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Post by Admin on Mar 2, 2020 19:58:23 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2020 17:11:00 GMT
Opposition parties call for emergency legislation to protect Universal Credit claimants from impacts of Covid-19 Written by Kitty S Jones politicsandinsights.org/2020/03/06/opposition-parties-call-for-emergency-legislation-to-protect-universal-credit-claimants-from-impacts-of-covid-19/"Both Labour and the SNP have called on the Prime Minister to provide emergency legislation to protect workers’ rights and ensure people receiving Universal Credit do not face sanctions if they are unable to make an appointment due to the coronavirus outbreak. In Prime Minister’s Questions, Ian Blackford MP asked that while the Governor of the Bank of England suggested a ‘financial bridge’ may be available to assist markets through any economic volatility, would there will also be a ‘financial bridge’ for ordinary workers and those on social security. He said statutory pay must be in line with the Living Wage, and Universal Credit claimants must not face sanctions if they need to self isolate through becoming ill."
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2020 17:48:42 GMT
Coronavirus: ‘Disabled people must not be seen as inevitable cannon fodder’ By John Pring on 5th March 2020 Category: Independent Living Disabled people are beginning to raise grave concerns about the potential impact of coronavirus on people with long-term health conditions and high support needs, particularly those who employ their own personal assistants. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) published its action plan on dealing with COVID-19 this week, but the document said little about social care. Health and social care secretary Matt Hancock said: “Protecting the most vulnerable is our absolute priority.” www.disabilitynewsservice.com/coronavirus-disabled-people-must-not-be-seen-as-inevitable-cannon-fodder/
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2020 20:48:50 GMT
Class and the Coronavirus March 5, 2020 Written by Katherine Connelly Published in Opinion "In the event of a large-scale outbreak, which seems ever more likely and for which the government is planning, it is the poorest paid workers who will face the cruelest decision: whether to sacrifice their own and others’ health or their income. Boris Johnson’s response, when questioned on this, was to advise workers who don’t qualify to get “help through existing systems such as universal credit”. A typically callous response, since universal credit is widely linked with plunging people into poverty. The problems with access to statutory sick pay have been exacerbated by the huge rise in insecure work over the past decade: nearly a million people are on zero-hours contracts with no guaranteed work. This is over five times the number of workers who were on zero-hours contracts in 2010 – the year the Conservatives got into government. The TUC’s figures show that 34% of those on zero-hours contracts are not eligible for statutory sick pay. Others trapped in low pay include many young workers – 22% of workers aged 16 to 24 are not eligible for statutory sick pay, nor are 26% of older workers aged 65 and over who have been judged among the most vulnerable to the virus. Low pay mirrors and exacerbates the inequalities inside society which is why women are disproportionately hit by this. 10% of women workers are not eligible for statutory sick pay. The lowest-paid jobs include work in health, social care, and cleaning and are the sectors in which women workers are heavily represented. In the fight against the Coronavirus, these sectors are going to be vitally important. There have been a number of high profile strikes by cleaners for a living wage, often in difficult circumstances against vindictive employers. The justice of their cause, and the importance of their work and that of other low paid workers, should be recognised at once. Precarious work has now been proved a health risk. The damage done by decades of neoliberalism, which shifted more power to employers and tore up rights for workers, must be undone if we want to have a society that can effectively combat new threats to public health." www.counterfire.org/articles/opinion/20945-class-and-the-coronavirus
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Post by Admin on Mar 9, 2020 10:55:46 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 9, 2020 11:07:54 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 9, 2020 11:41:38 GMT
The Virus that dared to stand up to CapitalismPosted on March 7, 2020 by George Tsakraklides "Earth is dragging the global economy to its very first rehab meeting. It means business, and not Business As Usual. This is what Coronavirus will be remembered for: grounding flights. Shutting down schools, theatres, offices and restaurants. Cancelling major events. Shutting down major tourist destinations. Potentially cancelling the Tokyo Olympics. And as the virus continues to spread, the economic shocks begin to reverberate throughout the global economy. The roads are becoming empty, the shops are shutting down and the lights from space begin to look ever so much dimmer, even as the atmosphere over China clears of pollution day by day. Who would have ever imagined this was possible. There is a much Bigger PatientThis virus is much, much different than any other virus that came before it. It arrived in the age of international trade and globalisation, Twitter and technological automation. It arrived in a world that is ever so much more connected than 2, 5, 10, 20 years ago. So much more connected than we had realised. This virus is revealing just how sensitive and interdependent the economic system of the planet is. It is a Jenga tower, hastily built and prone to collapse if just one of the bricks is pulled out. While humans may be the direct victims of the virus, there is a much bigger patient, the real elephant in the room: the CO2 Machine that has been powering the planet’s eventual demise since the industrial revolution, through climate change. The Machine is being starved at both ends: demand, supply, and everything and everyone in between. The planet has began to deploy its most sophisticated arsenal towards climate change: biological weapons. And it is paying back humanity with the same token: we tried to choke the planet in CO2, it is now trying to choke us with a virus that is a respiratory pathogen. Isn’t it…vironic? The Productisation of ExistencePeople on quarantine are getting bored. They are getting fidgetty. Our civilisation is so dependent on economic transactions that we cannot imagine ourselves without shopping or selling, without working like slaves on paper-pushing jobs so that we can buy more “stuff”. Our obsession with placing a price on everything so that it can be sold, our obsession with creating single-use products so that we can sell more of them, means that we eventually made this a single use planet. And we forgot what things are really actually worth, and most of all we forgot of all the things that were free. And we, instead of users of the products, we eventually became products ourselves, selling ourselves online and seeing each other and the other species of the planet as products too. Used, bought, sold, then thrown away like fast fashion. The planet doesn’t like its timeless, ancient wealth and wisdom being price tagged and paraded on the Ebay of greed and mental illness that humanity has succumbed to. Earth wants its stuff back, in one piece. to be continued…" tsakraklides.com/2020/03/07/the-virus-that-dared-to-stand-up-to-capitalism/
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2020 17:02:26 GMT
The Decameron – the 14th-century Italian book that shows us how to survive coronavirus Giovanni Boccaccio’s work taught citizens how to maintain mental wellbeing in times of epidemics and isolation. www.newstatesman.com/2020/03/coronavirus-survive-italy-wellbeing-stories-decameronen.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron"The spread of the Covid-19 virus has triggered an epidemic of advice. This advice is important, but it seems destined to make our lives more miserable and isolated. However, there is an unusual source of counsel which offers another way to deal with an epidemic. That source is the Decameron. The Italian Renaissance author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in the wake of the plague outbreak in Florence in 1348. The disease ravaged the city, reducing the population by around 60 per cent. Boccaccio described how Florentines “dropped dead in open streets, both by day and by night, whilst a great many others, though dying in their own houses, drew their neighbours’ attention to the fact more by the smell of their rotting corpses”. Social bonds broke down as “this scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers”, and “fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their children”. Some people retreated into their houses, while others formed groups and staggered through the city on multi-day benders. The ten friends who the Decameron follows leave Florence for a deserted villa in the countryside. Upon arriving in their rural idyll, they spend their days telling amusing and often racy stories."
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2020 19:52:48 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 11, 2020 0:59:24 GMT
The coronavirus pandemic and the failure of capitalism 10 March 2020 "On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its single worst points decline in history as the implications of the global coronavirus pandemic began to manifest themselves in a selloff in the markets. The Dow fell by 2,013 points, or 7.79 percent. The decline was so rapid that it triggered a market circuit breaker for the first time in 23 years, leading to the cessation of trading for 15 minutes. Energy stocks fell by a staggering 20 percent, followed by financial stocks, which were down 11 percent, as US sovereign debt yields fell to a record low amid an unprecedented flight to safety. The selloff occurred against the backdrop of the mounting toll of the global coronavirus pandemic, and particularly the events in Italy, where the government announced a mandatory quarantine throughout the country." www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/10/pers-m10.html
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Post by Admin on Mar 11, 2020 1:01:15 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 11, 2020 21:19:28 GMT
Super-rich jet off to disaster bunkers amid coronavirus outbreak‘Self isolate’ for some of world’s richest means Covid-19 tests abroad, personal medics and subterranean hideouts www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/disease-dodging-worried-wealthy-jet-off-to-disaster-bunkers"Like hundreds of thousands of people across the world, the super-rich are preparing to self-isolate in the face of an escalation in the coronavirus crisis. But their plans extend far beyond stocking up on hand sanitiser and TV boxsets. The world’s richest people are chartering private jets to set off for holiday homes or specially prepared disaster bunkers in countries that, so far, appear to have avoided the worst of the Covid-19 outbreak."
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Post by Admin on Mar 12, 2020 20:40:36 GMT
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Coronavirus Crisis Requires Science, Not Magical Thinkingwww.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2020/03/neil-degrasse-tyson-coronavirus-crisis-requires-science-not-magical-thinking/More Of This Please: Astrophysicist and leading science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson warns that COVID-19, the novel coronavirus currently sweeping the globe, is a problem that must be “guided by science and not by magical thinking.” Earlier this week on Twitter Tyson tweeted: Like an invasion of hostile space aliens, COVID-19 Is an enemy of the human species that won’t negotiate. It cares not of your nationality, ideology, politics, or religion. This enemy of us all requires a global effort to combat, guided by science and not by magical thinking.
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Post by Admin on Mar 13, 2020 0:09:30 GMT
Coronavirus: keep calm and carry on is not a policy but an abdication of responsibilitywww.counterfire.org/articles/opinion/20960-coronavirus-keep-calm-and-carry-on-is-not-a-policy-but-an-abdication-of-responsibility"Government response is showing to be a key factor in how the virus is affecting populations and we will all pay for the inertia of our own, argues Kevin Potter It can seem as if one of the few things that matches the infection rate of Covid 19 is the proliferation of statistics and advice in relation to it. There are a bewildering range of opinions and statistical analyses. However, there are common themes and correlations. Studies of the virus and its spread/impact in areas where it is now established indicate that the timely action of governments makes a huge difference to transmission rates. This in turn has a huge impact upon the ability of health services to cope and, by extension, the regional mortality rate of the virus which seems to fluctuate from between around 1% to 4% (although with an uneven demographic impact, adversely affecting older people and those with existing health problems). The state of a region's health care provision is also a major determinant of outcomes, and the NHS is ill-prepared."
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Post by Admin on Mar 13, 2020 2:20:21 GMT
A great equaliser'Economic history shows epidemics are great equalisers. The most cited example (for which we also have most data) is still the Black Death, which hit Europe around the mid-14th century. In some places, it killed up to one third of the population. But by reducing population, it made labour more scarce, increased wages, reduced inequality and led to institutional changes which—for some economic historians, such as Guido Alfano, Mattia Fochesato and Samuel Bowles—had long-term implications for European economic growth.' www.socialeurope.eu/a-great-equaliser
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