I spent a fair amount of time, in a galaxy far, far, away and long ago, traveling through Spain. Ten or twelve trips, maybe, and hitchhiking mostly, and even though it was at the tail end of the Generalissimo’s tenure I still liked the place. And the people.
We’ve visited there a few times recently on this blog, too, to observe that the place is coming apart at the seams rápidamente, and judging from a number of reports on the militarization of their domestic police forces, and the extended powers being introduced, they seem to be heading back to the days of the Generalissimo’s Guardia Civil. The country is in desperate straits economically, and the “remedy” there is as it has been throughout all the troubled European countries—enforced austerity and the stripping of the public sector to protect the assets of the usual suspects.
Some of the law-enforcement developments are sinister indeed; Spain had a general strike back on March 29th, which had in excess of 70% participation. Nothing like uppity proles to get the defensive juices flowing among power and privilege;
In the aftermath of the strike, Catalunya’s notorious interior minister, Felip Puig, reacted with indignation and promised harsh new security measures ….[but] … the new security measures and police powers the Catalan government in particular is granting itself are not a reaction to the rebelliousness of the March 29th general strike, Puig’s hypocritical handwringing notwithstanding.
In the early months of the crisis, before any popular outburst could provide the excuse, it had already become clear that one of the only growth sectors for employment in the foreseeable future would be police and private security. Puig made it clear where his priorities lay from the moment he stepped into office in December 2010: among his first acts were removing the article in the police protocol that prohibited torture and removing the cameras from Catalan police stations – cameras that had proven their usefulness in the previous administration by catching frequent beatings and acts of torture carried out by police.
It was Puig who presided over the brutalizing of thousands of peaceful protesters involved in the occupation of Plaça Catalunya last May. Also under his tenure, private security in the metro and elsewhere have been given police powers. Violence and repression has always been this politician’s preferred response to popular discontentment.
Nothing pleases authoritarians more than the ability to simply scoop people up and imprison them without all that inconvenient time-wasting associated with trials and evidence and due process and such nonsense, so they’re working on that too;
And of course, Interior is pushing for harsher sentences for a variety of crimes. While Puig graciously admits that, “vandalism is not the same as terrorism,” he nonetheless proposes making the sentencing the same and allowing two years of pretrial imprisonment for public-disorder-related accusations, effectively giving the police the power to pass prison sentences of up to two years without trial.
As a piece in the Guardian the other day by the vigilant if somewhat obsessive Jennifer Able documented, the expansive “mission creep” of our own Department of Homeland Security doesn’t exactly have the US heading in the opposite direction either. A substantial part of the comment thread attending that piece became bogged down in an argument about whether we could refer to the US as a “police state” now without being accused of hyperbole. Pointless.
What is not pointless is to observe that Police States do not simply materialize out of the blue— an awful lot of infrastructure is necessary to operate one, and that takes time to build. Certainly the US is not a Police State if the benchmark comparison is Burma, say, but it’s equally certain that there is one hell of a lot more infrastructure in the US now than there was yesterday, or last week, or in the last twenty years that would facilitate one, and we show no signs of slowing down. So no, we’re not a Police State in the sense that so many other places are. We’re working on it though.
But back to Spain, and its economy. Oh yes, and magic.
It seems, along with a lot of other institutions, Spain’s Deposit Guarantee Fund (DGF )— something along the lines of the FDIC deposit insurance fund here in the US—has run out of money. All hands on deck then to do something about that. Never let it be said that the denizens of the World of Finance are short on ingenuity when the books need a thorough cooking;
The solution to this particular problem the authorities have hit upon is comparable to the most recent exercises in financial creativity in Greece (it is the extent of creativity that is comparable). The government doesn’t want to contribute anything to the fund in order to be able to meet its deficit target, or rather, not miss it too badly. So the banks are going to lend the fund €24 billion, with their individual contributions graded by their market share (initially, €12 billion will be disbursed).
If you’re still with us, the short version is that the banks are going to lend the fund that is supposed to bail out the banks the money to bail them out. As Exane’s bank analyst Santiago Lopez Diaz notes, although the loan is a true contingent liability, it won’t (at least at first) be influencing earnings statements – except perhaps positively, as the banks will book interest on it! As he notes, this is simply astounding financial alchemy.
If you have the heart for it, you can follow the links to read all about it in more detail. Basically the banks, which are in trouble, are lending the sovereign (which is short on funds) the money with which the sovereign will, um, bail out the banks. A transaction, if that’s the right word, which will perhaps even improve the banks’ accounting statements by counting the interest as an “asset”.
Somebody might be able to come up with a way to successfully satirize that. Any takers?
Forget the freaking interest: the whole damn “loan” is a long term receivable — an asset, in other words, which will fall straight down to the income line of the balance sheet.
I too did my share of bumming around Spain in the 60s. A bottle of wine for a nickel, all the paella you could eat for a dime and a pensione with two meals for a buck a day. You just haven’t seen the glory of authentic, no-kidding fascism till you’ve seen it mixed with deflation, and you with a ten-spot in your wallet. Viewed from a table on the sidewalk with a half full bottle of red and a free bowl of fried calamar, it made those poor, silly guys goose-stepping around the square in their Nazi uniforms so quaintly amusing. Believe me, I can understand nostalgia for that.
Natasha
I would have loved a ten-spot or two in my pocket, but that was a little too rich for my blood back then. From your vignette I suspect we could have been there at the same time, but it’s unlikely we would have crossed paths.
I was detained twice by the GC, once for 4 days and again, later, for 10. I’m not able to muster any sense of quaintness about them, but of course you were being facetious.
The regular country people—I avoided large towns and slept outside— were a delight.
Ain’t nothing quite like passing the goatskin of wine around on the roof of the bus. Of course we ended up wearing half the first one. I have never, before or since, been laughed at so hilariously and good naturedly. It became a matter of honor that we not be allowed to arrive sober.
Another time, near Valencia (of course), we’re walking past an orange grove and the oranges are calling to us. Find the farmer and ask, how much? (Thereby exhausting the collective vocabulary.) He gestures for me to take out my wallet, rummages around and finally takes the smallest bill, shaking his head. He walks off mumbling, returns with a bushel basket, fills it up and hands it to us, then gives us each a couple more because a bushel wasn’t enough for the six or eight cents I’d given him.
Puig seems like a guy who remembers those days as fondly as I do.
Too young to have experienced your near Hemingway exploits but I did visit Spain as a child on vacation at the end of Franco’s time. I remember dusty police sputtering around on mopeds with ancient rifles strung over their shoulders and shiny black hats with sharply folded brims perched on their heads. Threats of garroting political criminals reached the UK – not sure if they were ever carried out. The taxis were Seats. God knows what the buses were. Now they are all Mercedes.
I traipsed around Spain for a month back in those days, with a broken hand swelled up like an inflated surgical glove (I was telling myself the bone wasn’t broken -mostly because I didn’t have the cash to see a doc) and people were very kind. And cheap wine kept the pain to a dull ache.
Could be a good alternative to universal health care: subsidized drink.
As for the Spanish banks lending money to the government to bail them out: that’s actually a brilliant end run around one of the main problems they are facing because of the monetary union, which is an inability to print money. They are in effect just creating 24 billion euros out of thin air, and injecting them into the Spanish economy, without having to deal with the Germans or the IMF. Not stupid at all.
And the Germans are letting them get away with it because they would rather the money was printed on the sly than out in the open. Even though they are the main beneficiaries of a weaker euro. Everyone wins.
I’ve thought for a very long time that all governments tend to authoritarianism. And it is easier to apply when you have the means to enforce it nationally.
To some extent, it’s been impeded (so far) here because we haven’t had a national police force, or one organised on military lines like the Spanish Guardia Civil or the French Gendarmerie. And (again, so far) the Brits have mostly determinedly stuck to the idea of terrorism as being criminality not warfare.
(And thus it appears we are to have 2,000 armed FBI and CIA on our streets during the Olympics, because apparently we can’t be trusted, despite forty years of experience, to protect ourselves against terrorists.)
I must admit Jennifer Abel infuriates me with her near-hysterical style. But the expansion of the TSA into another kind of (apparently barely regulated and overseen) nationwide paramilitary force in the US is rather shocking.
(French pal was a bit upset a few weeks ago by being held up by the UK immigration people twice, leaving Paris and again on arriving in London. Much tapping away at the computer and irritating questions. Getting her passport renewed at the French Embassy last week, however, she discovered the French identity card she uses for travelling had expired a month before . . .Fortunately, it appears that the Border Agency’s computer must have recorded that she’s been a blameless resident of the UK, with an Arabic name, but married to a senior Eurocrat, for most of the last 20 years . . .Having been at first annoyed she’d been singled out because of having an Arabic name, she was annoyed that they didn’t tell her. It was kind of reassuring that a presumption of innocence still holds sway. But, as I’ve said before, she’s extremely nervy about her forthcoming trip to the States to see her stepson. We’re hoping her husband’s occupation — and having once been a military attache to the US — will avoid any Immigration/TSA nonsense, but . . .)
squirrel;
Right. There’s not one here in the US either, at least not on paper.
Here locally I spend a bit of time now and then meeting with law-enforcement officers (as part of the “co-ordination” exercises between them and the Volunteer Fire Departments around here), and it’s interesting.
The US has multiple layers of law-enforcement agencies—Federal, State, County, Municipal etc—and the differences in attitude and demeanor is striking. The local County Sheriff’s department is really mellow, the Sheriff himself being an old ex-hippy, and he too is concerned about recent trends. They run their operation like the old style “community policing”, the deputies know everyone’s name, almost, and they’re real low-key.
The small-town cops are commonly newbies, usually fresh graduates on their first rung of the ladder. The State cops (“highway patrol”) are often impersonal, robotic, humorless and look like skinheads.
Then there’s the Feds, who we never see around here unless there’s a big cocaine bust in an ski-area, which is rare. Not because there’s a shortage of cocaine, but because busting film stars is bad for business. Every once in a while they’ll swoop in and scoop up some amateur dealer, but that’s mostly to protect some “approved” dealer’s monopoly.