Mass Demonstrations Against Financial Coup In Spain

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World News

Strikes and demonstrations rock Spain

By Alejandro López

WSWS

Wednesday, Feb 27, 2013

27 February 2013

On Saturday, hundreds of thousands participated in demonstrations in over 80 cities around Spain on the 32nd anniversary of the attempted coup led by Civil Guard Lt. Col. Antonio Tejero, who seized the Congress of Deputies in 1981 to reverse the transition to bourgeois democracy back to Francoism. The main demonstrations took place in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Vigo.

The main slogan in Madrid was “No to the financial coup. We don’t owe, we don’t pay.”

In other cities the marches went ahead under banners such as “Against the coup of the markets”, “No to the brutal adjustment policies” and “The government has to resign”.

The demonstrations, known as F23, were called by the platform Citizens’ Tide (Marea Cuidadana), an organisation which includes remnants of the 15-M indignados movement, the Communist Party-led United Left, the Mortgage Victims Platform (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, PAH), and anti-austerity organisations such as the Green Tide against education cuts, the White Tide against health care privatisation, and dozens of others.

In Madrid, marches began at different points in the capital and converged at Neptune square near Congress where they were met by 1,400 riot police who blocked off a wide area around the parliament building, the Ritz Hotel and the stock exchange.

Following the mass demonstration in Madrid, the police violently attacked the protesters who did not go home and arrested 45 people, including nine minors, charged with “vandalism”, “disturbing the peace” and “assault against authority”. About 40 people were injured.

Ironically, more were arrested during last Saturday’s protest than among the army officers involved in the coup 32 years ago.

F23 was the latest in a series of mass protests in recent weeks against cutbacks to social and health care services being imposed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party government, which has been rocked by corruption allegations of kickback payments to Rajoy and other top officials from real estate developers. (See “Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy implicated in corruption scandal”)

A week earlier, thousands marched in over 50 cities to protest harsh repossession laws that have led to 400,000 evictions. In Madrid, the Spanish-born secretary general of the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), Beatriz Talegón, was jeered by protesters and had to be escorted away by the police. She had been heavily promoted by the media as a radical for accusing the main delegates of the social democratic parties at the Socialist International conference held in Portugal of being out of touch with the problems facing young people while meeting in a luxury hotel. But workers and youth rightly saw her as a member of the Socialist Party, which was responsible for the first round of austerity measures whilst in government.

In early February, mass demonstrations were held in Madrid and another 15 cities, including Barcelona and Valencia, in defence of public health care and against the cuts. For the fourth time this year, thousands of doctors, public health care workers and users marched on the streets against austerity policies that have seen nearly ?7 billion (US$9 billion) cut from central and regional health budgets in the last three years, representing over 10 percent of total funding.

During these weeks, major companies, public administrations and banks have announced mass redundancies, adding to the ranks of the already record 6 million unemployed.

The leading Spanish tour operator Orizonia Group announced an ERE, an administrative “workforce adjustment” process required of businesses, which will involve 4,000 workers. The company announced that the February payroll is in jeopardy. The ERE at Orizonia follows one agreed between management and unions at travel company Globalia affecting 2,500 workers, involving job losses, a 25 percent cut in shifts and wage reductions.

Spanish utilities company Gas Natural Fenosa, which has 10,000,000 customers worldwide and increased its profits to ?1.44 billion in 2012, has announced a “non-painful adjustment” of employees as part of its strategic plan for 2013-2015. The last time a “non-painful adjustment” occurred was in 2008, when the two major trade unions, the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) and the UGT (Workers General Union), agreed to 600 layoffs (16 percent of the workforce)

The Polytechnic University of Madrid has announced that 301 workers will be sacked, and the remainder will have their salaries cut due to the slashing of ?39 million from the Madrid regional government for the 2013 budget.

Bankia, the bailed-out, state controlled bank, has agreed with the CCOO and UGT to the sacking of 4,500 workers, and CaixaBank has announced the slashing of 3,000 jobs. Banco de Valencia has announced that 890 of its 1,613 workers will lose their jobs, on top of the 360 sacked last November. All of these arrangements are currently being negotiated with the unions, which have colluded with layoffs, salary cuts and the increase in working hours.

The restructuring of the banking sector comes after the meeting held between the euro zone finance ministers on December 3 last year that approved a ?37 billion rescue package for four banks that were already functioning with Spanish state support: Bankia, Catalunya Caixa, Novagalicia, and Banco de Valencia. The terms imposed by the ministers included cutting the size of their business by 60 percent and closing 50 percent of their branches.

But the onslaught on jobs in the banking sector is not finished. The Association of Spanish Banks has stated that 30,000 jobs and 10,000 offices are surplus to requirements. Last November, CCOO general secretary for the financial sector, Luis Jiménez, defended these arguments saying, “In Europe the average employees per office is 10 workers and are more efficient than the Spanish.” In reference to redundancies, he said, “The banks enjoy a sufficient [financial] base to make comfortable adjustments for those who want to leave.”

Strikes have been a daily occurrence in the private and public sector. According to the Ministry of Employment, at least 80 national strikes will take place this year, 23 percent more than in 2012. The unions are doing their utmost to control them.

The strike by Iberia ground staff and cabin crew that commenced a week ago and which forced the cancelation of some 1,200 flights has been suspended until next month in order to give the unions more time to prepare a sell-out. (See “Iberia airline strikers clash with Spanish police”) Public Works Minister Ana Pastor announced on Thursday that Iberia and the unions had agreed to invite Gregorio Tudela, professor at Madrid’s Autónoma University, to act as mediator in the dispute.

In Seville, garbage collectors went out on strike for 11 days against the municipal collection company Lipasam. A ballot to continue the strike was nullified by the CCOO on the grounds that it included temporary workers and a second one held excluding them. The strike was finally betrayed by the CCOO, which helped impose a 3.6 percent wage cut and an increase in working hours.

In Barcelona, bus drivers took strike action for the reinstatement of Andreu de Cabo, sacked after filing an official complaint accusing the bus company of embezzlement and other irregularities. In the same city, 15 Telefónica workers are on a hunger strike for the readmission of a co-worker sacked after applying for medical leave and for the improvement of working conditions in the company.

In Madrid and Seville, workers at the multinational producer of sanitary products Roca went on a three-day strike against plans to eliminate 486 jobs. They are on indefinite strike and forced the unions to call off negotiations with the company, during which leading UGT official Julio Mateo stated: “If the [factory] plants have to remain idle we offer to make the necessary economic sacrifices.”

Last Wednesday, 2,000 judges, prosecutors and civil servants of the judiciary went on strike against new legal fees, the elimination of locum judges and the proposed reform of the CGPJ legal watchdog.

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_65435.shtml

Mass Demonstrations Against Financial Coup In Spain

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By Jérôme E. Roos

Source: roarmag.org

Monday, February 25, 2013

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Europe’s 2013 protest season finally kicked off this week. On Saturday, three days after the umpteenth general strike paralyzed Greece, a “citizens’ wave” of indignation washed over Spain with hundreds of thousands of protesters swarming onto the streets of Madrid and over 80 cities in yet another major popular outcry against the ongoing financial coup d’étât. In Madrid, clashes broke out and at least 40 were arrested after police sought to disperse protesters who had once more encircled Parliament.

Saturday’s demonstration in Spain was deliberately timed to coincide with the 32nd anniversary of El Tejerazo, an attempted coup d’étât by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, who in 1981 led a military contingent of 200 armed officers as they stormed into Congress while it was in the process of electing a new Prime Minister. Although King Juan Carlos publicly condemned the coup, Der Spiegel last year revealed secret documents showing that the King privately sympathized with the coup.

For millions of Spaniards, the embarrassing issue of the country’s anachronistic aristocracy is enough of a headache already. As Spain’s crisis burst out into the open, King Juan Carlos infamously went elephant-hunting in Botswana, amply displaying the insensitivity and aloofness of the head of state (who also serves as honorary president of the country’s WWF branch). Meanwhile, the King’s daughter and son-in-law are facing major corruption charges for multi-million euro fraud and money-laundering.

Still, past military coups and absurd royal scandals are some of Spain’s least concerns at the moment. As the economy plunges ever deeper into the abyss, spectacularly missing EU-imposed debt goals by posting a dramatic 10.2 percent budget deficit last year, millions are now at risk of poverty. According to Oxfam, some 18 million Spaniards (almost 40 percent of the population) could face life of destitution by 2022. Decades of development risk coming undone. In the EU, only Bulgaria and Romania have a higher percentage of their population living in such dire circumstances.

With unemployment hitting a shocking 26 percent, with over 400.000 families evicted from their homes since the start of the crisis (amounting to a mind-numbing 500 families per day), and with another 53,272 families projected to lose their homes this year alone, an acute humanitarian crisis is presenting itself. Meanwhile, with the excuse of “balancing the budget”, salaries are being slashed, employees laid off, hospitals privatized, pensions cut, tuition fees hiked, taxes raised, and social spending decimated.

Last year, a quarter of the government budget went to servicing the public debt, while 100 billion euros were wasted to bail out Bankia, itself a conglomerate of bankrupt savings houses. Despite the lavish provision of public funds and the extravagant bonuses of Bankia’s executives (one of whom was given 6.2 million euros to go into “early retirement”), the bank will next week reveal total losses amounting to more than 19 billion euros, constituting the largest corporate losses in Spanish history.

All the while, the elephant in the room is a sickening corruption scandal that continues to plague Rajoy’s conservative government. Last month, Spain’s biggest newspaper El País published secret documents revealing years of endemic corruption at the highest levels of the governing party. Luis Barcenas, the treasurer of the Partido Popular, kept a double account from which secret contributions by Spanish businessmen were redistributed to leading party members. Among the benefactors of the scandal are former Bankia executive and IMF official Rodrigo Rato, as well as Prime Minister Rajoy, who for 10 years netted over 250.000 euros in illegal side-payments.

To make matters worse, much of this money appears to have originated from the construction sector, which experienced a huge boom during the build-up of the Spanish real estate bubble, suggesting that leading politicians greedily took bribes to allow private investors to bypass construction regulations and build on protected lands. In the process, thousands of building projects scarred the Spanish landscape, leaving behind hundreds of uninhabited ghost towns and destroying much of the country’s once pristine beach lines. When the bubble finally burst, millions of workers in the construction sector lost their jobs and hundreds of thousands lost their homes — while politicians, bankers and businessmen made windfall profits.

The PP corruption scandal confirmed a long-held suspicion among the Spanish population that democratically-elected representatives were largely complicit in causing (and profiting from) the country’s severe financial crisis. Already back in 2011, millions of indignados took to the streets to denounce the country’s representative institutions as a sham of democracy, counter-posing the corporate and corrupt practices of their politicians with a genuine form of grassroots democracy practiced through popular assemblies and solidarity networks.

This Saturday, the Marea Ciudadana — a loose and decentralized coalition of over 200 action groups and movement associations, and itself a product of nearly two years of popular resistance — brought hundreds of thousands of people back to the streets to send yet another message to the government: enough with austerity and debt repayment; enough with political and economic corruption, with banker impunity, royal dishonesty and police brutality; enough with the rule of financial markets and EU/IMF-imposed reforms; enough with this inhumane neoliberal solution to the crisis of capital.

As the PP corruption scandal sent Rajoy reeling and clinging on to power, the government’s last remaining fragments of legitimacy are rapidly evaporating. Polls show that 96 percent of Spaniards believe their politicians are thoroughly corrupt, and the persistent mobilization of hundreds of thousands of outraged citizens shows that millions are acutely aware that there is a direct line connecting these corrupt politicians to national businessmen, European institutions, and international finance capital.

And so, exactly 32 years since the Tejerazo, the people of Spain are making it known that they will not abide by yet another attempted coup d’étât. The elephant in the room has been exposed and the emperor is revealed to stand without clothes. The 2013 hunting season has begun. This time around, the hunter will be hunted and the King will be prey — along with the entire blue-blooded financial aristocracy: from Rato to Rajoy and from Bankia to the Troika. ¡Que se vayan todos! It’s time for them to go.

http://www.zcommunications.org/23f-mass-demonstrations-against-financial-coup-in-spain-by-j-r-me-e-roos

Mass protest in Spain against 'authoritarian' austerity (VIDEO, PHOTO) — RT News

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rt.com/news/spain-austerity-protests-madrid-215/

2012. 9. 15.

Tens of thousands of protesters from across Spain gathered in Madrid to decry austerity measures enacted by ...