Monthly Archive for May, 2005

Doctors and employees scamming ACC?

Published
by
Christiaan
on 4 May, 2005
in Aotearoa New Zealand
. 1 Comment

Someone with the username magnacarta has posted a message on ACCforum.org today, entitled “Fraud At ACC,” alleging that doctors and ACC employees have been scamming “significant” amounts of money out of the Crown entity “over some considerable period of time.” Although the website appears to have degenerated into a huge bitchin session and the allegations appear to be politically motivated (or even a joke), they’re also pretty sensational, which is a good enough reason to post them here:

More news has come to hand about alleged fraud at ACC.

Forum members will recall that claimant support groups and individuals firstly approached the police commissioner with allegations that conduct at ACC had stepped over the line from civil into the criminal jurisdcition.

You will recall that the complaint was sent to detective sergeant Robert Scott at Christchurch CIB and they are now with detective inspector Win van der Veld at Police National HQ, but not all claimants who lodged complaints have been contacted or interviewed.

Now comes the news that things have been happening behind the scenes.

It has come to light that behind the scenes apparently ACC Minister Ruth Dyson has appointed law firm Buddle Finlay (which just happens to be former ACC chairman David Caygill’s law firm) to investigate yet more allegations.

These allegations are that ACC employees over some considerable period of time allegedly arranged medical assessments and paid doctors to conduct assessments on-the-papers on some claims without ever seeing the particular claimants.

The doctors then billed ACC for significant amounts of money.

The cost of the assessment was put to the particular claim but paid into a different bank account with ACC employees and the doctors allegedly splitting the fees between them.

Sources say that when this comes out we wil be surprised with some of the names.

Anyway, selected claimants are going to Wellington to be interviewed by Buddle Finlay’s lawyers who are conducting this “investigation.”

Sources also say that some employee’s (managers) have been sacked but no prosecutions while others have apparently been demoted and transferred.

Couped with the limited investigations of complaints by police, it now appears that the Minister is in damage control so that she can say “Oh yes, I was made aware of this so I acted prudently and authorised an investigation.”

If that scenario is correct then it’s too little, too late, Minister.

Are the other political parties who have been jumping up and down in Parliament about lesser issues concerned at all when they have been advised - Not likely.

Inferences can therefore be drawn.

Could one of those inferences be that the politicians are on the take by receiving insider information about ACC’s share transactions and then making a killing on the sharemarket.

Or could it be that these politicians don’t want to see their big business mates suffer if the whole ACC scheme is brought into disrepute because then they might have to take some responsibility for their poor work safe practices and have to pay.

Big business loves the ACC scheme because it absolves them of liability for massive damages.

And who do we know who supports big business - Labour, National and Act. The Greens are shutting up and now don’t want to rock the boat because they want to see their mates (Labour) elected. NZ First deputy Peter Brown is also disinterested.

Is all this why there is no inquiry from the petition.

The ACC scheme is not corrupt - the ACC scheme has been corrupted - from the top to the bottom.

The next poster has this question:

Why is a private sector law firm in which the former chairman of ACC is a partner, conducting an investigation into allegations of criminal behaviour? Surely this is a matter for the Police?

A laugh at the expense of profits and corporate lawyers

Published
by
Christiaan
on 3 May, 2005
in Technology
. 0 Comments

If you’re the type who thinks stealing from corporations that extort billions out of the masses so their execs can get rich is, uh, naughty, you should probably stop reading now in case a moral panic is induced.

For those pinko commies and anarchists still reading, please enjoy…

You might have heard about Apple Computer’s recent ascendancy on the back of the iPod, with its coffers filling to over-flowing. Less likely is that you’ve heard of Apple letting loose its dogs on the student owner of Think Secret (a website that specialises in publishing reports and rumours about Apple Computer), and other sites, for talking about future Apple products without Apple’s permission. Naughty boys. In other cases Apple has gone after people who have shared Mac OS X 10.3 (Apple’s previous operating system) with others on the net via Bit Torrent, a fast file sharing technology. Suffice to say Apple has been kicking and stamping it feet, and treading on many a teenage fan in the process.

Logo of The Pirate BayBut that’s the United States, land of the walkover citizen. Turn to Sweden and Apple look to have met their match. The Pirate Bay is a Swedish based Bit Torrent portal and, in the face of Apple’s recent litigation, were the only website in the world (besides maybe China) to list a Bit Torrent of Apple’s latest and greatest Operating System Mac OS X 10.4 (or “Tiger”).

To get a gist of the kind of characters running The Pirate Bay you need look no further than their “Legal threats” page, dedicated to publishing legal threats they have received and their responses to them.

One of my favourites is a geography lesson for Dreamwork’s lawyers:

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe.
Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here.
For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium, will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats.

It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Please also note that your e-mail and letter will be published in full on http://www.thepiratebay.org.

Go fuck yourself.

For more giggles, head to their legal threats page.

Here’s a direct link to their response to Apple Computer’s recent and hollow legal threat.

The party might be moving onto new pastures pretty soon however, the 1st of July to be precise. According to an article on LinuxReview.org new EU “harmonisation” laws will bring an end to Sweden’s sane copyright laws and replace them with something a little more corporate friendly, apparently allowing the RIAA to sue minors and dead people.

Another side effect of the new Swedish laws will mean that many Linux-distributions will be illegal:

The Swedish government will from the same date be forced to prevent a huge number of Linux-distributions as a consequence of the new law which prohibits the sales of software or other tools that can be used to bypass copyright protection. Such protection is found on DVD and ‘CD’ discs. ‘CD’ discs with copy protection are actually not real CD’s at all, the official CD specification from Philips has no room for such protection. This is why modern so-called CDs can not be used in a huge percentage of the CD players sold today. The DVD specification, on the other hand, has built-in protection against copying and therefore also protection against fair use. A DVD can not be used without special software. There are no such legal software available for Linux.

The Movie Industry has numerous times shown that they think Linux-users demand too much when they demand the right to use the DVD discs they have legally bought on their own entertainment systems. Luckily for us, someone quickly managed to create a nice tool that enables fair use of DVD discs on Linux and others non-standard operating systems. The movie industry responded to this by suing the person who made it possible to view my own, legally bought DVDs on my own system. The Norwegian courts dismissed the case and the code for viewing DVD discs on Linux systems are now a standard component in many main-stream Linux-distributions.

This actually means that the sales of Linux-distributions who include media players like Xine and Mplayer will become illegal when the new Swedish Copyright law goes into effect 1st of July 2005.

LinuxReview.org encourages it readers to start using anonymous file-sharing technologies such as I2P and FreeNet, and finishes off with:

There has been many global trials between Freedom Of Speech and Copyright throughout history. Copyright won every round until last years big case of ‘Anonymous Peer To Peer’ versus ‘Big Media Corporations’. The introduction of Freenet (and later I2P) finally ended this struggle. Freedom Of Speech won and the technology found in these program have effectively killed Copyright on the Internet. Copyrights only way of appealing this verdict is to make software that enables users to be anonymous illegal. This would, obviously, be a huge attack on Freedom of Speech and Freedom in general and LinuxReviews strongly encourages our readers to ignore any such law if something like that ever gets passed.

Can’t argue with that.

It’s official, Blair’s a Bliar (oh yeah and a War Criminal)

Published
by
Christiaan
on 2 May, 2005
in Imperialism
. 0 Comments

Alasdair Palmer of Lord Tubby’s newspaper has this to say:

Lord Goldsmith’s confidential advice to the Prime Minister on the legality of invading Iraq without a second UN resolution, revealed for the first time last week, was equivocal about almost everything. It was clear about one point and one point only: “Regime change,” insisted the Attorney General, “cannot be the object of military action.” Any invasion which had that goal would be unambiguously illegal under international law.

Last week, most of the discussion of the Attorney General’s advice centred on whether it was “arguable” that the invasion would be legal without a second UN resolution explicitly authorising it. Yet when compared with the glaring illegality of an invasion whose explicit purpose was regime change, this is a non-issue. The Prime Minister knew it, the Attorney General knew it, the Cabinet knew it, and so did anyone who bothered to think about it. What, then, was Tony Blair doing when he stated: “What is important is that whatever action we take is done in accordance with international law”?

The repeated insistence of the Prime Minister, the Attorney General and, indeed, the whole Cabinet, that the invasion of Iraq was compatible with international law seems simply to have been a pose to try to fool people who genuinely wanted the invasion to be legal - but were too stupid to see for themselves that it wasn’t.

Of course, a number of the people in that category include the Labour MPs who voted for it after hearing the Prime Minister and the Attorney General assure them that it was in line with what international law required. Many of those MPs are now very angry at their own stupidity. They have deflected their anger on to the Prime Minister and the Attorney General for not sharing the confidential advice that was released last week.

This is simply a further demonstration of their own idiocy, for there was nothing in that confidential advice that was not obvious at the time of the Commons vote. It was extremely easy to work out that the invasion was incompatible with international law. If that law has a guiding principle, it is that the invasion of one country by another in order to replace its ruler is a flagrant violation of state sovereignty.

I do not believe that the Prime Minister cynically exploited his MPs’ stupidity by his pretence: the first person he fooled by his sophistry was himself. A self-deluding sophist is not an ideal character to have as the leader of our country: it is what we will get if we re-elect Tony Blair and Labour next week.

It’s worth reading the whole piece: Regime change is illegal: end of debate to say.

Michael Smith of the Sunday Times points out that:

The minutes show Goldsmith warned Blair eight months before war started on March 19, 2003 that finding legal justification would be “difficult”. The attorney-general only ruled unambiguously war was lawful a few days before the war started after Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the defence staff, demanded unequivocal written confirmation.

Boyce was never shown Goldsmith’s more equivocal advice to Blair of March 7, 2003, and says today ministers failed to give him protection from prosecution at the International Criminal Court. “I have always been troubled by the ICC,” he says, adding that if British servicemen are put on trial, ministers should be “brought into the frame as well”. Asked if that should include Blair and Goldsmith, he tells The Observer: “Too bloody right.”

Too bloody right.

Sir Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said the leaked minute showed Blair had “agreed to an illegal regime change with the Bush administration. It set out to create the justification for going to war. It was to be war by any means.”

Suggestion for next week’s headline, “Britain re-elects War Criminal!”

Here’s one for you martini-drinking Leftists out there

Published
by
Christiaan
on 2 May, 2005
in Imperialism
. 0 Comments

Some excerpts from Why America needs to be Defeated in Iraq by Mike Whitney of Information Clearing House:

The argument most commonly offered by antiwar Americans (who believe we should stay in Iraq) doesn’t defend the legitimacy of the invasion, but provides the rationale for the ongoing occupation. The belief that “We can’t just leave them without security”, creates the logic for staying in Iraq until order can be established. Unfortunately, the occupation is just another manifestation of the war itself; replete with daily bombings, arrests, torture and the destruction of personal property. Therefore, support of the occupation is a vindication of the war. The two are inseparable.

Independence is not bestowed by a foreign nation; the very nature of that relationship suggests reliance on outside forces. True independence and sovereignty can only be realized when foreign armies are evacuated and indigenous elements assume the reigns of power. (Bush acknowledged this himself when he ordered Syrian troops to leave Lebanon).

There’s no indication that the conduct of the occupation will change anytime soon. If anything, conditions have only worsened over the passed two years. The Bush administration hasn’t shown any willingness to loosen its grip on power either by internationalizing the occupation or by handing over real control to the newly elected Iraqi government. This suggests that the only hope for an acceptable solution to the suffering of the Iraqi people is a US defeat and the subsequent withdrawal of troops. Regrettably, we’re no where near that period yet.

Support for the Bush policy is, by necessity, support for the instruments of coercion that are used to perpetuate that occupation. In other words, one must be willing to support the torture at Abu Ghraib, (which continues to this day according to Amnesty International) the neoliberal policies (which have privatized all of Iraq’s publicly owned industries, banks and resources) an American-friendly regime that excludes 20% (Sunnis) of the population and, worst of all, “the return-in full force-of Saddam’s Mukhabarat agents, now posing as agents of the new Iraqi security and intelligence services.” (Pepe Escobar, Asia Times)

We should also ask ourselves what the long-range implications of an American victory in Iraq would be. Those who argue that we cannot leave Iraq in a state of chaos don’t realize that stabilizing the situation on the ground is tantamount to an American victory and a vindication for the policies of aggression. This would be a bigger disaster than the invasion itself.

… we look for an American defeat in Iraq. Such a defeat would serve as a powerful deterrent to future unprovoked conflicts and would deliver a serious blow to the belief that aggression is a viable expression of foreign policy.

Student loan interest rates

Published
by
Christiaan
on 2 May, 2005
in Aotearoa New Zealand
. 0 Comments

A reader over at frogblog explains the history behind and the justifications given for charging a rate of interest on student loans anything more than inflation. Not surprisingly the free-market fundies of Labour and ACT had a major part to play:

Christiaan,

The loan scheme was set up under Phil Goff as minister of education during the Lange/Roger Douglas Labour regime. The claim at the time was that anything less than market interest rates would disrupt the free market in credit, eg causing students to ‘max out their loans in order to pay down their mortgages’. ACT has made similar claims since.

This ‘logic’ (and I use the word loosely) has not been used anywhere else in the Western world: as a result we ended up with a student loan scheme that even Americans consider draconian (USA has a much kinder federal student loan scheme than ours). Quite how the supporters of market-like interest rates failed to notice that overseas loans scheme don’t hit the problems that claimed were ‘inevitable’ I won’t go into.

The student loan scheme has been tweaked since, but the basic history is that is started draconion so minor changes haven’t yet made a really big difference.

A further complication is that student debt is turning into a major part of the govt’s debt, so lowering interest is now a major budget-shock to the govt. This is the ‘intertia’ problem - the longer the loan scheme goes on, the more is owed by more people, the harder it is to change.

Keith NG of Public Address and Salient Magazine gets the scoop on pointing out the difference between Labour’s rhetoric and actuality with regard to student allowances. Frogblog gets in on the action, and Just Left sets up for the apologist line.

Meanwhile, the 27 true authors of DogBitingMen had a Muriel Phase and compiled a list of things they’d like politicians to ban people from doing in order to get their votes.