Political Critique: Lisbon: the caravan documenting Portugal’s housing crisis

In the first two weekends of September, Il Salto, the Italian magazine and friends of Political Critique, followed the first six stops of this journey. What we saw provides a deep picture of the housing problems in a country at a crossroads between the austerity of previous years and new proposals of a left wing government, in a moment in which tourism is rapidly changing the face of both Lisbon and Porto. Meanwhile at the walls of the city there are people who still live in shacks, who run the risk of seeing themselves kicked out without any guaranteed alternative. [...]

It was a move from a small ghetto to a bigger ghetto. Now the inhabitants of Casal da Boba pay rent for apartments that in just a few years have began to present many problems, and lack basic maintenance. Not only this: the inhabitants feel discriminated against, simply for the fact of living in a neighbourhood stigmatised as “problematic”, a centre of crime and drug dealing. Police violence, as a result, has focused on people of African descent, as some recent episodes have unfortunately confirmed. [...]

The idea that tourism is the only economic resource that can save Portugal from the crisis is put to the test. For while tourism brings great wealth to big investors, it also offers salaries that are lower than in other industries. Precarity and underemployment are very concentrated in the city precisely where tourism has become dominant. What needs to be respected, the event concludes, is the ‘right to the city’: giving space to more sustainable and socially important sectors.

read the article and see the photos

Vox: Why Puerto Rico will be without power for months

Salon: U.S. votes against U.N. resolution condemning death penalty for LGBT people; is this who we are?

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council approved a resolution condemning the use of the death penalty in a discriminatory manner such as consensual same-sex relations. Along with 13 other nations, the United States voted against it. Instead, the U.S. sided with allies such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. Bangladesh, China and India also voted against the measure, which still passed along a 27-13 margin.

"The resolution asked countries that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that it is not 'applied arbitrarily or in a discriminatory manner' and that it is not applied against persons with mental or intellectual disabilities and persons below 18 years of age at the time of the commission of the crime, as well as pregnant women," according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA). [...]

LGBT rights activists criticized President Donald Trump's administration and U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, for not supporting the resolution. Yet, don't go thinking this stance is anything new or localized to the 45th president's administration. The U.S. has never voted to support any U.N. measure that condemns the death penalty in any way. The Obama administration did abstain from a similar vote in 2014, according to BuzzFeed News, though that one did not contain provisions for LGBT individuals.

read the article

CityLab: Where the Catalonian Crisis Came From

The shocking violence in Barcelona on Sunday makes the politics behind Catalonia’s separatist movement even harder to parse. Helmeted police in riot gear disrupted polling places, beat citizens attempting to vote, and left an incredible 893 people injured—all in the name of halting a referendum on Catalonian independence that national laws deemed to be illegal. [...]

Catalan elites, however, have never quite got a slice of the national political pie that corresponds with their economic power. The autonomy written into Spain’s national system means that the region gets considerable say in its own affairs—the regional government, called the Generalitat de Catalunya, has substantial (and sometimes absolute) local jurisdiction in many areas. Still, the lion’s share of national institutional influence has always remained fiercely guarded in Madrid. In times of prosperity, this led to tension, but since the financial crisis of 2008, the post-Franco pact has truly been coming unstuck. With Spain continuing to flounder economically, people are losing faith in the central state’s ability to solve their problems. [...]

This being the 21st century, there’s still more to it than that. The independence push is also a vessel through which Catalonia’s citizens voice their disaffection with wider problems affecting people across Spain, such as falling living standards and appalling youth unemployment. Faced with a vote for change—any change—people have mobilized, although independence has never quite gained majority support: Pre-referendum data from the Generalitat itself showed a mere 41 percent for independence. It’s not entirely coincidental that the movement has grown during the era of Brexit, another referendum that was partly a vehicle for frustrations that lay beyond the question being directly posed to electorates.  [...]

It would be extremely wrong to suggest the somewhat murky motivations behind Catalonia’s referendum means that the leaders of Spain’s national government are in some way the good guys. In fact, the central government has also been accused of using the separatist debate to distract voters from other problems. It has failed to take advantage of numerous opportunities to defuse the situation, in part because anti-Catalan saber-rattling is catnip to a section of its base.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence

First, they’re rare, and the people doing the shooting are different. The majority of gun deaths in America aren’t even homicides, let alone caused by mass shootings. Two-thirds of the more than 33,000 gun deaths that take place in the U.S. every year are suicides (click through the graphic below to see how gun deaths break down):

And while people who commit suicide and people who commit mass shootings both tend to be white and male, suicide victims tend to be older. The median age of a mass shooter, according to one report, is 34, with very few over 50. Suicide, however, plagues the elderly as much as it does the middle-aged.

Second, the people killed in mass shootings are different from the majority of homicides. Most gun murder victims are men between the ages of 15 and 34. Sixty-six percent are black. Women — of any race and any age — are far less likely to be murdered by a gun. Unless that gun is part of a mass shooting. There, 50 percent of the people who die are women. And at least 54 percent of mass shootings involve domestic or family violence — with the perpetrator shooting a current or former partner or a relative.

The historical trends for different kinds of gun deaths don’t all follow the same course. While data suggests that the number of mass shootings similar to the Las Vegas event has gone up, particularly since 2000,2 homicide rates have fallen significantly from their 1980 peak and continued on a generally downward trajectory for most of the 21st century. Meanwhile, suicides are way up, with the biggest increases among women. The trends are different because the situations are different and the people are different. Maybe different solutions are warranted, as well.

read the article