It was to call regional and local elections and to get the houses out from under the stones. With tens of thousands, all destined for an affordable rent, promoted by Pedro Sánchez against the evils of the PP’s autonomous communities who want their entire population – whose vote the PP calls for – to sleep on the streets. The problem is that Sánchez’s ads are like gas: they absorb a lot, but they weigh very little in the minds of citizens. These announced flats are either absolutely useless in addressing the housing problem in the way socialism wants to do it – out of 50,000 in Sareb, only 9,000 are fit to be inhabited and are not found in stressed areas – or they are simple headlines with no news body, no details, and no management; songs written on the air like hasty improvisations spurred on with opportunism to run an election campaign that does not bode well for the PSOE. In addition to downplaying the housing problem — which has seen no significant government action in five years of office — and choosing Doñana’s highly complicated future as a field of confrontation with the PP by an executive who has done nothing in five years of what he promised to bring water to the natural park, Sánchez devotes much of his endless speeches to rewriting the history of the crisis and denouncing what he calls the neoliberal management of the debt shock that began in 2008. On September 15, 2008, US investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. A few months earlier, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had won the election over Mariano Rajoy. To get his second win, Zapatero had opened the doors of government spending. He too filled his campaign with generous advertisements such as the infamous ‘baby check’. His economy minister, the recently deceased Pedro Solbes, heard about Zapatero’s commitments through the press or in the Chamber of Congress. His – timid – objections to such joy with public funds were answered by Zapatero with a friendly rebuke: «Pedro –Zapatero settled–, don’t tell me there is no money to do politics!». And no, there wasn’t, at least for the way Zapatero believed politics are conducted. It goes without saying that government discourse not only lacked any hint of prudence, but also, with the frivolous airiness that characterizes Zapatero, denied the possibility of a crisis, spoke of Spain in the “Champions League” of economics. problems that became apparent in the United States with subprime mortgages as if they were phenomena occurring in another galaxy. When things started to look bad, the answer to the debt crisis was more debt, but the term “crisis” was banned from the official dictionary. Expressing caution was a doomsayer’s game. Spending more to solve expenses with a ‘Plan E’ of works that are difficult to justify, ghostly and ineffective, crazy in the approval of renewable energy installations – “we have lost the pot of renewable energy”, would Miguel Sebastián, minister, later admit Industria de Zapatero – and above all a suicidal attempt to prevent reality from spoiling the pleasant story that Zapatero wanted to keep telling. And so for nearly two years, with the government messing around, spending what wasn’t there and dedicated to the practice of self-aggrandizement. Ignored reality retaliates, as Ortega warned us. And I already believe he took revenge. On May 7, 2010, a few days after Zapatero assured that all was well, European Union finance ministers meeting in Ecofin identified Spain as a systemic risk and imposed an unattractive adjustment. Alarmed by the risk of bankruptcy for the Spanish economy, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, and the Chinese Xi Jinping – a notorious neoliberal? – Called Zapatero to urge him to take over the adjustment that was demanded of him . On May 12, 2010, Zapatero announced in the Congress of Deputies an immediate adjustment of 15,000 million euros, freezing of civil servants’ salaries, pensions, suspension of processing of dependent benefit files, freezing of pharmaceutical expenditures, public investments and transfers to local governments and abolition of the payment of 2,500 euros per birth, the so-called ‘baby check’. Sanchez should know. He was there and he voted in favour.
Source: La Verdad
I am George Kunkel, an author working for Today Times Live. I specialize in opinion pieces and cover stories that are both informative and thought-provoking – helping to shape public discourse on key issues. My work is regularly featured across the network’s many platforms, including print media and social media.
