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Just a cople of links to the latest Daily Stirrer posts:

Japan’s Triple A credit rating has just been downgraded, that of the USA is looking a long way short of secure.What is going on in the world of finance when economic powerhouses like these are in trouble? Is the continuing financial criis and the threatened meltdown in the bond market just a knock on effect from 2008’s problems or is something bigger going on?
The Debt Threat To Our Way Of Life

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, claimed that many PFI deals were “ghastly” and imposed an unfair “penalty” on schools, hospitals and other public services. It is understood that Cabinet Office and Treasury officials are examining PFI contracts worth billions of pounds, looking for ways to claw back money for taxpayers. Signalling an end to the era of PFI.Coalition Government Urged To Make PFI Profiteers To Repay Funds

Well that’s nice of him but although the worst PFI deals were made by Labour let’s not forget it was the Tories who introduced the scheme when Maggie was running things.

Children Are Being Given Chemical Cosh For Shyness

Children are being prescribed mind-altering “chemical cosh” drugs for conditions such as shyness and mild social anxiety, behaviour experts have warned. Young people are routinely being given medication to treat normal childhood conditions, it was claimed, despite fears over their long-term health.

The disclosure came as it emerged that the number of eight- to 13-year-olds on drugs such as Ritalin has soared seven-fold since 1997. In many cases, pupils are being put on medication amid fears from parents, teachers and doctors over a serious deterioration in their behaviour. But Dave Traxson, a senior educational psychologist who works in schools in the West Midlands, warned that normal childhood conditions like shyness…

read full report:Children Given Chemical Cosh For Shyness

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From Pensioner To Jobseeker

In keeping with a committment in the Coalition agreement, Employment Minister Ed Davey announced the end of compulsoery retirement at 65 this week. Age campaigners have long called for it to be scrapped.

Althoughe not all firms still insist on people leaving on their 65th birthday, there are concerns in the business community about the change.

Many bosses have criticised the move – featured in both Conservative and Liberal Democrat election manifestos – for reducing flexibility for employers.

The Daily Stirrer comments:
That’s going to do wonders for the young jobless. The economic mismanagement of governments over the past thirty years has created a pensions time bomb. Many people who responded to the exhortations to ‘save for a comfortable retirement’ are now finding that having denied themselves luxuries in order to provide security in retirement for themselves, their pension funds have been eroded by inflation, stock market boom and bust economics, stealth taxes and fraudulent practices in the finance industry.

Some pensioners have always supplemented their income with part time or low paid work but if all pensioners now have the opportunity to stay in work so long as they feel able and to thus keep their savings growing who can blame them. This will only deny jobs to younger people of course.

Nobody in politics or the civil service has bothered to give much thought to the age problem created by the sudden increase in average life span in the past half century. When the retirement age was set the average age at death (distorted by the two great wars of the 20th century) was under 65. When I started work in the 1960s it had risen to 68 for men, 71 for women. Now people expect to live until over eighty and longevity expert Prof. Aubrey de Grey says life expectancy is increasing by almost a year for every real time year that passes.

Wjavascript:b2evoInsertTag(b2evoCanvas,%200);e have to lower our expectations or find a way of employing a lot of extra people.

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Leaders of the western powers, anxious it seems to divest themselves of responsibility while extending and tightening their grip on power, are happy to promote the United Nations as a de facto World Government. The problem is the United Nations employs as advisers and bureaucrats many people whose authoritarian and racist political position makes Herr Hitler look positively liberal.

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Birthing Pains May Cripple Coalition

NHS Maternity services are near to collapse and care for mothers is worsening, a leading midwife warns in a vigourous polemic on the declining state of childbirth in hospitals.

Labour wards are struggling to ensure women get an appropriate quality of care under the “relentless pressure” of a record birth rate, staff shortages and increasingly complex births, says Cathy Warwick, general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives. (She does not mention the relentless pressure to prioritise paperwork imposed by bureaucratic management teams.)

Writing in the Observer, Warwick warns that the situation in maternity units is so grave the …

From The Daily Stirrer
Again we must say ‘we told you so’ having warned of this disaster in waiting in the maternity care departments of the National Health Service, in pre – Daily Stirrer days. Our predecessor Little Nicky Machiavelli wrote on this subject.

Once again however we are afraid we’ll see the coalition government getting the blame for the mess labour made during their dominance from 1997 to 2010. We don’t much care for the coalition or any other political grouping but at least let’s give them a chance. It seems unfair that people as obsessed with the word ‘fair’ as Labour leader Ed Milliband and other leading figures in the party are could blame the Conservative governments of 1979 to 97 for all the country’s ills right up to May 2010 but now accept no responsibility for their own incompetence and blame the new government for everything that is wrong with society after 13 years of Labour rule.

The breakdown in maternity care is not due to the coalition government’s planned public spending cuts which have not taken effect yet but are down to the financial idiocy of Labour minister from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, architects of the disastrous PFI schemes that tip shitloads of taxpayers money from the public purse into private pockets, the insane growth of NHS bureaucracy at the expense of front line care and the slavish devotion of Labour to academics who have spent their lives cocooned in University faculties and are thus too divorced from reality to ever see the folly of making vocational occupations like nursing into degree – entry professions.

All this move achieved apart from getting people out of the employment market and therefore off the jobless figures for a few years was to fill hospital wards with mincing queens who strut around brandishing their degrees in nursing while showing absolutely zero understanding of human nature and running a mile when a job involving anything messy or smelly needs dealing with.

Read the story on NHS maternity at The Guardian …
Maternity Care On The Verge Of Breakdown

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