The Great UK Ruling Class Robbery: Rotten to their Stinking Core

14th September 2020

The UK’s economic and political life revolves around corruption.

Rotten to the Core – by George Monbiot

Sept 2020. Illustrations added

Fear, shame, embarrassment: these brakes no longer apply. The government has discovered that it can bluster through any scandal. No minister need resign. No one need apologise. No one need explain.

As public outrage grows over the billions of pounds of coronavirus contracts issued by the government without competition, it seems determined only to award more of them.

Never mind that the consulting company Deloitte, whose personnel circulate in and out of government, has been strongly criticised for the disastrous system it devised to supply protective equipment to the NHS. It has now been granted a massive new contract to test the population for Covid-19.

Never mind that untendered contracts with firms that had no previous experience in supplying medical equipment have left us with vast piles of substandard PPE that can’t be used.

Never mind that, Byline Times has reported, one of these contracts has cost taxpayers £800 for every medical gown it has delivered.

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Let’s Lockdown the Cars. Let’s take back the city… English /Spanish

by Ecologistas en Acción translation TheFreeOnline

Ecologistas en Acción displays a banner to present its#ConfinemElsCotxes #RecuperemLaCiutat” campaign that has started in Valencia coinciding with the European Mobility Week (SEM) to claim the abusive use of the car in our

daily trips.

The campaign calls for a Crash Plan for the conversion of the road to give priority to pedestrians, bicycles and public transport. The organization warns that it will continue to pressure and plan possible actions in the streets until it does not.
They ask the administrations that the lack of control protects the health of the people, guaranteeing the safety distances and the maximum levels of contamination established by the WHO.
The campaign has been launched with a video on LEZs and the unfurling of a banner to claim car-free day.
#RecuperemLaCiutat

Pollution kills 30,000 people every year in the Spanish State

On the occasion of the European Mobility Week, dedicated to emission-free mobility, Ecologistas en Acción launched the campaign Let’s confine cars, let’s recover our space, in the city of Valencia, with which it demands to prioritize active mobility and public transport over car.

The first part of the campaign focuses on the Low Emission Zones (LEZ/or ZBE) proposal and consists of seven infographics and a video. This material explains what these traffic restriction areas consist of, what their benefits are and how they should be designed to be efficient.

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Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell.. Free Download, PDF

Literature Book Review, shared with thanks

…”They [Catalans] had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war.”…

FREE DOWNLOAD CLICK HERE

Homage to Catalonia (1938) is what it says, George Orwell’s homage to the people of Catalonia who attempted an anarchist/socialist revolution in response to the army’s attack on their fledgling democracy, and more broadly in response to centuries of harsh rule by feudal landowners supported by the Catholic church and the monarchy. A revolution that was brought down not by the civil war but by the backsliding of right-wing socialists in the Republican government and by the treachery of the Communists.

In this it resembles (or presages) another account of anarchist ‘revolution’ undone by Communists, Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative(1968) about the Paris uprisings of that year and which I have owned almost since it was written. In fact, a great deal of Orwell’s book, particularly about the lies invented and propagated by the news media, serves to show plus ca change etc.

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#COVID19 #Madrid: The neighborhoods of #Villaverde, #Usera, #Vallecas and #Carabanchel rise up against selective confinements

Madrid. Spain. The neighborhood associations of Carabanchel, Villaverde, Usera, Puente and Villa de Vallecas categorically rejected the proposal of selective confinement of their neighborhoods to stop the advance of Covid-19. About thirty of these groups, together with the FRAVM, made the “Manifesto for the Dignity of the South in the face of the second wave”…

#COVID19 #Madrid: The neighborhood associations of #Villaverde, #Usera, #Vallecas and #Carabanchel rise up against the proposal of selective confinements — Enough 14 –

About thirty of these groups, together with the FRAVM, made the “Manifesto for the Dignity of the South in the face of the second wave” public, a forceful writing that reviews a good part of the endemic problems and the abandonme

nt of the Administration that these districts have suffered for decades and serves to confront the “stigmatization, exclusion and territorial discrimination”. We do not share everything in the following statement, even reject some parts (like the part about sharing a police station in Usera and Villaverde). Still we think its an important read about the growing resistance in Madrid against classist cofinement measures in the framework of COVID-19.

Originally published by Asociaciones Vecinales Madrid. Translated by Enough 14. Image above by @DRYmadrid.

“This is my neighbourhood, not a ghetto”. Concentrations in popular neighbourhoods of Madrid, againts the proposal for segregating poor neighbourhoods for controlling #COVID19

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How the world’s richest destroyed the climate to fly more and drive bigger cars.

As longer term readers will be aware, the original title of this blog was Make Wealth History. I chose the name to highlight the fact that a fair and sustainable world is impossible if all the attention is on lifting the poorest out of poverty.
How the world’s richest destroyed the climate — The Earthbound Report

There isn’t the ecological space for everyone on earth to enjoy a Western consumer lifestyle. Those in the richest countries have to shrink their consumption in order to make room.

The role of the richest in environmental destruction has rarely been presented as graphically as it is in Oxfam’s latest report. Confronting Carbon Inequality investigates the last 25 years of accumulating carbon emissions and maps it onto income brackets.

The headline finding is that the top 1% are responsible for double the emissions of the poorest 50% of humanity. The climate was not destroyed to lift people out of poverty, or because people in Africa had too many babies. It was destroyed so that the world’s richest could fly more and drive bigger cars.

This is why it is vital to understand climate change as a justice issue.

Since the majority of that poorest 50% are people of colour, and the majority of that 1% are white, it has to be understood as a matter of race as well.

Graphs like this make a mockery of the idea that responsibility for solving the climate crisis lies predominantly with developing countries. Middle income countries make up 40% of the world’s population, and 41% of the cumulative emissions. While there is an obvious need for those countries to peak and reduce their emissions, their share of the overall total is proportional. The wealthiest 10%, on the other hand, have 52% of the total.

For my generation, climate change is the front line of global justice. This is the civil rights movement, Apartheid, the struggle to end slavery. It is on this question that future generations will judge us.