Fight Back News Service is circulating the following statement by the Political Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España).

While Europe is being declared to be in a pre-state of emergency due to the expansion of COVID 19, the troops of the imperialist invader are moving freely throughout the partner countries of the criminal NATO coalition. For them there are no restrictions or quarantines

In yet another of its arrogant imperialist displays, NATO is violating the sovereignty of the peoples and imposing its inherent criminal logic, preparing for a war of plunder and pillage of all natural resources and transport routes for the same, especially for oil and gas.

The Defend Europe 20 (Defense of Europe 2020) maneuvers, with tens of thousands of troops mobilized, with all their air and ground equipment, between the months of April and July, represent an expenditure which, without having been disclosed by the governments involved, will in no case be less than several billion euros.

Millions of euros that the imperialist powers will spend on these maneuvers, to prepare their troops for future scenarios of repression of the peoples, and forces us to improve our organization to fight them and to confront the interests of the oligarchy and the monopolies they defend.

Millions of euros will be deducted from the income of workers, while at this moment the European bourgeoisie and its governments are implementing a whole battery of measures to destroy productive forces and to oppress labor under the pretext of fighting against COVID 19.

Imperialism subjugates the peoples with all its violence, and these preparatory war maneuvers are proof of this fact.

Faced with imperialist aggressions in all its forms, economic and/or military, the PCPE emphasizes the need for the active and latent proletarian forces and popular classes to organize a broad front to defend our interests as a class and for all of humanity in its entirety. Blockades, sanctions, threats, sieges, military maneuvers..., are all “weapons of war” of imperialism against the people. Cuba, Venezuela, Korea, Yemen, Syria, Iran..., are the most active fronts today. A Europe lulled to sleep by a virus is going to be invaded again by NATO with the active complicity of its governments. In the face of the internationalist examples of the Chinese and Cuban medical brigades, we have NATO war exercises. A dichotomy between bombs and humanity that the Spanish government resolves by asking for NATO's help and showing which side it is on.

NO TO NATO MILITARY MANEUVERS NATO NO, BASES OUT FOR AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORLD FRONT

#Spain #Healthcare #PeoplesStruggles #CommunistPartyOfThePeoplesOfSpain #Europe

The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) which represents more than 92 million workers in 126 countries of the whole world, strongly condemns the events that took place today in Catalonia, where the Spanish state’s repressive forces injured, assaulted and arrested many civilians in Catalonia who wanted to express freely and democratically their opinions.

The world class-oriented trade union movement affiliated to the big class-oriented WFTU family denounces the authoritarian practices and the terrorism of Rajoy’s government against its own people. The WFTU, faithful to its founding principles supports all peoples’ right to decide freely on their present and future.

The Secretariat

#Spain #Europe #PoliticalRepression #PoliceRepression #Catalonia #Vote

For the last two years the mainstream media has been painting a picture of the economic crisis in the euro-zone as one of governments spending too much on social welfare programs, leading to large budget deficits and debt. This reflects a right-wing, free market view that crises of overproduction under capitalism are because of ‘too much government intervention’ in the economy. The poster-child for this story has been Greece, whose large government budget deficit of about 15% of Greek GDP (total production of goods and services) and large government debt (which went as high as 160% of Greek GDP), triggered the crisis in 2010. In response, the big capitalists and their politicians called for more and more austerity in the form of tax increases, spending cuts and reduction in workers’ pensions and employment protection.

But Spain, whose economy is much larger than Greece’s, and which actually has a higher unemployment rate than Greece, is now the new center of the crisis. Spain has just had to take a 100 billion euro ($125 billion) bailout of its banks by the euro-zone. But Spain actually had government budget surpluses during the last economic expansion (2001-2007) so that its tax revenues were greater than government spending. In contrast, Germany, which is often portrayed as being ‘thrifty,’ also had government budget deficits (albeit about half the size of Greece’s). Spain also had one of the lowest levels of total government debt before the last recession and still had a government debt level lower than Germany, until it took out the bank bailout loan.

What Greece and Spain (along with Portugal and Ireland which have also had to impose austerity in exchange for more loans), had in common is that they all had large inflows of capital from Germany and other northern European countries. When the recession (or in a growing number of countries, depression) and financial crisis that began in the U.S. hit, these capital flows dried up. Thus the current euro-zone crisis is very similar to the 1997 Asian economic crisis, which also resulted from a boom and then bust in capital flows and led to a severe crisis of overproduction that spread to Russia and Latin America.

These booms and bust caused by international flows of capital are not accidents; rather they are a fact of life under modern monopoly capitalism. About 100 years ago, the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin pointed out that the concentration and centralization of capital led to a handful of huge corporations dominating industry after industry. Lenin called this monopoly capitalism to differentiate it from the more competitive capitalism of Marx’s time, where most capitalist firms were relatively small.

One of the features of monopoly capitalism pointed out by Lenin was that the export of capital, which is movement of money across borders, became more important than international trade, or the movement of goods and services between countries. Today capital flows, for both investment and speculative reasons, far exceed the value of trade. In 2010, world trade averaged about $75 billion per day. In contrast, the foreign exchange market, which trades money for trade, investment and speculation, averaged a whopping $4 trillion per day, or 50 times larger than the trade of goods and services.

While free market apologists for monopoly capitalism claim that these huge flows of speculative capital actually make capitalism more stable, the fact is that these flows can be the trigger for worldwide economic crises of overproduction. These huge international flows of capital go hand-in-hand with the growth of the financial sector, another characteristic of monopoly capitalism described by Lenin in his work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Some countries with capitalist economies, such as Malaysia during the 1997 economic crisis, turned away from free-market fantasies and introduced controls on capital flows. While free-market economists predicted disaster, these controls actually helped Malaysia’s economy to weather the storm.

But while controls on capital, like other Keynesian government policies such as government deficit spending, can help reduce the damage of an economic crisis, they do not prevent such crises. The more that such controls help limit the damage of crises, the more the capitalists want to reduce the government’s role in the economy to free big corporations and big banks to make the most profits. This is the policy of deregulation, imposed by politicians bought and paid for by the 1% for the last 30 years.

Only with a socialist economy can a country distance itself from the global monopoly capitalist financial whirlpool that is leading to one economic disaster to another. A socialist economy is one where the production is for people’s needs and not for profit and ownership is not concentrated in the hands of the wealthy 1% but instead collectively owned by the people.

#Europe #CapitalismAndEconomy #Ireland #capitalistCrisis #Greece #monopolyCapitalism #Spain #Portugal

San José, CA – On June 9, Spain and the European Union made an agreement to bail out Spain’s troubled banking sector. This agreement means Spain is the fourth country (along with Portugal, Ireland and Greece) in the eurozone to have to take a bailout.

The agreement will provide up to 100 billion euros ($125 billion) in loans to Spain’s bank bail-out fund, the FROB (Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring). The agreement with the European Union was triggered by Spain’s third largest bank, Bankia SA, which needed a 19 billion Euro ($24 billion) bailout. But the FROB had only 9 billion euros, after three earlier rounds of bailouts of Spanish banks. The Spanish government, which would normally sell bonds to borrow money to bail out banks, was having a harder and harder time selling its own bonds.

Spain’s banks have billions of euros of bad real estate loans because of the boom and bust in the Spanish housing market. Spain’s housing boom was almost twice as large as the one in the United States, with construction spending accounting for about 10% of Spain’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP, the total spending on goods and service made in Spain), vs. 6% in the U.S.

Here in the U.S., big businesses have been able to bounce back from the financial crisis caused by the boom and bust in U.S. housing. This was aided by the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, which printed some $2 trillion in money to buy financial assets, while the U.S. government spent another $800 billion on a bank bailout.

But Spain does not have the power to print money since it adopted the euro; rather this power lies with the European Central Bank or ECB. Spain’s government is also limited in its ability to borrow and spend money since its government bonds are not backed by the ECB.

As a result, while unemployment in the U.S. peaked at 10% and has since dropped to almost 8%, the unemployment rate in Spain has increased to almost 25% and is still rising. Over half the young people in Spain do not have jobs.

Spain actually had a small federal government budget surplus during its housing boom (with tax revenues greater than spending by 0.3% of GDP from 2000-2007). However the government budget deficit swelled to 12% of Spanish GDP in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and deep recession in Europe that went hand-in-hand with Spain’s housing bust.

The Spanish government, first led by the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), and now by the conservative People’s Party, has instituted deep spending cuts and tax increases that have reduced the budget deficit from 12% to 9% of Spanish GDP. But this austerity has also led Spain into another deep recession, even before it had recovered from the 2008-2009 economic downturn.

These back-to-back recessions have dragged down the Spanish housing market, leading to even more losses at Spanish banks, which made a lot of loans during the boom times. Then in December of 2011, and again in February of this year, the European Central Bank made one trillion Euros (about $1.3 trillion) of long-term (three year) loans to Spanish and other European banks. But Spanish banks have already burned through almost all of this money in order to pay depositors withdrawing their money, and the rest, almost 40%, going to buy Spanish government bonds.

As the Spanish government had a harder time borrowing, the price of Spanish government bonds fell, causing even more losses among Spanish banks. Thus there is a need for another round of bank bailouts, to be paid for by the 100 billion euro E.U. loan.

While the bailout does put off an immediate Spanish banking crisis, it adds more European supervision to Spanish banks. This could worsen the Spanish depression if Spanish banks are forced to limit loans or even shut down to make the remaining banks more profitable. Spain’s unemployment rate is already close to 25%, the highest in the Euro-zone, and even higher than Greece’s unemployment rate. Industrial production (the goods produced by factories, mines, and refineries) in Spain has fallen 8.3% over the past year.

While the Spanish bailout does not have the severe austerity measures of tax increases and government spending cuts that have been imposed on the Greek, Irish and Portuguese people, it will make it harder for the Spanish government to borrow in the future. The EU bailout loan will be ‘senior’ to other Spanish government debts, meaning that the EU must be paid back before other owners of Spanish government bonds. This will make it harder for the Spanish government to sell bonds in the future.

On June 11, prices for Spanish bonds fell and their interest rate rose to more than 6.4% on a ten-year bond (in contrast, U.S. government ten-year bonds had an interest rate of only 1.6% on June 11). This increases the odds that the Spanish government itself may need a bailout or end up being forced out of the eurozone.

#SanJoséCA #Unemployment #Depression #Europe #capitalistCrisis #bankBailout #EuropeanUnion #Spain

Millions of strikers and their supporters came out for evening protests in over 100 cities and towns. Union organizers estimated that 1.7 million combined protesters took to the streets in just Madrid and Barcelona alone. That is an overwhelming protest turnout in a country with a total population of approximately 46 million.

The general strike was called in protest of the conservative government’s plans to weaken labor laws and impose massive budget cuts. The changes in labor law would make it easier for employers to lay off workers and unilaterally cut wages. The proposed budget would freeze public worker salaries, raise electricity rates, and impose 17% cuts to most departments. Spain’s finance minister called the budget the most austere since elections resumed in 1977 – after the death of fascist dictator Francisco Franco.

Spain’s capitalist crisis intensifies

The government’s attack on workers and the consequent strike by unions take place as the capitalist crisis in Spain deepens. Spain has the highest unemployment rate in the European Union. The unemployment rate is projected to reach almost 25% this year. Almost half of all youth in Spain are unemployed.

The Bank of Spain issued a report confirming that the country’s economy has officially reentered recession after shrinking for a second consecutive quarter. Spain’s economy is projected to contract by as much as 2.7% this year.

Spain, like many countries, is experiencing what is often referred to as a debt crisis. The total amount of Spain’s 2011 deficit was equal to 8.5% of the country’s GDP. The European Commission pressured Spain to agree to slash its deficit to 5.3% of GDP this year.

The dramatic deficit reduction target is intended to please the foreign big banks and speculators that own much of Spain’s debt in the form of government bonds. However, the contracting economy means that even with the recent round of cuts Spain is unlikely to meet its target. This means that the French, German, and British banks that have high exposure to Spain’s debt will likely continue to demand ever more drastic budget cuts.

Spain joins Greece, Portugal Italy, and Ireland as one of the euro zone countries mired in a severe economic crisis. The crisis in Greece brought that country to the brink of an outright economic collapse. The crisis in all of these countries is intensified by their participation in the euro zone. Having given up their national moneys for the euro, they are not able to lower interest rates or lower the value of their currency to cheapen their exports and stimulate their economies. They also cannot print money to pay off their bonds, increasing concern among banks and speculators about Spain’s ability to pay its debts.

Spain’s economy is the 13th largest in the world and is twice the size of Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined. Many economists believe the intensifying crisis in large economies like Spain threatens to destabilize the entire European Union. Such destabilization could set off a domino effect and drag the broader euro zone into deep recession. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden recently stated that the Obama administration is concerned that the crisis in Europe could grow and spill over into the U.S. before the November elections.

Same struggle, different continents

The ongoing crisis in Spain and other euro market countries has its roots in the same global recession that hit the U.S. in 2008. Much like the U.S., Spain experienced a construction boom and housing bubble that burst and was followed by a foreclosure crisis and a period of recession.

Governments in both countries have also turned to policies that ease the pain on banks and focus on reducing the deficit at the expense of investing in public programs. Meanwhile, workers both here in the U.S. and in euro market countries like Spain know that what they are facing is a crisis of unemployment.

Like Spain, the U.S. has also seen its share of large-scale labor protests in recent years. When right-wing governors in states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida pushed union-busting legislation, labor responded with campaigns of mass protest. General strikes, like that in Spain, are an even more advanced tool that workers have in their arsenal to fight back.

Spain’s unions have vowed more action during International Workers’ Day on May 1. This has been a significant day in the U.S. in recent years after immigrant workers reclaimed it as a day of strikes and protest in 2006. Immigrant rights and Occupy protesters are planning for May 1 actions this year in many parts of the U.S.

#Spain #strike #generalStrike