info
Spanish firefighters clash with riot police during a protest against proposed spending cuts in Barcelona on May 29. Hundreds of firefighters had earlier gathered in front of the Catalonian parliament building, lighting flares, throwing smoke bombs and burning coffins labelled ‘public services’.
The firefighters’ union warned that cuts to staff and budgets proposed as part of Spain’s broader program of austerity would “put at risk the safety of workers and the people of Catalonia.”
Massive crowd in Barcelona; banner: “Stop financial genocide, together we can!”
Unconfirmed reports that upwards of 200,000 people are marching in Spain today. Madrid Anti Austerity Demonstration Panorama of Sol Plaza now. On the second Anniversary of the movement.
GR.TV will be covering the events live all day: http://globalrevolution.tv/
Via Occupy LosAngeles
“To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts, to create is to resist. To resist is to create.” —Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-Vous! (Time for Outrage)
Real, complete, fire-able 3D printed ‘liberator’ gun downloaded tens of thousands of times
May 9, 2013
If gun control advocates hoped to prevent blueprints for the world’s first fully 3D-printable gun from spreading online, that horse has now left the barn about a hundred thousand times.
That’s the number of downloads of the 3D-printable file for the so-called “Liberator” gun that the high-tech gunsmithing group Defense Distributed has seen in just the last two days, a member of the group tells me. The gun’s CAD files have been ten times more popular than any component the group has previously made available, parts that have included the body of an AR-15 and the magazine for an AK-47.”This has definitely been our most well-received download,” says Haroon Khalid, a developer working with Defense Distributed. “I don’t think any of us predicted it would be this much.”
The controversial gun-printing group is hosting those files, which include everything from the gun’s trigger to its body to its barrel, on a service that has attracted some controversy of its own: Kim Dotcom’s Mega storage site. Although the blueprint is only publicly visible on Defense Distributed’s own website Defcad.org, users who click on it are prompted to download the collection of CAD files from Mega.co.nz, which advertises that it encrypts all users’ information and has a reputation for resisting government surveillance.
Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed’s 25-year-old founder, says that the group chose to use Mega mostly because it was fast and free. But he also says he feels a degree of common cause with Kim Dotcom, the ex-hacker chief executive of Mega who has become a vocal critic of the U.S. government after being indicted for copyright infringement and racketeering in early 2012. “We’re sympathetic to Kim Dotcom,” says Wilson. “There are plenty of services we could have used, but we chose this one. He’s down for the struggle.”
The most downloads of Defense Distributed’s “Liberator,” surprisingly, haven’t come from the U.S., but from Spain, according to Khalid’s count. The U.S. is second, ahead of Brazil, Germany, and the U.K., he says, although he wasn’t able to provide absolute download numbers for each country.
Update: Although Spain was initially outpacing the U.S. in downloads, it seems more Americans have now downloaded the file.
The gun’s blueprint, of course, may have also already spread far wider than Defense Distributed can measure. It’s also been uploaded to the filesharing site the Pirate Bay, where it’s quickly become one of the most popular files in the site’s 3D-printing category. “This is the first in what will become an avalanche of undetectable, untraceable, easy-to-manufacture weapons that will turn the tables on evil-doers the world over,” writes one user with the name DakotaSmith on the site. “Share and enjoy.”
It’s worth noting that only a fraction of those who download the printable gun file will ever try to actually create one. Defense Distributed used an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST to print their prototype, a 3D printer that the vast majority of its fans won’t have access to.
Nonetheless the “Liberator,” which I first revealed last Friday and then witnessed being test-fired over the weekend, has caused an enormous stir online. Defense Distributed says that it received 540,000 users to its website in the two days since its printable gun was released, and its video revealing the gun has attracted 2.8 million views on YouTube.
The project has also already immediately inspired a legal backlash. New York congressmen Steve Israel and Chuck Schumer have both called for the renewal of the Undetectable Firearms Act to ban any gun that can’t be spotted with a metal detector.
But Defense Distributed’s real goal hasn’t been to create an undetectable gun so much as an uncensorable, digital one. As the group’s founder radical libertarian founder Cody Wilson sees it, firearms can be made into a printable file that blurs the line between gun control and information censorship, blending the First Amendent and the Second and demonstrating how technology can render the government irrelevant.
“Call me crazy, but I see a world where contraband will pass underground through the data cables to be printed in our homes as the drones move overhead,” Wilson said when we first spoke in August of last year. “I see a kind of poetry there…I dream of this very weird future and I’d like to be a part of it.”
Scary. We reported this about a year ago when they only had a few parts of the gun available to print. It got reblogs with comments like ‘yah but they won’t develop the technology in our lifetime to print the whole gun.’ Welp, as I said then and I say now, this is not some distant-future technology. It is here now, available to people who have an expensive 3D Printer, but in the next few years, 3D printers will become cheaper and cheaper and eventually, way cheaper. So I think this is important & I think we should be paying attention to this.
This is the reality of austerity: Greek children are starving
April 22, 2013
Force-feeding Greece with budget cuts and tax increases gets a predictable, and tragic, results.
It’s not fair to blame Rogoff and Reinhart for the austerity craze that has gripped Europe. It is fair to say that their presentation of flawed data about the last half-century of growth and debt was used as intellectual ammunition in a total war on deficits that has destroyed families across the continent.
In Greece, the fog of austerity is more than a metaphor. This winter, a very real cloud of smoke haunted the city at night, as families burned felled trees and broken chairs to stay warm. While the economy has shrunk by a fifth and youth unemployment has screamed past 50 percent, the real tragedy can’t really be told with numbers. It’s simple, really. Children are starving.
The New York Times reports the heart-breaking details:
“He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground. He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.
The euro was supposed to tie Europe together as a single unified economic powerhouse. When Greek children go malnourished while unemployment falls in Germany, you can see very clearly that unity is just another European myth. In the United States, we have an answer for weak state economies. It’s called Mississippi. They get a permanent “bail out” through an annual transfer of money: tax credits, Medicaid spending, infrastructure assistance, and so on. In Europe, the answer for failing state economies is: You get this bag of money if you take the following measures to destroy your economy.
You don’t need to know how to fact-check Harvard economists to understand a simple truth: Force-feeding austerity to a country starving for money and growth will only get you more starvation.
The People’s Record News Update: this week on our dying planet
March 17, 2013
- In Brazil, environmental authorities in Rio de Janeiro have launched a huge clean-up operation after an estimated 65 tonnes of dead fish filled up the 2016 Olympic rowing lake.
- Greenpeace released a report on pollution in India that indicated one Indian coal power plants kills 120,000 people a year. Also, the report on pollution in the country warns emissions may cause 20 million new asthma cases a year.
- In China, more dead pigs have been recovered from the Huangpu river in Shanghai following the discovery of more than 2,800 floating carcasses earlier this week. The find brings the total to more than 6,600 carcasses since last Friday.
- In Spain, a majestic sperm whale has been found to have died due to swallowing 40 lbs of plastic. The dead sperm whale that washed up on Spain’s south coast had swallowed 17kg of plastic waste dumped into the sea by farmers tending greenhouses that produce tomatoes and other vegetables for British supermarkets.
Scientists were amazed to find the 4.5 tonne whale had swallowed 59 different bits of plastic – most of it thick transparent sheeting used to build greenhouses in southern Almeria and Granada. A clothes hanger, an ice-cream tub and bits of mattress were also found. The plastic had eventually blocked the animal’s stomach and killed it.
- Big Pharma on Friday won the first round of its fight to defeat a European proposal to ban a trio of commonly used pesticides suspected of killing honeybees. The closely watched measure, which calls for a European Union-wide moratorium on three types of neonicotinoid pesticides, failed to secure the needed votes from the 27 EU member states today, a result cheered by the manufacturers of the chemicals.
Capitalism isn’t working - look at what the private industries who hold all the power in our society are doing to the living things on this planet. We need to restructure the way we organize ourselves and we need to do it fast. This is all just so overwhelming.
Thousands of people are marching on Spain’s parliament to protest austerity measures imposed by the government.
February 23, 2013
Saturday’s protest comes on the 32nd anniversary of a failed attempt by the armed forces to overthrow the government. Several protest groups joined forces under a single slogan called “Citizens’ Tide, 23F,” referring to the Feb. 23, 1981 attack by armed forces on Spain’s parliament.
Organizers say that Spain today “is under a financial coup” and have called on people to march to parliament to protest austerity measures and what they say is government favoritism toward financial institutions at the expense of ordinary citizens.
Marchers decried “the pressure of financial markets” and corruption in government and the country’s banking system, and called on lawmakers to find alternatives that won’t “give away” the welfare state.
Thousands protest privatization of healthcare in Spain
February 17, 2013
Thousands of demonstrators have marched through the streets of 16 Spanish cities Sunday to protest plans to part-privatise the public health care system, with some questioning the government’s motives.
It was the third “white tide” demonstration in Madrid, named after the colour of the medical scrubs many protesters wear.
But it was the first time cities other than the capital took part, including Barcelona, Cuenca, Murcia, Pamplona, Toledo and Zaragoza.
Protesters marched carrying banners saying “Public health is not to be sold, it’s to be defended”.
Health care and education are administered by Spain’s 17 semi-autonomous regions.
Some indebted ones, like Madrid, have announced the part-privatisation of some services, with some people openly suspicious that the move is more a political-motivated ploy than an attempt to cut costs.
Civil servant Javier Tarabilla, 31, said Spain’s welfare state was being dismantled to be handed over to the private sector.
“This is pillaging of our public services, looting something we’ve all contributed to through taxes, to give it to private companies to run for profit,” he said.
Spaniards protest against healthcare privatization
January 7, 2013
Thousands of Spanish medical workers marched through downtown Madrid on Monday to protest against budget cuts and plans to partly privatize their cherished national health service.
The march is part of a series of such demonstrations, described as a “white tide” because of the color of the medical scrubs many protesters wear. Participants on Monday walked behind a large banner saying, “Health care is not to be sold, it’s to be defended.”
Monica Garcia, spokeswoman for the Association of Medical Specialists of Madrid, which initiated the march, said her organization would continue to protest “the loss of our public health care, a national heritage that belongs to us and not to the government.”
She said the regional government was trying “to obtain economic benefit” from a system it had not invested in.
Health care and education are currently administered by Spain’s 17 semi-autonomous regions rather than the central government.
Many regions are struggling financially as Spain’s economy has fallen back into recession, having never recovered from a real estate crash in 2008. Some regions overspent in the good times but are now unable to borrow on financial markets to repay their huge debts, forcing them to make savings and even request rescue aid from the central government.
The region of Madrid proposes selling the management of six of 20 large public hospitals in its territory and 27 of 268 health centers. It argues that’s needed to fix the region’s finances and secure health services.
Doctor Agustin Reverte, 31, said privatizations would lead to less diagnostic tests on patients who will be attended by fewer medical staff, reducing the overall quality of the service.
“Those in government have money, so they don’t care if they have to pay for health care,” said Aurora Rojas, a 55-year-old nurse. “But the rest of us who just have a regular salary will not be able to afford decent treatment,” she said.
The insufferable human drama of evictions in Spain
December 14, 2012
With 500 families being evicted in Spain every day, foreclosures have become a source of great suffering. But luckily, there are still those who resist.
Throughout this crisis, there has always been a certain alienating quality to the pronouncements of European leaders and technocrats. Sometimes one is led to wonder if these people are actually talking about the same continent — or the same universe, for that matter. Just today, for instance, the European Central Bank announced that “the eurozone is starting to heal.” Indeed, the major weakness the central bankers could detect from the commanding heights of their glass-and-steel tower in downtown Frankfurt was “falling bank profits.”
But this morning, huddled together with activists and independent journalists in a small apartment in Madrid, the eurozone seemed to be far from healing. Together with Santiago Carrión from the Associated Whistleblowing Press, we were there because the Platform for those Affected by their Mortgage (PAH), which runs the Stop Desahucios (Stop Evictions) campaign, had called on the city’s indignados to protect Juana Madrid and her two daughters of 21 and 17, who were about to be evicted from their humble home in the poor neighborhood of Orcasur. The atmosphere, of course, was tense.
The living room was full of people, most of them photographers, while outside the first chants of activists could be heard as people prepared to physically block the entrance to the apartment. Nervously dragging on her cigarette, Juana’s baggy and dark-ringed eyes said it all: this was a woman on the verge of a breakdown. Her voice was calm and subdued, but her facial expression exuded despair. “We have nowhere to go,” Juana’s 21-year-old daughter Isa told us in the kitchen. “If they evict us today we will end up on the street tonight.”
Sadly, the story of Juana and her daughters is by no means an exception. Ever since the start of the crisis in late 2008, over 350.000 families have been evicted from their homes. According to government figures, Spain currently faces a staggering wave of 500 evictions per day — 150 of them in Madrid alone. The vast majority of these involve families whose main breadwinner lost his or her job in the recession and who have inadvertently fallen behind on their mortgage payments to the bank. At 25.02%, Spain’s unemployment rate is the highest in the developed world, higher even than in the U.S. at the peak of the Great Depression.
Recent months have seen a wave of high-profile suicides by people who were about to be evicted from their homes. The most paradigmatic case was that of a 53-year-old woman in the Basque Country, who jumped from her balcony and plunged to death as foreclosure agents made their way up the stairs of her apartment. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, tells the harrowing story of a Spanish locksmith who was taken aback when he pried open the door of a foreclosed apartment for police, and encountered a woman giving birth inside. According to the locksmith, it was “evident that the stress of the foreclosure had induced premature birth.”
Since then, a number of high judges have spoken out against the “inhumane” foreclosure laws in Spain, which they consider to be “overly protective of the politically influential banks”. Under immense media pressure, the conservative government finally passed an emergency law allowing the most vulnerable families to be spared from eviction. Still, the new law will only cover some 120.000 people and does not tackle the root of the problem, which is the fact that the government keeps squeezing workers, students, homeowners, pensioners and the sick and disabled in order to pay for the folly of a tiny elite of gambling bankers.
The human tragedy, after all, is only part of the story. The other part, as the Spanish indignados rightly point out, is the estafa: the fraud. Many of the mortgages that now shackle millions of families to unpayable debt loads, came about under highly dubious circumstances to begin with. The banks never cared if people would be able to repay their debts: as long as house prices kept rising, a defaulting family could still be evicted and replaced by another. After the bank reclaimed the property, it could just re-sell it at a profit. The fact that lives are being destroyed and families shattered in the process is wholly irrelevant for the financial imperatives of the bank.
And thus, the people end up paying the banks triple: first through the usurious interest rates they pay on their mortgage loans (which are essentially conjured up out of thin air by the banks); second through the tax-payer-funded bailouts of the same banks, after many of these mortgages started going bad; and third through the homes they are losing and which subsequently fall back into the property of the bank, which can — a few years down the line, when real estate prices will have recovered somewhat — sell on the property to a third party.
The People’s Record Daily News Update - Whose news? Our news!
November 22, 2012
Here are some stories you may not otherwise read about today:
- 23 medics in Bahrain were sentenced to three months in jail for offering medical assistance to critically injured protesters. The medics alternatively have the option to pay a large sum of money (roughly $550 US Dollars) to their oppressive government to forgo their sentence.
- The Moscow Region in Russia is set to outlaw all ‘promotion of non-traditional sexual relationships’, following the lead of St Petersburg, who banned the promotion of “gay propaganda” toward children months earlier.
- Six elderly women in Massachusetts face charges for chaining themselves to the gate of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The women will be tried on trespassing charges next week.
- In an out-of-character surprise PR move, internet giant Google is expressing public concern over the upcoming UN conference focused on implementing censorship & security measures in order to take control of the free and open internet and create an alternative internet in its place that is controlled and monitored by the UN.
- As more and more eviction-related suicides occur in Spain, public concern about Spain’s humanitarian crises is on the rise. As profit is valued over human lives, more and more people are coming to target the eviction-related-deaths as homicide more than suicide.
Follow us on Tumblr or by RSS feed for more daily updates. You can also like our Facebook page for related content.
Spain halts evictions under popular pressure
November 14, 2012
After two years of struggle for housing rights, the Spanish government and the country’s banks have announced an end to evictions for two years in cases of extreme need. Although activists say that this will not stop the “drama of the mortgages,” as it is called by the mass media in Spain, this was the fruit of a long fight by the Platform of the People Affected by Mortgage (PAH) and the housing-rights groups of the 15M assemblies, which have used direct action to prevent nearly 500 evictions.
One of the last actions before the announcement was an encampment in front of the main Madrid office of Bankia, the bank that is behind 80 percent of the evictions in this region. Three weeks ago, nearly 60 people affected by the mortgage crisis decided to sleep in front of the bank to push for a fair solution to all the cases of evictions carried out by Bankia. After several days sleeping and living in the street, the bank agreed to negotiate, case by case, and stopped the evictions planned for that week. For the occupiers, however, this was not enough.
“We don’t want them to stop only these evictions, we want a solution for all the people who will be evicted by Bankia,” said Tatiana Koleva, a PAH activist whose own eviction was the first to be prevented by the campaign in Madrid.
For three weeks, the protest in front of the bank’s office building continued. At the same time, several people were collecting signatures on behalf of a popular initiative calling for a policy of dación en pago, which would make it possible for mortgage-holders to hand back the keys and the property to the bank and end the debt obligation. Despite having already gathered more than the half million signatures needed to introduce dación en pago to the Congress, their goal is to present at least 700,000 signatures to ensure that there is a debate.
Meanwhile, evictions continued day by day, sometimes with grizzly consequences. On October 25, a 53-year-old man hanged himself in his house in Granada minutes before he was to be evicted. A few days later, in Valencia, another man tried to to commit suicide by jumping out the window in front of his son after opening the door for the police who had come to evict him. Last Friday, 53-year-old Amaia Egana — a former council member in the Basque Country town of Barakaldo — also jumped out of a window before being evicted.
These suicides represented a turning point. The same night that news was spreading about Amaia Egana in Barakaldo, thousands of people joined demonstrations in many Spanish cities protesting against the evictions and the government’s inaction. Even police joined the effort; one of the major police unions announced legal and financial support for policemen who refuse to participate in evictions. In several cities, mayors have prohibited city police officers from participating in evictions as well.
In Alicante, several dozen people followed the example of the encampment in Madrid and camped by the doors of the main Bankia office in their city. Across the country the next morning, hundreds of ATM and bank offices had the word “assassins” burned or painted on them. A new call, under the name #OpLolaFlores, invited people to put coins in ATMs to “save the bankers.” This recalled a famous story from the 1980s, when the flamenco singer Lola Flores, accused of swindling the treasury, made a plea for everyone in Spain to give her one peseta — the old currency — in order to pay her fine.
Spain’s banking association has said it will halt evictions of indebted home owners in extreme need for the next two years.
November 12, 2012
Monday’s decision to freeze mortgage-related evictions came after reports of a second suicide in 15 days by indebted homeowners facing expulsion in Spain surfaced.
The deaths shocked a country already weary of tough austerity measures in the midst of recession and record unemployment, and the news sent thousands into the streets in anti-bank protests.
The freeze, which will be observed by Spain’s largest banks, is aimed at taking the heat out of an increasingly dramatic trend affecting thousands of people caught in the economic crisis.
Source
It shouldn’t take human beings ending their own lives for banks to understand & take responsibility for the depth of suffering that they create.
Italy to join Greece, Portugal and Spain in European mega strike
November 8, 2012
Italy will join Greece, Spain and Portugal in holding strikes against austerity on November 14 in an unprecedented show of co-ordinated action on the continent.
The decision to take a four hour strike was announced Monday night by Italy’s largest trade union confederation, CGIL, which stated:
‘For many years, the European trade union movement deplores austerity measures…They are dragging Europe down into economic stagnation and recession. This results in stunted growth and unemployment that continues to increase.’
‘Cuts in wages and social protection are attacks on the European social model and exacerbate inequality and social injustice.
‘The ‘errors of judgment’ of the International Monetary Fund have had an incalculable impact on the daily lives of workers and citizens. The whole basis of the policies of austerity has to be revisited. The IMF must apologize. And the Troika must revise its demands.”
‘Twenty five million Europeans are out of work. In some countries the youth unemployment rate exceeds 50%.
‘The sense of injustice is widespread and social discontent is growing.”
‘We need to change direction towards a European social pact. The European trade unions are calling for a change of course.”
The European Trade Union Confederation, which has called a day of action on November 14, has been campaigning for economic policies that stimulates quality employment, ‘solidarity’ between countries and social justice.
‘It is time to end tax evasion, tax havens and tax competition between countries. A financial transaction tax should help repair the damage of unregulated capitalism,’ the CGIL added.
The CGIL’s strike was also called in opposition to a fresh set of austerity measures and neo-liberal reforms recently unveiled by the government of unelected prime minister and former Goldman Sachs advisor Mario Monti.
Spain and Portugal are planning on holding a second wave of general strikes on November 14 while Greece, Malta and Cyprus are also planning strike action on the day.
Spain’s El Pais journalists strike over job cuts
November 8, 2012
Staff at El Pais, one of Spain’s most popular newspapers, went on strike on Tuesday over management plans to slash the workforce in a bid to prevent the publication becoming a casualty of the country’s economic crisis.
Workers posted pictures of an empty newsroom on the web and said on Twitter that 95 percent of the newsroom staff were observing the strike, due to last three days.
A company spokeswoman said 79 percent of total staff had backed the strike.
“The strike has been a success, the newsroom is practically empty. There are only some subdirectors and managers there,” a representative of the workers’ committee said.
Dozens of publications and media outlets in Spain have closed since the country’s economic crisis erupted in 2008 as a housing boom fueled by cheap credit turned to bust. Advertising revenues have plummeted.
El Pais was founded in 1976, during Spain’s transition to democracy following the death of dictator Francisco Franco and gained a reputation as the newspaper of democratic Spain.
But it ran into debt troubles when it bought out the minority shares of its Sogecable pay-TV unit soon before the 2008 financial crisis.
Over the years, many well-known Spanish and Latin American novelists have contributed to the newspaper. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian author who won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, was among a group of writers who wrote to the newspaper to express concern about lay-offs.
Workers had called off a previously planned strike as they negotiated with Spanish media group owner Prisa but discussions reached an impasse.
Management has offered to scale back planned dismissals to 139 out of the paper’s 460 posts and cut salaries for remaining staff by 13 percent. Staff rejected this new proposal.
The management plan also includes early retirement for some workers. Staff took a pay cut of around 20 percent in 2011, the workers’ representative said.
Prisa lost 31 million euros between January and September this year. The company, with assets across Latin America and Europe, said strong growth overseas was overshadowed by weakness in print media and radio, particularly in Spain.
Prisa’s Chief Executive Juan Luis Cebrian angered staff with comments two weeks ago that workers over 50 no longer fitted the newspaper’s profile.
“We can’t keep living so well,” he said.
Cebrian earns 13 million euros a year and workers facing pay cuts have demanded he return some of his high salary.
Advertisers in Spain expect to spend 15.1 percent less this year, according to a survey published by media consultancy Zenith.
El Pais had an average circulation of 345,000 in the year to end-June 2012, according to Spain’s circulation registry (OJD). The Madrid-based paper reported last Tuesday that it had made a loss for the first time this year.
El Pais has regional offices in Spain and is also printed across Latin America and in Britain, Italy and Belgium.
Gracie & I were going to go to a screening of this. I don’t remember what interfered with that, but I sure wish we had. It looks great. I can’t wait until it comes out.
Here’s the website and here’s the Facebook Page for SHIFT CHANGE.
This is a preview of the feature length film, which documents both the growing number of cooperatives here in North America, and also the very successful Spanish cooperative, Mondragon. It suggests much of what we’ve been talking about recently, about growing cooperatives as one somewhat transient solution to the crisis of (and the disaster that is) capitalism.
Along the same lines but focused strictly on cooperatives across Europe, check out the documentary TOGETHER, available free online.
For more related content, check out our most recent post on Democracy@Work, and our recent write up on Baltimore collectively run coffee shop & bookstore, Red Emma’s.
