EL LOBBISME DES DE LA POLÍTICA

Grans noms vinguts de la política, a esquerra i a dreta, posen el seu poder d'influència al servei de les elèctriques 

10/01/16 02:00 - BARCELONA - JORDI GARRIGA RIU 

El viatge del càrrec amb responsabilitat a l'administració cap a un lloc en una de les grans empreses del sector elèctric s'ha convertit en un fet normalitzat en un sector que es resisteix a perdre el seu caràcter concessional. 

El polític que arriba d'un ministeri al consell d'administració d'una gran elèctrica duu una gran agenda d'influències i una capacitat de pressió, sobre l'executiu i el legislatiu, que no és menyspreable. De vegades, es tracta simplement de pagar serveis prestats. Un joc, el de portes giratòries, en què s'hi juga des de l'esquerra i des de la dreta. 

En el reguitzell de fitxatges enlluernadors d'Endesa, va destacar amb llum pròpia fins al 2014 tot un president, José María Aznar, que s'enduia per fer lobbisme uns 200.000 euros a l'any. En aquesta tasca hi vam veure, abans de ser ministre d'Economia, Luis de Guindos, i va anar de ben poc que el seu seient al consell l'ocupés Rodrigo Rato. El partit de la gavina també va tenir com a candidat tot un expresident d'aquesta elèctrica, Manuel Pizarro, l'home que es va encarregat de neutralitzar l'opa de Gas Natural sobre Fenosa. 

Però Endesa també ha tingut al seu consell personatges del cantó oposat en l'espectre polític, amb tota una ministra d'Economia, Elena Salgado, que tot just deixar l'alt càrrec va esdevenir vocal del consell d'administració de la filial xilena de l'elèctrica. També procedent del PSOE, i amb aura ministerial, és Joan Majó, antic titular d'Indústria i membre del consell assessor de l'elèctrica que presideix David Madí, qui fou gran estrateg d'Artur Mas a CDC. Miquel Roca Junyent, a qui li corresponia ser hereu de Jordi Pujol, des del seu bufet d'advocats ha sabut crear vincles valuosos, com ser conseller independent, per un sou de 308.378 euros. No hauríem d'oblidar tot un emblema de la Transició, de com la va conduir la dreta, com ara Rodolfo Martín Villa, exministre d'Interior i exvicepresident del govern, entre altres molts càrrecs amb la UCD, i que actualment, després d'haver estat a la filial xilena d'Endesa, n'és president d'honor. 

Iberdrola també ha anat a pescar a la política gent que es fa rebre i escoltar. Podríem començar amb aquell ministre de l'Interior que s'entestava a adjudicar l'atemptat terrorista del 14-M a ETA, Ángel Acebes, que ara potser no ha de recórrer a la seva vehemència com a membre del consell d'administració d'Iberdrola (216.000 euros anuals de retribució). 

Juan María Atutxa, exconseller d'Interior del PNB, dóna fe de la diversitat política en la nòmina de consellers d'Iberdrola, talment com Manuel Marín, socialista expresident del Congrés dels Diputats i exvicepresident de la Comissió Europea, que presideix la Fundació Iberdrola. Un altre gran puntal és Braulio Medel, antic cervell econòmic dels socialistes a Andalusia, que és conseller independent de l'elèctrica (297.000 euros de retribució). A Gas Natural Fenosa, segur que era significada al consell, com a representant de Repsol, la presència d'un exsecretari general d'Energia i Recursos Minerals amb Aznar, Nemesio Fernández Cuesta. En representació de Criteria Caixaholding, al consell hi ha Heribert Padrol, exnúmero dos de la llista de CiU al Congrés (126.500 euros de retribució anual). Cristina Garmendia, antiga ministra de Ciència i Innovació amb els socialistes, és una altra presència destacada del consell. El ministre que no va saber, o no va voler, observar que venia la crisi, el socialista Pedro Solbes, és conseller d'Enel, accionista de referència a Endesa, amb un sou de 132.000 euros. Red Eléctrica Española (REE) és també un altre gran cementiri d'elefants remunerats amb 150.000.180.000 euros anuals, amb noms ben significatius com ara Ángeles Amador, exministra de Sanitat amb el PSOE; Ana Cuevas, antiga cap de gabinet de la secretaria d'estat d'Energia i Desenvolupament Industrial amb el PP; Paloma Sendín, exdirectora general de Mines amb el PP, o el mateix president de la cotitzada, José Folgado, que amb els populars va ocupar el càrrec de secretari d'estat d'Economia, Energia i Pressupostos. Abengoa, ara tan necessitada de liquiditat per esquivar la fallida, també ha recorregut a exalts càrrecs de l'administració, com ara Luis Solana, exdiputat socialista i antic director de RTVE, i José Domínguez Abascal, exalt càrrec de la Junta d'Andalusia. A Enagás hi trobem noms com ara Antonio Hernández Mancha, exlíder d'Alianza Popular, i Isabel Tocino, exministra de Medi Ambient amb el PP. 

http://www.leconomic.cat/neco/article/4-economia/18-economia/930983-lobbisme-des-de-la-politica.html

Zygmunt Bauman: “Social media are a trap”

The Polish-born sociologist is skeptical about the possibilities for political change

Zygmunt Bauman has just celebrated his 90th birthday and taken two flights from his home in the northern British city of Leeds to get to an event in Burgos, northern Spain. He admits to being tired as we begin the interview, but he still manages to express his ideas calmly and clearly, taking his time with each response because he hates giving simple answers to complex questions. Since developing his theory of liquid modernity in the late 1990s – which describes our age as one in which “all agreements are temporary, fleeting, and valid only until further notice” – he has become a leading figure in the field of sociology. His work on inequality and his critique of what he sees as the failure of politics to meet people’s expectations, along with a highly pessimistic view of the future of society, have been picked up by the so-called May 15 “Indignant” movement in Spain – although he has repeatedly highlighted its weaknesses.

Born in Poland in 1925, Bauman’s parents fled to the Soviet Union following the German invasion in 1939. In 1968, after he was stripped of his post as a teacher and expelled from the Communist Party along with thousands of other Jews in the wake of the Six-Day War, he left for the United Kingdom, taking up a post at Leeds University where he is now Emeritus Professor of Sociology. His work has been awarded numerous international prizes, among them Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award, in 2010.

He has outlined his pessimistic world view in books such as 2014’s Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?, which argues that the world is paying a high price for the neoliberal revolution that began in the 1980s and that wealth has not trickled down to the rest of society. In Moral Blindness, published last year, he and co-author Leonidas Donskis warn about the loss of community in our increasingly individualistic world.

QUESTION. You have described inequality as a “metastasis.” Is democracy under threat?

ANSWER. We could describe what is going on at the moment as a crisis of democracy, the collapse of trust: the belief that our leaders are not just corrupt or stupid, but inept. Action requires power, to be able to do things, and we need politics, which is the ability to decide what needs to be done. But that marriage between power and politics in the hands of the nation state has ended. Power has been globalized, but politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off. People no longer believe in the democratic system because it doesn’t keep its promises. We see this, for example, with the migration crisis: it’s a global phenomenon, but we still act parochially. Our democratic institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of democratic institutions.

Q. In which direction is the pendulum that you describe between freedom and security swinging at the moment?

A. These are two values that are tremendously difficult to reconcile. If you want more security, you’re going to have to give up a certain amount of freedom; if you want more freedom, you’re going to have to give up security. This dilemma is going to continue forever. Forty years ago we believed that freedom had triumphed and we began an orgy of consumerism. Everything seemed possible by borrowing money: cars, homes… and you just paid for it later. The wakeup call in 2008 was a bitter one, when the loans dried up. The catastrophe, the social collapse that followed hit the middle classes particularly hard, dragging them into a precarious situation where they remain: they don’t know if their company is going to merge with another and they will be laid off, they don’t know if what they have bought really belongs to them… Conflict is no longer between classes, but between each person and society. It isn’t just a lack of security, but a lack of freedom.

Q. You say that progress is a myth, because people no longer believe the future will be better than the past.

A. We are in a period of interregnum, between a time when we had certainties and another when the old ways of doing things no longer work. We don’t know what is going to replace this. We are experimenting with new ways of doing things. Spain tried questioning things through the May 15 (15M) movement, when people took over public spaces, arguing, trying to replace parliamentary procedures with a kind of direct democracy. This hasn’t lasted long. Austerity policies will continue, nobody could stop them, but they could still be relatively effective in finding new ways to do things.

Q. You have argued that the likes of 15M and the global Occupy movement know “how to clear the way, but not how to create something solid.”

A. People set aside their differences for a while in the public squares for a common goal. If that goal is negative, about getting angry with someone, there is more chance of success. In a way it could have been an explosion of solidarity, but explosions are very powerful and short-lived.

Q. You also believe that by their nature, there is no room for leadership in rainbow coalitions.

A. It is precisely because such movements lack leaders that they can survive, but it is also precisely because they lack leaders that they cannot convert their sense of purpose into action.

Q. In Spain, the 15M movement has helped create new political forces.

A. Changing one party for another will not solve the problem. The problem is not that the parties are wrong, but that they don’t control things. Spain’s problems are part of a global problem. It’s a mistake to think you can solve things internally.

Q. What do you think about the Catalan independence project?

A. I think we’re still following the principles of Versailles, when the idea of each nation’s right to self rule was established. But that’s a fiction in today’s world, when there are no more homogeneous territories. Today, every society is just a collection of diasporas. People join the societies to which they are loyal and pay their taxes, but at the same time, they do not want to give up their identity. The connection between where you live and identity has been broken. The situation in Catalonia, as in Scotland or Lombardy, is a contradiction between tribal identity and citizenship. They are Europeans, but they don’t want to talk to Brussels via Madrid, but via Barcelona. The same logic is emerging in almost every country. We are still following the same principles established at the end of World War I, but there have been many changes in the world.

Q. You are skeptical of the way people protest through social media, of so-called “armchair activism,” and say that the internet is dumbing us down with cheap entertainment. So would you say that the social networks are the new opium of the people?

A. The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.

http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html

BUILDING A BUSINESS OF POLITICS

Hardcover: 296 pages

• Publisher: OUP USA (28 Jan. 2016)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0190217197
• ISBN-13: 978-0190217198

Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy 

Since the early twentieth century, political races in the United States have relied on highly paid political consultants to carefully curate the perceived personalities of hopeful politicians, to advise candidates using polling and analytics, and to affect voters' perceptions with marketing and advertising techniques. Much of the $1.3 billion spent in the 2012 presidential election went to these consultants who control virtually every aspect of the campaigns from polling, fundraising, and media to more novel techniques of social media and micro-targeting. These consultants play a larger role in our political races than ever before-determining not only how the public sees politicians, but also how politicians see the public. 

In Building a Business of Politics¸ author Adam Sheingate traces the history of political consultants back to the Progressive Era at the turn of the twentieth century, when reformers viewed increased publicity as a positive way to further open politics up to public scrutiny. Through the following century, the addition of publicity to politics transformed political races into a very profitable business. Consultants command a hefty fee from politicians and in turn leverage the perceived message of the politician into increased special interest group campaign donations. In fact, critics often blame these consultants for the state of politics today. 

The implications of this system on the state of American democracy are significant: the rise of the permanent campaign brings with it the rise of a permanent campaign industry, thus affecting the priorities of politicians. A professional political class stands between the voters and those who claim to represent them, influencing messages on both sides. This book shows how the character of our politics depends on who controls these vital aspects of democratic practice, and what this means for the future of our political system.

Preface

1.) The Business of Politics
2.) Publicity and the Public
3.) Professional Propaganda
4.) The Art and Science of Politics
5.) A Business Takes Shape
6.) Advertising Politics
7.) The Consolidation of Control 
8.) The Business of Digital Politics
9.) The Evolution of Political Work

Appendix: Estimating the Size of the Political Consulting Industry
Notes
Index

 Adam Sheingate

Adam Sheingate is an associate professor and chair of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy. His is also a co-editor of theOxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism and the author of the Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State: Institutions and Interest Group Power in the United States, France, and Japan as well as journal articles and book chapters on American political development, historical institutionalism, and comparative public policy.

 Sheingate teaches courses on American politics and institutions at the graduate and undergraduate level, including a popular seminar on the politics of food. Prior to joining the Johns Hopkins University faculty, Sheingate was a Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford. He is also a past-recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar Award in Health Policy Research at the University of California-Berkeley, and he served as the Mary Ball Washington Professor in American History at University College Dublin.