Invading Madrid, closing the skies

Farmers, ranchers, hunters, fishermen, hauliers, irrigators, taxi drivers and consumers invaded Madrid to tell Sánchez that they are fed up with his continuing to ride in the Falcon while the street can't make ends meet. The social-communist government is the number one danger for Spaniards. Every sector it touches sinks them.  Our country is burning from north to south and from east to west and the president, in the best Francoist tradition, is opting for inaction in domestic policy and unconditional surrender to Morocco with a U-turn on the Sahara that could destabilise the region.

Meanwhile, the shelves are emptying and the pigs are eating the pigs because they have no feed. So let's start with a thought out loud: the hauliers cannot work at a loss and fuel prices must be lowered, but the anger of the Platform must be in solidarity with the rural and fishing sectors that have supported them by regulating minimum services. And putting an end to violent pickets. Animals cannot be slaughtered and cows' milk cannot be spilled to irrigate the fields, nor can the fleet continue to be stranded because there is no outlet for their catches in the supermarket line. 

They are right in their demands, starting with being listened to by the government, which insulted them as "ultra-right-wingers" and "putinejos"; they are the real interlocutors of the sector, but they do not have the right to stop the country as if they were class unions encouraged by the cry of: Let's have a seafood feast! They have the full support of public opinion, but the people of the countryside, the sea and the factories are also working to survive against this despotic and erratic government.

Madrid was invaded civically (400,000 people) - not a single incident - by rural Spain under the slogan "Together for the countryside". It is painfully fed up with the oblivion and disregard of an Executive that offers a few crumbs of euros to the sector as a subsidy for diesel and fertilisers when it guarantees 19,319 million euros over three years for Minister Montero to spend on gender bullshit. It is not that pissed-off Spain is against the missing doctor in the skies (which it is) and his Podemos mariachis, - the real Popular Front of 'Life of Brian' - but it is the despot Sánchez who is against all of us. Without moving a muscle he attributed inflation (almost verging on 8% a year now) and the rise in gas and oil prices to "Putin's war".

It's a lie, of course, because prices have been out of control for almost a year. It all serves to keep the demagogy and propaganda going. As if we were in the heart of the coronavirus. But they are no longer fooling anyone. Millions of families have been left behind by the pandemic, corruption and waste. Starting with the mega-ministries. They should be halved.  First there was the cordon sanitaire against the PP and VOX and now we are all "counter-revolutionaries and Francoists". Right-wing thugs. Is there any greater cynicism than to threaten the legitimate and majority government of CyL before it is formed when he is eternally in the Moncloa, constantly supported by philo-terrorists, communists, coup plotters and members of a war-mongering PSOE? 

The hypocrisy of this liquid and gaseous statesman, without an idea in his head, has no limits like his endless journeys in search of the lost Ithaca. He only wants easy money from the EU and the ECB to squander it hand over fist, like that 400 euro voucher for 18-year-olds to play SEGA or go to the cinema for free.

Even Rufián, who is bad but not stupid, is discovering that he does not eat with separatist or Maoist ideology. "Nobody understands us on the left," he explained in parliament. "We have to stop being a soldier of morality and start being a soldier of utility". An enemy of the Constitution talking about morality and democracy. Even the president reproached him for his speech encouraging the far right. Ordinary people who pay their monthly gas and electricity bills are fed up to the gills with the wolf is coming! Because the wolf has been here since 2018 dressed in the guise of a lamb that engages in dialogue when it scorns all dissenters inside and outside the chamber.

Pablo Iglesias was even more wise in his tele-preacher's sermon: "There is no greater imprudence than trusting Sánchez". If the former vice-president who advises the mother of his children and Belarra, Garzón and Doña Yolanda that the only loyalty is the official car, the maids paid by the party and the salary at the end of the month, with two years of bonuses (lucrum cessans) for services rendered, knows this.  We must go and hide behind the barricades of the four-star restaurants, like the trade unions UGT and Comisiones (of more than 3%), which were neither in Atocha nor in the Castellana on Saturday to continue receiving millionaire subsidies and prepare mobilisations against "energy poverty" when the centre-right returns to power. Brave and ruthless!  
 
The war on transport, the war on the countryside, the war on industry, the war on hunters, the war on energy and the invasion of Ukraine should make us think about a future of survival in which pensioners are not the real mainstay of the economy. Because at this rate, pensions are in danger.  The crisis is so wide and deep that it could generate a million workers on ERTES in the coming weeks if there are no supplies of raw materials. It is time to discuss all policies (Education, Vocational Training, Defence, Water-Trasvases, Agriculture, Livestock, Agri-Food, Energy, including nuclear, fracking, oil, gas and rare earths, Transport and Logistics, Immigration, Ukrainian Exiles, Foreign Affairs, Industry and Mining).  Not forgetting SMEs and the self-employed.  And less Agendas 2030, 2050 and 2100. Eco and green are unsustainable. We are talking about food. 
 
It is foolhardy to trust our president, who is neither here nor expected at all difficult times. In all of them. He has explained nothing about his judicial irresponsibility in the irregular entry of Ghali into Spain, nor about the recent assaults on Ceuta and Melilla, nor about his commitment to those outraged by his policies that are leading them to ruin, nor about his latest letter to Mohammed VI.    Sánchez lives in the worlds of Yupi. He offers us in his "Bolivarian" television interventions - he has never submitted to an open press conference - a perfect world. But I already have mine: "Lie to me, president; tell me that you love me" as we heard Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar.

Read diplomacy for lelos. That is, a person who does not know what is going on or what is being said because of distraction or lack of intelligence. Presumably all three because of jet lag. The thirty lines of the letter sent to the King of Morocco are a monument to stupidity. Of supreme irresponsibility, unbecoming of a nation with our negotiating culture. This historic text confirms that we are in the hands of incompetent politicians and even more incompetent diplomats. Is there anyone close to Pérez-Castejón to reconcile him with the world? It does not seem so. They fear him. They don't want him. It is the end of the headless caudillo. 

The text reveals that the new course is above all a spelling improvisation. It has three incongruous sentences, the commas have been put in at random, the anagram of the Moncloa is missing, they do not differentiate between the singular and the plural and they do not know the position of our chancellor; they call him in line 28, referring to Albares, Minister of European Affairs, European Union and Cooperation. Don't they know that he is first and foremost the Minister of Foreign Affairs? To make matters worse, he copies and pastes (line 13) a tweet from former President Trump. "In this regard, Spain considers the Moroccan proposal for autonomy [for the Sahara] presented in 2007 as "the most serious, credible and realistic basis" for the resolution of this dispute." The boldface was the leak from Rabat that has upset and angered La Zarzuela, the government, the opposition and the entire parliament. 

The letter that Sánchez signed to the Alaouite monarch in his bombastic Caesar Imperator handwriting is the most embarrassing historical document ever sent by diplomatic pouch. Sánchez must have signed it in the middle of the Falcon flight while playing the lyre, perhaps in the skies over the Adriatic. The president, in his escapist style, once again avoided the Congress of Deputies. He will dilute his verbiage by explaining the Brussels meetings of NATO and the EC on fuel prices and dependency. He will demand that the opposition behave with a sense of state. A question of state - that of Western Sahara - that he has unilaterally broken after 47 years, when it is the Foreign Policy Council and the Parliament that have to decide on changes.

Sanchez is who he is.  God of God, Light of light. Creator of heaven and earth. And always a liar and invisible. The tsunami of information arrived hours after the red dust of the desert left us. A biblical premonition. 

José Manuel Albares, the one with the Cánovas stily glasses, tried to implicate the Monarch Felipe VI himself in Parliament, but the Royal Court has denied having anything to do with this inappropriate letter that ends with a cheesy and Frenchified phrase: "Please accept, Your Majesty, the expression of my most distinguished feelings". Does this president have any feelings? For the first time in the history of democracy, a Foreign Minister has been left alone in the defence of a betrayal and a lie.  From the CUP to the PP, they have already made it clear to Albares that when he goes to Rabat on 1 April to prepare the way for his master, "he should not speak in the name of the Spanish parliament".  Nor of the Spanish people. And even less of the Kingdom of Spain. 

It is worth remembering that when the news broke, the Foreign Minister himself, escorted by the Minister of Culture, told us that in exchange for this change of direction and alignment with Washington, Paris and Berlin, the claim to the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla would be paralysed. There is a slight mention of cooperating on migratory flows, nothing more. When will the next assault on our cities in North Africa take place? Sánchez guarantees in the missive that "Spain will always honour its commitments and keep its word". Sanchez's word? The cotton wool of the newspaper archive does not deceive: "I would not be able to sleep if I made a pact with Podemos". Having a pact with Bildu? Never. Do you want me to repeat it 20 times?  I suppose it rings a bell.

The irresponsibility of this conceited president who signs such a transcendental document without reading it has shifted our neutrality from being a decolonising country in the Morocco-Algeria dispute to being judge and party after this swerve in favour of Rabat. The Alawi ambassador has returned, but the Algerian ambassador has been recalled for consultations. How much will this untimely and foolish decision by this unprincipled and unfinished statesman cost us just when we are negotiating the price of gas for the next two years?  The lightning trip of the doctor president to Ceuta and Melilla has turned him into the liberator of both cities according to Vivas (PP) and Castro (former Cs), presidents and new vassals, respectively. They are the viceroys of our Falconian Quixote. The most serious thing is the abandonment of the Saharawis: where are the human rights of the once Spanish people? Now Sánchez will repeat his mantra that no one will be left behind.

To know the scope of this decision, which has no political logic, it would be enough to send King Felipe and Queen Letizia on an official visit to both cities, which no Spanish monarch has ever attended. Our statesman has the word to convince us of the goodness of his epistle, which he signed without reading.  Moreover, the UN, China, Russia, Italy and Iran - even the US Senate - do not subscribe to Spain's new theses which, as a country administrator, he has renounced to lead. Who is in charge of Sánchez if it is he alone who decides to go against Spain? What interests is he defending?  

It is clear that the letter is an unconditional and pre-emptive surrender to Mohammed VI. Pure coherence in the cowardice of a man who never shows his face and never tells the truth. Maybe he changes in his docudrama for private television, selling a close and close image... to sweeten the elections.  Too long without stepping on the street. Most citizens are no longer afraid of him. Although he lives with his back to Transparency and in his subsidised television bubble, the reality is that the more people know about him, the less they vote for him. 
 
His exegetes say that he is only interested in the vicissitudes of the Strait of Hormuz, the Bosphorus and the European institutions. And that he is seeking to be nominated NATO Secretary General now that Jens Stoltenberg has decided to step down. Borrell is apparently his Baptist. May the gods assist us. We will have to wait until next week to find out where this rhinoceros of politics is breathing after signing that letter-trap to the prince of Moroccan believers and how much more the Algerian gas bill will cost us from now on if he doesn't turn off the second tap that opens in Almería. 

The first month of the assault on the Ukrainian people has passed. The resistance of Viriato Zelenski and the heroism of the numantine Ukrainian people augur that they will not surrender to tyranny. Freedom is the way. I hear your affliction in Ukraine/ and I listen to the sad concert/ formed by the bell and the cannon playing dead. Bernardo López García's Ode recalled the Napoleonic invasion. "Never a slave can be, a people who know how to die". 

Someone should translate this patriotic psalm into Ukrainian to instil more faith in life and the land. The images coming in speak of a country razed to the ground, burned, killed, raped. The Soviet tanks seek not victory but humiliation, revenge and destruction. It will take a quarter of a century to clear away the rubble and build new houses, and a whole century to heal the wounds. Hatred of the invader will not die out until the next millennium. Mariupol is the martyr city symbolising a people who do not want to return to the clutches of communism. It is the new Syrian Aleppo. The Russian infantry persists in besieging Kiev, but the fierce defence of the people and the army has prevented it. The response has been swift: supersonic bombardment of theatres, old people's homes, barracks, schools, supermarkets, residential areas... Death and desolation. Carnage. Blue-yellow flag of patriotism and hope.

The Soviet slaughter, Putin's genocide will change our existence beyond destruction, extermination and mass exodus of innocent people.  Let us prepare for the other wars we will have to face starting with reconstruction, new defence budgets and aid to refugees. Putin blames the "Russian traitors" for stopping his blitzkrieg invasion. Today we must highlight the courage of journalist Marina Ovsiannilova for her courage in interrupting the Russian state channel's top-rated news programme with a sign reading "No to War". She has been fined 200 euros and after a 14-hour interrogation and the withdrawal of her passport will be tried by a military court. She could face up to 14 years in prison. It is this dictatorial regime that our Ukrainian friends detest. I end with the appeal an exiled woman made to the EU in sobs when she arrived in Poland after leaving her family in Kiev: 'Close the skies or Putin will kill us all'.   

PS. I close this chronicle-rio without the leaders of NATO and the EU having made much progress in the other open wars against the Kremlin: energy dependence, the effectiveness of sanctions, the mediation of Beijing and the urgent lowering of fuel prices so that our countries do not collapse from watching and condescending to the enemies of democracy and freedom.

Antonio REGALADO runs BAHÍA DE ÍTACA in:

aregaladorodriguez.blogspot.com