Not the best advertisement for Serco in New Zealand

Posted: 09 Aug 2011 04:21 PM PDT

Mmm:

Auckland’s Mt Eden prison operator Serco has been accused of bribing inmates with bigger helpings of food and televisions in their cells to encourage them to behave.
The prison officers’ union, the Corrections Association, said that in addition to larger meals, Serco served dessert every night, unheard of in the State prison system, Radio New Zealand reported.
Association president Beven Hanlon said the “luxuries” allowed the private prison operator to get by with a skeleton crew but guards were feeling vulnerable and leaving on a daily basis.
Serco said in a statement the televisions must be paid for by the inmates and the quantities of food served and the number of officers employed were both appropriate.

The current financial crisis is caused by the crack whores talking about it in our media

Posted: 09 Aug 2011

Leading Australian academic Scott Burchill offers thoughts on the current financial crisis:

It is amazing that S&P and Moody’s are still in business after their contribution to the GFC, let alone able to trigger GFC2 by downgrading the US’s credit rating.

Ha-Joon Chang is absolutely right about the desperate need for structural reform in the financial sector. There was a window of opportunity to do something about re-regulation at the depths of the GFC, as I argued in The Age two years ago. So what happened? 

The financial sector (which paid most of Obama’s campaign bills) fought a determined and very successful campaign (more accurately a “class war”) to ensure there would be no meaningful reform of any kind. They soon got their bonuses back and nothing was done, despite the fact that they drove the world to the economic precipice. Consequently, a new crisis is upon us before the old one was even over (at least for Australia – for Europe the GFC never went away). The problem for the elite, as Noam Chomsky has just written, is that the people (“extremists”) the financial sector put in Congress to protect their interests have gone off reservation and could bring the whole system down.

What a disaster!

“I don’t call it rioting, I call it an insurrection”

Posted: 09 Aug 2011

Nick Clegg, in April 2010, warning of Tory-led “riots” in Britain

Posted: 09 Aug 2011

Of course, Clegg is now in the British government:
 

You can only push “austerity cuts” so far and not expect payback

Posted: 09 Aug 2011

The rioting in Britain has shocked Britain and the world but it really should not. Is this about payback for years of police mistreatment, a powerful statement from those who feel ostracised from mainstream England or criminal looters? A little bit of everything.
The Guardian expands on the social media aspect:

In October 1985, on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham where the death of Cynthia Jarrett sparked riots that culminated in the brutal murder of PC Keith Blakelock, a community leader stood on his chair at a packed open-air meeting.
The man bellowed into a megaphone to the 150 residents in front of him: “You tell them that it’s a life for a life from now on. This is war.”
Over whoops and cheers from the residents, he turned to a huddle of police officers standing 50 yards away and warned: “I hope you’re listening. There is no way I am going to condemn the actions of the youth on Sunday night.”
Twenty six years later, police officers are still listening – but the megaphones and open-air meetings have been largely replaced. This weekend’s north London riots, the Daily Mail announced on Monday, were “fuelled by social media“.
But is this necessarily the case?
Certainly, the first online gathering of people mourning – and soon vowing to avenge – the death of Tottenham resident Mark Duggan took place on Facebook. Some of those behind the page, which now boasts more than 7,500 fans, launched into action shortly before 10.30pm on Saturday evening – more than five hours after the first public show of protest, outside the police station on Tottenham High Road.
At 10.45pm, when rioters set a double decker bus alight, the page posted: “Please upload any pictures or video’s you may have from tonight in Tottenham. Share it with people to send the message out as to why this has blown into a riot.”
However, otherwise, if there was any sign that a peaceful protest would escalate, it wasn’t to be found on Facebook. Twitter was slightly more indicative: tweets about an attempt to target Sunday’s Hackney Carnival were spotted by police and the event was abruptly cancelled.
Scotland Yard warned on Monday afternoon that those “inciting violence” on the 140-character social network would not go unpunished. Deputy assistant commissioner Stephen Kavanagh confirmed that officers were looking at the website as part of investigations into widespread looting and rioting.
However, the most powerful and up-to-the-minute rallying appears to have taken place on a more covert social network:BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).
Using BlackBerry handsets – the smartphone of choice for the majority (37%) of British teens, according to last week’sOfcom study – BBM allows users to send one-to-many messages to their network of contacts, who are connected by “BBM PINs”. For many teens armed with a BlackBerry, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free, instant and more part of a much larger community than regular SMS.
And unlike Twitter or Facebook, many BBM messages are untraceable by the authorities (which is why, in large part, BBM is so favoured by Emirati teens to spread illicit gossip about officialdom).

Defending BDS activists to speak out against the crimes of the Zionist state

Posted: 08 Aug 2011