Algarrobico & the perils of decentralization

In his latest blog entry, Winnipeg-based urbanist Christopher Leo asks, URBAN GROWTH AND MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE: ARE STRONGER LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS THE ANSWER? Here Chris examines examples of successful planning in Ontario that challenge his usual enthusiasm for decentralization.

As I told him, I'm glad to see that he continues to rethink his positions, keeping from getting locked in a box of his own devising. Anyone who has been watching urban misdevelopment in Spain is aware of the perils of extreme decentralization of authority. In our immediate vicinity, our little town (pop. 7000) of Carboneras has been making national headlines over a hotel allegedly (and I believe in fact) constructed on protected parkland and onto the supposedly protected coast. Aspects of approval authority are split among municipality, provincial government (in this case, province of Almería), and the Junta, or regional government, of Andalucía (a region covering seven provinces including Almería), above all of which is the national government and its several, sometimes bickering, ministries.

Here in Carboneras, town hall appears to have fiddled with the map of the park boundaries so as to evade regulations, with the connivance of the provincial government, and granted all the necessary permits for a hotel developer (including participation of George Soros) to build the monster. What was in it for the locals was, first, opening up more of the surrounding parkland to their own development projects (hotels, golf courses in this waterless land, luxury summer homes), and secondly (useful for political purposes) the employment opportunities the new hotel would supposedly bring (the wives of fishermen could become chambermaids), as well as the shorter-term building contracts of local companies. So they tore into the mountain and built the multistoried hotel on Algarrobico beach, practically up to the water line.

Only Greenpeace and a local pro-ecology group raised a cry while this thing was going up. Finally, when the structure was all up and they were just finishing the interiors, planning to open for business this past summer, the central government took notice. In a whole series of court decisions (each one challenged and requiring a new hearing) the whole operation has been declared illegal, the junta (Andalucian regional government) swallowed its embarrassment and demanded the thing be torn down, and found provisions in Spanish law saying they did not have to compensate the builders because their permits (never before challenged by the junta) were all illegal. Carboneras town hall, the mayor in particular, refuses to admit defeat however and they and the developers are still mounting challenges.

For a video of the Greenpeace action (12 August 2007) where they painted the word "Illegal" (ilegal in Spanish) on the façade of the hotel, see this article in El Mundo.

On a personal note, Susana & I are now in New York City, until Dec. 14, so I'll be reporting from here when I get a chance. The interruption of my blogging was due mainly to having to give all our attention to finishing the building project in Carboneras (see previous blog for photos) and getting ready for this trip.

Our castle in Spain

Buzón

Our 8-unit condominium, designed by Susana Torre with the collaboration of Carboneras architects DA-3 Estudio (Carmen Alcaide, Paco Caparrós and Enrique Bejines), is now (nearly) completed. Click on image to see 17 photos taken last week by Chantal Le Lièvre.

European v. American political consciousness: II

Here's another response to my friend Don Monkerud's query, about differences in political awareness and attitudes between Europeans and people in the U.S. This from Dan Bessie, in France:

Without doing a long sociological study, I believe that greater European political sophistication (and less idiocy - though there is certainly plenty to go around, witness Le Pen in France, right wing quasi-fascist nationalism in the Serbian countries, etc) has to do with a number of factors:

1. They have a longer and more recent association with working class struggles than do Americans. Though much weaker than they once were, socialist and communist parties are both in power in several places (socialists in Spain), communists in a few hundred cities throughout France, Italy and in other countries, and most European countries have unions that still exert far greater influence on economic events than is true in America.

2. Europe has seen two world wars rage across it. Hardly anyone here, including the British, who were bombed extensively, has been untouched by it. Fascism never touched America in the same way, in spite of the number of American deaths during WW II.

3. Large numbers of Europeans travel internally, speak more than one language (several in some cases), and thus have developed a much broader international outlook than that developed by the more or less continuing provincialism of the vast majority of Americans.

4. European media is much more open to being critical of leaders than is American media. American media fears not having access to a candidate. If, for example, the corporate owners of American media conglomerates should let too many of their reporters and commentators really nail McCain-Palin on the issues and on their lies, and, heaven forbid, they should get ELECTED, they might not have ACCESS. So their motto is, I believe, "don't bite the hand that might feed." (Since access is their bread and butter.) Most European commentators are fairly open in their political views (not all, but many more than in the States. During the last election I was in the UK when the results were coming in, and commentators on almost every station were saying substantially the same thing - "What's going on with the Americans? They must be nuts to vote for that guy Bush again.")

5. And yes, far fewer Americas travel than Europeans (though again, a lot of Europeans travel internally).


Europe is not without problems. TV watching is big and addictive here just like there. There are almost as many dumb programs (but a much higher number of quality programs as well). This (France) is also very much a consumer society. But it's someone less focused on big splashy cars and huge TVs (though there are those as well) and more on things like family vacations, seeing that the kids are well prepared for college and careers, etc.

Most Europeans are aghast that America doesn't have a national health plan in place. Here (in France and most of Europe) it's taken as a national RIGHT. Most also know that in terms of overall quality of life - health care, education, environment, standard of living, all the other things that go into making up "the good life," that America (contrary to what most Americans believe) is not #1 (Actually, France is). America, depending on which report one reads, is either #3, 4, 5 or 6 in line).

Are we happier living in Europe? On the whole, yes. But neither Jeanne nor I were unhappy in America.

Our greater happiness, I guess, comes more from what we do than from the actual conditions of life. Because the conditions of our lives here are more or less the same as they were in the States, in terms of standard of living. Some things are much less expensive (health care, for example: Jeanne had to pay about $6000 per year for an "ex-pat" policy for major medical in California. And that one had a $5000 deductible PER INCIDENT. Since she's a member of the EU (as are all Brits), she gets the same health benefits she'd get in the UK - which is about 80% (like Medicare), and spouses, even if they're not EU citizens, get the same benefits. To make up the difference we pay an annual "top up" policy of about $1500 for the BOTH of us. When we go for a doctor visit (GP) we pay a flat 23 Euros. (about $32). More for specialists We get about 75% of that back from the top up plan. Except for a very few things, all medication is included in the top up plan, so it's virtually free.

Food in restaurants are more expensive in general. Food in supermarkets is about the same, but there are a lot of items that the French consider "essential" that are very low in cost (bread, wine of course, canned veggies, etc). Gas is very high (about $7.00 a gallon).

We left the U.S. for a number of very specific reasons:

1. Why do the same thing all our lives? (That's one thing that was very important for us.)

2. Jeanne has family in the UK and she can see them more often. (You can literally fly from here to the UK for as little as about $2.00 sometimes - plus taxes, bringing it to about $25.), because a low cost Irish airline, RyanAir, would rather fill seats in the off season than have an empty airplane, since they fly back and forth to several French airports several times a day.

3. We are central to lots of places to drive to. Barcelona, about 7 hours, Paris about 6, etc, etc. (We've been to Spain once since we've been here, are going again in October, and have also been to Paris and Berlin. Aside from about three trips to the UK and two back to the States - which is getting very expensive now for air fare).

4. We like France a good deal. We live in an area of gently rolling hills, farms, small quaint villages, very friendly people for the most part, and etc. Lots of nature (France is more than 40% forest land).

Shh! Don't think about the colossus

The crash of the construction industry with its bankruptcies and now soaring unemployment, the air disaster in Barajas last month (where we lost a good friend), the absurd and cruel distortions of the judicial system (people kept in prison because the judge forgot they were there, others never sent there although they were condemned and go out to commit more crimes, the divvying up of judicial slots to party loyalists), the constant arrivals of half-dead, and sometimes dead, would-be immigrants on the coasts -- Spaniards have a lot to think about these days. But there is one very big thing that they have been trying not to think about for nearly 70 years. And if, by misfortune or carelessness, they did think about it, they were afraid to mention it. Now -- seemingly all of a sudden -- people are daring to speak, mass graves are being dug open and analyzed and those long-silenced events are being treated as news, and to lots of Spaniards the wartime and post-war atrocities of Francisco Franco's troops, allies and government are news.

What took so long? Fear works, as we've seen in post-war Germany, post-dictatorship Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and other places. It works to silence people, sometimes because the trauma of extreme violence has left them in a state of semi-shock, unable to pronounce the horrible truth even to their own children; and sometimes because of fear of the consequences to those children if others know what happened to their parents. It has worked more thoroughly for longer in Spain than in those other countries, because the Franco fear regime lasted so much longer, almost 40 years: from the first massacres on June 18, 1936, until some months after the death of the monster in November 1975.

"Don't mention that! You'll just open old wounds!" protests Rajoy, leader of the Partido Popular. No, say the survivors and grandchildren of the massacred, our wounds have never healed and never will until we know just what happened to our loved ones and where their remains are now. It's a lot like Srebrenica, multiplied many times all over the map of Spain. Today's El País includes such a map, showing the location of known mass graves. Presumably there are many others yet to be discovered. The sons, daughters and grandchildren, plus other truthseekers -- including prominent historians and novelists like Dulce Chacón, Manuel Rivas and others -- have been pushing for years for an accounting, have coaxed terrified oldsters to murmur their horrid memories, and have formed associations pressuring local, regional and the national institutions for their records. Now finally a judge, Baltasar Garzón, after pursuing Pinochet, the Argentine generals and other miscreants abroad, has ordered the armed forces, the police and the Catholic Church (which knows more than it lets on) to open its archives.

If you want a comprehensive story of the Spanish Civil War, with a balanced treatment of the atrocities on both sides and ample demonstration that the White Terror was many times more brutal than the Red Terror, not just in numbers of victims but in the deliberate cruelty, you could do worse than read Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain. I may have more to say about this book later. Especially important is his argument about the role of the Communists -- the Republic could not have survived without them, but also could not survive with them in the leadership.

Illustration: El coloso, long attributed to Francisco Goya but now thought to be by another hand.

Unsophisticated Europeans

One of my American friends has the impression that Europeans are much more "politically sophisticated" than Americans, and he has been asking me and other European residents why. So after pondering and writing up a response, I decided to post it here, because other people may be interested in joining the discussion.

Voters in Rome salute their victorious mayor, Gianni Alemanno, in April.

I don't think Europeans generally are more sophisticated politically than Americans, though they are more aware and respectful of other countries -- for pretty obvious reasons. Countries are smaller, the foreigner is much closer. "Respect" doesn't mean "like" -- but it's a starting point. Every family in Carboneras (the southern Spanish town I live in) has at least one member who worked for years in France, or Germany, or Holland or some other country. A surprising number of barely educated people are bi- or even trilingual, just because of life experience. Those people tend to be tolerant and open-minded toward all other cultures, which is good.

But they are no more likely than ordinary Americans to have any coherent, critical understanding of the Big Issues that they are always being asked to vote on. Global warming, nuclear energy, national immigration policy (even people who have been emigrants themselves are likely to panic about "too many immigrants", esp. when the economy tightens), national economic policy, religion in schools (as hot an issue in Spain as in the U.S., with the difference being that here the Church -- which still has a big hold -- is on the defensive while in the U.S. the churches are on the offensive, trying to gain privileges like those the Catholic Church enjoys in Spain). The irrational right has been able to mobilize huge demonstrations to demand, among other things, the repeal of the law to teach basic citizenship (mainly tolerance of religious, racial and sexual differences) in the public schools, because only the Church has the right to discuss morality (and the Church's teachers should be paid by the State, i.e., all the taxpayers, whether religious or not). In the last legislature (2004-2008), they accused Zapatero of "destroying the family" because of laws recognizing homosexual marriage, abortion, etc. Now those same people -- a very large minority -- are outraged because a judge (Baltasar Garzón) is requiring ecclesiastical, state and military authorities to open their records so that families can find out when and how their loved ones were murdered during the civil war and Franco-ist postwar years, and where they are buried. None of this is sophisticated.

Before you overpraise the sophistication of European voters, it would be good to analyze the recent votes in Italy. Show business trumps argument. Berlusconi & Co. have blamed all the country's problems on the Gypsies, and now that they've forced a census, they are surprised to find that there aren't that many of them. But no matter, it just feels good to send your cops out to beat up a couple of Gypsy kids or to egg on the crowds to burn down a Gypsy homestead.

Alternatives: Cuba tries to make a socialism that grows

But can it succeed? The Cubans have proven so resilient and Cuban institutions so resistant to joining the "There is no alternative" crowd, that they may just make this work. It's a small economy, but its methods may again -- as they have been repeatedly through the 1960s and 1970s -- be a model for other low-income countries. From the Financial Times: A revolution to repair: New friends come to the aid of Raúl’s Cuba By Richard Lapper

Alternatives to and within capitalism

Baumol, William J., Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm. Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007.

Baumol et al. start from the common premise that, since the collapse of the Socialist bloc, "There is no alternative" ("TINA") to capitalism, by which they mean an economy where “most or at least a substantial proportion of its means of production -- its farms, its factories, its complex machinery -- are in private hands, rather than being owned and operated by the government." (p. 62) Socialized ownership of the means of production and central planning collapsed with the Berlin wall, and what they call “precapitalist” economies, as in Afghanistan and Somalia, where the only property rights are those defended by warring clans, are just not viable.

But, the authors insist, there are at least four alternative forms of capitalism, some much better at promoting growth and prosperity than others.

"Oligarchic” capitalism, where a few rich families own everything that produces wealth and make sure nobody else gets any, is “bad” capitalism. Not just because of its unfairness, but because the oligarchs are too ignorant, too indolent and too self-occupied to invest in anything productive. Of course, they really don't have a lot of margin -- after their country club dues, luxury estate management, imported automobiles, foreign vacations, and other obligations of their class, they have to spend much of their country's wealth on army and police to shoot, beat or intimidate those pesky peasants who want to change things -- which, as we have seen in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam and other places, can get very, very expensive if those rebels are serious, well-organized, and can get funded somehow.

“State directed” capitalism, where the state picks sectors or even particular firms to favor (e.g. by subsidies or high tariffs against competing imports), hasn't proven efficient either. A major historical example was the "import substitution" policy promoted by Argentinian economist Raúl Prebisch for Latin America. The problem is that governments -- being run by human beings with their own interests and prejudices and corruptibilities -- are not very good at making such decisions. Most likely, the minister of the economy will pick the companies run by his brother-in-law. Or, even absent corruption, the inertia of bureaucracy (and pressure from interest groups) will keep the government supporting a sector whose growth potential has passed.

"Big firm" capitalism, free from the strictures of government, is better (for promoting growth), since big firms have the capital and need to invest. But they tend to be cautious and (with a few exceptions, like Bell Labs in the old days and Apple today) discourage innovation.

"Entrepreunerial" capitalism -- meaning the kind that breaks into the market by inventing new technology or new marketing techniques -- is the real hero of this book. But the wild-eyed entrepreneurs can survive and grow only if they get the backing of capital from big firms, until they turn into big firms themselves. When that happens, they either have to make special efforts to keep the innovation going (e.g., Bell Labs or Xerox) or look outside to back and buy rights to inventions made by new entrepreneurs. That kind of marriage (big firm/small innovator) is what has given the U.S. economy its dynamism in recent years and is the best bet for other economies seeking to grow.

In the real world (as the authors recognize), every economy has some mix of the four forms. The U.S. (like France and other economies) protects its agribusinesses ("state-directed" capitalism), and "big firm" and "oligarchic" systems are sometimes hard to distinguish. (E.g., the big business families of Italy, or the Fords in the U.S., where business power is hereditary.) The important question is which form prevails.

Baumol et al. also lay out four elements (they like that number) that they think are necessary to encourage such big firm/small innovator successes:

1, ease of forming or abandoning a business (if a company cannot declare bankruptcy if things go wrong, then the risks may be too high for anybody to start up in the first place);
2, rewards (they mean big money payoffs) for ”socially useful entrepreneurial activity." They specify "socially useful" to exclude such entrepreneurial activity as cocaine production and distribution, hedge-fund manipulation and other big money-making enterprises.
3, economic growth should be favored over redistribution of existing wealth -- which sounds like, Let the rich get richer as long as they invest in things that will make us all richer.
4, continuing incentives to companies to innovate and grow.

The most important thought I took from the book was what they call their “fundamental proposition”:

that economies are complicated systems that cannot be reduced to one or two central driving forces, and cannot be turned around by applying one or even a few of the policy prescriptions various development economisys or institutions have recommended over the years. (p. 59)

In sum, I found the book useful in clarifying categories (such as those four types of capitalism), though its arguments are too general and abstract, and say too little about the political forces involved, to explain much about the current world recession, or the surge in the price of oil, or what's at stake in the Georgia-Russia conflict (we know economics is a big part of it, but just how?) or other issues.

I'm not convinced that "There is no alternative," that growth and prosperity are impossible unless all major means of production are in private hands. We'll have to see if China, for example, can continue to innovate with its mix of capitalism and socialism. Or if Hugo Chávez's "Twenty-First Century Socialism" (which so far appears to be another mix of state-ownership and private enterprise) matures and survives. But it is obvious that there are many alternative systems within capitalism.

So who's “white” in the U.S.?

Interested in “race” issues in the U.S.? Read this and laugh (except it's all true).

From AP comes the news that by 2042 whites will no longer be the majority ethnic group in the United States…

What does this mean? Historically, not a damn thing.

Primary Sources: The 1940 Census on "White"

Summer readings: authors' bugaboos

I should have mentioned in my note about Axel Munthe's Story of San Michele the frequent appearance of Death, seen as a wise and ancient professional, a colleague of the doctor who has final disposition of the cases Munthe cannot save – including Munthe himself. There are other fantastic or phantom visitors, including an ancient goblin and Munthe's own younger self, but Death is clearly the most important of them. I assume that, as a physician and psychiatrist, Munthe would admit that these beings are really nothing more, and nothing less, than projections of his own fears and premonitions, rather like my own fantastic partners (described here). Such projections compartmentalize persistent concerns (death, or professional anxiety, or whatever else is driving you nuts) and may aid their creator to deal with them rationally. Unless and until you come to believe that they really have an independent power over you, as too often happens. But Munthe appears to me to have been too rational to let that happen.

Since Munthe, I had occasion to read a marvelous collection of short stories – a friend here in Carboneras happened to have a copy – by Carson McCullers, whose first novel had impressed me deeply. (See my note on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.) This collection includes The Ballad of the Sad Café, where the author's bugaboo is not Death (which doesn't seem to concern her very much) but the dangerous sickness called Love. Marvelous book. Great descriptions of dreariness.

Georgian blunders

The west shares the blame for Georgia

By Anatol Lieven

This article in the Financial Times is the most sensible I've read so far about this conflict.

Also see this by Gregory Djerejian in his blog "The Belgravia Dispatch." Well worth reading.