A Glimpse of the Future

Atrios points to an article in today's Guardian in the UK about a private security company that used unemployed "volunteers" to act as stewards (i.e., security guards") during the Queen's Jubilee celebration over the weekend.  Just to set the stage, the Conservative government in the UK has put into place a 'work program" that the long-term unemployed must participate in to continue receiving unemployment benefits.  What has been happening is that a lot of private firms have been taking advantage of the program to obtain cheap labor.  Here is a particularly egregious example:

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.


Up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth as part of the government's Work Programme.

Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost their benefits, said they had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant. They told the Guardian they had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.

One young worker said she was on duty between London Bridge and Tower Bridge during the £12m river spectacle of a 1,000-boat flotilla and members of the Royal family sail by . She said that the security firm Close Protection UK, which won a stewarding contract for the jubilee events, gave her a plastic see-through poncho and a high-visibility jacket for protection against the rain.

Close Protection UK confirmed that it was using up to 30 unpaid staff and 50 apprentices, who were paid £2.80 an hour, for the three-day event in London. A spokesman said the unpaid work was a trial for paid roles at the Olympics, which it had also won a contract to staff. Unpaid staff were expected to work two days out of the three-day holiday.

The firm said it had spent considerable resources on training and equipment that stewards could keep and that the experience was voluntary and did not affect jobseekers keeping their benefits.

The woman said that people were picked up at Bristol at 11pm on Saturday and arrived in London at 3am on Sunday. "We all got off the coach and we were stranded on the side of the road for 20 minutes until they came back and told us all to follow them," she said. "We followed them under London Bridge and that's where they told us to camp out for the night … It was raining and freezing."
A 30-year-old steward told the Guardian that the conditions under the bridge were "cold and wet and we were told to get our head down [to sleep]". He said that it was impossible to pitch a tent because of the concrete floor.
The woman said they were woken at 5.30am and supplied with boots, combat trousers and polo shirts. She said: "They had told the ladies we were getting ready in a minibus around the corner and I went to the minibus and they had failed to open it so it was locked. I waited around to find someone to unlock it, and all of the other girls were coming down trying to get ready and no one was bothering to come down to unlock [it], so some of us, including me, were getting undressed in public in the freezing cold and rain." The men are understood to have changed under the bridge.

The female steward said that after the royal pageant, the group travelled by tube to a campsite in Theydon Bois, Essex, where some had to pitch their tents in the dark.

She said: "London was supposed to be a nice experience, but they left us in the rain. They couldn't give a crap … No one is supposed to be treated like that, [working] for free. I don't want to be treated where I have to sleep under a bridge and wait for food." The male steward said: "It was the worst experience I've ever had. I've had many a job, and many a bad job, but this one was the worst."

Both stewards said they were originally told they would be paid. But when they got to the coach on Saturday night, they said, they were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for well-paid work at the Olympics.

As Atrios points out:

Aside from the obvious "slave labor" element of this, using people like this for security by a private security is a complete scam. It's just collecting a bunch of money from the government to pretend to provide security. Security people need to be trained, have authority, and actually give a shit to serve any legitimate purpose. The only purpose here is "take tax dollars and run."

Unfortunately, such is the case with many jobs programs for the unemployed.  They turn our to be sources of cheap labor for the employers, who generally dump the workers as soon as the subsidy is no longer available.

Sinful.

Is It Just Me?

Or is there a lot more lying going on in politics these days?

Just What is Socialism Anyway"

Via Heather at Crooks & Liars, Jon Stewart answers the question.

My Daily Atrios

Accountability Free:

A big problem with our system right now is that the more non-democratic parts of our system (Fed, regulatory agencies, etc.) lack non-voting democratic accountability. It's just not polite to mention the fact that if they had any decency, all the top people at the Fed would be resigning in shame. There would be public pressure for them to do so, and the press would amplify such pressure. Instead it's just LEAVE BEN BERNANKE ALOOOOOOONE, trust the man behind the curtain to do his job without any pesky criticism.


The economy isn't the way it is because The Kids Today didn't study enough, it's because the people in charge fucked it up and are refusing to fix it.

This is What I had to Live With

My Congresswoman's communications director:

Let's hurl some acid at those female Democratic senators.

Sigh....

Use of Interpol in Tax Cases

I just received a blurb through one of by LinkedIn groups regarding a recent tax case out of Russia.  The case turned on whether the Russian company involved was affiliated with another company organized in Cyprus, a well-known tax haven country.  "Affiliated" in this context means under common ownership or control.  The documentation of the company indicated that it was not affiliated, but the tax authorities in Russia attempted to contradict this by introducing information obtained from Interpol.  Apparently, the information obtained indicated that the founder of the Cyprus company was a woman living in cohabitation with the founder of the Russian company and had children with him.  The court rejected the information as "obtained in violation of established procedure."

Not sure what to make of these kinds of decisions.  The fact that the tax authorities attempted to use information obtained from an outside policy agency in a tax dispute is kind of troublesome.  But then again, so is the fact that the court essentially ignored a relationship which clearly should establish that some tax shenanigans were going on. 

Which is worse?

Well...I'm Fascinated by This Stuff...

I guess Atrios doesn't really care, but I find this kind of thing most interesting.  From the BBC:

Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to work out when precisely our Milky Way Galaxy will crash into its neighbour, Andromeda.

The pair are being pulled together by their mutual gravity and the scientists expect them to begin to merge in about four billion years' time.

A further two billion years on and they will appear as a single entity.

Our Sun's position will be disturbed but the star and its planets are in little danger of being destroyed.

Viewed from Earth, however, the night sky should look fairly spectacular. That is assuming, of course, that a human species is still around billions of years into the future to look upwards.

I don't know if the human species will be around to see it or not, but if we are it won't be on Earth.  The latest science indicates that the Sun will continually grow and become hotter, so that a billion or so years from now it will no longer be able to support life:

The Earth is entering the final 10% of its lifespan, according to a US geoscientist.

Professor James Kasting, at Pennsylvania State University, calculates that the Earth's oceans will disappear in about one billion years' time, due to increased temperatures from a brightening Sun.

However, well before the planet is left as an arid desert, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be too low to support plant life, destroying the foundation of the food chains.
 
....
 
"Astronomers always knew that the oceans would evaporate, but they typically thought it would occur only when the Sun left the main sequence - that will be in five billion years."

Stars leave the main sequence when they stop burning hydrogen. The Sun will then become a red giant, swamping and obliterating Mercury. Venus will lose its atmosphere and become a burnt-out planet.

"However, my calculations show the oceans may evaporate much earlier," said Professor Kasting. "They are somewhat pessimistic and present a worst-case scenario, but they say a billion years."

The earlier loss of carbon dioxide will occur because as the climate gets hotter and wetter, more rock is weathered by rain. This dissolves carbon dioxide and hides it away on the ocean floor as calcium carbonate.

I remember when I was a kid I used to worry about this stuff.  The difference between 70 years and a billion didn't seem so great then I guess.  I'm not worried anymore.

Just fascinated.

Astronomy Pic of the Day

V838 Mon:

From NASA (originally posted in 2003):

Nominated for most mysterious star in the Milky Way, V838 Monocerotis briefly became one of the brightest stars in our galaxy. Its outburst discovered in January 2002, observations have indicated that V838 Mon somehow transformed itself over a period of months from a small under-luminous star a little hotter than the Sun, to a highly-luminous, cool supergiant star -- defying the conventional understanding of erupting stars and stellar life cycles. In this spectacular image, one of a series recorded last year by the Hubble Space Telescope, the dimmed V838 Mon is surrounded by an "expanding" nebula. But the nebula is actually a series of light echoes from formerly unseen shells of dust up to light-years in diameter. Previously ejected, the intricate shells progressively reflect light as it reaches them from V838 Mon's outbursts. Astronomers anticipate that light echoes from farther out in the dust envelope will continue to be visible until about 2010. Some estimates now place V838 Mon about 20,000 light-years from planet Earth.


Here is a further image of the same star two years later: