Trumpism as Capitalism’s Default Option

Happily, many on the US left are beginning to see the intense, ongoing battle between Trump and his defenders and the self-described “Resistance” as reflective of a “split in the ruling class.”

This is a welcome development because it removes some of the confusions fostered by the Democratic Party leadership and the childish sensationalism and witless simplicity of the capitalist media. With little more than Russians-under-every-bed to rouse the electorate, the Democrats sell a narrative of Trump-as-Traitor, Trump-as-Defiler-in-Chief, and Trump-as-Fascist. Nancy Pelosi, the billionaire face of the Democratic Party parliamentary contingent, declared three priorities, should the Democrats win the interim election, three pieces of battered, rusty liberal boilerplate: lowering health costs and med prices (always promised, never delivered nor deliverable under a private system), higher wages and improved infrastructure (unrealized for nearly half a century and a teaser to the labor movement), and “cleaning up corruption” (which means continuing the bizarre Mueller witch hunt). No mention of overturning the Trump administration’s tax cuts for the rich.

It is a step out of the weeds of political posturing and shallow cable news analysis to now see a real, fierce battle between different groups of the wealthiest and most powerful, a conflict that gives some deeper meaning to the bizarre antics of the Trump era. Behind the lurid and illusory imagery of a corrupted vulgarian (Trump) resisted by the “heroic” protectors of freedom and security (the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc.) lies an actual contest over ideas, interests, and destiny. So it is a good thing that not everyone has been seduced by the cartoon-like political circus constructed by the capitalist media. It is a good thing that more are seeing a contest between the rich and powerful, contesting different visions of the future of capitalism: “a split in the ruling class.”

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks”

For much of the last two years, I have written often of the emergence of a ruling class alternative to the conventional wisdom of market fundamentalism-- so-called “neo-liberalism” and “globalization.” I have written of the growth of economic nationalism in the “advanced” economies as the expression of that alternative. I have postulated its increasing ruling class popularity as grounded in the damage to globalism-- deceleration of trade, slow growth, financial imbalances, popular discontent, etc.-- in the wake of the global crisis that began in 2007. The intensifying competition in the politics of energy are offered as materially symptomatic of economic nationalism, as is the disinterest in maintaining a relatively peaceful backdrop to securing and promoting trade. The US, for example is more interested in selling arms than in resolving its many wars (Secretary of State Pompeo is said to have convinced those in the Trump administration publicly shamed by the slaughter in Yemen not to cut off support for Saudi Arabia because of the possible loss of $2 billion in weapons sales).

Therefore, a recent commentary (The Dividends of Wrath, 9-3-18) by the influential senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, Joshua Green, counts as recognition of the shifting political terrain triggered by the crisis and its direct consequence in “Making America Great Again,” the slogan of Trump’s economic nationalism. The subtitle of Green’s think-piece clearly identifies that theme: How anger over the financial bailout gives us the Trump presidency.

Through reminiscences of an interview with former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Green takes us back to the aftermath of the financial collapse, where a resigned Geithner expressed a profound fear of the populace seeking “Old Testament justice” for Obama’s bailout of the banks and the coddling of the banksters.

Green reminds us of Obama’s infamous White House meeting with the CEOs of the major banks where he candidly told them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Reflecting on Obama’s words, Green comments:

Ten years after the crisis, it’s clear Obama was foolish to think public sentiment could be negated or held at bay… Millions of people lost their job, their home, their retirement account-- or all three-- and fell out of the middle class. Many more live with a gnawing anxiety that they still could. Wages were stagnant when the crisis hit and have remained so throughout the recovery. Recently the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US workers’ share of nonfarm income has fallen close to a post-World War II low.

This unusually harsh mainstream indictment of post-apocalyptic capitalism well captures the conditions that have stoked fear of dusted-off pitchforks. And make no mistake, those who rule the major capitalist centers pay attention to the anger, not to answer it, but to deflect it.

Green continues: “...the pitchfork-wielding masses will eventually make themselves heard. The story of American politics over the last decade is the story of how the forces Obama and Geithner failed to contain reshaped the world… unleashing partisan energies on the Left (Occupy Wall Street) and the right (the Tea Party)... The critical massing of conditions that led to Donald Trump had their genesis in the backlash...” [my emphasis]

While it may be emotionally satisfying to blame Obama and Geithner and go no further, it is more revealing to locate the cause of Trump in the failure of market fundamentalism and the unsettling consequences for capitalism if no alternative were found. Trump and “Make America Great Again” may be a crude response to dangers unleashed by market fundamentalism run amok, but response it is.

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off these proposals”

Insightfully, Green locates the first stirring of an alternative to the reigning politico-economic paradigm in Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to dissociate the Republicans from the Obama bailouts-- in his words to “...keep our fingerprints off these proposals [the TARP funding of the banks].”

But it wasn’t until Trump that anyone crafted a strategy that successfully harnessed the mass anger into political success. “By the time Trump declares his candidacy in 2015, Americans of every persuasion had soured on the ‘elites’ running both parties, something his Republican opponents didn’t understand until far too late,” Green notes.

Trump was able to cobble together a campaign based on responding to the anger with a measure of economic nationalism, patriotism, and, paradoxically, partisanship for the working class.

Green explains:

Today, his campaign is remembered as having been driven mostly by anti-immigrant animosity. But… Trump spent loads of time attacking Wall Street on behalf of the forgotten little guy and fanning the suspicion that a cabal of political and financial eminences was screwing ordinary people.

When I interviewed Trump just after he’d locked up the Republican nomination, he told me that he intended to transform the GOP into “a workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry.”

His closing message in the campaign consciously evoked the disgust so many people had come to feel toward Wall Street and Washington. His final ad on the eve of the election flashed images of Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and sought to implicate them, and Hillary Clinton, in what Trump called “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of large corporations and political entities”... It’s no surprise that this message struck a chord: What is Trump if not the embodiment of a balled fist and a vow to deliver Old Testament justice?

Of course the idea that Trump is building a workers’ party is ridiculous, and Green knows it. But that is not the point.

The point is that Trump is not merely the anomaly, the Elmer Gantry figure, bent on capitalizing solely on his cynicism, his vulgarity, his hypocrisy to cheat his way to the pinnacle of power. He is not simply the cartoon-like character of orange hue, small hands, and a Mussolini-like pout. Instead, he represents a section of the ruling class’s alternative to the now nearly thirty-year unopposed reign of market fundamentalism.

But it is most important to stress that he is a ruling class answer to the failings of a ruling class-dictated era of the universal worship of private property exclusively, of US policed globalism, and of lubricated trade. The latter ideology has not surrendered and the ideology of economic nationalism has yet to dominate. In no way does the struggle between the two roads promise to advance the interests of the working class-- both are dead ends for working people. And Green confidently reminds us that the damage wrought by the economic crash “...makes it all but certain that the next presidential election, and Trump’s possible successor, will be shaped by it, too.”

Green, with his earnest, liberal hopes, believes that there is a chance that the otherwise disinterested Democrats will take up the cause of those wielding the pitchforks. He sees that opportunity in Elizabeth Warren. Others see it in Bernie Sanders or the ripples of DSA progressivism on the surface of the Democratic Party.

With the Democrats delivering no qualitatively meaningful reforms for the US working class since the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, that likelihood has moved from hope to groundless faith.

Taking sides in this struggle over how best to serve capitalism will only further set back the cause of working people. And looking for a road away from serving capitalism within the Democratic Party is a futile repeat of old illusions.

Only a concerted effort to create or nurture a truly independent, anti-capitalist movement addressing the real and urgent needs of working people makes sense today, when the bourgeois parties willingly sacrifice the interests of workers to the Moloch of capitalism. Only a movement with revolutionary purpose can divert the working class from the false prophets of inward-looking demagogy, tribalism, and Spencerian Survival of the Fittest.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Remembering Chile

September 11 will mark 45 years since the military coup deposing the elected Popular Unity government of Chile. With the electoral victory on September 4, 1970 and under the leadership of presidential candidate, Salvador Allende, the Chilean left proclaimed the first steps on a peaceful transition to socialism. Millions of progressive and socialist-minded people worldwide followed the Chilean developments with intense interest only to witness their hopes dashed and tens of thousands of Chileans brutalized or murdered by the junta lead by Augusto Pinochet.

In the aftermath of the violent coup and the destruction of Chile’s constitutional system, hundreds of thousands worldwide marched and organized in solidarity with Chilean democrats, socialists, and Communists. At the same time, a rigorous examination of the three-year experiment took place, dissecting the objective and subjective factors leading to and allowing the coup. Articles, books, forums, and witnesses argued passionately the possibility of peaceful transition, of a parliamentary road, the role of intermediate strata, the absence or necessity of stages of struggle, the role of reformism, of compromise, of dependency, of foreign intervention, of the socialist countries, of economic priorities, and of many other aspects of the Chilean struggle.

Today, the questions raised in the 1970s-- a time of great promise for socialism-- remain relevant, urgent, and vigorously debated. With the passage of time, they stand out as essential to interpreting our world, theoretically and practically. Every process for change, from the Italian elections, the Portuguese revolution, and African liberation movements of the 1970s to the most recent events in Syria and Nicaragua, prompts most of the same questions that were raised by the Chilean counter-revolution.

The Role of the US

The one point of agreement shared by Communists, socialists, democrats and even the left wing of Christian Democracy was that US influence occupied an essential place in the undermining of the Popular Unity government and its programs and prospects. We know even better today of the active, intense interventions of the CIA and US corporations like Anaconda, Kennecott, and ITT in strangling the Chilean economy. From the first election, the US government at the highest levels devised a plan and began actions to derail the Chilean left.

Credits and loans were denied. The global price of copper (70-80% of Chilean exports) was manipulated downward to deny Chile’s government essential revenue for the country’s social programs (salaries rose between 35% and 66% in 1971) and industrial development.

Without hard currency outside loans or revenue from trade, hyperinflation eventually plagued Chile, reaching 163% in 1973.

“The US credit and trade squeeze was designed for a political purpose…: to promote the political demise of a democratic socialist government. Economic pressures led to economic dislocations (scarcities), which generated the social basis (discontent among the middle class) that created the political context for a military coup.” (The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government, James Petras and Morris Morley)

Funding middle class truck-owners’ “strikes” through the CIA and AIFLD further fueled middle class alienation (the middle strata in Chile was quite large-- one study claimed that the 45% of the population beneath the top 5% shared 53% of national income).

Of course the Chilean military maintained strong and dependent contact with its US counterpart, a fact that guaranteed that the US would be a partner in the coup.

The CIA paid bribes to Chilean legislators, funneled money to leading newspapers to influence popular opinion, and encouraged and financed acts of terror.

Writing in 1970 and anticipating the impact of economic warfare on three Latin American independent and progressive processes-- Peru, Chile, and Bolivia-- Italian Communist, Renato Sandri, astutely observed:

The strategy of the imperialist siege of the three countries seems to be a combination of an insidious pressure from the outside, primarily on the economic level, with internal resistance by the unseated oligarchies, [and] the reactionary sectors of the armed forces… The besiegement of these countries, in which the contradiction between the desperate needs of the largest masses and the possibilities of meeting them soon is so acute, has a clear objective: to force them into economic bankruptcy, to bring the governments to their knees in isolation from their own peoples… (Critica Marxista, 1970, number 6)

For those most sincerely in solidarity with the Chilean people, condemnation of both US intervention and the Pinochet regime became the immediate priority. For those dedicated to returning governance to the people of Chile, resisting the machinations of the US ruling class and its allies overshadowed settling the political differences following in the wake of the coup.

For a broad base of US leftists and democrats, Chile solidarity served as the template for internationalism, solidarity, and anti-imperialism. At its core was the idea that US activists must first and foremost resist the meddling of the more powerful country in the affairs of a weaker country; solidarity required a universal respect for another country’s absolute right to determine its own fate regardless of what we may think of its internal affairs.

A Lesson Learned?

For reasons that are not easily discerned, the US left has compromised the principles that united the many factions in the Chile Solidarity movement. Despite deep political divides, solidarity work in the past stood firmly on the foundation of respect for other countries’ right of self-determination. Another lesson learned-- though less widely accepted-- was to avoid the conceit of judging other people’s paths, especially by the conventional standards of affluent, privileged US citizens.

But that resolve was to erode after the Pinochet coup. By the end of the decade, most of the US left failed to respond to the US intervention in Afghanistan which fell on the side of the anti-secularist, millenarian, ultra-conservative counter-revolutionaries. No doubt, anti-Communism played a role, but it is worth noting that liberal values supposedly deeply embedded in the US left were quietly retired before the onslaught of the Jihadis.

Cold War politics surely account for the disinterest of the predominantly white left organizations in the US government’s substantial support for the wrong sides in the liberation of the last remaining colonies in Africa. “Specialized” organizations and a fairly broad section of the Black community were moved to condemn US engagement.

Anti-Reaganism and a determined core of Latin American solidarity activists restored some of the vigor of the Chile Solidarity era with an insistent defense of the Sandinistas against the onslaught of the US-sponsored Contras. It helped that the cause proved useful in the Democratic Party’s fight against Reagan and his cohorts.

The dismantling of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a non-event for most of the US left and a troubling turning point in US left solidarity. As the US and its NATO allies encouraged, financed, and actually interceded in the orgy of nationalism, with roots in World War II fascism and anti-fascism, there were no demonstrations, marches, or actions in the US. Few voices, notably excepting Diana Johnstone, Michael Parenti, and scant others, challenged the newly minted doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” concocted by the Democratic administration.

When the Jihadis bit the hand that fed them in the twenty-first century, the US struck hard at Afghanistan. Given the popular image of the US as an innocent “victim,” it was not surprising that little opposition arose to the invasion.

But then emboldened by that lack of opposition, the US brazenly invaded Iraq in 2003. For this naked aggression, the broad left mobilized, agitated, and demonstrated, particularly after the claimed justification collapsed. Once again, hatred for a Republican president fueled the mass expression, along with pacifistic anti-war convictions devoid of deeper solidarity sentiments (muted by vulgar charges of “islamo-fascism”).

Obama’s wars brought a further decline of left internationalism in the US. Partly because of the ascendance of a Democratic president unjustifiably deified by much of the left, murderous actions in the US’s longest war, in a once-stable Libya and Syria, and through remote drones, were shamefully ignored by much of the left. The deliberate destabilization of countries like Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, the meddling in Iran’s elections, and the coup in Honduras were largely met with left indifference.

The turn-of-century anti-imperialist renaissance in Latin America created excitement and support from a broad segment of the US left. Developments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, ranging from liberal nationalism to proclaimed socialist-orientation (and real socialism in Cuba!), inspired many to celebrate a crack in the US global hegemony.

But as hardships piled up and US economic warfare increased against these upstarts, many in the US abandoned them, surrendering to North American-media charges of corruption, incompetence, and human rights violations. The shallowness of US left solidarity is on full display.

After the charismatic Hugo Chavez died in Venezuela and after the US economic sanctions tightened (in a way only too much like Chile during Popular Unity), many on the US left fled the Venezuelan cause like rats from a sinking ship.

Still others turned on the leadership, voicing intense criticisms of the Venezuelan government’s chosen path at the moment of greatest duress. Nothing gives meaning to great-power chauvinism like the second-guessing of a privileged US leftist.

But the reaction of the US left to the recent events in Nicaragua exceeds the shabby sell-out of Venezuela. Despite the fact that the Sandinista government won an overwhelming victory in elections last year, we are to believe that they are now disowned by a majority of the citizens. We are to believe that confidence in the government is so fragile that it justifies burning cars and buildings, constructing homemade mortars, and organizing violent attacks, actions that would turn US liberals and some on the left running to demand police intervention should this happen in their own country.

The carping and criticizing of the Sandinista government-- a matter best left to Nicaraguans-- overshadows the well-documented intervention of US agencies in Nicaraguan affairs. The media’s overwhelmingly negative and one-sided campaign against the Sandinistas should be transparent to anyone who has faced the US media’s persistent negative characterization of anything remotely left wing. Yet many US leftists ponder the “complexity” of the conflict. Many hesitate to defend not only the government, but Nicaraguans’ right to determine their own future, their own fate, free of US influence. Maybe the bully has good intentions?

One would think that a left worthy of the name would gladly err on the side of any regime that found itself in the gun sights of the US government, its security agencies, and the corporate media. When, since World War II, has that formula NOT been a fairly reliable guide to taking an anti-imperialist stand?

The Chile Solidarity moment is a dim memory. In the past, solidarity movements-- the Spanish Republic, the Vietnamese Liberation Front-- were springboards for the US left. Unfortunately, the same is not true in the wake of Chile Solidarity.

Social Democrats or Democratic Socialists or Democratic Democrats seem only interested in democracy in the US; they show little regard for the global democracy of self-determination and national independence. When it comes to the fate of peoples in far-off lands victimized by an arrogant US foreign policy, they are too often diffident.

Those ignorant of the nobler episodes of US solidarity with the victims of US imperialism are not to blame. But those leaders on the left who are beholden to foundations, think tanks, non-profits, and other organs of dependency have tarnished that legacy. They cannot hide behind the fig leaf of class-defined “human rights” forever.

Thankfully, there are still some who remain dedicated to principled solidarity work, there are many diligent enemies of the bullies of the world, steadfast in accepting the heavy burden of fighting their own country’s bid for global dominance. Anti-imperialism does live!

We celebrate their work on the anniversary of the tragic end to the Chilean people’s reach for control over their lives.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Pumpkin and the Soccer Ball

We won the Hiss case in the papers. We did. I had to leak stuff all over the place. Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it. Hoover didn't even cooperate.... It was won in the papers. I leaked out the papers.... I leaked out the testimony. I had Hiss convicted before he ever got to the grand jury.... Go back and read the chapter on the Hiss case in Six Crises and you’ll see how it was done. It wasn't done waiting for the goddamn courts or the attorney general or the FBI. Richard Nixon tapes

Unless you are my age or spent time hanging around old Reds you probably don’t know about Richard Nixon’s Great Pumpkin ploy. Nixon ran for office in California in 1946 under a “Red under every bed” platform, successfully red-baiting a New Deal Democrat House incumbent. His understanding of the power of anti-Communism became the driving force in his career, a career further realized when he promptly joined the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) soon after his election.

Always on the lookout for scandalous new revelations about Communist “mischief,” Nixon soon found a source in Whittaker Chambers. Chambers-- a damaged personality-- had, in the 1920s and 1930s, been allowed to take on responsibilities in the Communist Party far greater than his stability or trustworthiness. After he broke with the Communists, he tried to peddle his ever-changing, exaggerated tales of clandestine activity and espionage to the Roosevelt administration.

They declined.

In the early war years, the FBI interviewed Chambers. They also walked away from his stories.

As the Cold War heated, Chambers made another attempt to sell his product, this time to HUAC. Many, including President Truman, discounted Chambers’ claims.

But they underestimated Richard Nixon. In a media-recorded drama, orchestrated by Nixon, Chambers visited his farm where he proudly showed the public a pumpkin in which he had hidden documents allegedly incriminating Alger Hiss, a former high-ranking State Department official, in Soviet espionage.

The Great Pumpkin Caper, infused with the ominous threat that Communists were out to assassinate Chambers for his treachery, proved to be just the right amount of theatrics and fear-mongering to put Chambers’ wild accusations into mainstream respectability. It should be added that many New Deal liberals quickly lost their spine and dutifully joined the anti-Communist crusade.

I was reminded of these Cold War hysterics when I read a Bloomberg News 45 pt headline, Putin’s Soccer Ball for Trump Had Transmitter Chip, Logo Indicates. Could the gift from Putin to Trump after the recent summit actually be a spy device?

Author Vernon Silver attempts to place an inch of distance between his suppositions and an actual allegation of Russian perfidy, but he takes it seriously enough to inquire with the ball’s maker, the President’s spokesperson, and a hacker group. Further, he reminds us of a Forbes article that described an engineer who used a chip similar to the chip affixed to the ball to invade a nearby cell phone. Could the soccer ball be a nefarious Russian attack?

Apparently another intrepid journalist thought so. Clare Foran, writing for CNN, revisited the story under a 42 pt headline Putin gave Trump a soccer ball that may have a transmitter chip. Like Silver, Foran checked in with Adidas, the President’s spokesperson, and the ubiquitous “cyber-security expert” hanging around newsrooms and TV studios. In addition, she checked with the US Secret Service. Its prepared statement, reassuring readers, suggests that many other amateur sleuths had inquired about the suspicious soccer ball.

Despite the cautions, Foran remained vigilant, citing Senator Lindsey Graham’s “warning”: “if it were me, I’d check the soccer ball for listening devices and never allow it in the White House.”

Not for lack of effort, these two elite-school graduates failed to generate enough interest to warrant a serious look from the master conspiracy theorist, Robert Mueller. Nixon would have gotten it done.

In another crackpot moment, Newsweek writer, Cristina Maza, sensed a trojan horse in the NATO camp. Her article, VLADIMIR PUTIN'S BIKER GANG SETS UP MILITARY CAMP IN NATO MEMBER STATE, PUBLIC FIGURES URGE GOVERNMENT TO TAKE ACTION, raises the specter of a military take-over by a group of Russian and Slovakian motorcyclists from the Night Wolves motorcycle club. The group recently occupied a building complex about the size of a large high school campus. Maza worried “that the group had access to tanks and armored vehicles.” Apparently, they had rented a few Soviet era tanks from a local military museum to add some color to their gathering. While the Night Wolves claim to have organized the event to inaugurate a new chapter, two hundred “public figures” signed a petition urging the Slovakian government to expel the invaders.

The US’s enduring regime change vehicle, Radio Free Europe, quotes the vigilant petitioners as characterizing the Night Wolves ominously as  “Putin’s paramilitary vanguard in a hybrid war against the EU, NATO, and Slovakia.”

Nixon would approve.

How do you “infiltrate” the National Rifle Association (NRA)? Like most membership organizations (AAA motor club, the local library, even the Democratic Party), you give your personal information and pay a fee to the NRA and you’re a member. If you want to join from Russia, Afghanistan, or Colombia, it’s an additional $10.

Yet an uncommon diversity of news and entertainment organizations (MSNBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Chicago Tribune, Vox, Democracy Now!, Rolling Stone, Jimmy Kimmel Live, etc. etc.) have charged Russian national, Maria Butina, with “infiltrating” the NRA. I suppose that my membership in the Green Party, coupled with my openly expressed desire to influence the organization towards advocating socialism, makes me an “infiltrator,” too.

Curiously, her Department of Justice affidavit does not describe as an “infiltration” Butina’s engagement with a more elite, politically charged organization, The Fellowship Foundation, and its annual National Prayer Breakfast.   

Wikipedia describes the National Prayer Breakfast as “designed to be a forum for the political, social, and business elite to assemble and build relationships,” seemingly an ideal event to “infiltrate.” Wikipedia also asserts that the guest list is limited to about 3,500 people including guests from 100 countries, presumably none of which, except Russia, were bent on influence peddling.

The Butina case reeks of the media’s hysterical “Russian under every bed” campaign. Nixon would be pleased with the use of the Cold War-tested, sinister-conjuring word, “infiltrate.”

It is no surprise that the Gallup poll reports that only 22% of its respondents have a “Great Deal” or “Quite A Lot” of confidence in the criminal justice system. The recently reluctantly released-- and heavily redacted-- FISA application that the FBI submitted to the secret FISA court in October of 2016 and the ensuing disputes give ample evidence for that lack of confidence.

The focus of the request for extra-legal surveillance was Carter Page, a business consultant and a campaign advisor to Donald Trump for six months or so. Despite the fact that the FBI released 414 pages, the meat of the case could be carved out in about thirty heavily redacted pages. The rest of the release was redundancies, boiler-plate and blackened copy to add gravitas to an otherwise slight document.

No doubt the FBI anticipated that the FISA courts are perceived as push-overs for government agencies; of 22,990 FISA requests from 1979 to 2006, only 5 have been rejected. So much for judicial vigilance.

Remarkably, much of the revealed substance of the suspicions about Carter Page are based, in one way or another, upon the infamous Christopher Steele dossier.

To an objective observer, the fact that no one wants to take ownership of the claims made in the dossier would cast suspicion on the real intent of the FBI and Justice Department officials who sought the surveillance approval. Even when the security agencies presented the dossier to Obama and Trump before the 2017 inauguration, they refused to attest to its veracity, they refused to take ownership of Steele’s “research.”

The FISA request does not, in those sections not redacted, explicitly reveal that the Steele information was gained at the paid behest of the Democratic Party (Steele was told, his immediate employers claim [Fusion GPS], that he was only instructed to answer the question: “Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?" -- a question akin to ‘when did he stop beating his wife?’).

Surely, no one would contend that the Democrats were paying for positive information on Trump. Nor could any rational person expect Steele to receive the instruction and not understand that his job was to dig up dirt. And just as assuredly, the failure to explicitly reveal the Democratic Party connection-- with no independent verification of the dossier-- casts a long shadow over the FISA request and its granting.

Either the FBI withheld relevant information or the FISA court is such a rubber stamp that its standards of evidence are nearly non-existent. Or, perhaps, the FBI used unverified claims for a fishing expedition and the FISA court is a sham.

If further proof of the corruption of the legal system is needed, it is provided by the vapid, amoral defense of the FBI’s FISA request by three former US Attorneys. Writing in the Daily Beast, they argue that, in fact, hearsay-- a sophisticated word for gossip-- is a sufficient condition for surveillance. The FBI would have been “derelict” if it had not sought a FISA request based on the Steele dossier or any other hearsay-- leaks, innuendo, anonymous calls, vendettas. They seem little concerned with establishing the limitations of hearsay.

They assure their readers that a FISA request only requires revelation of “potential for bias.” What an amazingly low standard for the credibility of evidence!

Nixon would have regretted not living to exploit such an abysmal decay of journalistic and legal standards.

Had he lived, he would have enjoyed the incredible expansion of the surveillance state, the demise of critical, combative, questioning journalism, the glorification and unchallenged legitimacy of the security services, and the punitive use and abuse of the grand jury and court system. He would have seen opportunity in narrowing the scope of permitted discourse and action-- all long strides toward a national security state. He would have hailed the promise this development offers for protecting the interests of the rich and powerful.

On the other hand, he would have been surprised at the complicity, even enthusiastic advocacy, of many liberals and “civil libertarians” in furthering this agenda.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

“...Who would have thought that this circus would have come to town?”

You can’t say we weren’t warned. We should have seen it coming.

The carnival-like quality that best captures the flavor of today’s cable news has been unfolding for a long time. The imagery of barking, shouting, teeth-gnashing commentators is neither exceptional nor uncalculated. The picture of elite-school graduates, multimillion-dollar salaried regular “joes” and "janes" earnestly deploring political wrongs supposedly troubling the masses and saluting the banal antics of the US professional political stratum would be laughable if it weren’t so transparently contrived.

The early US success of Fox News didn’t go unnoticed by the heads of the other entertainment mega-corporations. When Fox leaped to the head of the pack with a posse of relentlessly partisan, right wing gas bags, competitors scrambled to find a way to recapture the ratings.

Immediate rivals, CNN and MSNBC, were locked in the jaws of a dilemma, however.

The management of both networks were genetically disposed toward the political space already occupied by Fox News. But they also understood that no gains could be made by merely duplicating the Fox News strategy.

Instead, they tried to find a position to the left of Fox, the space that made the most sense for a competitor. Unfortunately for the networks, the management suits were unnerved by even the most tepid leftists, leading to a revolving door of commentators who either crossed a cautious line in the sand or needed to be “balanced” by an always growing stable of right wingers hired to counter the appearance of left-wing rabble-rousing.

The 2003 firing of liberal Phil Donahue serves as a prime example of this paranoia. Despite the fact that Donahue generated greater viewership than either Chris Matthews or Joe Scarborough, Donahue was dropped from MSNBC because executives believed his show would become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

Nevertheless, the Obama victory opened the door for a network to attach to the youthful, media-savvy, and well-spoken President. Obama’s cool aloofness and measured manners served as a politically centrist counter to the ravings and bluster on Fox News.

MSNBC grabbed the brass ring and challenged Fox. The network earned the title of the “Anti-Fox,” awarded by The New York Times (November, 2012). The paper quoted Bill Clinton as saying, "Boy, it really has become our version of Fox."

And the presidential election of 2016 offered a unique opportunity to further reset the hierarchy of the cable news networks, depose Fox News, and construct a new entertainment-posing-as-news direction. As I described in an April, 2016 post:

...CBS CEO Les Moonves is ecstatic over the revenues flowing into entertainment coffers from the primary campaigns (“I've never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us.”). Moonves, the entertainment mogul, understands better than most the triumph of entertainment over substance, posture over issues; CBS and the other mega-corporations peddle reality television and tabloid news. So it's not surprising to see him hail the current electoral season's antics as special (“Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ...Who would have thought that this circus would have come to town?”). For Moonves and his ilk the more inanity and sensationalism, the more money flows into corporate coffers (“You know, we love having all 16 Republican candidates throwing crap at each other. It's great. The more they spend, the better it is for us...”).     

It was this “circus” and the subsequent election of Donald Trump that worked all the entertainment moguls into a frenzy. For MSNBC, it was a perfect conjunction of factors: a reputation as the liberal channel, a vulgar, truth-averse President with absolutely no basic principles, a host of conspiracy theories concocted by hollow and incompetent Democrats, and, not least, a stable of sharp-tongued, ambitious personalities even more adept at the Fox News method of earnest fibbery. Thus was born the 24-hour news cycle of alleged leaks, anonymous tips, suspicions, and exaggerated fears. Thus was spawned a reserve army of self-styled experts: think-tank hired guns, rejected politicians, pensioned generals, hectoring columnists and commentators, and publicity-seeking celebrities ready to affirm any threat, any scenario fabricated by the guiding lights.

What appears to some as a deplorable, but hopefully temporary state of media childishness-- a departure or deviance from good practices-- is really the culmination of the persistent, advancing concentration of media assets-- books, newspapers, radio, television networks, communication systems-- into fewer and fewer hands. A handful of giant corporations control what we are to see, to hear, to read, and-- the ultimate goal-- what to think.

Entertainment monopolies do not look to innovate; they prefer settled, tested genre. Monopolies do not like surprises; they favor reproducible formulae. That is the essence of brand building. That is why we swim in a cultural sea of reruns, prequels, sequels, celebrity pulp writers, revivals, homages, and other diluted art forms that are repeated and are repeatable until the last dollar is collected.

Of course these “values” carry over to the monopoly-controlled news-as entertainment-sector. It explains the cookie-cutter, robotic gesturing news readers, as well as the search for sensationalism and political narratives that, like a mini-series, can be repeated until the public grows bored.

That certainly captures the allure of the Mueller investigation to the big corporate media-- it is the gift that keeps on giving, until it doesn’t. And it seems, more and more, that it has stopped giving. That would likely be the meaning of Senator Mark Warner’s comments last week at a retreat with important fellow Democrats: “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know,” Warner reportedly told the 100 or so guests, according to the Boston Globe (6-25-18). “If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.”

Warner knows better than most that Mueller and Russiagate are the only meatless bones that the Democrats have tossed to the ravenous corporate media. Also, he knows that the Democrats need the issue to stay alive for the next “couple of months” to help the Democrats in the interim elections.

But most significantly, he knew when he spoke that confidence in the Mueller investigation had waned and was in need of some juice. As The Hill reported on June 13: Mueller’s public image sinks to all-time low in new poll. “The Politico–Morning Consult poll found that 40 percent of voters believe that Mueller's probe has been handled unfairly — a 6-point increase from February…”, and a greater number than those who thought the investigation to be fair.

That, too, explains the endless, desperate, nagging emails that I get from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) begging for my support for the Mueller investigation (Breaking: Robert Mueller’s image is at an all time low.)

And in an opinion piece in The Hill, former National Security Prosecutor, Joseph Moreno, hopes to let the faithful down gently with Prepare to be disappointed with Russia investigation conclusion (6-26-18).

Clearly, this mini-series is losing the public, a development that backs the Democratic Party into an awkward corner. The Democrats needed wildly sensational stories to court the sensationalist monopoly media and to cover the embarrassing loss to a vulgar entertainer who makes Ronald Reagan look like a seasoned, measured diplomat.

And we can draw some consolation in knowing that the cable news shows each draw no more than a couple of million viewers each night, despite the pose they take as the opinion makers for the entire country.

Meanwhile the youthful Democratic Socialist (DSA) wing of the Democrats continues to demonstrate to an intransigent corporate Party establishment that Democratic Party voters really place more importance on the issues that the voters want addressed rather than the issues that consultants believe that voters want answered. Good jobs, debt relief, healthcare, education-- the issues that have always mattered to working people-- are anathema to the corporate Democrats who cannot touch these issues without touching up the wallets of their fundraising base.

It is no small pleasure to see the media lackies squirm with the victory of a young, outspoken DSA woman over a ten-term house member, possible Pelosi successor, and corporate Democrat in this past Tuesday’s New York primary. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s overwhelming success underscores the dilemma faced by a corrupted Democratic Party locked into a Republican-lite posture by its corporate masters. The ruling class really only needs one corporate party. And the people are in dire need of their own party.

While many are growing tired of the 24-hour news cycle of Russia-baiting, while many are weary of watching politicians “...throwing crap at each other,” as CEO Moonves so eloquently put it, corporate-owned media and corporate-owned political parties dare not address the fact that 43% of US citizens live from paycheck to paycheck with no room for even a minor unexpected expense. They run from the fact that Baby Boomers are faced with insufficient wealth and income to successfully negotiate their retirements. Both recent studies point to desperate straits that can only be engaged by a substantial redistribution of wealth and income to the needy, a solution completely unacceptable to the elites that control our media and our politics.

Instead, they choose to attack what they deem “evil”: Russia, President Putin, Chairman Kim, and a host of other imagined threats that will distract many from the real problems.

And so the carnival continues. When you have nothing to say, tell a joke!

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

False Choices: Globalism or Nationalism

In November of 2008, in the midst of the most severe global economic crisis since the Great Depression, I wrote that the era of global internationalism-- so-called “globalization”-- was coming to an end. “Centrifugal forces” of self-preservation were now operant, pulling apart existing alliances, blocs, joint institutions, and common solutions:

The economic crisis has reversed the post-Soviet process of international integration – so-called "globalization." As with the Great Depression, the economic crisis strikes different economies in different ways. Despite efforts to integrate the world economies, the international division of labor and the differing levels of development foreclose a unified solution to economic distress. The weak efforts at joint action, the conferences, the summits, etc. cannot succeed simply because every nation has different interests and problems, a condition that will only become more acute as the crisis mounts… It is highly unlikely that the [European] Union will come up with common solutions. Indeed, the unraveling of the EU is a possibility.

A decade later, it should be apparent that this projection anticipated the rise and growth of economic nationalism, a political trend that threatens to sweep away the institutions and policies of free market globalism. Just as the failure of the Keynesian consensus to address a new crisis in the 1970s brought the ascension of market fundamentalism (so-called “neo-liberalism”) and its later international consolidation as the “globalization” consensus, the shock of 2007-2008 brought the weaknesses, shortcomings, and failures of market fundamentalism to the fore. Consequently, the policy of open global markets is now engaged in a life-and-death struggle with economic nationalism. To a great extent, the larger capitalist states are retreating toward aggressive self-interest and intensifying global competition.

The most obvious expressions of these growing rivalries are sanctions, trade barriers, shifting alliances, military buildups, saber-rattling and, inevitably, wars.

That a global consensus has been disrupted is neither widely acknowledged nor accepted. But keen bourgeois observers are beginning to expose the fractures in global economic integration. Mohamed A. El-Erian, a prominent columnist for The Financial Times and Bloomberg News writes of the “cracks” in the “global policy coordination that can make the whole much larger than the sum of the parts…”. He laments how “...too many years of low and insufficiently inclusive growth… tears at the fabric of society, erodes trust in key institutions, and fuels the politics of anger.” “[S]omething deeper is going on here-- a common thread, if you like,” he opines. “And the ramifications will be accentuated by what are now widening inequalities brought about by differing growth rates and policies in advanced economies as the U.S. increasingly outpaces other economies.” (Bloomberg Businessweek, 6-11-18) The “common thread” is intensifying rivalries, a scramble to secure advantage in a global economy increasingly resembling a ‘state of nature.’

Despite the glowing US reports of booming employment, economic growth, rising wealth, and stock market euphoria, serious observers are noting the disparate economic news emanating from the reaches of the global economy. Recent Wall Street Journal headlines underline this reality: Global Growth Loses Steam, Emerging-Market Route Feeds Contagion Fear, U.S. Profit Boom Leaves Europe Behind, Growth In U.S. Leaves World Behind. With competition for fewer and fewer crumbs, the strongest, healthiest economy-- the US-- is snatching them up at the expense of its friends and allies alike. Ironically, the PRChina and Russia are the staunchest public defenders of the old order of global “cooperation,” while preparing to forge new partnerships and tactics to meet the disintegration of that order.

As Lenin wrote in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism:

...in the realities of the capitalist system… alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one is the condition for the other, giving rise to alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle out of one and the same basis of imperialist connections and the relations between world economics and world politics.

Thus, we are seeing the passing from the global “alliance” moment towards intensifying competition now contained by a regimen of sanctions, tariffs, other “peaceful” forms, and “limited” wars, but with general war looming off-stage.

Getting It Wrong

It is a mistake or a witting mischaracterization to see the break-up of the global open market consensus as merely the result of crackpot policies of Trump and his ilk. It is a serious error to associate sanctions, tariffs, and sharpening rivalries simply with the tactics of the rightwing populist parties and their partisans.

In the first place, the nationalist, protectionist policies emerging today are not rooted in policy whims or ideological dispositions alone. Instead, they are urged on by a badly performing capitalism. While the prevailing paradigm-- the globalism consensus-- has served capitalism well, generating profits and growth, it is profoundly in need of repair or replacement. The ruling class recognizes this failing and is searching for a solution, a process expressed, in one way, through the political confrontation between traditional centrist parties and upstarts.

Secondly, the struggle is trivialized and obscured if it is posed as a struggle between reaction or fascism and the forces of enlightenment or progress. Economic nationalism has no necessary ideological link to either. In the Great Depression, autarky-- economic self-sufficiency, isolationism-- was as identified with Roosevelt as it was with Hitler. The fact that the creepy politics of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, and Salvini most vigorously embrace economic nationalism is historically contingent. While the US media have portrayed Trump’s tariff-mania as an affront to economic sanity, they fail to portray the other weapons of economic nationalism-- sanctions and wars-- similarly. While the Obama administration hewed to the orthodoxy of foregoing new tariffs, it briskly accelerated the use of sanctions and war.

Thus, the sanction/tariff initiative in the US is often not a matter of pro or con, but rather who is targeted. Senator Schumer, the leading Democratic Senator and harsh critic of Trump, is not against tariffs per se. Instead, he differs from Trump only on which countries should be attacked. He is sharply critical of tariffs against NATO allies or Japan, but enthusiastic for punitive tariffs (and other maneuvers) against Russia, the PRC, Venezuela, and other rivals or perceived delinquents.

The current ZTE controversy demonstrates how economic nationalism infects both US parties. ZTE, a leading Chinese multinational telecommunications corporation, is accused of defying US sanctions against the PDRKorea and Iran. Trump, the arch-America-First warrior negotiated a $1 billion penalty and an outrageous arrangement that would make ZTE pay for a team of on-site US inspectors! This insulting affront to Chinese dignity is opposed by leading Senators of both parties who hope to go further and put ZTE completely out of business by denying it access to essential US components.

While the US ruling class may be debating how to address disappointment with the reigning paradigm, it fully understands that the US is still the world’s leading economic and imperialist power. The clash between Trump and his European counterparts is over how best to engage and expand that power with or without concessions to international cooperation.

Entrapping the Left

In the 1970s, capitalism suffered a severe crisis of inflation, stagnation, and declining profit rates. The tools that had stabilized and steered capitalism from The Great Depression until the 1970s (popularly identified with JM Keynes) proved to be largely ineffective against the particular mix of problems then afflicting the global economy. In the US, a new paradigm (rather, the revival of an older paradigm) of unfettered, unregulated markets gained political traction as an answer to that failure, first in the second half of the Carter administration, and then more intensely in the Reagan administration. By the mid-90s, the new market-centered paradigm dominated both US political parties, attained broad ideological hegemony, and reached into every crack and crevice of life in the US, from public services to cultural production. With the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries, and the reorientation of the many socialist-oriented countries, market-obsession and deregulation spread worldwide like a virus.

With a market-based answer to every problem, ruling classes began to dismantle the protective and social-maintenance structures that had been hard won by generations of working people. Market fundamentalism clashed with the very notion of social guarantees or a welfare safety net.

Understandably, the left rallied to defend these gains against the full assault on living standards. To a great extent, the left initiative was an attempt to achieve a broad popular front to defend the twentieth century victories-- limited as they were-- of the broad masses.

The left failed. It failed at great cost.

By the end of the twentieth century, every center-left political party of consequence had fully embraced market fundamentalism and had become wholly untrustworthy allies in the defensive battle against deregulation, privatization, and the evisceration of the welfare state. This left the anti-capitalist and revolutionary left to fight alone for the historical center-left program. In the US, we like to joke that this was the era when Democrats became Republicans, and socialists, even Communists, became Democrats. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party programs-- the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society -- continue to erode.

Most of the anti-capitalist and revolutionary left placed the socialist program aside in the interest of an ephemeral unity with the center-left. The option of a serious replacement of capitalism was shelved to achieve a united defense of working-class gains, a common defense that never materialized. Consequently, a generation of rebellious youth-- scorched by poverty, unemployment, underemployment, and student debt-- are searching for a radical alternative, but finding anarchism, ersatz socialism, and other miraculous potions.

We’ll Not Do that Again!

Today’s fight between the market fundamentalists, the globalists and the economic nationalists is not our fight. It is a fight over how to maximize profits and sustain capitalism. The working class has no stake in its outcome. Unlike the dismantling of the welfare state, there is no defensive battle to be waged.

Market fundamentalism and globalism were disasters for the working class, allowing capitalism to drive down the price of labor power to its historically determined cost of production and reproduction-- wages in the US have been stagnant for nearly 50 years. Economic nationalism, on the other hand, offers workers nothing but ephemeral gains at the expense of brothers and sisters in other countries or the destruction of war.

When liberal pundits attack Trump’s tariff plans they are defending profit and growth, not the working class. When Krugman, Reich, or Stiglitz defend the sanctity of unfettered global markets, they are making “trickle down” promises, promises that have not been delivered in the many decades of expansive trade growth.

And when self-styled populists offer protectionism for jobs, they are protecting corporations and not jobs; they are selling snake oil to workers while seizing competitive advantage for corporations and their CEOs.

Nothing demonstrates the shell game of economic nationalism, of protectionism, better than the machinations of generations of class collaborationist trade union leaders who latched their careers to protectionism. Preaching the approach of “identity of interest,” they became cheerleaders for corporate success. When faced with rank-and-file stirrings, they join the chorus of “unfair competition.” Joined at the hip with corporate bosses, they discover foreign countries that don’t “play by the rules.” It should not go unnoticed that US union leaders typically point to “cheaters” in predominantly non-white countries-- Japan, the RoKorea, and now the PRChina.

Eventually, this no-struggle, blame-foreigners strategy as an explanation of stagnant wages and job loss backfires. For decades, the United Steelworkers Union has blamed the plight of steelworkers on foreign steel. So now, with President Trump promising a large tariff against the largest exporter of steel to the US, USW president, Leo Gerard, is in a quandary. His union represents the steelworkers in Canada, the largest exporter of steel to the US.

“‘The steelworkers believe in tariffs. We just believe they should be brought against countries that cheat,’ Mr. Gerard said, adding that is clearly not the case with Canada.” (Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 6-13-18). Of course it is hard to square this response with the fact that PRC only accounts for 2% of US steel imports. To this, Gerard uncovers a conspiracy: PRC surreptitiously ships its steel through third-party countries, thus, “masking the real country of origin.”

If true, how would tariffs targeted directly at the PRC change the flow of disguised “cheating” steel to the US? Wouldn’t the imports still sneak through?

Gerard followed up with a lengthy op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (6-17-18) notable for its transparent appeal to crude patriotism and relentless China-bashing. As for the leading threat to the US steel and aluminum production industry, Gerard weakly reminds us that “American steel is used to make some cans in Canada that are then shipped to the United States where they are filled by American food companies.”

Hopefully, steelworkers are beginning to see this ruse designed to distract union members from the continuing rapacious exploitation of workers by the corporations.

For the left, there is, as there always has been, a third way: the fight for socialism. Those wedded to reforming capitalism and social democratic programs will, indeed must, choose between greasing the skids of global capitalism or closing the borders to foreign competition. Those are false choices for the working class. Those choices are dead ends for the left.

The struggle for socialism is neither a false choice nor a dead end.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com