"Needled" – My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: Oriol Duran, Barcelona.]

You could call me one of the lucky ones; one of the chosen few.

A week ago, I had my second dose of Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at Bellvitge Hospital in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat just outside Barcelona. 

This was the same medical centre that successfully operated on me to transplant a kidney 3 years ago, giving the reason for why I stood in line on a Friday evening with mainly 70 year old’s, some of whom undoubtedly have malfunctioning immune systems, as I do.

I’m in this category because since the campaign started in Catalonia on December 27 last year, at the time of writing, 1,572,518 residents had been given the first dose of the various vaccines. 

That represents just 20.36% of the total population. Of these, just over half a million people have also been administered the second dose (6.49% of the populace).  

Naturally, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I don’t want to sound at all petty. I’m one of the biggest supporters of public health systems anywhere on this planet of marvels and mysteries. 

It just strikes me as disappointing that organisation from the EU, Spain and our government here wasn’t better. It disturbs me. 

You could say, in another meaning of the word, it needles me. 

There are even large numbers of school teachers (for example, my wife who’s in her mid-50s) who have not yet had their Covid protection maximised with a simple injection.

I accept that some causes for delays have been outside local authorities’ control. One case in point was the closure of the Eurotunnel in the English Channel just before Christmas. 

Reportedly, the main reason for the slow vaccine rollout speed in Catalonia was fridges (used to store doses) being trapped in Dover, one of England’s main ports.

Of course, that was 4 months ago now. And yes, I know there are plans to quicken the pace so that 70% of the population have been covered by the end of August. Plans don’t impress me. Well-coordinated action does.

There are other parts of the world that have done this task much more efficiently. Unsurprisingly maybe, places like Australia and New Zealand who’ve had relatively few cases of Covid have also already begun vaccination programs. 

Even that obscenely corrupt, malfunctioning corporation called the United Kingdom is looking pretty flash on this question.

While I’m all riled up, I’ll mention another related point. Now that it seems agreed that there’s going to be some kind of special travel “passport” for the pre-vaccinated elite like me in Europe, I have to ask about what’s going to happen to everyone else in the next few months leading into and through the summer?

What about the opportunity to travel across borders (is it even a human right?) Children, young people, many immigrant adults and all those not lucky enough to be immunised are clearly going to be discriminated against.

And here's another crucial error. I was arguing from the very start of scientific investigation into a vaccine that it should be centrally run by the World Health Organisation and an enhanced European Medicines Agency. 

The pandemic was, and still is, much too dangerous and long-lasting to be handled by local governments as prisoners of private interests who make medicine for profit.

Surely, one single contract should have been given to the most effective vaccine company and the patent for that vaccine should have been waved in the interests of global public health.

But I suppose that wouldn’t have been a financial shot in the arm for the pharma giants, would it?

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2021.]

"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.

"Oxford vaccine is safe, according to second stage study data"

[ Rumyana Vakarelska]

"The vaccine builds immunity, but still does not protect against infection."

"We have some really good news; the so-called "British 'A' vaccine being developed by scientists at Oxford University is entering its third phase of testing," Rumyana Vakarelska, a journalist in London, told Horizon's "Before All" program. She works for an American financial information and analysis corporation and covers Covid-19 and the impact on business.

Her comment is that the latest phase of clinical trials of the experimental coronavirus vaccine, developed by the American National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the major biotechnology companies, begins today in the United States. 

This is the first vaccine tested in the United States. The University of Oxford and one of the major pharmaceutical companies are also testing vaccines against Covid 19. This was announced last week from the rostrum of the British Parliament.

"The most important thing from the second stage of the study is that this vaccine is safe. It is likely to be implemented in early 2021 and the team's optimal plan is that most people can be vaccinated by April-May next year. "

In the third phase of testing the vaccine, there are also questions, the journalist believes.

"What is known so far is that the vaccine builds immunity, but still does not protect against infection. That is, if you get sick, you will get sick more easily and deaths will be reduced in the future. The vaccine will attack the virus and create antibodies and will create immunity. '

Rumyana Vakarelska explained that a gradual vaccination is expected , and the vaccine has so far been tested on the age group between 18 and 55. Testing has also begun on people between the ages of 59 and 65 and a second group for people over the age of 70.

The United Kingdom has ordered 100 million vaccines from the company, and the United States has ordered 400 million vaccines, although they are also developing a vaccine, Vakarelska explained.

When asked if there will be access to the vaccine at a good price, the journalism specified:

"The UK will do everything possible if the vaccine is completed successfully and in the third stage the transmission of the infection from person to person is prevented, the UK will help the vaccine reach everyone. The program for the UK provides for its distribution through GPs and will most likely be free. It is not yet known whether pharmacies will be available and available there. "

Vakarelska stressed that anti-epidemic measures, however, must not stop being observed, although we will be able to catch our breath if there is a vaccine.

"14 percent of people in the UK have said they will not get the vaccine, for the United States this percentage is 45 percent," said Vakarelska in connection with the anti-vaccine movements."

Original source from Bulgarian media BNR here.

"Fears increase, virus surges in Spain" -- My latest interview with ABC Radio (Sydney)

This morning I talked by phone to Anna Pykett from ABC Radio in Australia about the continuing second wave of Corona in Spain/Catalonia and the UK government's actions.

5 minute recording here.

"Weightless" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

What is wrong with this scene?

Excited children playing together in a Barcelona street, their parents standing nearby watching, chatting, smiling.

Of course, only a few months ago, there was everything natural, normal and perfectly ‘right’ about this everyday picture. 

Now (at least at the time of writing) the responsible adults in the scene are breaking the law and can be fined for it. Something that was as wholesome as a summer day suddenly became an awful sin.

So, how are people in our part of the world dealing with this and other similar flips of fate?

One person who has a sharp insight into how Catalonia is coping at the moment is Australian psychologist Leigh Matthews [pictured above,] owner and founder of Therapy in Barcelona. In mid-March, flying back to Barcelona after visiting the Alhambra for her 43rd birthday, she travelled from the pleasures of Granada into a city under lockdown.

Leigh believes that Covid-19 has all the ingredients of the kind of collective, traumatic crisis that she routinely deals with on a personal level in her work: the element of surprise, a threat to essential aspects of life and loss of control.

She says she is able to bear witness to the stories of her international colleagues and clients. In her opinion, they bring expat powers of adaptability and a comfort with ambiguity to difficulties that are firsts for everyone here.

As a comparison, the current number of infections in Spain stands at 264,663 and deaths at 26,620 whereas Australia’s are at 6,941 and 97. “This disparity is great,” Leigh says. “Here we are tormented with a huge toll and suffocating restrictions, but Australians, with their elaborate economic rescue package and comparatively mild threat, are also gripped with uncertainty, grief and exhaustion from groundhog days of confinement.”

To Leigh, the pandemic reminds her of the engineers charged with saving the lives of the astronauts in the Apollo 13 space capsule almost exactly 50 years ago. They solved the crucial problem of making a square filter fit into a space that had only been designed for a round filter. 

In her view, what governments in Catalonia and Spain have to face is something very similar to the Apollo 13 scenario.

She believes the question for the authorities is essentially the same one for many people: doing what is possible. “Identify a problem. Throw the resources you have to deal with it onto the table and figure out how to manage the problem. Variation in contagion and death rates aside, we all face the “Apollo 13 exercise” daily – fumbling for solutions to working from home while crisis schooling, mastering the Virabhadrasana pose in online yoga and simultaneously managing stress, grief, trauma and death anxiety with the menace of infection and economic impairment looming over us,” she says.

“As a psychologist I can give you the shopping list of coping strategies. I can tell you there is resilience to celebrate, but resilience is intersected by privilege and the domestic, political and economic theatres we inhabit. The cohort of people in my life are well resourced, but the pandemic is as multitudinous as each story of every person living it. Many stories won’t have an Apollo 13 finale. They came up with something adequate and so can we, even if it’s just wearing a mask to take care of others or writing a “new normal” that embraces everyone.”

Personally speaking, some days I feel the gravity of the situation holding me down. On other days, like the Apollo 13 crew, I am weightless. I almost float.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2020.]

On beating Corona, a new order and kindness...

[Photo: Lluis Romero]

Author and journalist Matthew Tree's latest penetrating article in Catalonia Today magazine (published under the title "Ringing in the new:) 

"Last month, Maria Branyas, the oldest woman in Catalonia and indeed in the whole of Spain, and possibly in the whole of Europe, hit the virtual headlines when she survived a coronavirus infection at age 113. 

(She had also got through the First World War – during which the ship taking her and her family back to Barcelona from the United States was almost bombed -; the 1918 ’flu pandemic; the Spanish Civil War; and, of course, Franco’s wretched four-decade dictatorship). 

This extraordinary woman, born in San Francisco in 1907 and now resident in the Pyrenean town of Olot, broke the isolation of quarantine by tweeting clear and coherent messages to all and sundry, in one of which she said, re Covid-19: “I believe that nothing will be the same again... You will need a new order, a change in the hierarchy of values and priorities, a new human era.” 

She’s by no means the only person to think that the post-virus world will be completely different from the one we used to be used to. 

For example, Xavier Farràs, a professor at Barcelona’s Ramon Llull University, also sees major changes ahead, such as the ascendance of Chinese-type methods of social control and a huge increase in the number of people working at home. 

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek agrees that there will be no return to normality, and foresees the emergence of “a certain form of communism”. 

By contrast, a good friend of mine in London thinks that hardly anything will change, except maybe a certain reluctance for people to pay a lot more for a coffee served in a café when they’ve got used to making their own at home for a sixth of the price (and the same goes for any other drink you care to mention). 

The French writer Michel Houellebecq has stated publicly that absolutely everything will go back to normal. 

For what it’s worth, I was firmly in the ’nothing will change’ camp until I stumbled across an article entitled ’Greed Is Dead’ in the Times Literary Supplement by the economist Paul Collier, in which the author points out that ’Economic Man’ – a term coined in the 1950s to describe the type of person who does well in capitalist societies by putting greed and selfishness to economic advantage – is on the way out and indeed, must be frog-marched to the door if the rest of us want to survive. 

Recent studies of the evolutionary origin of successful human communities have shown that homo sapiens sapiens is a uniquely social species that functions best when it’s able to weave a “vast web of kindness and mutual obligations” (Collier dixit). 

In other words, exactly the type of web in which the successful capitalists of today would be unable to avoid throttling themselves to death. In a nutshell, we are genetically programmed to be prosocial, to exchange information and assistance without a profit motive, and to thus develop the ’collective brain’ we call culture, which is essential to future human progress. 

Needless to say, any aberration from this ethical model based on mutual aid is precisely that: an abnormality, a deviation, a mistake. 

Our business model of the past couple of centuries is thus a freakish wrong turn along which those who take it are given a licence to be bad, with fatal consequences: wealthy capitalists, far from being social successes, are as impossible to integrate into a healthy society as are psychopaths. 

These recent discoveries are the result of an increased overlapping of scientific disciplines (by way of example, one of the scientists Collier quotes is a professor of ecology, biology, sociology, medicine, data statistics and biomedical engineering), which have now made it possible for us to take a much better look at the still fairly blurry Big (Human) Picture. 

It could well be that the impact of Covid-19 will finally enable us to see it so clearly, we’ll be able to detect the devil in the details – and deal with him."

(1 min video:) "Covid19 Appeal: Food & vital supplies for migrant workers in Southern Spain"

"Migrant workers, providing fruits and vegetables to UK supermarkets, have been confined to the cramped settlements in Southern Spain where they live due to recent social-distancing laws, often without access to running water, basic sanitation or food.

Ethical Consumer (here) appears to be an organisation that looks to publicise bad business practice. ‘Learn how to use your spending power to help change the world for the better’, they say."

Original source: (the highly informative) Business Over Tapas.

"MICRODYNAMICS 2020, Xavier G Solís" -- (Art in a time of Covid)

"The state of emergency confined me to my workshop, where I was putting the final touches on an installation that was to open in Barcelona on March 27, 2020. Coronavirus. I felt the collective pain touching my skin, clouding my heart.

Now in lockdown, I rediscovered a series of unpublished engravings I had made with a steamroller almost ten years ago, when the anti-austerity movement took over the country’s public squares.

Now, they revealed subtle meanings within the universe of the dynamics of abuse of power in which I had conceived them: predators feeding off disorder, sinister economic forces emerging, figures making invisible threats, examples of arrogance and cruelty.

But there are also many examples of creative solidarity. The anonymous bravery of unprecedented sensitivity that comes from looking after one other.

And in the light of coming together in this forced coexistence, I reanalysed the entire series and noticed that the engravings had grown."

More videos of his work here.

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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

"Who owns London's golf courses?"

[Beckenham Place Park, a former golf course turned into a public park by its owner, Lewisham Council.]

"Half the golf courses in Greater London are owned by councils or the Crown Estate, a new investigation by Who Owns England can reveal. 

The findings add further impetus to growing calls for golf courses and other private green spaces to be opened up to the public during the coronavirus crisis, so that there is more space to safely exercise in...

              [Golf courses (red) vs existing public parks & gardens (green) in Greater London.]

The lockdown has highlighted how access to nature is a fundamental human need – there’s mountains of evidence on the physical and mental health benefits of getting outdoors – and the fact that this is a matter of social justice: people in deprived areas have smaller gardens and less access to green space.

In the context of this emerging debate, let’s take a look at who owns London’s golf courses, and whether they could be readily persuaded to open up to a wider public.

THE OWNERS OF LONDON’S GOLF COURSES: FROM HARROW TO IMPERIAL TOBACCO

To uncover who owns London’s golf courses, I took Ordnance Survey’s Greenspace dataset, extracted just golf courses, clipped this with the GLA boundary, cleaned up a couple of errors in the dataset where polygons overlapped, and measured the area of each course. I then cross-checked the resulting 131 golf courses against Land Registry’s Corporate & Commercial dataset to uncover the owners. The full results are in this Google Spreadsheet.

Here’s the headline findings:

Golf course owners in Greater London	Acres	Percent
Corporate / private	5,122	45%
Councils	4,702	42%
Crown Estate	853	8%
Split 50/50 council & private owner	363	3%
Unknown ownership:	270	2%
Total	11,310 acres	100%

Whilst most of the corporate owners are simply fee-paying golf clubs, there are also some intriguing names, including:

• Harrow School;
• Dulwich College, who have commendably already opened up their sports fields for the public;
• Imperial Tobacco’s pension fund, owners of Selsdon Park golf course (who knew Big Tobacco cared about outdoor exercise?);
• and Du Parcq (Jersey) Ltd, owners of Brockley Hill Golf Park, registered in the offshore tax haven of Jersey.

The Crown Estate own golf courses at Hampton Court, Richmond Park, and Eltham, amongst others.

But to me the most interesting owners are the councils. Hillingdon, Enfield and Barnet are the top three London councils who own the most acres of golf course. And Bexley, Brent, Bromley, the City of London Corporation, Croydon, Ealing, Harrow, Havering, Hounslow, Kingston, Lee Valley, Lewisham, Redbridge, Richmond, Sutton, Waltham Forest – together they own thousands of acres of golf courses. They could all be opening this up immediately, if they chose to, to create more space for safer exercise. So why don’t they?

If you’d like to see this change, please sign and share my petition!"

Source here.