#covid profiteering
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Tory-appointed 'Baroness' Mone, steeped in obscene profiteering from the Covid emergency while the rest of us struggled to survive, still hasn't been jailed yet...
...but let's hope she'll be behind bars soon.
They're closing in on you and your husband, you crooked Tory tart.
#britain#uk#fuck the tories#conservative party#british politics#tory party#inequality#tory corruption#ppe scandal#ppe equipment#crooked contracts#michelle mone#tory government#tory covid disaster#covid enquiry#covid profiteering
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GIVE THEM THE VACCINE It wasn’t clear how many boxes – priced at more than $400 each – were sold, or when they would be restocked, but Pfizer told Reuters it was “actively collaborating with all stakeholders to secure an adequate supply of Paxlovid in China.”
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Pixar taking a deep long look at themselves and deciding that they need to pivot to slop
#like lmao Luca and turning red did incredible on streaming and probably would have turned a profit if it hadn’t been for COVID#elemental was marketed unbelievably badly so people skipped it#lightyear is exactly the kind of film they’ve convinced themselves they need to make and it sucked and no one saw it
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Doctor Beverly Crusher
@SpaceDocMom
From your ongoing pandemic to your related worker shortages to your ridiculously high rates of burnout and more, your era's insistence on making people work or go to school when ill is destroying you all. emojis: black heart, blue heart, masked
5:24 PM · Nov 26, 2023
#star trek#doctor crusher#star trek the next generation#star trek memes#star trek tng#kindness#support#care#compassion#health care#healthcare#medicine#capitalism#profit#burnout#covid is not over#covid isn't over#spoons#spoonies#disability#chronic illness
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Everyone's desperate for Covid conspiracies. Here's what a real one looks like:
Knickers, dodgy-pills and fake-tan saleswoman Michelle Mone is made a Conservative life peer. For her contribution to society, presumably. We can't vote her out. We're stuck with her. She is in one of our Houses of Parliament until she or it croaks. She'd vote on our laws, which would be terrifying, if she ever bothered to turn up to work.
Mone uses her government links to bypass normal tendering processes and get the company PPE Medpro into the 'VIP lane' for government contracts during the Covid pandemic. PPE Medpro is not even incorporated as a company at this point, let alone qualified and experienced, but is subsequently awarded £200 million of government business to supply medical gowns. Mone insists she does not benefit from this so there's no possible impropriety.
The contract is waved through unscrutinised due to the public health emergency. Frontline healthcare workers are getting sick and dying because of the lack of safety gear. Contracts going through the VIP lane are 10x more successful than those going through the normal public tender process. Also the VIP lane will subsequently be declared illegal.
These gowns are never actually used, as they don't meet the British Standard and never make it through the medical regulator's process to get an exemption. The government is refusing to confirm this due to the 'commercial sensitivity' of the 'mediation' process, but it's widely reported. Also the British taxpayer is still paying money to store the things.
PPE MedPro deposits £29 million in an offshore trust. You get three guesses as to the beneficiary, and the first two don't count. Rhymes with 'Bone', as in what they've done to us.
This is what an actual conspiracy looks like. It's just capitalism and political patronage, which nobody finds very exciting. No Bill Gates microchipping your kids. Just rich fuckers passing money around and profiteering from misery and death while you all keep voting for them.
#Covid#Real conspiracy#Corruption#Covid 19#Fuck the Tories#It's almost like people who love profit more than anything probably shouldn't be trusted#UK politics#Conservative Party#Michelle Mone
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Give them the fear of God
#Canada#scamdemic#COVID#fraud#pseudoscience#profiteering#looting#wealth transfer#corruption#conflict of interest#fearmongering#tyranny#biofascism
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Canada's privatised shadow civil service
PJ O’Rourke once quipped that “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.” But conservative parties have unlikely allies in the project to discredit public service: neoliberal “centrist” parties, like Canada’s Liberal Party.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien
The Liberals have become embroiled in a series of scandals over the explosion of lucrative, secretive private contracts awarded to high-flying consultancy firms who charge hundreds of times more than public sector employees to do laughably bad work.
Front and centre in the scandal, is, of course, McKinsey, consligieri to opioid barons, murdering Saudi princes, and other unsavoury types. McKinsey was brought in to “consult” on strategy for the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), a Crown corporation that gives loans to Canadian businesses.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/business-development-bank-canada-hudon-mckinsey-1.6720914
While there, McKinsey performed as per usual, veering from the farcical to the grotesquely wasteful. Most visible was the decision to spend $320,000 on a livecast fireside chat between BDC president Isabelle Hudon and a former Muchmusic VJ that was transmitted to all BDC employees, which featured Hudon and the host discussing a shopping trip they’d taken together in Paris.
Meanwhile, BDC has been hemorrhaging top people, which leaving the organisation with many holes in its leadership — the kind of thing that would pose an impediment to its lofty goals of substantially increasing the support it gives to businesses run by women, First Nations people and people of color.
Hudon — a Trudeau appointee — vowed to “start from scratch” when she took over the organisation, but then went ahead and did what her predecessors had done: hired outside consultants who billed outrageous sums to repurpose anodyne slide-decks full of useless, generic advice, or unrealistic advice that no one could turn into actual policy. They also sucked up BDC employees’ time with endless interviews.
The BDC has (reluctantly) disclosed $4.9m in contracts to McKinsey. The CBC also learned that Hudon parachuted several cronies from her previous job at Sun Life into top roles in the organisation, and that BDC had reneged on promised promotions for many long-term staffers. Hudon also repeatedly flew a chauffeur across the country from Montreal to BC to drive her around.
In Quebec, premier François Legault hired an army of McKinsey consultants at $35,000 per day to advise him on covid strategy, for a total bill of $8.6m. McKinsey’s contract with the province stipulated that they wouldn’t have to disclose their other clients, even in the event that they had conflicts of interest:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/caq-legault-mckinsey-pandemic-consulting-1.6602374
The contract was kept secret, as was the long-running, $38m contract between McKinsey and the Hydro Quebec power authority:
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1927738/mckinsey-hydro-quebec-consultants-barrages-affaires
Most of the bad press McKinsey gets revolves around the evil advice it gives — like when it advised opioid companies to pay cash bonuses to pharma distributors for every death-by-overdose in their territory (no, I’m not making this up):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/30/mckinsey-mafia/#everybody-must-get-stoned
But these rare moments of competence should be understood in the broader context in which McKinsey isn’t evil, they are merely utterly, totally fucking useless. The 2022 French Senate report on McKinsey really digs into this:
http://www.senat.fr/commission/enquete/2021_influence_des_cabinets_de_conseil_prives.html
They find that a quarter of the work McKinsey turned in was “unacceptable or barely acceptable in quality.” This is in line with the overall tenor of work performed by consultants. For example, when it came to giant Capgemini, the French Senate found that the work it provided was “of near-zero added value, indeed sometimes counterproductive.”
And yet, despite the expense and “near-zero added value,” hiring outside consultants is a reflex for neoliberal centrist leaders. Trudeau has presided over a massive expansion of the Canadian government’s reliance on outside consultants:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-liberals-spend-billions-more-on-outsourced-contracts-since-taking/
After campaigning on a promise to reduce outside consultancy, the Trudeau administration increased consultant spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion. This shadow civil service is not just more expensive and less competent that the real civil service — it is also far more opaque, able to fend off open records requests with vague gestures towards “trade secrecy.”
Since 2015, McKinsey has raked in $101.4m in federal contracts, even as the civil service has been starved of pay. Meanwhile, federal departments insist that they need to “protect Canada’s economic interests” by not disclosing outside contracts, and list their total spend at $0.00.
https://nationalpost.com/news/outsourcing-contracts-mckinsey-billions
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada estimates that between 2011–21, the Canadian government squandered $18b on outside IT contracting that could have been performed by public servants. In 2022, the Government of Canada spent $2.3b on outsource IT contracts, while the wage bill for its own IT staff came in at $1.85b.
It’s not like these outside IT contractors are good at their jobs, either. The most notorious example is the ArriveCAN covid-tracking app for travellers, the contract for which was awarded to GCstrategies, a two-person shop in Ottawa, who promptly turned around and outsourced it to KPMG and other contractors, whom they billed to the government at $1,000–1,500/day, raking off 15–30% in commissions.
For months, the origins of the ArriveCAN app were a mystery, with the government insisting that the details of the contractors involved were “confidential.” But ArriveCAN was such a steaming pile of shit, and so many travellers (a population more likely to be well-off and politically connected than the median Canadian) had to deal with it, that eventually the truth came out.
The ArriveCAN scandal is ongoing — just last year, it cost the Canadian public $54m:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-arrivecan-subcontractors-multinationals/
Trudeau’s Liberals didn’t invent outsourcing high-stakes IT projects to incompetent grifters. Under Conservative PM Stephen Harper, Canada paid IBM to build Phoenix, an utterly defective payroll system for federal employees that stole millions from civil servants, bringing government to a virtual standstill. Thus far, the Government of Canada — which paid IBM $309m to develop Phoenix, as a “cost savings measure” — has paid $506m in damages to make good on Phoenix’s errors:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-paid-out-400-million-in-phoenix-pay-compensation-to-federal/
The Liberals didn’t invent Phoenix — but they did deploy it, after campaigning on the wastefulness and incompetence of the Tories’ outsourcing bonanza. And after Phoenix crashed and burned, the Liberals increased outsourcing spending.
All of this is well-crystallized in last week’s Canadaland discussion between Jesse Brown and Nora Loreto:
https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/853-the-indulgent-consultant/
And on his Substack, Paul Wells proposes that the Senate — a largely ornamental institution in Canadian politics — is the unlikely check of last resort on the Liberals’ fetish for outsourcing:
There are former deputy ministers at the federal and provincial levels, secretaries to cabinet, a former Clerk of the Privy Council, a former chief of staff to a prime minister. A lot of them can remember the days when big decisions weren’t farmed out to firms that make their founders rich and are spared the rigours of accountability for their counsel. Surely some of them would like to shine a light?
https://paulwells.substack.com/p/shine-a-brighter-light-on-contract?
Image:
Sam (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Canadian_House_of_Commons.jpg
Presidencia de la República Mexicana (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Justin_Trudeau_June_2016.jpg
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
[Image ID: The legislative chamber of Canada's House of Commons; behind the speaker's chair, the back wall has been replaced by an enormous $100 bill. The portrait on the $100 bill has been replaced with an unflattering, braying picture of Justin Trudeau. The Bank of Canada legend across the top of the note has been replaced by the McKinsey and Company wordmark.]
#pluralistic#canada#cdnpoli#neoliberalism#consultancy#opacity#impunity#hollow government#mckinsey#justin trudeau#liberal party#covid#quebec#profiteers
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If you are trans or queer in so called Canada and not currently masking wrt Covid let me help you connect something:
the "freedom convoy" started with demanding that vaccine and mask mandates get dropped.
the government(s) caved to them. no masks anywhere.
now the same ppl are demanding anti-trans and anti-queer policies in schools and beyond.
"we keep us safe" means all of us. disabled lives are worth protecting. Covid denial is a canary in a colemine to facism and we've been seeing it on display for years.
We Keep Us Safe.
wear a mask (K/N95 or better), fight the fash, care about eachother and yourselves.
I dont want you to die and I dont want you to kill anybody. We HAVE to take care of each other or else we're fucked.
(reblogs encouraged)
#canpoli#canadian politics#canada poli#i know the ongoign covid and lack of safety from authorities is terrifying#i get the appeal of denial#but fuck im queer and disabled#and so are most of you esp ir youve HAD covid#we are some of the 'other'#please im fucking begging we have to take care of everyone#no one else is gonna do it cuz its easier and more profitable to their power if we die
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Opening a post of someone on here asking for skincare recs and seeing every single one suggested either fall under “company that directly states their support for israel” or “company that does business with israel” was very jarring, are you guys seriously limiting yourselves to the bds list and “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” excusing yourself for every other thing you buy? Like the bds list is the bare MINIMUM. You’re bare minimum-ing your support for divesting from an apartheid state & limiting your financial impact for the continuation of the genocide against Palestinians? Your skincare routine is not more important than other people’s literal lives.
#x#like are you serious.#ok . i have to get that post about covid mitigations together but i’ll start posting about additional boycotts on here more as well.#i have a spreadsheet i’m working on that is more comprehensive than the barcode scanner apps (which are often wrong)#i feel so disoriented rn bc i’ve stopped buying upwards of 65% the shit i used to and ppl are out here recommending cerave#we are. not on the same page here lol#i’ll try to make the info more accessible#but for example. lush claims to be neutral but the olive oil in their products is sourced in part from israel. they make sure to mention#that it's sourced by a female run nonprofit cooperative between israelis and palestinians and how the org is a beautiful symbol for peace#but the “nonprofit” in question is israeli run. and the profits go to the welcome center/visitor centre. which is a pitstop on birthright#tours. where they push propaganda about how palestinians are treated. so by supporting lush you are directly supporting that programming#you CANNOT be neutral about a settler colonial apartheid occupation state put that fucking idea in the gutter!!!#do you think sindyanna effectively utilizes girl power by funneling your money into genocidal apartheid propaganda?
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In the US, according to the CDC, more than 10,000 people died of COVID in December 2022, capping off a year that saw some 263,000 COVID deaths. As of this writing, 4,000 people have died of COVID in each of the last two weeks. As of this writing, average weekly deaths in the US account for 1 in every 5 COVID deaths reported globally. And deaths are, of course, not the only impact of the pandemic: Think tanks have highlighted that millions of people have long COVID and many are out of work as a result.
The Biden administration plans to end this arrangement as soon as this year. While we saw multiple allusions to this plan last year, the clearest articulation of the Biden administration’s intentions came from Jha in an August 2022 live stream when he spoke to the corporate lobbying group the US Chamber of Commerce. Jha stated, “We need to get out of that business … My hope is that in 2023 you’re going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products … so we just move them into the regular health care system. This business of kind of day-to-day running of a pandemic, It needs to transition,” he added.
It is hard to overstate just how much of a disaster it would be if the Biden administration is allowed to successfully transfer its responsibilities here.
Over the course of the pandemic, activists have been operating under conditions where the federal government has been the central point of leverage on the pandemic response. While state and local governments, businesses, and the courts have been important centers of activity, the Biden administration has held enormous responsibility for everything from vaccinations to setting the terms of public debate over the virus.
The moment that changes, the entire advocacy landscape around COVID will change. All of a sudden it’s not primarily the federal, state, and local governments we have to appeal to. Instead, it will be the government plus every private insurance company under the sun, Medicaid programs state by state, Pfizer, Moderna, the FDA, the courts, Walgreens, CVS, pharmacy benefit managers … the list goes on. We know that COVID advocacy will be forced to split in this way because it is how our existing political economy of health care currently distributes responsibility for everything else.
In other words, while we believe the Biden administration has failed on COVID in many respects, we know one thing for certain: If there is one thing built to fail more than the Biden administration, it’s “the regular health care system” in the US.
The most immediate impact of this move has been dramatically foreshadowed. In October 2022, Pfizer announced plans to increase the price of their vaccine to between $110 and $130 per dose. In early January of this year, Moderna made a nearly identical announcement that it plans to raise the price of its vaccines to the same price point per dose as Pfizer.
This is where it becomes important to have an understanding of the many failures of the US health care system. If responsibility for COVID vaccines is kicked to the private market, the effects of Pfizer and Moderna raising their prices will be felt extraordinarily unevenly.
(continue reading)
#politics#joe biden#healthcare#profitized healthcare#capitalism#privatized healthcare#medicare for all#m4a#coronavirus#covid-19#public health
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Of course the moment my province announces increasing the minimum wage as it's tied to inflation, people pop out of the woodwork saying that this will mean prices will go up as if there hasn't been rampant inflation already.
I'm pretty sure it's not a future $0.65 raise which was just announced that's causing you to pay dozens/hundreds extra a month on food and rent alone for the past several months if not a year or more.
Stop gnashing your teeth at people already scraping by because you "went through the same and managed" and focus that anger at the people and systems that are actually causing it.
#haven't seen any 'but think of the mom and pop stores' yet but it's only a matter of time#pretty sure the bigger impact that would help independent stores out#would be to sort out the companies that hold commercial locations#and would rather have stores/buildings be empty than rent them at a reasonable rate#also it's not the same thing because have you seen the prices lately?#the official inflation number is far lower than what people actually experience#an extra $5 a day (assuming someone can find a job that's full time)#does next to nothing when companies are allowed to increase prices willy nilly just because they can#and once again if minimum wage was the driving factor of inflation there would have been no inflation whatsoever#it's almost like companies don't actually care about it and got addicted to covid profits#and got brazen about how they don't care about anything other than getting the c-suite/shareholders more money
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“One of these states recently invited me to speak at an event. Before going on stage, I was told what I could and could not say."
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Food for the Hungry!
Poverty in India have increased so much especially after covid-19. Many people lost their jobs, inflation in food grains, necessary items have increased very much.
Problem of poverty-
Despite of watching TV, news and other social platforms, we are not ready to help people especially children. Major people who are starving for food are from small countries who don't know how to decrease this issue.
Though there are many facts about this-
740 million people live in extreme poverty.
Agriculture is the major source of income of rural people to survive.
One in ten persons in developing world lives on less than $1.90 a day.
September 5- International Day of Charity
We can donate children's old clothes, food items, other necessary things.
We can donate on www.care.org.
But fair-trade fruit once a week to help poor farmers.
There are many poverty alleviation programs shoot out by government -
Integrated rural development program
Jawahar rozgar yogna
And many more..
Let's take a step forward and reduce the chances of poverty in India.
Share sites of reducing poverty to your friends and family and sort this issue.
#poverty#love#help#charity#food#homeless#donations#sustainability#covid#india#non profit#end poverty
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While we have a ruling class that believes it is ‘unrealistic’ to control a pandemic virus, as long as death and disability is normalised as the acceptable price of business-as-usual, we cannot move forward.
We cannot heal.
The future can only be more dangerous and precarious.
And eventually everyone becomes the vulnerable that once-upon-a-time were sacrificed for normality.
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yeah people who just started boycotting big business bc of i/p sorry but where were you the rest of your life lol? why'd it take October 7 for you to do something about big business?
#my ramblings#like why was it that point that you decider enough#not the contributor to capitalistic policy that keeps people poor starving homeless#hpw they wanted covid mitigations to disappear so they can go back to making record profits#so they can price gouge#so they can control the market and keep certain people on top#why wasnt that enough for you#and im talking about politically aware ppl btw if oct 7 is your intro to world events fair enough ig tho i encourage you to know your source#primary secondary sources etc how to check whats true whats a lie or how information is positionng you to feel#thats key to politicsl engagement#but yeah if youre in the game before oct 7 why tf wasnt everyrhiny else enougj for you?
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