Flatulent tosspottery

Médecins Sans Frontières, the medical NGO, is riddled with institutional racism and bolsters colonialism in its humanitarian work, according to an internal statement signed by 1,000 current and former members of staff.

Here are all these – largely – Europeans doing largely European and American invented stuff, for free, to all these much poorer and darker people. All largely paid for by Europeans and Americans.

Among personal testimonies from signatories cited by the Guardian, one complained of an “almost suffocating” white saviour mentality.

Could be really, could be.

Capitalism’s inseparability from anti-black racism lives on through neocolonialism, which compounds black suffering across Africa through extractive, ecologically damaging multinational corporations, the predatory practices of international lending agencies, and Euro-American military intervention. The assassinations of anti-colonial African revolutionaries by ex-colonial powers and suppression of grassroots social movements further entrenched economic dispossession. Today, we see staggering class divides within many African nations widen, as elites benefit from their lucrative alliances with this neocolonial order.

We are all guilty.

Dr. Kiosk is alive and well at The Guardian.

In a tweeted video message this month, Farage said the UK faced “cultural Marxism”, a term originating in a conspiracy theory based on a supposed plot against national governments, which is closely linked to the far right and antisemitism.

The phrase “cultural Marxism” is now an id of being far right and antisemitic? This is like DeSmog insisting I’m aclimate denier because I recommend a carbon tax.

Cambridge defends academic who said ‘white lives don’t matter’
Dr Priyamvada Gopal, an expert in postcolonial literature, claimed her tweets were ‘speaking to a structure and ideology, not about people’

Can’t possibly mean what it looks like it does now, can it?

Courtney Lawes, the Northampton and England lock, faced a backlash on Tuesday after suggesting it was important to be “financially secure and preferably married” before having children in order to reduce the levels of child poverty in the UK.

Of course, the populace is now shouting at him for having done so.

Hmm, actually, most of the populace would probably cheer, it’s the commentariat having the sours at him.

Chris Lilley’s “Jonah” is not from Tonga, I am.

I’m the same age as Chris Lilley, mid-forties, woman of colour, born in Sydney on the ancestral lands of the Cadigal people. I’m a Tongan woman, indigenous to the Kingdom of Tonga, the last remaining indigenous monarchy of the Pacific. I’m also Australian.

If you’re born in Oz then you’re not from Tonga, are you?

As the world faces a reckoning over racism and police violence, social media influencers are being blasted for making the movement about themselves.

How dare you come out and say this is about me, meee, MEEE! when in fact it’s about me, meee, MEEE!

If there was any doubt about the true nature of this government, it has now been erased: the country is run by a small, tight-knit group of arrogant and talentless entitleds. Apart from riding the public to office, they have no interest in our safety – or our respect. We must do our duty and submit, because these are the new pandemic rules, stripped back to an essence that in normal times would be more carefully obscured. In short: know your place.

Any illusions that we were ever protected from the rank contempt of our rulers by the logic of democracy – because the government embodies the will of the people who elected it – are now gone.

Well, we can in fact say that the majority of the country somewhere between dislike and despise you and your whining. That’s why you’re writing for a minority interest paper like The Guardian instead of something that actually sell like the Daily Mail. So, that he elected government is ignoring you and your whines would show that they’re doing pretty well in that logic of democracy.

The National Food Service is a new public service, built by and for the communities that it serves. Our aim is to eliminate food insecurity and tackle the interconnected issues of social isolation and food waste. We are building a National Food Service right now, with communities across the country stretching from Glasgow to Falmouth. This network of initiatives are providing proof that a National Food Service is possible if we connect. The growth of a grassroots National Food Service will be the seed for bigger change.

If it’s grassroots and voluntary then it’s not a national service in the sense of the NHS now, is it? Might well be more effective than the NHS but that’s another matter.

Crowded buses and trains: it’s the stark new image of Britain’s class divide

Apparently public transport is bad now:

But many commuters have little choice over their start times, or route to work. And so they have to risk their lives at the start and end of every day.

The coronavirus crisis has exposed what already existed – the inequalities we should have been aware of but perhaps for too much of the time ignored. We have had, crudely, a two-tier workforce for many years. While “white-collar” professionals have been able to relocate their screen-based work to home, others, mostly poorer paid, are now cramming in to overcrowded buses and trains to get to work, to complete a shift that provides barely enough to live on. And it is these workers – security staff, transport workers, construction workers, cleaners, as well as health and care professionals – who have been, and remain, most at risk of infection. And if they’re black or Asian, dying at three to four times the rate of white British people, they face a stark race inequality as well as the class divide.

Terrible, isn’t it? Guess we’d better not have any more public transport then, given that it’s so terrible and such a marker of our inequality and class divides.

It also suggested that the government introduce clauses that make any support they provide repayable on demand if companies are found to be involved in unlawful tax avoidance.

Impossible. If it’s illegal then it’s not tax avoidance, if it’s tax avoidance then it’s not illegal.

The phrase they’re not using but should is “tax evasion”.

Revealed: Amazon told workers paid sick leave law doesn’t cover warehouses

Really?

California workers say the company is pressuring sick employees to show up – and flouting a California law meant to protect them from Covid-19

Gosh.

On 16 April, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, passed an executive order providing food sector workers two weeks of supplemental paid sick leave if they have to isolate due to Covid-19 concerns. The law covers “workers at warehouses where food is stored” and is aimed at protecting consumers from the virus and offering additional support to essential workers whose jobs involve the food supply.

Amazon warehouses in the industrial neighborhoods of San Bernardino and Riverside counties handle a wide range of packages, including food items. But employees say that when they have asked about Newsom’s order in recent weeks, the human resources department has ignored their questions or responded that the facilities are not considered part of the food sector.

That’s a little less appalling than the headline, isn’t it. And could someone call Sorites to decide here? Is an Amazon warehouse that is 98% not food but which has a case of Marmite in the corner actually part of the food sector?

While the anti-coronavirus lockdowns springing up around the US came as a surprise to many, the involvement of the conservative billionaire DeVos family, repeated donors to a slew of dubious rightwing causes, should not.

The family – which includes Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary – has been a regular donor to the Michigan Freedom Fund, which helped promote a Michigan protest against the state’s stay-at-home orders in mid-April.

That rally, which saw about 3,000 people descend on the state’s capitol building, in Lansing, sparked a slew of other protests in states, and an endorsement from Trump.

But the DeVoses’ donations to the Michigan Freedom Fund – more than half a million dollars over the past four years, including from Betsy DeVos herself – are the tip of an iceberg of support for conservative causes.

Conservative type people spend their money on conservative type things.

Horrors, eh? Better tax it all off them so that proper progressives can decide upon the allocation of funds.

Coronavirus causing some anti-vaxxers to waver, experts say

Something to which there isn’t a vaccine causes people to reconsider their views on something for which there is?

Most technology companies reserve a large chunk of shares for founders, and Amazon is no exception. Bezos currently owns nearly 60 million shares, or 11% of the company, even after having liquidated $12bn of shares (Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie holds 4%, as part of their divorce agreement last year). Of the shares held by employees, ownership is heavily concentrated among early employees in executive roles. The workers most at risk during this pandemic are severely underrepresented: warehouse workers, who were previously awarded approximately one share per year, saw their pay adjusted in 2018 to remove even that paltry grant.

There was considerable public pressure that Amazon should raise the cash wages of those workers. There were even insistences, in law, that the wage paid must rise – that minimum wage stuff.

So, Amazon did a demanded, raised the cash portion of compensation and adjusted the non-cash portion to balance.

They are to be castigated for this?

The Mash Report – and Kumar and Parris’s segments in particular – has never shied away from tough topics. In past series, Kumar has taken on the rise of the far right, Conservative immigration policies and climate change, somehow making them all funny.

To work out how to do this just tune into any BBC comedy from the past 40 odd years. For the subjects haven’t changed, have they?

We therefore call on the Government to:
(1) initiate a health-based food rationing scheme to see the country through this
crisis. This should start from Public Health England’s Eatwell Plate, our official
nutrition guidelines, and draw on expertise from the devolved administrations,
and relevant disciplines

Nowt like making use of a crisis, is there. That’s from Tim Lang by the way. Where’s that bloody wall now the revolution’s here?

while the well-to-do may deploy their private health insurance to circumvent our already struggling and soon to be overrun National Health Service.

1) Wouldn’t we all prefer that those able to alleviate the strain upon that scarce resource of the NHS?

2) How many ICU beds does Bupa have?

Let’s Get Serious About Fighting the Corona Depression
The economic impact could dwarf the 2008 collapse. We need a New Deal–scale response—and fast.

OK, cool, and I like the emphasis on “fast”.

What’s needed is a massive infrastructure and public-health program running into the trillions of dollars. We should start by taking stock of essential activities where government spending could produce economic expansion despite the epidemic, as well as long overdue public improvements.

This should be complemented by significant increases in public-health investments. Both should include significant job training or retraining.

For instance, the bill for deferred investment in basic public infrastructure is pegged at $3.4 trillion by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The Prospect recently devoted an entire special issue to laying out needed and practical investments associated with a Green New Deal.

These are things that can be done “fast” are they?

Idiot.

It goes without saying that all needed medical supplies must be produced domestically.

??

Has Peppa Pig addled my brain – or is it a critique on capitalism?
Séamas O’Reilly

Sigh:

Almost every adult in the show is called Daddy or Mummy or Grandad etc, suffixed by whatever animal they happen to be – Daddy Pig, Grandad Dog, Mummy Rabbit. A rare exception is Miss Rabbit, Mummy Rabbit’s identical twin sister who has, for no explained reason, roughly 18 part-time jobs. Are we to detect a critique of late capitalism in the fact that she works as a cashier, librarian, bus driver, helicopter rescue pilot and training co-ordinator for the local fire service? And what kind of zero hours contract is she on that she must also sell ice-cream on the side? I’ve now watched every episode several times and no answers are forthcoming.

Having to be the Jack of All Trades is pre-capitalist you snivelling moron. It is capitalism and markets which allow the division and specialisation of labour.