Mute Column

the decision about what to do next is being mic checked:

some people

just can't break

down their sentences

efficiently

to be echoed

up the chain

and

keep saying

too few words

or too many and have to make with the

enjambement.

this seems

particularly hard

for those schooled

in the oratorical

habits

of the organised

left

their expressive

contours

are shattered

the rhetoric

halted

is this

reification

reified

November 2011, FT.  Paypoint, a processor of electronic card transactions using terminals  in neighbourhood shops, is expected to win a UK government contract to administer welfare benefit payments, previously handled by the all-but-defunct Post Office.  Is it too soon to imagine the potential for an all-'smart' card benefit system, allowing monitoring of claimants' purchases or restriction to an approved list of products, as with the vouchers that replace cash for asylum applicants?  (Micro-control of low-income lifestyles

Evening Standard, 21/12: "Foreign rough sleepers sent home to save on health care" 'Homelessness charity' Thames Reach will be paid £200,000 by the British state next year to continue sending "hundreds of homeless foreigners back to their own countries". According to the 'third sector' deportation agency more than £250,000 will be saved" on "emergency call-outs and hospital admissions".

Following on from Benedict Seymour's precise placement of the analytical axe in 'We’re into Endgame', the previous ‘Fifth Column’...

The Beckett double acts do indeed unthread the sub-dialectical spooooooooool of ‘hawk’-‘dove’ codependency, institutional autophagy and ‘sobriety’ backed by Quantitative Easing.

Hackney Council in the East End of London plan to drop CLR James's name from a public library in fashionable Dalston. As the UK regime of austerity deepens, should we be fighting for symbolic concessions to those deleted or displaced by gentrification, or is it time for a more material response?, asks Ben Seymour