Italy has essentially “caved” on its threat to run a high budget deficit and confront the managers of the Eurozone.
The Italian government will trim its deficit target for next year in its latest proposal that seeks to avoid European Union sanctions for violating the bloc’s budget rules, the Ansa news agency reported.
“We have reached agreement on everything,” Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said after a lengthy budget meeting in Rome Sunday night. The budget would be “within limits that should please the EU.”
In a previous Brexit thread, the idea that Italy was about to confront and maybe start the process of leaving the Eurozone due to the budget conflict was bruited about. I laid out the main path by which this could occur in a comment:
Right now, the main issue is Italy, and the deciding questions are:
Whether the Five Star/Lega Nord government is really going to escalate the budgetary conflict with the Commission.
Whether, in doing so, they will force the Commission to back down.
Otherwise, whether the resulting conflict will cause them to back down.
If they don’t back down, whether the Greece-like economic consequences will cause them to lose popularity.
The path to an EU breakup is charted with: (1) yes; (2) no; (3) no, and; (4) no. So far we are getting (1), maybe, and (2) no.
Italy has already departed this path at step (1), and with a non-buffoon “clever” right-wing agitator in the driver’s seat like Matteo Salvini.
The Hungarian government, led by Victor Orbán, the great defender of the worker from the hordes of cheap labour and cultural contamination knocking on Hungary’s doors, has decided to pass a law that:
Drastically raises mandatory overtime for 250 to 400 hours.
Allows employers to bypass union negotiations and make agreements with individual workers.
Allows employers to pay out overtime over three years, rather than one.
The combined changes make it possible for employers to make Hungarian workers work a six-day week rather than a five-day week.
Orbán is widely considered the leading figure of the “nationalist international,” promoting “family values” that will protect ordinary working people against the social and economic dilution brought about by liberal attitudes to culture and immigration. In reality, this type of nationalism (perhaps all types?) is not a real protection for the worker and typically presages a different set of extractive and exploitative compromises with capital.
I notice there’s been a sort of low-key, left-wing argument going on lately about open borders. I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that when it comes to the movement of people, I consider myself an open borders supporter, and by no means consider that an inherently “neoliberal” position as some people claim, depending on your definition of neoliberalism (something that is rarely fully resolved…).
There are a lot of reasons why I take the open borders position for humans — despite being less positive about the flow of goods and capital, to say the least. Some of those are arguable, such as the impact on wages and so forth. But there’s one show-stopper issue for me with the concept of enforced national borders — the enforcement part. Enforcing national borders necessarily requires a concept of deportation. Why? Because until we have a Star Trek force field and magical entry authorization detectors and a flawless, uncorrupt border control system, “unwanted” people will always get in. And then the border only means anything if you can remove those who cross it illegally.
But removing them requires not only a police force given the responsibility of exercising physical violence to control a non-violent crime, it also necessarily requires the entire apparatus of the carceral and surveillance state. For example: Due process must be given in order to deportation power prevent abuses (very common), but this requires preventing the object of deportation from “running to ground” to avoid enforcement of a negative outcome. Which requires jails, courts, and so on, and for nation-states of any size, all these things at quite a large scale. In order to catch border-violating individuals, a surveillance state of great power and detail (indeed, such as now exists and expands) must be implemented. Indeed, if it is not, then the worst wage effects of an undocumented labour class ensue quite logically.
Do I need to explain why a comprehensive carceral and surveillance state is a very bad thing, and indeed, how bad it is?
For this reason, I find it hard to take left-wing critiques of free movement and defenses of borders seriously until they engage with the topic of enforcement and particularly the mechanics of deportation. It is all well and good to say that people shouldn’t have to leave their communities of origin for employment, for important family reasons, or for their own amusement, and here we would all like to see, I hope, a world in which that is the case. It’s another thing to argue for a regime that works to stop people from moving, for whatever reason. And I suspect the overlords of the world are, as a group (if not individually), just fine with either regime, at least depending on the ascendant faction.
The next century from this point on is likely to be pretty awful, and unless something changes drastically Real Soon Now, a lot of that will be due to very large global temperature increases. Not much will change for the better, though, because the world’s largest economy was willing, after all, to elect a man whose platform includes digging for and burning more coal, doing more offshore drilling, etc. More importantly, be believes shouting out loudly that these are good and praiseworthy things to advertise to the world, which makes it all significantly worse because saying is doing.
There’s a lot of hullaballoo about a report that appeared in the Washington Post (paywalled but sometimes you can get through). Everyone is saying that it reveals that the Trump administration accepts that a four-degree-Celsius increase in temperature is baked in. If you read the fine print, however, what is being argued that if a four degree increase is baked in, then the contribution of some emissions control measures is so small that it is not worth the alleged economic drag created by regulating them. The intended corollary being that if there is no global warming in the first place, there is no point in regulating emissions, therefore there is no point in regulating emissions either way. It is either insignificant or useless.
There is no “admission” here — the Trump administration is not accepting the likelihood of a four degree increase. One should consider who is running Trump’s environmental policy. I have been following the right-wing for a long time, and what were once internet trolls and small-time lobbyists are running the show. One of those characters is Steve Milloy, the tobacco and chemical industry lobbyist who has blogged for a long time at JunkScience.com. In a nutshell, Milloy vociferously denies the worth or necessity of any pollution control, particularly air particulates of the kind people blame for respiratory disorders (after all, if tobacco smoke can’t hurt you, how can small amounts of particulates?), and he most certainly rejects the prospect of global warming. Milloy now also boasts, quite credibly, of having a direct line to the people dismantling the EPA (they cite his work in their justification of doing so).
And for quite a while now, Milloy has been saying precisely what the Trump administration is “admitting” — that if car emissions standards are enforced, they will have a trivial effect on the climate, if the worst forecasts — which he and other denialist lobbyists love to emphasize — are true. But under no circumstances are they advising “resignation” to a fate they have consistently claimed they don’t believe is going to happen. (Whether they secretly believe it and are knowingly lying is one of those “stupid or evil” debates that are, on the whole, rather distracting and pointless. Maybe there will be a smoking gun screenshot of Milloy’s phone or something.) The draft government report to which the WaPo article refers uses a reference scenario in which no climate action whatsoever is taken to emphasize how small the effect of the regulations being relaxed really are.
So if the Trumpists don’t really believe in global warming, why would they deploy an argument based on the premise that regulation would have a trivial effect even if it were true? After all, it would be more straightforward to deny global warming full stop as a justification to cancel regulation. The reason is ideological: They know that other people believe in anthropogenic catastrophic global warming, so they know that regulation is tempting. And they believe firmly in a regulatory slippery-slope argument (this goes along with the deeply embedded libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism) — that if they allow a little regulation that has small effects, the regulatory system may entrench itself and produce much larger regulations. (And worse, people might like those regulations.)
And they’re right. The — alas — too-slow path to large-scale regulation under our present systems of government do mostly work their way through using small/insufficient regulations as wedges or levers to much larger regulation. That is why they vociferously scuppered US participation in the Paris Agreement, because the Paris Agreement admits that regulation is necessary, regardless of how small the Paris Agreement’s actual goals were. And saying is doing: The minimal regulatory “admission” is necessary for anything else to proceed.
The fundamental unit of representative democracy in the vertically-stacked, hierarchical systems of governance of most modern states that claim to be democratic is the political career of the individual representative, not, as it might seem on the surface to some, the vote. This is necessarily the case, because during the term of representation, the representative is only bound at best indirectly to the will of the voters, and in formal terms, principally through the risk of being rewarded or punished at the next election through the ballot box. The reward of cushy post-office positions and honours, effectively post hoc bribery, is not “formally” a part of the system in the way that losing office definitely is.
The representative is therefore an independent agent, subject to incentives and disincentives, even under the condition of the best intentions and personal incorruptibility. The purest-intentioned elected representative must thus weigh the good that can be done now in terms of their official powers against the risk of losing office — thereby losing the ability to do future good at a critical juncture, and worse, potentially losing the position to someone who will use the power to actively do evil/harm, from the perspective of the current representative or candidate. This means that this hypothetical “best-intentioned representative” is constantly faced with the possibility that foregoing good or accepting an evil may extend their term of office to do greater good and that doing good or rejecting evil may end their term of office and usher in a greater evil.
In our large-population, modern states with elaborate political hierarchies (municipal, county, state/provincial, national/federal, with multiple branches, etc.), it takes considerable resources to operate a candidacy, because one is usually competing against other candidates for the attention of a large number of voters. Such systems vary across countries, but this fact is the same in all cases under conditions of formal electoral freedom. Even under ideal conditions of equitable campaign financing and media access, election campaigns will still differ in resources relative to the effectiveness of their message and numerous, difficult-to-control conditions relating to the number of activists and volunteers that can be mustered to raise awareness, bring voters to the polls, and so on. Furthermore, because the system is hierarchical, again, with other conditions being hypothetically equal, very few (personally ideal) candidates can be successful trying to start at the “top” of the system (e.g., president, prime minister), but instead must fight the electoral battle upstream, if they have the ambition of doing good at a larger scale.
All of this necessarily becomes part of the incentive calculation for our hypothetically best-intentioned candidate. Simply put, such a candidate must factor in the ability to maintain a stable support base to pursue a political career not only to implement one good policy or piece of legislation, but over time, and upwards in the hierarchy. (Indeed, not at least appearing to strive for status-improvement in the hierarchy in the future may weaken a representative’s ability to enact policy in the present, by causing their colleagues to filter out their future influence on said colleagues’ own political careers.)
What does this mean for the role of ideology and material benefit in the political system? Quite simply, both are effectively marginal/tangential to the system as a whole. The main currency of representative democracy is politics itself, whereby good or at least ideologically-consistent policy is a by-product created by interactions among representatives who must necessarily balance all decisions against the benefit of continuing their political careers. This, I must emphasize once again, is under the hypothetical conditions of maximum honesty and good intentions among such representatives, conditions that of course we do not obtain in the real world.
Anyone, inside or outside the formal houses of representative democracy, who is principally interested in an ideological or material aim that they believe must be achieved through legislature or state orders, is therefore also constrained to consider the incentive structure of representative democracy in terms of the political career of the representatives. This means, even given ideal circumstances of personal probity and ideological alignment which do not hold in the real world, that they must provide a stable basis upon which a significant number of representatives can resolve the choice between doing good now and doing good later at the minimal total “goodness cost” overall. Ideological movements that are not able to supply an close-to-optimal resolution between these choices will, one way or another, not be able to obtain the cooperation of sufficient representatives as to implement policy.
Then, factor in the reality that we do not live in an ideal world of equal financial resources, media time, personal probity, ideological commitment, and so on…
The Assad regime in Syria is ghastly, and I have no truck with the sort of leftism or anti-imperialism that lionizes it as some kind of grand resistance against imperialism — it is of the same sort of moral absurdity that attempts to paint Russia as anything other than a weaker rival imperialist competing with the US, as though it were a kind of moral paragon. You can make a case for or against a multipolar world in utilitarian terms (more stable or prosperous in some sense?), you can have ideological content preferences among the different imperialism flavours, but ghastly regimes are still ghastly and military imperialism always involves mass suffering. Whose catspaw the Assad regime is does not make it more or less criminal. Someone who wants its overthrow is not automatically an ideological fellow-traveller of ISIS.
On the other hand, I also have no patience for the neoconservative/liberal hawk tomfoolery that uses the Assad regime’s ghastliness (and the horror show that encompasses its victory for anyone who is seen as an enemy of the regime) as a reason to wash away the utter failure and downright evil of the intervention in Iraq. (Is this “virtue-signalling”? I’m under the impression that in some quarters, if you’re anti-Assad, you must be an interventionist.) I am not a pacifist, so in principle I accept that there is a case to be made, under very abstracted conditions, for a stronger military power to intervene to prevent suffering in another country. In practice, the conditions under which this leads to a better outcome are very rare–if they ever occur at all. The risks of creating a worse situation in Syria, given the experience in Iraq, are extremely high. The vested interests are strong, the risk of making a bad situation worse from a direct overthrow of the Assad government are overwhelming for that and other reasons.
Which leads me to the question of the White Helmets. I gather that a lot of people on the “anti-imperialist” side view them as propaganda catspaws of imperialists. The reason for this seems largely to be that they operate in areas held by forces opposed to the regime (this to me is perfectly legitimate — how could a rebel trust the government to conduct rescues?), organizational and media help is offered by foreign entities with vested interests in the overthrow of the Assad government (again, to me legitimate — I would accept such help if I were opposed to the regime and in dire straits), and they receive foreign funding (ditto). None of these indict the organization to me — victims of Assad’s attempt to retake forces held by opposition groups are going to need rescue from someone and frankly, publicity.
Now it appears that a large number of them have been given asylum by Israel en route to being distributed to other countries, as Assad looks to retake most of all of Syria. If they stayed, surely they would face criminal proceedings (or, probably, much worse) from the Syrian government. But a lot of anti-imperialist (pro-Assad?) commentators, including/especially on the left, seem to view this as a further indictment of the White Helmets. Naturally, there is considerable moral inconsistency in Israel’s action, to say the least, but that is not an ethical quandary for those who are fleeing Assad.
What are they supposed to do? Stay and face Assad’s torturers (which he definitely uses)?
It should generally be possible to accept the legitimacy of opposition to Assad, including (especially!), rescue of his enemies, while criticizing the vested interests that might seek to take advantage of his overthrow.
The reaction to my previous post was very gratifying in the sense that it sparked off a discussion in the comments touching on hitherto little-asked questions of moral priorities in a time of increasing global political crisis. More interestingly, it also helped point out places where we don’t necessarily even agree on important terms and definitions — I am particularly thinking about a part of the discussion that veered off into analyzing the material consequences of oligarchy, capitalist or otherwise, but it turned out we didn’t all seem to agree on what oligarchy was, who oligarchs are, and so on.
So let me take the opportunity to cast my own light on what the choices are, overall, in terms of real and possible oligarchies. There are, at a global level, two “mainstream” forms of hegemonic politics, each with their own oligarchical backing. One of these is the Clintonian-Merkelist-Obamist-Sorosian politics that is a confluence of at least overt social-liberalism and a variety of economic neoliberalism. The other one is a Trumpian-Putinian-Bannonite-Orbánist instrumentalization of parochial nationalism. The former represents an oligarchic politics, democratically unrestrained trans-national capitalism, that has the potential to do great harm to the world if left unchecked. The latter represents a con game that starts out with cotton candy for the True People and eventually ends up with states under the control of local and not-so-local looters who instrumentalize nationalist conflict for crony enrichment — this too, is oligarchy.
(This is Fascism 101: There are a small number of people who genuinely support exclusivist nationalism who, if they play their cards well right now, will be able to briefly experience that special, depraved feeling of being able to surround yourself with your imagined extended flesh and blood like a warm blanket, as the “antibodies” of the national immune system destroy the lives of the unwanted. Everyone else, even the True People, will be sucked dry and converted into feudal peons.)
Both of these options are bad. The problem is that they are the only ones currently on offer, in the sense that they have a significant quantity of “boots on the ground” — two sorts of oligarchy. If you’re a genuine supporter of “ethno-states” or revanchist nationalisms or whatever, you will naturally ignore my warning and happily choose the latter option. It’s what seems closest to what you want. If you’re not in that category, things become a lot harder. The transnationalist oligarchy espouses a social ideology that is, at least at the level of words and aspirations, less noxious, but wrapped in a lethal package.
What seems to be the case, however, is that some people on the left of the spectrum, who nevertheless have understandable reasons to object to the neoliberal hegemony, have a tendency to lean, in a functional sense, to the side of revanchist nationalism. And this form of nationalism gains increasing power (due to the known failures of the major alternative), it seems tempting to make it out to be the real alternative, or at least the only one that will break the grey monotony of neoliberal choicelessness.
I see a few ways to understand this in terms of desired outcomes. One is that only when the Clinton-Merkel-Soros-Whatever worldview is defeated, will space be returned once again to better, hegemonic left-wing progressive politics. Precisely how this is to proceed when the entire world is under the control of nationalist autocracies, I am not entirely sure. Another is that only the revanchist nationalists have the means to save the world already, because only revanchist nationalists can make peace with other revanchist nationalists, due to ideological affinity. The problem is that is that everyone now has to live under nationalist autocracies.
This seems like a pretty lose-lose situation to me; the nature of nationalist autocracies is that even if they make peace now, we can’t trust that the irredentism they encourage won’t lead to nuclear war and world annihilation anyway. But if you don’t want to support the other, Clintonian hegemony, not least because it ends up leading to much the same places, you don’t have many other alternatives. A just, free, non-oligarchic world is presently not on offer, for whatever reason.
In a weird twist of fate, American liberals and (some) leftists are finding themselves in the non-traditional position of standing in the “hawk” corner, while (some) American conservatives under Trump are in the position of wanting to cut deals with so-called traditional enemies of the US. Whether those deals will actually lead to world peace is another question, but I know it seems a little odd for this constellation of allies and enemies to have occurred — in particular, for American liberals to side so openly with what was traditionally considered a very reactionary part of the US security and foreign policy state.
I would suggest that this is not so odd or illogical or morally convenient. American liberals and (some) leftists/progressives/whatever see this form of peacemaking as being between ideological brethren — opening the door to a form of intolerant, relativist nationalism that pushes back on notions of universal rights and freedoms. If world peace is to be made by people seated at the table who are happy to sacrifice openly international struggles for equality of race, religion, culture, and gender, what value is this world peace other than mere survival?
