Italy’s Constitutional Referendum Fails, Europe Shudders

@someofparts
A free-for-all of looting, armed with the police power of the state.

next piece of Julia up
https://symbalitics.blogspot.com/2016/12/julia-apollinaire.html

The difference, big picture, is which group to scapegoat. The left, historically, has scapegoated the rich. As a bonus, scapegoating the rich can be a multicultural project as well.

I want to believe we can navigate the course without scapegoating, but I also realize othering is the default, minus your Buddha types who often come across as sociopaths to the default, and history doesn’t supply many examples of reloution where there weren’t scapegoats of one kind or another.

Taxation- Right, Trump seems to want Bush-style cuts which presumably would add yet another $10 trillion to the national debt.

Racism- I guess this boils down to law-and-order? (since Trump is even pro affirmative action)

Immigration- I’d lump this in with the culture-war issues, albeit the impetus is bolstered by the establishment left’s cynical voter-replacement scheme, and also by the ethnic sympathies of nationalized immigrants. The populist left was always anti-immigration as in anti-cheap labor (Cesar Chavez, even Bernie Sanders). I would expect a resurgent populist left to flip on this one.

Economic policy- so largely shared ends, dispute about the means. I guess we’re talking roughly Hitler/Mussolini versus FDR?

I’ve been talking in great detail with my peers on the right about a great many things, and have, as a result, been toning down my eat-the-rich side a bunch. I probably need to reflect some more.

“On welfare-state issues, and even on social-justice type issues, Trump, LePen et al are center-left.”

Trump has feinted left, mainly on TTP and trade, pretending he’s blue-collar. Other than that the republican right and democrat “left” have been in lockstep in matters of war, surveillance and domestic repression. They only criticise the party in power in terms of executing force, not the fact of it.

They have been somewhat in opposition on social welfare matters, although the dems are sneaky about slashing and privatization and reps are blatant.

That and diversity and abortion are about all that separates them.
I think you have it backwards.

I’m guessing the French right is way left of the US, left or right, on social welfare.
Maybe you are european?

Damn, I don’t tell stories as well as I used to. A critical detail left out: when the black cowboy hat was thrown away, I was told hats had to be ball caps. The Che Guevara hat was a ball cap.

We are watching the slow motion falling apart of Europe. It began with the rape of Greece in order to bail out German banks. Next were the rumbles of the PIIGS and the growing discontent of the forgotten East. Throw Cyprus in there somewhere. Then came Brexit, followed by the lurch to the right in France after Hollande’s implosion of the Socialists. The Netherlands is trending in the same direction. Austria keeps dodging anti-European bullets, but only just. And now Italy. So we have a shaky periphery, and three of the four largest core economies in Europe: the UK, France, and Italy, not Germany are moving away from Europe.

It is sort of like watching the Clinton campaign. At every failure, disaster, missed opportunity, and flashing redlight, the Establishment message was always she was inevitable, unstoppable. Much the same dynamic is taking place in Europe, but, if possible, with even more denial.

Why is noone talking about Smoot-Hawley?

Why we need a new economy – Part 735

(Julia next part
https://symbalitics.blogspot.com/2016/12/julia-mez-mitteleuropaische-zeit.html
)

They have to go over the cliff.

The Clinton wing is already gearing up a new batch of Neoliberals to run in 2020. It’s going to take another a 2nd Trump victory before these people start to learn their lesson.

It is going to worse – the elites, politicians, and people still need to learn an important lesson. And as one scalawag used to remark “and they all learn it, good and hard”.

Think of it as Game Theory 101.

Meanwhile there was a rumor going around that something happened in Austria that doesn’t fit the Rightist Resurgence Narrative.

Must not of happened, though…

@SP

We already have a police, surveillance, inverted totalitarian state with superficial freedom sans real liberty. The old jackbooted authoritarianism isn’t necessary when most of the population buy and constantly use the best little surveillance device ever invented. They know where you are going and where you’ve been and they are already beginning to tell you where you want to go.

Your question about internationalism is a good one and your identifying the IWW as the true Left is even better. What the true Left means by internationalism is solidarity with the world working class while most of the so called left is actually supporting capitalist globalization a complete rejection of Left ideals.

The populist right would de-emphasize universal surveillance, in favor of closing the borders and tested techniques that disregard PC pieties like profiling, stop-and-frisk, and broken windows policing. You could see this thrust clearly in Trump’s campaign. It would also surely reverse Obama’s push to federalize local police forces. It would however come down hard on the Soros-funded riots (no doubt he’d love a color revolution to unseat Trump). Remember what happened last time liberals were put in charge of law enforcement – riots proliferated and violent crime exploded, which led to Nixon’s election on a “law and order” platform (Trump also revived that exact phrase).

You can really feel the dissonance in the populist left over internationalism. You now have capital’s interests aligned with the 3rd-world lumpenprole, as both benefit from the regime of labor arbitrage and mass migrations, at the expense of the 1st-world lumpenprole. All the elites believe in open borders. So as a result you have Bernie Sanders telling Ezra Klein that open borders is a “Koch Brothers idea”, but of course Bernie couldn’t run on that because all the Mexicans in the D coalition don’t just believe in open borders, they live it. The people being imported to vote D are persecutors of the D base – Mexicans hate blacks more than the Klan and ethnically cleanse them; Muslims hate gays more than fundamentalist Christians, and will not tolerate them. The populist left surely has to break in favor of nationalism?

@Lisa

The fantasies are strong with these.

“Muslims hate gays more than fundamentalist Christians”.

Not according to the Pews survey…US evangelical ‘christians’ were far worse on LGBTI people than Muslims…….. and, in the US and elsewhere in the west, there are a lot more of them..

It is not Muslims in the US that are attacking LGBTI people, it is white ‘christians’ and all the money and their organisations like the FRC and so on.

I don’t have to worry about Muslims here in Australia it is the Catholic and Anglican and evangelical churches and all their front organisations like the Australian Christian Lobby that are trying to eliminate me from society….and I do mean eliminate.

The official position (for example) of the Catholic church is for all LGBT people to become cis, straight or be celibate and for intersex people just to accept what gender the doctors pick for them as babies. Total elimination.

Naturally they don’t have the same concern about priests (etc) being child sex abusers… In fact it is amazing to see how ‘soft’ those those anti-LGBTI people are on the vastly greater numbers of child sex abusers (1 in six male and 1 in 4 female children abused).

In fact the greater a group’s hatred of LGBTI people the greater the rates of child sex abuse they have …interesting eh? In the US child sex abuse is dominated by ‘christian’ religious people (93% no less), mostly white no less. And that is whole field of study on its own….

@Lisa, I don’t believe the surveillance state is a left/right issue. All the regime hacks support it. Lots of ordinary people don’t think it’s a big deal, and they say “I don’t care because I have nothing to hide”. Most thoughtful people oppose it on principle. I haven’t seen it come up at all in the past few years, have you? It was a big deal for a while when the story broke of Bush’s warrentless wiretaps and then also Snowden’s revelations.

The thing is, now that we have the surveillance state, how do we get rid of it? No politician wants to oppose it for fear of being blamed for the next terror attack. And of course the NSA/deep state will fiercely oppose any effort to scale back their powers, with fear-mongering and any tricks they can think of. The best thing we can do is to restore sanity to the nation in other ways – eg, shut the borders to the “”Syrian”” “”refugees””, of whom (and of whose descendants for generations) we know for a fact a certain percentage will be violently hostile to us. When you’re in a hole, the first thing is to stop digging.

For those who haven’t seen it I recommend Mark Blyth’s “Global Trumpism” video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm2Vfj42FY\
I recognize most aspects of the new world order but this is first presentation I’ve run into that pulls it all together.

Donald Trump will continue to escalate privatization, looting and the fracking earthquakes while tweeting to the plebs and hassling the media. At some future date, the only choice will be taxing corporations and the wealthy to create jobs and economic demand by dealing with climate change. On the other hand, if the ignorant short term greed of the rich continues unabated, mankind faces extinction.

I also doubt whether the third world shares your opinion of ‘neo-liberalism’. Globalisation and free trade has brought about an averaging of income levels to their advantage, but at the expense of western working classes.

As Welsh has pointed out multiple times, poor nations’ economies grew substantially faster , and far more equably, under the protectionist/developmentalist framework than they did under neoliberalism/”globalisation”.

Further, most of the statistics you’ll see trotted out in support of neoliberalism disingenuously lump China–which saw the greatest improvement by a very wide margin–together with the other poor nations, even though China kept with the developmentalist programme while most other poor nations were strongarmed into adopting neoliberalism. When separated out, the progress of the latter looks sadly mediocre, and looks even worse if you exclude the south-east Asian countries, which didn’t get the full-bore Chicago School treatment.

“Globalisation” was mostly about maintaining political and economic white supremacy in the face of the increasing economic power of the “developing world”. It is on the altar of that charming ideal that the livelihood of the Western middle classes has been sacrificed.

You can really feel the dissonance in the populist left over internationalism. You now have capital’s interests aligned with the 3rd-world lumpenprole, as both benefit from the regime of labor arbitrage and mass migrations, at the expense of the 1st-world lumpenprole. All the elites believe in open borders.

Now this drivel me of the “debate” in the mass media over whether to invade Iraq–“Are the Iraqis vile, subhuman animals unworthy of being blessed with our benevolent Freedom Bombs, or are they fellow human beings with an intrinsic worth which we should recognize by bombing, invading, slaughtering, raping, and subjugating them?”

Why am I not surprised that you’d play along with such nonsense, BOO.

@ Vietnam Vet

Ah Blyth. Thanks for that specific video. I was glad that at least one student challenged him on his “global” premise, because he only spoke of Euro-American “Trumpism” as if it represented a global phenomenon. It does not. It’s important for his argument to pretend it does. In the world he was constructing The Globe = Euro-America, no? Always has, always will.

He hinted that Europe had largely adopted corporate-populism, fascism, authoritarianism and its variants prior to the outbreak of WWII. He even alluded to the overtly fascist influences on the early New Deal. (Mussolini’s son was the most frequent visitor to the White House in 1934…) The widespread adoption of fascism and its variants prior to WWII — perhaps more widely than Trumpist “populism” has been adopted currently — was due to the failure of capitalist-democratic institutions to serve the interests of the people in the face of economic disaster and decline. If capitalist-democracy doesn’t work, people will naturally try something else. Rightist corporatism-fascism is a tailor made “solution.” It’s easy to comprehend, and practitioners require little or nothing from the people beyond loyalty and obedience. The leftist-Trumpism he refers to as a counter and parallel to rightist-Trumpism (referring specifically to SYRIZA and Podemos and even Bernie) is jarring given the compromises and capitulations they’ve accepted if they’ve managed to achieve any power at all. Any sensible person who voted for them would call it betrayal. But Blyth skates on that issue in order to pursue his argument.

He doesn’t deal with the neo-liberal/neo-conservative paradigm and consensus as such, but that’s not his topic. The European project is savaged and declared a failure for its inability to handle even the simplest housekeeping and economic chores. The US is hailed a success because it has processes to balance its political and economic spheres and interests. Besides, the value of his Boston condo keeps going up 6% a year without his doing anything thanks to Chinese money seeking safe investments. What’s not to like.

He explains in simple terms why there’s been no economic advance for most workers in Euro-America since 1970-something. There can’t be under the current regime of globalization, finance capital and labor disempowerment, by intent and by design. Nothing the people do within the rules (such as elections) changes the situation. It’s not being driven by the people in any case.

What to do about it barring revolution is … vague. Things that ought to be done, mostly focused on income redistribution, require the active agreement and cooperation of the exploiting and thieving classes, because the people can’t do it on their own according to the Rules. Rules written by the exploiters and thieves tend to protect the writers from the people.

He was asked what will happen if Trump wins the election. His answer was essentially “very little will change.” First, he says the president can’t do what Trump thinks he can. A president can’t initiate legislation, for example. His authority is limited by the Constitution, and the structures currently in place are mostly beneficial to the interests Trump would be likely to pursue. He might build that wall and deport more brown people than Obama did, but beyond that… the most likely things he would go for are infrastructure improvements, simply because they are way overdue, and they can be done on borrowed money at low or negative interest rates.

What’s not to like?

Most intriguing was his claim that if Trump were elected, “nothing much will change.”

That’s a comfort, isn’t it?

Of course, it’s false. But what the hell, it sounds good.

“capitalism” =/= neoliberalism/”globalization”. Developmentalism a la the “developing world” pre-1970ish or China post-1980 was/is capitalist but not neoliberal/”globalist”. In many ways neoliberalism is a reversion to a pre-capitalist economic form.