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cryptovalid · 4 years

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An attempt at political analysis in 2021

I remember when I was still working on my Masters Degree in Political Philosophy. I really used to believe that liberal institutions could stand up to fascism. I really believed that our systems of law and justice, our constitutions as democratic states, had the means to prevent totalitarianism from rising.

As the end of Trump's presidency approaches, it strikes me how much damage Trump has done to the public's trust in elections and democracy in general. How he has succesfully warped the public's perception of how freedom of speech and rights and equality work. But honestly, over the last four years it has become clear to me that Trump is not an abberation or a rejection of the centrist liberalism that preceded him. He is the inevitable result of the neoliberal project that started under Reagan and Thatcher and never abated.

Not a single institution stopped Donald Trump, a man repeatedly convicted of discriminating against tenants on the basis of race who spouted racist bullshit constantly, who repeatedly bragged about abusing women and vocally supported political violence all over the world, who shamelessly used his position for monetary gain. Nothing stopped him from stacking the Supreme Court or imprisoning children in camps without their parents for the crime of crossing a border.

The courts were toothless, and charges against him were dropped for no other reason than his electoral success in 2016. These last four years have seen the rise of similar figures and movements all over the globe. It is simply not a coincidence that everywhere from Turkey to Hungary, France and the Phillipines, from Greece to the Netherlands and the UK, in Bolivia and in many other democracies around the world, similar movements have arisen.

Movements that claim to represent the true people and a return to tradition and sovereignty, that propose a violent cleansing of foreign influence and moral corruption of the 'elites', while themselves colluding with foreign powers and led and funded by billionaires. Racist and violent regressive movements that channel the resentment over economic and political failures towards immigrants, the poor and the left.This is not the first time that liberal democracy has fallen into fascism or the second or third, and we would do well to understand why.

Over the past 50 years, the ideas of socialism have almost completely left the political mainstream. Previously leftist movements have been seduced by centrism, and have given up their fundamental opposition to capitalism to join the ruling class. The most famous living leaders of the biggest socialist party in the Netherlands now work for oil companies. As a result, all policy in the Netherlands is market-based. And when the market inevitably crashes because it is driven by unsustainable greed, the left no longer has a clear way forward.

The right can always say: 'we need to turn more stuff over to the market. We need to punish people who 'leech' off the system. It's the foreigners, the poor and the left that took your money. We should remove them.'The mainstream left can't say that. It has no identity left, because it has already accepted the market as a solution before. They believe the same things about the world as the right, but less so. The ideas of the mainstream left are fundamentally in tension with each other: markets are good, but equality is also good.

So whenever the left embraces the market as a solution, and the market crashes, they lose credibility. They've already dismissed anticapitalism as naive. They're stuck having to concede to the right. Anticapitalists have no choice but to vote for centrists, and the resulting policies are just watered down and ineffective, if any can be implemented at all. And so we have the perfect recipe for political desillusionment. There is no real debate or difference in the political mainstream and no real socialist alternative.

When the market collapses, the only radical change that shares the common worldview of the mainstream is fascism. Fascism is just capitalism with all the compassion and high-minded moral qualms thrown out. When even the left has spent the last 30 years insisting that anti-capitalism is a utopian dream, how are people supposed to deal with growing income inequality, rising costs of living, stagnating wages and a looming climate crisis, not to mention a pandemic that is spread by economic activity?

Since critiquing the system is not present as a mainstream political option, most people just stick to the options that are already available: blaming the outsider and the poor, but even more so. Where refugees, the disabled and the unemployed were previously just bad investments, now they are the reason your income is at risk. The people that were hit hard by the financial crash and by COVID measures are told not to be angry with lax/corrupt financial oversight, the inevitability of growing income inequality, forced labor and pollution in a global capitalist economy or with indecisive and compromised anti-pandemic measures, but to blame specific people and groups. This is fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

There is no easy 'free speech' solution to this, because hearing that specific people are responsible, especially disenfranchised people, is much more comforting than hearing that the culprit is the very system that you currently have to use to get most goods and services you need.

It has proven to be especially easy to direct people's deep anxiety over the future towards minorities, 'the media' and the scientific community in stead of the systems that got us here: self-interested power dynamics. Going back to the way things were 'before' is only going to produce the same results in the future. There is no capitalist solution to forced labor, pollution, financial crashes and growing income inequality. The market will at most try to sell you the illusion of a solution to those things. Individual self-interest will just not be a good guide in solving those issues, no matter how enlightened.

#political analysis #long screed #ramble

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howieabel · 5 years

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Poetry in the time of isolation

For the first time in the globalised age, everyone is reacting to and in some way affected by a single story - a virus making its way around the earth; and this is the first time in history that we can speak about our experiences to people all over the globe as it happens.

I've recently been reading about other plagues and epidemics in history. A century ago, as the first world war was raging and coming to an end for some, the Spanish Flu took more lives in a shorter time than the war took in its four years, a sum which could have been many times more than 50 million people. Nobody really knows exactly where that flu came from, although anyone who knows what life was like in the trenches wouldn't be too surprised of its potential to spread. However, the first cases of the flu were in military forts in the USA, and may have spread to Europe from there. It was only called the 'Spanish' Flu because Spain was neutral in the first world war, and therefore its press was more free - Spanish newspapers reported on the flu accurately, unlike every other combating power who didn't want to demoralise their troops with the mass death that was occurring, not at the hands of enemy soldiers, but a common enemy to all combatants - the appalling conditions that they were fighting in, the ideal way for a virus to wreak havoc.

This time around, calling the virus the Coronavirus, or Covid-19, is more sensible, as much as demagogues like Trump may want to call it the 'Chinese virus'. It seems to have been past from bats (like Ebola) to pangolins, which were sold in wet markets in Wuhan in China, to humans, but as is always the case, these origins remain murky, and often disgusting. These markets are unregulated by the government, as animals from all over the world can be imported there, where they languish in the most awful conditions - not to feed the poor, but as a sort of trophy food for the rich; and that's why many countries are in on the game, letting their merchants illegally export rare, often endangered, often hunted animals to the wet markets.

The Chinese government had tried to crack down on this after previous outbreaks of SARS, including in 2002, but it has proved difficult to rein in the peculiar tastes of the new rich, and of trophy hunters around the globe. Hopefully they learn from the crisis and regulate or eliminate the trading practices of their wet markets. In the mean time, it seems they have controlled the outbreak very well once it happened, and now they are sending doctors to Italy, alongside more recent help from Russia and Cuba, to help with the Italian government's much less successful attempts to control the spread. Unfortunately, as we saw with Ebola, these viruses can pop up every few years just about anywhere, especially, it seems, where there are bats. But I don't know enough about the transmissions from animal to human to write more about this. What i'm most interested in are past examples of how human communities and their governments have tried to shield their vulnerable from plagues and pandemics.

The most interesting example I found was from when the plague came to Italy almost 400 years ago, in the autumn of 1629. This of course is especially relevant as, from the day of this post, Italy is the worst affected of all countries by the virus, which poses a number of questions - Why Italy? Because they have one of the oldest populations? Because there is more inter-generational living than in many other countries? Because of just simple bad luck, for example a virus spreading through catholic mass, hour upon hour upon hour, so that by time it was realised to be a problem, it was already too late?

The reason the reaction to the 1629 plague interests me, is because it shows the importance of government and community reaction to a pandemic - it can make all the difference. Italy had a number of different city states, so we can compare their reaction, and although such comparisons are never perfect, they are some of the best we have. For example, in Verona 61% of people died - in Milan, 46%, in Venice - 33%, and in Florence? 12%. So what did the Sanità, the city of Florence's health board, and government, do so well that they greatly lessened the death toll in comparison to other cities in Italy? One reason this is an especially interesting question is because 12% seems to be around the average mortality figure for the coronavirus (especially among countries with an ageing population and/or a fractured health care system).

What did the Sanità in Florence do then, in the plague year of 1629? They arranged the delivery of food, wine and firewood to the homes of the quarantined (30,452 of them). Each quarantined person received a daily allowance of two loaves of bread and half a boccale (around a pint) of wine. On Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays, they were given meat. On Tuesdays, they got a sausage seasoned with pepper, fennel and rosemary. On Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, rice and cheese were delivered; on Friday, a salad of sweet and bitter herbs. Every morning, hundreds of people in the lazaretti were prescribed theriac concoctions, liquors mixed with ground pearls or crushed scorpions, and bitter lemon cordials. The Sanità also devolved some tasks to the city’s confraternities. The brothers of San Michele Arcangelo conducted a housing survey to identify possible sources of contagion; the members of the Archconfraternity of the Misericordia transported the sick in perfumed willow biers from their homes to the lazaretti. But mostly, the city government footed the bill, and making use of its own police force, court and prison – also punished those who broke quarantine. Its court heard 566 cases between September 1630 and July 1631, with the majority of offenders – 60 per cent – arrested, imprisoned, and later released without a fine. A further 11 per cent were imprisoned and fined, rich and poor alike.

Some of this account would even sound impressive now (especially the pint of wine a day!). It must have been like a revelation to the poor for them to realise that something like this was possible - that the people around them who were thirsty or hungry didn't have to be. It shows how a crisis can destroy the previous idea of normalcy and replace it with a totally new normal. In Britain, for example, the Conservative Party for years laughed at the spending plans proposed by the Labour opposition, ridiculed them as the mad schemes of communists, and every day ad infinitum posed the question on television - but how will you pay for it? Doesn't it all seem very unrealistic?

And now look where we are - our governments are spending more money to cope with this crisis than anyone had ever suggested, millions and millions of people's wages are being payed as a sort of Universal Basic Income, and it suddenly turns out that it would have been a very good thing if everyone had free and fast public broadband after all, now that it is apparent that everyone needs and deserves good communication during this pandemic, not only for them to communicate with their loved ones, but also so they can access the right information. Homeless people in London have been given hotel rooms at no cost. People are coordinating in their communities to help the elderly and the vulnerable, to bring them their groceries so they never have to leave the house. Many countries have nationalised their entire private hospital network, to give their beds to the infected. Look at how Korea and Taiwan have reacted to this crisis, for example, and then compare it to European countries. Many government's have not yet gone far enough, and will need to go further over the coming months to cope with the crisis as it unfolds, and as usual the British and the American governments are some of the most reluctant, not just to foot the bill, but to make what was previously thought impossible, possible after all. If they show, in direct counterbalance to the last decade of austerity, that they had the money to do this all along, it might cause them some problems afterwards. But they have no choice - we are living now in a new normal, and all the old economic orthodoxy has been thrown out the window.

In a time of crisis like this, it suddenly becomes apparent that doctors, cleaners, supermarket staff, food and public sector workers, and in this case also postmen and delivery workers, are the lynchpins of society. It's a shame we haven't spent the less 10 years looking after them a bit better, and perhaps because of this, many more people will lose their lives than should have done if we had started looking after them earlier. There's still a very high possibility that the NHS in Britain could break under the pressure. Unfortunately, we don't have as many doctors are we could have had. There isn't much of an incentive for the young to train to become doctors or nurses, with such pitiful pay and long hours. But there are still many selfless souls who take it upon themselves to make the sacrifice - nevertheless, most of my friends who studied medicine and care had to leave the UK to continue their studies after school, countries where they are now helping in this crisis as junior doctors. They simply couldn't afford the university and accommodation costs in the UK.

As we all begin to adjust to this new normal, and as it becomes clearer that the old world can never be brought back again, perhaps from now on we can fix some of our mistakes and prepare better, so that when the next crisis comes along, we don't find that the people who keep our society going were kicked out of it by the rest of us a long time ago. And as we come out of the crisis, with millions, even billions, of unemployed all over the world, remember then how it was possible to pay people's wages even when they weren't working. If we are against all visionary thinking, then we are also against the NHS, the 8 hour working day, and public parks and free museums. They were utopian ideas once, and in many countries, they still are. What will be normal afterwards? Our reaction now will define the future we can create. Our breadth of vision will determine whether or not we demand its creation.

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.” - Murray Bookchin

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#Coronavirus #UK #Britain #Conservatives #Boris Johnson #England #Virus #Covid-19 #Wash your hands #Wuhan #Italy

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asymptotichigh5 · 4 years

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Energy, the economy, and everything else.

I’ve been meaning to address this subject somewhere for a while. For the longest time, I hesitated on what the best medium to achieve this would be : on one hand, a Facebook status needs to be short and concise, which is not necessarily my forte and of course, there is also the fact that it would quickly be washed away in the storm of social media posts that has become 2020. A YouTube video then occurred to me to be most appropriate, but it would be long, my camera sucks and I hate video editing. So, I finally turned to this blog, which I had abandoned for quite some time. Surprisingly, there was an article in my drafts I had started writing almost 5 years ago about exactly this topic titled “A physics crash-course for politicians: a recipe not to kill us all”, but it was a bit too dramatic and I might get called off for taking political stances, when in reality there will be none in this post (which is surprising, for any of those reading this who know me). Anyway, this article will be the first in a series, which I might or might not continue, depending on interest, even though I did promise a friend of mine to carry through the entire message the whole way through, hopefully I’ll be able to do this with some of you actually reading all the way through, though that might be too optimistic.

Energy is a concept which is as important (if not more) as it is misunderstood by the general public. Most people don’t consider energy to be a considerable issue in their daily lives, but hopefully by the end of this post you will understand that energy is what allows you to live your 21st century carefree lifestyle. It turns out that most of us consider energy to be a bill to pay at the end of the month, or an annoyance to pay for when we fill our cars with gasoline at the pump, but energy — before being a bill to pay, or a commodity — is a physical quantity. A quick look at Wikipedia will give you a definition of energy which appears to be rather circular. Perhaps a more appropriate definition of energy for the sake of this post is the following:

Energy [/ˈɛnədʒi/, noun] : a physical quantity quantifying the ability to change the environment, or the ability to do work.

By “change the environment” we refer to the ability to perform any kind of change at all. Letting a ball fall involves energy, heating up water to make a cup of tea involves energy, me typing on this keyboard at this very moment also involves energy, etc. The SI unit for energy is the Joule, which at the human scale represents a tiny bit of energy (roughly speaking, it is the energy required to lift a medium-sized tomato (300 grams) by 1 metre. This unit has the annoying nuisance of being too small, so for the rest of this post we will talk about energy in terms of MWh (megawatt-hours), which corresponds to 3 600 000 000 Joules, which is a hell of a lot more medium-sized tomatoes lifted, or in terms of kWh (kilowatt-hours), which corresponds to 3 600 000 Joules. It is a good exercise to try to understand the MWh in terms of human work to put everything into perspective. To this effect, the BBC actually had a great documentary which appeared in 2009 about electrical energy consumption in the UK which performed an experiment in which a tiny army of people were forced to pedal to provide electricity to an average-sized house with an average-sized family having an average-sized consumption of electricity. While the documentary has great shock value, we need not hire an army of 80 cyclist to get the right orders of magnitude. An 80 kg man carrying 10 kg of supplies with him and climbing 2000 m up a mountain spends roughly 0.5 kWh to go up the mountain. Similarly, digging up 6 m${}^3$ of dirt to make a hole 1 m deep takes roughly 0,05 kWh of energy. By comparison, 1L of oil provides 2~4 kWh of (usable) mechanical energy.

Of course, using the oil to drive up the mountain, or to fuel an excavator to dig up the holes is a no brainer. Oil, or more precisely the machines it feeds, are not constrained by fatigue, do not form unions, do not complain that the ruble is too heavy, or that their legs are tired. It is also incredibly cheap by comparison, even if the human workers going up the mountain or digging up the hole are not getting paid at all. Assuming the cost of a slave to simply be the sustainance cost of a human being (i.e. minimal clothing, food and shelter) it is still a couple of hundred times cheaper to use a machine instead of a person to perform tasks, whenever possible. The reason why slavery ended is not because all of a sudden people grew a conscience out of thin air, or because we are so much better or educated than our ancestors ; it is simply stupid to have slaves in a world where you have access to a dense source of energy, because using this energy for mechanical work is many times more efficient and cheaper than owning slaves. This heuristic argument is also what ultimately explains the correlation between the abolition of slavery and the first industrial revolution (although the latter was mostly fed by coal as opposed to oil). In other words, the huge disparity in the efficiency of dense energy sources is what explains that mankind has historically always transitioned to sources of energy which monotonically increase in energy density.

But just what makes energy so important? Well, the answer lies in the definition. Since energy is ultimately the driver for any transformation of the environment, energy is by definition the main driver of the economy, too. In fact, the availability of a large supply of energy is what has allowed the development of modern society as we know it: paid holidays, retirement benefits, social security, social programs, your trip to Thailand last year, the variety of food you find at the supermarket, the fact that you even have disposable income to spend however you wish, free time, your ability to pursue long years of study, etc. Without the access to a cheap, reliable source of energy, this would all be impossible. Without realizing it, on average, we can calculate an equivalent amount of slaves used by any human on Earth today, given our estimates on the output of energy a human being is capable of delivering above and the total energy consumption of the planet. Doing the math, we find that an average human lives as if he/she had ~200 slaves working for him/her constantly. If we look at developed nations, this number jumps to 600 to 1500 equivalent slaves. This is an outstanding standard of living compared to what any of our ancestors ever knew. And so, it’s not that our generation is 200 times more productive than previous generations of humans, what has been driving the economy for the past 220 years is not humans, so much as it is the increasing access to a park of machines which has driven GDP growth since the industrial revolution. In fact, this can also be seen in developing countries, where an increase in development is immediately accompanied by a rural exodus driven by the introduction of machines to perform the heavy work in the fields. This allows for a widening of the pool of workers, which can then be free to use more machines and increase GDP.

So what sources of energy have we been exploiting in the last 220 years? Worldwide, the mix looks a little bit like this:

Notice that most of this mix (oil, gas and coal) are sources which are fossil fuels. In essence, what this chart is saying is that we owe all of the societal progress of the past 220 years to fossil fuels. Of course, the use of these fuels has the annoying consequence of releasing CO${}_2$ into the atmosphere which — as we know — has some rather undesirable consequences for the future of humanity. This chart also tells a story about how people have completely misrepresented and misunderstood the problem. Most people think that the energy crisis will ultimately be solved by replacing the carbonated sources of energy by “renewables”, even though the later are basically invisible in the above chart. Luckily, a world where we live only with renewable energy is entirely possible: it’s called the Middle Ages. The impossibility of replacing these carbonated sources with “renewables” is an important point to treat, and deserves an article of its own, but in the end its cause is the same as what has driven this discussion so far: energy density. We shall come back to this important point in a subsequent post. For now, let us finish driving the point home in establishing the unequivocal link between energy, specifically oil, and GDP. Energy availability is the main driver of the economy, this is simply because the economy is nothing other but the collective transformation of stuff into other stuff by humans. This, and the fact that 50% of the world-wide oil consumption is used to transport goods or people from point A to B is what explains the following correlation between oil and GDP:

In light of global warming, the question becomes one in which we are forced to arbitrate between real GDP growth and carbon emissions. It is literally that simple, yet it is difficult to grasp what this means. GDP growth is an abstract concept most of us don’t really understand, and most people advocating for giving up growth don’t fully grasp the consequences of what it will mean for all of us. Very really, what it means is diminishing real wages and purchasing power by a factor varying between 3 or 10 over the next 30 years (we will come back to these figures eventually in another article, too). Now, most people will point out that we can and should just take all this wealth from the oligarchs and the billionaires out there, and this is true and should definitely be done, but it will unfortunately still not be anywhere near enough to solve the problem. Orders of magnitude are a bitch and maths sucks, especially when they contradict your political opinions. In real terms, giving up growth means to take your current salary, and divide it by 10, and ask yourself whether you are really ready to live with that. The questions on left and right are at this point so irrelevant that it is stupid to even ask them. Both of these models of thinking completely rely on a pie which is ever increasing and in which the living standards of everyone eventually rise. For the right, this is obvious, but this holds true even in a leftist society, in which the social programs and everything that goes with it relies heavily on economic growth and an increase of the economic pie. This view is flawed, as in very real terms in order to protect ourselves from climate change, the only way is to considerably decrease our dependence on fossil fuels, in other words, considerably decrease global GDP.

(Un)fortunately, whether the politicians decide to take global warming seriously or not, the problem will auto-regulate eventually. You see, there is a tiny and obnoxious problem regarding our addiction to fossil fuels: we are running out of them. We should point out that not all fossil fuels are equal: this is not only true from a carbon emission perspective, but also from a transportation point of view. Indeed, only about 10% of the coal produced yearly is actually exported, because it is inconvenient to transport. Gas presents a similar problem, given its physical form, which is not sufficiently energetically dense to be easily shipped without compression (which itself involves energy). This leaves oil as the main source of energy which is actually exportable and tradable. And so, not only is oil vital due to the fact that it is the only source of energy which can reliably be used to for transportation, it is also the only option when looking at trading energy internationally. However, oil production has been already past its peak in most countries with considerable oil reserves. From a European point of view, the problem is actually worse as the energy consumption in Europe has been stagnating and in fact decreasing since 2005, when we reached peak consumption.

Incidentally, this explains why there has been no -- and there will be no -- economic long term real growth in Europe in the future, and it this has indeed been the case ever since 2008. In fact, most of the economic growth which has happened in Europe ever since is due to the trade of goods which increase in value over time (such as housing), which gets further gets inflated as there is a surplus of liquidity which has been continuously injected into the system since the introduction of quantitative easing. We will come to this problematic in a latte post. Similarly, we observe analogous curves of decrease in variation of energy consumption in the countries of the OECD (source of data: BP Statistical Review 2017), which means that this halting of real economic growth is not to be expected anywhere else in the OECD either.

During a recent discussion with a close friend of mine, he pointed out that the decrease in consumption in energy could be explained by the fact that the economy in developed countries had essentially become an economy of services, and that thus, this correlation between GDP and energy consumption and production was flawed, but this reasoning is wrong. First, because many of these services introduced involve or depend strongly on developments in e-commerce and industries attached to the development of the Internet and computers. However, the digitalization of the economy has not led to a decrease in energy demand, but in fact quite the opposite, if anything it has considerably increased our energy dependence. Second, the data simply states otherwise across the board. For instance, the chart below depicts an evolution of the percentage of people working in services and the amount of tons of CO${}_2$ released in the environment per capita in the World (data is from the World Bank).

Of course, the fact that these are positively correlated in the world and these countries is expected. In the world, because supporting the increasing living standards of the people working in the service sector necessarily comes out of an increase of the economic pie, which can only mean that the energy consumption (thus, at first order, the tons of CO${}_2$ in the atmosphere) increased. In European countries, the CO${}_2$ per capita has been reduced, partly to a negligible population growth, but also due to the delocalization of the most polluting elements of the economy to developing countries. Nonetheless, the general worldwide trend is clear: more service sector employment correlates with higher output of CO${}_2$, which implies higher energy consumption. But of course, by the reasoning above, this is hardly surprising.

Most of the time, the decline in the rate of growth of oil production is dismissed by saying that we will always find alternative forms of petroleum which will remain exploitable and will secure us with more oil. However, these alternative sources, such as bituminous sands and are problematic to exploit, require more energy input to be exploitable and are of lesser energetic quality. Similar decreasing curves of consumption and production have been appreciated for gas as well. Coal remains an exception to this, but it is not easily tradable, which implies that only 8 countries (including the US, China and Australia) really can consider exploiting coal for long term energy consumption, but given the climate consequences this poses, this is hardly a desirable outcome.

And so ultimately, it is not even a question of deciding whether or not we want to transition out of fossil fuels or not. The decrease in fossil fuel consumption will happen whether we like it or not — and by extension, so will the inevitable shrinking of the economy. The problem is that it might not happen fast enough to avoid catastrophe, which might already be unavoidable. What this also means is that the questions we should be asking ourselves as a society are not so much whether we should adopt liberal or leftist policies, but rather how we optimize the distribution of resources in a world where the economic pie decreases year by year, but no one seems to be wanting to have this discussion seriously.

#energy #energy crisis #renewables #renewable power #oil #environment #environmetalists #economy #economic crisis

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hogtown-socialist-alternative · 5 years

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Understanding Britain’s Brexit Crisis

By Claire Laker-Mansfield -October 18, 2019

Britain’s ongoing Brexit crisis has entered a new and spectacularly explosive phase. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is in a state of chaos. His attempts to regain control, including via the dissolution of Parliament, have so far failed. Johnson’s first week in parliament as Prime Minister saw him lose six parliamentary votes in six days, including two failed attempts at calling a general election.

It was also a week in which the thin thread that had been holding together the Tory (Conservative) Party’s warring factions finally broke. Twenty-one Conservative MPs, including Philip Hammond, who just weeks ago held the office of chancellor under Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, were thrown out of the party by Johnson. Hammond’s name sits alongside a series of former cabinet ministers and several notable “grandees” who have all been de facto expelled by the prime minister.

Chaos ensued in the House of Commons as the archaic rituals associated with proroguing – or suspending Parliament – were carried out. Chants of “shame on you” came from Parliament’s benches. The speaker of the house, himself a Tory MP, described Johnson’s decision as an act of “executive fiat.”

But far more important than any of the MPs’ stunts or Tory machinations have been the thousands of workers and young people who have turned out on protests against what is commonly referred to as Boris’ “coup.” Up to 100,000 people took part in protests across Britain in the week the proroguing was announced. And the Tory party conference was also marked with a major protest through the streets of Manchester. While the demonstrations have inevitably reflected the confusion that exists around the question of Brexit, and while they have sometimes been led by middle-class and pro-capitalist forces, these protests have offered a small outlet for the tremendous pent-up anger that exists within society. They hint at the huge potential for working-class people to be mobilised against Tory rule, to fight for an end to austerity, and to demand much more than that.

This was followed in late September by the U.K. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule the proroguing declaring it “unlawful.” But while this was certainly a setback for Johnson it did not lead to any clarity on how the Brexit crisis would be resolved.

The political implosion that took place in September had been brewing for a long time. In June 2016, a majority of British people voted in a referendum to leave the European Union, thus ushering in a new era in British politics – one of profound crisis and uncertainty

Three Years of Drift

Three years later, the issue of Britain’s relationship with the EU has only increased in dominance. And the Brexit crisis and the utter malaise in which British capitalism finds itself, has continued to deepen.

Mere hours separated the counting of ballots in the 2016 referendum and the resignation of the then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron. His replacement, Theresa May, who in the end faced no serious challenger, was the almost unanimous choice of the capitalist establishment. She was the chosen “safe pair of hands” – trusted to prioritize their interests in deeply uncertain times.

May was chosen for an historic task: the task of delivering a “Brexit in name only,” of mitigating and minimizing the damage done to Britain’s capitalist class by the “Leave” vote. In practice, this meant securing a deal that would maintain Britain’s membership of, or at least close relationship with, the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union, meanwhile respecting the result of the referendum in a formal sense.

In short, her mission was to regain control of the situation for the capitalist class. But far from succeeding, she resigned her office in utter defeat. She became the second Tory Prime Minister to fall victim to the Brexit crisis. But the cost of her failure to Britain’s capitalist class was far greater.

May’s inability to deliver did not stem fundamentally from personal weakness. This incredible loss of control by the capitalist class – symbolized in the maverick figure of her Trump-idolizing successor, Boris Johnson – was not caused by personalities and egos. Instead, this situation has arisen out of the deep, global crisis of the capitalist system, combined with the more specific, long-term decline of British capitalism.

Once known as the workshop of the world, Britain now has lower levels of productivity than impoverished Greece. Rather than investing in the development of new technology and technique, Britain’s capitalists instead tend to rely on low wages for the maintenance of profitability. Meanwhile, ten years on from the crisis of 2008, amidst stagnant living standards, the UK is once again heading for recession, with negative growth reported for the first quarter of 2019.

It is this malaise which was the underlying cause of the initial defeat suffered by the establishment in the referendum. It’s this which explains the profound difficulty the capitalists have in winning a stable social base of support for politics which represent their interests.

The explanations most commonly offered in the capitalist media for the Brexit vote are centered around the issue of immigration. But, while capitalist politicians on both sides of the debate used anti-migrant and, in some cases, openly racist rhetoric, it is not accurate to describe racism as the central feature of the Leave vote. In actual fact, in a confused and inchoate way, the Leave vote represented a revolt by primarily working-class voters. It was a revolt against a capitalist establishment responsible for a decade of austerity, for the decimation of communities through de-industrialisation, for wrecked public services, privatization, slashed benefits, and food-bank Britain.

The most important factor determining how likely someone was to vote Leave in the referendum was class. Almost two-thirds of low-paid workers – classified as “C2DE” in surveys in Britain – did so. When surveyed about their reasons for voting the way they did, only a third of Leave voters cited the issue of immigration as their main reason for doing so. By far the most common factor referred to – the reason given by almost 50% – was the issue of democratic control, the desire for a proper say over the decisions that affect our lives. What is this, if not an acknowledgement that the society we live in is “rigged” in favour of the super-wealthy – that working-class people lack a genuine voice in the way our society is run? Surely underlying this sentiment, even if it is not always clearly articulated, is an understanding that the European Union plays its part in the “rigging” that is inherent in capitalism – that it is part and parcel of this establishment.

Nevertheless, in the absence of a clear lead coming from the workers’ movement outlining a socialist and internationalist Leave position, many working-class and young people supported Remain – repulsed by the bigotry of Johnson and Farage. But this instinctive internationalism of many workers and youth has nothing in common with the neoliberal capitalist project that is the EU, nor with the Tory leaders of the official Remain campaign, who themselves used anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout.

What we have witnessed in the past years has been a process of slow disintegration within the Tory Party. This is a process which Boris Johnson’s election as leader has now accelerated to a dramatic climax. The Conservative Party is the oldest and, in many ways, the most successful capitalist party in the world. And its falling apart, especially at the same time as the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn occupies the leadership of the Labour Party, leaves the capitalist class without any reliable and stable form of political representation.

This has resulted in a situation where the capitalist class – which overwhelmingly supports Britain remaining in the EU – is currently unable to guarantee against a no-deal crash out.

Looming General Election

Indeed, very avenue available for attempting to stop such an outcome is fraught with problems for them. In normal circumstances, a general election would be the chosen “way out” of such a deadlock. But the lack of reliable political representation for the capitalists means this is not straightforward.

It’s possible a general election could deliver Johnson a larger majority. Or that the newly formed right populist Brexit Party could become a significant parliamentary force, with what remains of the Tories reliant on their votes for a majority.

Another possible scenario – one which the capitalist class is toying with as a potential way out – is the possibility of Corbyn coming to power.

Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015 based on a massive upsurge of working-class and young people who wanted to see a voice for anti-austerity politics expressed in the mainstream. But Corbyn’s emergence as leader was not the result of a steady transformation of the Labour Party from the ground up. Instead, Corbyn emerged at the head of a party which, in Parliament, in local government, and in its apparatus and machinery remained completely dominated by neoliberals linked to former party leader Tony Blair. Under Blair’s leadership, the party renounced its commitment to socialism and sought to move in the direction of the U.S. Democrats. And despite having led the party for four years, and the tens of thousands of Corbyn-supporters who have joined the party to support him, Corbyn has failed to mobilize these forces to conduct a campaign to wrest control of the party – including through the reselection of MPs and so on – from the hands of the neoliberals.

That’s why elements within the capitalist class are now weighing up whether a Corbyn-led government, if it were adequately restrained by the presence of the Blairite fifth column which has been allowed to remain dominant in the parliamentary party, might be preferable. Its potential merits are being openly discussed among the more serious capitalist commentators. But they are playing with fire. Especially if it came on the back of another Corbyn “surge” like the one which brought him into the leadership, such a government could inspire huge expectations among workers and young people. It could generate a confidence and willingness to fight for pro-working-class policies, and an appetite for more far-reaching, socialist change. This type of surge also occurred in the 2017 general election when Corbyn ran on a program of bold pro-working-class reforms and shocked the establishment by leading Labour to a far stronger result than they expected.

In any case, such an outcome is far from guaranteed. The failure of both Jeremy Corbyn and the trade union leaderships to adopt an independent, class-based approach toward the question of Britain’s relationship with the EU has contributed to a situation in which tremendous confusion exists over the issue.

As far back as 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn first stood for the leadership of the Labour Party, this was among the issues on which he came under most pressure to retreat. By abandoning his historic position of opposition to the EU as a neoliberal bosses’ club, instead taking a type of “soft Remain” line, Corbyn played a part in allowing the development of the contradictory and in many ways false polarization that currently exists on the question of Brexit – polarization which does not sit neatly along class lines. Indeed, the failure of the labor movement to put its mark on the issue has opened a door to the racist and xenophobic right.

Johnson spent the summer seeking to shore up a base for himself in the context of an insurgent right-populist force in the form of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, which romped home in the European elections in May winning nearly a third of the vote. In attempting to undercut this serious electoral threat to the Tories, Johnson has made sacrosanct the 31 October withdrawal date for Britain leaving the European union – with or without a deal. This has been combined with a series of pledges for increased public spending aimed at creating the impression that a Johnson government will move away from austerity.

What Would A No-Deal Brexit Mean?

Despite his self-presentation as a determined hard Brexiteer, it’s clear Johnson would prefer to arrive at some form of agreement with the European Union. But for him to be able to justify such a deal to his own support base, both in parliament and outside it, this would need to be one which included significant concessions, particularly on extremely the thorny question of the “Irish backstop.” This refers to the border between Southern Ireland, part of the EU, and Northern Ireland which is part of the U.K. The Good Friday Agreement in 1997 brought an end to the “Troubles,” the previous period where the Irish Republican Army waged an armed campaign to force the British state to relinquish control of Northern Ireland and reunite the North with the South. Part of the Good Friday Agreement involved the withdrawal of British troops from the streets and patrolling the border while the IRA disarmed.

But the Good Friday Agreement also created a Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive which enshrined sectarian, communal division. Today Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the IRA, dominates in the Catholic community while the hardline Democratic Unionist Party dominates in the Protestant community. The underlying sectarian division in the North has actually become more entrenched in the past 20 years. As a result of this polarization, the institutions created by the Agreement have ceased functioning.

If Brexit leads to a hard border between the North and South of Ireland it will create mass opposition among the Catholic population and even has the potential to reignite the troubles. But the alternative of creating a border between the whole of the island and Britain across the Irish Sea (an “East-West” border as opposed to a “North-South” border) would lead to strong opposition among Protestants who would see it as part of the drift towards a united Ireland.

On a capitalist basis, this problem is in many ways intractable. From the perspective of the EU, any arrangement in which the UK ends up outside of the Single Market or Customs Union without a deal which closely aligns Britain to its central regulations and agreements, would necessitate some form of border. Socialists strongly oppose hardening the border within Ireland or creating a new border in the Irish Sea.

From Johnson’s perspective, agreeing to the proposed “backstop,” which would essentially keep Britain in the Customs Union for an indefinite period and which would make impossible the negotiation of new trade deals, would be seen a huge climbdown. What’s more, it would open the door for the far right-wing leader of the new “Brexit Party” Nigel Farage to paint him as a Brexit traitor in an upcoming election. Johnson’s latest proposal for how to square this circle seems dead on arrival with the Irish government and the EU.

On the other hand, Farage’s strategy – simple and effective – is to call for a “clean break Brexit,” which is another way of saying no deal. He and his acolytes link this to the idea of a renaissance in British manufacturing, and the return of well-paid, skilled jobs to areas of the country that have been laid waste by more than thirty years of neoliberalism. This approach is combined with a conscious attempt to whip up anti-migrant and racist sentiment.

In the context of a huge fog surrounding the question of Brexit, and of a correct sense among many working-class Leave supporters that the capitalist establishment is attempting to overturn the 2016 referendum result, the seeming clarity of this approach cuts ice with many ordinary people. A recent ComRes poll found that 38% of voters would favour a no-deal exit on October 31 if an agreement has not been reached before then. This growing sentiment not only threatens to eat into the Tories’ base, but Labour’s as well – especially in many of the party’s working-class heartlands in the north of the country, many of which voted by a large margin to leave the EU.

The threat posed by Farage has pushed Johnson to at least pretend to take a harder and harder line on the negotiations, leaving him with little room to manoeuvre. Johnson hoped that by dissolving parliament he could buy himself space to seek a new deal with the EU. The plan was to put a take-it-or-leave-it style bill to parliament with just one week left to prevent a crash out. Despite the setback for Johnson caused by the Supreme Court ruling, his basic strategy seems unchanged. Nonetheless, he has now indicated he may be forced to request an extension to the deadline, and he could be potentially be jailed for defying parliament should he refuse.

In threatening a no-deal exit he has placed his own ambition and narrow electoral interests ahead of those of the capitalist class more widely.

While the stories hitting headlines threatening economic Armageddon in the event of a no-deal Brexit do contain a large element of “project fear,” they are not a pure fantasy. There would be real consequences.Even a two minute delay for each truck coming in from Europe at the port of Dover, something which could easily be caused by the necessary new customs checks, would be likely to result in a queue stretching back for more than seventeen miles! The potential for the capitalists to carry out closures and job losses based on the disruption of supply chains is also not simple scaremongering. But neither are these outcomes inevitable. The reality is that many of the firms threatening job cuts and closures related to Brexit were in many cases planning them anyway – with Brexit a handy “excuse” – part of an attempt to shift blame for economic distress onto working-class Leave voters. Equally, relocations are costly and take time. The more extreme threats of a potential mass exodus of companies from the UK almost overnight are exaggerated. It would be possible for a left government to intervene to prevent closures and job losses – if it was prepared to take companies threatening such measures into public ownership, guaranteeing the jobs and the conditions of those who work there.

This emphasises the importance of Corbyn intervening now with a clear program on these issues. It underlines the need for an independent, pro-working-class approach to the issue of Brexit.

Political Realignment

As we have explained, he British ruling class is seeking to regain some semblance of control over the situation. In particular they want to use of the parliamentary Remain majority, which in reality consists of a coalition of pro-capitalist MPs from all the main political parties, to tie Johnson’s hands.

Combined with the breaking up of the Tory Party and the ongoing (if rather one-sided) war within Labour, the “Remain coalition” that has developed in parliament in the last weeks hints strongly at the potential for the broader political realignment that has been inherent within the situation for some time, but which has so far failed to crystallize.

The parliamentary campaign to stop a no-deal outcome has resulted in a bill being passed which requires Johnson to seek an extension of article 50 (delaying Brexit) should he fail to reach an agreement ahead of October 31. So far, his approach has been to say that he will defy this law if there is no agreement. Theoretically, this would make it possible for him to be jailed for allowing a no-deal outcome.

This parliamentary rebellion has also resulted in MPs blocking, on two occasions, Johnson’s attempts to call a general election. With his parliamentary majority gone – down from +1 to -43 – there is ultimately no way for him to continue to govern without a new election.

Meanwhile, Corbyn has participated in the cross-party approach to stopping a no-deal Brexit and whipped Labour MPs to participate in blocking a general election both times it was put to the vote. There are grave dangers posed for Corbynism in the current situation. And with an autumn general election still overwhelmingly likely, the importance of him resisting the tremendous pressure he is under to capitulate, both on Brexit and on a myriad of other issues, is heightened.

While it is not necessarily wrong for Corbyn to have opposed Johnson’s general election on the basis of it potentially allowing him to maintain control over the Brexit process, the Labour leader’s failure to seize the initiative on this question has allowed him to “blend into the background” of Remain MPs.

There is potential for another “Corbyn surge” to take place. This could be combined with a huge mood of revolt against Tory austerity, and particularly against the bigoted and reactionary figure of Boris Johnson. But there should be no complacency about the outcome of a general election. Any hint of Corbyn participating in some form of “rainbow Remain alliance” would be toxic for him and would likely end in catastrophe.

That’s why Corbyn needs to spend the next weeks speaking directly to and for working-class people. He needs to, in a clear way, outline an independent, class-based approach on all the central questions facing society.

This should begin with calling on trade unions, climate strikers, and all those suffering under austerity, to take to the streets in mass protests against Johnson’s government – fighting to kick out the Tories.

A Socialist Program

On Brexit, Corbyn can offer clarity and unity. A socialist approach to the issue has the potential to cut through the false polarization that has been created, uniting working-class Leave and Remain voters behind a common program. As a starting point, Corbyn must make clear that a government led by him would act to guarantee jobs and protect living standards, whatever the outcome of the Brexit process. In particular, that means pledging now to bring any company threatening closures or layoffs into public ownership, with compensation only paid to shareholders on the basis of need.

Corbyn’s approach should include fighting to re-open negotiations on a totally different basis – laying down as red lines not the interests of big business, but those of workers, young people, and pensioners. This means opposing all the treaties and agreements that the EU has institutionalised which act to encourage a race-to-the-bottom in pay, or which would place obstacles in the way of a left government carrying out pro-working-class policies such as bringing sector like the railways which were privatized back into public ownership. It means opposing racism and attacks on migrants, as well as the erection of any new borders in relation to Ireland. It means taking a clearly internationalist approach – appealing over the heads of pro-capitalist EU negotiators to the workers of Europe, many of whom are already engaged in battle against austerity. In short, it means posing the question of a new collaboration of the peoples of Europe – one only possible on the basis of socialism.

Such an approach, if it were linked to a bold program to end cuts, introduce free education, give workers a real living wage and carry out huge investment in public services, would gain tremendous support.

But the reality is that getting elected would only be the first of a whole series of major challenges faced by Corbyn. The context of crisis in which he could come to power means there will be a ferocious campaign of sabotage by the neoliberals and the right against any attempt by him to implement a genuinely pro-working-class program.

That’s why it’s necessary to use the next five weeks, as well as any future election campaign, to prepare for what could come.

Faced with direct economic sabotage, or with the immediate fall out of a chaotic Brexit, Corbyn would need to take swift measures to defend the interests of working and middle-class people. Within a short time frame, that would mean being prepared to take control of the key levers of economic power within society – starting with bringing the banks into democratic public ownership. It would require taking into public ownership the big monopolies that currently dominate the economy and consequently the lives of millions, allowing for society’s resources used to the benefit of people and planet.

Crucially, for Corbyn to succeed in this, he would need to be prepared to decisively break with the representatives of capitalism who currently sit behind him in the Commons. He would need to rely not on a Parliament stuffed with pro-capitalist MPs, but on the mass of working-class people who, when mobilised and organized, represent the most important force needed to change society.

It is this approach and this program which members of the CWI in England, Wales, and Scotland will be organizing around in the next period. And while Britain’s capitalist class trembles in fear at what the future holds, we are confident in the tremendous opportunities that are opening up for us to build the forces of socialism in capitalism’s birthplace.

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thesustainableswap · 4 years

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Say Goodbye to Fast Fashion.

For some of us it’s easier said than done. We’ve grown up online, where anything and everything is available to purchase and have delivered to your door within moments. But, it’s time for us to consider just how fair fashion is (short answer, it’s often not). For those constantly shopping for deals, for those trawling websites like wish, shein, boohoo and pretty little thing, for those making the rounds in primark, H&M and even TopShop - it’s time to consider what impact your purchase is having on others.

I’m sure you remember this absolutely ICONIC moment from the Lizzie McGuire movie, in which Lizzie is shamed by Kate for wearing an outfit she has already worn, thus being the worst of all people: ‘An Outfit Repeater.’ I too once had this fear, feeling like I could not be seen in the same thing twice. With the birth of social media, outfit repeating became even more shameful. You could no longer repeat an outfit for different groups of friends if you had already uploaded a picture in it online. The horror!

Fashion had to adapt to this culture of buying an outfit purely for one event. Starting with weddings, but then seeping into less prestigious life events, 16th birthday’s, proms, random nights out where you attempt to impress a bunch of drunk people you don’t know and will ultimately end with you being sick on the floor. I’ve been there. I feel you. Fashion followed the trend, giving you a one off, single use outfit for every occasion at low low prices.

Cheap labour combined with cheap materials often brings us items that wear down or break easily. Forever on the hunt for bargains, we often fail to see the repercussions of our actions. We are driven by the need to have the newest trends at the most affordable prices. Factory workers and delivery drivers are often on zero hour contracts and given little to no support (see my blog post on why I don’t support Amazon here). Garment makers across the globe earn little and work in poor, unsafe conditions. Once again, Corona virus is highlighting the main issues that come up time and time again across industries, especially the fast fashion industry.

On March 31st, ASOS’ warehouse in Barnsley was open. That warehouse sees up to 4,000 employees. They do not have any protective equipment, they’re dealing with an unclean workplace, they have to be in close proximity with other workers. It’s not like it’s beneficial for a worker to take time off either, as statutory sick pay in the UK stands at £95.85 a week. JD Sports is also still open, with workers there saying their lives are being ‘put at risk.’

Over on Instagram, XR Boycott Fashion have uploaded information on just how much money brands are withholding from garment workers. They write:

“A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Bangladesh, with the fate of 4.1 million garment workers in the hands of western fashion brands, who have reportedly cancelled over $2.8 billion in orders as the COVID19 crisis escalates.” The True Cost Of Brands Not Paying For Orders During The COVID-19 Crisis by Brookes Robert-Islam, Forbes, March 2020.

The production on these garments is completed. The orders fulfilled. These workers should not now have to suffer by waiting for what they are owed. I realise how lucky and fortunate I and many of my friends are - to be in positions where we are working from home, where maybe we have been furloughed, or completely unable to do our job but we are still getting paid for it. I fall into that last category, as I work as an English teacher / childminder here in France. I can’t do that job right now but I am still getting paid (my full wage) because, luckily, France seems to have a good social security system. In the UK a furloughed wage sits at around 80% of what you normally earn. Though, if you’re on that £95 a week... that’s rough. That is certainly not enough to live on. But these garment workers, they are getting nothing. Zero. And despite that, there still seems to be confusion over whether they should be working or not, with workers being called into the factories or trying to get there themselves (risking their lives), traveling on packed vehicles. It seems now that the factories are planning to shut, but that still leaves the workers living in uncertainty.

So let’s name and shame those companies who are withholding payment.

(Image from XR Boycott Fashion’s instagram page)

I urge anyone reading this. Now, and after Corona virus, really consider where your clothing comes from. Can you be sure that everyone in the supply chain is protected and supported? Are you certain that people are being paid fairly for their work? I’m sure you recognise this headline from 2019, when Missguided sold a bikini for £1. If something is that cheap, then somewhere along the line, someone is suffering.

Join me by swapping out fast fashion companies. Even if you aren’t someone who buys clothes for one event. Even if you (like me) have pieces in your wardrobe that you’ve had from high street brands for years! Pledge to yourself that you will not support them any longer. I use the app Good On You if I see something I like in a shop to check the ethics of the company. If it scores three out of five or less, I don’t buy it. Mend what you already have. Shop secondhand. Check out depop or other similar swapping apps. Companies like this, like ASOS, like Primark... they are only interested in their profit. They will continue to exploit workers for as long as they can. The only way to put a stop to it is to not fund them and speak up against them.

(And, despite what Kate says - Repeat those outfits!)

Until next time,

The Sustainable Swap.

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Recent weeks have seen a shock to France’s elites. President Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax hike sparked widespread protests, with road blockades across the country and violent clashes with police in Paris. The gilets jaunes movement (so named after protesters’ distinctive yellow vests) imposed a humiliating climbdown by the liberal president, who was forced to abandon the tax and raise the minimum wage.

These protests have given voice to often-ignored parts of French society. But while much media has shown its contempt for those involved, the movement has found a vocal ally in Pamela Anderson. The former Baywatchstar and Playboy model has spoken out on multiple causes before, from her pro-animal rights work with PETA to her environmental stances and support for earthquake relief in Haiti. Now she has become a keen backer of the revolt against austerity.

In her tweets and blog posts Anderson emphasized the wider importance of the protests, terming them a battle against the “politics represented by Macron and the 99% who are fed up with inequality, not only in France, all over the world.” She similarly responded to claims of protester violence by tweeting “I despise violence . . . but what is the violence of all these people and burned luxurious cars, compared to the structural violence of the French — and global — elites?”

Showing her broad interest in the political upheavals currently gripping the continent, she has in recent days also voiced her support for left-wing UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn while also sharply criticizing Italy’s far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini for his racist agenda.

In an interview with Jacobin’s David Broder, Anderson and philosopher Srećko Horvat discussed the French protests, Europe’s crisis, and Anderson’s own activism.

David Broder:

The gilets jaunes protests in France have drawn a lot of scorn from media and political elites, but your comments have been supportive, noting that this “revolt has been simmering for some years.” What do you think these protests represent? Do they respond to a mood that you see in France more generally, since you’ve been living there?

Pamela Anderson:

My comments were at first provoked by the images of violence. Everyone was hypnotized. Why? And why did it come as such a surprise? What stands behind the violence? I wanted to understand. I know it’s not easy to accept me as I am. I stir things up in an unconventional way, and will continue to do so.

A few days after the protests broke out in France, I traveled to Milan. There I found Mr. Salvini in the newspapers saying that “Macron is a problem for the French.” But I see it differently. I think it’s a European problem. In the same way, the rising xenophobia in Italy is a European problem. Not just an Italian one.

Just before I arrived in Italy, the top Italian chef Vittorio Castellani was told not to use “foreign recipes” on his TV show. I love Italian food. But what is Italian — or any — food without “foreign influences”? I am sure Mr. Salvini enjoys “foreign food” too. OK, we moved on from the gilets jaunes . . .

Srećko Horvat:

But this is an excellent detection of the problem. This actually started in 2009 with Silvio Berlusconi’s campaign against “non-Italian” food in Italy, it is a continuous process of “normalization” — the slow introduction of measures or even laws which in a near future will seem “normal.”

If I remember rightly, it was Vittorio Castellani who, already then, almost ten years ago, pointed out that there is no such thing as authentic “Italian food,” because tomato came from Peru and spaghetti from China. So, without foreign influence “Italian food” would literally taste different. When you say that Salvini probably enjoys “foreign food” then you name the true problem.

As with the case of Macron talking to gilets jaunes from his salon doré surrounded by gold decorations, there is a disconnection between the political elites and the people. Moreover, this is utter cynicism on the part of the ruling elites. As for France, it became obvious that the “world-spirit on the horseback” (as Hegel saw Napoleon, and Jürgen Habermas sees Macron) is nothing other than Jacques Lacan’s king who is mad to believe he is a king.

When a cabinet minister from Macron’s party, trying to show the gulf between the working poor and political elite, complains that Paris dinners cost “€200 without wine,” it is another clear sign of the disconnect between the elites and the people.

The gilets jaunes believe, and they are right, that Macron doesn’t live in the “real world.” At the same time, these days you could have seen, as if it came from the alternate reality of the Situationists themselves, a graffiti simply saying “Pamela Anderson Présidente!”

David Broder:

French government officials and some media claim that the protesters are ignoring the need for environmental protection. As someone with a keen interest in conservation, do you think the gilets jaunes‘ own demands can fit together with a green agenda?

Pamela Anderson:

I do not think the poor should pay for climate change. Yet it is the poor who are paying the biggest price. Some say that the protesters in France protested so they could continue polluting the planet. But I do not think this is true. They protest because the rich keep destroying the planet. And the poor are paying.

In 2013, after the devastating earthquake, I visited Haiti to distribute aid. I visited a children’s hospital and refugee camps. Again, it was the poor paying the price. Since then, many grassroots projects have been going on in Haiti that show what a green transition could look like.

The protests in France started when President Macron announced an increase in carbon and air pollution taxes. This was supposed to collect more money for the state budget and also motivate people to use alternatives to diesel-fueled cars. Macron would like to ban diesel cars by 2040. But the French state encouraged people to buy diesel-fueled cars for many years.

For example, in 2016, 62 percent of cars in France were diesel cars, as well as 95 percent of all vans and small lorries. So it is no wonder that many people view the new policy as a total betrayal.

Getting a new car is probably not a big deal for President Macron and his ministers. But it is way too difficult for many people who are already financially stretched. Many poor people will not be able to get to work, especially if there is no reliable public transport in place. Many old people will not be able to get to the shops or to the doctor.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #pamela anderson #macron #environmental justice #protests #yellow vests #austerity #neoliberalism

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anne1066-blog · 6 years

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30th January 2019

This is a new idea that Jane suggested because I have various things niggling at the moment and I can’t quantify them. So this is a very private blog diary just monitoring how I’m feeling and where I’m at. I might share it with friends or I might not. Why put it on a public platform? Well pressing post makes you really feel you’ve set the feelings free and put it out there even if no one actually reads it. It worked for me before when I was getting a load of stuff out of my system regarding a failed engagement, cheating and a pretty intense relationship with a much older man who had 3 children.

Where am I at today? Bloody knackered. I’ve basically called in sick all week with a recurrence of a cold that didn’t have major symptoms but made me feel crappy and subhuman. I’ve fought through it a bit to work in extreme cold and also to go an a weekend with friends in York which of course I did enjoy but I also didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have. It felt way too short. I need a get away from my life at the moment. There are a lot of hard decisions to face and I know I’m not managing them all that well.

So to recap what got me to where we are today:

In 2014 I moved to Oxfordshire to set up a cheesemaking dairy. It was a brand new start for me and had the promise to be an exciting chapter in my life. I learned a lot from it - how to plan a new building specifically for a cheesemaking facility, how to find the site, plan the layout, source the milk, decide on a marketable recipe, build a brand (not the first time I’d been involved in branding to be fair) and not least but troubleshoot a recipe which ended up being the achilles heel. As it turned out the milk production standards weren’t really up to the recipe we wanted to make. After months of cheese we didn’t want to sell, I was made redundant. I don’t want to be bitter but I feel there were some bad commercial decisions made by my business partner who was meant to be in charge of sales. She charged ahead with full scale production when the cheese wasn’t good enough to sell at full price and she also gave away vast amounts of cheese which could have been sold for at least a price that covered costs. All of this lead to a financial crisis and that was it - I was gone.

Before that happened, I had what had was a life changing holiday around the world which happened just as the cheesemaking dairy was opening and needing to go into production - it was 6 months over schedule. It was a revelation though. I flew to countries I had never visited and had to negotiate them by myself. I had a couple of days in Dubai, flew through Singapore (never left the airport to be fair so it doesn’t really count), flew on to Australia and from there to New Zealand after a very brief overnight stay in a hotel near the airport and from there after driving solo around South Island to Sydney, the Cook Islands, Santa Monica, San Francisco and then home. It took 6 weeks and it really made me feel confident; not least because after years of being invisible to any guys out there but I got attention in every place I touched down in - some rather more meaningful than others to be fair. In Dubai, I connected with our desert tour guide who was a worker from Pakistan living in the UAE (not Dubai it’s far too expensive but the more restrictive Sharjah where women’s rights are quite seriously undermined). He was an outsider but loved the desert and remembering the way the Namib desert had made me feel many years ago, so did I. Our fellow travellers were good time tourists so there seemed a contrast between them enjoying the desert safari tourist activities and me just enjoying the culture of the country and the stillness of the desert. i know that makes me sound extremely up myself but I can’t think of another way to describe it. He asked me out on a date which never happened and in retrospect that was a good thing. I would never have realised that things like holding hands with a potential romantic partner are forbidden in Dubai nor would I have realised that normal activities like kissing a first date can actually get you taken to prison. After Dubai, I flew to New Zealand but happened to talk to my co passenger on the flight to Adelaide and have a very interesting conversation about colonialism and England��s position in Australia - not heavy - we joked about it - food for thought all the same which s the point of travel after all. In New Zealand, I met up again with lovely friends I hadn’t seen for years and also met up with my sister and her boyfriend and my friend Cathi’s family who welcomed us as part of their big, lovely family too. It was an amazing time to feel so incredibly accepted and welcomed. And again I connected with someone, my friend’s older brother (also the only other single person there - I may have decided unlike me to flirt a bit with him as we were the only singletons there). He was a lovely, funny, warm guy who as a chef was a great person to cook with and this was an area we had in common. After the wedding ended and we moved on to normal life (him) and the rest of my holiday (me) we stayed facebook friends and he often is one of the first people to like my posts even to this day because he’s a genuinely great person. In Sydney, i went out to dinner with my uber glamorous friend Cristiana and because she’s open, chatty and lovely we ended up on a communal table in a restaurant when we went out for a meal and she got involved in conversation with a noisy group of guys sat to our left. One of them was looking at me and when I went for a ‘comfort break’ he actually approached Cris to say I was lovely and ask who I was! From Sydney I flew to the Cook Islands where I met a lovely lady (not in thet way) who invited me to go swimming with her family after the kids got back from school and who took me down the road to my hostel to collect my swimming things on her motorbike. My first time on a motorbike and frankly a bit terrifying. I also get ogled which hadn’t happened in let’s say about 20 years in London. In San Francisco, a waiter who I had quizzed about local cheeses and wines slipped me his telephone number on my bill. I didn’t find it until I sorted my receipts back in the UK and hadn’t fancied him anyway so just as well but all helps the ego doesn’t it? Especially when you’re over 40 at the time and have resigned yourself to no one finding you attractive anymore.

Anyway so that’s my trip and there was so much more too that I don’t have time to write about. The key thing is that I came back feeling much more empowered and confident. I had travelled the world by myself and not only that but after years feeling invisible I had finally felt attractive again. Boosted by this, I decided to take action, try internet dating again and this time I actually met someone. I was a bit concerned about meeting him - he was openly into kink and sexual things I wasn’t experienced in but as well as that he was warm, made me laugh and I was interested. I wasn’t openly attracted to him when we met. There was certainly something there - we had been very open when messaging and honest and I fancied his personality but as usual on a first internet date, the nerves kicked in and it was difficult when we first said hello to feel anything much. I knew that would happen though so when I couldn’t think of anything to say to him and he moved in for a reassuring hug, I decided to turn it into a chemistry test and effectively snogged his face off for about 90 minutes until our table reservation was ready. That certainly broke the ice so conversation flowed more easily afterwards and I made moves to go back with him to his place after the meal where I could test the theory further. I was relieved and rather pleased to find that the attraction wasn’t just based on text messages and being a gentleman he also drove me home and stayed in touch afterwards. We met up a few times and eventually decided to get together. I would never have had the courage to do this if I hadn’t had my empowering holiday and since we’re still together despite the odds 4 years later it was definitely a good move.

However this was all very new when I was made redundant. He assured me he wouldn’t be going anywhere but it was too soon to move in together so I moved all my 3 bedroom house’s worth of belongings back to my parents’ house in Marple and looked for a job. I emailed anyone I could think of to explain I was looking for work and found somewhere in London that seemed a great match. It was with a Spanish importer looking to improve their cheese maturation and whose owner I had worked with before when setting up Borough Market in London.

Unfortunately although the interview went well, the owner wanted to work with me and my references thought it was a given, I failed their HR tests and I have to be honest it knocked my confidence extremely badly. I took another job that seemed exciting and had been a second choice due only to location - north Yorkshire, a long way away from the lovely new boyfriend.

I worked with them for 3 months before again, redundancy. This time, they great ideas they had had for expansion which I was a key part of, had to be put on hold because of a disastrous Christmas in which various storms flooded large parts of the north of England and cut into their sales. By this time, I had bought a house nearby and now had to find a new job and work out what to do with a house I had hoped to make a home.

Initially I had looked to resurrect the house which had at the time all the hallmarks of having been owned by an elderly couple who loved it and had also done nothing to it since probably the 1960s in a way i would live in. The plans changed to make it something that could be sold or rented and without wishing to be dramatic, with that a little bit of me died at losing my home.

I didn’t wallow though, there was work to be done. The house needed substantial work including rewiring, replastering, a new kitchen and new decorating and floors throughout. By the time it was finished it was actually rather lovely. I felt sad that i wasn’t going to live in the results of our work and sad that I wouldn’t be living in a beautiful part of the country. Actually I felt very sad not to be living in a house whose renovations I had initially begun with a view to making it my home. But again I had been looking around for another job although with a heavier heart this time. Being knocked back 3 times will do that to you. This time I had a message from a friend who makes cheese in Suffolk and her cheeses are extremely well regarded so helping her albeit on a basis that wouldn’t be full-time seemed like a great idea. We tried it out and she reckoned I could work 2-3 days a week although with some big changes to the recipe as she was currently making cheese at midnight and cat napping to accomodate the make schedule.

So I moved to Bungay in Suffolk. It was different - flat lands where I am used to seeing hills, but it had an artistic, musical community and I started to look at property prices again wondering about living there if the job worked out.

I had been there a month when Brexit happened.

My constituency was a big Brexit voting area. I saw people in my local co op looking afraid when their children spoke polis to them. I began to feel much less welcome myself. It seemed there was a big difference between the artistic fringe in the area and the locals who resented anyone who moved in whether they were Polish or just from Marple. I stopped feeling welcome. I actually felt observed, scrutinised and as though I didn’t belong. iI felt like Roystn Veasey. ‘You’re not local are you?’

The vote itself upset me more than I realised it could. I spent months watching the 2012 Olympics ceremony which was a celebration of multicultural Britain and crying my eyes out as racist hate crimes increased across the country and in he wake of right wing extremists killing the pro-Muslim MP Jo Cox. During the football in the Europe that preceded the vote as violance and yobbishness hit 1908s levels among chants of ‘We’re leaving the EU and we don’t care’, I could see what the results of the vote were going to be. An MP was murdered and my worst fears were confirmed. And yet 52% of the country still cast their votes with a racist ideology and Nigel Fargae’s openly racist campaigning. If I had been concerned about EU corruption and taking back control, his anti muslim poster and the rise of race crime before the referendum empowering racists to openly abuse people in public in a way they had not felt able to for over 30 years would have convinced me this vote was not going the way I hoped and I would have changed my mind. I respect anyone who did this and I can not forgive anyone who didn’t.

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lizseyi · 10 months

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How Can You Prep Now For The Perfect Christmas Hampers - Shredded-Paper

Yes, we know what some of you are likely thinking: isn’t it still slightly early for us to be providing homemade festive-season hamper advice? That may seem the case, but with the cost-of-living crisis having reportedly led many Britons to spread out their Christmas spending over a longer period than they might have once done, we don’t think it’s too early at all.

In any case, it can be good to prepare as early as possible for certain things – especially if you are interested in assembling your own Christmas hampers, and therefore need to gather a lot of essential materials together. You won’t want to risk finding yourself short of certain crucial items at the last minute.

Below, we have outlined some of the steps that the Shredded-Paper.co.uk team would advise you to take now, in order to ensure your homemade hampers make the right impression on 25th December.

Decide on themes for your Christmas hampers

We’ve included this tip first, for the simple reason that the theme you choose for a hamper will inform and guide you with the rest of your hamper shopping and preparation. Plus, a big part of the point of putting together your own Christmas hampers is surely the opportunity to personalise them in special ways for the intended recipient.

The actual theme that you choose for a given hamper doesn’t have to be something overly complicated. If you’re assembling a hamper for someone who loves their four-legged furry friend, for instance, a dog or cat-themed hamper could do the job nicely. Or if the intended recipient is on the green-fingered side, a gardening-themed hamper is sure to be well-received.

Start getting together the items to include in the hamper

Even if you’re merely grabbing a few products for now rather than trying to purchase everything that will go into a given hamper, doing so at a relatively early stage will enable you to have some fun with it. As part of this, you will be able to be opportunistic in grabbing some quirky items or bargains from places like the local Sunday market.

And as we touched on above, the theme that you decided on for each hamper will guide you. A hamper for a garden lover, for example, could contain the likes of a hand tools gift set, some garden gloves, and some seeds and bulbs. Or a hamper intended for someone who adores their cat could feature a catnip toy and some well-chosen cat treats, among other feline-related offerings.

Stock up on the materials that will protect the contained items

So much of skilful Christmas hamper assembly is about knowing how to get the protective packaging elements right. You might choose to put each item into a small cellophane bag, for instance, and tie it up with jute twine. Other products that are to be included in the hamper, you may arrange to have wrapped in brown paper, with a colourful bow added. There are just so many fun possibilities.

And of course, our own shredded paper can play a big role, too. In fact, our Yuletide store at Shredded-Paper.co.uk is already open. This means you have the chance right now to replenish your supplies of Christmas hamper kraft filling paper in more-or-less any colour or cut you like.

The shredded paper in our range looks great – adding to the presentational quality of your hamper when the recipient opens it – and is an excellent all-round protective packaging material. It is tougher than tissue paper, for example, but also an environmentally friendlier option than bubble wrap.

So, when you are on the lookout for the optimal Christmas hamper kraft filling paper over the coming weeks and months, why look further than our own online store? It’s worth remembering, too, the free delivery that we offer to most UK mainland postcodes.

#Shredded-Paper

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gamerhunter780 · 3 years

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Idea To Life: Community Through Food

Idea To Life: Community Through Food Truck

Idea To Life: Community Through Food Pyramid

Idea To Life: Community Through Food Stamps

Idea To Life: Community Through Food Bank

Users can search for vegan, non-vegan, or any specific food menu through the app. #100 – All-in-one Launcher App. An all-in-one launcher app that consists of the features of all the existing launchers and then some more like app drawers, voice commands, customization, and more. Bonus: 12 New Ideas for Mobile App Development for 2021. Relationships: How to Connect with Others Through Food. Family fun. family fun-traditions. By Flavia Scalzitti on July 12th, 2018 9 Comments » If you think about life's different occasions, food is most likely at the center of each one. We use food to mark special occasions, such as birthdays, anniversaries, baby showers, graduations. Food in Italy is love, then nutrition, then history, then pleasure, he says. An Italian child’s first experience with food is not buns or rice or eggs, but probably ice cream, notes Bolasco. Status and wealth play less of a role in food than say, in China. Food as community. In Arab cultures, community is key to the food culture. Here are a few ideas on how to benefit your community through song. Get unstuck from a volunteer rut If you’ve been volunteering in the same capacity, at the same place, or with the same people for an extended period of time, the rewarding aspect of the process can start to wane, and volunteering can start to feel like a dead-end job.

Idea To Life: Community Through Food Truck

Gardening has a power that is political and even democratic. And it is a political power that can be applied constantly, whereas one can only vote or demonstrate occasionally.

—Wendell Berry

Because of disputes over land, access to green space, and equal rights to the city, urban gardens have become a symbol of community activism and empowerment, and they are part of a contemporary grassroots movement supporting environmental justice, collective action, and equitable access to nutrition and good health. Due in part to the current swell of interest in the local food movement, since the early 2000s there has been a remarkable surge in the prevalence of community garden initiatives.

Idea To Life: Community Through Food Pyramid

But while they may be in the current media spotlight, the practice is certainly not new.

Community gardens have been part of American cities since the late-19th century. As a way to confront the congestion, economic instability, and environmental degradation that were part and parcel of turn-of-the-century urban life, residents began taking matters into their own hands—by planting school gardens, for example, or cultivating the vacant lots between buildings.

Since then, the popularity of these gardens has seen ebbs and flows in relation to the social and economic climates of particular eras. During the World Wars and the Great Depression, for example, the practice became much more widespread (as a result of the “Victory Gardens” encouraged by the federal government during WWII, Americans produced 40% of their own food!) only to diminish once again as the nation’s devastated economy began to recover. The 1970s witnessed another economic crisis that made its mark on urban cores. As soaring food prices coincided with the birth of the modern environmental movementand the availability of open spaces as a result of failed urban renewal projects, community gardens began to reemerge as part of a movement to reclaim ownership of the “public commons.” Most recently, after the 2009 recession, there was a 19% increase in the prevalence of community gardens as a strategy for supplementing food costs and cultivating local resilience.

While their ability to improve food access alone, especially among lower-income and under-served communities, is proof enough of their enduring value, community gardens are—and have always been—about much more than food. Indeed, they embody powerful placemaking strategies that are showing to have multiple and measurable impacts.

Here are some of the many interrelated benefits that that these collectively held (and sometimescontested) spaces can bring to urban neighborhoods:

Physical and mental health

Idea To Life: Community Through Food Stamps

Across many fields and disciplines, researchers are finally beginning to see the powerful connections between social capital and healthy places. Given the physical exertion that gardening requires and the increased consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, the connection between community gardens and physical health is clear. But recent research is has also underscored the links between community gardens and mental health. For city dwellers, connecting with nature—a proven remedy for stress and depression—can be quite difficult. A recent UK study shows that people who gardened for at least 30 minutes a week had lower body mass indexes (BMIs) as well as higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of tension and stress. “With an increasing number of people residing in urban areas, a decline in the number of homes with gardens, and the increased risk for mental ill health associated with urban living,” researchers write, “allotment gardening might play an important role in promoting mental well-being in people residing in urban areas.”

Educational opportunities and community partnerships

The educational programming that takes place at many community gardens can give neighbors the opportunity to learn about everything from nutrition and culinary skills to environmental sustainability, business principles, and job skills. The Sustainable Flatbush Healing Herb Garden, for example, holds hands-on demonstrations to highlight basic urban agricultural techniques, and it offers community workshops on using herbs in culinary practice and as medicine. As detailed on the garden's ioby funding page, the project sought to provide volunteer and internship opportunities, while also pursuing partnerships with community members, neighborhood schools, and social service organizations.

Land for community gardens can be publicly or privately held, and the programs often involve partnerships with outside entities such as nonprofits, youth or senior programs, prisons, housing developments, or schools. The national farm-to-school network is a large-scale model of how gardening can be an educational tool, an economic catalyst, and a vehicle for strong public-private partnerships. There are farm-to-school programs in every state, where the fruits and vegetables grown on school grounds supplement meals served in the cafeteria.

Safety and crime reduction

There is evidence linking community gardens to improved safety in neighborhoods – showing that crime decreases in neighborhoods as the amount of green space increases. Two reports in the Journal of Environment and Behavior studied (1) the impact nature has on mental fatigue (often a precursor of aggression and violence), and (2) the relationship between green space and inner city crime rates. The research determined that aggression and violence was “significantly lower among those people who lived near some green space than those who lived in more barren conditions.”

Echoing Jane Jacob’s now-famous idea of “eyes on the street,” a 2012 study in Philadelphia comparing two clusters of vacant lots—one that was cultivated and one that wasn’t—showed that greening the vacant lots made nearby residents feel significantly safer, and the newly cultivated lots could be linked to a decrease in gun crimes in the area.

'Our theory is that transforming vacant lots from a space overgrown with vegetation and filled with trash to a clean and green space may make it difficult for people to hide illegal guns and conduct other illegal activities such as drug use in or near the space. Additionally, green space may encourage community cohesion.' – Eugenia C. Garvin, MD, lead author of Penn Study on greening vacant lots to reduce violent crime

Cultural Heritage and Exchange

Shared gardens have played a powerful role in helping communities who have experienced the traumas of displacement, such as new immigrants and refugees. For these populations, shared gardens can be a vehicle for re-establishing a sense of place, building new social ties, and celebrating and maintaining cultural traditions. Little Haiti Garden in Miami, for example, enables the area’s Haitian community to use traditional farming techniques in producing often-unavailable crops such as callaloo and calabaza. Community gardens like Little Haiti Garden, which is located in one of the poorest districts in the country, also maintain a strong economic development component. By holding gardening and nutrition workshops, teaching retail skills, and selling produce to the neighborhood, local markets, and restaurants, the garden helps brings additional money and food into the households that need it.

In Fresno, California, seven state-funded community gardens seek to boost mental health within the area's large refugee, immigrant, and low-income populations. “The thinking of community leaders and health professionals,” writes Patricia Leigh Brown of the New York Times, “is that gardens can help foster resiliency and a sense of purpose for refugees, especially older ones, who are often isolated by language and poverty and experiencing depression and post-traumatic stress. Immigrant families often struggle to meet insurance co-payments, and culturally attuned therapists are in short supply.”

***

Wendell Berry once quipped that it may be too easy to underestimate the power of a garden. 'A garden,' he continued, 'is a solution that leads to other solutions. It is part of the limitless pattern of good health and good sense.'

Since their origin in US cities at the end of the 19th century, the popularity of community gardens has tended to increase during periods of crisis. And as we face new challenges such as the rising rates of chronic health issues like obesity, heart disease, and depression, along with socioeconomic issues like high unemployment rates and increasing food insecurity, it makes sense that community garden initiatives are experiencing a nationwide resurgence.

Even beyond issues of food access, community gardens are about building social ties, sharing skills and experience, learning about nature and culture, and taking proactive measures to improve our physical and mental well-being. One thing is certain: As our urban environments become home to more and more people, community gardens will continue to be a powerful, place-based tool for creating local connections and enacting positive global change.

Welcome to Spice Up Your Life! Through this blog, I hope to express my movement through life. I love talking about life, personality, and emotion, but I also love talking about and eating food. So, welcome to my outlet where I can do all of that!

I am a student at the University of Strathclyde in the Masters of Social Work program. I live in Glasgow, Scotland with my boyfriend, Barrie. But I was born and raised in North Carolina. Growing up in the American south, I learned how to appreciate the finer things in life: good barbecue, fried chicken, and fluffy biscuits. After traveling to the UK, I realized I was missing out on the essentials like black pudding, late-night chippy shop runs, and the necessity of tea on a cold day.

Idea To Life: Community Through Food Bank

I graduated from Appalachian State University located in the lovely Blue Ridge Mountains of NC. Register for hcc classesleto collegiate academy tuition. I received a BA Religious Studies with a minor in Psychology.

I love road trips, comfy clothes, and jamming out in cars. I will always say yes to a good pasta dish, campfires, and a pint. I strongly believe that the kitchen holds the heartbeat of any home. Put a song on I’ve heard once, and I will sing like I know the words. I eat my fruits & veggies, but I’m not vegetarian for the love of bacon & all things chicken. Give me a craft or a book, and it will stay 70 percent done for a couple years until I pick it up again.

I am working to live with joy and gratitude, to appreciate small moments, to accept the temporary nature of life, to listen to the anxiety but not live into it, to express myself, to show genuine love, to forgive. ‘Cuz what’s the point of life if we do it without joy, laughter, and tasty food? Download salem witch trials victims martha carrier free.

This blog is mostly for myself, but if you get something out of it, that rocks! Ip cam viewer for mac free download 64-bit.

– leilapwright Download os x mavericks dmg on windows.

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un-enfant-immature · 4 years

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Deliveroo criticized over “inadequate” PPE provision and income support for riders risking coronavirus exposure

UK food delivery giant Deliveroo has been called on to do more to protect riders’ incomes and safety during the coronavirus crisis. The ‘meals-on-wheels’ service couriers provide makes them key workers in a pandemic characterized by social distancing and ‘shelter in place’ lockdowns, is the key argument.

More than forty MPs from across the political spectrum — including the former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn and veteran Conservative MP, Sir Peter Bottomley — have co-signed a letter urging the company to provide all riders with adequate personal protective equipment (PPE), given the risks faced to those who keep working doing deliveries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The letter also calls for riders who contract the disease or need to self isolate because of exposure risk to be given “full pay” — rather than the £100 per week Deliveroo has sets aside for riders via a coronavirus emergency fund.

The MPs argue the fund “is simply not enough to compensate a courier for having to self-isolate and forces many to work through potentially early symptoms in the hope of it not being COVID-19″.

“The fund has also proven to be inaccessible for many riders as they are not able to meet the eligibility criteria, as they have not completed the numbers of orders required. The fund should be there to assist everyone during this testing time; self isolation should not be a privilege,” they add.

The letter also calls for a “minimum standards guarantee” — given couriers’ key worker role delivery food during the crisis — arguing they should be provided with “a real living wage plus costs, holiday pay and sick pay”.

Another demand is for Deliveroo to allow “high risk” couriers — such as those who have pre-existing health conditions that may make them more vulnerable to the virus — to self isolate for 12 weeks with “full pay”.

Regular testing for riders is another demand.

The MPs also call for a halt to terminations until the end of the crisis, arguing: “It is clear that Deliveroo headquarters staff is stretched and does not have adequate time and resources to investigate customer and restaurant complaints which could lead to riders being unfairly terminated.”

Contacted for a response to the MPs’ demands, Deliveroo aggressively rejected accusations it has been lax in providing riders with adequate PPE.

The MPs argue the company’s current opt-in system for PPE provisions is “inadequate and ineffective” — urging it to take a proactive approach instead by providing “necessary safety equipment to all”.

The letter also claims some riders that have opted in the system have not been provided with the promised PPE. “The riders ordered this PPE from Deliveroo on the 26th of March and have not yet received any provisions (14th of April),” they write. “Your negligence is putting your riders and your customers at risk, especially now that you are encouraging hospital staff to order from your platform.”

The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain’s (IWGB), which has been campaigning for Deliveroo couriers to gain workers rights — and has today launched a petition in support of the MPs’ demands to Deliveroo — told us that many riders still haven’t received any PPE after requesting it on March 26, querying how much PPE has been despatched by the company to its ‘30,000’-strong workforce to date.

The union also said it’s heard from riders who have received PPE who told it the amount provided — four masks and four small bottles of hand sanitizer — would only last them for around a week.

Asked about this, Deliveroo told us it has ordered 135,000 masks and 145,00 hand sanitizers for UK riders to date — though it did not provide a figure on how many items have actually been delivered to riders, saying only that it has delivered “tens of thousands” of masks and hand sanitizers.

Additionally, it said it has reimbursed all riders “up to £20” to cover any PPE and hand sanitiser they procure and pay for themselves — as an interim policy.

On pay, Deliveroo claimed the £100 per week emergency provision it offers for COVID-19 sick (or isolating) riders, via its emergency fund, is higher than the rate of Statutory Sick Pay available to employees.

On the call for a minimum standards guarantee, Deliveroo reiterated its long-standing argument that riders value the flexibility afforded by its business model which involves them working as independent contractors, not contracted workers.

It also disputes that the IWGB’s campaign for riders to gain workers’ rights has widespread support among Deliveroo riders. But it noted that it has continued to call for updates to UK employment law which would enable it to provide more support for riders without jeopardizing flexibility.

It also told us it was involved in providing input to the government when it was working on support measures for self employed people during COVID-19. This support can cover riders, per Deliveroo, which notes that anyone who has been self employed for more than a year will receive three months of their average earnings based on previous years under this national government scheme.

Even if riders continue to ride and earn during the crisis the support still applies, it added. On vulnerable people, its line is therefore that it would never suggest such people ride during this time.

Rather it suggests they seek support under the government’s Self Employment Income Support Scheme, as well as the wider UK social security system.

On rider terminations, Deliveroo disputed that it is unable to properly focus on this area during the pandemic, arguing that contract terminations are an important safety tool at this time — such as in instances where riders have ignored public health requirements to be socially distant when making deliveries.

The company added an option for customers to request so-called ‘contactless’ deliveries early on in the crisis in Europe, removing the requirement that couriers hand food packages direct to customers. Though it was only optional at that point.

On testing, Deliveroo said it has worked closely with the government to ensure riders are entitled to claim free COVID-19 tests — noting that riders were in the first group of people outside of the National Health Service and care home staff able to be able to access these tests.

However the company is not itself sourcing and making tests available to riders. Rather it’s indicating they do the leg work of ordering them via the government’s online self-service portal.

The UK government, meanwhile, has faced weeks of sustained criticism for failing to provide enough tests for people who need them, with accusations of inadequate provision and inaccessible test centre locations which require people to have a car to access a test continuing to trouble Boris Johnson’s government.

So Deliveroo’s message that riders essentially ‘fall back’ on government testing provision may offer little comfort for workers at a front line of exposure to the virus.

In a statement responding to the MP’s letter Deliveroo added:

At Deliveroo, riders are at the heart of everything we do and we are working hard to support them during this unprecedented time. This includes distributing PPE kit to riders across the UK, supporting riders financially if they are unwell and keeping riders safe through contact-free delivery.

We are incredibly grateful and proud of the vital role riders are playing in their communities, helping the public, including the vulnerable and isolated, receive the food they need and want. We have dedicated teams on hand to support riders every step of the way through this crisis.

The London-based food delivery giant has raised some $1.5BN in venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase, including a whopping $575M round led by Amazon last year.

#TechCrunch

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lizseyi · 10 months

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How Can You Prep Now For The Perfect Christmas Hampers - Shredded-Paper

Below, we have outlined some of the steps that the Shredded-Paper.co.uk team would advise you to take now, in order to ensure your homemade hampers make the right impression on 25th December.

Decide on themes for your Christmas hampers

Start getting together the items to include in the hamper

Stock up on the materials that will protect the contained items

#Shredded-Paper

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holytheoristtastemaker · 4 years

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More than 100 million people are in strict lockdown across Europe as governments and health systems attempt to battle the spread of the devastating Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic. And, while normal life has effectively ground to a halt, it’s become increasingly clear that the digital infrastructure that underpins the systems and services we use is vital in holding the world together.

From coping with spikes in internet traffic as the world logs onto Netflix, to keeping a nation of remote workers connected away from the office, few can doubt the importance of the datacentre to our lives right now. So much so, datacentre operators have now been deemed key workers by the UK Government, because of the role they play in delivering critical services, vital communications and much-needed entertainment to the public at-large.

Colocation comes into its own during Covid-19

For individual businesses, the stakes are also high. Companies that have got their datacentre strategy right will now benefit from an intelligent and scalable asset that helps keep their show on the road.

This is where colocation excels. An increasingly important option for organisations wanting to focus on their core business operations and reduce their capital investment in infrastructure construction, many companies are now choosing colocation partners to take full responsibility for their physical environment when they simply cannot – either due to cost, expertise or both.

Organisations tend to stay with their selected datacentre provider for a significant length of time, so making the right decision for today and in the future is critical. Here are some key considerations.

Location, connectivity and reliability

Businesses rightly expect low-latency and reliability from colocation providers, with zero tolerance for downtime, so being connected and always-on is a fundamental requirement.

A major factor in making this happen is location. Though data itself is not physically tangible, the infrastructure and power needed to store and transfer it are. For example, how data is stored and accessed is affected by local infrastructure, power resources, and geographic location. A good choice of location means an optimised infrastructure and application environment, whilst poor location can result in unstable connections and efficiency problems.

When it comes to networking and connectivity, it’s important to ensure your provider can deliver advanced, carrier neutral, networking capabilities in line with the organisation’s needs. For companies operating a hybrid cloud model, connectivity to the right carriers is critical. Companies should be aware that whilst some datacentre providers can build the best high-performance computing platform, without connectivity provisioning on-ramp to other clouds, businesses won’t be able to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy.

In the wake of the Coronavirus, it’s important to remember that working practices, legislation and attitudes to working conditions and or safety can vary significantly from country to country. Similarly, rules regarding remote working, remote access to data, and on-site attendance can vary widely depending on where you’re operating. And when it comes to end users, whose digital usage has increased and changed during the lockdown, their demands also need to be paramount. Low latency, access to good networks and power, and guarantees of 100% uptime have become basic needs. In this respect, location has perhaps never mattered more.

Security and business continuity

Unfortunately, a time of crisis presents an opportunity for some, and there is plenty of evidence that cyber criminals are already capitalising on the fears and vulnerabilities of the oronavirus outbreak.

There has been a significant spike in phishing email scams featuring Covid-19 lures, spoof government tax refunds and numerous fear-mongering messages.

With cyberattacks on the rise, even more so in today’s climate of home working, it’s crucial that a datacentre provider can guarantee they’ll keep your mission critical company hardware safe. By choosing the colocation route, organisations benefit from 24/7 controlled access, battery back-up and diesel-powered generators that start automatically if power were lost – and compliance with the important ISO 27001:2013 certification.

During times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, datacentre providers must have stringent Business Continuity Plans in place, which can quickly and effectively be deployed, ensuring that security isn’t compromised, no matter the external factors.

The best datacentre providers have developed specific pandemic preparedness plans. They have adapted processes, implementing changes such as shift segregation with no movement of personnel between shifts, no-contact handover, more automated operations (such as remote / smart hands) and no-touch entry where access is required. They have also identified services for deep cleaning appropriate to data centre environments.

On a broader level, providers are scrutinising their supply chains in order to ensure they’re robust and can deliver, and companies are working together in order to share best practice.

Flexibility is key

If there’s one thing that’s characterised this pandemic, it’s uncertainty. From an inability to model when the virus might peak in each country, to long-term doubt about when the nation will be able to get back to work. Or at least some level of pre-pandemic normality. It’s been difficult for experts to predict what is likely to happen next in these unprecedented times.

For businesses, and their relationships with datacentre providers, this means flexibility is crucial. Even before the pandemic, long-term, rigid, datacentre contracts were no longer palatable for many global cloud and digital organisations, where the fast pace of business and technology often required them to change direction quickly. Right now, the ability to flex and scale as required is increasingly critical.

Indeed, if enterprises and IT agility are held back by antiquated and inflexible datacentre platforms or contracts, they won’t be able to react quickly in line with fast-changing business plans – which is needed more than ever today.

As we move through this period of extreme uncertainty, it’s crucial that we effectively manage the digital infrastructure that is enabling businesses and ultimately the economy, to function. The critical relationship with your datacentre provider can be the difference between keeping your company running, and failing to survive. Consideration given to these important factors when choosing a supplier at the outset, to ensure that your datacentre partner is able to guarantee service levels performance, security, reliability and uptime – even (and especially) through the current crisis, could pay substantial dividends in the long-term.

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