From Private Eye, the otherwise barely-reported story of the recent Treasury paper underlying the UK government's renewed commitment to more! bigger! better! PFI, which draws on the 'analysis' of PFI fee-farmers PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG etc.

    It has screwed scores of hospital budgets, snarled up the school building process and lumbered taxpayers with billions of pounds of hidden debts, yet the private finance initiative continues to thrive.  Why?

Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity w

Courtesy of the Financial Times, the latest news on the financial sector's most self-allegorizing activity: death hedging.  Or more prosaically, the develpment of 'longevity derivatives' and associated indices, through which fund managers can hedge against the risk that people (not to speak of broker-dealers) might not die soon enough.  In this update, Deutsche Börse has introduced live (so to speak) data feeds from undertakers to find out the age of the bodies they bury.

Death data drive new market

This starts off as sounding like a Bobo anti-gentrification rant - 'what! you mean Clapham is suffering from rising prices! The poor middle classes can't afford to dine out anymore!

From World Socialist Web Site (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008/guar-j09.shtml), a telling example of what 'the real world' means when invoked by government, unions and sympathetic media.  The story of a group of women care-workers employed by Cleveland and Redcar council who were forced to turn to 'no win no fee' lawyers after to obtain back-pay withheld through a council-Unison stitch-up.  Guess whose side the 'Guardian' was on...