Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- There's a new book on the last decade here in Spain: After the Fall: Crisis, Recovery and the Making of a New Spain by Tobias Buck. It tells of how the Spanish boom turned to dust but the reviewer notes positively that: Spain’s economic collapse was severe, but the mood is still remarkably cheerful. See a comprehensive review below. I recall the bum (boom) as a time of utter madness, when I really couldn't believe what was happening around me. And so made no money out of it. The effects can still be seen in the 30-40 empty houses in the barrio in which I live. Probably bought and sold several times before the last suckers found themselves with a big mortgage and ever-more-negative equity. Before handing the house over to the bank.
- A local reporter asked this week whether O Burgo bridge really would open by October when all this week there's been a maximum of one person working on it.
- The vicious Asian wasp (Vespa Velutina) has been a nuisance here for a while. The latest remedy is to shoot frozen insecticide into their nests. Hope it works.
- Talking of shooting . . . A total of 36 rampant wild boars have been killed by archers in the last few weeks, attempting to ravage crops. The boars, not the archers.
- Galicia's wine sector is naturally worried about the impact of Fart tariffs on its business. At the moment exports are 2.4m bottles a year to the USA, 1.5m to the UK and 2.4m to the rest of Europe. For some reason Puerto Rico takes 0.4m bottles a year. Lots of Gallegos there?
- Although today is overcast so far, we've had a good run of fine weather for the last week or two. Despite this, the locals are complaining that summer hasn't yet arrived here and postulating - on the basis of freak hot weather there - that's it's gone on vacation to Alaska.
- If we really do get a plague of e-scooters on our pavements, I will resort to my anti-cyclist strategy of walking next to the wall and carrying a walking stick horizontally. Or an umbrella. Or both if it's raining.
- I'm typing this in a café on the upper floor of Pontevedra's wonderful fresh fish and meat market. I've really come to see if the 'Gourmet Foodmarket stalls' are yet open, as promised for this month. They aren't.
- Germany: Electric scooter riders face the full force of the law in Germany after a spate of accidents in the four weeks since they were allowed on the roads. No helmet or driving licence is required to ride the scooters. Riders have to be at least 14 years old and must stick to bicycle lanes, although they can use roads where there are no lanes. The maximum speed permitted is 20km/h. . . . Germany is the latest country to legalise e-scooters, welcomed by many as a potentially carbon-neutral option for urban transport.
- In Britain e-scooters are banned from roads, pavements or cycle lanes. Not for much longer, I suspect.
- There's a terrific speech below as Article 2, in which Facebook’s Libra Association is compared to Spectre in a James Bond Movie. Should frighten anyone still on FB.
- More on the time-bomb which is the Jeffrey Epstein case - An asteroid poised to strike the elite world in which he moved.
- According to the White House Chaplain appointed by Fart: This has been a difficult and contentious week in which darker spirits seem to have been at play in the people’s House. He then spoke to God: In your most holy name, I now cast out all spirits of darkness from this chamber, spirits not from you. May your spirit of wisdom and patience descend upon all so that any spirit of darkness might have no place in our midst. Rather, let your spirit of comity, of brother - and sisterhood - and love of our nation and of all colleagues in this chamber, empower our better angels to be at play in our common work to be done for the benefit of all your people.
- Said one observer: I’ve heard plenty of (accurate) criticisms from Democrats about how Republicans have basically ignored Trump’s hateful rhetoric, either pretending they didn’t hear it or acting like it wasn’t a big deal at all. But what Conroy is doing is a different kind of mindlessness. Instead of downplaying Trump's hate speech, he is blaming the “spirits of darkness” — as if Satan is causing Trump and other Republicans to foment a race war. Quite. Who needs a devil when you've got Fart? Espcially if he has a Mephistolean pact.
- Word of the Day: Aire.
- Not exactly shocked to read that it's harder to learn Welsh than Spanish.
- Something else I didn't know . . . For almost 4 centuries the Borgia apartments, with their Catalan tiles, luxuriously painted walls, including emblematic bulls and a depiction of Alexander VI at prayer, would remain unoccupied, silent and bereft of furnishings, sealed off from the outside world as if they harboured a contagious bacillus. Now they have been reopened, becoming a tourist attraction, their strange decor and chilling history stirring the imagination of the lines of visitors from all parts of the globe, which over 500 years ago Alexander VI had divided into two by drawing a line.
1. After the Fall - The Spanish boom that turned to dust
Spain’s economic collapse was severe, but the mood is still remarkably cheerful, says Gerard DeGroot
In 2006 I bought a home on the Catalan coast. To finance the purchase I arranged a mortgage with Banco Sabadell. I tried a British bank, but they proved painfully slow. My Spanish bank manager, Josep, found British bureaucracy hard to understand. “It’s not a difficult decision,” he remarked. “You look at the house. Is it good? Sí. You look at the borrower. Can he make the payments? Sí. That shouldn’t take more than two days.”
At the time, Josep’s attitude seemed refreshing. The Spanish, I thought, could teach the British a lot about user-friendly banking. Thirteen years later, I’m not so sure. I was unwittingly part of the Spanish property boom, when the number of British homeowners in Spain topped one million. This was a time of dinero fácil — easy money — when mortgages were handed out like sweets. But then came the crash.
The property boom started in 1999, just after Spain joined the euro. Cheap borrowing stimulated reckless construction — lovely orange groves were bulldozed to build tacky holiday homes. The boom lasted until 2007, during which the Spanish built 5.7 million new units, increasing their housing stock by 30%. In 2007 Spain built more new homes than the US, which has a population eight times larger. At the peak, a quarter of male workers were employed in construction.
Property booms drive even the most sensible people gaga. Most Spaniards would have realised that the good times could not last, but they were addicted to the excitement of dinero fácil. Perhaps more than any other city, Valencia embodied the febrile exhilaration of the boom. “The city that borrowed more rashly, built more lavishly and invested more foolishly, than any other,” says Tobias Buck, author of After the Fall.
Across the country, municipal and private authorities built extravagant museums, futuristic stadiums, lavish motor-racing tracks, oversized hospitals, unnecessary airports and, of course, ugly tower blocks. Yet only Valencia built them all. In truth, quite a few were never finished. They are skeletal monuments to economic folly.
When the crash came in 2008, a slump in the housing market quickly became a banking crisis and then a political calamity. But it was, most of all, a psychological crisis. A prosperous country suddenly became poor. Spaniards were rudely awoken from a very pleasant dream: “We thought we were rich, but we weren’t... We trusted our leaders, but they failed us. We trusted our banks, but they betrayed us.” Everyday certainties dissolved into dust.
Economic crises result from personal failures, usually when powerful people make stupid or selfish decisions. Journalists and historians, when recounting these events, too often leave out the human element and thus present a sterile picture of misfortune. Buck, who was the Madrid correspondent for The Financial Times from 2012 to 2017, understands economics, but he also understands people. Spain’s crisis is therefore appropriately told as an engaging story of human folly. This is a superb book about a fascinating country — an easy read about difficult times.
After the Fall is not just about fat-cat bankers who led their country astray, but also about ordinary people who paid dearly for inane economic management. David Pérez left school early to take a job in a window factory, putting little rubber seals in aluminium frames. The work was dreadfully boring, but he earned enough to buy a BMW. Then the crash came and he lost everything. Now he’s just a statistic — one of Spain’s millions of long-term unemployed, a new underclass for whom precarious is a way of life.
The shockwaves of economic collapse were felt in every corner of society. The birth rate, for instance, has plummeted, since the young unemployed now live with their parents or simply can’t afford to have children. In politics, Spain’s stable two-party system has unravelled, leading to the emergence of new parties — Podemos on the left, Ciudadanos on the right. This has meant that the established parties, the Partido Popular (PP) and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) are no longer able to secure working majorities, yet Spaniards remain viscerally opposed to coalition. Spain has been rendered ungovernable at precisely the time that it desperately needs strong central authority.
The most profound effect of the slump has been seen in Catalonia. It’s fair to say that there wouldn’t have been an independence crisis if not for the economic collapse. Catalonia has always been wealthy, and has remained so despite recent events. The region constitutes 16% of Spain’s population, but one fifth of its GDP. An estimated €10 billion in tax revenue flows outward, to prop up poorer areas.
That imbalance, once tolerable, has become a source of deep resentment. Castilian Spain is seen as a leech, sucking the lifeblood out of Catalonia. Economic resentment is exacerbated by a sense of cultural superiority. Catalans are, in the nicest possible way, snobs. They see themselves, says Buck, “as the open, tolerant, sophisticated and truly European element trapped inside a reactionary, corrupt and backward-looking Spain”. Tension was unnecessarily aggravated by the cack-handed reaction of prime minister Mariano Rajoy[very true, as I repeatedly said here], who responded to the pro-independence result of Catalonia’s 2017 referendum with rubber bullets rather than dialogue.
Spain’s predicament is hardly unique. Other countries, most notably Britain, have experienced a similar combination of a property boom, unemployment, fractured government and an independence movement. Yet what sets the Spanish apart is how they have reacted. They remain unusually devoted to the EU. They continue to welcome immigrants and — the Catalan issue aside — have not fallen victim to religious or ethnic bigotry. A far-right party (Vox) has emerged, but enthusiasm for it has been muted. Despite the crisis, the Spanish mood remains warm-hearted and forward-looking.
Buck feels that critics — Spanish and foreign — have not given due credit to the country’s remarkable strengths — “the openness and tolerance... the everyday friendliness, the way people look out for each other, the curiosity and creativity”. He clearly loves Spain, but his assessment of the Spanish character still seems astute.
When I asked my neighbour from Barcelona about Catalan independence, he replied: “Es complicado” — it’s complicated. That’s code for saying: “Let’s not talk about problems.” It’s a common reaction, one that dates back to the death of Franco in 1975 when Spaniards decided to forget the past and move forwards to democracy. Spaniards prefer to leave history to the historians while they feast upon their bountiful present.
As Buck argues, they successfully reinvented their nation in 1975 and will now have to do so again. That reinvention is in full swing; the business sector is now younger, more female and founded on products rather than property. Politicians are more responsive. The corrupt have been sent to prison. And, despite it all, my bank manager retains his delightfully easygoing nature.
After the Fall: Crisis, Recovery and the Making of a New Spain by Tobias Buck, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
2. Senator Compares Facebook’s Libra Association to Spectre in James Bond Movie: By Pam Martens and Russ Martens:
Yesterday the U.S. Senate Banking Committee assembled to hear Facebook’s David Marcus explain how the company wants to create a global digital currency called Libra, to be run by a Switzerland-based global organization called the Libra Association, made up of 27 members from the fields of payment systems, technology, telecommunications, blockchain services, venture capital, nonprofits and academic institutions.
Given Facebook’s serial history of abusing the privacy rights of its users and selling their data without their permission, not to mention its role in facilitating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, we immediately went to check out the names of the nonprofits that had signed up to monitor this sprawling international monetary system cooked up in a Facebook lab in a year’s time. We were hoping to see names like American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen, Consumer Federation of America, or Center for Constitutional Rights. No such luck. Here’s who Facebook lists under nonprofits, multilateral organizations and academic institutions: Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking. We have to admit to ignorance of any of these groups.
At the end of the hearing, after Facebook’s Marcus had struggled to explain the checks and balances of his short-on-specifics plan, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said he suspected that Americans were going to view this organization as something like Spectre (the evil international surveillance organization) from the James Bond movie series.
It felt like Van Hollen had just read our minds.
Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the ranking member of the Committee, made opening remarks at the hearing that were so on-point and poignant to the interests and concerns of the American people that we’ve printed them in full.
Statement by Senator Sherrod Brown
Facebook is dangerous.
Now, Facebook might not intend to be dangerous – but they certainly don’t respect the power of the technologies they are playing with. Like a toddler who has gotten his hands on a book of matches, Facebook has burned down the house over and over, and called every arson a learning experience.
Facebook has two competing missions – make the world more open and connected, and make a lot of money. And as Facebook attempts to serve both of those missions, they wreak havoc on the rest of us.
Look at its version of disrupting the newspaper industry. Facebook has made it easier to share what you’re reading with friends. But at the same time, Facebook has redirected most of the media industry’s profits away from actual journalists and into its own coffers—and they have done it without the benefit of recreating the local news desk, without conducting the hard-nosed journalism that keeps politicians honest, and without meeting even the most basic journalistic standards.
This kind of “creative disruption” that doesn’t actually create anything is just disruption.
Or look at the impact Facebook’s profit motive has had on the way it connects people. Facebook and other tech companies will tell you that the internet just holds up a mirror to society, and reflects what is already there.
But that’s not true.
To be profitable, Facebook has juiced its algorithm to hold up a magnifying glass to society rather than a mirror – kind of like the way I learned in Boy Scouts to use a magnifying glass to burn a hole in a piece of wood – concentrating our focus on the most divisive issues, pushing the most controversial opinions to the top of our news feeds —usually those are posts that play on people’s fears and worst impulses, but they may not be based on any sort of fact.
Facebook does all it can to manipulate its billions of users so it can direct our eyes toward more ads and turn an even bigger profit.
This is no exaggeration: Facebook tested whether it could manipulate our emotions. The corporation ran a psychological experiment on more than half a million users to see if it could manipulate our moods. Turns out it can.
And that emotional manipulation has led to horrifying results.
I don’t have to tell you what amplifying our divisions has done to discourse in this country – not just between political parties. I’d bet half the people in this room have had to block an old high school classmate or even a family member on Facebook.
Or look around the world. A UN report detailed how Facebook was used to spread propaganda in Myanmar that led to genocide. In the first month of violence, more than 600 members of the Rohingya people were killed – and more than 700,000 refugees had to flee the country.
I don’t think for a moment that Facebook created hate, but we know that their competing missions of connecting people and turning a profit created an algorithm and a business model that intensified it.
It’s hard to remember a world without Facebook, and it’s hard to remember a time before we had to tell our kids “be careful what you do on the internet, because it never goes away.”
Today, we expect everyone to know that what happens online has consequences offline. It’s just common sense.
That’s why it’s so hard for us to understand why Facebook – the company that ushered in this revolution – doesn’t seem to comprehend that its actions have real world consequences. And they don’t seem to understand why their intention to run their own currency out of a Swiss bank account, the topic of today’s hearing, has been met with so much opposition.
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook might be more like a government than a company. But no one elected Mark Zuckerberg.
And what kind of dystopian government wants to turn families and friends against each other rather than bring people together?…Well, maybe I shouldn’t answer that.
Facebook has demonstrated, through scandal after scandal, that it does not deserve our trust, and that it should be treated like the profit-seeking corporation it is, just like any other company.
He and his executives have proven over and over that they don’t understand governing or accountability.
They’re not running a government, they’re running a for-profit laboratory. No Facebook executives have been harmed by Facebook’s experiments. But look at what has happened everywhere that Facebook has run its social experiment on us.
Their motto has been “move fast and break things.” And they certainly have.
They moved fast and broke our political discourse, they broke journalism, they helped incite a genocide, and they’re undermining our democracy.
Now Facebook is asking people to trust them with their hard-earned paychecks. It takes a breathtaking amount of arrogance to look at that track record and think, you know what we really ought to do next? Let’s run our own bank and our own for-profit version of the Federal Reserve for the world.
I understand that given the financial crisis and given the massive inequality and unfairness to workers in our economy, it’s tempting to think anyone could do a better job than the Wall Street megabanks.
But the last thing we need is to concentrate even more power in huge corporations.
Look at Facebook’s record. We would be crazy to give them a chance to experiment with people’s bank accounts, and to use powerful tools they don’t understand, like monetary policy, to jeopardize hardworking Americans’ ability to provide for their families.
This is a recipe for more corporate power over markets and consumers, and fewer and fewer protections for ordinary people.
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