Posts tagged austerity

Austerity Is Death By Another Name. 11:14 am / 24 November 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.



       When that babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, report on the Greek “crisis”, it is always about bailouts, debt, and need for greater “austerity”. What, seldom if ever, gets a mention is the death factor in all this financial Mafia economic gobble-gook. Hidden behind the unemployment figures and falling wages, rising taxes and prices, is the death factor. Accelerated deaths from malnutrition, stress, drug and alcohol addiction are all linked to the “austerity” plan. There is another toll the people of Greece are paying to satisfy the financial mafia and banksters, suicide. During the first 4 years of Greece's “financial crisis”, 2007-2011, the suicide rate increased by a staggering 43%. In fact 2011 marked the highest number of suicides in Greece, for 50 years. According to some authorities the last two years are showing indications that there will a further very large rise.
        The group Klimaka, based in Athens, stated that reported suicides rose dramatically, but we cannot take these figures as accurate, as there are a considerable number of unreported suicides, the figures are in all probability, much higher. Greece is a relatively small country population wise, with a population of just 11.28 million, (2012 figures), but with the direct impact of the financial Mafia's dictate, creating 27% unemployment, 60%+ among the young and a stratospheric minimum 43% increase in suicides, you begin to get the true meaning of “austerity”. This is a small country, a member of one of the largest and richest developed economic blocks on the planet, yet we can't see to it that the people of a small country of 11.28 million, can have a reasonable standard of living. Capitalism isn't working for the benefit of the majority, capitalism will never work for the benefit of the majority, capitalism can't work for the benefit of the majority. It isn't made that way, it is simply a system of exploitation, where the few live in luxury off the backs of the many, who struggle to survive, as all the wealth they create is siphoned up to that few, the parasites, the leeches of society. Capitalism is the enemy of the people.

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Austerity And Deprivation, Two Sides Of The Same Coin. 11:07 am / 20 November 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.


        What does “austerity” mean, or what should it mean? You would imagine “austerity” would mean a doing without the luxuries, a little tightening of the belt, but does this financial Mafia's variety of “austerity” fit that description? This brand of “austerity” means abject poverty for families the length and breadth of the land. In England, since the 2008 “crisis”, malnutrition treated in NHS hospitals has almost doubled. Diagnoses of malnutrition in England rose from 3,161 in 2008/09 to an criminal 5,499 in 2012. This has been driven by wages being frozen/cut, while the cost of food and heating have rocketed. Add to this the various benefit cuts, bedroom tax, ATOS attack on the disabled, and it becomes very clear that this “austerity” is a vicious attack the living standards of the general population.
      Oxfam, that organisation that we see as a charity for those poor countries, stated that, in the UK, "increasing desperation to avoid starvation in one of the world’s richest and unequal countries has seen the number of visits to food banks rise to around half a million a year." The Trussell Trust, the UK's largest food bank operator, has seen the number of those receiving food parcels rise from approximately 26,000 in 2008, to more than 350,000 in the past five years. UK director of Trussell Trust has stated that, “It’s not surprising that rates of malnutrition have also increased. We see people coming to food banks who’ve gone without food for days.”
     Poverty and debt go hand in hand, as people get desperate in their struggle for survival, they are more likely to run up more debt. The average UK household debt is £54,000, that is close to twice the level of a decade ago. Personal debt in the UK's is almost 94% of the total UK economic output for 2012, a mind boggling £1.43 trillion. Lots of people are failing to manage that debt and are suffering in many ways, cutting down on food and heating. Interest rates are set to rise, when that happens, thousands more who are at the moment barely coping will start to sink into the mire of poverty and deprivation. With poverty comes health problems, both mental and physical, families and relationships start to strain and break.
        This is the true meaning of “austerity”, it is not a slight drop in your luxuries, a little bit of inconvenience, as you miss a night at the movies. It is mind crushing stress, it is malnutrition, it is health problems, it is watching your family disintegrate, it is seeing your kids future being stunted and their potential obliterated. It is living with the reality or the fear of homelessness, for what? To sort out a bunch of financial parasites' gambling mess, while they continue to live in the lap of unearned and undeserved luxury. That's capitalism. Do you want it? If not, what are we going to do about it?
Cum'awn, dae sumthin'

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Prosperity And Austerity – Them And Us. 4:00 am / 13 November 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.


    The European Commission has stated that the UK still has a structural government budget deficit of 5.7% of GDP, where as the eurozone as a whole has minus 1.5%. This after our millionaire cabal, sitting in those Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, have slashed our social services by attacking us with three years of “austerity” that was supposed to take us to the land of prosperity. However, the land of prosperity that they refer to is not for you and I. Austerity is now to be a permanent feature of our lives, public sector jobs will continue to be sacrificed at the alter of privatisation. Wages will continue to be squeezed well below inflation, that is the prosperity that is facing you and I. There will be no let up in the squeeze on the living conditions of the ordinary people, as this is the demand of the financial mafia, that band of thugs in suits, known as the Troika, (E.C. European Commission, E.C.B. European Central Bank, I.M.F. International Mankind Fuckers), their aim is a European sweatshop economy to compete with their Eastern sweatshop competitors. They see more prosperity for them if they can get the living conditions in Europe down to a level on par with those Eastern sweatshop countries. 

     Under the stewardship of this bunch of financial vultures, the people of Greece have been plunged to a level of deprivation not seen in Europe for many a decade. In spite of this, it is not enough, the vampire Troika, has demanded a further push to deeper deprivation for the people of Greece, and has demanded that a further 15,000 public sector jobs must go by 2015, this with unemployment at present sitting at 27% and almost 60% among the young. This is not because the Troika hates the people of Greece, this is the path they want for all of Europe, the end of the public sector, the privatising of all public assets, and a continent of low wages. Excellent fertile conditions for the corporate world to exploit and grow fatter.
     Burgeoning prosperity looms on the near horizon, but it is for the financial Mafia and their parasitic friends. This will continue unabated, unless we the people decide to take control of our own lives, destroy this festering cancer called capitalism and build that better world based on mutual aid and co-operation. There is no point in trying to modify the present system, there is no point in believing that there is such an animal as compassionate capitalism, it is a ruthless exploitative system of selfish greed and can only survive by the plundering and rape of the planet and the exploitation and enslavement of the people.

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Saturday 9 November, International Day Of Solidarity. 3:16 am / 08 November 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.



       The brutal and consistent crushing of what vestige of democracy there ever was in Greece continues unabated. The Greek government, having dismantled practically all social services, paid off thousands of public sector workers, pushing unemployment to approximately 29%, and increased taxes beyond breaking point for the ordinary people, the Troika, (E.C. European Commission, E.C.B. European Central bank, I.M.F. International Mankind Fuckers), after a visit to Greece, have come up with the idea that the Greek government hasn't carried out enough of its austerity plan. Along side this vicious attack on the living conditions of the people of Greece, the government increases its attack on any sign or symbol of people organising.
     When the Greek government closed down ERT, the Greek national radio, without discussion or legislation, the employees occupied the building and continued broadcasting, with massive support from the people. But once again the state resorts to its usual brute force, to silence the voice of the people and to break any solidarity among the people. In response the people of Greece are calling for an international day of solidarity on Saturday 9th. November.

This from The Greek Streets: 

“Police forces have just entered the studios of the Greek radio… It’s not for ERT alone. It’s not only for our jobs. But it is for Democracy itself… Don’t seek for legality… for the defence of Democracy, for holding each other’s hand, for our dignity and honour, for standing shoulder to shoulder to each other… because we met at the same street together, because we fought the same struggle… we ask you to come now at the headquarters’ of ERT… The voice of the Greek radio is silenced!”
“The prosecutor said that the person responsible for ERT’s inventory now is the ‘brigadier general’ of the police forces.”
Thursday, 7 November 2013
Read the full report HERE:

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Austerity, Poverty, 21st. Century Capitalism. 9:38 am / 05 November 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.



      Austerity continues unabated in Spain, with the usual wage cuts/freezes, massive layoffs and the resultant poverty that ensues with such policies. Monday 4 November, saw thousands of the refuse collectors demonstrate in Madrid, it was a noisy and colourful affair, they set off fire crackers, chanted and started bonfires in the Puerto del Sol plaza. This was to mark the start, at midnight, of an indefinite strike by the refuse workers in protest against the plans to lay-off more than 1,000 staff. The refuse workers started to converge on the Puerto del Sol plaza in the late evening. Another city, another angry population, another country facing deprivation, the face of 21 century capitalism.

 Photo courtesy of Demotix.com
      This picture is repeated across the world, how do you keep silent, how do you keep calm, when millions die in poverty, while the few lavish themselves in unimaginable wealth. A wealth created by us, the ordinary people. As children die of hunger, the parasites grow fat on their blood. This system has nothing to recommend it to the ordinary people, it is a system of abuse and exploitation that favours the greedy.

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A Killer With Gloves On Is Still A Killer. 1:52 am / 01 October 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.


      We should not be fooled by the Greek state taking a stand against Golden Dawn, this is not an ushering in of democracy in Greece. The Greek state is still a killer, but perhaps with gloves on. However, the state likes to keep the monopoly on killing. This is the same bunch of Troika puppets that dragged the people of Greece to the pits of deprivation. The same vicious fiends that sent mental health problems soaring, suicides rapidly escalating, decimated the health service and shattered the education system. They are the ones who introduced a new sight in Athens, families sleeping on the streets. Like I said in a previous post, this is a public relations exercise, an act at pretending that their hands are not stained with blood. Nothing has changed in Greece, the death dealing austerity continues, the brutal state repression goes on, tomorrow the people of Greece will wake-up with the same problems as before, deprivation,and repression.
This From The Greek Streets:
      And so, on the sunny autumn morning of September 28th – a quiet, almost tranquil morning – the state and media, inside and beyond the Greek territory, woke up anti-fascist. Were the days when the exact same culprits fueled Nazism, the days when authorities meticulously wovethe  institutional racism, totalitarianism and impoverishment just a bad dream? Of course not. In the time that has passed since the murder of Pavlos, they have scrambled to present a clean face, but for all their pretensions the anger is still there. Just under five swirling years after Alexis dropped dead on that Exarcheia street corner, we are still faced with the same power zombies that our revolt had attacked but did not manage, it seems, to finish off. During all these years, the number of our sisters and our brothers who died in the hands of the state or its offshoots only keeps growing. Katerina Goulioni, Nikolas Todi, Cheikh Ndiaye, Mohammad Atif Kamran and Shehzad Luqman… Katerina died in the hands of her state captors; Nikolas, Cheikh and Mohammad were assassinated by the police; Shehzad was killed by the knives of Nazis, just like Pavlos did on September 17th. Along with who knows how many others, tortured and pulled off the streets, held in Amygdaleza and all the other concentration camps, sentenced to death and then to oblivion, too – for national homogeneity reserves no space even for the memory of most of its victims. These same people that have now supposedly turned anti-fascists are those who ordered the detention 70,000 migrants in a single year; who vilified HIV-positive women and rounded up drug addicts en masse; who lead women and men to despair and suicide daily… The list only keeps growing.
Read the full article HERE:

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2013/14, The Winter Of Discontent!! 10:18 am / 30 September 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.


       The present "austerity" measures that are being used to savagely claw resources away from the living standards of the ordinary people, are probably the most brutal for many a decade. In 1978/79 we had the "Winter of Discontent", back then by 1978, the ordinary people had suffered 4 years of voluntary and legislated wage restraint, as this economy driven system, even under Labour, tried to sort out the problems simply by milking the working class into poverty. Here we are again, the system requires "adjustments", and the powers that be, the same financial/corporate Mafia, have only one method, milk the working class into poverty.


       Where is our "Winter of Discontent", where is the solidarity between the various working groups that are seeing their conditions decimated, where is the solidarity between the communities that are seeing the very fabric of those communities being shredded? This attack on our living conditions is not directed at any one group, it is aimed at all of us, it is just that they are picking off the weakest in our society first, the unemployed, the disabled, those who receive social benefits, they will however work their way through the complete range of ordinary people as an entire class. As a class we have to build our resistance across that class, we have to organise across the workers/unemployed segment of society, in conjunction with our communities, that are being assaulted. View it as you will, it is a class war, they recognise that fact, the "austerity" never falls on their class, they always protect their own. It is time that we done likewise and as a class start to defend our own. I see nothing wrong in the present day conditions of having our own 2013/14 present day "Winter of Discontent".
      For those who are not too familiar with the 1978/79 "Winter of Discontent"
The Commune has an excellent article reviewing the event.
      The Winter of Discontent was the longest and most comprehensive strike wave since 1926, with nearly 30 million working days lost embracing more than 4,500 industrial disputes. However, as suggested above, its analysis has always been riddled by mystifications and misconceptions. One such, very common, is that the WoD was a public sector strike – an assumption bolstered by the various urban near-myths of the dead being left unburied, rubbish piling up in the streets, etc. While these are not untrue, they are exaggerated – and in any case ignore the class basis for such supposedly “selfish” acts.
Read the full article HERE:

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Austerity My Arse. 11:52 am / 27 September 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.



 ht f35 night flight ll 120207 wblog Why the $400B F 35 Fighter Is Not an Option for Syria


       Austerity is the cry from governments across the world, but that only applies to the social side of society. Every budget gets trimmed, benefits get cut, wages get frozen, social services get decimated and their costs go up. However this all looks ridiculous when it comes the that side of the state apparatus called “military”. The case of the super-duper, F-35 “do-everything” fighter, makes you scratch your head and wonder, why do we tolerate such idiots running our affairs. This power monger's toy is estimated to cost the US almost $400 billion and rising. It was to be operational in 2012 but is now thought to be 2015/18, what a wonderful money spinner for the arms industry, no austerity there. It will be available to their NATO buddies and some other “friendly” nations, who will chip-in to the development fund, some of their taxpayers money for the privilege of being able to buy a few of these toys. Once you buy this money eater, you are lumbered with astronomical costs just to keep the thing running. Norwegian Rear Admiral Arne Roksund estimated the his country's 52, F-35's, will cost $769 million EACH, over their operational lifetime. When the state apparatus talks to us about “austerity”, they are really just laughing at us, and taking us for a bunch of idiots. And we are if we tolerate this unbelievable waste of time, energy and resources to be spent on the toys of empire, while millions live in poverty, millions starve and others die from preventable diseases. What will the people of the world gain from this multi-billion dollar state status symbol?


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Spectacle Amidst Austerity. 1:07 am / 06 September 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.

      The Thessaloniki Annual Trade Fair has come around, this is when the Athens puppets of the Troika put on a show in another city. Teacher Dude gives an excellent review of the coming event.

      In years gone by the political leadership would take the chance to make lavish promises and announce grand public works in the city. Indeed this approach proved so popular that five PMs in a row announced that, unlike their tardy predecessors, they would ensure that Thessaloniki's promised subway would start the following year.
      Despite the fact that the country has yet to reach budget targets and is faced with the prospect of requesting yet more bail out cash, government officials and their friends in the media have once again started making promises that public works project, long stalled for lack of cash will resume, a minimum guaranteed income will be introduced and the country will be flowing with milk and honey before the month is out.
     On the other the list of those unhappy with New Democracy and PASOK's austerity measures continues to grow and after five years of economic contraction, broken promises and despite claims that the worst is over few believe that Athens is in a position to say no to its creditors demands for yet more cuts.
      So the stage is set for a potentially violent showdown on Saturday when the prime minister will give a speech surrounded by anything up to 8,000 police and the streets fill with angry Greeks.
Read the full article HERE: 

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Workers Know Your History, Dic Penderyn. 1:12 am / 03 August 2013 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.


     Each improvement in the conditions of the ordinary people is paid for in the blood of one or more from our communities. Every increment of decent conditions we gain is at the heavy cost of blood, sweat and tears from our brothers and sisters. Despite this we can never relax in the belief that we have won those gains for all time. Those from whom we wrestled them will always try to take them back by stealth, duplicity, corruption, force and their brand of the "stamp of legitimacy". Today the attack to claw back the conditions we won over decades is in full swing, wages are cut/frozen, contracts are ripped up and replaced by "zero hours" contracts, working conditions are shredded, social benefits/services are decimated. If we accept this onslaught without an all out fight, we do an injustice to those from our communities who paid with their life to win them in the first place. Our history is littered with the blood of an army of our heroes, we can pick one from any era, they are there, calling on us to fight for justice.
      August 1831, Dic Penderyn was hanged on a trumped up charge, his real crime, he was a a union man, a fighter for better conditions, the type detested by this system of repression, exploitation and corruption. When our present lords and master come at us with their scythe of austerity and deregulation of working practices, let's remember we paid for these conditions by the blood of our own, we insult our heroes if we hand them back without a bloody fight.

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