Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Saturday, 25 February 2012
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Mark Steel Iraq was such a laugh, Lets do it to Iran
Why can't our leaders think up new stories to justify a military attack?
A4e Claims Success In Getting Taxpayers Money Off Benefits & Into Its Own Pockets
22
Wednesday
Feb 2012
Emma Harrison, the woman appointed by David Cameron
to help get tax payers’ money off benefits and into her own pocket, has
issued a statement explaining why she has decided to pay herself a dividend of £8.6m siphoned off from her firm’s lucrative “workfare” contracts with the government.Ms Harrison is the chairman of A4e (it means Ample for Emma), which specialises in that very modern practice known as “welfare to pocket”, which means her company is paid to reduce the amount of money the government spends on jobless people by giving it to herself instead.
A4e’s only income comes from public welfare contracts from the Department for Work and Pensions, worth an estimated £3bn-£5bn in total as part of the coalition’s new work programme, under which private companies are paid loads of cash to do nothing, while the unemployed have to work as slaves for free.
But this week, as officers from Thames Valley police raided A4e’s offices in Slough as part of a fraud inquiry, the company was forced to defend its record.
A spokesperson for the company explained:
A4e has always taken very seriously our role in giving support to unemployed families, some of whom are in desperate situations, mainly by forcing them to take jobs as slaves and spending millions of scarce taxpayers’ money on big houses and holidays for ourselves.On the A4e website, the promotional blurb characterises what the company does – claiming they are in the simple business of: ”improving people’s lives – especially our own“.
A spokesperson for the Prime Minister, David Cameron, explained why the coalition government had decided to give away so much taxpayers’ money to private individuals:
When Labour was in power they thought the solution to every problem was to just throw taxpayers’ money at it. We, on the other hand, realise that the solution to every problem is to throw taxpayers’ money at private companies instead. Especially the ones run by our friends.
Friday, 17 February 2012
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
World war 2 Hero assaulted by Greek Police
renowned for his act of defiance 70 years ago, is now a force in Greece's civil
disobedience movement.By Helena Smith in Athens .guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2
August 2011.
Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images.
Seventy years ago Manolis Glezos scaled the walls of the Acropolis to tear down
the swastika, hoisted over the monument that Hitler had triumphantly described
as a symbol of "human culture". This single act of defiance – the first direct
action against Nazi rule in Greece – would go on to cast the headstrong young
man as one of the country's greatest defenders of democracy. Manolis Glezos
was teargassed by a riot policeman outside the Greek parliament in March last
year.
Today the enemy may have changed, but at nearly 89, Glezos is still fighting. For many Greeks he
has become a symbol of resistance in another, very different sort of war: one that has pitted the
near-bankrupt country against the forces of world capitalism and thrown it into an unprecedented
struggle for its economic survival.In the midst of Athens' worst crisis in modern times, Glezos says
he never thought he would see Greece come to this. "Not since the German occupation have we
been in such a difficult and dangerous situation," he laments, with an angry thump of his
hand."Economically, democratically, the Greek people are seeing hard-won rights being wiped
away. Unemployment is growing, shops are closing daily and decisions that are totally
unconstitutional are being made."
Popular icon, protester par excellence, Glezos does not require much to goad him into action. The
veteran leftwinger is a force in the civil disobedience movement shaking Greece.As a proponent of
direct democracy, the campaign that has propelled thousands of Greeks to protest against the
austerity measures meted out to rein in the country's runaway debt, demand for Glezos to be on the
frontline at demonstrations is at an all-time high."People are not going to back down. They are very
conscious of what they want," he says, seated before a desk in the book-lined study of his Athenian
home. "The summer may be here but I've been very busy attending neighbourhood assemblies to
discuss what our future tactics might be."In March last year pictures of the wiry, white-haired
activist being teargassed by a riot policeman outside the Greek parliament sent a tremor through
Europe's nascent anti-austerity movement. But, though appalled by the harshness with which rallies
have often been crushed, Glezos reserves his greatest criticism for the attitude of Germany and
Britain towards Greece. Both countries, he insists, stand guilty of "enormous ingratitude"."Germany
today lives not under Nazi rule but in a state of freedom and that it owes in great part to the struggle
of the Greek people," he said, referring to Hitler's disastrous decision to postpone the invasion of
the Soviet Union as a result of the unexpected resistance encountered in Greece. "Then there is the
issue of food. If German people are alive it is because Greek people died."Glezos has not forgotten
the howls of the starving or the images of municipal carts carrying the corpses of those who, during
the Nazi occupation, collapsed begging for food in the streets of Athens.
He knows not only because he was there; he counted them."I worked in the statistics office of the
International Red Cross and every day I would note the deaths of around 400 people as a result of
famine. We lost 13.5% of our population, more than any other occupied country, because all of our
foodstuffs, our crops, were requisitioned [by the Wehrmacht]. For those two reasons alone Germany
should help Greece."Throughout the war "little Greece" had stood alongside the Allied forces.
"Who came to England's help? Who was behind the first victory against the Axis [powers]?" he
asked, conjuring the Greeks' defeat of Mussolini's forces on the Albanian front in 1940. "Who did
Churchill so famously say fought like heroes? Britain should have tried and helped Greece at this
difficult moment. Its behaviour should have been different."Glezos, who would subsequently spend
nearly two decades in prison – often in solitary confinement — as Greece slipped into civil war and
then years of authoritarian rightwing rule, backs up his argument with figures.It wasn't just the
famine and the thousands killed in reprisals as a result of mass resistance, or the eradication of
virtually all of Greece's once vibrant Jewish community or the destruction of the countryside.
It was, he says, the other indignities suffered by Greece under Hitler. The pillaging of archaeological
treasures, the plundering of factories and homes, the looting of national resources, the crippling of
the Greek economy – following the Nazis' deliberate circulation of counterfeit Deutschmarks –
offences that were all part of what Churchill would go on to call the "long night of barbarism" and
from which it has yet to recover."To this day, Greece remains the only country in Europe that never
received reparations from Germany," added the former MP, who has long headed the National
Council for the Reclamation of German Debt. "We never got back any of the antiquities that they
took, or the buildings that they seized, or the tons of silver and nickel that they stole."If you take
into account the enforced occupation loan, I estimate that they owe us around €162bn, plus
interest." Glezos, who has proposed that Berlin fund companies in Greece and scholarships for
students bound for Germany by way of compensation, insists he is neither motivated by hatred nor
revenge.
He has many German friends and every year, he says, they descend on Athens to "try and
right the wrong" by demonstrating outside the German embassy. But he is infuriated that Greeks are
invariably typecast by the German media as lazy laggards when studies show them working the
longest hours in Europe.
"The latest agreement to save Greece is all about saving banks and financial capital,
not people," he says. "After the war, we won our freedom but we emerged as vassals,
first of the English and then the Americans. Being indebted in this way keeps us in
that subordinate role. Our new masters are the troika [the EU, IMF and ECB] and
they have to go. Mark my words, the Greeks will play a pivotal role in resisting the
policies they want to impose." End.
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
Monday, 13 February 2012
Friday, 10 February 2012
Thursday, 9 February 2012
Pensions Fight starts to Heat up again
The union's national executive council decided to hold a consultative ballot of 250,000 public sector members on the campaign, which could include further co-ordinated strikes and industrial action with other unions in education and the civil service.
The ballot - in which members will be able to vote by post, online or by phone - will be held in late February and early March, with a possible date for another co-ordinated strike on 28 March, followed by a rolling programme of industrial action, joint union protests and political campaigning.
In addition to PCS NUT have also agreed to ballot for further action, along with Unite,UCU, also FBU are considering joining the fight. We urge union members of the other unions to urgently lobby there various NEC,s to join the fight.
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