NHS nat'l health service u k
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10 26
US spy-tech firm Palantir has been accused of "intimidation" after writing letters to MPs who raised concerns about its involvement with the UK Government.
Novara Media reported that parliamentarians including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had been sent letters after publicly raising concerns about the company, which has close ties to both the Israeli military and the Trump administration in the US.
In the UK, Palantir has contracts totalling hundreds of millions of pounds with bodies including the Ministry of Defence, NHS England, and the Cabinet Office.
In June, Corbyn told the Commons: "Palantir is a very big and very dangerous outfit. The Government are developing a close relationship with Palantir, platforming and so on.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
"Could the minister assure the House that everything to do with Palantir will now be paused until we can get to the heart of the matter of how it first became embroiled in government contracts, how it gained them and what its influence over this government is, particularly via Peter Mandelson?"
Disgraced Labour grandee Mandelson – who is under police investigation due to his close friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – owned the now defunct Global Counsel, which had represented Palantir.
Novara reported that Corbyn had been sent a letter by Palantir two days later.
The former Labour leader said: "I am in no doubt as to why Palantir is writing these letters to MPs: to intimidate its critics into silence.
"Their tactics of intimidation will not work and they will not shut me up. I will never be deterred from speaking out against Palantir, which should have no place in our public services whatsoever."
READ MORE: Amnesty backs calls to scrap Palantir's NHS contract
Labour MP Rachael Maskell and independent MP Shockat Adam were also contacted by Palantir after publicly raising concerns about the company.
Maskell told Novara Media: "Clearly there is a reason as to why Palantir has paid close attention to the scrutiny that MPs have brought to this company which has been handed lucrative contracts by successive governments."
On social media, Palantir UK chief executive Louis Mosley responded to Corbyn saying: "The letter wasn't to silence you, but simply to point out where you are saying things that are not true.
"Perhaps I should have softened the phrase 'I hope this alleviates any concerns you had'?"
A Palantir spokesperson said: "There are a great deal of incorrect claims about Palantir circulating online. When politicians – sometimes inadvertently – amplify these falsehoods, they risk misleading the public.
"The purpose of these letters was to set the record straight. If politicians continue to repeat false claims, we will continue to correct them."
Elsewhere, Labour MP Clive Lewis has been involved in a public row with Labour peer and former party deputy leader Tom Watson, who recently joined Palantir as a senior vice president.
Lewis accused Watson of deploying "the opaque and misleading arguments used to defend Palantir".
READ MORE: Palantir boss given VIP viewing of Bayeux tapestry by British Museum
Speaking to the BBC earlier this month, Watson said: "One of the things I'd say to my former colleagues is 'Do you want to let the rule of law lead procurement practice, or do you want to let mob rule to lead procurement practices?' Because you get yourself in a lot of trouble if you go down on the latter one."
He added: "I think we are very targeted by the people that are targeting Israeli companies. We're not an Israeli company, but because of our work in Israel, we found ourselves in the middle of the row of the Gaza protests."
Watson also told the BBC that Palantir would work with a Reform UK government on immigration crackdowns if the situation arose, saying: "We don't actually work in that sector, but yes, of course we would."
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How Elon Musk went from Tesla CEO to the 'most powerful civilian, non-governmental actor in history
Fri, 23 October 2026
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Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams
The demonstration plans come as new research reveals that nearly £15 billion in health service contracts have been given to private firms since 2015, casting doubt on Tories' claims that NHS isn't "up for sale."
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-ceos-behave-like-closet-socialists/
no lnx
How CEOs behave like closet socialists
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg poses a question during the CEO Summit. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Written by Paul Adler / YES! Magazine February 28, 2020
Progressives and socialists in the United States are working towards major economic changes such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. It is urgent that we empower national government to take over such critical functions in society as health insurance and the transition to a green economy. But we often encounter pushback: Many Americans worry about the risks of giving control over so much of our lives to a central authority. Our opponents cite the failure of the USSR.
We need to convince people that centralized economic planning can be democratic and effective. One way is to point to a working model of what that looks like, one they are already familiar with. In my recent book, The 99% Economy, I argue that we can find just such a model in a strange place—in many of our biggest capitalist businesses.
A working model, right under our noses
Many corporate CEOs behave like closet socialists. In public, they defend the superiority of markets over planning. But inside their own corporations, where they could leave their various business units to compete with each other, they rely instead on comprehensive strategic planning. Such planning aims to ensure that the various business units that make up the corporation coordinate their production, investment, and other plans to achieve the best outcomes for the corporation as a whole. Yes, some corporations try to emulate the market in their internal operations, but that approach is relatively rare. In most firms, the activity of business units is coordinated by a strategic plan—just like a government-run health insurance program, a national health service, or a national energy system.
In this internal planning process, corporations confront in miniature the same challenges that bedeviled centralized economic planning in the old USSR. But our corporations have developed effective techniques to deal with those challenges—techniques that could be deployed on a wider scale and to similar advantage in socialist planning.
Consider Kaiser Permanente
Consider how Kaiser Permanente orchestrates its strategy process. KP is the largest private-sector health care provider and one of the largest private health care insurance companies in the U.S., with more than 12 million health plan members, 696 hospitals and medical offices, and more than 217,000 employees.
Many things about the way KP operates anger us progressives—it’s a basically capitalistic enterprise that often puts its own profits over the needs of its workers and patients. But there’s a lot to admire about its planning.
Instead of letting its 22,000 doctors compete with each other as little independent businesses and haggle with insurance companies over prices and services, and instead of putting its hospitals in competition with each other for patients and doctors, KP draws them all into a strategic planning process aimed at maximizing the performance of the system as a whole.
As in many other big enterprises, KP’s strategic goals are informed by both top-down leadership and bottom-up input about opportunities and challenges. Through this vertical and horizontal dialogue, the organization determines goals and mobilizes towards achieving them.
One key feature of KP’s planning is the role of its unions. In 1996, KP formalized a partnership relationship with a coalition of most of its unions, representing the vast majority of its employees. While this labor-management partnership was originally conceived as a labor-relations strategy designed to minimize the risk of strikes, it soon evolved into the organization’s operating strategy. Management came to see that front-line employees could contribute to organizational performance if given a chance.
The leaders of the union coalition worked with KP’s top national leaders to develop a shared set of strategic goals. And the labor-management partnership put into place structures for joint planning and decision-making at every level—national, regional, medical center, and department—to advance those goals. On the front lines, 3500 Unit-Based Teams with management and union co-leads were mobilized to contribute to them.
The result is a health care delivery system that offers impressive levels of efficiency and clinical quality, levels that would be unattainable if KP were organized internally as a market-based, competitive system. One of the many advantages of planning over competition is that—unlike much of the rest of the U.S. health care system—KP units have a strong incentive to invest in preventive care and community health.
In this way, Kaiser Permanente shows how socialists would solve our health care crisis: nationalize the entire industry and implement an expanded version of this type of strategic management process in the newNational Health Service.Having nationalized ownership and having thus turned the entire health care delivery system into a public agency, we could overcome the limits imposed by capitalism on KP’s planning. Employees’ voices could be guaranteed, rather than being a conditional privilege accorded by an enlightened management. Financing would be determined by democratic deliberation, rather than subject to the veto power of investors. Patients and community voices would be brought into the governance of the agency on an equal footing.
Beyond health care
Now pivot from health care to, say, the automobile industry, whose products and processes have proven so toxic to the environment. We can nationalize the auto companies and their suppliers. We can integrate them into a national transportation industry planning council to rebalance public and private transportation options. Our democratically elected representatives would develop economic, social, and environmental goals for the industry—just like GM or Ford executives develop strategic goals for their companies today, but on a bigger scale, and with much deeper and wider participation. Workers in the transportation industry as well as the wider community would work in regional and sector councils to formulate their input on these goals and develop plans to achieve them.
Their plans would be funded by the national investment bank in accordance with criteria developed democratically at the national and local levels. We would rationalize the internal structure of this industry, greatly reducing costs by eliminating unnecessary variation in components, designs, and processes. We would task the national investment bank to invest in creating new job opportunities in regions hit by the resulting downsizing.
Some worry that such gargantuan public enterprises would be unaccountable. But socialism would replace the very unreliable accountability provided by the market (remember Enron anyone? Or the banking collapse of 2008?) with a more robust, democratic form of accountability through regulators, courts, legislative oversight, and public advocacy.
Our Aristotle problem
As progressives and socialists, we have to find some way to help people form a mental image of the better world we want to create. But it’s hard for many Americans to imagine that centralized economic planning could be democratic and effective.
We shouldn’t underestimate this challenge. Consider this: Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle—one of the greatest minds of his era or indeed any other—was convinced that if the right to vote were extended to women and slaves, Greece’s glorious political democracy would degenerate into rule by the rabble. Yet most of us today are committed to political democracy with universal suffrage, even if we accept that its implementation is never perfect.
To deal with the many challenges we face today, the democratic principle must be extended from the political realm to the economic. But we have grown up in a capitalist world. It is as difficult for us to imagine the expansion of democratic decision-making to the economic realm as it was for Aristotle to imagine the expansion of democratic rights to women and slaves.
Perhaps pointing to the central planning that already operates in our big corporations can help people overcome this hurdle.
Paul S. Adler is currently Harold Quinton Chair of Business Policy and Professor of Management and Organization, Sociology, and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. He began his education in Australia, moved to France, and was employed as a research economist for the French government. He came to the USA in 1981, and before arriving at USC in 1991, was affiliated with Barnard College, Harvard Business School, and Stanford’s School of Engineering.
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Lee Fang
The Brexit deal may be a Trojan horse for U.S. corporate interests, from Silicon Valley and American pork to pharmaceuticals.
Privatization at the NHS? American Business Interests Seek Growing Share of U.K.’s Health System
Lee Fang
The American health care industry has long had its sights on harnessing a wave of privatization and outsourcing in the U.K. system.
an 1219
Britons gear up to defend NHS from privatization scheme as Tories win strong majority in UK electionhttps://www.alternet.org/2019/12/britons-gear-up-to-defend-nhs-from-privatization-scheme-as-tories-win-strong-majority-in-uk-election/Jake Johnson/Common Dreams
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