Glasgow, George Square, the forenoon of Sunday 3rd. May, a drab wet and cold day, lousy for this time of year, but the array of colourful banners and colourful umbrellas, painted a different picture. It was Glasgow's official May Day march, and despite the lousy weather, by my estimate, I would say that 500+ turned out to brave the rain and the cold. Think what a wonderful turn-out there would have been had the sun been kind to us. They were lead off by a brass band and the usual banners, were held aloft by soaking wet arms, well done.
Tomorrow, Sunday 3rd. May, Glasgow's "official sanctioned" May Day march and rally will gather at George Square at 11:00am and form up and march off at 11:30. The march will make its way through the city to O2 centre on the south side of the city. Let's make this a big one, get there, bring the kids, banners whistles and your hopes and dreams of a better world for all.
In the UK there are killings by the police, and rightfully, there is an outcry of anger when ever they occur, one, is one too many. However, the figures of police killings here in the UK, look almost saint like when compared to those in that land of the free, the Good ol' US of A. This giant that stomps about the world bombing people into democracy, sees more of its citizens killed by its law enforcement officers than any other country in the developed world. Here in the UK, from 1920 to 2014, 46 people have died at the hands of the police. Shocking and unacceptable.
However, in America the average appears to be 1,000 a year, killed by its law enforcements officers, I wonder how this compares with its hoopin' and howlrin' days of the Wild West? How can that be acceptable in a so called civilised country. Looking at the out break of violent protests over the most recent US police killing, and then considering these figures, I'm surprised that there is any peace on the streets of America, any day of the week. The US government ranks up the fear of terrorism, yet Since 9/11, foreign-inspired terrorism has claimed about two dozen
lives in the United States. Compare that to 1,000 a year by the US police forces. Obviously the government is looking in the wrong places if it claims to be protecting the American people. There is something rotten at the heart of America.
It turns out that record keeping on this subject tends to be a bit makeshift but that 1,000 deaths-by-police is not a crazy number. 1,000. In a year. I can’t get my mind to ingest that number. In Great Britain, the usual number, per year, seems to be zero. Give or take one? Germany reported 8 deaths by police service weapons in a two-year period. In Canada, well, I read a bunch of reports like this one, but I never got a hard number. I think if you said a dozen a year, you wouldn’t get much argument. 1,000. I’m in shock. We really have to look at this. To pretend that calling
attention to it amounts to some kind of verbal war against police is
ridiculous.
May 1st. May Day in Glasgow this year, was as usual, a friendly and good humoured affair, with a bonus this year, the weather wasn't bad at all. It is always good to meet up with friends, comrades and acquaintances that we have all been too busy to meet up with on a regular basis. The usual groups were there, IWW, Glasgow A. Fed, Glasgow Anarchist Collective, Solfed, Faslane Peace Camp, and others, with a good scattering of black and red and black flags waving it the chill breeze. Lots of literature was handed out and sold, and lots of chats with the passing public. All these activities were well received by that public looking for a change to this brutal system that hits them with nothing but austerity and promises of more austerity, while the rich get richer.
Sunday, May 3rd. will see the Glasgow "official" May Day march and rally, gather at George Square 11.00am, setting off at 11:30am, marching through the city to the O2 centre on the Southside of the city. Hope to see you all there for another show of working class pride.
Some photos from Glasgow's Friday May 1st. May Day:
The outpouring by the babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, on the refugee situation in the Mediterranean, does the usual thing, poor refugees, we do our best, but these people smugglers are evil and we must deal with them harshly. We seldom hear of the main cause of this mass movement of people. Are we to believe that these evil people smugglers go around kidnapping people and shipping them out to Europe against their will? Or is there another reason for this humanitarian crisis? Why are there masses of people looking for any means available to escape the tragedy that is most of Africa today. A look at what has become of North Africa, the whole of the Middle East, and Afghanistan, and try to deny that Western foreign policy has not a very large part to play in the making of this crisis.
We have destroyed the infrastructure of these countries for nothing more than wealth and power, we have walked away and left the people in dire poverty and ruins, and unleashed a landscape of warlords, and faction fighting. We then spend billions of Euros doing our damnedest to keep those same people out of our slice of the cake, a cake made with the help of their resources. Imperialism is alive and well today, power blocks take what resources they want from other countries. Just as the British Empire raped and pillaged its way across the planet under the Union flag, today the process of imperialism continues, under the banner of “Western democracy”.
------Refugees are pushed out of their home countries by pillaging
neocolonial economy, conflicts fuelled by the seller of weapons,
environmental disasters included in the cost of the European wealth, and
finally imperialist invasions, and often have no choice but to flee in
the direction of ‘European paradise’. The increasing stratification,
hunger, poverty and fear motivate them to walk through deserts, passing
oceans, and clinging to aircraft wheels, often submitting themselves
under organized smugglers mafias. Frontex’ activities only add more
kilometers and obstacles; without breaking Europe’s hegemony and its
neo-colonial policies the determination, which families and sometimes
entire villages rely on, of those people will never be reduced. Usually tragedies are happening far away from the eyes of Europeans,
but their scale, with an increase in the number of refugees (eg related
to the events of the Arab Spring, the massacre of Afghanistan, the
Syrian and Ukrainian war), had grown so much that it is impossible to
keep ignoring them. Mass drowning off the coast of Italy and assaults on
the borders of Ceuta and Melilla, death on the Evros minefields and
barbed wire of the Bulgarian border are just a few examples of the
tragedied, which become increasingly larger and more frequent as the
social crisis in neighboring countries deepens. The crisis, which often
is the result of European foreign policy, economic colonization or
direct military intervention.--------
April 30th. last day of National Poetry Month, so I thought I might finish it off with a bang. As usual one of my own, but a couple of others I like, and a wee film about Herbert Read, anarchist poet, writer, and art critic.
First one by Herbert Read on the fascist bombing of Spain during the Spanish civil war.
Bombing Casualties In Spain.
Dolls' faces are rosier but these are children
their eyes not glass but gleaming gristle
dark lenses in whose quicksilver glances
the sunlight quivered. These blenched lips
were warm onceand bright with blood
but blood
held in moist bleb of flesh
not split and spatter'd in tousled hair.
In these shadowy tresses
red petals did not always
thus clot and blacken to scar.
These are dead faces.
wasps' nests are not so wanly waxen
wood embers not so greyly ashen.
They are laid out in ranks
like paper lanterns that have fallen
after a night of riot
extinct in the dry morning air.
Herbert Read.
Familiarity Breeds Contempt.
Now television has allowed the proles
to have a look at the eminent,
we sans-culottes can scan with great intent
their skins for pimples, wens and blackhead-holes,
quite pleased to find they too have scars and moles
just like the more plebian element.
Such epidermal flaws on dame and gent
bring the Mob close to those with Higher Goals.
Now we're all privileged to watch a lord
waggling his eyebrows or large moustache.
You don't get worried till They start to speak
and now that none of them has ssaid a word
worth listening to. What earns them all that cash?
Homelessness is part and parcel of capitalism, and the idea that somehow capitalism will sort the problem out, to me is naive. In this society, shortages mean higher prices, more profit, solve the shortage and you see an end to increasing prices, not good for capitalism. There always has to be demand to feed their insanity of perpetual growth. Everything they make has to become obsolete quickly, so that there is a demand for the next, “better”, “improved” “thing”. Think who gains from ever increasing house prices and ever increasing rents? Think of the money that pours through that “industry”. What would happen to that golden goose if everybody had a decent home?
Tomorrow morning around 93,000 children will wake up as homeless, they will be scattered around in B&Bs and hostels, and often find themselves moving from place to place, an invisible army of damaged children, victims of capitalism and its insane policies of profit before people.
Appealing for solutions to this problem from a bunch of very rich, pampered politicians, who are managers of this insane system, is asking the wolves to guard the sheep. The rules of the game are not set up to see that everybody gets their needs attended to, it is to amass as much wealth as possible in the hands of those who control the system. What pittance comes our way is grudgingly given after a struggle, and the corporate world, with the aid of the financial Mafia, is always trying to take it all back again. What quality of life we have, is not the fruits of capitalism, it is what we have managed to wrestle from the controllers of the system. We may create all the wealth in this world, but we allow it to be syphoned up to the parasite class that has its hands on the levers of power.
So if your running to the ballot box to try to solve the problem of those 93,000 homeless children, then take it from me, you'll be running to the ballot box next time round to try to solve the same problem. Meanwhile, those 93,000 damaged children will be growing up to be 93,000 damaged people, with another invisible army of homeless children marching behind them.
