Lose a billion and get bailed out - cash in two euros - you're fired

The story of Barbara Emmely is getting well known. She found some return bottle slips in the store she worked for and cashed them in (technically is that theft? Sounds a bit far fetched doesn't it really). The amount? One Euro thirty. About a pound, well at last year's prices....Then a co-worker denounced her and the store, without an ounce of proof fired her. She won't be getting her job back because the law has come down on the employer's side. The bankers can lose billions and then help themselves to taxpayers' money but when the 'little people' get economicially incorrect, there's hell to pay. The employer's defence, though, is priceless "We were good employers for Ms. E for 31 years," head of Kaiser's Tobias Tuchlenski told Bild Zeitung on Wednesday. "I can't understand why she stole from us. We have 5,000 employees in Berlin. Imagine what would happen if all of them stole €1.30 every day?"

Royal Bank of Scotland - are you angry now?

.......If not, then you're dead from the neck up. The Fred Goodwin pension scandal is another provocation for people to demonstrate, riot and wreck things on the high street. It's our money these snouts are troughing up - money that could be put to practical social use once the parasites have been shot or beaten to death. The choicest thing is that this particular leech is adamant that he's going to keep his ill-gotten stream of gold. Not only should he lose he pension, this tossr should lose his teeth, his eyes his everything. His lot of hogs have taken the piss for too long and now, especially now, molotov cocktails should be the order of the day. They have got to go - the whole rancid lot of them - bankers, politicians, industrialists, lawyers, judges, civil servants - they all deserve the scaffold for the looting, the theft and the wars. Why on earth obey any of their laws now they blatantly crime in open view. They have no defence and deserve all they are going to get.

Summer of rage

Every year someone somewhere prophesises as Winter of discontent or a hot Summer of social protest or riots. This year, though it's rozzer himself who is worried. Or secretly thrilled. Back in the wasted 90's it was left-wing (!) Labour MP's who would pop up on the radio gloomily forecasting riots and upheaval after yet another spike in inequality or unemployment. Disappointingly, these doomsayers were never proved correct. True, there was the occassional disturbance (I was once in a council van that toured a recently rumpused estate in Yorkshire back in 2001) but nothing like on the scale that one would have hoped. We say this because angry riots are the 'id' of any social reaction against 'the general order of things'. Of course, there are elements of them that are uncontrollable and 'apolitical'. The recent 2005 riots in France, for instance, saw the burning of nurseries and schools which on the face of it, is counter-productive. Burning cars and trashing shops are easily condemned and used by the media to discredit the wider impetus behind any disturbance. But the destruction and lashing out are a function of the wider grievances that the political system in all European countries cannot accommodate. The youth in the inner-cities of the modern state, the unemployed, the working poor and the discriminated against represent a huge proportion of the peoples in Europe. The rioters are locally based, enviromentally and architectually contained in their zones and furious. Any target of the state is fair game. As long as the neolib mode of production was working and providing the semblance of economic distribution, though, these puturbances in the otherwise smooth functioning of things could be isloated and easily contained. After a few nights of trouble, the police regained control, people were arrested and the social policemen of the unions and 'official opposition' groups could quell the disorder and explain away the root causes of the mini revolts.
But now that the economic orthodoxy has been shattered and the system itself is revealed for the bare faced robbery it really is, things are not going to be the same for a very long time. Each protest, each demo and certainly each political riot will be seen in a totlly different light. The elites have known for a long time just how much stress the system has placed on its worker citizens. You know this as much as anyone. The last thirty years of neolib order have seen your standard of living gradually decline, the standard of goods fall and work place effort increase. Things, basically, have got much harder for the/us little people to keep ends met. Now, the general breakdown, the credit crunch or more accurately, the Second Great Depression mean that the only way the state and its elite controllers can maintain a veneer of continuity and 'governance' is by placing even more burdens on the working (and increasingly non working) sectors of their respective economies - witness the measures being prepared by the Dublin regime. The famous bail-outs, as everyone knows, are merely temporary paliatives designed to buy the bosses time whilst they gather their strength and judge what the people's reaction is going to be. Things are that stark. The recent brilliant demos in Dublin, are a brute sign of how quickly the arcane dealings of finance can impact on peope's political consciousnesses. The fall of the governments in Iceland and Latvia, though relatively small countries, have alarmed governments all over Europe. The Anglo-Saxon media have largely ignored the recent upheaval in Guadaloupe where the population is in open rebellion against the intolerablely high cost of living, exploitation, discrimination and unemployment. It has gone beyond a general strike and is gradually drawing in mainland France.
In all these revolts, on their own and in another more stable economic context easily dealt with, the unions and the 'normal' parties of oppossition, are not to be trusted. They have long been incorporated into the state apparatus. Their decayed aims are to keep hold of their privelidged position inside the system that they entered uttering the words" You have to be inside the system in order to change it", knowing full well that the dialectic runs completely the other way and to help to shore up the now crumbling edifices of their national economies by dampening the organic revolt. Specifically, on a march keep a wary eye on the forces of order but also keep a healthy mistrust of the stewards walking on the sides of any manifestation.
Times are tough and about to get a lot tougher for us. The choice is bare boned. Sit back, adapt to the new demands of the capitalist (dis)order and swallow the natural and justified resentment that you feel or become a link in a chain raction that is lighting up the world. They are paying you less, making you work harder and, in taxes, taking more off you. The elite's fears of a Summer of Rage are justified in so far as you are not prepared to take this kind of treatment anymore. There are millions who feel exactly like you do. The game is rigged and we are the only force capable of stopping it all. Join in the rage. Indeed why let it be just a Summer and not a Spring as well?

Get going.

Mass demonstration in Dublin

There are millions of people as angry as you are...as we are about the economic wreck and who's paying for it. 120 000 march in Dublin, for instance, but apart from the snippet on Yahoo, the MSM UK have blanked that and the (minorish) fact that the Latvian PM has bailed out too , though in the right way this time and packed the whole charade in.

What with Soros telling his fat cat cronies that the liberal business model is finished, it looks pretty much like the game's up for the capscum. Get prepared - there are major changes headed our way.

IMF to run out of money

The International Monetary Fund is running a bit short of readies. What with things being like they are and that. They will have to go running to the Labour Party cap in hand again, I guess. It's at times like this that one needs to discover life on other planets - so we can borrow a few quid from them to tide us over til next month or so.

Will they get away with it?

The 'crisis' has moved up a gear this last month or so. It's also the case that those not living in the prosperous west have been under crisis conditions ever since the neolib counter-revolution got going all those damned years ago in the eighties. The main questions are, how long are we all going to put up with the elites taking the piss so much and are they going to win out and ride through the current storm and tell us how it's all blown over in the year's time or so. Then business as usual.

Surely not. . .

The object is to silence opposition

There is a lull in the ideowars on the internet. The alternative sites are quiet or off-key. The tomb is intermittent and strangely disorientated, K-Punk almost extinct and the comrades over at WSWS terse and anachronistic. The alt world is subdued. It's all temporary of course. Extreme violence and its enforced ideological superiority in Gaza, the depression and the globalised political paralysis have shocked one and all.

Even phoney wars are still wars. First of all, resist the order to be silent.

On Israel

Lenin might have cracked the real reason for the war - to prevent any left coalition interfering with the right's manouverings. The war entrenched Israeli hostility towards the Arab miorities and guaranteed the Arabs themelves would certainly not cooperate even if they were asked, unlikely as that is. For, "...why would the Arab parties work with the butchers of Gaza?" The right, though fractured like the left, can thus behave as if they were the 'only game in town'.

And this is the least bad system of political organisation.

A forgotten revolution

The MSM is desperate to fill the airwaves with 'good' news. Thus the bailout ad nauseum, the Israeli election (hurrah! The least right-wing party won! But, hang on lost too!! Tut eh? Democracy it's the least bad system we've got eh?) and the weather (at least the government isn't getting the blame for that - - hmmm, or should it?) etc.
Two, at least two, social revolts are being systematically excluded from government propaganda outlets - the revolt in Madagascar and the hugely popular and enduring general strikes in Guadeloups and Martinique. These rebellions against the capitalist oder of things are getting deeper and deeper and more and more entrenched by the day. There was a similar wave of revolt back in 1967 over pretty much the same type of problems in Guadeloup. A year later was 1968 and all that.
The point being, the revolt is everywhere and though superficially separate, its filaments are connecting everywhere throughout the world. Be part of it.

Cheery news

People in Stamford, America, have been marching in defence of their homes in front of the CEO of Morgan Stanley's gaff. This is one set of flames that we can all hope will spread far and wide.

On blogging

A reporter wrote this . It's really bad. Would give bloggers heart everywhere.

No to anti-semitism

Freedland makes the point, in the Guardian, that the left did not insist as strongly enough that Jewish people were not to blame for the Israeli attack on Gaza as they were to make sure that muslims were not persecuted as a group for the crimes of 9/11 and 7/7. He goes on to argue that the number of anti-semitic assaults have risen sharply since the Israeli war on Gaza. He fails to mention that anti-Muslim attacks have risen as well (though he does point out that Jack Straw's ramblings about headscarves a few years ago prompted Islamaphobic attacks to rise) and argues that the left should not attack Zionism as, on the streets, it makes no difference since it is all interpreted as 'Attack the Jews'.
He concludes "It is perfectly possible to condemn Israel's current conduct and to stand firmly against anti-Jewish prejudice." - which is what the left, at least the left we've been reading, has been saying all along. Point being, why is it the left that always gets the blame for this. Like the left has that much power! If only.

Eco migrants

If, as we are constantly told by the capdogs and their media allies, that the economy is pretty much like the weather in the sense that one can do little to alter it and in the end one just has to put up with it, then economic migrants should be granted the same understanding as those people fleeing flood, drought and storm.

Weathery gloom

About this time of year, usually, I think "Wouldn't it be a nice idea if around this dark time of year, that there was some sort of festival, where people, I dunno, gave each other things, went out and had parties." followed immediately by the thought that "Oh yeh. That was that Christmas thing a while back I guess."

Demo against the system

Lurking rozzer - totally outnumbered

The splendid looking marie/town hall

Good humoured enrourage.

The basic message.

Angouleme, southern France January 29th. 30 000 demonstrate against the neo-liberal system. 2.5 million across the whole of France.