A-Infos (en) UK, Merseyside Resistance! Winter 2003 Edition - Local news sheet produced by the AF in Liverpool.

[Worker <a-infos-en@ainfos.ca>]

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You Have The Right To Remain Silent, Punk!
Basic democratic freedoms, the very right to walk the streets of our city, are being sold
out to the grotesquely rich Duke of Westminster as he seeks to squeeze more money from
ordinary working people. Liverpool City Council is backing the privatisation of 35 public rights
of way and a series of compulsory purchase orders for a £750m redevelopment of the Paradise
Street area.  An area of Liverpool stretching from Hanover Street to The Strand will be policed by a
private force known as 'quarter masters', if a public inquiry happening
right now says yes. If a Government inspector approves a series of
applications to take away traditional rights of way with public realm
arrangements it will pave the way for the private sector to control who
can - and cannot - enter the shopping area.


”Keeping The Riff Raff Out”

The Council and developers admit that taking away the rights of
ordinary people isn’t necessary for the project to go ahead, they
just want “to control and exclude the riff- raff element".  Well,
who’s to decide who’s “riff-raff”?  Some minimum
wage security guard from out-of-town?  You bet!  The consultants are
recommending American-style “controlled zones”, sterile
areas given over totally to shopping, eating and drinking.  But these
streets are public spaces that we have walked for centuries in
freedom.  If the proposals are accepted rules will be drawn up to be
applied in the controlled zone:



*              Alcohol and food only to be consumed in designated areas
– their shops, where they can milk you of money;

* Skateboarding and rollerblading not allowed;

*              Demonstrations will also need police permission with a
controlled meeting place;

* Street entertainers will need permission, even girls with violins



Private owners and money men – especially the semi-invisible
companies that own half the city - don’t want to have to deal with
looking at locals who may not be wearing expensive clothes.  Eating
food in my mall? Not dressed right? Three black lads with your hands
in your pockets? Kids out without their mums?  Hanging around with
no money to spend? Get out! Get lost!  Fuck off!

Just Who Do We Think We Are?

Its not just people going from one place to another without spending
money who will be watched, challenged and barred out.  People with a
story to tell or a grievance they want you to know about will also be
victimised by this greedy and disgusting theft of public space.  The
right to legitimate protest, to hand out leaflets against injustice or
simply talking to people about important issues will be abolished
completely.  Liverpool already has more cctv cameras and beady-eyed
security guards than anywhere else in Britain.  Do you want to be
watched everywhere you go in the city centre?  Pretty soon New
Labour will be introducing identity cards. How would you like to have
to produce one to some deadbeat with a can of mace in order to buy a
Big Mac or go to Debenhams? If the privatisation of everything
continues we won't be able to go anywhere or express any opinion
without our owner’s permission...  Civil rights group Liberty are to
investigate the plans for the UK's first privatised city centre. Their
lawyers would be carefully examining the scheme to decide whether
to mount a legal challenge.

What are you going to do about it?

__________________________________________

REVOLUTION!

It’s Not Possible…………

Ask the people of Bolivia if it’s possible or not.  What began as
isolated strikes for better working conditions in the tin mines and
against the export of natural gas and privatisations, turned in October
into a full-scale insurrection against pro-market policies imposed by
the IMF. People established neighbourhood committees which
organised road blockades, isolating the capital, La Paz.  The trade
union federation, our TUC, called a general strike and the government
called out the army to push petrol through to La Paz.  Shots were fired
and protestors killed.  In response, protests began in La Paz during
which there were more deaths.  What began as isolated demands for
social justice in a country where 80% of people live below the poverty
line turned into a political demand that the president stand down.
Tens of thousands of people began to march on the capital and despite
a military crackdown, martial law being declared and mass arrests and
murders, eventually the president was forced to resign and fled to a
‘safe’ city in the west.  He will become the latest
asylum-seeker welcomed to America’s shores. This was no
crazed military dictator.  President Gonzalo de Losada was a nice
looking, US-educated businessman and regular churchgoer.   But
years of grinding down the people and lining his and his cronies
pockets with bribes and kick-backs from western companies eager to
exploit Bolivia proved his downfall.  Now what other nice-looking
political leader famous for kickbacks, cronies and selling us out to the
Americans do we know?

…………Is It?

CAPITALISM

You Buy The Dream But Live The Nightmare

Capitalism is a sickness killing the planet.  It encourages greed,
creates the illusion of hope, counterfeits happiness out of the things
we buy, drives people to despair, madness and death.  You keep it
going by buying things you don’t really need, that you think will
make you happy but only make you empty inside, that you throw away
and replace with something equally crap.



SPORTS SLUTS AND SAD BASTARDS

Female athletes have been forced to parade their bodies on a
pay-per-view site to raise money for winter training; it seems the
Dutch Athletics Union is happy to make money from their
performance on the track but won’t pay for the training that gets
them there.  The site was created by a (male) trainer, who is selling
images of the women in the same way a pimp sells time with one of
his girls.  The site received 2m hits in one day alone, proof that the
sick gym-shorts brigade is still with us.  Like everything else, sport
-and sportswomen’s bodies- is for sale.

Playboy or Sports Illustrated?  Pay your money, take your choice.



BARCLAYCARD ADMITS: WE’RE CRAP

The boss of Barclays has admitted he would rather gnaw his left leg
off than use one of his own credit cards: “It’s a mugs game,
debt, and only idiots like my customers would use a Barclaycard”.
He went on to say he would “feed his children to a pack of wolves
(cute!) before letting them borrow on credit”.  Barclaycard’s
9m customers – and everyone else living in never-never land by
buying things on credit – are about to suffer one of the worst
economic crashes in history. Like addicts they can’t stop shooting
up (or as the junkies call it, “shopping”) and the more worried
they are by debt the more they have to buy to make them happy.  Boss
Matt Barrett earns £1.7m a year – that’s why he doesn’t
need to use a credit card.

Junkies and vampires rule this planet.  Which are you?



GOT A JOB?  FUCK OFF!

The boss of Jobcentre Plus (hah!) has admitted it is agency policy to
sack people just days before they reach two year’s employment.
In case you’ve never worked anywhere near that long, two years
is when you become entitled to pension payments, holidays and other
employment ‘rights’. He’d previously told MPs that such
treatment by an employer would be “appalling”, apparently
forgetting that it’s policy for the agency he runs.  But David
Anderson can afford to be appalling: he earns almost £200,000 a
year forcing people to take mickey mouse jobs and making disabled
people work.

Anderson works for the government you voted in.  Tough, isn’t it?



WAS HATTON ALWAYS A SHITHEAD?

How times change.  Derek Hatton, once the working class hero of
Liverpool’s militant working class, has turned into a
money-grubbing, property-mad sleaze bag.  Robbed of a computer, a
Mercedes convertible and a Chrysler Cruiser worth £60,000, he said
“I can now sympathise with Tony Martin (the mad farmer killed a
teenage burglar when he broke into his home). I only wish I had woken
up so I could have done something (what, blown them apart with a
shotgun?).  They have violated my home and taken the liberty of
stealing things”.  Hatton promised people the earth and when it all
when wrong he pissed off and sold out to whoever would fund his
‘celebrity’ lifestyle.  Now, when the crime he couldn’t
cure comes back to bite him in the ass, he reaches for a pump-action
shotgun.  Where’s your politics now, Degsy, or was it just a game
you played to get what you wanted?

Perhaps guns ARE the answer.  It only depends which way
they’re pointed, eh?

The Kinder Face of Capitalism………

Now for some heart-warming stories about capitalism us anarchists
would never tell you:



Child Slaves Saved In Africa

74 children sold into slavery by their parents for as little as £25 have
been rescued from a quarry in Nigeria where they were being slowly
worked to death.  Not so lucky were the 13 children already dead from
illness, starvation and beatings.  Nor the 6000 other children
indentured in Nigeria, living lives of equal brutality before dying,
un-mourned and unremembered. The children, some as young as four,
can earn up to 25p a day quarrying rocks and breaking them for gravel
using primitive tools.  Earlier, 116 children were rescued from the
same quarries in September and 1200 children sold to work the Lake
Volta fisheries were returned to Ghana.  But little can be done to
rescue the thousands of children sold as sex slaves and prostitutes
throughout West Africa; their owners are usually important priests,
businessmen and politicians who can’t be touched.  At least
someone is looking out for them, hey?



Italian Couple Bring Hope To Child

Whose heart would not be warmed by the tale of Oracio, a little
Albanian boy given the chance of a new life by an Italian couple
desperate for a family?  Or the fact that his parents, Kujtim and
Fatmira got a new TV from the couple for selling Oracio to them?  Or
that their other five children now watch Venezuelan soap operas on
the TV? Or that the £5000 paid by the Italian pensioners was
pocketed by the child-trafficking gang that set the deal up? Or that up
to 15000 other Albanian children have been trafficked throughout
Europe, all of them – presumably – to good homes and loving
parents. Children can be bought for as little as £1000 or – as in
this case – a new TV, then sold by child-trafficking gangs for
£200,000 to wealthy European couples, often in sordid
‘auctions’.  Some are sold on repeatedly and end up in
brothels, often near to US Army bases.  You make the connection.  It
isn’t just in impoverished Africa that it happens, its wherever
there is a commodity that someone is prepared to buy – don’t
you just love the free market at work……..



Baa Lambs Saved – Aahhhh!

52,000 sheep have been saved from a horrible death in Saudi Arabia
(having their throats cut) and sent by a caring Australian government
to live out their lives in comfort on an idyllic tropical island.  Aahhh!
Well no, actually.  The Saudi inspectors found the consignment
infested with disease and refused to allow it in.  The sheep sat on the
ship for two months in searing heat before the owners were forced to
take them back.  Thousands died.  But the government won’t let
sick sheep back into the country so has sent them to the Cocos
Islands – without bothering to ask the islanders – where they
will sit off-shore in crowded cages until they die and are thrown
overboard or are certified disease-free so they can be slaughtered in
good old Oz.  Yum!

Capitalism: You vote for it every year and you pay with the rest of
your life
====================================
AF = Anarchist Federation


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