Catalonia Vice President Says “No Choice” But Declare Independence

True, but that’s not to say that the guys in Madrid are honest. Anyway, that’s not the question now. The question is if Catalonia would be a prosperous independent country in the context of today. All the Catalonian leaders (not their followers) know the truth, that the cost would be enormous and the payoff iffy, but they have created a virtual parallel reality for the indepes in which their debt will be written off, they will magically be accepted in the EU, create an Estonia-style cloud economy, pay teachers, retirees, diplomats and police in cryptocurrency, etc. The economy is already tanking. Sign of things to come. When they wake up, they will be very, very mad at this leadership, which did not even have a majority of the popular vote.

link to lavanguardia.com

Interesting reading for those who like to follow history as it unfolds, knowing tomorrow might be completely different. Google Translate should help. During the night, Puigdemont offered to cede his post to his independist vice president, Oriol Junqueras. Junqueras said he would if all the coalition Junts pel Si would support him unanimously. They would not, so he passed. Now Puigdemont hurled the whole hot mess right back at Parliament, so his minister of enterprise resigned, citing that he preferred to practice politics based on values and ideology rather than “identity”. Just another day in hell for all Catalonians.

Rock and hard place. Last night Puigdemont was about to call an election (best possible beginning to a way out) but had to back out because his radical wing was revolting and calling him a traitor. So there will be no avoiding 155, which also puts Rajoy in a very tricky position. And the many unionists in Catalonia, especially in Barcelona (a majority), will be screaming bloody murder and calling Puigdemont a traitor. Different majority pro-union comarques (mostly urban) will want their own vote. Flat footed Madridians will for sure mess up the intervention. The Arran valley will want to secede within the secession, and the law is on their side. An independent Catalonia will have to raise taxes to pay for the gap in retirement funds when Madrid stops sending money. I don’t think they will print money, they can keep the euro as de facto currency, but I may be wrong. However, even if they keep the euro they won’t be able to get loans because their bonds are junk, so they will have to raise taxes, so more businesses will leave. There is no end in sight….balcanization has always been an issue in Spain, and the mediocrity of their current leaders may have tipped the balance.

If there were inaccuracies in the voting process, whose fault was that? If Spain had any doubt what the outcome of the vote was going to be, we can presume they would not have interfered in the voting process. They very much wanted to prevent the people of Catalonia from speaking, so we can presume they had a very good idea what outcome they could have expected.

link to needtoknow.news

How Spain responds to a declaration of independence is the least of the Catalan government’s problems. The real catastrophe will result from the outrage that the pro unionist Catalan citizens will have with a vote for independence. Even if the unionist supporters are a minority they are still a very sizeable percentage of the population and they feel as if they have had no say in the decision to go independence. Sure, we can blame boycott of the vote by “no” supporters on the cynical strategy of Rajoy who told unionists to stay home, but the end result is that the same. The unionist supporters in Catalonia will rise up if independence occurs.the no voters stayed home and didn’t vote at Rajoy

What constitutes an informed decision? Opponents of Brexit projected a number of dire consequences if Brexit passed. People would have made an uninformed decision had they listened to the propaganda and acted on it. Cameron allowed a Scotland referendum, as he thought it would fail, then scrambled to scare the Scots, when polls began to show secession leading. In that case, the scare mongering worked.

And we know the stolen votes figure of 770,000 is accurate how? And we know all “Yes” voters in the confusion prevalent on 1 October when people were told to find another polling station if their local one had been closed only voted once how? And we know voters made an informed decision despite a “No” campaign being absent by reason of obeying the constitutional court to ignore the referendum how?