Note: This being
Friday, several items below come courtesy of Thursday's Business Over Tapas bulletin.
SPANISH SOCIETY
Security of Employment:
From BoT: Following a determination in EU law, temporary contract
workers are liable for compensation. El Confidencial warns that some
two million erstwhile short-term workers who had lost their jobs in
the last twelve months are now claiming indemnities from companies.
Corruption:
- Per BoT again: EU auditors warn of "waste" in Spanish maritime ports. The European Court of Auditors estimates that €394.2 million of European funds have ended up ‘underexploited’ in infrastructure. The original story in El País here.
- And again from BoT: Spain is the European country with the most corrupt politicians of all, says a report here. Interesting to see the UK gets a worse rating than France, Germany and Holland.
THE SPANISH ECONOMY
GDP Growth: Despite the
absence of a government for the last 8 months, this ploughs/plows on.
The number for this year is forecast to be 3.2%, better than
virtually any other EU country. And up from 2.7% as recently as June. The impact of massively increased tourism? It's an ill wind . . .
SPANISH POLITICS
The PSOE Party: Just
like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, the leader of this left-of-centre party is
facing attempts by his own team to oust him. I've mentioned he might
be succeeded by the Presidenta of Andalucia and wondered how she'd
deal with long-standing allegations of vast corruption down there.
Here's something on
this.
Acting President of the
PP Party: As I suggested, he's being seen now not as a stubborn
Gallego but as a strategic genius who could see the PSOE ripping
itself apart, after being squeezed by Podemos from the Left and the
PP from the Right. Here's one Spanish political commentator on him: Rajoy’s way of
playing a winning hand is to hold on and not have to play his hand.
He was already the leader of a unified and hierarchical party with
more parliamentary seats, but now he is also facing a party in a
vitriolic rift, whose institutional renewal will be complicated and
will require time, especially as we know the fragmentation of the
left is here to stay. As in the UK, so here in Spain.
THE EU
The Banking System:
Here's another worrying article from Don Quijones, explaining how the
EU – with the help of lawyers - might manufacture legality out of
illegality to save not just Deutsche Bank but also the entire banking
systems of Germany, France, Italy and Spain: When failure becomes the
ultimate virtue, you know the game is almost over. Once Germany’s
über-austere government bites the bullet and rescues its own
flagship bank with public money (as it quietly did with many of its
smaller banks in the wake of the first leg of the global financial
crisis), all attempts to reform Europe’s deeply dysfunctional
financial sector will have come to naught.
En passant, I noticed
at the Post Office yesterday that the Deutsche Bank desk had gone. A
search quickly confirmed that their collaboration with the Spanish
government ended last March.
Nice Quote: Ulster Unionist leader
Mike Nesbitt: We went on a fact-finding mission
to Brussels recently. It was a failure. There are no facts.
ELSEWHERE
Russia: Here's a
catalogue of Moscow's disinformation on the Malaysian airline shot
down over Ukraine. And there's a Times article on the need to
stand up to this at the end of this post.
GALICIAN STUFF
Localism: 60% of
Galician holiday-makers stayed here in Galicia this year. Only
7% went abroad. The rest presumably went somewhere else in Spain.
Though you never know, as the word extranjero(foreigner) is sometimes used here for Spaniards from outside Galicia.
PERSONAL STUFF
Touché: In a
supermarket checkout yesterday, those in my queue were advised to
move to another line. The 2 women behind me got there first but, as the
second one had a ton of items, I went ahead of her as she was
placing them on the belt. This conversation then took place after I'd
paid:-
Hombre, you should have
asked my permission to go in front of me.
Mujer, firstly, you
were behind me in the first queue; secondly, I only have 2 items;
and 3. In other cultures it's considered polite to let the people in
front of you go first at the new line. So, please don't lecture me on
manners.
TBH, I'd anticipated a
comment and had my response ready. Everyone else in the queue seemed
amused at the exchange.
FINALLY
The Nazi Government:
This flew high for a while in the 1930s and 40s. This fascinatingarticle shows just how high.
THE GALLERY
More examples of
Finnish/British nightmares:-
ARTICLES
The West must stand up
to Putin’s lie machine
In June 2014 I flew
back from Sydney to London by Malaysian Airlines. Every now and then
I’d consult the moving map to see where we’d got to. When the
little pixellated plane showed us to be over the Ukrainian city of
Donetsk, I wondered at our flying high and untroubled while under us
a civil war was going on. Less than two weeks later another Malaysian
Airlines plane, flying over that almost exact spot, was blown out of
the sky and nearly 300 people — children, doctors, Dutch families,
random travellers — were killed.
It’s more than two
years on now, and the machinery of justice has ground exceedingly
slow. The interim report of the Joint Investigation Team of
international prosecutors was published yesterday afternoon and
concluded that the passengers and crew on MH17 died when their plane
was hit by a ground-to-air missile fired from territory held by
pro-Russian separatist rebels.
Actually we knew all
this within a week of the disaster. Various sources, including most
notably a website called Bellingcat, operated by a British blogger
called Eliot Higgins, had begun the task of using maps, contemporary
social media utterances by witnesses and photographs (they call this
“geolocation”) to establish that a Russian BUK ground-to-air
mobile launcher had driven to the area where a missile launch had
been detected. Bellingcat was even able to suggest what unit the BUK
had belonged to (the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade) and where in
Russia it had originated. It was a remarkable job and would have been
impossible in the pre-internet age.
From the very beginning
the Russian authorities were determined to fight the conclusion that
they were responsible, directly or indirectly, for the 298 deaths. So
they contested the work that Bellingcat and others were doing, and it
is that contest that holds such significance for the West today.
That’s because it plays upon a weakness that exists in modern
democratic societies, a problem — a crisis almost — of trust.
In the first instance
the Russian authorities directly contradicted what we might call the
Bellingcat version of events. A week after the shooting down they
held a press conference presenting crudely manipulated satellite
imagery to suggest that a Ukrainian plane was in the vicinity at the
time. They altered the supposed flight path of MH17, said they had
radar data that they never produced, and gave wrong information about
the photographs that already existed of the BUK in Ukrainian
territory.
This was only one
aspect of their disinformation campaign. At the same time Russian
media (almost all media outlets there are run by allies or employees
of Putin) began to broadcast their own theories, or those of Russian
separatists. One such was that the plane had been loaded with dead
bodies in Amsterdam so that it could be shot down and create a
pretext for war.
They also ran character
assassination campaigns originating in the Russian media about
Higgins and some of the people whose work he used. One was a former
“Stasi agent”, Higgins himself was unemployed and therefore
probably deficient. And so on.
If we cannot trust
anybody any more, if everything is moot, then we can have no
confidence in ourselves. Everything: our democracy, free press,
beliefs in human rights, become relative
There were some figures
in the West who needed little prompting from the Russians to conclude
that all was not as it seemed. The veteran Australian journalist John
Pilger (whose books I once revered) wrote that autumn that if there
was disinformation, it was western. “Without a single piece of
evidence,” he thundered, putting a Nelsonian eye to his telescope,
“the US and its Nato allies and their media machines” blamed
Russia, whereas, said Pilger, “a wealth of material from credible
sources shows that . . . the airliner may well have been brought down
by the Ukrainian regime.”
The “wealth of
material” mostly came from Moscow originally. But just to show how
something like this can stay in the mental water supply, the Daily
Express ran a headline this April: “SHOCK CLAIM: Ukrainian fighter
jet ‘SHOT DOWN Malaysia Airlines MH17’ say witnesses”. In fact
this was a report of a BBC documentary examining conspiracy theories
about MH17, which concluded that a Ukrainian jet had done no such
thing. By the time the documentary went out the Express was being
prayed in aid in scores of “alternative” western news sites.
We’ve known for some
time that some westerners prefer Putin to our own flawed leaders. It
is an area where, interestingly, the left of the Stop the War
movement and the right of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen overlap. And
one of the things they agree with Putin about is the contention that
the “mainstream media” is corrupted in its opposition to all of
them, is not to be trusted and must be fought.
In June this year the
press agency Russia Today even hosted a three-day conference entitled
The New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream, to which it
invited 300 journalists from around the world — though not
Bellingcat. Among those addressing the conference were that great
friend of journalism Vladimir Putin and (by link from the Ecuadorian
embassy in London) Julian Assange, who chose to attack Hillary
Clinton. A British invitee was a writer called Neil Clark, who used
to guest for The Guardian and who appeared on Russia Today in the
wake of MH17 to decry the theory that Russia had anything to do with
it. Other attendees were obviously quite unaware of what they had
walked into.
Russia Today (or RT)
was also recommended for its “more objective” coverage back in
2011, by one Jeremy Corbyn. Weeks after MH17 Seumas Milne, later to
become his communications tsar, went on RT (“away from the
mainstream media echo chamber”, said his host) to blame the West
for what had happened in Ukraine. The plane disaster wasn’t
mentioned. Why bring it up?
More than one observer
has noticed that the use of selective web hacks, including Assange
being given the Democratic National Committee emails by the Russians,
add up to a system of blurring any idea of the truth. According to
one view these tactics are designed not to convince of an
alternative, but to disrupt. If we cannot trust anybody any more, if
everything is moot, then we can have no confidence in ourselves.
Everything: our democracy, free press, beliefs in human rights,
become relative.
Maybe this is a
strategy, and maybe it isn’t. And maybe, given our capacity for
self-laceration, it doesn’t have to be. For months after the MH17
shooting down I would be told by people on social media or even on
our own website that the evidence against Russia wasn’t there. Just
as they said about Assad’s chemical attack a year earlier. I take
some comfort from people like Bellingcat. But, in the Age of
Stupidity — who needs Putin to make us dumb?
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