Amy Goodman: The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain (Folk)

[marmar]

from truthdig:


The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain (Folk)

Posted on Jul 11, 2012
By Amy Goodman


As Spain’s prime minister announced deep austerity cuts Wednesday in order to secure funds from the European Union to bail out Spain’s failing banks, the people of Spain have taken to the streets once again for what they call “Real Democracy Now.” This comes a week after the government announced it was launching a criminal investigation into the former CEO of Spain’s fourth-largest bank, Bankia. Rodrigo Rato is no small fish: Before running Bankia he was head of the International Monetary Fund. What the U.S. media don’t tell you is that this official government investigation was initiated by grass-roots action.

The Occupy movement in Spain is called M-15, for the day it began, May 15, 2011. I met with one of the key organizers in Madrid last week on the day the Rato investigation was announced. He smiled, and said, “Something is starting to happen.” The organizer, Stephane Grueso, is an activist filmmaker who is making a documentary about the May 15 movement. He is a talented professional, but, like 25 percent of the Spanish population, he is unemployed: “We didn’t like what we were seeing, where we were going. We felt we were losing our democracy, we were losing our country, we were losing our way of life. ... We had one slogan: ‘Democracia real YA!’—we want a ‘real democracy, now!’ Fifty people stayed overnight in Puerta del Sol, this public square. And then the police tried to take us out, and so we came back. And then this thing began to multiply in other cities in Spain. In three, four days’ time, we were like tens of thousands of people in dozens of cities in Spain, camped in the middle of the city—a little bit like we saw in Tahrir in Egypt.”

The occupation of Puerta del Sol and other plazas around Spain continued, but, as with Occupy Wall Street encampments around the U.S., they were eventually broken up. The organizing continued, though, with issue-oriented working groups and neighborhood assemblies. One M-15 working group decided to sue Rodrigo Rato, and recruited pro bono lawyers and identified more than 50 plaintiffs, people who felt they’d been personally defrauded by Bankia. While the lawyers were volunteers, a massive lawsuit costs money, so this movement, driven by social media, turned to “crowd funding,” to the masses of supporters in their movement for small donations. In less than a day, they raised more than $25,000. The lawsuit was filed in June of this year.

Olmo Galvez is another M-15 organizer I met with in Madrid. A young businessman with experience around the world, Galvez was profiled in Time magazine when they chose “The Protester” as the Person of the Year. Rato’s alleged fraud at Bankia involved the sale of Bankia “preferred stock” to regular account holders, so-called retail investors, since sophisticated investors were not buying it. Galvez explained: “They were selling it to people—some of them couldn’t read, many were elderly. That was a big scandal that wasn’t in the media.” Some who invested in Bankia’s scheme had to sign the contract with a fingerprint because they couldn’t write, nor could they read about, let alone understand, what they were sinking their savings into. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_pain_in_spain_falls_mainly_on_the_plain_folk_20120711/

[xchrom]

1. i don't know where spain thinks it's future is going to be -- 51% youth unemployment. nt

[fasttense]

2. The same place American youth's future is going

Guess what the unemployment rate is for an American between the ages of 16 to 24?

Yes, 51.7%.

http://www.dol.gov/odep/categories/youth/youthemployment.htm

[Igel]

3. I assume you took the 16-19 number and averaged it with the 20-24 number.

And subtracted it from 100. Assuming that those two cohorts are the same size, that'll give you the number of youth not employed.

They give employment figures. And they don't adjust them for summer breaks, either. And I'm not sure that "not employed" is equivalent to "unemployed."

The different is with those not seeking work. A lot of students don't seek work, during the school year or otherwise.

Can't find contrastive definitions on the site. Just the definition of "employed". Leads me to think that that 51.7% (even if accurate) also includes all the high schoolers who don't work, as well as college kids in summer school.