The bailout of the financial system, greatly responsible for the economic situation that we are living in, has its price set from Europe, the price of brutal cutbacks that they expect the social majority to pay. The Spanish state alleges that it doesn’t have the capacity to act, but, just as in the rest of Europe, it plays at preserving and caring for some very specific interests: multinational interests and, mainly, those of the banks, whether they be German or Spanish.
PRINCIPLE MEASURES
State reform to install an economic dictatorship
We don’t find ourselves under any temporary measures, nor before a series of cuts that allow for dealing with a difficult economic phase. Above all we find ourselves with a state reform whose only objective is to install a more savage capitalist model.
After the set of measures and reforms (those already applied and those on the way) that are destroying the public sector: without resources, without capacity and completely residual. A public sector that isn’t even a motor as a regulator of the economy and a public sector that doesn’t give services or social protection to the population. And they continue promoting measures that for the few will continue to accumulate wealth and speculating at the cost of the social majority: fiscal policy is not an instrument for the redistribution of wealth, but an instrument of pure plunder, an example of which is the brutal rise in the VAT after applying a fiscal amnesty to those who have defrauded with their hands full.
The state has neglected their duties in all of their functions as a mediator and guarantor of rights and has decided to convert itself into a simple instrument in benefit of the very few: providing and diverting public resources to the private sphere and guaranteeing social control.
Regression and centralization of the state
Antidemocratic forms and the coup by decree and basic law, is the form that they have adopted to install in politics a totally centralized and uniform model. The “one size fits all” approach of ’78 doesn’t work any more and it is necessary to transform it: a single economic model with a single political framework.
To talk about the invasion of alleged rivalries when the Spanish state has decided that it is the moment to settle and close the autonomic model is a play to the crowd without any trajectory.
Continuing to be tied to the policies of the Spanish state is political and economic suicide for the Basque Country. An economic suicide because the measures that are being adopted aren’t serving to create jobs or to stimulate the economy; cutting salaries while prices rise and basic services are privatized and benefits are cut while unemployment grows is a synonym for poverty. And a political suicide because the are closing the capacity and the instruments to make our own policies that allow us to get out of this situation. If this framework doesn’t serve to make our own policies, then we need another one that does make it possible.
There is an alternative for the Basque Country: subordination or our own way out
What’s at stake at this moment is if they are going to impose this road to nowhere. The alternative exists and it is possible if three decisions are taken: don’t apply the measures of the Spanish government; annul the cuts established in the budgets of the institutions of the Basque Country; and put on the table a new and integral institutional plan to make policies that allow us to leave the crisis. A plan defined on four pillars:
• Fiscal justice
• Developing a system of public services
• Creating a public financial system for the Basque Country
• A real plan for the creation of employment and guaranteeing a basic income
The option is clear: or the subordination and the standardization of a state that has opted not to leave the crisis, or the possibility of taking our own leave from the capacity to make policies and take decisions in our own sphere.
LAB demands that popular consultations be convoked in Navarre as well as in the Basque Autonomous Community in this sense. This is the decision that must be adopted and it is up to the society of the Basque Country to take it and for the political sphere to respect it. We must pass from “apply it because it is obligatory” to “it can’t be applied because Basque society has rejected it.”
On September 26th, we are going to fill the streets of the Basque Country with one objective: that all of these measures aren’t adopted in our area and that before this state reform it will be our people who have the word and