El meu primer article internacional... "chispas"

The general feeling in Spain is that we found ourselves in a crisis we didn’t expect. It is a global crisis that started as a financial one and has become a real economic one because the governments –both PSOE with Zapatero and PP with Rajoy– have helped the industry sector to restructure the sector. So that, unemployment –already high in Spain– continued growing and has brought other problems such as unpayments, evictions and to curb the expenses on families.

Before the elections in November that Mariano Rajoy won, the population was already feeling the crisis and with Rajoy the cuts have gone on harder and harder: a labor market reform; a general reduction on public salaries; cuts on public education, health and on public assistance to the poorest population. After asking formally the bail out, the hardest cuts arrive on 13th of July, this time, for instance, increasing VAT or with cuts for unemployment compensation.

And that was only the very beginning, because 7 days later, the government signed the Memorandum of understanding (MoU). Although this is transcendental and it is going to change everything from now on, mass media passed quite over this fact. The government did not explained what they were going to sign; they use euphemism to talk about it and ­never say “bail out” and they affirm that FMI and Europe “are going to be near to help” instead of saying they are going to decide on our economy. We were able to read the MoU thanks to Neederland Government site and know about conditions and read the translation thanks to personal sites, a few newspapers or the Citizen Debt Audit Platform.

Now, more and hardest cuts are expected because we accepted a bail out that can reach 100.000 millions of Euros that are going to increase the public debt and Spain is committed by the MoU to correct the present excessive deficit situation by 2014. Moreover, structural reforms are committed too by the memorandum to correct macroeconomic imbalances, such as taking additional measures to open up professional services and to increase the effectiveness of active labor market policy, addressing the electricity tariff deficit or implementing the labor market reforms.

People are very disappointed with politic parties and with our democratic system. Every day it is much clearer that we do not deserve this economic situation and that the 1% that is the responsible and beneficiary of the crisis and it is being identified with banks and the ruling class.  From May the 15th, society has restarted a politic discuss, and we have recovered the confidence on reaching goals, so people has organized to, for instance, bring before the judge a banker such as Rodrigo Rato or some of the politics responsible for public health in Catalonia. A Citizen Debt Audit Platform has been created to analyze Spanish public debt and to promote the social conscience that it must be repudiated and another platorm PAH, stops mortgage evictions with a lot of popular support. We are having lots of denunciation actions against banks, the Troika or the ruling class and plenty of social or labor demonstrations every week in many cities and some mass demonstrations from 2011. In May the 22th we had the first strike of the whole education sector for decades and nowadays the miners are still in permanent strike after two months. We had also a general strike on March, and probably another one on September the 26th. Spanish start to accept that we are suffering the same attack that Greece. Although lots of people are still on shock because of the measures, many others are starting to react, so the protests start to proliferate and get stronger, as well as the repression of the police gets harder.

Revolta Global in Catalonia confederate with Izquierda Anticapitalista in Spain is a politic organization conducting their own campaign against paying the debt because it is illegitimate. We know capitalism is not an equal system, and we want to offer an alternative with a feminist, ecologist, internationalist and anticapitalist view. We are activist, and we don’t believe that the change will come from elections, but will be created on the street by the social movements. We don’t discard using the elections but we know if the left appears as an option in elections it should be a coalition of radical left parties and social movements that honestly stand against austerity measures.

(Militant of Revolta Global-Izquierda Anticapitalista).

Per al diari grec PRIN