Yahoo News: Angry kids protest gas prices after losing cable TV.
Poverty
What New Labour Wants For The NHS
The danger of privatised health care:
Doctor Holds Patient Hostage Until She Pays Her Bill
A doctor named John Drew Laurusonis and two of his assistants in Georgia have been accused of locking a woman in an examination room “when concerns arose about her ability to pay the bill.” The three were indicted last week on charges of false imprisonment for the October 4th, 2007 incident.
For several hours, the staff refused to allow her to leave, locking her in for periods of time, [her attorney Joseph] Fried said. They had her log into her bank records from a computer while she was there, he said. “They said, ‘Don’t you have anyone who loves you who can come and help you? Because you’re not leaving until this bill is paid,’ ” Fried said. “They made her feel like she was a criminal. She was made to feel like she couldn’t leave without something bad to happen to her.”
One reason the patient couldn’t pay was that she was charged nearly eight times more for the visit than she was initially told by clinic employees, from $98 to $755
Via The Consumerist.
It’s Not So Brilliant Here Either
The US may treat European visitors like vermin (see previous post) but we’re hardly spotless in our attitude towards immigrants, as events in Naples show:
Residents of the former communist stronghold on the northern outskirts of Naples have been raising hell about the camp since Saturday, when a woman claimed a Gypsy girl had entered her flat and tried to steal her baby.
The first Molotov cocktails descended on the improvised huts and cabins on Tuesday evening, after which the 800-odd inhabitants began moving out of the area in groups. On Wednesday the fire-raisers, said to belong to the Camorra, the Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia, burnt the camp in earnest, watched by applauding local people and unchallenged by the police. When firefighters showed up to douse the blaze, local people taunted and whistled at them. The last Roma moved out under police protection.
Only then did local politicians shed a few crocodile tears: Antonio Bassolino, governor of the Campania region, declaring: “We must stop with the greatest determination these disturbing episodes against the Roma.” Rosa Russo Iervolino, the Mayor of Naples, chimed in: “It is unthinkable that anyone could imagine that I could justify reprisals against the Roma.”
More…
I don’t know enough about the state of Italian politics to say that we’re seeing a surge of modern Mussolini-ism with the reaccession of Berlusconi to the presidency – but it doesn’t half look like it. Crimes committed by Romanians are a hot political issue in Italy:
Since Romania’s accession to the EU this year, the authorities say that over 1,000 Romanian immigrants have arrived in Italy each month.
Since June last year 76 murders have been committed by Romanians.
The mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, says that 75% of arrests for murder, rape and robbery in his city this year can be attributed to Romanians.
Mr Prodi believes Italy is not alone in facing this new wave of crime and he has called on Europe’s home office ministers to meet and find a solution.
The Romanian prime minister has responded by sending police liaison officers to major Italian cities to help.
Of course this is Naples and there’s more to this particular outbreak of violence than just politically organised hatred; Naples is well-known to be a stew of corruption, crime and poverty and the local mafia don’t like rivals. Times are getting harder too, for the worried poor and worried-about-getting-poorer middle classes – where Berlusconi sees his support – who are looking for scapegoats for their troubles. The Roma fit the bill, as has been depressingly usual throughout their peripatetic, outcast history in Europe.
As is also depressingly usual in European history concerted government and police action intended to pander to the political base is fostering a culture of tacit approval for mob violence.
Police in Italy have arrested hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants in raids across the country.
Expulsion orders were issued for several dozen of those detained. More than 100 Italians were also arrested.
One raid was on a makeshift camp housing Roma (Gypsies), on the edge of Rome. Italian concern about immigrant crime has tended to focus on the Roma.The police crackdown was part of a week-long operation in Rome, Naples and northern Italy.
It is an apparent sign of the change of policy promised by the new right-wing government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
.
(Except it isn’t new policy, it was his predecessors’ policy too.)
What is important to remember is that this isn’t a case of plucky litle Italy repelling invading criminal gangs from Fortress Europe’s borders: after all, Romanians are our fellow EU citizens, with theoretically equal status to all other EU citizens, including the right to reside in other EU countries. If other EU member countries were to follow Italy’s example, in light of the spread of the mafia EU-wide we’d be expelling Italian criminals from the capitals of Europe by the planeload and Berlusconi would be complaining about ethnic cleansing – which is essentially what this is, but because it’s Roma, it’s OK.
But the first act of ethnic cleansing in the new Italy passed off with little fuss. Flora Martinelli, the woman who reported the alleged kidnap attempt on her baby, said: “I’m very sorry for what’s happening, I didn’t want it to come to this. But the Gypsies had to go.”
Wasn’t that the refrain of the Good Germans, and the Hutus too?
Who You Gonna Call, Ghostbusters?
For once the Guardian has a comment piece, by Madeleine Bunting, that tells it like it actually is for the thousands upon thousands of low paid and badly-treated people condemned to live their daily lives in quiet and increasingly panicky desperation as a result of New Labour’s complete capitulation to the corpocracy and their wilful destruction of access to free or low cost legal services:
The months of sitting on the commission listening to people’s accounts of their working lives and to those who tried to offer advice when things went wrong provided a glimpse of what an obstacle course it is when you’re poor. It’s not always the lack of material resources that cuts deepest, but the lack of power and the absence of options. When you’re sacked or when you don’t get the sick pay or holiday pay you are owed, how do you fight back? How do you find the employment adviser to help or the courage to stand up to an employer and the sheer guts to take a case to an employment tribunal with no legal aid or a lawyer to help you? The answer is that more often you don’t, you can’t – and that’s how you get trapped in bad jobs.
Poor pay is inextricably bound up with a culture of institutional negligence: no one ensures workers know their rights or how to find out about them; a myriad of enforcement agencies with tiny budgets confuse everyone, and the legal system to arbitrate on abuse is slow and inaccessible. While the government has consulted and dithered, low-paid, insecure work has flourished like some rapacious mould. The face-to-face legal advisers (which the most vulnerable are known to find easier to deal with) have been axed and replaced with cheap websites and telephone helplines (but how do you know about them?). English language lessons have been cut. While millions of pounds are devoted to advertising for benefit fraud, the amount allocated to advertise the national minimum wage was, until a recent increase, a sixth of that spent on a government campaign urging people to use tissues when they sneeze.
I was one of those face to face advisors for a long time and immediately post Labour’s landslide in ’97 a government packed with provincial solicitors and honourable members of the Bar began to deliberately dismantle the already precarious network of community legal services and advice agencies with the imposition of the cost cutting, bureaucratising and horribly complicated legal services contract scheme.
It was dressed up to look like a bonanza in funding for the voluntary sector and a boon for the regularisation of patchy legal services – but it soon became clear that the aim was to control, divide and demolish opposition to corporate law firms while eliminating several campaigning thorns in the side of government as a happy side-effect.
Put broadly, advice services mostly staffed by volunteers were now to compete with high street practitioners and big professional law practices – and each other – for legal aid funding, despite the imbalance in staffing and resources. Advice agencies staffed by volunteers with already shaky finances could not even begin to put a legal aid bid together, but other funding streams from other national and local schemes were gradually turned off; after all, there was a proper scheme now, apply to that.
But even if you could jump through the hoops required under the contract scheme legal aid cash itself was strictly cut back, with, in some instances, an 80% chance of success being required by the Board before allowing more than a standard hour’s funding. (When I left it was about 42 pounds an hour on a case, out of which had to come all and any overheads including admin and support staff and all the on-cost that employing paid staff implies.) Any lawyer or advice worker knows it can take an hour just to get someone to open up to you, let alone assess the evidence or take a statement and especially not to estimate the chances of success; how many potentially winnable cases, with say a 50 or 60% chance of succeeding on the first hour’s investigation, have failed at that very first hurdle?
I was one of the first law graduates to leave university with a student loan and it’s still a millstone round my neck. I had a place to go the Bar but couldn’t take it. A Tory government and the banks between them made sure working class women with children had as many obstacles as possible put in their way. A loans or grant for necessary professional training? How dare you, silly woman.
I had to watch and grit my teeth as my dozy friend with the well off parents in the home counties funded her long party through bar school and arrange a cushy pupillage for her in a relative’s chambers, despite her emotional instability and worrying drug use. No millstones round the neck for her.
I also watched as another friend, academically talented and with better results lose out on a Phd scholarship because the head of department and the other candidate had both been in the navy and knew the same people. I somehow suspect that she was black, working class and female had something to do with it too… which is why we worked for a Labour victory in ’97, despite clause IV and Tony Blair. We thought they’d be different. Listen to my hollow laughing.
But now it’s even worse for anyone who is at all interested either in becoming a lawyer and working in public interest law. You can either work fulltime in another job while studying fulltime, and almost kill yourself, or you can burden yourself with an amount of debt that will cripple you forever unless you can snag a place in a corporate law firm and again, half-kill yourself writing boilerplate contracts and doing some spotty senior partner’s nephew’s bidding for twenty-five years to pay it off.
Legal education is about much more than just educating lawyers, though – it’s about making information about the law available to the widest number of people so as to aid democracy. Rights and responsibilities, innit? An informed populace is an empowered and involved populace, yeah?
Isn’t that just one of Labour’s multifarious core values? Well no, not exactly:
A 62-year-old man from Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, on income support and facing eviction from his home of 50 years, was forced repeatedly to travel by public transport to west London to find a lawyer to advise him on legal aid.
His story came to light as a coalition of groups that provide legal and social welfare advice prepared to highlight the legal aid ‘desertification’ of England and Wales in the run-up to the introduction of the biggest reforms of public funding in more than 50 years.
A survey of law centres throughout the country by the Law Centre Federation, undertaken for Independent Lawyer magazine, has revealed the extent of the problem. It found that:
· Nine out of 10 centres regularly turned away clients eligible for legal aid;
· Seven reported that their ability to offer access to legal advice was deteriorating;
· One noted an alarming trend of violence towards staff;
· Seven identified specific gaps in provision where, for example, there was no publicly funded employment, housing or immigration advice in their area; and
· Three law centres reported problems finding help for victims of domestic violence.
‘The survey is a snapshot of what’s happening in the areas law centres serve,’ says Steve Hynes, director of the Law Centres Federation. ‘While we acknowledge that demand has always outstripped supply for civil legal services, there is a strong perception that things are getting worse. If the reforms are implemented as proposed, we will quickly see further fraying at the edges.’.
The negligence is deliberate. Should citizens, empowered by knowing what their rights are and how to enforce them, start to challenge the boss, who knows where it might lead? Why, such an informed populace migjht start enforcing their rights on other things too. They might even start to challenge the everyday petty tyrannies of Labour’s incompetent and authoritarian government, like, say, the deaths of children in custody or the illegal invasions of other sovereign nations or the selective imposition of swingeing terrorist legislation on people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion. Hence the policy of dismantling community legal services and access to civil justice, and don’t get me started on the deliberate destruction of criminal legal aid.
Sweeping changes to the legal aid system are going to mean that thousands who find themselves dragged into the legal system are going to find themselves without proper legal advice. Despite the fact that this government has created 6,000 new criminal offences in the last ten years, and is hauling record numbers before the courts and off to chokey, they’re now keen to restrict access to legal advice. All in the name of cost-cutting and reducing ‘inefficiency’ of course. What is actually happening is a massive erosion of hard won rights and the end of the legal aid system, which helped achieve some degree of parity in court cases. (OK, so SchNEWS is obviously against ‘the system’, man, but meantime still not keen to see what few civil liberties we have taken away!)
The changes came in on January 14th. Prior to this, on arrival at the police station you would be offered contact with a solicitor of your choice. From now on you will be directed to the Criminal Defence Call Centre (CDCC). This is staffed, not by solicitors but by ‘accredited’ representatives who’ve done a training course – many of them actually ex-coppers. You will only be allowed to contact your ‘own’ solicitor if you pay privately. Needless to say the call centre advice is probably going to be different to that of a specialist defence solicitor.
One Brighton-based solicitor told SchNEWS, “Previously we could intervene in the process earlier – warn people to make no comment, not to sign police notebooks and not to answer any questions off the PNC1 form*. We could act as an outside guarantee of people’s rights while they were inside”. Now, “the system is in meltdown.” If the call centre is too incompetent to get hold of your brief then you may end up using a duty solicitor or remaining unrepresented. If you’re not going to be interviewed then you can be fingerprinted, DNAed and booted out of the door without once receiving any independent advice.
Keep ’em ignorant, keep ’em quiet.
Now a new set of legal aid reforms has been published by Justice Minister Jack Straw and on first glance it looks like bad news for those still doggedly fighting away trying to protect the rights of ordinary people. Injustice – it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
“We Shall Fight them On The Beaches…”
I’ve been looking at New Labour’s security strategy(pdf file) recently and there appears to be a strange omission – what will the government do when food shortages start to bite at home and when the rising human cost of globalisation and climate change pushes more and more desperate refugees to flee starvation, only to wash up drowned on the shores of Fortress Europe?
In Sierra Leone, the price of rice has risen 300 per cent and in Senegal and much of the rest of West Africa by 50 per cent. Palm oil, sugar and flour, all imported, have also surged.
[…]
Food riots have been reported in recent weeks in several countries. At least 40 people were killed in protests in Cameroon in February. There have also been violent demonstrations in Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Senegal and Burkina Faso, where a nationwide strike against any more food price increases started yesterday.
Rice shortages in the Phillippines Thailand and Vietnam, long queues for Indian imports in Bangladesh simmering violence in Egypt over inequality and the price of bread: soon unrest over food prices and global inequality will begin to get closer to the borders of the developed world. If prices rise high enough and staples become scarce it may even infect those countries themselves.
Many commentators think that food price hikes and resulting civil unrest may not be temporary events or restricted to poor countries. They say this is a crisis: it’s not just about markets or cyclical recession or inflation, but results from more long-lasting causes, such as globalisation, subsidies, spreading desertification and the growing demand for grain-fed meat from unchecked, exponentially increasing populations.
In Brown’s security strategy
There is to be a significant increase in anti-terrorism police capability, new regional intelligence units, disruption of violent extremist activity, unified border controls, compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals, stronger action against those who stir up tensions and – yes – an extension of preventative detention to 42 days.
Blair and Brown have imposed ever tighter controls on the liberty of the UK population and abrogated unprecedented emergency powers to themselves via the Civil Contingencies Act, in the name of fighting terrorism, but we won’t really feel the full force unless and until there’s public unrest, whether it’s over fuel or taxes or floods or food prices.
The styrategy may not mention it overtly, but possibility of unrest due to food and commodity shortages, complicated by an influx of starving refugees from the rest of the world, is really what New Labour’s oppressive laws have been passed to deal with; the orchestrated fear of terrorism is a convenient fiction to manufacture consent for the oppressive laws that are really there to control us, not some unknown idiot jihadi with a bottle of peroxide. Those biometric databases and ID cards do actually have a purpose other than faciliating the natural tendency of civil servants to commit petty oppressions.
Take entitlement to rations: how can you ration anything, whether it’s carbon, gas, rice or water, if you don’t know who’s entitled to it – or more importantly, who’s not entitled? Much easier for each citizen to get his or her allotted minimum share – and no more – if all their fingerprints or iris scans are on file. Much easier to control who’s entitled and who’s not. But the manipulation of entitlement to food and fuel is a known political weapon: you only have to look at Zimbabwe. Do we want New Labour’s clever boys and girls to have similar power over us?
It’s notable that the UK Resilience website has a section dealing with public protest, but not with food shortages. DEFRA studies show that the UK food chain is not well-prepared for any emergency at all, let alone food shortages.
British civil defence types would point out they’ve been planning for disasters for a long time. Well, they might call it planning, but it’s more about who’s in charge. Rather than making sure infrastructure is sound, commodity stockpiles are sufficient and the population is informed enough to weather a world food crisis, (much more likely to happen than some idiot schoolboy with a dirty bomb) they’ve concentrated on consolidating their own political power. It’s clear that the future that the government has in mind is a dystopia in which we’re all considered criminals, potential terrorists and a threat to the state.
Why might any one of us be considered a terrorist? The prospect of food shortages also puts another twist to the antiterror laws: in a time of scarcity anyone who interferes in any way with the food supply must ipso facto be a terrorist. This could include battery farming protestors (we may yet see a time when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver are banged up without trial for 42 days) and anti-GM agitators, anti-globalisation activists, potentially even Granny, who’s obviously an antisocial hoarder putting the nation at risk with her cupboard full of flour and sugar.
Environmentalists have been warning politicians of the potential for a food supply catastrophe for years and yet the government and prime minister seem to have spent little time considering that threat to public well-being. What they’re actually worried about is the threat to their grip on power.
Brown’s spent the last 7 years wasting our national resources and public goodwill in spending billions ‘fighting’ the chimaera of terrorism; he’s obsessed with the idea of subversive enemies without and within, when in fact the real enemy of the people has been the political and economic system we live under.
Brown’s very fond of quoting Churchill so perhaps he should think on this:
” One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.