The UK’s health and social services have become tools of surveillance and control, with working class women the most vulnerable to state intervention. Madame Tlank reviews the State’s policies, targets and pilot-projects and uncovers the warped logic and fragmentary effects of marketised welfare

Michael Hudson on the fiscal policy continuity from Reagan's supply side 'voodoo' through (Bill) Clinton-era government by Goldman Sachs bond traders (a tradition continued with Bush's appointment of Paulson) to the present crisis.

Detailed summary by Michael Hudson (author of the essential Super Imperialism, new edition: Pluto Press, 2003) of US government moves over the last few weeks to rescue Wall Street's fictitious wealth claims by turning upside-down the New Deal-era agencies designed to keep small producer-debtors from going under.  Treasury Secretary Paulson will pay whatever it costs to fund "creditors to lend debtors enough money for them to pay the interest costs so as to keep current on their loans", even if it means bankrupting Medicare and Social Security.  In this respect Paulson may be closer than the neo-Georgeist Hudson to the minority-marxist intuition that 'capital's executive committee' has to bail the gamblers out because financial looting is by now the only possible basis for accumulation.  But Hudson's ongoing account of this kind of policy as the 'socialization of risk' is vindicated today more obviously than ever.  The other side of this, of course, is that when, government withdraws from 'the market', leaving a policy vacuum for the FIRE sector to fill, as Hudson describes, state action to condition and coerce labour tends to go into overdrive.  As Elizabeth Povinelli observes in the current issue of Mute (http://www.metamute.org/en/Doing-it-for-the-Kids), in practice this often means mortal risk-taking becomes compulsory for the asset-poor, at the same time as the biggest  gambling debts are being 'forgiven'.
From Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org)

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.

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 with the Royal Mail workers.)  This Private Eye squib mentions the workers only in passing and the Directives not at all, but it draws attention to an important mediating stage in the restructuring: the banker-run Shareholder Executive, created in 2002 to subject the UK's remaining state-owned companies to the ultra-short-term criteria of 'shareholder value'