Angola III

Yesterday I went for a viewing of the film ‘In the Land of the Free’ (by Vadim Jean) about the three Black Panther members that has been held in solitary confinement for more than thirty years. This is torture and nothing else. The three persons are Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King. King has been released but the other two are still held in solitary confinement.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, also called Angola is built on an old slave plantation that was worked by slaves from Angola, therefore the name.

Today it’s a private prison and the prisoners have to work on the field and the prison owner takes the profit and put it in their own pockets. To me that is the same system as the slave plantation system.

The new warden at the prison believes that you cannot repent unless you turn Christian and share his religious faith. Prisoners that join his faith get better treatment than others.

The Angola also has a rodeo where prisoners are fighting the horse or the bull. They have one ‘game’ where four prisoners sits around a table and the person sitting the longest after the bull attack gets $200. I suppose the rodeo crew is awarded privileged treatment in the prison. The ‘game’ reminds me of the roman gladiators in the Coliseum in Rome, in other words an ancient practice.
See rodeo video from Louisiana State Penitentiary website:
Angola Rodeo

The Angola prison is a scary example of what is wrong with privately owned prisons and since HM Prison Service has started to contract out prisons to private companies we can expect the same future in Britain.  

I strongly recommend people to watch the film about the Angola III and to get involved in the fight to get the two remaining Angola III out of Angola and free at last. (See links below)

In The Land of the Free

Amnesty International

Osama Bin Laden

I woke up this morning to the news that US Army have killed Osama Bin Laden and that people are outside the White House celebrating. But what exactly are they celebrating?

According to American Intelligence, Bin Laden was a bit of a superman and he was here and there and everywhere but nobody could catch him, the elusive terrorist leader. How could this thin old man control an organisation stronger and smarter and more advanced than CIA and MI6 from a little hiding place in the mountains of Afghanistan and then later from a villa in Pakistan?

Morgan ‘Super Size Me’ Spurlock has made a funny video on our exaggerated fears.

I guess Spurlock was successful and told the CIA where Bin Laden been hiding...

Now when they have killed this super terrorist leader will we have peace on earth then or what are the Americans celebrating? Will the death of one old man change the world and stop the super organisation Al-Qaida? Does this mean the forces will pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan?  

Bin Laden is gone and other than that the world is still the same place and the people in power are still playing their little propaganda and power game.

See my further views on terrorism in my other blog Shit Happens

The F-word

When I moved to England from Sweden I was shocked to realise that feminism was seen by many as extremism. How can the fight for equal rights be seen as fanatical?

But after living in the UK for more than thirteen years I have realised that the history of feminism in England has been more violent than in Sweden.

In England, the suffragettes had to go to extreme measures to make their voices heard in a society where they had no right to speak in public. Not that I really think it is extreme to chain yourself to the gates of Buckingham Palace.

The suffragettes were facing strong resistance from the established society and that meant that they were forced to constantly raise the stakes to make their voices heard. The state responded with the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ (Prisoners, Temporary Discharge for Health Act), which was a very effective way for the state to deal with the suffragettes. The men in power were not going to give up their powers and since the people in power make the laws, they used the laws to increase their powers against the suffragettes.

When the oppression of a group has become extreme then the resistance has to be extreme. You can see evidence of this political struggle against oppression all over the world; we have seen it in Iran, Iraq and now lately in Egypt and Libya.

It is easy to forget that the suffragettes were just women fighting for their right to vote and be recognised as a legal person in their own right and not just as some ones daughter or wife. They were not some mentally deranged lunatics that made no sense. And they were certainly not extreme in their actions!

Today, feminism is seen as something old fashion and out of date as if the oppression of women has stopped and women should stop nagging about equality, we have moved passed that now. But have we? Is the issue really out of date?

The 5^th March 2011, I joined the Million Women Rise march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square on the anniversary of the International Women’s Day. The march was to end the male violence against women and children and the Statement of Demands is not out of date or old fashion, it is a fair demand for justice for women and our equal right to be protected by the state from violence.

 

Don’t be afraid to use the word Feminism - do it with pride!

Join the struggle for women rights:

• Million Women March
• Fawsett Society
• Object

Reading the news again

Why do I never learn? I read the blooming papers again and now I am completely depressed and lost the will to live...

First of all, I think Cameron can stuff his bloody Big Society somewhere where the sun doesn’t shine. Basically this is the largest rip off and privatisation scheme since Margaret Thatcher. Cameron and his fellow millionaires in the Government has come up with this master plan of a huge mega car boot sale of the public resources that in effect is a closing down the state, to bargain prices for the rich.

Hands off the NHS, education and our forests. This is not for Cameron to sell because it is not his property; it belongs to the people of Britain and its taxpayers.

The Government scare the councils by setting hard cuts in their budget and they go into some sort panic sale as well and sell off our libraries, supportive housing and public buildings.

The localism in Cameron’s Big Society sounds like a grand scheme to leave people to fend for themselves as best as they can, a state of ‘the survival of the fittest’. He creates a hard core capitalism and move us back to the times when the aristocrats ruled on the backs of the rest of the people.

The localism will be hardest felt when it comes to NHS changes where the GPs will be in charge of 80% of the budget that the Primary Care Trusts used to manage. That means that each GP will get a petty cash box to use for their clients so next time you go to your GP you might be told, ‘sorry mate but the money is finished and you can’t have any treatment for your cancer. You could try to get it privately or maybe you have private health insurance that might cover for it? Otherwise you will have to wait until next budget year, it’s only seven months away and you might be able to get treatment then but only if you put yourself on our waiting list. If you are lucky the cancer has not spread that much by then.’

What is so flaming Big about that type of society?

I then moved on and read about the huge pay some people in public office rakes in, despite economic crisis. I mean the BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons claimed £12,000 in expenses alone. That is more than most people earn per year! And then I read that the Council bosses earn more than £185K! Blimey, that can cover the housing benefits for a family for 336 month (28 years) or four families for 7 years!  I have said it before and I say it again, the problem is not lack of money it is the distribution of money that is the problem.

As if that was not enough, the sodding sport commentators at Sky Sport go and verbalise their sexism on air! And why is that men thinks that the epitome of intelligence is the offside rule, which any bloody moron can understand. It is not exactly complicated like splitting an atom or like string theory, is it? Big up for Sky to sack the chauvinist pigs and gets them off the air!

Then I saw a front page in Evening Standard: ‘Tory MP blasts feminists bigots’. In the article you could read that MP Dominic Raab said feminists are ‘obnoxious bigots’. He thinks it is time for men to burn their briefs. What planet is he from, the same as ET?

All I have to do now is to come up with a great plan to kick the Government out of the office of power. Any ideas?

Cameron’s New Year

Cameron told us in his New Year’s speech that we have a hard year ahead of us with cuts in public services. He try to tell us this is for the people and that we are “in this together”, which is rather a lie. What his plans means is that the poor pay and the millionaires in the Government and their rich friends remains more or less unaffected by the cuts. The conclusion is that people to Cameron is only people above a certain income level, the rest of us are just riff-raff.

The VAT increase will hit the poor the hardest. If you are on minimum wages, disability benefits or unemployed then the increase of VAT will eat into your already small amount of money. As a result, poor people will have to cut down on food and necessities and the children living below the poverty line will increase.

I find it immoral of a Government to neglect its people so brutally. It is almost like the way Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette neglected the starving people in France. Cameron should be concerned about creating a too large tension between rich and poor.

Yes, there is an economical crisis and we do need to take actions but the question is; what actions do we need to take? I suggest we stop the lavish spending on keeping the military in Afghanistan and Iraq, curtail bankers pay and bonuses, increase taxes on incomes above 80K. My point is the problem is not lack of money; it is the distribution of the wealth that is the problem. Poverty is only possible when the few take more than they are due. Poverty is not an immorality that needs to be punished; it is a consequence of an unequal society.

We are not in this together because if you are poor you suffer more than if you are rich. Cameron’s talk about togetherness therefore becomes very hollow.

Cameron’s plan to ruin the NHS with his silly plans of what he calls reforms. But the word reform implicates improvement and Cameron’s plans will certainly not improve NHS, instead it will make it harder for people living in poor areas to get equal access to NHS as people in rich areas. The NHS plans combine with the movement to move poor people out from rich areas makes the inequality even worse.

The inequality in access to public services makes me think about Rousseau and the Social Contract. My question is why should the poor people living in a poor area with less access to public services pay the same tax as the rich people with higher access to public services?

When you add the silly suggestion to allow employers to sack “underachievers” that do not meet their targets during their first two years of employment, the situation becomes very grim!

2,498,000 people in the UK are unemployed and if you add all the people on long term sickness, ESA, lone parents and carers to the mix, then we talk about a lot of people. When these people try to get into the work market they will face these new insecure employment contracts. Obviously, the employers will purposely set their target very high and then the workers will underachieve, which allows the employer to sack people as they please. This will leave people at their mercy and it will also make it very difficult for the young people to build up any good pension qualification because they will struggle to make the necessary working years required.

Cameron also plans to stop the right to claim housing benefits if you live in popular central areas. Cameron say They should be moved to the cheaper areas, which means far from work places with increased travel costs and up-root children at a point when the family already suffers hardship.

Cameron also suggests people should lose benefits if They do not take the jobs! But if he increases the cost of studying it will lead to an increase in uneducated people. Who will employ these uneducated people? Just because there are jobs available does not mean that the unemployed are qualified to do the jobs available.

Cameron also would like to limit the time people can live in social housing. Surely, that would result in families being up-rooted and children from vulnerable families being forced to change schools and friends, which will put an increased pressure on people unable to pay the bankers high rents. The result, which might be what Cameron actually is after, would be a creation of migrant workers that can be used by the rich as cheap labour. How convenient for them.

The Government’s We (the rich) and Them (the poor) mentality is frightfully similar to the propaganda broadcasted in Rwanda before the Hutus genocide of the Tutsis, claiming the Tutsis were evil, whipping up hatred in people against Them. To talk in terms of ‘we and them’ by politicians is dangerous. Cameron is creating myths about how bad the others are, which in this case is the poor and lazy welfare cheats and spongers! It reminds me of how the Irish migrants were viewed during the potato famine. The poverty was seen as the Irish’ fault and God’s punishment for low morale!

His propaganda against Them makes us focus on the wrong “baddies” and takes away attention from the real parasites in society, the rich that take their wealth to tax paradises to avoid paying their dues.

Cameron’s politic is aiming to create a poverty dispersal system were all poor people will be forced to move to the outskirts of the major cities and to live in some sort of ghettos. We have to resist and stop these wicked plans of the Government before it is too late.

The Government and their supporters need to sit up and reflect that if you do not share your stability with the poor then the poor will share their poverty and instability with you. You could call this a spill-over effect of poverty and Somalia is a good example of this, where the poverty had created the Somalia piracy.

Greed and selfishness in the “free” market is irrational because you cannot take without giving back or it will come back and bite your ass.

The International bankers have become the new aristocracy and they should be made to pay their fair share of the burden of the crisis. Not just use the society and the market as a play ground for the rich. To the rich as say, “Neglect the poor on your own peril.” 

Happy New Year!

The social services have housed my friend Maria in a hostel in Westminster to keep her safe from her abusive and unsafe home environment. She is what social services used to call a young vulnerable person.

Two weeks before Christmas Maria called me and told me that she had been evicted from the hostel. Apparently the hostel is closing down because the council do not want residents in the borough living below a certain income level!

So that is how the richer boroughs are going to solve the cuts and the economical crisis. Just kick the poor people out! Well, that should solve the problem nicely.

Send the poor to the poor councils and do as they done in Paris with their growing ghettos in the outskirts of Paris with their annual riots and where young girls walking alone are seen as fair game for gang rape. That should sort the poor out and force them of their lazy backs and give them a nice incentive to work.

As if poverty is a moral defect rather than a result of the unequal power structures in the country.

What the Government and its millionaire MPs are trying to do is to increase their wealth on the back of others’ work and the poor. Cameron keep on saying we are in this together but actually, some people has to take the blunt of the cut backs whilst others continue to attend their glitzy Champaign parties asking themselves “where is this economical crisis everybody is talking about?”

The overall assets of a country belong to its people in an equal share but the Government is building a society where the rich take from the poor and give to rich.

Cameron needs to be aware of that when you neglect the poor you do it on your own peril. It is just so much a person can put up with. I do not think that poor people silently will sit at home and starve to death. There will be a point when you have to fight back. That fight can take the form of increasing demonstrations but also riots and crime waves. If you are locked out from all avenues to earn your money by working, you will have to take it from those who stack their wealth on piles in tax havens such as Cayman Islands, Guernsey and Liechtenstein.

The Tory Government will bring us back to a pre-industrialism relationship between the rich and the poor and as history told us this will lead to revolution, social unrest and famine.

The rich are completely alien to the state of the country to the point where Prince Charles and his darling Camilla goes for a drive to the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium in their royal car straight through the well known and planned student demonstration. Completely oblivious to the fact that the streets of London would be filled of young people fighting for their right to education and their right to be able to make a decent living and that the posh royal car gliding past would be a sore eye. The photo with Camilla’s face in a complete shock and surprise is just a proof of how distant the rich are from the harsh reality of the people. What did she expect? That the commoners would take a break in the demonstration to cheerfully wave at her on her route to her free ticket at the Royal Variety Performance?

I do wish we all could have a Happy New Year but I am afraid that will not happen as long as we have a Tory Government.

Robin Hood where are you when we need you?

Reading the news

I do not read newspapers too often because it makes me depressed for weeks. I sort of lose my faith in a better world. Over a week ago, I was on the tube and got my hands on a Metro and I have still not recovered from the chock!

In Metro I read that the blue-chip companies increased their pay with 55 per cent the last year and the executives got an average of £4.9 million in bonuses! Seriously, something must be very wrong when some people are allowed to skim the cream whilst others struggle to make ends meet. The country has a severe budget deficit and the solution is not to cut in public spending and take money from the poor and sick. I say cut the bonuses for the fat cats instead and let the real parasites pay for the financial crisis they created!

After Metro I found a Daily Mail hanging around so I read it in some sort of desperation of boredom. There was an article about the new university degrees, which could increase up to £9,000 a year, some people earn less in a year! This, of cause will be of no significant problem for the children of the blue-chip companies and fat bankers but what about the children of the poor? The right wing has managed to introduce the class society in less than a year!

More worrying was that the Universities Minister David Willetts (do they have ministers for anything nowadays?) say he will “weed out poor quality courses”, meaning courses with low job prospects! When I read things like that I feel so tired and hopeless.

The universities will then in effect be turned into some sort of breeding school for more bankers, right wing politicians, economics and blue-chip executives. As if we need more of them. The problem is that if humanities are reduced then the bankers, politicians, economics and executives can make their view of the world as the only truth because there will be nobody around able to argue against their views about what the society needs. The opposition to the conservatives will die out and the papers will be even more depressive to read.

In a democracy it is vital that all individuals have the same access to free, good quality education equal to all. It is imperative that the people are educated so that they can make informed decisions when they go to election. The people have to be able to understand what the politicians talk about and to identify their lies. Then, the voting system would work as a protection of the democracy.

Each individual should have the right to choose their education and how they would like to lead their lives. Poor young people’s future should not be determined on their wealth, as a citizen they have equal rights as the rich to a good education.

I say, open the universities for all!