by Kate Shea Baird on April 7, 2015 first printed in ROAR
Ada Colau and the other women involved in the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú are showing how municipal politics can be feminized from the bottom up.
Something special is happening in Barcelona. At the local elections in May, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) could snatch control of the city council. If it succeeds, the consequences for the women of Barcelona and, perhaps, cities all over the world, could be radical.A victory for Barcelona en Comú would catapult anti-eviction activist Ada Colau into the mayoralty. Continue reading “¿ Barcelona Council to be taken by Feminists ?”
We reprint with thanks this excellent (though US centered) attack on schooling.. how our kids get abandoned and wiped out in soulless institutions.
what we need is community based activity and project learning run by volunteers and the youths themselves.
Our kids are in CRISIS.
I work with teenagers in an affluent suburban area.
They don’t comprehend what they read. They use calculators to multiply 10 x 10. The average high school junior has no clue what the word “diligent” means.
They write essays resembling those of a 5th grader. About how Albert Einstein discovered electricity.
In tests administered in reading, science and math to 15 year-olds globally, we are behind TWENTY NINE countries in math. And our kids’ performance in reading and science is not much better. And yet, American investment in education is unrivaled, globally.
Are you scared yet?
We lead the world in the consumption of illegal recreational drugs. And one of the chief sales outlets?
Our SCHOOLS.
Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world.
EVERY DAY there are over 5,400 suicide attempts by kids in grades 7 – 12.
NOW are you scared?
The two places teenagers…
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There have been many solidarity events, pickets, demos, cafes, graffitis, etc in a wave of solidarity across Spain and around the planet.
Via Squat.net.
Early afternoon on Wednesday 1st April, the judge of the Audiencia Nacional [NationalHigh Court] Eloy Velasco, remanded in prison 5 of the 15 individuals arrested on Monday 30th March during the police operation named Piñata. 24 others were arrested during the 17 raids, which took place in Madrid, Barcelona, Palencia and Granada, for “disobedience and resistance”, who were then subsequently released.
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On anarchism and machismoWe’ll start with a story that illustrates the sort of thing anarcha-feminists regularly deal with within the anarchist movement in Spain.
It happened at Casa Blanca – a squatted, self-managed social centre in central Madrid. It was a very big building with lots of space, and had more-or-less anarchist politics. It was squatted in early 2010 and evicted in September 2012. Hundreds of different collectives participated in the space.
Sometime towards the beginning of the occupation, a group of womyn asked the general assembly of the building for a womyn’s autonomous space. [This article uses the term ‘autonomous’ as is common among English-speaking activists, but the term used in Spanish is literally ‘non-mixed’.] The assembly said yes to this request, and the womyn started fixing up the space – cleaning and putting in lights etc.
During this time, we put up a poster on the door of the space that said ‘autonomous space – no machistas’ [ie ‘no patriarchs / macho arseholes’]. Someone wrote on the poster underneath ‘nor feminazis.’ That was a sign of things to come.
Continue reading “On the anarcha-feminist movement in Spain”
The Free 