Austerity Normal.

             That coterie of platitude producers known as MPs, who meet in their private club, The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, have had 8 pay rises in 10 years, while NHS staff have seen their pay frozen. Now that same bunch of self interested careerists decide to give the NHS staff a 1% pay rise, at the same time the body that regulates the MP's salaries as stated that MPs will not receive a pay increase of more than £3,000. Compare that £3.000 increase with what 1% would amount to for NHS staff, some where around about £170 per year. At the moment The basic annual salary for an MP from 1 April 2020 is £81,932, plus expenses, whopping subsidised meals, and fancy foreign travel junkets. Those expenses are very generous, and come with a comfy pension scheme. Who do you think serves the country best, the NHS or the MPs. Parliament can close down for generous holidays, and the country merrily functions. Close down the NHS for generous holidays and see in what sort of mess society becomes. It is unthinkable.

 

          However this is the type of society we tolerate, we pay pompous privileged careerists generous salaries, we allow them to pile up obscene wealth through the contacts of their privileged position, and let them administer austerity to the rest of us. When do we get the will to tear down this edifice to inequality and corruption, we have the power? When do we decide that we want the fruits of our labour to come to us, the real wealth creators. There is a tidal wave of austerity coming our way, we accept it and stunt the futures of our kids and grand kids for generations, stand by and watch homelessness grow, food banks proliferate and poverty spread like a new pandemic. 

 

        At the moment the state has in place, due to pandemic legislation, population controls sufficient to stop wide spread protests, which it will try to cement into some sort of permanent legislation, while its propaganda wing preaches that we will soon be back to "normal". There is no "normal", there is only deeper austerity, and unless we take back control of the streets, austerity will be our continuing "normal". We must have the right to vent our anger at gross injustice, inequality and blatant corruption, and the only places we can do that are on the streets, in our workplaces, and in our communities. Their plan is already set, where is ours, in defence of our freedoms and conditions?

 

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

No Friend.

  

          The following article will be seen by many as good news, as indeed it is, but we should not be fooled into thinking that we can gain a fair and just world through the courts of law as they stand, we should not forget that they are inexorably linked to the police and the state and are no friend of the people. After all they are part and parcel of this unequal society and have a vested interest in keeping a hierarchical system where power lies in their hands and they hold a privileged position in that society. They would certainly draw the line at a horizontalist system where they hold no power, privileges or considerable wealth.
       We can only seek freedom and justice outside a system built on, and that relies on, power and wealth, and the privileges grabbed by these conditions.Never the less it is great news that an climate activist has been freed to carry on her fight against this ecologically disastrous system of profit privileges and greed.  Thanks Keith for the link.       

The following from World Review:

         A court ruling in India has delivered an urgent message this week - not just for their country’s own government, but for the world: “In my considered opinion, citizens are conscience keepers of government in any democratic nation,” said the judge. “The offence of sedition cannot be invoked to minister to the wounded vanity of the governments.”
       With these words, the judge released on bail the 22-year-old Indian climate activist, Disha Ravi. Her alleged offence? Editing and sharing an online “toolkit” which advised fellow activists on how to support the country’s farmers’ protests’.
       The protests, which farmers argue are necessary to defend their livelihoods in the face of new laws, have rocked the nation since last summer - becoming a symbol of wider revolt against both deregulated capitalism and state oppression, as Ravinder Kaur has written.
       Ravi’s post was consequently widely shared, including by the Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg. Yet the kickback to the toolkit was also swift: within hours, the hashtag #GretaThunbergExposed was circulating on Twitter, implying the climate campaigner was part of an international conspiracy against India.
       Effigies of Thunberg and other supportive international celebrities were burned in the streets, President Narendra Modi later appeared to echo the sentiment, claiming that some “foreign powers” were engaged in systematic efforts to “malign” the image of Indian tea, while the Delhi police alleged that Ravi was part of a global conspiracy to defame India and stir unrest.
       This week’s court ruling has attempted to squash these dangerous claims: “The freedom of speech and expression include the right to seek a global audience,” added the judge. 

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Showdown.

       We are now being told that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and we will soon emerge from this pandemic. That of course means different things to different people, to the financial mafia, the corporate bosses and their minders, the state, it means get back out there, put on your harness and start grafting to make their tills ring, start sweating to fill their coffers. It will also be their dream that you will go back under worse conditions than before, new contracts stripping away at your rights and conditions, slices off your income, and more unemployed chasing your job, to make you too nervous to demand justice, for fear of joining the unemployed.
      However, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel as an opportunity to restructure the way we live, how we shape society for the benefit of all our people, instead of scratching a survival while we feed the ravenous insatiable appetite of a corrupt parasite class, that has plundered and pillaged the fruits of our labour for generations.
      There will be choices, there will a need for decisions, and we have to be the ones that make these decisions, we have to be the ones who make those choices and they must be for the benefit of all in society. There is no compulsion to go back to the society of gross inequality, injustice and corruption. I'm sure we all have the imagination to visualise a fairer society, to organise resources in a fairer manner. All it takes is the collective power of the people, solidarity among the people, and community organisation. I doubt that there will be a better opportunity than now, for us to come together take control of our lives, and build that better world for all, free from the profit motive and the slavish dictate of "the economy".

        The following is an article by David Graeber published posthumously in the Jacobin. Thanks Tommy for the link. 

 

David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep

        At some point in the next few months, the crisis will be declared over, and we will be able to return to our “nonessential” jobs. For many, this will be like waking from a dream.
      The media and political classes will definitely encourage us to think of it this way. This is what happened after the 2008 financial crash. There was a brief moment of questioning. (What is “finance,” anyway? Isn’t it just other people’s debts? What is money? Is it just debt, too? What’s debt? Isn’t it just a promise? If money and debt are just a collection of promises we make to each other, then couldn’t we just as easily make different ones?) The window was almost instantly shut by those insisting we shut up, stop thinking, and get back to work, or at least start looking for it.
      Last time, most of us fell for it. This time, it is critical that we do not.
      Because, in reality, the crisis we just experienced was waking from a dream, a confrontation with the actual reality of human life, which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.
       How about this: Why don’t we stop treating it as entirely normal that the more obviously one’s work benefits others, the less one is likely to be paid for it; or insisting that financial markets are the best way to direct long-term investment even as they are propelling us to destroy most life on Earth?
     Why not instead, once the current emergency is declared over, actually remember what we’ve learned: that if “the economy” means anything, it is the way we provide each other with what we need to be alive (in every sense of the term), that what we call “the market” is largely just a way of tabulating the aggregate desires of rich people, most of whom are at least slightly pathological, and the most powerful of whom were already completing the designs for the bunkers they plan to escape to if we continue to be foolish enough to believe their minions’ lectures that we were all, collectively, too lacking in basic common sense do anything about oncoming catastrophes.
      This time around, can we please just ignore them?
      Most of the work we’re currently doing is dream-work. It exists only for its own sake, or to make rich people feel good about themselves, or to make poor people feel bad about themselves. And if we simply stopped, it might be possible to make ourselves a much more reasonable set of promises: for instance, to create an “economy” that lets us actually take care of the people who are taking care of us.

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

Keelie 16.

      Once again the wee pocket rocket of radical criticism and info, the Glasgow Keelie is out, its new March edition, issue No.16. now available. Info on the 1911 Singer strike, plight of migrants and asylum seekers, the world's biggest workers strike, and much, much more. Always a valuable and enjoyable read, spread the word, The Glasgow Keelie, make it your paper, send in you stories, grips and criticisms of this system of corruption and inequality that we live under. 

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State Control.

 

          I, like many others have spouted at regular intervals the need to be vigilant as the pandemic diminishes, as the government will do what it can to hold onto the restrictions that it has put in place in the name of controlling the pandemic. The state apparatus always aims at a subservient population, one that sits and waits for government instructions as to when to meet up, where and how many. It has gained this through emergency legislation and will be most reluctant to let that control go, giving the people the right to move as they please, meet where and when they please, and with how many they wish to meet.

       It seems that Priti Patel, she who allegedly shouts and swears at those who work for her, but in doing so has not broken the ministerial code, according to bumbling Boris, now wishes to tighten controls over people's right to protest, giving the police more powers to deal with those who would dare to protest. With in her twisted mind she seems to think that the police, already do not have sufficient powers to go carte-blanche and heavy handed into any protest, with the states blessing, she wishes to hand them more power to stifle our right to public protests.

       This population control is just one of the restrictions that the state will do its damnedest to hold onto and enhance, it is in the nature of the state. Not only must we be vigilant but also ruthless, in the defence of our right to peaceful  and mass protest.  We must also protest in mass and loudly at any attempt to hold onto any of the pandemic restrictions that were introduced as emergency legislation because of the pandemic. Otherwise the few freedoms we do have will vanish into the annals of history. where it will be almost impossible to retrieve them. Freedoms and governments pull in the opposite direction, If you value your freedom, then be prepared to fight for them, the state will not hand them over with a smile. 

 

the following is an extract from the Guardian:       

 

    Concern over the government’s limitation of the right to protest during lockdown continues to mount after it emerged that the home secretary, Priti Patel, is eager to grant police greater powers to control demonstrations once the Covid restrictions are lifted.
       In a letter to HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) Patel wrote that although she appreciates protest is “a cornerstone of our democracy” she wanted to know how the Home Office could help police ensure protests in the future do not impact on “the rights of others to go about their daily business”.
       In a letter to Sir Thomas Winsor, the head of HMICFRS, dated last September but just released under freedom of information laws, Patel wrote: “I would like to know ... what steps the government could take to ensure the police have the right powers and capabilities to respond to protests.”
      Campaign groups such as Liberty argue that police already have extensive powers to control or ban protests and arrest individuals who stray from police-imposed conditions.
       Patel recently described last year’s Black Lives Matter protests as “dreadful” after previously calling them illegal. BLM demonstrators have claimed they were subjected to intimidating police tactics such as kettling, and a report from the monitoring coalition Netpol alleged the policing of the protests was “institutionally racist”.
         Patel’s letter to Winsor has prompted a review by the inspectorate into how effectively the police manage protests.
        Its findings will help Patel prepare a new law to curb protests that it is understood will target those that block parliament or affect judicial hearings, among other criteria.
       There is growing concern that the government has used the pandemic to suffocate protest. Gracie Bradley, the interim director of Liberty, said Covid regulations passed as emergency laws appear to create a blanket ban on organising and attending protests, which was a disproportionate restriction of human rights.
        “It’s a failure to prioritise what is the exercise of a fundamental democratic right and one that is all the more important given the government’s propensity to sideline parliament in the course of dealing with this pandemic,” she said.

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Out Of Control.

         The police in most countries are out of control and all with the blessing of the state. I think the Greek police are at the forefront of this charge to suppress any form of dissent. However the citizens of Greece are not taking this lying down, day in and day out they face this police brutality  for simple protesting a gross act of inhumanity, and stand their ground, we owe them solidarity and support. There is a bond of unity between all police, there has to be a bond of unity between  all citizens seeking that better world for all.

          Athens, Greece: For the 7th time in 7 protests in solidarity to the hunger striker Dimitris Koufodinas, scores of riot policemen tried to spread fear and terror amongst those that dared to raise their voices and their feasts in the air to protest the prisoner’s imminent death, but people stood their ground, as you may see in the video. If Dimitris Koufodinas (on strike since January 8, 2021) dies it will be the first prisoner on hunger strike to die in the European Union, since the death of Bobby Sands on May 5, 1981, in Northern Ireland, under the Margaret Thatcher regime. Dimitris Koufodinas, now 63 years old, is on hunger strike for the last 50 days and has begun a thirst strike too since 23 February. His death is considered imminent. His current demand is to be transferred to Korydallos prison, as well as, an end to these arbitrary interventions against him. Even after 50 days without food and 3 without water, the greek government refuses his right to equal treatment. People that dared to protest in Athens today, 26 February 2021, were, once again, forcefully attacked by scores of policemen for no reason, just for protesting. This is the 7th time in the last few weeks that protests for Koufodinas in Athens city centre have been heavily attacked by riot cops. 

 - The rise of right wing fascism within the greek government -

 Germany: Hundreds march in support of imprisoned Greek militant https://youtu.be/Cu4vY9raz5c Thanks Loam for the link, but where are the others?

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The Crowd.

         What will the end of covid19 bring, will it see the underlying anger of the people explode, will it see the long suffering, exploited and marginalised take to the streets, not to demand change, but to unstoppably create change, in doing so destroy this system of greed, pillage and plunder, that for generations has stunted their lives and that of their children. Or will they humbly submit to more of the same, leaving the rich pampered parasites laughing all the way to their luxury yachts.  

I Am The Crowd.

I am the crowd
I awim in the quagmire of poverty
its hooks, its barbs, tear my flesh
rupture my dreams,
I hold my breath for centuries
hoping to break through, gasp pure air.
Through the murky mire
I see bright things, shiny things sparkle
I see women in fine dresses, men in silk shirts.
I ask myself
why do I swim in this cesspool?
I want the light and warmth of rectitude
to caress my labouring body,
seeds of my dreams to bloom
like wild flowers in a meadow.
one day, I will use my boundless strength
to haul this torn, battered being
out of the morass
onto the warm grassy bank,
when I do;
woe betide you, women in fine dresses
woe betide you mister in your fine silk shirt
should you ever try to get in my way,
for I am the strength of the world,
I am the crowd.

 

The following Lifted from ANARCHISM:

London, the most unregulated city in the world - rich scum particularly welcome ★
“Give me your rich, your greedy,
Your mafia drug-gangs from every corner of the globe
yearning to launder cash,
The people traffickers who exploit the teeming shores.
Send these, the property speculators
who create the city's homeless and drive out the working class.
Bring on the economic power of right-wing churches
To buy up our cinemas, our theatres, and our music venues.
I lift the lamp of the corrupt politician
To illuminate your way!”

   

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

Uncle Willie.

My Uncle Willie.

         To those who know me there will be no doubt in their minds about my hatred of the economic system we bleed under. In my eighties now, I have seen this system destroy individuals, tear families apart, and in its voracious greed for profit and power, it has murdered and maimed countless millions in its endless wars. Each individual destroyed, each family torn apart, each war grave, and each veterans hospital are all indictments against a system where people are sacrificed to keep the system functioning for the benefit of a small cabal of over privileged parasites. You would think that our humanity would demand that the system should be altered, modified and shaped to meet the needs of the the people, not the other way round.
        As we look at this society we can see all around us, those unfortunate individuals whose lives are deeply scarred by a system that uses people to perpetuate its greed driven machinations. It is so easy to encapsulate the ruthless viciousness of the system in one person's life, to me my uncle Willie is such a person. To the system, a nobody, a human being of no significance, but to those around him, a father, a son, a brother, a husband and an uncle.
        My uncle Willie was my mother's younger brother, naturally I didn't know him in his early years, but I heard the stories. Willie, like the rest of my family, lived in Garngad, a Glasgow slum in the north of the city. A young man in his 20’s, he was married and had three kids, and like so many of that era, unemployed. It seems that Willie was a family man and loved his kids, he could be seen most days walking with them along the waste ground off Charles Street at the back of Glenconner Park, usually two kids running in front and the youngest on his shoulders. It seems he was an excellent snooker/billiards player, and that is where he supplemented his income, by playing round the many snooker halls in Glasgow. However to the system, he was superfluous to requirements, so could scrape a living in the slums of Glasgow as best he could. 

 

       Then, suddenly, he is a valuable asset to the system, 1939, WWII starts, and Willie is scooped up and shipped out to Egypt. We no nothing of his experiences there, but after three years there and later his demob, he returned home with malaria, this is when I got to know him, just a little. His shaking hands, the troubled look in his eyes. His return to civilian life didn't get off to a good start, on returning home to his family, of wife and three kids, he discovered that he now had five kids. This was the end of his marriage, the family broke up, and Willie moved from job to job, and his drinking got worse and he eventually couldn't hold a job, he was now an alcoholic and homeless. Moving from homeless hostel to homeless hostel, occasionally staying with family, but his alcoholism made that an ever decreasing possibility.
       I remember my mother, a church goer and anti-drink woman, on many an occasion, looking out the window and saying, “Oh here's Willie coming”, then a pause, then, “he doesn't look too drunk”. He would sit and chat to his big sister and myself, my mother would make him something to eat and give a cup of tea. Though it was never a full cup of tea, his hands were shaking so bad it would have been all over him, she only quarter filled the cup and kept topping it up, it was his troubled eyes that have stuck with me all these years, as he was leaving, my mother would slip a 10 shilling note into his hand. 

 

       Willie spent the rest of his years moving around hostels for the homeless, eventually dying in one down in Ardrossan in his fifties. To me, my uncle Willie epitomises this stinking system, you're a worthless entity, left to rot unless the system needs you, either to make its profits, or to fight its imperialist wars, and your reward for either of these activities, if anything at all, is never anything grand, usually nothing or suffering.

 

The Warmth of a Dream.

 

He lay in a dark doorway, dreamed of home,

night frost locked his joints

morning rain chilled the marrow of his bones.

In the dream there was a sister, 

a pram in a garden, a crowd of youngsters

who called him "mister", a time of little pain.

Are these youngsters the same young men, who

now laugh at him, throw beer cans, 

piss on him as he lies drunk in some dark lane?

When was that first step to no forgiveness.

No will to rise to beg for food,

numbness kills the pain.

The dream brings a warmth that feels good,

dark fog shades out consciousness,

an ambulance carries off a body washed in rain.

 

 

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

Coiled Spring.

        A week or so ago I posted a piece referring to the pent up anger of the people, and likened it to a coiled up spring and sooner or later it will uncurl as all coiled up springs do, and the pent up anger will no longer be a murmuring under current but will become a physical event. A glance across the world and there is a realisation that the coil of anger is already releasing its energy. From Hong Kong to Ecuador people have been taking to the streets in protest at the myriad of injustices, gross inequalities, corruption, police brutality, blatant abuse by those in power and a host of other foul endemic features of this capitalist system.

 

 Spain:  https://www.npr.org/2021/02/19/969320165/protests-continue-in-spain-against-jailing-of-rapper-over-tweets?t=1614269967662

Belarus: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-23/belarus-revolution-women-nina-baginskaya/13164670

Greece: https://www.voanews.com/europe/greek-students-teachers-defy-weeklong-ban-protests

Europe: https://carnegieeurope.eu/2021/01/27/europeans-right-to-protest-under-threat-pub-83735

South America: https://www.brinknews.com/why-is-latin-america-aflame-with-protests/

      And of course the little reported largest workers strike in the world ever.

India:  https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/51024/Indian+farmers+join+mass+action+after+Modi+government+attacks%C2%A0

 

        However, where is the anger of the people of UK, still murmuring below the surface, what little act will cause the UK pent up coil of anger to explode? 

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

State Barbarity.

        Not that long ago two prisoners died on hunger strike in one of Turkey's many prisons. A vicious and inhumane set of circumstances that we expect from a deluded dictator like Erdogan. However, here in the EU, that self proclaimed, bastion of democracy such barbarity should be unthinkable, it is forty years since a prisoner died in a European prison due to the intransigence of the state to a hunger striker's requests. That is shortly about to change as the Greek state, probably the most right wing state apparatus in Europe, sits back and lets Dimitris Koufontinas die a slow agonising death after 45 days of hunger strike. Greece, like all other states, consider its authoritarian system and its package of enforced legislation, as more valuable than the life of a citizen.
      Of course the people in that patch of soil called Greece, don't take such savage barbarity lying down, and they deserve all the support and solidarity we can muster, as the face down this murderous act by the state.  

The following from Act For Freedom Now:

           “They follow you secretly and openly gangs and torturers and search
day and night to find you but there is no trail to follow because they
were never poets to worship the soil they tread on” 

           On the night of Friday 5/2 we placed an incendiary device in one of the entrances to the courts of Evelpidon (specifically that of the lawyers) wanting to support the struggle of the hunger striker Dimitris Koufontinas. The attack on the central structures of the judiciary is a response to a very clear political choice. The central governmental authority in direct collaboration with the representatives of civil justice is leading to the comrade’s death or at best to irreparable damage to his health. This political decision to assassinate Dimitris Koufontinas cannot go unanswered. Violating even their own legal tools, first legislating an photographic device to remove him from the agricultural prison now they are denying him the obvious, his transfer to Korydallos prison.
         The whole bourgeoisie and especially its head viciously and vigorously seeks the physical extermination of one of its political opponents, whose contribution to class struggles and to the appropriation of revolutionary violence by the oppressed, deeply challenged the omnipotence of the State beast and practically challenged its monopoly of violence.
         Their own murderous insistence must be answered with our comradely and fighters’ solidarity. We call on every part of the movement to sharpen its action and stand as a bulwark against the murder of the hunger striker. Dimitris Koufontinas is a link in the chain of the history of the revolutionary movement and part of our struggles. With this action we declare to his tormentors, blinded by authoritarian arrogance, that they must seriously consider the political costs that they will be called upon to manage if they attempt to murder the comrade.
Victory to the hunger strike of the revolutionary communist Dimitris Koufontinas

Cell of anarchist attack

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

Cesspool.

        So health secretary Hancock acted unlawfully while dishing out government contracts, and a government contract given to his neighbour is being investigated, while Boris's chum Cummings, say that the fact that two of his mates got a government contract had nothing to do with him. Sort of makes you hold your nose, doesn't it? These are just the ones that come to light at the moment, but we all know that the handing out of government contracts during this pandemic has been a wonderful opportunity to throw taxpayers money at the rich and powerful friends of Her Majesty's Government. Let's not be to harsh in singling out Hancock, he is just one of an army of greed driven parasites that hold the reigns of power.
       Hancock, of course says that what he and his cronies did was the right thing in the circumstances. So in his eyes it's alright to act unlawfully if you think it is the right thing to do in the circumstances. Boy does that open the door for lots of our actions at protests and direct actions etc. If you find your self in court after protesting against injustice, you can claim the "Hancock" defence, it was necessary under the circumstances. He gets off with that defence, why not you.
        Of course we all know that's not how it works, there is one law for you and another for that wee bunch of powerful parasites. Let's face it, this society with its power and privileges for the wealthy is nothing more than a suppurating cesspool, which is poisoning all walks of life. It is pointless to call for Hancock or those of his ilk, to be replaced, as they will just be replaced with another one of the "Old Boys" network.

 

        The ordinary people have to be ruthless and completely drain and demolish that cesspool, forget trying to clean it up, that has never worked in the past and it will never work in the future. It may be difficult, but we have the road map, it's called "Anarchism" 

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

 

Coiled Spring.

 

       One of our government pundits stated that the economy was like a coiled spring, and would bounce up quickly. I believe that the underlying anger of the people is like a coiled spring, and that as this lockdown and pandemic comes to an end, and unemployment and slashed working conditions start to make their mark, that anger in the coiled spring will be released. In so doing it will bounce up and reverse that submissive attitude that has affected all our actions like a thick gum. Some of the coils are already releasing their energy, all for different aspects of this type of society. Spain, against the arrest of rapper, Pablo Hasél, in India, the largest strike in the world, because of the government pushing its neo-liberal free market policies. There may be different reasons but the anger is there and will thrust itself up like that released coiled spring.

     There will be plenty to vent that anger on, child poverty, homelessness, unemployment, inhumane treatment of migrants, police brutality against public protests, the privatisation of the the NHS and other public assets, and the myriad of population controls introduced during the pandemic, which our lords and masters will attempt to retain. Then of course there will be the anger against the oncoming austerity engineered to pay back the billions handed to their corporate friends, to keep their luxury yachts well stocked. 

       We should never pull back from showing our anger at the injustice and inequality that is the bed rock of the capitalist exploitation system. What we must try to do is link up all this anger with that of other countries, we must organise across borders. Our corporate overlords, are well versed in that cross border organising, in conjunction with the various states. The ordinary people of this world must never recognise borders, we are all in the same struggle against the same state backed corporate juggernaut. Only unity across these imaginary lines will end this world of wars, exploitation, injustice and inequality. Let's release that coiled spring of anger, and in the words of an old Korean saying, "Enjoy the ecstasy of your righteous anger".

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

Bailout Scam.

        How long will it be before the public at large get really pissed off with being shafted generation after generation? In this capitalist system the bigger you are the less you play by the rules. In capitalism, when a small business runs into financial difficulties, it goes bust. However if you are a very large capitalist business, and you run into difficulties, then there is every chance that the government will bail you out with tax payers money. This is not new due to the pandemic, it is standard practice and has been for generations. The pandemic has just opened the sluice valves that bit wider. Of course it is not just happening here in the UK, it's part and parcel of the capitalist system the world over. America is probably where the largest hand over of tax payers money to big businesses is happening.  

 

 

        Here in the UK we try to mimic the U$A in this bailout scam.  

    While SMEs struggle to gain access to government-backed loans, large corporations have already been bailed out to the tune of approximately £7.5bn via the Bank of England’s newly created Covid Corporate Financing Facility – and it’s all being hidden from public view. ------
----- The most concerning aspect about the CCFF however, is that neither the Bank of England nor the Treasury are being transparent about which corporations have access to the facility. The Bank explicitly states that “the names of issuers and securities purchased or eligible will not be made public” and recipient companies are even required to sign a confidentiality agreement regarding their participation in the scheme.
       A few companies however have seemingly broken this agreement by publicly announcing the support they’ve received through the CCFF. This includes EasyJet, Redrow, and Greggs who have secured £600m, £300m, and £150m respectively. With these sums amounting to £1.5bn, that leaves another £6bn already doled out to some of Britain’s biggest businesses completely in secret. 

       This is just the tip of the bailout iceberg, and all this while the NHS is struggling for more staff, equipment and funding, councils are slashing services to local communities and vulnerable groups are flounder in a morass of  poverty stricken services and facilities, and food banks grow by the day. It is glaringly and blatantly obvious that we the real wealth creators in society, are being plunder and pillaged by the rich and powerful, through the auspices of Her Majesty's Government, yet we tolerate this generation after generation, while watching the ever growing poverty among our children, why? 

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

Profit & Misery.

           I wonder when we will grab the bull by the horns and create a civilised society, a society where the locking people up in cages is finally recognised as barbaric and inhumane. When will we see a society where the only reference to this savage activity is in our history books.
         The fact that these degrading institutions are more and more being run by large corporations for profit, makes them even more unacceptable to civilised people. Inflicting misery and violence on fellow humans for corporate gain condemns them beyond the pale. Profit will always strip away at conditions, making prisons even more damaging to the mental and physical health of those caught up in this human crushing machine. In these inhuman institutions there is never enough money for medical care, security and profit come first. So it comes as no surprise that there have been approximately 260 people infected with covid19 in Kilmarnock prison. This particular human degradation institution is run by SERCO, a company that is no stranger to useing human misery to enhance its profit margins. Apart from prisons, Serco have been grabbing a slice of public money to harvest a profit from the misery of migrants.
        As long as we follow the economic madness of the capitalist system, making money from human misery will be an acceptable method of enhancing shareholders' bank accounts. If we dare to call ourselves civilised, then we have to erase any possibility of this type of enterprise entering the human chain of thought. A civilised society will only grow from the dust of demolished prisons and an end to the profit motive.

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