One of the things about Catalan nationalism is that there are complete and total jerks on both sides of the issue. Case in point: Albert Boadella, a theatrical director and playwright, who is one of the founders of the Ciutadans anti-Catalan-nationalist political party. I generally agree with Ciutadans's view on nationalism, because it's on the right side of the issue in its campaign against anti-Spanish discrimination.

But Boadella is a self-righteous prick. He's disgruntled because the "cultureta"--that is, the Generalitat-subsidized official lower-middlebrow Tàpies-Porcel-Llach-Joel Joan-Els Pets TV3 Catalan-only exclusivist branch of Catalan culture, which just embarrassed itself before the whole world in Frankfurt--has ignored him and denied him subsidies ever since he began criticizing them. So of course he has to react immaturely. He's written a book, and he held the premiere on a boat offshore of Barcelona "in order not to do it on Catalan territory." How childish.

Of course, this doesn't mean he's going to pack up and leave, since "the climate is benign as long as the nationalists can't change it." Boadella claims that in the rest of Spain, his works fill theaters, while in Catalonia "the silent majority" does not. Well, Al, the market has spoken. People around here won't go see your stuff, for whatever reason. So you have two choices: Give the people what they want, or don't change what you're doing and accept that you're going to be poor and ignored.

But no, Boadella blames his lack of success on a Catalan-nationalist campaign against him, on the part of both Convergence and Union and the Catalan Socialist Party, which would be just about the first time those two lots ever agreed on anything. He claims that they unfairly criticized his work because of his politics; I'd respond that his politics are an integral part of his work, which is generally crappy anyway. Boadella added that he "cares less about Catalonia than Burma."

He's just as bad as Carod-Rovira, but on the other side.

Other notes: Iberia announced that starting in 2010 it will fly four regular nonstop routes from Barcelona El Prat to the US and Latin America. Hey, all you right-thinking perennially indignant Barcelonese, if America sucks so bad, why do you want direct flights there so desperately?

TV3 is gleefully chortling that Sarkozy will be brought down by the combination of the transport strike and his separation from his wife. Naturally, as good capital-S Socialists, they're playing up the marital-discord part, and playing down the fact that Sarkozy is going to stomp the unions on this one. Hispano-Catalan lefties, who are all Francophiles and Americaphobes, have been terribly disappointed at France's turn to the right; they feel abandoned by their parents.

Judge Garzón jailed two more Batasuna leaders, charging them with belonging to a terrorist organization. He added that he was going to lock up a whole bunch more of them. Good. ETA-fomented "kale borroka," street violence in the Basque country, is up massively over the last week. I don't understand why there aren't lots of plainclothes cops all over Basqueland ready to whack these jerks on the head as soon as they torch an ATM or a garbage skip.

The Guardia Civil finished its search of the Odyssey ship, and they didn't find anything or they would have announced it. The ship has been released and is free to go.

The IMF predicts a Spanish economic growth rate of 2.7% for 2008, and Spain's second-largest bank, BBVA, predicts 2.8%. The Zap government's prediction is 3.3%. We'll see who's right. I'm going with the BBVA, since they're the private institution whose income depends on getting such predictions correct. For 2007 the IMF and the Zap government agree that growth will be about 3.7%. The IMF warns that Spanish housing prices may decline because credit has become tighter, making the demand smaller, and it adds that the housing market is considerably more overvalued in such European countries as Britain, Ireland, and Spain than it is in the US. It estimates Eurozone growth for 2007 at 2.5% and for 2008 at 2.1%. The rise in the price of the euro--it hit $1.43 today--is hurting Spanish exports; Spain runs about a 10% trade deficit, which is made up by income from tourism.

Pepelu Carod-Rovira, president of the pro-Catalan-independence Izquierda Republicana de Cataluña (ERC) political party and Vice-Premier of the Catalan Generalidad, has decided that the best defense is a good offense.

Don Pepelu and his henchman, Pepe Bargalló, just made incredible fools of themselves by bragging before the TV cameras that they had scored a nonexistent invitation for Cataluña to host a pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennial art fair. The Venice Biennial immediately responded that Pepelu and Pepe were full of poop. In feigned embarrassment, Pepe Bargalló turned in his resignation as Head President Number One Nabob of the Instituto Ramón Llull, the government organization that is supposed to do for Catalan what the Instituto Cervantes does for Spanish. Pepelu refused to accept the resignation, of course, and everybody's still holding their lovely government positions.

So Pepelu went to TV1 in Madrid for a program called "I Have a Question for You," in which ordinary citizens ask questions to politicians. Zap and Rajoy have both been on, and last night they invited Pepelu, Llamazares the Communist, and Unión Democrática leader Durán y Lérida.

Four million people were watching throughout Spain.

And Pepelu got all indignant. Very indignant. His dignity was injured. More than that, Holy Cataluña and the Sacred Catalan Language were desecrated.

Some people from Valladolid had the nerve to address him as "Don José Luis."

Here's the video; Pepelu comes on. He's the short bald guy with the combover and the brushy mustache who looks like your 11th grade geometry teacher--you remember that guy, the one with BO who wore a maroon polyester blazer and stared at all the girls' chests.

(Note: Non-Catalan Spaniards do not like the fact that bilingual Catalans can leave Catalonia and pass a government job exam in Spanish, but monolingual Spaniards cannot come to Catalonia and pass a job exam in Catalan.)

Transcription:

Young man: Good evening, don José Luis.

Pepelu: Excuse me. My name is Josep Lluís.

YM: I don't understand Catalan.

Pepelu: You don't have to understand Catalan. My name is my name just as much here as in China. You have no right to change my name.

YM: Señor Carod-Rovira, or whatever you prefer...

Pepelu: No, not what I prefer, what my name is.

YM: My question is simple. Don't you think it's unfair that a Castilian-Leonese, which I am, shouldn't be able to go to Catalonia to take a civil service exam because Catalan is demanded, but it can be done the other way around? Don't you think since both Catalan and Spanish are co-official languages in Catalonia, people should be judged by their knowledge and skills before the language?

Pepelu: You're right, people should be judged by their skills, and in Cataluña there are two official languages. Those who know both languages have more skills than those who only know one. If you went to work as a doctor in Paris would you claim to feel rejected because you didn't know the language of Paris?

YM: But we're talking about Spain.

Pepelu: That's where I wanted to go. Well, this Spain that you love is a Spain that is only in Spanish.

Old Woman: Good evening, don José Luis. I'm from Castilla y León, and I'm sorry I don't know Catalan.

Pepelu: Allow me to repeat something to you. Don't bother. My name is not José Luis. If you haven't learned in the three centuries between 1714 and today to say Josep Lluís, but you know how to say Schwarzenegger and Shevardnadze, you have a problem, not me.

OW: I have no interest in learning Catalan, thank you.

Pepelu: If you have no interest in learning Catalan, how is it that you want people in Catalonia to feel comfortable in a state (Spain) that expresses the scorn for the language that you just showed.

What a self-righteous prick.

Well, he got what he wanted. All the Cataloonies, who only live in Cataluña, have an excuse to forget all about Pepelu's little faux pas about the Biennial, and get all indignantly up in arms because people from León can't pronounce "Josep Lluís" and feel embarrassed about doing it in public. The other result of his tantrum, of course, will be even more support in the rest of Spain for the extreme anti-Catalan wing of the PP. He stirred up his homeboys and antagonized everybody else, which is just what he wanted.

This contretemps was the big story on the TV3 news this afternoon, and the afternoon talk show devoted its roundtable to the subject. All the panelists were righteously indignant at the insult to Holy Sacred Catalanity, and almost all the dorks who send SMSs to the show had their blood stirred up and were ready to raise the barricades.

Get this. La Vanguardia's Web article has attracted more than 1150 comments already. That's more than I've ever seen for any story. Naturally, all the commenters are thoughtful and educated gentlemen and ladies making reasoned and logical arguments.

Meanwhile, the following LV story from page 20 in this morning's paper has received zero reader comments:

The Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) yesterday accused Convergence and Union (CiU) of charging illegal kickbacks, after a Barcelona judge ruled that in the year 2003 a contractor paid a 20% kickback when working for Adigsa, a public company belonging to the Generalidad...The investigation began when Pasqual Maragall in February 2005 accused CiU, on the floor of Parliament, of collecting kickbacks of 3% of all public works contracts...The judge ruled that there was evidence of embezzlement of public funds, fraud, influence-peddling, abuse of power, and forgery...The judge wrote that Adigsa's plan to build housing for young people "was created with the goal of winning votes for the party in power in the region, CiU." He mentioned the 20% kickbacks, but could not specify the final destination of the money..."All parties finance themselves in the same way, said Pasqual Maragall yesterday in Valladolid...The ex-premier expressed his surprise at the size of the kickbacks. "I didn't know the commissions were 20%."

All Spanish and Catalan political parties, see, run patronage machines. When your buddies are in power, you get a share of the jobs and the contracts, and you have to pay somebody between 3% and 20%. And everybody gets a share, it's all neatly divided up; the Socialists get the biggest piece, but their partners ERC and the Communists have their own little domains as well. CiU, of course, got the biggest piece back when they were running the regional government; now they're out of power, and desperate to get some back, because they have sagging bank accounts. Pepelu Carod-Rovira's ERC openly levies contributions on holders of patronage (not civil-service) government jobs in the departments they control. This, by the way, is actually at least semi-legal.

Breaking news: The Spanish Navy and Guardia Civil have seized the American ship "Odyssey Explorer" in Spanish territorial waters, and brought it to the port of Algeciras. A Spanish court ordered the seizure on the grounds that it is investigating whether Odyssey, a US company that searches for undersea treasure, stole its most recently discovered trove, worth €370 million, from Spanish waters. Odyssey, of course, denies it. Spain has also filed suit in American court. My guess is that this is not going to do wonders for bilateral relations. Guess number two is that Spain is never going to get its hands on this stuff because there's no way they can prove it was found in Spanish waters.

Slate's running an interesting series by Tim Wu on American laws that the government does not enforce. So far they've dealt with prescription drugs, copyright, and porn. I thought the following was worth noting:

What all of these changes reflect are several major shifts in how the U.S. legal system views depictions of sex. The first reveal an acceptance of the libertarian idea that private consumption of nearly any material is not a public harm. That view excepts children and animals as victims, but not consenting women and men who have sex before cameras. In that view, the U.S. legal system has effectively and informally reached the same conclusion as the 1970 commission: Whether you like it or not, private consumption of pornography is just not harmful enough to merit public enforcement.

Yet at the same time, the United States has concluded that it will not be a place, like Europe, where bared breasts grace bus-stop billboards or soft-porn films can be found on regular late-night television. Americans love zoning—compartmentalizing behavior to designated times or places. It's how a diverse nation manages to live together. And so our obscenity system—much of which takes the legal form of an outright ban—is often in practice being used to move erotic content away from public places.

The funniest fallout from the Frankfurt book fair is that, at the closing ceremony, wacky independentista Carod-Rovira of ERC bragged that Catalonia had been invited to the Venice Biennial art fair, with its own pavilion, in 2009, and that he had confirmation from the mayor of Venice.

Of course he was bullshitting. The Venice Biennial does not invite anybody. Independent countries PAY (Spain's participation is subsidized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) for their pavilion in the Biennial's official building. Non-independent regions or countries or pieces of land or whatever are allowed to apply to the Biennial for the privilege of setting up a pavilion in some other building; only Scotland and Wales have ever done so. Paying for it, of course, and outside the official program. The president of the Biennial said he hadn't even received an application from Catalonia, and that no decisions of the sort would be made until February 2008 anyway. Finally, get this, the mayor of Venice has nothing at all to do with the Biennial art fair.

Says author Llátzer Moix in La Vanguardia: "How is it possible that Bargalló (boss of the Ramon Llull foundation and ERC blabbermouth) and Carod acted in such a precipitous way? What caused their modus operandi, which does not concord with the reputation for seriousness and trustworthiness that we Catalans have worked for? Maybe one answer is enough: For these politicians, culture has a mere instrumental and propagandistic value, and it's more important to shoot first rather than take aim."

Plenty of news from Baja Andorra today. The story that's picked up international attention is the beginning of the trial of 30 Islamists who allegedly conspired to blow up the National Court building in 2004. The plan was to crash a truck loaded with 500 kilos of explosives into the courthouse. Irony: They're being tried in that same building.

Most of the evidence consists of "incriminatory messages" exchanged between the conspirators, which leads to the question of: how did the authorities get hold of them? Obviously they were monitoring these guys' telephone and Internet use. So why is this a threat to democracy when the Americans do it, and good security and intelligence work when Spain does it?

The first guy to be questioned by the court claimed that he was a junkie and didn't remember anything, which is a fairly original defense.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese intelligence service arrested seven persons allegedly implicated in the attack that killed six Spanish peacekeepers in Lebanon on July 24. Spain has 1100 peacekeeping troops in Lebanon as part of the UN force.

A gunman shot an Army sergeant in the back in San Sebastián last night; he is not seriously injured. Nobody's claimed responsibility, but it's most likely ETA or ETA sympathizers, of course. Meanwhile, Zap and Basque PM Ibarretxe are supposed to meet today to discuss Ibarretxe's plan for an illegal referendum on Basque independence. Zap will tell him no dice.

And you thought America was racist: The inhabitants of a town in Galicia called Vilarchán voted to contribute a total of €250,000 to buy a vacant house in order to preempt a gypsy family from buying it. That'll cost them 16 euros each per month over the next 35 years; a high price for keeping your town Gypsyrein.

According to a government survey, 36% of Spanish teenagers between ages 14 to 18 have tried cannabis; 30% have consumed it during the last year; and 20% have consumed it during the last month.

Get this. The Environmental Ministry is going to pay €580,000 in order to distribute 30,000 copies of the Al Gore pseudoscientific documentary to Spanish schools.

And maybe the biggest news of all: The National Competition Committee, something like the FTC or the ICC, has accused Spain's three largest mobile-phone companies, Telefónica, Vodafone, and Orange, of conspiring to fix prices. The three companies are accused of "increasing their income in an abusive manner" to the tune of €1.2 billion during 2005. When the operators were prohibited from rounding up per-minute charges, they all raised the basic price of making a call by 25%, from 12 to 15 cents. Spanish mobile-phone prices are 20% higher than the European average. The companies may be fined as much as 10% of their income for that year.

La Vanguardia ran a two-page interview this morning at the beginning of their international section. With a spokesman for the Iraqi Baath Party. Disgusting. Sickening. Terrorist-loving. I wrote a piece for Pajamas Media. Go read it.

Quote from the interview:

We have been invited (to Spain) by the State Campaign against the Occupation and for the Sovereignty of Iraq (CEOSI), a movement that supports the rights and welfare of the Iraqis. We represent the Iraqi people and give thanks for the opportunity to tell what is happening in our country. This allows us to transmit our message to the occupier from outside.

My reaction:

He fulsomely thanks La Vanguardia for allowing him to spread propaganda.

The CEOSI needs to have its headquarters raided right now to find out how much of its money (which it claims is for “medical aid”) has gone into the hands of the Baath Party terrorists, with whom they are openly in contact. I would expect a long string of arrests to follow. Googling “CEOSI” leads you to an enormous long string of links that clearly show it’s a front for the Communists and those to their left.

The CEOSI is mixed up with Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, and we all know who those guys are: a front for the Workers World Party, a bunch of Trotskyist-Maoists.

They’re still fighting the Cold War, they’re the Vanguard of the Revolution, and the Baath Party is their proxy now.

La Vanguardia devotes four pages and the lead editorial today to the presence of "Catalan culture" as the guest of honor at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair. One article mentions that the whole thing cost the Institute Ramon Llull €12 million, of which €4 million came from the Ministry of Industry in Madrid. The Ministry of Industry spent a total of €12 million in 2006 and 2007 subsidizing Catalan publishing houses for the occasion.

Absolutely disgraceful. The government should not be subsidizing private companies, period. And next time I hear any whining about how the central government in Madrid cares about nothing but putting everything Catalan in its place, I'll point out that this is by far the most money spent on the behalf of any "guest of honor" culture at the Frankfurt fair. For example, when Russian culture was guest of honor last year, they spent about €5 million.

La Vangua is falling all over itself praising this great success, but they let slip that only 2500 people, total, attended any of the speeches or readings or whatever. El Periodico reported last week that the majority of those in attendance were Catalans, and that one of the events attracted zero non-Catalans.

I think this whole expensive wingding was a huge failure. Basically, nobody gives a crap about the whole thing except for the Catalan cultural establishment--and the Catalan cultural establishment got a huge black eye.

Probably the nastiest comment was from the Frankfurter Allegemeine, which said, "Catalan cultural patriotism is becoming impossible to put up with." (Frequent comment I hear around here: "Americans are too patriotic." My standard response: "Am I in Catalonia or am I not?")

From the Times: Appointing Catalonia as Guest of Honour for the Frankfurt Book Fair has caused no end of controversy: the regional government in Barcelona – fiercely protective of its autonomy – decided to invite only authors writing in Catalan, thereby excluding a whole group of popular Spanish-language writers from the region, such as Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind). After a lot of pressure, the government relented, only to have the angry Spanish authors turn their invitations down. The director of the fair, Juergen Boos, said, “We made some calls last week, but nothing happened. It’s very disappointing that the Spanish authors didn’t come, and it’s a pity that this political dispute is overshadowing the Catalan Culture part of the fair.”

From the International Herald Tribune: One of the Spanish-language writers boycotting the fair is Barcelona-born Carlos Ruiz-Zafon, author of the international best-seller "The Shadow of the Wind." He blamed "political commissars who eagerly took over and handled this affair and who decided what kind of image of Catalonia they wanted to project, mostly to their own Catalan constituents, who are the real audience of this whole sideshow, not those attending the fair or the international media."... Ruiz-Zafon told The Associated Press that Catalonia's handling of the fair was "an unfortunate mixture of ignorance about the very nature of the fair and its purpose. Misguided political ambition and bigotry coming from all sides has provoked this discussion."

Another writer who will not be attending is Javier Cercas, author of "Soldiers of Salamis," a hugely successful novel which has been made into a film. Cercas told the Spanish daily La Vanguardia he saw no point in going unless "the politicians responsible make it clear that in the Catalan culture includes two languages" — Spanish and Catalan. Ildefonso Falcones, author of "The Cathedral of the Sea," last year's No. 1 best-seller in Spain, said authorities had decided what the 'official' Catalan culture consisted of without consulting others. The Spanish government and regional authorities have spent €12 million ($16.5 million) promoting the Catalan section — the biggest budget ever spent by any country at the book fair.

From Der Spiegel: The Catalan regional government has hired the Ramon Llull Institute, a cultural organization similar to Germany's Goethe Institute, to stage the exhibit ... But the institute has retained little of its namesake's cosmopolitan approach ... Rivalries within Spain led to heated discussions in the run-up to the book fair. Sergi Pámies, one of the best authors writing in Catalan, declined an invitation to attend the Frankfurt fair, saying that he preferred not to be exploited for nationalist purposes ... It was Volker Neumann, the former head of the Frankfurt Book Fair (from 2002 to 2005), who invited Catalonia, apparently without considering the problematic nature of inviting a linguistic region in which regional nationalism is thriving, more so than in most other parts of Europe.

From Agence France-Presse: Nationalist tensions, never trailing far behind questions of identity in Spain, emerged after the regional capital Barcelona decided that only those who write in the Catalan language may come. Under fire for playing politics, Barcelona -- which is a stronghold of Spain's publishing industry -- changed its mind in June and said all writers who hail from the region were welcome to represent it at the fair.

The U-turn rang hollow for Catalan authors like Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who writes in Spanish and scored an international hit with "The Shadow of the Wind", a whimsical mystery set in his native Barcelona. He is boycotting the Frankfurt fair, along with Javier Cercas of "Soldiers of Salamis" fame and Eduardo Mendoza -- known to English audiences mainly for "The Year of the Flood", a heart-rending story of a nun who falls obsessively in love with a landowner ... But Ruiz Zafon has said the writers' polite stance masked their anger at politicians for trying to hijack the event and show the literary world a selective picture of the region that fits their separatist agenda. Albert Sanchez Pinol, the author of the hit thriller "Cold Skin", was initially in the protest camp though he writes in Catalan, but now plans to attend. "It is true that I considered not going but thinking about it I had the feeling that many people would be disappointed and perhaps it would harm Catalan culture," he said recently.

Looks to me like all they gained out of this is criticism from the British, American, German, and French media. Note that the only American story I could find was from the IHT, the European version of the New York Times, and not from any American papers themselves.

You'll also note, if you look at the stories I linked to, that all of them claimed that Catalan was banned under Franco's regime. This is the standard nationalist lie which we have already been through. Use of Catalan was restricted, but not banned. Publication of books in Catalan resumed in 1940, Catalan-language literary prizes were introduced in the 1950s, and by 1962 censorship had been reduced a great deal, and publishing houses that used only Catalan had been established. So maybe the nationalists won something after all, since they managed to spread their version of history in the world press.

However, I don't think anyone who's not in the book business ever read any of these articles anyway.

Bonus: Which blogger and occasional commenter here said the following on Barcelona Reporter's comments page?

As to whether it's right that Spanish language writers are excluded from the invite, I don't have much of an opinion on that. I find it difficult to think of one Spanish or Catalan writer who I've enjoyed reading so as far as I'm concerned, they can invite whoever they like: it'll still be full of fatuous bumpkins.

What utter contempt. And they accuse me of being unfair to Spain and Catalonia! I have said more than once that there are several writers in Spanish and Catalan who I don't like at all, starting with Balto Porcel and going all the way down to Maria de la Pau Janer. But Mendoza, Monzó, Ruiz Zafón, Sergi Pàmies, and Cercas are all worth reading, as are many others. Do any of these folks match the best writing in English? I would say that Mendoza does, and there are at least twenty-five more authors from Spain / Catalonia who are very good.

I suppose everybody has heard that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. What a dreadful choice. Al is a partisan politician, not a disinterested truth-seeker; Al's documentary, which made him internationally famous, is full of errors; Al's personal lifestyle, with his private jet, energy-wasting mansion, and mining interests, is the height of hypocrisy; and it's quite obvious this is just the Nobel committee trying to slap Bush again, like they did with Jimmy Carter. Of course nobody takes the Peace prize seriously--I mean, they gave it to Arafat, of all people.

Not many people take the Nobel Lit prize seriously, either, because they keep giving it to obscure writers nobody has ever heard of for political reasons--this year it's a French speaker, next year it has to be an Asian, and so on. So I was surprised to see that Doris Lessing won it this year, an author that real living people have actually read. I've only read The Good Terrorist by her, and that is a hell of a good novel. She's certainly a much better choice than jokers like Dario Fo.

La Vanguardia is proposing that Quim Monzó should be awarded the next Nobel Lit prize, in the wake of his stunning triumph at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Yeah, right. When donkeys fly. I think Eduardo Mendoza would be a good candidate, though.

There's an alleged John Edwards sex scandal breaking; he's been accused of having an affair with a very weird New York woman who he hired to make films showing the behind-the-scenes of his presidential campaign. The National Enquirer, not the most trustworthy of news sources, broke the story, and Edwards made the mistake of publicly denying it, which lets the mainstream media run with it on the grounds that they're just reporting the candidate's denial, not actively spreading sensationalistic muck.

I have to say I doubt it. I don't like Edwards at all, I think he's just a rich ambulance-chaser who bought himself one term in the Senate and is now trying to buy the presidency. He stands for nothing but what the focus groups tell him is going to sell. But he seemed to have a real relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, who was diagnosed earlier this year with what might be terminal cancer; when that story broke, she announced that her top priority was going to be her husband's campaign. It's hard to believe that he was cheating on her, and especially not with such an unpleasant woman as this filmmaker seems to be.

If he has been cheating on her, though, his campaign is dead, because pretty much all he has going for him is his attractive image and this scandal would completely wreck it.

One point: No lawsuit against the National Enquirer has yet been announced, and if the story about the affair is not true, Edwards should sue the hell out of them. He's a trial lawyer, he knows the libel laws better than anybody else. If he does not sue, it's tantamount to admission.

The European press is going to go wild over this one.

There's really not that much news around here, a bunch of political posturing from the PSOE and PP and CiU and the PNV, because the general election will most likely be held in early March and it's campaign season already. Not quite as bad as the US, where the campaign is well in swing though the election won't be held for 13 more months, the primaries don't start until February, and Bush's term in office lasts until January 2009. Fearless prediction: The PP wins but without an absolute majority, mostly due to a low turnout by Socialists lukewarm about Zapatero.

Big stink about the PSOE's Historical Memory law. My perspective is that the government shouldn't, and can't, legislate what people can think and say about history, and most especially when that history is still very controversial. The law, of course, only refers to the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, not to stuff like the conquest of the Americas and the Dutch war of independence and the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims and the Rif war and Spain's 18th century submission to France and the Carlist wars and the Thirty Years' War and the insurrection of 1934.

So Zap and the Commies, along with most of the regional nationalists, have the votes to pass the bill in Congress. Esquerra Republicana is against it, I guess because it's not radical enough. CiU is still against it, though the law includes a section put in at their behest that "explicitly recognizes the victims in the Republican rear area executed by the popular tribunals, particularly for religious reasons." Note: Some 8000 persons were murdered in Catalonia for political/religious reasons by the Republic during the war; some 4000 were murdered by the Francoists afterwards.

I mostly approve of the section of the law that removes Francoist symbols from public buildings; there should be an exception made for historical plaques, especially those that commemorate murdered people, no matter who murdered them. I do not approve of the section that removes Francoist symbols from private buildings, since the owner should be able to paint an enormous mural of Enver Hoxha on his front door if he wants. I approve of the section that strikes down 14 laws of the Franco regime. I do not approve of the section that declares Franco regime court decisions to be invalid, since those should be studied case by case; I do approve, of course, of reviewing those decisions.

A lot of people agree with me about the law in general, though: it's a bad idea because it reopens old wounds of the past, which have been at least partly healed by thirty years of democracy.

La Vanguardia and TV3 are making an enormous big deal because Catalan-language literature is the "guest of honor" at this year's Frankfurt book fair. La Vangua published Quim Monzó's opening speech verbatim. TV3 has led off with it for what seems like the last week. Absolutely nobody else in the world gives a crap.

Meanwhile, the Generalitat is going to spend €24 million on a media campaign encouraging people to read books. I'm all in favor of reading books, but I figure that if you don't already do it, no amount of ads on TV is going to convince you to start. If they use that money on something like, for instance, buying. like, BOOKS for like, LIBRARIES, which totally suck in this country, then of course I'd be in favor. But that don't look to be what they is planning.

La Vangua runs a story today on Barcelona's sewers being stinky. They are. The old city stinks like hell of human excrement on bad days, and Poble Nou and the Forum are supposedly worse. It's notable enough that they kicked off their local news section with this one. A lot of people are also complaining about a strong ammonia smell, which some are comparing to cat piss.

Barcelona has 1500 kilometers of sewers, and the sanitary system and the storm system are one and the same. Half of Barcelona's sewers are too small in diameter for workmen to enter, and the poo piles up downtown, since Barcelona's built on the side of a hill and what comes out of our butts up here in Gracia naturally flows down there. They flush out the sewers three times a year, but obviously they need to do that a lot more often. Note: Barcelona now treats 100% of its sewage before it goes into the Mediterranean. This is good.

The Barça is whining about having to give up most of its players for international matches next weekend; club games are not scheduled, of course, but they're worried their guys might get hurt or get all tired. Sorry, that's the deal for everybody, that's what the FIFA, the international organization, says you have to do. Every club that owns an international player runs the same risk, and if you're a team that spends big money on international superstars, you should take that into account when making contract decisions.

So Spain plays Denmark and then somebody like Latvia. Big excitement. They ought to do international soccer competition in divisions; have Europe's top sixteen countries play for the Eurocup, the next sixteen play for the Junior Eurocup, and all the rest play for the Midget Eurocup. That way we don't get all these Spain-San Marino games, and we see a lot more of the likes of Spain-Italy, which is what everybody wants except people in San Marino and Liechtenstein.

I've linked to Making of America Books before; it's an online collection of more than 10,000 e-books from the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of which have some historical, social, or cultural interest, and all of which were published in the US. You can now browse their archive by subject, and though there's a lot of chaff (collected sermons, patriotic poetry, treatises on homeopathy), there's plenty of wheat. Just try browsing the subjects "Civil War," "Slavery," or "Immigration."

Hint: When you click on a subject (say, "Abolitionists"), you'll see the various books available on it. Choose one that looks interesting and then click on "List of All Pages." From there go to the book's first Table of Contents page. I've already done that for the books I've linked to.

The US has always had its pacifists; I'm currently reading an anti-Mexican War book titled The War with Mexico Reviewed, by a high-minded Bostonian who makes most of the points anti-war activists make today. Noticeably absent from most of today's pacifist arguments: the author's insistence that making war is not Christian behavior.

For more arguments that haven't changed much for the last 150 years, check out the anti-capital punishment book The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor-House, by another do-gooder. Again, the religious argument wouldn't be made today, but all the rest of them still are.

More arguments that are still the same: English Items, or Microscopic Views of England and Englishmen, contains some lovely Nativist anti-English invective, along with a long refutation of anti-American stereotypes common in England. In case you hadn't guessed, we were vulgar, ill-mannered, badly educated, uncultured, money-obsessed, and practical to the exclusion of all higher thoughts back then, too, besides being dangerously warlike and imperialistic. One snooty English complaint that is no longer made: Americans spit tobacco juice all over everything.

The Great Riots of New York, 1712 to 1873, is totally awesome, not least for its apocalyptic ultra-reactionary tone. Don't miss the section on the New York Draft Riot of 1863, the closest thing to a Paris Commune we ever had in the States.

Anyone interested in swindles and con games ought to look at The Diddler; most of the scams out there were invented a very long time ago.

The Reformed Gambler is another look at the world of the grifter, written as a rather fantastic autobiography full of unlikely adventures. Wanderings of a Vagabond is similar, though much less moralistic. Both are good stuff, and probably tell you more about everyday life 150 years ago than any textbook could.

Baseball fans should check out America's National Game by Al Spalding, an early star who set up the sporting-goods company that is still in business.

The Longshoremen is an analysis by a group of early social workers of the lives of waterfront workers in New York, a must-read for those interested in labor history in the US.

For a thoroughly disgraceful exaltation of the Ku Klux Klan, including several allegedly funny stories about ignorant Negroes, read K.K.K. Sketches, Humorous and Didactic.

Probably some of you guys need to read Self-Enervation: Its Consequences and Treatment.

Breaking news: ETA planted a limpet-bomb under the car of the bodyguard of a Socialist city councilman in the Basque town of Galdakao at 2:15 this afternoon. The man, Gabriel Ginés, was originally reported to have been killed, but he is actually in the hospital with second-degree burns. His life is not in danger.

Scum. They don't have much longer.

News: The Spanish police arrested 22 leaders of Batasuna, the ETA-front political party. Batasuna called a meeting in the town of Segura in order to designate their new executive committee, and Judge Garzón ordered the cops to show up and bust them all on charges of belonging to a terrorist gang--sort of a Spanish equivalent of the US RICO law. Some of them are also being charged with recividism--seems that it's against the law to carry on political activity after your party has been banned. Good.

I say lock 'em all up and throw away the key. We've got enough problems with real Islamist badass terrorists that we don't need these clowns farting around now mucking things up. They're finished.

They held a torching-of-the-King's-photo at the Autonomous University today, and they hung him in effigy too. Three hundred junior Cataloonies showed up. A spokesman for the arsonists, according to La Vanguardia, "denounced the 'witchhunt' that 'critical thinking' and 'organized independentism' is suffering in Catalonia, reaffirmed their 'firm commitment' to freedom of expression, and rejected the Spanish monarchy. 'We will keep on with demonstrations and symbolic actions in order to defend freedom of expression and open the debate on the imposition of the monarchy in Greater Catalonia (els Paísos Catalans).'"

Sophomoric. Juvenile. Silly. Upper-middle-class kids, of course. The people who are actually studying something difficult like engineering at the Polytechnic, where I used to teach, don't waste their time burning pictures of a figurehead monarch. They're too busy going to class.

The big news today is a real MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over)--the distribution of slots at the new Barcelona airport terminal, to be finished in 2009. AENA, a company owned by the Spanish government, is in charge of managing all the airports in Spain, and it decided how the slots would be divided up.

AENA said the criteria it used to decide which airlines would get which slots included: how many passengers each airline currently transports; how many international connections each airline provides; and the presence of the two airlines with their headquarters in Barcelona, Clickair and Vueling. (Clickair is controlled by Iberia Airlines; Vueling is in deep trouble with its share price collapsing.)

Note: As a free-market and decentralizing kind of guy, I would of course prefer the privatization of AENA. And I think AENA, or whoever is in charge of the airport, should auction off slots to the highest bidder.

However, the Cataloonies are naturally pissed off. They're always pissed off. They look for things to be pissed off about, and if there's nothing, they'll find something anyway. I really have no idea what's angering them, since the Barcelona airport is being expanded and there will be more flights and more growth and more business for everybody.

I did do some research, and discovered:

Barcelona's El Prat airport serves 30 million passengers a year, and will have a capacity of 55 million after the expansion. Barcelona is what they call a "focus city," meaning that it's not a hub, and that it specializes in point-to-point flights within Spain and Europe; it does have a few direct connections to Asia and the US.

Madrid's Barajas airport serves 45 million passengers a year, with a capacity of 70 million after its expansion is finished. Iberia, Spain's former government-owned airline, provides 60% of Barajas's traffic. Barajas serves as Iberia's hub, especially for flights between Europe and Latin America, which provide the majority of Iberia's profits.

Iberia has been privatized; British Airways owns 10% and has right of first refusal on up to 49% of the shares. (Because of bilateral agreements with Latin American countries, who are not part of the Open Skies US-EU arrangement, 51% of Iberia must stay in Spanish hands or the airline will lose its privileges in those countries.) The savings bank Caja Madrid owns 10%, Spanish bank BBVA owns 7%, Logista owns 6.5%, Sepi, the state-owned holding company, still owns 5.2%, which should be sold off immediately, and El Corte Ingles, of all people, owns 2.9%.

Last year Iberia decided to reduce its service to Barcelona for obvious reasons: they were losing a bunch of money, largely due to competition from low-cost airlines on non-stop flights to other major European cities. So they decided to spin off many of their Barcelona routes and form a new low-cost airline, Clickair. No other airline wants to step in and make Barcelona the center of a hub-and-spoke system; London, Frankfurt, Paris, and Amsterdam already do that, as does Barajas. Barcelona's job is to feed traffic into those hubs, and to transport people nonstop to other major Spanish and European cities.

And of course, the market is always right. If there were a market for more routes out of Barcelona, you can bet the airlines would be all over it because their job is to make as much money as possible. Hell, it looks like there is such a market, which is why they are building the new terminal, and why the various airlines want slots there. It just doesn't look like there's a market for direct flights to Tokyo and Sydney and LA and Sao Paulo.

Oh, one more thing. The slot assignments AENA made are merely provisional and will most likely be changed before the new terminal actually enters service.

So check out these comments from the online readers of La Vanguardia; they've gotten 376 so far, and of course all of them are related to the eternal debate about whether Madrid is screwing us over again as usual. Observe some of these pearls of reasoning:

Barajas is taking advantage of a decision dictated from above: Madrid should be a hub and the rest of the Spanish airports mere satellites. We cannot compete while El Prat is managed from Madrid by a consortium with interests in the capital. I am very indignant and more and more convinced that Spain is ripping us off.

We're bending over again. What do they think, that we're sucking our thumbs? We want direct intercontinental flights. If we don't get them, we must boycott Barajas and its new terminal. I will make connections in any European airport that is not Madrid.

The fault is the Generalitat's, which is bending over again as usual. We should create a Catalan airline connecting Catalonia to the world without layovers, and manage our own airports.

Spain has ripped us off again. I'm sick of being in this State, which does not even let us breathe.

In Madrid they want to handcuff us so they can make Barajas stronger.

They piss on us and say it's raining. Spain as usual will keep ripping us off.

Many of us are very angry. Now we need Catalan civil society to mobilize and go out in the street to defend what the current submissive Tripartite government does not dare defend: CATALONIA.

I can tell you that PP minister Arias Salgado met with the Madrid hotels lobby because they were afraid that if El Prat became an intercontinental airport, that would cost Madrid hotels millions. Arias Salgado promised them that El Prat would not be intercontinental.

Now everything is decided in Madrid, which is a direct competitor of El Prat. With this management we cannot aspire to be more than a satellite, with all of its political and economic implications.

If Madrid robs us and does not allow us to improve our economy, we will have to do something.

Paranoia? Or lucid political and economic analysis? You be the judge.

Contrary to what many furriners think, the United States is full of anti-Americans, self-hating Yanks, people who feel guilty for being born comparatively wealthy and privileged, and who think the US government is an amoral front for a small group of powerful oligarchs. Examples: Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, 90% of university professors, and all the rest of that lot. Not to mention half the people who vote for the Democratic party.

Israel is also full of self-hating Israelis, people who really think that the Israeli state is a colonialist repressive racist regime. La Vanguardia interviewed one of them on Thursday; her name is Nurit Peled-Elnahan, and somehow she received the Sakharov prize for freedom of thought a few years back. (Most prizewinners were fairly good choices; this seems to be an unusual mistake.) She is in town because the Catalan Generalitat's Office for the Promotion of Peace and Human Rights (pompous, no?) is footing the bill.

I am not going to criticize Ms. Peled-Elnahan as a person; in fact, she has my greatest sympathy. Her swing to the radical fringe seems to have occurred after her 13-year-old daughter was killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing in 1997. She was clearly unhinged by the murder, as anyone else would be, and she's taking out her rage on the government of her own country (and on the United States), rather than on the people who actually killed her daughter.

Check out some of these quotes:

In Israel children are taught a xenophobic doctrine against Arabs. They are told that Arabs are like Nazis, and no textbook says that Jews and Muslims lived in harmony for 2000 years. The Holocaust has become a political tool.

The powerful propagate fear and ignorance because war, exploitation, and occupations are very good business.

Jewish Greater Israel is afraid of the Muslim uterus, which its ministers call a demographic threat. The US and Great Britain pollute their citizens with blind fear of Muslims, who are seen as a mass producer of terrorists.

Interviewer: Read this headline [from La Vanguardia]: "Al Qaeda wants to cleanse North Africa of the French and Spanish."
N P-E: It's all part of the political propaganda to justify what the United States is doing in Iraq, and Israel in Palestine. Al Qaeda is an answer to the chronic exploitation of the Third World.

Interviewer: Your daughter was murdered in a Palestinian suicide bombing.
N P-E: All the children that die in that area are victims of the Israeli occupation. Every two days a Palestinian child dies at the hands of Israeli soldiers, we're talking about 400 a year, and nobody, nobody has been tried or punished for one single murder. Therefore we can say, in an absurdist manner, that at least the Palestinian murderers have the decency to kill themselves...The State of Israel is pushing the Palestinians toward different kinds of death, and what I wonder is: How is it possible that the majority of Palestinians do not become human bombs?

The American media report on Israeli deaths 500% more than Palestinian deaths. Tell me what the Americans are doing in Iraq and in Afghanistan with the support of Europe, but what is the headline? A terrorist group is threatening us.

Interviewer: Remember the attacks in New York, Madrid, and London.
N P-E: They don't come out of nowhere; they are reactions. If you analyze suicide bombings in Israel one by one, you will see that a day or two before something horrible happened and this is the reaction, but they present it to us in a different way, and those who suffer are not the criminals, who always escape, but the innocents. We call some criminal actions war, and others terror.

Wow. She's justifying terrorism, and it wasn't a slip of the tongue or a misinterpretation, because she repeats it.

What I want to know is: How does someone who justifies the New York, Madrid, and London bombings, not to mention Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel, get invited to Barcelona, presumably with expenses and a fee paid by the Catalan taxpayers, by the Catalan government's Office for the Promotion of Peace and Human Rights? Especially when apology for terrorism is actually against the law in Spain? And how could someone who supports suicide bombers have been awarded the Sakharov Prize? Andrei Sakharov must be really pissed off up there in freethinkers' heaven.

TV3's afternoon talk show, hosted by Albert Om, just ran a roundtable discussion on the Catalan September 11 impostor. The panelists were just fine, but many of the SMSs sent in by the audience were a bit weird.

Three of them were some kind of variation on "Her lie was minuscule compared with the big lie of 9-11. The US government is hiding much bigger lies." One of them, which seemed even more paranoid, was "Now Bush has us Catalans in his sights." A couple of people tastelessly congratulated her on her successful imposture, which I guess is Iberian picaresque. And several people asked timorously, "How are they going to punish her?"

You can't be punished in the US for telling lies except under specific circumstances defined by law. If the impostor made up her story for financial reasons, that's fraud, but it doesn't seem that she did it for money. If she lied in court under oath, that's perjury, but I don't think she ever did that. She might get sued by a variety of people for a variety of reasons, but that would be a civil judgment, not criminal, and the worst thing they can do is take her money. And they can't deport her or anything like that unless she's actually committed a crime.

Anti-American comments from the readers of La Vanguardia's online edition (see, they're capable of America-bashing just on general principles; they'll manage to come up with a reason somehow):

Every day lies in the United States are normal. Look at Bush, their "brilliant" and criminal president, the drug addiction rate, the crime rate, the death penalty, shootouts in the schools, racial discrimination, etc. But the pearl of them all is the story about Bin Ladem (sic), an old CIA agent. What she did is a peccadillo in order to be a celebrity. Isn't that the ideal that the system fosters?

There are many relatives of victims who are demanding a new INDEPENDENT investigation of those attacks, but they are silenced. The media only publicize witnesses who make viewers reach for their hankies, without criticism. Why do you think this fraudulent woman was there?... There is an enormous campaign under way of propaganda about 9-11. If you don't want to see it, it's your business.

Which came first, wars or terrorism? I think one of them caused the other. What the (attack on) the Towers was, was a real answer to the fantasies of American movies, where the good guys always defeat the bad guys.

Or is this just silly old Iberian Notes mendaciously seeing anti-Americanism under every bed? Something must be done.

By the way, of course, this story is completely dead in the United States, where it never was a big deal in the first place. It made the New York Times and the evening news, and Time did a short piece on it, and then it was quickly forgotten.

What a few thousand Cataloonies want to call "civil disobedience" is under way; they held a torching-of-photos-of-the-King in Manresa, and last night about 2000 of them had an illegal demo on the Ramblas in solidarity with the image-burners. They chanted slogans in favor of defunct Catalan terrorist gang Terra Lliure, and threw shit at the cops, who charged them five times with nightsticks. Go Cops! Beat 'em, thump 'em, Cops, Cops, Cops!

Down at the café this morning a non-loony Catalanist told me, "These guys are going to hand the general election to the PP, and they're making all of us look like carallots (fools)." They're really pissing off the rest of Spain, including the people who are generally moderate on political and nationalist / regionalist questions--and there's going to be a backlash. CiU agrees; Artur Mas called the photo-torchers "people who transmit an incorrect image of our country as a place where the citizens entertain themselves burning things in the streets."

Zap has leaked that he's not going to accept anything resembling Basque PM Ibarretxe's plan for negotiations about the "political normalization" of the Basque Country, or anything that smells like a referendum. Most of the press is speculating that this last genius idea from Ibarretxe is going nowhere and will be forgotten soon. The moderate wing of Ibarretxe's own party, the PNV, is behind Zap on this one; they believe that the elected democratic government should not take any steps that are among ETA's demands until ETA is out of business. Catalan PM Montilla is also against Ibarretxe's brainspasm.

Zap has also leaked that the general election will be in March 2008.

Disgracefully, the Zap administration has cut a deal with Cuba, with a public signing ceremony in Havana graced with the presence of a Spanish cabinet minister (Leire Pajín). Spain will provide more than €20 million of taxpayers' money in foreign aid to the Castro dictatorship; Spanish local administrations already send €15 million of their taxpayers' money to the Communist regime. In return, the Castroites have to do absolutely nothing. The next step is the reopening of the Spanish cultural center in Havana, "of great symbolic relevance," says La Vangua. Spain is Cuba's third-largest trading partner, with more than $1 billion in commerce per year.

FC Barcelona stomped Levante last night 1-4, with a hat-trick from Henry and another goal from Messi. Levante is a really bad team; it's not only that they have below-average players, but that they were disorganized the whole match, not even staying in their lines and bunching up far too much around the ball. They also committed a few pretty nasty fouls. That team is heading straight for Second Division. On Wednesday Barça beat Zaragoza 4-1, and Zaragoza is a good team with good players. The doubters are silenced, at least for now, though their silence never lasts long. Zambrotta and Touré are both hurt, but Puyol's back. I'd use Puyol as the right fullback, play Thuram and Milito as center-backs, and put Márquez at defensive midfielder to replace Touré.

Here's a sick story: A perv in Badalona went around to the local football fields and pretended to be a scout for a professional team. He told kids and their parents that he would make soccer stars out of them, and gained their confidence. The really sad thing is that all the kids were immigrants between 9 and 11 years old, with families who don't speak Spanish and need money badly. He then sexually abused them, including whips, chains, and dog collars, and videotaped the whole thing. The guy has a police record of sexually abusing children. Why did they let him out in the first place? And how long is he going to stay in prison until they let him out again?

Wackiness from here in Baja Andorra: Liberation theologist José Ignacio González Faus says in today's La Vanguardia:

In the name of progress and security, is humanity on the road toward a new form of world Fascism? The secret CIA flights authorized by NATO and Europe, or the jail at Guantánamo, are alarming indicators. We will reach that point after some "American-style" democracies in which we can only choose between the right and the far right. This world Fascism will last centuries, like slavery and feudalism. During those centuries people will look back on a few years in which humanity lived under fairly democratic conditions. When this world Fascism falls, we do not know whether the human species will be prepared to create a new democracy that has learned the lessons of the failure of the first one: that democracy and self-enrichment without limits are absolutely incompatible.

Wow. That's completely insane. I know a guy who knows González Faus, and says, "For a priest, he's a pretty good Marxist."

Note that what's driven him over the cliff into catastrophism are alleged CIA secret flights (transporting allegedly "kidnapped" terrorist prisoners to alleged torture camps in Eastern Europe) and the non-alleged prison at Guantanamo. The alleged CIA secret flights and torture camps don't exist, of course, and Guantanamo isn't exactly Auschwitz or the Gulag. One would think Father G. F. would have been much more shocked by, say, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, or the psychopathic killer Saddam Hussein, or the Kim dynasty in the North Korean police state, or the bloody-handed current Chinese dictatorship, or the Burmese military junta, or Assad or Khomeini or Gaddafi or Idi Amin or Bokassa or Castro, than these comparatively minor alleged American sins.

La Vanguardia has a bit of a scoop today. You may have heard that a woman calling herself Tania Head, who was until this week the president of the 9/11 survivors' association, has turned out to be an impostor.

She's from Barcelona and her real name is Alicia Esteve Head; her family are well-known Barcelona business people. Her father and brother were sentenced to prison in a 1992 fraud and forgery case. Between 1998 and 2000 she was a secretary for the company that owns Barcelona's Hotel Arts, Hovisa. Her co-workers say she always wanted to be the center of attention and was a "complicated" person who made everyone's live difficult. She was notorious for telling wild stories about her experiences; she claimed that a scar on her arm was the result of the surgical reattachment of the arm after a car accident, to have studied at Harvard and Stanford, and to have a plastic surgeon boyfriend in the US. Later she claimed that her arm was injured during the WTC bombings, but she already had the scar while living in Barcelona. Her co-workers say she speaks very good English.

Time magazine explains quite clearly why people like her do things like this:

"Why do people do this? There's an obvious benefit," says Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Irvine who is famous for her critical work on the recovered memories of alleged sexual-abuse victims. "It may not be immediately financial. But certainly being bathed in a love bath of attention and affection is a lot of benefit for a lot of people."

So La Vangua beat everybody on this one. Congratulations. But did they have to run it on the front page, give the story pages 3 and 4 (the top of the international section), and an editorial? It's not that big a deal, though the newspaper says that the case has "descolocado" (surprised, shocked) New York.

Agam, a blogger in Thailand associated with Pajamas Media, has the latest information from Burma. You'll want to read what he has to say. He links to Burma Digest, an opposition website with articles, photos, and videos about what is happening, and to another opposition site called The Irrawaddy. All three sites are constantly being updated. It's the amateurs who are getting the news out. This is important.

Basque prime minister Juan José Ibarretxe, in an act of stunning irresponsibility, declared today that the Basque Country would hold a referendum on a hypothetical "pact with the central government on the political normalization of Euskadi," to be held October 25, 2008. What Ibarretxe announced, therefore, is not a straight-out referendum on the question of self-determination, which would be anticonstitutional.

Rather, Ibarretxe proposes to negotiate bilaterally with Madrid in order to reach an agreement on "political normalization." Whatever that is. If an agreement is reached, then the referendum will serve to confirm the people's consent. However, of course, no agreement will be reached, since the more extreme wing of Ibarretxe's party, the PNV, has forced the moderate wing into submission, and Ibarretxe's demands will therefore be unacceptable to any central government, especially if the PP wins the general election coming up at the beginning of 2008.

If no agreement is reached, then the purpose of the referendum will be "to overcome the blockage." Uh, excuse me, no referendum held only in the Basque Country is valid for the rest of Spain, and it doesn't matter if they all vote to flap their arms and fly to the moon, it won't count for anything. Secession is not permitted by the Spanish Constitution.

Of course, we already know what the results of any referendum would be, anyway, since the Basques hold them every few years or so already. They're called elections. Never has there been a pro-independence majority.

There's been a lot of anger in the rest of Spain at the wave of burnings of photographs of King Juan Carlos here in Catalonia; the extremist Cataloonies did another one today at the university here in Barcelona. Torching the king's image is illegal in Spain, as is burning the Spanish flag, and those who have burned photos are being prosecuted for lese-majesté.

My opinion is that 1) burning an image or a flag is political expression--it says very clearly that you despise everything that what you're burning stands for--and should therefore be legal, as it is in the US 2) Anyone who does such a thing to a symbol of democracy is a complete and total asshole and should be scorned by all the rest of us 3) The law's the law, and until it's changed it should be enforced. Put these jerks on trial for lese-majesté; it doesn't bother me in the least. But don't put them in jail, that'd be counterproductive (and besides, I think jail ought to be reserved for violent criminals). Give them a massive community service sentence, and make sure that the service they do is cleaning up bedpans in nursing homes 4) Change the law. Don't fear free expression, unpleasant as it might be.

I understand the anger at the photo-burners, and what's interesting is that the rejection is coming from both the moderate wing of the PP and from the PSOE. The Communists don't seem to care, and there are elements of the far right who don't like Juan Carlos either. What the moderates are objecting to is the photo-burners' hatred of what they have created, a successful modern democratic Spain with all its faults--and its virtues.

King Juan Carlos is a symbol of Spanish democracy, the democracy built by the moderates on the right and the left. He was the most important single figure during the transitional period. If he hadn't set the transition in motion, and had been willing to serve as a puppet for the army (which is what Franco wanted him to do), Spain would be something a lot worse than it is today. If he hadn't spoken on TV to the people against the February 23, 1981 attempted coup, and made it clear that he would abdicate if a military junta took over, it might not have crumbled so fast--and don't forget, General Milans del Bosch rolled the tanks through the streets of Valencia that night, while rogue Guardias Civiles held the Parliament hostage. A weaker man might have folded.

The photo-burners say Juan Carlos is Franco's appointed successor. So what? Does that invalidate him as monarch? Juan Carlos certainly did the opposite of what Franco wanted him to do. Pasqual Maragall, Paco Ordoñez, Miguel Boyer, Adolfo Suárez, Manuel Fraga, and a whole lot of other people whose commitment to democracy is unquestionable worked for Franco's government, too, on the moral grounds that somebody competent had to run the country, whether elected or not.

This is the funniest thing I've seen in months.

This is Iberian Notes's 2000th post on Blogger; I had a couple of hundred posts on the old Homestead site I set up back in February 2002 as well. That's more than five years of blogging. I still haven't figured out how to get the archives functioning on the Blogger template, but here's a link to them in case you're interested.

There's been news this week but I've been too lazy to post. The most important item was the deaths of two Spanish soldiers (paratroopers) in Afghanistan, Germán Pérez Burgos of Badajoz and Stanley Mera Vega, originally of Guayaquil, Ecuador, when their armored vehicle was bombed by Taliban terrorists. The Afghan interpreter was also killed. Three more Spanish soldiers were seriously wounded, and three more lightly wounded. The vehicle had a "frequency inhibitor" to prevent radio-controlled bombs from being set off, but this one was connected to a cable.

Our deepest gratitude and sympathy to the families and to the Spanish armed forces in Afghanistan.

The Communists are calling on Zap to cut and run just like he did in Iraq, but Zap's position on Afghanistan has been that it is a legal conflict declared by the UN and therefore Spain will participate, though with a very small force of 690 soldiers based at Herat in the southwest.

The PP is demanding that Zap admit that Afghanistan is a war zone, which doesn't make much sense to me. The logic seems to be that if Spain pulled out of Iraq, then it ought to pull out of Afghanistan, too. However, the PP backed Spanish participation in Iraq, and supports expanding the Spanish force in Afghanistan. I guess they're trying to make Zap look inconsistent, which his policy is, but their policy isn't too coherent either.

This contretemps, mixed with Ahmabignutjob's speech at the UN, sort of took away Zap's thunder, since he wanted to make a big deal of leading the global struggle against climate change or something ecosocialist like that. He had a big speech all prepared and everything. Nobody cared. Internationally, Zap reminds me a little bit of Eleanor Rigby, lonely and ignored though he tries his best.

For some reason, it is big news over here that Zap and Bush have never held an official meeting, and that Bush has given Zap the cold shoulder. I don't think it means anything, since of course official Spanish-American relations are handled by the appropriate ministries and departments and are going along quite smoothly, as usual. The two crossed one another's path at the UN, and Bush said, "Hola, amigo, ¿qué tal?" This was one of the top international stories in the Spanish press.

Meanwhile, the French cops busted fifteen etarras this week, four of whom are medium-size fish who had multiple warrants out for them. I just don't see ETA being able to sustain the terrorist struggle with all their guys getting arrested right and left. They let off a five-kilo bomb on Tuesday in front of the Basque regional police station in Zarautz, but almost no damage was done.

The political crazy nationalist news coming up is that tomorrow Ibarretxe, the Basque prime minister, is supposed to announce something important about the referendum on self-determination that the PNV keeps threatening to call. Since any referendum would be illegal and its results non-binding, it's pretty much mental masturbation on the part of the Basque Nationalists.

La Vanguardia ran a big article on changes in Spaniards' alcohol consumption. They've just discovered the concept of binge drinking, which 30 percent of males and 18 percent of females between 18 and 24 admit to doing on occasion. 14% of males between 18 and 64 have binged within the last month; the figure for females is 7%. People who binge-drink do it between twice and three times a month. La Vangua blames this alleged trend on Anglo-Saxon influence, of course. They quote a social worker who blames it on the consumer society. I must say I notice a good deal more drinking in general, and specifically among college and high school kids, since I got here back in 1987.

Last Friday there was a serious electrical fire at the Vall d'Hebron hospital, which I believe is the metro area's biggest. The entire electrical system went out and it still isn't back to normal. They had to postpone procedures and move patients to other hospitals; they've moved 20 generators there to provide electrical power. Things won't be back to normal for four months, and there's going to be some debate on closing it down, since it's more than 50 years old.

I have to admit that the city government's Bicing program--you sign up for fifteen bucks or so and get unlimited bicycle pick-up and drop-off usage--seems to be quite successful. They've got 3000 bikes, plan to add 1500 more in January and 1500 more next summer, and to expand the center-city area where there are pick-up points out to Les Corts and Poble Nou. 90,000 people have signed up, and you see people riding the bikes all over the place.

Somebody's going to get killed, though, mixing all these bikes with heavy Barcelona traffic. The city government came up with a whole set of new bicycle rules, which has hacked off the bicyclists since they are now going to get fined for breaking traffic laws.

The situation in Burma is getting a lot of press over here. Let's hope a real "people power" movement can force the dictatorship to step down without too much bloodshed. Burma's much poorer and more backward than any country in its region except maybe Laos, and the military junta is very hard-line. It's not quite as bad as North Korea, but it's still pretty bad.

Dumb Spain media thing: A Spanish woman snapped a photo in Morocco on August 31 of a young couple with a blonde girl who looked a little like Madeleine McCann. She went to Interpol. The media ran with it, especially television, and of course the girl turned out to be a nice Moroccan child named Buchra Achkar taking a stroll in the park with her parents.

Catalan prime minister Montilla is already promising how he's going to split up the pork-barrel money Catalonia is going to get. Companies who give "permanent" contracts to people under 30 will score a €2000 check; more discrimination against older workers, you could argue. The "death tax" will be eliminated on estates under €500,000, which sounds like an excellent idea to me. The metro will run all night on Saturdays and nights before public holidays, which is also a good idea, and he wants to spend the rest of the money on the health care system. Not too bad; I don't see way too much of this cash going to the Socialist patronage network, with the exception of €319 million to raise health care workers' salaries, and you can argue they deserve it.

The Police are in town tonight. Of course I'm not going.

Hey, guess what? We've got the far-leftists around here in a tizzy! A rather hysterical blog post (including such statements as "The US trained and armed Osama Bin Laden," "No nation has behaved more irrationally in the Middle East than the US," "warmongering lunatic," "This is the world of fantasy inhabited by the neocon revolutionaries in the US," and "History will not be kind to these despicable people") attracted these comments:

BTW: watch out when you mention Americans! Commenters at the increasingly mendacious Iberian Notes blog have now made it clear that they regard any disagreement with any American as 'anti-American'. This comes after that blog's author claimed that criticism of Bush counts as anti-Americanism because he was elected by some Americans.

Cool! I'm "mendacious," meaning I intentionally tell lies while knowing the real truth.

So it's interesting that I never said what I am alleged to have said. Criticize Bush and his politics and actions all you please. I criticize Zapatero all the time and I don't think I'm being anti-Spanish when I do so. What I did say was that gratituously insulting Bush is anti-American (e.g. "Fuck Bush"), especially when the gratituous insults would never be proffered by the insulter against, say, Castro, Assad, Kim, or Saddam. And I added that people who unnecessarily insult the democratically elected president show a lack of respect for the American democratic process.

Regarding Iberian Notes, I read it in the same way as many Catalans listen to COPE radio station: part masochism, part comedy value. Following their bizarre logic, PP’s criticism of the PSOE is anti-Spanish, and criticising the Tripartit surely must be anti-Catalan. It’s good for a laugh every now and then though.

Well, I'm glad that this blog provides masochists with pleasure. Wouldn't want to seem sexually intolerant, would we? Hope everyone finds it especially exciting today, especially those wearing nipple clamps!

The problem with Iberian Notes is that it seems to be moderately popular with people outside Spain - who often have no idea quite how distorted and misleading it is. Something should be done.

It's also moderately popular among people inside Spain and even inside Catalonia, but I digress. What I like is, "Something should be done." What? Hunt me down and kill me? Sabotage my site? Accuse me of working for the CIA--oops, La Vanguardia's ex-ombudsman already did that.

Sports update: Right now, the lead story on Yahoo news is that Ronaldinho is in trouble for too much partying. That's interesting; I didn't know English-speakers, especially not Americans, were particularly interested in a Brazilian soccer star who plays in Spain. But the Sun is reporting that Chelsea is going to make an offer for him.

La Vanguardia has blasted him for being a lazy drunk, comparing him to Best and Gascoigne, and also comparing him unfavorably to Romario, who was always out all night at discos but who has also never been seen intoxicated, at least not in public.

Last season Ronaldinho was criticized for staying out late, though there were few specific accusations made then. He missed training a lot, and the excuse was that he was working out in the clubhouse. He also often looked tired during the games, though in his defense he was the only top Barça player who didn't miss serious time because of injuries, and he hadn't really had a summer vacation because he'd played the World Cup with Brazil. However, La Vanguardia accused him of breaking training and drinking, along with Ronaldo and Adriano, while he was with the Brazilian team.

Ronaldinho hasn't played a full game so far this season, and he missed yesterday's 2-1 victory over Sevilla because of an alleged injury suffered in practice. He wasn't in the stands at Saturday night's game, though other injured players like Puyol and Eto'o were there, sitting with the club president. Ronaldinho was supposedly watching inside the clubhouse. He's missed training the last couple of days, too, supposedly working out in the clubhouse; he's also going to miss the next match on Wednesday in Zaragoza. There was massive criticism when it was reported last week that he had stayed out all night partying two nights before the Osasuna game.

I would say that if such negative stuff is being published in the fanatically pro-Barça local press, and being reported on TV3, it means the club hierarchy has concluded that Ronaldinho is more trouble than he's worth and has about one more chance before being shipped out, especially since Giovani Dos Santos and Bojan Krcic have looked so good this season.

That would really be too bad. Ronaldinho has had a good year, two great years, and then a disappointing but still pretty good year while with the Barça. I'd hate to see him leave under a cloud, since he seems like a pretty decent guy who has fun on the pitch and has tremendous talent.

The Sevilla game was very good. Both teams were strong in the first half, Barcelona wore them down, Henry had a couple of good chances and played the whole match--he's just been unlucky, he's not washed up--, Messi scored a tremendous goal on a volley off a center by Henry, and Poulsen tackled Giovani in the area for a penalty which Messi converted. Then, in extra time, off a misplay by Oleguer, Kanouté broke through and lobbed Valdés for 2-1.

Messi is the Barça fans' new hero, and he certainly is a good player; I doubted him at first, and he's proven me wrong. But when Barcelona signed him up when he was a young kid, they got a doctor to diagnose him as undersized and to prescribe him human growth hormone. That's right, the club fed a teenager HGH.

Joan Golobart, the football commentator who seems to make the most sense, says that 1) Marquez and Milito, as center-backs, get the ball to the midfielders a lot quicker than Thuram and Oleguer do; 2) Messi and Iniesta are Barça's best players right now; 3) Deco's performance has been subpar but he's in good physical shape and sure plays hard; he also gets booked much too often; 4) Abidal is an excellent player, Zambrotta looks much better than he did last year, and Barça now has a very solid defensive back line; 5) Barcelona is a better team with Ronaldinho, but he is not irreplaceable.

They've made a big deal out of Norman Foster's design for a remodeled Camp Nou, and it's about time the stadium was refurbished. It's all concrete inside, and not too attractive from the outside. Inside it looks great, but the standard criticism is that too many seats are too far away from the pitch; the remodeling is supposed to move a lot of seats in much closer.

Foster's remodeling will cost at least €250 million, begin in 2009, and be completed in 2012. Supposedly, they'll be able to continue playing there while the construction is going on.

The remodeled Camp Nou is supposed to have a transparent outer skin that will be lit up, much like Foster's Agbar Tower, also known as the "giant suppository" or "giant dildo." Foster claims to have been inspired by Gaudí and his broken colored tiles. Here's the promotional video showing what the new stadium will look like. They could have done a much better job on the videoclip. Too much computer special effects crap. Keep it simple. Just because you can do something on the computer doesn't mean you should.

Budget and spending follow-up: The Solbes-Castells pact on how much pork-barrel spending Catalonia is going to get means that Catalonia will receive €30 billion more in central government cash over the next six years. Catalan "infrastructure" spending will rise from €4.0 billion in 2007 to €5.9 billion in 2013.

La Vanguardia asked a bunch of powerful locals, business and union leaders, what the Generalitat ought to do with this windfall of cash. Their list of priorities was:

The commuter train network.
The freight train network. (Railroads handle only about 3% of goods transport in Catalonia; in the allegedly energy-wasting US, it's more than 40%.)
The high-speed passenger train from Barcelona to the French border.
Widening the road that runs Barcelona-Vic-Ripoll-French border.
Better access from the suburbs to Barcelona city.
Better access to the port of Barcelona.
The airport.
High-tension electric line connecting to the French grid.
"Neighborhood rehabilitation," whatever that is. Probably slum clearance. Or payoffs to "community leaders" for organizing workshops on empowering lesbian immigrant Sandinista single mothers.
Business schools.
Irrigation.
Maintenance of rural roads.

I'll agree that a lot of this seems pretty reasonable. Gotta maintain your infrastructure; if we're going to spend taxpayers' money on something, railroads and highways ought to be a priority, as they benefit nearly everybody. And since in the construction business you pretty much get what you pay for (unless too much of this cash goes into the pockets of the local party machines), it makes sense to spend a few bucks and get the job done right.

Spain's booming economy has led to a record budget surplus this year. Economics minister Pedro Solbes said it will reach €19 billion, much more than the expected €7 billion. They'd calculated that GDP growth would be 3.2% in 2007, and it will turn out to be about 3.8%, meaning that government revenues will be 5.8% higher than planned for. Solbes admitted the Econ Ministry intentionally underestimated its predictions for growth in order to avoid pressure from the Communists and ERC for increased spending last year; he said that increased spending would have caused more inflation.

(I hate giving Zap credit for anything, but this is the third consecutive budget surplus the Socialists have run. Zap's by no means a brilliant administrator, but he did have enough sense to pick Solbes and Fernandez Ordoñez as his economic policymakers. You can argue that the PSOE is able to run a surplus now because Aznar's administration cleaned up the economic mess Felipe Gonzalez left us in eleven years ago, and the PP does that with some justification. You can also argue that maybe Zap calls himself a socialist, but he hasn't nationalized anything or introduced a 30-hour workweek or tripled everyone's wages or done anything radical and stupid with the economy.)

So Solbes, Fernandez Ordoñez, and the Bank of Spain want to use the windfall cash to pay down the national debt (a total of €391 billion, 37.7% of Spain's yearly GDP, which is €1.2 trillion), which sounds like an excellent idea to me.

Zap wants to spend it, though; he calls it "fulfilling campaign promises." So he's going to spend nearly €5 billion of the surplus on this year's proclaimed new programs: €900 million to cover Dependents' Law requirements, €850 million for "infrastructure" in Andalusia, €825 million for the same in Catalonia (Andalusia and Catalonia are of course the two regions that give Zap the most votes), €1.5 billion for the newborn child payments, €785 million to subsidize young people's apartment rentals, and €45 million on dental care for children. And Zap is going to spend €1.1 billion more on "social policy."

The remaining €6 billion of the surplus will be transferred to the Social Security reserve fund; that's enough money to pay everybody's pension for seven months.

Fernandez Ordonez, the governor of the Bank of Spain, warns that this government spending boom cannot be sustained, because one of these years coming up there's going to be a recession. And, of course, the PP says that if we're running such a huge surplus, maybe we ought to cut income taxes.

A new Spanish daily newspaper, Público, will begin publication on September 26. The money behind it is Jaume Roures, and Ignacio Escolar will be editor-in-chief.

Roures is a media mogul, boss of Barcelona-based Mediapro, a movie and TV production company that is part-owner of the TV network La Sexta. Mediapro put up some of the cash for Woody Allen's Barcelona movie, and owns the rights to FC Barcelona games, along with Barça's and Real Madrid's TV channels. Roures is part of the Catalan Socialists' patronage network, and is considered close to Montilla and Zapatero. Escolar, an anti-American lefty, is probably Spain's most popular blogger, at escolar.net.

Público will be "clearly to the left of El Pais," according to El Mundo, and they're going to sell it for fifty cents, half the price of every other Spanish newspaper. Great, just what Spain needs, another America-bashing Zap mouthpiece spouting sustainability, solidarity, and surrender.

They've been running an extremely offensive ad on La Sexta--I saw it several times last night during the Barça game--that leaves no doubt about Público's political attitude. The theme of the ad is that Público is going to be everybody's newspaper; viewers see a series of shots of diverse people doing various things. One of them is a young girl who comes dancing out on her balcony wearing a tank top that says, "FUCK BUSH," apparently displeasing an old lady who pours water from the balcony above on her. Then the old lady turns around, and the back of her blouse also says, "FUCK BUSH." So it wasn't the message on the tank top that offended her, you see.

What's sad about this: The Mediapro people, experienced TV and advertising pros in Spain, have determined that using this insulting anti-American slogan is going to help their sales, not hurt them.

The Spanish media has made a big deal over the jerk college kid who made a fuss and got himself tasered at a John Kerry speech at the University of Florida. TV3 made it appear as if it were a question of police repression of freedom of speech, the Gestapo dragging away a protestor who asked dangerous questions. Of course, what happened was the guy 1) charged to the head of the line of people asking questions and grabbed the mike 2) went way over his allotted one minute and wouldn't give up the mike when asked to 3) resisted the police when they came to remove him from the premises 4) had someone filming the whole thing for his web site 5) is a notorious "prankster," but seems more like a guy with a long record of jerk behavior.

Also, somebody is already selling "Don't tase me, bro" T-shirts.

La Vanguardia is reporting that Cuban baseball star Alexei Ramirez, the Cuban league's top home-run hitter, has defected to the Dominican Republic and plans to sign a major-league contract. I hope the Royals sign him.

A World Health Organization study ranks Barcelona as the 8th worst city in the world, out of 26 cities surveyed, in air pollution, specifically suspended particles. Here's the ranking, along with the number of micrograms of particles per square meter of air in each city.

New Delhi 170
Peking 105
Bombay 90
Seoul 65
Santiago de Chile 63
Prague 62
Bucharest 60
Barcelona 60
Milan 58
Mexico City 56
Berlin 50
Oslo 48
Los Angeles 45
Sevilla 43
Helsinki 42
Hong Kong 41
Budapest 41
EU goal for maximum particles in suspension in 2010: 40
Vienna 40
Madrid 38
Munich 35
Johannesburg 35
Amsterdam 35
Tokyo 32
London 30
New York 25
Brussels 21
WHO recommended maximum of particles in suspension: 20
Stockholm 15

Barcelona doesn't do well at all, especially not compared with those nasty environment-destroying Anglo-Saxons who don't believe in the Kyoto treaty. Hard to believe our air is more polluted than Mexico City or Hong Kong or Tokyo. Supposedly 1200 Barcelona residents die every year from excessive air pollution.

La Vanguardia is making a big stink about the Blackwater incident: what happened was that last weekend a State Department convoy was passing through Baghdad when it was attacked. Security guards working for Blackwater repelled the attack, but eight people, at least some of whom were civilians, were killed. Of course what happened needs to be investigated, and I must say I don't like the idea of private security forces running around a war zone packing serious weapons.

But check out what Eusebio Val in La Vanguardia has to say (I've shortened it a bit):

"The most visible face of the privatization of war...they have a license to kill...modern mercenaries...Rambos out of a movie...they opened fire indiscriminately...succulent government contracts...an authentic private military base...CIA...arrogant...place no value on Iraqi lives...indignation."

Now, now. First, "mercenaries" is the wrong word, since they have been hired by their own country's government, and their mission is exclusively defensive. That is, they can't go out and do a patrol and shoot up some alleged terrorists; they're restricted to defending what they're told to defend.

Second, "license to kill" is out of a James Bond movie, since Blackwater security guards are not allowed to intentionally shoot at anybody who is not attacking them.

Third, Mr. Val has definitely seen too many movies. Rambo? Please.

Fourth, the great majority of subcontractors in Iraq are, like, cooks and truck drivers, not security guards.

Since there is a general election coming up before March 2008, Zap has been making promises of government grants and subsidies to pretty much everybody and his dog. Two days ago he announced that persons between ages 22 and 30 with gross earnings of less than €28,000 will receive a monthly rent subsidy of €210, along with a €600 loan to meet the deposit and a government 6-month payment guarantee for the landlord. The measure will take effect January 1, 2008, and will cost €436 million a year.

More Zap government spending programs:

The new Dependents' Law, in effect since January 1, 2007, will provide €13 billion of central government money between now and 2015 to some 225,000 seriously disabled people. The various regions are to match central government spending with €13 billion more.

€2500 per new child born, in effect since Zap announced the measure on July 3. The plan is to make the payment retroactive to include all children born in 2007.

The minimum government pension will be increased by double the average increase of all pensions.

The National Health will pay for the dentistry work of all children between ages 7 and 15. This will take effect next year, benefit some four million children, and cost at the very least €160 million a year.

The PP has suggested that instead of subsidizing rental apartments for people under 30, Zap might consider reducing everybody's income tax instead. They also suggested that the government might consider providing better legal security to landlords, who have great difficulty evicting tenants who don't pay and repairing damage caused by said tenants; this would bring more rental apartments onto the market, as many people are unwilling to rent with current laws. Even the Communists have pointed out that landlords are very likely to simply increase the rent they demand by €210 a month.

Personally, I don't like this particular rent subsidy; what I'd do is pass better landlord-protection laws, get rid of rent control (which keeps literally millions of dwellings either off the market or occupied for rents far below market level), and re-zone extensively to make it easier to build housing.

I'm a moderate on government social spending in general: I prefer for spending and taxes to be as low as possible. However, I also understand that we have a social contract to protect the weakest among us. In that spirit, I like the Dependents' Law; if most of that money is spent reasonably, it ought to help out Spain's most severely disabled people a lot. I also like raising the minimum pension; these are retired folks getting by on very little, and they need all the help they can get. Paying for children's dentists should be means-tested. Poor children are weak and vulnerable and deserve to have their cavities filled just like everybody else, but middle-class folks ought to be able to pay for their kids' dentist themselves.

I'm going back and forth on the subsidy for newborns; the government's purpose is to raise the birth rate, and I guess that's important enough that all taxpayers ought to kick in in order to make sure there are enough kids born now to pay for our pensions in thirty years or so. On the other hand, I can't help wanting to means-test the payment. And I don't think a €2500 check is going to convince a lot of middle-class people to have kids, and I'm not sure we ought to encourage the reproduction of those who are willing to bear a child in exchange for a check.

By the way, the money spent on these programs is going to add up to a lot less than the "infrastructure" central government transfer to the Catalan regional government. It has been decided that 18.8% of all Spanish government "infrastructure" spending is to be transferred to the Catalan government in order to invest as it pleases; Catalonia produces 18.8% of Spain's gross domestic product.

So on Monday economics minister Solbes and Catalan economics counselor Castells came up with their new definition of "infrastructure" spending: it will consist of not only spending by the Development and Environmental ministries, as it had until now, but also spending on industry, commerce, agriculture, technology, and research and development. So this year the Catalan government received €3.2 billion from Madrid for "infrastructure"; next year it will get €4.3 billion, in addition to an extra €800 million for 2007.

On one hand, I'm not offended at all. This is just divvying up the pork, something that exists everywhere, and the Catalans are doing their best to get as much of it as they can. That's what I'd do if I were a Catalan politician.

However. All this extra cash is going to be turned over to the members of the political machines currently in power, the Socialists, Communists, and Esquerra. It's no secret that what they call "clientelism" is rampant in Spain, and it's reminiscent of big city boss politics in the bad old days in the States. The money is going to be handed out in the form of jobs and contracts to party loyalists, and the Socialists are going to get the biggest slice of juicy ham.

And it's ridiculous that political machines hide behind the ideal of nationalism--"we poor Catalans are getting screwed over again, Madrid is stealing our money, they want to keep us down, that's why they won't let us be independent, so they can exploit us, and blah blah blah." Come on. Catalonia is prosperous and Catalans have a high standard of living, and I figure that most of the problems (none spectacularly important) we have around here are pretty much our own fault. But it's such fun to blame Madrid.