News Briefs — SPAIN: Demonstrators Protest Bank Bailouts and Spending Cuts

By - - Reprint | | Print |

Feb 25 2012 (IPS) - MÁLAGA, Spain, Feb 25 2012 (IPS) – Demonstrators in nearly two dozen cities in Spain raised their voices Friday to protest against the use of public funds to bail out banks while the budgets for basic services like education and health are being slashed.

In the southern city of Málaga, dozens of people chanting “We aren’t paying for this crisis” and “The bank always wins, and I don’t like that” marched through streets downtown in a festive mood and entered a bank to try to cash symbolic checks, saying they were facing “a shortage of funds after the government’s cutbacks,” which especially hurt middle and lower-income sectors.

The simultaneous nationwide protests against the bank bailout were organised over the on-line social networks by Democracia Real Ya (DRY) – Real Democracy Now – a platform that sparked the May 15 movement (15-M).

The demonstration “aims to highlight, by peaceful action in many banks around our country, the enormous responsibility of financial bodies for the difficult situation we are in,” Fabio Gándara, a DRY spokesman in Madrid, told IPS. We criticise the use of public money to rescue mostly private banks,” Santiago R., a DRY spokesman in Málaga who preferred not to give his last name, told IPS.

The DRY manifesto complains that on the one hand, for the sake of the stability of the financial system, taxpayers are being asked to rescue institutions ruined by ineffective management, while on the other they are being forced to bear the loss of public services. “There is not even money for heating in public institutes in Valencia, yet millions of euros are being injected into the banks,” said R.

This week, thousands of students, parents and teachers, supported by trade unions and political parties, took to the streets in many Spanish cities to protest the cuts in education and condemn the Monday Feb. 20 brutal police crackdown on a group of students during a peaceful rally in Valencia, in the southeast of the country.

“The situation borders on madness. There is a lack of common sense,” said the Málaga DRY spokesman, in whose view public money should be used to improve the lives of all citizens.The manifesto calls for an immediate stop to bank bailouts using public money, as well as the clarification of all economic or criminal liabilities arising from poor management of the rescued institutions.