embezzlers

2022-12-17T11:19:58.930Z

The misuse of public money causes a very deep rejection that goes beyond political considerations and preferences, and can be as offensive as blatant theft, and the harm to the common good is no less serious.

It is not necessary to believe that this government aspires to destroy democracy, or that its president is on his way to becoming a dictator, to feel an immediate rejection of this reform of the Penal Code that reduces the punishment for the crime of embezzlement almost to an affectionate reprimand.

The contortions of legal prose express confusion and impudence at the same time.

Words are not used to explain or specify, but to cover up, vainly, what is in sight, not only for those initiates who always know how to decipher what others do not see, but for everyone.

The allegorical lady of justice raises her blindfold a few centimeters to wink at those interested, but she does it with so little skill, or with such shamelessness, that there is no one so clumsy that she does not find out about her maneuver. .

The legislator,

Perhaps in the Government they thought that the issue of embezzlement would provoke a rejection as localized, and as fleeting, as that of sedition.

I believe that many of us who are skeptics and supporters of concord can at least give the benefit of the doubt to these appeasement measures, and that the pardon of the convicted secessionists was an encouraging precedent.

But embezzlement concerns the use of public money, and that provokes a very deep rejection that goes beyond political considerations and preferences.

When life is so difficult for almost everyone, when there are so many priority needs that cannot be met, the spectacle of embezzlement is as offensive as that of brazen theft, and the damage to the common good is no less serious.

It is undoubtedly a very serious crime to allocate public funds that come from the taxes of all of us to a secessionist conspiracy.

But crime takes on its full dimension when we think not about what was spent, but what could have been spent: how many hospital beds, how many primary care positions, how many teaching positions, how many funds allocated to scientific research and not to propaganda.

There is embezzlement in the strict sense, which deserves more punishment and less leniency, and there is another more general one that perhaps cannot be classified as a crime, but which is at the root of our institutional fragility: that of those public institutions or services that support the architecture of democracy and civil coexistence, and that when degraded due to lack of means or collective respect or excessive partisan political interference, they are no longer effective in fulfilling the purposes that correspond to them: equality, justice, improvement of life, concord, the rule of law.

The Spanish political environment is a toxic waste of verbiage.

The waste of words makes it impossible to have a rational debate on the real problems that lie ahead, and which we face with very limited room for manoeuvre.

In every sphere of public life one finds a similar atmosphere and the same approximate type of person: the atmosphere is one of insufficiency, of penury, of frayed and worn-out things, of overflow;

the person, the public servant, is competent and vocational, and although it is the vocation that sustains her through thick and thin in his work, he compensates her less and less for his effort, and it does not alleviate her wear and tear.

The public servant is almost always a highly qualified professional who receives a mediocre salary as a rule and does not have much hope of promotion, and in many cases not even stability.

An indication of the deterioration of the Administration in Spain is the multiplication of interim chains, precarious contracts, often of very short durations, even for positions of great responsibility.

The career of a research scientist can be just as subject to uncertainty as that of an administrative assistant or janitor.

One finds oneself with these public servants everywhere, in Spain and outside Spain, in departments of culture and in the headquarters of the Instituto Cervantes, in libraries, in laboratories, in dependencies of the European institutions, in health centers, in institutes of immigrant and worker peripheries, in hospitals, in offices where friendly treatment alleviates a wait and helps resolve a setback.

Many of them have to put up with reasonable complaints, the insolence or impatience of users, and sometimes their open aggressiveness, the exasperation of those who, driven by necessity, cannot be attended to.

Talking with public servants, a sober and accurate diagnosis is obtained of the specific plot of reality that corresponds to each one, and that they know better than anyone, even if no one with political decision-making capacity agrees to ask them anything, nor does they pay much attention to them. in the media.

In many of them —or of them, I should say, because in almost all of these professions there are already a majority of women— there is an increasing tone of urgency and alarm, a distressing awareness that the deterioration may be irreversible, that let gradual decline turn into collapse.

A citizen calls an emergency or customer service phone and only hears the same recorded message over and over again, for hours or days,

or you cannot complete an essential procedure because the only way to do it is with a digital fluency that you lack.

Cardinal rights such as education, health and the protection of the law are suspended when, due to lack of foresight or bossiness or political frivolity, absolute priority is not given to the good practical functioning of the institutions that make them possible, which includes the sufficiency of means. materials, the efficient and austere organization and the respect and encouragement towards the professionals who work in them.

The old negligence of both leaves the administration of justice without sufficient means, and the political hooliganism of the Spanish right undermines it even more by illegally blocking the functioning of its government bodies.

The best educational reform,

Leaving aside declarations of principles and lucubrations in pedagogical jargon, it will be the one that guarantees, free of charge, bright classrooms with few well-cared for and well-fed students, with vocational and well-paid teachers, with good libraries and sports areas, with sufficient resources to attend to recently arrived migrants and children with special needs.