Brett Hetherington's Blog: "First thought:" My Substack page, page 22

"InfoBarcelona: New labour advice services for citizens, organisations and businesses"

"In response to the current Covid-19 crisis, a freephone number has been set up to handle labour queries from citizens and a new Barcelona Activa portal opened up to facilitate financial support and resources to help workers, organisations and self-employed professionals in the business sector. 

In addition, Barcelona Activa will not be charging rent to any companies housed in its business incubators while the state of emergency is in place.

New freephone number for citizens The new service offers personalised phone support and is aimed at anyone with doubts and queries which Barcelona Activa may be able to resolve. The freephone number (900 533 175) will be operational from Monday to Friday, from 9 am to 6 pm. Depending on the nature of each enquiry, they will be referred to specialist services and resources. Points to protect labour rights While the state of emergency is in place, face-to-face support provided at labour rights protection points at the three district offices has been suspended. The service is being provided by phone and online instead and is available citywide.Three phone numbers have been set up: 932 346 122, 932 346 121 and 932 346 120.Any of the three district offices can be contacted by email. Check the email addresses and service times here.Website with information on financial resourcesBarcelona Activa has set up a new information portal on financial resources and support provided by all administrations, aimed especially at micro companies, SMEs, the self-employed and workers, who have borne the brunt of the drop in turnover since the state of emergency was declared. The website also provides services for businesses, cooperatives, organisations and associations who request it.Subsidies for projects from the cooperative, social and solidarity economyOrganisations also have access to an online advice service to present projects from the cooperative, social and solidarity economy for open subsidy calls. The goal of this service is to resolve queries relating to documents for calls from the programmes ‘Impulsem el que fas’ and ‘Enfortim l’ESS 2020’.Read more from source at barcelona.cat  here.

Tonight: "Hope and humour in times of Coronavirus"

Co-writer of the brilliant comedy Seinfeld, Larry Charles is in conversation with Srećko Horvat from DiEM25 tonight at 7.00PM CET.

 40 min live conversation + 20 min Q&A with Larry Charles

"We call it TV because we like retro-futurism. But it's much more than TV. In times of global pandemics, DiEM25 is launching a special online and completely free program to understand the current crisis and offer tools and hope to get out of it stronger and more united in building the World After Coronavirus. Everyone will be able to join and pose questions, suggest next topics and next guests! THE LOCATIONOnlineThis discussion will take place on Zoom and also be streamed on the DiEM25 Youtube channel. We will send a link to all Registered participants, so please Register."

"Women Writers in Catalan"

"This is a catalogue with a selection of 50 contemporary and ten classic women writers...Written in English, with the exception of the literary samples by each author, with the English translation and the original Catalan text, it's book to discover Catalan literature written by women, prose and poetry, classic and contemporary. A book to help getting to know and understanding Catalan literature and some of the women who have helped to create and construct it. "Read more from source here.

" Women Writers in Catalan"

"This is a catalogue with a selection of 50 contemporary and ten classic women writers...Written in English, with the exception of the literary samples by each author, with the English translation and the original Catalan text, it's book to discover Catalan literature written by women, prose and poetry, classic and contemporary. A book to help getting to know and understanding Catalan literature and some of the women who have helped to create and construct it. "Read more from source here.

"Post-sentence:" My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today

["February 12, 2019," photo (by the artist) of a piece from the exhibit."]  If art is to be meaningful it has to say something significant from the private or public world; one artist who does this is Barcelona’s Xavier G-Solis.

Having seen some publicity for his upcoming exhibitions in Barcelona and Vilafranca del Penedes, it’s clear to me that in his work he’s skillfully combining profound statements with more intimate acts of expression. In other words (like me), he sees the role of an artist as being someone who communicates in images where words alone don’t do the required job.What appeals to me most about his creations is the pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian symbols in the exhibition, which has a title that is a play on words of “state”. Or maybe it’s more accurate to also say “State”.In a piece that could be controversial to some, he uses shoes – his most popular item of choice over his career – in this case alternating red and yellow espadrilles previously worn by dancers at the Festa Major de Vilafranca.These traditional Catalan shoes are shown with a military-style sword skewering through them. Their hanging down laces suggested running blood and puss to me. The work is entitled “February 12, 2019”, the date when the pro-independence political prisoners’ trial began.This is what has been termed as a post-sentence installation, arranged alongside some engravings made with an open-casting machine on bare ground: a brutal and forceful technique that the artist hadn’t used since 2012, when the outraged “Indignats’’ occupied the Catalan capital’s most well known public square (as well as Xavier’s attention.)Next to this are two pieces entitled “Europe”, including a bank safe that has a combination number lock forgotten years ago. Who knows what’s inside. As well as the promise that visitors are going to have the opportunity to manipulate one of the exhibits, the artist has also been scheduled to do some kind of performance in the gallery.G-Solis, a former lecturer in philosophy, told me: “If you want to understand my work, you may have to start by thinking about the history of the human, the history of the power of man and how it began with the technique of making fire and continued with the gesture of getting on top of the world and other humans: the powerful high classes began to wear skins under the feet or some kind of sandals for ceremonies. Finally, footwear was globalised as a sign of socialisation: repression, distance, simulation, psychological protection, ostentation. All characteristic of the worst kinds of power.”And that is exactly what I personally want from art, in any of its forms: substance.We are living in an age where, sadly, the written word is carrying less weight as an important way to influence minds and actions. Increasingly, visual artistic expression is the preferred means for a younger public to get their ideas, and in the case of video, also their information and inspiration.In private art galleries in Catalonia, there are still legal ways to make our chosen points. If that becomes dangerous or impossible in this European country, then we are no longer living in a place that can claim to be a democracy.
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2020.]  

"The Normalization Of Far-Right Populism In Europe"

Herbert Kickl, Austrian politician (FPÖ) – (Photo credit: Michael Lucan, Lizenz/Creative Commons)
"A new coalition agreement in Austria highlights how bigoted, far-right policies are being embraced by mainstream political parties in Europe...

To date, in no country in Western Europe or North America, has a right-wing populist made it into office without help... Wherever conservatives and Christian Democrats decide against supporting right-wing populists, they have not been able to succeed."

Read more from source here.

Nobody says it better...

   
I've never read anything that undestands what's behind support for Brexit or explains it better...

Definitely worth reading from start to finish.

A.A. Gill (Sunday Times journalist and food critic) writing about Brexit before his death in Dec 2016:
“It was the woman on [BBC] Question Time that really did it for me. She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law. The camera closed in on her and she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my country back.”
It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from what? Back from where?”

Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity.
We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.

The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.

And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position, then just listen to the language they use: “We are a nation of inventors and entrepreneurs, we want to put the great back in Britain, the great engineers, the great manufacturers.” This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.

All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the humourless Germans and spoilsport French and all their collective liberalism and reality. There is a concomitant hope that if we manage to back out of Europe, then we’ll get back to the bowler-hatted 1950s and the Commonwealth will hold pageants, fireworks displays and beg to be back in the Queen Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will sacrifice a thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being called the Gold Coast and Britain will resume hand-making Land Rovers and top hats and Sheffield plate teapots.

There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.
The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from them. They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a phrase most outies identify with is “women’s liberation has gone too far”. Everything has gone too far for them, from political correctness — well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? — to health and safety and gender-neutral lavatories.

Those oldies, they don’t know if they’re coming or going, what with those newfangled mobile phones and kids on Tinder and Grindr. What happened to meeting Miss Joan Hunter Dunn at the tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand dryers, or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password that has both capitals and little letters and numbers and more than eight digits.

Brexit is the fond belief that Britain is worse now than at some point in the foggy past where we achieved peak Blighty.

We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side.
Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “ ’Ello luv, you’re looking nice today. Would you like some?”

When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers reply, with Terry-Thomas smirks, that “they’re going to still really fancy us, honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not Merkel, but the bosses of Mercedes and those French vintners and cheesemakers, they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of course they’re going to want to go on making the free market with two backs after we’ve got the decree nisi. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

Have no doubt, this is a divorce. It’s not just business, it’s not going to be all reason and goodwill. Like all divorces, leaving Europe would be ugly and mean and hurtful, and it would lead to a great deal of poisonous xenophobia and racism, all the niggling personal prejudice that dumped, betrayed and thwarted people are prey to. And the racism and prejudice are, of course, weak points for us.

The tortuous renegotiation with lawyers and courts will be bitter and vengeful, because divorces always are and, just in passing, this sovereignty thing we’re supposed to want back so badly, like Frodo’s ring, has nothing to do with you or me. We won’t notice it coming back, because we didn’t notice not having it in the first place.

Nine out of 10 economists say ‘remain in the EU’

You won’t wake up on June 24 and think: “Oh my word, my arthritis has gone! My teeth are suddenly whiter! Magically, I seem to know how to make a soufflé and I’m buff with the power of sovereignty.” This is something only politicians care about; it makes not a jot of difference to you or me if the Supreme Court is a bunch of strangely out-of-touch old gits in wigs in Westminster or a load of strangely out-of-touch old gits without wigs in Luxembourg. What matters is that we have as many judges as possible on the side of personal freedom.

Personally, I see nothing about our legislators in the UK that makes me feel I can confidently give them more power. The more checks and balances politicians have, the better for the rest of us. You can’t have too many wise heads and different opinions. If you’re really worried about red tape, by the way, it’s not just a European problem. We’re perfectly capable of coming up with our own rules and regulations and we have no shortage of jobsworths. Red tape may be annoying, but it is also there to protect your and my family from being lied to, poisoned and cheated.

The first “X” I ever put on a voting slip was to say yes to the EU. The first referendum was when I was 20 years old. This one will be in the week of my 62nd birthday. For nearly all my adult life, there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been pleased and proud to be part of this great collective. If you ask me for my nationality, the truth is I feel more European than anything else. I am part of this culture, this European civilisation. I can walk into any gallery on our continent and completely understand the images and the stories on the walls. These people are my people and they have been for thousands of years. I can read books on subjects from Ancient Greece to Dark Ages Scandinavia, from Renaissance Italy to 19th-century France, and I don’t need the context or the landscape explained to me. The music of Europe, from its scales and its instruments to its rhythms and religion, is my music. The Renaissance, the rococo, the Romantics, the impressionists, gothic, baroque, neoclassicism, realism, expressionism, futurism, fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch were all European movements and none of them belongs to a single nation.

No time for walls: the best of Europe, from its music and food to IM Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, depends on an easy collision of cultures

There is a reason why the Chinese are making fake Italian handbags and the Italians aren’t making fake Chinese ones. This European culture, without question or argument, is the greatest, most inventive, subtle, profound, beautiful and powerful genius that was ever contrived anywhere by anyone and it belongs to us. Just look at my day job — food. The change in food culture and pleasure has been enormous since we joined the EU, and that’s no coincidence. What we eat, the ingredients, the recipes, may come from around the world, but it is the collective to and fro of European interests, expertise and imagination that has made it all so very appetising and exciting.

The restaurant was a European invention, naturally. The first one in Paris was called The London Bridge.

Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages it and you can truncate it. You can make it harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build walls, but why on earth would you? This collective culture, this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made everything we have and everything we are, why would you not want to be part of it?

I understand that if we leave we don’t have to hand back our library ticket for European civilisation, but why would we even think about it? In fact, the only ones who would are those old, philistine scared gits. Look at them, too frightened to join in.”

"Street photographer documenting Madrid's invisible population"

"When Michael Damanti, a photographer from the United States, moved to Madrid five years ago with his Spanish wife and two children he expected to make a bunch of new friends in the new city...

'In 2015 I was an outsider in this country, trying to learn the language and find work. A chance encounter soon changed that, forming the beginnings of a long-term photographic series about Romani population in Europe,' he told The Local.
'Walking home one day from another disappointing day of cliche photos, I came across a Roma Girl sleeping on the ground holding an old change cup. Her name was Sibella. I knelt down to take her photograph and as I stood up I noticed another Roma-girl walking right towards me saying, "What are you doing? That is my sister!" That was the day I met the "Cobadin-Girls of Sol".

[image error] “Over the next four years I met with them every day, carefully documenting their story and gradually becoming absorbed into their lives. We have been through births, deaths, arrests, fights and the day to day struggles we all endure.”
What he has produced is a remarkable set of photographs of a group of people who are at best invisible to society and at worst, the frequent targets of abuse.
At first, he approached them with handmade signs with witty slogans, such as 'freewifi' and '#Brexit: Keep calm and give me money' to replace the ineffectual ones they had written themselves. [image error] “This was the way into their lives, I noticed their signs were incredibly long (5-6 lines) and 100 percent trite and boring.  No one was reading them. So I offerend alternatives, lighthearted signs with quick simple messages in English for the tourists. This began the friendship.”
Read more from Fiona Govan's article at the Local.es here.

"Australia’s burning questions" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[EFE]
The great tragedy of the Australian bushfires -- that even after several months are still consuming huge parts of the country -- is that so much of the destruction is entirely avoidable.How can this be? Why have more than 1 billion animals perished? Why have over 2,000 thousand homes been destroyed? Why have 23 people died and how is it possible that a total area of land bigger than Portugal or Hungary has already been burnt out?The simplest correct answer is that Australia has always suffered from these kinds of wild blazes but that this time around the ‘fire season’ started much earlier and the spread of the fires was much wider than usual, with hundreds of them burning out of control at any one time.Firefighters (most of whom are unpaid volunteers) have been almost completely powerless to stop the hydra-headed infernos because of continued fierce winds and the extreme high temperatures that the fires themselves have partly made worse.Another major cause of the devastation can be accurately put down to state and federal governments underfunding emergency services for year after year.ln an attempt to push any responsibility away from his own ultra-conservative party, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has used all kinds of political trickery and lies across the mainstream media (which fully supports him). He has also been widely condemned for choosing to go on holiday to Hawaii during the crisis, as did the relevant state minister from his party.As well as that, Morrison has repeatedly argued that the global climate crisis is not a factor in this disaster, despite overwhelming scientific evidence showing it undoubtedly is.As a fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian, he has instead maintained it is all the fault of arsonists or “greenies” who oppose targeted ‘back-burning’ to stop fires spreading. (The Green Party has always supported it, in fact.)Accusations of climate denial against Morrison have come as thick and fast as the air that has choked the populations of Australia’s big cities of Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney over periods of weeks and months.Even several former leaders of the PM’s own party have called for rapid action against carbon emissions and emergency policies to combat the years-long drought across the nation.In many Australians’ experience, these fires have come on top of continuing and severe tap water shortages in many of Australia’s rural towns. Some, such as the small rural village of Murrurundi (located in a once relatively fertile area) have already run out of water and are having to buy in supplies privately. An increasing number of towns are expected to follow this disturbing practice soon.Of course, water running low in Australian drought periods is nothing new.What is causing outrage though amongst groups as diverse as farmers and environmentalists, is the massive (and often unmeasured) amounts of natural water from rivers, lakes and underground sources that are being sold off to private companies.The Indian (multi-national) mining company Adani (which has the absurd, double-speak slogan of “Growth with Goodness”) extracts coal from the earth, among other things. It runs a business that is a major cause of global warming through carbon emissions and it requires large amounts of water in the coal cleaning process.Adani -- which has paid not one cent of company tax in Australia -- will be allowed to siphon off 12.5 billion litres of local river water up until the year 2077. Another of its mines is being given $4.4 billion in public subsidies from the government. An open secret muddies the waters here: mining industries have been major financial donors to the conservative political parties in Australia for many years.Corruption? You bet it is. For the governing parties, it’s raining money. This at a time when both rain and money are what’s really needed across a land that is dying of thirst and from fires on a biblical scale that Morrison had only ever read about.[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Feb. 2020.]

Barcelona book launch of "Sails & Winds" by Michael Eaude -- Sun.16 Feb, 12.00

Prolific author and a fellow Catalonia Today journalist and reviewer Michael Eaude is launching his latest book about the culture, history and politics of Valencia this Sunday in Barcelona at 12.00.

Location: La Carbonera bookshop, Carrer Blai 40, Poble Sec.

Manuel Lillo, director of weekly Valencian newsmagazine El Temps is to introduce him and the work, 'Sails & Winds.'