On the off chance that another civilization stumbles across us and studies how it all went wrong, at some point one will say, “Ahah! They gave personhood to corporations. That’ll do it.”
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Setting these fools face up on the guillotine will be the first time in their lives they’ll experience foresight.
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This is a good companion to that
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Thank you! Had not seen or heard of this one. I had heard of Profits of Doom: How Vulture Capitalism Is Swallowing the World which is one of his earlier books.
Antony Loewenstein’s bibliography looks interesting.
Rabbit-holing for sec, found this:
and then I found this, on his own web site, and… dang!:
Ok I definitely need to make time to read this guy.
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And this - it is UK-specific, and on a similar theme, but focused more on how neoliberalism, in the form of the Tory right in the UK, has a political agenda to dismantle the state.
And of course a dismantled state has plenty of opportunities for disaster capitalists, who fund the very same politicians doing the dismantling and who end up on the boards of the same firms when they retire (or even while still in office).
… in recent years there has been a systematic and covert attack on the state that has turned us all against it - the government have depleted funding and resources, and mounted an ideological assault on the public sector through the media.
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Sounds like the invasion of Iraq,
and Dickie’s Haliburton
Collusion .
We vote to get Your kids to destroy it
and then
You tax-payer’s pay us
to rebuild it.
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I think the only way one can parse that is that they mean you can recharge it repeatedly.
As for the rest, why on earth would you buy all those other things when you can have an iphone? /s
Plus how else will we get to our cyberpunk future unless we have The_Poor™ working any job they can get in order to afford 3 generations old tech?
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Does the Tory right carefully starve its children the education that used to be funded by the government (and therefore, by the people, through taxes)? I can probably guess your answer, but I am curious to hear what you have to say.
The education of the UK’s next generation and indeed the quality of your education has been and is–at least for us Yanks–a marvelous thing compared with our own education system run on public funds here in the States.1 And a good free college / university education? Completely beyond our American comprehension, largely.
Here in Texas…
… the variously labeled Tea Partiers and Evangelical Conservative Christians and Trumpers etc. etc. have cynically designed our current system to keep the young as ignorant as possible, including the total absence of civics taught in school here now. A relentless concerted effort to push students toward schools run by churches, preferably run by the “Religious Right” 
is only made more perverse by the Religious Right lobbyists pushing for state funding of their “schools.”2 So much for “separation between church and state.”
When these poorly informed, poorly educated students come of age, they are and will be no trouble for The Powers That Be. Ignorant of the tools as provided by our legal system [such as it is], ignorant their rights, and often bereft of critical thinking skills, these shiny new citizens with voting rights and responsibilities have merely been “taught to the test” (state-mandated testing), which emphasizes a very narrow curriculum. (Incredibly, Austin Independent School District school board struck the teaching of critical thinking skills from its mission statement. Yes. In Austin.) Schools with students that score badly get tracked to lose their funding, of course.
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I am trying to avoid confusion re “public school vs private school” terminology because I am unclear whether UK “public schools” are what we call “private schools” in the US and vice versa.
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The Religious Right in our Texas education system is certainly working tirelessly to turn our clock nay calendars back. Way way back.
(with apologies for paywalls where you find them)
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Yup.
Contractors reap $138bn from Iraq war
https://www.ft.com/content/7f435f04-8c05-11e2-b001-00144feabdc0
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A quick explanation of the UK system.
State school = US public school
Private school = private school
Public school = elite private school, originally the schools that weren’t run by the Catholic church/Church of England.
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Wow! Thanks for this!
Does the term “UK Public School” apply to all [elite] private schools regardless of whether or not the school is affiliated with any religious institution?
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Yes. The defining factor now is membership of the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference.
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I also picked up on that meaning, but decided to take it in a different direction, because obviously you can charge it repeatedly, and also…
“…they can be charged for many days via car batteries or even hand cranks.”
Why include “for many days” in that sentence? Without it, it’s clear that you can use a car battery or hand crank to charge the phone. So… why “for many days”?
Maybe it was meant that in an emergency situation when you don’t have access to electricity in your walls, you can turn to a car battery, or a hand crank to juice up your all-in-one survival tool… well, not “all-in-one” I guess; it obviously can’t be a hand crank or a car battery. Perhaps they’ll work that out for the iPhone XI?
Right? I like how they don’t mention that if your phone breaks in an emergency situation, or is stolen as soon as you reveal it, there goes your flashlight, siren, first aid instructions, and radio.
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Ah yes, the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference…
if they invite you to give a speech at their annual convention, do not be late.
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The short answer is yes although not as blatantly as in the US. And it’s not exclusively a Tory thing.
The UK method has been through not keeping up with the increased real costs of schools (in truth a multi-party approach) and introducing various alternative state funded options which are not required to follow the National Curriculum.
Add to that the delightful Private Finance Initatives initially introduced by the Tories but massively encouraged/imposed by New Labour back in the day and you have a serious funding issue for the classic state school.
We have this too although slightly differently. Here the ‘faith schools’ come in two flavours.
Nice, respectable Catholic or CofE schools which all the middleclasses want their kids to go to because they are thought to be better than comprehensives and obviously little Tarquin and Lavinia (or Harry and Kate or whatever kids are called these days) need to go to a ‘good’ school with the ‘right’ people (in the sense that their parents can afford to buy houses in the areas where these schools are, attend the right church and keep in with the vicar, etc.) but the parents can’t afford a fee-paying school/can’t stomach the idea of packing their little darling off to some grim hole in the wilds of Yorkshire (British public schools are not all like Hogwarts).
Then you have Islamic faith-based schools which usually only crop up on people’s radar when someone (usually a Daily Mail editor or Tony Robinson) decides to allege that something awful happened in one or that they’re all training up jihadi death squads.
Oh, there’s jewish faith schools but they usually just get mentioned when someone chucks paint at them.
And they all get coverage whenever something vaguely modern is suggested like say teaching kids how not to get pregnant or that LGBTQ people deserve to live.
We used to have that. We now have a weird system where people have to pay for their tuition but they can get a government backed loan which they only have to pay back if they earn over a certain amount and whatever is left is written off after 30 years.
The government was recently told that it can’t pretend that all those loans will be paid back and that it has to account for the actual anticipated shortfall in its public accounts. Only 45% is expected to be recovered.
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Well, anything else wouldn’t be as impressive. Plus how else to get across the point that even if you are without electricity for many days, you can still fully participate in the Apple ecosystem?
Never mind the fridge, the freezer or the lights or using the car battery to get somewhere where there is power - keep cranking that hand crank so you can jive to itunes 
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I love that movie. It contains one of my favourite lines ever.
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Right!
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In addition to the longer replies (esp from L0ki) the quick answer is yes and no. 
Basically, yes. Education is being privatised. Academies and so on are basically privately run state schools, funded by govt. Being run by private firms not local education authorities (the old local council education organisations) they have had many scandals of a financial nature. This is not necessarily an indicator of educational quality, but it is a hint in many cases.
Tory govt imposes daft, restrictive national curriculum and exam regime on non-Academy schools. Basically scrapped coursework asssessments and went back to “you will learn by rote and regurgitate in lots of exams” because if it was good enough for Tory MPs in their public and grammar schools the moves away from it must be the cause of all educational problems (and certainly not the fault of successive govt’s tinkering, prescribing and starving of funds, oh no).
University education has not been free for years - you are well behind the timeline here! Letting U’s charge fees direct to students turned U’s into competitive markets and students into consumers demanding value for money (employability - even though many are doing degress that are unlikely to lead to lucrative employment) seeing as the students graduate with tens of thousands of pounds in debt.
But on the other hand “no”: I do not think the UK is yet as bad as US (some states - e.g. restriciing teaching of science that contradicts sky-fairy beliefs) but focus has been moved back more to the three R’s and not on how to learn, how to analyse, or how to think.
But reports trickle out of university arrivals unable to figure out how to organise, research, learn, and expecting to be spoon-fed, because the schools producing these students have focused ruthlessly on exam passes and league tables and spoon-fed rote learning focused solely on the natial curriculum/exam board’s scope, to ensure they maintain their league table places.
This is a very ‘loose’ snapshot based on what I read in the papers. I am not currently involved in or have any contact with UK education. But I can smell govts (Tory and neo-Tory - aka New Labour) when they fart out their privatisation, denigration of council controlled schools, and mourn lack of educational achievement which is irinaically largely due to their own lack of funding and tinkering with what schools must do.
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