Anaïs Nin started her famous diary in Barcelona?

 

"In Barcelona I didn't have the impression that the absence of my father was definitive. I thought it could come at any moment. We saw his family, his parents, his grandmother...It was his homeland...".

A blog (in Catalan) on the childhood of the great writer in Barcelona.

Baldwin's Barcelona -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

(Photo: Allan Warren)

The book must always come before the author,” said Nobel Prize winner, VS Naipaul. 

Unlike another genius such as James Baldwin, Napaul spent his entire brilliant, vicious life seemingly trying to prove himself wrong.

For Baldwin, words came first. By becoming a child preacher in his native New York City he avoided the Harlem ghetto.

He also soon found the power of images and a sense of himself as gay and American, an American “negro”: the mid 20th century polite English word for “black”.

(I remember the shock of hearing the other, offensive ‘N-word’ when my cousin in Sydney used it as the name for his pet dog. I was seven years old at the time but even then somehow I knew how wrong that was.)

On a wider tour of Iberia, Baldwin (who died in rural France in 1987) came to Barcelona six decades ago last May.

He met the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma and stayed in his basement in Carrer Muntaner – “blacker than my reputation,” he called it – and they spent seven frenzied days together with [current mayor of Hijar] Luis Marquesán.

Biedma wrote in his diary: “Life, since Monday, when I met Jimmy Baldwin, has been so hectic that today I find myself in a state of real moral and physical exhaustion, aggravated by the intellectual dullness that comes with an alcoholic regime such as the one I have been following.”

According to Marquesán’s biographer, Miguel Dalmau, they went to the picnic areas of Montjuïc, “where they saw the landscape of misery, the shantytowns in disarray on the mountainside.” Ultimately it all led to Baldwin’s new friend Biedma questioning himself about whether he was a coward.

Despite the stimulating week, it seems fair to say that the Catalan capital was a place of mixed fortunes for Baldwin.

As reported in this magazine in October 2019, the publisher, Lumen, “had asked Barcelona photographer Oriol Maspons to advise on publishing the book ‘Nothing Personal’ by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, but his advice was ignored.

Hurt, he and other photographers published a signed ad in the magazine Destino, criticising the indifference shown towards a masterpiece dealing with the US’ racist and classist system.”

Fortunately though, one of Baldwin’s books, ‘Beale Street Blues’ has finally found its way into a Catalan translation, thanks to the publisher Edicions 1984 and the work of Oriol Ampuero.

He launched it along with professor and writer Josep-Anton Fernàndez on June 13 at the Sants bookshop La Inexplicable.

Baldwin’s work, like so many others, was censored in Spain during the Franco years, but Barcelona played another part in his local history when the US writer Nicholas Boggs was a recent writer-in-residence at Jiwar on Carrer Astúries (founded by two Barcelona residents, Mireia Estrada Gelabart and Moroccan-Canadian Ahmed Ghazali). Boggs spent his time co-editing and writing the introduction to a new edition of Baldwin’s ‘Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood.’

He is also continuing work on his manuscript in progress about love and race in Baldwin’s life and work at the Department of English at New York University.

I share Boggs’ fixation. It knocked me sideways when I read Baldwin’s novel, ’Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone’, during lockdown in spring 2020 and I’ve barely left his words untouched since then.

Reading James Baldwin (or listening to his captivating voice) is like having a fogged-up window wiped clean. Now the view can be seen for what it is, whether picturesque or hideous.

Baldwin’s penetrating work, too, is now starting to be seen more and more for what it is, both in Catalonia and across the wider planet.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2022.]

"Donald Trump doesn't like to read" [but some of the rest of us do...]

In a period of weeks where blind ignorance and Islamaphobia have been tragically demonstrated around the globe, it's apparent that the act of reading (and here I don't mean skimming racist Tweets) is more important than ever but some of the most powerful people are against it...

"The Trump statement [in the blogpost title] was used in an ad campaign ("World, stay awake") by the German bookstore chain "Thalia" to attract attention; according to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, it is true (cf. The Washington Post, Dec. 7, 2018).

The publisher Jordi Nadal used the same slogan for the title of an op-ed piece published in La Vanguardia newspaper in which he gave good reasons for reading, of which some excerpts read as follows:

[...] reading is growing, is feeding curiosity, is giving our minds and emotions more circuits and ressources. The biggest difference between the mind of a child educated in a rich family and that of poor one lies in the words he/she knows. A poor mind doesn't have words. A rich mind has got a universe of words that, in turn, combined and made their own, turn into the master key that will open a good part of the doors and situations present along life.

Juan José Millás reminded us that reality is made of words, which means who dominates words dominates reality. Thus, we consider it an absolute gift to have discovered books and reading. For very many reasons: we can read, because we want to feed our curiosity, because we want to grow, because we want to evade ourselves [?], because we want to understand other things and other people and cultures, because we want to listen to other lives.

[...] Without reading there is no depth of field, nor contrast, nor nuances. Without reading we easily fall into fanatism. You know, a fanatic is the one who doesn't want to change neither the topic nor the opinion. Fanatics read little or badly. Without reading, there triumph naturally the tweet and hate.

What is more, reading is healing and healthy. Reading --every day there are more scientific studies that avail it-- is good for your health. Readers on average live two years more.

Reading is a clean way of enjoying life. Enjoying it as a superior form of research to learn to govern a little better, with humility and gratitude, a life that's one's own in freedom. A PISA study revealed that, beyond the indicators of place, country, etc. and levels of reading competence, a home with less than 20 books is a reliable indicator of a more than nearly assured school failure, and, on the other hand, a home with more than 200 books is a near guarantee for academic success.

[...] Every reader has got the unique and non-transferable opportunity to be the master of a world when he/she dives into the intimacy of reading, and, as was said masterfully by the great author C.S. Lewis [at least in William Nicholson's Shadowlands]: "We read to know we are not alone."

Another statement [from] the Thalia campaign: "The world has got more secrets than those known by Siri."

SOURCE: La Vanguardia, Feb. 2, 2019, p. 26 [printed edition]; horizont.net [images]

Found at Literary Rambles here.

[5 min. video:] The good news and the bad news from Trump's defeat

Balanced and clear-headed comments from Yanis Varoufakis, co-founder of DiEM25, a pan-European, progressive movement that aims to democratise the EU before it disintegrates.

 

 

"Something remarkable happened this August: How the pandemic sped up the passage to postcapitalism"

 

"Two days ago, something extraordinary happened. 

Something that has never happened before in the history of capitalism. 

In Britain, the news came out that the economy had suffered its greatest slump ever – more than 22% down during the first 7 months of 2020. 

Remarkably, on the same day, the London Stock Exchange, the FTSE100 index, rose by more than 2%. 

On the same day, during a time America has ground to a halt and is beginning to look like not just as an economy in deep trouble but also, ominously, as a failed state, Wall Street’s SP500 index hit an all-time record.

Unable to contain myself, I tweeted the following:

Before 2008, the money markets also behaved in a manner that defied humanism. News of mass firings of workers would be routinely followed by sharp rises in the share price of the companies “letting their workers go” – as if they were concerned with their liberation… But at least, there was a capitalist logic to that correlation between firings and share prices. That disagreeable causality was anchored in expectations regarding a company’s actual profits. More precisely, the prediction that a reduction in the company’s wage bill might, to the extent that the loss of personnel lead to lower proportional reductions in output, lead to a rise in profits and, thus, dividends. The mere belief that there were enough speculators out there thinking that there were enough speculators out there who might form that particular expectation was enough to occasion a boost in the share price of companies firing workers.

That was then, prior to 2008. Today, this link between profit forecasts and share prices has disappeared and, as a consequence, the share market’s misanthropy has entered a new, post-capitalist phase. This is not as controversial a claim as it may sound at first. In the midst of our current pandemic not one person in their right mind imagines that there are speculators out there who believe that there are enough speculators out there who may believe that company profits in the UK or in the US will rise any time soon. And yet they buy shares with enthusiasm. The pandemic’s effect on our post-2008 world is now creating forces hitherto unfathomable..."

Read more from source 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)

"How to Lose a Country, in 7 Steps -- A Conversation with Ece Temelkuran"

" “I am one of the early birds…” Ece Temelkuran told me, “I saw democracy collapse in Turkey and tried to warn the United States, European Countries and Britain about this.  

I’ve been telling people that what you think is normal, or a passing phase, is part of a bigger phenomenon that affects us all.  Somehow though, European democracies feel they’re exceptional – and too mature to be affected by neofascist currents.”

Ece has seen this all before.  In her incredible 2019 book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, she notes, “We have learned over time that coups in Turkey end the same way regardless of who initiated them. 

It’s like the rueful quote from the former England footballer turned TV pundit Gary Lineker, that football is a simple game played for 120 minutes, and at the end the Germans win on penalties. In Turkey, coups are played out over forty-eight-hour curfews, and the leftists are locked up at the end. Then afterwards, of course, another generation of progressives is rooted out, leaving the country’s soul even more barren than it was before.”

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator, whose journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel. She has been twice recognised as Turkey’s most-read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people in social media (with three million twitter followers). In this exclusive interview, we discuss the dangers of populism, authoritarianism and fascism, and why we need to act now.

Q: What are populism and nationalism?

[Ece Temelkuran]:  Today, there is less time to understand the differences between nationalism, populism and authoritarianism.  In Britain, democracy is literally crumbling at the hands of a strange guy with funny hair!  People simply aren’t recognising the dangers that lay ahead, so there’s not enough time to get into definitions

One truth is that you cannot really know what populism is until you experience it.  Populism is the act of politicising and mobilising ignorance to the point of political and moral insanity.  Nationalism as we know, comes from the phenomena of nation-states – and it’s quite ironic therefore that we are now talking more and more about the failure of nation states and the failure of supranational and international institutions as well… and meanwhile neo-nationalism is on the rise." "

Read more from source here.

Spain defies Trump's military request over Iran

Spain's government have pulled their frigate from a US-led naval group because of Trump's warmongering with Iran...
"MADRID (Reuters) - Spain has withdrawn a frigate from a U.S.-led naval group in the Gulf because [the USA] was now focusing on alleged threats from Iran rather than an agreed objective to mark an historic seafaring anniversary, the Spanish government said on Tuesday.

“The U.S. government has taken a decision outside of the framework of what had been agreed with the Spanish Navy,” acting Defense Minister Margarita Robles told reporters in Brussels.

That led to the temporary pullout of the 215-sailor Mendez Nunez from the group led by aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as the mission no longer had the objective of celebrating 500 years since the first circumnavigation of the world, as envisaged by a bilateral U.S.-Spanish agreement, she said.

Robles said Spain respected the U.S. decision to focus on Iran and would rejoin the group as soon as it returns to its original task, adding: “Spain will always act as a serious and reliable partner as part of the European Union and within NATO.”

While the European Union shares some U.S. concerns about Iran, including its involvement in Syria’s war, it still backs a 2015 international nuclear deal with Tehran from which U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew a year ago.

Trump, now trying to isolate Iran, has reimposed sanctions on it and sent the aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers to the Middle East in a move Washington said aimed to offset threats from Iran to American forces in the region.

Trump is also seeking to cut off Iran’s oil exports to pressure the Islamic Republic to renegotiate stricter limits on its nuclear program and drop support for proxy forces in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen."

Reporting by Paul Day and Jesus Aguado; Editing by Mark Heinrich

"My First Life as a Nurse"

"...Emergency Room: A motor vehicle accident. Mad with cocaine, a driver has wedged his sports car under a semi on the interstate. Partial (mostly complete) decapitation.

Emergency Room: A knife fight between two women who, after they are admitted, discover that their beds are only a curtain’s breadth apart. A skinny man, the object of their fight, tries to separate them.

Emergency Room: A slow Sunday night in the break room. A resident asks me if I’m really reading the New York Times Book Review or just pretending to. I’m not really sure.

Operating Room: A surgeon throws something heavy at me because I’ve handed him the wrong suture material. Another surgeon, three times my age, propositions me after I’ve tied the back of his surgical gown..."

Read more from source here.

"The summer of Trump"

[Image: Lluis Romero]

Author and journalist Matthew Tree gives one of the most accurate and damning round-ups of Donald Trump's actions in the highest public office...

"This summer, whether you be hiking in mountainous areas, lolling about in a sea or visiting the foreign capital of your choice, one thing is certain: you’ll be hearing about Donald Trump. 

He has never failed to make daily headlines, right from the start of his campaign (the racist slurs about Mexicans being rapists, neatly counterbalanced by his own recorded comments about seizing vulvas as a recommended method of seduction) through to almost everything he’s done since he’s been president: banning immigration from Muslim countries where he has no business interests, but hob-nobbing and sword dancing in Muslim countries where he does; lying about paying wads of hush money to a porn star with whom he had sex just days after the birth of Donald Jr.; slashing the size of national parks to allow mining; defending outspokenly racist demonstrators; imposing immigration restrictions that allow police to seize small children from Latin American mothers trying to cross the border; imposing metal tariffs that could plunge the world – including the US – into another economic recession; praising an unpredictable Korean dictator who runs the world’s deadliest labour camps, keeps a large part of his own population at or below starvation level and murders members of his own family, in exchange for a handshake photo with said tyrant; and, last but not least, planning to ban abortion completely (the only other country which did this was Romania under the Ceausescus, with tragic results for hundreds of thousands of unwanted orphans) and promoting sexual abstinence in schools as the only acceptable method of contraception (this is not only odd, coming as it does from a serial adulterer, but research done on existing Christian pro-abstinence schools has revealed a marked increase in anal sex among their teenage pupils). And as for Trump’s ties to Russia, let’s not even go there (Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel for the Department of Justice, is doing that for us).

The source of the fascination which Trump exercises on so many of us – we tend to gawp at his latest blunders like people passing a car crash – probably has something to do with the disjunction between what he proclaims to be the truth, and the reality which gives him the lie. 

In Catalonia, we know the feeling well: the previous Spanish government – and, at the time of writing, the current one – persist in accusing a cultural activist and 15 elected politicians (eight in distant jail, seven in even more distant exile) of violent rebellion for organising a referendum in which the violence was all but monopolised by imported Spanish police. 

The reaction of many people here to this is similar to that of many Americans towards Trump: there is some outrage, some frustration, but the topmost feeling is one of sheer incredulity. Having said which, there is an important difference: the judges and politicians responsible for the unlikely charges against Catalan leaders are professionals who got where they are because they wanted to be there. 

According to the journalist Michael Wolff in his book ‘Fire And Fury’, the key to Trump’s incompetence is that he never expected to be president: he ran for the post to raise his profile sky-high in order to launch a TV network. He even guaranteed that he wouldn’t win to his wife (who didn’t want him to). 

It makes you wonder which is worse: an accidental president who does nothing but create accidents? Or a government and judiciary that knowingly and deliberately creates a situation which is patently absurd?"

Source: here at Catalonia Today magazine.

"In western democracies, is reading a political act?"

[Azar Nafisi. Photo: SJ Staniski]

 Azar Nafisi is an academic and writer, who left her native Iran for the US in 1997. 

Her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, was an international bestseller. Her new book, The Republic of Imagination, looks at the importance of fiction to democracy. It is published by Heinemann.

What made you write your new book?

Saul Bellow posed the question of how those who survived the ordeal of the Holocaust would survive the ordeal of freedom. When I came to America, I felt there was an evasion of this ordeal of freedom. The idea I had of America was replaced by an efficient and ideologically polarised attitude. I had to fight it here as I did in Iran.

The book argues that fiction can be a solution to the loss of freedom. How? 

A democratic society is supposed to be based on plurality of voices. What is happening here – and I’m sure in Britain – is that this is being replaced by greed and utilitarianism, where we educate our children not to have a meaningful life, but to become efficient worker-bees. The philosophy that education exists to orient you towards careers was horrifying to me. American fiction is a reminder of American morality – that aspect of the American dream which brings with it the question of individual responsibility. It is always written from the point of view of the outsider. I wanted to recall this voice of conscience. The denigration of ideas and imagination is also a denigration of reality.

Is arts education too easily dismissed in the US?

This utilitarian attitude has always been part of American thinking. It has now gained dominance. Right now, people talk as if being a teacher, a museum curator, a librarian – things essential to any vital society – are barely jobs, because they make less money. I relate it to the reality we live in, to poverty. There is monopoly of both money and ideas. It is very dangerous.

Why do you feel so strongly about this?

I came from a society where an absolutist religious ideology took away all our rights as human beings. It wasn’t just about torture and political repression; it was about robbing individuals of their humanity. So I am very sensitive to the same thing happening in the US, through the seductions of money and the encouragement of greed. In a democratic society, individuals can only survive if they make choices freely. To make free choices in a society where everything from your toothpaste to your candidates is packaged, you must be able to reflect, to be critical and self-critical.

How does technology affect personal freedom?

The access to information and the fact that if something happens in Iran or China, people can tell the world – that is a good aspect. But we have turned technology into a god, and developed intellectual laziness and sclerosis. We are using technology not to think harder, but to evade obstacles and questions. The owners of technology can manage our private lives and live with us in our homes. How can you talk about democracy without privacy?

Reading Lolita in Tehran portrayed reading as a deeply political act in a repressive society. Is it the same in western democracies?

It is a political act [but] not in the obvious manner. It questions the basic tenets of authoritarian thinking. That is why this plurality of ideas and voices which fiction represents becomes dangerous to tyrants. In fiction, there is no status. In the realm of ideas and imagination, the only thing that is sacred is to allow the profanities to come in. Every great revolution starts with an idea. America is based on an idea – Enlightenment. Once you take that away, all that is left is a different kind of tyrannical mind-set. Great 
fiction always questions us and brings to the foreground the essential human questions.

You ask the same serious questions of the US as of Iran. Is there a comparison?

In the west we say, “It is their culture” and think we are being supportive. But this is condescending, because the worst aspects of culture – like the treatment of women – should be rejected, in the same manner that women in the west fought for their rights even though society said women should stay at home because it’s in the Bible. While I see the complete differences between Iran and America, and appreciate the freedoms I have in America, having lived in Iran I realised that I have to use those freedoms to fight for freedom. Freedom is not something static that you gain and have for ever. People who come from repressive societies are blessed with alternative eyes. We become sensitive to the signs of tyranny, even if they are sugar-coated.

Were you surprised by the success of Reading Lolita in Tehran?

I was absolutely flabbergasted. I didn’t expect it, especially because I was so discouraged by so many people. But I had no choice. It is like falling in love – everybody tells you this man is not good for you, but there you go, you follow him. So I followed it, with utter despair.

You left Iran many years ago. What’s your view of the political situation there?

Living in the Islamic Republic is like living in the month of April – there are a lot of thunderstorms with periods of sunshine in between. I’m both pessimistic and hopeful. My hope is in Iran’s civil society. The way minorities, journalists, women and various strata have been putting up a fight. I hope that change comes from within, through open democratic means.

In the West, debate on Iran is often polarised.

I had hoped to continue the discussions we were having underground in Iran among the Iranian diaspora in the US. But I discovered that inside Iran, this debate around who we are, what we want, what we used to be, was far more vital. Despite the dangers, we talked. Unfortunately, over here I discovered a soulless, partisan debate that is very disgusting.

Does this matter?

Iran was the first country in the 20th century to overthrow a secular regime and create a theocracy. With 1979, everything changed. Iran formulated this theory about Islam invading the rest of the world, the internationalism. The defeat of that ideology is so important – but nobody is paying attention. Everybody wants me to tell them whether the US should talk to Iran. In a democracy, diplomacy is the first thing. But you have to know who you are talking to, and you should not compromise on the principles."

Read at source, New Humanist here.

Review of "This Boy's Life" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

It’s a great relief to read something as authentic as this memoir of Tobias Wolff’s childhood.

In 2018, when (even for adults) predictable superhero and action movies are dominating the western world’s popular culture as a form of escapism, my bowels were nicely warmed by having come across a one euro second hand copy of this little printed gem in Barcelona. 

It had been republished in 1994, seemingly given away with an end of year issue of ‘Esquire’, a North American men’s magazine.

I happily absorbed all the low-lights of the author’s young life in Concrete, a small company-town just south of the Canadian border, dominated by a cement factory. 

The reader learns that Jack (as he preferred to be called, after novelist Jack London) needed to drag himself through an upbringing that had all the underhandedness of Spain’s ultra-conservative government and the punishing violence of a month in Syria. 

Punches and kicks at school were the norm and sometimes the same at home with added insults from Dwight, an ornery stepfather who drank to excess whenever he had the money to indulge.

Like plenty of working class women of her era, Jack’s bright and capable mother is shown to be trapped in low paying jobs and a string of abusive relationships. In a sign of what is to come, she and Dwight come back early from their two-day honeymoon “silent and grim, not even looking at each other.”

One of the refreshing things about this autobiography is how honest Wolff is about his own character. 

With the perception of a fine mimic, he picks apart his family and friends but he also openly acknowledges how he uses lies to beef up his status with the locals and how he steals like a modern-day financier. 

Wolff even details the deceptive methods he employed to swindle his way into an (unsuccessful) scholarship interview for an expensive private high school.

Touchingly, the author also explains where he found relief from the daily grind of school and unending chores at home. 

Through music he gained some mental freedom and earning boy scout symbols provided a way to “compel respect, or at least civility from those who shared them and envy from those who did not.”

The official scout publications (where the book’s title comes from) Wolff read with the kind of fanaticism that is common in teenagers. “What I liked about [their] Handbook,” he remembers, “was its voice, the bluff hail-fellow language by which it tried to make being a good boy adventurous, even romantic.” 

The Scout Magazine he reads in a trance, “accepting without question its narcotic invitation to believe that I was really no different from the boys whose hustle and pluck it celebrated...Reading about these boys made me restless, feverish with schemes.”

As you can see, for a book that was first published in the late 1980s its language is pleasingly still rooted in a much earlier post World War II rural USA.

As well as this, Wolff’s work stands out to me because it examines a cross-section of American society that is still badly neglected in English language literature. Today, these are the same gun-carrying people who voted Donald Trump into the White House, in the hope of something better for their receding lives and now dead or dying industries.

In a recent interview, Tobias Wolff quoted Auden’s line that “writing an autobiography [is] like being a leper showing his sores in the marketplace.” 

He could just as easily have mentioned Flannery O’Connor, who argued that anyone who survives adolescence has enough material to write about.

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

"A very personal reason" -- My latest column for Catalonia Today magazine

If I lived in the USA, I could well face the prospect of being heavily in debt for the rest of my life. A civilised society is one that looks after its lower income earners

If you are a regular reader of this column you might remember several articles I’ve written in support of the public health system over the past few years.

This month I have an interest that is particularly close to home because I am just two days away from having a kidney transplant in Bellvitge Hospital in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, just outside Barcelona. The organ donor is my wife Paula so I now have another reason to be grateful to her, apart from putting up with me for the last 25 years.

We only have to look at the United States of America to witness the hideous tragedies that unfold when there is no universal public health scheme to protect those who cannot afford to pay for private medical insurance.

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, “the first-year billed charges for a kidney transplant are more than US$262,000.” On top of this, the drugs that are needed after the operation, including anti-rejection drugs and other medications are estimated to be about US$3,000 a month.

In my case, probably like many others who are lucky enough to live where we do, the financial burden on my family and I will be limited to some loss of income because I won’t be able to work for a few weeks or a month or so.

If I was living in the USA, I could well face the prospect of being heavily in debt for the rest of my life, or even completely devastated. This, purely because I have had the misfortune to inherit a genetic fault.

As one American reported recently, “after we went through all of our savings, all of our retirement, and all of the equity in our house, we filed for bankruptcy.” Sadly, these kinds of situations are as common as hot dogs and apple pie in the USA.

New schemes have helped some people to a limited extent, under the Affordable Care Act and the so-called ‘Obama Care’ state and federal funding, but the Trump administration is determined to end these programmes.

Republican party members of congress have their eyes equally fixed on ensuring that the private health industry completely dominates patient treatment and that increases its ability to make a healthy profit from unhealthy people. At the moment, there are still 27 million Americans without the insurance that is necessary for them to ensure they get looked after properly.

It’s easy to take what we have for granted in this country. Personally, I have no problem paying my share of taxes, provided it goes to vital services, like health, education or other human infrastructure.

The mark of civilised society is that it looks after its lower income earners or those who make next to nothing. Having a health problem should never be a passport to financial misery.

These are the kind of thoughts I have as I think about what I am facing in the coming weeks. I am extremely thankful to my donor but also thankful to all those ordinary people who both fund and fight for the continuation of a quality public health system. Long may it continue to help people like me who need it.

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

VIDEO: "The Big Picture: How We Got Into This Mess, And How We Get Out..."

Robert Reich looks at the rise of Big Money in politics, the decline of our democracy, and Trump's election.

"The High Cost of Denying Class War"

"In 2016, the year of both Brexit and Trump, two pieces of data, dutifully neglected by the shrewdest of establishment analysts, told the story. In the United States, more than half of American families did not qualify, according to Federal Reserve data, to take out a loan that would allow them to buy the cheapest car for sale (the Nissan Versa sedan, priced at $12,825). 

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, over 40% of families relied on either credit or food banks to feed themselves and cover basic needs..."


Read more from this article by DiEM25's co-founder Yanis Varoufakis here.

"Why Europe Needs a New Deal, Not a Breakup"

[Illustration by Curt Merlo.]

"The EU is facing a crisis of legitimacy—but retreating to the nation-state will only benefit the far right.

By Yanis Varoufakis and James K. Galbraith

The American New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt’s first two terms combined the goals of financial stabilization, reconstruction, conservation, and employment—jobs for the jobless; public works; power systems and new industries, especially in the South; soil conservation and reforestation to battle the Dust Bowl; and a potent mix of regulations and insurance to assert public power over high finance.

Europe today needs all of these. Its overgrown banks, haunted by the specter of insolvency, are pushing households into foreclosures and evictions across the continent, and at an accelerating scale in the most depressed countries. 

States are bankrupt and will only become more so as the European Central Bank begins to tighten under pressure from German savers crushed by negative interest rates. 

Like America 80 years ago, Europe has a vast periphery. In its South, there is a semi-permanent Great Depression, whereas in the East there is great need for new and renewed industries, transport networks, housing, and social investments. Above all, Europeans need jobs.

Unlike the United States in the 1930s, Europe is also facing the menace of disintegration, as the absence of a democratic federal system has spawned a crisis of legitimacy. 

Paralysis in the face of deindustrialization and chronic unemployment is breeding a toxic politics throughout Europe, with a postmodern form of fascism threatening some countries and a sense of hopelessness elsewhere. 

Europe has not yet suffered ecological calamities comparable to those in the past few weeks in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico; but they are coming, in the form of droughts, rising sea levels, and (most immediately) unstoppable waves of refugees from conflict and climate change in the Middle East and Africa.

The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) has therefore proposed a European New Deal (END), inspired by FDR but designed for European conditions. 

Chief among these is the sad fact that the European Union is a weak and limited thing—a confederacy, more or less. The crisis has made it virtually impossible even to discuss the creation of a US-style federation in Europe, with full powers to budget and mobilize for the emergencies at hand. 

European polities are so alienated by the authoritarian incompetence of the current leadership—exemplified by the crushing of the Greek government in 2015 and the heavy-handed approach of the European Commission to Brexit—that an increase in central powers (“more Europe,” as they say) would almost certainly meet heavy resistance. 

So it is necessary to work within existing charters and treaties to bring about stabilization by means of a European New Deal before hope is restored and the creation of new, democratic, federal, pan-European institutions—even a proper European Constitution—can be discussed sensibly and with cool heads.

To this END, we have proposed the following programs for all European countries, independent of whether they are in the European Union or the eurozone..."

Read more from source at The Nation here.