On the edge of lunacy (Global Privatization)

[cprise]

Spare a thought this bleak new year for all those who rely on charity. Open your hearts, for example, to a group of people who, though they live in London, are in such desperate need of handouts that last year they received £7.6m in foreign aid. The Adam Smith Institute, the ultra-rightwing lobby group, now receives more money from Britain's Department for International Development (DfID) than Liberia or Somalia, two of the most desperate nations on Earth.

Are the members of the Adam Smith Institute starving? Hardly. They work in plush offices in Great Smith Street, just around the corner from the Houses of Parliament. They hold lavish receptions and bring in speakers from all over the world. Big business already contributes generously to this good cause.

It gets what it pays for. The institute's purpose is to devise new means for corporations to grab the resources that belong to the public realm. Its president, Madsen Pirie, claims to have invented the word privatisation. His was the organisation that persuaded the Conservative government to sell off the railways, deregulate the buses, introduce the poll tax, cut the top rates of income tax, outsource local government services and start to part-privatise the national health service and the education system. "We propose things," Pirie once boasted, "which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they're on the edge of policy." In this spirit, his institute now calls for the privatisation of social security, the dismantling of the NHS and a shift from public to private education. It opposes government spending on everything, in other words, except the Adam Smith Institute.

more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1116854,00.html

[demodewd]

1. puke

The utter arrogance of these people makes me want to puke. :puke: :puke:

[Avalon Sparks]

2. The adam smith institute web site:

Adam Smith institute is jacked out:

Here's their website:

http://www.adamsmith.org/home.htm+

Here's a priceless quote from the site:

Exporting Jobs is OK!

As more UK jobs go to the Far East, should we be downhearted? No, says Dr Eamonn Butler, as long as we keep on our feet and avoid more regulation.

and another one with a link to the story that follows..

Forget the Tories: We want a Vietnamese government
The UK government spends £9.57 per hour per worker in the country. The Vietnamese government spends just 9.8p. Is it any wonder we are so uncompetitive?

http://www.adamsmith.org/cissues/tax-and-economy/burden-of-government.htm

What a bunch of assholes!

[cprise]

3. Their slip is showing with that one

Unrestrained corporatism looks a lot like communism; production interests are merged with the state. Only with capitalism, it's corporations that buy/control the state whereas in communism the state creates/controls corporations.

It is the same.