Like New Labour, Only More So

Welfare reforms will include tougher conditionality clauses for those on welfare, the introduction of more private-sector employment providers, and immediate testing for availability for work of current incapacity benefit claimants.

What work? Thus the sacred neoliberal gods are sated, privatisation, reduced entitlement and increased conditionality to make labour easier to exploit. Medical decisions on incapacity have already been sidelined so your medical condition is now judged by a clerk with performance targets to meet, the assessment examination already altered by a private corporation to find 70% of claimants well enough to work regardless. A grand present from the Tories and the Orange bookers. James Purnell would be proud. The message is simple Social Darwinism- Don’t get sick, or perhaps Malthusian, the useless eaters shall be discarded. Welcome to soft eugenics by proxy, for profit.

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May 20, 2010 | | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

BP & Coastguard Deploy War/Greenzone Model Of Embedded Media

An extraordinary piece on Rawstory shows that the coast guard seem to be working with BP to produce a privatised information environment where only eminbedded media are allowed to play, it reads very like the depiction of the Green Zone in Baghdad exposed in The Shock Doctrine/Baghdad Year Zero in terms of private and government forces working together against the public interest-

As BP withholds information on impact of massive oil spill, Coast Guard says that ‘embedded’ media have been allowed to cover response effort

As oil from the massive BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico approached the US coastline, a CBS News crew was threatened by the US Coast Guard with arrest if they attempted to film a beach in South Pass, Louisiana.

“When we tried to reach the beach … a boat of BP contractors with two Coast Guard officers on board told us to turn around under threat of arrest,” CBS’s Kelly Cobiella reported on Tuesday.

“This is BP’s rules, it’s not ours,” an officer can be seen calling from the other boat in the CBS video.

Since this initial brief report, the CBS video clip has been widely reposted, but there has apparently been no followup from either CBS or BP. The Coast Guard, however, released a statement from Rob Wyman, Lieutenant Commander, USCG, Deepwater Horizon Unified Command:-

Neither BP nor the U.S. Coast Guard, who are responding to the spill, have any rules in place that would prohibit media access to impacted areas and we were disappointed to hear of this incident. In fact, media has been actively embedded and allowed to cover response efforts since this response began, with more than 400 embeds aboard boats and aircraft to date. Just today 16 members of the press observed clean-up operations on a vessel out of Venice, La.

The problems with embedded media are well known even if they remain an open secret in media world, thus one can only conclude it continues because media elite, corporate and government elite have shared interests. Which does not bode well for those negatively affected by the Deepwater Horizon, government colonised by corporate revolving door personnel will not represent the people or protect the environment. Given that BP look to be criminally responsible for this disaster there is great danger that any authority they have will be used first and foremost to protect themselves, government agencies granting them that looks to be at best a symptom of neoliberal privatisation fetishism and at worst simple collusion & corruption. With wars pursued in similar fashion meaning little capacity for domestic emergencies remains, disaster capitalism will be all that prospers.

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BP Are Criminally Responsible

Otto @ IKN, where you need to go to read his whole post and follow his links to informed people in the industry-

“BP contracted Schlumberger (SLB) to run the Cement Bond Log (CBL) test that was the final test on the plug that was skipped. The people testifying have been very coy about mentioning this, and you’ll see why.

SLB is an extremely highly regarded (and incredibly expensive) service company. They place a high standard on safety and train their workers to shut down unsafe operations.

SLB gets out to the Deepwater Horizon to run the CBL, and they find the well still kicking heavily, which it should not be that late in the operation. SLB orders the “company man” (BP’s man on the scene that runs the operation) to dump kill fluid down the well and shut-in the well. The company man refuses. SLB in the very next sentence asks for a helo to take all SLB personel back to shore. The company man says there are no more helo’s scheduled for the rest of the week (translation: you’re here to do a job, now do it). SLB gets on the horn to shore, calls SLB’s corporate HQ, and gets a helo flown out there at SLB’s expense and takes all SLB personel to shore.

6 hours later, the platform explodes.”

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A Cartoon For Draw Muhammad Day

There is a tension between artistic freedom and cultural sensitivity, at the same time treating Islam as a monolith that obeys one rigid set of rules is not only inaccurate, it is probably rooted in an orientalist racism. There are also Islamophobics seizing any chance to attack Muslims and there are also people not even aware they are imperialists thinking their comfortable lives somehow equal enlightened freedom and not violent dominance. So it was with those ideas in mind I devised the following comic strip for the occasion (with props to KV & ht2 D-Notice)-

Update: Juan Cole has a good post, I do not think I have been gratuitous and in fact purposely made the strip something that would challenge Islamophobes & Imperialists while also expressing the freedom not to be bound by religious diktats. I think the point is one part of a religious tradition cannot expect to dictate what those not belonging to it do in an open society, that some will choose to attack Islam but not other religions is wrong. Some of this is certainly a kind of cultural & religious tribalism, for example Sarah Silverman ridicules Christianity but does not -to my knowledge- deal with Zionism or Israel much, she is free to do that but in my opinion her material would be stronger if she also applied her gags to those controversial (particularly for US audiences) areas. Or take Team America, a funny film, but juvenilely racist and ultimately it makes a plea for US imperialism. So there is more to this than a prohibition on iconography by some Muslims, there’s relative power, there’s who is the designated enemy of the US. But no religious rules can or should limit an artists work, unless there is absolute proof of 1. God existing and 2. It is your brand of God, then the rules are actually stuff -mostly- men have made up a long time ago and thus it is merely a competition for authority using a trump card of claimed divine endorsement. Equality demands such esoteric privileging of authority not be inflicted on those who do not believe or believe differently, something all religions have a massive problem with. If you are offended by this cartoon I am sorry for you because it is a bad series of drawings not genocide, I reserve my outrage for the carnage inflicted by those who believe they are right, pure and better than everyone else.

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