Render unto Caesar

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look at an endemic wrong. An ongoing robbery from the people that now looks like it's only going to get worse. Click over to read the original article in Spanish published in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

I’ve always had an inherent respect for the taxman. Irrespective of the country that I was living in, from my native Canada to the United States to semi-lawless countries like Azerbaijan, Libya and Yemen, I’ve always had a keen awareness of their presence.

After all it was Eliot Ness and not the police that took down someone like Al Capone. He went to jail for tax evasion and not for murder. In the end it probably won’t be his inciting insurrection and crimes against democracy that imprisons Donald Trump, but he just might don an orange jumpsuit to match his hair and makeup for cheating on his taxes.

Each country has its own quirks when it comes to tax time and imagine my surprise the first time I filed my taxes here in Spain. The complex language itself was complicated enough to wade through, but then I got to a series of boxes that I simply did not understand. It was something I had not seen before in other countries.

There on the form were two boxes to tick, 105 and 106. They confused me. One was for if I wanted to give 0.7 percent of my taxes to what is in effect a foreign power and the other was to give the same to unspecified NGOs. That or a combination of both, in which each get 0.7%. And if you marked neither, that money would then return to the state’s coffers.

The stark choice made it suspiciously seem like the Catholic Church was the state sponsored religion when it is in fact just another belief amid the myriad of creeds and faiths out there. Evangelists, Orthodox, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Bahai’s, Gnostics, Jupiter and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster members it seemed need not apply.

But this anomaly looks like it might soon change with the recently created Direccion General de Libertad Religiosa, upgrading its former status from subdirectorate to directorate. Apparently one of its main aims will be the fiscal equalization of all religions. All religions recognized by the state that is. It seems that not all imaginary beings are considered equal in the eyes of the law.

With this move, rather than closing these yawning tax loopholes, more creeds would be able to take advantage of the ludicrous tax exemptions that the Catholic Church now enjoys. Exemptions which allow it to not only be exempt from paying taxes on its buildings where worship takes place, but more pertinently on the enormous sums it makes from the rental of its vast holdings of real estate.

The Government seems to have confused strengthening the necessary secularism of a modern, democratic State with a move towards a fuzzy, gutmensch multi-confessionalism. Instead of suppressing the unbridled prerogatives of the Catholic Church, especially the IBI, and the reversion of more than 100,000 properties unlawfully immatriculated by the Catholic Church since 1948, it is going to increase the privileges of other religious confessions of "well-known roots".

As Mark Twain once wrote, “(Where) No church property is taxed, and so the infidel and the atheist and the man without religion are taxed to make up the deficit in the public income thus caused."

Release the ...Bees?!

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look at the agricultural protests that have been taking place across Spain and indeed Europe. Swayed by the siren song of the ultra right, farmers just may be delivering themselves into the hands of the very people who support the neoliberal policies that make their lives difficult. Click over to read the original piece in Spanish in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

This wasn’t Mr. Burns from the Simpsons snickering and telling Smithers to release the hounds. Its vibe was more like something straight out of a 70’s James Bond movie. Except this evil mastermind wasn’t sitting above a tank full of circling sharks wearing a baby blue polyester leisure suit in front of a world map.

This would-be-mastermind had the slicked back longish hair of a bullfighter, black horned rimmed glasses, the checkered shirt of a secondary school math teacher and wasn’t necessarily looking for world domination. This headman had more regional designs in mind.

Rather than threatening to use his new orbiting satellite death ray if his outrageous demands weren’t met, what this man was menacing the world with was something much more ordinary: bees. And not killer African bees either, but just your average honeybee.

In a rather surreal press conference the president of Asaja Extremadura threatened to open up the hives that they had trucked in from the countryside if the riot police were used to block them in their ongoing agricultural protests against the government and the EU. It was as if they had been trained to attack after he gave a secret signal. Words so utterly bizarre that I was convinced they were from the parody website El Mundo Today until I realized that they were in fact true.

But the deeper you dig into these ongoing protests, the more incongruities and outright contradictions you begin to unearth. Attack bees end up being simply anecdotal in the heady brew of fake news and globalist conspiracy theories that surround the protests.

In a rural milieu that is by nature conservative, the ultra-right have seen a large section of disgruntled voters ripe for the picking. They’ve doubled their efforts to harness this discontent and have tried to incite them further, using their dubious explanations for some of the real and justified demands of the farmers.

It’s fertile ground for their antienvironmental stances, creating strawman arguments against their loathed 2030 Agenda. All the while placing the blame an overreaching EU for the problems farmers face. Another of the organizations that the far right also deeply distrusts and is suspicious of.

The somewhat ironically green party has also done a complete about-face regarding government subsidies and grants. They are now calling for increased grants for things like helping to palliate the effects of the long-standing drought in some parts of the country. A natural catastrophe caused by something they don’t even believe in, climate change.

Then there are the protective measures they are now in favor of. They wave their made in China national flags and now insist on protectionist measures they normally abhor to help guarantee food sovereignty, perhaps more because it is a Muslim majority country that they want protection against rather than their preferred vulture capital funds listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Real, complex problems exist in the agricultural sector but much of these have to do with the neoliberal policies that the extreme right favor rather than their fallacious arguments against the 2030 Agenda. Farmers need to be cautious who they hitch their wagons to or in the end may end up even worse.