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On this day, 8 April 2013, former UK Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died. Street parties spontaneously broke out across the country, particularly in working class areas and in former mining communities which were ravaged by Thatcher’s policies. Her legacy is best remembered for her destruction of the organised workers’ movement in Britain, after the defeat of the miners’ strike of 1984-5. This set the scene for the drastic increase of economic equality and unemployment which occurred in the 1980s. Her government also effectively destroyed social housing, helping to create the situation today where it is unavailable for most people, while private property prices have skyrocketed to a level unaffordable for most young people. Thatcher also complained that children were being taught that “they have an inalienable right to be gay”, so she introduced the vicious section 28 law prohibiting teaching of homosexuality as acceptable. In terms of foreign-policy, Thatcher was a powerful advocate for racism, advising the Australian foreign minister to beware of Asians, warning that his country should not “end up like Fiji, where the Indian migrants have taken over”. She hosted apartheid South Africa’s head of state, while denouncing the African National Congress as a “typical terrorist organisation”. Margaret Thatcher was a close personal friend to Chilean dictator general Augusto Pinochet, who was responsible for the rape, murder and torture of tens of thousands of people. Back in Britain, she backed numerous high-profile child abusers, despite being aware of allegations against them like Sir Peter Hayman, and MPs Cyril Smith and Peter Morrison. And she lobbied for her friend, serial paedophile Jimmy Savile, to be knighted despite being warned about his behaviour by civil servants. She was eventually forced to step down after the defeat of her hated poll tax by a mass non-payment campaign. Pictured: Jimmy Savile welcoming Thatcher to hell, reportedly. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1395124427339370/?type=3

workingclasshistory

On this day, 22 March 2009, prison riots were sparked in Greece after the death of prison activist, Katerina Goulioni. Inmates in the women’s prison in Thebes refused to return to their cells, set fires and destroyed property, while protesters outside the prison clashed with riot police. 200 inmates in Athens also held a protest in solidarity. Goulioni was a prominent incarcerated activist, who had campaigned against lack of facilities for physically disabled prisoners, prison transfers in which many prisoners suspiciously died, and vaginal inspections which she termed “informal rape”. In the wake of the rebellion, the government promised a review of vaginal inspection methods, and other prison conditions. Goulioni’s fellow inmates sent the press the following goodbye statement: “All your life was full of thirst. Thirst for struggle and justice. You fought for all and for everything without care for the consequences. And at the end the consequences of your struggles rewarded you in the worse of manners, with a violent, unexpected sudden death. But we are still here, Katerina, and we shall remember you and continue the struggle you began. You are everywhere. We sense you and we thank you for taking care of us. For us, you will live for ever. Have a great journey!” More info here: https://libcom.org/news/prisoner-activists-death-sparks-uprising-womens-prison-thebe-greece-22032009 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1380865428765270/?type=3

#forest #trees #nature #photography

Alte DB-Zentrale Frankfurt

#frankfurt #architecture #brutalism

profeminist

“The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It’s a girl.”

“Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.”

“I want history to remember me, not that I was the first black woman to be elected to the Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and who DARED TO BE HERSELF.

I want to be remembered as a CATALYST FOR CHANGE IN AMERICA.”

- Shirley Chisholm, American politician, educator, and author.

More posts on the amazing Shirley Chisholm

postsatire

The man crying is George Gillette, tribal chairman of the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa tribes of North Dakota in 1948. He was forced under the threat of death of all his people to sign over the tribes’ homeland on the fertile floodplain of the Missouri River in order to build the Garrison Dam.

The final settlement legislation denied tribes’ right to use the reservoir shoreline for grazing, hunting, fishing or other purposes, including irrigation development and royalty rights on all subsurface minerals within the reservoir area.

After the dam was constructed, the three tribes were scattered, their communities and extended families flung to different shores of the 200-mile-long Lake Sakakawea.

This is what your freedom and democracy is built on.

Fliegenpilz

#forest #fungi #autumm #photography

mostlysignssomeportents

In an age of disappearing prison libraries, jail profiteers provide "free" crapgadget tablets that charge prisoners by the minute to read Project Gutenberg ebooks

The past couple years has seen a rise in prison profiteers who strike deals with state corrections departments to provide “free” tablets to prisoners (these being the flimsiest, cheapest, least reliable hardware imaginable), and then profiting by charging exorbitant sums for prisoners to send emails (selling “digital postage stamps” that have to be affixed to each “page” of email), videoconference with family members, and provide media, charging prisoners for music that they lose every time a prison changes suppliers.

At the same time, these companies lobby prisons to eliminate in-person visits, paper mail, and even libraries in the name of safety, contraband interdiction, and cost-savings. This replaces the prison-administered systems that encourage rehabilitation and smooth re-entry with private systems designed to extract large sums from prisoners’ families. As bad as prison-administered systems are, the private systems can be worse – and when you combine them, you get the worst of both worlds: prisoners who violate the vendors’ terms of service get sent to solitary.

A recent presentation by Katy Ryan from the Appalachian Book Project describes in gruesome detail how this affects in-prison reading. In West Virginia, a company called Global Tel Link has the contract to provide prisoners in ten prisons with “free” tablets, for which they charge $0.05/minute for reading ebooks, primarily drawn from Project Gutenberg, a free online service of volunteer-produced, public domain and CC-licensed ebooks.

Not only does this deprive prisoners of more recent titles, including “how-to guides (carpentry, starting a business, repairing small engines, etc.), contemporary fiction, popular mysteries and sci-fi, African American literature, Native studies, recent autobiographies” – it also makes prison reading fantastically expensive: they estimate that a quick read of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would clock in at $19.80, while a used paperback would cost the prisoner less than a dollar (and a copy checked out of the prison library would be free).

The prison system receives a 5% kickback on the revenues from this program (GTL also charges prisoners $0.25/min for videoconferencing, $0.25/message for IM, and $0.50 for every photo and $1.00 for every video sent to prisoners). GTL’s contract allows it to raise prices at its sole discretion, and to recoup any shortfalls from its expected minimum profits by billing the state department of corrections.

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/20/captive-markets.html