ellenrr
ellenrr's JournalWomen win big in Spain's national elections
"It will be interesting to see how the new group of left-wing female MPs influence women’s issues, such as domestic violence, the country’s controversial abortion laws and the gender pay gap.
Podemos also made history when one of its candidates became Spain's first ever black MP. Rita Bosaho from Alicante is also the first woman to head a party's electoral list in the region and win a seat in parliament.
Bosaho, 50, was born in Equitorial Guinea - Spain's former colony in West Africa - and has lived in Spain for 30 years.
She has long worked with feminist groups in Alicante: "Feminism is a serious issue," she told Spanish daily El Diario. She has spent her career working in human rights and women's rights, according to her official Podemos profile.
http://www.thelocal.es/20151221/and-the-real-winners-of-spains-general-election-are-women
happy solstice all, this is some writing I like:
2014 Winter Solstice: I Watched You Forget That I Need You
This is meant to be read aloud, and, I have trust.
Every year there are fewer and more to sing me up. They know not that it is true, my very survivance is entirely dependent on their willingness to believe that I am not inevitably to return. Here, wandering, a steadfast course through the unfathomable long night. Here, where every possible way awaits an impulse to become, and I but one of those ways, await feeding, and to be enstoryed in the marrow of your lives. I am not a metaphor, I am what allows you. And I am fragile for want of sustenance, as the churning tumult of your estrangement shakes you unsteady from wondering with awe.
–- –- –-
(continues)
https://raincrowe.wordpress.com/2014/12/20/2014-solstice-i-watched-you-forget-that-i-need-you/?blogsub=confirmed#blog_subscription-3
Sanders' press sec'y Symone Sanders on Dem Now yesterday
I was very impressed with her.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/21/bernie_blackout_as_dnc_accused_of
Donald Trump, anti-Muslim hysteria and the hypocrites who enabled his rise
for ex:
Donald Trump is “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who “doesn’t represent my party,” asserted Republican presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham in response to Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims.
But even as the South Carolina senator, who has scarcely seen a Muslim country he didn’t want to bomb, spoke out against Trump’s bigotry, he continued to spew his own.
Addressing a Jewish audience on Sunday, Graham promised that if elected president he would launch a US military ground invasion and occupation of Iraq and Syria to defeat Islamic State.
“There’s no way to defend freedom without fighting against evil, and there’s never been a bigger evil since World War II than radical Islam,” Graham told the crowd.
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/donald-trump-anti-muslim-hysteria-and-hypocrites-who-enabled-his-rise
Good round table discussion on Democracy Now right now on The Sheldon Adelson Republican Debate.
includes Bob Herbert and Stephen Zunes, among others.
Any GED teachers here? I have a couple of questions. nt
"Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of a Democratic Europe"
With Spain's national elections coming on Dec 20, this is imo an important book.
"Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of a Democratic Europe by Pablo Iglesias"
review in London Review of Books by Dan Hancock, Dec 2015
excerpt:
Spain goes to the polls on 20 December in what will be a historic election. Since the 1980s, general elections in Spain have been two-way races between the conservative Partido Popular (the People’s Party, or PP) and the centre-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE). The PP won the most recent election, in 2011, with 44.6 per cent of the vote; the PSOE gained 28.8 per cent. But in December the two parties’ combined share of the vote is unlikely to exceed 50 per cent. The two new contenders are Podemos and the centre-right populists Ciudadanos (Citizens). Ciudadanos have been doing better in the pre-election polls, but Podemos has been the big story since its formation and astonishing rise in 2014. Like Syriza, it has given organisational form to a new European left-wing populism. In the European elections of May 2014, with a tiny, crowd-funded budget and just four months of existence, it gained 1.2 million votes and five MEPs. By the end of the year it led the two establishment parties in the polls.
The roots of Podemos lie in the huge 2011 indignados protests against the Spanish political system in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008.
From the outset, Iglesias and his comrades understood that it was vital to know how to operate on hostile media and political terrain. They had to be realistic about the hegemonic strength of Spanish neoliberalism and the gap between what was being said in the streets and squares about the struggles of everyday life and what was making it into the mainstream media. Much has been made of the indignados’ exploration of digital democracy (they have used such platforms as Reddit to discuss policy proposals, and the online forum Plaza Podemos to vote on them), but Iglesias makes it clear that he believes TV remains ‘the great medium of our time’, the primary place for challenging establishment narratives and language. ‘When our adversaries use terms like la casta, revolving door, the “Berlusconisation” of politics, eviction, precarity,’ he writes, ‘they’re acknowledging the displacement of the fight onto a terrain that favours us.’
A large part of the book is devoted to a tour of Spain’s 20th century and its glaring precedents for the present: a succession of grim lessons concerning the use of crises by the strong to repress the weak, unnecessary compromises and the betrayal of mass movements. There are contemporary resonances everywhere: especially, given the likelihood of a coalition government after 20 December, in a passage about the subduing and incorporation of marginal parties in the 1910's to prop up national governments. One message is clear throughout: under capitalism, democracy is always incomplete, and always contingent.
Capitalism is rarely named explicitly as the enemy ideology, in part because attacking capitalism head-on is identified with the (failed) way of the old left, but perhaps also because it hardly needs spelling out. Fundamental to Podemos – as it was to the indignados – is the sense that Spanish democratic sovereignty has been usurped by the forces of global capitalism, represented recently in the form of the Troika, with the co-operation of the country’s own political and economic elites. As if to demonstrate this, in 2011 the PP and PSOE agreed to a constitutional reform that made it a legal obligation for Spain’s governing party to designate balancing the budget a priority over public spending and investment – in Iglesias’s words, formalising ‘the victory of a Hayekian Europe’.
Podemos aims its critique not just at European austerity, but also at the failures of Spain’s post-Franco settlement.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n24/dan-hancox/can-they
Protesters Disrupt Donald Trump Speech at NYC Luncheon
12/11 - About a dozen protesters disrupted Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's speech at a $1,000-a-plate New York City luncheon Friday, criticizing the billionaire businessman's recent anti-Islam rhetoric as security staff forcibly ejected some of them from the event.
Four protesters chanting "Trump is trying to bring us down, targeting people black and brown," tried to storm a side entrance into the speech at Manhattan's The Plaza Hotel as security staff pushed them away.
The protesters were affiliated with various Arab-American and Muslim-American groups, as well as groups for racial equality.
One of those protesters, Jorge Gonzalez, fell down a flight of stairs after a hotel security worker pushed him. He said he was uninjured. Another was thrown to the ground in the hotel lobby.
Two reporters from The Associated Press, Jake Pearson and Warren Levinson, were also forcibly removed from the lobby by hotel security. The event, sponsored by the Commonwealth Club, a Pennsylvania Republican group, was closed to the press.
Later in Trump's speech, about nine other protesters from various advocacy groups stood up to denounce his recent comments to temporarily bar Muslims from entering the U.S., protesters said.
"I'm really frightened by that kind of rhetoric," said Martha Acklesberg, 69, a member of the group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, who along with Judith Plaskow, 68, paid to hear Trump speech and then disrupted it in protest.
via "WWChat" which may be a Workers World site.
I went to DI to look around...
I didn't stay long, so my comment is by no means comprehensive, but I thot it was funny, that on this one thread people were all agog and atwitter with the idea that scores of du people would be bursting on to DI.
that was it. I was not tempted to go further.
Climate Justice Movement "Extremely Disappointed" in COP21 Draft's "Failure to Step Up"
We examine what is in the latest draft text—and what has been left out—with a roundtable of women: Chee Yoke Ling, a legal adviser to the Third World Network based in Malaysia; Ruth Nyambura, a Kenyan political ecologist; and Kandi Mossett, an indigenous activist from North Dakota and an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network. "We want to get out of this sinking ship, but countries like the U.S. are holding the lifeboats," Nyambura says.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/11/climate_justice_movement_extremely_disappointed_in
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