Opinion

Government versus State

photo_camera Gobierno versus Estado

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón has started his summer holidays at La Mareta Palace in Lanzarote. In the third week he will return to the Doñana National Park in the south of Andalusia. All for free. And, no doubt, well deserved for a servant of the people who has kept his promises. In one of his Maduro-like television appearances, he has described his administration as outstanding, starting with the gold medal in vaccination. Aren't the Autonomous Regions the ones who have vaccinated? No. The president himself is the nation's first practitioner. It's a pity he didn't take him to compete in Tokyo. He would have been a powerhouse like Michael Phelps. Unbeatable.

In the USA he has insisted that he keeps his word while the opposition only shouts... fiercely. They don't know him there and here he is more and more unrecognisable every evening. For thirty-seven lagos months now we cannot deny that he has become a great man of action to execute the opposite of what he had promised. Remember the cruelty of the newspaper archive: ("I will not agree with Podemos, nor with Bildu, nor with the separatists; depoliticisation of TVE and Justice and I will not pardon the coup plotters"). Before leaving for the Canary Islands, he gave a sharp order to his chief negotiators - they are not ministers, just unopposed civil servants. That they should speed up the 56 competences for Catalonia and the 16 urgent ones for the Basque Country so that "autumn does not get hot".  In exchange for what? In exchange for nothing. He could have begged for institutional loyalty. Not even that.

For the moment, he has injected 1.7 billion into the Catalan Generalitat to expand and manage El Prat airport and will receive 800 million more to increase the Mossos d'Esquadra (the National Liberation Army of the Aragonese-Puigdemont duo). He has handed over coastal surveillance to the regional police - the front line for the landing of mafias and money laundering - and has committed, as Colau demanded, to expel the National Police and the Guardia Civil from Via Layetana. In other words, he has handed over the territory to ERC-Junts so that they can strike the definitive blow as soon as possible, joining forces with sufficient means and tools to accelerate the separatist process. With the MIRs, he will break up public health care. Casado threatens to take it back. In the next bilateral summit they will appropriate Cercanías, -while Renfe does not reach Extremadura-, the scholarships, the Minimum Vital Income; they will eliminate the Spanish language as Borrás has already done in the Parliament and they will force Sánchez to enact the unconstitutional amnesty and the illegal and definitive referendum. 

Gobierno versus Estado

The Olympic... warrior's rest

In 43 years of democracy we have never seen such unconditional surrender to the enemies of the Constitution. The worst is yet to come because after the meeting in La Moncloa with Pere Aragonés, our visionary César promised not to litigate with the Govern and not to take separatist aggressions to the SC or the TC. I am sure he will fulfil it. The State's lawyers - I mean, the Government's lawyers - are already working on legalising the guarantee of the Instituto de Fi(n)anzas before the Court of Auditors so that we can all pay (exceptionally) the convictions for embezzlement of the 1-0 coup perpetrators. The exceptionality will become an Enabling Law and they will be able to storm the skies with our own money. Zero economic and political cost. 

The Attorney General's Office with Lola Delgado at its head has been delegitimized. Institution that touches this man, institution that sinks. The Olympic warrior's... rest will become a nightmare come September. Because this president lives in his own bubble, whether in Spain, Europe or America. Our position in Cuba, Venezuela, Peru, Nicaragua and Bolivia is as cowardly, as petty and as undemocratic as it is with Algeria and Morocco. Then, they are champions in the defence of human rights. And freedoms. The silence with the Cubans of Patria y Vida after the demonstrations of 11 July and the humiliation to which they subjected King Felipe VI at the inauguration of Pedro Castillo - the death threats and exiles have already begun - confirms that this government has no foreign policy either with González Laya or with Albares Bueno. Sánchez is everything.

And Washington knows it. That is why his trip to the US was a failure. Investors want guarantees that Spain will remain a state governed by the rule of law. With a social-communist government that only thinks of taxing vulture funds and taxpayers to the point of confiscation, and of killing the labour reform that was one of the few serious things Rajoy left us, I don't think Hollywood will choose our country as the best film and television set. We were already a film power during Franco's regime with the Bronson Studios in Madrid and Clint Eastwood's Wild West in Almería.

Now we know why Ivan has been killed off. He doesn't need anyone because he is the only actor. He doesn't dialogue, he monologues. The president thinks, writes, performs, redecorates, illuminates, stages and interprets politics in his own way. Apropos of nothing, as Woody Allen would say. He is the tallest, the strongest, the handsomest and the one who will get to break Spain before the Catalans and Basques themselves. With this latest move in Castellana 3, the minister and spokesperson, Isabel Rodriguez, with her "positive meeting" has opened wide the whitewash of secession. The president claims that he only complies with the Statute - a rule the Catalan government does not believe in - and, moreover, always pays in cash and without a receipt, as Negrín and Largo Caballero, his revolutionary idols of the 1930s, did with the gold from Moscow and the plundering of the Bank of Spain. To the separatists Giró and Villagrà all concessions seem insufficient. Nationalism is an addiction more dangerous than designer drugs that always ends in Nazi supremacism. For the time being, our president's rest in the possessions of the National Heritage must not be interrupted by anything or anyone. He lives in his Monclovite bubble and his Falcon while we ordinary Spaniards continue with our problems on our shoulders.

Gobierno versus Estado

The greenest and most feminist government

The change of government will serve to face a new time of transformation, resilience, sustainability, green and feminist. With the manna of European funds as blackmail to the Autonomous Regions. But Pedro Sánchez has already threatened in Salamanca during the Conference of Presidents that he will continue to be the master of the destiny of the miraculous money from Brussels. And then the finance minister, MJ Montero, added: he could write off the debt of advances and VAT arrears to the autonomous regions and local councils if they support us in the PGE/22. Catalonia has said yes, because of the almost 4,700 million it has already received 1,084 million. To say yes to the doctor is to perpetuate him in power until 2030.

The medal-laden president is enjoying his summer holidays after exciting his militancy with an explosive letter in which he forgets the pardons but charges the opposition (PP, Vox and Ciudadanos) for not acceding to his requests for a change in the CGPJ, for their lack of support during the pandemic, for rejecting the State of Alarm by the Constitutional Court and for torpedoing his imperial policies loaded not with the future, but with lies. 

We would be unfair if we did not value the drop in employment in July. Logical in the summer season. We have sunk so low in the year 20 that any rise is a consolation. But it is not enough. We are still above 4.5 million unemployed without counting the ERTES. The COVID once again puts us at the top of the list of infected and dead people (130 last Monday); the debt and public spending are bordering on indecency. 235 billion during the 1130 days of Frankenstein's mandate and a debt of 1.4 trillion euros (125% of GDP). 

Isabel Rodríguez García

Car sales - the most reliable barometer of a country's performance - fell by 29 per cent in July. And foreign tourism fell by 75 per cent. And squatters encouraged by the Government Households without any income are approaching 1.5 million and the hunger queues at Caritas and the Food Bank have increased by 60 per cent since May last year.ocial and communist have increased fivefold in the last three years. The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande Marlasca, continues to protect ETA members and so far, it is not known that he will prevent the bloodthirsty Henri Parot (26 sentences, 82 murders, 4,800 years in prison) from being honoured in Mondragón next September. The PNV picked up the nuts from the Salamanca summit (transfer of three new taxes worth 500 million euros) and Urcullu posed in the official photo as if he were a hero. The absence of Aragonés on holiday in Geneva, Switzerland, to visit the fugitive Marta Rovira, reveals that the disloyal and the enemies of the Magna Carta are the priority of the great socialist helmsman. As he is the "master of the farm", he has already offered the former vice-president Carmen Calvo the presidency of the new PSOE. Another rigged Congress. 

And what about energy poverty? The newspaper archives are aware of the PSOE and UP's rattle against Rajoy's government. We have the most expensive kilowatt/hour in history (close to 110 Euros) and the alternative is to put the washing machine on at two in the morning. It is not Europe's fault, as Nadia Calviño and Teresa Ribero point out, but the lack of political will on the part of Spanish governments to eliminate nuclear energy. We have been left out of the construction of the new fourth and fifth generation nuclear power plants - with almost total security - and we are left with grinders stopped for lack of air. The blackout in France at the end of the month, which left 1.5 million homes and industries in Catalonia, Madrid, Aragon and Castile and Leon in the dark, shows that electricity and gas bills - mainly in Catalan groups - will continue to rise and rise while energy poverty will be paid by the usual people. 

Belarra, Montero and Sánchez are no longer concerned about the cold or the heat. Only, like good communists, they are oblivious to reality. To forget it if possible. While United Podemos wants to dynamite the reservoirs for being Francoist, -they will end up demolishing the Aqueduct of Segovia for being Roman and imperialist- the socialists and populars of CL-M continue to confront the populars and socialists of the Valencian Community and Almeria for a water transfer that leaves the riverside residents without water. This water war was started by ZP, after withdrawing troops from Iraq, by repealing the National Hydrological Plan. What happened to the desalination plants, Mrs Narbona? More socialist inequality or more multilevel inequality.

Being so ecological, so green and so sustainable will cost us a third of our salary and half of our pensions from now on. The rest will be seized by gender and equality policies.

Gobierno versus Estado

Multilevel suspensions

When I was young, socialism was equality; socialism was freedom. And what about communism... Here's a piece of information I got from Miami. A worker in the 58s in Cuba earned 40 times more than a worker today. Long live the Revolution! Long live the Castro's and Che Guevara! According to Sánchez - thank goodness - Cuba is not a democracy. And that's where we were when, a year and a half after coming to power, the Popular and centrist parties made public some heart-stopping audits where the socialists set up chiringuitos with millionaire salaries while the PER kept the vote of the less well-off. Not even the Mexican PRI got that far in its first 100 years. Neither Chaves nor Griñán - already convicted - nor Susana Díaz, the new senator, knew anything about this permanent corruption. And poor Juanma Moreno was unable to sell such looting in either the public or private press. They will always have El Mundo and Bahía de Ítaca.

Sánchez's medals have increased considerably this year with the Celaá Law. At the Félix Rodriguez de la Fuente secondary school in Seville - friend Félix is still playing in heaven with the Ursa Major teddy bear - they have achieved the feat of Maoist equality: passing a student the eight subjects he failed the previous year. And without attending class. His mother protested and the school staff, the teachers, the management, the inspectorate and the Regional Ministry of Education in the hands of Javier Imbroda Ortiz, looked the other way. The teachers who changed their minds say they did so "to avoid getting into trouble". Rajonian doctrine. 

If they were professionally and economically disqualified for a month, none of them would do it again. In the wake of this scandal protected by the damned LOMLAE, the example has spread to several schools in Guadalajara and Valencia and in the modules of Vocational Training, all approved. A hurrah doctor president, for effort and equal opportunities! An example of your cut-and-paste doctoral thesis.  And, as if this were not enough to see in plenitude a decadent Spain that yawns and lunges at the same time, now, precisely now, we witness in astonishment the unopposed fixity of thousands and thousands of interim workers for more than a decade. 

Then, from indifference and oblivion - thanks to the Internet - we have seen in the University of Barcelona, condemned by the Contentious-Administrative Court of Catalonia for lack of ideological neutrality in the separatist process, - for supporting the coup plotters - that the professor Ricardo García Manrique is insulted and spat upon in the cloister as a fascist and colonist. We are getting closer and closer to the third wave of the night of broken glass.  The new rector has kept quiet like a miser. Dozens of professors from all over Spain have expressed their solidarity with this Nazi outrage and only two Catalan professors: Chantal Moll, from the UB itself, and Isabel Fernández, full professor at the UAB. García - by the way, the most common surname in Catalonia - is already a "stinker". Civilly, he is dead.  Of course, neither the minister of universities nor the president of the government nor the PSOE have denounced such aggression. Nor has Sánchez defended the Emeritus from the fierce attacks of Minister Belarra - who has not explained the "nani" of the Marquise of Galapagar or the B boxes of Unidas Podemos in all the circles of Spain - while the president was conferring with the King in his Miravent residence in Palma de Mallorca. This is the multilevel Spain, the federal co-governance, the Nation of nations that awaits us in autumn.

Gobierno versus Estado

Fratricidal war on the right

It has been an intense fortnight in which we have lacked for nothing. More boats from Morocco to invade the Canary Islands, assaults and more assaults on our cities of Ceuta and Melilla, recommendations from our European and North American partners not to travel to Spain, Covid 19 on the crest of the fifth wave and the culmination: the Assembly of Ceuta declaring by majority vote the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, persona non grata. Thanks, it must be said, to the PP's abstention. A proposal by the MDyC (Movement for Dignity and Citizenship) instigated by the socialist Manuel Hernández, who set a trap for the popular pardillo Juan Jesús Vivas. Inés Arrimadas and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo were the only voices supporting Abascal. Casado remained silent as always at times when it is necessary to show one's face, and secretary general Teodoro García Ejea backed Vivas by telephone. Vox has put itself on guard and will condition its votes in Madrid and Murcia. Andalusia may bring forward elections because of this collateral damage. Have they not yet understood that to defeat Sánchez they need the help of VOX? Have they forgotten the Pacto del Tinnel and the sanitary cordons of nationalists and PSOE in Catalonia? Of course Santiago Abascal will return to Ceuta and Melilla to defend the interests of Spaniards against Morocco as he did during the invasion last June. The Casado-Abascal disagreement is the best virtual wall that Sánchez can build to prevent an assault on his fiefdom of La Moncloa. The prosecution of the last PP Interior chief (Fernández Díaz) for spying on Bárcenas excludes María Dolores de Cospedal despite her frequenting disreputable companies such as Villarejo. The newsreel convictions are no longer forgiven by anyone. I am happy for her. Gobierno versus Estado

To finish muddying the political field comes from the east the magician Ximo Puig, the Mediterranean nepotist with brothers, cousins and cronies to demand that the rich in Madrid pay more taxes. Do the richest in Valencia pay more to level the Alicante and Castellón people? A guy who includes the Market of the city of Turia among the cultural assets and heritage of the Catalan Països, a squanderer of public money, a guy who does not prosecute abuses in the centres for minors under his government's care, a politician who maintains the highest taxes in Spain after Catalonia, only deserves to alert his fellow citizens not to vote for him again.  Thank goodness Isabel Isabel Díaz Ayuso has given him a free recipe: lower taxes and you will collect more. 

Fulfilling

The president will return to the Palace as he has left: lying and assuring that he has fulfilled 32% of his programme; in reality he only governs for half of Spain, curiously for the partners disloyal to the Law of Laws. The head of government worst rated by his citizens in the whole of the European Union will take advantage of his "multilevel" occurrence to further discredit and delegitimise our institutions. He has already given up defending in the European Parliament the Spanish language that the courts have ordered to be taught, at least 25% in classrooms. In Catalonia, only three national schools comply with this rule. The street has lost respect for Sánchez. His latest booing has been in Salamanca. It is the logical response of his action-reaction because he treats us citizens as if we were subjects or socialist militants. Is nobody going to raise their voice within the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party in the face of the asymmetry, the unevenness, the inequality and the injustice that this unscrupulous and unprincipled politician is organising? No one, I am afraid.

We are against the "tyranny of the minorities" that are propping up Sánchez more and more every day in La Moncloa - he doesn't give a damn about the street - because he is bringing us closer to the abyss of instability. His calls for unity before the presidents of the constitutionalist Autonomous Regions only last five minutes. Then, to discredit and insult them. As he does with the opposition. Let's go to the single party, without family, municipalities or trade unions. Sánchez has gone down on his knees before separatism. The government against the state. We are seeing things that we could not believe. Do we live in Orion? This way there will be no recovery to make up for the time lost to the pandemic. Many people are already falling behind, Mr. President. Twenty days without news from God Peter is a relief to the soul. 

Julio nos ha traído dos buenas noticias

July has brought us two pieces of good news: the Paseo del Prado and Madrid's Retiro become World Heritage Sites. Good for everyone. And the Xacobean Jubilee Year augurs well for us.  Fortunately we still have the royal family. The applause of the common people in Santiago, Salamanca and Palma de Mallorca reconciles us with the democratic Transition. In this holy year in Santiago de Compostela, Felipe VI asked for the protection of the apostle St. James - we need it - and claimed the crown as a bridge of continuity between the past, the present and the future of our nation and of Europe.  Unity, solidarity and concord. Three words that are more urgent and necessary than ever for coexistence. Happy holidays free of floods, hailstorms and fires.

Antonio REGALADO runs BAHIA DE ITACA on:
aregaladorodriguez.blogspot.com.