ATOS

ATOS

AtoS, as the logo is written, is a non-name really and I refer you to Wikipedia for details if you wish to know more.  But many people ask "What does ATOS stand for?" and knowing something about what is going on

Auschwitz Terminal Outsourced Sorting

simply springs to mind.

I am not entirely sure what is going on here.  When I was at primary school (way back in the 1960's) it seemed straight forward when someone was being kind and when someone was being unkind.  It has never been difficult for me to know the difference between simple kindness and simple unkindness.  There are lots of things that don't so easily fit into those categories but nice and horrid were poles apart.

Years ago, in the 1970's I 'signed on' what was then called the Dole and went to the equivalent of the Job Centre.  Back then the government department was called the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS).  Funny how it has changed its name to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and it seems to have lost the Social Security bit for real.  I recall we used to have a card called a UB40 which stood for Unemployment Benefit Form 40.  You may have heard of the reggae band from Birmingham called UB40 which formed in 1978 and named after the little card.

The people in the Dole office (or the SS as we sometimes called it) were like the kids at school.  Some folk were kind and some were unkind.  But for me, much as socio-politically times were similarly difficult, it seemed that generally the people were real people with the occasional not so nice git (to put it colloquially).  So, although the circumstances were not good the people were quite often quite nice and helpful.  And it didn't affect me too badly because I was fit and strong so I could easily take on most unqualified jobs.

I went off to get educated and still don't know if that was a mistake for me.  I had a brief spell unemployed in the early 1980's and things seemed to have changed dramatically.  The general attitude of the people in the DHSS was judgemental and negative.  There was an air of disdain in their demeanour.  I knew someone who worked in the department and they told me that the staff were trained to treat people badly.  In fact it went deeper than that; they used techniques like making the floor higher on their side of the counter than on the claimants side.  The counter was at a height suitable for them thereby making the claimant feel small and inferior.  They actually employed psychological techniques to make this a negative experience for the unemployed.

My unemployment didn't last long and I spent many years fully occupied and working and other stuff like getting married and having a child.  Then, due mainly to unkindness, my situation was catastrophically wrecked as was that of my daughter's too.  We are now a single parent/single child family.  For many years I have been totally beside myself with dismay at the institutionalised cruelty that we have experienced.  Major issues like cruel teachers, vicious education authorities, vindictive nurses in the NHS and ruthless abusive Children Services employees.

I am now watching, at close quarters, the behaviour of the political elite and the cascading abuse bleeding throughout this culture.  I have no doubt that experts are involved in designing and manipulating the socio-political landscape.  I think one would have to be slightly insane to think that somehow the people in positions of power today were more naive or less capable than the equivalent folk in the 1960' and 70's.  Or even than the folk back in the 1930' and 40's.  So now I ask you to take a look at how much behind the scenes planning went into the socio-political landscape in the 1930's and 40's by both the Germans and the British (let alone the Americans et al.).  When one reads historical accounts of what was going on behind the scenes it is hard to imagine how calculating and, indeed, ruthless some people were.  As Franklin D Roosevelt famously commented "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."

One could write endless weighty tomes dissecting and describing multiple dimensions of cultural manipulation, collective psychology and political machinations and there is possibly some benefit in that but ... ... It can also come back to that simple environment of the primary school playground;  Some people are being kind and some are being unkind.  It is clear to me that, like the money, the unkindness is accumulating in heaving excess at the top of the cesspit of British society.

Atos:  We have a respected and regulated profession of Doctors authorised to use their expertise to issue official sick notes where required.  To use a foreign private  IT company to arbitrarily override the British Medical Profession and to segregate the sick into those who can be put to work and those too sick to work is inhumane and disgusting.  It is just a more sophisticated way of sorting people than they used for the gas chambers in Auschwitz.  But then you would expect them to be more sophisticated if they are going to try it again in the 21st century.

Here is an excerpt from DW's web site.  They are the German equivalent of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and say of themselves that they "represent[s] Germany in the international media landscape."  They have a page entitled "Germany marks the liberation of Auschwitz"

What had happened in Auschwitz was not immediately public. It was in mid-April 1945 when the survivors recounted their ordeals to the German service of the BBC. Anita Lasker, a young cellist, was one of them.

"A doctor and a commanding officer stood waiting upon the arrival of the transporters on the ramp and everyone was sorted before our very eyes," she remembered. "That meant, people were asked their age and about the state of their health."

Many unsuspecting new arrivals revealed certain ailments, in effect signing their own death warrants. "Children and the elderly were disregarded above all. Right left, right left. Right is to life. Left is to the chimney," one eyewitness said.

They didn't think it could happen then and we don't think it can happen now.

EXCEPT
IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING
ATOS

Auschwitz Terminal Outsourced Sorting

I refer you to a small entry in Wikipedia concerning a brief history of Atos Healthcare and I offer just a small sample here for your delectation:

In June 2012 British Medical Association doctors voted that the Work Capability Assessment should be ended ‘with immediate effect.

Grant Shapps MP claimed that 878,300 benefit claimants dropped their claims rather than be assessed by Atos

In 2011/12 Atos was paid £112,400,000 (that's £112.4 million) to carry out 738,000 assessments. 38% of appeals were successful which cost the government £500,000,000 (that's £500 million) to fund the appeals.

Atos has been criticized in the media, in Parliament, by the Church, by the medical profession, and by protest groups regarding its disability programs.

Government statistics reveal that between January 2010 and January 2011, 10,600 sick and disabled people died within six weeks of ending their claim.

Government statistics also revealed that 1300 people died shortly after being declared fit for work by Atos.

In January 2012, there was a scandal when it was disclosed that Atos had found a man in a coma to be 'fit for work'.

Atos assessors have found patients with brain damage, terminal cancer, severe multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's Disease to be fit for work.

On 24 April 2013 a woman who was a double heart and lung transplant patient died in her hospital bed only days after she was told, after assessment by Atos, that her allowance was being stopped and that she was fit for work.

In 2013 an FOI request revealed that from 1 Jan 2012 at least 92 Atos doctors have been found guilty of misconduct.

28 of the 140 medical assessment centres (that's 20%) do not provide wheelchair access and many are based on the second or third floor of buildings.

And it gets worse!  Can you believe it?  It actually gets worse!

It appears I am not the first person to see the similarities between Auschwitz and Atos.  Just do a search on Google images for "Atos logo" and it transpires lots of people are comparing the Nazi health checks and Atos health checks.  I have included some of the logos on this page as historical social documentation of the mood of the British people in 2013.  You can see more on The Great Atos Rebrand – Update Of course I have to add here that I DO NOT CONDONE THESE IMAGES - and of course if I added "*innocent face*" some stuck up Judge Tugitoff could interpret what I have said to mean that "Atos is a paedophile ring" but I would have to take exception to the judge's interpretation because it means nothing of the sort.  I couldn't claim that Atos is a paedophile ring because I have no information to suggest that.

That would be like Iain Duncan Smith claiming "that 8,000 people had found jobs because of the benefit cap".  Oops!  He did.  And when John Humphrys challenged him on the Today programme saying “Your statement is unsupported by the official statistics published by your own department.” His response was “Yes but by the way, you can’t disprove what I said either."  So following Iain Duncan Smith's logic I could do exactly as Iain Duncan Smith has done and say that  "You can't prove that Atos is not a paedophile ring."  Of course logically that is true but it is no argument to suggest they are which is what Iain Duncan Smith was trying to suggest.  No - I'm not saying that Iain Duncan Smith was suggesting Atos is a paedophile ring, just that it would be the same logic.  What I am doing, of course, is proving how ridiculous and unacceptable Iain Duncan Smith's remarks really are.

So it seems people can say what they want if they are the bullies with money but other people are not even allowed their own opinions even if they are correct.  So, given that some people are expressing negative views about Atos (and with substantial reason if the facts are to be believed), Atos simply overrides the law and gets a website, carerwatch.com, shut down without any enquiry, warning, court order or anything legal.  They just bullied the ISP to shut down the web site.  Check out the article "Atos complaint suspends carerwatch website" by Nick Sommerlad on the Mirror's blog site or "ATOS SHRUGGED" on SchNEWS.

So although the web site is back up, and credit to whoever achieved that, it remains the case that dissent is not so welcome in this country when you are a near monopoly foreign company taking billions of pounds from the British tax payers.

And to be absolutely clear here it is my opinion and my perception that Atos is engaged in something so sinister that history will pretentiously regard it as a crime against humanity.  Why do I say 'pretentiously'?  Because (as well explained by Sigmund Freud) it seems we are quite happy to project our evil ways onto other people or other times and so we see the Nazis as evil whilst interpreting similar behaviour in our time as perfectly morally acceptable.

Well goodness gracious me!  I was looking up Arbeit Macht Frei to explain briefly the meaning and relevance of the 'Atos Macht Frei' logo when I happened across an article on the Guardian's Greenslade Blog entitled "Daily Mail deletes 'Arbeit Macht Frei' advice to unemployed graduates".  If you don't know the appalling history of this phrase then go read the article and then read up on 'Arbeit Macht Frei' on wikipedia.

Oh dear - I will have to stop this and go to bed but just before I go I encountered

THE NEW REPUBLIC
ENTWICKLUNG DURCH IKONOKLASMUS

And a couple of articles:
Time to Rise up and Defend
Germany Calling - Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich
Even the Dying Will Work
ATOS Register of Shame
ATOS Suicide Attempt

If this was a movie I'd be scared.  But this is real life.