alanjjohnstone
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/10/uk-food-waste-charity-fareshare-donations-lockdown
When it comes to fresh perishable food, the food banks are awash with donations from food companies.
£20m of food with a shelf life of less than three months was at one stage lying in warehouses, according to the Federation of Wholesale Distributors, after the government ordered the closure of millions of hospitality businesses around the country.
The volume of food received every week by the UK’s largest food redistribution charity has more than doubled since the coronavirus lockdown.
But I have read elsewhere , no refrigerated storage and less volunteers to distribute it, they too may well have to dispense with surpluses
COVID-19, has it been more damaging to EU unity than Brexit?
Make of it as you wish
“Christoph Hofinger, told a news conference: “Based on this study, we believe that 0.33% of the population in Austria was acutely infected in early April.” Given the margin of error, the figure was 95% likely to be between 0.12% and 0.76%.
The Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, who saw initial findings a few days ago, said on Monday that the rate of infection was around 1%. This disproved the idea of herd immunity, which requires widespread infection, as a viable policy option…Commenting on the result, the science minister, Heinz Fassmann, said it indicated a low rate of immunity, which meant that without controls there was a continued risk of an exponential growth in infections.
“The mountain is higher than expected and we are not yet on the safe side,” he said.”Another example of the authoritarian approach to the pandemic
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52244039
“The US has expelled more than 6,300 undocumented migrants on its Mexico border using emergency powers to curb coronavirus spread. The 21 March public health measure lets officials override immigration laws, expediting removal processes.”
Just to let you all know, I’m not on lockdown but there is one operating in the capital and the main tourist cities and that resulted in an exodus of work-force back to their home-towns and villages – probably leading to the spread of COVID-19 to mostly unaffected regions
Many provinces have imposed sale of alcohol bans
I am subject to a nightly curfew but I rarely socialised in the evening anyway.
The government is rolling out a scheme to pay about 100 pounds a month to informal workers.
There is of course the option of calling ourselves, libertarian socialists, BD.
Words and language are fluid and they change. Etymology is a whole school that records the origins of words and how they evolved into other meanings. Even in our own lifetimes we see that happening.
I really cannot see a solution to the situation except to keep qualifying and describing what we mean when we put our case by using a variety of synonyms and different phrases which helps to clarify.
As an aside, my bugbear is how in 99% of our articles we always define the working class as those who labour for a wage or a salary.
It’s invariably used and I always think it is unnecessary, a relic from when there were those who were monthly paid and those who received it weekly in cash. People know what we mean and it is simply superfluous to add a further explanation. (Don’t some of us work for a fee for our services or on commission?)
Another article to read during your enforced lockdown
More importantly, the drop in demand for some products would mean that they would be an increased reserve stock, not a glut on the market creating a drop in prices.
Excess fresh milk turned into milk powder. Never had powdered eggs but I do recall they had it during WW2 rationing.
Deep freezing much of the other food produce.
The farming community would later have the opportunity for longer leisure and less work.
Today we see Germany making migrant deals to bring Romanians to pick their harvest, chartering special flights for them.
In the UK those furloughed workers are volunteering to become pickers too. (But I wonder just how many will stay the pace once they discover the back-breaking toil and how martinet field overseers can be)
As ALB and I not so long ago found, there will be plenty of anarchists on Libcom who won’t be at all pleased if we used the term “anarcho-socialist.”
In America, anarchists lost the battle for the term “libertarian” where the free-enterprise capitalists openly admitted they stole the word from the anarchists.
In Scotland, left nationalists resurrected the archaic expression “commonweal” and had the “th” dropped.
As with Militant/CWI usurping our name, reclaiming words is extremely difficult. It can only be overcome in the general work of explaining our ideas and differentiating ourselves from others.
After an initial bounce, Zeitgeist and their “Resource Based Economy” have stalled (or am i wrong)
Isn’t it the same with Parecon (participatory economics), a spurt to growth then stagnation?
We can’t be all things to all people, unfortunately, but it doesn’t mean we cannot express our aims to be seen as inclusive. SOCIAL is the important part of the word socialism.
As we all suspected, the recession was arriving before the coronavirus came on the scene.
“The British economy went into reverse in February as GDP growth declined by 0.1%, even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that brought the country to a halt.”
The general secretary of trade union body the TUC, Frances O’Grady, said: “Even before the coronavirus crisis hit, our economy needed a change of direction.”
“Status Quo Joe”
We will see what moves are afoot to substitute another candidate now that they have gotten rid of the Bernie problem
An interesting article on the supermarket supply-chain
So supermarkets won’t run out of food very quickly. But what it doesn’t address is when people run out of money to buy the food
The establishment Jewish lobby have applauded the election of Starmer and his pledges to “clean house” but the smears of anti-Semitism against the left has continued
The Smearing of Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn is the Face of our New Toxic Politics
Loach’s offence, was the fact that he has denied that Labour is institutionally anti-Semitic and that he was somehow associated with a certain GMB union member who had been expelled for being critical of the IHRA definition, Peter Gregson.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order banning abortion care during the coronavirus pandemic, making the procedure illegal in most cases in the state for the first time since before Roe vs. Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973.
The ruling and the order are examples of “a state government using the pandemic to violate the individual rights of women to seek abortion and for physicians to provide them,” tweeted infectious disease physician Dr. Amesh Adalja.
The Strategic National Stockpile is nearly out of the N95 respirators, surgical masks, face, shields, gowns and other medical supplies desperately needed to protect front-line medical workers treating coronavirus patients,
The Department of Health and Human Services told the Associated Press
