A Spanish mayor's left turn on housing

Al Jazeera English

This month, Barcelona's new left-wing mayor Ada Colau announced a total of 60,000 euros in fines against three Spanish banks for the possession of houses that have stood empty for more than two years. The fines were for 12 properties located in neighbourhoods most affected by the ongoing housing crisis, but Colau has promised this is only the start.

Across Spain, homes are being repossessed at the rate of at least 90 a day, down from the 500 daily evictions the Associated Press reported in 2012. According to the most recent census analysis by the national statistics institute, there were nearly 3.5 million empty homes in the country as of 2011 - about 14 percent of the total housing stock.

For those of us accustomed to seeing financial institutions rewarded for their unhelpful behaviour, the crackdown in Barcelona may seem rather unusual. But the role of financial institutions in the misfortune of countless Spaniards can't be downplayed.

Following a period of frenetic bank-backed construction, land speculation, wildly overvalued property prices, and the proliferation of subprime mortgages, the Spanish property bubble burst in 2008, giving way to five years of recession and austerity measures. The punishment for fiscal recklessness was meted out to the poorest echelons of society. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

I am not General Beg

London Review of Books Blog

In June, I received an invitation to the Second International Congress of 17,000 Iranian Terror Victims, to be held in Tehran at the beginning of September. The email was addressed to General Mirza Aslam Beg, the former head of the Pakistani army. I wrote back to say that, although in no way affiliated with the armed forces of Pakistan, I’d like to come. Four days later I got my own invitation and a promise to arrange my visa.

Two days before I was due to fly to Tehran from Barcelona, I was told to go to the Iranian embassy in Madrid. At first the embassy staff told me a visa couldn’t be issued till the following week. Then they said I could have one immediately for a fee of €80, before finally giving it to me for nothing.

On the flight I met someone else going to the conference, a former right-wing Spanish politician turned military adviser to Hugo Chávez turned university professor. He told me he didn’t know much about terrorism against Iran, but had advised the Iranian ambassador to Spain that the Islamic Republic should get a nuclear weapon. His counsel had been rejected on spiritual grounds, he said. READ MORE AT LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS BLOG.

Humans of the White House?

TeleSUR English

During a recent excursion to Iran, Brandon Stanton — creator of the wildly popular Humans of New York (HONY) blog — posted some shots of humans in the Islamic Republic. One of them features a father and his 10-year-old son in the city of Tabriz, with the accompanying anecdote from the dad:

“One time when he was five-years-old, he came with me to the store and we bought two pounds of fresh apricots. I let him carry the bag home. He walked a little bit behind me the entire way. After awhile, I asked him to hand me an apricot. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve given them all away.’ I knew then that I was raising a humanitarian.”

The post elicited a Facebook comment from none other than Barack Obama, who praised the “inspirational story” as one that “really resonated” with him. Before signing off as “bo,” Obama pledged to “continue doing whatever I can to make this world a place where [the Iranian boy] and every young person like him can live up to their full potential. (And if I ever get to meet him, I hope he’ll save me an apricot!)”

Rapidly accruing over 160,000 “likes,” the president’s comment also spawned predictably sappy media coverage. The Huffington Post reported that Obama had “pulled at America’s heartstrings.” Over at Vox, Max Fisher lauded Stanton’s photographs for “doing important work in humanizing a people who are too often vilified in America and in Washington particularly.”

At first glance, it’s a convenient arrangement. Stanton humanizes the vilified Iranians, while also giving the U.S. president the opportunity to humanize himself. And we the viewers get to feel all warm and snuggly at the sheer abundance of emotion transiting the internet. Which means everyone’s happy, right?

Not so fast.

Let’s start with the president and  the nature of his office which generally excludes anyone with genuine human qualifications. Obama is no exception, having presided over an impressive amount of suffering worldwide, and especially in the Middle East. One can safely assume he would not have felt inspired to comment on a photograph of a regional father accompanied by, say, this quote: “When he was five-years-old, my son was obliterated by a U.S. drone.” READ MORE AT TELESUR ENGLISH.

During a recent excursion to Iran, Brandon Stanton — creator of the wildly popular Humans of New York (HONY) blog — posted some shots of humans in the Islamic Republic. One of them features a father and his 10-year-old son in the city of Tabriz, with the accompanying anecdote from the dad:

“One time when he was five-years-old, he came with me to the store and we bought two pounds of fresh apricots. I let him carry the bag home. He walked a little bit behind me the entire way. After awhile, I asked him to hand me an apricot. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve given them all away.’ I knew then that I was raising a humanitarian.”

The post elicited a Facebook comment from none other than Barack Obama, who praised the “inspirational story” as one that “really resonated” with him. Before signing off as “bo,” Obama pledged to “continue doing whatever I can to make this world a place where [the Iranian boy] and every young person like him can live up to their full potential. (And if I ever get to meet him, I hope he’ll save me an apricot!)”

Rapidly accruing over 160,000 “likes,” the president’s comment also spawned predictably sappy media coverage. The Huffington Post reported that Obama had “pulled at America’s heartstrings.” Over at Vox, Max Fisher lauded Stanton’s photographs for “doing important work in humanizing a people who are too often vilified in America and in Washington particularly.”


At first glance, it’s a convenient arrangement. Stanton humanizes the vilified Iranians, while also giving the U.S. president the opportunity to humanize himself. And we the viewers get to feel all warm and snuggly at the sheer abundance of emotion transiting the internet. Which means everyone’s happy, right?

Not so fast.

Let’s start with the president and  the nature of his office which generally excludes anyone with genuine human qualifications. Obama is no exception, having presided over an impressive amount of suffering worldwide, and especially in the Middle East. One can safely assume he would not have felt inspired to comment on a photograph of a regional father accompanied by, say, this quote: “When he was five-years-old, my son was obliterated by a U.S. drone.”

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Humans-of-the-White-House-20150912-0017.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

During a recent excursion to Iran, Brandon Stanton — creator of the wildly popular Humans of New York (HONY) blog — posted some shots of humans in the Islamic Republic. One of them features a father and his 10-year-old son in the city of Tabriz, with the accompanying anecdote from the dad:

“One time when he was five-years-old, he came with me to the store and we bought two pounds of fresh apricots. I let him carry the bag home. He walked a little bit behind me the entire way. After awhile, I asked him to hand me an apricot. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve given them all away.’ I knew then that I was raising a humanitarian.”

The post elicited a Facebook comment from none other than Barack Obama, who praised the “inspirational story” as one that “really resonated” with him. Before signing off as “bo,” Obama pledged to “continue doing whatever I can to make this world a place where [the Iranian boy] and every young person like him can live up to their full potential. (And if I ever get to meet him, I hope he’ll save me an apricot!)”

Rapidly accruing over 160,000 “likes,” the president’s comment also spawned predictably sappy media coverage. The Huffington Post reported that Obama had “pulled at America’s heartstrings.” Over at Vox, Max Fisher lauded Stanton’s photographs for “doing important work in humanizing a people who are too often vilified in America and in Washington particularly.”


At first glance, it’s a convenient arrangement. Stanton humanizes the vilified Iranians, while also giving the U.S. president the opportunity to humanize himself. And we the viewers get to feel all warm and snuggly at the sheer abundance of emotion transiting the internet. Which means everyone’s happy, right?

Not so fast.

Let’s start with the president and  the nature of his office which generally excludes anyone with genuine human qualifications. Obama is no exception, having presided over an impressive amount of suffering worldwide, and especially in the Middle East. One can safely assume he would not have felt inspired to comment on a photograph of a regional father accompanied by, say, this quote: “When he was five-years-old, my son was obliterated by a U.S. drone.”

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Humans-of-the-White-House-20150912-0017.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Turkey’s War on the Kurds

Jacobin

The network of loudspeakers that stretches across Fethiye, a town on the southwestern coast of Turkey, is generally reserved for announcements regarding lost children, vehicles in violation of parking regulations, and funerals. On select occasions, it is used to blare football anthems.

Yesterday, one event got top billing: the funeral of twenty-five-year-old Adnan Ergen, a soldier killed over the weekend in an attack by members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the southeastern Turkish village of Dağlıca. Fifteen other soldiers also perished. A former resident of the Fethiye area, Ergen was buried in the nearby district of Seydikemer.

Prominent Turkish media outlets put the number of funeral attendees at twenty thousand. For the past two nights, caravans of cars draped in Turkish flags have careened around Fethiye in a noisy tribute to the fallen soldiers. Storefronts and buildings, already cluttered with flags, have somehow found room for more.

Adding to the atmosphere is the ever-present slogan emblazoned on a hill overlooking the town’s bay: “şehitler ölmez vatan bölünmez,” which means, “martyrs never die and the homeland will never be divided.” The rhyme is also quite conducive to repetitive chanting, and features prominently at nationalist protests.

Interestingly, some of my acquaintances here who were formerly gung-ho on the bölünmez front have now come around to the idea that homeland division is in fact possible and even desirable. Let the Kurds have the southeast, the new thinking goes, and stop costing us money and lives.

But among the problems with the we’ve-had-enough-go-back-where-you-came-from approach is that many Kurds come from here, not there, and that the just establishment of a Kurdish state obviously can’t take place via forcible expulsion.

More importantly, Turkey’s application of the “terrorist” label to the PKK — and the commonplace ascription of the label to all Kurds in the popular discourse — purposefully leaves no room for the history of the state’s transgressions against the Kurdish population. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Iran: A victim of terrorism

Al Jazeera English

"One should have a single, not a double, standard."

These were the (translated) words of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, speaking at a conference I recently attended in Tehran. His observation was in reference to the habit of the United States & Co of decrying terrorism but then applauding terroristic behaviour when it serves their interests.

US mastery of the double standard means that, for example, the word "terrorism" is dutifully applied to situations in which planes are flown into US buildings, but not to ones in which US warships shoot down Iranian passenger jets, killing everyone on board. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.