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Pro-Independence parties win Catalan elections
Jordi Oriola Folch    Off_Guardian , 17 February 2021
off-guardian.org/2021/02/16/pro-independence-parties-win-catalan-elections/


For the third time in a row, the Catalan pro-independence movement wins with an absolute majority in the Catalan elections. It has won resoundingly with 74 seats, more than the 68 that establishes the majority (in the previous elections it had won with 70). This time also with 51.22% of the votes, making it the majority among the voters.

The elections were due next year, but they were brought forward because the Spanish courts overthrew Catalan President Joaquim Torra for having disobeyed an electoral board that ordered him to take down a banner criticising the imprisonment of Catalan politicians. The President refused, citing freedom of expression, and the Spanish judiciary considered that the contempt was sufficient to force the removal of the President of the Parliament of Catalonia and cause the elections to be brought forward.

Furthermore, after consulting experts on the pandemic, the provisional Catalan executive decided to postpone the elections for five months until the third wave of Covid-19 had subsided. However, yet again, the Spanish judiciary interfered forcing the elections to be held on 14th February.

This is the same Spanish Justice that keeps 9 Catalan politicians and activists in prison, that has issued search and arrest warrants against 7 exiled Catalan politicians (which the German and Belgian courts rejected because they did not see the accusations as justified or because they understood that there were no guarantees of a fair trial in Spain), it is the same Spanish Justice that maintains the search and arrest warrant against a Majorcan musician –exiled in Belgium– for singing against the King of Spain and that is imminently going to imprison another Catalan musician, Pablo Hasel, for also having sung against the King.

In this context, and despite having the entire state apparatus and the Spanish press against them, independence has won again, and has done so obtaining a larger absolute majority than ever and with over 51% of the votes. In front of the pro-independence movement, we have the former Spanish socialist health minister during the pandemic, who has had the full support of the state, the press and unionism in general, and also the Spanish extreme-right of VOX, which has burst onto the Catalan Parliament with 11 seats.

Given this scenario, the Spanish state and the European Union cannot deny the right of self-determination of Catalan society, which must be expressed in a referendum with democratic guarantees, transparency and without foul play.

All in all, democracy is about allowing citizens to decide at the ballot box, not about violating their will with the application of laws that should in fact serve to guarantee there is a framework that respects what societies want for themselves.

Jordi Oriola i Folch is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Transforma Films. His work has been broadcast on television stations around the world and touches on issues of human rights, sustainability, democratic participation and community work, historical memory and the economic crisis. He has also taught audiovisual classes in the Basque Country, Catalonia, South America and Africa. He can be reached through his website or twitter.



https://english.elpais.com/society/2021-02-08/spain-approaches-end-of-phase-1-of-covid-vaccination-campaign.html

El Pais - PABLO LINDE
Madrid - 08 FEB 2021 
Spain approaches end of phase 1 of Covid vaccination campaign

Spain’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign is entering the final stages of the process of immunizing residents of senior residences, while the majority of healthcare workers have also received their first jab – many have also got the second. Meanwhile, the final part of this first phase, inoculating adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care, has begun in the Canary Islands, Murcia and Navarre. This process is expected to get going in the rest of the country before the middle of February.

EL PAÍS has collected statistics in an attempt to take a snapshot of where the vaccination process has got to in Spain and these are the principal conclusions. Despite a year having passed since the first coronavirus infections having been detected in the country, the system for collecting data on the health crisis is still deficient. The Health Ministry has not centralized the collection of information on the vaccination process and just 11 of the country’s 17 autonomous regions have supplied sufficiently detailed figures.
The process is both complex and flexible. The first three groups in phase 1 of the campaign overlap in order to optimize the process, and so that it continues without pause. Healthcare workers started receiving the vaccine before the process finished in senior residences, and adults with need for daily assistance will start being immunized before all healthcare staff have had their doses.

Along the same lines, some regions are already planning for the over-80s – who are the first group in phase 2 – to start the process before phase 1 has finished. There are around 380,000 adults with need for daily assistance, and they are a complicated group to vaccinate given that home visits are often needed. It could be more efficient to vaccinate non-dependent seniors at the same time – this group is made up of 2.8 million people and accounts for six in every 10 Covid deaths in Spain. In January of this year, more than 1,300 people over the age of 80 died every week with the disease.

To complicate the situation further, not all of the approved vaccines are going to be administered to everyone. The AstraZeneca vaccines, which will start arriving in Spain this week, will only be given to people aged between 18 and 55, given that this is the group where clinical trials have proved it to be effective. For now, the Health Ministry has decided that it will be used to immunize healthcare workers who are not on the front line, and next week a decision will be made on which section of the population to prioritize – it could be essential workers or young people with underlying health conditions.
This, in effect, is what some regions are already doing. It is not completely clear which healthcare workers are being immunized in phase 1, and in many cases, the authorities have opted to give all staff in hospitals their doses, independently of their role. In Madrid, for example, a higher percentage of healthcare workers have received the second dose of the vaccine than among seniors who live in residences. This is despite the fact that senior residences – where more than half of official Covid deaths took place in Spain, according to the Health Ministry’s figures – were the absolute priority of the central government’s vaccination plan.

That said, the available data suggests that immunity is not far off for residents of the country’s senior residences. With the information supplied by the regions, nearly all residents and staff have got their first dose, and the majority of regions have administered the second dose to more than half of the recipients.

The process in residences is being delayed due to outbreaks in some of these centers. According to regional health departments consulted by EL PAÍS, this is not presenting a problem given that the process is simply being postponed where there is a high number of people infected.
Data supplied last week by the Catalan regional authorities show that the vaccines are starting to have an effect, and that number of new infections is rising less inside such residences compared to outside. Fernando Simón, the director of the Health Ministry’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts (CCAES), also said on Thursday that outbreaks in these centers are falling and that comparisons made by the ministry between the over-65s who live in residences and those who do not show a lower infection rate among the former.

The full protection offered by the vaccines, however, does not arrive until a week after the second dose. With the extreme levels of transmission that are currently being seen in Spain – the 14-day cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants is around 750 – it is no surprise that the virus is finding its way into senior residences during this process, infecting inhabitants, and even claiming the lives of those who have been inoculated. The risk after the first shot is low, but it still exists.
The latest data from the Health Ministry shows that all regions have administered more than 70% of the doses that they have received. The authorities insist that the problem now will not be the capacity to deliver the vaccines, but rather the number that Spain will receive. From this weekend onward, that number will rise, with, for example, AstraZeneca sending 1.8 million doses this month. And it will go up even more in March, which is when a new vaccine – from Janssen – may be added to the list. The vaccination process for adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care will be a good means to measure the agility of the system.
With reporting by María Sosa, Isabel Valdés and Lucía Bohórquez.
English version by Simon Hunter.









Leftinspain
I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view.

More Spanish history I didn't learn

11/6/2018

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From the Working Class History Facebook page.
www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073.1073741830.294706370714520/891601351025016/?type=3


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On this day, 11 June 1973, workers in Pamplona, Spain defied general Franco's dictatorship and went on strike. The stoppage spread through the auto industry and eventually to bars and restaurants and lasted at least a week. This is a great short book on the mass strikes which swept Spain following Franco's death:




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Wildcat Spain encounters democracy, 1976-1978 - Los Incontrolados

Comrades,
When the situation after the death of Franco cried out to the capitalists 'make your play', the workers answering with their strikes said 'not any more'. By enthroning Juan Carlos, the neo-francoists still believed that they could at their bidding and under the conditions laid down by them accord a place in the democracy, to the bureaucrats of the opposition. From the beginning, however, they had to accept the help the opposition could not but otherwise proffer them, an assistance which they provided effectively and which was the determinant cause in liquidating the most important strike movement since the civil war.
Since the first Government of the Monarchy (1), some 100,000 workers, principally in Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country have been on strike. The movement spread and at the same time became more radical. With its practice of assemblies and the formation of flying pickets, it surpassed all organisations and endangered the legalism of the bureaucrats. By January, strikes were taking place all over Spain. But it was in Madrid where the autonomous movement of the workers fought its first great battle involving 320,000 workers, principally in the building and metal working industries. The minister for union affairs called for a cease-fire to which the USO, CC.OO and UGT agreed, saying, 'it's neither a question of retarding nor of radicalising the strikes but of finding a negotiable solution.' The principal liquidators of the strikes were to be the Stalinists who while unable to control them, could at least block them. They were the first to accept the promises of the bosses, the bosses the first to renege on them, and the Stalinists, in turn, the first to accept this reneging. Ariza (2) himself, dismissed from Perkins, (3) called on his work-mates to 'continue working normally', which illustrates in caricature the impotence of the CC.OO, and the consciousness of such impotency in utilising the strike as a support for Stalinist politics. In managing to smash the most important strike - Standard Electric (4) - with false information, cheating at the polls, underhand agreements and unrepresentative delegates and everything else that the Stalinists long experience in manipulation and the art of lying had taught them, they succeeded in breaking and demoralising the strike front. First came the big engineering firms, then the smaller ones, then all of the others on strike. The government militarised the post, Renfe (5) and the metro: dismissals, sanctions, arrests and threats did the rest.
Following the principle, sustained with every trick in the book, of an 'ordered retreat so as to regroup at a later date', one by one the strikes collapsed in El Bajo Llobregat, in Malaga, in Valladolid, Barcelona, Tarragona, Elda, Allicante. . . the strikes that continued, like Laforsa in Bajo Llobregat, the three Michelin factories, Roca in Gava, Vers Hutchinson and Terpel in Madrid, remained isolated and doomed to collapse from exhaustion. And in Vitoria, where the strikers' assembly movement had come to the point beyond which only revolution lies, where all recuperation was disarmed and bullets alone could stop it, the guns of the police spouted democracy's last word while the moralising lamentations of the opposition provided harmony. All the defenders of the bourgeois order with their tear-soaked handkerchiefs had been saved for the day.
The battle that started in Madrid and ended in Vitoria the first collision of the proletariat with an opposition henceforth in tow to francoism. The sharing out of repressive tasks was settled and the police completed what the lies and manoeuvres of the bureaucrats could not. Camacho speaking about 'strike mania' opportunely recalls Jesus Hernandez (6) commenting on the 'mania for seizing and collectivising'. In Madrid and in the rest of Spain the return to work was a very costly victory for the battered opposition, they paid dearly to keep their union dyke standing. As a result, the Stalinists had to abandon their project of taking over the CNS vertical union 'with all the lifts in working order', because it was really 'out of order', and a useless vehicle for all concerned. Having to resort to the base to recuperate the assemblies, the Stalinists had to renounce assuming from above the monopoly of workers representation. Forced to go along with the UGT and USO, whose liquidationist capacity was appreciably less, they joined in the negotiations with government and the bosses. Although they recuperated the parallel unionism of the committees formed in each company and the negotiating committees set up from above and outside of the assemblies, it didn't help them. But this parallel unionism, obliged to go through the assemblies, could not last for very long when the latter ceased to function. And when the assemblies were in ascension the lies of parallel unionism had to triumph completely if it did not want to 1ose in one assembly everything achieved in the rest. The assemblies of strikers, however imperfect their control over the struggle, contain the possibility of total autonomy in making and carrying out decisions and have to suppress all external representation. In conclusion, the sad role that the politico-union opposition played throughout the present historical period was that of supporting the government no matter what, even to its own detriment, without ever being able to guarantee peace.

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    I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view. 

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