Spain's 'Lost Generation' threatens social fabric

Posted on by nadrim

Daniel Lorente has worked construction, flipped burgers at McDonald’s, been a camp counselor, telemarketing representative and doorman.

But Lorente’s part-time jobs never lasted more than seven months: He was laid off from each one as Spain’s economic gloom deepened into a historic crisis. Now the 21-year-ancient is staring into a dead-end future.

“How am I going to make it if I don’t have a steady job, to pay a mortgage, for example?” questions Lorente. “Or for a wedding, or anything involving a huge expense? You can’t get anywhere.”

Lorente is stuck among Spain’s “Lost Generation” of 20-somethings, with no work and no real prospects in sight: Roughly half of all Spaniards between 16 and 24 are jobless, the highest level among the 17 nations that use the euro. It’s a devastating depiction of blighted youth that threatens to distort Spain’s social fabric for years to come, dooming dreams, straining family structures and eroding the well-being of a speedily aging population.

“This puts the whole welfare state at risk,” said Gayle Allard, a labor market specialist at Madrid’s IE Business School. “The childish people who are coming on the market now are the lost generation. They are losing the advantage of their youth and energy and that does not come back.”

The staggering jobless figures – 48.6 percent for Spaniards between 16 and 24; 39 percent for those ages 20-29 – hold dire consequences for a country that grew accustomed to prosperity on the back of a property boom that collapsed in 2008.

The 1.6 million unemployed teens and childish adults in the nation of 47 million risk never having a decent start to a career. They probably won’t accumulate assets like their own homes or savings until they are in their 40s. And they then will liable face much higher taxes to maintain Spain’s costly social welfare system.

What’s more, they’re expected to place off having children or have less than their parents, slashing a birth rate that’s already declining just as Spain’s large baby boom generation starts to retire. That earnings less people to absorb the expenditure of caring for the swelling ranks of pensioners.

“It’s a historic waste,” Allard said. “The nation has not been transformed into a higher-productivity nation even though all those educated childish workers were available for the task. I would not be surprised if eventually they rebelled against the tax burden.”

Rage and frustration among childish adults have already full root. Thousands erected protest camps last spring and summer in Madrid and Barcelona in illegal tent cities set up in central plazas. Disorder erupted over again last week when students in Valencia protesting simplicity cuts clashed with riot police, generating nationwide demonstrations against alleged police brutality.

Some Spaniards dread that Spain’s relatively new democracy, launched in 1978 with decades of dictatorship, may become threatened if an entire generation ends up convinced they will never attain the same lifestyle as their parents.

“The main risk for the country is we could lose a generation who go away and the childish people who stay will have less culture, condemning Spain to crisis for many years to come,” said Ricardo Ibarra, the 27-year-ancient president of The Spanish Youth Council, which represents groups for childish adults.

“In 10 years we could have populism instead of democracy, and we cannot waste our democracy and toss it away.”

Segundo Gonzalez – a 23-year-ancient university student majoring in economics – says the only job offers he has received are for menial positions, for no more than eight hours a week with monthly pay of euro300 ($400).

“If those of us who should be entering employment have to place the country or can’t get a job, or can only get poorly paid and low-tax work, it’s going to be very complicated for us to be able to sustain our parents’ pensions,” said Gonzalez.

“Future prospects are very complicated, bleak.”

In a scene mirrored nationwide, Lorente lives at home with his mother and an unemployed 28-year-sister. Like many other childish Spaniards, he thinks Spain’s nation is so terrible as it heads toward recession for the second time in four years that he might not be able to go out until he hits 40.

But with the overall unemployment rate now at a eurozone high 22.8 percent, even family help networks are being eroded – as childish people find they can rely far less on handouts and shelter from mom and dad.

And with low-paying jobs the norm – often euro1,000 ($1,325) a month or less – institution graduates are increasingly moving abroad to do work below their qualifications, for example as bartenders or hotel workers in Germany or Britain.

Last year more people left Spain than came to descend for the first time in a decade. While 418,000 went to this country, 508,000 departed, the National Statistics Institute reported.

Ibarra of The Spanish Youth Council said his sister, a bank worker, was making euro18,000 ($24,000) a year but went to Switzerland where she’s now getting more than euro60,000 ($80,000) in a new bank job she likes more. Another friend of Ibarra’s who worked with computers in Spain is now a bartender in Scotland.

“The feeling is growing in our country that if you want a excellent life, you have to go away,” Ibarra said. “Childish adults are leave-taking for anything, and the typical profile is a qualified who can’t get anything or can’t get what he wants.”

Many Spaniards are reminded of the 1940s and 1950s, when men with no opportunities at home left for construction or factory jobs in countries like France, Germany and Switzerland. But the current running away is more worrisome because the nation is bleeding some of its best and brightest.

Spain’s phenomenal boom saw a massive boost in Spaniards getting institution degrees in the expectation that excellent times would translate into lucrative opportunities.

The reality turned out to be different, due to the financial crisis and rigid labor structures in which older workers loved generous benefits and were very nearly impossible to cut loose.

Employers cringed at giving new hires open-finished contracts with the same benefits, so younger workers often finished up with temporary ones, sometimes lasting just a few months. During the growth years, companies rolled these contracts over, but they now let them run out, boosting the ranks of the childish unemployed.

Experts say professionally trained childish adults are increasingly dumbing down their resumes to apply for jobs as janitors, secretaries and nurses aides.

“They do this because they reckon if they don’t that they’ll be turned down because they’ll be seen as frustrated and overqualified,” said Alex Navas, a sociology professor at the University of Navarra.

Reforms were passed this month that are aimed at slashing the high cost of laying off older and less-productive workers, a go that could open up new opportunities for childish people.

But for now, economists predict that joblessness will liable get worse with recession virtually guaranteed and the new labor laws prompting businesses to eliminate more jobs before they start making new ones.

Eric Lluent, an underemployed freelance journalist in Barcelona, teamed up with a jobless friend to set up blog called “The New Poor” that allows struggling childish Spaniards to document their tales.

The only rule is that contributors must submit photos, their names, and tell their tales in the first person.

“If things stay the way they are, we’ll all have to emigrate,” said one contributor, 29-year-ancient inventor Claudia Freixas.

Lluent, who lives with his parents, himself is gearing up to place Spain – for Iceland. While that country’s nation imploded three years ago, he’s betting the tourism business will come back, meaning he might land a job in a restaurant, bar or hotel.

But the 25-year-ancient Lluent worries that Spain is making an entire generation that will become alienated from society.

In his own posting, he wrote:

“I’m part of the Lost Generation, those childish 20-somethings stuck in the ditch of a society that we increasingly see less as ours and spot more as the enemy.”

—

“The New Poor” blog (in Catalan and Spanish): http://elsnouspobres.wordpress.com/

Alan Clendenning can be reached at: http://www.twitter.com/alanclendenning

BSkyB warns pubs over cut-price foreign broadcasts

Posted on by jack

LONDON (Reuters) – Satellite broadcaster BSkyB and the Premier League said they would pursue publicans showing football matches on the cheap, despite a legal victory for a landlady who screened action via a Greek network.

Friday the High Court in London overturned the conviction of Karen Murphy, who runs a pub in Portsmouth

Murphy had been ordered to pay very nearly 8,000 pounds in fines and expenditure for using a foreign decoder to access English games shown live in Greece.

Hopes that the long-running case would drive down the fee of screening games in pubs across the land have been dashed by the technicalities of rulings on the issue.

Murphy had won a partial victory last October in the European Court of Justice, which said it was not illegal to import a foreign decoder, a ruling that allowable her to clear her name Friday.

But, a related test case has asserted that the Premier League retains copyright control over some of the material that goes on screen during matches.

Tony Ghee, a lawyer with London firm TaylorWessing, said that nuance meant those trying to undercut BSkyB had “fallen at the last hurdle.”

He noted that official Premier League logos and anthems were protected by copyright and that would outlaw the unauthorised transmission of broadcasts intended for foreign markets.

“They need clearance from Sky and the Premier League to show those bits,” he said. “Next season’s coverage will have as much of that kind of material in there as they can stuff in.”

BSkyB had already started writing to publicans warning them against using imported foreign broadcasts.

“The UK courts have already ruled that the unauthorised use of the Premier League’s copyrighted material via foreign satellite systems in pubs infringes copyright and is therefore illegal,” a Sky spokesman said.

“This remains the case following the ruling in the Murphy case. We will continue to protect our legitimate customers by supporting action against licensees who break the law.”

The spectacular growth of the Premier League over the past two decades has been underwritten by its partnership with the satellite broadcaster.

BSkyB has an estimated 44,000 pubs, clubs and offices signed up to its Premier League soccer services and they pay nearly 1,000 pounds per month.

(Reporting by Keith Weir; Editing by Will Waterman)

The Artist” salvages Jewish pride at Oscars

Posted on by nadrim


“The Actor” salvages Jewish pride at Oscars

February 27, 2012

LOS ANGELES (JTA) – Jewish pride had a place at the Academy Awards with the triumph of “The Actor,” a black-and-white worship to Hollywood’s silent film era.

The film won five Oscars for best depiction, director, actor, costume design and original musical score at the ceremony at Kodak Theater Sunday night.

Director Michel Hazanavicius is a French Jew, whose parents and grandparents survived the Nazi occupation by hiding in the French countryside.

Producer Thomas Langmann is the son of famed French director Claude Berri, whose parents were East European Jews and whose first film, “Two of Us,” dealt with a French Jewish boy hiding from the Nazis.

In addendum, veteran Woody Allen won the golden statuette – as always in absentia – for his original play for “Midnight in Paris.”

The Iranian entry, “A Separation,” won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, beating out four other films including Israel’s contender, “Footnote,” which depicted the rivalry between a father and son, both Talmudic scholars, and Poland’s “In Darkness,” a Holocaust-era film in this area a dozen Jews hiding in underground sewers during the Nazi occupation of Poland.

An Israeli movie has made the elite list of five Oscar finalists in four of the last five years, but without garnering the top prize.

Director-writer Asghar Farhadi of “A Separation,” which centered on the conflict of a husband and wife in a complicated and hard society, struck a note of international appeasement in his acceptance speech.

He spoke of his country’s “rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics” and of his countrymen as “people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.

 In a backstage interview, Farhadi heaped special praise on Poland’s Agnieszka Holland, the half-Jewish director of the Holocaust-themed “In Darkness,” describing her as “a fantastic director, a fantastic filmmaker and a fantastic creature being.”

A Sunday night viewing party hosted by the Israeli consulate and the Israel Leadership Council brought together some 200 Israelis at an L.A.-area hotel, and while guests acknowledged some sense of disappointment at the Oscar outcome, most tried to look at the bright side.

Israeli Consul-General David Siegel noted that Israeli movies and television programs were showing the world that “Israel is not just in this area conflict but has become a fountainhead of creative talent… We’re now the people of the book and of the film.”

Documentary filmmaker Dan Katzir sounded a similar note of optimism, observing that “with each year, Israel gets closer to winning an Oscar.”
 


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Scotland ponders breakup

Posted on by jack

Edinburgh, Scotland – With centuries of war with England, politicians in this stately city signed away Scotland’s sovereignty in the early 1700s for the promise of materials and the glory of empire. Three hundred years later, resurgent nationalists here are plotting a new rebellion to win it back.

Appealing to the force of tartan pride, the Scottish National Party won bolt from the blue control of the regional Parliament last year, which thrust the separatist fantasy of hearing “Scots Wha Hae” on the bagpipes as the national song of praise into the realm of distinct possibility. The British government, boxed into a precarious corner, has opened formal negotiations with the Scots to set a date for an independence referendum.

Scotland’s independence crusade is emerging as the greatest threat to the cohesion of the United Kingdom since Ireland achieved independence – a three-decade process that culminated in 1949, when Ireland left the Commonwealth.

Scotland won the right to a “devolved” Parliament in the late 1990s and has sweeping powers over, for example, its judicial system and government spending. But full independence would give the SNP the power to fulfill a wide array of pledges, including expelling the British nuclear fleet from Scottish waters, withdrawing from NATO and unwinding Scottish regiments from Britain’s military forces overseas. It would also give politicians in Edinburgh the freedom to vote separately from – and perhaps counter to – Britain in world bodies such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.

North Sea oil

As in any divorce, a break with Britain could also set up an economic scuffle – particularly over the lucrative rights to North Sea oil, seen as key to the prosperity of the Scots on their own.

The push here is being watched with nervous eyes across Europe, particularly in countries that have long struggled with powerful separatist movements, such as Spain and Belgium. At the same time, the prospect of an independent Scotland is sending shockwaves through Westminster, the seat of the British government in London.

Fearing a diminished voice in global affairs and an irreparable tear in modern Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron this month launched his own battle to win the hearts and minds of the Scots. “I believe that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are stronger together than they would ever be away from each other,” Cameron declared here this month in a signpost speech for British unity. “Something very special is in danger. The danger comes from the determination of the Scottish National Party to remove Scotland from our shared home.”

His fiercest foe: Alex Salmond, Scotland’s deft political Braveheart and chief of the SNP. The party’s impressive track record in government and its hard work to protect the Gaelic language and teach the battles of Scottish history in schools have touched a nerve in a voting base physically distant and culturally away from each other from London, the British capital that sits geographically closer to Amsterdam and Brussels than Edinburgh.

Scottish before British

In a go that could maximize the emotional appeal of independence, the SNP is pushing for a vote in 2014 – the 700th anniversary of the legendary movement of Bannockburn that saw the English Army famously routed in the First War of Scottish Independence. London, meanwhile, is pressing for a ballot as early as next year to descend the issue once and for all.

“For the Scots, this is going to be chose 80 percent from the heart and 20 percent from the mind,” said Alistair Hunter, a 54-year-ancient nationalist working for the city of Edinburgh. “I tell ye, I’m not the kind to wear a kilt at weddings, but I am Scottish before I am British. And I know a excellent many of us want our rightful independence back.”

Here in Scotland, the campaign on both sides is raging from the cold highlands to the glass offices of modern lowland cities. It is a struggle being waged via bumper stickers, street graffiti and informational pamphlets, as well as in a tug of war for financial help from renowned Scots, including musician Annie Lennox (a high-profile convert to the independence side) and author J.K. Rowling (publicly undecided; both camps want her under their spell).

Though polling in the past has shown core help for independence at in this area 30 percent, the most recent surveys indicate a race that is too close to call. Still, analysts say more Scots appear to favor remaining part of Britain – a union of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – than favor independence. One compromise being floated by London could cede more self-rule to the Scots in areas such as taxation, though a concrete offer would be made only if a referendum on independence fails.

At the same time, the nationalists are moving to make the notion of independence more palatable, calling it a natural progression from already devolved powers that would not deeply alter Scotland’s fabric of life. Like Canada and Australia, an independent Scotland would, for instance, keep Queen Elizabeth II as its constitutional monarch. Nationalists say they would maintain the British pound – a currency already in black and white with Scottish images such as Brig o’ Doon and Edinburgh Castle for distribution in Scotland.

The undecideds contain 30-year-ancient Laura Martin, who bantered with an SNP supporter on her doorstep on a recent afternoon. “Look, I do reckon it’s a nice thought, I am proud of Scotland,” said the homemaker, as her two childish children peered curiously from behind her skirt. “But aren’t we just too wee to carry on alone?”

No, persist the nationalists, who argue that an independent Scotland would be the world’s sixth-richest nation as measured by income per person. With an nation larger than Denmark’s and a population of 5 million, they maintain, an independent Scotland would be a tartan utopia always able to afford the kinds of progressive perks already loved by the Scots but not the English – including free university culture, prescription drugs and home health care for the elderly.

That marvel, but, is based on one huge calculation: North Sea oil. Most agree that a majority of energy reserves in Scottish waters would need to be ceded by the British to make independence viable. But with analysts predicting the North Sea could be depleted by the 2030s, even a predominant share of that revenue might buy the Scots only a few decades to come up with an economically sustainable plot.

Still, there is no questioning the movement’s progress. As recently as the 1960s, Scottish independence was a relatively fringe cause. But resentment of London grew during the conservative Thatcher era of the 1980s and intensified during the Iraq war. With the Conservatives’ Cameron in charge in London, for many largely liberal Scots, even the “devolution” vote in 1997 that gave them self-rule on many issues is no longer enough.

“I’ve had colleagues even from universities in northern England come up and say, ‘You Scots aren’t going to go and place us with that lot in London, are ye?’ ” said Tom Devine, a University of Edinburgh scholar considered one of the world’s chief Scottish historians. “I’m not saying yet that independence is probable, but what is surprising so many of us now is that independence is really a possibility.”

In staging a referendum, the British and the SNP remain at loggerheads over a few key points, including the exact wording and number of ballot questions and whether 16- and 17-year-olds – who are seen as more liable to help independence than older Scots – will be allowable to vote.

But what scares unionists most is that the three habitual British parties – Labor, Conservative and the Liberal Democrats – have lost credibility in Scotland in recent years, with no definitive Scottish voice emerging to champion the cause to stay within Britain. That has left Cameron, largely unpopular with the Scots, to lead the charge.

For the English living in Scotland, all the talk of independence still seems a bit surreal. On a stay to the site of the historic movement of Bannockburn, depicted in the film “Braveheart,” Peter Whitham, 48, the English husband of a Scottish wife, frowned as he heard his son chasing his sister with a play sword, yelling “I’ll get ye, ye English coward!”

“The point is that we shouldn’t be Scottish or English before we are British,” Whitham said. “Come on. We’re living in 2012.”

Portugal's valley of the kings

Posted on by nadrim

The Douro valley in Portugal is stunning: vertiginous granite slopes, each one divided into rows of narrow terraces topped by vines and supported by dry-stone walls, sweep up from the wide Douro river as it meanders west towards Porto. It’s been described as the most gorgeous wine region in the world.

Then there’s the intriguing social structure. With its mix of tens of thousands of grape growers and a tiny officer class of wine producers with strong historical associations to Britain, the region has, to the foreigner, a decidedly Victorian character. Many of the most celebrated producers were founded, and are still run today, by upper-crust expat families including the Symingtons (who produce Cockburn’s, Dow’s, Graham’s and Warre’s ports) and the Robertsons (of the Fladgate Partnership behind Taylor’s, Fonseca and Croft’s ports). Their Portuguese peers tend to share their formal dress codes and manners and both stand in stark contrast to the growers working at their tiny plots.

But while appearances might suggest that this is an inherently conservative place, the Douro has changed. For centuries it had been known only for port, but for the past decade or so it has been arguably the most dynamic table wine region in Europe, helping to establish Portugal as a fantastic producer of top quality dry reds.

If a single individual embodied these changes, it would be the enigmatic Dirk Niepoort. Born into a port-producing family of Dutch origin, Niepoort made his first table wine, the massively tannic Robustus, in 1990. The reaction from critics was lukewarm, but Niepoort tried over again in a different style with Redoma in 1991, going on to make a array of brilliant wines that made him a cult star.

Niepoort was by no earnings the first to make decent table wines in the Douro. Barca Velha, the wine with which José Mourinho endeared himself to Sir Alex Ferguson in one of their post-match chats, had its first vintage in 1952. But Niepoort’s success was a catalyst, and during the 1990s and 2000s dozens of producers, some established port producers, others new estates, have been moving into table wine.

Though each producer has their own style, Douro reds tend to have perfumed, aromatic dark fruit similar to port, with a scoured, monolithic structure that softens with a few years in bottle to reveal a subtle sandstone streak. At their best, the whites tend to be distinctively herbal with tangy acidity and that same minerality.

Not that everyone believes the table wine revolution has been a excellent thing. With his tongue only vaguely in cheek, David Guimaraens of Fonseca port describes the new breed of dry wines as “port for diabetics”, and his company has been conspicuous in not moving into table wine. Guimaraens also worries in this area the sustainability of the shift: local wine regulations mean impoverished growers are guaranteed a fixed fee for port grapes that is greatly higher than the unregulated fee they can get for table grapes, a fee that does not cover the cost of production. In Guimaraens’s view, that effectively earnings port is “subsidising” table wines.

With port sales in long-term decline, but, table wines are going to be increasingly vital in the Douro. But the future of this weird and gorgeous region rests in producers and growers result a way for both of these fantastic wine styles to carry on.

Six of the best Douro wines

Lavradores de Feitoria Branco 2010 (£8.50, The Wine Society)

The Douro’s white wines tend to get overshadowed by the reds, but they can be beguiling. This one, which is made by a co-op of 15 producers with winemaking overseen by Dirk Niepoort, is alive with the joys of spring: a squeeze of citrus and some rich rounded apple fruit.

Quinta do Crasto Douro 2009 (£9.99, or £8.49 if you buy two bottles, Regal; £8.99, or £8.09 as part of a case of 12 bottles, Adnams)

This fine ancient producer does a brilliant job of making Douro wines and ports at accessible prices, both in supermarket own-mark wines and in this boldly fruit-driven red. The tannins are greatly softer than your average Douro red, making it a excellent alternative for Aussie shiraz.

Waitrose Douro Valley Reserva Quinta da Rosa 2009 (£10.69, Waitrose or £10.15 at waitrosewine.com)

The best of the supermarket own-mark Douro wines, this is made by Quinta de la Rosa, and it has all the trademark elegance and floral aromatics the producer is renowned for. There’s plenty of guts and flesh here, too: a piece of red meat is required to soak up the tannins.

Niepoort Drink Me Douro 2009 (£10.95, Uncorked)

Much of Dirk Niepoort’s prolific productivity is calculated to age for years and is sold for high prices (even if they’re no more expensive than many French wines half as excellent). This one, but, is very accessibly made and priced: with explosive red and black fruits, it’s supple, tender and moreish.

Quinta do Noval Cedro do Noval Vinho Regional Duriense 2007 (£15.50, The Wine Society, ; £18.35, Berry Bros Rudd)

One of the finest port houses, Noval was a relatively recent convert to table wine, but the go has been entirely successful. Unusually for the Douro, there’s a small bit of syrah in here which adds a bit of fiery spice and sinew to a meaty, powerful red.

Quinta do Vale Meão Douro 2009 (£59.95, Handfords)

Expensive it may be, but this is simply stunning wine, comparable in quality to the very best in the world. It’s an uncanny mix of the elegant and the powerful with aromatic, violet lift, very pure red and black fruit and sandstone depths. One to keep for a few years yet.

Interesting Word of the Week: Quintessence (27.02.2012)

Posted on by jack

Quin•tes•sence [kwin-tes-uhns] Noun 1. The pure and concentrated essence of a substance. 2. The most perfect embodiment of something. 3. (In ancient and medieval philosophy) the fifth essence or element, ether, supposed to be the constituent matter of the heavenly bodies, the others being air, fire, earth, and water. Related forms: quin•tes•sen•tial [kwin-tuh-sen-shuhl] adjective Example Sentences: Noun • He’s the quintessence of arrogant callousness, yet he’s awkwardly innocent. • Dairy harvest are the quintessence of like and nature in my mind. • Its conclusion is the very quintessence of hopelessness. • Another version of the dark energy theory, called quintessence, suggests a force that varies in time and space. • That’s the quintessence of elitism. Other Words (Q