Why Catalans Want Independence From Spain

Federico Demaria

If anyone thinks, says or writes that the Catalan question is easy to understand, I would say that she or he did not understand anything. The question comes from long back and is complex. Catalan independence can appear to a foreign eye, both as a matter of avarice (Catalonia not willing to share its economic wealth with the rest of Spain), and simultaneously as a political force of emancipation (similar, but obviously different to that of the Kurds or Saharawi).

I’ve lived in Barcelona for ten years. I’ve witnessed the cultural, economic and political motivations of contemporary Catalan ‘independetism’ (separatism might be a more common expression for this in English, but not in Latin languages). In response to the referendum that took place on October 1st, I suggest the need for mediation, rather than repression to tackle a political conflict that questions the meaning of democracy itself.

Catalonia is a small region between Spain and France, with Barcelona as the capital, and 7.5 million people. The name is used since the Middle Age, and is roughly the same territory of the County of Barcelona created around 800 dC. In those years, Muslims controlled almost the whole of the Iberian peninsula under the name Caliphate of Cordoba (or al-Ándalus). For centuries Catalonia has been conquered repeatedly by neighboring kingdoms (more or less Spain and France, in today’s configuration). It was an independent republic, under the protectorate of France, between 1640 and 1652, before falling definitively under the Spanish dominance in the War of Succession ended in 1714. At that time, the King was Philip V of Spain (1683 – 1746) of the Bourbon dynasty, still reigning in Spain. Today the King is Philip VI. Catalan nationalism (that Paul Mason calls ‘cosmopolitan’), as we know it today, has its roots in the second half of the 19th century, at the time of industrialization. From the beginning, and through out its history, nationalism has been supported by both progressive and conservative forces. The first Catalanist party was the Lliga Regionalista de Catalunya (1901-1936; Regionalist League of Catalonia). In 1931, the party, which still exists, the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, Republican Left of Catalonia) supports the cause of a Catalan republic, but they would have to be content with an autonomous region under the name of Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia). The autonomous government between 1936 and 1939 will be abolished after the victory of the putschist Francisco Franco. Political autonomy is canceled and the Catalan language is forbidden. Once Franco died in 1975, the new Spanish Constitution of 1978 allowed for the formation of the new Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia in 1979, similar to that of 1932 abolished under the dictatorship. In 2006, the Catalans approve a new Estatut by referendum, that would further expand the authority of the Generalitat de Catalunya, but the Constitutional Court challenged its constitutionality and modified it substantially. This generated a lot of frustration, and as a consequence the option of independence from Spain, up to that time rather a minority position, begins to gain terrain in the public opinion. This is demonstrated by the increasing participation in the Diada (Catalan National Day) on September 11^th each year, with 2 million people according to the organizers (and 600,000 according to the Spanish government) in 2012 demanding independence. In 2014, the first popular consultation is celebrated and in the elections of 2015 the coalition of independent parties wins the elections. Here’s how we get to the referendum on October 1^st 2017, vite fait.

To simplify, I would say that there are three main elements of contemporary Catalan indepententism that have to do with culture, economy and politics.

First of all, the Catalans are very proud of their language and culture, and feel different from the Spaniards. Catalonia is completely bilingual, Spanish and Catalan. Those who went to school under Franco’s fascist dictatorship (from 1939 until 1975) speak Catalan but often do not know how to write it. It was forbidden even to speak it. Of course, schools today are in Catalan. The memory of the civil war (1936-1939) and the fascist oppression is very alive.

Secondly, there is an economic issue, that recalls reasons behind the Brexit. Catalonia accounts for 20% of Spanish GDP, 16% of the population and pays 23% of taxes but receives ‘only’ 10 % of investments. There would therefore be a fiscal deficit, between what Catalonia contributes and receives from Spain. So if Catalonia was independent, it could ‘earn’ about 10% of its GDP. I confess that the exact logic of these estimates escapes me. For example, in terms of energy, Catalonia is largely dependent on foreign imports of fossil fuels, and its industrialization has been allowed by migratory flows from southern Spain and from abroad. What is the deficit and debt not only economic, but also ecological, between Catalonia, Spain and the rest of the world is questionable. In a more comprehensive way, the Catalan left-wing eco-feminist party CUP, based on autonomous local assemblies according to the principles of deliberative democracy, calls from a transition from autonomy to sovereignty, not only in political and economic terms, but also in relation to energy, food, health and education.

The economic issue has certainly been aggravated by the financial crisis. Although it was the Catalan government to apply the first austerity measures, these were said to be justified by the lack of funding from the Spanish government. The economic question is the most controversial one.

The last question would be the political one. Spain is a parliamentary hereditary monarchy, divided into 17 autonomous communities. Communities have ample competences, which include health and education, and to the state only corresponds the basic legislation. Some communities such as the Basque Country and Catalonia have their own political dynamics with their regional parties. They complain that Spain has never recognized to be a pluri-national state. The Catalans do not feel identified with the Spanish government, now dominated by the right-wing post-fascist Partido Popular of Mariano Rajoy. There is also the hypothesis that if the government was at a lower geographical level, it would be more democratic. Last, there is the intention to break with the 1978 Constitution, which many on the left think it has not made justice with the fascist past (a transaction rather than a transition). Each one projects on a potential Catalan republic her/his own expectations and fantasies, many of which are in itself contradictory. For example, CUP sees it as an opportunity for a revolutionary project focused on anti-capitalism, direct democracy, feminism and ecology. This is definitively not the position of the majority of Catalans.

In conclusion, even though these issues contribute to understanding the emergence of Catalan independetism, I still wonder whether there are broader issues that have to do with global processes, such as some refusal to globalization, and which could potentially be valid elsewhere. Some argue that across the world, people yearn to govern themselves. Are there increasing aspirations for direct democracy? We shall see.

Hoping to have clarified some of the origins of Catalan independetism, let’s focus on today. The current Catalan government convened a referendum on October 1^st with the question: “Do you want Catalonia to be an independent state in the form of a republic?” Yes or no.

The Catalan government, made up of independentists (or separatists), celebrated the referendum, according to a law approved in the Catalan parliament. More than 2.000.000 Catalans casted their vote, 90% in favour of independence. The Spanish government considers it illegal because it violates the Spanish Constitution, and attempted to prevent it with violent repression. The Catalan government consists of the coalition Junts pel Sí (with the two main catalan parties Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, center-left, and the Partit Demòcrata Europeu Català, center-right) with the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular(CUP), left-wing, eco-feminist and pro-degrowth. These Catalan parties have 72 votes in a parliament with 135 votes. Against, with 52 votes, there are the Catalan branches of main Spanish parties Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya, il Partit Popular de Catalunya e Ciutadanos. The other 11 deputies are from Podem (the Catalan Podemos) are in the middle: they are not in favor of independence, but of a referendum.

With the same firmness, the Spanish government (in minority) of the Partido Popular has been determined to prevent it. Even the Partido Socialista Obrero Español opposes, while Podemos no. The Constitutional Court has suspended it. Over the past two weeks, government officials have already been arrested and 10 million ballot papers have been seized, calling 700 (out of 900) Catalan mayors to declare in the Court for showing their support for the referendum. The Spanish government has sent in Catalonia about 10,000 members of the Spanish military police Guardia Civil (same that under the fascist dictatorship), which are partly hosted by three Italian cruise ships. The Spanish government has little faith in the Catalan police (the mossos) with 16,000 members. Let alone that one of the cruise ships, Moby Dada, is decorated with the canary Tweety and Sylvester the Cat. The brutality of the Spanish anti-riot police has left 800 wounded voters, despite their peaceful attitude. In Catalonia human and civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of information and freedom of assembly are being violated by Spain’s central government, in a dangerous drift towards authoritarianism. The unquestionable truth is: the more the repression by the Spanish government, the more the support for Independence in Catalonia. This is linked to a fundamental question: What is democracy? Is it defending the Spanish Constitution principle of the indissoluble unity of Spain with repression, or voting to exercise people’s right to self determination?

This recalls an old debate in political science regarding whether national self-determination, in the form of creation of a new state through secession, overrides the principles of majority rule and of equal rights. Surveys say that around 80% of Catalans think that they should be legally allowed to vote. Participation would be about 60/70%, and about 50% would vote for independence. Instead, 60% of Spaniards think that such a referendum should not be allowed. The Catalan question is a political conflict that I doubt can be solved with repression. It needs mediation, urgently.

Buying Homeland Insecurity

Dave Lindorff

Thank god for the US Department of Homeland Security!

Thanks to its $40-billion annual budget, and Homeland Security laws like the PATRIOT Act that Congress passed quickly after the horrific attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we have not had a major terrorist attack in the US in the ensuing 16 years.

Oh, wait a minute. My bad.

We have had some major mass murders over the ensuing years, haven’t we, including some being officially labeled “acts of terrorism.”

There was the sniper shootings of 10 people in suburban Washington, DC back in 2002. There was the execution of 5 Amish schoolchildren in their one-room schoolhouse by a gunman in 2006. There followed the 32 students and faculty killed at the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, the lone gunman who opened fire at an open-air meet-and-greet session hosted by an Arizona Congresswoman which killed six people and gravely wounded the Congresswoman in 2011, the 12 killed in the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting in 2012, the Vietnamese immigrant who shot and killed 13 people in Binghamton, NY in 2009, the 20 grade-school kids and a teacher murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, also in 2012, and the Navy contractor and former sailor who killed 13 in a Washington, DC industrial complex, the murder of 9 people in their church in Charleston, SC in 2015, and now this latest killing of over 58 people in Las Vegas. I’m just naming the big ones here, or particularly outrageous one like those that focused on killing little kids.

Thank god not one of these horrible incidents was considered an act of terrorism!

Of course there were some at least nominally terrorist mass killings too — the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three or four depending on whether you count the killing of a police office during the later manhunt part of the deal, the 2014 attack at Fort Hood by a deranged Army psychologist, the 2015 San Bernardino rec center attack, and the 2016 murder of 49 at a disco in Orlando, but in most of these cases the link to organized terror was tenuous at best, and in the Orlando case in particular, which was touted at the time as the worst mass killing in modern US history (at least until this latest Las Vegas incident), the killer appears to have had no connection to ISIS and was probably just claiming a link in order to ensure that he would be killed by police, and not captured (he succeeded in that plan). We know these were acts of terrorism not just because the government calls them that, but because, well, they were committed by Muslims.

The few actual or supposed “terrorist’ attacks aside, what all these mass murders in the US not committed by Muslim terrorists have in common, along with many more that I did not list either because the number killed was less than 10, or because the cause was so mundane — worker laid off, family dispute, road rage or whatever — is that they were the work of lone usually deranged (and usually white) men using guns — and often guns designed for killing people.

The New York Times reports that since 2000, mass shootings and the deaths caused by mass shootings in the US have been on the rise, with the rise being especially sharp in the last six years ended in 2014 when the article was published (and when Homeland Security was supposedly fully staffed up and running like a finely oiled machine), and that rise has continued since over the next three years, especially with the help of this week’s epic Las Vegas slaughter.

So what has all that money spent on “homeland security” gotten us? What has the surrender of our right to private phone and internet conversation, our right to be left alone in our homes, our right not to be monitored in our travels, and our right not to have massive dossiers gathered on our lives, what has the militarization of our local police forces, and the training of cops to behave as occupiers and centurions instead of peace officers gotten us?

Are we more safe now?

Actual terrorist attacks have occurred, or at least the government is calling them that, while most of the alleged planned terror attacks the FBI says it “foiled” have turned out to be the creations of FBI “informants” — that is, people paid and planted among unfortunate low0-wattage or psychologically vulnerable people the Bureau hoped to induce into attempting some act of terror that the FBI could then swoop in and bust up, then claiming to have saved the day. That means that for all its awesome invasive technology and its multi-billion-dollar assets and interlinked law enforcement personnel, America’s Homeland Security Industrial Complex has been remarkably unable to prevent terrorism.

And meanwhile, mass shootings — terrible even if they don’t get called terrorism because they are committed, for the most part, by American white men like Stephen Paddock— are becoming increasingly common and also increasingly deadly.

To me, it appears obvious that the War on Terror has been a spectacular bust — and not just the $40 billion a year spent on Homeland Security, but the $10 billion a year (at least) that we are told is spent on the National Security Agency, as well as a fair amount of what is spent on both the FBI the CIA, the National Security Council’s Office of Counterterrorism, and of course all the anti-terror budgets of state and local police.

What is really making this country unsafe, let’s just face it, is the ready availability of really deadly firearms — let’s call them Guns of Mass Destruction (GMDs).

The only reason so many people died in Las Vegas is that wack-job Las Vegas mass killer Stephen Paddock was reportedly able to obtain and bring, unimpeded, into his hotel room, some 19 high-powered rapid-fire rifles and handguns, including at least one fully-automatic rifle capable of firing dozens of rounds per second. (That’s in addition to some 20 more such weapons police found in his home and car, including, reportedly, explosives.)

What’s nuts is that in some parts of this country, Nevada being one of them, guns, including military weapons, are so ubiquitous and so unregulated that the sight of someone checking into a hotel with two golf bag’s worth of lethal weaponry suitable for mass murder wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Heck, he probably asked at check-in for a bellhop to carry them for him. No doubt they just figured the old duffer was headed for a gun show or was a salesman with product to show to gun dealers.

Hey, if the guy doesn’t look or dress like a Muslim, what’s to worry, right? Nice older white dude with a friendly southern accent? He should be okay.

Maybe now that we have a case of a friendly-seeming older white guy mowing down good decent white folks attending a good-ol’ American country and western music concert, the pro-National Rifle Assn. crowd will start to re-evaluate their absolutist position on GMDs.

My suggestion would be not banning guns, an extremist idea which will never happen in this country and which isn’t even done in Europe, but at least registering every single weapon from its point of import, sale or manufacture until it ends up in private hands. I would make it illegal to transfer a gun to someone else without that transfer being registered with the government. I’d eliminate the gunshow loophole to registration too. I have little hope that such measures could be passed, though. There is to much political opportunism among Republicans in Congress who want that National Rifle Assn. money and the votes of the gun-toting yahoos of Middle America who think registration is akin to giving up their right vote (though they want everyone to have to register to do that).

But if we could at least limit our American-grown terrorists to single-round-per-trigger weapons, and outlaw high-capacity clips that allow them to kill more than, say, five people without reloading, we’d all be a hell of a lot safer in America. At least more of us would be able to run out of a crowded area safely when an attack happens, and there’d be more opportunity for heroic types to tackle a guy who has to stop and reload all the time.

Also, keeping America safe wouldn’t cost us $50 billion a year for an army of spooks and federal investigators, or require the surrendering of our hard-won freedoms either, so more money could be made available for treating mental health problems.

We should give it a try. It’s obvious that the Homeland Security/War on Terror approach has been a bust. It sure hasn’t provided security in the “homeland,” and, as the spread of ISIS and al Qaeda/al Nusra or whatever they’re calling themselves demonstrates, the “War” on terror has clearly been lost. (There’s another example of wasted treasure. With just a fraction of the trillion-plus dollars spent on the 16-year US war in Afghanistan to date, the US could have paid that country’s impoverished 10 million families, who eke by on an average of $400 a year, an income of $2500 a year back in 2001 for the next decade— enough to turn the country overnight into an economic powerhouse and its people from virtual serfs to a bustling middle class and into America’s BFFs.)

We’ll never be able to prevent the domestic American nut jobs who snap and decide they need to kill a lot of people or do enough damage to be killed by the police. But at least we could reduce the carnage they can do here at home if we made it a little harder and slower for them to cause their desired mayhem.

Wheels and Deals: Trouble Brewing in the House of Saud

Pepe Escobar

Suddenly, the ideological matrix of all strands of Salafi-jihadism is being hailed by the West as a model of progress – because Saudi women will finally be allowed to drive. Only next year. Only some women. And still subject to many restrictions.

What’s certain is that the timing of the announcement – which comes after years of liberal American pressure – was calculated with precision, arriving only a few days before House of Saud capo King Salman drops in for a chat at Trump’s White House. The soft power move was coordinated by the 32-year-old Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, a.k.a. MBS, the Destroyer of Yemen; the king merely added his signature.

The diversionary tactic masks serious trouble in the court. A Gulf business source with intimate knowledge of the House of Saud, having held a number of personal meetings with members, told Asia Times that “the Fahd, Nayef, and Abdullah families, the descendants of King Abdulaziz al Saud and his wife Hassa bin Ahmed al-Sudairi, are forming an alliance against the ascendancy to the Kingship of the Crown Prince.”

No wonder, considering that the ousted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef – highly regarded in the Beltway, especially Langley – is under house arrest. His massive web of agents at the Interior Ministry has largely been “relieved of their authority”. The new Interior Minister is Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Nayef, 34, the eldest son of the governor of the country’s largely Shi’ite Eastern Province, where all the oil is. Curiously, the father is now reporting to his son. MBS is surrounded by inexperienced thirty-something princes, and alienating just about everyone else.

Former King Abdulaziz set up his Saudi succession based on the seniority of his sons; in theory, if each one lived to the same age all would have a shot at the throne, thus avoiding the bloodletting historically common in Arabian clans over lines of succession.

Now, says the source, “a bloodbath is predicted to be imminent.” Especially because “the CIA is outraged that the compromise worked out in April, 2014 has been abrogated wherein the greatest anti-terrorist factor in the Middle East, Mohammed bin Nayef, was arrested.” That may prompt “vigorous action taken against MBS possibly in early October.” And it might even coincide with the Salman-Trump get together.

ISIS playing by the (Saudi) book

Asia Times’ Gulf business source stresses how “the Saudi economy is under extreme strain based on their oil price war against Russia, and they are behind their bills in paying just about all their contractors. That could lead to the bankruptcy of some of the major enterprises in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Arabia of MBS features the Crown Prince buying a US$600 million yacht and his father spending US$100 million on his summer vacation, highlighted on the front pages of the New York Times while the Kingdom strangles under their leadership.”

MBS’s pet project, the spun-to-death Vision 2030, in theory aims to diversify from mere oil profits and dependency on the US to a more modern economy (and a more independent foreign policy).
That’s completely misguided, according to the source, because “the problem in Saudi Arabia is that their companies cannot function with their local population and [are] reliant on expatriates for about 70% or more of their staff. Aramco cannot run without expatriates. Therefore, selling 5% of Aramco to diversify does not solve the problem. If he wants a more productive society, and less handouts and meaningless government jobs, he has to first train and employ his own people.”

The similarly lauded Aramco IPO, arguably the largest share sale in history and originally scheduled for next year, has once again been postponed – “possibly” to the second half of 2019, according to officials in Riyadh. And still no one knows where shares will be sold; the NYSE is far from a done deal.

In parallel, MBS’s war on Yemen, and the Saudi drive for regime change in Syria and to reshape the Greater Middle East, have turned out to be spectacular disasters. Egypt and Pakistan have refused to send troops to Yemen, where relentless Saudi air bombing – with US and UK weapons – has accelerated malnutrition, famine and cholera, and configured a massive humanitarian crisis.

The Islamic State project was conceived as the ideal tool to force Iraq to implode. It’s now public domain that the organization’s funding came mostly from Saudi Arabia. Even the former imam of Mecca has publicly admitted ISIS’ leadership “draw their ideas from what is written in our own books, our own principles.”

Which brings us to the ultimate Saudi contradiction. Salafi-jihadism is more than alive inside the Kingdom even as MBS tries to spin a (fake) liberal trend (the “baby you can drive my car” stunt). The problem is Riyadh congenitally cannot deliver on any liberal promise; the only legitimacy for the House of Saud lies in those religious “books” and “principles.”

In Syria, besides the fact that an absolute majority of the country’s population does not wish to live in a Takfiristan, Saudi Arabia supported ISIS while Qatar supported al-Qaeda (Jabhat al-Nusra). That ended up in a crossfire bloodbath, with all those non-existent US-supported “moderate rebels” reduced to road kill.

And then there’s the economic blockade against Qatar – another brilliant MBS plot. That has only served to improve Doha’s relations with both Ankara and Tehran. Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani was not regime-changed, whether or not Trump really dissuaded Riyadh and Abu Dhabi from taking “military action.” There was no economic strangulation: Total, for instance, is about to invest US$2 billion to expand production of Qatari natural gas. And Qatar, via its sovereign fund, counterpunched with the ultimate soft power move – it bought global footballing brand Neymar for PSG, and the “blockade” sank without a trace.

“Robbing their people blind”

In Enemy of the State, the latest Mitch Rapp thriller written by Kyle Mills, President Alexander, sitting at the White House, blurts, “the Middle East is imploding because those Saudi sons of bitches have been pumping up religious fundamentalism to hide the fact that they’re robbing their people blind.” That’s a fair assessment.

No dissent whatsoever is allowed in Saudi Arabia. Even the economic analyst Isam Az-Zamil, very close to the top, has been arrested during the current repression campaign. So opposition to MBS does not come only from the royal family or some top clerics – although the official spin rules that only those supporting Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey, Iran and Qatari “terrorism” are being targeted.

In terms of what Washington wants, the CIA is not fond of MBS, to say the least. They want “their” man Nayef back. As for the Trump administration, rumors swirl it is “desperate for Saudi money, especially infrastructure investments in the Rust Belt.”

It will be immensely enlightening to compare what Trump gets from Salman with what Putin gets from Salman: the ailing King will visit Moscow in late October. Rosneft is interested in buying shares of Aramco when the IPO takes place. Riyadh and Moscow are considering an OPEC deal extension as well as an OPEC-non-OPEC cooperation platform incorporating the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF).

Riyadh has read the writing on the new wall: Moscow’s rising political / strategic capital all across the board, from Iran, Syria and Qatar to Turkey and Yemen. That does not sit well with the US deep state. Even if Trump gets some Rust Belt deals, the burning question is whether the CIA and its friends can live with MBS on the House of Saud throne.

New presidential election in Kenya overshadowed by political crisis

Eddie Haywood

On Monday police in several cities across Kenya used tear gas and live rounds to disperse protests called by Raila Odinga and his National Super Alliance party (NASA). The demonstrators demanded a change in leadership of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) and to stop the ruling government from changing voting laws, before a new presidential poll takes place on October 26.

With the atmosphere of a siege, scores of police were deployed in the cities of Kisumu, Nairobi, and Mombasa to quash the demonstrations, leaving one dead and several injured, with many others beaten and detained.

The social unrest arises against the backdrop of the September 1 Supreme Court decision that invalidated the August 8 presidential election result, which named incumbent president Uhuru Kenyatta the winner over his challenger Raila Odinga, citing that “balloting had been tainted by irregularities.” As part of the court’s decision, it ordered a new poll to be conducted within 60 days.

The protesters’ demands called for IEBC head Ezra Chiloba to resign, with many chanting and holding placards bearing the slogan, “Chiloba Must Go!”

The IEBC, in a bid to quell social anger, agreed to a meeting on Tuesday with both presidential candidates, stating on Twitter, “We look forward to meeting with the presidential candidates. We hope to create a common understanding on the 26th October poll.”

Kenyatta skipped the meeting, leaving only Odinga and a contingent of NASA officials to attend, in which the group failed to reach a consensus with the election commission on Odinga’s demand of “irreducible minimums,” a reference to Odinga’s and NASA’s demand that IEBC chief Chiloba and other officials resign from the commission, as well as the revocation of contracts from the printing companies NASA suspects of aiding the rigging of the August poll.

After initially praising the decision of the Supreme Court overturning the election’s result, Odinga stated that he “will not let Kenyans participate in another election that will be bungled by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission as presently constituted.”

Coming after an election season overshadowed by suspicious circumstances, which fueled the widespread perception that the vote was rigged in Kenyatta’s favor, many Kenyans have little faith in the outcome of a new poll overseen by the IEBC. The IEBC is widely perceived as corrupt and biased toward the ruling Kenyatta government.

For his part, President Kenyatta condemned the demonstrations, saying “the protesters’ demands are unrealistic.”

In an attempt to prevent future election nullifications by the Supreme Court, Kenyatta and his ruling Jubilee party introduced into parliament the Election Laws Amendment, a bill that would completely curb the judiciary from intervening in an election.

The crisis shaking the Kenyan ruling establishment has reached a fever pitch, and the widespread corruption surrounding the election is fueling fears that the crisis will provoke broader popular outrage against the government. To ameliorate these fears, the Kenyatta government is conducting a violent crackdown on social opposition.

The measurement of the rising social tensions threatening to boil over, of which the October 26 election is a catalyst, is the shutting down of the University of Nairobi for an indefinite period, as a result of what administrators called a “deteriorating security situation” following days of student demonstrations on the campus.

The closure came after students protested the arrest of Babu Owino, a former student and member of parliament who was detained for allegedly “insulting the president” and assault. Summoned by the administration to break up the demonstration, the General Services Unit (GSU), a paramilitary wing of the Kenyan police, entered the university compound and beat and detained several students.

Angel Mbuthia, a deputy chairperson of the student union behind the protest, told the Voice of America, “Students right now are not happy with the situation. What we planned was to have a demonstration to ask for answers and to find out why our vice chancellor ordered the GSU to get into university hostels and use excessive force on our students.”

Speaking on the broad opposition to the establishment felt among the students, Mbuthia added, “The country is a bit unstable right now, and it has been reflected in our university because now politicians are running into the university to get a share of the votes they can get from there and influence everything they can, so that is what is coming in and dividing students in such a magnified way.”

For Washington and the European imperialist powers that extract profits from Kenya’s economic resources and vast working class, the chaos surrounding the election represents a threat to their economic operations.

The uncertainty over the new election is unnerving markets and investors in Kenya. Amid a sluggish economy, Western capitalists are clouded by pessimism for the economic prospects for the country, fearing that the political chaos will disrupt the flow of their profits.

The Kenya Private Sector Alliance, a private entity organized by Western and Kenyan capitalists to promote a “favorable” business climate in Kenya, issued a statement regarding the threat to its members’ profits: “Our super-heated political rhetoric and hardline positioning by politicians, accompanied by threats of chaos and implied violence, are now a serious threat to the continued economic well-being of this country.”

Moving to assuage the apprehension of Western banks and corporations, a coalition of Ambassadors from the US, UK, and EU embassies in Kenya issued a statement sharply rebuking both Kenyatta and Odinga for “not demonstrating the required leadership to ensure [the October 26 election re-run] proceeds smoothly.”

Speaking on the threat to capitalist operations presented by the election conflict, the statement added, “If the upcoming election devolves into chaos, the economy, businesses, jobholders, and families—all Kenyans—will pay a heavy price.”

The US Ambassador to Kenya, Robert Godec, stated, “We are deeply concerned by the deterioration in the political atmosphere and the impact this has had on preparations for the election.”

The eruption of conflict over the election constitutes an embarrassment for Washington and Europe, who unanimously certified the election as “free and fair.” The suspicious instances surrounding the poll, together with the Kenyan Supreme Court’s ruling and the violent crackdown on protesters, have exposed these certifications as a fraud.

Additionally, Washington is deeply concerned that any chaos resulting from the election could threaten its imperialist operations in the region, namely the US-backed war conducted by Kenyan forces against neighboring Somalia.

Director of British rights group Cage convicted for refusing to reveal mobile phone and laptop pass codes

Steve James

The international director of advocacy group Cage, Muhammed Rabbani, has been convicted under Schedule 7 of Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act for refusing to reveal pass codes for his mobile phone and laptop.

Rabbani was convicted last month at Westminster Magistrate’s Court by Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot for “willfully obstructing” a stop and search. He was ordered to pay court costs and conditionally discharged for 12 months. He intends to appeal.

Cage was set up in 2003, as CagePrisoners, to highlight the “plight of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror.” Among Cage’s other directors is former Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg.

Rabbani was held November 2016 at Heathrow Airport in London on return from Qatar. He was questioned for three and a half hours before being handcuffed, arrested and held for nine hours. His laptop, phone and a USB stick were seized.

In a statement made in May this year, Rabbani made clear his principled stand:

“I considered that although the police were in law entitled to ask questions so that they could satisfy themselves I was not engaged in terrorist activity, that did not justify my in addition being required to expose all the sensitive contents of my phone to being copied and undoubtedly disseminated not just to police but to intelligence services and possibly elsewhere in the world—an unjustifiable, uncontrolled acquisition of material.”

During his trial Rabbani explained the sensitive nature of his case as one “involving the US against an individual who was allegedly tortured over the course of 12 or 13 years in US custody.” He went on, “There were around 30,000 (documents) which I was especially uncomfortable handling and I felt an enormous responsibility to try and discharge the trust that was given to me.”

Under Schedule 7, police and immigration officials can detain and question any person passing through border controls under the pretext of determining whether they are involved in terrorism. In practice, the schedule is a dragnet to pry on the affairs of travellers, particularly those whose activities come into conflict with the nefarious activities of the military-intelligence complex.

According to Middle East Eye, between 2015 and 2016 under Schedule 7 561,660 people were asked screening questions, 28,083 examinations were carried out, 10,000 intelligence reports were filed and 1,677 had the contents of their phones downloaded. Yet only 0.02 percent of stops led to an arrest, even less to charges.

The most notorious use of Schedule 7 was the arrest in 2013 of David Miranda, also at Heathrow, when he was carrying electronic files relating to material leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposing mass surveillance by US and UK spy agencies. Miranda was threatened with jail and his laptop, camera, cell phone and other personal items seized and trawled for data.

Rabbani’s case underscores the significance of recent investigations into the massive extent of mobile phone surveillance in Britain by local police forces.

Extensive use of smart phones means that, in addition to allowing voice and text messages to the targeted, vast amounts of personal data, either stored on smart phones or accessed from them, can potentially be collected.

So-called “IMSI-catchers” [International Mobile Subscriber Identity-catchers] are portable devices that masquerade as mobile phone cell towers to which mobile phones connect for voice calls and data transmission and reception. By deploying an IMSI-catcher in an area, its owner can potentially identify every active mobile phone within an area of up to eight square kilometres via its unique subscriber identity and approximate its location. Police operators can develop a live map of every active phone user in an area. They can also listen to phone calls and read text messages.

In 2016, an investigation by the Bristol Cable media cooperative revealed that, as well as London’s Metropolitan Police, as many as five other local forces were using IMSI-catcher technology. British police forces have consistently refused to report any use of the devices, but by deciphering an acronym, CCDC, in police procurement records and published minutes as Covert Communications Data Capture, investigators concluded Avon and Somerset, West Midlands, South Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and West Mercia police forces all had purchased CCDC technology. The devices purchased by West Mercia and Staffordshire at least were compatible with 4G mobile networks.

The deployment of IMSI-catcher tools in a locality allows police forces to identify individuals attending a demonstration, while monitoring their communications. It allows eavesdropping on private phone calls and messages, for example between lawyers and clients, or journalists and their sources.

Efforts by rights organisation Privacy International to use Freedom of Information requests to clarify the extent of IMSI-catchers by police forces have been rejected by every police force contacted on grounds of “national security”.

Other technologies are in use.

Further investigations by the Bristol Cable, and the Ferret, another investigative group based in Scotland, focused on the widespread deployment of easy to use mobile phone cracking devices. As of January this year, some 28 local police forces in the UK, as well as the Home Office, had contracts with Israeli company Cellebrite whose most popular product is the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED).

The UFED is a portable gadget that can quickly extract mobile phone pass codes allowing access to personal text messages, emails, photos, videos, GPS location data by attaching the target mobile phone to the UFED and following straightforward documented procedures.

Cellebrite also claim that data stored in encrypted apps, passwords to cloud services and third-party apps can be extracted, giving access to a vastly expanded data hoard. In all, the company claims that data can be pulled from some 21,374 phone models, including most iPhone and Android based devices.

Further investigation by the Cable concluded that North Yorkshire police is one of the forces deploying UFEDs and that no audit trail had been left for 50 percent of a sample of its mobile phone data extractions. This means that there is no means of confirming whether searches were even legal or what happened to the extracted information. The same investigation found that only 26 percent of searches were regarding “serious crime type, for example sexual offences and murder cases.”

Hundreds of police officers are being trained in the use of UFED and similar devices. West Yorkshire Police is reported to have trained 150 officers on how to examine mobile phones, for offences ranging from traffic violations to assault. Durham Police reported that 90 percent of searches are carried out by local officers, while the City of London reported that searches are generally undertaken by “frontline officers... generally in the first custody detention period.”

The scale of data gathering was clarified in another article in the Ferret which, based on Freedom of Information requests, reported that over the last three years Police Scotland alone had successfully extracted data from 35,973 phones and 16,587 computers. The Ferret notes that police can legally seize and analyse electronic devices belonging to anyone detained, or arrested, for any reason. Evidence is admissible in court even if the data is obtained without the owner’s permission. Police Scotland have 56 staff members dedicated solely to analysing mobile devices, with more being trained every year.

People voluntarily giving consent to their phone being examined may not be aware of the extent of personal data being handed over. Police Scotland procedure states, “Only information held on the mobile telephone or SIM card when it was seized can be retrieved during the course of an examination,” but this can be overcome if the device owner gives authorisation for the examination or if the police obtain a warrant.

US confronts critical teacher shortage

Khara Sikhan

The United States is facing a critical teacher shortage. Every state has classrooms without teachers and face the problematic choice of eliminating subjects or increasing class sizes. Despite the well-established fact that class size is the most important factor in student achievement, classrooms are overfilled. States are lowering the professional standards for educators, inevitably reducing the quality of learning in public schools.

Nearly eight percent of teachers are leaving the profession each year. This is compounded by a 35 percent drop in college students entering teacher training programs between 2009 and 2014. The Learning Policy Institute noted that this means that 240,000 fewer teachers entered the classroom in 2014 compared to 2009.

Decades of defunding public education and the deliberate demonization of teachers by advocates of school privatization have had profound consequences for American young people. Today most US states provide less funding for elementary and secondary education than before the Great Recession of 2008; in some cases like Arizona and Alabama, funding has fallen by 20 percent.

The Education at a Glance 2017 report published last month by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that teachers in the US are now paid less than 60 percent of the salaries of similarly educated professionals in the developed world. The study found that American teachers had “the lowest relative earnings across all OECD countries with data” and that they worked longer hours than their counterparts around the world.

As most would-be teachers are forced to take on staggering levels of student loan debt in order to finish college, the prospect of these low-wage positions is unsustainable, dissuading them from choosing the career path.

While the shortage of teachers is worst within high poverty school districts, it is a national epidemic. In the 2015–16 school year, 48 states reported shortages in mathematics, 46 reported shortages for special education teachers, and 43 states reported shortages in science.

Since the beginning of the 2017 school year, over 500 Arizona teachers have left the classroom, many citing an overwhelming workload. The state has more than 1,300 classrooms to fill with teachers, with the demand increasing as teachers leave. The state has now enacted a tuition waiver for 236 students entering the Arizona Teachers’ Academy in a feeble attempt to staunch the crisis.

In South Carolina, 6,500 teachers left the profession in 2016, a 21 percent increase from the previous year. Along with many other states, South Carolina has turned to international exchange programs for foreign teachers to fill vacancies. Nevada is recruiting heavily from the Philippines to fill special education positions.

More than 3,000 teachers are needed in Colorado where teacher education programs have graduated 24.4 percent less students over the last five years. On top of that, more than a third of the state’s teachers are 55 or older and nearing retirement.

According to a report on the crisis in the Denver Post, some teaching positions have gone unfilled for a year or more. Rural schools pay teachers an average of $22,700 annually, barely subsistence wages.

The La Veta School District was short a math teacher for more than 18 months and the Revere School District went a full year without a music teacher. “This is as pure a crisis as we have in this state,” Mark Payler, the superintendent of Custer County schools which serves 360 students, told the Post. “There is no pool of teachers anymore, the candidates for jobs just aren’t there … We advertise, we push out our job openings nationwide, and we are not seeing any apply,” he explained.

Nationally 145,000 teachers are needed, on top of the standard hiring numbers, to reduce the teacher-student ratio to pre-recession levels.

A veteran teacher from Detroit, Michigan described to the WSWS the difficult conditions created by the shortage: “In Detroit, we have a huge shortage of teachers, despite what [Superintendent Nikolai] Vitti says. We have very overcrowded classes. This means that it becomes difficult to differentiate our students and pay attention to their learning. It becomes more of a disciplinary situation. You fall behind in the lessons because of constant interruptions. It is very stressful dealing with behavior issues with that size of a classroom.

“I’ve been teaching 16 years and I don’t recall having oversized classrooms when I went to the district, but a couple of years ago it was up to 43 students. I love what I do, but the education environment has really diminished,” they explained.

“For an elementary teacher, dealing with all subjects, this is overwhelming. It’s like you don’t have a life. You don’t get paid for all those hours at home and going the extra mile. But I love teaching that much. I’ve worked for the same salary for 10 years—who does that? At first it is all about your passion and then you realize you are being taken advantage of.

“Then they claim it’s the teachers’ fault. I have a BA in business and I know these things flow from the top down. The courts recently ruled there is ‘no right’ to read. In other words, the state is not responsible for providing a quality education for our children. Yet teachers are evaluated on student behaviors.”

In the new Detroit Public School Community District (DPSCD), there are hundreds of vacancies in the classrooms. Substitutes, long-term subs and administrative personnel are filling in while class sizes continue at unteachable levels.

The embattled teachers of Detroit have been forced by the district, with the full collaboration of the Detroit Federal of Teachers (DFT), to make one round of concessions after another for nearly a decade. In 2009, the DFT agreed that teachers would “loan” the district $10,000 apiece; despite the dissolution of the Detroit Public Schools (DPS), this money was not repaid. When the failed Educational Achievement Authority experiment was folded back into the DPSCD, senior teachers earning over $60,000 were informed that they would be restarting their years served and entering at $38,000.

Approximately 90 percent of teacher vacancies are created by teachers leaving the profession, most citing dissatisfaction with working conditions. Adding insult to injury, it is often impossible for teachers to maintain their seniority-linked pay scale and transfer between districts, so they often cannot improve their wages by seeking a better teaching position.

States and school districts are now watering down the requirements for teacher certifications in order to fill classrooms. When the DPS was dissolved last year and repackaged as a “Community District”, new language allowed non-certified teachers into the classrooms.

In 2016, Las Vegas recruited teachers from other states and issued provisional certifications without testing, filling almost 400 vacancies by lowering requirements.

Arizona introduced a bill this August actually dispensing entirely with teacher training. Any person with five years in a respective field can enter the classroom. There are now almost 2,500 classrooms led by people who are not trained or certified to teach.

In Illinois the state board of education cut back the required coursework and requirements for teachers in an effort to address between 1,000 and 2,000 missing teachers.

The Detroit teacher described to the WSWS how this process of dramatically lowering standards has evolved in Michigan, “A lot of this started in 2009-10 when the Emergency Managers walked in the door. They had no clue about education. These men came in and became richer than anyone in the district. Robert Bobb made over $400,000. They changed the state laws to allow noncertified teachers into the district. They have already removed the cap on charter schools in the state; there is no limit.”

“I can see them using technology and moving to online schools,” they noted. “I can see them trying to privatize education, having us teachers working remotely and being paid less. Already Google, Microsoft, etc. are into the market including certificates to become a Microsoft Innovative Educator.”

The defunding of public education has been accompanied by the rise of “edu-business.” Charter schools, which are hailed as offering freedom of choice for teachers and students by Democrats and Republicans alike, are a move towards “subsistence education” for the working class that comes with a shoestring budget for teacher pay, supplies, and support staff. The wealthy elite, meanwhile, will have an entirely different education system based on well-funded private schools and small islands of “public” schools in well-off districts.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has paid to expand charters and lobby for the use of Common Core standards in all 50 states. Real estate and insurance mogul Eli Broad now leads a group of corporate funders pushing a plan to move half of all K-12 students in Los Angeles into charter schools. The Walton family of Walmart created a $1 billion campaign to promote charter schools across the nation and financier Carl Icahn has established a chain of charters in New York City.

The ruling elite is aiming at nothing less than the elimination of public education. Education is to be run for profit at the mercy of hedge funds and financiers, eliminating all the gains associated with hard-won democratic rights over more than 200 years.

Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded for discoveries on the circadian rhythm

Benjamin Mateus

Life on Earth has adapted itself to the rotation of the planet. Through the study of living organisms, including human physiology, scientists have understood that organisms have developed internal biologic clocks that allow them to anticipate and adapt to daily variations. What had not been known till recently is how this process worked.

On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to three scientists from the United States, Dr. Jeffrey C. Hall, Dr. Michael Rosbash and Dr. Michael W. Young, for their work on the molecular mechanisms that control the body’s circadian rhythm. Their findings help explain how plants, animals, and humans can adapt their biological rhythm to synchronize it with the Earth's rotation.

Dr. Hall received his doctorate in 1971 from the University of Washington and is currently professor emeritus of biology at Brandeis University. Dr. Rosbash received his doctorate from MIT and continued on to the faculty at Brandeis University. Dr. Young received his doctorate from the University of Texas, Austin in 1975 and is a professor of genetics at Rockefeller University in New York.

Their work on fruit flies was able to locate a gene that encodes a protein that accumulates in the cell during the night only to be degraded during the day. When this gene was mutated (or “knocked out”) the fruit flies lost their rhythm. This protein is linked to other cellular processes that produce the “self-sustaining clockwork inside the cell.” These biological clocks function under the same principle in all multicellular organisms, allowing the precise adaptation of the physiology to the various phases of the day. These include our metabolism, behavior, hormonal levels, body temperature and sleep patterns. That is why our well-being is affected if our external environment is not in synch with our inner biological clocks.

Schematically, genes within our DNA are “turned on” by molecular signals. A template of the gene in the form of Messenger RNA (mRNA) is created. The mRNA moves out of the nucleus into the cell’s cytoplasm where the protein for that gene is produced.

At night PER (period protein) accumulates in the nucleus blocking the period gene from synthesizing mRNA for the manufacturing of PER. During the daytime, PER is degraded allowing the process to start again. TIM (timeless protein) is another protein that couples with PER allowing it move into the nucleus where it can inhibit the period gene. DBT (double-time protein) delays the accumulation of the PER protein allowing for adjustments to more closely match a 24-hour cycle. Other proteins have been discovered that allow light to influence and synchronize the clock.

The mechanisms described above for the fruit fly have been further elucidated in mammals and found to be more complex and intricate although basically similar. The circadian rhythm established by the molecular components of the mammalian circadian clock at an organism level sees a high cortisol release in the early morning. From this follows a rapid rise in blood pressure and heightened alertness. By early afternoon best coordination and fastest reaction times are evident. Our body temperature reaches its maximum by sunset. Our blood pressure is highest in the early evening. Later, melatonin is secreted and need for sleep ensues. After midnight we are in a deep sleep, and our body temperature reaches its lowest point.

From these, our sleep patterns are regulated, our feeding behaviors are developed. The core molecular clock components are composed of a dizzying number of genes controlled by transcription/translation feedback loops that oscillate with 24-hour rhythmicity that regulates these seemingly instinctive human activities.

But what happens when we throw a wrench into this elegant evolutionary achievement? In a review published in Circulation Research in 2010 titled “Circadian rhythms and metabolic syndrome,” the authors note that the incidence of Metabolic Syndrome continues to increase in the industrialized world. Though genetic and environmental factors have been known to implicate this spectrum of disorders, evidence suggests that alterations in the circadian rhythm are linked to the pathogenesis of these disease processes as well as many others.

The Metabolic Syndrome is a clustering of medical condition—abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol or triglycerides, and low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) levels—that increase a person’s risk of developing cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The syndrome is a global epidemic affecting 25-40 percent of individuals in the prime of their life.

The Metabolic Syndrome has been connected to the lack of exercise and poor diet which then leads to obesity and the development of the syndrome. There is growing evidence that the introduction of artificial light and lack of sleep leads to behaviors associated with circadian disorders such as the increased sensation of hunger, suppression of our metabolism, and changes in the hormonal signals that tell us when we are full. Epidemiologic studies have implicated “short sleep” in contributing to the risk of acquiring diabetes. Workers with alternating shifts have an independent risk for an increase in their body-mass-index. Prolonged sleep restriction has been shown to impair insulin sensitivity.

A better understanding of the molecular aberrations that lead to metabolic disorders in states of disrupted sleep awaits further investigation and, given its broader implication to human illness, is necessary and urgent in light of the importance of a properly functioning physiology synchronized with its circadian rhythm. For instance, genetic variations in our circadian cellular mechanisms are associated with psychiatric diseases like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Research in this area could afford novel strategies for the understanding and treatment of these illnesses.

Myocardial infarction, sudden cardiac death, pulmonary embolisms and aortic aneurysm rupture occur most frequently in the morning. Shift work increases the risk of heart attacks by as much as three-fold in men and women between ages 45-55. The risk of a fatal heart attack increases by 45 percent for people who chronically sleep less than five hours each night. Even transitioning to daylight saving time in the spring carries an increased incidence of a heart attack for the first three days after.

Instead of focusing on the social implications of the disruption in circadian rhythms in human life, the New York Times reports on these Nobel Prize research as novel discoveries for explaining the lethargy and irritability termed “jet lag” from air travel—an area much more interesting to high-income editors and readers than the condition of the working class in America in 2017. More compelling would be in exposing the connection between health and epidemic reports of obesity, diabetes and heart disease with the organization of work and production.

The CDC has estimated that about 84 million (35 percent) US adults get an insufficient quantity of sleep. Approximately 23 percent get less than six hours, and 12 percent get less than five hours. Lack of sleep, like many health issues, has a significant class dimension, as a recent report in the Huffington Postfound, disproportionately affecting the poor and underprivileged. Those unable to work reported the lowest rates of healthy sleep. The southeastern US and the Appalachian region were characterized by a lower duration of healthy sleep, and also have higher rates of obesity, serious health conditions, and death.

There has also been a rise in Americans working multiple jobs under pressure of the persistent economic decline in past decades, felt most sharply working people who live paycheck to paycheck. American families work on average 11 more hours per week than they did 30 years ago. Wages for lower-income families have decreased 29 percent and for middle-income families 13 percent in the same period. These economic forces contribute significantly to worsening health conditions.

Spanish king demands new crackdown in Catalonia

Alex Lantier

In an ominous address last night branding Catalonia an outlaw region of Spain, King Felipe VI denounced Sunday’s Catalan independence referendum and demanded that the Spanish state seize control of the region.

An open intervention by the Spanish king into public affairs is without precedent since the February 23, 1981 military coup, shortly after Spain’s 1978 Transition to parliamentary democracy. Coming amid a vicious press campaign demonizing Catalonia after police repression failed to halt the referendum, the king’s speech is a signal that plans for an even broader military-police intervention against Catalonia are being actively prepared.

Attacking the Catalan authorities for “threatening the social and economic stability of Catalonia and of Spain,” Felipe VI said they had “systematically undermined legally and legitimately approved norms, showing an intolerable disloyalty to the powers of the state. … These authorities, in a clear and unmistakable way, have placed themselves outside the framework of law and of democracy.”

In this situation, he continued, “it is the responsibility of the legitimate powers within the state to ensure the constitutional order and the normal functioning of the institutions.”

The king’s brief for a renewed onslaught against Catalonia is based on a tissue of lies. In fact, it is not the population of Catalonia, but the Spanish ruling elite that trampled democratic rights underfoot, sending in 16,000 Guardia Civil who brutalized firefighters, Catalan police, and even elderly women trying to vote, in a failed attempt to halt the referendum through physical terror.

Videos showing the brazen repression of peaceful voters have spread across the Internet and shocked millions of people around the world. Turning reality on its head, Felipe VI blames the victims of this repression for the violence, in order to argue for a new attack on democratic rights.

As for law and democracy, the Spanish monarchy is not in a position to lecture anyone on these subjects. It is a matter of historical record that the monarchy owes its power to a 1936 fascist coup led by Francisco Franco that drowned Spain’s Second Republic in blood, in a Civil War in which Franco’s main enemy was the working class. After establishing a fascist dictatorship in 1939 over all of Spain, Franco formally reinstalled the monarchy in 1947 and handpicked Felipe VI’s father, Juan Carlos I, as his successor.

Juan Carlos oversaw the transition to parliamentary democracy in 1978 and publicly condemned fascist loyalists who launched a failed coup attempt in 1981. His son’s speech, however, comes after the post-transition regime and the entire European Union (EU) has been discredited by decades of austerity and war, and particularly by the mass unemployment that has devastated Spain since the 2008 Wall Street crash. The Spanish regime is teetering on the verge of dictatorship and civil war.

Felipe VI all but declared the millions of people who voted in the Catalan independence referendum to have placed themselves outside the protection of the Spanish state.

Asserting the “unity and permanence of Spain,” he claimed that in Catalonia, there are “many concerns and deep worry over the conduct of the regional authorities. For those who feel this way, I say you are not alone and will not be; that you have the full solidarity of the rest of the Spanish people and the absolute guarantee of our rule of law to defend your liberties and rights.” He said nothing, however, about the supporters of the Catalan regional authorities.

The Spanish press promptly reacted to Felipe VI’s comments with a coordinated campaign demanding that Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing Popular Party (PP) government invoke Article 155 of the Spanish constitution. This provision would allow Madrid to send forces into Catalonia to suspend its regional government and seize its administration and finances, paving the way for a military-police occupation of the region.

In an article titled “If you can’t decide on 155, get out,” El Español demanded that Rajoy invoke the measure or leave office. It wrote that “Only Alberto Rivera,” the leader of the right-wing Citizens party, “is willing to take the bull by the horns and proposes to apply Article 155 of the Constitution to end Catalan autonomy and call elections… If Rajoy is not up to this task, the best he can do is get out and give someone else his place.”

Similarly, in its editorial today, El Mundo writes, “The person who cannot fail, by his position and his oath to protect the rights violated in Catalonia, is Rajoy. Yesterday we asked him to apply Article 155 to end the unpunished rebellion of Puigdemont and his partners. This urgency becomes more urgent today. The King’s message calls him to it.”

El País, the main daily close to the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), carries a column by professor Javier García Fernández endorsing Article 155. Fernández criticized those who allow the article to be “demonized, when it is a legitimate instrument to deal with territorial crises.”

The main danger at present is that the working class in Spain and internationally is not being warned of the repression being prepared by Madrid. There is broad opposition in the working class of Spain and all of Europe, rooted in the experience of fascism and world war in the 20th century, to a turn to police-state forms of rule. This opposition can only be mobilized on a politically independent, revolutionary and socialist perspective in opposition to the entire ruling establishment.

The reaction of Spain’s main political parties made clear that no effective opposition to a new crackdown in Catalonia would come from the political establishment in Madrid.

Rajoy’s PP, Rivera’s Citizens party, and the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) all hailed the king’s speech, signaling they would support a renewed crackdown. Rivera praised the king for offering “hope and leadership” that Spain needs at present, while PP Deputy Press Secretary Pablo Casado applauded Felipe VI for guaranteeing the “harmony, coexistence, legality and of course the historical continuity of Spain.”

Through its secretary for institutional relations, Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, the PSOE hailed the king’s remarks as a “call for harmony and understanding.” Other PSOE officials remarked to El Diario that, while the remarks of de Celis are the PSOE’s official line, it was clear that the king was calling for an end to dialog with Catalan regional officials, which the PSOE claims to advocate. “If we support the king, we are clearly no longer seeking dialog,” they noted.

The Podemos party, which has provided political cover to the PSOE, appealing to join it in backing a dialog with the Catalan nationalists, issued impotent and complacent complaints in response to the king’s threat of a new police onslaught against Catalonia. Podemos number two Íñigo Errejón wrote, “The king lost the opportunity to be part of the solution. There was neither a call for dialog nor a proposition. It leaves me worried.”

The politics of Catalonian separatism, a form of bourgeois nationalism, offers no way forward for working people in the defense of their social and democratic rights. This is only possible on the basis of a fight to unify the world working class around a socialist perspective.

Such a struggle must, however, proceed with unwavering opposition to the military/police crackdown being carried out by the Spanish state and sanctioned by the European Union and the imperialist powers.