Government media subsidies - that's our money they're spending

This matter has attracted considerable attention in the media recently - but I hadn't really got to the bottom of it until I read Alf Duran's column this morning (www.alfdurancorner.com)
The context on this occasion is Catalonia - the north eastern region of Spain, dominated by its capital city, Barcelona (greater metropolitan area has 70%+ of total population of Catalonia).
Politics here has been dominated by one party for more than 20 years until the last election (before Christmas). Since then, the value of a change is gradually emerging, as cosy relationships and a network of favours is slowly unravelled.
The report on media subsidies - and the 6 million euros paid across in 2003 to the publishers of La Vanguardia (the leading Barcelona daily paper), suggest a lack of transparency and misappropriation of taxpayers funds for political interests.

In short...state robbery

First post

When it comes down to it, all of us have seen examples of State Robbery. The State, protector of all, often fails us all through its inefficiency, inadequacy, inflexibility and incompetence....

Place: Spain - that's where I live and have lived for the past 10 years

Time: 2004 - almost 30 years after Franco died... long enough for the State to get its act together

With all the hype that Spain is pushing to become the 8th largest economy in the world, I would have thought that a level of state efficiency would be one of the parameters that journalists and analysts were watching.

But no ... we're still living in a world of
a) public exams to enter the civil service (with thousands of people spending great amounts of time and money to prepare themselves to sit the exams ... in the hope that they might get a job for life)
b) jobs for life ... okay, the Spanish employment market is complicated, but can the State afford to offer lifetime security to all public servants (they can't even budget two years ahead, so why should they burden future taxpayers with thousands of public servants who may not be required tomorrow
c) no resources ... employees without computers, doctors with too many patients, not enough places in schools or kindergartens

These problems and more are not unique to Spain... and you might not think that they are equivalent to State robbery... but lets face it. Would you get away with spending money the way the State does and still have a job?

More to come in future posts

No computers

We recently had to go to the Registry Office - to register the birth of our baby boy. By law you've got 30 days to do this, but in practice you need to do it the first week out of hospital, as you need papers to be able to get a doctor's appointment for the baby - for his first check-up one week after leaving hospital.

I decided to check the procedure myself before dragging my partner down to the Registry Office. There were loads of people waiting for birth certificates and who knows what else in this huge building down by the old Port. I knew the building already, as I once lived just around the corner for about 6 months - and remembered seeing people gathered in the adjoining square after getting married.

Having assembled all the papers we needed, we arranged to leave the baby with our neighbour upstairs and took a taxi down to get the paperwork done. There was no system for arranging a visit at a fixed time. The day before nobody was waiting when I checked on this service, but on this day we'd timed our arrival badly. What's worse, those waiting entered according to alphabetical groups (the reason for this soon became apparent). In seeing others arrive later and enter before us I felt there had to be a better way. Then a man approached who obviously knew the workings of this service inside out. "Everything is manual", he told me. Each new birth is written in a huge book by hand - and there are six different books, covering different letters.

In the whole building there were probably only two computers, he noted. The rent on this building alone must be at least €100,000 a month, sufficient to buy 100 computers. Imagine how much time, money and personnel could be saved if the service was computerised. Other regions in Spain allow you to do this by internet - but hey, who cares if everyone has to stand in line for an hour to do something as basic as register the birth of their child.