PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
What the big media don’t show
Paris 29 November 2015.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/147310542[/vimeo]
By chance I was in Paris for the weekend. No demos are allowed in Paris because of the State of Emergency following the November 13 terrorist attacks, so at midday protestors organised a human chain along Boulevard Voltaire. One of the organisers, a friend of mine, told me that the police agreed to this as long as roads were not blocked, and the memorial site at the Bataclan theatre was excluded. None of this was reported in the big media, which focussed instead on the shoes at the Place de la Republique and a violent clash which took place there later in the afternoon. The shoes made a powerful symbolic statement, but so did the human chain which the media ignored. Read more
Two takes on the new economics
Two events during October, one in Bristol and one in Brussels, give evidence that notwithstanding the capitulation of Greece’s Syriza to the Eurogroup’s shameless intransigence, anti-austerity economics is gaining ground in Europe in tandem with the gathering social movements across the continent. We went to film both events for Money Puzzles, our documentary-in-progress about money, debt and us. In some ways, Bristol’s New Economy Summit and the Citizens Assembly on Debt in Brussels were complementary, and in other ways contrasting. The former was centred on questions of money, and the theory and practice of green economics, including alternative currencies like the Bristol Pound. The focus of the latter was on questions of debt (the other side of the coin, so to speak) which neoliberal policies create at every level, from the household to sovereign states, with disastrous social effects.
Solidarité avec les sans-papiers
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/142798928[/vimeo]