Well, here's the news. The Tripartit government in Madrid is going to raise the minimum wage by 6.6%. Sounds good, until you notice that it's going up to 490 euros, which is a lot less than what most low-wage workers in Spain are making. The effective minimum wage in Barcelona is 735 euros net, which is what they'll pay you to work at your neighborhood Dia supermarket, sort of like the effective minimum wage in Kansas City is what they'll pay you to work at UPS or FedEx, ten or twelve bucks an hour or so. Meanwhile, buried in the Economics section at the back is the breaking of one of the Socialists' campaign promises: they now admit there's no way they're going to put up 180,000 housing units a year as they promised. Where are all the demonstrators yelling "ZAP LIED!!!"?

The Generalitat has announced that its 2003 deficit is nearly $1.2 billion; this, of course, is the fault of the Pujol government (in power since 1980), which couldn't balance the budget for a peanut stand, much less an autonomous regional government. Catalonia's total debt is $17 billion or so, 12% of yearly GDP. The Tripartit, now in power, is promising a balanced budget for 2008. Yeah, right. To my knowledge the only serious budgets in the history of Spain were those surpluses that Aznar used to run. Remember the good old days?

Bit of Catalooniness: They're reopening the "Salamanca papers" issue. This is about as dumb and symbolic as nationalism gets. Seems that back during the Franco Regime they got together all the papers and documents and government files and whatever that had some relation to the Civil War of 1936-39 in a single archive in Salamanca. Now, of course, all those papers have been microfilmed by now. Anyway, it seems that some of the documents the archive has are the records of the Generalitat, Catalonia's regional government during the Second Republic and the Revolutionary Triennial. They were seized by the invading Francoist troops when they took Barcelona in 1939. Now the Cataloonies would like those documents back.

One: Who really gives a rat's ass? It's not like packing up a bunch of documents and transferring them to Barcelona is going to change anybody's life. Two: Why spend the money it would cost to move the damn things? Three: They've microfilmed it. I certainly agree that sending a copy of the microfilmed documents to Barcelona would be perfectly appropriate, so Catalan scholars could have easier access to them. Hell, if they're so important, post them on the Internet so everybody can have access to them. Four: I'm against moving the records because of the people who want them moved. I consider most of those people to be idiots and am happy when their will is thwarted. Five: If the "Salamanca papers" are moved to Barcelona, I for one will support the removal of the Archives of the Crown of Aragon, one of the most important and valuable collections of medieval documents in the world and which is currently housed in one of the late medieval buildings that surround the Cathedral, to Zaragoza or to somewhere else in Aragon itself.

Aznar paid a private visit to Washington; he was invited by Chapman University to speak, and he met with representatives of Georgetown University, where he will teach two seminars this fall semester on European politics and trans-Atlantic relations. Oh, by the way, he also had private meetings with Bush, Rumsfeld, and a group of four congressmen. Since Mr. Aznar is now a private citizen who holds no government post and who, as far as I know, holds no party post, either, seems like there's nothing to object to. The Socialists are mad, though, because Mr. Aznar allegedly criticized their administration. They're calling it "disloyalty". Seems to me that Mr. Aznar, as a citizen of Spain, is entitled to all of the rights everyone else enjoys, among them being the right to free expression, the right to travel, the right to free association, the right to choose whatever job he wants, and all that sort of thing.

Writes Quim Monzó in La Vanguardia on the Forum: "On Friday, my friend who notices things went to one of those debates of a dialogue titled "Shared Memory" and drew the conclusion that rather than a dialogue it was a monologue with different voices, because everyone agreed that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys are the Americans and the good guys everyone else. Among the speakers were Rigoberta Menchu, Danielle Mitterand, Mayor Zaragoza, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Gilberto Gil..."

Among people they announced for the Forum who aren't going to show: Bill Clinton, Susan Sontag, Juan Goytisolo, José Saramago, Kofi Annan, Jorge Semprún, Helmut Kohl, and Jacques Delors. Clinton informed them the standard 1000-euro fee that Forum speakers are receiving isn't quite up to what he charges. Susan Sontag is pissed because Joan Clos announced twice that she was coming and she informed him twice that she wasn't, so stop using her name.

As for the prices for these dialogues, they run from 33 euros to 450, according to the Vangua. Nobody's coming to them, so they're going to cut the prices and paper the house by "ceding 30 or 40% of the seats to sponsoring institutions", apparently for free. The Vangua has one of those instant polls; 91.8% said Forum tickets were overpriced and 1.7% said they were good value for money. Attendance figures are running well under the 35,000 a day average that they're going to need in order to break even, the average they need for the five million visitors they promised.

I would say this here Forum is already a disaster. Nobody outside Catalonia is paying any attention to it whatsoever and not too many people inside Catalonia give a crap, either.

The Vanguardia has its annual journalism prize, which it calls the Godó Prize after the count who owns the paper. Guess who got it this year?

(SCROLL DOWN FOR ANSWER)












That's right, it's Baghdad Bob Fisk. Get this: the story he won it for is titled "The looters of a devastated Iraq", published in La Vangua on June 4, 2003. Now, if I remember correctly, it turned out that there was virtually no looting of anything of value in Baghdad after the American capture of the city. Yet they give him the award. There are three pages of Fisk's pontifications, including the back-page interview. I'll save you Bob's splutterings of outrage.

Among the jurors were "Gang of Five" member Alberto Abián and totally useless Vanguardia ombudsdickhead Josep María Casasús, the guy who accused me and Trevor of being American government agents.