Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“This is the people’s vaccine,”  said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program.  “Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are funding its development. … It should belong to humanity .” Calling the shots

Corruption and plunder in Britain: the example of Branson "What all this resembles is a looking-glass version of capitalism. The public are handing money to private businesses for them to take a clip and pay us back the rest. Just in case that wasn't ludicrous enough, remember that Virgin's parent company is listed in British Virgin Islands, a sunny tax haven that is a stop pretty far from Wigan. And as we've seen repeatedly with the east coast line, the ones who don't make a profit can simply walk away, dumping their service back in public hands. Heads they win, tails you lose. Branson is not the sole offender here; he's simply the most flamboyant representative of a completely rotten system for siphoning money from the public into private hands. The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by  "thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind" . And as a former investment banker, she'd know what those...