Mistakes of 2010 - DIE ZEIT

I wanted to write about aging: the biggest problem that I see in it is the sad fact that more and more of the people you liked, you learned from, you admired are leaving this world, some earlier some later. But this would be a sad note to say goodbye to a year not at all bad for me personally.
Thus, on a funnier tone, I will publish an unauthorized translation of a few of the mistakes made in 2010 cited in this week's magazine (dated Dec. 30, 2010) of German weekly DIE ZEIT, my favorite newspaper.

Things that went wrong this year:

Harald Ehlert, chairman of a Berlin charity dedicated to the aid of the homeless, is caught in a "radar trap" speeding in his official car, a Maserati with a price tag of 114,000 euros.

While Yonni Barrios is trapped in the mine in San José, Chile, a few hundred metres higher his wife gets to know his lover.

The former French justice minister Rachida Dati says in late September that currently there is "hardly any fellation" (she meant inflation), then Brice Hortefeux, the interior minister, talks about "genital finger prints" (instead of genetic).

Stephanie zu Guttenberg flies to Afghanistan. (She is the glamorous wife of the current German minister of defense, who many believe will be German chancellor after Merkel.)

The oil platform "Deep Water Horizon" explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the greatest environmental disasters ever.

The referee does not see a regular goal by the English team during the World Cup in a match against Germany.

Silvio Berlusconi justifies extramarital affairs and sex parties: "Better than being gay."

Miss Philippines is asked during the Miss World contest for the biggest mistake of her life and says that she did not commit any.

Byron Scott, basketball coach wears for a photo shooting a tie with a swastika motif.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck makes the movie "The Tourist".
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck talks in interviews about his new movie "The Tourist".

The A/C in Germany's high-speed trains ICE do not work due to the high summer temperatures - and the windows cannot be opened.

Three German newspapers print a fake interview of Michael Douglas.

The grey sky over Germany in a far too cold August.

Millions of Toyota cars in the US have to be called back to the dealers as there is a problem with the gas pedal.

Pop singer Rihanna has herself made a tatoo with faulty grammar ("rebelle fleur" instead of the correct "fleur rebelle").

After it has become public that he paid a 17 year old occasional prostitute for sex, Franck Ribéry declares that he only gave her "pocket money".

iPhone 4 users complain about difficulties - especially left-handed ones have a bad call reception.

Take care and have a good 2011!

Mourning Richard C. Holbrooke (1941-2010)

I experienced him two times in person. The first time was in 1995 in Washington, D.C. where I did a student internship with NBC's "Meet the Press" and he was a guest on the Sunday morning show - it must have been around the time of the Dayton Peace Accords. I remember an agreeable diplomat. The second time was in May 2000 in Bologna, Italy, where he was the keynote speaker on Alumni Weekend of Johns Hopkins U's Bologna Center. At that time I still dreamed of becoming a diplomat or an EU official myself.
If you need some background information on the person, view today's article of the New York Times here.

"Buy nothing day" and shopping guides

Today, the day after Thanksgiving in the US and traditionally the most important day for retailers there due to a lot of Christmas shopping by people on a long weekend, is also "buy nothing day" for those that deplore the excesses of materialism. You find more information here.

In contrast to that, on Spanish TV one starts to see a lot of perfume comercials these days and on the radio supermarkets encourage one to buy the traditional seafood early at a discount price to keep it in one's fridge until the holidays. The traditional holiday TV spot by champagne-maker Freixenet will star the Colombian pop star Shakira, supposedly clad in very little golden stuff. On newspaper websites appear shopping guides (the NY Times' here, the Financial Times' here) that tempt one to forget that the Spanish economy is in crisis and that a lot of people who already lost their jobs will also lose their homes as they cannot pay their mortgages any longer. Banks are now the biggest property holders in the country.

The Catalan Elections in the New York Times

The New York Times reports on the Catalan elections that will take place on Sunday, November 28. Regional watchgroups here consider the article balanced and fair as it does not take the typical point of view from Madrid where most of the foreign journalist are based.

The Problem of Aging Populations

Natasha Singer wrote a thought-provoking article on "How Aging Populations May Crimp the World's Finances". It should be read by all those who still doubt that radical reforms of public pension systems are necessary. With people living longer and populations shrinking in most developed (i.e. rich) countries, it's time to act if one wants to prevent grave intergenerational inequalities and the resulting conflicts; it does not mean to abandon public pensions but to share the costs between generations equitatively; as far as I have heard, in India there are already people killing their parents if they cannot afford to feed them any longer - and we do not want to get to such an extreme... The article published in the New York Times is here.

In memoriam Theodore C. Sorensen (1928-2010)

He was John F. Kennedy's legendary speech-writer and he died on October, 31 at the age of 82. You might not have heard of him but surely you have heard some of his masterful rhetoric.

If you want to know more (and see pictures and videos), read the Washington Post's obituary here, the New York Times' here, Vanity Fair's here, The Guardian's here, and a blog entry from the New Yorker here.

November 9 in German history

November 9 is a strangely important day in German history. Here are some examples of events that took place on this day:

1918 – Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicates after the German Revolution, and Germany is proclaimed a Republic.

1923 – In Munich, Germany, police and government troops crush the Beer Hall Putsch in Bavaria. The failed coup is the work of the Nazis.

1938 – Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath dies from the fatal gunshot wounds of Jewish resistance fighter Herschel Grynszpan, an act which the Nazis used as an excuse to instigate the 1938 national pogrom, also known as Kristallnacht.

1989 – Cold War: Fall of the Berlin Wall. Communist-controlled East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall allowing its citizens to travel to West Germany. This key event led to the eventual reunification of East and West Germany.

For more details, consult the Wikipedia. The most specific article is the one in German.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

50th Anniversary of Kennedy Election as US President

On Muesday, 8th of November 1960, John F. Kennedy won the presidential elections in the US, defeating Richard M. Nixon. He was the first Catholic to do so and his victory was not overwhelming.

One finds a lot of information on JFK at the pages of the Presidential Library in Boston, MA, and at those of the museum dedicated to the Kennedy family in Berlin.

The German weekly Die Zeit offers this article by Susanne Kippenberger.

The Spanish daily El País had this article to commemorate the event.

The Boston Globe offers this article on the anniversary, the Boston Herald this one, as well as this one on a new exhibition at the JFK Hyannis Museum.

An electric scooter made in Catalunya

Yesterday it was presented: an electric scooter designed for urban traffic, i.e. for short distances of up to 50kms -afterwards the batteries have to be charged for six hours-, and the first one entirely made in Catalunya. It's name: Rieju Mius 4.0. It will be on sale in the spring of 2011 and cost around 4.000€ in its homeland. The picture acompanying this post is from an article in today's Avui newspaper.
You can find a presentation of the scooter on its maker's website.

Dexter House

Nothing concerning Catalonia or any recent event. If you are ever looking for a cheap place to stay in New York City try Dexter House on W 86th Street. It's old and the bathrooms would need some reformation but everything is clean, the rooms have a sink, a fridge, a microwave, a TV, and AC. The atmosphere is that of a student dorm. It's even cheaper than a youth hostel and a lot quieter. There's a metro station two blocks away, i.e. on upper Broadway as well as supermarkets and pizza places. I stayed there in March 2010 and really liked it. Reservations can be made via budgetplaces.com.

Finally an anti-tobacco law

Though today the big news in Spain is the government exchange of six secretaries and the long overdue "elimination" of two departments - that of housing and that of gender equality (cf. FT article at post's end) - finally the parliament in Madrid has approved a general smoking ban from January 2011 on in all restaurants and bars and also on child playgrounds and hospital facilities - though there will the exceptions for psychiatric hospitals, old-age nurseries and prisons.
This was also long overdue as the first "anti-tobacco" law of 2005 was a "toothless tiger" as it exempted bars smaller than 100 sqm, where the owners could decide if they wanted to become smoke-free; and hardly any wanted to...
Campaigners criticize that the new law will allow gas stations to install cigarette vending machines, i.e. increasing the number of places where one can buy tobacco at the same time that it is decreasing the number of places where one is allowed to smoke.


For more news on the changes in the Spanish government:

Zapatero reshuffles cabinet as austerity bites

By Victor Mallet in Madrid

Published on ft.com: October 20 2010 13:29

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spanish prime minister, has reshuffled his cabinet in the face of rumbling popular discontent over his handling of the economy and the government’s austerity programme.

On Wednesday he promoted Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the interior minister widely regarded as the most competent member of the administration, to the additional post of deputy prime minister, replacing the loyal Maria Teresa Fernández de la Vega.

Full article here

Ils sont foux les français

They are simply crazy the French strikers: while in the rest of Europe governments are pushing the retirement age to 67, they do not want to accept that they will have to work until age 62 before receiving a government pension. With life expectancy rising in France like everywhere else in Europe the actual system will quickly become unsustainable: the pension age has to rise or pensions have to be cut drastically - or the children of today's strikers will have to bear the burden of their parents' blindness.
This blog's writer was affected personally by last week's general strike in France as his parents had to stay two days longer on a holiday to the Catalan countryside as their flight was cancelled due to the air traffic controllers's strike...

St. Michael's little summer and the General Strike

September 29 is St. Michael's Day and around this date, summer returns here with very sunny and warm afternoons.
This year the two big Spanish trade unions planned a general strike for this day. Around the countryside there were very few people participating; most of the farmers are self-employed and a lot of other workers had to guarantee minimum services as fire-fighters or nurses. It was more or less a public sector and big industry strike; and as train and bus drivers went on strike and others blockaded important roads other people had problems to get to their jobs.
The trade union's perspective is typical of European trade unions: they look to the interests of their members and do not care about the unemployed or the economy in general; the Spanish unemployment rate is around 20%, and for workers under 35 it is around 42%! Dominique Strauss-Kahn recently talked about the "lost generation" in this context. Around 40% of people with a university degree who have a job work in areas they are overqualified for. On the World Economic Forum's competitiveness index Spain has fallen to the same level as Costa Rica, I think, around position 40, while countries such as Sweden, Finland, Britain, Germany have climbed positions. Yesterday Moody's lowered Spain's debt rating.
Trade unions should become more realistic and wait if the recently introduced labor reform leads to more employment before opposing every change. And the goverment should continue with their reform program and raise the retirement age to 67; Spain has one of the oldest populations in Europe and due to its benign climate and good health system life expectation is continually growing.
Where the government is wrong is in cutting education funds: Spanish students are only mediocre in the PISA studies and its universities do not figure on the lists of the world's best. And there is a brain drain of graduates who do not find adequate employment to the north of Europe and America.

Grape harvest 2010: Carinyena

Carinyena is the grape variety we harvest last. This year its quality has been good to very good. On the family architect’s field we harvested in a muggy afternoon 30 boxes of premium quality grapes, and on a breezy Saturday a tractor load of good grapes. The vines are old and not supported by guiding lines, i.e. they grow close to the ground and it is hard on your back harvesting the grapes. On the field we went to they use a method called “sexual confusion” to prevent a pest from mating and multiplying; the system comes from Japan and works with smells, I think.

As to the harvesters we were the typical family team: the 82 year old officially retired wine grower, uncle of the 61 year old public sector worker and active wine grower, his 56 year old wife (officially in charge of all the family’s agricultural activities as she once received subsidies as a young farmer), the already mentioned 47 year old family architect on visit from the capital (owner of the field) and the active wine growers’ 38 year old immigrant son-in-law who irregularly works in editing and translation.

For breakfast there was salted herring roasted on-site for those who like it, the uncle cooked some tomatoes on the fire, too; then there was bread with ham and cheese, nuts and cookies, water and wine.

In general, 2010 has been a very good year as to the grapes’ quality due to a cool and rainy winter and a very dry summer.

(Written on Sept. 27 but not posted earlier due to problems with the internet connection.)

The grape harvest again

Two weeks ago the grape harvest finally started in our village. The time depends on the grapes' maturity and varies from region to region and village to village and probably according to the winemakers' preferences, too. Before and during harvest time, the wine growers watch the weather forecast more closely than they normally do as a lot of their future income depends on the state of the grapes on harvesting day.
The local cooperative determines which growing zones and grape varieties get preference and how the harvest proceeds. During one or two days a rabbi comes from Barcelona to supervise personally the delivery of the grapes that are used in the production of kosher wine - a great idea to draw a lot of attention to the cooperative and its other wines that sell in more than 40 countries.
Though in other places the harvest is widely mechanized, here the grapes are harvested manually: a labor-intensive and back-breaking operation. One heads out before sunrise, often accompanied by relatives from the city who return for a few days to reconnect with their roots and lend a helping hand. The best part of the workday is the breakfast hour around or shortly after the full sunrise; the traditional meal consists of herring roasted over an open fire accompanied by bread and wine.
As one works side by side with the others there is a lot of time for the exchange of family news and village developments. After all the news have been shared it's time for the old stories that are retold for the benefit of the younger generations and the newcomers: stories involving villagers dead or alive and crimes or scandals.
The afternoon is normally quieter as the work seems harder with tiredness and higher temperatures. One goes to bed early as the body demands rest.
These events are repeated every year. During the first week one still enjoys it. Afterwards it becomes a little tiring, especially if the mosquitoes and flies do not move away from one's head on a muggy day and the grapes begin to rot due to late harvesting or rain showers not untypical for this time of the year.

How to gain publicity for your "Oktoberfest"

These days Avilés, a town of 84.000 inhabitants in Asturias, is frequently on the news because it's socialist city councillor for women's affairs wants the organizers of a beer fest to change their poster announcing the event as she deems it sexist. The poster is the one acompanying this post



and the question is debated widely in the Spanish blogosphere. Helpfully a blogger already has put together a collection of American posters inviting to similar events.
The link is here.

If the authorities in Munich thought as the councillor in Avilés does they would have to impose dress codes on the waitresses there...

All of this might be part of what Javier Marías sees as a growing trend in Spanish society of prohibiting everything that you do not like. There certainly is this trend but a lot of things they want to prohibit I would prohibit, too, e.g. smoking in restaurants, bars and other public places or bull fighting in Catalonia (I would prohibit it in all of Spain, too).

Animals and Climate Change

After reading the current number of Fluter, a German youth magazine on political topics, I am seriously thinking about becoming a vegetarian, or at least reducing my intake of meat and dairy products.
Up to now I was not aware of the enormous amount of CO2 and other climate killers such as methane produced by cows and other domestic animals. In one of the articles it says that the problem of the future will not be the nine billion people on earth but the still larger number of cows, pigs, etc. to feed them as more and more people switch to meat-eating as they become richter... I never especially liked dogs; now there is another reason not to have one as a German shepherd, for example, during a year produces about half the amount of carbondioxide of a European human being.

I am not sure this entry is good English but I am getting out of practice with Catalan provincial journalism...

Burqa, no; T-Shirt, yes, please!

Strange times in Catalunya. More and more city and village administrations are introducing local ordinances that prohibit the wearing of a burqa or other face-covering Islam-inspired dresses inside public buildings. As if the streets were full of burqa-wearing women ready to storm city hall. The craze is such that even villages where there are no immigrants at all are thinking about introducing such a measure preventively in case a burqa-wearing immigrant wanted to move there. And parties on the political right are insisting that the words "burqa" or "niqab" are included in these ordinances; the prohibition of entering a public building with your face covered does not do it for them - pure knee-jerk populism in an election year (regional elections to the Catalan parliament in November 2010). Surveys say that a majority of the population would prohibit the burqa in public places, i.e. on the streets in general, but local administrations can only rule on public buildings.
Meanwhile the city of Barcelona has got a different problem at the same time: apparently a lot of tourists like to wander around Las Ramblas in the heart of the old town or use the metro with nothing on but a bathing suit or bikini; often not a nice view, and apart from aesthetics a potential public health problem. Therefore, the city will fine these "nudist" tourists, but first wants to raise awareness to the problem with an information campaign ("dress well") and stickers like the one pictured down here. We are living in strange times.

Not really news

This is a short version of a news story I wanted to write but was not allowed to as the chief editor thought the topic was already everywhere else and not really of interest to our readers, and he might have been right ;-)
As I browse the news about the ”iPad” I see that today’s headline is that the gadget has already been sold more than 2 million times since it came on the market two months ago, or 60 days to be more precise. In Europe, it’s launch came last Friday, May 28th, and at least in Madrid stocks sold out within hours. This is quite amazing, as the gadnet does not come cheap: the iPad’s most basic version costs 479,- € in Spain (499,- € in France, Italy, Germany) and 499,- USD in the States, the most complete one (with 64GB memory and 3G access) 779,- € in Spain (...) and 799,- USD.
The iPad is a tablet PC, something between a smartphone and a laptop computer. It’s LED screen has a size of 9,7 inches and you can use it by touching on the screen. The simple version can connect with the internet via a wifi red, the more advanced version can use mobile internet via a 3G red – but you need a separate service contract (that will cost you around 35 € per month if you opt for the flat rate option in Spain). The typical user of the iPad will be more of a consumer than a creator as the machine incorporates the typical Apple programs for contents consumption rather than creation - it's not a MacBook (from 979,- € in Spain). With the iPad the company also launched its own digital bookstore and wants people to read the book on the pad – though it does not offer the digital ink technology typical of other e-readers’ screens. The user can also use e-mail and administrate music, videos and fotos but the iPad does not incorporate a camera. Neither are there USB slots. It also does not support contents made with flash technology. And it can do only one thing at a time, i.e. there is no multi-tasking. These are the main points of criticism alongside the absolute control that Apple has got about what you can and what you cannot do with your machine and that it is a little difficult to type on a touchscreen. On the positive side are the iPad’s slick design, its speed in executing tasks, its low weight and the long battery life, up to 10 hours without recharging. And you can buy some accessories like a dock with a USB slot and a physical keyboard, if you like to. There are already competitors in sight: the iPed (I think, Chinese ;-)), and more seriously NVIDIA’s Tegra2.
What I personally find most suspicious is the exclusivity as to the applications one can use with it. If I had to buy a device like that right now, I would go for a far cheaper netbook and watch as Apple develops future generations of the iPad like it does of the iPhone all the time.

In Memoriam Àngel Hidalgo, † 07/05/2010, 89 years

I got to know him in his 80s though I did not really know him personally. He was a short and skinny man with an egg-shaped head, always cleanly shaven, who walked around in old-fashioned clothing of the countryside, hat included. One would see him around the village or on of the paths surrounding it, with a plastic bag and maybe some small tool gathering stuff that might be useful, edible or sellable: e.g. in May that might be wild asparagus, in October almonds from trees grown wild or from those whose owners did not care to collect their fruit – he did not steal, I think. On Tuesdays, market day in the county capital 7 km away, he would put cushions in the back of his tricicle-like open vehicle powered by a noisy motorcycle engine and take his partner to the market at a speed of about 20 km/h. His wife had died years before and his new partner he had got to know by placing an ad in a newspaper, they said. She claimed to be more than ninety years old but nobody around here knew for sure. They were close to few people in the village, maybe because of their Castilian origins. She sometimes went to the 6 p.m. train to see her grandson pass by – and to give him some food or money. On Friday we passed by their house and saw it was for sale; we had not seen them around in quite a while. On Saturday we heard the church bells ring for a funeral mass but did not know who had died. On Sunday we learned it was him whom they had buried the day before at the village cemetery in a “whole” next to his wife; he who had recently lived with a daughter of his in a neighboring village, separated by the circumstances of old age and ill-health from his partner who lived with her children somewhere else.
As we are at it: Àngel had had a short and skinny son also named Àngel, who died about five years ago of lung cancer: a chain-smoking construction worker who was a regular at the local bar, one of the likeable ones, until they diagnosed his disease. He left a bereaved wife and two grown-up sons, both of them short and skinny, one of them “problematic”, also named Àngel...

NY impressions: Starbucks

On a recent trip to “the Big Apple” I discovered the convenience of having a Starbucks café on nearly every street corner of downtown Manhattan. As the weather was mixed it was good to know that there was a safe haven around whenever one needed it. Though the heating did not work properly in all of them and not all of them had a restroom, if one made sure about these requisits, one could spend an agreeable time with cheap coffee (1,20 EURO the smallest one, paradoxically called “tall”), sometimes even seated on comfortable armchairs, watching people. As they offer free wireless internet access, one could learn about the types of laptop computers now “en vogue” and especially see which types of cell phones the locals use: basically Blackberries and phones by other brands that are emulating these, i.e. have a keyboard for comfortable text-messaging. Probably our favorite Starbucks was near Cooper Union, with another one near Columbus Square a close second. I observed Asian-American students discussing a passage from scripture: one with a traditional Bible in front of her, the other with the text on her cell phone screen. Other students tasting cup cakes that one of them brought with her from another store. Some even studied. People in danger of becoming homeless and / or alcoholics sleeping in a corner or with their head bend down touching the table or a note pad in front of them. At some establishments sleeping was tolerated, at others they were woken up by staff. If one doesn’t fall asleep, nobody cares about how long one stays, and there are refills at half the price if you keep your cup. Some people might critizice that they provide only unisex bathrooms. And I would recommend a better waste management, i.e. selection and recycling of plastics.

Dreary shopping

This morning I went grocery shopping in a discount supermarket in Móra d’Ebre, Ribera d’Ebre district, a small town about 20km from here where they have real supermarkets. The experience was depressing, as always. It rained, not a common event around here, and the temperature was about 15°C (59°F). The main road leading to the supermarket is windy and open to traffic in two directions though due to a variable width not all spots of it allow for two cars using it at the same time. Parking spaces are limited and with heavy rain, a popular spot underneath a river bridge becomes dangerous as the water coming down from the centre of town might flood away the cars parked there. I arrived at about 10 a.m. At the supermarket’s fruit and vegetable area it was difficult to reach things as there were crates and boxes everywhere as they were still filling the shelves – one hour after opening. Nowadays one has to be very attentive and look carefully as a lot of the stuff they sell is already rotten or about to rot or behind its “best before” date; today all the broccoli they had was brown... Walking through the rest of the supermarket one could observe a lot of immigrants: one Brit in bathing shorts, extravagant to say the least, considering the weather. Maroccons going quietly about their shopping. Sub-Saharan Africans counting their change to see if they could afford a packet of bread and a glass of mayonnaise; and a homeless of local origin counting his change to buy a tetra-pak of red wine. Near the cash register I saw a price tag for a USB memory stick, a good bargain. Items like these, but also brand deodorants costing 1,99 EUR, they sell from locked shelves. I asked for one stick, they had to look for the key first, and then they discovered that they did not have any... I paid and went outside to carry my shopping to the car. On the way there, I passed the window of a cheap-goods store run by Chinese and I could smell its typical smell though the window was closed. I also saw a group of homeless-looking men sitting in a dry spot drinking canned beer and two gypsies, one inside and the other aside an open trash container where they looked for I don’t know what. If one tries to leave old clothes in a special container there, they are immediately beside one and ask one to hand them the old stuff. My car was still there and I could drive home. Though it might sound condescending or even racist, I always feel relieved that I do not live there and only have to go every other week for the grocery shopping.

Flying Swiss

Recently I travelled to NYC via Switzerland with Swiss International Airlines. It was a very good experience though their connecting flight back to Barcelona was half an hour late. The transatlantic flight was really enjoyable as they do not use big Boeing 747s but smaller Airbus A 330, i.e. embarking and desembarking goes faster. Every tourist-class seat has an individual screen and one can choose between about 20 movies, a similar variety of TV series and documentaries, music albums and music channels, and a range of playstation-like video games... The food was vegetarian and delicious, the restrooms very clean, the flight attendants friendly - a very enjoyable experience. And they arrive earlier than other airlines at JFK international and leave later - so one has more time in the city.

Really that bad?

The Pain in Spain
As its economy goes down the drain
BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
April 5 - April 12, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 28
WEEKLY STANDARD

Madrid

A survey taken a few weeks ago found that 60 percent of young people in Spain want to work for the government. You wouldn’t think this was possible. A decade and a half ago, the country’s conservative prime minister, José María Aznar, began to deregulate the system he inherited from the socialist Felipe González and tightened the country’s budget to allow it to join the new European currency. The Spanish economy took off like a rocket, achieving rates of growth that were almost Chinese. Aside from Ireland, no place in the Western world could match it. Unemployment, which had been as high as 25 percent, quickly fell into the mid-single digits. The country’s debt fell just as fast. Aznar does not deserve all the credit. It was González who negotiated the tens of billions of dollars in “structural funds” from the European Union, which were invested wisely in highways, bridges, electrical grids, and high-speed trains. Spain gave the
impression of a country that was not just dynamic but competently managed, no matter what party was in power. Such countries tend to produce young people whose ambitions go a bit further than whiling the days away behind a counter in the ayuntamiento.

But there is something rotten at the heart of the Spanish economy, and has been for quite a while. In the spectacular national elections of 2004, bombs placed by al Qaeda-linked terrorists killed hundreds of Spaniards in and around Atocha station in Madrid, and brought the socialist José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero to power. Zapatero had called for Spain to withdraw from its participation in the U.S.-led Iraq war, and the bombers claimed they had set their bombs in Iraqis’ name. So Zapatero became an accidental prime minister. He pulled out of Iraq immediately, to the delight of the Spanish electorate, which had opposed the war by majorities topping 90 percent. He passed a bunch of social reforms no one had been clamoring for: gay marriage and more liberal laws on abortion and divorce. And rather as Gordon Brown did in Britain, he recklessly allowed the state to grow faster than the economy. But aside from that, he left Aznar’s free market economy
pretty much alone. The economy was almost a distraction for Zapatero. It was not the kind of politics he cared about, and when things began to go desperately wrong for Spain in the fall of 2008, he refused to use the word “crisis,” preferring to describe what was happening as a “deceleration.”

But signs of trouble were proliferating. During Zapatero’s campaign for reelection in early 2008, his economics minister, Pedro Solbes, debated Manuel Pizarro, the economics guru for the main opposition party, now led by Mariano Rajoy. Pizarro warned of certain statistics that showed Spain drifting into crisis. What new factor, he asked Solbes, had led Spain’s current account balance to rise from 4 percent in 2001 to 10 percent in 2007? Why had the price of clothes, and the price of fruit, risen three times as fast in Spain as it had in the rest of Europe? Pizarro raised these questions in the curt, cold manner of the businessman that he was. Solbes was more easygoing and professorial. The big point he wanted to introduce was: Crisis? What crisis? The inflation was due to fluctuations in the price of oil, he explained, and Pizarro’s worries were exaggerated. Solbes disparaged the conservative plan for allowing people to invest their own retirement
funds as “the Pinochet model.” In the phone-in poll after the debate, the consensus was that Solbes had blown Pizarro away, and this was the verdict of Spanish voters, who gave the Socialists and Zapatero another term. It sure does not look that way if you watch the debate now.

Spain is by some measures the country most dangerous to the Western economic system. Unemployment has doubled (to 19 percent) in the past 18 months. Spain is one of the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain), the European countries running an elevated risk of falling out of the common currency or into sovereign default. Spain is not as bad off as Greece, which was given a credit lifeline at a European Community summit in Brussels last week. But, since Spain’s economy is about four times as large, making up 9 percent of the Eurozone, most of the stopgap solutions that fixed the Greek economy cannot be applied to it. Its problems are like those of the two other countries where a housing bubble fed into a financial crisis that threatened to take down the entire economy. One of them, Ireland, appeared to be in desperate straits a year ago, but has since mustered the will to shrink its government 8 percent. It has slashed benefits, and
cut public employee salaries by 14 percent. As a result, despite going through a period of austerity, it is on track to bring its economy back into balance. Spain’s problems, alas, run deeper. They go back decades. A combination of partisan animosity and unreasonably high expectations of government may make it impossible for the country to right its fiscal ship. In this, Spain has less in common with Ireland than with the second of the two real-estate-boom countries, the United States.

Housing, banks, and government

When GDP in Spain was growing by 6 percent a year, the construction industry was growing by 30 percent a year. At the height of the boom in 2007, construction made up 13 percent of GDP and about 10 percent of employment. As a result, there are now around a million homes in Spain with no one to live in them. There are entire subdivisions in the deserts outside Madrid—including one notorious boondoggle in the town of Seseña with 13,000 housing units—that are standing empty because financing ran out before the infrastructure was quite complete.

Since Spain’s native population was shrinking as all this housing was being built, it might seem obvious now that what was going on was a bubble. But it was less obvious at the time. Several factors were driving the housing boom. First, the market for second homes among Northern Europeans took off. Second, 4.5 million immigrants arrived, mostly from North Africa and Latin America, in the decade after 1999, many of them to work in construction. (In a funny way, they were brought over to build houses for themselves.) They quickly transformed Spain from a zero-immigration country into one in which more than a tenth of residents were foreign-born. Finally, divorce boomed, particularly after the passage of Zapatero’s reforms in the middle of the decade, and this caused the demand for housing to increase by mitosis. Prosperity accelerated the trend. Whereas a young man in his twenties during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco would live in his parents’
house until he married, a “modern” young man in a rich democracy wants—and feels he deserves—a place of his own.

It is in the financing for all this construction that the Spanish crisis differs from the American. Under the circumstances of Spain’s entry into the common European currency, its lending market could not help but overheat. Spain’s interest rates were around 15 percent in the years leading up to its euro membership—and then overnight interest rates fell to levels that were suited to the sluggish economies of Germany and France. These eventually fell into the low single digits, and Spain had negative real interest rates for the whole half-decade after 2002. The banks were paying their customers to borrow money.

That being the case, Spain behaved relatively responsibly. It had neither subprime loans, nor a mortgage market heated to the boiling point by Fannie Mae, nor offshore “special investment vehicles” that permitted banks to take a lot of their mortgage exposure off their books. In fact, it had one of the toughest and most responsible systems in the world for making sure that banks’ loan portfolios were adequately capitalized. Under a system of “dynamic provisioning” introduced in 2000, Spanish banks had to keep reserves of roughly 10 percent of the value of every housing loan they made. That seemed onerous when the default rate of mortgages was 1 percent, as it was 18 months ago, but now that about 7 percent of mortgages are defaulting, it provides a nice cushion.

Unfortunately, it may not be cushion enough. Spain had another problem: the entanglement of its political system with its banking system. This is not just a story of modern interlocking directorates. A system of “cajas” accounts for more than half of Spain’s financial system. There are now about 45 cajas, and they are often compared to savings-and-loans or credit unions, but they are better described as semi-public, semi-private foundations. Cajas date to the 19th century, but there is a tradition of church-based lending organizations that goes back even before that. Cajas pay no dividends but use about 30 percent of their earnings for projects that serve the common good. It is a very noble-sounding enterprise, and that is partly why Spaniards put their money in cajas. They might work as advertised if a church were in charge of them, but Spain’s constitution of 1978 gave the regional governments a voice in how the cajas were run, which, in
effect, made them the policy instrument of whatever political party was in power.

Mostly the cajas were managed responsibly, but, given their link to political parties, they had to keep in mind that loan applicants were often voters, too. What is more, the idea of what constituted the common good broadened. Cajas had traditionally shared their wealth with social programs, health providers, and art institutions. But, for instance, when a plan to build a Warner Brothers theme park outside Madrid—very much desired by the region’s politicians—did not find funding, the Madrid caja took 25 percent of the shares in it. That investment worked. Others didn’t. The government of Castilla/La Mancha—the same one that approved the empty housing in Seseña—prevailed upon the local caja to build an airport in Ciudad Real that nobody needed. The caja went bankrupt. It is the only one to have done so thus far, but another dozen are on the verge. The caja system controls such a huge amount of Spain’s financial activity that they are
unlikely to fail systemically, but they are going to need to be consolidated, and the government reckons that this will cost $120 billion. Moody’s threatened to lower Spain’s sovereign credit ratings if caja mergers don’t push ahead.

One reason local savings banks affect the nation’s credit is that the cajas lend to government, too. The distribution of political power and budgeting authority in Spain is so complex that Spanish political scientists have a hard time understanding it. In simple terms, much budget authority is in the hands of local ayuntamientos (town halls) and autonomias (regions, which have a lot of the prerogatives of states in the early American republic). So about 20 percent of the national debt is not even under the government’s control. The autonomous communities (Catalonia, the Basque Country, Madrid, etc.) will probably be able to make the billions in cuts they need to bring their deficits back down to 3 percent before 2013, as the European Union has urged. But the ayuntamientos, since they are financed mostly by building permits and property taxes, are under water. Very much as in Ireland, when the building boom stops, governments stop with it. One
ayuntamiento, Ochandurí, in Rioja, has debt of $13,000 for every man, woman, and child in the town.

This conflict between central and regional government is what shapes Spanish politics now, and Spanish politics makes budget balance hard to sustain. Zapatero has built his electoral coalition on the loyalties of the autonomous communities, particularly Catalonia, Andalusia, and the Basque country, where distrust of the overarching Spanish state is strong—as is nationalism. He infuriated the conservative Popular party when he described the Spanish state as “a concept that is open for discussion.” The conservatives, in turn, are apt to blame Spain’s present deficits on the alleged waste, fraud, and abuse of autonomous communities and the other minority interests that Zapatero woos. Gays, feminists, Basques, and atheists are no less Spanish than their fellow citizens, conservatives say. But they are not more Spanish either.

It is hard to translate the politics of the autonomous communities into American terms. In some places, such as Andalusia, it resembles U.S. minority politics. State handouts account for a significant proportion of the region’s income—about 25 percent, according to some estimates. Zapatero, who faces critical regional elections there next year, can keep his forces together provided he can offer enough state money. On a trip to Andalusia in mid-March, he did just that.

In Catalonia, however, where his Socialists have scraped together a coalition with nationalist parties of the left, the politics is more like the U.S. politics of states’ rights. A substantial proportion of the Catalans, who make up one-fifth of the population but account for about a third of the country’s economic activity, want more autonomy. They feel the left-wing nationalists who made a coalition with Zapatero have done a poor job of securing it. Catalans have an allergy to the Spanish conservatives that dates from the Civil War of the 1930s and will not vote for them in the next election. They appear likely to restore to power Convergència i Unió, the relatively free-market party of the nationalist right, which is the region’s natural majority.

The politics of labor reform

The toughest nut to crack for Zapatero will be reforming the Spanish labor market, which went wrong in the Franco era (1939-75) and has proved impossible to fix. It will be tough to crack because he doesn’t want to crack it. Spain’s labor market has much to do with the present dangers to Spain’s economy, and no attempt to get Spain out of its fiscal hole will be convincing without a reform of it.

Franco’s corporatist model offered low-wage jobs for life. Spanish workers were keen on the “for life” part of this bargain, less so on the “low wage” part. During the transition to democracy, unions were legalized and added to the mix. While the level of unionization in Spain has never been high, unions are seen as the custodians of the will of the free working class. Any victory by the country’s General Workers’ Union quickly gets translated into policy across the entire labor market.

The benefits and protections would be thought generous even by French or German standards. Unemployment compensation lasts up to two years. It initially pays 70 percent of final salary, which falls over time, but only to about 60 percent, and in the present climate of high joblessness, there is great pressure to extend these benefits. If a worker has a permanent contract, you cannot fire him without cause, unless you are willing to pay 45 days’ worth of salary for every year worked. If you claim to have cause, you need to go to court to prove it—a drawn-out, expensive, and probably futile process during which you still have to pay the worker his salary. The unions consider these arrangements derechos adquiridos (acquired rights), almost a kind of property. Any suggestion that they are negotiable is considered an insult. “It used to be machines were fixed, capital and labor was variable,” one former government economist (a Socialist) told me.
“But now it has changed. A machine you can throw out, a worker you’re stuck with.”

Since this level of worker benefits was hobbling the economy even in the 1980s, a new kind of temporary contract was introduced. The attempt to institute it resulted in a general strike. Spain’s unions called general strikes in 1988, 1992, 1994, and 2004 when labor reforms were proposed, and in each case they threatened to make the country ungovernable.

The idea of temporary contracts was that workers could be hired and fired at will, but after three years of good performance they had to be offered full-time, permanent contracts. What resulted, as anyone but a politician could have predicted, was a strange dual labor market that leaves Spain with both the most pampered and the most exploited workers in Europe. The arrangement has a crippling effect on productivity. Older workers are inefficient because they are too secure. Younger workers, who tend to be much better credentialed than the older ones, can work hard for peanuts and then be put out on the street after two years and 364 days. Career-wise, they tend to spin their wheels for three or six years at just the time of life when people are willing to take risks, move, start companies. Unsurprisingly, no company wants permanent workers. What they want is people who will take low-wage jobs. In practice, the dual labor market has been a recruiting call
for immigrants, and it has encouraged the sort of low-tech work that immigrants do—roofing, dishwashing, landscaping—instead of investment in productivity. During the boom, 85 percent of contracts were temporary, and no more than a tenth were ever converted to permanent contracts. Now the rate of conversion is even lower.

Getting out of this mess will take some political courage. Any serious labor reform will probably, in the short term, drive the unemployment rate upward from the 19 percent where it stands now. Zapatero is an instinctual leftist with a Manichean view of the Spanish Civil War. As such, he fears nothing more than a general strike. General strikes are things that only happen to fascist dictators and other enemies of the working class. It has surely not been lost on Zapatero that Greece has had three of them since it started trying to put its financial house in order this winter. In February, after Zapatero suggested in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he would favor raising Spain’s retirement age from 65 to 67, the unions went into the streets, and a general strike was the implicit threat.

Over the falls

This makes the probability that the government will tackle Spain’s labor arrangements—at the heart of the problem—very low. It means that piecemeal measures are the order of the day. The government has introduced a Value-Added Tax that conservatives have promised to oppose, it has scrapped its plan to modernize the army, it has announced that it will phase out the mortgage-interest deduction starting next year. It has passed something called the Law on the Sustainable Economy, which will incentivize high-tech start-ups over real estate start-ups, as if a million empty housing units were not incentive enough.

Like many Western governments—like the United States, in fact—Spain has a clear path to recovery provided the economy grows at utterly implausible rates. The secretary of state for the economy now gives presentations to investors in London and Paris professing that Spain is “determined to act” to reduce its deficit. But this is very much like American noises on the deficit: lots of declarations of will and idealism and very little concrete description of how to get there. Olli Rehn, the monetary commissioner of the European Union, has described the Spanish promise to cut the deficit to 3 percent of GDP in 2013 as wishful thinking. Standard & Poor’s lowered its rating of the Bank of Spain’s debt from Group 2 to Group 3 (which includes the United States).

The Spanish debt crisis can be looked at in a lot of different ways. You can see the housing bubble, the labor market, the division of governmental labor between Madrid and the autonomous communities, or the lack of political will as the main cause. There are so many budget-cutting measures you may possibly have to take that a good case can be made for shutting down almost any aspect of the welfare state. The whole kit and kaboodle may be nearing the point of unsustainability. The system of state guarantees and welfare rights that Spain has erected may be the biggest bubble of them all. In that case, the wisest course for a politician may be to stay in the boat, hope you are wrong that you are going over the falls, and wait and see what you really have to do to survive.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

7th of November 2010

Two important events will happen in the Iberian peninsula on that day, if I remember correctly:

in Barcelona, Pope Benedict XVI will "inaugurate" the central nave of the Sagrada Família church during mass with about 10.000 people attending;

in Madrid, MTV will give it its European Music Awards with a huge number of people attending.

There probably won't be too many people with difficulties of deciding which event to attend...

Recycling in the countryside

Since March 1, our village participates in the recycling of organic waste. For this purpose, during the last week of February there was an information booth at the square in front of the village hall where everyone intersted could go and receive information on how to separate organic waste from the other stuff. And besides the information, one got a recycling kit: a special dustbin, biodegradable waste bags, a timetable for the fridge to remind one of the recollection days, and a leaflet with information on where to bring the different kinds of waste. Glass, paper, and plastics one has to carry to different containers.

Campaigns by the Generalitat

As you can see from these images, the Generalitat de Catalunya (government of the autonomous region of Catalonia) has a good agency for its campaigns. This one is meant to encourage people to incorporate healthy habits into their daily lives, such as eating five pieces of fruit or vegetable, climbing steps and walking. The Generalitat does not have many means to solve people's real problems these days, i.e. creating jobs or making adequate economic policy, more or less a prerogative of the central government in Madrid. It could do more in the field of education, but the teachers' unions are opposed to anything that looks like more work for or accountability of teachers.

Thoughts from a country in crisis

A few days ago a friend of mine sent me an e-mail with the following content (my translation from the Spanish original):

Facts for thought

Will you have sex? The government will provide you with condoms.
You already had sex? The government offers you the day-after pill.
She got pregnant? The government garantees an abortion.
You got the child? The government gives you a cheque worth 2.500 Euro.
You are unemployed? The government will pay you an assistance.
You are lazy and don't like to work? The government will guarantee your survival.

Now, try to study, work, produce something and look what will happen:
the government will increase your taxes to pay for all the above mentioned.
We learn: f***, abort, be lazy as ****, but never ever think about working hard; that won't be paid by the government and you will have to sustain all the lazy folk in Spain.

I don't think that it is that extreme yet but the government is really only prolonging handouts, trying to remedy the effects but not the causes of the actual crisis. Spain is the only big country in the OECD that is still in recession, and on the verge of an unemployment rate of 20%. Last week it was about to be called equal to Greece, and the finance minister went to London to "educate" the Financial Times about the reality as she sees it. The Wall Street Journal encouraged the Spanish prime minister to put up more resistance towards the trade unions that are fighting more or less everything that looks like change. The trade unions are good institutions for those that have jobs but they don't seem to mind the young and/or unemployed. Spain will have the oldest population in Europe by 2050 and there is no way but to reform the pension system. The government wants to put the retirement age to 67 which makes sense; when Bismarck invented the modern old-age pension system, if I am not misled, the retirement age was set at 65, but hardly anyone reached that age. Today most Spaniards and Catalans live until their mid-80s...

I hope to find more time to ramble on more positively in the near future.

Gandhi, Larsson and nuclear waste

Today is the 70th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's death and around here they celebrate the "Student's day of non-violence and peace" and the 20th anniversary of the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child. In Germany they remember Hitler's rise to power in 1933...
Finally, I got to read Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (I am still at vol. 3). It is quite good, though it has its faults: the main characters are too good to be true and the heroine has got illimitated financial means. And the histories are not for those with weak nerves. But it is one of the few series that kept me awake reading until 2:30 a.m.
As to nuclear waste, a village about 50km away from here that already has two nuclear reactors (Ascó) wants to host a nuclear waste storage center for all of Spain. Not a very appealing perspective, having trucks and trains loaded with nuclear waste coming to the region. The central government will have to decide in five month or so where to build this storage place - and there are seven other villages that want to have it, because there comes a lot of money attached to the project...

A typical Christmas day (an exercise in German prose)

Der Weihnachtstag 2009 (written on Dec. 25, 2009, in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany)

Erkältung (A), Übelkeit (C), ganztägiger Schneeregen bei positiver Außentemperatur, schnell überhitzte Räume, Telefongespräch mit kürzlich verwitweter Tante, die sieben Personen und einen Hund zum Essen erwartete.
Onkel und Tante, die zum Mittagessen geladen wurden, stehen um kurz nach 11 Uhr auf der Matte.
Gespräche über dies und das: kürzlich Verstorbene und in wilder Ehe lebende Kinder von Freunden und Bekannten; dann schlägt der Rauchmelder Alarm, der wohl zuviel penetranten Gänsekeulendampf abbekommen hat.
Onkel G. setzt zur ersten seiner unendlichen Geschichten an: der Neubau der Straße (Renovierung der Frisch- und Abwasserrohre, Gasrohre, unterirdische Verlegung der bisher überirdischen Stromleitung), die Probleme mit seinem DSL-Internetanschluss und die seines Nachbarn, ein möglicherweise kostspieliges Versehen seines Gasversorgers bei der Rechnungsstellung durch ein fehlerhaftes Ablesen der Gasuhr, die mehrtägigen Verhandlungen zur Beseitigung des Fehlers und ein in der Zwischenzeit aufgetauchter Korruptionsskandal beim überörtlichen Gasversorger.
Zum Mittagessen gibt es auf Wunsch des Hausherrn Gänsekeulen, die zum Leidwesen der Hausfrau etwas zu hart geraten und kaum vom Knochen zu trennen sind. Die sonst eher empfindliche Tante lässt plötzlich das Besteck neben dem Teller liegen und greift mit bloßen Händen nach dem Geflügelbein. Die tapfere Hausfrau bietet sich schließlich zum fachlichen Zerlegen an und wird selbst ein nur noch mäßig warmes Festtagsessen zu sich nehmen. Als Beilagen werden gereicht: Rotkohl, Salzkartoffeln, Nudeln und Reis. Die sonst eher empfindsame Tante bestreut den roten Kohl großzügig mit Kümmel und tauscht kurz darauf ihr kaum berührtes Weinglas gegen das leere des Onkels aus. Sie ist entsetzt darüber, dass ihre Großnichte, die sie zuvor erst einmal gesehen hat, keine gepflegte Konversation auf Deutsch mit ihr führt und so wenig für sie wahrnehmbare Ähnlichkeit mit ihrem Neffen aufweist.
Zur Zeit der Mittagsruhe läuft die Spülmaschine im Schnellwaschgang und der Onkel erzählt ein oder zwei weitere der unendlichen Geschichten. Dazu hatte sich die Gesellschaft vom Ess- ins Wohnzimmer bewegt; zum Kaffee und Kuchen wird die Gegenbewegung vollzogen. Die wohlmeinende Hausfrau hat einen riesigen Berg Schlagsahne vorbereitet, obwohl nur zwei der Tafelnden diese zum Kuchen essen. Der Hausherr wird nervös, wenn nicht alle Anwesenden auf ihren Plätzen sitzen, sondern sich z.B. um die Obstmahlzeit seiner Enkelin kümmern oder seinen Kaffee herbeischaffen.
Nach dem Kaffeetrinken wird erneut der Weg ins etwa fünf bis sieben Meter entfernte Wohnzimmer eingeschlagen. Nun darf der Onkel endlich die auf der Karte seiner Digitalkamera gespeicherten Fotos vorführen. Damit alle daran teilhaben können, sucht er schnell im Auto das Kabel zum Anschluss an den Fernseher.
Die zweijährige Großnichte wundert sich über die unendliche Abfolge von Bildern einzelner Blumen und Obstbäume aus dem Garten des Onkels und fragt ihre Mutter, glücklicherweise in der für den Großonkel unverständlichen Fremdsprache, nach dem Grund und ob man damit nicht aufhören könne. Dabei war der Onkel noch gar nicht bei den Fotos mit Details zu Wärmedämmungsarbeiten und Kabelverlegung im Haus angekommen.
Die eher gelangweilt-gelassene Stimmung kippt merklich, als die Tante die Hausfrau fragt, ob sie schon das Essen für ihre Geburtstagsfeier im Februar geplant habe. Die Antwortet lautet, dass es vorher noch Wichtiges zu erledigen gebe, und dann erklärt sie, dass sie sich im Januar bereits zum dritten Mal einer Blasenkrebsoperation unterziehen muss. Obwohl diese Operation normalerweise recht unproblematisch und nur mit kurzem Krankenhausaufenthalt verbunden ist, dämpft diese Nachricht die Feststimmung deutlich.
Aber bald darauf gibt es Ablenkung durch das Abendessen...