Members of Critical Mass are being kettled by the police. Protest is not allowed during the London 2012 Olympics.
Life under Capitalism
Zeitgeist
it’s kind of funny that in this day and age we’re supposed to respond negatively to seeing thousands of policemen imprisoned, prisoners jailed over unfairly harsh sentencing laws released, and the rich being publicly executed. I can’t be the only one who applauded when Bane stormed Gotham’s Bastille, or when the rich were being lined up for sentencing. I am sure the scene at the Gotham stock exchange was conceived as something that was supposed to make the audience uncomfortable by sympathizing with Bane’s actions – but I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all.
Providing less for more
When Alex Nunns, a campaigner wanting to keep the NHS public, was offered a job with a private healthcare company, he of course sent in his application. Some highlights:
You should play to your strengths. Care UK is a true pioneer in this privatisation drive. You were the first private company to run a GP surgery in Dagenham back in 2006. And the first to face enforcement action from the Healthcare Commission because of slack hygiene procedures at the Sussex Orthopaedic Treatment Centre in 2008. And who’s to say you weren’t the first to forget to process 6,000 x-rays at your ‘urgent’ care centre in North-West London in 2012? As a Mediocre Relations Executive, I would advise not mentioning those last two.
If there’s just one thing that Care UK knows how to do – and there is – it’s take money from the state. I would make a bigger deal of the fact that 96 percent of Care UK’s revenue comes from the NHS. That’s the kind of solid base that any company would envy – taxpayers’ money, minimal risk, easy profits. So shout about it! It shouldn’t just be left-wing NHS obsessives who hear about this stuff.
Take the Barlborough Treatment Centre. It’s a complicated story, but in the hands of a good Media Relations Excretion it can be turned into a wonderful example of the company’s strengths. First, Care UK was paid £21.9 million over five years to do orthopaedic surgery – hip and knee replacements, that kind of thing – but you only did £15.1 million worth of work. (The local NHS Medical Director saw the trick, complaining: “The problem we have got is that they cherry-pick; they don’t take any patients with complicated conditionsâ€. I guess the joke’s on him.) The NHS eventually realised it was getting a bad deal, and things weren’t looking good for Care UK. But then the NHS bought the treatment centre from you for £8.2 million, a lovely gesture. And finally the NHS signed a new 30 year contract to run the centre with… Care UK! (As an aside, it is important from a media management perspective not to spoil this tale of triumph-from-the-jaws-of-lucrative-defeat with any reference to the several lawsuits brought by local patients claiming that their surgery went wrong.)
Libor explained
Austerity isn’t meant to work
In the Guardian, Ha-Joon Chang writes why austerity measures like the ones below cannot solve the economic crisis
The remedies on offer are well known. Reduce budget deficits by cutting spending – especially “unproductive” social welfare spending that reduces growth by making poor people less willing to work. Cut taxes at the top and deregulate business (euphemistically called “cutting red tape”) so that the “wealth creators” have greater incentives to invest and generate growth; and make hiring and firing easier.
What he misses is that all these measures were never meant to solve the crisis, but come straight off the wishlist of big business; the crisis is used as an excuse to implement them. A child can see that reducing unemployment benefits or making it easier to fire people when every company is already busy firing people isn’t going to help, but it sure comes in handy if you’re a business owner who wants to be able to fire his employees at will.
The thing we should remember is that by and large, the big banks and big businesses, with some exceptions, have paid the price for their own crisis. Instead, by measures such as these, the costs have been transferred to the workers. Bankers get their bonuses, the rest of us get fired.