The demagogy of facts

There is no demagogue more shameless than simple reality;

There is no pamphlet more incendiary than the Economics section of the newspaper.

Just a few weeks ago, in the same days in which the profits of the Spanish banks were announced, a successive and triumphant Niagara of billions of euros, the news came of that 78-year-old woman who was being evicted from the house in the who had always lived by not paying a debt of 88 euros.

It seems that banks made more money than ever last year: in a reverse record, a vulnerable, elderly person may never have lost so much, their house and their entire life, for so little money.

It is difficult to imagine what merits the banks and their managers have accumulated to receive their multimillion-dollar compensations, what wealth or prosperity they have created in the course of a year.

It is true that in this our condition as a mediocre country comparatively reduces the loot of our banks and our billionaires.

Elon Musk had granted himself in 2023, in his capacity as owner or leader of the Tesla company, a remuneration of 56,000 million dollars, and a judge in the State of Delaware has left it on hold, considering it perhaps somewhat excessive, a scruple that the Barcelona judge who found it appropriate to evict the debtor of the 88 euros did not have the opposite.

While this woman, Blanca, collected a few things from her abandoned house to stay in the pension that the City Council apparently found for her and pays for her, the large technology companies took over from the Spanish banks to make their benefits public, and The amounts were so enormous that they overwhelmed even the imagination of the most arrogant plutocrat.

I find the morbid taste that others satisfy by reading dystopian fiction in everyday information, in the paper newspaper that I buy every morning with the same anachronistic and somewhat disillusioned loyalty as a declining number of my contemporaries, with the same routine between pleasant and melancholic with which I take my dog ​​for a walk or prepare breakfast.

Although it may not seem like it, we read not only with our eyes: also with our hands, with touch, smell, hearing, the bodily habit of leaning over the unfolded pages.

Just as literature, and especially poetry, stays in my memory better when I read it on paper, the misfortunes and horrors and pamphletary nonsense of reality hurt me more when I see them highlighted by ink, at that time in the morning in which the necessary forces to face the day that begins have not yet fully activated.

Agitated by those stimulants that in other times always went together, ink and caffeine, I am perhaps more outraged when reading that the same technology companies that declare profits never earned by anyone in the history of humanity simultaneously announce massive layoffs.

With its outdated logic, one thought that a company fires workers when it suffers losses, but in these companies it is seen that wealth exaggerates their greed, and the more they earn, the more people they fire, to earn even more.

On the Internet I have wanted to follow the trail of Blanca's story and I have lost it very quickly.

Banks and technology companies and their inventions and monstrous tricks to suck up every last second of our attention and our last cents continue to occupy a growing space today, but nothing has been heard from Blanca again.

No matter how much I search, I cannot find her surname, as if a person of such little importance did not have full rights to them.

Will she still be in that boarding house, like an impoverished and old widow, like the mourning ladies who led ghostly existences in the boarding houses of my first youth?

And why have social services not had the minimum generosity to accommodate her not only in a boarding house, but at least in a hostel?

Blanca had been living in the same apartment in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona for 50 years, on a street where there was only one other home other than hers that was not tourist accommodation.

She says that she arrived at her house for the first time wearing a wedding dress and that she aspired not to leave it except with the shroud.

An apartment inhabited by an old woman who pays a modest rent is a calamitous business in one of those central neighborhoods of Spanish cities where poor and working people had their natural space for more than a century, resisting in the times when the best placed They were leaving and the streets were succumbing to crime and heroin.

The same people who sustained the life of the neighborhoods in the dark years are the ones expelled when times change and the neighborhood becomes more attractive, and houses are rehabilitated, thriving owners and businesses arrive, the modest stores that supported daily life disappear, finally the international tourists dragging clattering suitcases with wheels and consulting the Airbnb page on their mobile phones.

Blanca, at her age, had the elemental aspiration that García Lorca's

Somnambulistic Romance

enunciates : “Compadre, I want to die / decently in my bed.

/ Of steel, if it can be / with the sheets of Holland.”

After many years of deterioration of her house, Blanca managed to get her landlord to make some urgent repairs, which apparently came out anyway, although she, the tenant, was required to pay without legal basis.

But the owner could afford lawyers and legal tricks, and Blanca, in her dilapidated house, still with humidity and shoddy repairs, with all the accumulated memories of her life, her clothes in the closets, the photos of her dead, stopped paying one of the receipts that were claimed, the 88 euros, a billionth part, so to speak, of the profits of a bank in a single day, a tenth of a second in the income flow of one of those oligarchs who do not even pay taxes , who buy governments and corrupt and ruin entire countries.

Jean Valjean from

Les Misérables

ended up serving 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread.

There are extreme forms of demagogy that are no longer exclusive to the social and sentimental novels of the 19th century.

Thomas Piketty says that social inequality reached its maximum degree in 1914, and that the world wars and the crises of the first decades of the century led to a decline in the concentration of wealth, accentuated by the egalitarian policies of the welfare state from of 1945, which have been dismantled in the United States, and sadly also in Europe, since the triumph of Reagan and Thatcher in the early eighties.

Now wealth accumulation and social inequality are even more pronounced than in 1914. In a recent book,

The Inequality of Wealth,

Liam Byrne says that Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich's yacht measures 162 meters and cost £1.2 billion, and includes Among its various features, a heliport with capacity for several helicopters and a missile detection system.

“In a social order like this, my only possible position is that of a beggar,” says James Joyce.

For corporations or individuals to exist that have so much money and so much power, a social order is needed in which a 78-year-old woman can be kicked out of her house for a debt of 88 euros.

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