What May’s Brexit Deal Tells Us About the EU and Britain’s Future

Britain and Italy are the second and fourth largest economies in the EU and account for 26% of its GDP. Germany, Britain, France, and Italy together comprise 62.6% of the EU’s GDP. To all intents and purposes these four countries are the EU. Yes, there is an EU bureaucracy, but it is a convenient fiction, a curtain behind which the Germans and French, but especially the Germans, are pulling the strings and calling the shots. And they have been doing a terrible job. Greece illustrated the complete failure of their leadership. Merkel essentially destroyed another EU member to bail out a bunch of German banks which had made improvident loans. She and Germany cut the East loose and have done nothing to address its slip into authoritarianism. And then there is Brexit. This is portrayed as some kind of to be expected aberration of the British, but it is much more another failure of the Germans. The EU is sold as equal members but the reality is Germany and its vassals. I have never understood the reluctance to confront the Germans over this. I mean what do the British, especially Corbyn, have to lose by calling a spade a spade?

So what does Corbyn do? If he sinks the deal, it is a crash-out Brexit or a quickie referendum on cancelling Brexit.

Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong: A Review of Michael Hudson’s New Book, And Forgive Them Their Debts

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/145003.html

So let us reconsider Hudson’s fundamental insight in more vivid terms. In ancient Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. In what we call Western Civilization, that is, in the plethora of societies that have followed the flowering of the Greek poleis beginning in the eighth century B.C., just the opposite, with only one major exception (Hudson describes the tenth-century A.D. Byzantine Empire of Romanos Lecapenus), has been the case: For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists. And so Hudson emphasizes that our Western notion of freedom has been, for some twenty-eight centuries now, Orwellianin the most literal sense of the word: War is Peace • Freedom is Slavery• Ignorance is Strength. He writes: “A constant dynamic of history has been the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is at the expense of the governing authority and the economy at large. As such, it is the opposite of liberty as conceived in Sumerian times” (p. 266).

And our Orwellian, our neoliberal notion of unrestricted freedom for the creditor dooms us at the very outset of any quest we undertake for a just economic order. Any and every revolution that we wage, no matter how righteous in its conception, is destined to fail.

May appears to have made the worst of a bad situation. Hopefully this deal dies its richly deserved death, and the resulting mayhem gets laid at the feet of the Tories, whose irresponsible austerity, caused it all.

@ Bill Hicks

Any governing philosophy or institution that devalues the individual (Soviet style communism, fascism), will sooner or later come to see the individual as an impediment that must be removed.

The “individual” is an invention of modern liberal/bourgeois/capitalist/Randroid ideology. Humans evolved to be social primates, and the main reason for the modern pandemic of insanity on the individual and social levels is that humans abrogated their communal nature.

Modern ideologies that promise to re-aggregate the group are trying to exploit the vacuum where the modern decadence knows our souls ought to be but which we’ve thrown away for the sake of Mammon.

The only way forward once this civilization collapses will be a true renaissance of tribes.

@ Mallam : “the answer isn’t “leave”. It is greater integration and more democracy.”

there is no alternative, eh?

It is an odd sort of call for more “democracy” that rejects voters as “racist assholes” and embraces a bureaucratic borg that outlaws the exercise of sovereign power on behalf of the people

Hudson demonstrates that we … have been morally blinded by a dark legacy of some twenty-eight centuries of decontextualized history. This has left us, for all practical purposes, utterly ignorant of the corrective civilizational model that is needed to save ourselves from tottering into bleak neo-feudal barbarism. …

This corrective model actually existed and flourished in the economic functioning of Mesopotamian societies during the third and second millennia B.C. It can be termed Clean Slate amnesty … It is the necessary and periodic erasure of the debts of small farmers — necessary because such farmers are, in any society in which interest on loans is calculated, inevitably subject to being impoverished, then stripped of their property, and finally reduced to servitude … That is what creditors really wanted: Not merely the interest as such, but the collateral — whatever economic assets debtors possessed, from their labor to their property, ending up with their lives …

The Mesopotamian idea of reform had ‘no notion … of what we would call social progress. Instead, the measures the king instituted … were measures to bring back the original order …. The rules of the game had not been changed, but everyone had been dealt a new hand of cards’”…. Contrast the Greeks and Romans: “Classical Antiquity,” Hudson writes, “replaced the cyclical idea of time and social renewal with that of linear time. Economic polarization became irreversible, not merely temporary” …. In other words: “The idea of linear progress, in the form of irreversible debt and property transfers, has replaced the Bronze Age tradition of cyclical renewal”

http://www.unz.com/article/everything-you-thought-you-knew-about-western-civilization-is-wrong/

Leviticus describes the year of Jubilee in terms very similar to the Mesopotamian Model. Every 50 years, all debts to be forgiven, all land returning to original owners, bondsman freed. See Lev. 25 and following. The idea is to prevent all the capital concentrating at the top. Funny how the bible thumpers tend to overlook this and all the admonitions against usury(19 in the OT alone!).

Most of the history we are taught is mythology.

Often deliberate. I often catch part of Morning Joe on MSNBC because there isn’t a lot else on and it is a good way to find out what the current elite groupthink is. Anyway, this morning they had on a historian who had just written a book he was flogging on Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. He praised their spirit of compromise and bemoaned our current lack of it. It was jarring. This guy was praising politicians who were compromising on slavery. Slavery! Somehow I don’t think the slaves involved would have had the same fulsome view of these politicians that he had. And he and his interlocutors were completely (and deliberately) self-unaware about all of it.

EU elites are absolutely convinced their way is best, and that anyone who is against it is wrong. They are not primarily concerned with democracy (the EU is run primarily by un-elected bureaucrats), and do not consider democratic legitimacy as primary. If people vote for the “wrong” thing, EU elites feel they have the right to over-ride that.

Replace “EU elites” with “the CIA” and you have the U.S.A.’s Cold War foreign policy in a nutshell.

After the fall of the USSR deprived the CIA of its bogeyman, the slack was taken up by the IMF and the onerous “structural adjustment programs” it imposed on indebted 3rd world nations while the relative prosperity of the ’90s made First World electorates complacent in the face of an increasingly intrusive neoliberal regime. That began to fall apart in the last few years of the ’90s with the “Battle of Seattle” and increasingly loud demands for a mass write-off of third-world debt.

The next decade brought the “War on Terror” and the loud insistence that only the general prosperity that neoliberalism would inevitably bring (ha!) could “drain the swamp” of Third World poverty that provided a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. So obviously anyone who doubted the utility of neoliberalism was “with the terrorists”.

But the paranoid Muslim-baiting that underlay that messaging ultimately resulted in the right wing going off the neoliberals’ reservation, so now the messaging is that neoliberalism is somehow just the thing to cure society of racism, sexism, et al. even though extreme inequality tends to worsen such social divisions, and the neoliberals themselves had spent most of the previous ten years fanning the flames of nationalism and religious intolerance.

“It is failing around the world: in America (Trump does not believe in the mulilateral neoliberal order),”

I don’t think any American President really believed in a “multilateral Neoliberal order”, Neoliberalism was imposed through the world by US military power. Any political or economical system needs to be imposed through force, the Modern Left is too soft and forgets that politcal power comes from a barrel of a gun.

Legal advice (Martin Howe QC) is that any deal will be written into international law and therefore very difficult for Parliament to change later. That in itself surely is an overwhelming case for No Deal.

bob mcmanus–NC is against self-determination, so why does this surprise you? on nearly every issue, they come down on the side of forcing people to do what you think is best for them, from individuals to countries. although i think a one-world government structure should be inevitable, i would favor heavy local control for the common good. at NC, they have never wanted Brexit and like the Greece debacle, they show their hand: stay and suffer, and try to muddle out a better path for yourself. don’t go against the Powers That Be because you will suffer even more for it, and we will make sure to lay out all of the ways in which you will so that you will be dissuaded from agitating for such action.
i read their links, but am less and less moved by them. they are definitely NOT radicals. barely progressives.

I strongly agree that neoliberalism is the enemy.

But I have a minor nit: “Economics” is not the plural of “economic”. Like “politics”, it is singular.

Here’s the argument from the NC comments a little while ago against the idea that the EU inherently bans nationalizations under state aid rules (making no mistake: the EU policy leadership is hostile to nationalizations, but does not ban them):

Yes, I will contend all this.

First, as Anonymous2 says below, rules on state aid and competitive tenders are NOT (only) EU rules. They are built in in WTO rules, and most of trade agreements. IIRC, Canada’s FTA with EU has clauses on them too. So unless Corbyn turns the UK into an autarky – good luck with that – he will not avoid them.

Secondly, if you haven’t noticed, UK successfully nationalised Railtrack. In 2002. The current Network Rail is state owned, not-for-profit, and the ONLY owner of rail infrastructure in the UK (well, technically there are some small insignificant tracks that say fans operate steam engines on etc.., but for all terms and purposes it’s the only one). Please provide a reference to an ECJ case that contests this. In fact, the Treaty explicitly says that there’s no forcing a choice between public and private ownership. In case of strategic national interest, there’s even allowance of excluding competition. In case you haven’t noticed, all of the EU has a nationalised health service, and no-one in the EU is calling for it to be privatised. NHS is under more threat from the US post Brexit than it ever was from the EU.

RBS (and for a time Lloyds Bank, and what used to be Norther Rock etc.) is majority owned by the UK state. Your contention of “only in accounting sense” is wrong. The assets are in full control of the UK state, via the board that the state appoints (see Network Rail for example). Please provide an example of how is the state unable to do what it wants with the assets (within the law). Oh, and since this is an article on Northern Ireland, I’d call your attention to the fact that NI rail operator is publicly owned. Duh. (in fact, there’s a couple more state owned rail companies in the UK, not that the proponents of the nationalisation talk much about it).

Thirdly, France is just one example of a state that has a national rail operator (in fact, France’s EDF is a majority owned state utility. Germany has similar companies, as do other EU countries ). Most of the continentals have one, if the UK people cared to look, but most of the UK politicians know f-all about how the continent runs (in fact, they know zilch about NI too, see above).

The contention of “but France/Germany is a big dog that can break the rules” doesn’t hold, as for example Slovakia, Czech Republic and a slew of other smaller countries (in fact, pretty much all of them) have state owned and run rail operators, which in most cases provide 90+% of the rail connections (as non-profits). I’ll ignore the fact that even it it was true, the UK was also big enough dog to ignore things as well as France could – when it suited it. And it blamed the EU rules when it suited it to blame them.

Fourtly, a non-profit should have a significant advantage in a competitive tender. Because it’s a non-profit. Further, a state aid can be given, the main condition is that it is available equally to everyone.

Fifthly, there’s been a slew of “municipalizations” in the Europe. Again, if pols paid attention to the continent, and not their UK-centric bickering, they might know. That is, municipalities across the continent (started in Germany, but other countries are doing it now IIRC) are setting up/buying out the local utilities, and running them as non-profit for the local community (in fact, the place I stay in Europe just bought out its water company, and our water bills are now to the town council). Which IMO is way more efficient than nationalising the massive utility companies with all the political graft that goes with it. Yet I can’t recall Labour pushing this (in general, I can’t recall Labour pushing more responsibility and powers locally.. does it remind me of something?)

About the only thing that can be said about the EU vis a vis nationalisation is that it would make it somewhat harder, because some rules would have to be followed. As I put above, numerous examples shows it can be done, and is not even that hard though. Please provide counterexamples, with links to the ECJ cases, where the EU stopped nationalisation.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/northern-ireland-constitutional-settlement-a-brexit-booby-trap.html

This rings true with what I have read on the topic and my experience of living in Europe and following European politics: nationalization is frowned on, but allowed, and almost certainly a hypothetical Corbyn rail renationalization would fall within the bounds of what was allowed. The main caveat being: that it not be presented as a blow against EU rules, but rather a necessity that exists within the UK government’s economic remit.

I presume this is from Yves Smith?: in general, I can’t recall Labour pushing more responsibility and powers locally.. does it remind me of something?

Labour’s Socialist Realism …Jacobin, about John McDonnell’s (UK Shadow Chancellor) new book on the Labour Platform

McDonnell: “The old, Morrisonian model of nationalization centralized too much power in a few hands in Whitehall. It had much in common with the new model of multinational corporations, in which power is centralized in a few hands in Silicon Valley, or the City of London. It won’t work in a world in which technological change is providing opportunities to decentralize power. We cannot turn the clock back to 1945 either.”

I haven’t read the book yet.

Glad to know the EU will avert its eyes from a possible Nationalization and Expropriation of the City and all assets it manages.

Mandos: “There are alternatives and they can be democratic . . .”

a lovely thought, but if no such thing is on offer, it remains irrelevant.

i cannot honestly say that i think nationalism can be raised from the dead, if indeed it is dead. at best nostalgia in this case may only be a politically useful coordinating heuristic to get some kind of democratically responsible state and politics organized. the necessary idea is that residual power has to be transferred back from global business corporations and a tiny elite of business oligarchs to a political state responsible to a popular base, a public.

i think the EU is constitutionally incapable but in an ideal politics, my fondest hope would be to see the EU evolve in a way that undid its current bureaucratic centralization in favor of becoming a decentralizing umbrella that would allow smaller “national” polities to thrive: Catalonia, Scotland, Slovenia, et cetera. To do that would require radically re-thinking the four freedoms as something other than idealistic cover stories for empowering business corporations vis a vis disabled states. Otherwise, one is just waiting for the next Greece or the slow slide of Italy toward destruction.

Much of western politics is driven by the ideological self-deceptions of the supremely smug professional and technical classes who staff the controlling echelons of the institutions just below the level of the billionaires. Their distaste for the political attitudes and ignorance of what we used to call the working classes is a great obstacle to any democratic impulse. The unwillingness to represent the hoi polloi leaves the job to demagogues and we can see how that works out in the person of Trump. The professional and technical classes do quite well for themselves out of the EU, and it is not surprising to see political arguments based on the complexity those classes administer to be brought to the fore as “ya cannot get there from here” in opposition to Brexit. This goes to the point Ian has made that a real leftist agenda requires a cadre of class traitors who can get the administrative details there from here.

I’m the person who posted the link to Ian’s piece on Naked Capitalism (NC). I’ll make two points.

[1] Ian has reproduced Article 17 from the proposedwithdrawal deal between the EU and the UK, and if you read it says exactly what Ian says it says.

Hence, whether or not past and current EU law and procedure prevent nationalization in the UK as Yves Smith and others at NC claim they have not, they certainly will _in the future_ if this deal becomes law.

So Yves Smith and others at NC are being clearly dishonest on that score.

[2] As for the argument that _existing_ EU law and custom prevents nationalizations in the UK and other countries, Mandos has reproduced above the NC counter-argument that (a) existing EU law doesn’t prevent large-scale (re)nationalization and (b) existing EU custom does allow nationalization because, “all of the EU has a nationalised health service, and no-one in the EU is calling for it to be privatised.”

As regards (a):

The EU’s existing rules require ‘competitive tendering’ — to the extent that even Norway, which isn’t in the EU, has succumbed to this rule — and thus _existing_ EU law certainly does mitigate against nationalization, as the person making the counter-argument admits at the end.

When I originally made this point, I also stipulated that EU rules do currently allow “a private company, whose shares are majority- owned by the UK state. But the contract would still be subject to competitive tendering, while the value of the assets it held while it had the contract would only belong to the taxpayer in an accounting sense.” Hence, the NC counter-argument employs what I think is a bunch of word salad (reproduced by Mandos) to refute that. I think my point still stands.

As for (b): the argument that “all of the EU has a nationalised health service” is just fatuous (and ignorant).

A wide variety of healthcare systems now exist in different EU nations. Germany has a compulsory health insurance system that’s cost-controlled by the government and under which companies cannot refuse coverage; this model was what Peter Drucker used to push for in US healthcare and the now-existing ACA does bear a perverted family resemblance to it. Conversely, Italy has universal health coverage that’s free at the point-of-entry, but organized on a much more regional basis than the UK’s NHS. France has something else again. And so on.

Is the NC claim that “all of the EU has a nationalised health service” supposed to establish or prove that the EU isn’t stupidly neoliberal enough to recreate a fiasco like the US healthcare system, and that the Tory party in the UK _is_ potentially that stupid . Agreed — and so what?

Here, however, is what the EU _is_ stupidly neoliberal enough to do —

The burden of disease in Greece, health loss, risk factors, and health financing, 2000–16: an analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(18)30130-0/fulltext

To precis it very roughly, 50,000 or so Greeks died because of the EU’s imposition of its austerity policies on Greece. In other words, they died because Merkel in Germany and Sarkozy (and then Hollande) in France were unwilling to tell their electorates they were bailing out German and French banks, and so the bailout to those banks was carried out through the backdoor of Greece.

And _that_ is the kind of neoliberal organization the EU is.

@different clue

Various countries (impersonal states with geographically defined territories) have at their small-c constitutional cores various principles of unity — usually more than one such principle per country and sometimes overlapping territorial domains or subdomains to go with them. These can be cultural, linguistic, ideological, religious and ethnic. What the principles are at any one time and how those principles are honored and ritually enacted is an essential part of politics, and can be the occasional object of contested narratives and will evolve over time. The important point as I see it, is that ordinary people participate in politics with some commitments to a idea of a shared, transparent public good and power as individuals and in factional groups or movements.

A democratic politics requires government by rules derived from principles, aka policy, with those principles and the rules and administrative procedures derived from them subject to informed and public critique and practical accountability for performance in public office. That implies the possibility of organization and concerted action from below.

Quebec, or at least Montreal, was dominated for many decades by an English-speaking economic and political elite. When that finally changed in the 1950s and 1960s the economic effects were profound for the whole French-speaking population of the province. A people does not soon forget the passing of a colonial regime. The ability to govern themselves mattered, it seems.

The effects were also profound for Greece when they found out they could not govern themselves, but were to be governed by the Troika.

&different clue,

“Civic nationalism” is an already existing term, that would fit America very well.

“Countryism” might be a good word for the civic-linguistic nationalist platform that a certain section of Québec sovereigntists tried to run on for some years: acquired language as the unifying characteristic of the Québec polity, where an independent Québec would be the North American microcosm of Francophonie the way the Rest of Canada was the “new world” microcosm of the British Empire. The reason for this was because the previous “French-Canadian” nationalism was tied to a Catholic identity that was paradoxically used to keep French-Canadians in a state of uneducated backwardness — the national identity of French Canada was preserved at the expense of anglophone economic domination. Consequently, decoupling the ethnic roots of this identity from the linguistic was their strategy to

It didn’t really work. Québec never got its independence, and the nationalist base has returned to the collaborationist ethnic nationalism that satisfies its national urges by demonizing minorities while allowing economic elites to loot. This dynamic is further evidence to me that a “blanched” civic nationalism is not a sustainable solution to the underlying problem of nationalism, and that attempts to construct democratically legitimate polity this way in this era are doomed to fail.

Here’s the big picture: there is the Rodrik “trilemma” — you can have two out of three of national sovereignty, globalization, and democracy, but you can’t have all three. I pick globalization and democracy knowing fully well that we don’t know yet how to organize a planetary polity that is responsible to the people it represents. But we have no choice but to do so (yes, there is no alternative here) somehow. The other alternatives are “national sovereignty + democracy”, this I think is what left-wing Brexiteers want — and national sovereignty with globalization (but not democracy) which is what real existing Tory Brexit means. I think the left-wing Brexit is founded on a nostalgic fantasy, and for all the EU project has been steered by neoliberals it is increasingly clear that just as nation-states in their heyday were elite projects that could be steered in socially-responsible directions, so too must we now find a way to reinvent transnational elite projects in the same way.

@Mandos,

I think there is a severe accountability problem when it comes to global governance. It is hard enough to try to keep national elites on a leash much less global ones. Working people only obtain some degree of power versus elites when they control their own organizations that are not dominated by elites. There was an explosion of these organizations in the 20th century that helped to create the post-war consensus in the West that was basically a class compromise settlement but they have either disappeared or ossified since the 1970s.

I just don’t see how we can make the various supranational institutions that govern capitalist globalization accountable to working people. Globalization is not compatible with democracy because it requires a technocracy to run it, hence its popularity with the managerial/technical class. They are the people who run much of the globalist machinery for the super-wealthy elites.
In fact, you could argue that neoliberalism is itself a class compromise settlement. Instead of a class compromise between capitalist owners and the native-born working class, neoliberalism is a class compromise settlement between the ownership class and the managerial class that developed after World War II.

The management class provides expertise and a strong voter/activist base for the capitalist ownership class in exchange for high incomes, social status and superior working conditions. That is why both the Republicans and Democrats are so keen on winning affluent voters. They are the political base for neoliberalism. They control the media and education and set the cultural and political tone for the entire population hence why elections often revolve around identity politics and culture warfare issues and not economics.

The anger and fear gripping establishment liberals and conservatives at the sight of rising populism is based on the realization that more and more people are seeing that the last 40 years of policy have been detrimental to the bottom 90 percent of the population and that the party might be coming to an end soon although perhaps not in the way that socialists and other left-wingers want.

For example, right-wing populist efforts to restrict immigration will make it harder for affluent people to hire cheap nannies, gardeners and other forms of domestic help that make dual-income professional households possible while allowing time for self-care, a social life and political activism, things that are becoming unobtainable luxuries for many working-class people.

Maybe the just-yesterday-banned Pontin should start commenting here so other Naked Capitalism readers can come here to keep reading future Pontin comments. After all, I have been commenting more here ever since being banned at Naked Capitalism. Any NaCapper who wants to read my comments can keep coming here to do so.

Naked Capitalism remains a fun place for me to read stuff at. But its putative opposition to agnatology is a bit rich in light of its deliberate practice of agnatology to suppress any and all objections raised about the “magical” aspects of MMT ( Magical Monetary Thinking).

“Taxes don’t fund Federal Spending”. No? What do Federal Taxes do, then? I gather they “sop up” all the issued Federal Money which would otherwise pool up and slosh around to create Inflation and then Hyper-Inflation. In other words, taxes keep drainaging back out of the economic soil zone all the money which would otherwise waterlog it ( moneylog it?) and stop it from functioning at all.

So . . . Taxes don’t fund Federal Spending. But . . . Taxes do create and maintain the “headroom” to keep Federal issued-money spending possible. Well, that is a distinction without a difference. And that is part of the Agnatology which Naked Capitalism deliberately fosters about Magical Monetary Thinking. And since I am banned over there I don’t get to say it over there. But I still get to say it over here. And Naked Capitalism can’t stop its readers from reading it over here, if they so choose.

Mandos, in a world that will fall apart due to overpopulation, climate change, and environment and species destruction, globalization isn’t an option.

different clue, you either stay ahead of the curve or get run over by it. Sites like firedoglake and naked capitalism were at their best when they questioned the status quo and provided fresh and interesting insights, and they descended into mediocrity when this no longer became their focus. And while these sites touted the support they received from public fund raising, they were both opaque to their other connections and funding sources. I mention FDL because I see naked capitalism following a similar trajectory.

Balkanization is underway. I’m unclear as to the precise inflection point, but am certain things are coming apart already. Momentum is heading that a-way.

Mandos, you posit an idea of globalization that doesn’t exist as the deus ex machina to address a series of existential threats. Why not posit sparkle ponies to save the day? They don’t exist either.

Take it from a back row kid, shifting paradigms is hard. Very few of the front row kids I’ve ever known over the years have ever made it into positions of real power.

In any high tech large population world, every system will fail if it rewards the wrong people, specifically, those who cannot see past their own short lives. Job 1 is to make the iron law of oligarchy an impossibility, which front row kids seem unable to understand is not an easy task.

@Willy,

As Dilbert and his little dog once said to eachother . . .

“What’s that metallic grinding sound?”

“Someone shifting paradigms without the clutch.”

This has all begun to remind me of the bank bailouts and the ACA. “The whole economy will collapse if we let the banks fail” and “Health care is complicated and you need to have all the stakeholders at the table — the insurance companies, Pharma, hospital chains, medical providers”. We supposedly need to work within the current complicated system, which will be reformed! Looking at the outcomes there (the details always ended up looting the commoners for the sake of the plutocrats) and the price the Greek commoners were forced to pay in the EU, it’s hard to figure out how to believe the “support the current system, it’s really the best” crowd.

Whoa… that was fast.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/staggeringly-bad-idea-pelosi-pushes-tax-rule-kneecap-progressive-agenda.html

Mandos, I can only assume you are not paying attention. “Requires coordination at a global level?” Again this is simply not happening and time has already run out on it.

If your position is that there is nothing to be done except await the eschaton, then obviously, there is nothing to discuss.

And why blame those of us who have been warning about this for years and not the rich and elites and the political classes who have done shit all to stop it?

Because they have behaved in the way one would have expected them to behave given their moral priors. Yes, absolutely, the economic left in its behaviour and attitudes bears some responsibility for this outcome, it repeatedly turns its nose up at opportunities, and as I have repeatedly lamented, uses a hokey negotation metaphor for its engagement with institutions.

“Rather than make fine distinctions, look at the details for charting a way forward” First, this is a nonsense. Fine distinctions are details. So what this equates to is: don’t pay attention to the details, pay attention to the details. Second, nobody in the UK or the EU/Germany is charting a way forward. That too has been known for years. Again some of us have written on the fatal flaws in the EU/EZ for years. And the trend continues in the mismanagement of its disintegration. If words mean anything, the plain text of Article 17 which Ian cites makes his case.

You misread me or rather I miswrote. I meant it conjunctively: “Rather than make fine distinctions [and] look[ing] at the details” — of course fine distinctions are details. I will accept this as a mea culpa for careless writing.

But on your overall point: (1) if the EU disintegrates it is a bad thing, because there is no institutional framework waiting in the wings, certainly the left hasn’t come up with an alternative or even thinks it needs to and (2) even as the right has risen in some European countries, there are still opportunities for the left to affect the EU’s direction, as even Yanis Varoufakis points out — if it doesn’t continuously look the gift horses in the teeth.

Or maybe, as above, there is nothing to discuss.

“The details always ended up looting the commoners” because they took the details seriously and you did not.

No, because they argued details so that they could pervert purpose and social criteria. It’s rather like writing a computer program by starting with how to code each detail and promising later to figure out what the program is supposed to do. By the time later arrives, the outcome has already been decided by the details. And the people for whom all this works then sneer that those advocating purpose and outcome don’t work with details. The details always end up looting the commoners because that’s what the people in power want, and they argue details as excuses. There have been plenty of reasonably fleshed out alternatives to bank bailouts (see Iceland), access to medical care (see any other developed nation) and Greek misery (see post WWII Germany).

As Dilbert and his little dog once said to eachother . . .

“What’s that metallic grinding sound?”

“Someone shifting paradigms without the clutch.”

The strip:

https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-08-25

Yves Smith is this rare beast: a technocrat with a conscience. Pretty much an oxymoron. I don’t think she’s ever explained why she stopped working for Goldman Sachs and the likes after serving them for decades. She must be a complex individual.

Disclosure: I was also banned from NC (or rather moderated out of commenting).

About Brexit. I lived in England for almost a decade around 2000. Those were the good years, the boom years. The atmosphere around me was bullish. I never saw Brexit coming. I never had a clue except maybe at the very end of my stay and only with the benefit of hindsight. I had been living in a college town, in a nondescript middle-class neighborhood. I had never really explored that neighborhood. It was just that typical boring British residential neighborhood where every house looks the same. When it was time for me to go, I walked around for the first time looking for a large bin where I could throw stuff I couldn’t ship back home. I found one and was about to chuck some stuff when a child asked me if he could have the stuff I was about to throw away. I looked around and here was this trailer park in front of me. All those years I had been living next to a trailer park without knowing it. I ended up giving some stuff to a family. I vaguely remember a mother with 1 or 2 children. If there was a man, he wasn’t present at that time. It was a Caucasian family. Except for the astonishment I didn’t make much of that. It’s only after Brexit and all the talk about the people left out of the Thatcher revolution that I started thinking about them again.

The EU is loathsome. I won’t say it’s done no good, but it’s now doing more harm than good…
perhaps it’s time to reconsider state sovereignty: The federal government is loathsome. I won’t say it’s done no good, but it’s now doing more harm than good…

I left Corrente because I felt that Lambert was increasingly labeling disagreement dishonesty. I explained why, and Lambert agreed that if I felt that way I should leave. It started with MMT and was slowly expanding to other topics. At Naked Capitalism with Yves and Lambert, the same thing appeared and is getting stronger: “If you don’t agree with me, you’re dishonest”, or as Ian puts it, “that place confuses their orthodoxy with the truth”.

What I find interesting is that I perceive them as dishonest in certain areas — not just disagreeing with me, but dishonest. It’s made me consider the parameters that should promote a valid discussion of issues and the assumptions we are justified in making about the other participants. I haven’t reached any conclusions yet.

nihil obstet:

It’s made me consider the parameters that should promote a valid discussion of issues and the assumptions we are justified in making about the other participants.

A little different but the categories laid outa by Jack Gibb that create threatening/defensive communication climates versus safe ones are

1. evaluation vs. description
2. control vs. problem orientation
3. strategy vs. spontaneity
4. neutrality vs. empathy
5. superiority vs. equality
6. certainty vs. provisionalism

A few of those may not be as applicable to comment sections on blogs but most are. (Construing a commenter as “dishonest,” for example, might fall into the areas of evaluation and certainty.)

Ian Welsh:

…I’m sure some people would say the same about me…

I don’t know what other people would say but I wouldn’t say so. One thing I really appreciate about the way you handle this blog is you have enough “space” between whatever your orthodoxy is and your own ego to not get entangled emotionally when people present differing views. You don’t get defensive, you don’t go on the attack, you might think the other person is wrong but it’s not taken as some personal affront. It’s a very light-handed, deft—and, in a way, to me, psychologically healthy—approach.

I like that framing: MMT as Cargo Cult.

I agree with anon y’mouse above. Naked Capitalism steadfastly backed the line that somehow Greece staying in the EU was better than leaving it. Of course, staying in destroyed the country and killed lots of people. But hey details, details. Naked Capitalism is now selling a similar line: the EU is calling the shots on Brexit. No. Brexit will hurt in the short term, but there is no indication that staying in would have been better. Now Brexit is baked in. And the question is the trade-off between sovereignty and access to a trading bloc that is slowly but surely falling apart. Indeed Brexit is a reaction to the failures of the EU and its principal actor Germany: Greece, Cyprus, the PIIGS, the East, and now Italy again. This is not a healthy union. And the idea that the EU/Germany has absolute control over a British exit or speaks for the countries of the EU is ludicrous. I can not underline enough that the UK is the EU’s second largest economy and its departure will be every bit as devastating to the EU/Germany as it will be for the UK. The difference is that the UK will have at least a chance to chart a course to benefit its citizens whereas those living under the accelerating decay of German hegemony within the EU won’t.

I have been away due to Real Life, hopefully this thread is not too stale:

nihil obstet:

No, because they argued details so that they could pervert purpose and social criteria. It’s rather like writing a computer program by starting with how to code each detail and promising later to figure out what the program is supposed to do. By the time later arrives, the outcome has already been decided by the details. And the people for whom all this works then sneer that those advocating purpose and outcome don’t work with details. The details always end up looting the commoners because that’s what the people in power want, and they argue details as excuses. There have been plenty of reasonably fleshed out alternatives to bank bailouts (see Iceland), access to medical care (see any other developed nation) and Greek misery (see post WWII Germany).

We already know that the people in power are looting the commoners. However, they know how to do that while keeping some semblance of stability. You are reduced, effectively, into waiting for the catastrophic breakdown in the hope that you will be able to pick up the pieces with your vision of “purpose and outcome”. That is, in part, because you are unable to:

1. articulate your vision to the “commoners” in developed countries in a way that they would be willing to vote for candidates who support it. (Cue complaints that they control the media so it is hopeless.)

2. secure the support of politicians who can sustain political careers within the system. (Cue complaints that they designed the system — so we will just have to wait for the catastrophic breakdown and revolution, I suppose.)

3. convince anyone that you have the capability and competence to replace the system.

Yes, of course, there are exemplars of good policy that was implemented here and there. It is one thing to have an example, and another thing to implement it. Of course, they are not going to implement those solutions that they do not even believe in. You must show that you can do it, or at least have thought something deeper than “Iceland did it, so we can do it to Wall Street”.

That’s why the code example is so off the mark. There is already an existing code base, and the maintainer of that code mostly likes the way it is written just fine. You are trying either to change that existing code base, or propose a wholesale replacement. The latter carries a much bigger burden of proof. Both of them require you to show that you’ve thought about the problem in context.

While I have doubts about MMT as such, I have to give them credit for one thing: it is one of the very few proposals out there whose proponents have thought about the details, how to get there from here in a halfway realistic way, and so on. So they deserve a good deal of credit for that, even if I myself had a catastrophic rupture with Lambert in the now-distant past and I don’t like his moderation style, but this thread and the overall viewpoint here must validate some amount of smugness on his part.

You either can’t or won’t understand the case for seeking an alternative to the current regimes.

I have no problem with “the case for seeking an alternative to the current regimes.” I don’t see any argument made so far that describes the process of “seeking an alternative to the current regimes”. I see vague aspirations (hilariously presented as “solutions”) and bad analogies, none of which have changed in decades and none of which have moved an iota forward.

Mandos epitomizes the victory of cognitive dissonance. He’s the French guy in 1788 who thinks his world will never end. Sure, the regime has problems but hey, there are no alternatives. For someone who says he doesn’t support the elites he certainly defends their rule. Somehow no matter how he twists and turns, he always ends up backing the status quo. What he reminds me of is a neoliberal counterpart of the Trump supporter. Both are impervious to facts, logic, and argument. He is invested in a corrupt, criminal world that is a dead man walking. Like the Trump supporter, whenever reality intrudes, he simply reinvents his narrative to explain it away. He is going to believe whatever he wants to believe. We give him a list of the crises and contradictions in the EU and all he does is put his fingers in his ears and say, I can’t hear you. Why did voters in the UK decide that Brexit however uncertain was better than staying in the EU? If the EU wasn’t a malevolent, criminal organization, how could it let what happened to Greece and the Greeks happen? How could the EU sit idly by as the East returned to authoritarianism? Mandos has no answers. This does not mean, however, he won’t continue to offer lame defenses of his bankrupt world view.

Thanks Mandos.

Hugh, and others, I’m baffled. I probably need a longer citation, as I’ve no idea what you’re all talking about.

Yes, the EU is neoliberal, and does pretty evil neoliberal things.

However, the UK is even more neoliberal (think of the Iraq war), and does even more evil neoliberal things.

How will Brexit, which involves transferring power from the EU to the UK, make any difference to anything?

This “plan” didn’t pass the sniff test originally, and it certainly doesn’t when a moderately right-wing Tory government is implementing Brexit, with pressure to act in an even more extremely right-wing way from the ERG (removing environmental and labour rights protections, cutting tariffs in order to destroy industries the working class still have jobs in etc.)

Sure you can give me a fantasy world where the UK is mysteriously better. Just as easily though, we could have a fantasy world where the entire-EU is mysteriously better. It’s not clear to me that one is more or less likely than the other.

Wouldn’t it be better to *start* by electing a decent Government in the UK, and then if they implement everything they can and want to leave the EU, then do that? Especially as if the EU is about to collapse, won’t it be considerably easier (politically and economically) to leave as it collapses?

So yeah, citation needed please. These comments assume lots of things that make no sense to me without any explanation. (And I’ve read Ian’s blog for years now).