Brett Hetherington's Blog: "First thought:" My Substack page, page 26

"Spain's coal miners continue to wait for their country's Green New Deal"

"Credit: Lucia Benavides/The World"  "Spain’s government isn’t getting much done these days.

No political party won a majority in the nation’s general elections in April, and parliamentary negotiations to form a new government remain at a standstill. If a new government can’t be formed by Sept. 23, Spanish voters will go back to the polls in November for another general election, in what would be the country's fourth in four years.One of the many projects on hold is Spain's “ecological transition” — a push to close all of the country’s coal mines and transition to renewable energies, like wind and solar. Related:  How a forest became Germany’s poster child for a coal exit People in Spain’s northern region of Asturias are anxiously waiting to see how things play out. They’ve been mining there for 150 years. But today, the industry is almost dead.During a recent weekday at the San Nicolás coal mine, dozens of miners — mostly young men — walked out of their shift around 2 in the afternoon, in a hurry to get home and eat lunch. The underground mine is located in a valley, surrounded by lush, green hills. At its peak, the mine employed around 2,000 people — today, about 200 work there. It’s the last working coal mine in all of Spain.Gorka Peña, 36, has been working at San Nicolás for nine years. He says his father was also a miner, and he didn’t expect to end up in the trade himself.“There’s no future here, no youth,” Peña says. “The towns are becoming more depopulated, its residents are getting older. You don’t have anywhere to go, so you have to migrate.”Last October, the leading mining union struck a deal with Spain’s Socialist government to funnel 220 million euros ($246 million) into the region over the next decade, which would include retraining programs and investment in new industries.“In Asturias, what we’re asking for and what we need is for this 'ecological transition' to be exactly what it says it is,” says José Luis Alperi, the union’s spokesperson. “That is, that no one be left behind.” "Read more from Lucia Benavides article at PRI here.

"Legal certainty for all UK nationals in Germany"

[© Monika Skolimowska/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa]"All British citizens and their family members who have been entitled to free movement in Germany will be eligible to a residence permit in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Today, the German Government has adopted a draft law to be submitted to the Bundestag."

(Axel Dittmann, Director for EU Institutional Affairs, Brexit and EU Coordination at Federal Foreign Office.)

Read from original source here.

VIDEO: Ursula Le Guin on capitalism and writing

"authors who can see through our fear-stricken society..." "sales departments given control over editorials" " the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art"
"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words".

(Thanks to Jennifer Camacho.)

"Sewing a way out of sex work in Barcelona"

"BARCELONA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Sewing makes a welcome change from sex for the 20 women who escaped years of forced prostitution to stitch together a new life in Spain’s second city. 


Paid work - making clothes - is a path back to normality, they say, a way to feel useful, not used, and learn how to fit into society after being trafficked underground.

“Working here I feel empowered, relaxed and happy,” said Fer, a 42-year-old former prostitute from Brazil whose name has been changed as she wished to remain anonymous.

Fer said working alongside other trafficked women in a simple, white, inner-city workshop had helped her move on and put the past where it belonged.

The women busily cut patterns and stitch garments, chatting as they work. Outside is the commotion of the Raval district – a hive of Pakistani grocers, poor immigrant families and tourists who cram the narrow cobblestone streets and mediaeval squares.

Inside is a women-only sanctuary.

The Dona Kolors clothing brand was born in 2012 to help women like Fer regain confidence and start afresh.

The clothes are simple, boxy pieces in linen and cotton aimed at 30- and 40-something women.

It is a social enterprise - a business that aims to do good - that was set up by a local Catholic organization, El Lloc de la Dona, Catalan for ‘Women’s Place’, which has for decades helped prostitutes in this crime-ridden corner of the city."

Read more from source here.

"From Cairns to Madrid:" The first female Australian Indigenous ambassador goes to Spain

" Julie-Ann Guivarra was the first in her family to go to university. She was the first Indigenous person to serve as a senior executive in the Australian Foreign Ministry. 

Last year, she became the first Indigenous woman to represent Australia as its highest-ranking diplomat in Spain.


“Certainly I’ve never set out necessarily in life to be a trailblazer, but I do think that being the first Indigenous female ambassador is a huge honor. It’s an honor for myself, you know, I know that my family back in Australia are very proud of this achievement."Ms Guivarra was posted to Spain, the country where her Basque surname originated. Ms Guivarra's Spanish connection dates back to one of her great-grandfathers, of Indigenous and Filipino origin: a combination not all that unusual, given the ancient maritime trade routes between Asia, Europe and Oceania reached the Torres Strait islands.""My last name is Spanish because my great-grandparents were from the Philippine islands. It was only when I got this position that I started learning the language," the ambassador explains.Read more from source here.

"BREXIT & EMPIRE: Nostalgia for a Nation That Never Was Is Driving Britain Over a Cliff"

  
"With the likely next Prime Minister Boris Johnson praising Britain as the ‘greatest place on earth’, all the unlearned lessons of Empire are coming back to haunt us.When did the British Empire end? Not that long ago.Take Kenya, which has only been an independent country for 56 years, or Uganda’s freedom from British rule that happened only a year before in 1962. It was only in 1997 that the British handed back control of Hong Kong to China. The recent pro-democracy protests on the island, and the UK’s tricky position in upholding its ‘one country, two systems’ pledge, is testament to how the legacy of Empire is very much alive in Britain and the world today.

By choosing a Brexit that refuses to recognise we were never just an autonomous nation-state… we are condemned to an impossible search for a past that never was.

Except, no one seems keen to speak much about it.  Empire is not a marginal part of British history; it is our national story. But, a lack of public debate and education on why it happened, what it meant, how it was carried out, and how it has shaped Britain and its former colonies, is leaving the door open to a nostalgic, fantasised idea of Empire being weaponised in order to sow division. "Read more from source here.

"Who are The English?" --- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

This summer while we on the continent of Europe are enjoying doing whatever we can afford to do under the Mediterranean sun, we should all spare a thought for the English and their other Brit cousins.

They will be living through the continuing economic and social disaster created by Brexit and other agonies that are certain to multiply and crowd around like flies at a July barbecue.A large slice of the pain of modern England comes from its identity and Brexit is only one symptom of this disease. I recently read an exceptional book titled ‘God is an Englishman’ published exactly 50 years ago, and all the way through it the Australian author Donald Horne, (who also wrote the well-known book ‘The Lucky Country’ about his own homeland) shows as much penetrating insight into who exactly the English are as anyone else I know of.Using his book as a measuring stick against the past, it’s remarkable how little England seems to have changed (especially for the better) in that half a century that I have now lived through.Facing up to the coming instability of the 1970s, Horne found that Britain’s history meant that it too deserved to be called a fortunate country. As he saw it though, “what gets on British people’s nerves is that they no longer know who they are.” (Loud echoes of today’s Brexit confusion?)He saw a culture where people “find reality in excitements of..fashion and the entertainment businesses.” This led to an emptiness and general dissatisfaction with their lot. For him, it meant too that almost half of young British people alive then were fantasizing about emigrating. Of course, many did or already had (including my father.)Some of Horne’s other best observations come from his clear understanding of the social class system that still operates deeply all through life there. He recognised that all Brits essentially operate to serve the comfort and ease of the “Upper English” but that a visitor who stayed for years might not notice that England is genuinely one of the world’s most working class nations.Here, the author, who did in fact marry an Englishwoman and live for five years on a farm in Cornwall, west England, relates a truth that few Brits would have liked to admit, even in the unlikely event that they knew it. Twice as many manual workers as white-collar workers went out to their jobs in this “antique economy”; one that directly made it possible for the queen to stay happy in her castle.The average Brit was in fact a relative of a peasant who had been tossed by need into the provincial towns or London, just like so many ’internal immigrants’ who arrived in Catalonia from (other) parts of rural Spain in the 1950s and ‘60s.Soon after the time that Horne was writing though, it was estimated that at least half of England’s land was entirely unregistered: a hotchpotch of inherited wealth. Today we now know that this half a nation is owned by just 1% of its population: 25,000 landowners – typically members of the aristocracy and corporations.These crucial numbers of course ignore the ironic title of the book. It refers to the 16th century monarch Elizabeth’s bishop of London who specifically claimed that “God is English” and “His nation was to be the New Jerusalem” of the British Isles.The very English genius George Orwell warned against the “habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects” but if we think about today’s English people I’d compare them to that little desert lizard who hops from foot to foot to avoid getting its feet burnt on the hot sand. Here I mean the political and social temperature, not that from the sun.
(This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2019.)

"German captain becomes anti-populist heroine in Italy migrant standoff"

 [Photo.Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters] "The young German captain of a migrant-rescue ship stranded off Italy dismissed threats of arrest and personal criticism from the country's far-right interior minister on Friday, saying her main priority was the safety of 40 rescued Africans.
After two weeks at sea, the...31-year-old, Carola Rackete, has become a symbol of defiance for challenging the authority of minister Matteo Salvini, known as "Il Capitano" at home for closing ports to non-government rescue ships.Speaking to reporters from her ship, the Sea Watch, via a Skype connection, Rackete said she was forced to enter Italian waters due to the worsening condition of the migrants plucked by her crew from international seas off Libya on June 12. Related:  The radical populist party that shook Italy's establishment "The need which we have on board is psychological... The necessity to go into port is to prevent any harm or any self-harm which people might be contemplating," she said.Rackete, a conservationist who has served on cruise ships and on a Greenpeace vessel in the past, has drawn strong support from Italy's pro-immigration opposition parties and also felt the sting of Salvini's ever-busy Twitter account. Related:  After 'Salvini decree,' refugees face uncertain future She says she now devotes her time to rescuing migrants as a reaction to her privileged upbringing."My life was easy. … I am white, German, born in a rich country and with the right passport," she said in comments provided by Germany's Sea Watch, a charity that has been running rescue operations in the Mediterranean since 2014."When I realized it, I felt a moral obligation to help those who did not have the same opportunities as me." "Read more from source at PRI here.

2 min. VIDEO -- The gig economy is killing people'

'Platform workers' are literally dying on the job.
As ever, the working class have to risk their lives for the profits of the ruling class. This is capitalism.

Another new review of my book --"Slow Travels in Unsung Spain"

Someone called 'Avidreader' is kind enough to write on Amazon:

"A hispanophile travels across various hidden corners of Spain, holding dialogue with marginalised Spaniards on the way. 

A unique and quirky account of his journey, with a clear and consistent voice. I read it in one sitting. 

Hetherington's general knowledge of Spain's twentieth history and current political situation is excellent. His love of the country, in spite of its inherited prejudices and social inadequacies is evident. 

A very interesting read!"