Alternatives to Neoliberal Failure

I’ll put this one here, just because its ‘tone’ is so completely different from article in the original post, but the substance is not all ‘that’ different, really. Just substitute the word ‘neoliberal’ for ‘predatory capitalism’.

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Deplorables 1, Empire 0
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45833.htm

By Paul Edwards

November 11, 2016 “Information Clearing House” – It’s done. The foolish, arrogant propaganda excreted by the captive press of the Imperial Establishment is flushed, and they and their owners are eating their hubris, choking down the bitter, toxic medicine they inflicted on themselves. The nightmare they swore could never win is the Chosen One.

What this may mean to them, to all of us, and to The Empire, no one can guess. The origin, though, of what Michael Moore called the greatest “#### You” in our political history, is clear behind the shock and awe of the elite.

Between them, Trump and Clinton diligently stripped away the last shreds of the rent and ragged camouflage that disguised our zombie body politic.

Behind the mantra of Exceptionalism, the American Empire has behaved with exactly the same solipsistic arrogance all empires have embraced.

Internationally it has raged, as imperial China did, as if with a “Mandate of Heaven”, flaunting self-interest with no regard for other nations or the laws of war. It has inflicted misery, chaos, and death on many millions of the poor and helpless for a Full Spectrum Dominance it could never impose. America’s Capitalist War Machine has raped and destroyed many countries for its profit, and destablized the entire world in its megalomania.

Schumpeter said it best, of Imperial Germany’s military industry: “Created by the wars that required it, the Machine now creates the wars it requires.”

America has been transformed over time from a civil democracy with imperial economics to a militarist empire with vaudeville democracy. This was accomplished by binding both wings of the duopoly to the exclusive interest of Predatory Capitalism with corrupting money. A corporate state imposed via political and military power is the essence of Fascism.

For generations, Americans have been dosed with the ultra-nationalist poison of Exceptionalism, with its implicit racist subtext, and its sexism buried in a hoo-rah masculinity cult, but it has always been flavored with the sweetening agent that We, The People, were both masters and beneficiaries of our benign, patristic system. The last several decades have painfully taught any conscious observer that this is a cynical fiction.

In this election, the threadbare mythology of the duopoly was ripped away in a manner that left no doubt, in even the least informed, most credulous minds, that the American political system was a dead, stinking fraud. Each party, with its purblind lack of understanding of, and connection with, the mass of American people, suffered uniquely humiliating public pantsings.

Having stealthily, assiduously cultivated and nurtured the most regressive, dim, and hateful elements in its Redneck Wing for decades, the CEO Wing gaped impotently as Dogpatch was appropriated by a vulgarian who spoke to peckerwoods directly, not in code. He jettisoned the few Silverspooners and Coupon Clipper Bosses, stole their ground troops and mobilized their outrage. He only succeeded then due to the universal rage of the working class that has been dealt out and bankrupted, its jobs and prospects stolen and its lives sunk, for the benefit of a tiny clique of professional criminals.

The Republican Party is done, killed because Trump grabbed its posse.

Democrats, confident of being lesser evils, opted for selbstmord. After Occupy’s warning, exposes of record financial inequality and the rapid unravelling of democracy, one might have thought a show of fight against those evils would be mandatory, but no: they pre-selected the candidate who embodied them instead. As the long, impassioned cry went up across the country, from the young, working people, the ill and poor, disabled and elderly, for an old man who would be their champion, Party commissars chose to freeze out Bernie’s burn and go geriatrically into that good night. Then, when caught out in their shoddy chicanery, they Hitlered Putin.

The Democratic Party is done, dead of peritonitis from undigested hubris.

The failure of faction, the implosion of coherent parties, means more, not less division and acrimony. America faces now the same degree of crisis that has blown the senile Parties in pieces. The time ahead is fraught with tremendous and unknown perils and challenges with no precedent. Our Republic stands a good chance of becoming ungovernable.

Franklin said, with the tough days in Philadelphia over and the Constitution signed, that we had a Republic, if we could keep it. We’re about to find out.

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link:http://www.sodiumhaze.org/2016/11/10/it-was-the-rise-of-the-davos-class-that-sealed-americas-fate-naomi-klein/
It Was the Rise of the Davos Class That Sealed America’s Fate |
Naomi Klein
Submitted by admin on November 10, 2016

They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.

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Trump’s message was: “All is hell.” Clinton answered: “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.

Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.

People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.

Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.

Bernie Sanders’ amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential. Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.

That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are “leaderful”, as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.

So let’s get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let’s set aside whatever is keeping us apart and start right now.

link:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/14/neoliberalsim-donald-trump-george-monbiot?CMP=share_btn_fb
Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph
George Monbiot

Monday 14 November 2016 01.30 EST

The events that led to Donald Trump’s election started in England in 1975. At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it on the table. “This is what we believe,” she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.

The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.

This, at any rate, is how it was originally conceived. But by the time Hayek came to write The Constitution of Liberty, the network of lobbyists and thinkers he had founded was being lavishly funded by multimillionaires who saw the doctrine as a means of defending themselves against democracy. Not every aspect of the neoliberal programme advanced their interests. Hayek, it seems, set out to close the gap.

He begins the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions as political freedom, universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands.
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Democracy, by contrast, “is not an ultimate or absolute value”. In fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising choice over the direction that politics and society might take.

He justifies this position by creating a heroic narrative of extreme wealth. He conflates the economic elite, spending their money in new ways, with philosophical and scientific pioneers. Just as the political philosopher should be free to think the unthinkable, so the very rich should be free to do the undoable, without constraint by public interest or public opinion.

The ultra rich are “scouts”, “experimenting with new styles of living”, who blaze the trails that the rest of society will follow. The progress of society depends on the liberty of these “independents” to gain as much money as they want and spend it how they wish. All that is good and useful, therefore, arises from inequality. There should be no connection between merit and reward, no distinction made between earned and unearned income, and no limit to the rents they can charge.
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Inherited wealth is more socially useful than earned wealth: “the idle rich”, who don’t have to work for their money, can devote themselves to influencing “fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs.” Even when they seem to be spending money on nothing but “aimless display”, they are in fact acting as society’s vanguard.

Hayek softened his opposition to monopolies and hardened his opposition to trade unions. He lambasted progressive taxation and attempts by the state to raise the general welfare of citizens. He insisted that there is “an overwhelming case against a free health service for all” and dismissed the conservation of natural resources.It should come as no surprise to those who follow such matters that he was awarded the Nobel prize for economics.

By the time Mrs Thatcher slammed his book on the table, a lively network of thinktanks, lobbyists and academics promoting Hayek’s doctrines had been established on both sides of the Atlantic, abundantly financed by some of the world’s richest people and businesses, including DuPont, General Electric, the Coors brewing company, Charles Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, Lawrence Fertig, the William Volker Fund and the Earhart Foundation. Using psychology and linguistics to brilliant effect, the thinkers these people sponsored found the words and arguments required to turn Hayek’s anthem to the elite into a plausible political programme.
The ideologies Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan espoused were just two facets of neoliberalism.
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The ideologies Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan espoused were just two facets of neoliberalism. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

Thatcherism and Reaganism were not ideologies in their own right: they were just two faces of neoliberalism. Their massive tax cuts for the rich, crushing of trade unions, reduction in public housing, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services were all proposed by Hayek and his disciples. But the real triumph of this network was not its capture of the right, but its colonisation of parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested.

Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did not possess a narrative of their own. Rather than develop a new political story, they thought it was sufficient to triangulate. In other words, they extracted a few elements of what their parties had once believed, mixed them with elements of what their opponents believed, and developed from this unlikely combination a “third way”.

It was inevitable that the blazing, insurrectionary confidence of neoliberalism would exert a stronger gravitational pull than the dying star of social democracy. Hayek’s triumph could be witnessed everywhere from Blair’s expansion of the private finance initiative to Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, which had regulated the financial sector. For all his grace and touch, Barack Obama, who didn’t possess a narrative either (except “hope”), was slowly reeled in by those who owned the means of persuasion.
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What will be the first actions Trump takes as president?

As I warned in April, the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people’s lives; debate is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation. The man who sank Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency was not Donald Trump. It was her husband.

The paradoxical result is that the backlash against neoliberalism’s crushing of political choice has elevated just the kind of man that Hayek worshipped. Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation of Hayek’s “independent”; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained by common morality, whose gross predilections strike a new path that others may follow. The neoliberal thinktankers are now swarming round this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled by those who know what they want. The likely result is the demolition of our remaining decencies, beginning with the agreement to limit global warming.
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Those who tell the stories run the world. Politics has failed through a lack of competing narratives. The key task now is to tell a new story of what it is to be a human in the 21st century. It must be as appealing to some who have voted for Trump and Ukip as it is to the supporters of Clinton, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn.

A few of us have been working on this, and can discern what may be the beginning of a story. It’s too early to say much yet, but at its core is the recognition that – as modern psychology and neuroscience make abundantly clear – human beings, by comparison with any other animals, are both remarkably social and remarkably unselfish. The atomisation and self-interested behaviour neoliberalism promotes run counter to much of what comprises human nature.

Hayek told us who we are, and he was wrong. Our first step is to reclaim our humanity.

zn wrote:

There is no doubt that Trump voters are worse than average in attitudes towards non-white Americans, immigrants, and women.

That’s nice. I’m a Trump voter, and so are many of my friends, associates and family. Including my mother and sister. We all have poor attitudes towards non-white Americans, immigrants, and women I guess. Never mind that a great many of the left’s voters are non-white, vote against Conservatism, and have an even worse than average attitude towards whites and non-whites alike. Black on black crime is ridiculously disproportionate to white on black crime. Black and Latino gangs killing their own and each other (not whites) daily, and in gross. And because Trump is a braggart perv, most of his supporters are also braggart pervs, it seems. That also means we’re all misogynists. Never mind the fact that Black women are almost three times as likely to experience death as a result of domestic and intimate partner violence than White women. And while Black women only make up 8% of the population, 22% of homicides that result from DV/IPV happen to Black Women and 29% of all victimized women, making it one of the leading causes of death for Black women ages 15 to 35. Statistically, they experience sexual assault and DV/IPV at disproportionate rates and have the highest rates of intra-racial violence against them than any other group. But the problem is white-american Trump supporters. They’re the perpetrators of hate, intolerance and misogyny. They’re the ones that impregnate multiple women and leave them with no support. They’re the ones who kill each other in Chicago to the tune of 3891 shot to date, and 689 of them fatally. Instead of condemning that, harshly, the left would rather court their vote with promises of hope and change while doing absolutely nothing to improve their situation.

wv wrote:

Having stealthily, assiduously cultivated and nurtured the most regressive, dim, and hateful elements in its Redneck Wing for decades, the CEO Wing gaped impotently as Dogpatch was appropriated by a vulgarian who spoke to peckerwoods directly, not in code. He jettisoned the few Silverspooners and Coupon Clipper Bosses, stole their ground troops and mobilized their outrage.

And now we’re rednecks and peckerwoods if we live in middle America. And those are the only people (rednecks) who got Trump’s message about security, immigration reform, jobs, 2nd amendment rights, and sending unconstitutional S.C. decisions back to the States (aka, legal marijuana and abortion) where the people themselves can make those determinations. Nah. We’re just stupid, dim, regressive, and hateful in the red states. We’re just courted by all dem fansy and perdy werds. AIn’t need nuttin’ else.

wv wrote:

For generations, Americans have been dosed with the ultra-nationalist poison of Exceptionalism, with its implicit racist subtext, and its sexism buried in a hoo-rah masculinity cult

Or, it seems, it’s manly-men overflowing with excess testosterone – the neanderthals of the Country – that are the plague. And because they’re manly-men, they’re also racists and sexists. A breed of devolved women hating, mexican haters. They probably hate mexican women more than anything else! Yikes! How do you leftists fix the Country in the face of that super gender? We’ll just kick the shit out of you if you try, and then we’ll rape your women and drive your Latino maids back across the boarder ourselves in our Ford F150’s. Watch your step, y’all. Y’aint’ know what y’all messin’ with.

wv wrote:

And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women.

Of course. That’s the only thing we know. We’re stupid.

wv wrote:

I think the Clintonistas love to OVER-emphasize that one ugly faction.
I think the Trumpites love to UNDER-estimate that one ugly faction.

I think that’s fair. And I also think that’s what will sustain the divide. Trump supporters will continue to be labeled all the “ists” the left can muster. Democrats will continue to be labeled entitled pussies by the right.

We only have one life. We should all strive to do less of that.
In that regard, I’m more like you all than you might suspect.

Zooey wrote:

Black on black crime is ridiculously disproportionate to white on black crime.

And white on white crime is ridiculously disproportionate to black on white crime.

Cuz, by and large, they don’t live in the same neighborhoods.

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And, what REALLY complicates things is some of the MOST hideous behavior imaginable — ie,Corporate Pollution, Toxic Waste, etc — is all perfectly LEGAL.

So how do we define ‘crime’ exactly….etc.

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— X — wrote:

Zooey wrote:

And white on white crime is ridiculously disproportionate to black on white crime.

Cuz, by and large, they don’t live in the same neighborhoods.

Point taken. But I was clumsily trying to make the point that racism (white on black crime is considered the only true form of racism) isn’t as rampant as black on black crime. And yet, which gets the most press? Which is the most repugnant according to the media? Which of the two are people protesting right now?

If you are talking about Black Lives Matter, then I think you are over-simplifying what that is about.

It isn’t just white on black crime. It isn’t crime totals. The black on black crime statistics are a diversion from the point, deliberately promoted to distract from the real issue. The real issue is how white power structures dispossess black people all the time. Daily. And all the videos of white police (power structures) assaulting powerless black men reinforces that experience, becomes symbolic of that experience which manifests itself in all kinds of ways, many of them not criminal at all (like job discrimination). For example, numerous experiments have been conducted on job screening. Sociologists have submitted job applications to see who gets called in for interviews.

And, of course, what they have found is when they put names like DeQ’uisha Jefferson and LaRondry Isaiah on the applications, they don’t get called for interviews as often as the Jennifer Smiths of the world – even when the entire resume is significantly stronger. Moreover, blacks are more likely to be pulled over by cops, searched by cops, arrested by cops, found guilty, and serve longer terms than white people are. That is all just data-driven, empirically true. Their neighborhoods get less funding, their police and fire departments get less funding, their infrastructure gets less attention, and their schools get less funding. They spend more time in prison than white people, and a higher percentage of them go to prison, even though studies show that crime rates are roughly the same demographically.

On top of that, they see their neighbors harassed, and sometimes even SHOT when they are trying to comply with officers. Some of these incidents have been caught on camera, as you well know.

So do black people commit crimes against black people more often than black people get shot by white people? Yes, of course. But that is not a systemic abuse of power. That’s crime. That’s a different thing altogether and not at all comparable.

And, frankly, I don’t even know why this is even controversial. To me it is so completely obvious that the power structures in this country are inherently racially biased, I am simply surprised that people take issue with the assertion.

Oh, and also. They don’t see any justice when a white officer abuses a black man or woman. They often just get paid leave, and that’s it. Paid vacation for shooting a black man. The charge against the guy who shot Phillipe Castille (did I get that name right?) is rare.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Zooey.