A (pre) X-mas story in Catalonia

(Photo: Mané Espinosa)

 

"The sad news for many health workers is that their temporary contracts fell due and they lost their jobs. Now Catalonia has picked up some 600 Andalusian health workers who say they now get better hours and a better contract."

[This story from La Vanguardia originally found at excellent news service Business Over Tapas.]

"The time has come to #FightTheDebt"

"A tsunami of debt has crashed over the world, and billions of people are drowning.

This week, the G20 will meet to decide the direction of the global economic recovery — and we are demanding debt justice.

The G20 governments are the major creditors to the world. But instead of sending emergency support to the world's poor countries, they have helped big banks and vulture funds to collect money that is desperately needed for public health.

We need to break this system of exploitation — and replace it with a system centred on debt justice and the delivery of green and just transitions everywhere.

This struggle is not new. For decades, peoples and nations have fought debt as an instrument of neocolonial extraction.

Today, we take forward that legacy in a global campaign to #FightTheDebt, using this historic opportunity to advance the cause of debt justice."

Download the Briefing & Read Our Demands

Why do the poor suffer more from Covid19 in Spain? Interview with ABC TV.

Author of "Slow Travels in Unsung Spain" Brett Hetherington talks to Fauziah Ibrahim of ABC TV in Australia about the connection between poverty and Covid 19 in Spain.

Guest post by Antoni Cardona on the Corona virus: "Imagine"

The lockdown that we have been suffering through these days could easily generate a lot of questions about now, of course, but also about the next period of the future.

I think that maybe the first issue is the psychological effort that every individual has to make to maintain normal mental conditions, or at least to try to overcome a number of challenges.

First of all, I’d like to say that I have a lot of confidence in Science in the abstract sense, but the Scientific World gives me very little belief in it because it is very often controlled by political and economic Power. I hope and expect that the mysteries of Coronavirus and its infection of human beings will be clarified in a few months and some treatments and vaccines will probably be discovered but  more in the long term.

 Researchers, health and social care, some government decisions -as people live in confinement or making the face mask compulsory-, all this will help to stabilize the expansion of Covid-19 illness around the world and achieve very low levels of newly affected people and death. We have to take into account the great number of government mistakes and indecisions in some other countries. How long will be needed to finish with Covid-19? What will be the final death toll? How much impoverishment will people have to suffer?

            On the other hand, I don’t trust countries – neither their governments and politicians - nor in global Economy. It’s very well-known that some countries intend to defeat their rivals or enemies, not so much by directly spreading viruses. Instead of that, these countries, generally rich and powerful ones, can try to suffocate their opponent's economy, steal or pollute their natural resources, prevent access to new knowledge and so on.

            

Moreover, in some supposedly democratic countries, people have their rights limited and the Power is extended, centralised and militarised. All of this is done with the excuse of fighting the Enemy, the Virus.

           

I’d like to imagine the world, humankind, having the ability to learn the lesson that nature has been given to us. After thousands and thousands of dead people, hundreds of thousands of infected people, millions of people having lost their jobs or seeing their incomes decreased, after all that, we can expect at least two possible ways out. One would be very bad and the other would be excellent.

The evil way out would be that Power in different countries acts as it is defined in the Shock Doctrine [by Naomi Klein.] To take advantage of shocked people (sad, disconcerted, scared or perhaps ill people) by way of the big disaster, then the Power cuts off a lot of social benefits, causing a regression of human rights and democratic values in general. For the people being hit like this it’s very difficult to notice the magnitude of the tragedy that is falling down onto them.

The best way out would consist of people reacting against the pandemic and its associated causes, such as the feeling of depression, fear, general impoverishment and the tendency towards a totalitarian society. How could people lose their fear of the authorities and their orders without being paralysed by the terrible Coronavirus threat? That’s the question.

My wish is that people, confined or not at home, look for imaginative solutions to empower themselves and go back to all kinds of  organisations in different fields and countries.

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Born in 1949, Antoni Cardona is a retired doctor, specialised in Psychiatry, who worked in different public health institutions.

At a very young age, he started writing poetry but later made the decision to more often concentrate on creating short stories.

Over a number of years, Antoni trained in various writing techniques at the Aula de Lletres de Barcelona then the Escola d'Escriptura de l'Ateneu, also in the Catalan capital.

He has contributed a story to each of the following literary collections: "Setze Petges" (2004), “Edició Especial” (2011), a food-themed title "Contes per menjar-se'ls" (2015) and “Passió pel conte” (2018).

Antoni has received a number of prizes at literary competitions such as the Narrativa del Col·legi de Metges (medical association.) Other awards for his short stories came from the professionals of the Taulí Hospital in Sabadell and the Crime Fiction Festival of l'Espluga de Francolí.

“Desoris endreçats” (“Ordering disorders”) is his first solo publication.

https://www.voliana.cat/llibres/desoris-endrecats/

"ORDERING DISORDER" (2018)

In this book of short stories you will find characters, some of whom are everyday people, and others that are difficult to come across in the streets.

These are characters who are suffering in silence or maybe without being fully aware of their pain and having different ways of coping: irony, indifferently acting in an off-hand manner, making life-changes, feeling desperate and intense hopelessness or even somehow adapting to their disasters. 

There are those as well who attract danger and play with it. The reader will also encounter characters that cause the cruellest suffering and physical hurt with contempt for their victim. 

Watch out too for those who operate using subtle over protection.

Tonight: "Hope and humour in times of Coronavirus"

Co-writer of the brilliant comedy Seinfeld, Larry Charles is in conversation with Srećko Horvat from DiEM25 tonight at 7.00PM CET.

 40 min live conversation + 20 min Q&A with Larry Charles

"We call it TV because we like retro-futurism. But it's much more than TV. In times of global pandemics, DiEM25 is launching a special online and completely free program to understand the current crisis and offer tools and hope to get out of it stronger and more united in building the World After Coronavirus. Everyone will be able to join and pose questions, suggest next topics and next guests! 

THE LOCATION

Online

This discussion will take place on Zoom and also be streamed on the DiEM25 Youtube channel. We will send a link to all Registered participants, so please Register."

"The great human paella" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia today magazine

Walk around any medium sized town in this part of the world and you will see something different.

Compared to say, Britain or the USA, here on the average wall in public places, there is a lot of space that is used for posters which are not commercial advertising.

Apart from the sometimes humorous and succinct graffiti and crammed Informatico Ciutadana boards, blank vertical spaces are often being utilised for letting people know about various events, festivals and not-for-profit performances.

The number and range of groups and organisations that do not follow the "post no bills" credo still surprises (and impresses) me even after more than a decade of living here. What this suggests is that there is a collective consciousness that goes well beyond clicking the "Join" button on a Facebook group. It shows that there is a genuine interest and involvement with what goes on outside ourselves.

The cult of fear

In stark contrast to this, as Lewis Thomas identified as early as the 1970's, in countries like Australia and the USA, people have instead become obsessed with their health -- the private world, not the public one.

He believed there was "something fundamentally unhealthy" about this "loss of confidence in the human body" and saw much of this attitude being created through (apart from the obvious) such seemingly unlikely sources as television medical dramas and those shows where the central human dilemma is illness.

I would say that the "cult of fear," meaning fear in general, is what keeps alive entire industries. It feeds self-obsession.

This in turn has infected that species of person whose mind is never too far from the state of their own body. They can be heard in San Francisco or Melbourne cafes talking about how their last purely organic meal affected them or how they are desperately craving some holistic yoga therapy. They are not only looking for power over their own physical domains but over fear of ageing and inevitable decay.

As Lewis Thomas pointed out, the "healthy hypochondriacs" should not distract us from more urgent problems. Thirty five years ago he correctly foresaw that preoccupation with personal health would be a worrying distraction. Just outside the limits of our flesh and bone, he observed that "the whole of society is coming undone."

On a more optimistic note, it makes me happy to see that others enjoy what I enjoy. The journalist Vicente Molina Foix recently wrote about travelling in the Madrid Metro:

“I like to see the juxtaposition of various skin colors, and hear the melody of incomprehensible languages, as the train of the future approaches on the rails of life.”

Here is a man at ease with one of the biggest changes to European and Spanish life in the last few decades. He is not afraid of the new. The cult of fear has seemingly bypassed him. Instead, Molina Foix has realised that this continent is becoming one great human paella with a tasty mixture of fresh ingredients.

Those Europeans who make the effort to appreciate the benefits of migrants from across this odd little planet will be doing little more than opening up their senses.The continuing mixing of cultures is one of the great success stories of human history and closing ourselves off from the results of migration is as pointless as trying to ignore the music from a neighbour’s radio drifting into our ears.

Migration will not end. The human animal that adapts best to the changes in its surroundings will continue to be the human animal that thrives.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2018.]

"Portrait of an Asturian miner" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

The coal miner's wife wakes him and he coughs. He shuffles to the small bathroom sink and spits black liquid, washing it away with with the brown tap water.

Last night he slept badly, suffering from stomach cramps, diarrhea and vomiting again. He had been working in the zinc mine at Arnao in Castrillon but the Belgian company who own the site have let him go to the San Juan mine. He felt himself to be quite lucky. At least there they had a river pool for the miners to wash in.

As he leaves for another day under the earth the miner looks for a last time at the mountains, at their ferns and the tall groups of eucalyptus - – pencil thin, not quite straight, just like the trees in a Dr Seuss book. He sees the houses with their sharp pitched roofs in front of deep gorges and is comforted by the roll of the hills across this green land.

Our miner is living before the era of the chemical plants and big metal factories. He knows others who dig for iron and knows it’s vital for tinned food because electricity and refrigeration have not yet arrived to this part of the world.

His mine, like many mines, is close to a river: a means of transporting the coal for trading this raw material with British towns like Cardiff and Newcastle-upon-Tyne [where my own father was born and also grew up next to a polluted river.]

This miner's children will one day see the construction of chemical industries, thanks to the mines, thanks to his labour. In fact, he thinks, as he makes the walk to the pits, the story of Asturias is the story of the miner and the story of the miner is the story of Asturias. It is one of hardship and scant reward, of growth but also ill health. It is a tale of the deep earth's hidden secrets and humanity’s immeasurable suffering with the open spaces of the valleys and their claustrophobic confines - as unforgiving and back-breaking as any imagined hell in those greedy shafts penetrating ever downwards into the planet.

Today, like thousands of other days, he will launch his body into the ground and probe for hour after hour for that black rock. Finally, at the end of the day our miner will take aspirin for his aching bones, smiling at the ironic fact that it has ingredients made from the very coal he has been digging for. He does not yet know though that, decades later, his children are going eat kiwi-fruits and chestnuts that will come to grow particularly well in the carbon-coloured soil left from abandoned open-cut mines scattered across the nearby hills.

As the miner eats his simple lunch with his hands still blackened by coal dust, he remembers his father, who was also a miner. He too worked to extract the iron that was in such high demand for both twentieth century century world wars – a metal that helped the rich become richer. His father started life as a rural worker and had to adapt from the rhythms of the seasons to the very different rhythm of an industrial timetable. He had to learn to accept days and nights with no sky or trees, down in the mines which lay right next to his cramped terrace house.

Like every other subterranean labourer, his father and he both wondered if life could ever be different for them. He’d heard that things were a bit better at the only mine run by a trade union. But it was on the other side of Asturias and he had never even visited there.

Our miner lives in Bustiello town where all of the aristocrat Marques de Camilla's workers have their neat little houses below everyone else, at the bottom of the valley. It is an orderly, rectangular village and each house has a small garden. Up the hill above them live the engineers and above them is the church, then God of course. This is what he knows: the planning of the town exactly reflects the social and spiritual hierarchy. The Marques is a conservative man. He fears the progressive men who want social change.

Further on in the mountains there are mining zones that suffered from “special measures” during Franco's dictatorship. Around Pozo Fortuna trade union activists were assassinated and their bodies were thrown down an old pit-hole. Our miner speaks about this sadly with his friends and later falls asleep hoping that the bad times will end.

In the morning, he rises and faces another day.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2016.]

"TTIPing us over the edge" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

While we are all going about our daily business this month, big business is going about trying to make sure that Europe is run purely in its interest.

If agreed to by the European parliament, the new Free Trade Agreement between the United States and the European Union, better known as TTIP, will do immeasurable damage to the lives of citizens across this continent. 

The progressive organisation Global Justice believes that it poses "great risks to hard won measures to protect public health, worker rights and the environment."

Essentially, TTIP is "designed to take away barriers which are behind the customs border – such as differences in regulations, standards and certifications" of goods for trade. 

This may sound reasonable but what it means is that Europe would be required by law to have exactly the same product rules as the United States, which are widely known to be the loosest and most anti-consumer protection in the developed world.

The TTIP negotiations have all been conducted in secret sessions - closed to the public and the media. 

The reason for this is simple. 

The leaks of information from the meetings have shown that TTIP would mean that any business could take any government to court if they believed that a government policy threatens their profits. 

This legal method, (known as the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism) has already led to countries being sued for putting health warnings on cigarette packets, regulating medicine and energy prices, raising minimum wages, and removing tax incentives.

TTIP would further strengthen the power of big business (because only the largest can afford it) to control what national parliaments can and cannot do for their private citizens. 

Fracking, to take just one other example, would be more likely to go ahead because public administrators would want to avoid costly litigation that they are likely to lose defending a decision against it.

On top of all this, there is a fear – from the European Commission itself – that because of TTIP changes up to one million workers employed in small businesses are almost certain to lose their jobs. 

So, if accepted, TTIP may well worsen inequality across the EU.

Meanwhile, according to online global web campaigners Avaaz, “cruel factory farms are pumping healthy animals full of antibiotics so that they can produce more meat, faster and cheaper.” 

They argue that this practise is also creating drug-resistant superbugs but, in a positive development, several European countries have already drastically cut the use of antibiotics, and now EU ministers are negotiating laws to do so across the wider region. 

Unsurprisingly, and in a parallel move with pressure on TTIP, “the farm and pharma lobby is out in full force to stop the new EU laws.”

I would urge readers to think about taking action by signing the online petitions (as I have done) at the websites of the two organizations I’ve mentioned above in this article: Global Justice and Avaaz.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2015.]

W.H.O. targets a trans fat-free Europe

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has called for a complete ban on trans fats throughout Europe as part of a new action plan on diet and health.

More at source here.

Down syndrome, Dawkins and doubt

Even the greatest have intellectual blind spots.
 
I regard Richard Dawkins as having one of the most brilliant minds of our time but I think he was wrong to say what he did this week. He has given a kind of apology/clarification but I'm still unconvinced about his key point, which was...

"if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare."

I've spent time around teenagers with Down syndrome and they certainly did not strike me as being especially unhappy, and often seemed quite a bit more happy than many others their age.

I worked with some teenage students with the syndrome during my teacher training in the 1990's and have very fond memories of two kids in particular. Jason was a big, quiet guy who loved soccer and his brother. His favoured response to most questions was "Nuh. Nothin'..."

 

Mary was a lively and flirtatious girl who had a huge crush on Australian game-show host Larry Emdur. She always insisted that I sit next to her because she believed I looked like her idol.

Here is one woman's beautiful and moving account of the joys of having a brother with Down's syndrome.

The food in Spain

(Photo: Javier)

Around the world, one in eight people go to bed hungry every night but Spain ranks as the 13th best country for food overall, according to Oxfam's Food Index.

The reasons for this are that in the categories of "enough to eat, food quality and food affordability" Spain does very well, though perhaps surprisingly in the area of health it scores poorly. This is largely due to having a relatively high level of diabetes and obesity, as opposed to most of Africa and Asia which has relatively little of those two medical problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How the economic "crisis" kills

Photo: Corbis *from source.

On Monday morning a woman committed suicide in the Madrid suburb of Carabanchel, after receiving an eviction notice.

She was only the most recent victim of a problem that psychologists have been warning about for several years : mental disorders caused by the crisis, mainly due to a rapid increase in unemployment, ending up raising suicide rates.

But, even though there have been numerous studies linking mental disorders and economic crisis there had been no fully-conclusive evidence of it.

Until now.

The crisis has made the suicide rate increase markedly around the world.

A new study published in the British Medical Journal this week says that in 2009, the year after the start of the global economic crisis, the overall suicide rate among men rose by 3.3 %, an increase of approximately 5,000 self-inflicted deaths in all countries analyzed in respect to the expected trend. 

 

In Spain, suicides increased by 7.2% more than expected, but only among men, one of the authors of the study, professor of epidemiology at the University of Bristol, David Gunnell confirms.

In the 20 European countries that already have data for 2010, the analysis indicates an even greater increase in male suicide: 10.8 % more than in 2009.

Researchers from the University of Hong Kong , Oxford and Bristol, found that the evidence suggests that the increase in the number of deaths was observed mainly in the 27 European countries studied (up 4.2%) and in 18 countries in the Americas (6.4%) .

They further stress that their findings are "probably an underestimate of the true impact of the global economic crisis on suicide " because some countries data was not yet available.

In fact , in the 20 European states that already have information on 2010, his analysis indicates an even greater increase in male suicide, 10.8% more than in 2009.

The increase in the suicide rate is particularly high among men in countries where the level of pre-crisis unemployment in 2007 was relatively low (in Spain it was at 8.26% ) .

According to the researchers, this is explained by "the economic crisis and rising unemployment causing more fear and anxiety...and stigma...in countries where unemployment was low, which in turn has resulted in increased suicides."

For scientists, an increase in the suicide rate is usually the tip of the iceberg of emotional distress related to the recession. According to statistics, for every person who takes his own life, about 30-40 try to, and for every attempted suicide a dozen people experience suicidal thoughts.

The impact of the economic crisis on the mental health of the Spanish was investigated by a team of scientists from the University of the Balearic Islands, led by Dr. Margalida Gili.

They published their findings last year in the European Journal of Public Health. According to them, between 2006 and 2010, mental disorders (as seen by primary care physicians) grew significantly. In this period diagnoses of depression increased by 19.4 %, anxiety was up 8.4 % and there was a 4.6 % jump in alcoholism.

The government's austerity policy is causing further loss of jobs, and increasing the risk of suicide, the authors of the study found, but they are cautiously hopeful and insist that this problem has a solution:

"Our findings show that the economic crisis causes a significant increase in suicides, but previous research shows that this risk is not inevitable. Programs to boost the labor market may help offset the impact of the recession on suicide levels, since a successful relocation of the unemployed significantly reduces or eliminates risks to mental health on the unemployment. In times of cuts, countries with limited resources can focus their aid on young men of working age. In many countries, however, government austerity is causing further loss of jobs, which will increase the risk of suicide. Urgent action is needed before the economic crisis causes a further increase in suicides.

My translation from original source here.

Mortality atlas shows Spain's north-south inequality

There are not many better ways to show the crude inequality of a country than in a mortality atlas: a map that shows at a glance where and how people die.

The most complete atlas of mortality to date in Spain is heartbreaking. Data and 200 maps showing the mortality of men and women between 1984 and 2004 show that in southern Spain premature death from all causes and for both sexes is higher than in the north.

The atlas, made by 25 researchers led by Joan Benach and Jose Miguel Martinez, professors at the University Pompeu Fabra, reveals that in the case of men, higher mortality is concentrated in the southwest, with cancer of the trachea, bladder disease and lung cancer as most common.

"The atlas does not explain the causes of mortality," says Joan Benach. The maps, however, do point to where the problems to investigate are, as when an earlier work showed an increased risk of dying from several types of cancer in coal mining towns [including those in Asturias where I recently visited to learn and write about.]

[My translation from source in Castellano here.]