He has done it. He has pardoned himself "forever". In terms of taxes, he and his family will be able to do whatever they damn well please from now on. They will never be able to be investigated. The president of the USA has signed an out-of-court settlement with the tax agency that depends on his government, endorsed by the Department of Justice headed by one of his former lawyers. It's all in the family. In other words, Trump has agreed with himself to eternal tax absolution. The message is clear: I do whatever I want, got it? My power is absolute.

Fighting the material poverty of so many people is a moral imperative of human solidarity. Even, for the sad argument of selfishness, we will reach the conclusion that it is much better for everyone to live in a cohesive society than in one divided between a few rich people and a lot of poor people.

The Pope's visit to Catalonia, which counts on Montserrat and Sagrada Família as world emblems of Christian pilgrimage, coincides with the selectivity exams of our hardworking and always most tender adolescents. Among these students, do not doubt it, there are —there must be— our substitutes and who knows if the Pope's own.

We accept, some with more resignation than others, that money is an inevitable part of our lives. And from what we know of our ancestors, before money existed, greed already existed. How much money do we need to live? How much money do we need to accumulate in life? How much money do we think we deserve to have? Why do we think we deserve anything?

"Since they improved the [Rodalies] service, it takes 20 minutes less, and without having to go through Barcelona". This is one of the phrases heard in the presentation video of the Metropolitan Commitment 2030, the strategic plan for the metropolitan region of Barcelona approved three years ago, explaining what the metropolis should be like at the turn of the decade. A phrase that condenses a dream for many people: to be able to move between the main cities of the so-called metropolitan arc without Barcelona being mandatory on any journey.

For a long time, the speech given by Václav Havel on January 1, 1990, shortly after being elected president of the Czech Republic, was cited as an example of a leader who dared to speak with frankness and honesty to citizens, always addressing them as adults and responsible individuals. He unreservedly acknowledged the ruin the state was in after the communist dictatorship, but also explained that the responsibility for the disaster lay not only with the rulers who had been in power, but also with all those who, in one way or another, had acquiesced to it or had reaped illicit benefits from it. To set the future on the right path, he appealed to the civic conscience, responsibility, and the defense of the rights and freedoms, as well as the duties, of each and every citizen.We have witnessed an operation of demolition and emptying of public language that makes Havel's discourse, today, unviable in the terms in which it occurred thirty-six years ago. “Speaking frankly and honestly to citizens” has become another banner that charlatans and demagogues, especially those from the far right and its circles, have adopted to degrade it into a barrage of lies, insults, and absurd conspiracy theories. In this way, the debate is poisoned to such an extent that often whoever shouts the loudest, and does so with the most visceral, absurd, or irrational arguments, appears in the eyes of many – often a majority – as the one who speaks “the truths,” when it is quite the opposite. If he were to deliver his famous speech today, Havel would be attacked by a swarm of accusations from fake media and fake journalists, and from social media influencers and activists, who would defame him and accuse him of all sorts of vileness. The uproar would be so deafening that it would be difficult to distinguish, as is often the case today, reality from falsehood. One effect pursued with this confusion is to change the necessary criticism of institutions into a permanent, poisoned distrust that is never anti-system, but rather one of the most perverse ways the system has of perpetuating itself.The judicial dirty war in Spain, which has been going on for decades and has trampled over a large part of Catalan independence movements and the Spanish left, now wants to get rid of the part of the PSOE that bothers them, no matter what. Zapatero is the first Spanish president to be indicted, curiously in the National Court, curiously with lawsuits from Manos Limpias and Hazte Oír involved, curiously before any similar lawsuit accuses other architects of Spanish democracy like Felipe González – with his enormous, and never explained, increase in wealth –, José María Aznar or Mariano Rajoy, who are obviously the main responsible parties for scandals like Gürtel, Kitchen or Operation Catalonia. “Whoever can, should do it,” said Aznar. Often, what seems too obvious turns out to be true. We live in days when, from a state deformed by a judicial and police power that acts as a party, they want to call it democracy: it was precisely against this that Havel fought and wrote.

We read in ARA

The United States has “permanently banned” the fiscal inspection of past tax returns of President Trump, his family, his companies, and his associates. Trump filed a lawsuit against the American treasury because he considered himself persecuted, and now he has withdrawn the complaint in exchange for this fiscal immunity and a multi-million dollar compensation fund that could also benefit attackers of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The Fènix Report has been a very healthy wake-up call about the seriousness of the trajectory of the Catalan economy in recent years and in the last generation, with a GDP per capita that continues to drift away from the European average (twenty percentage points in the last twenty years –from 114% to 94%). 

Turning religion into a political actor, even physically eliminating progressive and secular forces, has historically been done in the service of imperialist militarism. In 1978, the Carter administration, with its security advisor, the Pole Zbigniew Brzezinski, began to sponsor the anti-communist far-right of different religions. They financed Sunni jihadists to dismantle the socialist government of Afghanistan and Ayatollah Khomeini's Shia jihadism to abort the Iranian democratic revolution. And, in the same year, while financing Lech Walesa's pseudo-workers' union in the People's Republic of Poland, they installed John Paul II at the Vatican, the center of the soft power of global capitalism, a Polish anti-communist and opponent of liberation theology. All these were maneuvers related to countries that, by "coincidence," were neighbors of the Soviet Union.

Politics should not be a profession. In an optimal democratic system, our representatives should come from society itself and, therefore, already have their own job, a profession. The cases of those who come from work and return to work once their task is finished are so unusual that their case becomes news, as happened with Julio Anguita. Former presidents, moreover, have a lifelong pension, a secretary, an office, and a driver with an escort, whether they were in office for half their lives or only lasted a few months. A luxury retirement, at the opposite extreme of widows who receive the minimum wage. The establishment of these privileges is already a scandal and establishes a completely unfair comparative grievance with the rest of the workers. (Well, I am self-employed, so I know what awaits me the day I can no longer string two sentences together and get paid for it: becoming an occupier and anti-system grandma, at the very least.)

It is quite disheartening that, as soon as the news of Jonathan Andic's arrest appeared as an accused (but not guilty, nor tried, nor sentenced) in his father's death, the reaction of many compatriots was to wonder when Carles Porta would make an episode of Crims. The popular interest (or at least, what could be seen on Twitter) reached the point where Porta himself was forced to publish a tweet reminding good people that this would be jumping the gun. (But he also announced that they “will try to do the Andic case”, because indeed the program consists of documentary and dramatized recreations of real-life crime cases). Nor should we be scandalized by things that are more than known. Crime is morbid, parricide is morbid, the crimes and parricides of the rich and the very rich are even more morbid (because, yes, the mob is thrilled when the powerful fall into the same mud as the rest of mortals: that's what classic tragedies are about), and all this morbidity, when it hits the right note of success, always sells enormous quantities of whatever: tickets, copies, downloads, viewers. However, crime is not a trivial matter. It is sad and sordid, as we know from Dostoevsky, who in Crime and Punishment narrates a crime among the poor. It is also philosophical and chilling, as Tolstoy teaches us in The Kreutzer Sonata, a husband who kills his wife, in a well-to-do marriage, because he cannot bear the sexual act. Liberating and abysmal, as we read in The Infanticide by Víctor Català, or vengeful and dark as in The Cask of Amontillado, by Edgar Allan Poe. It can still be, moreover, hilarious, as Thomas De Quincey demonstrates in The Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. It can become a source of entertainment when presented as a puzzle to be solved, as in the infinity of stories (literary, cinematic, television) that follow the schemes of the stories of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, or Inspector Maigret. We must naturally add the roughness and murkiness of the American hard-boiled, the coldness of the French polar, or the Mediterranean illuminations of the Italian giallo. Things become less interesting when they fall into sensationalism, opportunism, or a kind of catharsis for citizens of declining national communities (“it's just that we, if we set our minds to it, are also capable of killing each other, you know”). There are two more references, Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood and Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary, which have become easy justifications for all sorts of programs, podcasts, and more novels of what is known as true crime, a denomination where what has real power of attraction is more the true than the crime: an audience eager to consume recreations of real crimes, with their blood and guts, to then go to sleep warm. And who, when they hear the news of a sensational crime, already Pavlovianly imagine the narration that their favorite program will make. It is, also, an image of a country.

The theory has a name and everyone knows it: equality before the law. And that includes former Spanish government presidents, of course. When justice indicts someone who has been at the very top of one of the three branches of the State, it means the system doesn't flinch and it works. And to indict a former president, the evidence should be solid.

We read in ARA that Jonathan Andic, accused of homicide against his father, Isak Andic, the founder of the Mango clothing stores, has entered the Martorell courts handcuffed and "with his head down".

Following the regional elections in Andalusia, there has been much talk again about the far-right's attempts to seize power. One of the tactics to achieve this – not only in Spain but also in other countries like the United States or our neighbor France – consists of trying to dominate the media, the more massive the better, with the aim of influencing society's beliefs or the collective imagination. This tactic is part of the “cultural war,” which seeks to impose a hegemonic way of thinking. Societies are plural, and the free expression of differences in political, ideological, religious positions, etc., is a symptom of democratic health. It is revealing, however, that lately it is the anti-democratic right that invokes freedom of expression as a weapon in this “war,” while when it is in power, what it does is eliminate all dissident discourse.In France, a scandal occurred a few weeks ago in the cultural sphere that is still causing a great deal of uproar. The circumstance that caused it seems trivial: the Algerian writer of French expression Boualem Sansal (a candidate for the Nobel Prize for years), who had been imprisoned for months for political reasons in his country and was released thanks to international pressure, decided to change publishers. So far, everything suggests that this is a personal and not at all reprehensible decision, but the problem is that the publishing house Grasset, which will publish his next book —a chronicle of his stay in prison, with the ambition of a bestseller”— is in the hands of the Bolloré group. The founder and owner of this holding company, which includes several well-known periodicals and television channels such as Canal+, is the millionaire Vincent Bolloré, who has openly declared himself in favor of leading a "civilizing project" based on the ideals of the far-right and the most rancid Catholicism.

Agustín de Foxá (Madrid, 1906-1959) was a Spanish aristocrat and diplomat best known for a novel openly hostile to the Second Spanish Republic, Madrid, de corte a checa (1938). The book that interests us here, however, is another: Por la otra orilla (1955), in which he paints a nostalgic and paternalistic view –very typical of that era– of Latin America. I own the first edition of this collection of chronicles published by Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, with a cover that inevitably evokes the aesthetic of the NO-DO (the book, by the way, cost 80 pesetas in 1955; it was very expensive). Abstracting from the cloying adjective of some passages, as well as the underlying ideology, it is a generally interesting and well-written work.In Foxá, Hispanic America seems to him, in general, a space of cultural continuity, a “bother world” where Spain has left a deep mark and, at the same time, has received influences that have also transformed it. His descriptions combine imperial nostalgia, aesthetic fascination, and the search for an exoticism that aims to be effective and is often expressed through poetic prose. Foxá observes the New World as an inverted mirror: a territory where Spanish history has taken unexpected paths. Throughout its 526 pages, this perspective, characteristic of the Francoist mentality and the texts published by Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, tends to idealize the colonial past, presenting it as a civilizing and sentimental bond, but in Foxá's case, without entirely shying away from the most problematic parts previously sugarcoated. On page 437 ("El cenote sagrado"), he even relativizes, for example, the issue of human sacrifices in Mexico, which was quite problematic in the midst of national-Catholicism.

Albert Einstein said that “if the Moon had consciousness, it would be convinced that its rotation around the Earth is free”. And humans? We have elevated our condition above that of the other inhabitants of the planet, consecrating as a reference for our way of being in the world the ideal of the Enlightenment: the ability to think and decide for ourselves. But day-to-day life makes it evident that we are far from meeting this standard; we are a species articulated around power – the difference in potential contained in any relationship – and the abuses that derive from it. And, if Voltaire is right when he says that “humans have no remorse for the things they are accustomed to doing”, there is still a lot of ground to cover. We must be very careful. Reinhart Koselleck put it more sophisticatedly, in the story of a German doctor's dream: “After the consultation, around nine in the evening, I lie down on the sofa with a book about Matthias Grünewald, and suddenly my room, my whole house, is left without walls. I hear the loudspeaker noise: by decree, the walls are removed until the 17th of this month.” The paradoxes of the human condition: without walls there is no freedom, even though walls are the most common instrument for isolating the citizen and leaving them without space to make their own. Translated to the present day, Ulrich Beck put it more prosaically: “We are heading towards a state authoritarianism that, on the outside, will adapt to global markets and, on the inside, will behave authoritatively.” We see it day by day. And the proof is that every day there are fewer democracies and those that remain are ossified, in societies that do not even have the impetus to stop the penetration of the far-right.

Letter to my grandmotherSometimes I wonder what you would say if you could hear some of the things being said today. The other day I was walking near the Sagrada Familia, that immense church designed by Antoni Gaudí, a man almost of your time. It's a marvel, Grandma. Every day thousands of people from all over the world enter. They pay thirty-six euros to visit it. You didn't know the euro, but so you understand me: with that money you would have filled the pantry for more than two weeks.