Spain: "Demonstrations turned violent in Barcelona as angry young adults clashed with police"

BARCELONA, SPAIN - FEBRUARY 29: A riot police officer reacts in front of a fire during a university students demonstration on February 29, 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. Student associations have called upon 120,000 students to strike in protest against education cuts recently announced by the Catalan government. (Getty Images)

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Tens of thousands of students protested education spending cuts in big cities across Spain on Wednesday, and the demonstrations turned violent in Barcelona as angry young adults clashed with police.

Riot police charged a crowd outside the stock market in Barcelona, Spain's second largest city, after protesters who broke away from a peaceful rally numbering thousands threw rocks and other objects.

Video in Spanish media showed protesters setting plastic garbage containers alight with flares, causing a blaze that destroyed at least one car. They also hurled rocks at the glass front door of a bank branch. [...]

Spain is in the midst of a deep economic crisis, with the unemployment rate for people ages 16-24 at nearly 50 percent.

Many young adults fear they have no future in the country and are angry at the new conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, which is enacting widespread austerity cuts to prevent the country from being forced into a bailout such as those taken by Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

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It's important to note that Obama regularly mentions Spain as the model for where he wants to take our country.

The [Obama] administration regularly mentions Spain as the model for where they want to take our country in terms of wind energy and “millions of green jobs”. Countries in Europe moved to wind energy faster so we can learn from their experience.

Very instructive is the study by Dr. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Juan Carlos University in Madrid that found for every green job you create, you can count on 2.2 lost real jobs. AND only 1 in 10 green jobs are permanent. The study calculated that, since 2000, Spain spent $774,000 to create each “green job”, including subsidies of more than $1.3 million per wind industry job. It found that creating those jobs resulted in the destruction of nearly 113,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every “green job” created. Principally, jobs were lost in the fields of metallurgy, non-metallic mining and food processing, beverage and tobacco.

“The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices,” Dr.Calzada said recently in an interview with Bloomberg News.

The Obama administration believes that tax payer monies diverted to the industries they like solar, wind, electric cars will assure success.

In reality, as shown by Spain, it doesn't.

It bypasses the normal market economy where those technologies that are useful, workable, marketable, reliable, and competitive are the ones that succeed.

It's like the Chevy Volt. A complete failure for a number of reasons — cost, maintenance, competitiveness, engineering problems (like battery fires). One review called it the 20k car you can get for 42k. It may be "the most government-supported car since the Trabant", costing taxpayers up to $250K per vehicle. Fortunately, they aren't selling many.