ISRAELI TERROR ON THE HIGH SEAS

          The death toll after the Israeli assault on the Gaz aid flotilla is now
reported to be over 20. The attack took place in international waters, making it a major violation of international law. Imagine the response if such an attack had been carried out by Iran. We would now be at war.
      Below is athe press release issued by Stop the War earlier, calling for the
British government to condemn the attack and to break links with Israel.

See the Stop the War website for links to videos of the Israeli attack:
http://bit.ly/aEMHws

     Please use all means you can — by email, text, Facebook, Twitter, phone — to publicise today’s emergency demonstration.

EMERGENCY DEMONSTRATION TODAY
MONDAY 31 MAY 2.00PM DOWNING STREET LONDON

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ISRAELI VIOLENCE.

 

ISRAELIS KILL TEN  STORMING GAZA FLOTILLA
EMERGENCY DEMONSTRATION TODAY
MONDAY 31 MAY 2.00PM DOWNING STREET LONDON
SPREAD THE WORD

          Yet another act of Israeli barbarism as its forces storm one of the seven ships on the international flotilla taking aid to Gaza, where Israel’s illegal siege is starving Palestinians of essential resources. At least ten activists on board have been killed by Israeli forces.
      Please join the emergency demonstration today if you can. Publicise it as widely as possible.

     See video of Israeli assault from Turkish television: http://bit.ly/aKExFf
For updates see: http://http://bit.ly/bg5gIu

CONTACT FOREIGN SECRETARY WILLIAM HAGUE & YOUR MP

PROTEST TO FOREIGN SECRETARY WILLIAM HAGUE:   
EMAIL:http:// msu.correspondence@fco.gov.uk

AND/OR http://private.office@fco.gov.uk

AND MSU.PublicIn@fco.gov.uk   
LETTER TO: 
William Hague MP,

 Foreign Secretary,

 King Charles Street,

London, SW1A  2AH

CONTACT YOUR MP:

http://findyourmp.parliament.uk/ Ask him/her to contact Hague on your behalf

CONTACT DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER NICK CLEGG 
EMAIL: cleggn@parliament.uk
LETTER TO: Nick Clegg MP, House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA

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STATISTICS AND LIES.

 

I thought the 80’s were wonderful.

 

         Ah, those glorious eighties!! A period between 1979 and 1994, when it was claimed that average earnings rose by 40%, of course this gives a very distorted figure. If we look at the richest 10% of the population the growth in income was approximately 68%. On the other hand if we look at the poorest 10% their incomes grow by a mere 10% before housing costs and actually fell by 8% after housing costs. What a wonderful time to be among the richest 10%.

           Under capitalist labour/conservative governments this country has always had more than its fair share of poverty. The last thirty years the poverty has been considerable and what this means to the lives of all those affected by this poverty is immeasurable. It leads of course to poor maternal nutrition, risking unhealthy babies, we have the young unable to afford a healthy diet, with housing and jobs out of their reach, pensioners dying of hypothermia. Then there is the poverty related ill health pushing the national health service to breaking point. Let’s not forget poverty related crime and the effects it has on peoples’  lives.

           All this adds up to billions more than it would cost to implement a decent living wage for all, but this is capitalism and it is not the welfare of the people that matters, it’s profit. So wages must be kept to a minimum to keep the shareholders happy. Tinkering with minimum wages and such will not get rid of the deprivation, it is the system that is rotten and doesn’t work for the benefit of all our people. It is a winner take all and to hell with the hindmost system that benefits the small band of parasites at the top. Keep the system, keep the poverty.

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A SLIP OF THE TONGUE???

        

          Recently in a TV interview Ian Duncan Smith made a statement that perhaps displays the way his class actually think of ordinary people. He was referring to people on incapacity benefit and he said that many on incapacity benefit, “could be worked.” It is much the same way that  farmer would refer to his horse or his sheep dog, a possession to be worked, not a person with equal rights. Was it a slip of the tongue, where is that Freud book??

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WESTMINSTER HOUSE OF HYPOCRISY.

 

       You have to hand it to them for arrogance. Our nice new shiny young millionaire Chancellor of the Exchequer made a statement recently in which he said, “—the age of plenty is over–”. Of course he wasn’t talking about his friends in his millionaire/billionaire club. No, you see their plenty will still go on and on at our expense, and as for us, who never had the plenty in the first place, well our imaginary plenty is all over, again. The stench of hypocrisy coming from the Westminster House of Corruption is overpowering. When that place is in session you probably have the largest collection of millionaires sitting in one room than anywhere else in the country. They will sit and in all seriousness discuss the need to tighten belts and get used to the age of plenty being over. They will point out how wages will have to be frozen or cut, how services will have to be decimated, while they resent having somebody looking over their extortionate expenses claims. They will continue their champagne dinners and retreat to their summer residence in some leafy idyllic spot, leaving us to get on with the poverty and deprivation.

          The decisions of this millionaires’ club will heap untold misery on thousands, while they will be rewarded by their friends in the corporate world for their part in depressing the wages in this country. How much unemployment? Well the Fraser of Allander Institute at Strathclyde University has come up with a figure of 60,000 job losses in the Scottish public sector alone. Professor Brian Ashcroft, policy director of that institute stated, “The public probably don’t realise what we we’re facing. We are set to see a cut in spending unprecedented in recent history.” Though I can accept the learned Professor’s figures, I’m inclined to think that it is an underestimate. It is the “WE” part that I take offence with. All the top paid academics and the millionaires’ club at Westminster keep uttering the word “WE” when there is no real connection between their lifestyle and that of the ordinary people. This is to create the impression that there is some relationship between the lifestyles of the two classes, that we have something in common. “WE” have nothing in common with “THEM”, their decisions will hurt us, it will in no way hurt them. Do they have the right to inflict a such pain and deprivation on others while they themselves lap up the luxuries of a parasitical lifestyle? Does anybody? If, as they keep saying, “we’re all in this together,” well let’s start sharing all the wealth of the nation to see to the needs of all the people, as well as all sharing the burden. As a democracy perhaps they will let us, the people, vote on that suggestion. However, I’m not holding my breath on that one.

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WHY WAIT FOR HISTORY’S VERDICT??

 

        

         It is obvious that when historians come to write about the capitalist era it will be written up as a dreadful failure for humanity. They will be able to write about the fact that at its period of highest development, approximately one third of the world’s population were well fed, one third were hungry and one third were starving. They will be able to detail the misery of those fifteen million children who died of hunger every year. In their learned papers they will catalogue the enormous wealth poured into unbelievable destructive weaponry and they will calculate that in the midst of all that hunger and starvation, the price of one missile could have supplied 100 nutritional meals every day for five years. No doubt their findings will also include that to feed this grotesque beast of privilege and greed it was necessary to pollute and plunder the earth’s resources to the extent of destroying the planet’s ecosystem. Their conclusions will obviously be that it was a cruel, vicious, unjust, hypocritical and unnecessary system inflicted on the population of the planet by a small band of greedy, power hungry, over privileged parasites.

           Why do we have to wait for the historians verdict? We are now aware of the type of system that has been created and the misery that it inflicts on vast swaths of the world’s population. We know that the greatest benefits go to the smallest group, a useless, pampered bunch of parasites. We also know that it is a man made system, not something written in tablets of stone. It is well within our power and our imagination to dismantle this abomination of greed and hypocrisy, and replace it with a system of mutual aid. A system based on free association, voluntary co-operation and sustainability that sees to the needs of all our people, a system freed from the greed driven motif of profit.

        We have the imagination, the ability, and the resources, all we lack is the will.

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GENERALS RULE.

 

          It appears that General David Petraeus, Commander of US Central Command issued secret orders last September, allowing the Pentagon to engage in espionage and reconnaissance throughout the Middle East and the Horn of Africa without regular congressional oversight or prior approval from the White House. This encompasses friend and foe lumped into the one package. So, can America claim to be a democracy now that its Generals can conduct their own form of foreign policy. A policy that interferes in the internal affairs of its sovereign allies?

          Of course those who are in anyway informed will be well aware that America has been for some considerable time, governed by a military/corporate plutocracy. It is an imperialist power that rides roughshod over friends and foe alike in its quest for control over the planets resources.

        Every four years the American public are granted the privilege of voting to see which bunch of millionaires/billionaires and their cabal of Generals/oil barons will have the privileged seat of power. This will decide which of the corporate moguls will get the cream and which will have to play second fiddle. However, the American people, like those in the other developed capitalist countries, will always remain at the bottom of the heap and for some strange reason they will continue to applaud their parasitical masters.

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GOVERNED BY PARASITES.

 

         As our new government sit down with their glasses of wine discussing how they can cut the living standards of the ordinary people, they will also be making rumbling noises about, us all being in this together. They will be discussing cuts to health, education, social services, social benefits, pensions, council budgets and all this will be tied in with higher unemployment. They will bleat about it being necessary and we will all need to tighten our belts.

          However, we should be aware of a few facts, not one of those working hard to implement these savage cuts to our standard of living will in any way be affected by those cuts. You see, our new cabinet is really a cabal of extremely rich individuals. Our two public school boys at the helm are part of a cabinet that has in its little cosy circle no less than 25 millionaires!! Can you see them doing anything that might hurt their positions of wealth and power in an attempt to help the lot of the ordinary people? Do they even understand the problems of the ordinary people? Do they really care??

        You can rest assured that they will be working hard to safeguard their own positions of wealth, power and privilege. They will be working in conjunction with their rich millionaire/billionaire friends from Cameron’s cousin the Queen to his buddy Lord Ashcroft, making sure that the wealth continues to travel up the way into their sweaty little hands and we continue to slavishly accept our position of humble, subservient workforce. They will of course every four years or so give us the privilege of changing which millionaires will preside over the transfer of wealth in the usual upwards fashion.

          Surely we must all be nuts to accept such a ludicrous situation. We live in perpetual struggle producing all that this planet has and they sit on top of us licking up the cream. These parasites need us to maintain their position of wealth, power and privilege, we, on the other hand do not need them to produce a thing. It is our world, we have earned it by the blood,  sweat and tears of our ancestors, all we need is the will and the courage to take it back.

ann arky’s home.

 

WHERE ARE YOUR COMMON GOODS GOING?

 

        

      Culture and Sport Glasgow workers from unions Unison, Unite, BECTU and GMB will be striking on Friday 28 May and Monday 31 May. This is a continuation of the fight from the strikes on the April 30 and May 6.         

      Strikers will again be picketing major Culture and Sport Glasgow holdings across the city, including Kelvingrove Museum, the People’s Palace and the Burrell Collection.

       Strikers are protesting because CS Glasgow is: 

– cutting all overtime payments to single time;

– downgrading some jobs to impose pay cuts of £500 – £2,000 per year;

– ending premium rates for work on six public holidays.

Strikers would appreciate solidarity at the pickets.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

      [Scottish Artists Union] Solidarity with those protesting Culture & Sport Glasgow cuts.   Posting Date: 14-05-2010

      As industrial action by employees of Culture & Sport Glasgow continues the SAU expresses its support of the work being done by BECTU, GMB,Unison and Unite. We know that many Glasgow-based artists rely upon jobs within CSG venues as a source of crucial supplementary income. Not nly are the pay cuts and reduced hours proposed by CSG an attack on the well-being of these workers and their families, they risk leaving the population of the city culturally impoverished.

 

 

http://http://www.sau.org.uk/newsroom/readnews.php

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POVERTY EVERYWHERE.

     

       Recent government figures show the extent of poverty in this, one of the richest nations on the planet. The previous government set the target of cutting in half by 2010 the number of people living in poverty. It miserably failed, the figures for 2008/09 show the number of people in this country living in poverty amounted to 10.9 million, 18% of the population. A marginal decrease from the previous year. Of course in this rich capitalist country, working does not necessarily mean that you lead the good life. You can be employed and still need to have your income topped up by taxpayers money, in fact we are subsidising your employer who fails to pay you a living wage. This sink of poverty is spread across the full spectrum of the population, taking in children, adults and pensioners.

         The number of children living in poverty in this country is a staggering 2.8 million, 22% of the child population of the country. Pensioners after their life of working producing the wealth of this country come out no better. 18% of pensioner couples, 18% of single male pensioners and a shameful 25% of single female pensioners are all struggling in that sink of poverty.

         If those with their rose tinted glasses expect to see the manicured twins now in charge, wave a magic wand and make poverty disappear, they are going to be miserably disappointed. With the cut and slash plans they are spouting, what we can expect is a revisit to the Victorian era. Ask yourself, when has this rich capitalist country ever been rid of poverty? What makes you think that keeping the same capitalist system that has mired millions in poverty will somehow transform itself into a benevolent system that will see to the needs of all?

          We don’t need a change of faces at No.10, we don’t need a pair of photogenic, privileged public school boys to fiddle about with some figures, making sure that the wealth stays right where it is at the moment. NO, we need a complete change of system, an end to the free market capitalist winner take all and to hell with the hindmost. We need to organise to take control of our communities, work places and assets, and organise society so that we can see to the needs of all our people,. We need to build a society based on mutual aid, free association, voluntary co-operation and sustainability. We either do that, or we face a future of more poverty for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren.

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BIG BROTHER IS HERE!!!

 

       

       In Britain today we are a nation of the observed, there is one cctv camera for every 14 people, making a total of 4.2 million cameras watching you go about your business, more than any other country in the world. It is not unusual for an individual to be captured on more than 300 cameras on one day. There are now plans to to expand the capacity to read vehicle number plates from an amazing 35 million per day to 50 million by 2008.

         You are also being recorded in other forms, the national database holds more than 3.5 million profiles of individuals. Since 2002 there have been more than 8 million criminal records checks on those applying for jobs. By the end of 2002 law enforcement bodies had made more than 400,000 requests for data from mobile network operators. Last year to April, 631 adults and 5,751 juveniles had been electronically tagged.

         We have kids being fingerprinted at school on the pretext that it makes it easier for them to use the library, (how did you use the libraries in the past?) and some schools using palm prints for ID.

           Is your personal data safe, the simple answer is NO. As more and more private companies enter the security field the sharing of data becomes more widespread, the more it is shared the more it leaks into other hands, plus data is valuable on a commercial basis and companies will pay good money for information about you and what you get up to.

           At present there are 216 catalogue companies in the UK that are part of the Abacus data-sharing consortium with information on more than 26 million people. All this available to those how have the money to pay. You can also rest assured that there are lots of other organisations collecting your details to sell to the big companies, if there’s a profit in it, somebody will do it. .

          It is all about control, control of you and me, that’s why the state backs every one of these activities. To know where you are, should you be there, have you permission to move to another point, are you doing what you should be doing at that given time, and all verifiable and therefore can be enforced. Such activity is repugnant to any society that professes to be free, this society is obviously not free. Until we dismantle the state and all its attendant apparatus and replace it with a system of free association, voluntary co-operation and mutual aid, the growth of this type of activity is inevitable. Use your imagination, think where can it further expand to in you personal life, perhaps your living room? Big brother would like that!!

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THE BRITISH IMPERIAL STATE, A BENEFACTOR??

       

          We should always know our history, it gives us a more accurate picture of the world we live in and the injustices perpetrated in the name of power. The imperialist power struggle goes on with the corporate world leading the charge backed up by its minder the state apparatus. Today the battle for the ordinary people is still the state and its bed partner the corporate world.

         Britain’s Imperial history is always portrayed as a force for good, a paternal approach. Taking care of the colonies for their own good, a civilising process until they were able to look after themselves. Of course those who know their history are fully aware that the reality is a far different scenario.

      Mike Davis’s book, Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, details famines that killed between 12 million and 29 million inhabitants of the Indian continent. He clearly shows that these people were murdered by the British state. When the drought of 1876 impoverished the farmers of the Deccan plateau India had a net surplus of rice and wheat. The then viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should stand in its way as it was exported to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices”. The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

         As millions died, the imperial government launched “a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought”. This collected tax, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government’s export policies manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, in spite of the fact that they had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m people died.

         The same type of imperialist policies are still employed today by the western corporate world. The continents of Africa and South America can bear witness to the poverty inflicted on millions of people to feed the corporate greed machine. Only when we as ordinary people come together and organise at community level and co-operate with each other on a global scale creating societies based on mutual aid and sustainability, undermining the festering marriage of state and corporate greed and so consigning it and its wars, exploitation and greed, that is part and parcel of that system, to the dust bin of history and perhaps remembering it as man’s darkest hour will we see a world fit for all our children and grandchildren.

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Justice for Aafia Siddiqui

 

Public meeting,

6:30pm, Saturday 22nd May, Augustine Church,

41 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1EL

Speakers:  Aamer Anwar, Mujahid Islam 

Organised by SACC and the Muslim Women’s Association of Edinburgh

       Dr Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani woman who has lived and studied in America. She  is currently Prisoner Number 90279-054 in New York’s Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Centre.

        In 2003  Aafia “disappeared” along with her three children while visiting her mother in Pakistan. Evidence now shows that she was “Prisoner 650” in the notorious Bagram. As a US Detainee she was given no rights to question her treatment and has suffered physical and mental torture.

       In 2008  she was taken to the US to stand trial. After all the investigations done on her, the only thing they charged her with was “assaulting and attempted murder of US personnel in Afghanistan” while she was in prison. She was convicted in March 2010 on flimsy evidence. 

In the Brooklyn Detention Centre she is being denied phone calls and letters while she awaits sentencing (scheduled for 16 August). This is inhuman and she is becoming very ill.  

       SACC is a member of the Justice for Aafia Coalition, an umbrella body of organisations campaigning for the release and return to Pakistan of Aafia Siddiqui and for the opening of a full investigation into the circumstances of her detention and the fate of her children. We are also demanding that while Aafia Siddiqui remains in US custody she must be treated humanely. The humiliating and degrading strip and cavity searches must stop. She must be allowed contact with her family. She must be allowed letters, phone calls, visits and reading material. 

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT??

 

          … consent is always compromised by force; the mere existence of effective force dedicated to some end constitutes coercion toward that end, whatever you may think or want. If I consent to abide by the law when that law is enforced by a huge body of men with guns and clubs, it is never clear, to say the least, whether my consent is genuine or not. … It will always be prudent for me, under such circumstances, to simulate consent, and there are no clear signs by which a simulation could be distinguished from a genuine consent in such a case. That I am enthusiastic in my acquiescence to your overwhelming capacity for violence—that I pledge my allegiance according to formula, sing patriotic songs and so on—does not entail that I am not merely acquiescing. … [T]he mere existence of an overwhelming force by which the laws will be enforced compromises conceptually the possibility of voluntarily acceding to them. Or put it this way: the power of government, constituted by hypothesis under contract, by which it preserves the liberties and properties of its citizens, is itself conceptually incompatible with the very possibility of their consent. (50-51)

Crispin Sartwell.      Against the State, Page 50/51

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THE BRITISH STATE AND ITS EMISSARIES.

         This is an old post of mine but I think it is always a good idea to remind ourselves of our imperial masters’ history and to remind ourselves that it is still going on in the usual brutal fashion but with more powerful weapons and greater resources. 

         Three recent books – Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis – show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise – some of them violently – against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder – more than a million -were held in “enclosed villages”. Prisoners were questioned with the help of “slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes”. British soldiers used a “metal castrating instrument” to cut off testicles and fingers. “By the time I cut his balls off,” one settler boasted, “he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket.” The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked “provided they were black”. Elkins’s evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had “failed to halt” when challenged.

           Extract from The Guardian, Tuesday December 27 2005.

         The history of British Imperialism is littered with such horrors, as is all the empires of the past. Today we have the new imperialism, American Imperialism and its more recent history in South America, Afghanistan and the Middle East show that it is following in true brutal and ruthless imperialist fashion.

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