{"id":17803,"date":"2025-06-12T15:18:23","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T14:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=17803"},"modified":"2025-06-12T15:18:23","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T14:18:23","slug":"charity-privatisation-and-body-counts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2025\/06\/12\/charity-privatisation-and-body-counts\/","title":{"rendered":"Charity, Privatisation and Body Counts"},"content":{"rendered":"

The common denominator between charities and private service providers is that they all live off public money on the basis of serving \u201cvictims\u201d of one stripe or another, the raw material of these particular \u201cindustries\u201d. But a victim helped and eventually \u201ccured\u201d is no use to this business model. To make it viable you need more \u201cvictims\u201d coming onstream at a steady rate. But fixing the victims or the circumstances creating them is not part of the business model, since to actually fix the problems is to put yourself out of business. Raise awareness by all means, but please, don\u2019t go fixing things. Broken is best. It\u2019s broke, we\u2019re fixed. It\u2019s fixed, we\u2019re broke.<\/span><\/p>\n

Private Concerns<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

While it might be said, and often is, that privatisation is a \u201cgood\u201d, promising efficiency and so on, there are of course problems. But then, there are problems with everything, life being what it is, so it wouldn\u2019t be unusual for privatisation to also have problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn fact, it would be downright unnatural if privatisation didn\u2019t have problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes minister, but that isn\u2019t the question. The question is: is privatisation better than public ownership?\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem with the privatisation of services is the profit motive. It stands to reason that a private company entrusted with a service, any service, is going to rig the system to maximise profits. This means cutting and cutting and cutting, while valiantly keeping up appearances. This explains the awful food served in private prisons and direct provision, for instance, primped to appear as normal as possible for as cheap as possible while carefully managing not to descend to clear and present pig swill; while the company directors, healthy on profits, hang out in sun resorts, beaming around the beaches with great white shark\u2019s teeth and the latest in designer shades.<\/p>\n

More Bodies<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I once worked in RTE and there was some kind of to-do between workers and management. Inevitably us writers got involved, because there\u2019s none so militant as a writer, it\u2019s almost a lifestyle thing, but management swiftly solved that small problem with a genius move: they hired more writers, lots of writers, flooding the writer\u2019s pool with more writers than anyone could ever use, smothering the original small militant group of writers with grateful newbies. This tactic crossed my mind recently when our manifestly unpopular government kept our borders open to the entire third world and their grandmothers despite cries of dissent and distress from towns and villages far and wide.<\/p>\n

What do you do with disgruntled voters?<\/p>\n

\u201cGet more voters! Grateful ones!\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem with this short-term solution to a long-term problem is that some newbie from Mumbai or Kabul is not really going to give a damn about Fine Gael versus Fianna Fail versus the Shinners. When you dangle power like that to the hungry world don\u2019t expect gratitude translated into neat generous voting patterns. You put power up for grabs like that and not only have you given your country away, you\u2019ve given yourself away too, opening enticing opportunities for the thoroughly ruthless.<\/p>\n

Win-Win<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In 2017 a private prison company in Torrance County, New Mexico, threatened to sue the county on account of disappointing returns and close the damn prison, costing the county two hundred jobs. The private company demanded two hundred extra prisoners pronto, \u201cOr we\u2019ll see y\u2019all in court!\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t you just love the symmetry of those numbers? Two hundred prisoners: Two hundred jobs.\u00a0 As Paul Simon once wrote, \u201cWhen times are mysterious, serious numbers will always be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

I lost track of the story after that. It was all pending. Maybe Obama sorted it out before turning out the lights, took some prisoners from elsewhere and sent them down there to Torrance to keep the private company in business and the country out of the courthouse.<\/p>\n

Or maybe that\u2019s where the blind-eye to illegal immigration comes in. Just let a few hundred thousand South Americans steal over the border and impress upon your police force the urgent need for many arrests in a hurry to ward off a potential corporate suing tsunami. Keep the system oiled with more bodies.<\/p>\n

Business Plans<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

What does a charity need most of all besides funding? It needs someone or something to be charitable towards. What\u2019s say, a homeless charity without homeless people? Well, jobless would be one word that might spring to mind, maybe even homeless. Homeless charities and the people who work in them need homeless people. Arguably, they need homeless people far more than homeless people need them.<\/p>\n

Like privatisation of services, there is profit in charitable causes, which may go some way towards explaining the existence of over 30,000 NGOs in Ireland, nearly a thousand of which came into existence since 2020, according to Benefacts legacy. It\u2019s boom time in charitable work and it\u2019s not difficult to imagine the CEOs of charitable NGOs also hanging out in sun resorts, beaming around the beaches with great white shark\u2019s teeth and the latest in designer shades.<\/p>\n

So it may be that mass immigration is little more than a few bad management plans gone awry. A result of unpopular political parties seeking grateful voters who\u2019ll work for peanuts and act as infantry should the Russians invade, (you can never have too much cannon fodder), and poverty industry entrepreneurs spreading their nets wider to catch more \u201cvictims\u201d to expand their businesses, based as they are on a kind of economic cannibalism. Because in the end, charity, like politics, war and orgies, all comes down to body counts. The more the merrier.<\/p>\n

Feature Image: U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1988.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The common denominator between charities and private service providers is that they all live off public money on the basis of serving \u201cvictims\u201d of one stripe or another, the raw material of these particular \u201cindustries\u201d. But a victim helped and eventually \u201ccured\u201d is no use to this business model. To make it viable you need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":176,"featured_media":17807,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[501,1069,1360,1546,1547,1819,1964,2787,2788,2789,6497,7455,7456],"class_list":["post-17803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comment","tag-and","tag-body","tag-cassandra-voices-comment","tag-charity","tag-charity-sector","tag-comment","tag-counts","tag-eamonn-kelly","tag-eamonn-kelly-cassandra-voices","tag-eamonn-kelly-freelance-writer","tag-neoliberal-charity","tag-privatisation","tag-privatisation-and-body-counts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}