any government to meet our needs. We believe in revolution and have a revolutionary ideology and we want to win people over to anarchism. If people started associating Anarchism with the political parties, then it would be difficult for people to understand what  Anarchism actually is.
        By arguing for our anti-electoral position we can get our ideas across about the nature of the current system, how elected politicians are controlled and shaped by the state, and how the state acts to protect capitalism. In addition, it allows us to present our ideas of direct action and encourage those disillusioned with political parties and the current system to become anarchists by presenting a viable alternative to the sham of party politics. For, after all, a sizeable percentage of not just non-voters but voters too are disillusioned with the current set-up. Many who do not vote do so for essentially political reasons, such as being fed up with the political system, failing to see any major differences between the parties, or recognition that the candidates do not represent their interests. Many who do vote do so simply against the other candidate, seeing them as the least-worst option. This is an opportunity when people are talking a little more about politics to challenge the notion that important decisions can only be made by a few, and put across our anarchist ideas.
        We started with a quote from Vernon Richards, and we will finish with one:
“If the anarchist movement has a role to play in practical politics it is surely that of suggesting to, and persuading, as many people as possible that their freedom from the Hitlers, Francos and the rest, depends not on the right to vote or securing a majority of votes ‘for the candidate of one’s choice,’ but on
evolving new forms of political and social organisation which aim at the direct participation of the people, with the consequent weakening of the power, as well of the social role, of government in the life of the community.”
[“Anarchists and Voting”, pp. 176-87, The Raven, no. 14, pp. 177-8]

       So… Don’t vote, or spoil your vote if you want, and let’s start making a real difference.

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Rioting & Looting.

 

      With conditions for the ordinary people growing more drastic by the day and the powerful movement of Black Lives Matter, it is obvious that we will see more protests on the streets of countries across the globe. Often these protest morph into riots and looting, sometimes the rioting and looting is provoked deliberately by the police. There will always be those moralists who sit in the wings who preach, "why don't you just hold a peaceful protest, sing your chants, wave you banner and placards, then just go home?"

       No matter whether the police provoke the violence or not, there has to be a deep rooted anger and feeling of injustice, underlying these actions of "rioting" and "looting".

       This position is eloquently explained with passion and sincerity by Kimberly Jones. Listen and think about what she is saying. She may be talking about Afro Americans, but the same principles apply to  the ordinary people of this world and the pampered, privileged parasite class, that hold the reins in this economic system of exploitation. Thanks Loam for the link.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Claps Don't Pay Rent.

 

        Support the nurses demonstration on Glasgow Green today, Saturday 8th August, certainly got the weather. Glorious sunshine and not much wind, though there was a fair turn out, I was a little disappointed at the numbers. Where were all those who stood outside their doors and clapped, and those that put support images up on the windows, just remember, images and claps don't pay the rent. Surely now was your opportunity to come out in numbers and show some real support for the nurses.

     Just looking and having a guess, I would say that a high percentage were nurses, this was a protest with social distancing, carried out by responsible people who know what Covid19 can do, we should all take a page out of their book.

       Here are some photos for those who didn't make the demo.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Support Nurses.

      During these troubling times, if there is one group that surely deserves our support and solidarity it is the nursing profession. Well now is the time to show that support and solidarity by attending these demonstrations across the country. Now more than ever we have to show solidarity with each other, by doing this, we can shape our new normal not wait to be regimented back into subservient wage slaves. demonstrate with anger but stay safe and protect each other.

Edinburgh demo
Edinburgh NHS work Pay Justice
11am – 2pm at the Scottish Parliament tomorrow Saturday 8th August
https://www.facebook.com/events/295330008217451/

      Nurses United write: “ Throughout the pandemic, we’ve clapped to thank Healthcare workers for the incredible work they’ve been doing. Now let’s pay them properly too! We demand a 15% pay rise for all health and social care workers.”
      Info on actions Britain-wide including Glasgow and Inverness

https://www.nursesunited.org.uk/pay-rise-actions/

Demo guidance re Covid-19

https://www.nursesunited.org.uk/app/uploads/2020/08/Demo-R-rate-guidance.pdf

 

       Reel News give some background to the demos tomorrow
      Thousands of furious nurses demanded a 15% pay rise as they marched to Downing Street to confront a government that has agreed a pay rise for 900,000 other public sector workers for their work during the COVID-19 pandemic - but not for a single nurse, cleaner or porter.
       The astonishing - and very emotional - demonstration came off the back of a facebook group formed just 7 days previously, and already with over 70,000 members.
      Anger was also directed at union leaderships who are still not organising action, after shamefully agreeing a paydeal 3 years ago which has led to a now 20% pay cut over the past 10 years allowing for inflation.
       Amid calls for a national strike across the NHS, this new movement of rank and file nurses has now called demonstrations all over the country for August 8. Whether you're a healthworker, or one of the millions who applauded NHS workers for their sacrifices (540 healthworkers dead already, with 61% of them BAME workers) - find your nearest demo and get our NHS workers the pay rise they deserve.

All out on the 8th!

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Fawkes V.

         Surveillance keeps spreading its ever refined net over our world, apart from companies wanting to know what your up to, so they can target you with crap ads, and the state ever fearful that you are a bad apple, wants to build a very complete profile of you, from your habits, whereabouts, friends and what you actually look like. So anything that can hamper that process has to be welcomed. 

      A recent article from The Verge offers you free software that can go some way to making your facial recognition that bit more difficult. It's called Fawkes, after the Guy Fawkes mask worn in V for Vendetta.. Surely anything that might in some small way stick to fingers up at our surveillance masters is worth spreading around.

      The following is from The Verge:

    Ubiquitous facial recognition is a serious threat to privacy. The idea that the photos we share are being collected by companies to train algorithms that are sold commercially is worrying. Anyone can buy these tools, snap a photo of a stranger, and find out who they are in seconds. But researchers have come up with a clever way to help combat this problem.
      The solution is a tool named Fawkes, and was created by scientists at the University of Chicago’s Sand Lab. Named after the Guy Fawkes masks donned by revolutionaries in the V for Vendetta comic book and film, Fawkes uses artificial intelligence to subtly and almost imperceptibly alter your photos in order to trick facial recognition systems.
       The way the software works is a little complex. Running your photos through Fawkes doesn’t make you invisible to facial recognition exactly. Instead, the software makes subtle changes to your photos so that any algorithm scanning those images in future sees you as a different person altogether. Essentially, running Fawkes on your photos is like adding an invisible mask to your selfies.
        Scientists call this process “cloaking” and it’s intended to corrupt the resource facial recognition systems need to function: databases of faces scraped from social media. Facial recognition firm Clearview AI, for example, claims to have collected some three billion images of faces from sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo, which it uses to identify strangers. But if the photos you share online have been run through Fawkes, say the researchers, then the face the algorithms know won’t actually be your own.
            According to the team from the University of Chicago, Fawkes is 100 percent successful against state-of-the-art facial recognition services from Microsoft (Azure Face), Amazon (Rekognition), and Face++ by Chinese tech giant Megvii.
           “What we are doing is using the cloaked photo in essence like a Trojan Horse, to corrupt unauthorized models to learn the wrong thing about what makes you look like you and not someone else,” Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago who helped create the Fawkes software, told The Verge. “Once the corruption happens, you are continuously protected no matter where you go or are seen.”
          The group behind the work — Shawn Shan, Emily Wenger, Jiayun Zhang, Huiying Li, Haitao Zheng, and Ben Y. Zhao — published a paper on the algorithm earlier this year. But late last month they also released Fawkes as free software for Windows and Macs that anyone can download and use. To date they say it’s been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
In our own tests we found that Fawkes is sparse in its design but easy enough to apply. It takes a couple of minutes to process each image, and the changes it makes are mostly imperceptible. Earlier this week, The New York Times published a story on Fawkes in which it noted that the cloaking effect was quite obvious, often making gendered changes to images like giving women mustaches. But the Fawkes team says the updated algorithm is much more subtle, and The Verge’s own tests agree with this.
        But is Fawkes a silver bullet for privacy? It’s doubtful. For a start, there’s the problem of adoption. If you read this article and decide to use Fawkes to cloak any photos you upload to social media in future, you’ll certainly be in the minority. Facial recognition is worrying because it’s a society-wide trend and so the solution needs to be society-wide, too. If only the tech-savvy shield their selfies, it just creates inequality and discrimination.
       Secondly, many firms that sell facial recognition algorithms created their databases of faces a long time ago, and you can’t retroactively take that information back. The CEO of Clearview, Hoan Ton-That, told the Times as much. “There are billions of unmodified photos on the internet, all on different domain names,” said Ton-That. “In practice, it’s almost certainly too late to perfect a technology like Fawkes and deploy it at scale.”
          Naturally, though, the team behind Fawkes disagree with this assessment. They note that although companies like Clearview claim to have billions of photos, that doesn’t mean much when you consider they’re supposed to identify hundreds of millions of users. “Chances are, for many people, Clearview only has a very small number of publicly accessible photos,” says Zhao. And if people release more cloaked photos in the future, he says, sooner or later the amount of cloaked images will outnumber the uncloaked ones.
           On the adoption front, however, the Fawkes team admits that for their software to make a real difference it has to be released more widely. They have no plans to make a web or mobile app due to security concerns, but are hopeful that companies like Facebook might integrate similar tech into their own platform in future.
          Integrating this tech would be in these companies’ interest, says Zhao. After all, firms like Facebook don’t want people to stop sharing photos, and these companies would still be able to collect the data they need from images (for features like photo tagging) before cloaking them on the public web. And while integrating this tech now might only have a small effect for current users, it could help convince future, privacy-conscious generations to sign up to these platforms.
           “Adoption by larger platforms, e.g. Facebook or others, could in time have a crippling effect on Clearview by basically making [their technology] so ineffective that it will no longer be useful or financially viable as a service,” says Zhao. “Clearview.ai going out of business because it’s no longer relevant or accurate is something that we would be satisfied [with] as an outcome of our work.”

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Fists Full Of Cash.

          HS2, a multi-billion pound prestige project that will help fill the coffers of the corporate and the pampered privileged few. A project that will shovel tax payers money into bank accounts of the greed driven parasites that  love tax payers money. It will destroy miles of natural environment, wildlife habitat, destroy thousands of trees and have people evicted from their homes by compulsory purchase orders, and the benefits will be that it will take a handful of minutes of the travel time from London to Birmingham. The usual insanity and corrupt distribution of your tax money.

HS2 costs could rise to £106bn or more, warns government review

And so it begins: HS2 Contaminating the Chiltern Aquifer

The following is from Enough Is Enough:
       UK. There are currently several courtcases going on prosecuting Stop HS2 activists, whilst HS2 Limited recently announced that their chief executive earned £659,000 last year, making him the highest paid UK government official. The board of directors got £1.6m remuneration in total … and this was all paid for by our taxes!? Instead of this greed and corruption being investigated, at the end of July young tree protector Jellytot faced charges at Birmingham High Court for allegedly breaking an injunction seventeen times. Defending ancient woodland in Warwickshire is the alleged crime!

         Originally published by Squat Net.

       HS2 Limited are pushing for a prison sentence for trespass, which HS2 Rebellion has called “draconian & totally disproportionate”. A TINAAR (This is not about a railway) blogpost stated “These injunctions are not only a violation of a lawful right to protest. They are another example of how our supposed criminal justice system and government over and over again bow to the will of corporations and business and sell out the people they are supposed to protect.” Representing Jellytot, Andrew Wagner raised concerns with the court about the injunction’s unjust nature, since it was not properly served and the area covered was altered over time. Wagner asked a high court enforcement agent “Your officers use violence don’t they?”.
       The court, presided over by Mr Justice Smith, heard Jellytot speak to deny the charge of breaching the injunction earlier this year. Referring to one alleged breach, the judge asked “This looks really quite dangerous – you really feel that strongly about preventing HS2 that you put yourself in physical danger?” and Jellytot answered “Yes, I didn’t think about the danger I just thought ‘this machine is going to cutdown trees so I will do what I can to stop it’”.

      The hearing was postponed for further submissions until September, dates to be confirmed. Report drawn from various sources including This is not about a railway, @HS2Rebellion and mainstream media.

        Thursday July 30th and Friday July 31st 2020, our friend Elliot will be on trial. He is being charged allegedly with 17 counts of breaking a high court injunction. He is facing a potential prison sentence for resisting against the HS2 land grabbing machine.
      The use of injunctions by big business and corporations is a concrete example of how our criminal “justice” system is used abused and manipulated by corporations to stamp even harder over any community resistance to their actions.
      An injunction, much like any other other part of a justice system is supposed to protect people. An injunction is similar to a restraining order, it is supposed to give legal protection to an individual who feels threatened by another. This is understandable someone on their own may be weak but with support can be strong and feel safe. At least in theory.
      However when used by corporations and business this is reversed. No one can possibly doubt the strength and endless reach of our government, big business and corporations. Their wealth, gained through our poverty, through the theft of our land and exploitation of our labour mixed with endless corruption, created through a governmental system that gives all the power to a few to do with as they please and forces us to obey whether we like it or not. Our voice is never counted.
      The brutality of our government and of corporations is shown clear and plain within HS2; compulsory purchase orders forcing people out of homes they have lived in their entire lives, out of their homes and livelihoods without even seeing a penny; refusing to allow farmers to harvest a crop before HS2 takes possession; people strong armed with threat of even less money if owners don’t comply with further orders. All of this we have heard first hand from the people who live on the proposed path of HS2.
     Considering all of this in the context of an injunction, all HS2 and other corporations are doing is demanding that the court extend their already brutally strong grip over communities. By criminalizing to the extent of locking someone in a cage, for demanding that their voice, and the voices of others which have been silenced, be heard.
      These injunctions are not only a violation of a lawful right to protest. They are another example of how our supposed criminal justice system and government over and over again bow to the will of corporations and business and sell out the people they are supposed to protect.
      We demand a society that has the needs of all it’s people at its heart. Only the people themselves know these needs and only the people can fulfill them.
     We demand an end to Hs2, a project alien and unendingly destructive to those needs.
     We demand justice for Elliot and an end to a criminal justice system that puts the desire of business over the dignity of the people.
     “The law prosecutes the man who steal the goose from the land, but protects the man who steals the land from the goose.”

Fight corporate control over our land and our lives.
We Are Jellytot
Community autonomy for all.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk