LPH 920 - Between Silences (2001-21)
3 hours ago
Friday, 22 October 2010
G4S security guards accused over restraint of Colombian deportee
The UK Border Agency has launched its second investigation this month into allegations of mistreatment of a man being forcibly deported through Heathrow after being refused asylum.
José Gutiérrez, 37, from Colombia, needed hospital attention after G4S security guards escorted him on to a British Airways flight. He was subsequently removed from the plane before take-off.
His experience – on the evening of 6 October – came only a few days before Jimmy Mubenga, a 46-year-old Angolan refugee, collapsed and died after employees of the same private security firm put him on to another BA flight at Heathrow. Gutiérrez's partner, Teresa Ramsey, contacted the Guardian after reading of Mubenga's death.
Gutiérrez, now being held at Dover immigration removal centre, claims he was mistreated in the stairwell outside the aircraft where there were no cameras.
The Guardian has seen his NHS medical notes, which show that he was admitted to Hillingdon hospital's accident and emergency department in the early hours of 7 October with swollen and tender wrists and soft tissue injury.
A letter written the same day by a doctor at the Colnbrook removal centre observed that Gutiérrez had multiple bruising or petechiae (purple skin spots caused by broken blood capillaries) on his torso, back and arms as well as tenderness over his lower abdomen.
Gutiérrez has reported his claims to the Ukba and the Independent Monitoring Boards, the watchdog responsible for overseeing prisons, immigration removal centres and short-term holding facilities at airports. G4S has launched its own investigation. Gutiérrez has now been informed he will be deported next Monday.
In a statement issued through the Home Office, the Ukba said: "This matter is subject to internal investigation and we are unable to comment. We expect the highest standards of integrity and behaviour from our staff and contractors. We take all allegations of mistreatment seriously and they are reported routinely to the appropriate authorities, including the police."
Gutiérrez said he had arrived in Britain in 1992 after refusing to join paramilitary groups that had tried to recruit him. He said that other members of his family had since been killed in the conflict, and that he fears he would be targeted if returned to Colombia.
His request for asylum in Britain was rejected, he explained, after he was given a criminal record for becoming involved in a fight.
Gutiérrez said that security guards had handcuffed him and put on a leg restraint before physically carrying him on to BA flight 247 to Sao Paulo. He claims he sustained injuries to his left hand, lower back and pelvic region outside the plane.
After he was put into a seat, he threatened to harm himself with razor blades he had smuggled on. At this point the decision was taken to remove him from the flight.
Speaking from Dover detention centre, Gutiérrez said: "The [security guards] tied my leg with a kind of belt and carried me up the stairwell. I was shouting 'please don't do this to me. I have a daughter here.' [Afterwards] they took me to Colnbrook.
"One of the officers there saw me in a state and called the nurse who examined me. She said they should take me to accident and emergency at Hillingdon hospital.
"The hospital gave me an x-ray on my left hand and checked my injuries. My soft tissue [around the pelvic area] has been bruised. I have since been passing blood. I have also seen another doctor in the detention centre."
A spokesman for the hospital, near Heathrow, confirmed that Gutiérrez had been treated in the A&E department on 7 and 8 October. "He was discharged on both occasions," the spokesman said.
Victor Fiorini, who works with the Dover Detainees Visitor Group, said he had known Gutiérrez for six months. He saw him at the Dover immigration removal centre a week after the failed deportation. "He was very shaken," Fiorini said. "He had bruises on his back and his stomach. He couldn't walk properly. There were also bruises on his arm. He tells me he has nightmares now."
In response, a G4S spokesperson said: "We can confirm that a complaint has been lodged with Ukba by a Mr Gutiérrez regarding an attempted deportation conducted by G4S officers in October 2010. A formal investigation has been launched by Ukba, which G4S will co-operate with fully. In addition G4S has launched its own investigation into the alleged incident."
Three security guards who work for G4S have been arrested and bailed by police investigating the circumstances of Jimmy Mubenga's death. British Airways declined to comment on the case.
G4S describes itself as "the world's leading international security solutions group" and "the second largest private employer" on Earth. It has 595,000 employees.
Founded in 1901, it has grown to incorporate numerous security companies including Securicor, Group 4, and Falck in Europe, as well as the US-based Wackenhut Corporation and Armorgroup. It operates in 110 countries.
In the UK it runs immigration detention centres on behalf of the UK Border Agency at Dungavel in Scotland, Oakington near Cambridge, as well as Brook House and Tinsley House on the perimeter of Gatwick Airport. Oakington is due to close next month.
G4S manages four prisons on behalf of the Prison Service: HMP Wolds in Hull, HMP Altcourse in Liverpool, HMP Parc in Bridgend and HMP Rye Hill near Rugby.
The firm is the main contractor providing services to escort those removed from the UK on repatriation flights overseas. Among its international security customers are Baghdad international airport.
Owen Bowcott, Paul Lewis and Matthew Taylor @'The Guardian'
Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney remembers Ari Up
Do you ever just feel like you're tired of people dying? Your friends die and your heroes die and it's just a sh** reminder that one day we're all going to die. Last night we learned that Arianna Forster, a.k.a Ari Up from The Slits, has passed away after a serious illness. She was only 48 years old. The Slits! THE SLITS!
The Slits were a life-changing band that made life-changing music. What does life-changing mean? It means someone puts a song on a mix tape or throws a record on and you stop dead in your tracks because now, whatever path you were on no longer exists. In that moment, you think of histrionic and cliche things such as "from this day forward" and "from here on out," and you hope to God you have the conviction to follow through with all the things this music has inspired you to do. And, hey, you don't always do them, or all of them, but the fact that some song like "Typical Girls" — with it's swirling punch punch punch of a melody — makes you think that you're capable and bold and a little on fire, well isn't that what music is for?
Not once did a Slits song cease to amaze me, not after repeat listens, literally hundreds of listens. Not once did they fail to excite or inspire me, to make me a worshipper of rhythm, chaos and of attitude. The Slits were giants and they only grew bigger and more potent over the years. Their album Cut — on which the band is pictured topless and caked in mud — is nothing short of a pinnacle. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Cut sat there in the record collections — of both musicians and fans - -as the dynamic, the sound and the uniqueness for which to strive.
But the Slits and Ari Up were and are inimitable — a singular and spectacular force. That's why I'm so shocked and saddened that Ari Up is gone, it creates a glaring hole in a sonic legacy short on pioneers. Damn. So tough.
BONUS:
The Slits
from Caroline Coon's '1988'
Thursday, 21 October 2010
RIP - Ari Up
Vivien Goldman says
"The loss of Arri-Upp of the Slits is devastating not only for those like me who got to frolic and skank with her for three decades plus, but for music. A genuinely original free spirit, Arri at 14 showed us how to be a punk. In many ways, she was the soul of the movement, specially the Punky Reggae Party people. An incredible songwriter, lyricist and a conscious hurricane onstage. Miss you, sister."
In The Beginning (studio and live w/ Neneh Cherry)
Man Next Door/Version
Animal Space/Animal Spacier
Earthbeat/Dub
The Slits live @ Erics, Liverpool 1977
HEREJohann Hari: A colder, crueller country – for no gain
Margaret Thatcher is lying sick in a private hospital bed in Belgravia but her political children have just pushed her agenda further and harder and deeper than she ever dreamed of. When was the last time Britain's public spending was slashed by more than 20 per cent? Not in my mother's lifetime. Not even in my grandmother's lifetime. No, it was in 1918, when a Conservative-Liberal coalition said the best response to a global economic crisis was to rapidly pay off this country's debts. The result? Unemployment soared from 6 per cent to 19 per cent, and the country's economy collapsed so severely that they lost all ability to pay their bills and the debt actually rose from 114 per cent to 180 per cent. "History doesn't repeat itself," Mark Twain said, "but it does rhyme."
George Osborne has just gambled your future on an extreme economic theory that has failed whenever and wherever it has been tried. In the Great Depression, we learned some basic principles. When an economy falters, ordinary people – perfectly sensibly – cut back their spending and try to pay down their debts. This causes a further fall in demand, and makes the economy worse. If the government cuts back at the same time, then there is no demand at all, and the economy goes into freefall. That's why virtually every country in the world reacted to the Great Crash of 2008 – caused entirely by deregulated bankers – by increasing spending, funded by temporary debt. Better a deficit we repay in the good times than an endless depression. The countries that stimulated hardest, like South Korea, came out of recession first.
David Cameron and George Osborne have ignored all this. They have ignored the warnings of the Financial Times, the newspaper most critical of their strategy. They have dismissed the warnings of Nobel economics laureates like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, who have consistently been proved right in this crisis. They have refused to learn from the fact that the country they held up as a model for how to deal with a recession – "Look and learn from across the Irish Sea," Osborne said – has suffered the worst collapse in the developed world. They have instead blindly obeyed the ideological precepts they learned as baby Thatcherites: slash the state, and make the poor pay most.
Osborne galloped through his Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) speech, failing to name almost any of the services that will be slashed or shut down. It's revealing that he doesn't want to name them while the nation is watching.
But beneath the statistics, there was a swathe of human tragedies that will now unnecessarily unfold across Britain. PriceWaterhouseCooper – nobody's idea of a Trotskyite cell – says that a million people will now lose their jobs as a direct result. My father lost his job at the height of the last Tory recession, and had to leave the country to get another one. I remember how that felt. I remember what that did to my family.
Now it's going to happen to a million more families and probably more. For the private sector to get all these people into work, as Osborne claims, there would have to be the most rapid business growth in my lifetime. Does anyone think that will happen? Osborne has chosen the weakest people to take the worst cuts. The poorest 16-year-olds were given £30 a week to stay on in education, so they could afford to study – until Osborne's team dismissed it as a "bribe" and shut it down. The frailest old people depend on council services to wash them and feed them – yet Osborne just slashed their budget by 30 per cent, which service providers say will mean more pensioners being left to die in their own filth. Every family living on benefits is set to lose an average of £1,000 a year – which, as I've seen from living in the East End of London, will mean many poor kids across Britain never getting a birthday party, or a trip to the seaside, or a bed of their own, or a winter coat. This isn't just On Yer Bike, it's On Yer Own.
The irrationality of this approach is perhaps plainest when you look at housing. We badly need more affordable housing in Britain. Some 4.5 million people are stuck on waiting lists, and the average age of a homebuyer is now 37. It's a cause of constant stress to the real middle class and despair for the poor. By a happy coincidence, house-building is one of the best stimulators of the economy: it employs a lot of people on average wages, who then spend their money quickly in a "multiplier" effect.
Yet Osborne has chosen the opposite. There will be on average one new home built per week in the whole of London and the south-east. That's one. Indeed, instead of building homes, he's driving people out of them. By slashing housing benefit, London councils alone say 83,000 people here are going to be forced to leave their homes, with 1.3 million ending up in more debt. Cameron has revealed that his baby daughter sleeps in a cardboard box decorated for her by her big sister. Thanks to him, a lot more people are going to be sleeping in cardboard boxes soon.
It can't be coincidental that this is being done to us by three men – Cameron, Osborne, and Nick Clegg – who have never worried about a bill in their lives. On a basic level, they do not understand the effects of these decisions on real people. Remember, Cameron said before the election: "The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background", but "she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school." Osborne is a beneficiary of a £4m trust fund he did nothing whatsoever to earn and which is stashed offshore to avoid tax. Clegg actually thought the state pension was £30 a week, a level that would kill pensioners.
These attitudes have real consequences. We're not in this together. Who isn't in it with us? Them, their friends, and their families. They were asked to pay nothing more in this CSR. On the contrary: they are being let off left, right and centre. To pluck a random example, one of the richest corporations in Britain, Vodafone, had an outstanding tax bill of £6bn – but Osborne simply cancelled it this year. If he had made them pay, he could have prevented nearly all the cuts to all the welfare recipients in Britain. You try refusing to pay your taxes next time, and see if George Osborne shows the same generosity to you as he does to the super-rich.
There is one stark symbol of how unjust the response to this economic disaster caused by bankers is. They have just paid themselves £7bn in bonuses – much of it our money – to reward themselves for failure. That's the same sum Osborne took from the benefits of the British poor yesterday, who did nothing to cause this crash. And he has the chutzpah to brag about "fairness."
Britain just became a colder and crueller country. And for what? To pantingly follow a disproven ideology over a cliff. On the eve of the general election, Cameron told us: "There'll be no cuts to frontline services," "we're not talking about swingeing cuts," and "all cuts will be fair". Is it possible to call him anything but a liar and an ideologue today?
You can enjoy a long rest, Baroness Thatcher – your successors have embarked on a mephedrone-charged imitation that exceeds your most fantastical dreams.
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
English football should have heeded Lord Triesman's debt warning
The shredding of Liverpool's dignity and Manchester United's sense of looming crisis both arrived almost exactly two years since Lord Triesman, the now-deposed Football Association chairman, delivered his famously rejected warning about high levels of debt in English football.
In October 2008, the Premier League's chief executive Richard Scudamore dismissed the analysis as naive and ill-informed. The debts of the clubs in the world's richest and most popular league were sustainable, Scudamore said, because they added up to the same, around £2.5bn, as their overall income. "Debt to a degree is healthy," Scudamore said. "What is important is that the level of indebtedness has got to be in proportion to your income."
Given the dragging of Liverpool through courts in London and in Dallas before last Friday's takeover by John W Henry II – who paid Tom Hicks's and George Gillett's £200m "acquisition debt" back to the Royal Bank of Scotland, the £769m debts loaded on to Manchester United by the Glazer family's takeover, last season's insolvent wreckage at Portsmouth and the 2009 bankruptcy of West Ham's then owner and former Icelandic "billionaire" Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, it is instructive to revisit Triesman's analysis.
"There is one certain fact about debt," he said. "It has to be repaid [which mainly it is not] or re-financed. The debt mountains are owned, and therefore the clubs are owned, by either financial institutions some of which are in terrible health, or very rich owners who are not bound to stay, or not very rich owners who are also not bound to stay. As we all know today and far too painfully, finance institutions have finally become highly risk aware … I tell you, I think this poses very tangible dangers."
Calling on the professional game to work with the FA and introduce regulations to protect the game financially, Triesman said the leagues and FA should be: "Partners in a spirit of common purpose."
What happened instead was the vilification of Triesman, which continued until he was ultimately forced to resign after the Mail on Sunday reproduced extracts of a taped private conversation Triesman had with a friend, Melissa Jacobs.
The Premier League said Triesman had made his speech without warning or consultation, which was his most grievous offence. Triesman said he had consistently tried to raise financial issues since early August 2008, and to begin a joint approach, but the Premier League told him it was none of the FA's business and it would regulate its own financial affairs.
In the aftermath, Triesman was characterised as a dolt who did not understand finance, who could not read a balance sheet. In fact the then FA chairman was, and still is, a visiting professor of economics at Cambridge University, had been a government spokesman in the House of Lords for the Department of Trade and Industry, and had conducted his own investments successfully since the 70s. He may have underestimated the lethal nature of English football's power politics, but he could read a balance sheet. He did have a clue that there was a global economic meltdown coming and the top clubs were more vulnerable than they were prepared to believe.
Six days later, 13 October 2008, with the football media backlash against Triesman gaining momentum, the government announced it was injecting £20bn and taking a 58% stake in Royal Bank of Scotland. Alistair Darling, the chancellor at the time, revealed later that a senior RBS executive had called him and said the bank was two hours from collapse. That experience, Darling said, made him realise: "Even something that looks extremely strong and secure can be extremely fragile."
RBS had made many graver misjudgments than lending Hicks and Gillett the £185m to buy Liverpool in February 2007, repayable in 12 months. But that loan, to fund the needless takeover of a healthy sporting institution 115 years old and so loyally supported, encapsulates something of the banks' irresponsibility, as well as the destructiveness of the leveraged buy-out.
Liverpool's crisis this month was precipitated by RBS, now 84% owned by the taxpaying public, deciding it wanted its £200m back, as Triesman warned banks would. The club's chairman, Martin Broughton, beamed last Friday that Henry's paying of Hicks's and Gillett's "leverage" will transform Liverpool financially, because the club is suddenly almost debt free and not paying £30m interest a year. In effect, a new US owner, who may be well intentioned – not in it to make money for himself, as he claimed at the weekend – but who knows nothing of football, now owns Liverpool because he has put them back to where they should have been had the former chairman David Moores never pocketed £90m of Hicks's and Gillett's borrowed money by selling the club to them.
Throughout the determined campaign which Liverpool supporters ran against the pair, they were stunned by the silence from the Premier League and FA. "The authorities were nowhere," laments James McKenna of the Spirit of Shankly fans' group. "The frightening thing is: this can happen again. There are still no rules to stop somebody borrowing money to buy a club, then making the club pay those borrowings."
The Premier League can point to new rules introduced since Scudamore responded to Triesman by claiming clubs were managing their debts "responsibly". Clubs must now show they can pay their way for a full season, and new owners like Henry must show the league their business plans and source of funds. Most Premier League clubs, besides United, are financially supported by owners, not drained by them, and Uefa's financial fair-play rules, beginning next season, are designed to ensure they live within their means.
"We have taken financial regulation and governance to a place few would have imagined possible even a few years back," a Premier League spokesman said. "The regulations, which the clubs have bought into and willingly submit to, create a framework that encourages responsible and sustainable financial management."
However, there are still no rules to prohibit leveraged buyouts, and nobody in football will say a word about it, even as Broughton was punching the air because Liverpool were liberated from theirs. Manchester United have paid £487m bank interest, charges and fees – around the cost of building the 2012 Olympic stadium – to service the Glazers' 2005 takeover. Despite that, the total owed has grown to that eye-watering £769m.
When United released their accounts for 2009-10, amid the assurances that the debts are not hampering investment – whatever Wayne Rooney's reported grumbles – a telling detail got a little lost. It was that £41m, much more than United spent on players, went out on an interest-rate hedging arrangement. It had to be repaid in full, in cash, when the Glazers refinanced and borrowed £500m via a bond in January.
Throughout all this, from the FA, and its acting chairman Roger Burden, there has been not a peep. Triesman's experience had not led to an emboldened FA. Instead, seeing the fury which broke over him afterwards, the lesson has been that no good will come of warning about "very tangible dangers", and that the financial damage visited on England's greatest clubs is not, after all, any of the governing body's business.
David Conn @'The Guardian'
Andrew Vachss: Fighting Bullies One Book at a Time
Bestselling author Andrew Vachss wonders what the devotees of his inarguably adult hard-boiled crime fiction will think of his new book, Heart Transplant—created in partnership with illustrator Frank Caruso—for which he has taken his detective fiction and reconfigured it for a younger audience. Somewhere between graphic novel and picture book, Heart Transplant is aimed at the victims of bullies with the intent of helping the victims and their parents, family and friends deal with the situation effectively. The book will be published by Dark Horse this week.
“I think it’s certainly going to be a stone shock to people who are used to reading my books,” Vachss said. “Frank would tell me, considering the audience this book is aimed at, you’ve got to lose some of the language. I know that’s the way you write, he said, and I know that your books are adult only, but this isn’t. I said okay and went through and got it balanced out better.”
Heart Transplant is both a meditation on cultural views about bullies and the story of Sean, a kid whose tragic life takes a turn when he is taken in by a tough old guy named Pop following the murder of his mother.“All the ingredients are there for a bad, bad ending for everybody. A happy ending, I don’t know— but the correct ending, I’m absolutely sure of,” Vachss said.
For Heart Transplant Vachss reconfigured the typical paths in crime fiction, fashioning characters who choose different forks in the similar roads offered in detective novels. Wrong turns are made part of the past and characters like Pop and Sean move forward with the understanding that life is a series of choices. It’s not just Sean who gets a second chance, but his benefactor as well, and both as a result of their choices...
Continue reading
John Seven @'Publishers Weekly'
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