Donald Trump’s Greatest Allies Are the Liberal Elites

Posted on Mar 5, 2017

By Chris Hedges

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

The liberal elites, who bear significant responsibility for the death of our democracy, now hold themselves up as the saviors of the republic. They have embarked, despite their own corruption and their complicity in neoliberalism and the crimes of empire, on a self-righteous moral crusade to topple Donald Trump. It is quite a show. They attack Trump’s “lies,” denounce executive orders such as his travel ban as un-American and blame Trump’s election on Russia or FBI Director James Comey rather than the failed neoliberal policies they themselves advanced.

Where was this moral outrage when our privacy was taken from us by the security and surveillance state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3 million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people of color? Why did they not thunder with indignation as money replaced the vote and elected officials and corporate lobbyists instituted our system of legalized bribery? Where were the impassioned critiques of the absurd idea of allowing a nation to be governed by the dictates of corporations, banks and hedge fund managers? Why did they cater to the foibles and utterings of fellow elites, all the while blacklisting critics of the corporate state and ignoring the misery of the poor and the working class? Where was their moral righteousness when the United States committed war crimes in the Middle East and our militarized police carried out murderous rampages? What the liberal elites do now is not moral. It is self-exaltation disguised as piety. It is part of the carnival act.

The liberal class, ranging from Hollywood and the Democratic leadership to The New York Times and CNN, refuses to acknowledge that it sold the Democratic Party to corporate bidders; collaborated in the evisceration of our civil liberties; helped destroy programs such as welfare, orchestrate the job-killing North American Free Trade Agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, wage endless war, debase our public institutions including the press and build the world’s largest prison system.

“The truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more important than ever,” reads a television ad for The New York Times. What the paper fails to add is that the hardest place to find the truth about the forces affecting the life of the average American and the truth about empire is in The New York Times itself. News organizations, from the Times to the tawdry forms of entertainment masquerading as news on television, have rendered most people and their concerns invisible. Liberal institutions, especially the press, function, as the journalist and author Matt Taibbi says, as “the guardians” of the neoliberal and imperial orthodoxy.

It is the job of the guardians of orthodoxy to plaster over the brutal reality and cruelty of neoliberalism and empire with a patina of civility or entertainment. They pay homage to a nonexistent democracy and nonexistent American virtues. The elites, who live in enclaves of privilege in cities such as New York, Washington and San Francisco, scold an enraged population. They tell those they dismiss as inferiors to calm down, be reasonable and patient and trust in the goodness of the old ruling class and the American system. African-Americans have heard this kind of cant preached by the white ruling class for a couple of centuries.

Because the system works for the elites, and because the elites interact only with other elites, they are mystified about the revolt rising up from the decayed cities they fly over in the middle of the country. They think they can stuff this inexplicable rage back in the box. They continue to offer up absurd solutions to deindustrialization and despair, such as Thomas Friedman’s endorsement of “a culture of entrepreneurship” and “an ethic of pluralism.” These kinds of bromides are advertising jingles. They bear no more connection to reality than Trump promising to make America great again.

I walked into the Harvard Club in New York City after midnight on election night. The well-heeled New York elites stood, their mouths agape, looking up at the television screens in the oak-paneled bar while wearing their Clinton campaign straw hats. They could not speak. They were in shock. The system they funded to prevent anyone from outside their circle, Republican or Democrat, from achieving the presidency had inexplicably collapsed.

Taibbi, when I interviewed him in New York, said political power in our corporate state is controlled by “a tripartite system.” “You have to have the assent of the press, the donor class, and one of the two [major] political parties to get in,” said Taibbi, author of “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus.” “It’s an exclusive club. It’s like a membership system. They all have to agree and confer their blessing on the candidate. Trump somehow managed to get past all three of those obstacles. And he did it essentially by putting all of them on trial. He put the press on trial and villainized them with the public. I think it was a brilliant masterstroke that nobody saw coming. But it wouldn’t have been possible if their unpopularity hadn’t been building for years and years and years.”

“It’s a kind of Stockholm syndrome,” he said of the press. “The reporters, candidates, and candidates’ aides are all thrown together. They’re stuck in the same environment with each other day after day, month after month. After a while, they start to unconsciously adopt each other’s values. Then they start to live in the same neighborhoods. They go to the same parties. Then it becomes a year-after-year kind of thing. Then after that, they’re the same people. It’s a total perversion of what’s supposed to happen. We’re [the press] supposed to be on the outside, not identifying with these people. But now, it’s a club. Journalists enjoy the experience of being close to power.”

CONTINUED:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/donald_trumps_greatest_allies_are_the_liberal_elites_20170305

How the European Union Turned Into a Neoliberal Nightmare

WORLD

Workers across Europe are rallying against a union which has used its undemocratic structures to force neoliberalism on a continent.

By Enrico Tortolano / Open Democracy

June 20, 2016

Retro style clenched fist held high in protest against grunge concrete wall background indicating revolution or aggression. Graffiti fist.
Photo Credit: Kunal Mehta

This article originally appeared on Open Democracy. 

Voting to leave the EU is a no-brainer for the Left. The European Union is remote, racist, imperialist, anti-worker and anti-democratic: It is run by, of, and for the super-rich and their corporations. A future outside austerity and other economic blunders rests on winning the struggle to exit the EU, removing us from its neoliberal politics and institutions. Corporate bureaucrats in Brussels working as agents of the big banks and transnationals’ now exert control over every aspect of our lives. Neoliberal policies and practices dominate the European Commission, European Parliament, European Central Bank, European Court of Justice and a compliant media legitimises the whole conquest. This has left the EU constitution as the only one in the world that enshrines neoliberal economics into its text. Therefore the EU is not—and never can be—either socialist or a democracy.

Against the left’s strategic case for exit is relentless blither and blather from the elitist liberal commentariat: the EU is a social-democratic haven that protects us from the nasty Tories is their litany and verse. This is an absurd fantasy: by design the EU is a corporatist, pro-capitalist establishment. Therefore, it strains credulity that the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party and a rump of the trade union movement believe in the myth of Social Europe. The late Bob Crow was bang on the money when he said: “social EU legislation, which supposedly leads to better working conditions, has not saved one job and is riddled with opt-outs for employers to largely ignore any perceived benefits they may bring to workers. But it is making zero-hour contracts and agency-working the norm while undermining collective bargaining and full-time, secure employment.”

The only thing that should remain is the truth: a social Europe was never part of the European Union super-state project. How could it be? The EU has always travelled on the “free trade” train alongside “free” movement of capital, business-austerity, flexible labour markets, low pay, privatisation of public services and the eradication of welfare states. These were not just random policy proscriptions, but specifically designed by ‘free-market’ fanatics. It was the deepening and integration of the EU project that allowed unelected policy makers, driven by the powerful EU corporate lobby, to circumvent and eradicate the social rights that were won by workers in the aftermath of World-War-Two. Creating democratic deficits in all the EU institutions and policy-making by unaccountable technocrats enabled and accelerated this process of dismantling rights. This arrangement ensured the neoliberal Holy Trinity of public spending cuts, privatisation and the removal of trade union rights could be enforced with little contestation.

It’s worth noting the continuity of contempt by the European Union elites towards public opinion. Jean Monnet the founding father of the EU understood democracy was an obstacle to the elitist project and had to employ a degree of deception: “via money Europe could become political in five years” and “…the current communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity. Only then would … the mutual commitments make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal.” Jean-Claude Juncker, today’s unelected EU chief makes clear that nothing much has changed, “when it becomes serious, you have to lie.” “There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.”

Neoliberal logic is insidious and some trade union leaders in Britain seem bewildered by it all and continue to argue that some kind of utopian Social Europe exists, offering protection for workers in Britain. In reality the Social Chapter, while it potentially gave some extra legal protection on a few issues, was never much more than crumbs: a gesture to disguise the reality of the European Union as a bosses union. What protects workers in Britain is not the social rights from benevolent bureaucrats in Brussels, but our collective strength and ability to organise and take action.

It was organised struggle by workers’ and their trade unions in Britain that created the 1948 Factory Act, the 1970 Equal Pay Act and so on right through to the National Minimum Wage. To argue that we would lose our right to annual leave if we left the EU is ludicrous and just another part of the Remain project-fear campaign. We’ve had holiday pay enshrined in UK legislation since 1938, and if the Tories were desperate to withdraw these rights, why haven’t they at least scaled them down to the EU minimum in their six years in power? The answer is democracy. Unlike the unelected European Commission, the Tories face the British public at the ballot box at every general election. And lets be honest, even Eton Tories know withdrawing employment rights isn’t a vote winner.

The consolidation of the EU treaties and judicial rulings into the European Constitution—renamed the Lisbon Treaty—meant even the concept of a Social Chapter was the stuff of Alice in Wonderland. EU member states that have been ‘bailed out’—the bailout funds actually went to French and German banks—by the troika have suffered the biggest fall in collective bargaining rights in the world. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) collective bargaining rights have fallen by an average of 21% across the ten EU countries hardest hit by the economic crisis, and have fallen by a massive 63% in Romania and 45% in Greece. The anti-trade union laws and polices passed and implemented in the UK are actually just regional versions of the articles laid down in the Lisbon Treaty. The message is clear: the EU is no place for trade unionists.

The EU is also no place to be young. In fact they have most to lose if we remain in the EU. An over competitive education system, the closure of vital youth support services and the introduction of student loans has meant that young people have fewer opportunities than their parents generation. With the EU being the world’s low growth region, with 23 million unemployed, the social fabric is deteriorating at an alarming rate. In some EU countries youth unemployment has pushed northwards of 50%. Outside of the EU we would be able to prioritise building a society without unemployment and with secure, skilled, well paid jobs. We would be able to tackle the unaffordable housing market and enable young people to develop again free from the chains of debt. Young or old: the toxic mix in the EU of low growth, low productivity and mass unemployment means a bleak future.

The EU is no place for internationalists either. It is a racist ‘Fortress Europe’ project doing everything it can—including allowing refugees to be shot or drown in the Mediterranean every day—to prevent those fleeing from Syria and neighbouring countries being able to enter the EU. Those who do get to EU shores end up locked away in brutal concentration camps. Those at the sharp end of EU trade policy have also been brutalised. The EU conducts economic terrorism on a global scale through aggressive global trade policies and structural adjustment conditions, in particular towards African states. This has served only to deepen their poverty and inequality whilst enriching the white EU 1%. Nor does it build meaningful solidarity between EU states; through the lens of Greece and Germany we see tensions not witnessed since 1945.

Inequality and intimidation doesn’t just exist between the EU and the so-called developing nations either, but the strong EU economies such as France and Germany prey on what they call the ‘peripheral countries’ in Southern and Central Europe. The institutions of the EU have relentlessly and very deliberately imposed the misery of neoliberal austerity and privatisation on these economically weaker countries. Governments across the EU have used EU Treaty rules as cover for this robbery of public wealth.

Real internationalism is workers’ solidarity throughout Europe. The working class are facing the same fight against low pay, casualisation, cuts and privatisation in every country of the EU. Right across the EU workers are hoping the UK exit so they too can demand referendums. There is no doubt a successful UK exit would have huge support, and be emulated, across the continent. That is why the bankers and institutions of the EU were so desperate to force the Syriza government in Greece to its knees: in order to demonstrate to workers in other EU states the fate that would await them should they demand democracy and an end to austerity. It may have backfired. The Syriza government’s capitulation has forced the Greek working class to demand Grexit. If Syriza had only stood firm and implemented the socialist policies it got elected on it would have been kicked out of the Eurozone and even the EU, but by developing a real alternative to austerity it would have inspired millions of EU workers to demand their liberation.

The social disintegration, economic decline and democratic deficit across the EU seem to surprise some. They should not. The major EU policy initiatives such as the Single Market Strategy, European competition policy, Economic and Monetary Integration and the Growth and Stability Pact have put “free” trade and “free” capital mobility, fiscal restraint and business-austerity before the collective interest. In other words the 1% always come before the 99%: the employers always come before the workers. Only in Pinochet’s Chile—where democracy was also absent—have we seen such an embedded programme of neoliberalism. It ruined Chile’s economy too.

A new multi-nation survey from Pew Research Centre finds that Euro-scepticism is on the rise across the EU. It found the EU’s image and stature has been in rapid decline in recent years. In a number of nations the portion of the public with a favourable view of the Brussels-based institutions have fallen markedly in recent years as the economy collapsed. Nevertheless, dogged by defeatism and despair some on the left are terrified of Tory mavericks Gove and Boris. They should recognise that by voting to Remain, these buffoons will still be around. Moreover, they should ask why Cameron, Osborne, the CBI, IMF, WTO, World Bank, US and the entire armoury of finance capital want Britain to Remain. To improve workers rights? Don’t think so. From Yannis Varoufakis to Caroline Lucas—there is no shortage of postmodern opportunists lining up to claim it is better to stay in the EU and try to reform it. What they don’t have—and can’t have—is a strategy. The EU constitution doesn’t allow it.

The late Tony Benn summed up the whole issue: “We are discussing whether the British people are to be allowed to elect those who make the laws under which they are governed. The argument is nothing to do with whether we should get more maternity leave from Madame Papandreou (a European Commissioner at the time).”

For those still struggling to understand why we must leave the EU: It’s democracy, stupid.

 

Enrico Tortolano is campaign director for Trade Unionists against the EU. He also works as a freelance journalist covering European and Latin American politics. He designs and tutors courses on a wide variety of trade union issues including political economy and International solidarity. He is regularly published in political journals such as Tribune, Alborada and the Morning Star, and a number of academic periodicals.

http://www.alternet.org/eu-neoliberal-nightmare?akid=14368.265072.XK1ynb&rd=1&src=newsletter1058662&t=14

Europe’s pink tide? Heeding the Latin American experience

By Leonidas Oikonomakis On March 14, 2015

The rise of Syriza and Podemos closely mirrors the experience of the Latin American left. Can grassroots movement in Europe avoid the same pitfalls?

Photo by Yorgos Karahalis

If you are expecting yet another hagiography of Syriza, their “no-tie, casual style,” their proud “no” to the Troika, Varoufakis’ glamorous new family home (with a view to the Acropolis, eh!), and everything else you have been reading elsewhere lately, do not bother with this article. I don’t like hymns and hagiographies, especially when we are talking about a government, and I have long been studying similar processes in other parts of the globe to be wary enough and not to get over-excited with the electoral victory of a center-left party.

The Pink Tide

Three years ago, when Syriza was just starting its incredible rise and when Podemos was just an imagination, I wrote a piece for ROAR with the following post-script: The pink tide reaching the shores of Europe?

I was referring to the rise to power of left or center-left parties in several Latin American countries over the past fifteen years, riding on a wave of discontent against the neoliberal policies that were implemented by national governments across the continent; a wave of discontent that was cultivated largely by grassroots movements. Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia are exemplary cases.

Of course all of these cases have their own local differences and specificities. But they also have some striking similarities: a neoliberal assault on the social character of the state; a wave of discontent rising from below and seriously challenging representative democracy as a system of governance and the political party as an organizational form; a network of grassroots movements leading the resistance and proposing autonomy and direct democracy as a radical alternative; and a left (or center-left) party that eventually won the elections to overturn the neoliberal restructuring of the state and restore the “lost honor” of the political system.

Just like in Greece today — and maybe in Spain tomorrow?

The rise of center-left governments in Latin America came to be known as the Pink Tide — exactly for that reason: they seemed to constitute a diluted form of red. Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and the Kirchners, among others, became the protagonists of a kind of left-populism whose passionate rhetoric sounds revolutionary yet whose practice and politics look more like capitalism with a human face, or like social democracy. Environmentally-friendly rhetoric and supposedly pro-poor policies combined with an economic strategy based on not-so-pachamama-friendly neo-extractivism: oil and gas in Bolivia and Ecuador, Monsanto’s GM soy fields in Argentina.

I am not saying that Syriza or Podemos will necessarily walk down the same road — the social, political and economic contexts in Greece and Spain are completely different, after all. However, there’s something that we should not be overlooking: the relationship of the movements that created the conditions for Correa’s, Morales’ and the Kirchners’ rise to power, with the center-left governments they eventually formed. Taking a look at how that relationship evolved in Latin America in those ten to fifteen years, we may learn a lesson or two that may be applicable to Greece today and maybe to Spain tomorrow.

Autonomy and direct democracy!

If there is one common factor between the Latin American and the Greek experience, it’s the evolution of a network of horizontal movements focusing on prefigurative politics, direct democracy and autonomous self-organization as a response to the financial and social crisis and the legitimation crisis of the political system more generally.

Between the piqueteros and the neighborhood assemblies in Argentina, theCoordinadora por la Defensa del Agua y la Vida in Bolivia, and the Movement of the Squares in Greece, several striking similarities can be drawn: the rejection of representative democracy as a system of governance and of the political party as an organizational form, and the articulation in its place of a horizontal, directly democratic, autonomous form of self-organization from below.

Each of these movements was the expression of a “constituent power” that never managed to create its own institutions and become “constituted” as a new social and political order. However, these movements did manage to challenge the legitimacy of the state’s representative institutions, and they did create a wave of discontent that eventually managed to overturn governments and presidents.

Elections?

All these cases have one more thing in common: when eventually elections were called, those horizontal, autonomous and directly democratic initiatives ran out of steam and lost ground to political parties — of the left this time — that managed to capitalize on the popular discontent and grasp state power. From my point of view, the reason behind this shared experience is simple: the proposal of the grassroots movements did not manage to translate itself into a tangible, solid structure.

To be fair, the movements did not even have the time to develop such structures. When elections were eventually called, the movements — and together with them the overall population — had to make a decision: do we ignore the elections and continue building our own institutions from below that do not yet exist, or do we participate in the institutions that already exist, despite the fact that we do not really believe in them, in order to bring the left into power?

The easiest choice was the latter.

Unfortunately, when those center-left parties rose to power, despite their promises of reinforcing autonomy and direct democracy, they actually ended up co-opting the grassroots movements that could be co-opted, and repressing the ones that could not, in the process establishing a divisive discourse — ‘you’re either with us or with the right-wing’ — that basically stigmatized the autonomous voices in case they dared to challenge the government’s policies. The reason for this dynamic is obvious: political parties, even the most left-wing ones, are top-down structures based on verticality and, of course, representation.

Take as an example the process through which the election of the President of Greece took place under the left-wing Syriza government. I am not going to comment on the selection of a right-wing politician (Prokopis Pavlopoulos, ex-deputy of Nea Dimokratia), who voted for all the memorandums and whose name is implicated in several corruption cases. But what I will criticize is something that clearly reveals the hierarchical character of Syriza’s political project: the fact that its deputies were warned by the party leadership that they would be forced out of the parliamentary group should they fail to vote for the right-wing candidate selected by the party leadership.

That is, even if Syriza’s MPs strongly disagreed with the choice of Prokopis Pavlopoulos — and several of them openly expressed their criticism — they would have to vote for him. I personally do not see any difference between that and the “yes to all” mantra that the MPs of previous Greek governments were forced to repeat during the parliamentary voting procedures on the Troika memorandums. Clearly this type of logic cannot be squared with the horizontality and direct democracy of the movements, which operate according to an entirely different worldview.

However, with the electoral victory of left-wing parties there’s an additional process that begins to unfold: a process that has to do with the restoration of institutional politics, of representative democracy, and of the party as an organizational form — exactly what the grassroots initiatives of previous years had challenged.

Honeymoon?

Finally, another common element among Pink Tide governments is that they initially enjoyed a honeymoon period — a sort of truce — with the grassroots movements upon entering office. This truce broke down later on, at the expense of the movements, of course. Take for example the repression of the indigenous peoples mobilizing against the construction of a super-highway that would pass through their territories in Bolivia (the TIPNIS National Park), or the case of Rafael Correa breaking of his promise not to drill for oil in the Yasuni National Park, or his attack against the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and his efforts to “register and control” the country’s social movements.

A further misconception I notice, especially when it comes to the case of Syriza (and Podemos) is the belief that with a center-left government in office, grassroots initiatives will be able to revive, re-occupy social spaces, and strengthen their proposals. The Latin American experience, however, points towards a different direction. The restoration of the representative logic actuallydemobilized both the overall population and the movements that had previously engaged in radical prefigurative autonomous experiments. And for those that were not demobilized, co-optation and repression gradually ensured their irrelevance.

I am not saying here that the same process will necessarily repeat itself in Greece and Spain as well. Only time can tell whether it will. What I am saying, however, is that the Latin American experience is there, and if we don’t pay attention to it we may suffer the same fate in Southern Europe — at least those of us who believe in a different world: one that is autonomous, directly democratic, and built form below and to the left!

Leonidas Oikonomakis is a PhD researcher in Social Movement Studies at the European University Institute, a rapper with the Greek hip-hop formation Social Waste, and an editor for ROAR Magazine.

 

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