megaspora

Public demonstration to denounce public stealing

By: psr, 2008-11-18

The state budget (public money of the Spanish people) is plagued with items destined for subsidies of all kinds. There are public subsidies to finance private economic activities which do not benefit society nor the country as a whole. There are public subsidies for deficitary businesses that cannot stand on their own. There are public subsidies for private film industry productions that insult part of the very society which is paying for those subsidies. There are subsidies financing inefficient energy sources. Public money is also thrown away on car races, paying musicians at town fairs, paying for so-called “art works”, paying for regional politician’s whims, and paying to support politics of repression on part of the population, among many other ways of wasting …

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2008-11-18 | Economy - Rights - Spain | Trackback | No Comments »

USA 2008 Election

By: psr, 2008-11-04

I haven’t commented much about the election in USA in this blog. Lots has been said about it and about the two main candidates, McCain and Obama. The big news headlines, as always, did not discuss the issues and the actual political programmes of these two gentlemen. Likewise, the main reasons influencing people’s votes are rarely rooted in the actual political agenda. Instead, the campaign itself, the image and the three or four big sounding messages from each candidate are what drives a large number of people to decide their vote.

Polls predict Obama will win. Clearly there’s strong momentum for him to win. Many people prefer a younger candidate versus the older McCain; many like the idea of having a …

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2008-11-04 | General - World | Trackback | No Comments »

Spain: DVB-T for nothing

By: psr, 2008-11-01

Mass media is the nicest toy for a politician. No better tool exists for mass control of people, regardless of the type of content: news, documentaries, sports, arts, or anything else. Almost any of it can be sprinkled with political messages, and it’s in the interest of politicians to control the mass media market, as much as they can, to convey the political messages and ideologies they want to impose on people.

Some leaders manage to assert complete control minimizing market freedom (only state-owned TV or radio channels exist at a state-wide scale), while others maneuver around market freedom by constraining the reach of given channels to certain areas of territory.

In Spain, the advent of DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial, or TDT by its Spanish name) failed to …

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2008-11-01 | Braindead - Rights - Spain | Trackback | 3 Comments »

Renewable corruption

By: psr, 2008-10-26

The October 24, 2008 edition of Spanish financial newspaper “Expansión” reports that the Ministry of Industry is investigating fraudulent practices in renewable energy subsidies.

What a surprise. How naive can the Ministry be?

The desire to promote renewable energy at all cost, almost obsessively, has drawn governments to offer juicy subsidies on any attempt to research or produce energy from new sources. It is all framed, of course, in the human-caused climate change dogma, which ought to make humans change our habits.

How to implement such change? By pouring loads of public money in subsidies for private companies, to make new businesses with energy sources (wind, solar, bio-fuels) which will supposedly help the planet.

There are two basic problems with such policy:

It is nonsense to think that those energy sources can …

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2008-10-26 |