Apparently it's not considered newsworthy beyond the local press, but a whole block of the Morningside Estate in Hackney Wick/Homerton, i.e. prime Olympic boom territory, has been without electricity for SIX days and counting.  The supplier (French state-controlled London Olympic bid sponsor EDF Energy) blames a water leak (Thames Water: acquired for £8 billion by Macquarie Bank of Sydney, 2006).  You couldn't ask for a better display of how financialized infrastructure works: resource rundown by two fragments of the former utility system converges neatly to make life impossible for guess which class demographic (sitting on guess which real estate...)

re-posting from the [reclaim-spaces] list, originally in Black Agenda Report

Tear Down the Ghetto: The Price is Wrong
http://www.nathanielturner.com/teardownghettopriceiswrong.htm

What the misanthropic Jenkins calls a "small mental adjustment" is
actually a government-
subsidized economy of destruction -rather than production- divorced
totally from human needs but instead dictated by the demands of those
who deal in "moneyness."

While bird flu panic made a return to the UK mainland last autumn, the promised pandemic failed to materialise. What does continue to evolve, however, are repressive forms of population management sustained by hypothetical threats of megadeath – writes C. L-Stavrides

Preamble to Defend Council Housing document on the 'council housing' bill being rushed through parliament, which looks likely to extend authoritarian regulation of tenants' use of 'low-cost rented housing', a nebulous category encompassing public and private ownership, into which 'council housing' as hitherto understood will disappear.  On one level this confirms James Heartfield's warning (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3657/) that the Brown government's newfound enthusiasm for 'social housing' revives the disciplinary mission of Victorian estate building post-'slum-clearance'.  On the other hand, there were always two sides to council housing: social discipline AND the cheap consumption of a basic commodity which worker/tenant struggle forced the state to concede.  The new bill is the latest in a long series of attempts to reinforce the former while neutralizing the latter.
The full DCH briefing is available at: http://www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/resources/DCHBriefing2ndReadingHousingBill.pdf