Greece: Syriza touts for investors and fêtes Macron

Katerina Selin

In Greece, the parliamentary summer break is over, and in the weeks and months ahead, a new round of cuts will begin, which will inevitably lead to fierce class battles.

On Monday, representatives of the troika—European Commission, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund—returned to the country to check on the progress of the government’s austerity measures.

“Tsipras faces a hot autumn,” was the headline of a leading German business daily Handelsblatt in its August weekend edition. The government of the pseudo-left Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), under Prime Minister Tsipras, has been tasked to carry through a further 113 reforms and austerity measures by August 2018, which were agreed with the country’s international creditors. Only then will Greece be provided with the financial means it needs to pay its debts.

Tsipras has promised to push through 90 different cuts by the end of the year. Further social cuts, limitations on the right to strike, stricter controls on hiring public sector workers and the implementation of a series of privatizations, represent just a few of the attacks that the working class will face.

Tsipras is preparing for his “hot autumn” and seeking solidarity from the European and international bourgeoisie. Last weekend, he used the annual trade fair in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, to tout Greece as a haven for foreign capital and a reliable partner for the geo-political interests of the great powers. The fair attracts entrepreneurs and bankers from all over the world; this time there were more than in previous years, mainly from the host country, China.

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Thessaloniki for rallies and protests against the business summit, which was protected by about 4,000 officers from special police units.

In his opening speech, Tsipras kowtowed before the international financial and business elite. No one could deny the enormous “interest from investors in our country,” he enthused. “Greece’s image” had fundamentally changed in recent years, “for the positive.” He then forecast a growth in Gross Domestic Product of almost 2 percent for 2017.

Based on current economic data from the Greek statistics authority (Elsat), the prime minister calculated that Syriza had transformed the country into an economic paradise for foreign investors, and resorted to a clumsy play on words, declaring that the country had gone from “Grexit” to “Grinvest.”

This had only been possible, he said, through the “winning back” of international recognition and Greece’s geo-political position. These important steps included the recent visit by French President Emmanuel Macron, the visit of former US President Barack Obama and the Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as his own visits to China. In this way, Greece had once more become a “strategic partner” for significant international economic powers.

Tsipras went on to boast, “Even if some still condemn us as enemies of business, we have developed very concrete initiatives and carried these through on the way to improving the business climate.” For example, 11,000 businesses had benefited from a simplification of licensing procedures; the financial sector had also made a positive development, and the largest agreement so far had been concluded with the European Investment Bank, in order to improve Greece’s liquidity. With French support, Greece was planning the establishment of its own development bank.

In the second part of his speech, Tsipras claimed that economic growth would also benefit the majority of the population. He attempted to substantiate this open lie by listing the social measures introduced by Syriza, including the creation of new jobs, the improvement of access to health care and the reforms in education. However, given the massive social attacks that Syriza has carried out—contrary to its own election promises—the measures listed are nothing more than crumbs, handed out to try and prevent a social explosion, or that will prove, on closer inspection, to be nothing but illusions.

For example, according to Savvas Rombilis, Scientific Director of the Institute for Work of the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE), and honorary professor at Pantheon University in Athens, just over half of those hired in 2016 now work part-time. Where Elsat talks of a fall in unemployment to 21.5 percent, actual unemployment stands at about 31.5 percent, according to a study by the European Central Bank.

In continuing his austerity measures, Tsipras is relying on the close collaboration of the other European governments. A week ago, he received a visit from French President Macron, who was accompanied to Athens by a phalange of French business leaders and bankers. Macron praised Tsipras and his “reforms” to the skies and used the Athens trip to seek support for his own attacks on French workers’ rights.

The Syriza leader, who three years ago posed as the voice of opposition, rolled out the red carpet for the former investment banker. Macron delivered a long and florid speech on the Pynx at the foot of the Acropolis. As twilight fell, he spoke of the “future” of Europe, with no shortage of platitudes about the heritage of ancient democracy.

The French president proposed the extension and redirection of the European institutions, and stressed: “In order not to be dominated by great powers such as the Chinese or Americans, I believe in a European sovereignty that permits us to defend and assert ourselves.” He also called for debt relief for Greece, and for the US-dominated IMF to withdraw from the Greek debt programme, something Germany strictly opposes.

Essentially, Macron seeks the strengthening of the European Union as an imperialist counter-weight to the US, and as a bulwark against the European working class. This is also Syriza’s perspective.

Tsipras posted photos of himself with his “friend” Macron on Twitter, and wrote: “We support initiatives for a new economic and financial architecture of the EU towards a more democratic and social Europe.”

He declared that his country had “opened a new chapter” and assured Macron that he would “not regret investing in Greece.” Macron was accompanied by several French businesses that hope to profit from the purchase of Greek state-owned enterprises. Energy company Total is extracting oil and gas in the Ionian Sea, and is interested in resources in the Mediterranean. An international consortium with French participation recently took over the running of the port at Thessaloniki. The Suez conglomerate is interested in taking over the water supply in both Athens and Thessaloniki.

A member of the French delegation told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that contracts would be agreed for the Greek purchase of French military hardware in the next months.

In the mainstream Greek media and government circles, Macron was treated like a superstar. In an interview with the state news agency ANA-MPA, vice foreign minister Giorgos Katrougalos (Syriza) gushed, “The visit of Macron was a great political event, not just for the two countries’ bilateral relations, but also for the future of Europe.” That Macron had brought the “leaders of the French business world” was a “confirmation of the transformation of the Greek economy towards growth.”

According to Katrougalos, Tsipras and Macron would share the view that the economic policy of the euro zone had to be “democratized.” The Greek premier had even proposed the appointment of a European “minister for social cohesion.” “Growth and social cohesion” were the precondition for the “new social model of just development that our government is already pursuing.”

Katrougalos, who was minister of labour from 2015 to 2016, knows exactly whereof he speaks. The “new social model of just development” is a euphemism for the aggressive austerity policies that have led, in recent years, to an unparalleled redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top in Greece. The call to make this the example to follow throughout Europe should be understood by European workers as an unconcealed threat.

Australia: New “learning precinct” ties public schools to business

David Cohen

In a precedent-setting move that will undermine both public schools and their teaching staff, the state Labor government in Victoria is amalgamating several public schools in Melbourne’s inner-west, under the banner of the “Footscray Learning Precinct.”

The “national first” is aimed at directly tying every level of education, from kindergarten to university, to the needs of businesses and corporations.

This agenda is proceeding behind the backs of ordinary teachers, students and families in the area. Sham “community consultation” events have been held, including “pop-up” stalls in local shopping centres. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, everything is being worked out by the state government, in collusion with the Australian Education Union, on the basis of the pro-business conclusions of the “Review into Government School Funding,” issued by former Premier Steve Bracks in December 2015.

The Victorian government has already spent $15 million on initial planning for the development of three northern, central and southern “hubs” of the Footscray Learning Precinct.

According to the publicly announced proposals, several schools in Footscray will be effectively merged across several campuses over the next three years. Footscray City College, now a Year 7–12 school, will be redeveloped as a senior Year 10–12 school. The Gilmore College for Girls, currently a girls-only Year 7–12 school, will be effectively shut down, with the site and facilities used for a new co-educational Year 7–9 school. Another, smaller, multi-storey Year 7–9 high school is planned for construction on a small plot of land in the area. Footscray City Primary School will be expanded, and a new kindergarten centre opened nearby.

Victoria University is a prominent part of the proposed Learning Precinct” and will supposedly help establish a new Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Learning Centre, available for use by schools in the precinct. The advance of STEM is connected to the promotion of new tech industries in Melbourne’s inner-west, as well as the wider agenda of developing new military technologies.

How much of these plans eventuate remains to be seen. Many details of the project remain open to revision, and, crucially, the government is yet to invest the necessary infrastructure funding. A change in government at the next state election, or a stepped up austerity drive by the current administration, could trigger the scrapping of the entire scheme.

The state Labor government is nevertheless making grandiose claims about the Footscray project. Education Minister James Merlino declared earlier this year: “The Learning Precinct is an Australian-first that will transform education in the inner-west … giving families access to a first-class education from early childhood to university.”

In reality, the government’s perspective has very little to do with the quality of education being provided to children. Its primary concern is the quality of its relationship with the financial and corporate elites.

This was made clear last April, in the “Footscray Learning Precinct Feasibility Report” prepared for the government by the Aurecon transnational corporate consulting firm. The report is saturated in business jargon, reflecting the underlying agenda. It outlined how the government and local council could “maximise the return on investment of all assets [i.e., schools]” by “making better use of existing and under-utilised sites.”

“Maximising returns” is code for failing to invest the necessary public money into constructing the new schools required in the rapidly growing area.

Severe shortages of public school places are already emerging, and forecast to rapidly worsen in the next years. The government’s own feasibility report for the precinct found that Footscray is set to “experience a population boom in the next 25 years,” increasing from 17,000 to 46,000. This 170 percent population growth is lower than the forecast rise in the number of school-aged children in the area, with a 266 percent increase in the number of 5–11 year-olds anticipated over the same period.

In Footscray, as across Australia, state and federal governments have deliberately done nothing to plan, develop and construct the necessary new public schools to meet population growth. This failure in public policy has become another mechanism for promoting the expansion of the private school system.

In Melbourne’s inner-west, existing schools will be crammed with ever-greater numbers of students. The one new school planned for Footscray, a Year 7–9 school on Pilgrim Street, will be a so-called “vertical school.” Rather than invest the necessary resources to purchase adequate land for the new school, the government has commissioned the construction of a multi-level tower, with students denied access to adequate open-air playing and physical exercise areas.

The Aurecon report’s conclusions detail the longer term calculations of the business world, beyond its immediate budget concerns.

Parts of western Melbourne have been devastated by deindustrialisation in recent decades, with the pending shut down of the car industry set to further exacerbate unemployment and poverty. While tens of thousands of working-class families in these areas have been abandoned and thrown onto the unemployment scrapheap, the Footscray Learning Precinct is being geared towards providing new opportunities for a select layer of the children of a new upper-middle class in Melbourne’s gentrifying inner-west.

The state government has outlined a perspective of establishing the inner-west as a new centre for the technology and tertiary education industries. The architectural firm responsible for the new infrastructure in the “Learning Precinct,” claimed that the aim was to “transform Footscray from an industrial city to a knowledge city.”

The Footscray Learning Precinct Feasibility Report underscored the way in which public education will be narrowed to the immediate needs of big business.

The document emphasised that the new precinct would “create greater alignment between the skills demanded by employers and those taught in education and training,” with a “high technology focus.” It would allow for greater curriculum specialisation, “based around future industry and employment demands.” This would, the report concluded, “deliver a community service that meets community and industry needs that may not be commercially viable using other private provider models.”

The learning model will focus on the “collection and sharing of student data” with literacy and numeracy being “enhanced across all curriculum areas.” In other words, the agenda will involve an even greater focus on NAPLAN standardised test results.

Such a regressive, profit-driven model for school education runs directly counter to the democratic conception that all children have the right to an all-rounded, high quality, intellectual, physical and cultural education.

Another report, “A Future Focused Learning Framework for the Footscray Learning Precinct,” commissioned by the government, detailed the pressures that will face teachers who work there. It showcased the work of education academic, Yong Zhao, and his concept of an “Entrepreneurial Mindset.” Yong, who addressed a “Pedagogy Working Group” convened by the government for the Footscray Learning Precinct, has elsewhere explained that an “Entrepreneurial Mindset” should be taught in schools because “massive changes brought about by population growth, technology, and globalisation not only demand but also create opportunities for ‘mass entrepreneurship.’”

The state Labor government’s plans for the precinct make clear that any barriers to an extension of the corporate reach into public schools in the area will be torn down.

The Feasibility Report insisted that the “private sector and organisations that have not historically been considered as partners for education organisations must be considered” in order to “forge greater integration of educational services and facilities, and build a culture of collaboration in the community.” It explained that the Precinct would provide the opportunity to “support strategic alliances and partnerships between Maribyrnong City Council, Victoria University, education providers, communities and businesses [to] support schools, with resources to increase services delivered ‘inside the school gate.’”

These measures are aimed at making Footscray public school students and teachers the guinea pigs for a wider restructuring of the education system.

The education agenda underlying the new Learning Precinct was detailed in the Bracks review into school funding. This major document, endorsed by the state government and the Australian Education Union, recommended that a new “Learning Partnerships Challenge Fund” be created to “encourage and enable collaboration between schools, other service providers and business, in areas of shared interest.” Bracks added that the government had already “made it easier for businesses to support and make donations to Victorian Government schools,” but complained that existing policies were too “restrictive in the government sector, making it difficult for partnerships to strategically engage with education authorities.”

While classroom teachers across multiple Footscray schools have been kept in the dark about their local Learning Precinct, the Australian Education Union has been integrated into the project’s development from the very beginning. Union bureaucrats were among the first to be officially consulted when the Learning Precinct plan was first unveiled.

The ramping up of the Footscray school amalgamations comes just months after the union rammed through a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement covering Victorian public school teachers. After refusing to hold a single mass meeting, while at the same time orchestrating a campaign of lies and censorship promoting its deal with the government, the union imposed an agreement that not only worsened teaching conditions, but explicitly endorsed further pro-business “education reform.”

The Footscray Learning Precinct provides a foretaste of the further government assault on the public education system that is being actively prepared.

NSA documents expose secret US spying program in Ethiopia

Eddie Haywood

According to documents released Wednesday by the Intercept, the National Security Agency (NSA) has established an elaborate network of spy facilities in Ethiopia.

The documents, acquired from the trove made public by Edward Snowden in 2013, reveal that the NSA’s Ethiopian operation dubbed “Lion’s Pride” encompasses a surveillance effort by Washington over East Africa of enormous magnitude. The secret program’s broad operational components include not only spying and eavesdropping, such as the indiscriminate gathering up of phone calls, e-mails, and Internet traffic in multiple countries, but also comprises a program of cyber warfare and the infection of networks and computers with spyware.

The program set up by the NSA in Ethiopia is strongly suspected to have utilized FinSpy, a software product marketed by the company Finfisher, that allows the user to hijack other computers by e-mailing the target an “infected” attachment file. This enables the FinSpy user to steal passwords remotely, from the target’s Internet browser, e-mail, and even administration passwords. Essentially, the user of this software can take total control of another computer without the target being aware.

The “Deployed Signals Intelligence Operations Center” was set up by the NSA in 2002 in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa, as part of Washington’s “war on terror” in the aftermath of 9/11. According to the document, the spying operation began as a small outpost, employing only twelve Ethiopian officials.

By 2005, the program had expanded its reach and influence to include an additional three remote branches around the country, including one in Gondar, a province in northwestern Ethiopia. The program also expanded its operations to include the eavesdropping on communications in Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.

The spying operations established by Washington in Ethiopia are a key element of the broader drive by imperialist strategists to assert US dominance over the region and the Horn of Africa.

The Ethiopian program functions as a subset of the worldwide operational effort of the NSA’s vast anti-democratic architecture that has stretched its tentacles into Internet and communications networks across the planet.

Illustrating the close relationship Washington has cultivated with the government of Ethiopia with the introduction of the NSA program, the documents cite a report written in 2005 by Katie Pierce, who was the officer-in-charge of Lion’s Pride in Ethiopia, “[The] NSA has an advantage when dealing with the Global War on Terrorism in the Horn of Africa.”

Pierce describes the mutually beneficial relationship between the US and Ethiopia, writing, “The benefit of this relationship is that the Ethiopians provide the location and linguists and we provide the technology and training.”

The establishment of such a blatantly anti-democratic operation in Ethiopia, a country with a history of grave human rights abuses, including extra-judicial murder and torture, corresponds with Washington’s lawless methods in striving for total dominance over the Horn of Africa.

Between 2015 and 2016, during a wave of anti-government demonstrations in Ethiopia, more than 500 protesters were gunned down by security forces, while many others were arrested and beaten. Teargas was used by police indiscriminately to disperse the demonstrations.

In October, attempting to quell the protests, the government of Hailemariam Desalegn imposed a nationwide state of emergency and assumed sweeping draconian powers—which included restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly and granting the police extra-legal powers to detain anyone without cause.

Exposing the true nature of the government’s claim of fighting terrorism, media outlets critical of the government were shut down under the pretext of “promoting violence and disorder”.

In May, elucidating Washington’s imperialist aims for Ethiopia, the US State Department stated on the US Embassy in Ethiopia’s web site: “The U.S. Embassy engages with the Ethiopian government to improve the business climate, create a level playing field for all investors, and to foster an entrepreneurship culture. There are growing opportunities for U.S. trade and investment, particularly in manufacturing, energy, and agricultural processing”.

The NSA program in Ethiopia began after September 11, 2001, when Washington commenced its so-called “war on terror”. Long before the 2001 attacks, Washington regarded the Horn of Africa as a geo-strategic target because the region fronts the main waterway for the world’s oil traffic originating from the Middle East through the Red Sea. In more recent years, the struggle for hegemony has unfolded as part of US imperialism’s rivalry with Chinese influence in Africa.

The chaotic state of Somalia, itself the result of decades of US imperialist intervention, has long been an obstacle to Washington’s aims for the region, beginning with the fall of the Mohamed Siad Barre dictatorship in 1991, which precipitated Somalia’s plunge into complete disarray, with various warring factions battling for power. The destruction of Somalian society has had a grave impact on the masses, and fueled the rise of the islamist militant organization Al-Shabaab.

Backed by the US, Ethiopian forces in 2006 invaded and occupied Somalia to neutralize the Council of Islamic Courts (CIC), when the Somali Islamist organization staged a political rebellion against the US-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu.

According to Human Rights Watch, Ethiopia carried out grave atrocities during the invasion and ensuing occupation, including indiscriminate killings and torture.

Another NSA document divulged by Snowden dated from 2007 reveals that the agency praised Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia. “Ethiopian invasion of Somalia plays to the advantage of US counter-terrorism forces,” it stated.

The document goes on to detail that the NSA provided Ethiopian forces with the agency’s Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) efforts against the CIC, including reports of its troop movements and communications.

Coordinating its intelligence-sharing with the CIA and the US military in Djibouti, the NSA boasted that its “program paid off handsomely” and that “Ethiopia easily defeated the CIC”. The document also boasted of the killing of two unnamed so-called leaders of Al-Qaeda by Ethiopian forces, owing to the effectiveness of the intelligence provided by the NSA program.

The US support has propped up an oppressive regime representing a narrow ruling elite against the Ethiopian masses, who experience immense social misery. More than half of the population lives in poverty, surviving on less than $2 per day.

Illustrating the stark contrast of the social position of the masses to that of the small layer of the ruling elite sitting atop Ethiopian society is the fact that ten of these individuals collectively possess more than $25 billion.

Making clear the Ethiopian masses are the principal target of the NSA program is the revelation that the ruling Desalegn government has used the program against internal political enemies and dissidents.

Felix Horne, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, told the Intercept,“The Ethiopian government uses surveillance not only to fight terrorism and crime, but as a key tactic in its abusive efforts to silence dissenting voices in-country. Essentially anyone that opposes or expresses dissent against the government is considered to be an ‘anti-peace element’ or a ‘terrorist.’”

Under conditions of continual decline in its living standards, fueling a rise in mass social anger, the increasingly restive population is perceived by the establishment as a threat to be crushed.

Mexico earthquake death toll climbs to 98

Andrea Lobo

More than one week after southern Mexico and Guatemala were hit at midnight by an 8.2 earthquake, the strongest in almost a century, food and basic supplies are still scarce in the affected areas, efforts to find victims continue and thousands are sleeping on the streets after losing their homes.

The official death toll currently stands at 98, and the state governments have reported 80,000 damaged homes, along with 1,000 schools, and 96 health facilities. While the total number of people in need of aid has climbed to 2.5 million, the damage and casualties were heavily concentrated in the most impoverished areas of the two poorest states of the country, Oaxaca and Chiapas. Guatemala suffered no casualties, but 605 homes were reported damaged.

Just as with Hurricane Harvey a week earlier in southeast Texas and Hurricane Irma at the same time in the Caribbean and later in Florida, the historic earthquake in Mexico has exposed conditions of staggering inequality, deteriorated social infrastructure and corrupt negligence on the part of the ruling elites.

The deteriorated state of relations between the US and Mexican governments was also made visible. On Tuesday, the Mexican Foreign Ministry cancelled the sending of a convoy of food and medical aid to the areas affected by Hurricane Harvey in Texas in order to direct those resources to the areas impacted by the earthquake.

The Mexican ministry further indicated that the US had not responded to their formal offer of aid after a week, while Trump waited a full week to offer condolences for the losses inflicted by the devastating earthquake. He spoke to President Enrique Peña Nieto only on Thursday, claiming he could not do so earlier because of problems with “cell phone reception.”

This response was in line with his administration’s “America First” program, threatening to “terminate” NAFTA and force Mexico to pay for a border wall. Moreover, the Mexican foreign minister had complained last week that thousands of its citizens will be “potentially affected by the decision” to revoke the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Under these conditions of perceived animosity toward Latin America’s second largest economy and Washington’s top military partner in the region, next to Colombia, US Defense Secretary James Mattis, travel to Mexico City to attend the Independence Day festivities over the weekend. Despite the guise of aid and solidarity, many Mexicans will appropriately perceive that the fifth-ever visit of the Pentagon chief to the country is intended to remind Mexico’s comprador elite of their semi-colonial status and commitments to US security demands.

It was also announced yesterday that the tropical storm Norma is approaching the Pacific coast of Mexico threatening Baja California with high winds and heavy rains.

This storm comes shortly after yet another hurricane hit the state of Veracruz along the Atlantic coast last Friday, leaving seventy thousand people without electricity and two dead from a mudslide.

On Wednesday, the President Peña Nieto travelled to Oaxaca and set off a wave of indignation after he asked “respectfully” that the media not act as “indicators or critics of what is missing, but be part of the solution.”

This was merely the final the drop of cynicism that caused the glass to overflow. A series of denunciations followed in the bourgeois press, led by the conservative El Universal. A column by Carlos Loret de Mola warns that the deadly 1985 earthquake provoked the formation of the political organizations that “fed militants into the nascent PRD,” referring to the Party of Democratic Revolution. He concludes his piece abruptly: “Let’s see what sprouts out of the earthquake… politically speaking”.

This uneasiness goes beyond fears that the earthquake will affect the ruling party in the general elections next year or that it will lead to the formation of other right-wing, nationalist organizations like PRD and its offspring Morena. What preoccupies the ruling class the most is that its criminal negligence exposed by the earthquake leads to the independent mobilization of the working class, leading the peasant and impoverished masses against the governments’ agenda of militarization and austerity diktats from Wall Street and the City of London.

Only eight months ago, workers carried out mass demonstrations all across the country in response to a 20 percent gas price hike or gasolinazo as part of the government’s energy privatization scheme. Already, the earthquake has been trailed by bold acts of protest in southwest Mexico.

Last Tuesday, about 200 peasants in Tapachula, Chiapas, calling for running water, electricity, street maintenance and security, clashed with the police, which responded with beatings, tear gas, and at least a dozen arrests. The next day, protesting the disappearances of their classmates in 2014, 60 teacher students or normalistas from Ayotzinapa seized a bus, a tanker truck with fuel, and other vehicles, and allegedly kidnapped four police officials. The Guerrero police fired live rounds at their caravan, intercepted it and arrested twelve students.

Last week, expert in disaster management and geologist Nieves Sánchez Guitián declared that, unlike the 8.1 earthquake in 1985 that killed tens of thousands, the recent one was off the coast and twice as deep. Nonetheless, she concluded that, after 32 years, “the key to escape the cycle in which poverty leads to more poverty with a catastrophe” remains the same, technical preparedness and prevention.

The hardest-hit states have been long recognized as the poorest of the country. According to the National Council of Evaluation of Social Policies (Coneval), only 7.4 of the population in Oaxaca is not considered poor or vulnerable, compared to 10.3 percent in 2012. In Chiapas, this figure is 6.4 percent. This is in a country in which 1 percent of Mexicans own one third of the country’s wealth.

Juchitán de Zaragoza, one of the two poorest districts of Oaxaca with over half of the population people living below official extreme poverty, was the most affected. Thirty-six people died and about one-third of its homes were fully destroyed. The mayor complained that “assistance is lacking” and that there is no “close coordination with the government”.

The newspaper La Jornada reported that the distribution of food, medicines, clothes, and personal items has depended on the initiative of neighbors, families and friends. A painter, Francisco Toledo, organized the establishment of 20 community kitchens, while a retired teacher Virginia López delivers food to the thousands sleeping on the streets.

“Those affected have not received any provisions”, says López, while the government announced that it is deploying over 4,000 military officials presumably to help with the distribution. A peasant in Ixtepec told EFE: “The Army is not supporting us, it only goes by like a parade. What is required from them is help to remove the debris”.

A 2015 study by the Inter-American Development Bank found that Mexico already dedicates a lower percentage of its GDP to social infrastructure than any other Latin American country. Nonetheless, the government’s response to the disaster has centered around tax breaks and loans to small business ostensibly to “accelerate the reactivation of the economy” in Chiapas and Oaxaca.

Tellingly, the Wall Street credit agency Moody’s discarded offhand that the official response will go beyond meager economic aid to affected families under the natural disaster fund Fonden, noting simply that the economic cost of the disaster will be “limited”.

India and Japan strengthen their anti-China “strategic partnership”

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones 

Tokyo and New Delhi used Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s two-day visit to India last week to further cement their anti-China “strategic partnership,” laying plans for enhanced military-security cooperation across the Indo-Pacific region and for joint economic and strategic initiatives to counter Chinese influence in Africa.

Ominously, this included a pledge from India to work closely with Japan in its efforts to compel North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program under conditions where the United States—Japan’s principal strategic partner—has repeatedly threatened to launch a “preventive war” on the Korean Peninsula. Abe, moreover, is exploiting the US-provoked crisis with North Korea to speed up Japanese rearmament and eliminate the remaining constitutional restrictions on Tokyo pursuing an aggressive, militarist foreign policy.

Abe and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi scrupulously avoided mention of China in their public pronouncements and in the lengthy statement they issued at the conclusion of their summit last Thursday. But no one was in any doubt that China was the principal motivating factor and target of their push to strengthen the Indo-Japanese alliance.

In the run-up to the summit, the Indian media was full of editorials and opinion pieces arguing that New Delhi must augment ties with Japan in response to this summer’s 73-day border dispute and war crisis with China.

Invariably such commentary emphasized that—apart from tiny Bhutan, whose territory New Delhi claimed to be defending—Japan was the only country to explicitly back India during the tense military stand-off on the Doklam Plateau.

According to the Indian Express, Abe raised the Doklam standoff with Modi in private and “complimented” him for “standing his ground” during the crisis.

In their joint statement, Modi and Abe outlined plans to strengthen Indo-Japanese military-strategic cooperation across the board, emphasizing theirs is a “global” partnership. The two countries pledged to work together to “enhance defence equipment and technology cooperation in such areas as surveillance and unmanned system technologies, and defence industry cooperation.” They also agreed to explore the possibility of mounting “joint field exercises” in 2018 between the Indian Army and Japan’s Ground Self-Defence Forces.

Japan, as the statement noted, used the summit to reiterate its readiness to sell India its state-of-the-art US-2 amphibian aircraft. It had been rumoured Abe and Modi would announce they had finalized Tokyo’s largest ever foreign arms sale, but to the disappointment of many Indian and Japanese strategists the negotiations on the US-2 deal are continuing, apparently because New Delhi is angling for greater technology transfers.

Modi and Abe welcomed “the renewed momentum” for Indo-Japanese “trilateral cooperation” with the US, and Australia “stressed …the strategic importance of these cooperative frameworks” and agreed to work for their expansion. The statement made specific mention of the annual Indo-US-Japanese Malabar naval exercise, whose most recent iteration was hailed by the Trump administration as the largest-ever Indian Ocean wargame.

Tokyo also gave strong support to India’s campaign to strategically isolate its traditional arch-rival, Pakistan. Japan pledged to work with New Delhi to combat Pakistan-based Islamist groups active in the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir and endorsed India’s demand that Islamabad “bring to justice the perpetrators of terrorist attacks including those of the November 2008 attack in Mumbai and the 2016 terrorist attack in Pathankot,” in Indian-held Kashmir.

The joint statement’s paragraph on North Korea also included a snipe at Pakistan and an implicit attack on Beijing, with Modi and Abe urging “all parties that have supported North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs” to be held “accountable.” India has long accused Pakistan of having collaborated with North Korea in developing its own nuclear capabilities.

The People’s Republic, it need be noted, has responded to New Delhi’s integration into the US military-strategic offensive against China and the parallel burgeoning of Indo-Japanese ties by strengthening its own strategic partnership with Islamabad.

Again without naming it, the Modi-Abe statement attacked China’s Belt and Road Initiative, in which Pakistan (through the $50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor) is playing a major part. This was coupled to pledges that India and Japan will cooperate in building infrastructure to enhance connectivity between Asia and Africa and between India’s northeast and Southeast Asia. India and Japan are currently working on a $40 billion Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, although the project has yet to be officially launched.

India’s invitation to Japan to help build infrastructure in India’s northeast—an economically backward region bordering China, Bangladesh, and Burma—underscores the strength of Indo-Japanese ties. India views its northeast as especially important and strategically vulnerable, because it is the site of myriad anti-Indian ethno-nationalist insurgencies, is at the center of its border conflict with China, and is connected to the rest of the country only by a narrow corridor.

Development of the northeast is critical to India’s plans to expand its commercial and strategic ties with Southeast Asia. Both Washington and Tokyo have repeatedly pledged to support India’s “Act East” policy as part of their attempts to implicate New Delhi evermore deeply into the South China Sea conflict. Japan is also anxious to link its existing cheap-labor production lines in the ASEAN countries with India.

Beijing’s response to the Abe-Modi summit has been muted. This is not surprising given that it is seeking to reset relations with India in the aftermath of the Doklam crisis and, more importantly, is coming under unrelenting strategic pressure from the US as it stirs up the crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

That said, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying did take exception to India’s plans to have Japan assist it in developing the northeast as India’s gateway to Southeast Asia. No “third party,” said Hua, should “meddle in the disputes between China and Indian over territorial sovereignty in any form.”

While the forging of closer military-strategic ties topped the Modi-Abe summit agenda, Japan and India were also anxious to kick-start their commercial ties. These have waned in recent years, with Japan’s exports to India remaining stagnant and India’s exports to Japan falling from US $6.81 billion in 2013-14 to just $3.85 billion in 2016-17.

A highlight of the summit was a groundbreaking ceremony held in Modi’s home state of Gujarat to initiate the building of the 508-kilometer Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail project. Determined to beat out a Chinese bid to develop India’s first-ever high speed rail line, Japan is funding more than 80 percent of the project’s total cost via a 50-year, US $17 billion loan at a concessional interest rate of 0.1 percent.

Modi and Abe also joined Suzuki Chairman Osamu Suzuki to inaugurate a new Maruti Suzuki car factory in Gujarat. To demonstrate to foreign investors that the Indian state will ruthlessly suppress any challenge to the sweatshop conditions that prevail across India, the political establishment, police and courts have jailed 13 Maruri Suzuki workers for life on frame-up charges. The 13 had led resistance to poverty wages and precarious contract-labour jobs at Maruti Suzuki’s Manesar, Haryana car assembly plant.

Both Modi and Abe are anxious to underpin the Indo-Japanese military strategic alliance with an economic partnership in which Japanese capital helps India emerge as a rival cheap-labour production-chain hub to China. A recent editorial in India’s Economic Times boasted that the wages of Indian workers are only one fifth of those in China and argued that maintaining this wage differential is key to realizing Modi’s plans to make India a world-force in manufacturing.

Workers must beware: the cementing of the Indo-Japanese alliance will only encourage US imperialism in its reckless and incendiary offensive against China and whet the great-power appetites of Japanese imperialism and the Indian bourgeoisie.

South Korea assassination squad to target Pyongyang leadership

Ben McGrath

South Korea is assembling an assassination unit to be activated by the end of the year, according to Defense Minister Song Young-mu. It is being trained by the US military to be able to murder North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as well as other high-ranking figures in Pyongyang. The move is part of an overall agenda in Washington and Seoul to expand plans for war against the impoverished state.

The decision to roll out the hit squad is particularly chilling given South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s comments on Friday following North Korea’s test firing of another ballistic missile. Moon responded by ruling out talks with Pyongyang saying, “In a situation like this, dialogue is impossible.” He then warned that South Korea has the “power that can destroy the North beyond any recovery.”

The assassination unit is just one aspect of the preparations for war with North Korea. Defense Minister Song told the National Assembly’s defense committee on September 4, “We are in the process of conceptualizing the plan. I believe we can create the unit by December 1.” The assassination squad would also be tasked with carrying out nighttime raids across the Demilitarized Zone, separating the two Koreas.

The same US Navy Seals team that murdered Osama bin Laden in 2011 is working to train the new unit. This US Seal Team 6 took part in this year’s massive Foal Eagle/Key Resolve war games, conducted by the US and South Korea each spring. It was the first time it had been involved in the exercises, during which, it practiced assassinating Kim Jong-un.

Seoul and Washington are openly discussing the murder of a country’s head of state, though claiming it is only meant to scare Pyongyang or be used in the event of war. However, influential former government figures are openly calling for Kim’s assassination. Nam Seong-uk, a professor at Korea University and former leading official in the National Intelligence Service (NIS) told a meeting of members of the right-wing Liberty Korea Party two weeks ago that, “The problem will not be resolved unless Kim Jong-un is eliminated.”

The assassination squad is part of the Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation (KMPR) program. It divides Pyongyang into different sectors to be destroyed in a barrage of missiles supposedly if North Korea shows any signs of attacking. The hit team would then infiltrate and kill any top regime officials who survived. The key to the KMPR is its implementation at any signs of an attack, making it a part of a wider preparation for preemptive war.

South Korea demonstrated its KMPR system in its response to Pyongyang’s missile test on Friday. The military launched two Hyunmoo-2A ballistic missiles only six minutes after the North’s launch. Both landed in the Sea of Japan but only one accurately hit its designated target. After signs of the North’s missile test were reported to Moon on Thursday, “The president, without taking anything else into consideration, approved the firing of Hyunmoo missiles upon North Korea's missile provocation,” a government source stated.

A second system, known as the Kill Chain, has similarly been designed to launch preemptive attacks on North Korean military positions. The third system being put in place is called the Korea Air and Missile Defense (KAMD), which can supposedly track and shoot down an incoming missile.

The KMPR program is not new. It was announced, along with its hit squad, last September following North Korea’s 5th nuclear test, by the Park Geun-hye government. President Moon, who postured as an opponent of military escalation and promised to engage Pyongyang in dialogue, is continuing the program.

In fact, South Korea is accelerating its war drive as the US’s Trump administration continues to ramp up tensions and threats. Seoul has already reached an agreement with Washington to remove the limit on the war head weight on its ballistic missiles while also agreeing to the full deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery.

Moon is planning to increase South Korea’s military budget to 2.9 percent of gross domestic product during the course of his term, up from 2.4 percent. Trump also stated in a Tweet that he would allow South Korea and Japan to purchase substantially larger amounts of military equipment from the US.

The overall joint US-South Korea war strategy is known as Operations Plan (OPLAN) 5015. First adopted in 2015, it instituted a far more aggressive posture, including plans for “decapitation raids” on North Korean officials. It served as the basis for the springtime Foal Eagle/Key Resolve exercises as well as the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills conducted last August. Seoul’s KMPR plan is designed to carry out OPLAN.

Even if one takes at face value South Korea’s claims that these programs are “defensive”, they greatly heighten the danger of war. In its article on the assassination squad, the New York Times admitted, “[T]he potential consequences of accurate detection [of a North Korean attack] are huge. Miscalculation could prompt an unwarranted preemptive strike, which could start a regional nuclear war.”

Such a war would be catastrophic. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ,General Joseph Dunford stated in July, a war “would be horrific, and it would be a loss of life unlike any we have experienced in our lifetimes, and I mean anyone who’s been alive since World War II has never seen the loss of life that could occur if there’s a conflict on the Korean Peninsula.”

At the same time, there is no reason to believe that South Korea or the US would not try to assassinate Kim Jong-un or conduct some other clandestine operation to goad the North into firing the opening shots. The Asahi Shimbun reported on June 26 that former President Park Geun-hye had signed off on a plan to remove Kim following an unsuccessful meeting of officials from the two Koreas in December 2015. Citing an anonymous source, the paper stated the plan included the possibility for Kim’s forced exile, retirement, or assassination.

Pyongyang made unsubstantiated claims in May that the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the NIS in 2014 bribed a North Korean lumber worker in Russia to carry out the assassination of Kim. Given the tensions and the regime’s own nervousness over a US-South Korean attack, even a minor incident or accident in Pyongyang involving a leading figure could be interpreted as an act of war.

Pentagon to fortify Kabul for unending Afghanistan war

Bill Van Auken

The Pentagon is implementing a plan to expand and more heavily fortify Kabul’s “Green Zone,” the section of Afghanistan’s capital where the American and other foreign embassies, NATO and other military headquarters, international organizations and government ministries are located.

This major project, reported by the New York Times Sunday, coincides with a major US escalation of the nearly 16-year-old war, and signals Washington’s intentions to maintain what is effectively a permanent occupation of the war-ravaged but strategically situated south Asian nation.

The Pentagon is reportedly sending another 4,000 troops into the conflict, the longest war in US history. This short-term response to escalating reversals for the security forces of the Afghan puppet government has been accompanied by the US military’s admission that—with the complicity of the corporate media—it had long deliberately undercounted the number of US troops already in the country, with the real number exceeding 11,000, rather than the 8,400 previously reported.

President Donald Trump has maintained the pretense that he is keeping the exact numbers of troops to be sent into Afghanistan a secret, so as not to tip off the insurgency there, however, the real motive is to conceal the buildup as much as possible from the American people. Nonetheless, there are local reports of ceremonies marking the departure of some 6,000 US soldiers being sent from the 4th Infantry Division in Fort Carson, Colorado, along with an undisclosed number from the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Drum, New York.

There are no grounds for anticipating that the beefed-up force of 15,000 US troops will fundamentally shift the situation in Afghanistan, where the government has lost control of roughly 40 percent of the country to the Taliban, which is stronger than at any point since the October 2001 US invasion that drove the Islamist movement from power.

While it was previously said that the US-backed Afghan government was in firm control of nothing outside of Kabul, the Afghan capital itself has become the target of increasingly devastating attacks, suffering the largest number of casualties of any region in the country. The plan to more than double the size of the Green Zone, absorbing a nearby US military base, and bringing in the kind of heavy security and fortifications utilized in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq is in part a response to a truck bomb attack last May that demolished the German Embassy and killed some 150 people.

The plan reportedly calls for the Green Zone to be expanded from its current 0.71 square miles to 1.8 square miles, with streets leading into the fortified district closed to all but official vehicles.

Pointing to the rhetoric of the Pentagon about a new strategy of a “conditions-based withdrawal” as well as Trump’s bombastic speech last month vowing that his administration would “push onward to victory” in Afghanistan, the Times report acknowledges that “the Trump administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan is likely to keep the military in place well into the 2020s, even by the most conservative estimates.”

Among the long-term military plans already on the books is the building of an Afghan Air Force, with the US set to pour some $6.5 billion into the effort between now and 2023.

These plans, along with the proposal for fortifying Kabul, pre-date Trump. As the Times reports, “The process of turning Kabul into a fortress started before Mr. Trump took office, of course—security measures were tightened and an obtrusive network of blast walls was established in some places years before President Barack Obama left office.”

Aside from the escalation in the number of troops on the ground, the shift in US strategy is characterized above all by an increased use of firepower that will inevitably drive up Afghan civilian casualties, which already number more than 1,500 this year alone.

US B-52 bombers flying from Qatar have been staging increased numbers of airstrikes since March, while new artillery units are being sent into the country to shell districts under Taliban control. Trump, ceding control to the cabal of active-duty and retired generals who are setting his administration’s foreign policy, has placed rules of engagement for US troops in the country entirely in the hands of local commanders, setting the stage for a sharp increase in the number of atrocities inflicted upon the Afghan people.

It has also been revealed that the Pentagon is working with the Afghan government on a scheme that would create a new irregular combat force by arming up to 20,000 civilian fighters to secure territory rested from insurgents. The plan appears to reprise earlier efforts to create the so-called Afghan Local Police (ALP), a force that placed effective local control in the hands of semi-criminal warlords who carried out killings of their opponents and extortion of local populations. The proposal is driven in large measure by the crisis gripping the Afghan security forces, which have suffered severe losses in terms of casualties as well as desertions.

In a further avenue in the escalation of the US killing in Afghanistan, the CIA has requested the Trump administration’s approval to begin carrying out drone assassination strikes in Afghanistan for the first time. While the US intelligence agency was given free rein to wage a murderous drone campaign in northwestern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), near the Afghan border, killing and maiming thousands of civilians, until now, drone strikes in Afghanistan have been carried out by the US military. As opposed to the Pentagon, the CIA treats its drone strikes as covert operations, refusing to acknowledge them.

A decisive component of the shift in strategy initiated under Trump is a far more aggressive stance in relation to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country of 190 million. The US president accused Pakistan of “harboring criminals and terrorists,” threatening retaliation, including a cutoff of aid.

On Friday, the US resumed its drone strikes against Pakistani territory, with one of its unmanned aerial vehicles reportedly firing missiles at a Taliban gathering in Kurram, part of the FATA region, killing three people and wounding two others.

Tensions between Washington and Islamabad were underscored by an interview in which Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif told the Wall Street Journal that the US was “pursuing a folly, a strategy that has already failed” in Afghanistan. He indicated that he would address the issue at this week’s opening session of the United Nations General Assembly, accusing Washington of relying on a “militaristic” policy, and insisting that only a negotiated settlement can end the war.

“I think Americans should be more realistic and more pragmatic about their approach in Afghanistan,” Asif told the Journal. “They have already lost more than 40 percent of territory to the Taliban. How do you keep on fighting with them?”

The deterioration of bilateral relations was made clear with Asif’s calling off a previously planned trip to the US for talks with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Pakistani government’s rejection of a planned visit to the country by the senior State Department officer for South and Central Asia.

While canceling meetings with US officials, Asif organized meetings with his counterparts in China, Iran and Turkey, stressing Pakistan’s agreement with the governments of these countries on the need for a political solution in Afghanistan. He also indicated his intention to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the UN session to coordinate Afghan policy with Russia.

Such initiatives, aimed at assuring Pakistan’s interests in any settlement of the Afghan war, particularly vis-a-vis its main regional rival, India, cut directly across the aims pursued by US imperialism in its decade and a half of brutal colonial war in Afghanistan. These include establishing a permanent US military presence in a country that borders both Iran and China, as well as the oil rich former Soviet republics of the Caspian Basin.

Washington’s response will likely include not only a further military escalation in the region, but also a further tilt toward India, heightening dangerous tensions between the two nuclear-armed powers in South Asia.

GM CAMI workers strike in Canada

Carl Bronski 

Autoworkers struck the General Motors CAMI auto assembly plant outside of London, Ontario late Sunday night after the Unifor union and GM failed to reach agreement on a new three-year contract. The strike by 2,800 workers is the first at the assembly plant since 1992.

The walkout will all but halt production of GM’s highly profitable Equinox SUV, which is only produced in smaller numbers at two other plants in Mexico. Workers at CAMI assembled more than 300,000 vehicles at the factory last year, making it one of the most productive and profitable in GM’s system.

The strike will immediately hit production at GM’s other operations, including an engine and transmission plant in St. Catharines, Ontario, that supplies CAMI, as well as suppliers that make components for the Equinox.

The walkout by CAMI workers is part of a growing wave of struggles by autoworkers around the world, including the 2015 rebellion by US autoworkers at Fiat Chrysler (FCA) and recent strikes by Korean GM workers, FCA workers in Serbia and VW workers in Slovakia. Last year, there was widespread opposition by rank-and-file workers to the concessions Unifor handed to the Detroit-based automakers.

Workers, who voted 99.8 percent for a strike last month, were quick to set up picket lines determined to recoup their losses from a series of concession contracts signed by Unifor and its predecessor, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW). CAMI workers are forced to labour under a separate agreement than other Canadian autoworkers employed by GM, Ford and FCA—and their factory has long been used to set a lower labour cost benchmark that the unions could then impose on other autoworkers.

The Equinox is GM’s third top selling product in the United States and the fourth biggest seller in Canada. US sales of the Equinox, which retails for $US25,000–$US35,000 per vehicle, were up 67 percent in August. For the past eight years the CAMI plant has been running all out with three shifts producing vehicles six days a week.

CAMI workers have endured a ten-year wage freeze, the imposition of a two-tier wages and benefits system, with a third tier of temporary part time workers added in. They face relentless speed-up and the decimation of any semblance of a grievance procedure on the shop floor. In the last contract Unifor abandoned defined benefit pensions for new hires at the CAMI plant, which was then extended to all Canadian autoworkers in 2016.

If Unifor was forced to call the strike it is because there is enormous opposition among rank-and-file workers to any further concessions. GM is sitting on an $18 billion cash hoard and funneling the profits it extracts from workers to pay billions in dividends and stock buybacks to enrich its top investors.

Plant Chairman Mike Van Boekel told reporters that the main unresolved issue in talks with the company was keeping production of the Equinox at the facility. “We want a guarantee that the Equinox is not leaving and GM will not do it,” he stated. “We want a guarantee that we are the lead plant.”

GM officials refused to designate CAMI as the lead plant for future Equinox production, union officials said, and offered investment of $60 million, compared to $400 million earmarked for a plant in Oshawa, Ontario, during contract talks last year.

Whatever jobs promise GM makes will not worth the paper it is written on. Instead, Unifor, like its counterpart in the United States, the United Auto Workers (UAW) has always used claims of securing new investments to justify further wage, benefit and working condition concessions. Indeed, last February, after GM’s announcement of 625 job cuts at CAMI, Van Boekel told workers, “Let me be clear, we are not going to put ourselves on a pedestal and price ourselves out of jobs and people need to look at the big picture.”

Last February, GM announced it was moving production of its Terrain model to Mexico. Unifor did nothing to oppose the destruction of jobs. The union rejects out of hand any fight to unify Canadian, US and Mexican workers in a common struggle to defend jobs against the global automakers. Instead Unifor, along with the UAW, are peddling the claim that the Trudeau government and the billionaire president in the United States, Donald Trump, will renegotiate the NAFTA agreement to favor the interests of workers in Canada and the US.

The promotion of economic nationalism by the Canadian and US unions has never saved a single job. On the contrary it has served to drive a wedge between North American workers and justify the relentless attacks on workers’ jobs and living standards in the name of “saving” Canadian or American jobs. Both unions accepted massive concessions during the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler.

Thanks to “flexible contracts” with the UAW that include two-tier wage systems and profit-sharing payments instead of fixed raises GM's US hourly worker labour cost fell to $US5 billion in 2015 compared with about $US16 billion in 2005. Unifor has granted similar concessions.

Unifor officials have sought to silence opposition and brand as disloyal any opposition to its collaboration with management. If this struggle is not to be defeated, then rank-and-file workers must take over the conduct of the strike, block every effort to shut it down and impose a sellout deal, and fight to broaden the struggle throughout the Canadian, US and Mexican auto industry.

Spain threatens potential military takeover of Catalonia as referendum looms

Alejandro López 

Spain’s conservative Popular Party (PP) government is continuing its clampdown on the referendum on Catalan independence scheduled for October 1. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is threatening to implement an emergency clause of the Spanish Constitution to block the vote.

On Friday, Rajoy travelled to Barcelona and said Catalonians "are making a mistake, and you are going to force us to go where we don't want to go.” Last week, PP parliamentary group spokesperson Rafael Hernando and Justice Minister Rafael Catalá separately called for its invocation.

Article 155, widely described as the “nuclear option”, states that if a regional government “does not fulfill the obligations imposed upon it by the Constitution or other laws, or acts in a way seriously prejudicing the general interests of Spain, the Government” may take control of the regional government to compel it to meet its “obligations” or to defend “the general interest”.

The article has never been invoked. Until recently, even Rajoy and the Spanish military have been hesitant to call for its invocation for fear it will set off a social explosion among workers both inside and outside of Catalonia.

The Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) is equally fearful of the possibility of both the breakup of Spain and the possibility that opposition to Rajoy’s dictatorial threats will develop outside the framework of Spanish bourgeois politics. PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez responded to Rajoy’s comments in Barcelona by supporting him: “you [Rajoy] will do what you have to do.” A nervous editorial in Saturday’s El Pais, historically tied to the PSOE, noted: “It is impossible for democratic order and chaos to coexist. It is not stable. It is not sustainable. And above all, it is not acceptable. The government cannot permit this parallel legality to further implant itself…”

Madrid’s inflammatory language and actions recall the thuggery of the Francoist dictatorship that ruled Spain from 1939 to 1978. This only increases the likelihood the referendum will pass.

Madrid has taken the unprecedented step of announcing it will take over Catalonia’s finances this week in order to “guarantee that no euros are spent on illegal activities,” according to Spanish Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro.

Vice president of the Catalan government and Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) leader Oriol Junqueras has said that this measure is “a covert way to liquidate the institutions of the country [i.e., Catalonia] and a covert way to implement Article 155 of the Constitution." The separatist parties—the Catalan European Democratic Party (PdeCAT), the ERC, and the Candidatures of Popular Unity (CUP)—have so far continued to prepare for the referendum, holding public rallies calling for a “yes” vote.

The paramilitary Guardia Civil has seized at least 1.3 million pro-referendum leaflets and posters from print shops, closed down 10 web sites promoting the referendum, and threatened Catalan news editors with criminal charges if they publish referendum ads in their papers or on their web sites. Local police are also seizing pro-referendum materials on the streets and identifying anyone with pro-referendum material.

The 700 mayors allowing public spaces to hold ballot boxes in their towns and cities are now being summoned to court for openly supporting the vote. They have been threatened with arrest if they fail to comply.

For the moment, the judiciary has not sought the arrest of Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont. However, Spain's Attorney General José Manuel Maza has threatened to do so in an interview for daily right-wing El Mundo, adding that “I absolutely do not rule out asking for prison sentences”.

The only precedent that exists is under the Second Republic in October 1934, which is now being widely discussed. These threats constitute a warning to the working class of the enormous political tensions that underlie the present conflict. In 1934, in the context of fascism’s takeover of Germany, Italy and Austria, the Spanish conservative government in power brought in fascist ministers, provoking revolutionary struggles in the working class, especially in Asturias, when workers attempted to establish a commune.

In Catalonia, the regional authorities then proclaimed a Catalan State within the Federal Spanish Republic. The initiative failed due to a lack of popular support and the fact that the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (National Confederation of Labour), supported by most of the region’s workers, did not support the Catalan government.

The subsequent repression led to the detention of thousands of workers and left-wing political leaders. Political centres were closed, newspapers were suppressed and in Catalonia, the regional President Lluis Companys was arrested and the Statute providing the region with a degree of autonomy annulled.

The leader of the anti-Catalan secessionist Citizens Party, Albert Rivera, and former PP Foreign Minister José Manuel Garcia Margallo have both referred to the 1934 events.

Today, the right-wing press is denouncing the Catalan secessionnist drive in articles such as “The Republic Already Suspended the Autonomy of Catalonia” (OkDiario), “The first ‘Catalan State’ lasted 11 hours and Ended Up Behind Bars” (El Confidencial), “October 6 1934: the Coup that Finished in the Sewer”(Libertad Digital), or “Catalonia of 34: from Companys to Puigdemont” (ABC).

Once again, like in the 1930s, the crisis of capitalism has witnessed relentless offensives against the working class in the form of deep austerity, attacks on democratic rights and a rise in militarism.

The critical issue is the independent mobilization of the working class in opposition to both the ruling elite in Madrid and the bourgeois separatists in Catalonia and for the unity of the Spanish working class with their international class brothers and sisters. Neither the Balkanization in Spain, nor the growth of a repressive police apparatus centered in Madrid, offer anything to workers.

The Catalan separatists are reacting by fraudulently posing as defenders of democratic rights. The same forces that have clamped down numerous protests and strikes by workers and youth over the years against their successive austerity policies in the region are now presenting themselves as the defenders of “democracy” against “repression”. Puigdemont has likened his separatist movement's struggle with Madrid to Spain's 1936-39 Civil War and even the Vietnam War, saying in a TV interview, "Every day is a Vietnam."

The Podemos party is deeply divided and, for now, remaining on the sidelines. While opposing the degree of Rajoy’s clampdown, the party claims this referendum is not legal but supports it as a “citizens mobilization”. As staunch defenders of Spanish imperialism and its geopolitical interests internationally, they oppose separatism, but, like much of the European and US bourgeois press, propose to give concessions to the Catalan nationalists in order to stop the secessionist drive.

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has said the PP’s measures are endangering Spanish interests: “We are not only ruled by corrupt people, they are also useless and pyromaniacs who are bringing our democracy to a state of exception.”

Podemos hopes that the minority PP government will burn itself out against the secessionists, opening the door to a “progressive” Socialist Party-Podemos coalition government that would be better able to contain both growing social anger and the Catalan secession drive.