12 Nov 2024

Trump names key aides for war on immigrants, China

Patrick Martin


Fascist president-elect Donald Trump has named loyalists strongly identified with the persecution of immigrants and plans for military confrontation with China to leading positions in his administration, indicating the broad contours of the policy that the US government will pursue as soon as he returns to the White House next January.

President-elect Donald Trump with Florida Senator Marco Rubio [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]

For the top foreign policy position, Secretary of State, Trump will nominate Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, it was reported Monday night. Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, is a ferocious anti-communist and advocate of confrontational policies against China, Cuba, Iran and other targets of American imperialism. He has also been a supporter of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, although Trump himself has boasted he will end that war as soon as he takes office.

CNN and the Wall Street Journal reported Monday night that Trump has asked Florida Republican Congressman Mike Waltz to become his national security adviser. Waltz is a serving Army colonel, former Green Beret, veteran of special operations in Afghanistan and other countries. He is an anti-China hawk who is expected to spearhead an even more confrontational and belligerent policy towards Beijing than that pursued by the Biden-Harris administration.

Waltz replaced Ron DeSantis as the representative from Florida’s sixth Congressional District, which includes Daytona Beach, in 2018, when DeSantis gave up the seat to run for governor of the state. He defeated Democrat Nancy Soderberg, a career State Department official, in the general election, and has been reelected three times. His congressional career has been entirely bound up with the planning and funding of US imperialist provocations overseas, as he served on the House Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees. 

Earlier Monday, Trump announced via social media that he was nominating Representative Elise Stefanik of New York to be US Ambassador to the United Nations, considered the third-highest foreign policy position. Stefanik is a former White House aide in the George W. Bush administration, identified with rabid support for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

A supposedly moderate Republican, she worked as a congressional aide and then for the 2012 Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, before winning a safe Republican seat in the northernmost portion of New York state, a largely rural area that includes the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain.

In Congress, she moved steadily to the right, embracing the Trump campaign in 2016, then replacing Liz Cheney as the Republican caucus chair, the number three position in leadership, when Cheney publicly denounced Trump and supported his impeachment after the attempted coup of January 6, 2021. Most recently, Stefanik spearheaded the witch-hunt of college students protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza and helped force the resignation of several university presidents for their failure to crack down sufficiently on supposed “antisemitism.”

In domestic policy, Trump signaled that his number one priority will be the use of mass repression and police violence against immigrants by appointing two of his most odious loyalists to launch the police-state effort.

Stephen Miller, the fascist ideologue responsible for the separation of thousands of immigrant children from their families during Trump’s first term, will be deputy White House chief of staff for policy, a position that will put him in charge not only of immigration but of virtually all domestic policy.

While Miller will drive the setting of policy, the actual round-up and mass deportation will be the responsibility of Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the first Trump administration. Trump has confirmed on social media he would name Homan as “border czar,” responsible for stepping up military-police repression both at the US-Mexico border and more generally “in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.” 

Trump has threatened to invoke a 1798 law, the Alien Enemies Act, claiming it gives him the authority to deport anyone from a country which is engaged in an “invasion or predatory incursion” into the United States. He would apply this definition to the home countries of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, which includes virtually all of Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Miller has suggested that to enforce Trump’s orders, National Guard units from Republican-controlled states like Texas, Florida or Tennessee could be sent into states with Democratic governors, like New Mexico, Arizona and California.

Homan told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” last month the US government would resume large-scale raids on worksites to arrest undocumented workers by the dozens and even hundreds. Such raids were a feature of the first Trump administration but largely abandoned during the Biden administration.

A former Border Patrol agent and special agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor of ICE, Homan claimed there would not be “concentration camps” for migrants detained in mass round-ups, but did not explain how they could be detained otherwise. In response to a question whether mass deportations could be carried out without separating immigrant parents from American citizen children born in the United States, Homan said, “families could be deported together.” 

Trump’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News that Trump’s “day one agenda” could include revoking Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of migrants from Haiti, Central America and other countries, which could be done by executive order and does not require legislation. This would affect long-settled migrants like the Haitian factory and service workers living in Springfield, Ohio, who were witch-hunted by Trump and his running mate JD Vance with bogus claims that they were eating pet cats and dogs.

Homan said that the mass deportation campaign would initially target 1.3 million “criminal” immigrants. This term does not refer to migrants who have actually committed crimes, but to the 1.3 million who have received final orders of deportation from an immigration court. Most of these immigrants are living and working without incident, let alone hurting anyone, but evading arrest and deportation.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “As a first step, Trump’s advisers are discussing issuing a national emergency declaration at the border on his first day in office, which his team thinks would allow him to move money from the Pentagon to pay for wall construction and to assist with immigrant detention and deportation. But the legality of such a move is unclear. A national emergency, Trump’s advisers think, also would unlock the ability to use military bases for immigrant detention and military planes to help carry out deportations.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (Republican-Louisiana) said in a letter circulated to Republican lawmakers this week that the top priority for the next Congress would be passage of legislation that would “surge resources to the southern border to build the Trump Border Wall, acquire new detection technologies, bolster our Border Patrol, and stop the flow of illegal immigration.” This bill would be introduced through the “reconciliation” process which requires only a simple majority in the Senate.

The Republicans have not yet secured a majority in the House of Representatives, holding a lead of 214-204 over the Democrats, with 17 seats still undecided. With 218 required for a majority, and Republicans currently leading in nine of the undecided seats, it is virtually a foregone conclusion that there will a narrow Republican majority, roughly the same as the 222-213 majority before the November 5 election.

11 Nov 2024

Why Trump Won: And Some Consequences

Jack Rasmus


Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It’s now more than 48 hours after the election, the dust has settled, and the results are in except for a late counting in the state of Arizona–the outcome of which won’t affect the results of the election. Trump has won an undeniable victory, both in the electoral college and in the popular vote.

Political pundits, pollsters, and over-paid political strategists who seem to get it wrong repeatedly every election cycle are now concocting all manner of explanations and mightily spinning their excuses. Some say Harris lost because the Democrats’ ‘ground game’—i.e. get out the vote efforts—failed; or that the $1 billion in campaign contributions she received during the summer was ill spent; or her TV ads were poorly focused; or her ‘politics of joy’ theme grated on the mood of voters who were anything but happy. But all these tactical explanations of the Democrats’ devastating defeat—which was across the board and not just for Harris—are obviously irrelevant.

The pundits and political strategists who forecasted the election wrong are now failing to understand its results as well. Here are the more important takeaways from the election:

A Popular Vote Anomaly?

The electoral college result thus far, with Arizona’s 11 votes pending, is 301 for Trump and 226 for Harris (270 needed to win). Trump also won the popular vote with 73.4 million vs. 69.1 million for Harris—as of the popular vote count late November 8.

Perhaps the most glaring indicator of what went wrong for Harris, however, is the big shift in the popular vote away from Democrats in 2024. In 2020 the Democrats polled 81 million votes in the presidential race. In 2024 so far only 69.1 million. That’s 12 million fewer votes for Democrats! How to explain that fact?

Did all the 12 million cross over to Trump? Apparently not. Trump’s 2024 popular vote was not that much different from 2020. He received 74 million in 2020 and in 2024 so far about 73.4 million.

These contrasting numbers raise two interesting questions:

Where did Harris’s missing 12 million popular votes go, if not to Trump? The corollary question also arises: did Biden and the Democrats really receive 81 million votes in 2020?

Whichever the explanation, the mainstream legacy media (CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, WAPO, etc) are conspicuously avoiding any analysis of this missing 12 million or the apparent vote count anomaly.

But one thing is irrefutable in the official vote tally: roughly 13 million fewer turned out to vote for either candidate in 2024 and 12 million were Democrat voters. The only logical conclusion therefore is that 12 million Demorcrat voters apparently stayed home and did not vote. So why?

Whatever the popular vote, it is irrelevant for US presidential elections. Only the archaic electoral college vote matters. Why the USA keeps that institution when it allows ‘one person one vote’ for all other voting for members of Congress is interesting. Two-thirds of voters have indicated in multiple surveys recently that they want a direct vote for the president and an end to the Electoral College.  Why both parties continue with the system says much. Nevertheless it’s a question—like a Florida 2000 election ballot ‘chad’—that will be left hanging for now.

Electoral College Vote Repeat 

Trump’s 301 (eventual 312) electoral college votes confirms this writer’s prediction this past summer that the swing states would flip back to 2016 numbers and Trump. 2024 would be a 2016 swing states déjà vu election.

In the 2020 election, Biden’s electoral college vote was 306 to Trump’s 232. In 2016 Trump won 304 electoral college votes to Hillary Clinton’s 227. The winning margins of 304 (2016), then 306 (2020), now 301 (312) in 2024 is not merely coincidental.

The largely similar electoral college counts in 2016, 2020, and 2024 suggests strongly that deeper forces in the US political system created a shift beginning 2016 and have continued ever since.

Trump’s election in 2016 was therefore not the aberration as many Democrats and mainstream media argued in 2020; Biden’s in 2020 was.

Events of the past decade suggests the fallout from the economic crash and crisis of 2008-10 is still having its longer term political impact. Voters’ overwhelming concern with economic issues in 2024 reveal it is still reverberating. In 2024 it was manifested in inflation. In 2020 it was massive Covid job loss. Since 2008 it’s been the steady decline in real income and living standards for tens of millions of American households—amidst the accelerating income and wealth for the 1% or 5% households largely attributable to accelerating financial asset markets and values.  As one famous pundit said more than three decades ago: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

One might clarify that: “it’s the lopsided economy, stupid!” Economic conditions have deteriorated much further since the 1990s when that statement was made, especially after the 2008-10 crash and crisis followed by the Covid induced crash. Some political elites apparently never learned the economic lesson.

Throughout this past summer this writer has been predicting Trump would win the electoral college vote by slightly more than 300—by 302 to 236 to be exact. This forecast was based on the assumption he would win all the seven swing states, except for Michigan. In retrospect he has won the latter state as well. (see my piece “November 2024: A Swing States Déjà vu Election?” at the LA Progressive website last week).

Inflation and other economic conditions during the Biden years were firmly established by opinion polls since the start of 2024 as the primary concerns of voters, thereafter strongly confirmed again in the September Gallup poll.

Put in a long term perspective, Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and her loss of the ‘blue wall’ states in the north can be largely attributed to the weak GDP economic recovery after 2010 and the even weaker related job recovery during the Obama years. GDP grew around only 60% of normal after 2010 when compared to the prior nine US recessions since 1948. More importantly, jobs lost after 2007 due to the 2008-09 crash did not recover to 2007 levels until 2015. It took six years just to get back to pre-recession job levels. Add to this Hillary Clinton’s well known approval of free trade treaties and its offshoring of jobs effect—as well as her strategic error of not even bothering to campaign in the blue wall states—and the result was a predictable 2016 Trump sweep of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and victory. It was still ‘the economy, stupid’.

In 2020 Biden also largely won for economic reasons—specifically the severe recession and job losses of 2020 due to the Covid pandemic economy partial shutdown.  Biden swept back the blue wall states and won handily—almost exactly with the same electoral college votes that Trump had won with four years earlier! That stupid old economy had not gone away.

In 2024, the Covid induced mass layoffs in 2020 no longer prevailed but were replaced by another Covid induced economic consequence: inflation which erupted in fall of 2021. Prices for goods started abating by 2023 but inflation in the much more ubiquitous services sector of the US economy remained chronically high throughout 2023 and into early 2024.

Official government statistics estimate the price level rose 24% over the four Biden years but real inflation adjusted take home pay for tens of millions of households was impacted more severely than the statistics or politicians and media suggested during the recent election.

Actual inflation impact on family budgets was more like 30%-35%, especially after considering the sharp rise in interest rates starting March-June 2023 and rise in taxes, neither of which are included in calculations of the government’s price statistics. Households also pay for interest out of their take home pay and family disposable income. Mortgage rates rose 114% under Biden. Credit card average rates rose from 16% to 23% and households carried over record level of that debt monthly. New student loan rates rose from 4% to around 7%. And new auto loans from4% to 9%. And that’s not considering local taxes and fee hikes. Or problems with the methodologies and assumptions in government price calculations that tend to under-estimate actual inflation.

Households and voters knew what the real picture of affordability was the past four years—even if politicians, media, and mainstream economists did not!

This background of the voting outcomes since 2016 and longer term economic causes raises the more immediate question ‘why Harris’ lost in 2024. It certainly wasn’t due to irrelevant tactical explanations as the media and pundits now argue. And while jobs and inflation were the critical, even key, longer term causes determining election outcomes, in themselves they still don’t explain it all.

There were strategic failures for Harris’s defeat’; nor indeed defeat for the Democrat party in general since its losses in November were across the board in both houses of Congress, governorships, and other local elections. In addition, Trump’s strategy targeting disaffected you males, mostly working class and across racial lines, proved effective in turn.

Why Harris & Democrats Lost

 Failure to Differentiate from Biden… 

High on the list of why Harris lost must be her failure to differentiate her proposals from those of Biden, especially on economic issues. When directly asked in an interview during the campaign what she would change from Biden’s policies she replied: “nothing”.  That was perhaps the turning point of sorts in the campaign. Voters weren’t looking for ‘nothing new’. They wanted economic change that directly affected their declining real take home pay that had been slashed by 30%-35% inflation since 2020.

Harris this past week experienced what might be called the ‘Hubert Humphrey’ effect. In 1968, Democrat Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election. His policy for escalating the war in Vietnam, combined with the inflation of the late 1960s, meant it likely would not win. His VP was Humphrey who became the Democrat party presidential candidate that year. But Humphrey would not break with Johnson’s war policy nor did he offer any answer to the rising inflation of the mid 1960s. War and inflation doomed his campaign in 1968, which he lost convincingly to Richard Nixon.  Similarly, Harris’s refusal to break from Biden war policies in 2024 or to offer any answer how she’d lower prices for households played a big role in her defeat. Both she and Humphrey were convincingly defeated.

The Hubert Humphrey Effect should consequently be renamed the Humphrey-Harris Effect.

US voters wanted to hear specifics on how the candidates proposed to reverse the decline in their living standards. Harris gave them mostly platitudes. The Democrat party leaders may have removed Biden as their candidate over the summer, replacing him with Harris, but they left his policies intact. Voters understood they were still voting for Biden.  Especially Democrat voters as 12 million of them stayed home.

Some traditional Democrat constituencies jumped ship. Election data already show that many more black male voters voted Trump than in prior elections. So too did Hispanic voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania. Even Puerto Rican voters—who the mainstream media hyped would turn on Trump because of some comic at one of his rallies made disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans—voted Trump in key constituencies. And there were the white suburban women who the Democrats bet would vote Democrat based on the reproductive and women’s rights issues. In key swing states like Pennsylvania it appears they too voted by narrow margins for Trump.

Identity Politics Themes No Longer Resonate…. 

What all this may mean is economic issues and questions of class trumped identity issues of gender, sexual orientation, and race on which Democrats had based their campaigns in recent years had become of secondary at best importance to voters. Legitimate polls like Gallup were shouting this message all year and especially in latter months of the campaign. Democrat leaders were deaf, however. They apparently believed just changing the face of their candidate and throwing billions of dollars into the race this past summer would ensure re-election. It was another big strategic error.

If Harris failed to differentiate herself from Biden, then the Democrat party leadership kept her largely campaigning on issues of identity—gender, race, and sexual orientation.

January 2021 Is Not the Issue…

A third related strategy failure was the Democrat elevation of the January 6, 2021 events and Trump’s often out of context rally statements as a key issue.  It wasn’t. It ranked well down the list in almost all voter opinion polls. Just as in 2016 allegations that the Russians were interfering in the election and had Trump in their pocket had little influence on voters choices. In 2024 did voters didn’t believe the charge that Trump was the destroyer of American democracy incarnate, a felon, or closet fascist—or just didn’t care even if true—any more than they believed in 2015 Trump was the puppet of Putin.

Both the Democrats pushing of identity issues and the personality attacks on Trump as either foreign agent or a felonious fascist gained much traction.  The economy was paramount in both 2016 and 2024, as it was in 2020. But Harris and the Democrats just couldn’t let go of the old saws and themes that no longer worked, and get focused on the economy.

Emerging Electorate & Party Realignment…

Another strategic reason why Harris and Democrats lost has to do with the shift in constituencies in the past decade.  It’s now clear that Trump has been able to start building a base in the working class, especially among young male voters. This is now being called the ‘Bros Vote’. But it’s mostly young, non-college, males who have been among the most disaffected segments of the voting population in recent decades. They are young millennials and GenZers who have experienced the most negative effects of low wages, housing unaffordability, low paying jobs at which they must work two and sometimes three to get by, and other related issues.  Democrats appear to have abandoned them, as the party has drifted steadily away from the traditional working class since the 1990s and toward suburban women, LGBTQ voter constituencies, professionals, and college graduates.  This is a cultural thing that sometimes gets expressed in elites’ slips of the tongue—like Hillary’s calling them ‘deplorables’ in 2016 and Biden recently referring to them as Trump’s ‘garbage’.

Not all of Harris’s lost is attributable to her failures or Democrat party leaders failures. Some of the loss is explainable by Trump’s own personal appeal, his policy initiatives during the campaign, and his political strategy in general.

Trump Talks & Appears Like They Do…

Part of Trump’s appeal is evident when he speaks. He’s crude, sometimes incoherent, makes off the wall statements, insults people he doesn’t like, embarrasses himself. In other words, he often sounds like them in their own every day conversations. It makes him appear authentic to them. Democrats and their intellectual, educated supporters are often shocked by this behavior. They find it abhorrent. They are turned off by the crude working class ‘banter’ that is part of normal communication for this constituency. But they live in a different cultural world than the Bros constituency as well as the working class black and Hispanics.

The difference could be viewed in Harris rally speeches and even her final concession. It was all too perfect. Not a missed phrase. Straight from the teleprompter. As if she’s reading her comments, which of course she was. Too many platitudes, canned metaphors, and planned anecdotes. In other words, not natural or authentic.

Trump’s Working Class Policy Proposals…

Overlaid on this class cultural divide is the fact that Trump appealed to working class voters with policy measures that should have been Democrat, and often were in decades past but no more. Trump proposed no taxes on tip income, which Harris quickly copied; he proposed no tax on overtime pay and to remove taxing of social security benefits—which Harris conspicuously did not copy. Trump’s proposal for child care credits were more generous than Harris’s. And his proposals on tariffs as way to force corporations to relocate jobs back to the US seemed more convincing than Harris’s which was ‘no different’ than Biden’s which was to shower grants of tens of billions on companies to bribe them to ‘onshore’ back to the US. Even Trump’s immigration proposals were often stated as job creating, even if somewhat questionable in that effect.

In short, Trump at least verbally turned toward working class voters in the election, while Harris and Democrats seemed to further champion suburban women, identity issues, and push the worn out hackneyed line ‘Trump is a Russian pawn and closet fascist who’ll destroy democracy, the country and civilization itself’.

Widening Generational Divide…

But for the tens of millions of new younger voters who came of voting age a decade ago, the Democrats’ leading  election themes tying Trump to Russians and autocratic behavior are dead. Perhaps not dead but dying as well are the various themes associated with identity politics. Identity issues will not go away but they will no longer be predominant.  The focus on identity does not resonate with the Bros swing vote and has even become antagonistic. Nor do they elicit the same tacit approval within the Hispanic and Black voting constituencies in a period when the economic stress for tens of millions of working class households is approaching a breaking point after decades. A quarter century later it’s still ‘the economy, stupid!’. In fact, more so than ever before.

Some Likely Consequences

It’s somewhat early to define what Trump will now do as president in a second term. But there are outlines from the campaign and his own issues focus in his statement.

Most likely the initial actions will be associated with what he can do without Congressional legislation by means of his own Executive Orders.

At the top of his initial list will be EOs related to illegal immigrants’ deportations and rebuilding his border wall. EOs related to alternative energy matters and the environment will also take an early hit. Oil drilling permits are included in the latter action list.

Deregulation in general will also appear early. Elon Musk will make recommendations cutting government regulations to save spending and Trump will act more or less perfunctorily on Musk’s recommendations. Much of that can be done via EOs as well.

A third area is tariffs. Trump’s promise to raise tariffs 10%-60% (latter on China imports) will come quickly. It’s not coincidental among his first appointments already is Robert Lighthizer as Trade commission.

Trump believes that an increase in government revenue from raising tariffs and a big cut to social programs spending and deregulation will result in a major offset to US budget deficits, which rose last year to $1.8 trillion and is currently running at a $2 trillion estimate for 2025. Tariff revenues, deregulation and even general Austerity social spending program cuts (coming in the spring by Congress) will not even come close to cutting the deficit by a $1 trillion!

Trump believes the fiction that cutting business taxes further in 2025 will result in stimulating economic growth and thus tax revenues. He believed that when he cut taxes in 2018 by $4.5 trillion. It didn’t have the effect on economic growth then. Continuing his 2018 tax cuts (estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost the government $5 trillion over the next decade) and even adding to more cuts in 2025 will not even come close to resolving the fiscal crisis and economic train wreck that’s around the corner in 2025 and after. But tax cutting will again be his and his Republican Congress’s priority in 2025 nevertheless. That too will come this spring.

Voters who put their hopes in a fundamental change in direction for the country voting for Trump and Republicans may be therefore disappointed. Not that that’s anything new. The economy will therefore continue as the number one issue of voters come the 2028 election.

Mass protests erupt in Spain over official inaction on deadly Valencia floods

Santiago Guillen


On November 9, a large demonstration filled the streets of Valencia, as anger erupts against regional and national officials who failed to act to protect against the floods that devastated the Valencian region and other areas of Spain. The floods caused 223 deaths and left entire towns devastated.

A section of the mass protests in Valencia against official inaction in response to the deadly floods that devastated the region.

According to state authorities, more than 130,000 people participated in the march. It was reportedly the largest protest march in Valencia’s history, mobilizing a large portion of the Valencia metropolitan area’s 2.5 million inhabitants.

The number of protesters was so large that when the head of the march reached the end of the route, there were still thousands of protesters at the starting point, the town hall square. Crowds filled streets adjacent to the path of the protest as they were unable to reach the route itself, which was completely packed. Thousands more people demonstrated in other cities in the Valencia region such as Alicante, Elche and Castellón.

The marches called for the resignation of the Valencian regional president Carlos Mazón, a member of the right-wing Partido Popular (PP), and also criticised the national PSOE-Sumar government and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

During the march there were shouts of “Murderers, murderers,” “Mazón, resign,” and “Only the people save the people.” There were also signs that read “Mazón, your people repudiate you, neither forget nor forgive,” “We are stained with mud, you are stained with blood,” and “Neither Mazón, nor Madrid nor Bourbons.” This slogan refers to another leader of the Spanish capitalist establishment, Spanish King Felipe de Borbón.

Before the demonstration began, the organisers declared, “They have shown themselves to be incompetent. They do not deserve to lead the lives of the Valencians. They have not known how to manage a natural catastrophe, they have not known how to warn us in time, they do not know how to organise us with the help of the clean-up and the collection of material and, of course, they will not be able to organise the reconstruction.”

A WSWS correspondent who participated in the march noted a heavy police presence along the march. They arrived in muddy uniforms, which was taken by protesters as a false attempt to show that they were working on cleanup and rescue efforts. At one point, a police officer began laughing at protesters’ chants against Mazón, to which a protester replied by telling him: “Don’t laugh, there were deaths.”

After these provocations, the riot police finally charged to remove protesters who remained in the town hall square. Protesters replied by shouting, “I would be ashamed to be a police officer” and “You are defending a murderer.”

A section of the mass protests in Valencia against official inaction in response to the deadly floods that devastated the region.

Anger at this colossal social crime and at the actions of the various Spanish leaders had already erupted a week earlier when Mazón, Pedro Sánchez and the king tried to visit Paiporta, one of the towns most affected by the floods. These three parasites expected to be welcomed as the saviours of the people. But hundreds of people who were trying to clean the streets and help the victims of the flood turned angrily against them, shouting “murderers” and throwing mud at them.

On the day of the tragedy, despite the warnings of serious flooding that had been issued for several days by the AEMET (Spanish Meteorological Association) which that same day at 7 a.m. warned of extreme danger, Mazón took no action. He participated in various events, including an official meal, until 6 p.m. By the time he joined the meeting of the emergency services and authorized the first alarm to the population after 8 p.m., many people had already drowned.

Sánchez’s national government also failed to act until several days had passed, using the excuse that it did not want to interfere with the regional government’s powers. In reality, it could have taken measures from the outset that would have saved lives. Protest organizers issued a statement noting that the Sánchez government “should have immediately put strong pressure on the Valencian government to deploy all available personnel and help the citizens rebuild their lives.”

For her part, Sumar leader and Minister of Labor Yolanda Díaz did not at any time propose sending workers home and prohibiting non-essential activities. This meant that many workers were trapped at their jobs or in their vehicles trying to get home. A day later, Díaz made a pathetic call, appealing to the “responsibility of all companies” and asking that they not require their employees to go to their jobs in the areas affected by the storm.

What is palpable in the reaction to this catastrophe is the criminal nature of the capitalist political establishment. Though it had been known for decades that authorities needed to carry out a whole series of works for flood control purposes, neither the PP nor the PSOE, nor the PSOE’s allies Podemos and Sumar, took any action either at the regional or national levels. In fact, no such works have been carried out in the Valencia region for 15 years.

Since 2007, there has been a flood risk management plan for the Poyo and Pozalet ravines that was never put into action. If it had been, would have saved dozens of lives. This plan was valued at €250 million (about €378 million currently with inflation).

While this is a substantial sum, it pales in comparison with the PSOE-Podemos government’s historic increase in military spending to €27 billion; with the purchase of €1 billion in weapons from Israel since the start of the Gaza genocide by the current PSOE-Sumar government; or the tens of billions of euros in public bailout funds that the PSOE-Podemos government handed over to large banks and corporations after the COVID-19 pandemic began.