But the powers-that-be will be laughing in our faces just a few miles over the Downs from Worthing this month, when they meet to discuss how to transfer health services across the world into the hands of greedy multinational businesses.
The conference called 'Public-Private Investment Partnerships in Health Systems Strengthening' (catchy title, that!) is being held from Wednesday April 9 to Friday April 11 at Wilton Park in Wiston, the Foreign Office's secretive rural venue for all manner of dodgy chin-wags involving government, military and business bosses.
The preview document, which we found on the Wilton Park website, declares it is being staged in co-operation with the Global Health Group, UCSF Global Health Sciences of San Francisco, and The Health Redesign Group Inc, with support from BUPA, Crown Agents, Eversheds, Ovations Health and The Rockefeller Foundation.
The agenda preview explains: "The conference will develop the concept of what we are calling public-private investment partnerships (PPIPs) that go beyond private investment in hospital buildings and maintenance, such as that characterised by Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), or the contracting out of selected services to the private sector, which is common in many countries.
"PPIPs encompass private capital investment in hospitals, clinics and other facilities but take this a step further to include ongoing private management of clinical and support services."
Planned speakers include April Harding of The World Bank in Washington DC; Ken Anderson, former commercial director general at the UK Department of Health and now managing director of the UBS Investment Bank (say no more!); Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, an international director of KPMG International, and Chinese Minister of Health Chen Zhu, who is to speak on ‘China's Reform Agenda' (wonder if he'll mention Tibet?)
When you consider that in March the same venue hosted a conference on ‘counter-insurgency' (ie: putting down any resistance) with contributions from the brutal Colombian government, renowned for its use of death squads, the Wilton Park agenda is clear: hard-core global privatisation enforced at gunpoint.
By the way, funny how you never read about its activities in the ‘mainstream' local or national media, isn't it?
WORTHING has spurned a literally heaven-sent opportunity to save itself from the rising tides of climate change. That's the view of the local head of the controversial Church of the Immaculate Deception.
The charismatic one-eyed thong-wearing Rev Aubrey Mansell believes that the tonnes of wood that washed up on the town's beaches in January were sent by God himself to enable residents to build themselves an enormous ark and escape impending flood disaster.
He said: " I had a dream that the Lord would save this town from The Great Inundation and when I saw the piles of timber on the foreshore all those weeks ago, I couldn't believe my eye.
"I knew that this was His way of helping us. With no problem at all, we could together have built a mighty ark, big enough to hold every man, woman and child in Worthing - plus a few of the more edible family pets. But what did we do? We couldn't see the wood for the beach, we removed the plank from our own eye without spotting the biblical mote in the very nostril of Divine Salvation and now we are all doomed to the depths of hell!"
The Rev added that if readers wanted to apologise directly to God, cheques should be made payable to A Mansell.
* Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), already in place on roads out of Worthing, is also being used at local rubbish tips.
* Metropolitan Police made 3,000 requests for passenger journey data from Oyster cards in 2006, it emerged. (Guardian, March 13)
* A computerised mind-reading technique has been developed. Enthused a scientist: "Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience at any moment in time." (The Guardian, March 6). Yes, just imagine.
* Worthing taxi marshalls have headset-mounted video cameras, with footage made available to police (W Herald, February 14)
* A trial at the University of Washington involves total tracking of people's movements in the computer science building. "Two hundred RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) antennae have been fitted into the ceilings and individuals taking part in the trial wear RFID tags around their necks and on their possessions", reported The Guardian on March 13.
* Fingerprinting is being imposed on all domestic passengers using Heathrow's new Terminal 5. Reported The Daily Telegraph (March 8): "The controversial security measure is also set to be introduced at Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow's Terminal 1, and many airline industry insiders believe fingerprinting could become universal at all UK airports within a few years."
* In ten years' time, bosses may be implanting microchips into workers' brains to "monitor and control behaviour", says the Chartered Management Institute (The Guardian, March 14).
* 100,000 workers at the 2012 London Olympics site will be forced to undergo biometric screening, including palm-print reading and face recognition, to get to work. Biometric screens are also being considered for the 9 million spectators. (London Lite, March 5).
* British scientists are developing swarming, decision-making robots the size of sugar cubes that "will be able to assemble themselves into much larger machines". Rescue operations and other benign uses are being mentioned, as if military or police-state applications were a complete and absurd impossibility!
* The fascistic control freaks at the Association of Chief Police Officers want primary school children - from the age of five! - to be put on the DNA database "if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life" (The Observer, March 16).
* Meanwhile, there was a timely reminder that the 900-odd homes planned for the West Durrington countryside need not even be built, with the Worthing Herald reporting (January 31) that there are still 900 empty private properties in the borough. But then, the Titnore development is not really about providing homes for local people, but about fat profits for the usual greedy businessmen.
Party on the steps of the Town Hall in Chapel Road, Worthing
2pm on Saturday May 24
Like their close chums in the local Tory Party/business mafia, the hapless hacks at the Herald seem incapable of understanding that new roads destroy the environment. To them, countryside only exists as a sort of real-life screen saver in the car window, with the ‘Herald Comment' warbling on about "wonderful downland vistas opened up to drivers". And the wonderful vista from the downland is of a porkin' great motorway!
So it was particularly satisfying to discover the small item published in the March 6 edition of the Herald. Entitled "Readers vote no for bypass", it revealed that its online poll showed a 63% majority against a new road.
Stuff that up your exhaust pipe!
Published and printed by The Porkbolter, PO Box 4144, Worthing BN14 7NZ. No copyright, no suspiciously new decking in our sty.
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