Intercept the Transmission

Business as Usual While the City Sleeps

2012-02-29T18:59:00.001+01:00

Eviction in the dead of night. This has been the de facto strategy of authorities across the west when it comes time to strip an occupy commune apart. They move in under the cover of darkness, when most city dwellers are settled in for the night. Fast asleep and recovering from the previous day's onslaught, the general public are well hidden from what might go on when riot helmets come face to face with Guy Fawkes' masks.

In the small, quiet hours of the morning this past Tuesday, London police and bailiffs marched on the encampment outside of St. Paul's Cathedral, and served notice on Occupy London.

The occupiers were given 5 minutes to pack up and leave. Any failure to comply would be a violation of court orders. Neon vested bailiffs, hard hats on head, did most of the dismantling, with the riot cops hovering ominously in the background, waiting for the rabble to get violent. The rabble remained peaceful though, and if those dressed ready for trouble were at all disappointed, they didn't show it. When it was all over, 20 arrests were made, and only a few skirmishes broke out. Most of the remaining occupiers began to pack up the tents they've called home these past 4 months. Resigned to the finality at hand, they complied.

Some, however, chose to build a fortress from what remained of their broke down lodgings.

While many packed up to go home, or go find a new home, a group of protesters quickly gathered up wooden pallets, ladders, mattresses, and what other random debris they could find to build up a barricade in an effort to waylay their eviction. Young men and women stood atop their ramshackle blockade in defiance while spotlights flooded the square around them and rubbish lorries sat idle, waiting to be fed.

On the ground protesters and bailiffs engaged in a tug of war for control of the rubble, while at the top of the heap, a single bailiff climbed up on the unstable structure to force the occupiers down in to the waiting arms of their comrades in neon yellow and orange. When one occupier fell, another would climb up to take their place, and one clever long haired fellow managed to take the bailiff down with him as he dropped from the barricade wall.

Their efforts to remain were admirable, but the outcome was equally inevitable.

The last gasp occurred on the cathedral steps. A small group had gathered and, believing the steps to be safe ground, huddled at the cathedral's gateway; some kneeling down to pray. One by one they were swept off the steps by riot police. The resisters, bent in prayer or otherwise, were moved either by fear, or force.

This final action, which saw armoured police force citizens off the steps of the church, could only have occurred with St. Paul's approval. As documented in The Guardian, at around 2am protesters reported seeing police officers on the Cathedral balcony, giving support to the idea that the police had the full cooperation of the church to remove people from the steps. Shortly after, City of London police confirmed they had the blessing of the church, leaving many occupiers stung, and stunned, by the betrayal.

By dawn, there was little left to remind the city that there had been a camp outside of the venerable cathedral at all. The mess had been washed away before the morning's first mug of tea was brewed.

But while the city and the church worked to sweep Occupy into the trash bins and out of sight, the banker's at Barclays were providing yet another reminder of why these voices, calling out the excesses and damaging schemes of profit chasers, remain so necessary.

It was revealed on Tuesday morning that Barclays intended to implement two tax avoidance schemes that the bank was required by law to present to HM Revenue & Customs. The first scheme revolved around buying back their own debt, which had fallen in value during the financial crisis. The buy back of these debts at lower value would result in a rise in profits for the bank.

The second scheme is more convoluted, revolving around authorised investment funds. The bank's goal was to convert non-taxable income into an amount granting a repayable tax credit, thus guaranteeing a refund while no actual tax would be paid. Combined, the two schemes provided a loophole that would have helped Barclays avoid 500 million in tax.

In both cases the schemes ran afoul of a forthcoming new corporate tax dodging law to be introduced in Chancellor George Osborne's new budget next month. When faced with what were called two "very aggressive" tax avoidance schemes, the legislation was quickly backdated to take effect at the beginning of December 2011, an unusual act of retrospective legislating. Initially, the government refused to call out the offending bank by name. Barclays later admitted to being the culprit, and assured shareholders that profits would not be affected by the schemes being shut down.

These two events are at such perfectly opposing poles, it's difficult to believe there wasn't a bit of fate involved in the timing. While Barclays bank was caught out in the end, one has to question if it would have happened without the presence of those struggling to keep a light shining on the dark corners of unbound capitalism and its scramble for new, ever creative ways to turn civic responsibility inside out in the hopes of bonus profits spilling into their open hands.

With the ground troops of established rule driving the forces of dissent from the steps of St. Paul's, and the profiteers at Barclays attempting to game the system from the confines of the executive boardroom, on Tuesday night in London, it was back to business as usual while the city slept.

Eric Joyce, Drunken Master of Falkirk

2012-02-26T17:24:00.003+01:00

Bombed House of Commons 1941

Colourful Scots' MP inadvertently casts a light on the hypocrisies of Cameron's plan for mandatory alcohol pricing.

When the story broke in the news earlier this week of a brawl in the British House of Commons Strangers' Bar, I was busy writing about the return of the outraged here in Spain, so I'm a bit late to the carnage. My initial reaction was that "The Strangers' Bar" is far too fantastic a name for a pub where British policy makers and visiting dignitaries mingle over cheap, publicly subsidised alcohol. It sounds like the sort of haunt where you should find the likes of Camus and Sartre drunkenly hashing out the ultimate futility of existence, not Cameron and Osborne, tipsy and sniggering about draconian workfare schemes.

My second reaction was of course one of kinship with Eric Joyce, Member of Parliament for Falkirk, which coincidentally is my ancestral home. My parents were born there, as were my older sister and brother. I was the first member of my family born outside of Falkirk, and outside of Scotland for that matter. When I was younger, during an extended family trip back, I attended Cumley Park Primary School for a few weeks so as not to fall behind in my studies. During this time I discovered the strange, hitherto unknown realm of British crisp flavours, and marvelled at the elaborate Action Man displays that decorated the ceiling at Young's Toys. I also fell in love for the first time with a young girl named Chelsea. Well, I fancied her a bit, at any rate.

Apart from the obvious connection to Falkirk, I empathised with the bruiser who pummelled a few MP's, not to mention felling one with his own skull, because like many of you, I have at one time or another felt a nearly uncontrollable need to hand a politician or two a sound thrashing. I am also not afraid to admit that a few pints of cider most likely amplified such past urges. It's a good thing select Canadian political figures were never inclined to hang out at my local pub in Toronto's Parkdale borough when the Blackthorn was flowing. Noses might have been bloodied, and I might have found myself in prison.

On the surface, this tussle in the commons sounds like little more than a sauce'd Scots' leftie having a go at his Tory enemy after a few drams of scotch, with some of his labour chums taking a bit of friendly fire. This sort of thing will happen in a pub from time to time, nearly anywhere in the world. However, a little delving into the Falkirk MP's recent behaviour reveals the reality of a troubled man battling demons. I'm not going to get bogged down in Eric Joyce's personal life. For those interested, fellow blogger's Representing the Mambo touched on a few of the issues quite respectfully here.

What makes this incident quite pertinent is that, in losing control in the Commons bar while under the influence of too much of the creature, Eric Joyce has turned the mirror around on British Prime Minister David Cameron's campaign to legislate minimum alcohol prices as a way to curb alcohol abuse and ease the health costs associated with Britain's drink culture. The proposal would see the cheapest brands of various alcohols rise in cost to a set minimum price, the rationale being that the more it costs, the less people will consume it haphazardly and to excess. It hasn't taken long for the proposal to tumble into the realm of class warfare. The poorest will have to pay more for the privilege of a few drinks after a hard day's work, or as a means to escape the grim realities of austerity for a few hours each day.

The more you look at the plan, it becomes difficult not to see it as gauze bandaging wrapped over a festering wound before it's been treated. The unsightly sore is hidden away from view, but that does nothing to kill the infection. If the availability of cheap liquor were the root cause of alcoholsim and the culture of brawling, the streets of Barcelona would be soaked with vomit and blood every night. In reality, you have to try very hard here to get into so much as a glaring match with a fellow punter, much less a fist fight.

What it certainly will do is make it harder for people without a drink problem to partake in the simple pleasure of an evening's cocktail to dull the edges. Already miserable and desperate people struggling to get by from day to day, denied a bit of liquid comfort. Because they can't be trusted to moderate their consumption, the government will have to do it for them. Meanwhile, the honourable members of parliament will continue to drink on the cheap; draining down pints of bitter and glasses of merlot while passing a nice portion of the bill onto the same taxpayers they want to rescue from the gin soaked gutter by denying them discount booze at the corner shop.

While I doubt Eric Joyce had any intention of doing so, in giving a fellow MP or two a few clouts about the ear on a booze fueled rampage, he has introduced a fairly inconvenient quandary within the palace of Westminster. If David Cameron truly believes that the cheap cost of alcohol leads to problem drinking, surely it's time to stop subsidising the temptation of Britain's political classes, no?

The Light That Cracks The Darkness

2012-02-23T00:10:00.005+01:00

Twenty five thousand marched in Granada. In Seville they numbered fifty thousand. In Zaragoza seventy thousand took to the streets, while eighty thousand gathered in Valencia.

In Barcelona, four hundred and fifty thousand Indignats flooded the streets of Catalunya’s capital city. In Madrid five hundred thousand Indignados swarmed through the city, before converging once again on their beloved Puerta Del Sol. By day’s end, more than a million people, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, marched in cities across the country, coming together to tear at the darkness that looms over them.

This is what democracy looks like.

On Sunday the outraged returned to the streets of Spain. They returned to remind us all what the defiant energy of the downtrodden feels like; what the unwavering voice of dissent sounds like. This army of street kids and grandmothers, of workers and students, of anarchists and activists, returned to make it known that they are still here, they have not forgotten, and they are definitely not finished.

If it was ever a question of whether or not they had given up, it’s been answered. If notions lingered in the minds of the politicians these past few weeks that the people -- turned backwards and forwards by Spain’s short but strange winter, a schizophrenic mix of unseasonable warmth and chill -- might have fallen into lethargy or a tired acceptance of the hard times plotted out for them, those notions were erased on Sunday.

Newly elected Prime Minister Rajoy and his Partido Popular might have thought they had escaped without wounds on 20^th November, the default victors of a pantomime vote that offered the people a twisted play on democratic choice. In reality they were asked if they preferred to drown or to suffocate. This sham election was rejected by 10 million voters. They chose neither. They rejected the illusion. These new public officials might have mistaken the unwillingness of so many to legitimise their own suffering as a mandate to replenish the coffers of high finance; to force the people to bow down, as they do, in worship of the markets.

If such a mistake was made, this return of outrage on the streets corrected it.

What the Indignados did afford their fledgling government, was time. A few months to plot out a new course, to offer up a hopeful alternative, to lay new cards on the table and present ideas not designed to break the backs of the under classes. What their new leaders came to them with was an admission that they have nothing new to offer, and never intended to. In their eyes it’s business as usual; more of the same. "Reforma Laboral" that takes rights and wages away from the people; that affords corporations convenient new tools to rid themselves of older, poorly paid employees in order to replace them with desperate new blood that will work for even less; a fire-to-hire scheme as an answer to mass national unemployment, that amounts to little more than rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.

On Sunday, the people kindly rejected their proposal.

The Spanish refuse to sit by and watch as the same measures that have left mothers giving up children they can’t feed in Greece, that have more and more signing on for the dole in the United Kingdom, and that have already put more than half of their own youth out of work, are forced upon them while executive pay is capped at 600,000 euros annually. They will not be locked into financial slavery and routinely humiliated. They have seen what these failed ideas have done to

Greece

. They will not have the same done to them. Not without a push back.

The sun is shining in

Spain

again, and the air gets warmer from one day to the next. The ruling classes don’t have to change this course of protecting profits at all costs; of recouping their losses by scavenging from those with the least, but if they don't they should expect resistance. Summer is coming, and with nearly a quarter of the population out of work and angry, there’s ample opportunity for mass action. There is no hiding from it. Expect the acampadas to return -- sooner rather than later.

The return of 15M and Los Indignados should be well observed by the Occupy movement also. The manifestations that grew from a few hundred in Puerta Del Sol to hundreds of thousands taking the streets and squares across Spain in 2011 laid out the blueprint and inspiration for the occupations that exploded across the western world. Now, as Occupy struggles with irrelevancy in cities like New York, Toronto and London, it is time to rediscover your focus, to draw inspiration from the outraged here in Spain, as you did before. March side by side with union members rather than be co-opted by their leadership. Resist the plans of special interests, and of the democratic wing on the bird to manipulate you into a mass lobby group; a tea party to call their own. Reject the subtle manipulations of billionaires looking to turn you into a violent mob, and ultimately, the engine powering an agenda that will only lead to deeper control for the elites and their puppets in office. To find your voice and your resolve again, look to Spain. Mira a España .

This is what revolution looks like.

The Mad Words of Raging Tories

2012-02-19T17:34:00.001+01:00

"Either stand with us or with the child pornographers."

It takes a certain sort of mind to craft such a ridiculous statement, and to do it with any semblance of sincerity. This is the sort of wild, dangerous muck racking one might expect from a Rush Limbaugh, a Glenn Beck, or an Ezra Levant, all members of the hard right media juggernaut in North America, playing on the murky fears of soccer moms and hard working dads. They terrify their audiences daily with emotional diatribes, littered with language that manipulates the ill informed fears of people who, when all is said and done, just want to live a safe life, raise a family, and pursue the American dream. Even in Canada.

This statement was made by none of the above. No red faced Rush on his radio show, no weeping tea party enthusiast on Fox News, and no tabloid hack from the Toronto Sun, though I'm sure they all approved the use of such an emotionally charged, ludicrous bit of scare bait. No, this statement came straight from the mouth of Canada's Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews.

The remark came during a heated debate Monday in Canada's House of Commons, as they discussed the Conservative government's proposed Bill C-30, an internet surveillance bill that would force internet service providers to turn over personal user information to authorities without a warrant. Toews fired the remark at Liberal Public safety critic Francis Scarpeggia when he dared to question the intrusive powers being proposed. The bill opens the doors for the powers that be to spy on the citizenry, all in the name of public safety.

To keep you safe, governmental authorities need to know what you are doing on-line, whenever they deem it necessary.

The bill is sinister enough based on this alone, but it goes further. Section 17 provides for "exceptional circumstances" under which any police officer can request access to customer information from a telecommunications provider. This section of the bill and its implications came as a shock to Toews himself, who claimed not to know that this provision was couched in the bill. The suggestion that one of the most vocal and aggressive advocates for this legislation doesn't know what it entails leaves much to be desired. If he doesn't know what he's voting for, what hope does the average Canadian have of comprehending what it means?

I have a sneaking suspicion that lack of comprehension is what they were banking on.

The bill's short title, Protecting Children from Internet Predators, lends weight to the idea that the Harper regime intended to use the completely understandable fear of child abuse as a cloak to force through far more pervasive measures of public surveillance. The rhetoric then kicks in that only someone with something to hide would possibly argue against an act designed to protect children from sexual predators. If you oppose the act, you either are one of these predators, or as Toews blatantly argued in the House of Commons, you support them.

This is the stifling of dissent through guilt by association. It's a deceptive trick of language as a weapon that conservatives have become masters at.

In the past it was communists and pinkos. Then hippies and black panthers. In more recent years, islamic fundamentalists. Now, if you don't support the government's need to spy on the populace at will, you might as well be leaving your child's bedroom door open for paedophiles to come and go freely in the dead of night.

If you question this bill, and its potential for gross invasions of privacy at the discretion of government power and police authority, you are endangering children. No one wants to be lumped in with the lowest form of human devilry, unless they have skeletons in their inbox of a similarly dark and twisted nature. This rationale attempts to force our support of legislation like Bill C-30. The fear of being seen as a pariah by association, complicit in the evil crimes of the worst among us -- or worse -- being suspected of those crimes ourselves.

On this occasion, the tactic appears to have failed, at least for now. Toews edged away from his comments during a CBC Radio interview aired on Saturday, claiming them as the result of a heated battle on the Commons floor. The backlash from most public media outlets in Canada, and from the public in the greater on-line forums, shut down the Tories' mad, manipulative rhetoric. The legislation will still go through of course, thanks to Harper's majority in Parliament. It is a bitter sweet victory, and we still end up losing in the end.

But in the least, perhaps it has given them cause to question how effective this old tactic can be in the future. It isn't difficult to understand why governments are attacking the internet, and our ability to use it freely. The web provides us all twenty four hour access to perspectives that in the near past would have just been out of reach. Within moments of such an absurd statement like this being made, thousands of keyboard warriors can flood the super highway with detailed synopses of the real meaning behind the fiery rhetoric, and point out all the devils hiding in the details, covered in the trappings of righteous, moral responsibility.

These days, even soccer moms have friends like me.

Panic on the Metro

2012-02-12T20:32:00.001+01:00

An inconvenient game of "chicken" is brewing amidst the metro lines and bus routes of Barcelona. Who will flinch first? And will there be an app to follow the drama on?

The 2012 Mobile World Congress is set to descend upon Barcelona the weekend of 27th February. Some 60,000 attendees will flood the Fira - Montjuic area of the city, eager to test out the newest trinkets and gadgets on display from the giants of the mobile technology world. New smartphones from the likes of HTC, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson will be unveiled. A potentially company saving, game changing operating system from RIM will be previewed as Blackberry attempts to stave off irrelevancy in the face of the Android and the iPhone. Sleek new tablets will be plentiful. Except for the iPad.

Apple is staying at home this year.

The keynote speakers for the conference include major power brokers from across the digital playing field. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Facebook CTO Brett Taylor plan to address the corporate hordes in attendance, and those are only the companies with the most "cool" factor. The list of CEO's, CFO's, Presidents, and Chairmen speaking is long, and relatively unattractive. I can't confidently say why the CEO of Citigroup is coming to address the crowd, but I can confidently say that his mere presence may cause many banks in Barcelona to declare insolvency and demand a bailout to be forked over by the taxpayer. To my local friends, I suggest emptying your accounts and hiding the money in your mattress until he leaves town.

The conference has called Barcelona home for a few years now, and on 22nd July 2011 confirmed it would remain in the city through 2018. The event is a grand feather in the cap of the local government. It ushers in wealthy big wigs willing to spend lavishly on hotels, high class restaurants, and the finest cava they can find. I am mildly curious to find out if the working girls in Raval see a spike in revenues over the weekend, but getting official numbers from them might prove difficult. The conference directly employs roughly 1,500 people for each day that it runs. Millions in revenue is expected to flow into the city as the rich and innovative discuss new apps and the future of various technologies.

This year, though, attendees may find themselves walking a bit more than usual. Bring good trainers.

The CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo) anarcho-syndicalist trade union and employees for the TMB (Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona) have voted in favour of striking during the congress, as a result of TMB management attempting to deny them wage increases agreed to by both parties in their last collective agreement. The bold decision to effectively bring public transit to a grinding halt during such an important event for the city has set off a fierce panic among all affected parties. The MWC organisers are scrambling to find alternate methods for transporting attendees about, the city's hoteliers are in a rage over the possibility of lost revenue from the union's proposed action, and city mayor Xavier Trias has called on the workers to "apply common sense" and hold their strike action on a more convenient date so as not to tarnish the city's image.

In other words, do as we say, not as we do. Apparently the bosses don't enjoy the taste of their own medicine.

There's no denying it's an aggressive move by the union and the transit employees represented within. They are pushing back at TMB management and the municipal government by threatening a hugely profitable event for the city, essentially playing the one trump card they have.

Opinion on the strike is sharply divided amongst the public as well. Many support the workers and are quick to point out that they are asking for only what was promised to them. On the other side of the divide, many are questioning how they will get to their own jobs without access to public transit. Those in direct opposition to the strike, management and the city, are stoking the fires; playing worker against worker, accusing the transit employees of holding the city to ransom, in an attempt to divide and conquer. TMB Management contends they cannot afford to give what has been rightly earned. The company line is an echo of similar austerity measures stifling the poor working classes, and the squeezed middle classes, throughout the rest of Spain. We have made mistakes, you must pay for them.

Workers have started fighting back, and this conference represents an ideal opportunity to show the power they hold as the engine in the societal machine that makes a city run. Those in control should hardly be surprised. You can only beat someone down for so long, before they come back at you in a similarly brutal fashion.

While the order of the day in Spain continues to be great sacrifice by the masses in order to right the wrongs brought about by the controlling elite, expect the people to answer hard line tactics in kind. Expect a bite increasingly more ferocious than the bark.

For the CEO's, presidents, and chairmen still anxious to make the trip, I offer words of calm. I walk everywhere here in Barcelona, it's a fantastic city to experience on foot. However, if you powerful heads of the techno-empires aren't so keen on that idea, might I suggest picking up a Bicing card for the weekend?

Guiri Like Me

2012-02-06T13:28:00.009+01:00

I am not, nor shall I likely ever be, an obvious tourist. When I arrive in a new city for the first time, I don't come well prepared with an arsenal of maps, water bottles, velcroed utility pouches, wallet chains or multi-zippered back packs. There's never been a pair of overly pocketed shorts in my travel bag. In reality I come horrifically under prepared, usually with only the names of a few areas of town that sound enticing banging about in my head, and an excessive amount of curiosity. Getting lost in a new city can prove dangerous, but it's also usually how you wind up with a true feel for the place.

Not having to frequently dive into the confines of a stuffed to bursting bag to fetch out a ridiculously large map in the middle of an area like Las Ramblas in Barcelona leaves you looking, and feeling, a bit like you belong. It also increases the odds of avoiding the attention of pickpockets and muggers, but then so does not stumbling about in the faintly lit narrow streets of Raval in a drunken stupor while singing away in a cockney accent.

This adherence to getting about incognito means I've yet to be the victim of petty theft after ten months in my new home, which is something even the most entrenched expat usually experiences at least once; a sort of right of passage. However, it's not completely problem free. Presenting the façade of being a local in a city with two common languages, neither of which you're any bloody good at speaking, can leave you looking like a fool when a true local falls for the ruse and speaks to you in rapid fire Catalan, or Castellano, exposing you for the guiri you are.

Guiri is a local word to describe a tourist, primarily of British or German origin, though now it could be applied to myriad other European or North American sun seekers across Spain, not to mention the growing throngs of Japanese visitors as well. You won't find it in a standard dictionary. I hadn't heard the word until eight months in, and when I finally did it came from the mouth of another guiri, discussing the sort of jobs expats usually fall into in Spain; our guiri jobs. The word became common as a way for locals to poke a bit of fun at tourists without them knowing. As more and more expats became permanent residents in the city, they caught on to what it meant, and now use it themselves, often accompanied with a wry little grin.

For the most part, the long term guiris are in on the joke.

The jobs we take, the guiri jobs, tend to fall into the mind numbing, soul crushing realm of customer service. We make calls or take calls for companies taking advantage of the low cost of doing business in Barcelona. They range in degrees of horror, but they are all generally awful jobs. We are the punching bags for multi-nationals. We work them because most of us arrive without really knowing much Spanish, beyond the crucial "una cerveza, por favor." These jobs afford us the chance to work and live in a city we quickly fall in love with, and to do so in our native tongue, be it English, German, Dutch or Italian.

This sort of work, though, is a bit like making a deal with the devil.

We make the deal as it's the easiest way to stay, and start living in the city like a local, rather than sampling it as a tourist, but it also makes the process of learning Spanish more difficult, particularly for native English speakers. It becomes an ordeal to put off after speaking solely in your native tongue for eight hours a day, to go home and diligently work on improving your fluency in Spanish, or Catalan. You can suddenly find yourself not really learning at all, stuck in a rut, repeating the same words in the same situations.

You stall out, or you remove the need to learn altogether.

Barcelona truly is a cosmopolitan city. People from all over the world now call it home. There is a thriving British expat community here. English and Irish pubs are littered throughout Barcelona's many barrios. The temptation to immerse yourself in this familiar, comfortable world, with a language you already understand, and customs that you've trafficked in for years, is palpable. The more exotic, authentic world, the real Barcelona, falls back into the distance, and many expats don't notice because they're still having a damned fantastic time.

So far, I've avoided that particular trap. Early on I managed to meet a group of true locals, great people who happily invited me into their world. They keep me immersed in the language, the culture, the life. When I arrived in Barcelona I had planned to learn Catalan first; it was this group of new friends, all Catalans, who suggested tackling Spanish beforehand. For my part, I do what I can to help them improve their English, though most of them have a lengthy head start. I have taught them quite a lot of creative slang, though.

Attempting to learn a new language through immersion in the country, the culture and the community is a longer road to take. The rewards are less immediate, the frustrations constant. The truth is, you have to accept the reality that you will feel like an idiot more often than you won't, at least initially. After a series of mild embarrassments, the occasional breakthrough will occur; a moment of triumph. This tougher journey still seems the best for a full on adult with so much bad wiring in the skull, so much junk information clogging up the memory.

It is the difference between learning to speak, and learning to communicate.

Still, I can't help but think that all this could have been avoided; that it could be easier for the guiri's who want to make a life in Spain, or elsewhere. When I was in school, Spanish, along with German, finally popped up as an option for study midway through secondary school. French, the second official language in Canada, is mandatory when students are eight years old, but becomes a course one can drop by the time they are fifteen; many kids in English Canada do just that. The chance to learn other languages comes too late. As toddlers, when our minds are like sponges, hungry for knowledge, we will devour another language as eagerly as we would a slice of chocolate cake. For good or ill, we live in a world far smaller than it was just 30 years ago, yet we haven't really caught on to the idea that we should be learning to communicate with strangers half a world away at the same time as we do strangers around the corner.

As the months have passed here, I've become friends with quite a few guiri's as well. Most have made some attempt to learn Spanish, and some have added Catalan. Their knowledge of these languages vary; some have been here a few years and are nearly fluent, some have been here for a decade and are just getting by. The ease with which they adapt to the language is random, though English natives generally have a rougher time of it than their French, Italian, and German counterparts. Still, I have met more than a spattering of expats who've fallen into the trap of not bothering, or giving up.

In mid May, I was out with my wife and two friends visiting from London for the weekend to catch a Barça match at Camp Nou. We found ourselves in a little expat bar on Sant Joan just below Carrer Aragó, near where we were living at the time. A fairly intoxicated local fellow chose to strike up a very friendly conversation with me using a rapid fire mixture of Castellano and his native Catalan. At the time I understood very little of either, so the conversation amounted to me repeatedly saying "Lo siento, hablo poco español." A younger couple from Ireland were sitting near enough to catch the mildly absurd conversation. It gave them a good chuckle. Later into the night when the bar closed, I had the chance to speak with them while we all had a last cigarette before moving on. The man was younger than myself, but had been here for over ten years. He freely admitted that he understood the affable drunk less than I did, revealing that even after such a long time here, he didn't know much more than a few basics, and at this point, probably never would.

The other side of the coin is that, whatever struggles these lifer guiri's have in their attempts to learn the language, their children reap the benefits. A couple I know, the husband from England, the wife from France, have a young son who has spent his short life living in Barcelona. At barely six years old, he already speaks fluent English, French, Catalan and Spanish, and he is learning Mandarin, basically because he can. His father joked to me that, whatever happens, he knows his son will always be able to find work at the airport. As far as I'm concerned, the kid is a genius, and is likely to take over the world. I'm just glad I've made friends with our future potential leader.

Perhaps he'll give me a job as the cleaner someday.

Musings on a Cold, Blue Morning in Catalonia...

2012-01-29T15:51:00.001+01:00

On Transformation Into a Local

I'm not one to complain about the weather... much.

As a Canadian transplant here in Barcelona, where snow is so completely rare that a freak flurry will shut down the entire city, I've wandered about through this winter with a sort of smug toughness when met with complaints about the cold. I've mocked other expat friends from the UK when they shiver over coffee and bikinis, moaning loudly about the chill in their bones while we still lounge on street side terraces. In such instances I laud my thick Canadian blood and urge them to "man up." I believe the term "Nancy" has been thrown about a few times, as well.

Sadly though, I can feel that Canadian weather resistance abandoning me. It's four degrees here today -- and lovely, sunny blue sky notwithstanding -- it feels bloody brutal. My feet are like ice blocks, I shiver on the terrace, and I'm moaning about the "cold" at an alarmingly increased rate.

I'm becoming the damned Nancy.

On Irony and Tardy Prophecies

In the old city, exploring the Gótic barrio's intricate labyrinth of narrow, ancient streets will eventually lead you to Plaça de George Orwell. This little square with a fairly lofty name acts as a central hub in and around which drunken revellers -- locals, expats, and tourists alike -- swarm like locusts through the barrio's vast network of bars and nightclubs. It is named for the legendary author not so much due to his herculean literary stature, as for his escapades during the Spanish Civil War.

Orwell fought for the Republicans during the war against Franco's nationalists as a member of the International Brigades, which also included nearly two thousand Canadians breaking their own nation's laws in doing so; something not taught in schools back home, sadly. The author chronicled his time, and his perspective on the anarcho-syndicalist's brief liberation of Barcelona in the memoir Homage to Catalonia.

Named for him in 1996, the square is a great spot to meet and mingle; to people watch over a few mediana's before either abandoning the barrio to the hordes descending upon it to drink, dance, and hopefully find a warm body for the night, or joining them yourself in search of similar amusements.

Like much of the old city, the square has seen its share of seedier elements over the years. This is part of the neighbourhood's charm, but for a tourist lacking in common sense, or suffering from a high blood alcohol content, this can sometimes lead to a stolen wallet or mobile phone. Pickpockets are an issue here in Barcelona, primarily if you make yourself an easy mark for them.

With this in mind, in 2002 the Ajuntament de Barcelona leapt into the annuls of achievements in obvious irony when they made the area a "zona vigilada" and installed a security camera that now keeps watch over a square named after the author of 1984, in which we are given a chilling glimpse into a world where everyone is monitored as a possible dissenter; where each citizen is considered a suspect. You almost have to admire the twisted sense of humour of the Ajuntament employee that suggested the square as a prime spot for constant surveillance, though I may be giving them too much credit. The sad reality is that the choice most likely went straight over their heads.

When I saw the above photo, it reminded me that, while he was a bit off on the date, in writing 1984, Orwell has become more prophet than doom-saying novelist. Our cities are so rife with video surveillance, watching and recording everything we do outside of our own homes, that we no longer give the constant monitoring a second thought, even as the likes of Google, Facebook, and smartphone providers make the prospect of our private lives being documented increasingly likely. We have bought into the ludicrous notion that if we aren't doing anything wrong, we have nothing to fear from such invasions of privacy.

This strange trust that surveillance of the public will only be used in the service of catching criminals allows acts like the 2012 NDAA to come into law with only a half hearted resistance. We don't seem to realise these measures make us all suspects. We are all possible terrorists, potential dissidents, and likely criminals.

The camera in Orwell's square is an ugly little reminder that, to those in control, we are the enemy.

Photo Via Poumista

Mossoflautas!

2012-01-18T00:10:00.011+01:00

When the police can't afford to beat you, they join you

This past Friday some 50 members of the Catalan “Mossos d’Esquadra” regional police force marched into Barcelona’s largest police station at Plaça de Espanya to stage a sit in. Over the last eighteen months the Mossos have felt the pinch of a 5 percent cut in their wages, as the Generalitat de Catalunya marches along the austerity path in lock step with the rest of Spain. They entered with placards, and blew tiny plastic “flautas” in unison. One Mosso was quoted warning that “If they won’t negotiate, we’ll fight”. Still, by all reports it was a generally peaceful affair.

The problem is, the last time I saw 50 Mossos in the same place, they were beating peaceful 15M protestors bloody with truncheons:

That was 27^th May 2011, when under the guise of cleaning the grounds before the weekend's Champions League celebrations, the Mossos escorted city cleaning crews into the 15M encampment at Plaça de Catalunya, Barcelona’s central square. While they told the 200 or so Indignats camping there that they would be allowed back in, the cleaning crews began tearing down and removing the tents and other makeshift areas the protestors had constructed. Thousands of supporters descended on the square in a show of solidarity. It wasn’t long before the skull cracking began.

Plainly speaking, when it comes to stifling dissent, the Mossos don’t fuck about.

On 15^th June 2011, the Mossos fired rubber bullets on crowds seeking to block politicians from entering the Catalan Parliament situated in Barcelona’s Parc de la Ciutadella. Reports surfaced after the event that the Mossos employed the use of "Agent Provocateurs" during the march; a theatrical, subversive tactic used by police across the globe to turn peaceful protests into chaotic riots, effectively contaminating the public's view of a movement in an effort to turn the dissenter into a common enemy -- a shady villain to be feared and loathed rather than listened to.

The Mossos cast an imposing shadow at these protests. Clad from head to toe in black riot fatigues, thick kevlar covering their torsos, their faces obscured not only by the visors on their helmets, but by police issue balaclavas. This is the strange paradox of the riot police and the protestor; only one side ever comes prepared for a fight, and the public is made to believe those in heavy armour are the brave ones. You start to wonder who needs protecting from who?

On 19th June 2011, when the Indignats had once again converged on the Catalan Parliament buildings, I took a place along the barricade that separated the Mossos from the Indignats, standing across from one officer for about 30 minutes; his mouth and nose hidden under the black cloth of his Mossos mask. I could only see his eyes, permanently fixed on me. He stood completely at the ready, waiting for me to jump over the barricade. I half wondered if he was hoping I would.

Yet now, after months spent introducing their truncheons to the skulls of those calling out unfettered greed, and the strangle of austerity measures forced on the many to pay for damage wrought by the few, the opressors have become the protestors.

There is a rich irony in the Mossos being made victims of the same measures imposed by the elites they are made to serve, often toward violent and repressive ends, and embracing the spirit of dissent as a result. Feeling the sting of these same sharp cuts to their livelihoods that the Indignats have laboured under for years should be a lesson to them, and moreover, to police officers everywhere.

While the uniform, the badge, and the billy club may provide the illusion of power, ultimately the police remain members of the same under-classes they are frequently ordered to pummel into submission. To the elites they are a private army to be used for their protection, but ultimately, like the rest of us, they are expected to foot the bill for their folly. There is no justification for meeting peaceful protest with violent thuggery. “Just following orders” does not cut it.

For these 50 or so Mossos, and inevitably for police in every city where the people are rising up against the austerity disease, the question is simple. The next time you are ordered to crack the skull of a Perroflauta refusing to forfeit their right to be outraged, or to pepper spray a row of kneeling students at a university, will you remember that these same people whose orders you are “just following” can, and probably will, turn on you at any time?

2012: The Beginning of the End?

2012-01-05T17:18:00.006+01:00

Another year, another doomsday prophecy. They pop up so often now we might as well print them alongside holidays in the calendar. However, as fun and terror inducing as they can be, apocalyptic prophecies tend to vary wildly in severity and believability. Harold Camping banged his end of days gong more than once throughout 2011, managing to bilk a few sad, faithful dopes out of their life savings in the process, convinced that the rapture was upon us and eager to buy their spot in the blessed afterlife. The majority of us saw Camping's doomsday prophecy for what it was: a source of amusing Facebook status updates for most, and a con job for a faithful and utterly stupid few. 2012, though, sees the arrival of a doomsday prophecy we can sink our teeth into. There hasn't been one like this since Y2K, when we all partied like it was 1999, waiting to see if a niggling technical glitch would render life as we know it an irradiated memory, leaving us in a wasteland of spontaneously downed jet-liners cluttering up the scorched earth and sentient, rage-filled toasters hungry for our flesh. This time around, the annual prediction of doom isn't fucking about.

Welcome to 2012. According to the Mayan long count calendar, or at least according to a group of dubious "experts" on the Mayan long count calendar, the jig is up; the show is over, it's lights out for the earth. We've all got just shy of twelve months to get out there and live life to the fullest. Take all the drugs you've previously been afraid of. Have copious amounts of increasingly bizarre and unapologetically unprotected sex because all bets are off! Come 21st December, you are a dead human walking. A nebulous, opaque, poorly defined yet unstoppable threat is barrelling toward us from the cosmos. Do you really want to meet your ultimate demise never knowing the joys of a Caligulaesque orgy while tripping on a ridiculous cocktail of hallucinogens and heroin?

Of course, most of these predictions of imminent doom swirling around the Mayan long count calendar come from the sort of websites whose owners seem to think the progress of web design stopped sometime in 1997. In all reality the long count calendar was, much like our own yearly method of time keeping, intended to reset at the end of it's 5000 or so year lifespan -- a tracking of an entire age, rather than a single year. The only great cosmic event coming our way this year, in all likelihood, is the sun's alignment with the centre of the Milky Way, a galactic event that occurs every 26,000 years. So maybe bring a full box of condoms to all those super orgies you plan on attending, and leave the crystal meth at home.

Chances are we will wake up on 22nd December as we do every single day -- still existing. No rogue asteroid from the depths of space will have side swiped the planet. No blast of cosmic gamma rays will wash over us, turning us into withered mutants or super evolved telepaths, depending on whose take on the prophecy you're inclined to believe. Chances are we will wake up to the same sun in the sky with the same lives we led the day before, and we'll continue on.

Unless the powers that be right here on earth have something to say about it.

It didn't take long for the world's power brokers and manipulators to harsh our collective new year's eve buzz. While we were out drinking and cavorting, Barack Obama was in Hawaii pissing all over the Bill of Rights. In these first few days of 2012, Iran and the west have continued their game of metaphorical chicken, with the Mid East oil exporter threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, making veiled threats at US naval vessels in the area, all while the US, the UK, and the EU continue to make overtures of military action over Iran's nuclear weapons programmes, which western leaders assure us are very real, leaving me with an annoying sense of deja vu.

I feel like I've seen this movie before.

This latest round of international dick swinging by the likes of Barack Obama, David Cameron, Mahmoud Ahmedinajad and Angela Merkel has caught the attention of China and Russia, two nations with a vested interest in Iran and the free flow of its oil, and two nations with more than enough might to stand up to any military aggression coming from the west toward their supplier. With each raised voice, each veiled threat, each rattled sabre, the possibility of World War Three breaking out becomes less and less unthinkable, and more a matter of predicting when it starts, rather than if. We can hope that our world leaders are sane enough not to let things get to the point of no return, but a quick glance back at the past year or so quickly tells us they can, have, and more than likely will again. These are strange days. Once again it seems we live in a time of monsters. The best we can hope for is that none of them just want to watch the world burn.

On second thought, maybe instantaneous and unavoidable death from space is the better option.

2011: The End of the Beginning

2011-12-31T18:51:00.003+01:00

While the final days and hours of 2011 have been ticking down, I've been a bit too distracted to do much writing. Living in Barcelona will do that to you. I've enjoyed some interesting Christmas nights in my time, but none before this left me wandering home at five in the morning blissfully drunk on a steady stream of cider, wine, jaegermeister, whisky and rum, consumed in that order. The fact that I woke the next day not disgustingly sick from all the drink might have constituted a Christmas miracle, were I not a godless heathen. As it stands I’ll credit the miracle of a hangover free Boxing Day to the Philharmonic Pub’s incredible steak pie, and the lovely “pica pica” spread put out by the friends who invited two lonely expats to spend the holiday with them. This was a very different Christmas, but a fantastic one all the same.

So my apologies to the few but faithful for being less than prolific over the last few weeks, but I’m not going to lie to you. Being a lazy, shiftless bum for days on end was just what the doctor ordered. Still, to the loyal readers back home in the New World, the locals here in Spain, and that lone reader in Germany who checks in diligently every week or so, I promise to up the output in 2012, and to end delays like this recent one. However this is a promise I will more than likely break on multiple occasions, so in advance, lo siento.

One year ago tonight, I was at The Rhino in Toronto, my local pub of ten years. My wife and I gathered with our friends, standing at the bar drinking, carousing, singing “Auld Lang Syne” as the clock struck midnight. Kisses all around, followed by the Scots tradition of calling your mum, which these days means infuriating and numerous failed attempts to get a signal and successfully place a call while millions of people in town are trying to do the same. It was a familiar and lovely way to put one year in its grave and witness the first sparks of life in a new one. This particular year the sparks never stopped, they just grew hotter, before igniting a full on blaze across the planet.

This final year of the 21^st Century’s first decade had the feel of a video recap of the last ten years as spliced together by someone on a dangerous amount of psychotropic drugs. This has been a decade of perpetual war, terrorism either organic or manufactured, economic disasters, revolutions calling for democracy in the east while the very idea itself was hijacked by the bloated, sausage fingered corporate elites in the west. Change we could believe in dangled in front of us like a carrot on a stick, only to find the new boss was really no different from the old boss. We’ve spent the better part of ten years under the threat of imminent doom lurking around every corner, and 2011 served as the inevitable result of this constant feeling that we were all teetering on the edge of a cliff, desperate just to hang on and not fall to a bloody, bone shattering death. Who could blame us for wallowing in disillusion and apathy after being repeatedly battered with bombs, buzzwords, and boogie men?

The great thing about 2011 is that we stopped wallowing. We woke up.

It took a while, but here at the end of the beginning a grand chunk of people on this pale blue dot -- including yours truly -- finally opened their eyes to the reality those in control have been forcing on us for far too long. It took crossing an ocean and watching the birth of a revolution here in my new home to rouse me from the comatose state in which I spent most of this century. I hope this new found sense of actually giving a fuck or two sticks around for a while, in all of us.

In 2011 we lifted the veil, and got a good look at the man behind the curtain. He’s an ugly, twisted fucker, not pleased to be exposed to the public, but he’s hardly waving the white flag either. The people in Tahrir Square are still being beaten and assaulted by SCAF; Austerity is still the order of the day across Europe. The line between terrorist and protestor has all but been obliterated. It is going to get worse before there’s a chance of it getting any better. Tonight though, on New Year’s Eve, forget it all for a few hours. Go out, get pissed, and say goodbye to a bizarre, fantastic year.

Tonight I’ll be saying goodbye to 2011 in a new city, in my new local pub, The Philharmonic. My wife and I will raise a glass with new friends here; Catalans, Spaniards, and expats all among them. We’ll think of our friends and family back home, and across the globe, and no doubt share a fair amount of kisses while singing Auld Lang Syne.

It will be a familiar and completely new experience, all at once.

Happy New Year.

False Evidence Appearing Real

2011-12-14T07:37:00.005+01:00

On the night of September 11^th, 2001, after an exhausting day watching the birth of the 21^st century live in my dank, cigarette-smoke filled living room, I was sat in my favourite local pub with a few friends. We were all getting drunk. At the table next to us, and the table next to them, sat people all in the same boat. They were also getting drunk. Every table and every stool at the bar contained a snapshot – an identical image repeated over and over again: bewildered, sometimes angry faces pouring a bit of liquid comfort down their throats, each talking about the same awful bloody tragedy, trying and failing to make some sense of it. From person to person the arguments varied wildly, the emotional responses swerved from hysteria to hatred. We didn’t agree on much, but we didn’t really have to right then and there. We needed to talk, to get drunk, and be together because we didn’t want to be alone

We didn’t want to be alone because we were terrified.

People in homes and bars and cafes all over the world were drowning in this same sense of fear and dread. Whether you were feeling it in Boston or Baghdad, or if you were watching Fox News or Al Jazeera, you felt it. You might have feared that your city was the next target. You might have feared that you would be crushed by the full might of the inevitable response. Whatever the individual cause for panic, it was cripplingly real and near impossible to overcome. We had all just watched several thousand people die in a heap of concrete, twisted metal, and a choking cloud of ash and dust. We witnessed people trapped on the top floors of two mammoth skyscrapers leap to their deaths; many of us watched it repeated over and over again in a grotesque loop broadcast across all channels. As much as we wanted to, we couldn’t look away. These horrible visions were burning into our retinas to a soundtrack of screaming New Yorkers running through the streets and news anchors repeatedly uttering names like Bid Laden, Hussein, and Al Qaeda. It was an unrelenting assault on the senses, with any hope of escape completely futile. Logic and reason were high tailing it out the door. The fear had taken hold, and it wasn’t about to let go anytime soon.

What followed after that day was a calculated pageant of fear and loathing, designed to convince the people of the west to keep quiet while the military industrial complex set about inventing wars as a means to epic profit and a tightening of their grip on individual rights. This is an old trick, though – one that fools us every time.

The fear of communism directed the actions of the west for nearly fifty years. The scaremongering rhetoric that arose about the horrors of a red state was so masterfully orchestrated that to this day there is a certain sort of person still checking under his bed at night to make sure a “commie” isn’t lying in wait to steal his freedom and force him to wait in line for a roll of toilet paper. War is great business, and for decades the mere possibility of an impending fight for ideological survival led to fortunes being made through the manufacturing and sale of ever more terrifying weapons. The theory proves true over and over again. We are easily scared into submission.

For thousands of years fear has been used by Pharaohs and Presidents, Imams and Popes, CEOs and marketing gurus alike, as a means to control, to persuade, to make you do as you’re told. Many never stand a chance against its ability to cajole us so perfectly because from a very early age we are taught that failure to obey a higher authority will have damning consequences.

Before we have a say in the matter, most of us are taught that if you do not do as your god wants you face a never ending torrent of punishment and torture. Fearsome old men in grand costumes preach to us that these are the commands of our supreme father, a vague and faceless figure we cannot see or communicate with but through his human emissary. They assure us that he is everywhere and he wants you to follow his rules. The penance that awaits you for not living your life by the wishes of whichever creator you believe in are nightmarish and eternal -- and bloody frightening. The lesson starts early: Do as we say, or horrible consequences await you.

We move into adulthood carrying this deeply entrenched control switch with us, and the fears pile on, one on top of the other. Insecurities about your social standing become a constant presence as you are guided by a new minister: the marketer. Soon you come to believe that your status defines you, and your status is calculated by the things you own. You need a house bigger than the next guy's, a new car more expensive than the next guy's. Designer brand name clothing that immediately tells everyone how well you’re doing. The newest iPhone the nanosecond it becomes available. The biggest HD, 3D, LCD, flatscreen, plasma television monstrosity you can find, regardless of whether you can afford it. These things define you. They tell everyone else how much you have, and how important you are. Whether you need them or not is irrelevant. Enslave yourself in a sea of debt because if you don’t have these things, you have failed the game of life.

It is a dark and devilish business. Fear makes us consume.

There is profit to be made in keeping the public fearful. Few industries understand this idea – or have realized it so perfectly – as the war industry. This was the industry that kicked the use of fear as control into overdrive after 9/11. Hours of television reports told us that terrorists were everywhere, lurking in the shadows of every city and every town in the free world. Leaders took to podiums in Washington and London and scared the living daylights out of us. Strange and foreign invaders armed with dirty bombs, box cutters, anthrax and hatred were plotting against us. Thousands of terrorist cells were operating in hundreds of cities across the world, all with one common goal: To kill you and everyone you love.

Who wouldn’t be afraid of that?

This was the politics of fear firing on all cylinders, convincing us to make war in the Middle East against enemies old and new. The war against terror in Afghanistan led to the war on hazy nuclear threats in Iraq. Once again they sold the people fear, with murky photos of weapons facilities and suspect rumours about Nigerian uranium, and the people devoured it. In the end, completely disoriented by the constant doom surrounding us, we barely noticed as our rights were thoroughly trimmed down in the name of security. Peace through war. Love through hate. It was more than big brother could have asked for.

Today, in a year of revolution and ongoing civil disobedience, those who want to keep us afraid are telling us there is a new terror lying in wait: the dissenter. The radical is what you need to fear next. The occupier and the indignado are asking questions the elite don’t have answers for, and now they are back to the tried and true method of marginalization through fear. In London, the authorities have named the occupy movement a terrorist organization. Apparently filthy hippies sitting in public squares with no clear message are as dangerous to your way of life as Al Qaeda. In the mainstream media, the persistent message of the occupy movement is that of shiftless bums and violent drug addicts demanding handouts from the rich and successful. The camps are rife with the worst elements of society, people living on the dark fringes. Even the old red menace has reared its paranoid head.

The truth is occupy camps contain these elements of society, as does each community the world over. Drug addicts overdosing at occupy camps would have overdosed alone in some other dark part of the city. In many cases, being at the camps saved them from death. Those who live on the edge of the knife aren’t drug addicts, or mentally ill because they are at camps offering them hot food and some semblance of shelter for the night, they are at the camps providing these things because they are drug addicts, or suffering mental illness –- or both. Mainstream society left them behind a long time ago.

When we think it over for a moment, when logic and reason don’t high tail it out the door, when we don’t choose to fall for it, the fear mongering can be seen for what it is: dishonest manipulation.

The question is will we fall for it again, or not?

D'Hondt Let Me Down

2011-12-01T18:07:00.005+01:00

Ever get the feeling you’re being followed?

I do, at this very moment. I have come to believe that the right wing is stalking me, hunting me down as if I were the last Javan Rhinoceros, eager to mount my head on its wall. It’s either that, or I’m a curse for progressive thinkers and revolutionaries. You’ll forgive me if I prefer to think I’m being chased.

When I left Toronto times were grim. The city was a few months in to what's best described as the end result of former Provincial Premier Mike Harris’ final “fuck you” to the city he so loathed. The Harris “Mega City” amalgamation of Toronto proper with its surrounding suburbs delivered the city into the hands of a mayor who hates cities, progressives, art, culture, even bicycles. Mayor Rob Ford was the Harris regime's inevitable parting gift to the downtown core. If you listened closely, you could almost hear Harris crying out “from hells heart, I stab at thee!”

Similarly, though no less baffling, shortly after I left the country the federal Tories led by Stephen Harper, finally fooled enough Canadians, or lulled enough to sleep, to win the majority government they had craved for so long. No longer confined by the restraints of a minority parliament, and with no need to pay lip service to the idea of bipartisan co-operation, Harper and his cabal could drive through any legislation it liked. These were dark days for my city, my country, and my home. While these weren’t the reasons I left, they certainly worked to reaffirm the decision to go off and explore the world around me. Now, just seven months later, that same black cloud, the darkness on the edge of town, has tracked me down in Spain.

The national elections on the 20^th of November delivered Spain into the hands of the Partido Popular, a party formed in the burning embers of the old Franco regime when it fell in the mid seventies. For some here in Barcelona, it brings back sinister memories. A Catalan friend of mine, angry over the results and no doubt fearful of what’s to come, sent a message stating “La oscuridad se cierne sobre nuestro pueblo.”

The darkness looms over our people.

The results, while disappointing for many, come as no surprise. Sit down for a chat in a café, or a bar with nearly anyone you meet here to discuss the nation’s political parties and you will learn one thing very quickly: They are two sides of the same coin, ultimately controlled by Santander, the largest bank in the Eurozone. In essence, there is no choice at all.

The outgoing and thoroughly embarrassed PSOE had long ago shown that they were progressive and socialist only so long as it was convenient to be. When the pressure was applied from “Merkozy”, Zapatero quickly played the obedient dog. What is coming from New Prime Minister Rajoy and his party is simply more of the same crippling austerity measures applied by Zapatero in order to appease the creditors, to appease Chancellor Merkel, and to appease President Sarkozy. The people of Spain have been living under and fighting these efforts to sell them into financial slavery for some time now. Swapping out one set of thieves and opressors for another doesn’t mean much to them.

Far from a victory for conservative ideals, these election results stand as a punishment of the former bosses for abandoning their own ideals and turning their backs on the people in the face of relentless pressure from Chancellor Merkel. There were more nullified votes, blanked votes, and outright abstentions than there were actual votes cast for Rajoy and the Partido Popular. More people in this country feel that there is no one they can trust to represent them. They no longer place faith in the democratic process because it no longer belongs to them. It has been taken over by the financiers, the corporatists, and the neutered politicians who serve them.

When asked to choose between the person who wants to punch you in the stomach and the person who wants to kick you in the face, the vast majority of us would opt for neither. The people of Spain were being asked to vote for austerity, or more austerity. Many made the only choice they could. They said no.

It was a strange day here in Barcelona -- election day. The streets were quiet. The tourists were there of course, they always are. They walked up and down Passeig de Gracia as they do every single day of the year. No sense of what was at stake. To them this was not a day of any particular importance, just another lovely day in sunny Spain.

The locals though, the vibrant and rare lifeblood of this city, the ones that make it hum, were taking sides in a conflict of ideologies. Those who believe in the system, the ones that feel it’s working just fine, went to the polls and cast their ballot for more austerity, more crippling service cuts –- more of the same. On the other side of the field stood those who see themselves as prisoners, and the election as nothing more than a changing of the guards. The jailers faces and the names on their placards may have changed, but their plans and schemes all come from the same cold and sinister warden.

Those who refused to vote made a hard choice. They will not give consent to forced financial servitude. They have opted to show those in charge that if you abandon your ideals, and your promise to the public, forcing the people to pay the price for your corruption and that of the money men who hold the purse strings, the people will take you to task, any way they can. This was the harsh lesson the inevitable losers learned on election day, and it is the lesson the default winners should take to heart. Sooner rather than later.

On Sunday, 20th November 2011, millions of Spanish citizens made it clear that they will not be complicit in the methodical dismantling of their democracy. If the politicians don't have the courage, or the conviction to stand up for the people, they are more than capable of making their time on the throne extremely uncomfortable -- and very brief.

The Words of the Prophets are Written on the Subway Walls

2011-11-19T12:24:00.007+01:00

There was a time, not so long ago, when the world of journalism created epic figures and instilled them in the public consciousness: Hemingway and Gellhorn documenting the fight against fascism in Spain; Edward R. Murrow taking to the airwaves to speak out against McCarthyism and the communist witch hunt as it spread across the United States during the 1950s; Woodward and Bernstein blowing the roof off “Watergate”, taking down a president in the process; Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo tours of American culture and the campaign trail seen through a haze of uppers, downers, screamers and laughers. Rather than just reporting the events of the day, these larger than life icons of the medium helped us to understand them, and when necessary, to question the truth behind the headline.

These men and women weren't simply the chroniclers of their times, they were avatars for those at home. This was journalism as protest, journalism as a weapon against tyranny, journalism as a light to shine on corruption, and in Thompson’s case, journalism as psychedelic experience. Above all, it was journalism as a means of conversation.

Sadly things are very different now. Those voices are ghosts of the past, replaced with shrill, dishonest mouthpieces. Mainstream media in the west has abandoned the conversation in favor of the slogan. While it is true that corporations have long owned the news media, there was a time when they did not so deeply and blatantly control how the story gets told. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the Occupy movement’s fight against the same corporate overmind that controls the old media, these propagandists are not “on side” with the cause. You might as well expect a dog to bite the hand that feeds it.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Edward R. Murrow’s warning that we must not confuse dissent with disloyalty came to a morbid fruition. To ask questions about why the attacks happened, or to question who or what was the ultimate root cause became an act of betrayal. To even suggest that decades of imperialist policies, passed from Britain and France to The United States, may have had some part to play in the horror was likely to get you a swift kick in the balls, or worse. As the west marched to war, moving from the hunt for Bin Laden in Afghanistan to the hunt for WMDs in Iraq, we had no Murrow questioning the motivations and the methods of the Bush Presidency. What few voices there were in the media asking the questions were ridiculed, admonished, or snuffed out entirely, shouted down by the parrots and the patriots.

Like many a big lie, the truth eventually came to light. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or anything more than a paper thin justification for invasion. The war on terror, like Oceania’s “perpetual war” in George Orwell’s 1984 was never intended to be won, merely to be fought. The truth came too late. The dissenters, their questions silenced with talk of treason and support for dictators, were unable to halt the slogan from killing the conversation. Ironically enough, this stifling of dissent pushed those who wanted to have the conversation, who dared to ask the questions, toward the same tool that now drives perhaps the largest conversation to ever take place.

The internet is where the great barking dog of corporate owned, ideologically aligned media banished those who wanted to have a true dialogue, to ask the important questions. Once they all got there, it was only a matter of time before they started talking to each other, and realized many felt the same way: that something was very wrong with just about everything. These conversations spread from the message boards, the twitter feeds, the facebook walls and the blogosphere to the streets of Tunisia and Egypt, to the squares of Spain and Greece, to the student unions of Chile. When the old media locked the people out of the discourse, choosing to present the news as something to be processed, packaged and consumed for profit rather than absorbed for knowledge, they helped to create a new media with new journalists and a renewed sense that the questions must be asked. Always. Now, this new media is quickly making them irrelevant.

The contradictory, near schizophrenic way these dinosaur news outlets have reacted to what has quickly turned into a year of revolution, uprising, and occupation belies just how deep their ties to the corporate brand go. Revolts against regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya have been lauded and praised, stuffed to bursting with the buzzwords of capitalism. American media trumpeted “Freedom” and “Democracy” and “Western Values” when uprisings target clear enemies abroad, be they actual figureheads or simply unsavory ideas.

However when the people began rising up in America, taking to the streets in New York, Chicago, Oakland and countless other cities to rage against the methodical, amoral hijacking of their democratic process, the rhetoric changed. The cheers turned to jeers. The bluster and the bravado shown for brave revolutionaries abroad changed to bile and venom spewed for lazy, unemployed drug users, hippies, and communists here at home.

The North American movements, in particular, are most often faced with a corporate media whose sole interest is to marginalize them to the point where no one will take them seriously. The questions have been asked without their approval. This mass awakening of the underclasses had gone viral while Beck and O’Reilly were trying to work out what exactly that smiley-faced mask was all about. The old media works so hard to mock and discredit the occupiers because they question the golden calf the old media worships under, and what’s worse, this new media the activists have created has revealed that many arms of the old guard have sold their profession down the river. They took what was once a calling and turned it into a racket, and now they are being forced to look at themselves in the mirror.

Occupiers across the globe must come to the realization that it is pointless to hope and beg for sympathy and a fair shake from these bought and sold news outlets or the corporate mascots they put on the air day in and day out. They will always try to belittle, discredit, and spit on you from a great height. They will do whatever is necessary to warp the perception of their audience. They will take the words or the actions of one mad man in your open societies and prescribe them to all of you, because that is what they are paid to do. You are calling to rights their corporate feeding trough. Having tossed their ethics and integrity aside over the last ten or so years, all they can do is fight, brutal and dirty, to keep the corporate mother’s milk flowing. They hate you for having integrity. They hate you for having ethics. They hate you for daring to question the system that they allowed to devour them. They hate you for resurrecting the conversation in the face of their sloganeering.

The truth is you don’t need them.

Not their approval, or their respect, or their airtime. The old media scoffed at your ideas and ignored you, and as a result you created a new one, and its circulation is unparalleled. The new writers, and the seasoned journalists pushed to the fringes for refusing to give up their voice, now speak to millions with each click of a mouse. The social networks, the blogs, the twitter feeds and the YouTube videos are your medium. These are the tools that brought a million people on to the streets all across the world on October 15th, and each day thousands of new users find your articles and editorials. Some will agree with you, and some will not, but all will be allowed to join the discussion.

Simon & Garfunkel’s classic The Sound of Silence tells us “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls”. The walls have been digitized, and the virtual halls are filled with millions of tenants, eager for knowledge, for perspective and most importantly, for the conversation to continue.

"Te quiero, Barcelona..."

2011-10-21T18:47:00.008+02:00

On the ground at 15-O Barcelona

Photos by Wendy Taylor

When my wife and I first decided to cross the Atlantic and start living a new sort of life, Barcelona was the only real choice. In our small apartment on Toronto's Queen Street West we would dream of sitting at street side cafes, sipping con leches and Americanos, smoking cigarettes, listening to Spanish guitar, and most importantly, working to live as opposed to living to work. Six months on, we have that new life we'd hoped for. What was unexpected, was to land in our new home just as a revolution was being born here in Spain, one that has now spread to the new world we left, and effortlessly destroyed the cynicism that had grown in me over the first 12 or so years of my adult life.

Just a month into our new lives here, it all boiled over. Citizens across Spain began taking to the streets, occupying the vast squares and public spaces in their city centres. They came to give manifestation to their outrage over what was being forced upon them by the controllers of global finance, by the money men who own the politicians that are elected to represent the people, but have long since lost interest in doing so. In Barcelona I watched as the Catalan Els Indignats joined with the Castellan Los Indignados across Spain, setting up camp in Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya, the grand square in the Catalonian capital city that connects the old barrios of Raval and Gotic with the 19^th century modern expansion known as Eixample. Here, amongst the constant flow of tourists and the bold as brass pigeons, they joined their countrymen in Madrid’s Puerta Del Sol, and countless other Indignados in cities all over Spain, to be the bright star, the big bang of what we are now calling the “Occupy” movement.

Before AdBusters and Anonymous successfully forced the eyes of the world to turn to Wall Street, the world’s symbolic heart of elite finance and the capitalist dream, the Indignant ones here in Spain were drawing up the blueprint for them. Here in these little DIY barrios they crafted the unique ideas behind this growing shift in perspective. In Plaça Catalunya they built ramshackle kitchens, dormitories, a library, and a media centre to keep the world aware of what was happening. International media giants weren’t interested, but the people were. They followed the movement on Facebook, on Twitter, on Youtube. They voiced their support for Spain’s outraged, and only a few months later, took the cause to a stage that could not be ignored.

On October 15th hundreds of thousands of people, in a thousand cities across the world came out into their streets to occupy their cities, to support those in New York who took over Zucotti Park in mid September, and to take the next step in a global push for change that is not going away, despite the best efforts of our corporate media giants to ignore and mock them. Here in Barcelona, we went back to where it all began: Plaça Catalunya.

Just before 5pm we arrived at the edge of the square, crossing the famous Passeig de Gracia, and wandering into the gathering crowd. Already a few thousand had arrived, so we decided to stroll through and take a look at the different faces coming together.

Mixed in among the “Perro Flautas”, youth who live with their dogs on the street and play music for a few euros here and there, that the authorities often blame for these uprisings, were old Senors and Senoras who had lived through the dark days of Franco. There were young families crippled by the crisis with their children in tow, and of course, many a Guy Fawkes mask grinning out at us. This is not some collection of disaffected youth that can be easily brushed aside as a rabble of lazy unemployed misfits, more intent on drinking Estrella’s and asking for handouts than doing an honest day's work. Standing alongside the young and the outraged are their grandmothers and grandfathers, their older brothers and sisters, new mothers and fathers struggling to feed their children. A friend who had joined us shortly after we arrived pointed out a sign, held up by an older woman which read “No tengo un perro, no tengo una flauta!” I have no dog, I have no flute!

Right on time at 5pm, several massive columns of people converged on the square from three or four different directions. Within moments, what was a group of a few thousand swelled out of the square and onto the roads surrounding the Plaça . People began to move through the central square to join with the larger groups on the streets. Men and women carried long banners overhead, young girls with pierced lips and shaved heads walked side by side with white haired grandfathers. Tattooed, mohawked, and sometimes mulleted tough looking punks walked side by side with old matrons in their weekend best and mothers with little kids in their arms and on their shoulders. These were people of different generations, and of different walks of life, coming together in a fight to take their democracy back.

We watched as the crowd swelled all around us and soon, looking out in any direction, we saw only the indignant. The collection of faces, with cheers and raised hands, moved out onto Passeig de Gracia to begin their march, and then the music started.

Dotted throughout the crowd were small groups of musicians wielding an assortment of drums and various other percussion instruments. As they began to play, people cheered, and took to dancing all around them. My wife and one of our friends joined in the dancing from our spot on the raised grass hill in front of one of the square’s two large fountains. This crowd was the very picture of peace and joy, with no interest in destruction or violence. They didn't need that. They were here together, and they were happy.

We all moved up along Passeig de Gracia, a great collection of faces and voices moving through our city. Songs of unity from the old days of dictatorship rang out in time with new slogans of indignation. It became clear once we had taken to walking that the drummers and dancers were there not only to entertain the crowd, they were there to keep things open and calm. The drum bands would stop and perform brilliant and elaborate pieces of music for the crowd around them, allowing the marchers to flow easily along the street. Two or three women would come out of the throng of protestors and dance frantically to the beat of the drums; One curious little blonde haired boy with an edgy looking mullet joined in as well, quickly becoming the star of the little show. Behind him his young mother, with an edgy looking mullet of her own, flashed a beautiful smile as she watched her son upstage the musicians for a moment.

As the last light of the evening sun faded behind Sagrat Cor church in the mountains, we passed under the watchful eye of Gaudi, Catalunya’s visionary architect, as we walked by his scaly roofed “Casa Battlo” and turned right onto Carrer d’Aragó. Here, on this one way street, the indignant descended upon the institutions that had failed them. There was no violence, but the banks and corporate strongholds that can be found on every corner of Aragó were plastered with anti-corporate posters, and the walls covered with clever slogans in Catalan and Castellano alike. It was here that I read a short slogan that gave perfect voice to the perspective shared by those across this country:

"If you have a gun you can rob a bank, but if you have a bank, you can rob everyone..."

The message is concise, and it is clear. We are the victims of a grand theft, but these bankers, investors, speculators and corporate elites have stolen much more than just our money, they have stolen our democracy. They have hijacked our representation to make disgusting levels of profit. They have crafted a sick joke to play on all of us, and for far too long, we let them. They got so good at telling the joke that they believed it impossible for us to ever get the punch line. They do not want to believe that we can ever be anything other than blind.

Now, our eyes are opening. We are beginning to understand the joke that’s been played on us, by those that we are told to admire, revere, and fear. The rich, the powerful, the politicians with lined pockets. We are all starting to learn though, that they should be afraid of us, not us of them.

As the happy revolutionaries turned off Aragó and on to Passeig de Sant Joan to make their way to the Arc de Triomphe, my friends and I left the march to have a drink and to talk. Underneath a clear, star filled black sky we sat and discussed what we had been a part of, and what this movement was turning into. As we did, one thing became clear to me: While New York and Occupy Wall Street has become the important face of this movement, Spain and Los Indignados remain it’s strong heart, pumping fresh blood through the veins of this new revolution, growing all across the world.

To see more of Wendy's work, visit: http://wendytaylorphotography.blogspot.com/

You say you want a Revolution?

2011-10-12T18:41:00.004+02:00

The great unwashed have reached their limit. In different nations, different cities, and for different reasons, people are coming to the same conclusion, at roughly the same time: This system is broken.

In Greece citizens have marched, been assaulted, and died in an effort to stop crippling austerity measures being forced upon them by their leaders, the same people who allowed the banking system that holds their leashes to hurl the nation into a black void of debt. In Tunisia and Egypt, the people have risen up in search of a voice, full stop. They demanded freedom of speech, an end to police and military brutality, and the right to vote. In both cases, they fought and they won. In Spain, from the sprawling city streets of Barcelona and Madrid, to the quaint and picturesque towns of Figueres and Soria, the 15 de Mao movement, with its Castellan “Los Indignados” and Catalan “Els Indignats”, fought a happy revolution, occupying the grand squares of their ancient cities in a non violent, extended sit in. They erected make shift barrios, complete with libraries, canteens, daycare facilities, and media centres that allowed them to keep the message online and global twenty four hours a day. In Barcelona I saw first hand how pacifist and joyous these revolutionaries were. When the police came to move them, they did not raise a hand. When they were forced from the square, they returned immediately. They weren’t there to fight, but they refused to be chased away. Before long, it moved across the pond, where protestors in Santiago, Chile turned student protests over the state of education in the country into a full scale revolt against the country’s political system.

Now, it’s come to America.

By now you know the details. It started small, with the vast majority of the American mainstream media doing it’s best to ignore the gathering in Liberty Plaza Park. Then, hemmed in protestors were needlessly pepper sprayed by the NYPD. Before long, no media outlet could ignore what was happening, not even FOX News.

Now 23 days in, the movement grows in New York daily, and like Spain before, it’s spreading. As of October 7^th, similar movements have cropped up from Washington DC to San Francisco. They are taking to the streets in the windy city of Chicago and in the mile high city of Denver. From the swamps of New Jersey to the desert in Albuquerque, Americans are rising up and joining the rest of the world to tell the governments, and more importantly, the corporations, the banks, and the disgustingly rich who run the show behind the curtain: Enough.

Three years ago we all watched as corporate greed broke the back of our neo liberal system. We watched as the world’s largest banks, all complicit in driving us into the greatest economic collapse since the great depression, had hundreds of billions turned over to them because they were “too big to fail”. For our efforts, we watched them use the cash to pay out millions in bonuses to the same high level bankers and investors that brought the economy to its knees. All that mattered to them, all which ever mattered to them, was getting rich, no matter the cost to the rest of us. If it was ever really in doubt that the rich, the powerful, and the fortunate have crafted a world where they thrive off the toil and struggle of those underneath them, there can be no such illusion left. The only thing they didn’t count on, unsurprisingly, is that this time they have pushed us to our limit. At least we should all hope they have.

If this revolution is to succeed, there can be no let up from the will of the people. One day, one week, one month is not going to be enough. 100,000 protestors, while impressive, will not get them to listen. This truly has to be a revolt of the 99%, on a global scale. Every one who has been foreclosed upon, or had their young lives crippled right from the start by insurmountable debt, must take to the streets. We cannot just be Tunisians and Egyptians or Greeks. We cannot just be Castellan and Catalan. We cannot just be Chileans and New Yorkers. This is not a case of “your” revolution or “mine”. It belongs to all of us, and must be embraced by all of us. If you cannot take to the streets to be heard, take your voice online. If you cannot march against consumerism and the greed that it fosters, stop buying useless shit you don’t need. If you want a true change of the system, it starts with breaking free from the system.

On October 15^th, people across the world will come out from their homes and into their streets to raise their voices in support of the occupation of Wall Street, in support of the student protestors in Chile, in a reflection of the happy revolutionaries of Spain, and above all else in support of each other. Whether you are there for an hour, a day, or a year, make your self heard. You are not just one.

You are the 99 percent.

"No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!"

2011-09-09T07:54:00.009+02:00

At one point or another in life, we all day dream about living in the James Bond universe, and it's not hard to figure out who everyone pictures themselves as when they do. Everyone wants to be Bond, usually of the Sean Connery variety, though I’m sure there are a few sick bastards out there that day dream about being Roger Moore. One thing is certain though: with his unsightly eye scar, bland Maoesque suit and a fluffy white cat he’s probably having sex with, seeing as there’s never any women around him, no one ever fantasizes about being Blofeld.

No one, that is, except Peter Thiel.

File Photo: Peter Thiel (Citation Needed)

Thiel is the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, The first investor in something called Facebook, an avowed Libertarian, and a quixotically gay conservative. More recently, he has donated 1.25 million to a project that plans on building sovereign aqua nations in international waters under the guise of exploring new frontiers in the “governance industry”, as explained in a recent interview with Details Magazine. This latest venture isn't even his first into the world of "bondian" villainy. On his journey to the darkside Thiel has invested in Palantir, a software firm that was caught out recently for its role in planned attacks on Wikileaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald. His original darling venture, PayPal, was envisioned as a subversive tool to create a new world currency, which as discussed in the previous article, is the sort of bold stroke the west will depose you over.

With quotes like this one found at the end of the article, there can be little doubt that Thiel fancies himself a super genius.

This idea, known as Seasteading, is the brain child of fellow Libertarian and aspiring supervillain in his own right, Patri Friedman. The idea is to found these water worlds around specific ideologies: by which they mean “rich guys who don’t want to pay taxes or a fair living wage to poor saps” ideologies. When describing the idea, the examples Friedman gives are “no welfare”, “no minimum wage”, “looser building codes” and “less restrictive gun laws”.

Artist's rendering of first Seastead Nation (Citation Needed)

I think this is a brilliant idea.

Sure, while couched in some high minded talk of evolutionary government and freeing technology and science from the bounds of bureaucratic interference, what this really amounts to is a floating pleasure plank where the rich can create their own rules and escape all these annoying ideas like “ethics” and “equality” to focus on the important things like world domination, and slave labour. At its least damaging, it’s a bunch of trust fund babies trying to puzzle out who on earth would possibly come and work for whatever they feel like paying them when there are plenty of other nations that provide guarantees of a basic living wage, minus the constant threat of tsunamis, pirates and the corrosive properties of salt. At its most depraved, it’s “Hostel” on an oil platform.

However those of us naturally inclined toward fair wages, the distribution of wealth, the pursuit of happiness, now have a viable way to remove one of the great obstacles the poor and downtrodden face in life: Rich bastards.

In fine conservo-libertarian fashion, no doubt the building of these floating Studio 54's will be contracted out to the lowest bidder, who will no doubt use cheap materials, in the middle of the open ocean, to come in on budget. All we need to do is help get as many of the world's powerful and elite on them as quickly as possible, and watch as the inevitable occurs.

For that matter, if the dangerous combination of crushing waves and cheaply constructed supports doesn't finish them off, they may just do it themselves. If there's one thing we know about the rich, it's that they really love their cocaine. Imagine what would happen on "less restrictive gun laws" aqua nation when you mix a yacht load of cocaine and a large stockpile of AK-47's.

Or perhaps I'm underestimating their ability to find people willing to work for nothing to remove their trash and clean their toilets. There are arguably hundreds of thousands of people out there on the globe's poorest nations, desperate for a chance to earn something, anything to keep themselves alive. Perhaps these poor wretches will embrace the opportunity to plunge the chemical toilets of the rich and completely out of touch. At least at first.

Before long, Peter Thiel, Patri Friedman, and the rest of the self-proclaimed elite would find that there is a reason uprisings over class disparities and austerity measures are cropping up all across Europe, South America and soon enough, North America. Eventually, the new citizens of "AynRandia" might wonder if they could have planned better when their slaves have risen up, broken their salt rusted chains of oppression, and cast the mighty into the rough seas to die a slow and agonizing death as hypothermia sets in, or if you like, a fast and horrifying one as sharks circle in for an easy meal. Perhaps in this final moment, they might come to the stunning realization that those with nothing will only take it in the arse from those with everything for so long, before turning on the buggers.

See? Fantastic idea!

Meet the new boss…

2011-08-29T11:19:00.008+02:00

Well, not just yet. But he is coming. Riding in on a great, big fuck-off NATO stallion through Tripoli alongside thousands of rebels hungry for regime change and the sort of freedom they could previously only dream about. This is the dawn of a new democracy, filled with hope, the thirst for self determination, and the judicial use of NATO missiles.

This is the sort of story it’s easy to gather around and celebrate, a heart warmer for those in the west watching the long oppressed break the bonds of oppression and join the rest of us in the proverbial land of milk and honey.

For anyone who grew up in the eighties or earlier, the toppling of “Wacky Gaddafi” is an event in and of itself. The grand old man of mid-east despots, Gaddafi was the blue print for those that followed. Before Saddam, before Ahmadinejad, there was Gaddafi. Seeing him go down, something forty years in the making, makes it all worth while for many. Surely, the new boss to come will be a shining light in Libya in contrast to Gaddafi’s black hole.

However, over the last 72 hours, the negative on the other side of the snapshot is slowly coming into focus, and it’s telling a darker story. While UN, NTC, and imperial voices from the old and new world alike preach the same sermon, that this will not turn into another quagmire in the desert, many warning signs suggest the intervention record is about to start skipping again.

The NTC, UN, and various other governments and humanitarian organizations are scrambling to reverse the humanitarian crisis in Tripoli that arrived in the wake of the fight for control of the city. Currently, this city of two million people is largely without running water and electricity. There is no gas for cooking, and food is scarce. With no water comes an issue of sanitation, which could lead to further public heath issues.

Worse still, it could turn into a bloodbath.

An article from The Independent on Saturday indicates a growing trend of revenge killings being perpetrated by Rebel soldiers on Sub Saharan Africans within Libya. While the official line from the Rebels is that these are hired mercenaries lured by money from Gaddafi, the truth seems a bit murkier.

Migrant workers have been found among the executed, and in some cases the men killed had been lynched. The rebels claim they are being killed in gunfights. This begs the question, why do so many dead men need to have their hands bound behind their backs?

In their rush to get the old boss out, did Britain, France and the United States jump with both feet into a situation they didn’t fully understand? It’s not as if they don’t have a history of doing exactly that. After all, even Hamid Karzai seemed like a good idea at the time.

Alternatively, did they just not care?

There is little altruism in anything the power brokers of the world do these days, if ever there was. There is money to be made here, and resources to be had. NTC head Mustafa Abdel Jalil has already said the new government would favour foreign countries that had supported the rebellion when discussing contracts for Libya’s oil, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one.

Oil, though the favoured boogeyman of conspiracy theorists everywhere, doesn’t tell the entire story. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that Britain, France and the United States extended the hand of friendship to Gaddafi and brought him “in from the cold”.

Gaddafi and the western powers had been making nice for quite some time since the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. There was no reason for western oil interests to foment revolt for his removal as a push to get their share of Libyan oil. Their hands were already covered in it. What he may have been doing though, was working to turn the entire global economic hierarchy inside out.

Reports have surfaced suggesting Gaddafi was working toward a standard African Gold Dinar to trade in, drastically altering the value of global currencies. Gaddafi was pushing African and Arab nations to adopt this single gold dinar as a strong rival to the U.S. dollar and the euro.

A country’s wealth would no longer rely on the value of it’s currency, but on how much gold it had. Such a plan would cause havoc for the corporate elite who control the central banks of the world.

It’s not as if it hasn’t happened before. In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that Iraqi oil would be traded in Euros, not US dollars moving forward. Within a few years, Iraq had been invaded and Hussein deposed, again under the guise of liberating a nation from an oppressive dictator.

Gaddafi may have been looking to make the monetary system carefully constructed by the executives, lawmakers, and economists of the west nearly irrelevant. That certainly sounds like a good reason to foment rebellion and get shut of the guy trying to blow your financial house down.

The new man in charge will no doubt play ball with the west, in every way they want him to. At least that’s the rationale. But in a nation of angry rebels, potentially dangerous remnants of the old regime, and tribal warlords looking after their own interests, is the reality that simple? Will the west create another frankenstein’s monster in another middle eastern nation they will eventually have to take care of some twenty or thirty years down the road? This is the strange duality of the “Arab Spring”. People long oppressed are rising up and fighting for change, for a new way of living. The problem is the men behind the curtain, and what the outcome of their long game will be.

Who’s going to be the new boss? And will he end up being the same as the old boss?

And here… we… go!

2011-08-21T13:59:00.011+02:00

Let’s get down to brass tacks; it’s a rather chaotic state of affairs, isn’t it?

Everywhere we turn these days we are met with situations and images that inspire, nauseate, induce dread, and provoke apathy all at once. Societal revolts in the Middle East leave us cheering on rebels fighting for human freedoms, while also questioning who ultimately gains from the outcome. Austerity measures being forced down the throats of the poor and downtrodden across Europe and North America provoke rage in one city, peaceful assembly in another and tacit acceptance in the vast majority.

As the angry and disenfranchised react exactly as the powers that be want them to, we then watch as bloated and out of touch policy makers strive to limit our abilities to discuss and organize through the world wide web, while they remain all too happy to learn everything they can about who we are, what we view, and what we think using the very same tool.

As if this weren’t bad enough, we have other terrible things like Jersey Shore, the works of Michael Bay, Fox News, Reality TV, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party movement assaulting our senses with abject stupidity, lies shouted loudly and often enough that they kick the truth in the balls and send it screaming for mummy, orange skin and discount hair gel applied all too liberally. It sends a cold shiver down one’s spine.

This mind numbing assault often makes one want to hide under their bed with a bottle of Jameson to suck on while curled up in the fetal position.

But rather than do that, I've decided to drink my bottle of Jameson while typing reams of shite, smoking lots of cigarettes and staring out at the sky from my little enclave… somewhere in the world.

Transmission pending...

2011-08-20T23:49:00.003+02:00