Sverige

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 10 Aug 1998, Mason A. Clark crossposted:

> The NY Times has a long story on the mess Sweden has gotten itself
> into, in today's issue (8/10) and on its web site.
> Snippets:
>      Any attempt at restructuring faces formidable cultural
> resistance. The work force is 80 percent unionized, and 31 percent of
> the jobs are in the public sector. Pressure for change is coming from
> frustrated entrepreneurs and young people...said Lindgren of Kairos
> Future. "Businesses can't grow here, because it's too expensive to
> hire people," he said.

But it's not too expensive, apparently, to fund expensive overhyped
business consultants whose main occupation is taking one look at a
factory, telling management to fire everyone and move the shop to a slave
labor camp in Guangdong province, and collecting a fat fee. The solution
to Sweden's problems is obvious: Sweden needs a (suitably Nordic) Pinochet
to, uh, flexibilize those unions with cattle prods and death squads, just
like Latin America. Of course, we'll have to get rid of that pesky
democracy thing and trash the state sector, thus instantly turning 8%
unemployment into 38% unemployment and destroying what's left of the
Swedish industrial base. Admittedly people might protest against
this, so in the interests of accumulation we'll rehire half those
people to work as security guards and paratroopers, whose main job will be
putting down uprisings in Stockholm's ghettoes with those world-class
Swedish weapons systems. The resulting casualties will create a boom in
demand for medical assistants and emergency room technicians from the
newly privatized health system, which, in order to show an annual profit,
will require that the non-rich exchange personal biological equity (in the
form of mortgages on their internal organs) for medical care.

As a famously gruesome Monty Python scene pointed out (remarkable, that
MP diagnosed Thatcherism for the bloody nightmare it was and is), hey, you
don't *really* need that liver, do you?

-- Dennis