Letter from Spain

(This is a letter written from Spain by reader Jose.  I’ve known Jose since I was a small boy; he has lived more than 50 years in the USA and during this time he has worked here successfully as a teacher, Union leader and international financier. Jose now lives in Spain part of the year. He wrote this letter recently to a High School Teacher he knows from his time spent in Mineola High School on Long Island where he grew up. I post it because it addresses many issues , like austerity, that we are discussing here in America today. One hope I have for this blog is that it will give it’s readers a glimpse of the many sides of life and of the world, so this letter fits the bill. All comments are welcome of course.)

“I want to share with you that as an ex-union president of the Sweetwater Union High School District, I had no idea as to how a National General Strike works and whom it is against. Today, I participated in the largest demonstration since I have been in Oviedo.
Oviedo is a city of just slightly more than 200,000 inhabitants. I decided that besides participating to express my unhappiness with the government’s economic policies, I would stand at a street corner and try to get a sense of how many people where actually there. I stood at the corner and from the very start I check my watch til the demonstration ended. The demonstration lasted 1:45 minutes, a distance of about 1 to 1.25 kilometers, I would say close to a mile as I saw people in a crowded street go past me for 1:45 minutes. There were so many people that when the first group arrived the last ones had not even started to march. Tomorrow I will probably read that based on police account there were about 1,000 people marching.

I was just looking at yahoo and it said” that in Spain there were protests against austerity measures and labor reform”. This is another newspaper manipulation.  In Spain, there is no protest against austerity measures and labor reform, it is a protest about who is responsible (for people) to be on austerity.  It was best expressed by the slogan today that said there is money to rescue the banks, but there is no money for public schools and for public hospitals. There is no tax increase on the wealthy, but there is no money to pay for the prescriptions of those who have retired on 600Euros* per month.

The National Strike was about government policies that make the banks not pay for their waste, speculation and fraud of the public funds, but to the contrary get rescue funds from the ECB almost interest free, that is public money, but an unemployed worker who cannot pay his mortgage loses his home to the same bank who takes public money.

The press continues to manipulate the news. Spaniards are not against austerity measures to pay the debt created by real estate speculators such as the big banks, and the waste created by government corruption, however, they are against having funds that normally would go to public schools, public hospitals be used to pay for private use by private banks and other institutions.  Worse, they are against having retired workers, on minimal pensions, who paid into Social Security, now have to pay for their own care, while the politicians continue to buy cell phones and lab tap phones with public funds. They continue to travel first class at the expense of the public and so are the bankers, who take public funds and retire with large pensions, but expect the working class to live with austerity.

I was so proud to see thousands of people today take to the streets and to let the politicians and the bankers know that they are not stupid or afraid. There were people of all interest groups, all interest groups, not only unionist, but musicians, actors, scientists, doctors and hospital staff, young, middle age and old. Unless this government shows a much more equitable approach to share in the economic burden by all, this government will not be for long. Even those of the right who voted for it were on the streets today, because they too are smart enough to understand that when it ran it said that it would not increase any taxes and it did totally the opposite, worse it did so on the working class and those who are least able to pay, the retired.”

I’d like to hear from readers in Holland, India, Japan, Germany and from other countries as well.

Franque23

* equals about $775.00