Let them read

The Second Spanish Republic led pedagogical missions to 7,000 towns and villages, creating 5,522 libraries with more than 600,000 books.

"Pandemic as Polemic" ' -- Online seminar from the University of Barcelona

 "The Covid-19 pandemic has been a great challenge for everybody, individually and socially, and has raised many questions about lifestyle, environment, social and economic inequality, health policies, science and especially governance and politics. 

Covid-19, its development, impact and effects form the basis of most current debates in our media and politics, and the illness has therefore become a rich interface of conflict that exacerbates contemporary inequalities and creates new ones. Yet, polemic can also be the source of renovation and construction, and as such, Covid-19 needs and deserves to be discussed from a multidisciplinary, global perspective. 

The Barcelona November 2021 seminar Australian and Transnational Studies Centre│Fac. of Philology│U of Barcelona│Gran Via, 585│08007 Barcelona, Spain 

Pandemic as Polemic aims to provide such a floor for open-minded discussion. 

We invite scholars to submit proposals for panels, posters and papers on the topic, from whatever point of view or discipline. • Submissions should include an abstract of 200-300 words in the language of the paper (choose one of the nine languages listed below) as well as in English, together with a brief biography in English. All should be sent to the scientific committee no later than 15 May. • Acceptation of proposals will be informed by 15 June. 

The seminar will be held ON LINE on Thursday 4th and Friday 5th November, and is free of charge, but registration is needed at the e-mail address ceatubenrolment@gmail.com. 

The CEAT will send the information and links for the Seminar to the registered participants. English, Catalan and Spanish will be the languages of the Seminar, but participants can submit ad give their communications in German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Galician and Basque as well. No translation will be provided. 

For further information and submission of proposals contact us at ceatsubmissions@gmail.com Scientific committee: Dr. Isabel Alonso Breto, Dr. Montserrat Camps-Gaset, Dr. Maria Grau-Perejoan, and Dr. Martin Renes. "

"Richest 1% have almost a quarter of UK wealth..."

[Photo: Jeff Gilbert/Alamy]

'Official figures have missed £800bn of private assets, says thinktank, amid calls for wealth tax to fund Covid recovery'

Almost a quarter of all household wealth in the UK is held by the richest 1% of the population, according to alarming new research that reveals a historic underestimation of inequality in the country.

The study found that the top 1% had almost £800bn more wealth than suggested by official statistics, meaning that inequality has been far higher than previously thought. Researchers said the extra billions was a conservative estimate and could well be more.'

Read more from source at The Guardian's Observer here.

A New Year prediction for Europe/UK: "How the taxes on the wealthy have fallen over the past 70 years (USA)"

How the taxes on the wealthy have fallen over the past 70 years (USA)

"Spain's coal miners continue to wait for their country's Green New Deal"

"Credit: 

Lucia Benavides/The World"

 "Spain’s government isn’t getting much done these days.

No political party won a majority in the nation’s general elections in April, and parliamentary negotiations to form a new government remain at a standstill. If a new government can’t be formed by Sept. 23, Spanish voters will go back to the polls in November for another general election, in what would be the country's fourth in four years.

One of the many projects on hold is Spain's “ecological transition” — a push to close all of the country’s coal mines and transition to renewable energies, like wind and solar.

Related: How a forest became Germany’s poster child for a coal exit

People in Spain’s northern region of Asturias are anxiously waiting to see how things play out. They’ve been mining there for 150 years. But today, the industry is almost dead.

During a recent weekday at the San Nicolás coal mine, dozens of miners — mostly young men — walked out of their shift around 2 in the afternoon, in a hurry to get home and eat lunch. The underground mine is located in a valley, surrounded by lush, green hills. At its peak, the mine employed around 2,000 people — today, about 200 work there. It’s the last working coal mine in all of Spain.

Gorka Peña, 36, has been working at San Nicolás for nine years. He says his father was also a miner, and he didn’t expect to end up in the trade himself.

“There’s no future here, no youth,” Peña says. “The towns are becoming more depopulated, its residents are getting older. You don’t have anywhere to go, so you have to migrate.”

Last October, the leading mining union struck a deal with Spain’s Socialist government to funnel 220 million euros ($246 million) into the region over the next decade, which would include retraining programs and investment in new industries.

“In Asturias, what we’re asking for and what we need is for this 'ecological transition' to be exactly what it says it is,” says José Luis Alperi, the union’s spokesperson. “That is, that no one be left behind.” "

Read more from Lucia Benavides article at PRI here.

"Why Did Women Journalists Strike in Spain?"

[Photo: Elisa Piñeiro, used with permission. Sign reads “Journalists on strike.”]

  

"Some 8,000 women journalists from Spain, among them the author of this post, recently signed a manifesto called “Journalists On Strike,” which was read during the “Feminist Strike” that took place on March 8 in a dozen cities in Spain.

Neither the manifesto nor the strike were initiated by a union, political party, or media source, as is often the case. For the first time, women television show hosts, radio presenters, and newscasters decided to turn off their microphones in the studio and take their voices to the streets."

Read more from María Luz Moraleda's translated article at Global Voices here.

"The [top] 1% grabbed 82% of all wealth created in 2017"

"More than $8 of every $10 of wealth created last year went to the richest 1%.

That's according to a new report from Oxfam International, which estimates that the bottom 50% of the world's population saw no increase in wealth.

Oxfam says the trend shows that the global economy is skewed in favor of the rich, rewarding wealth instead of work.

"The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system," said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International.

The head of the advocacy group argued that the people who "make our clothes, assemble our phones and grow our food" are being exploited in order to enrich corporations and the super wealthy."

Read more from source here.

"Tragedy in Turkey" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: EFE]

Where to begin when we look at Turkey? Here is a part of the world with so much culture and history in its favour but in the last couple of years it has become somewhere you would not choose to live and you would even have to think twice about visiting.

The biggest single reason for this is the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has made an obvious grab at taking greater constitutional powers after a referendum on greatly extending presidential authority was narrowly passed. 

Unsurprisingly, the opposition No campaign disputed at least one third of the votes as being legally valid.

Erdogan’s clear intent is to move Turkey away from its secular, non-religious policy towards a much stronger and stricter Islamic state with him firmly in control. 

He has recently ordered that the teaching of evolution in schools should stop and that the death penalty should be reintroduced, through another referendum if necessary.

Aside from these backward ideological steps, his regime has taken to using a supposed coup last year as fair grounds for strangling basic freedoms. 

Thousands of ordinary people (including writers) have been imprisoned and tortured without good reason. 

Turkey now jails more journalists than any other nation – a third of the worldwide total – largely on the flimsy pretense of them being terrorists. 

During the summer, two local Turkish leaders from the respected human rights organisation, Amnesty International, were also locked up.

I find all this so sad for political reasons but also for more personal ones. My family and I spent a week based in the [country] a couple of summers ago and were enchanted by it. 

As well, I once taught at an Islamic secondary school in Australia and have very fond memories of my Turkish-Australian former colleagues and students there. 

They were the warmest of people and I still have Turkish friends now, who are some of the most generous and lovely individuals you could ever wish to meet and spend time with.

Going backwards

Turkey has been a cultured, open-minded society for some time now, especially since revolutionary figure Kemal Atatürk led his people towards becoming a more modern European-influenced society. 

Just two of his major legacies include greater equality for women and an educated middle class population that supported an Islam that was neither doctrinal nor overbearing. 

Even Atatürk’s simple decision to change the Turkish language to a Latin based script was enlightened.

This progress is now quickly being wound back under the heavy hand of Erdogan and his followers, who have been rammed into key government and legal positions. 

Some 100,00 public officials have already been dismissed from their posts, with almost half of them imprisoned on terror charges. 

Yes, Turkey hosts around three million more Syrian refugees than any other country, but many “face obstacles [in] education and employment.”

Academic and author, Mehmet Altan, could be speaking for most of his countrymen when he says: 

“Should the rule of law reign in Turkey again one day I am confident that I won’t be considered a suspect even for a second. I am a suspect now only because I demanded democracy.”

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2017.]

Video: 'Capitalism will always create bullshit jobs' | Owen Jones meets Rutger Bregman

"Rutger Bregman is the author of Utopia for Realists and he advocates for more radical solutions to address inequality in society. His ideas include the introduction of a universal basic income, a 15 hour working week and...open borders.

When I went to meet him, he told me politicians have failed to come up with new, radical ideas, instead sticking to an outdated, technocratic form of politics. He argues this has allowed politicians like Geert Wilders and Donald Trump to slowly shift extreme ideas into the mainstream."

"The Spanish Exception: Unemployment, inequality and immigration, but no right-wing populist parties"

[Crowd in the center of Madrid. Photo: Manolo Gómez (CC BY 2.0)]

If we accept that the governing Partido Popular is in fact right-wing but not actually 'populist' then these findings are fascinating...

"Very few European countries have proven immune to the appeal of right-wing populism. The exception is Spain: despite economic crisis and fast-eroding political trust, Spain has not seen any right-wing populist party obtain more than 1% of the vote in national elections in recent years. 

What might explain this remarkable absence of an electorally successful Spanish right-wing populist party?

Using public data (including statistics and opinion polls), interviews with experts and original polling, this case study scrutinises various factors influencing right-wing populist success in Spain – or lack thereof. First, it sets out why it is so remarkable that Spain should not have a right-wing populist presence in politics. 

Several explanations are discussed, including the historical weakness of the Spanish national identity and the Spanish people’s pro-Europeanism. These factors all seem to influence the (lack of) demand for a populist message by Spanish people. In and of themselves, however, these factors fail fully to explain the absence of a right-wing political party. 

Finally, this case study considers so-called supply-side factors, particularly the failure of parties that have tried to appeal to right-wing populist sentiments in Spain and the effects of the Spanish electoral system.

This report takes part of the Research Project “Nothing to fear but fear Itself?”, an initiative of the British think tank Demos, which covers six countries: Germany, Poland, France, the UK, Sweden and Spain. The full report can be found on this webpage."

Video: "The banned 400-year-old Shakespearean speech being used for refugee rights today"

"Some six hundred years ago in medieval England, feverish xenophobia swept through the population as 64,000 foreigners, from wealthy Lombard bankers to Flemish laborers, arrived on English shores between 1330 and 1550 in search of better lives. 

Locals blamed them for taking their jobs and distorting their culture. Tensions reached a zenith on May 1, 1517, as riots broke out in London and a mob armed with stones, bricks, bats, boots and boiling water attacked the immigrants and looted their homes. Thomas More, then the city’s deputy sherif, tried to reason with the crowd.
 
This dark day in history, known as Evil May Day, was portrayed in a then-banned play called The Book of Sir Thomas More, believed to be written between 1596 and 1601. William Shakespeare and two other writers were called to edit the manuscript, with the Bard contributing the 147 lines of More’s emphatic pro-immigrant monologue.

 “Imagine that you see the wretched strangers / Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage / Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation.”  

The play was never performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime because the Queen’s censor, Edmund Tilney, thought it might incite riots during a time when England was once again besieged by another immigrant crisis with the arrival of French-speaking Protestant asylum seekers from France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
 
More’s call for empathy, famously delivered by actor Ian Mckellan who played More on stage in 1964, has since become a clarion call for refugee advocates today.


“Thomas More’s speech to the mob is as relevant as ever,” said US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power in a Sept. 16 speech at the Lincoln Center Global Exchange to champion refugees. 

“The ‘wretched strangers’ have changed of course, from the Lombards targeted in 1517 in those riots to the Huguenot refugees in Shakespeare’s time and to the Syrians, Iraqis, South Sudanese, Eritreans and others fleeing repressive governments of our time,” explained Powers. She recruited Shakespearean actor Jay O. Sanders to perform the monologue in the middle of her speech.

The text begins with More’s response to the mob...

The Book of Sir Thomas More, Act 2, Scene 4

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another….
Say now the king Should so much come too short of your great trespass As but to banish you, whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error, Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, to Spain or Portugal, Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper, That, breaking out in hideous violence, Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats, Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants Were not all appropriate to your comforts, But chartered unto them, what would you think To be thus used? this is the strangers case; And this your mountainish inhumanity."

"The handwritten manuscript, the only example of a script written in Shakespeare’s penmanship, is on view at London’s British Library."

From source here.

"Women of Spain, go back to the bad old days!"

Sometimes I get the sense that I am living in a past era...

“A how-to manual called Marry and Submit Yourself (Casate y se sumisa) is proving a hit in Spain...

It is aimed at newly-wed women - teaching them to accept criticism of their cooking or housekeeping, and to learn to keep the peace in a marital home. 
 
The author, Costanza Miriano [has said] that her book is not about women being doormats, but being supportive.”

Source: here.

Does this sound familiar...?

The events of the 1590s had suddenly brought home to more thoughtful Castilians the harsh truth about their native land – its poverty in the midst of riches, its power that had shown itself impotent…

For this was not only a time of crisis, but a time also of the awareness of crisis – of a bitter realization that things had gone wrong. It was under the influence of the arbitristas that early seventeenth-century Castile surrendered itself to an orgy of national introspection, desperately attempting to discover at what point reality had been exchanged for illusion….

The arbitristas proposed that Government expenditure should be slashed…

Most of the arbitristas recommended the reduction of schools and convents and the clearing of the Court as the solution to the problem. Yet this was really to mistake the symptoms for the cause.

MartínGonzález de Cellorigo was almost alone in appreciating that the fundamental problem lay not so much in heavy spending by Crown and upper classes –since this spending itself created a valuable demand for goods and services – as in the disproportion between expenditure and investment.

‘Money is not true wealth,’ he wrote, and his concern was to increase the national wealth by increasing the nation’s productive capacity rather than its stock of precious metals. This could only be achieved by investing more money in agricultural and industrial development. At present, surplus wealth was being unproductively invested –‘dissipated on thin air – on papers, contracts, censos, and letters of exchange, on cash, and silver, and gold – instead of being expended on things that yield profits and attract riches from outside to augment the riches within.And thus there is no money, gold, or silver in Spain because there is so much; and it is not rich, because of all its riches….’

The Castile of González de Cellorigo was…a society in which both money and labour were misapplied; an unbalanced, top-heavy society, in which, according to González, there were thirty parasites for every one man who did an honest day’s work; a society with a false sense of values, which mistook the shadow for substance, and substance for the shadow.

J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469-1716

[Many thanks to Tom Young for sending me the above text.]