The cuts to which Spanish citizens are being subjected would not be necessary if corruption and waste did not exist, which is just another form of corruption. Let me explain. Corruption is the obtaining ...
The cuts to which Spanish citizens are being subjected would not be necessary if corruption and waste did not exist, which is just another form of corruption. Let me explain. Corruption is the obtaining of an irregular economic benefit, by those who manage the use of public money, for personal benefit. Waste is a common method of the political class, now turned into a caste, either to obtain juicy profits in the form of commissions of all kinds, or to obtain a benefit in the form of electoral support in exchange for selling as a merit, what in reality is nothing more than throwing everyone's money out the window, and into the hands of friendly builders or various commission agents.
If, for example, we analyze the last regional elections in the Community of Madrid, we will see that one of them was won with the promise of the famous Security Brigades of the Community of Madrid (BESCAM) and another of them with the construction of numerous and in some cases irrational hospitals through private concession to construction companies. Now, the BESCAM have become a serious problem for the Community of Madrid and the town halls, because there is nothing to pay them with, and the construction of hospitals without order or concert has been a round business for the "friendly" builders who have earned a fortune in them (and in the hands of whom it is now intended to privatize so that they continue to earn money with them), and a disastrous business for the people of Madrid who now have nothing to cope with their maintenance.
These and other pharaonic projects have been paid for in large part with the money in the coffers of the savings banks, run by politicians, and from where a partisan use of citizens' money has been made to finance airports without planes, cities of light, cinema, justice or the arts, and with whose brilliance the voters were blinded. In the end, the bill and the broken dishes of this bad political management are paid by the citizens, because the politicians, of all the representative parties without exception, continue with their own thing because the cuts do not affect them at all.
And I say that of all the parties, because corruption and waste are widespread and already affect from the Head of State to the person in charge of garbage collection in towns with two hundred inhabitants and all parties without exception. It is not a problem of this or that party, but it is a systemic problem, and that requires a structural solution and not empty words and hollow speeches. There is no more corruption from the right, the left or nationalist, but there is more corruption as more power is obtained.
Corruption and waste are born from opacity, from the lack of transparency and from the lack of a sense of public service of our politicians, who have believed that public money belongs to them and they can do with it whatever they want, without having to give more account than to the head of the party on duty. We do not have politicians with a sense of State, but unfortunately we have third-rate politicians, with no more sense or direction than that of their party and personal interest. Here nobody resigns, because they believe that the word resignation is a Russian word.
And no sir. Public money has to be able to be controlled publicly, because it belongs to all of us, with light and stenographers, without opacities, without Bárcenas, Urdangarines, or Filesas on duty. And until we have absolute transparency in the public accounts, whether they affect the King, the church, the parties, the unions, any councilor or whoever is financed with the money of all citizens, corruption and waste will continue to exist because there will be those who use public money with impunity and obscurantism.
Do the math on what the 400 politicians who are currently accused have thrown away in corruption, in pharaonic works or with exclusively political and electoral purposes, in what politicians continue to spend on official cars and lives of Maharajas of Kapurtalas on duty, in advisors, in observatories and useless organizations, or in the viceroyalties in which the autonomies have become, and you do not have to be an economic genius to know that without that money squandered in corruption and waste, it would not be necessary to make the cuts that are affecting citizens. Stop now once and for all, because this is unsustainable and you, politicians, know it.
*Augusto González is a writer, nephew of Adolfo Suárez and president of the Anti-Corruption League.
