Spanish anti-austerity Protests.

strobe wrote: »

And now with a minute by minute update, we'll hand over to our Spanish issues correspondent - Legs Eleven.

What are the latest developments Legs?

Sorry I'm late guys! Was just having tapas, shouting my head off, blocking up footpaths and dancing the Flamenco with Juan and Maria and the gang.


Was at the protest last night (obviously :cool: ) and it was insanely peaceful and civilised (I think I commented on that a good 20 times while I was there). Normal people of all ages from all backgrounds simply walking from one point in the city to another with no trouble whatsoever. No one drinking or causing trouble. You always have a small handful of extremists at these things but even they were fine while I was there. If they reported problems, then they were focusing in on the tiny bit of trouble there might've been out of the hundreds of thousands of people that marched last night. I have no idea why they do that but I suppose that marches that pass off peacefully for the most part is not newsworthy and doesn't sell newspapers/up TV ratings etc.


There's protests here monthly by the way and have been since I got here over 4 and a half years ago.



Over and out from your Spanish correspondent, Legs Eleven. :cool::cool::cool::cool:


.....

Guy:Incognito wrote: »

Protests to what end?

The government are taking in X amount . Do the people want them to spend X+ Y amount to make things easier? Give them more dole? Cut their tax? Where does the Y amount come from and when would they like to pay it back?

You can have a read of the manifesto in English if you like...

http://marchasdeladignidad.org/objetivos/manifiesto/manifesto/

Legs.Eleven wrote: »

Things are desperate here. Really, really bad. Perhaps these protests won't change a thing but at least they will raise the spirits among the millions of people in awful circumstances and show them that they're not alone. There was a great atmosphere last night and nothing like the media portrays it. My situation is not desperate but my boyfriend is unemployed and has no source of income whatsoever (you can claim dole for a max of 2 years here irrespective of how long you've worked). He's spending most of his day applying for jobs like the 4.7 million other people doing the same thing. There's is nothing here.

Pretty much echoes what he says alright and it is countrywide.

mayotom wrote: »

5 officially registered Protests per day in Madrid in 2013, its just kept under wraps

There was another one today and there'll be another one again tomorrow. They're never-ending.

Spain's situation is worse for a whole variety of reasons.

Their property bubble was more dramatic and had been building for much longer. The result of that was a huge over dependence on that sector.

Then, they'd a huge dependence on tourism and the UK, German and other northern EU countries cut their spending on holidays.
That had a very deep impact.

The North of Spain, Basque Country, Navarra, Catalonia and Madrid aren't as badly impacted because they've diverse economies and other industries.

The south of Spain is an economic mess at the moment with staggering levels of unemployment.

It's a far, far worse mess than Ireland.

Also, I think Irish government policies are very pragmatic. We are pulling in every favour we can pull and have gone into hyperdrive in terms od marketing the country abroad and it is paying off.

I'm not going to get political about it but given the circumstances we were in, they've really managed to avoid total disaster!

A small, relatively dynamic country, speaks English and is globally deeply globally connected is far easier to turn around than a huge economy like Spain that's largely governed on a classic left vs right dichotomy.

Red Nissan wrote: »

I don't have the episode to hand but I made it Cork size because of the population expectation, be mentioned a British City as well in comparison.

Hea, he made Spain look gorgeous, I never got the impression that he was running down Spain, more highlighting a Worldwide Problem.

Bear in mind Spain tends to have high density building. You can have a population the size of Dublin in 1/4 the space.

Quite a few cities of Cork's size, say Pamplona, are very compact in comparison because most people live in 4-5 story blocks.

You'd easily have 200,000+ in a city that looks smaller than Galway.

Irish, British and some Nordic cities are very very low density in the suburbs. Spain is the other extreme. Much higher rise than most of northern Europe and the polar opposite to Ireland, Scotland, Norway etc where hardly anyone lives in an apartment.

What looks like a small development can actually be enormous due to the design.

Stavros Murphy wrote: »

Are even bottom-dollar jobs not available? Is there literally nothing going??

A lot of jobs with people getting paid under the table and people doing nixers and stuff but nothing bottom-dollar that's above board or if there is, thousands of people are applying for the same position.

There's also a lot of issues with corruption and mismanagement of the economy though too.

It's not universally true all over Spain, but certain areas have really been badly managed.

The Cajas (regional banks that are sort of like building societies but more full service) got heavily involved in inflating the property bubble. Even worse is that many of them had regional government or city authorities on their boards. So you'd a case of politicians leaning on small regional banks to stimulate economic growth.

You'd also extensive regional borrowing for public infrastructure and art/culture projects. Everyone wanted an AVE line new fancy airports, new motorways and a Guggenheim style exhibition space!

Then couple that with the fact that you've autonomous regions with huge spending control that is outside of the federal government's reach. Those regions compete heavily and became quite show-off ish trying to out do eachother with public projects.

The result has been shiny new infrastructure like airports, museums, endless underground carparks, fancy refurbished streetscapes, metros, high speed rail to everywhere (regardless of demand in some cases!)...

Then you had a massive housing boom driven by local investors and also by a 'if we build it they will come' tourism idea in areas that hadn't really got a tourism industry.

All that stuff employed a lot of people during construction. When the money ran out the consequences were pretty dire, particularly in the south where this stuff and tourism were basically the entire economy.

The north is more like Ireland. It's not tourism dependent and it had more of a simple property bubble but has a decent underlying economy too. It's very very dramatic in the south though.

On top of that the Cajas also provided pensions and savings products to many people some of those have collapsed and many older people were very badly stung with products they didn't really understand the risk of.

I was reading and hearing horror stories where old folks had been convinced to take out high interest savings products by the local trustee caja and subsequently found they'd actually a big pile of worthless shares in the bank and no savings! Lots of dubious sales of products etc etc

Its just a horrible mess unfortunately.

Legs.Eleven wrote: »

Yep. Was coming home from work and there was a protest in the centre made up of old people who'd invested in the cajas and had obviously lost most of what they invested. It was really upsetting. People older than my dad marching down the street carrying signs scammed out of their money by these fuckheads. Really sad stuff and I think myself and all the onlookers were brought to tears watching it. Really shocking stuff.

I can't remember but are you the Spanish poster SpaceTime?

No, I'm not Spanish but I was living there for a bit just as the crash happened and also worked on the edge of the Spanish banking industry (nothing to do with the banking side of things though!).

Again, it's hard to generalise about the Cajas as they're actually quite a nice model in theory and some were quite well run. The biggest issue was that they were subject to huge political interference and often had quite strange boards taken from 'civil society'.

They've this model of 'civic banking' which emerged in the early 20th century. They started out as savings and loans banks and a % of profits had to go back into community projects. So, you often had the city council, the regional government, local charities and in quite a few cases the Catholic Church on the boards in the old days!

Those banks, much like our building societies became full-on commercial entities and started to go hell-for-leather into the mortgage and property development loans market.

Competition was absolutely cutthroat too as there were something like 165 of them! So, if you can imagine 165 Anglo Irish Banks only with a load of county councils sitting on the boards.

You also have an issue where regional governments may be major shareholders in those institutions and various public pension pots were managed by them directly. So, a lot of those have gone wallop too.

They created loads of totally inappropriate products.

The bank I was working 'with' was being driven to create employment and put money into the community. As a result it had 68 branches in a city the size of Cork. There were 4 on some streets!!!??!

They would throw open their branches as community spaces for customers / community groups to hold meetings. They had lovely coffee facilities in a lot of them. Kids entertainment, art exhibitions, live music in-branch, you name it.. they had it. Also the branches were all bleeding-edge architecture inside.

In some of them you could even just call in and play in video game tournaments !!?!

It also seemed to sponsor everything - arts projects, sports teams, you name it.

You can see why these organisations became 'pillars of the community' and very trusted.

It no longer exists (for obvious reasons!)

Sadly, a lot of those entities missold products, particularly to the elderly as they were seen as 'pillars of the community'.
The branches tended to be really friendly (not really like an Irish commercial bank, more like a credit union). So, some older person would go in and sit down, be served a nice coffee and talked into investing in some fund with a great rate of interest. They'd a level of trust public that I don't think any of our banks really ever enjoyed and they totally abused it.

They also granted a lot of mortgages to people who clearly couldn't afford them and similarly there were loads of business loans and development loans and you name it loans... The whole thing's really unbelievably bad when you start to analyse it a bit.