Hotel Blues

 An article in our local newspaper has fulminated against the private rooms, guest rooms, apartments, airbnbs and so on which, it claimed, were in direct competition with our glorious hotels. The Mojácar business association said that the hotels were subjected to a much higher standard of control than were the private lodgings. ‘They might even offer an unfair competition to the hotels, with lower quality service, while bringing a negative reputation to the area’.

After all, why should Sra Gómez or Mr Smith be allowed their modest slice of the tourist largesse?

Imagine staying a month in a hotel, because there wasn’t any allowable alternative.

Some of our hotels are ‘all-inclusive’, with drinks and food all free in the refectory or the hotel bar. Something one won’t be finding in an apartment-let.

One might indeed ask: why go out at all; after all who needs those restaurants, bars and chiringuitos, when it's free back at the ranch?

The hotels, mainly run (in our case) by large corporations based in Barcelona, provide employment for a limited time – usually South American staff – while the canteen is often run on the ‘catering’ system, where the food is prepared in Málaga and trucked in and reheated for the pleasure of the guests.

Perhaps a coach will take them one day to some resort up the road for a bit of an adventure. One doesn't want them to get bored while they board.

The business-people must of course argue their corner, and pull the ear of the tourist authorities, something that Sra Gómez and her peers unfortunately won’t be able to do.

Sad to relate, the day after the article appeared in La Voz de Almería, a number of clients at what is described as the best of our large Mojácar inns came down with food-poisoning. No less than 142 of them, says Onda Cero here.

Hot, Steamy and, Soon, Wet Too

 

Perhaps the hot spell has come to an end (and perhaps there’s another one on the way).

I was in Seville on Sunday and it was 42ºC. Monday apparently hit a high of 44ºC, although by then I was home in Almería, where it was a bit cooler, although decidedly steamy (bochornoso in Spanish). The days are one thing, since one can always sit in a swimming pool or the sea (or a large tin bucket full of ice if nothing else is handy), but at night, the only place is bed, and if you are without air-con, as I am, then it’s a cruel and unusual punishment.

A bit like my month-long Facebook jail, which was finally withdrawn on Monday, making me once again a productive citizen and faithful poster of endless pictures of cats.

Those who accept that we are experiencing a period of global warming will point to this current heat-wave, where records have been broken in fifteen Spanish provinces. Those who don’t recognise climate change will say that it was just a very hot week, and hope that their credibility will continue to be accepted.

The Mediterranean Sea is apparently getting warmer too, reaching a temperature of 30ºC which is about the same as the Caribbean. Nice for swimming in perhaps, but also a hot sea is the first ingredient of a summer storm. Indeed, this soupy water will, so they say, be the cause of torrential rains here on the Peninsular later on down the line, maybe by the end of August.

Right now, we have the fires across Spain. Some are deliberate, some are accidents (one reforestation agency somehow caused a spark and 14,000 hectares were burned in Zaragoza) and some just began as an ‘Act of God’ (as the claims adjuster explained the other day while tearing up the cheque).  200,000 hectares (775 square miles) had been burned by last Saturday: another doleful record.

Yes, one day we shall remember the summer of 2022 as being pleasantly fresh, as a headline in El País here sets the pace: ‘"These types of heat waves will become normal or will be even more acute," says the World Meteorological Organization. The WMO stresses that the process will continue until at least 2060, regardless of any last-minute measures that might be taken against climate change’.

The State of the Nation: Tax the Banks and Give Free Train-passes.

The banks have already collected their latest round of commissions, the monthly, quarterly and half-year wallops they like to remove from our accounts with a smile. Maintenance fees, they say airily: the cost of looking after our money for us.

However, as one of the pronouncements from the State of the Nation debate last week, they will now be paying some tax on their profits over the next 24 months and will unfortunately not be able to pass this along to their clients. Perhaps, like my bank, they’ll put up a sign which says ‘Less is More’, close their teller-windows for good and indeed many more of their branches and, why not, change their name in passing to the CajaOrwell.

They will probably quietly ease some more of their hard-won funds to the conservative opposition as well. Maybe buy another newspaper.

The Government will also be taxing the power companies’ profits, much to their chagrin.

The bonanza of gifts from last week’s debate did much to cheer up the left-wing of the government, as it did to appease citizens, worried about the high increase in the cost of living (did you know that making your own gazpacho has gone up, screams the ABC). Better still, from September, we will be able to travel around on the trains for free. Well, the local and regional ones anyway. The Guardian says ‘The price cuts are being implemented to cushion the impact of inflation and rapidly rising energy prices’. The money the banks scooped out of our checking account.

Since most of the focus in the last two decades has been on high-speed trains that whoosh from city to city (as a huge expense of capital), the local network, where it existed, has been rather left to founder. Here in Almería, where we haven’t ever had any trains except the one that chugs gloomily north to Linares in Jaén once a day, and where the old city train-station has been abandoned (lovingly), we have been promised an AVE by 2026 (it was first promised for 2009) or maybe a couple of years later, but of course, no word on a local train service. We will be able – one day – to go to Madrid, Paris and Moscow (no doubt changing trains in Murcia), but not to Alhama de Almería.

It’s a nice idea though – it worked in Germany – to use less petrol and go with public transport (they currently charge €9 a month for any and all train journeys).

Perhaps the bus companies won’t be amused – they talk here of ‘discrimination’, but Renfe (railways) is a public company and Alsa (Spain’s leading coach operator) isn’t – no, it belongs to National Express (wiki).

 

Two Stories: One Narrative

Most of the media in Spain - understandably enough - is owned by large corporations who want to make money (the general rule being, that newspapers, radio and even TV tend to lose money). They also want to bring the public, their audience, around to a particular view. After all, what one loses on the swings, one can make back on the roundabouts. The politicians will be interested in helping them as for the quid pro quo. You bring us voters, mass-approval and the odd swinging door promotion and we'll sort out that vexing company tax issue that the lefties have been on about.

An article at The Corner disagrees with the accusation of media manipulation in Spain. ‘Discrediting is easy, it sounds good because it serves to justify oneself and blame others for one’s own mistakes. It is the easy road to social regression, to that malaise that demobilises and encourages irresponsibility’ it says.

So, in short, we should believe everything we read. 

Several TV chat shows have been found to be manipulating the truth about Irene Montero recently, nothing new there. The Minister of Equality Montero (Podemos) was asked about the events in Melilla the other day when at least 23 immigrants died while trying to cross the border from Morocco. Montero went on record saying it was a tragedy and insisted on an independent inquiry. 

Her words were carefully edited and the result was something truly different. Thus the chat shows of El Programa de Ana Rosa (Telecinco) – a sort of ‘Fox and Friends’, Espejo Público (Antena 3) and Más de Uno (Onda Cero Radio) were egregiously brutal against the minister. The video in question was tricked up – it says here – by a right-wing journalist and lawyer called Javier Gimeno Priede. 

A few days after the original broadcast, Ana Terradillos apologised on El Programa de Ana Rosa saying that they had failed to show the entire Montero interview. 

Known in the World of the Media as 'the old apology at the bottom of page nine'.

There are several commercial TV channels in Spain, plus the ones operated by the regional governments, plus, of course, the national RTVE. The regional ones, in both the news and the opinion 'tertulia' talking-head programs, are slanted according to the colour of the politicians in charge, as we know and give them the appropriate credit (The Andalusian Canal Sur, for example, gives us the news slanted to favour the Partido Popular, with a few nods towards Vox). The RTVE is more or less impartial, like the BBC, with representation from both the Government and the Opposition on the board of directors. 

Or, to put it another way - both sides complain about their lack of impartiality...

Which brings us to the commercial channels with their long pauses for adverts. They are of course supporters of the conservatives and are owned by large corporations (Silvio Berlusconi owns both El Cuatro and Telecinco) while Atresmedia (Antena3 and LaSexta) belongs to a combination of Grupo Planeta (they also own La Razón) and Bertelsmann. Wiki says that 'The merger of Antena3 with LaSexta (by means of the absorption of the latter) was formalised in October 2012. After the merger, LaSexta somewhat retained a perception of a left-leaning profile, starkly contrasting to those of the rest of Planeta media properties'.

More important than the example of the hostile editing of Irene Montero mentioned above is the cynical manipulation carried out by the previous government regarding Irene's husband Pablo Iglesias (he of the ponytail, since removed) and the party he started in 2014: Podemos, and - according to some newly unearthed secret recordings involving (apart from the usual suspects) - the director of LaSexta, Antonio García Ferreras, who is better known to viewers as a news-caster and who is generally considered to lean slightly to the left. 

Ferreras, Pablo Iglesias and Eduardo Inda

The recordings are between the master manipulator the ex-commissar José Manuel Villarejo in March 2017 (shortly before his arrest) and Ferreras, who essentially admits on tape that he knew at the time that the 'proofs' against Podemos were bogus, but he had run them on his show anyway. 

The tapes, discovered by Patricia López at Crónica Libre, show that Planeta - owner of LaSexta among other outlets - were happy to run the invented news of Eduardo Inda from OKDiario, knowing it to be false. The bogus story (shortly before the June 2016 general elections) was how the Venezuelan government had donated $272,000 to an offshore account run by Pablo Iglesias. It is, we read, '...the final confirmation that the largest Spanish communication group has conspired for years with members of the police, judges and sundry self-styled journalists to try to sink the credibility and political career of Pablo Iglesias'. It was certainly effective, as the difference between the December 2015 and June 2016 Spanish general elections for Podemos was a fall of 20 seats, from 65 to 45).

Between the media, the corporations and the judiciary (Podemos has been the accused party in any number of court-cases which were later archived), it's no surprise to read that the presidents of Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Chile have all spoken of the 'mediatic sewers' in Spain. 

Also critical of the media-manipulation in Spain, we find France's Jean-Luc Mélenchon who writes: "Scandal in Spain: the journalist of an important television program invented defamatory revelations about Podemos and Pablo Iglesias in connection with the (Rajoy Government) Ministry of the Interior". 

The leading fake-news provider, OKDiario (its director is the talking-head Eduardo Inda), and (oddly) a regular on Ferreras' chat-show Al Rojo Vivo, naturally denies the whole story - based on the newspaper's fabrication of illegal financing for Podemos via Venezuela, known, at least in right-wing circles - as PISA or 'Pablo Iglesias sociedad anónima', claiming that it is nothing more than an invention from the left-wing media to attempt to justify Podemos' fall in popularity. It was certainly enough to lose Podemos a large number of votes in 2016.

Ferreras on his Monday broadcast at Al Rojo Vivo denied the charges, 'we have never published news knowing it to be false', he says.

...

"I guarantee you, there is a war out there. There is a war between facts and slogans, there is a war between information and propaganda, there is a war between truth and lies". Thus, Javier Ruiz's farewell in June 2018 on the final broadcast of the program Las Mañanas de Cuatro.