As the US subprime mortgage crisis plays out, the ‘dual morality’ of its victims' treatment becomes stark. But, Randy Martin explains, bailing-out the banks while leaving defaulters to rot is just the latest in a 30 year campaign of ripping off the American working class

"Your apartments are nice and tidy, but the stairways are covered with shit. What can you call this but a cult of space?"

– some interesting reflections on space, ludic and insightful, from Chto Delat?/ What Is To Be Done.

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?Itemid=127&id=267&option=com_content&task=view

Reads very well with Thomas Campbell and Dmitry Vorobyev's account of anti-privatisation/regen protests in St Petersburg elsewhere on metamute.org

B

Another Space. A Little Tragedy
Artiom Magun

Aeneas descends into the underworld and talks to his father Anchises, telling him about the modern age and about his wanderings, including a recent journey to Russia.

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 projects, and uncovers the warped logic and fragmenting effects of marketised welfare

Well Jeff, ... the fact is that you have the luxury of knowing that you will never ever ever ever EVER be faced with the government bossing you around like a child, simply because you have a parasite living in your body.

- The Law Fairy, Feministing.com

By now people have forgotten what history has proven: that ‘raising' a child is tantamount to retarding his development. The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF.

- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 1970

In what follows I wish to consider the effects of recent UK health and social policies on women and their children who are labeled ‘at risk'.[1]

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?
     Because there's a huge and hungry PFI industry out there that needs its billions and continues to control government thinking on PFI.  The Treasury's little-noticed by crucial paper Infrastructure procurement: delivering long term value last month paved the way for yet more private finance – relying on "evidence" from, er, PFI consultants KPMG and PwC that PFI remains effective.
    PwC's report in particular was a desperate attempt, called Hanging in the balance, to justify more PFI even though the off-balance-sheet magic that so attracted Gordon Brown to it is due to end.

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'

Shareholder Executive
BIG CHEQUES IN THE POST

Where did the ruthlessly commercial approach to Britain's post offices, and with it the massive closure programme, come from?

A majority of Royal Mail workers voted today for official acceptance of the stitch-up, sorry, settlement brokered by the Communication Workers Union, ending the recent cycle of strikes against the process leading to implementation of the EU directive on (selective - i.e. skewed against public sector working conditions) 'competition' in postal services.  As one postal worker remarked on the Royal Mail Chat site, the point where posties look for a better deal working at Tesco may have been reached.  This timely article from Libcom.org by Rob Ray, editor of Freedom anarchist newspaper, looks at the implications of this industrial struggle against a supra-national policy agenda

Rob Ray explains the introduction of competition to the postal service, and why it will be the government, not postal workers, who the public have to thank for the loss of cheap post and the universal service.

The problem, according to headlines in the mainstream press, was a 2.5% pay rise being offered by Royal Mail to its 190,000 workers, along with some vague problems to do with ‘terms and conditions’.

This extract from an unfinished text by Angela Mitropoulos, posted on archive : s0metim3s (http://archive.blogsome.com/2007/08/07/indigenous-land/#comments), gives part of the historical background (which some European readers may have overlooked) to the current military-medical invasion of Aboriginal land in Australia's Northern Territory.  Most importantly, the text explains the concrete connection between intervention in the name of 'health' and 'education', the blackmailing of the 'economically inactive' into the 'job-seeking' reserve army, and the rush to extract resource rents from legally inalienable Aboriginal land.

From New Left Review (http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2678) some solid statistical evidence -- particularly strong on intersections of national, municipal, private and foreign capital -- for a point that might have seemed to border on truism but apparently is not gasped in mainstream 'China studies: the expansion of Chinese industrial capitalism in the last 20 years can is broadly comparable to the same process in Europe and America in the 19th century, and speculation over notions like 'the paradoxes of market socialism' is useless.  (Anyone who doubted this should read Zola's Germinal  next to any journalistic account of migrant labour in Chinese coal mines.)  An earlier but more analytically developed account of some of the same phenomena, by Aufheben, can be found at: http://libcom.org/library/aufheben/aufheben-14-2006/welcome-to-the-chinese-century