Saturday, August 2, 2008

Mr Suñé, please godfather a Catalan kid

This week, we have been able to witness, once again, some more examples of stupid and unacceptable behavior of our politicians. I will start with the one, which in my opinion, was the less serious, but which attracted front page coverage in most of the Spanish online media. Mr. Lluís Suñé i Morales, a councilman of the town of Torredembara, south of Barcelona. decided to publish a post to call the attention about the unfairness of the current financing systems and the fact that even though the 8.7% of the Catalan GDP goes to support other regions, we are called unsolidary. Up to here, nothing serious. Many of us have written similar things and we have not made it to the front pages. The problem came when in order to illustrate his point, he added a picture that you can find here in which he urged Catalans to godfather an Extemaduran child with €1000, because the 8.7% was not enough. The picture was offensive, tasteless and most probably illegal since it portrayed a boy and a girl playing in the mud, the boy naked waist down, showing what the Catalan politicians do not have, with the logos of UNICEF, the Spanish government and the Extremadura flag.
This childish approach put Mr Suñé on the spotlight and as a good Catalan "cojonesless" politician, he removed the post and wrote an apology in Spanish language.
I would like to show to Mr. Suñé a video clip taken about 30 minutes away from downtown Barcelona, an area, where he, a member of the communist party, has probably never put a foot on, and invite him to start a real campaign in Extremadura to godfather a Catalan kid, since there are more kids in Catalonia below the poverty line that total number of kids in Extremadura. Maybe this video is a better justification to try to retain some of the 14 billion euros that leave Catalonia to support "less favored" territories. Please take a minute to watch the videoclip published by la Vanguardia.



One of the other two awful behaviors that I wanted to comment briefly today, much more serious that the childish behavior of Mr. Lluís Suñé, is the act of pure nepotism displayed by Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, who, without any parliamentary control, appointed his brother Apel•les Carod-Rovira as representative of the Catalan government in France. Even if he were the best candidate, what he is not, I would find the appointment disgusting and criminal, and yes I would prefer that this money would go to buy computers for the Extremadura children, or even better, to support the kids in the videoclip, but neither to the Carods nor to Mr. Ybarra and his friends like the "businessman" Gallardo.
The last one for the week has been the fact that CiU's Artur Mas has started to break the Catalan unity approach to financing, by coming up with a different alternative. He sold the Estatut for a picture with Zapatero. He will do it once again. Mr Mas, you are the botifler of the decade.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

você é um cara de pão, tem que conheçer como é que as balanzas fiscais são calculadas, pra depois falar. Amigo cuando yo pago mi factura de gas natural en salamanca, el iva se ingresa en la balanza catalana, pese a que la actividad economica ha sido unicamente desarrollada en Castilla y Leon, con lo que, Empresas Grandes=Madrid+Barcelona+Valencia=Deficit de la balanza fiscal. Hay que estudiar, el problema es que en los ultimos años se han dedicado a enseñaros catalan demasiado, adoctrinado vuestros cerebros, que si somos una nacion, que somos enemigos, que os robamos, odios, catetos que nos dais lastima. Cataluña es parte de España desde su constitucion como nacion, la nacion española nacida de la union del reino de aragon(al cual pertenecia cataluña) y castilla y leon se unen y forman esta nacion, 5 siglos despues tu la pones en duda, pero que me estas contando colega¡¡¡¡

ian llorens said...

Anonymous,
I am not that young. When I went to school, it was forbidden to teach or learn Catalan (late 60s, early 70s), and if a teacher overheard a conversation in Catalan during recess, we would get beat up.
So this cannot be the reason. I learned everything in Spanish, all the authors and pieces of literature, from Garcilaso de la Vega to Lope de Vega, from las Jarchas to el Cantar del Mio Cid, from La Celestina to La Familia de Pascual Duarte. Never ever a single author in Catalan.

Regarding the fiscal balances, in general they reflect the real added value generated in the different areas of Spain and you could extend the same analysis to the world. Consumers buy the products with the best landed cost and better cost/quality ratio. If you are, let's say, in Zafra and buy a Chinese product or a Swedish product, you do not expect to get part of the taxes that the manufacturer paid in their countries back, because you consumed their products. In our case now, even if Catalan products were more expensive and worst that the imported ones, you should buy them because you are getting a sizable rebate. But instead of admitting it, many of you threaten to boycott our products all the time.
How lucky Basques and people from Navarre are! They do not contribute much and no one is bothering them.

Agus said...

Ian,

I think neither you the blog's author nor we the readers should have to bear such entries like the one by "anonymous".

I'm really fed up with such Spanish spam in Catalan web sites (either blogs or online newspapers).

I think you should ban / delete such entries.

There's no point in discussing with such people. It's a total waste of time.

Moreover, the comment does not belong to this post, but the previous one.

We don't have to demonstrate anything to anyone. We don't have to be more tolerant than our "neighbours".

Respect is not gained through endless, meaningless justification. Respect is gained by being bold. Period.

Sincerely,

Agus

California CAT said...

I think it's good to have contrary points of view present on a blog as long as they're worded respectfuly and it promotes discussion.

Admittedly, a post such as the one by anonymous does not fall into this category.

ian llorens said...

I accept all viewpoints, all identities and entries in all languages in my blog, whether I like them or not.
So far the only one I deleted, was someone trying to sell Viagra.

ian llorens said...

To keep the record straight, Mas was not the "cojonesless" botifler this time. Saura got the award of "cojonesless" botifler of 2008, for having a side agreement that will prevent Zapatero from having to justify to the parliament all his screw-ups.

I feel like crying.

Nuri148 said...

I had the (dis)pleasure to briefly meet Mr. Mas in a Catalan Centres' Meeting held in Montevideo in 2001. He was a totally stuck up prat unfolding a ridiculolus display of assistants and protocol that messed up most of the Meeting's schedule. On the closing lunch, the First Lady of Uruguay was present and *she* had no entourage, while his delayed the lunch.
So IMHO Mas is an unsensitive metrosexual too full of himself to do anything good.