Turkey’s Looming Crisis

Conn Hallinan

Viewed one way, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan looks unassailable: He weathered last year’s coup attempt, jailed more than 50,000 opponents, fired more than 100,000 civil servants, beheaded the once powerful Turkish military, eviscerated much of his parliamentary opposition, dismissed almost half of the county’s elected officials, and rammed through a constitutional referendum that will make him an all-powerful executive following the 2019 election. In the meantime, a seemingly never-ending state of emergency allows him to rule by decree.

So why is the man running scared?

Because the very tools that Erdogan has used to make himself into a sort of modern day Ottoman sultan are backfiring. The state of emergency is scaring off foreign investment, which is central to the way the Turkish economy functions. The loss of experienced government workers has put an enormous strain on the functioning of the bureaucracy. And the promises he made to the electorate in order to get his referendum passed are coming due with very little in the till to fulfill them.

Part of the problem is Erdogan himself. In that sense he is a bit like US President Donald Trump, who has also alienated allies with a combination of bombast and cluelessness. The Turkish President is in a war with Washington over a corruption trial, at loggerheads with Germany (and most of the European Union) over his growing authoritarianism and, with the exception of Russia, China, Qatar and Iran, seems to be quarreling with everyone these days. It is certainly a far cry from a decade ago when the foreign policy of Ankara was “Zero problems with the neighbors.” As one Turkish commentator put it, it’s now “No neighbors without problems.”

What has thrown a scare into Erdogan, however, is not so much the country’s growing diplomatic isolation, but the economy and how that might affect the outcome of presidential elections in 2019.

In the run up to the constitutional referendum last year, the government handed out loans and goodies to the average Turk. Growth accelerated, unemployment fell, and the poverty rate was reduced. But the cost of priming that pump has come due at the very moment that international energy prices are on the rise. Turkey imports virtually all of its energy, but when the price of oil was down to a little more than $30 a barrel, the budget could handle it.

The price of oil in December, however, was close to $60 a barrel, and a recent agreement between the two largest producers—Saudi Arabia and Russia—to curb production will drive that price even higher in the future. Rate hikes for gasoline and heating will be up sharply in the coming months

Turkish unemployment is over 13 percent, inflation is close to 12 percent, and the Turkish lira has fallen 12 percent against the dollar. With energy costs rising and currency value declining, Turkey is struggling through an economic double whammy.

Economist Timur Kuran of Duke University says the Turkish economy is in serious trouble. “The AKP (Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party) is doing massive long-term damage to the Turkish economy. Corruption is up, the quality of education has fallen, the courts are massively politicized, and the people are afraid to speak honestly.”  Kuran argues that any growth is based on short-term investments, so–called “hot money,” drawn in by high interest rates. “This is not a sustainable strategy. It makes Turkey highly vulnerable to a shock that might cause an outflow of resources.”

Under Erdogan Corruption does seem to be increasing. In 2013 Transparency International ranked Turkey 53ed out of 175 countries on its Corruption Perception Index. By 2016 the country had risen to 75^th out of 176 countries.

Turkey’s economy is highly dependent on foreign money, but the continuing state of emergency and rule by decree is scaring off investors. Figures by the Central Bank show that Turkey is losing $1 billion a week in foreign investments. Britain, a major investor in Turkey, has reduced its investments by 20% since the declaration of the state of emergency.

The uncertainly has spread as well to Turkish citizens, who are putting their money into foreign investments in order to preserve their savings. From the end of 2016 to this November, Turks moved $17.2 billion to foreign firms.

Erdogan is blaming Turkish banks—in particular the Central Bank—for rising interest rates and the downturn in the economy. But Kemel Kilicdaroglu, leader of the centrist and secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) argues that “The real reason why foreign investments other than real estate purchases are decreasing is that [foreign investors] feel insecure in a country where law, justice and press freedom are non-existent.”

The state of emergency allows the government to suppress trade union strikes, but it has been less successful in damping down what was once a AKP strong suit: rural farmers.

One of Erdogan’s economic “reforms” was to open Turkish markets to foreign competition, which has resulted in losses for the country’s live stock and agricultural growers. Meat producers are up in arms over an agreement with Serbia to import 5,000 tons of red meat, and tea, grape, tobacco and apricot growers have been hard hit by falling prices and foreign competition. Hazelnut growers were so incensed at the government’s base price for their produce that they organized a large march under the banner of “Justice for Hazelnuts.”

A study found that foreign imports had reduced the number of families involved in growing tobacco from 405,882 families in 2002 to 56,000 in 2015.

It is not so much the marches that worry Erdogan, but the fact that some 20 million rural Turks are up in arms against the government, anger that might translate into votes in 2019. In the April 2017 referendum, rural votes solidly supported the AKP, while urban centers—particularly their youth—voted no. Losing cities like Ankara and Istanbul—the city where Erdogan began his political career—was a shock for the AKP, but losses in rural areas would be a political train wreck.

While Erdogan strains to keep the economic lid on long enough to get through 2019, there are fissures opening within his own party. A wing of the AKP is not happy with Erdogan’s foreign policy disputes and the impact that they are having on the economy.

On his right, former interior minister Meral Aksener has formed the Iyi Parti or “Good Party” and says she plans to challenge Erdogan for the presidency. Aksener appeals to the more nationalist currents in the AKP and hopes to attract support from the extreme right wing National Action Party (MHP). She is currently polling around 16 percent.

Polls indicate that the “Good Party” is cutting into the AKP’s support, which has dropped to 38 percent. Erdogan needs at least 51 percent, the figure that he claims he got in the referendum (outside observers called the election deeply flawed, however). Aksener could split Erdogan’s support within the AKP and the MHP, thus denying him a majority.

Nor has the CHP thrown in the towel, Besides organizing marches by angry rural residents, Party leader Kilicdaroglu pulled off a 25-day, 280-mile “Justice March” last summer that may have involved as many as a million people.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Turkey’s leftist party closely tied to its Kurdish population, has been decimated by arrests and seizure of its assets, but it is still the third largest party in parliament. “It may appear that injustice has won, but this will not last,” HDP parliament member Meral Danis Bestas told Al-Monitor. “Turkey’s future truly lies in democracy, rights and freedom.”

Erdogan has enormous power and has out muscled and out maneuvered his opponents for the past 20 years. But Turks are growing weary of his rule and, if the economy stumbles, he may be vulnerable.

That’s why he is running scared.

How Inequality Kills

Alan Nasser

The Global March of Neoliberalism: The World Inequality Report 2018

Contrary to the assumptions of left-liberal commentators, neoliberalism is not merely a bad policy adopted by “greedy” elites. It is in fact a fundamental systemic rejection of the post-laissez-faire settlement put in place in just about all of the developed capitalist countries after the Second World War. Out with the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society and forward with what is essentially a resurrection of 1920s capitalism. Because capitalism is a globally integrated system, if neoliberalism exists on a significant scale anywhere, it must exist everywhere. It is thus a “New World Order,” a phrase deployed by G. H. W. Bush and Adolf Hitler.

Neoliberalism is an eminently rational arrangement for the capitalists and their political cronies who instituted it. The system is called capitalism, not laborism, because it was forged for centuries and is presided over by those whose overarching objective is to maintain a settlement that serves the interests of owners of capital. Adam Smith’s tome is called The Wealth of Nations, not The Income of Nations or The Wages of Nations. The bottom-line priority of those who own society’s most valuable asset, its means of production, is that society be organized around the continuous increase of wealth, especially the wealth and income of its wealthiest. The welfare state foils that project. The evidence is unambiguous: after the Depression and during the great expansion of the Golden Age, we witnessed the unprecedented: the share of national income flowing to the one percent continued to fall by an increasing percentage each decade during the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s. These were the only years in American history when an essential feature of State policy was to increase social services benefitting the working class and redistribute income from the wealthiest to those who do society’s work. And these were also the only years in the history of the republic that featured ongoing and increasing downward redistribution. This was the result of New Deal and Great Society social legislation, and the power of labor unions. Hence, from the perspective of the enlightened capitalist, the legacy of these policies must be reversed.

The World Inequality Report  2018

The undoing of social democracy must be effected on a global scale. Because one of the principal effects of neoliberalism is the remarkable growth of inequality, Thomas Piketty and associates have produced the World Inequality Report  2018, assessing the growth of worldwide inequality. They conclude that “income inequality has increased in nearly all countries,” and that “rising inequality… can lead to various sorts of political, economic, and social catastrophes.” Inequality is lowest in Europe, where social-democratic economic policy is strongest, and has increased rapidly in North America, where the top 10 percent cop 47 percent of national income. The divergence in inequality levels is particularly extreme between Western Europe, which, as noted, retains significant vestiges of welfare state policy, and the United States, whose social democratic policies are the stingiest among the developed capitalist countries. The share of national income of the top 1 percent in both regions in 1980 was about the same, close to 10 percent. By 2016 it had risen slightly, to 12 percent in Western Europe, while in the United States it soared to 20 percent, while the share of the bottom 50 percent decreased from more than 20 percent in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016. Between 1980 and 2016 the global 1 percent captured twice as much of the growth in income as the bottom 50 percent. What’s more, Credit Suisse reports that as of 2015 the richest global 1 percent had accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together. In the same year, a mere 62 individuals had accumulated as much wealth as is held by the bottom 50 percent of humanity.

The World Inequality Report reminds us that  “economic inequality is largely driven by the unequal ownership of capital..,” as we should expect in capitalist countries. Capital can be either privately or publicly owned. With neoliberalism’s idolatry of the private and ongoing decimation of the public, we are not surprised to learn that “since 1980, very large transfers of public to private wealth occurred in nearly all countries… While national wealth has substantially increased, public wealth is now negative or close to zero in rich countries. Arguably this limits the ability of governments to tackle inequality; certainly it has important implications for wealth inequality among individuals.” The situation is graver still if we acknowledge, as the authors of this study apparently do not, that governments in the capitalist countries have no intention to “tackle inequality.” Quite the contrary. What we are witnessing is the bipartisan effort to “starve the beast.” As the study puts it, “Over the past decades, countries have become richer but governments have become poor.” The net public wealth (public assets minus public debts) of the most aggressively neoliberal advanced countries, the United States and the UK, “has even become negative in recent years.” “The balance between private and public wealth is a crucial determinant of the level of inequality.” In their summation, the authors conclude that ‘In a future in which “business as usual” continues, global inequality will further increase’.

The whole picture draws out the implications of Thomas Piketty’s demonstration that it belongs to the nature of capitalism that more and more private wealth tends to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. The plutocrats pass their booty on to their progeny, so that an increasing portion of total wealth is inherited. Indeed, as of today between 50 and 70 percent of U.S. household wealth is inherited. If this continues, it is a matter of arithmetic that the U.S. is headed for rule by dynasty.

How Neoliberal Austerity Kills

There is decisive evidence that neoliberalism’s widening inequality tends to generate uncommon rates of physical and mental health disorders. A Princeton study found that middle-aged non-Hispanic white Americans suffered a great increase in mortality between 1998 and 2013. This was the first such case in American history. The increase is entirely concentrated among persons with a high school degree or less, a reliable criterion of poverty. Among whites with any college experience, mortality rates have declined during this period. And disease is not the issue. The predominant causes of death are suicide, chronic alcohol abuse and drug overdoses. Paul Krugman has noted that these statistics mirror “the collapse in Russian life expectancy after the fall of communism.” The Princeton study labels these mortalities “deaths of despair.” It is noteworthy that among the population in question, wages have fallen by over 30 percent since 1969. In a detailed study of the health effects of austerity, based on data from the Great Depression, Asian countries during the 1990s Asian Financial Crisis, and European countries suffering austerity policies after the 2008 crisis, researchers found that the more austerity was practiced in a country, the more people became ill and the more people died. 

Homicide and murder are also strongly related to inequality. The World Bank reports that inequality predicts about half of the variance in murder rates between the U.S. and other countries and the FBI notes that of U.S. murders for which the precipitating reason is known over half stem from the agent’s sense that he had been “dissed.” Persons shoot someone who has cut them off in traffic or beat them to a parking spot.

In connection with the high number of homicides associated with dissing, i.e. challenging a person’s sense of self-respect or personal worth, the psychologist and neuroscientist Martin Daly documents the intimate connection between inequality and loss of personal and social status. He shows that inequality predicts homicide rates “better than any other variable.” In America, status is determined by how much a person has, and having is a matter of the standard of material living one enjoys, competitively conceived in terms of how one compares with others. And the admired standard is one’s level of material comfort, determined for the non-wealthy by a good job and the ability to support a family or the ability to enjoy a comfortable and independent standard of living as a single person. These makers of social status and self-respect are unavailable to those at the lower ends of the income hierarchy and the unemployed. Self-respect is one of men’s (and most homicides are male-on-male) most prized goods, and self-respect, as much as income and wealth, is unequally distributed. In a society where there are structurally determined winners and losers, if one is a loser one’s social reputation is all one has, all one can brandish, in order to maintain a sense of self-respect and personal worth. A diss is a blow to both social reputation and self-respect, and if one has nothing else, the threat looms disproportionately large.

While gang murders are not the majority of murders by the poor, they display in stripped-down form the way in which dissing translates to a social put-down and social denigration makes for personal humiliation and devaluation. The disser becomes a deadly rival. The research I cite in this essay shows that this syndrome is by no means limited to gang culture.

Most recently, David Ansell, a physician and social epidemiologist, has demonstrated in an exhaustive study that the acceleration of inequality between high and low socioeconomic groups over the past three decades has resulted in higher mortality rates for the poorest strata of the working class. He concludes that “[I]nequality triggers so many causes of premature death that we need to treat inequality as a disease and eradicate it, just as we seek to halt any epidemic.”Capitalism, in its post-welfare-state form, kills.

World Inequality Report And Inequality In India: Welfarism Declines And Inequality Abounds

Vivek Kumar Srivastava

World Inequality Report 2018 has been released by World Inequality Lab with which Paris based economists Piketty and Chancel are related. The report has analyzed the inequality in India in depth. The first major conclusion of the report is that in India after independence the inequality was not so much prevalent; the major factor was socialist policies but since the 7th Five Year Plan during 1985-1990 the deregulation started to take place and the relaxations in the economy were initiated.

Thereafter since 1991 to 2000 and then during the second generation reforms went quite rapidly and the result was that inequality which was so limited during 1970s was now a lethal reality of the Indian society. By 2014 the inequality was openly in existence and only few were in position to control the huge wealth. The deregulation of the economy allowed emergence of new rich class in major economies and this is true for India too.

The deregulation was a continuous affair as the report highlights the fact that- pro-market reforms were prolonged after 2000, under the 10th and subsequent five-year plans. The plans ended government fixation of petrol, sugar and fertilizer prices and led to further privatizations, in the agricultural sector in particular. Inequality trends continued on an upward trajectory throughout the 2000s and by 2014 the richest 10% of the adult population shared around 56% of the national income. This left the middle 40% with 32% of total income and the bottom 50%, with around half of that, at just over 16%.

Thus shift from socialism to capitalism and neoliberal policies have caused the huge imbalances in the equal distribution of the wealth in the Indian society.

The report also highlights the role of the tax system which in usual terms is progressive taxation in the country that rich will be taxed more than the poor. According to report this system became weakened after some time and after 1980s there were shifts and the taxation burden on the rich were being reduced than before as a consequence the accumulation of wealth was quite faster being transferred in the hands of the capitalist class. After the assumption of the NDA government the corporate taxes have been reduced and rich class is more benefited due to its capacity to diversify its businesses and the capacity to invest in the new sectors. Those who have more wealth have capacity to invest in the equity markets which is ballooned and the wealth of the rich class is continuously on increase.

In order to reduce the inequality it is necessary that effective progressive taxation system be implemented in the countries like India where phase of neoliberal economic policies have placed the burden most on the already starving classes. As after the implementation of the GST several medicines including the Insulin for the Diabetes patients have become costlier usually used by the middle class but what about those ones who abound around 80 crores in the country and are already hungry and living with the malnutrition also-how can these treat themselves for diabetes? They are bound to die.

In this respect not only the progressive tax system but also the provision of social welfare schemes and policies can play a crucial role in allowing the unequal Indians to survive in the cut throat social structure. Unfortunately Indian performance on this policy framework is quite alarming. Though government has implemented several schemes but due to improper implementation, leakages the schemes have not benefited to the target group. It is more saddening that governments never cared in effective manner to make these policies full of success. Take the case of Rashtriya Suraksha Bima Yojana (RSBY) which provide health insurance coverage of 30,000 Rs. To BPL families and other 11 new categories but most people are either unaware or find it hard to go for such social security products. In last nine years it is yet to gain recognition among the target groups.

In the social security areas Indian condition is critical. According to ‘Index Tracking Commitment to Reducing Income Inequality’ India stands at 132 out of 152 countries. Sweden stands at position 1st and Nigeria is located at the lowest position. The index studies the expenditures on the social welfare programmes, wage inequality etc. according to this report India spends less in the social welfare sectors.

In the background of these realities the inequality is likely to take more severe form in the country. As a large amount of the poor is lost in the health maintenance due to out of pocket expenses for which they have to bear health cost themselves due to costly insurance policies and weak government provided health infrastructure. The poor is more burdened when personal income is spent on the health and it becomes more critical and lethal on the existence and survival of this section of society who is already reeling under the unequal economic system.

As long as the inequality is address by more progressive taxation and more social welfare spending by the governments, this evil of the neoliberal economic system will plague the poor and finally will decimate them. The revelations of the World Inequality Report therefore needs to be taken into account along with the Index Tracking Commitment to Reducing Income Inequality for better policy making by the Indian government for the people who are highly distressed due to neoliberal phase of the country.

CAR’s Report on Islamic State’s Arms is Misleading

Nauman Sadiq

During the last week, a report by the Conflict Armament Research (CAR) on the Islamic State’s weapons found in Iraq and Syria has been doing the rounds on the media. Before the story was picked up by the mainstream media, it was first published in the Wired on December 12, which has a history of spreading dubious stories and working in close collaboration with the Pentagon and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) under its erstwhile reporters Noah Shachtman and Spencer Akerman, both of whom are now the national security correspondents for the Daily Beast, though this particular report has been written by Brian Castner, “a former US Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer and a veteran of the Iraq War.”

The Britain-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR) is a small company of less than 20 employees. It’s Iraq and Syria division is headed by a 31-year-old Belgian researcher, Damien Spleeters. The main theme of Spleeters’ investigation was to discover the Islamic State’s homegrown armaments industry and how the jihadist group’s technicians have adapted the East European munitions to be used in the weapons available to the Islamic State. He has listed 1,832 weapons and 40,984 pieces of ammunition recovered in Iraq and Syria in the CAR’s database.

But Spleeters has only tangentially touched upon the subject of the Islamic State’s weapons supply chain, documenting only a single PG-9 rocket found at Tal Afar in Iraq bearing a lot number of 9,252 rocket-propelled grenades which were supplied by Romania to the US military, and mentioning only a single shipment of 12 tons of munitions which was diverted from Saudi Arabia to Jordan in his supposedly ‘comprehensive report.’ In fact, the CAR’s report is so misleading that of thousands of pieces of munitions investigated by Spleeters, less than 10% were found to be compatible with NATO’s weapons and more than 90% were found to have originated from Russia, China and the East European countries, Romania and Bulgaria in particular.

By comparison, a joint investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has uncovered the Pentagon’s $2.2 billion arms pipeline to the Syrian militants. It bears mentioning, however, that $2.2 billion were earmarked only by Washington for training and arming the Syrian rebels, and tens of billions of dollars that Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf states have pumped into the Syrian proxy war have not been documented by anybody so far.

Moreover, a Bulgarian investigative reporter, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, authored a report for Bulgaria’s national newspaper, Trud, which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company, Silk Way Airlines, was regularly transporting weapons to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply militant groups in Syria. Gaytandzhieva documented 350 such ‘diplomatic flights’ and was subsequently fired from her job for uncovering the story. Unsurprisingly, however, both these well-researched and groundbreaking reports didn’t even get a passing mention in any mainstream news outlet.

It’s worth noting, moreover, that the Syrian militant groups are no ordinary bands of ragtag jihadist outfits. They have been trained and armed to the teeth by their patrons in the security agencies of Washington, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan in the training camps located at Syria’s border regions with Turkey and Jordan. Along with Saddam’s and Egypt’s armies, the Syrian Baathist armed forces are one of the most capable fighting forces in the Arab world. But the onslaught of militant groups during the first three years of the proxy war was such that had it not been for the Russian intervention in September 2015, the Syrian defenses would have collapsed. And the only feature that distinguishes the Syrian militants from the rest of regional jihadist groups is not their ideology but their weapons arsenals that were bankrolled by the Gulf’s petro-dollars and provided by the CIA in collaboration with regional security agencies of Washington’s client states.

While we are on the subject of Islamic State’s weaponry, it is generally claimed by the mainstream media that Islamic State came into possession of state-of-the-art weapons when it overran Mosul in June 2014 and seized huge caches of weapons that were provided to the Iraqi armed forces by Washington. Is this argument not a bit paradoxical, however, that Islamic State conquered large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq before it overran Mosul when it supposedly did not have those sophisticated weapons, and after allegedly coming into possession of those weapons, it lost ground? The only conclusion that can be drawn from this fact is that Islamic State had those weapons, or equally deadly weapons, before it overran Mosul and that those weapons were provided to all the militant groups operating in Syria, including the Islamic State, by the intelligence agencies of none other than the Western powers, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states.

In fact, Washington exercises such an absolute control over the Syrian theater of proxy war that although it openly provided the US-made antitank (TOW) weapons to the Syrian militants but it strictly forbade its regional allies from providing anti-aircraft weapons (MANPADS) to the militants, because Israel frequently flies surveillance aircrafts and drones and occasionally carries out airstrikes in Syria, and had such weapons fallen into wrong hands, they could have become a long-term threat to Israel’s air force. Lately, some anti-aircraft weapons from Gaddafi’s looted arsenal in Libya have made their way into the hands of Syrian militants, but for the initial years of the proxy war, there was an absolute prohibition on providing MANPADS to the insurgents.

US fire death toll in 2017 reaches 2,152

Steve Filips

As the holidays approach there has been a heart wrenching increase in fire deaths of children, highlighting the deplorable housing conditions and systemic poverty within the US. The US Fire Administration (USFA) collects information on civilian casualties due to fire and reports that as of this writing, 2152 people have lost their lives in fires. The prior year's total was 2,290.

The three states most impacted in November were Texas, with 21 lives lost, Illinois with 16, and California losing 14. Texas had the most fatalities for all of 2016 - 132. The state’s toll stands at 126 thus far in 2017.

The house fire crisis disproportionately impacts the working class, which faces substandard housing conditions, as well as declining living standards.

The beginning of this winter season has seen unusually cool temperatures in the southern US, which has led to increases in fatalities. Inevitably the onset of the winter heating season sees an increase in the loss of life and debilitating injuries because of the use of less safe, alternative heating methods such as space heaters. The poor condition of many older houses and apartments is generally characterized by inadequate insulation or improperly maintained or non-functioning central heating systems, often the result of strained budgets.

An equally serious problem is the high cost of utilities, which have outstripped any gains to workers’ stagnant wages, forcing unthinkable choices between necessities such medicines, food, education and medical care. As a consequence tens of thousands are impacted by the social crime of utility shutoffs, forced to live without light and heat in the winter months.

The USFA designated category for young people includes only children up through the age of 13. Those 14 years of age and older are not included, likely to blunt the true scope of the crisis. As a result, the total for November is 25 compared to the same period last year when 24 died. November’s total fatalities were 227, far exceeding last year’s 191 lives lost.

These figures also don't account for the life changing injuries, both physical and emotional, inflicted on the victims. Many often don't have any form of insurance, exacerbating the suffering.

Some of the more recent house fires in the United States include:

* A fire in Baltimore, Maryland which broke out sometime before 1 a.m. on December 13 in an older two-story row house. The blaze took three lives: Alicia Evan and her two young daughters Layla and Amani, four and five years old.

Fire officials have not reported a cause for the fire, but stated that there was at least one working smoke detector.

According to the US Census Bureau the poverty rate in Baltimore for those 18 and younger is 33.3 percent, and undoubtedly higher in some sections of that city.

Baltimore has recently seen a horrific rise in the death toll from fires. In the last year alone there have been 28 people who have perished in fire disasters that could have likely been prevented if more resources were available.

* In another tragic fire, on December 14 in Vicksburg, Mississippi a house fire took the lives two young children; Mariah Dearman and Glen Williams, 16 and 27 months old.

Firefighters arrived at the home within minutes of the initial call to find two adjacent homes fully engulfed. Before their arrival, the children's uncle Thomas Dearman 24, attempted their rescue and suffered severe burns to his face and arms. The modest homes were old style wood frame construction and had a fireplace, which was probably the cause of the fire.

The state of Mississippi is one the poorest in the US. The Census Bureau poverty rate figures for ages 18 and under statewide last year was 31.5 percent, while for Vicksburg it was a staggering 55.8 percent.

* On November 27, Brian Perez Jr., 10, and his great grandfather Tony Perez 85, lost their lives from in house fire on Tradewinds Road in Wichita Falls, Texas. The city of Wichita Falls lies near the Oklahoma border. The Census Bureau reports a 29.2 percent poverty rate for young people.

Virgin Care: A case study in how private corporations loot the UK’s National Health Service

Ajanta Silva

The Health Service Journal (HSJ) recently exposed a scandalous handout given to private healthcare company Virgin Care by a Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) in the county of Surrey, England.

This brings to light how private companies are plundering the National Health Service (NHS) with impunity like never before, with the blessing of central governments.

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 replaced the secretary of state for health’s “duty to provide health care” with a “duty to arrange,” and provided the basis to create 211 Clinical Commissioning Groups, which are allowed to purchase care from any “qualified provider.”

The Surrey Downs Clinical Commissioning Group accidentally disclosed in its October public finance papers a backdoor payment of £328,000 to Virgin Care, owned by billionaire business mogul Richard Branson. This would not have come to public knowledge were it not for the mistake on CCG’s part.

The removal of the report from the Surrey Downs CCG website—after the HSJ made enquiries about the settlement—testifies to the ongoing conspiracy to keep the population in the dark about the scope of the influence of private companies. Surrey Downs CCG later stated that this “level of detail should not have been included in the report.”

In 2016, Virgin Care lost its bid to provide children’s health services across Surrey—a contract worth £82 million. It then sued NHS England, Surrey County Council and six CCGs in Surrey, arguing that there were “serious flaws in the procurement process.” Surrey Downs CCG handed over the payment as a part of their liability in an out of court settlement with the private company. The amount paid by the other parties to Virgin Care remains undisclosed, but some reports suggest that the private company could have received more than £2.5 million from the NHS.

This spring, it was reported that Virgin Care was in dispute with East Staffordshire CCG over arrangements in the seven-year prime provider contract for frail, elderly patients, people with long-term conditions and intermediate care. In October, the HSJ reported that Virgin Care was demanding an extra £5 million from East Staffordshire CCG.

The anger felt by people nationwide against this daylight robbery is such that a petition, demanding Branson hand back the ill-gotten money to the struggling NHS, reached well over 100,000 signatures within few weeks.

Virgin Care, Virgin Care Services Ltd, Virgin Care Ltd, VH Community Services Ltd and Virgin Care Corporate Services Ltd are some of the subsidiaries of Virgin Healthcare Holdings Ltd based in the UK. Virgin Healthcare Holdings Ltd is a subsidiary of Virgin Group Holdings Ltd, belonging to Branson and his family.

To “legally” avoid taxes, Virgin Group Holdings Ltd is based in the British Virgin Islands tax haven. It “loans” Virgin Care the money to invest in the care industry in the UK. In return, Virgin Care transfers money to a mother company as loan repayments.

The NHS Support Federation pointed out “this type of corporate set-up has potential for reducing or eliminating the tax liabilities of operating companies; a company in the UK could always report a loss due to loan repayments to sister companies thereby never having to pay tax.”

Branson’s care companies have been reporting losses since 2012—the year that Virgin Care came to prominence for winning a lucrative £450 million NHS contract in Surrey.

This begs the question of why Virgin Care places ever more bids on NHS contracts if it supposedly loses money on them. Despite its reported losses and paying no tax, the company has been aggressively competing to win NHS contacts and exploiting opportunities opened up with the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act.

The Act laid the foundation for the acceleration of the privatisation of the NHS, which began through the backdoor during 13 years of Labour rule from 1997 to 2010. Under the Act, it is mandatory for CCGs to put services out to competitive tender if they can potentially be provided by organisations other than the NHS.

Surrey is a small county in England with a population of just 1.1 million. With the population of the UK at around 60 million, the scale of the rich pickings available to the NHS nationally is vast.

According to the NHS Support Federation, over the period of April 2013 to January 2016, £16 billion in NHS clinical contracts were awarded through the market and the private sector has won nearly £5.5 billion worth. The Federation point out that “in total around £30 billion worth of NHS contracts have gone before the market, although just over half this value has been awarded.”

Published accounts by the Department of Health demonstrate that NHS commissioners spent 7.7 percent of their budget on private sector providers in 2016/17.

Over the last five years, Virgin Care alone has won over £2 billion worth of NHS contracts to run NHS and local authority services ranging from primary care services—including GP services, walk-in centres and community-based NHS services—to adult social services. Virgin Care boasts of having 400 services across the country and treating more than one million people a year.

Last year, it won a £700 million contract to run health and social care services in Bath and North Somerset. This was the first NHS contract under which adult social care was privatised.

The latest is the £104 million contract that Lancashire County Council gave to Virgin Care to run the county’s 0-19 Healthy Child Programme for the next five years. Virgin Care was chosen as the preferred provider over the Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust, which currently provides these services before its contract expires in March next year.

Trusting their political paymasters in government to create endless opportunities to make inroads into the public provision of health care, this year Virgin Care started their own independent clinics that function entirely separately from NHS or Local Authority services. Patients have to pay for appointments to see health care professionals in these clinics.

Virgin Care is not alone in this plunder. Capita, HCA, Circle, Serco, Care UK, Interserve, The Practice, Inhealth and Alliance Boots are among the private operators providing NHS services ranging from direct patient care, elective surgeries, laboratory services, pharmaceuticals, cleaning and maintenance, logistical services and supplies to primary care.

The NHS, which has seen the lowest ever funding increase in its entire history and billions of funding cuts imposed as “efficiency savings” over the last seven years, is not placed on a level playing field when it is compelled to bid against the private sector for the contracts.

NHS trusts are saddled with massive deficits and are burdened by the crippling impact of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Under PFI—massively expanded under the 1997-2010 Labour governments of Blair and Brown—private companies were able to build and maintain hospitals and reap enormous profits, payable to them for decades hence.

The combined deficit of NHS trusts stood at £770 million in the last financial year. Over the last six years, private firms have made a record £831 million pre-tax profit from PFI contracts, which otherwise would have been spent on patient care.

When NHS trusts win contracts and deliver care they are forced to make savings and reinvest in patient care, while private companies winning contracts are allowed to make profits and transfer them to tax havens without difficulty, as revealed in the case of Virgin Care.

Numerous reports have exposed how private health companies, including Virgin Care, jeopardise patient care and safety in order to make profits. Some of the practices include replacing trained staff with untrained staff, stopping care packages on which vulnerable patients depend, persuading staff to take home sexual health testing kits to use on friends and family to help make the numbers up, and forcing patients to attend extra appointments to boost profits.

Trump authorizes $41.5 million sale of lethal US weaponry to Ukraine

Niles Niemuth

The Trump administration approved the sale of $41.5 million worth of US-made “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine this month. It is the largest deal since Congress authorized such sales in 2014 after the government that was brought to power in a US-backed, fascist-led coup met stiff resistance from pro-Russian separatists in the country’s eastern provinces. This latest weapons deal portends an escalation in the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine, which continues to claim victims and remains a flashpoint between the US and Russia.

First reported by the Washington Post, the latest deal, which was signed off on by President Donald Trump, allows for the sale of M107A1 sniper rifles, .50 caliber Browning machine gun rounds and associated parts and materiel for maintenance of the weapons. Utilizing the large rounds, the M107A1 is particularly effective against light armored vehicles and fortifications.

The report of Trump’s decision to begin selling lethal weapons to Kiev was denounced as a “dead-end technique, which would unleash bloodshed again,” by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, according to TASS.

While the Trump administration reportedly informed the leaders of a handful of Congressional committees of the decision on December 13, no public announcement was made of the measure, which will only further heighten tensions and increase the possibility of war between the US and Russia, the world’s largest nuclear armed powers.

The Obama administration backed the rabidly nationalist movement to oust pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych, which erupted in February of 2014 after he backed out of signing an association agreement with the European Union. The Kremlin responded to Yanukovych’s ouster by supporting pro-Russian separatists in the east and annexing Crimea after a popular referendum in the majority Russian-speaking peninsula registered popular support for joining the Russian Federation.

With the support of Washington, Kiev deployed its military and openly fascist militias against the separatists in the east in an effort to crush any opposition to the newly installed pro-Western regime of billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko.

Since April of 2014, more than 10,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed and nearly 25,000 wounded in the fighting; more than 2 million Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes.

Alleged Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine has been used, initially under Obama and now under Trump, to justify a provocative buildup of US and NATO military forces throughout Eastern Europe and in the Baltic States.

Approximately 4,000 US soldiers are currently stationed on Russia’s western flank on a permanent rotating basis as part of a buildup initiated by the Obama administration to check “Russian aggression.” Additionally, several hundred soldiers from the US Army National Guard have been deployed to western Ukraine to participate in training exercises with the Ukrainian military.

Prominent Republican critics of Trump in Congress praised the president’s decision to deliver arms to Kiev and pressed him to go further.

“I welcome reports the administration has taken the long-overdue step of approving the sale of lethal defensive weapons to help the Ukrainian people defend themselves from Russian aggression,” Arizona Senator John McCain, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a tweet. However, he went on to declare that it “must only be a first step. I urge the President to authorize additional sales of defensive lethal weapons, including anti-tank munitions.”

Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released a statement in which he said the decision to provide the Ukrainian regime with American weaponry “reflects our country’s longstanding commitment to Ukraine in the face of ongoing Russian aggression.”

While the weapons deal is scaled back from a plan which had been drawn up by US Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis and officials at the State Department earlier this year, including the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles and antiaircraft weapons, the decision opens the floodgates for the much larger and lethal weapons deals that have been demanded by Kiev and pushed for in Congress.

“We have crossed the Rubicon, this is lethal weapons and I predict more will be coming,” a senior Congressional official told the Washington Post. The 2018 defense budget signed by Trump on December 12 authorizes the US government to provide as much as $500 million worth of “defensive lethal assistance” to the Ukrainian government.

The Obama administration had publicly contemplated delivering the same range of lethal weapons but held back, supplying only “nonlethal” military equipment, in part to assuage concerns raised by Germany, France and other EU countries which opposed the move. The European powers, which receive a significant portion of their natural gas from Russia, in particular Germany and France, have sought to cement a ceasefire deal in the Ukrainian conflict while maintaining a pro-EU regime in Kiev.

The Trump administration’s decision on weapons sales follows the public announcement earlier this month that the cabinet of Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau had approved the commercial sale of lethal weaponry by Canadian arms dealers to Kiev. Conservative MP James Bezan told reporters that the decision will allow for the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles.

Next to Washington, the government in Ottawa has been the leading backer of the Poroshenko regime, first under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and now Trudeau. As part of Operation UNIFIER 200 Canadian soldiers have been deployed to western Ukraine to participate in military training exercises. The Liberal government recently announced that the military mission will continue until at least March 2019.

Japan’s cabinet approves draft budget that boosts the military

Ben McGrath 

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet yesterday approved a record-high draft budget for the 2018 fiscal year. The plan includes increased spending on the military as Tokyo continues to rearm. The money allocated to the armed forces has steadily risen under Abe throughout his five years in office.

Total government spending in 2018 will reach 97.7 trillion yen ($US862.3 billion), setting a record for the sixth straight year. The cabinet also approved an additional 2.9 trillion yen ($25.6 billion) as part of a supplementary budget for 2017. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga claimed these funds would allow the government to address “economic recovery and fiscal soundness.”

However, the spending is being driven by a 2.5 percent increase over the current military budget, setting a record-high in its own right at 5.2 trillion yen ($45.9 billion). Abe is exploiting the supposed threat posed by North Korea to justify buying new weaponry, including offensive technology. In the past, Tokyo has been cautious of acquiring offensive weapons that breach the country’s constitution and could provoke public opposition.

With Abe fully backing the Trump administration’s threat to “totally destroy” North Korea, this arms buildup includes cruise missiles that would allow the military, formally known as the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), to strike targets abroad. Tokyo claimed earlier this year that it could even launch a preemptive attack on North Korea as a supposed defensive measure, an act that would, in reality, violate the constitution and international law.

The Abe administration has requested 2.2 billion yen ($19.4 million) to purchase the Joint Strike Missile (JSM) from Norway’s Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace, and is examining buying additional missiles from Lockheed Martin. The missiles from Norway and the United States would be mounted on the Air SDF’s F-35 and F-15 fighter jets respectively.

Members of Abe’s cabinet, including Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera, have claimed that acquiring cruise missiles would not alter the supposedly defensive nature of Japan’s military. Yet, Onodera, before becoming defense minister, headed a commission of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) earlier this year that examined the possibility of obtaining cruise missiles that could strike North Korean targets.

Hiroshi Imazu, head of the LDP’s security committee, similarly stated in March: “Japan can’t just wait until it’s destroyed. It’s legally possible for Japan to strike an enemy base that’s launching a missile at us, but we don’t have the equipment or the capability.” Imazu claimed Tokyo could launch an attack also if an ally were targeted, under the spurious notion of “collective self-defense.”

Last Tuesday, Abe’s cabinet approved the purchase of two land-based Aegis shore missile batteries from the US, adding to its Patriot missile systems and Aegis-equipped destroyers. A cabinet statement asserted: “North Korea’s nuclear and missile development has become a greater and more imminent threat for Japan’s national security, and we need to drastically improve our ballistic missile defense capability to protect Japan continuously and sustainably.”

The government intends to have the batteries, which each cost approximately $900 million (2.1 billion yen), operational by 2023. Possible deployment sites include Akita Prefecture in the north and Yamaguchi Prefecture in the southwest. Japan will become the third country to host the system after Romania and Poland, as the US seeks to encircle Russia and China.

Tokyo plans to join the US Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) program, aimed specifically at China. A senior SDF official told the Asahi Shimbunrecently: “[The move] is partly intended to bolster Japan’s defenses against North Korea’s ballistic missiles, but the real aim of introducing the IAMD is to counter China, which has been upgrading a number of its missiles.”

The US announced the IAMD in 2013 under the Obama administration and intends to have it operational by 2020. Tokyo’s budget includes 2.1 billion yen ($18.6 million) to purchase SM-6 interceptor missiles, a core component of the IAMD.

Abe is continuing to push for the revision of Article 9 of the constitution, commonly known as the pacifist clause, by 2020. In a December 19 speech, Abe claimed this “would serve as a catalyst for creating a reborn Japan”—in other words, a Japan capable of projecting military power abroad at a greater intensity than at any time since World War II.

The claim that remilitarization is necessary for defense recalls the rationale advanced by the Japanese militarist regime in the 1930s and 1940s when it insisted that the aggressive annexation of surrounding countries was a defensive measure. In recent years, the history of Japanese expansionism and its war crimes has been officially whitewashed to further an image of Japanese imperialism as a victim and obfuscate the causes leading to war today.

Abe has emphasized “maximum pressure” on North Korea, an impoverished country with limited and unproven nuclear and ballistic weapon programs. Over the past two decades, Pyongyang has repeatedly attempted to reach accommodations with the US and Japan, only to be targeted again as a supposed threat that can only be dealt with militarily.

Any war on the Korean Peninsula could drag in China and Russia, both nuclear-armed countries. Ultimately, China is Tokyo’s true target as it attempts to offset Japan’s relative economic decline. Japan’s Defense Ministry stated in its 2017 White Paper that China “continues to display what may be described as a heavy-handed attitude, including its attempts to alter the status quo by force.” In the East China Sea, the territorial dispute with Beijing over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has been utilized to whip up public fears and justify the deepening military alliance with Washington.

Funds are being allocated in the 2018 budget to send more troops and weaponry to Japanese islands near Taiwan, part of an agenda announced at the end of 2015. The Defense Ministry has requested 26 billion yen ($229.5 million) to deploy and maintain some 700 troops on Miyakojima Island. Troops and surface-to-ship missile systems are also expected to be deployed to the Amami and Ishigaki islands.

There is widespread opposition to this remilitarization and the alteration of Article 9. A recent poll by Jiji Press found that 68.4 percent of people opposed the current proposals by Abe and the LDP for revisions to the constitution in 2018.

UN imposes harsh new sanctions on North Korea

Peter Symonds

The UN Security Council yesterday voted 15-0 for a US-drafted resolution to inflict draconian new sanctions on North Korea following its testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last month. Washington has been pushing for a complete economic blockade to starve the Pyongyang regime into submission.

The latest UN measures come on top of existing bans on the export of major North Korean exports such as coal, minerals and seafood, restrictions on the sale of oil to North Korea and the blacklisting of a number of North Korean officials and entities. The US has also imposed its own unilateral sanctions, aimed not just at North Korea but individuals and companies doing business with it.

The new sanctions include:

• Tougher restrictions on the import of energy products. A cap of 500,000 barrels will effectively cut the supply of North Korea’s imports of refined petroleum products by roughly 90 percent. Crude oil supplies to North Korea will be capped at 4 million barrels a year, with further reductions to come into force if Pyongyang tests another ICBM or conducts a nuclear test.
• The repatriation of all North Koreans working abroad. The draft resolution initially imposed a 12-month deadline, but that was extended to 24 months after Russia and China objected. The US estimates there are about 100,000 North Korean guest workers, including 50,000 based in China and 30,000 in Russia, a vital source of foreign exchange for North Korea.
• A ban on North Korean exports of food products, machinery, electrical equipment, earth and stone, including magnesite and magnesia, wood and vessels. Combined with existing bans, this will choke off virtually all export trade.
• A ban on the sale of industrial equipment, machinery, transportation vehicles and industrial metals to North Korea.
• Another 15 North Koreans, along with the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces, have been added to the UN blacklist, which freezes their assets globally and bans them from international travel.
• UN member states will be able to seize, inspect and impound any vessel in their ports or territorial waters that they believe to be carrying banned cargo or involved in prohibited activities.

The resolution does not, however, permit the boarding and seizure of ships on the high seas as proposed by the Trump administration earlier this year—a provocative measure that could trigger a naval clash.

After the vote, Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, declared: “It sends the unambiguous message to Pyongyang that further defiance will invite further punishments and isolation.” But North Korea is already the most isolated country in the world.

White House Homeland Security adviser Thomas Bossert said earlier this week there were few things left to sanction. “President Trump has used just about every lever you can use, short of starving the people of North Korea to death, to change their behaviour,” he said. “And so we don’t have a lot of room left here to apply pressure to change their behaviour.”

In reality, North Korea is already facing an economic and humanitarian crisis. UN human rights official Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein recently told the UN Security Council an estimated 18 million North Koreans, or 70 percent of the population, suffer from acute food shortages and aid agencies provide “literally a lifeline” for some 13 million.

While the Trump administration refers to “diplomacy” and the possibility of talks, it will accept nothing short of North Korea’s complete capitulation to US demands for the dismantling of the country’s nuclear and missile programs, and highly intrusive inspections. By ramping up the confrontation with North Korea, the US is also seeking to undermine China, which it regards as the chief threat to global American dominance.

Wu Haitao, China’s deputy UN ambassador, said tensions on the Korean Peninsula risked “spiralling out of control” and again called for talks. “Only by meeting each other halfway and through dialogue and consultations can a peaceful settlement be found,” he said.

China and Russia have proposed a so-called freeze-for-freeze plan—a halt to US and South Korean military exercises in exchange for a pause in North Korean nuclear and missile testing—to facilitate negotiations. The US has repeatedly rejected the proposal.

China and Russia voted for the latest UN resolution in a bid to forestall a war on their borders by the US and its allies against North Korea. The Trump administration, however, has insisted that it will not tolerate a North Korea armed with a nuclear ICBM that can reach the United States and will use “all options” to prevent it.

The London-based Telegraph this week reported, based on three sources, that the White House had drawn up advanced plans for a pre-emptive attack on North Korea. Options included bombing a missile launch site before the next test and destroying a weapons stockpile.

“The Pentagon is trying to find options that would allow them to punch the North Koreans in the nose, get their attention and show that we’re serious,” an unnamed former US security official told the newspaper.

In the current tense situation, any incident or accident, let alone a deliberate US military attack, no matter how limited, threatens to trigger a war that would quickly engulf the Korean Peninsula and draw in other powers. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, would be killed.

Speaking at Guantanamo Bay on Thursday, US Defence Secretary James Mattis told US troops they had to be “ready to go” should “diplomacy” fail. He declared that North Korea was a “not yet imminent but a direct threat to the United States.”

“If we have to do it [militarily], we expect to make it the worst day in North Korea’s life,” he said. If war comes, “every submarine he’s [North Korean leader Kim Jong-un] got is to be sunk, and every ship he’s got is to be sunk.”

In an ominous indication of what the US is preparing, Mattis said the US had been able to trust that other nuclear powers, such as Russia and China, did not want nuclear war. When it came to North Korea, Mattis said, “that may be an assumption we cannot make.”

In other words, the US is preparing to wage a nuclear war, if necessary, to destroy North Korea and its small and technically-limited nuclear arsenal.

Political turmoil in Spain following Catalan election

Paul Mitchell 

Thursday’s election in Catalonia threatens to entrench still further the division between separatist and pro-Spanish unity sentiment in the region, destabilising Spain and the European Union.

The Catalan nationalist parties—Together for Catalonia (JxCat), the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the Candidatures of Popular Unity (CUP)—won a narrow majority of 70 seats in the 135-seat Catalan parliament, two fewer than in the previous election in 2015.

Their ability to form a coalition government by January 23 and hold an investiture vote by February 8 is placed in question by the inability of eight of the elected deputies to attend the parliament.

Five have fled abroad to avoid arrest following the invocation of Article 155 of Spain’s Constitution by the right-wing Popular Party government of Mariano Rajoy in Madrid. They include deposed Catalan Premier Carles Puigdemont of JxCat, which is the largest separatist party after the election. Three others are political prisoners, languishing in jail, including deposed regional Vice-Premier Oriol Junqueras. This could leave the separatists six votes short of the necessary 68-vote majority.

For the first time, a pro-Spanish unity party, Ciutadans (Citizens), known as Ciudadanos in the rest of Spain, won the greatest number of votes, but fell short of the numbers needed to form a government. It and the other anti-separatist parties—the Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC) and the Popular Party (PPC)—won a combined total of 57 seats.

Catalonia en Comú (CeC)—the Catalan branch of the Podemos party, which claimed to be neutral between Spanish and Catalan nationalism, but which opposed the separatists’ call for unilateral independence—won eight seats.

Article 155 was invoked by Rajoy, with the full backing of Citizens and the Socialist Party of Spain (PSOE), to suspend the Catalan government, arrest its leaders and impose Thursday’s election in the hope of obtaining a pro-Spanish unity majority. This plan has backfired.

Speaking in Brussels, Puigdemont declared, “The Rajoy recipe has failed… The 155 has clearly lost the plebiscite.” He ended by calling on Rajoy to take part in negotiations “without preconditions,” while making yet another futile appeal to the European Union to intervene—despite it having supported Rajoy’s crackdown through its insistence that the issue was an internal matter for Spain.

“We are proud that this is an issue that arouses the interest of the European institutions,” Puigdemont declared. “I do not ask the European Commission to change its position, only to listen to the whole world, to listen to us in the same way that it listens to the Spanish government.”

ERC General Secretary Marta Rovira also made an appeal for a negotiated resolution, tying calls for a government “in favour of the Republic as soon as possible” to the statement, “If Rajoy is a democrat, he has to assume this democratic mandate—one that accepts the electoral results. It is time for politics, dialogue and negotiation.”

Rajoy will no doubt be under pressure to consider negotiations from some quarters, given the setback he has suffered. Rajoy’s Catalan PPC is now a rump in the Catalan Congress, after an unprecedented collapse in support from 11 to 3 seats. Just 184,108 people, or 4.2 percent of the electorate, voted for a party hated by workers, whether supportive of separatism or not, especially for the brutal police crackdown during the October 1 Catalan independence referendum.

However, there is no indication of a climbdown on his part. The line taken has been to cite the fact that the separatists’ overall share of the vote declined and that its reduced majority depends on rural seats with a smaller electorate than urban areas won by their political opponents.

Asked about Puigdemont’s offer, Rajoy replied that the only person he [Rajoy] should sit down with is Inés Arrimadas, leader of Ciutadans, “who is the one who has won the elections.”

“Catalonia is not monolithic, it is plural,” he added. Only after insisting that the separatists did not speak for Catalonia did he suggest a new era “based on dialogue, not on confrontation…always within the framework of the law.”

This was reinforced by references to the “judicial position” of some of the candidates elected, who, he insisted, must also be subject to the law. Rajoy has made repeated threats to invoke Article 155 and suspend the Catalan government if it dares to raise the independence issue again. More nationalists face being rounded up and thrown into jail for their activities leading up to the declaration of independence, including Rovira, former PDeCat (now JxCat) leader Artur Mas, Anna Gabriel (CUP) and Mireia Boyá (CUP).

The dramatic headway made by Citizens, a right-wing party that won 37 seats compared with just three in 2006, including in Spanish-speaking working-class areas, is a devastating indictment of the PSC and Podemos/CeC-Podem, which could make no significant appeal to any section of the working class, let alone advance a perspective for class unity.

The Socialist Party is as associated with Article 155 as the PP.

The fate of CeC, whose vote share fell by 2.5 percent, is primarily a response to its failure to organize any opposition to the PP’s dictatorial policies either in Catalonia or the rest of Spain. Prior to the election, its spokesman, Xavier Domènech, made a show of advocating unity, not of the working class, but of different bourgeois forces in the form of a three-way coalition made up of the pro-independence ERC, the CeC and the Socialists.

“We are the key, so that people don’t have to choose between one bloc or another,” he boasted. “We are not going to play Russian roulette with our country…”

No one believes such a manoeuvre offers a genuine alternative.

Following the election, Domènech complained, “From these results I do not take any joy. They show a detriment of the progressive forces in favour of the right, which must lead to a deep reflection within the forces of the left.” The reflections of such political bankrupts will produce nothing of value.

CUP leader Carles Riera had seen his party’s vote almost halved, as voters rejected the most bellicose advocates of separatism. He combined expressions of disappointment with declarations that nothing had fundamentally changed: “Our pressure [on the larger separatist parties] has decreased with the loss of seats, but we will continue to exercise force in the negotiation. It is not a question of returning to autonomy, but of returning to the republic.”

Riera said the CUP “will enforce” its goal of “building the republic unilaterally” since CUP “continues to have the key.”

Elsa Artadi (JxCAT) replied that with “more than 2 million independentist votes, we have never had so many independence votes.” He added, “We have to talk to the CUP, but we have a clear mandate.”

The Catalan elections have not resolved the crisis engulfing Spain because only a fresh turn by the working class offers a way forward. An effective struggle against the PP government and its agenda of austerity, militarism and state repression requires a unified struggle by workers in Catalonia and throughout Spain on the basis of a revolutionary, socialist and internationalist perspective.

As the World Socialist Web Site insisted on the day of the elections, “Against all attempts to pit Spanish and Catalan-speaking workers against each other, it is necessary to advance the struggle for power by the working class, the expropriation of the financial aristocracy, and the building of a workers’ state in Spain as part of the United Socialist States of Europe.”