Spain

The Spailout Has ALREADY Failed...Before the Ink has Even Dried

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/06/the-spailout-has-already-failed.html

"The market rallied for a couple of hours on news of the $100 billion dollar Spanish bailout (which everyone is calling the Spailout)..and then crashed. This 'Spanic' over the Spanish crisis is occuring even before the bailout deal has been finalized. Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz points out the Ponzi scheme nature of the whole bailout discussion..

'Europe's plan to lend money to Spain to heal some of its banks may not work because the government and the country's lenders will be in effect propping each other up. The system...is the Spanish government bails out Spanish banks and Spanish banks bail out the Spanish government. It's voodoo economics..'

Yanis Varoufakis on Europe's 'Dickensian Workhouse' and the Fiscal Waterboarding of Spain (and vid)

http://rt.com/programs/capital-account/yanis-varoufakis-bailout-spanish/

"The latest 'Spanish bailout' is really a 100-billion-euro-bailout for Spain's banks that adds to the tab of the already indebted Spanish government. But is this really just a blood wedding between banks and the state that will end in a bloodbath of pain threatening to consume all of Europe in its wake?

Are these really solutions that channel the workhouses of the Victorian era, of a Dickens novel, in their conditions? Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, has used this to describe the EU's solution to a crisis that has dragged on for almost five years in some countries, and even longer in others. He joins us to give us his take on the latest Spanish 'bailout'..."

Obama's kill lists. They have to implement austerity and force a generation of Europeans into unemployment and economic depression in Europe because of Obama's kill lists. Bankers and corrupt politicians have no real power over the 99% except to assassinate and order hits on one another unless they do as instructed by oligarchs.

Yeah it's not like Canadians have ever had to bailout Canada's big six banks for their losses on foreign oil speculations and bad real estate gambles in the 1980s-90's. We can hold our heads high and walk the talke because Ottawa doesn't do socialism for bankers. Just socialism for profitable oil and gas companies is all. Nobody here but us chickens.

Spanish Miners (and vid)

http://www.leninology.com/2012/07/spanish-miners.html

"The Asturian miners have embarked on a new 'Marcha Negra', a repeat of a famous action twenty years ago in 1992, when miners marched across the country to Madrid in defiance of job losses and cuts. Last night the miners arrived in Madrid, surrounded by approximately 150,000 supporters, about ten times the size of the reception in 1992. The Spanish media blacked it out.."

Spanish Rallies Turn Violent as Million People Protest in 80 Cities (vid, photos)

http://www.rt.com/news/spain-protests-austerity-cuts-634/

"Over a million public employees, trade union members and fed up citizens have taken to the streets in over 80 Spanish cities. A man holds up a sign reading 'Spaniards, Franco is back!' on a street in Madrid during a protest against the Spanish government's latest austerity measures.."

Indignados: austerity as a violation of human rights

By drawing attention to the systematic violation of human rights, 15-M has helped to shine a light on the illegitimacy of the financial structure.

http://roarmag.org/2012/08/indignados-austerity-as-a-violation-of-basic-...

Madrid On The Brink (video)

http://vimeo.com/50542582

This short film chronicles the events of September 25-29th in Madrid, Spain where tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand the resignation of the government and an end to police brutality. Many of the protests ended in clashes with the police. Since the stand off began on September 25th , the images of police brutality have travelled the world over, shocking and inspiring people across.

..that was an excellent piece ndpp. txs.

#GamonalEffect Reignites Mass Protest Across Spain

Yesterday, firefighters in Barcelona congregated in Plaça de Catalunya in an impressive show of force carrying signs that read “If Burgos can, We can too”.

Last night in Madrid 13 demonstrators were arrested as thousands took to the streets of the Gran Via.

Demonstrators were quickly bailed out thanks to crowd funding efforts. The #GamonalEffect reminds us of the latent potential of networks created after the #M15 and #TaketheSquare movements in 2011.

Video: hundreds of thousands march in Madrid

Over 100 people were injured and at least two dozen arrested after clashes broke out following an anti-austerity rally in Madrid last night. Arriving in six columns from all over the country (many of them on foot), hundreds of thousands of protesters converged upon the Spanish capital as part of a nationwide “March of Dignity”. As Spain enters its sixth year of crisis, with unemployment at a shocking 26% and nearly half a million families having been evicted from their homes since 2008, the indignation naturally runs high.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zrxf1Q3Jqo

A new(?) form of protest in Spain: The Iaioflautas

“We are the generation that has fought to achieve a better life for our children. Right now, they are toying with the futures of our children and grandchildren… We stand by them in spirit, at the local assemblies and at all their activities. If they condescendingly call these people “Perroflautas” (hobos) to diminish their audacity, then let them call us “Iaioflautas” (from the spanish yayo, which means grandpa)”.

The Iaioflautas support the young in their fight for democracy and social justice, “against the bankers and their accomplices the politicians”. They combat the rampant speculation, the cut-backs, the privatisation, and the mutualising of the losses, like saving banks with public money. They also support the PAH and all those who have been thrown out of their homes for mortgage debts. They are to be found in 11 cities, 4 of them in Catalonia, and are active on both facebook and twitter.

On October 27, 2011, the Iaioflautas occupied their first bank, Banco Santander in Barcelona.
 This particular bank was picked as a starting point for the day of actions against banks because its director, Mr. Botin, denoted that the banks are the doubtless winners of the economical crisis. This man has a personal fortune of about 1,7 Billion Euro. This was just the beginning of a campaign to occupy banks (i.e. La Caixa in Badalona), through which they still protest against the bankers and the financial oligarchy, who “ruin the lives of 99% of people”....

http://www.x-pressed.org/?xpd_article=a-new-form-of-protest-in-spain-the...

.......

Iaioflautas

video

The crisis we live in today has resulted in the birth of several protest movements to combat the policies of cuts and austerity, marked by the Government, the European Community and the IMF. These policies have been generating social unrest, and movements like 15M have given a voice to thousands of people disappointed with the way the Government has dealt with the crisis.

The collective ’iaioflautas’ is a movement made up of retired people that decided to join the 15 M movement to support the plight of the younger generations. They are between 60 and 90 years old and they lived through the Franco dictatorship era. They have been participants in the restitution of democracy and the establishment of the pillars of the Spanish welfare state. Today, they witness the devastating austerity measures that are in reality disintegrating the structure of the welfare state. Today, they witness how the financial and political crisis that we live in is taking apart the welfare state that was so difficult to build. Their struggle is not directly linked to their interests, it is a struggle they take for their children and grandchildren....

http://vimeo.com/58216283

Spain's 'Robin Hood' swindled banks to help fight capitalism

They call him the Robin Hood of the banks, a man who took out dozens of loans worth almost half a million euros with no intention of ever paying them back. Instead, Enric Duran farmed the money out to projects that created and promoted alternatives to capitalism.

After 14 months in hiding, Duran is unapologetic even though his activities could land him in jail. "I'm proud of this action," he said in an interview by Skype from an undisclosed location. The money, he said, had created opportunities. "It generated a movement that allowed us to push forward with the construction of alternatives. And it allowed us to build a powerful network that groups together these initiatives."

From 2006 to 2008, Duran took out 68 commercial and personal loans from 39 banks in Spain. He farmed the money out to social activists, funding speaking tours against capitalism and TV cameras for a media network. "I saw that on one side, these social movements were building alternatives but that they lacked resources and communication capacities," he said. "Meanwhile, our reliance on perpetual growth was creating a system that created money out of nothing."....

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/20/spain-robin-hood-banks-capi...

..i am finding what is emerging politically in spain quite fascinating. the speed in which these new parties are moving is astounding. makes me want to learn much more about them. what their policies are. how decisions are made etc....

The Left Can Win

Spain’s newest political party is also its most popular. With roots in the 2011 indignados movement (also called the 15-M movement), Podemos emerged in January with a petition launched by a few dozen intellectuals. In May’s European Parliament elections, just months after its formation, the leftist party captured 8 percent of the vote. It is now the second largest political party in Spain by membership and the largest in the polls. Even the Financial Times admits, “the new party appears to be on course to shatter Spain’s established two-party system.”

At a meeting held early this year in Valladolid, Spain, Podemos General Secretary Pablo Iglesias offered his thoughts on how the Left can win. Below is an excerpt from that talk. The video was uploaded by Joaquín Navarro and the transcript below was prepared for Jacobin by Enrique Diaz-Alvarez.

...

I know very well that the key to understanding the history of the past five hundred years is the emergence of specific social categories, called “classes.” And I am going to tell you an anecdote. When the 15-M movement first started, at the Puerta del Sol, some students from my department, the department of political science, very political students — they had read Marx, they had read Lenin — they participated for the first time in their lives with normal people.

They despaired: “They don’t understand anything! We tell them, you are a worker, even if you don’t know it!” People would look at them as if they were from another planet. And the students went home very depressed, saying, “They don’t understand anything.”

[I’d reply to them], “Can’t you see that the problem is you? That politics has nothing to do with being right, that politics is about succeeding?” One can have the best analysis, understand the keys to political developments since the sixteenth century, know that historical materialism is the key to understanding social processes. And what are you going to do — scream that to people? “You are workers and you don’t even know it!”...

Barcelona en Comú: the city as horizon for radical democracy

With all eyes on Syriza, Podemos and the Troika, the focus of attention among the left these days is the possibility to reclaim democracy at the state — and, inshallah, at the supranational — level. Yet at the same time, somewhat less visibly, there is a new cycle of struggles for democratic governance unfolding at the level of the city.

One such municipal movement and platform is Barcelona en Comú (Catalan for ‘Barcelona in Common’, formerly Guanyem Barcelona). Pioneering new ways and words for approaching the city as common(s), Barcelona en Comú opens possibilities for a politics rooted in everyday experiences, social relations and spaces of reproduction.

quote:

Methodology and organization

There’s a lot to tell about the methodology of Barcelona en Comú, as its radical democratic approach comes with a host of tools, techniques, mechanisms and structures for enabling municipal politics from below. Amongst those are various levels of assemblies (neighborhoods, thematic areas, coordination, logistics, media, communication, etc.) and online platforms (for communicating, voting, working). The initiative’s organigram looks more like a washing machine or a particle accelerator than a flat or vertical hierarchy.

That’s quite appropriate, because politics and organization are spun around on a daily basis here, reconsidered and reconfigured in an intense experiment in collective thinking and acting. All of that happens without prescriptions, instructions, funding or lobbies but with lots of heads, hands and feet at work: not your typical ‘smart’ and regulated participatory process.

Starting without a recipe, however, does not mean that the initiative is not inventing its own terms, conditions and practices. The most inspiring example of such innovation is the Guanyem code for Political Ethics, which was discussed, annotated and ratified at an open working weekend in October 2014 — with some 300 people present and many more following and commenting online. This ethics code outlines the platform’s basic compromises as concerning representation, auditing, accountability, financing, transparency, professionalization and corruption, and applies to anyone working within it.

At the level of policy proposals, thematic working groups (health, migration, culture, tourism, work, economy, urbanism, gender, local governance, education, information) have taken on the task of formulating position papers that feature minimum criteria and proposals for each area. These will be negotiated with the other parties (ICV, EuIA, Podem Barcelona, Procés Constituent und Equo) that joined Barcelona En Comú in a common candidature.

Barcelona En Comú is also an experiment in creating, accessing and valorizing common infrastructures and resources. It has very few material resources at its disposal, but it manages to create new forms of access to existing resources, opening doors to council infrastructures with new legitimacy and collective claims, as well as valorizing grassroots and self-run social and political infrastructures. This gives the ‘common’ in its name a very concrete significance....

http://roarmag.org/2015/03/barcelona-en-comu-guanyem/

In municipal elections, Podemos wins Barcelona, may govern Madrid in conjunction with the Socialist Party.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-24/podemos-may-win-madrid...

Grassroots movements sweep into Barcelona town hall

The outcome of Sunday’s municipal and regional elections in Spain is shaking the country. Two activist women connected to grassroots movements and backed by the leftist party Podemos are likely to become the next mayors of Spain’s biggest cities — Madrid and Barcelona — while the ruling right-wing Popular Party has taken a drubbing in cities and regions across the country. Five years of austerity have finally taken their toll on the establishment’s grip on power, effectively shattering the old way of doing politics....

http://roarmag.org/2015/05/barcelona-comu-election-victory/

[url=http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/25/409421435/spains-ruling... 'Occupying' A Spanish Bank To City Hall: Barcelona's New Mayor[/url]

Quote:

Colau is the first of the indignados, or angry ones — Spain's Occupy movement — to win office. She narrowly defeated Barcelona Mayor Xavier Trias in local elections Sunday.

Cheers of "Sí se puede!" — "Yes we can!" — went up through the crowd at Colau's campaign headquarters in Barcelona overnight, when vote tallies showed she had won.

"This is a victory of David over Goliath," Colau told supporters, beaming.

Yes let´s not fool ourselves into thinking even the most radical leftist parties are up to the challenge of systemic collapse...it will take a strong alternative community and ecology based decentralist and development movement...something which is pathetically missing in Canada...a political movement to challenge the credibility of all the parties must be established but based in community decentralist grass roots development including cultural transformation and economics and finance...this is our work in Canada!

From Occupying Banks to City Hall: Meet Barcelona’s New Mayor Ada Colau

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/5/from_occupying_banks_to_city_hall

Barcelona en Comú joins Podemos in Spanish elections

Last week, Barcelona En Comú declared that their radical municipal platform—currently governing Spain’s second largest city—will stand with Podemos in the Spanish general elections on December 20. According to their press release, the motion was passed by the platform’s plenary assembly with 71% of the vote in favor.

The candidacy will be a Catalan coalition aiming to secure its own parliamentary group in the Spanish Congress. The election ticket in Barcelona will be headed up by Xavier Domenech, a well-known historian and one of the leading voices in debates on constitutional processes and historical memory. A figure of consensus among the political forces signing the agreement, Domenech gained a certain level of notoriety in his short time as the city’s Commissioner for Strategic Studies and Historical Memory.

quote:

The name of the coalition in Catalonia will be En Comú Podem (“in common we can”). Their program will be based on four points, including the right to Catalan self-determination, the protection of municipal sovereignty and the defense of the citizen municipal movement, an emergency citizen rescue plan to deal with the impacts of the economic crisis and neoliberal austerity, and new mechanisms for change that tackle cross-border challenges such as TTIP and climate change.

The move comes after several months of declining support for Podemos in national polls and the underwhelming results achieved by a coalition between Podemos and the Catalan Greens in September’s regional elections.

Framed by Catalan politicians as a pseudo-referendum on their nation’s independence from Spain, the regional elections resulted in a pro-independence majority in the Catalan parliament and a surge in support for the pro-Spain Ciudadanos party, whose unequivocal centralism clashed with Podemos’s nuanced support for a binding referendum and constitutional change.

Over recent weeks, Podemos have approached radical parties and coalitions in Catalonia, Galicia and Valencia, among other regions, with the goal of building local coalitions in favor of changing Spain’s constitution along five points. These points include reforming Spain’s electoral law, guaranteeing the independence of the judiciary, guaranteeing social rights including decent housing, education and health care, stopping the revolving door mechanisms between political and business elites, and reforming the Senate to guarantee territorial representation.

According to a poll published in El País on Sunday, November 1, since adopting this strategy Podemos have reversed their declining numbers, and support once again appears to be on the upswing.

Beyond the Ballot Box

From the indignados and 15M to housing struggles and municipalismo, Spain has been at the forefront of some of the most creative and effective social movements of recent years. With citizen-led coalitions now governing in Madrid and Barcelona, many see the Spainish context as offering a beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak political climate.

As the country heads to the polls on #20D in one of the most unpredictable elections for many years, the capacity for upstart parties and movements to grow further will be affected by the result. But how exactly is the capacity of Spain’s grassroots politics related to what happens in parliament? And in particular how important is Podemos’s performance in the elections to the future of progressive politics in the country?

In our latest English language episode, filmed in the studios of La Tuerka, the talkshow founded by Pablo Iglesias, we discuss these questions and more with Juan Luis Sánchez (eldiario.es), Carlos Delclos (ROAR), Ana Méndez and Mario Munero (City of Madrid).

Exit polls: Conservatives to come in first but short of a majority. Podemos to win almost as many seats as the Socialists.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/dec/20/spain-election-results...

Podemos Decides

This weekend’s Podemos congress will see the party make existential choices about its future.

quote:

At the core of this dispute between the Pablistas and Errejonistas is the question of how Podemos, a party that traces its origins back to the indignados movement, should approach its new role as a force in the country’s political institutions. The divisions are particularly pointed on the subject of relations with the center-left Socialist Party (PSOE).

Errejón prioritizes “constructive” engagement in the hope of reaching out to a wider range of voters than their young, urban base. He views the party’s failure to achieve a sorpasso of PSOE in the second elections last June as proof that the idea of Podemos as an “iconoclastic party,” railing against the establishment, has reached its limit.

If the party is to grow, Errejón argues, it has to demonstrate that it can operate as an effective institutional force capable of “governing a different Spain.” As he put it: “the powerful already fear us — this is not the challenge. It is to seduce those who are suffering but don’t trust us.”

In contrast, Iglesias believes that the last year of political deadlock has revealed a Socialist leadership incapable of breaking from the “extreme center.”

Both are in agreement that Podemos should continue to be a “transversal” force, capable of appealing to a wide social spectrum, but Iglesias cautions against this becoming a rationale for Podemos to abandon its opposition to the Spanish regime.

Rather than turning Podemos into “respectable” parliamentary force, Iglesias keeps faith with its original populist hypothesis: that a radical force could come to occupy “the center of the political board,” redefining Spanish politics around a divide between the neoliberal agenda of the elites and the economic welfare of the rest of society.

“A political crisis is a moment for daring,” he said, “it is when a revolutionary is capable of looking people in the eye and telling them, ‘those people are your enemies.’”

Interesting developments. Such a contrast to what is happening in France.