Hologram Protest In Spain

On the night of April 10, the streets of Madrid swarmed with protestors. They were demonstrating en masse against a series of highly-controversial Spanish laws which, once in effect, will severely limit the ability to protest in that country. But, while the rally was both well attended and vociferous in its opposition to the new legislation, it was perhaps most noteworthy for the fact that nearly everyone in attendance—reportedly 18,000 total—were not really “there” at all. They were, instead, holograms, projected in front of Spain’s Cortes Generales parliamentary building for the first holographic protest of its kind.
 The event was organized as part of Holograms por la Liberdad, a movement designed to demonstrate widespread opposition—reportedly as high as 82 percent—against a trio of dramatically restrictive laws set to go into effect on July 1. The laws would impose steep fines on anyone caught engaging in a number of activities, including photographing the police, protesting outside government buildings, and even wearing a hoodie while engaged in public demonstrations. The laws come at a time when freedom of expression throughout Spain is seen by many as being under attack on multiple fronts.

China's Rat Tribe

“Rat Tribe” explores the lives of low-waged migrant workers who live underground in Beijing and make up one-third of the city’s estimated 20 million people. These waiters, karaoke hostesses, hairdressers, chefs, security guards, domestic workers and kitchen helpers are the backbone of Beijing’s service industry. But they have been unkindly dubbed the “rat tribe” for making a home in Beijing’s 6,000 basements and air raid shelters — about one-third of the city’s underground space.

Photographer Sim Chi Yin spent two years shooting members of the capitol’s so-called “rats.” “

Monthly rent for a single that sleeps two and three people can range between an affordable 300 and 700 renminbi (about $50 and $100). But kitchens and bathrooms are communal. Hallways are dank, dark, and airless.

The spending of the rich and famous, meanwhile, is insatiable. Consultancy McKinsey & Company forecasts that China will dominate more than one-third of worldwide luxury spending by 2015, a stark comparison to an urban underbelly populated by people referred to as rats.


China's Rat Tribe, by Sim Chi Yin from Invisible Photographer Asia on Vimeo.

Why Socialist Kshama Sawant's Campaign Matters To Seattle

Kshama Sawant didn’t have to identify as a socialist.

Seattle City Council races are nonpartisan, after all, and her views aren’t particularly revolutionary, as far as Seattle goes: She supports a $15 minimum wage (as do both mayoral candidates), unions for low-wage workers and rent control.

But branding herself as a socialist – still a dirty word in many corners of American politics – may have helped her rake in 35 percent of the primary vote with little money. (She had raised about $110,000 as of Monday night.)

Councilmember Nick Licata, who has been on the council for 16 years, said Sawant’s message resonates because a section of voters are tired of risk-averse Democrats and Republicans. Sawant, he said, has managed to make socialist ideas appeal to voters.

“We don’t have a mature socialist political movement in the country, and probably the last time we did was literally 80 years ago,” Licata said. “To Sawant’s credit, she has been able to craft a message that is understandable, simple and eschews most of the rhetoric.”

Sawant ran against Richard Conlin, 64, a darling of the Democratic party with left-leaning views. Conlin appeared to be winning on Tuesday night with 54 percent of the vote when King County released its first results. Sawant received about 46 percent of the vote.

Sawant stayed on message throughout her campaign, using dry, academic language to discuss the issues she wants addressed. The roots of homelessness are within the roots of our capitalist society itself, she said at the October debate.

Later, on the social media site Reddit, she addressed rent control:

What rent control would do is provide housing security for tenants, who are at present continually forced to move due to rent increases demanded by price-gouging real estate companies. It would also address the serious income and race segregation in Seattle housing and enable low-income people, people of color, and immigrant communities to not be red-lined out of the city.

It appears that Sawant, 41, won support on the strength of her message alone. She is a Mumbai-educated economics professor who rarely strays from her platform and who avoids discussing her private life – although she has grudgingly admitted that she is separated from her husband. She doesn’t wear pantsuits or coiffe her hair, and she rarely points to her past experiences or to endorsements.

Sawant’s political campaign director, Philip Locker, an organizer for the Socialist Alternative party, said that by running for office, Sawant pushed neglected issues into the spotlight.

“We’ve gotten an enormous response – we’ve even forced both Mayor Mike McGinn and Sen. Ed Murray to discuss the $15 minimum wage,” Locker said of the mayoral candidates. “That’s powerful.”

When Sawant speaks, her supporters cheer. The Stranger has endorsed her enthusiastically, and The Nation magazine, based in Washington, D.C., wrote about her this week in equally glowing terms.

The Nation noted that Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate for president in 1912, received more than 10 percent of the vote in the Western states, including Washington.

Sawant’s campaign in Seattle speaks to a similar sense of disgruntlement with the two-party system, The Nation wrote, saying that a “bold rejection of austerity has significant popular appeal.”

But even a century ago, when Debs won more than one million votes nationwide, no socialist was this close to winning a city council position in Seattle, Scott Cline, the city’s archivist said.

City council elections have been nonpartisan since 1910, Cline said, but “I have never seen any records that indicate a city council member has self-identified as a socialist or belonged to a socialist party.”

Cline said that before 1910, a number of socialist candidates ran, but none seem to have made it out of the primary elections.

“It is certainly possible that after 1910 there might have been a serious socialist challenge,” Cline said in an email to KUOW. “However, no name from general elections stands out as a strong socialist candidate; certainly not on par with Kshama Sawant.”

Cline searched through the available voters’ pamphlets dating back to 1983 and found there has been just one other socialist candidate for Seattle City Council who did well – Yolanda Alaniz. Alaniz came in second among four candidates in 1991. She lost to Sue Donaldson, 131,872 to 27,991.

“Nevertheless, nearly 28,000 votes is quite amazing for a socialist candidate,” Cline said.
Licata said he believes that Sawant won’t be an anomaly and that more fringe candidates — on the left and the right — will run for office in coming years.

“My hope is that she doesn’t disappear after the election if she loses,” Licata said on Monday, before Tuesday night's results. “She represents the poor, the immigrants, the refugees – the folks who are not in our City Council offices lobbying us.”

On Tuesday night, Sawant told her supporters that she's not going anywhere. She hinted that she might run against Conlin again if she loses. And she said that she views the passing of the $15 minimum wage in SeaTac as evidence of the left rising up.

Isolde Raftery @ kuow.org
Original article: http://kuow.org/post/why-socialist-kshama-sawants-campaign-matters-win-or-lose

Venezuela Opens Deputy Ministry For The Supreme Social Happiness To Keep Track Of Social Programs

President Nicolás Maduro announced on Friday the creation of the Viceministerio para la Suprema Felicidad Social – a deputy ministry for the supreme social happiness. The institution will take care of complaints and applications to the services, and will monitor who is receiving what program and how it is being carried out.

The new institution will supervise the social programs the country has initiated since 2003, called Misiones. Such programs give free health care to the poorest citizens, help to the elderly and disabled, and access to education. When they launched, the Misiones gave Chávez’s presidency a much needed boost. Read the entire article here...
Venezuela Opens Deputy Ministry For The Supreme Social Happiness To Keep Track Of Social Programs

The Story Of Marinaleda, Spain's Thriving Model Communist Village

Despite the “big” failures of 20th century Communism, the 21st century boasts plenty of smaller, enduring victories against the neoliberal order. Marinaleda is one of those victories. Few of us have heard of Marinaleda, a small town of 2700 people, tucked away in Spain’s Andalusia region, around 100km east of Seville. The town’s official coat of arms states “Marinaleda – Una Utopia Hacia La Paz” (a Utopia towards Peace).

They are led by their charismatic mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, who has held the position since 1979 – re-elected time after time with an overwhelming majority.  In 2012, he became a household name in Spain after heading raids on local supermarkets to feed the Andalusian unemployed.  Mr Sánchez Gordillo’s CUT-BAI party belongs to the Izquierda Unida (“United Left”),the Communist-led coalition.

The fascinating story of this town in Southern Spain furnishes us with evidence of an embryonic, functioning, democratic socialism, which has managed to effectively struggle against the poverty and immiseration experienced in the surrounding areas of Andalusia. In Marinaleda, the residents have won and guaranteed greater rights for themselves – to pay, to housing and to facilities.

The core of Marinaleda’s communist ethic is a 1,200 hectare co-operative farm that was won through a decade of occupations and hunger strikes from the Duke of Infantado. The Duke’s property was just one of many instances in Spain of vast estates with arable land fenced off from the area’s surrounding, usually starving, population. The farm, known as El Humoso, sells its products internationally. Fair-trade and “socially aware” brands often get a bad rap by critical theorists. But El Humoso makes a compelling counterpoint to the likes of Starbucks and Tom’s Shoes. “Know that when you consume any product from our co-operative, you are helping to create employment and social justice,” says Gordillo.

The eight agricultural co-operatives on the farm concentrate on labour intensive crop production such as artichokes, peppers, beans and also wheat and olive groves. Every worker gets paid the same wage – €47 for a six and a half hour working day. It may not sound like a lot, but it's more than double the Spanish minimum wage.  Marinaleda, now has an unemployment rate of 5%. Spain, by constrast, has an unemployment rate of 27%.

Marinaleda, surprisingly, has no police. They didn’t abolish the police force, or violently expel its officers. Marinaleda had one police officer. When that officer retired, they never hired a replacement. Now, Gordillo has been known to chase down delinquent youths on his own and speak to their families. Surprisingly, it seems to work out.

A few times every year Marinaleda organize something called red and green Sundays. On these days everyone participates in making the town and the cooperative better for the whole. ‘Red Sunday’ means that everyone does something to improve the town – paint houses, fix pipes, improve pavements and similar jobs. ‘Green Sunday’ means that everyone works extra in the fields, harvesting, packing and so on. This free work benefits everyone who lives in Marinaleda.

Everyone in Marinaleda is employed and nearly everyone has a proper house. The housing policy is that once you have lived in Marinaleda for two years, you get materials to build your own house. The houses are built on municipal land, with materials provided by local and regional government. Local people pay just €15 a month while contributing an agreed number of working hours per month to the construction of the houses. This house cannot be sold, but given away to your children or to someone you choose. Just in recent years three hundred houses have been build.

As an example of Marinaleda’s socialist ideology and believing that power has to be put into the hands of local people, the local Council has created General Assemblies where around 400 to 600 local people meet 25 to 30 times a year to voice their concerns and vote on issues. A further example of the Council’s form of local democracy is the use of “participatory budgets” whereby each year the Council’s proposed investments and expenditures are taken to local areas for discussion.

Marinaleda certainly is a breath of fresh air in a dark Spanish crisis, and might motivate others to live differently.

How Poverty Taxes the Brain

Human mental bandwidth is finite. You’ve probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you’re lost in concentration trying to solve a problem like a broken computer, you’re more likely to neglect other tasks, things like remembering to take the dog for a walk, or picking your kid up from school. This is why people who use cell phones behind the wheel actually perform worse as drivers. It’s why air traffic controllers focused on averting a mid-air collision are less likely to pay attention to other planes in the sky.

We only have so much cognitive capacity to spread around. It's a scarce resource.

This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

Read the entire article here.. How Poverty Taxes the Brain

The Tunnel People That Live Under The Streets Of America

Did you know that there are thousands upon thousands of homeless people that are living underground beneath the streets of major U.S. cities?  It is happening in Las Vegas, it is happening in New York City and it is even happening in Kansas City.  As the economy crumbles, poverty in the United States is absolutely exploding and so is homelessness. Read More..
The Tunnel People That Live Under The Streets Of America

Belo Horizonte: The City That Beat Hunger - Video

This is a short film (12 minutes) that shows how Belo Horizonte, a city of 2.5 million, in Minas Gerais, Brasil developed a food policy to ensure that no citizen went hungry.
Back in 1993, the newly elected city government of Belo Horizonte, Brazil declared that food was a right of citizenship. At that time, the city of 2.5 million had 275,000 people living in absolute poverty, and close to 20 percent of its children were going hungry.
The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting”.
It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.
In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about twenty healthy items.
Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.
In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.
The cost of these efforts?
Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.
(Excerpts drawn from http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/the-city-that-ended-hunger)

These women can't read ... and they are solar engineers - Video

(Courtesy: Avaaz)
These women come from the poorest communities in the world, they can't read, and often have no schooling. So how have they become solar engineers in six months? Meet the Solar Mamas of Barefoot College. For more than 30 years the Barefoot College has been working to improve the quality of life of the rural poor. They've found that trained men often leave their villages with their newfound skills, looking for better opportunities, but women stick around and improve life for their families, neighbours and the entire community.

Montreal Pots And Pans Video Of Protest Against Bill 78 Goes Viral

This beautiful black and white film shows protesters of all ages taking to the streets to protest the emergency law Bill 78 in Canada.Bill 78 is being called a draconian attempt to quell massive student protests that have taken over Quebec streets for more than 100 days. The bill limits the ability to protest by requiring groups to get police approval for demonstrations and restricting where they can take place, among other provisions.