Austerity, fascism and the ‘science’ of economics

THE CAPITAL ORDER: How economists invented AUSTERITY and paved the way to FASCISM by Clara E. Mattei (2022)

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, physicians had a universal remedy for serious illness.  It was to bleed the patients until they improved.

Mainstream economists have a similar prescription for national economic woes.  It is called “austerity.” The elements are holding down wages, letting prices rise, cutting public spending (except on the military and police) and raising taxes (except on the rich).

Austerity contributes as much to economic health as bleeding to biological health.  That is to say, austerity has, so far as I know, an unbroken record of failure in promoting economic recovery. So why hasn’t the economics profession abandoned austerity, as the medical profession abandoned bleeding?

That is because the purpose of austerity is not what its proponents say it is.

Clara E. Mattei, an economist herself, wrote this book to expose austerity’s overlooked, though not hidden, agenda.

She did it in an original way, by looking at the imposition of economic austerity in the immediate aftermath of World War One in two countries, Britain and Italy.

Among the victorious allies, these two countries were at opposite extremes.

Britain was the center of a vast empire comprising nearly a quarter of the world’s population and land era.  It was Europe’s leading industrial and financial power.  It was the birthplace of Adam Smith and free-market economic liberalism.  And it was known for being politically stable.

Italy, in comparison, was poor, powerless and backward.  Revolutionary parties were strong and had a good chance of coming to power. 

The Great War, as people then called it, upset a lot of people’s assumptions about how economies worked.  

Governments found the law of supply and demand worked too slowly for effective war mobilization.  Central planning with price controls worked much better.  

People began to think similar policies might achieve the goals of peace.   Some of them acted on their high hopes.

In the years immediately following the war, Britain seemed on the verge of radical change, and Italy on the verge of revolution.

Change was prevented by taking economic policy out of the hands of voters and into the hands of supposed economic experts.  In Britain, this was done by legal means.  In Italy, it required a violent coup by Mussolini’s Fascists.

But the actual economic policies followed by the two countries were similar.  Mattei pointed out how Mussolini was praised by Britain’s leading mainstream economists.

The life and afterlife of Stepan Bandera

STEPAN BANDERA: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist – Fascism, Genocide and Cult by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe (2014)

Stepan Bandera is the national hero of Ukraine.  He also was a fascist who collaborated with the Nazis..   

The founders of the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists, which Bandera led, was modeled on the Fascist and Nazi parties.  Bandera sought Hitler’s permission to set up a Ukrainian puppet fascist state during World War Two.  His followers conducted massacres of Jews and Poles.

I read this book in order to better understand why Ukrainians, who were marked by the Nazis for extermination and enslavement, could admire him.

Grzegorz Rossolinki-Liebe is a German-Polish historian affiliated with the Free University of Berlin.  His long and exhaustive book answers the question.

The short answer is that most Ukrainians don’t know, and don’t want to know, the truth about Bandera.  They see him as a patriot who bravely fought both Hitler and Stalin, did nothing against Jews and cared only for the welfare of his people.

Unfortunately, there also is a small but strong faction in Ukraine that admires Bandera for what he really was and wants to put his fascist ideas into practice.

This is has become a moot point, because Ukraine’s current plight does not originate from within Ukraine, but from the fact that Ukraine is a bone of contention between the USA and its allies on the one hand and Russia on the other.

What I did get from the book was a better understanding of the history central and eastern Europe, the widespread appeal of fascism and the nature of historical trauma.

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Rossolinki-Liebe spent many pages wrestling with the definition of fascism and the distinction between fascism and other right-wing authoritarian nationalist ideologies that flourished in the period between the two world wars. 

I need not dwell on this.  The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was fascist under any definition of the term. 

It arose after World War One in the province of Galicia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that became part of the newly-independent Polish Republic.

Poland was ruled by nationalists who tried to impose national unity by suppressing non-Polish cultures and the use of languages other than Polish.  The OUN was formed in struggle against the Polish, not the Soviet, government, although they also were anti-Russian and anti-Communist.

Ironically, Ukrainians suffered the kind of oppression Poles themselves had suffered under the Russia Empire, and the kind of oppression the Ukrainian government imposed on Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority after 2014.

Its founders admired Mussolini and Hitler and took the Italian Fascist and German Nazi movements as role models.  Like the followers of Mussolini and Hitler, the OUN believed in absolute loyalty to the nation, to the nationalist movement and to the leader of the movement.

OUN ideology combined ultranationalism with racism, mysticism, antisemitism, anticommunism, authoritarianism and a cult of war and violence. Its followers hated Poles and Russians as oppressor nations, and Jews as supposed agents of the oppressor.

But its leaders had a grudging respect for the methods, although not the goals, of Polish nationalists, Bolsheviks and Russian nihilists in 19th century Russia.  

Stepan Bandera was born in Galicia in 1909.  He was raised by a Ukrainian Eastern Rite Catholic priest who was dedicated to Ukrainian national independence.  Ukrainian nationalism was the young Bandera’s religion.  

He was brave, self-sacrificial, and uninterested in personal financial gain.  As a young student, he trained himself to endure pain by burning himself with matches and like means, so that he would not break under torture.  He joined the OUN in 1929 and rose rapidly in the ranks because of his zeal and organizational ability.

The USA is haunted by the specter of fascism

There are certain resemblances between the present-day USA and Germany in the last days of the Weimar Republic.

We have an ineffective government that’s unable to deal with major problems or rein in its military.

We have increasing numbers of Americans who’ve given up on trying to change things by means of politics.

Many see no point in voting or following politics. Others think the only hope for change is in street protests.

Along with this is a loss of confidence in all sources of authority—government, religion, science, academia and journalism—and a hunger for something new.

Ross Douthat wrote a column in the New York Times wondering whether the history of the Weimar Republic could repeat.  I think there are other, more likely ways that American democracy could break down, which I will get to.  But let me examine the Weimar script first.

While there are similarities, there also are big differences between Germany 90 years ago and the USA today. 

American political parties don’t have paramilitary auxiliaries.  Neo-Nazis and avowed racists are few.  Compare the turnout for the “unite the right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 with the massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year.

But all this could change if there was a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s, particularly if it was accompanied by a humiliating military defeat.

Here’s how things could play out.  This isn’t a prediction, just a possibility.

In the wake of economic collapse, the streets of American citizens are filled with rioters, including extreme radicals and extreme nationalists.  A nationalist demagogue is elected President, and industrialists and the military look to him to restore order.  Congress votes him the power to impose martial law, which he does.  Martial law is never revoked.

The fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s arose from a breakdown of social order and a fear of Communist revolution.  The same conditions could arise in the United States, except that revolutionaries wouldn’t necessarily be Communists and the President who imposes permanent martial law wouldn’t necessarily be a nationalist or a right-winger.

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The conservative Christian blogger Rod Dreher sees another path to totalitarianism—a kind of low-level bloodless Stalinism in the name of what’s called identity politics or “anti-oppression” or “wokeness.”

Individuals have every right to define themselves on the basis of race, sex, gender or any other attribute, and band together with others to defend their rights and advance their interests.  I would never deny that people are held back by prejudice, and have a right to organize to overcome discrimination.

The problem is that believers in wokeness have embedded themselves in institutions, and demand not only that people subject to those institutions passively accept their ideas, but actively endorse them. 

They also demand a certain kind of way of saying things, so you can get in trouble by saying  “all lives matter” instead of “black lives matter.”

That’s how the new ideology resembles Stalinism and Maoism.  They, too, demanded not only passive acceptance, but enthusiastic support expressed in a prescribed vocabulary and a required show of penitence for not measuring up.

A recent public opinion poll showed that six in 10 Americans have political opinions they’re afraid to share and three in 10 fear that their political views could harm their job prospects.  Half of all strong liberals would fire a business executive known to have donated to the Trump campaign; three in 10 strong conservatives would do the same to a Biden donor. 

I don’t equate this to Stalin’s mass executions or the Gulag.  But I do think there’s a widespread and well-founded fear of getting into trouble by inadvertently saying the wrong thing or offending the wrong people, and I do see people afraid to speak their minds as I think free Americans ought.

Some people make a practice of searching social media to find things that people have said that could be considered objectionable, and then using this information to attack their reputations and careers.

Dreher fears the emergence of a social credit system like the one in China, where everyone’s every move is tracked through surveillance technology and social media, and people are rewarded or punished according to the acceptability of their behavior.

US political polarization, past and present

Thomas Nast cartoons from the 1870s

Polarization in American public life is based on identity politics. That is, we Americans are more divided over who we think we are than over what we think needs to be done.

This isn’t anything new. We’ve always been more divided over race, religion, ethnic culture and region than over econom.

Or rather, clashes over economic interests have taken the form of clashes over race, religion and regionalism.  For example, the antagonism between native-born Yankee Protestants and immigrant Irish Catholics was not over questions of theology.

During the Gilded Age period lasting from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the New Deal, the Democratic Party got the votes of Southern white people, Catholics and Jews, and the Republican Party the votes of Northern white Protestants, plus African-Americans in the parts of the country where they were allowed to vote.

Even when I was growing up in the 1940s, Jews and Catholics were barred from many elite clubs and college fraternities.  Most universities had quotas on the number of Jewish students that could be admitted.

It was taken for granted that no Catholic, no Jew and no white Southerner could be elected President, let alone a woman, an African American or an atheist.

During the Gilded Age, leaders of both political parties were committed to support of corporate business and suppression of organized labor. 

Bribery and corruption were common and out in the open.  So was election fraud.

Class warfare during that era was actual warfare.  The most extreme example was the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921, where coal company supporters bombed militant coal miners from the air.

But none of this produced a realignment between Democrats and Republicans.  Opposition to corporate domination, such as it was, took place within the two political parties or, more rarely, through short-lived independent parties.

How U.S. foreign policy is like 1930s Germany’s

I am careful about using the words “fascist,” “Nazi” and “Hitler,” and I do not think that what’s left of American freedom and democracy is equivalent to Nazi Germany’s totalitarianism.

But there are good reasons why other nations view the USA as the same kind of threat to international order as the Axis powers posed in the 1930s.  We Americans need to try to see ourselves as others see us.

I recommend you click on the links below.

LINKS 

On Rogues and Rogue States: Old, New and Improved by Fred Reed.

Reclaiming Your Inner Fascist by C.J. Hopkins for Consent Factory.

The hour of maximum danger for U.S. democracy

The hour of maximum danger for U.S. democracy, or what will be left of it, will be when other nations rebel against the power of the U.S. dollar.   That will be when the United States is most in danger of a would-be Hitler or Mussolini.

The power of the U.S. dollar is what gives Washington the means to be a great economic power despite huge trade deficits and a hollowing out of American manufacturing.  It provides the means to maintain the world’s most expensive military.

It gives Washington the means to wage economic warfare against nations such as Iran, Venezuela and Russia, and to force poor nations to sacrifice the well-being of their people to foreign creditors.

But the power of the U.S. dollar is a legacy of a past when the U.S. was the world’s leading industrial nation, leading creditor nation and leading exporting nation.   Now the dominance of the dollar rests on the fact no nation’s leaders are both brave enough, and lead a nation that is strong enough, to defy the dollar system.

Benjamin Carter Hett wrote in The Death of Democracy that many European nations turned to fascist and right-wing dictatorships as a result of military defeat, which discredited the established governments, and strong Communist and revolutionary movements, which caused the middle classes to look for protectors.

German democracy survived for a time, but was pushed over the brink by onset of the Great Depression, which the established government was unable to cope with.

The conditions will exist in the United States following the crash of the U.S. dollar.  The U.S. government will no longer be able to raise money by borrowing in foreign markets.  Lack of borrowing power will mean it no longer will be able to pay for a world-wide network of military bases.

At the same time, the military will have to pay more for imported electronics components, imported oil and other supplies, including uniforms.  The fall in value of the U.S. dollar will make U.S. manufacturing costs cheaper in relation other currencies, but it won’t be able to fix the lack of manufacturing capacity.  And it will make investment in new manufacturing capacity more expensive.

The sudden collapse of U.S. military power without a military defeat would open the way to a “stab in the back” myth, comparable to the one about Germany’s defeat in World War One.

The buying power of U.S. workers will fall and the prices of merchandise, so much of which is directly or indirectly dependent on foreign supply chains, will fall.  There will be a crash in the U.S. financial markets and real estate markets.  Many workers will strike.  Many citizens will turn to the streets in protest—probably very few that are explicitly Communist, but who knows?

When is it okay to beat up journalists?

Civilization is not so stable that it cannot be broken up; and a condition of lawless violence is not one out of which any good thing is likely to emerge.  For this reason, if for no other, revolutionary violence in a democracy is infinitely dangerous.

==Bertrand Russell in 1920

Andy Ngo is a photojournalist in Portland, Oregon, who tries to document the claim that the “anti-fa” left engages in unprovoked violence.

The “anti-fa” movement had responded to his charges by breaking his equipment and beating him up, the last time seriously enough to send him a hospital emergency room.

The background is political demonstrations organized by two far-right groups, the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, known for engaging in street fighting and trying to provoke retaliation by leftists.  The response by liberals and progressives in the Portland area was to organize much larger counter-demonstrations in reply, which is an effective response.

Andy Ngo after beating

The “anti-fa” movement goes further.  They say it is necessary to meet street violence with violence.  They also say that any fascist – they get to decide who is a fascist – is a legitimate target.

A certain number of self-identified liberals and progressives have written excuses and justifications for “anti-fa” and Ngo’s beating, which is what moves me to write about it.  Otherwise I might have thought of all this as an isolated incident.

Here are some of the arguments:

• Andy Ngo was looking for trouble and wanted to portray himself as a victim of violence.  If that is so, why give him what he wanted?
• The reports of Ngo’s beating diverts attention from the real issue, which is that right-wing violence is a worse threat than left-wing violence.  Why can’t you be against both?
• The “anti-fa” movement hasn’t actually murdered anyone yet.  Good thing Andy Ngo didn’t die of his injuries, then.  The “anti-fa” movement might have been justly criticized.
• Nobody knows for sure who beat up Andy Ngo.  Supposedly it could have been anyone.  Would that argument be made if some left-wing photojournalist was beaten up after filming right-wing street fighters?

In an earlier era, there were street fighters who called themselves the “black bloc” who’d join peaceful demonstrations and then start breaking windows, overturning cars and so. Like the “anti-fa’ fighters, they wore black clothing and black hooded masks.

They called this as “diversity of tactics.”  The idea is that you do your thing (peaceful protest) and they’ll do their thing (vandalism and street fighting).  The problem with that is that if there is a political demonstration in which the vast majority are peaceful and law-abiding and a few break window or throw bricks at police, it is the window-breakers and brick-throwers that will be remembered, not the majority.

This is very different from the miners’ strikes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where gun-carrying union members fought virtual wars with corporate mercenaries, National Guard troops and sometimes federal troops.  The right to self-defense is a fundamental right.

The “anti-fa” fighters could provide a valuable service if they acted as a security service for peaceful leftists, as they did during the Unite the Right protests in  Charlottesville., Va., in 2017.

That’s different from denying that there are certain rights, such as freedom of speech, that apply equally to all—the basic principles of liberalism.

If the self-identified left fights the self-identified right with physical force and violence, it will lose.  In the United States today, it is the self-identified right that is better armed, is more willing and able to use lethal force and has more sympathizers in the police and military.

Jordan Peterson on the totalitarian temptation

One of Jordan Peterson’s core ideas is the human capacity for evil, and his great examples are the crimes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Communist China.

What’s notable about all three, he wrote, is not just the atrocities committed by the ruling party, but that the regimes were sustained by the consent of ordinary people.

Under certain circumstances, Peterson believes, almost all of us are potential secret police informers and concentration camp guards.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

His heroes are people such as Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who found a meaning in life to sustain him in a Nazi death camp; Vaclav Havel, who lived in truth despite his frequent imprisonments in Communist Czechoslovakia; and, above all, the great Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived Soviet forced-labor camps and found a way to tell the world about them.

Havel condemned those who went along with the regime, such as the greengrocer who put up a sign saying “workers of the world, unite” because doing so is a path of least resistance.  Solzhenitsyn went so far as to blame himself for helping make the Gulag possible by failing to contract the Soviet regime’s lying propaganda.

So the choice is stark.  Either be willing to say “no,” no matter what the cost, or be a potential cog in a killing machine.

What is it today to which we need to say “no”?

It is whether to go along with unprovoked military aggression, assassinations, preventive detention, torture of suspects, warrantless surveillance and all the other practices of police states—all of which have come to be accepted as normal.

Ordinary Americans let themselves be led, step-by-step, to committing atrocities such as the My Lai massacre or the Abu Ghraib tortures.  Until more of us learn to say “no”, we will be just like ordinary Germans in the book Peterson discusses in the video above.

Timothy Snyder on the 1930s playbook

There is a playbook from the 1930s that some people in the presidential administration are following.  This includes picking a minority in your country, associate it with a global threat and use the notion of a global struggle as a way to create national solidarity while neglecting the nation’s actual problems.

This is a quote from an article by historian Timothy Snyder for Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Donald Trump as the latest Hitler

For years, I’ve been listening to warnings of the threats of new Hitlers.

Back in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy supposedly was equivalent to Hitler.   Then George Wallace.   Richard Nixon.   Dick Cheney.  Now Donald Trump is the latest Hitler equivalent.

The problem is that Donald Trump can refute his enemies by simply not behaving like Hitler.

He can run an administration that is more corrupt than the Harding or Grant administrations.  He can be the enemy of organized labor, civil rights, civil liberties and women’s rights.  He can destroy the social safety net.  He can make the government more plutocratic and militaristic than it already is.

But as long as he does not embark on genocide or world conquest, he meets the standard of not being equivalent to Hitler.

I don’t see night-and-day differences between Donald Trump and the mainstream of the Republican Party on most issues.  On some few but important issues, such as relations with Russia or pro-corporate trade treaties, I think Trump is better than either the Democratic or Republican established leadership.

If you’re a liberal or progressive activist, there are better uses of your time that reading up on the Weimar Republic or making checklists of the characteristics of fascism.

Telling people that Trump is equivalent to Hitler makes it easy for Trump because (1) it’s unconvincing and (2) it shifts the focus to historical parallels and away from Trump himself.

Trump’s election is not the end of the world

A few weeks ago, Democrats and liberals ridiculed Donald Trump for saying he might not accept the results of the Presidential election, and hinting of protests and riots if it was rigged against him.

Now some Democrats and liberals are protesting the results of the election and asking members of the Electoral College pledged to Donald Trump to go back on their word.

Clinical psychologists in New York City and elsewhere are flooded with calls from people who need help coping with their fear of Donald Trump.   Little Hispanic and Muslim children are terrified that Trump supporters are going to come after them.

Donald Trump giving victory speech (AP)

They literally believe that the election of Donald Trump is equivalent to the election of Adolf Hitler.

I don’t want to make light of these fears.  I think people really are afraid.

Trump’s election was a bad thing.  A lot of people are going to be hurt because of the Trump administration (for that matter, many would have suffered under a Hillary Clinton administration).

American democracy survived Dick Cheney, Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy.  I am confident it will survive Donald Trump.  I highly recommend watching the 12-minute Ian Welsh video above and reading the links below for perspective.

Trying to negate the Electoral College vote is a terrible idea.  The effort is bound to fail, and will discredit future demands by liberals and Democrats to respect the rule of law.   Even if it succeeded, it would set a bad precedent of setting aside election results by fair means or foul.

The Electoral College has existed for more than 200 years.  It is what it is because of a compromise that was necessary to create a United States in the first place.   Progressive and liberal presidents have been elected in the past through the Electoral College system and have just as much chance of being elected in the future.

How to tell when the fascists have come

During the past few years, I’ve read a number of definitions of fascism, which have been mostly lists of personality traits or philosophical assumptions or political tendencies.

The problem with these lists is that while they are traits, assumptions and tendencies often found in fascists, they also are commonly found among people who definitely aren’t fascists.

A blogger named Ian Welsh challenged his readers to produce benchmarks that would be definite evidence that fascism has arrived or was about to arrive.

That’s tough!  During the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, we had the executive claiming the authority to (1) arrest enemies of the state without legal process, (2) torture enemies of the state, (3) order the assassination of enemies of the state without legal process, (4) put the entire population under secret surveillance and (5) start wars without approval of the legislative body.

All these things are characteristic of fascist regimes.  All would be powers that a fascist dictator would try to claim.

But I can’t really see the Bush and Obama administrations as fascist in the same way that, say, Chile under Pinochet was fascist.

Racism, misogyny, religious intolerance and extreme nationalism are characteristic of fascist governments, but not all racists, misogynists, religious bigots or nationalists are fascists.

For what it’s worth, here is my list of defining characteristics of fascism:

• Deification of a leader.
• A requirement to pay lip service to a ruling ideology.
• Arrests of opponents of the government on trumped-up charges or no charges at all.
• Fear of making criticisms of the government.
• Arbitrary power and lack of due process of law.
• Lynchings and pogroms.
• Death squads.
• Concentration camps.

The problem with making such a list is that the mere absence of death squads and concentration camps can be taken as evidence that the United States or any other country is a free country.

What a real US fascist movement would look like

Donald Trump is not intellectually, temperamentally or morally fit to be President of the United States.  If elected, he would do great harm to the United States and to the world.

Like Hitler and Mussolini, he is contemptuous of laws, human rights or restrictions on mob violence.

But I don’t think he has a conscious goal of creating a fascist dictatorship, and, even if he did, he is not backed up by the kind of fascist movement that would make it possible.

A full-blown American fascist movement would have these characteristics:

1.  A party line and strictly enforced party discipline.
2.  An armed party militia.
3.  A covert understanding with Wall Street.
4.  A parallel structure of authority that superseded the legal governmental structure.

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Here’s why Donald Trump and his followers don’t fit that profile..

Why millions of ordinary Americans back Trump

Donald Trump is a con man, a racist and a bully.  The record is clear.  But the world is full of confidence men, racists and bullies.  What sets him apart?

Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? and other great political books, took the trouble to listen for himself to several hours of Trump speeches (which I confess I have never done).

I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke.  I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years.

But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called left-wing. 

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade.  In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy.   Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame.  He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.

It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.

Trump embellished this vision with another favorite left-wing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”.  (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) 

Many liberals think that Trump supporters are simply out of touch with reality.  But they themselves are out of touch with how trade and immigration are changing American life.

Donald Trump and the sores of discontent

Lambert Strether, a blogger who helps with the naked capitalism web log, says college-educated liberals are making a big mistake to dismiss Donald Trump’s followers as ignorant, racist or fascistic, and nothing more

He wrote that history – the history of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and the reign of the Ku Klux Klan in the Old South – teaches that people turn to fascist movements when they’ve suffered damage – military defeat, economic devastation and, above all, psychic damage.

Germans and Italians in World War One, and white Southern Americans in the Civil War, suffered  military defeat, economic devastation and, worst of all, humiliation.   What kind of damage have Donald Trump’s followers suffered?

Speculating freely, I’m guessing we’ve got several overlapping subsets in Trump’s following, with damage common to them all.

• First overlap:  The cohort described by Yves [Smith] in this post: “‘Stunning’ Rise in Death Rate, Pain Levels for Middle-Aged, Less Educated Whites”; “488,500 deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999‒2013,” had the death rate continued to fall at its previous rate of decline.  That’s a lot of organic damage.
• Second overlap: The “working class whites” whose jobs and communities were destroyed by the neo-liberal dispensation that began in the mid-70s, given that “less educated” is a proxy for working class.  More damage there.
• Third overlap: Military personnel who were sent, by elites, to fight and lose the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, many of whom (thanks to the wonders of modern battlefield medicine) came back to their families and communities terribly wounded (not to mention with post-traumatic stress).  More damage.
• Fourth overlap: The “bitter”/”cling to” voters (explicitly) thrown under the bus by Obama’s faction when it took control of the Democratic Party in 2008 (with results that we saw in the failure to ameliorate the foreclosure crisis, and the administration’s successful shrinkage of the workforce, as shown by the labor force participation rate).  More damage.

So Democratic apparatchiks can recycle 2008’s racism tropes all they want — identity politics is all they know, after all — but at best they’re over-simplifying, and at worst they’re destroying the dream of “uniting lower- and middle-income Americans on economic issues.”

Again, add up the decades of organic damage.  My anger would be bone deep. And justified.  Wouldn’t yours?  Trump, and maybe Sanders, are speaking to that anger.  Today’s Democratic establishment is not.

Source: naked capitalism

Terrorism from the air is still terrorism

My friend Hal and I were in a coffee shop the other day.  Hal remarked that if somebody set off a car bomb in the parking lot and blew us all to smithereens, that would be an act of terrorism.

But, he went on to say, if somebody dropped a bomb from 15,000 feet into the parking lot and blew us all to smithereens, that also would be an act of terrorism.

And it would be an act of terrorism even if we were foreigners with brown skins and Arabic names.

This is so obviously true that I am continually amazed at how many people I know, including self-described liberals, that are unable to see this.

If killing civilian bystanders is terrorism when Muslims do it at ground level, it is terrorism when Americans and Europeans do it from the air.

LINK

An Idiot’s Guide to Why They Hate Us by Paul Street for Counterpunch.

Terrorism: Sayed Ali Khamenei’s Letter to Youth in Western Countries [added 12/23/2015]

How Obama paved the way for Trump

Seeing the popularity of Donald Trump’s nationalism and authoritarianism, many liberals and progressives are reading up on the history of fascism in Europe and wondering about the future of democracy in the USA.

What really makes Donald Trump and other authoritarian Republican candidates so dangerous is George W. Bush and Barack Obama have already created a legal and organizational framework for exercising the powers of a dictator.

Consider the powers claimed by President Obama:

• To wage war on his own say-so by means of bombs, drone attacks, Special Operations, proxy armies or any other means short of massive use of American ground troops.
• To order the killing on his own say-so of any person he says is a threat to national security.
• To preside over a secret national surveillance system that potentially reaches every citizen and covers the whole world.
• To prosecute whistle-blowers who reveal abuses of power.
• To give immunity from prosecution to torturers, crooked bankers and other high-level criminals.

Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered an attack on Libya, a nation whose government was no threat to the United States, and reduced it to bloody chaos, where radical jihadists flourish.  Now Obama is carrying on a proxy war to overthrow the government of Syria, which also was no threat to the United States, and which, if successful, would create more bloody chaos where ISIS terrorists would flourish.

The Department of Homeland Security exists in theory to protect Americans from jihadist terrorists from abroad.  But it was used to coordinate a nationwide crackdown on Occupy Wall Street protesters, which, whatever you think of them, constituted no threat to the security of the homeland.

To sum up:  The President has the power to commit acts of war, with no accountability.  He has the power to sign death warrants, with no accountability.   He presides over a vast surveillance apparatus which can be used to spy on dissenters and he prosecutes those who reveal abuses of power.

What power would be lacking for a would-be dictator?  Maybe you think President Obama has enough restraint and good judgment to be trusted with such power.  But he is not going to be in office after January, 2017.   Somebody else is.

Recently the U.S. Congress did enact one restriction on abuse of power.  Congress banned torture and limited interrogation to what is now permitted in the U.S. Army field manual.  But, oddly enough, this does not seem to bother Donald Trump, who continues to promise that, if elected, he would authorize torture.

How could Trump promise to do something that is against the law?  Well, torture was against international law all along.  And there is another law, called the War Powers Act, which forbids the President to engage in acts of war without congressional authorization except in an emergency, and then to get authorization within 60 days.   President Obama has disregarded this law, without consequences, so why couldn’t President Trump disregard the anti-torture law?

During the Watergate era, President Richard M. Nixon broke the law and abused the power of his office.  There were countervailing forces in Congress, in the courts, in the press and in his own administration that held him in check and made his accountable.   Where are today’s checks and balances?

Tommy Douglas on the definition of fascism

Via Notes to Ponder.

Tommy Douglas, as virtually all Canadians know, was the father of Medicare in Canada, which was first introduced in Saskatchewan and then rolled out into Canada as a whole.   Canadian Medicare inspired U.S. Medicare, but it covers almost all Canadians while the U.S. plan only covers the 65 and older population.

Douglas was a champion of civil liberties.  As a member of Parliament, he had the courage in 1970 to refuse to support the War Measures Act, which, in response to terrorist activity in Quebec, expanded police and military powers and curtailed civil liberties throughout Canada.

In 2004, Douglas was voted the greatest Canadian in a nationally televised CBC contest.

The new normal: Links & comments 6/22/14

Thrown Out of Court: How corporations became people you can’t sue by Lina Khan for The Washington Monthly.

Individual Americans are losing their right to sue large corporations by means of “terms of service” contracts that customers and employees are required to sign as a condition of doing business.   By signing these contracts, individuals give up their right to take their complaints to a judge and jury and instead agree to abide by the decision of a corporate-friendly arbitrator.

Corporations have been complaining for years about the burden of litigation, and, back in the day, I fell for this.   But even then, the courts were busier with lawsuits by corporations against each other than they were lawsuits by individuals or by class-action suits.

Owners and managers of corporations already have a privilege denied to ordinary citizens, which is limited liability for their debts and fines.  We are getting far beyond the question of whether corporate entities have the same rights as individuals.  By means of this 21st century version of the “yellow-dog contract,” they are becoming mini-governments.

Hillary Clinton forgets the ’90s: Our latest gilded age and our latest phony populists by Thomas Frank in Salon.

When Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he ran as the advocate of working people against the corporate interests who didn’t play by the rules.  What we got was Ronald Reagan with some of the sharp edges filed off.  As Thomas Frank wrote in Salon today, the Clinton Presidency was an era of corporate mergers, financial deregulation, downsizing of government and NAFTA

That’s what we’re likely to get from a Hillary Clinton presidency, too.  She voices the same populist rhetoric and has the same corporate allegiances.

The floor is open by Psychopolitik.

How committed are we Americans to democracy?  A Gallup poll indicates a “no confidence” vote in the institutions of democracy.   The institution in which Americans have the most confidence (74%) is the military and the one in which we have the least confidence is Congress (7%).   A majority lack confidence in the Presidency and the Supreme Court, but they have confidence in the police.

If I didn’t know better, I’d take that for a poll of Italians just prior to Mussolini’s march on Rome.

Every year, we waste Spain by Tim Stuhldreher.  Hat tip for this link to Mike the Mad Biologist.

U.S. Healthcare: Most Expensive and Worst Performing by Olga Khazan for The Atlantic.

If the U.S. spending per person for medical care were the same as a typical industrial nation, our annual health care budget would be more than $1 trillion less.   That’s the equivalent to the gross domestic product of Spain, out of which a nation of 47 million people feed, clothe, shelter, educate and amuse themselves, and, yes, also provide medical care.

The difference between Communism and fascism

Tens of millions of people died in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a result of Mao Zedong’s failed policies and his refusal to acknowledge they were failures.

I said his policies were failures, but from Mao’s standpoint, maybe they weren’t.  Like Stalin’s agricultural collectivization policies in the 1930s, they have have caused death and suffering, but they enabled the government to tighten its grip over the nation’s food supply and its population.

Some scholars think that Stalin and Mao caused the deaths of more than beings than Hitler did.   It is impossible to say for certain because the historical record was suppressed.

Why, then, does Hitler stand alone as a symbol of evil?  I think that one reason is that Hitler is a defeated enemy.  If Nazi Germany had won the Second World War, and if there were a powerful government in existence today that was the heir of Hitler’s regime, there would still be apologists for Hitler.

The other reason is the difference between the appeal of fascism and Communism.  Fascists for the most part are racists, elitists and thugs.  Communists for the most part are defenders of labor rights and civil rights.

Throughout the 20th century, members of the American Communist Party became disillusioned when they discovered that Communist regimes in fact suppress labor rights and civil liberties.   I never heard of a member of the American Nazi Party becoming disillusioned because they discovered the Nazis were insufficiently racists and thuggish.

I don’t think that Communists—the ones outside actual Communist countries—are as bad as fascists.  Many have fought courageously for civil rights, labor rights and other things I believe in myself.  The worst you can say of them is that they have been willfully blind to horrible things.

But Communism is the more insidious ideology.   It is one thing to recruit racists and thugs to defend a cruel totalitarian dictatorship.   It is a far worse thing to persuade people who believe in democracy and workers’ rights to justify the crimes of a totalitarian dictatorship.

Ukrainian resistance to the Nazis

Since there has been a lot of talk about neo-Nazis and fascists in Ukraine, it’s worth remembering that the Nazis killed millions of Ukrainians as well as Belorussians, Poles and other Slavs during the Second World War.

The Nazis regarded Ukrainians and other Slavs as sub-human, and that their long-range plan was to open up Ukraine as “living room” for the German population by killing or starving the majority of Ukrainians and reducing the rest to slaves and serfs.

Ukrainians suffered as much or more than Russians did from the Nazis, because the German army occupied all of Ukraine but only a tiny portion of Russia proper. Ukrainians in the Red Army against the Nazis as valiantly as any of Soviet peoples.

I briefly had a Ukrainian roommate, actually a naturalized Canadian citizen, when I was in college in the 1950s.  Lubaslaw was a teenager when the Nazis consquered Ukraine.  He ran away to join the partisan resistance fighters, and this enabled him to survive.  He told me of watching from a hiding place as German soldiers lined up all the members of his high school and shot them dead in reprisal.

He also told me that many Ukrainians initially welcomed the German invasion.  That is because during the 1930s, the Stalin regime also killed and starved millions of Ukrainians.  Stalin ordered targeted killings and deportations to force labor camps of prosperous farmers (kulaks) and confiscated Ukrainian harvests and let millions of Ukrainians die in order to force them into collective farms.   The government-controlled collective farms were an ineffective system for farming, but a highly effective system for keeping control of the population.

Older Ukrainians remembered the German occupation during World War One as comparatively benign, and were understandably willing to welcome the Germans back.  They soon learned they had gone from the devil they knew to the devil they didn’t know.

I find it hard to believe that, in the light of this history, that there is a substantial neo-Nazi following in Ukraine.  I have no direct knowledge, and I could be wrong, but I find it hard to believe.   Anybody who identifies with the Nazis is ignorant of the historical record and blinded by hate, but this would be especially true of Ukrainians and for that matter Russians.

What fascism is, and isn’t

Fascism and the Future, Part One: Up From Newspeak

Fascism and the Future, Part Two: The Totalitarian Center

Fascism and the Future, Part Three: Weimar America

Since the word “fascism” is being bandied about fairly loosely, I recommend these articles by John Michael Greer of Cumberland, Md., for anyone who is interested in the historic definitions of fascism and national socialism.

I read somewhere — I can’t verify the fact, but I believe it – that Stalin banned the use of the word “Nazi.”  The Communists instead referred to “fascists” and “Hitlerites” because the term “national socialism” might invite comparisons with the Soviet regime.

I have a couple of minor quibbles with Greer.  He is correct in saying that the Nazis were not conservatives, and that German conservatives were not comfortable with them.  But it also is true that the German business owners were allowed to continue enjoying their profits while German labor leaders went to concentration camps.

The reason that most of the internal opposition to the Nazis came from conservatives was that the socialists and Communists were in concentration camps.  That is not because the Nazis were in fact conservative, but they needed a functioning army and functioning industry and needed (temporarily) the existing Army officers and industrialists.

His last article is a scenario in which a Hitler could arise in the United States, as a populist reaction to the failure of the U.S. government instead of (as happened in Spain, Chile and Argentina) a counter-revolution imposed from above.

I don’t think his scenario is impossible.  I don’t think the United States can continue as it is, but change is not necessarily for the better.

I think Greer neglects the degree in which the existing U.S. national security apparatus is made to order for a Hitler.   But, as I said, these are minor quibbles.  His articles are a good review of the historical background and meanings of the words “fascist” and “national socialist”.

A pre-emptive counter-revolution in the USA?

Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer that people do not revolt because they are poor and miserable.  If that there the case, the world would be in a constant state of revolt.  No, Hoffer wrote, people revolt when something to which they think they have a right is taken away from them, or when hopes are raised that things will get better.  Having a lot of highly educated young people without jobs is a spark that sets off the tinder.

If that is the case, the American people are ripe for revolt right now.   Although we are wealthier and more free than much of the world’s population, our economic security and political rights are being eroded.  The younger generation knows it is worse off than the generations that came before.  And the hope of change generated by Barack Obama has proved to be an illusion.

Historically the powers that be in the United States headed off revolt by responding to the discontented and bringing them into the system.   This happened with the labor movement in the 1930s and the civil rights protests of the 1960s.  But I think this time is different.

The electoral process is being altered to increase the power of money and to shut out minority groups, poor people, young people and others who might upset the status quo.  The legislative process is being altered so as to give veto power to the opponents of progressive reform.  The administration of government is becoming interlocked with corporations and shielded from public view.

Protest and dissent are being criminalized.  The U.S. government has the legal and institutional basis to impose a police state.  And the United States is being locked into NAFTA-like trade agreements which give corporations rights that override national law.

BP and power grabs

President Obama has come under attack from the right-wing for pressuring BP into setting up a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Yes, they say, it may be a good idea, but President Obama has no constitutional or legal authority to tell the managers of a corporation to do the right thing.  According to columnist Thomas Sowell, he is putting us on the slippery slope to fascism.

The other day the Coast Guard announced new rules imposing $40,000 fines and prison terms of one to five years on reporters who come too close to the BP oil spill.  I’m not aware of anything in the Constitution or the laws that gives the Coast Guard the power to regulate the press.

This follows many reports of local law enforcement and Homeland Security officials acting as enforcers for BP in restricting news coverage.  These reports do not involve public safety or interference with the cleanup work; they’ve even banned planes from flying over the oil spill sites. This suppression of documentary evidence will be important to BP later on when it has to defend itself against lawsuits.

If I was going to draw analogies with fascism, this is the example I would use.