Puerto Rico continues to languish as tropical storm Nate threatens US Gulf Coast

Rafael Azul 

The current hurricane season in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico is proving to be one of the most destructive on record.

On October 5, tropical storm Nate struck Central America and skirted Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula; it is now headed toward the Gulf Coast of the United States.

Nate is fast moving and is headed in the direction of the Mississippi River Delta; New Orleans, Louisiana; Mobile, Alabama; and Pensacola, Florida, where it is expected to strike late tonight as a category one hurricane, with winds of 75 miles an hour.

An early count shows seven casualties in Costa Rica and 15 in Nicaragua. Costa Rican authorities also reported that 15 people are missing and some 5,000 were evacuated to emergency shelters. Louisiana has declared a state of emergency and ordered evacuations of low-lying areas.

Further to the east torrential rain and high winds are being predicted for Puerto Rico this weekend, still languishing from hurricane Maria, which struck more than two weeks ago knocking out the US territory’s entire electrical grid. Approximately 90 percent of the island remains without power and access to clean drinking water is limited.

Rain fell hard in Ponce and other southern cities on Friday increasing the danger of flash floods and mudslides. There are predictions of 10 inches of rain across the island by Sunday. Puerto Rican authorities issued a flash flood warning for the entire island.

Lares and Utuado, in the center of the island, are among the most damaged by Hurricane María, and still largely isolated, facing floods and mudslides. Directly to the north from them are the cities of Quebradillas and Isabela, close to the damaged Guajataca Dam. If this weekend’s rains force authorities to release more water from the dam into the Guajataca River, more flooding will impact those two cities and other coastal communities. The rainstorm is also limiting shipping around the island.

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials have continued to insist that President Donald Trump did not mean to say in a Tuesday night interview on Fox News that Puerto Rico would not have to pay its $74 billion debt obligation.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders declared that the president does not believe that the debt should be erased. What he really meant, said Sanders, is that the island should continue with the bankruptcy process under the Promise Act, administered by the Financial Oversight and Management Board.

“There’s a process for how to deal with Puerto Rico’s debt, and it will have to go through that process to have a lasting recovery and growth,” Sanders insisted. “This was a process that was put in place and set up under Obama, and that has a board of advisors that deals with that debt. And it will go through that process as we move forward.”

Sanders spoke a day after White House budget director Mick Mulvaney urged people not to take the president’s remarks literally.

The grim reality is that a $74 billion debt that was “not payable” in 2015, in the words of Governor Alejandro Padilla, before the one-two punch of Hurricanes Irma and María, is ever more so now that there are no significant assets for the vulture funds to pillage, and as a greater portion of the Puerto Rican population migrates to the US. Puerto Rico will now have to raise some $90 billion just to rebuild the inadequate infrastructure and housing that existed the day before Irma struck.

Recovery across the island is slow, there are reports that some public schools may reopen by the end of the month, and electricity is being restored at a snail’s pace. People continue to cue up for gasoline and for cash. According to one resident, “fuel has become like gold.” Forty percent or more of the population continues to be out of water.

The existence of water distribution centers, which in many cases consist of just one faucet or garden hose, are often not being advertised by the government with people finding out about them through word of mouth. The lack of water combined with no electricity to power air conditioners and fans in the island’s tropical heat is fast becoming a public health catastrophe.

Two weeks on there has yet to be a credible accounting of the extent of the damage, of how many people actually died from the storm; how many were injured; how many remain missing; an exact count of destroyed homes and businesses; how many people are still employed; or how the mosquito population exploded bringing with it the danger of Zika and other diseases.

As with London’s Grenfell Tower Fire, authorities are keen on hiding this information, surely out of concern that it will trigger a social explosion. Many of the reports coming in appear in the Facebook pages of volunteer groups in the mainland organizing the delivery of supplies and the rescue of those of that need to leave the island.

New information, particularly from the south and southeast, where the hurricane hit first and hardest, indicates that conditions are much worse than initially expected. Eleven thousand homes were destroyed in just four suburbs of Ponce, for instance. Yauco and Juana Díaz to the west survived the harshest pummeling of the storm only to be inundated a day after by the flooding of the Luchetti River, entirely covering many homes with water.

On Wednesday a resident of a Río Piedras home for the elderly committed suicide in desperation. Meanwhile, in at least one hospital, the stench of rotting corpses in its morgue forced it to sharply curtail all but emergency operations.

German government backs Spain’s violent crackdown on Catalonia

Peter Schwarz 

Germany’s government has given its explicit backing to the violent suppression of the Catalonian independence movement by the Spanish government.

At a government press conference on Wednesday, government spokesman Stefan Seibert stated, “We have a major interest in the stability of Spain, and it is therefore important that everything going on there politically remains within the rule of law.” Spain’s constitutional court took a clear decision that “this so-called referendum” was not in accord with the Spanish constitution. The Spanish government has the task of “maintaining the constitutional order.”

Seibert emphasised that the German Chancellor was not striving for a mediation mission, because the issue at stake is “according to our firm conviction an internal Spanish affair.”

Despite repeated follow-up questions from several journalists, the government spokesman stubbornly refused to utter a single word of criticism over the Spanish police’s brutal crackdown, which injured up to a thousand participants in the referendum.

Asked why the German government was not responding to the violations of human rights and police violence on Catalonia’s streets—“What are you waiting for? What still needs to happen?”—Seibert answered, “I have made the federal government’s stance on this absolutely clear. It is focused on the legal reality, on Spain’s constitutional reality, just as any future solution to this internal Spanish conflict must focus on Spain’s constitution. That is our firm conviction.”

As other journalists asked if the police violence had not been jointly responsible for the escalation, Seibert responded, “It is certainly not my job here to evaluate police operations in Spain. For the federal government, the central issue in our considerations is the situation as provided for in the Spanish constitution.” The referendum was “a breach of the Spanish constitution.”

Similar responses followed. A journalist asked, “Could you inform us at what point you condemn police violence or police operations? When police violence rules in Russia, you are the first to condemn it, and equally so in Turkey and other countries. Why not now in Spain?” Seibert answered predictably, “The question draws absurd parallels. I deliberately said earlier, in a democratic state, the constitution protects the rights of all citizens. That’s why the constitution has to be respected.”

The spokesman for Chancellor Merkel sought to avoid answering a question about the appropriateness of the force used by the state, “Spain is a democratic state. In terms of the media, it is also a pluralist state. All necessary discussions are being conducted in Spain. Nobody needs a statement on and an evaluation of a police intervention by a German government spokesman.”

A growing number of pieces in the German media are also supporting the Spanish government’s militarist crackdown. While some commentaries call for mediation and deescalation, right-wing hardliners are increasingly winning the upper hand.

Spiegel Online published Thursday an angry tirade entitled “This referendum cannot be allowed to succeed” by Markus Becker. He compared the head of the Catalan government, Carkes Puigdemont, with “the Kaczynskis, Orbans and Erdogans of the world” and justified this by saying, “He declares himself to be fulfilling the people’s will and deduces from this the right to break the law.”

Becker could not be more explicit about his opinion of referendums. They are good when they benefit the ruling class, and bad when they don’t fit in with its plans. “Referenda can be a valuable instrument of democracy,” he wrote. “They can give people the feeling that they are participating directly in the polity …at least this applies when referenda are used responsibly and for a definite purpose. But in the hands of populists, they are an extremely dangerous tool, which Puigdemont has once again dramatically proven.”

Puigdemont has, according to Spiegel Online, “transformed the referendum into a political weapon which he is aiming at the heart of the Spanish state and European Union, and with the help of which he is holding hostage the section of his own people that is against separation.”

Becker employs concepts that are normally reserved for justifying the bombardment of civilians in Aleppo, Mosul and Raqqa. “This purported majority,” he wrote, “is becoming something akin to a human shield in a conflict which in the most extreme scenario could culminate in bloodshed under conditions similar to civil war.” In this way, he leaves no doubt about the fact that he would support a bloodbath inflicted by the Spanish government.

Reinhard Müller was equally forthright in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Thursday in a comment entitled “Self-determination does not mean secession.”

Müller wrote, “No doubt: all peoples have the right to self-determination,” and referred to the United Nations Charter and other UN documents. But he went on to add that the right to secede from an existing state only applied in extreme cases. “Because the inviolability of the state is one of the fundamentals of the international community. Every state therefore has the right to oppose separatist strivings within its borders.”

Müller also sought to wrap himself in the Spanish constitution, which explicitly stipulates “that the central government can compel autonomous regions like Catalonia to the ‘forcible fulfillment’ of its obligations.”

Why is the German government endorsing the violent clampdown on the Catalonian referendum by the Spanish state, which 42 years after the fall of the Franco dictatorship, is returning to its authoritarian traditions?

The references to the rule of law and the Spanish constitution are threadbare pretexts, as shown by the German government’s stance in other cases. Whether they support or resist a separatist movement has nothing to do with the legal situation, but rather depends on their own interests. In the 1990s, Germany actively pushed for the fracturing of Yugoslavia and promoted separatist movements in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia, which led to a series of bloody wars with well over 100,000 deaths. The first military intervention by the German army since World War II took place in 1999 with the goal of separating Kosovo from Serbia.

The German government is backing the uncompromising stance of Mariano Rajoy because it fears concessions to the Catalan separatists could trigger a chain reaction, weaken the EU and thus undermine Berlin’s plans to rise to the position of an economic, political and military world power on the basis of the EU.

Several European governments fear that Catalonia will be followed by others. Flanders is threatening Belgium with secession, Lombardy is threatening Italy, and in Britain, the danger exists that with Brexit, the conflict in Northern Ireland could erupt once again. This is also why the EU Commission has adopted an unrelenting stance towards the Catalan nationalists. The Commission has made clear that in the case of secession, Barcelona should not expect to be accepted into the EU, and has even opposed adopting a mediation role, although some who fear the situation will otherwise get out of control are calling for EU mediation.

German EU Commissioner Günther Oetinger (CDU) warned of a dramatic escalation, “The situation is very, very concerning. A civil war in the midst of Europe is conceivable,” he said. “One can only hope that negotiating channels between Madrid and Barcelona are established soon.”

But there is a more fundamental reason why the German government is uncompromising in its approach to the Catalan nationalists. The ruling elite fears that any sign of relenting could encourage mounting opposition to social inequality and militarism. The period in which social conflicts in Europe could be overcome by means of compromise has long passed into history. Millions of workers and young people have been experiencing declining wages, tougher working conditions and worsening career prospects for years. Trust in the traditional parties is eroding.

The ruling classes are responding to this by resorting to authoritarian forms of rule. In France, the long-standing state of emergency is now being written permanently into law. During the German election campaign, the parties sought to outdo each other with demands for more police, surveillance and internet censorship. For the first time since the downfall of the Nazis, a right-wing extremist party is entering parliament.

Berlin’s support for Rajoy’s violent suppression of Catalonia’s independence referendum must therefore be taken as a warning. The German ruling class is preparing to brutally suppress any form of social and political opposition.

Identity politics and the growth of inequality within racial minorities

Eric London

A September 2017 report published by the Federal Reserve shows that social inequality in the US has grown to record levels over the last decade. From 2004 to 2016, the wealth of the bottom 90 percent of the population drastically declined while the top 1 percent saw a sharp increase.

The data also show that the growth in social inequality is most acute within racial minorities. Over the course of the last 10 years, affluent African-Americans and Latinos have seen their wealth skyrocket at the expense of the working class of all races.

This large shift of wealth has had a dramatic impact on the social anatomy of the population, placing wind behind the sails of sections of the affluent upper-middle class whose racialist political outlook has come to play a dominant role in bourgeois politics.

Matt Bruening of the People’s Policy Project analyzed data from the Federal Reserve report and showed the extreme degree of inequality within racial minority groups.

Among both African-American and Latino populations, roughly 65 percent own zero percent of the total wealth owned by their respective racial groups. The richest 10 percent of African-Americans own 75.3 percent of all wealth owned by African-Americans; the richest 10 percent of Latinos own 77.9 percent of all Latino wealth; and 74.6 percent of the wealth owned by whites is owned by the top 10 percent of whites.

Top one percent share of wealth by race

The level of inequality within racial groups has skyrocketed since the coming to power of Barack Obama. Over the course of his presidency, from 2007 to 2016, the top 1 percent of African-Americans increased its share from 19.4 percent to 40.5 percent. Among Latinos, the top 1 percent increased its share from 30.7 to 44.7. The figure also increased among whites, but less dramatically, from 31.9 to 36.5.

In another dataset, Bruening shows that during the Obama administration, wealth for the top 2 percent of African-Americans and Latinos skyrocketed, while declining for the bottom 99 percent within those groups.

Bruening also explains that due to higher levels of poverty among African-Americans and Latinos, only the top 2 percent within each racial group has sufficient wealth to enter the overall top 10 percent among all racial groups. In other words, the years 2007 to 2016 further devastated Latino and black working people while greatly enriching the minority members of the wealthiest 10 percent.

Black wealth distribution by decile

The Federal Reserve data show that the wealth of Latinos in the overall top 10 percent increased by $298,161 from 2007 to 2016, and by $275,414 for African-Americans in this group. The wealth of those whites who comprise the top 10 percent overall also increased under Obama.

Bruening’s analysis also shows that sections of the Latino and African-American working class which had previously been more economically stable—those in the 60th to 95th percentile in their respective groups, and situated in the 40th to 80th percentile overall—were particularly devastated from 2007 to 2016, as compared to the poorer halves of their racial groups who also lost wealth but had less to lose. These sections of the minority working class, which would have had relatively well-paying jobs with benefits in earlier decades, lost between $100,000 and $350,000 over the past decade.

Latino wealth distribution by decile

This massive transfer of wealth exposes the sham of Obama’s presidency. Hailed by the corporate media and pseudo-left as a “transformative figure” on account of his race, his administration oversaw the bank bailout, the bankruptcy of Detroit, the poisoning of the water in Flint, the deportation of 2.7 million immigrants, the expansion of NSA surveillance and a permanent state of war, and major cuts to social programs, education and food stamps.

The Democratic Party consciously used Obama’s skin color to give a political cover to social counterrevolution. The super-rich were primary beneficiaries, but the affluent middle class, including sections of African-Americans and Latinos, were among the greatest beneficiaries of this policy of intensified class exploitation. This created the conditions for the victory of Trump, who benefited from a decline in the vote for the candidate of Wall Street, Hillary Clinton, among all workers, including minority workers.

The Federal Reserve report shows that workers of all racial groups face declining wealth and stagnant incomes, and that growing economic hardship is prevalent across different strata of the working class. In other words, workers of different races and at differing income and wealth levels are objectively being drawn closer together by the impact of the ruling class’s social counterrevolutionary policies.

American society is increasingly polarized—not between races, but between classes. In this context, the class basis of the upper-middle class’s obsession with racial and identity politics becomes clearer. This is the reactionary political essence of groups like Black Lives Matter, authors like Ta-Nahesi Coates, and academics like Keeyanga Yamada-Taylor, who push racial politics to better fleece the working class members of their “own” racial groups, and the working class overall.

Their claims of a unitary “black community” or “Latino community” are fraudulent attempts to hide the immense class divisions that exist within these groups. At the same time, the affluent sections of these racial groups seek to manipulate discontent to advance their own claims to a greater share of wealth and privilege within the top 10 percent.

Identity politics has become a key mechanism through which the next 9 percent situated below the top 1 percent advances its grievances within the political establishment, fighting for “space” in the universities, trade unions, political parties, state apparatus, and corporate media. This layer, which forms a principal social base for the Democratic Party, is generally pro-war and supportive of the right-wing policies that have produced a soaring stock market.

Socialists fight not for a redistribution of wealth within the top 10 percent, but for a complete restructuring of society to abolish social inequality and end the domination of the corporate and financial elite over social and economic life. The social basis for the building of a revolutionary socialist movement lies in the bottom 90 percent, the working class, which will attract the support of the most socially-conscious and humane elements among the next 9 percent.

The social interests of all nationalities, races and social strata of workers are being drawn together by the impact of the social counterrevolutionary policies of the two parties. The task of socialists is to fight to give political expression to this objective process, breaking the barriers of racial chauvinism, linking workers across the world in a common revolutionary fight for social equality and socialism.

Observation of gravitational waves wins Nobel Prize in physics

Bryan Dyne

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2017 has been awarded to Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for their pioneering work to directly observe gravitational waves. As noted by the Nobel committee, this was a decisive advance in scientific cognition and technical mastery and has been celebrated around the world.

The most recent detection of a gravitational wave was made by both LIGO and Virgo, allowing astronomers to more accurately locate the wave's source. Credit: LIGO- Virgo Collaboration—Optical Sky Data: A. Mellinger

The work spanned the course of five decades and culminated on September 14, 2015 when the twin Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors recorded the first unambiguous signature of a gravity wave—one which also matched theoretical predictions of what a merger of two black holes into a larger one would show. Gravitational waves were first predicted by Einstein in 1916 and have been pursued for the past century as one of the many proofs of the general theory of relativity, and as a tool to explore a new facet of the universe.

Those honored in the prize ceremony reflect some of the variety of backgrounds of the nearly 1200 researchers and engineers that work on LIGO. Thorne was born in Utah in 1940 to a Mormon family whose ancestors traveled west by foot and horse during the era during and after the American Civil War. He studied general relativity at Princeton and joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in 1967 where he began to work on the mathematics needed to detect gravitational waves. Weiss and his family were forced to flee Nazi Germany and then Europe in 1938, when the future physicist was six years old, so that his father could avoid persucution and possibly death at the hands of the Nazis for being Jewish and for being a member of the German Communist Party. His academic career, from his bachelor's through his professorship, centered around the Massechusetts Institute of Technology, where he started work in the 1970s to develop the special instruments needed to test general relativity. Barish, now 81, was born in Nebraska to Jewish immigrants from Belarus. His education and professional life have been at CalTech, where he is currently a professor emeritus and the principal investigator and director of the LIGO collaboration.

Two others, both deceased and thus ineligible for the Nobel, deserve mention for their critical contributions to LIGO: Ronald Drever and Vladimir Braginsky. Drever was born in 1931 in Bishopton, Renfrewshire, Scotland and received both his bachelor's and doctorate at the University of Glasgow. He was part of the original team in the 1970s that worked on the mathematics to analyze and detect gravitational waves. Braginsky was born in Moscow in 1931 and received his Ph.D. from the Moscow State University in 1967. He had been working on his own method to detect gravitational waves when he was visited by Kip Thorne in 1968 and the two worked closely until Braginsky's death in 2016.

From a technical standpoint alone, the achievement of the LIGO collaboration is deserving of the prize. Starting in the early 1990s, the detectors were developed with the understanding that new technologies in lasers, vacuums, remote sensing, mirror polishing and seismology would all be needed to achieve the necessary sensitivity. The hundreds of engineers on this project played critical roles in trailblazing new fields to complete the first iteration of this detector, and to further upgrade it to sensitivities which now permit “routine” detection.

A rendering showing the merger of two black holes just before they collide and the resultant gravitational waves rippling outward. Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle

Researchers on the project also had to develop new areas of mathematics to properly understand the signals that were recorded and to extract an actual gravitational wave signature from the myriad false signals that appear. In effect, they had to measure the distance between Earth and the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, to the accuracy of the width of a human hair, while at the same time accounting for the subtle shifts in Earth's orbit caused by every planet, moon, asteroid and comet in the Solar System.

The theoretical achievement, however, is even more profound. The vast majority of what humanity has learned about what exists beyond Earth has been through the study of light and its different wavelengths and orientations. On occasion, we have learned about high energy processes when Earth is struck by a particularly intense cosmic ray, a particle produced vary far away and by some colossally powerful event such as a gamma ray burst. Once, in 1987, 20 neutrinos were detected from a star as it collapsed into a supernova, confirming parts of our understanding of the last moments of the life of stars much more massive than our own Sun.

Now, however, astronomers have a growing data set of events only observable through their gravitational interactions, through the warping of space and time that is caused as objects accelerate. While this field is still basically brand new, it has already yielded an impressive amount of scientific results.

To date, there have been four concrete detections of gravitational waves and a handful more that are less statistically certain. One of the initial findings is that all the events detected so far are from the merger of black holes in the range of seven to 36 times the mass of the Sun. While the existence of these objects had been considered a possibility, they had never been previously observed and no one was sure of how common they were or how often they collide. The origin of this population remains uncertain—some think many may arise from the very first population of stars. Thanks to LIGO and its sister detector Virgo, cosmologists now have new windows into the formation and evolution of rare ultra-heavy stars, addressing some long-standing questions.

There are also tantalizing clues, which a larger sample of detections will pin down, as to whether this first generation of stars formed preferentially in dense clusters or was more evenly distributed. The detected black hole collisions also give clues about how the supermassive black holes formed that are found at the heart of virtually every galaxy.

Four gravitational waves have been detected so far, each lasting mere moments as the two merging black holes collide and become one. Credit: Virgo Collaboration

The most recent detection, recorded seven and a half weeks ago on August 14, has revealed even more. This was the first time that the two LIGO detectors, in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana, were able to work in conjunction with the newly upgraded Virgo Observatory located near Pisa, Italy. By utilizing the detection recorded by all three instruments, the astronomers on each project were able to shrink the volume of sky from which the gravitational waves originated by a factor of 20. This enabled 25 facilities from around the world to perform follow-up visual observations, but no bright event was identified in the calculated region, further confirmation that what is producing the gravitational wave is a black hole merger.

The three-detector observation has also allowed researchers to determine the internal oscillation structure (the polarization) of the gravitational wave. This was a critical test of general relativity, which predicts a certain description of gravitational waves. Other theories of gravity, which modify, expand or sometimes replace general relativity, have their own predictions. The current analysis shows that even in such extreme cases, Einstein's theory is correct.

One of the more exciting future prospects about gravitational wave astronomy is the ability to directly gather information further back in time than is possible with light. As anyone who has ever stood in the shadow of a tree on a sunny day understands, branches, leaves and a variety of types of matter can block light. This is replicated on a cosmic scale when attempting to use light to see the first moments of the known universe. There is a "shadow" known as the cosmic microwave background that prevents us from seeing the first 380,000 years of the known universe's existence.

Gravitational waves do not have this problem. As far as we know, the only object that might reflect, refract, diffract or absorb a gravitational wave is a black hole, and they are few enough in number compared to the vastness of space that gravitational waves travel essentially unimpeded from where they were created to Earth. This allows us to get first-hand knowledge from events that we literally cannot see.

While a great deal has been learned in the past two years, a great many more questions remain. For example, there has yet to be a detected gravitational wave signal from a collision involving neutron stars or white dwarfs, both extremely dense objects whose insides are much more complicated than that of a black hole. And LIGO and Virgo themselves only observe one part of the gravitational wave spectrum.

A different sort of detection method, known as pulsar timing, observes different frequencies of gravitational waves than those observed by LIGO and Virgo and is expected to find gravitational waves from supermassive black holes during galactic mergers. As more and more instruments to detect gravitational waves come online, the more humanity learns about some of the most esoteric events in the cosmos, including its origins.

Huge increase in UK firefighters with mental health problems

Dennis Moore

The pain of such tragedy
The waste of such life
The death of a husband, his children, and wife.
The stairs were too many
My breaths were too few
My body exhausted. Now mentally too

It is difficult to sum up just how anyone could feel, after having entered Grenfell Tower on that fateful night, battling terrible conditions, desperately trying to save residents lives, against insurmountable odds. But Ricky Nuttall, one of the firefighters who was part of the Grenfell rescue effort, wrote a moving poem, “The Firefighter,” a part of which is quoted above. It says that the tragedy has “left a hole in my soul that will never repair.” The poem ends with the lines:

My lips wet with tears. I am lost. There is no plan.
Emotionally ruined. One broken man. 

The poem was read out on BBC Radio 5 live during a discussion on the impact of trauma on the mental health of fire crews. Nuttall, a firefighter for 13 years stationed at Knightsbridge and Hillingdon, told the getwestlondon web site of the mental anguish Grenfell wrought:

“I have been to counselling and I still currently go to counselling. I have had eight sessions since Grenfell. Grenfell was the catalyst for a lot of other incidents and stuff coming to the fore. It’s a collective thing, not just Grenfell. It’s other countless incidents I have attended over the years.”

Many of the firefighters who tackled the Grenfell fire suffered mental health problems following that terrible event. This year alone 103 firefighters from the London Fire Brigade had to take mental health leave, five as a direct result of Grenfell.

These figures were uncovered by the BBC’s 5 “Live Investigates” programme, using Freedom of Information requests.

The number of firefighters and other employees taking long-term leave because of mental health issues, including depression and anxiety, has risen from 600 to 780 in the last six years. Since 2011, 126 fire service workers have left the service due to mental health issues.

Separate research carried out by the Fire Fighters Charity found that there were 41,000 shifts lost nationally in the past year because of mental health issues.

The new findings substantiate research undertaken last year by the Mind mental health charity’s Blue Light Programme. It found that 27 percent of firefighters had contemplated suicide due to stress or poor mental health, with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) commonplace.

Mind’s research included an online survey of 3,627 emergency staff personnel, representing 1.5 percent of the “blue light” national workforce, including firefighters and ambulance workers. It found that those working in the emergency services were disproportionately affected by the work they do, with nine out of ten staff having experienced stress and poor mental health at work.

As a group of workers, they are twice as likely to identify problems at work as the cause of their poor mental health.

Emergency services workers are exposed to trauma by the nature of their work. However, large numbers of staff reported factors such as reduced budgets, with more challenging targets placing them under increasing pressure, and reducing the opportunities for more informal support—a significant factor that staff depended on in the past.

Of those interviewed, 56 percent were affected by excessive workload. Pressure from management was cited by 52 percent and long hours by 45 percent. Stress from exposure to traumatic incidents stood at 42 percent.

The aftermath of a fire or other incident can potentially leave staff experiencing symptoms associated with trauma. This can include, poor sleep, low mood, flashbacks, depression and anxiety. Without the right help, this can have a long lasting and detrimental effect and can in some cases lead to long lasting, and serious mental health problems.

Many emergency staff did their best to prevent their mental health affecting their performance at work, but this came at a high personal price, often affecting their physical health, and relationship breakdowns. Mind found that 28 percent of staff turned to drink and drugs to deal with increasing pressure.

Faye McGuinness, programme manager for the Blue Light programme, said, “Our survey of over 1,600 staff and volunteers across emergency services shows nearly nine in ten have experienced stress, low mood or poor mental health while working in their current role. A shocking one in four told us they had contemplated taking their own lives.”

Sean Starbuck, mental health lead for the Fire Brigades Union, said, “Grenfell has brought this issue to the forefront, but we’ve been raising it for some time with our employers on the back of the earlier Mind information.”

The Fire Fighters Charity reports a growing number of firefighters and rescue staff turning to them for help. According to CEO, Dr Jill Tolfrey, 5,000 people visit their support centres every year and 40 percent enlist for psychological support.

The drastic increase in stress and trauma levels among emergency services workers is a direct outcome of nearly a decade of unrelenting austerity measures, which have destroyed or sharply reduced their budgets. Cuts to London’s fire service vastly reduced their ability to deal with fires, but also included cuts to counselling services for those working on the frontline.

Former Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson, prior to the Grenfell fire, made enormous cuts to the fire services across the capital. These included the closure of 10 fire stations, the loss of 13 fire engines and 600 firefighters’ jobs. At the same time counselling services were slashed, with the number of counsellors trained to help firefighters process traumatic scenes slashed from an already low 14 to just 2. This is what the ruling elite now considers adequate for nearly 6,000 firefighters who serve the capital’s population of nearly 10 million and attend around 50,000 incidents each year.

Since 2010, 11,000 firefighters (one fifth of the workforce) have lost their jobs, while at the same time firefighters are responding to a record number of incidents. Latest government figures show a rise in fire deaths by 15 percent in 2015/16.

In April 2016, the heads of six large fire services across England, but outside London, raised concerns that further budget cuts posed a risk to community safety. In 2015, 294 deaths were caused by fire, as against 242 for the year 2014, a rise of 21 percent. This was the largest rise since 2001-2002.

The fire services face budget cuts of up to 50 percent by 2020, from a 2010 benchmark. Greater Manchester fire service is being cut by 43 percent, from £117 million to £96 million, and West Midlands by 46 percent, from £119 million to £94 million.

The firefighters who faced the inferno at Grenfell were clearly ill equipped to be able to deal with the fire as it unfolded. Following the fire, in an outpouring of solidarity from the local community, there were offers of help from more than 300 hundred professional counsellors and therapists. They offered free sessions to all those forced to deal with the trauma of the blaze.

This instinctive response to help others contrasted sharply with that of the central government and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council, who stood by and did nothing despite possessing enormous wealth and resources. This callous indifference was summed up by Johnson, who in 2013 told protesting firefighters—warning him about the life threatening impact his cuts would have—to “get stuffed.”

Siemens and Alstom rail train units merge as corporations prepare for trade war

Gustav Kemper

On September 26, the supervisory boards of the German company Siemens and the French Alstom Group unanimously approved a deal to merge the rail train units of both companies by the end of 2018 in a “merger of equals.” With 62,000 employees and an annual turnover of around 15 billion euros, the new corporation will be the world’s second-largest railway technology company.

Recent years have witnessed fierce competition on the world market for rail vehicles. In mid-2015, two Chinese manufacturers combined to form the China Railway Rolling Stock Group (CRRC). With over 180,000 employees and branches and production facilities in more than one hundred countries CRRC took over first place from Bombardier Transportation, the former world market leader. With a turnover of $34.5 billion CRRC also significantly exceeded the joint sales of the two Europe-based manufacturers, Siemens and Alstom.

Since then, Siemens, Alstom and Bombardier have worked to create a counterpart to the Chinese company. A series of mergers, rationalization, savings through increased production and a conversion from design and production to platform construction, in which the same components are used in different models, similar to the automotive industry, were all intended to increase competitiveness.

In mid-2014, Siemens offered Alstom its French subsidiary, Siemens Mobility. In return, the German company planned to take over Power and Grid, the most profitable sector of Alstom’s energy interests. The deal collapsed after the US company, General Electric, won the bid for the energy sector.

Siemens then began negotiations with Bombardier Transportation, a subsidiary of Bombardier Inc., the Canadian aircraft manufacturer. Bombardier Aerospace had suffered losses, and its management decided to implement a comprehensive restructuring program. As a result a total of 8,500 jobs are to be slashed, 5,000 in the transport sector. German plants saw 1,430 job cuts in 2016 and a further 2,200 jobs are due to go in 2018, mainly at the German Hennigsdorf and Görlitz plants.

In May 2017 it was reported that the joint venture agreements between Siemens and Bombardier were close to completion. However, Siemens, whose mobility department is an industry leader in signal technology and network infrastructure, generating higher profit margins than the production of rail vehicles, was able to pick and choose its merger partner.

Further financial problems at Bombardier were on the cards after the American aircraft manufacturer, Boeing, accused its Canadian competitor of unfair government support in the production of its C-series of aircraft. The company’s problems then increased dramatically when the Trump government raised an import tax of 219 percent on Canadian aircraft in September. The Siemens executive decided to quickly reorient to a deal with Alstom.

When the heads of Siemens and Alstom addressed the press on September 20 to announce the merger, they made clear that what was at stake were not just economic priorities but also political motives. Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser told the press: “We are putting the European ideal into practice and together with our friends at Alstom, creating a new long-term European champion of the railway industry.”

The merger is part of German and French plans to boost Europe to the status of a world power able to confront the US and China both economically and politically. Siemens CEO Kaeser had already consulted Chancellor Angela Merkel before the Bundestag election in September. Merkel then consulted with French President Emmanuel Macron, according to a number of daily newspapers.

On the day of the announcement of the Siemens-Alstom fusion, Macron had called for a “determined and concrete Franco-German initiative” to develop new European projects. The EU must be built up as a “competitor to China and the US.” The French state holds one-fifth of the Alstom shares and the merger was only possible with Macron’s approval.

Alstom’s CEO, Poupart-Lafarge, declared the merger to be a “key moment” in the company’s history. It will “create added value for customers, employees and shareholders.”

The sort of value generated was immediately reflected in the share prices of both companies: the price of Siemens shares rose by two percent and that of Alstom by 18 percent within the space of a few days. The merger is intended to provide savings of around €470 million annually through a so-called “synergy effect” in the fields of research, development, sales and product reduction over a four-year transition period. Until then, both companies have guaranteed to maintain jobs levels and existing plants.

The location of Siemens Alstom’s headquarters will be in Paris, as will the company center for rail vehicles, while the headquarters for mobility solutions and signal technology will remain in Berlin. Chief executive will be the current Alstom CEO Poupart-Lafarge, while Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser will chair the eleven-member Supervisory Board, where a total of six Siemens representatives hold the majority.

Siemens will receive 50 percent plus one of the shares listed on the Paris stock exchange, with the option to buy another two percent after the merger. The real power of the merged company therefore resides at Siemens, despite all the talk of equal partners.

The merger is supported by both the French and German governments, thereby overriding antitrust law. Trust law expert Martin Gramsch told the WirtschaftsWoche that the decision of Europe’s cartel monitors would be based on geographic considerations. When customers around the world seek out the products of manufacturers worldwide, then there could not be substantial objections to the Siemens Alstom merger.

The merger of whole industries into two or three world-dominating monopolies has accelerated enormously since the financial crisis in 2008. The sum of all mergers and acquisitions (M&A) reached its second highest peak in 2016 with 3.6 trillion US dollars. In 2015 this figure was 17 percent higher.

Historically low interest rates and huge amounts of money pumped into the economy are a major factor in promoting mergers. “Many companies are faced with poor organic growth prospects, which force them to consider the purchase of competitors or expand into new territories,” the Financial Times noted late last year.

Increasingly, however, mergers are also linked to the development of commercial and economic blocs. They are no longer continental, such as the takeover of Chrysler by Fiat, but serve to create “national champions,” which, with the backing of respective national governments, can compete fiercely for a share of the world market—a process which has historically taken violent, military forms. Donald Trump’s “America First” policy is the most naked expression of this development.

Such conditions have long prevailed in the market for passenger aircraft, where Europe’s Airbus and America’s Boeing are fighting for supremacy. The development in the rail industry is now assuming a similar form, but this time the main rival of the “European champion” Siemens Alstom is not the US, but rather China. The purchase of the US-German car maker Opel by Peugeot and the merger of the steel sector giants ThyssenKrupp and Tata should also be regarded in this light.

This policy of trade war has the fervent support of the trade unions, which share the nationalist outlook of the company bosses and shareholders.

The French trade unions and the German union, IG Metall, have welcomed the fusion of Siemens and Alstom. “If you want sufficient impact, a new ordering of forces is imperative,” declared the CFE-CGC union coordinator for Alstom, Claude Mandart.

According to Elisabeth Mongs, a leader of IG Metall in Erlangen, the fusion of the two train companies makes sense, creating a strong European alliance able to confront competition from China.

Heinz Spörk, Chairman of the Siemens Works Council in Krefeld, told the Westdeutsche Zeitung: “Alstom and us are currently generating 7.3 percent [sales revenue]. This can definitely be improved upon in the new company with far lower overhead costs.”

“This merger was desired and promoted by the federal government,” Spörk continued. “That is why I am confident that the antitrust authorities in Europe will give a green light. We need a strong European rail industry in order to challenge the world market leader China. The railway division of Siemens would have been too small in the long run.”

In common with the managers the union functionaries see their role as maintaining the “impact” and “competitiveness” of their company at the expense of the workforce by ensuring that “synergy effects”—i.e., job destruction and pay cuts—are made without resistance.

This is true not only of Siemens and Alstom’s employees, but even more so for Bombardier Transportation, the loser in this merger. Fresh job cuts are on the board or even the closure of entire plants. “The merger of Siemens and Alstom will increase pressure on Bombardier. I regard this with concern,” Olivier Höbel, head of the IG Metall district of Berlin-Brandenburg-Saxony, told the paper Welt am Sonntag.

Workers can only defend their jobs and oppose the development towards trade war and military warfare by breaking with the reactionary trade union apparatuses. The defence of jobs, working conditions and wages confront workers with political tasks—first and foremost the building of a socialist movement to unite the working class in the fight against war and capitalism. This is the prerequisite for harnessing the enormous potential of the globalized economy for the benefit of the world’s population.

Australian governments unveil sweeping new police powers

Mike Head 

The Liberal-National Coalition federal government and the state and territory governments, most of which are controlled by the Labor Party, yesterday announced an extraordinary increase in police powers.

The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) summit agreed unanimously to sweeping new measures, including “real-time” use of facial recognition technology to monitor the population, 14-day police detention without charge, expanded powers to call out the military to deal with domestic unrest, and vague new criminal offences.

Yesterday’s announcement marks another nodal point in the bipartisan agreement of the Coalition and Labor to erect the framework for a police-state. The powers are truly Orwellian, that is, reminiscent of the totalitarian nightmare of universal political surveillance and repression presented by George Orwell in his novel 1984.

The new powers add to the more than 70 tranches of “counter-terrorism” legislation already imposed on the population since 2001. The politicians, backed by the corporate media, claimed the measures are intended to “keep people safe.”

In reality, the “war on terrorism” has been a fraudulent cover for the evisceration of fundamental legal and democratic rights. Each of the latest measures extend far beyond combatting purported terrorist threats, and severely erode the civil liberties of the entire population.

The Labor Party premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, was the most explicit in dismissing any concerns about civil liberties, which he disparaged as a “luxury” of “notional considerations.”

Far from a “luxury,” rights such as freedom from political surveillance and protection from detention without trial were won through centuries of social and class struggle against absolutist regimes and capitalist governments.

In unison with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Andrews sought to depict the overturning of core legal rights as only affecting a minority of the population. “We are going to have to curtail the rights and freedoms of a small number of people in order to keep the vast majority of Australians safe,” he stated.

Every authoritarian regime has made the same claim. An examination of the measures themselves exposes the lie that only a “minority” will be affected.

First, as some technology experts warned, the “national facial biometric matching capability” adopted at the COAG summit will permit police and intelligence agencies to quickly pick out any individual in shopping areas, large cultural and sporting events, and political demonstrations. According to the COAG communiqué, this system will be targeted at not just terrorism suspects, but “other criminal activity.”

CCTV, drones and other increasingly sophisticated photographic and facial recognition devices will enable authorities to almost instantaneously match facial images to those in a national database of passport, visa and citizenship images, now to be expanded by the addition of all state and territory driver’s licence photos.

Turnbull denied suggestions by some journalists that this could lead to “Big Brother” mass surveillance, but he confirmed that the technology could be used in public spaces such as shopping malls. The prime minister also admitted that unspecified “private companies” would be given access to the intelligence information.

Writing in the Australian Financial Review, Paul Smith described the plan as “horrifying.” It “would hoover up the vast majority of the rest of us, and remove any notion of a right to expect privacy in our day-to-day lives (and yes, we have no Bill of Rights.)”

On the City A.M. website, Tom Chatfield, a technology author, wrote: “Imagine. A super-high resolution drone camera captures ten thousand faces from a crowd in one shot; an algorithm processes and identifies over ninety percent of them within moments; the results are cross-referenced with billions of bytes of other data, dating back decades. All of this is preserved indefinitely and shared widely, with corporations and governments tracking everything from credit and criminality to protest and voting patterns—and none of this process is either visible to you, reversible or accountable.”

Second, even children as young as 10 will be subjected to federal and state laws that permit police to detain “suspects” for up to 14 days of questioning before laying charges. This applies to any terrorism-related offences, which are defined so broadly that they could capture a range of political activities, such as opposing Australian military interventions.

Justice Minister Michael Keenan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation it was “deeply regrettable” that children could be held under the new powers, but he claimed Islamic State specialised in the “radicalisation” and recruitment of children.

As recently as 2015, Turnbull said such detention would be unconstitutional, because only courts have the power to “punish” people under the Australian Constitution’s separation of powers provisions. But now the state and territory leaders have agreed to meaningless “safeguards,” such as supervision by magistrates, that Turnbull claims overcomes the constitutional issue.

Just a decade ago, in 2007, a public outcry erupted when the Australian Federal Police (AFP) used “investigation” detention powers to hold an innocent man, Gold Coast-based doctor Mohamed Haneef, for 12 days without charge. That furore played a role, a few months later, in the landslide defeat of the Howard Liberal-National government. The incoming Rudd-Gillard Labor government was forced to promise limits on the power. That pretence has now been thrown overboard.

Third, two new serious criminal offences were unveiled at COAG—possessing “instructional terrorist material” and staging a terrorism hoax. These further widen the already vast scope for the authorities to use so-called anti-terrorism laws to organise provocations against broader expressions of political discontent.

Fourth, the COAG leaders agreed to yet-unseen legislation proposed by Turnbull’s government to expedite the domestic mobilisation of the Australian Defence Force. While Turnbull spoke of using troops “in the event of a terrorist incident,” the military call-out powers are tied to what the Constitution calls “domestic violence”—a term for political or social unrest deemed threatening to the existing political order.

This is not the end of the assault on democratic rights. Turnbull foreshadowed further measures. He said the Coalition, which has passed nine tranches of “national security legislation” since 2013, was determined to “stay ahead of the threat of terrorism.” Labor leader Bill Shorten has stated his “in-principle” support for the decisions at COAG.

Already, a previous COAG gathering agreed to a “post-sentence detention regime,” whereby prisoners convicted of “serious” offences—not just terrorist-related—can be kept in prison, potentially for life, even after their sentences have expired.

Over the past three months, the Turnbull government has unveiled the most substantial revamping of the country’s “security” apparatus since the global political convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s. This includes plans for a Home Affairs super-ministry to take command of seven agencies, such as the AFP, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and Australian Border Force (ABF), and a new US-style Office of National Intelligence (ONI) in the prime minister’s office, headed by a Director-General of National Intelligence.

In June and August this year, the federal and state governments, aided by the media, laid the propaganda basis for the latest measures by exploiting dubious terrorist incidents, one involving a hostage-taking by a mentally unstable young man, and an implausible “airport” plot to blow up a plane with a bomb encased in a meat grinder or kill the passengers using rotten egg gas.

The WSWS warned at the time that the manner in which governments seized on these events pointed to plans for another boosting of police-state powers. As a recent intelligence review revealed, ruling circles are wracked by immense political fears, related to rising social and political disaffection and the prospect of mass opposition to its mounting preparations for war. The review highlighted the global turmoil and uncertainties produced by the Trump administration, and the seething discontent in every country, including Australia, generated by ever-greater social inequality.

These are the concerns that are driving the endless escalation of police powers, not a threat from a relative handful of terrorists. Parallel build-ups of the capitalist state apparatus are underway internationally, such as in France, where President Emmanuel Macron’s regime is demanding permanent emergency powers. These developments are a warning of preparations for dictatorial methods of rule.

Spain prepares military crackdown in Catalonia

Alex Lantier 

With Spanish military and police units already being deployed, Madrid has signaled that it is preparing a brutal crackdown in Catalonia.

Spain’s Constitutional Court yesterday said that Monday’s planned session of the Catalan regional parliament, at which it was expected that the separatist parties would make a unilateral declaration of independence, must not take place. Coming after failing in a brutal attempt to halt the October 1 Catalan independence referendum, and with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy rejecting calls for mediation led by the Podemos party and the union bureaucracy, the move lays the basis for bringing in the army against what is now declared an unconstitutional meeting.

The Constitutional Court acted based on a complaint brought by the Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC)—the Catalan wing of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), which is now working openly with the PP to prepare a military clampdown. Calling the PSC’s complaint “relevant and of general social and economic interest,” the Court ruled that any act decided by the Catalan parliament would infringe the rights of PSC MPs and be “totally void, without the least value or effect. It warned that defying this order could mean arrests and criminal prosecutions.

On Sunday, the world was shocked and stunned as videos filled the Internet of 16,000 police assaulting polling places and peaceful voters, including women and the elderly, across Catalonia. Furious that its initial crackdown failed, Madrid is now preparing an even bloodier assault, using the military. As the Spanish press debates imposing a state of emergency, as in neighboring France, it is clear that this is bound up with well-advanced plans for military rule and the abrogation of basic democratic rights across Europe.

Rajoy’s minority Popular Party (PP) government is relying on the support of the major European imperialist powers. After official German, UK, and French sources signaled their support for Madrid following Sunday’s crackdown, the European Union (EU) again formally endorsed the Spanish crackdown on Wednesday.

Opening debate on the Catalan crisis at the European Parliament, Frans Timmermans, the first vice president of the EU Commission, unequivocally endorsed Madrid’s use of force against the population of Catalonia. “The regional government of Catalonia has chosen to ignore the law in organizing the referendum of last Sunday,” Timmermans declared, adding: “it is the duty for any government to uphold the law, and this sometimes does require the proportionate use of force.”

Yesterday, Spanish Defense Minister María Dolores de Cospedal made clear that Madrid views an army intervention to be a legitimate response in Catalonia. At a meeting at the School for Higher Defense Studies, she insisted that Spain’s army is tasked with “defending its territorial integrity and constitutional order.” After King Felipe VI declared in a bellicose speech Tuesday that Catalan nationalists had placed themselves outside the law and democracy, Cospedal added, “Everything that is located outside of democracy is a threat to our nation.”

Spanish army units are already providing logistical support to police deployed in Catalonia. And after Catalan regional premier Carles Puigdemont indicated after Sunday’s crackdown that he could declare independence on Monday, a measure that Madrid has stated for months is illegal, political maneuvers by Madrid to seize the Catalan government are underway.

There are also moves underway by the Spanish judiciary to prosecute Catalan judges and Catalan police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, for failing to crack down on voters and demonstrating sympathy for separatists. The head of the Mossos, Josep Lluis Trapero, is to appear today before a court on the unprecedented charge of sedition, facing a 15-year prison sentence.

The courts are also removing legal restrictions to decisions by banks and corporations to move their headquarters away from Catalonia, amid reports that CaixaBank could soon move to Mallorca.

On Thursday, Rajoy also rejected appeals for mediation from Podemos General Secretary Pablo Iglesias and Puigdemont, supported by the Stalinist Workers Commissions (CCOO) and social-democratic General Union of Labor (UGT) union bureaucracies. When Iglesias phoned Rajoy to discuss the plan, Rajoy thanked Iglesias but declared he had no intention of negotiating with anyone who “is blackmailing the state so brutally.”

This was a direct repudiation of the Podemos leader’s comments the previous evening. Iglesias had told reporters, “A group of trusted people should sit down at a table to discuss as a team for dialog. This is what I told the premier of Catalonia and the prime minister of Spain. I spoke to Puigdemont and Rajoy, and they didn’t say no.” Iglesias added that his conversation with Rajoy had been “cordial,” and that Rajoy had “taken note” of the proposal.

While the leader of Podemos held “cordial” talks with Spain’s right-wing prime minister, far-right forces are organizing anti-Catalan protests across Spain and singing hymns of the 1939-1978 fascist regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Well aware that a new crackdown could provoke explosive social opposition among workers in the entire country, the Spanish press is agitating for moving to a police-state dictatorship. They are discussing the application not only of Article 155 of Spain’s Constitution, a so-called “nuclear option” that suspends Catalan self-government, but Article 116. This suspends basic democratic rights—including freedom of thought and expression, the right to strike, and elections—and allows for press censorship.

After a quarter century of imperialist war and EU austerity since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union, European democracy is at the breaking point. A decade of deep austerity since the 2008 Wall Street crash, which brought Spanish unemployment to 20 percent, has shattered Spain’s economy and discredited its ruling elite. Amid a deep crisis of the post-Francoite regime in Spain, and as the ruling class savagely attacks democratic rights across Europe, the Spanish bourgeoisie is using the Catalan crisis to return to an authoritarian regime.

Madrid’s plans for a bloodbath in Catalonia must be opposed. The critical question is the politically independent, revolutionary mobilization of the working class, not only in Catalonia but in all of Spain and across Europe, in struggle against the threat of civil war and police-state dictatorship and for socialism.

This requires a conscious break with Podemos and the Catalan nationalists, who have worked over the entire past period to confuse and disarm working class opposition, despite explosive social discontent. While masses of youth and workers participated in a one-day protest strike on Tuesday in Catalonia, the CCOO and UGT, close to Podemos and the PSOE respectively, were careful not to mobilize any Spanish workers outside of Catalonia.

The Catalan crisis has in particular exposed the bankruptcy of Podemos. It ceaselessly promoted illusions in the PSOE, which is rapidly moving to endorse a crackdown in Catalonia since the king’s speech, calling on the PSOE to form a joint government to oust Rajoy. Faced with the PSOE’s capitulation to Rajoy, Podemos is now stimulating illusions in the PP itself—even as a bloody military crackdown looms, and Rajoy indicates that he has no intention of negotiating with Barcelona.

As for the Catalan nationalists, who have run a series of austerity governments in Catalonia that smashed several strikes of transit and airport workers, their reactionary plans to develop ties with the EU and negotiate with Madrid the formation of a Catalan capitalist state are in ruins.

Faced with the prospect of a military crackdown, panic is reportedly spreading among Puigdemont’s supporters. Among Catalan nationalists in Barcelona, the city’s daily La Vanguardia wrote, “A strong feeling of vertigo runs through everyone—undermining militant enthusiasms, revolutionary visions, indignation in capital letters, patriotic ardors.” It added that King Felipe VI’s speech “has accentuated this feeling of vertigo. There is fear that the current escalation will end in catastrophe.”

Incapable of and hostile to mobilizing broader opposition to Madrid’s crackdown in the Spanish working class, the Catalan nationalists’ pro-capitalist politics only serves to divide the workers while a bloody onslaught from Madrid looms.