Acá va una muy
linda nota del economista Michael Hudson (foto) publicada hoy en el sitio web
Information Clearing House. El tema de fondo es la ausencia total de
alternativas realistas al estalinismo neoliberal imperante en el Imperio. Acá
va:
Título: Wall
Street First
Texto: Nobody yet
can tell whether Donald Trump is an agent of change with a specific policy in
mind, or merely a catalyst heralding an as yet undetermined turning point. His
first month in the White House saw him melting into the Republican mélange of
corporate lobbyists. Having promised to create jobs, his “America First” policy
looks more like “Wall Street First.”
His cabinet of
billionaires promoting corporate tax cuts, deregulation and dismantling
Dodd-Frank bank reform repeats the Junk Economics promise that giving more tax
breaks to the richest One Percent may lead them to use their windfall to invest
in creating more jobs. What they usually do, of course, is simply buy more
property and assets already in place.
One of the first
reactions to Trump’s election victory was for stocks of the most crooked
financial institutions to soar, hoping for a deregulatory scythe taken to the
public sector. Navient, the Department of Education’s knee-breaker on student
loan collections accused by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) of
massive fraud and overcharging, rose from $13 to $18 after it seemed likely
that the incoming Republicans would disable the CFPB and shine a green light
for financial fraud.
Foreclosure king
Stephen Mnuchin of IndyMac/OneWest (and formerly of Goldman Sachs for 17 years;
later a George Soros partner) is now Treasury Secretary – and Trump pledged to
abolish the CFPB, on the specious logic that letting fraudsters manage pension
savings and other investments will give consumers and savers “broader choice,”
e.g., for the financial equivalent of junk food.
Secretary of
Education Betsy DeVos hopes to privatize public education into for-profit (and
de-unionized) charter schools, breaking the teachers’ unions. This may position
Trump to become the Transformational President that neoliberals have been
waiting for.
But not the
neocons. His election rhetoric promised to reverse traditional U.S.
interventionist policy abroad. Making an anti-war left run around the
Democrats, he promised to stop backing ISIS/Al Nusra (President Obama’s
“moderate” terrorists supplied with the arms and money that Hillary looted from
Libya), and to reverse the Obama-Clinton administration’s New Cold War with
Russia. But the neocon coterie at the CIA and State Department are undercutting
his proposed rapprochement with Russia by forcing out General Flynn for
starters. It seems doubtful that Trump will clean them out.
Trump has called
NATO obsolete, but insists that its members increase their spending to the
stipulated 2% of GDP — producing a windfall worth tens of billions of dollars
for U.S. arms exporters. That is to be the price Europe must pay if it wants to
endorse Germany’s and the Baltics’ confrontation with Russia.
Trump is
sufficiently intuitive to proclaim the euro a disaster, and he recommends that
Greece leave it. He supports the rising nationalist parties in Britain, France,
Italy, Greece and the Netherlands, all of which urge withdrawal from the
eurozone – and reconciliation with Russia instead of sanctions. In place of the
ill-fated TPP and TTIP, Trump advocates country-by-country trade deals favoring
the United States. Toward this end, his designated ambassador to the European
Union, Ted Malloch, urges the EU’s breakup. The EU is refusing to accept him as
ambassador.
Will Trump’s
victory break up the Democratic Party?
At the time this
volume is going to press, there is no way of knowing how successful these
international reversals will be. What is clearer is Trump’s political impact at
home. His victory – or more accurately, Hillary’s resounding loss and the way
she lost – has encouraged enormous pressure for a realignment of both parties.
Regardless of what President Trump may achieve vis-à-vis Europe, his actions as
celebrity chaos agent may break up U.S. politics across the political spectrum.
The Democratic
Party has lost its ability to pose as the party of labor and the middle class.
Firmly controlled by Wall Street and California billionaires, the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) strategy of identity politics encourages any identity
except that of wage earners. The candidates backed by the Donor Class have been
Blue Dogs who pledged to promote Wall Street alongside neocons urging a New
Cold War with Russia.
They preferred to
lose with Hillary than to win behind Bernie Sanders. So Trump’s electoral
victory is their legacy as well as Obama’s. Instead of Trump’s victory
dispelling that strategy, the Democrats are doubling down. It is as if identity
politics is all they have.
Trying to ride on
Barack Obama’s coattails didn’t work. Promising “hope and change,” he won by
posing as a transformational president, leading the Democrats to control of the
White House, Senate and Congress in 2008. Swept into office by a national
reaction against the George Bush’s Iraq Oil War and the junk-mortgage crisis
that left the economy debt-ridden, they had free rein to pass whatever new laws
they chose – even a Public Option in health care if they had wanted, or make
Wall Street banks absorb the losses from their bad and often fraudulent loans.
But it turned out
that Obama’s role was to prevent the changes that voters hoped to see, and
indeed that the economy needed to recover: financial reform, debt writedowns to
bring junk mortgages in line with fair market prices, and throwing crooked
bankers in jail. Obama rescued the banks, not the economy, and turned over the
Justice Department and regulatory agencies to his Wall Street campaign
contributors. He did not even pull back from war in the Near East, but extended
it to Libya and Syria, blundering into the Ukrainian coup as well.
Having dashed the
hopes of his followers, Obama then praised his chosen successor
Hillary Clinton
as his “Third Term.” Enjoying this kiss of death, Hillary promised to keep up
Obama’s policies.
The straw that
pushed voters over the edge was when she asked voters, “Aren’t you better off
today than you were eight years ago?” Who were they going to believe: their
eyes, or Hillary’s? National income statistics showed that only the top 5
percent of the population were better off. All the growth in Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) during Obama’s tenure went to them – the Donor Class that had
gained control of the Democratic Party leadership.
Real incomes have
fallen for the remaining 95 percent. Household budgets have been further eroded
by soaring charges for health insurance. (The Democratic leadership in Congress
fought tooth and nail to block Dennis Kucinich from introducing his Single
Payer proposal.)
No wonder most of
the geographic United States voted for change – except for where the top 5
percent is concentrated: in New York (Wall Street) and California (Silicon
Valley and the military-industrial complex). Making fun of the Obama
Administration’s slogan of “hope and change,” Trump characterized Hillary’s
policy of continuing the economy’s shrinkage for the 95% as “no hope and no
change.”
Identity Politics
as anti-labor politics
A new term was
introduced to the English language: Identity Politics. Its aim is for voters to
think of themselves as separatist minorities – women, LGBTQ, Blacks and
Hispanics. The Democrats thought they could beat Trump by organizing Women for
Wall Street (and a New Cold War), LGBTQ for Wall Street (and a New Cold War),
and Blacks and Hispanics for Wall Street (and a New Cold War). Each identity
cohort was headed by a billionaire or hedge fund donor.
The identity that
is conspicuously excluded is the working class. Identity politics strips away thinking
of one’s interest in terms of having to work for a living. It excludes voter
protests against having their monthly paycheck stripped to pay more for health
insurance, housing and mortgage charges or education, better working conditions
or consumer protection – not to speak of protecting debtors.
Identity politics
used to be about three major categories: workers and unionization, anti-war
protests and civil rights marches against racist Jim Crow laws. These were the
three objectives of the many nationwide demonstrations. That ended when these
movements got co-opted into the Democratic Party. Their reappearance in Bernie
Sanders’ campaign in fact threatens to tear the Democratic coalition apart. As
soon as the primaries were over (duly stacked against Sanders), his followers
were made to feel unwelcome. Hillary sought Republican support by denouncing
Sanders as being as radical as Putin’s Republican leadership.
In contrast to
Sanders’ attempt to convince diverse groups that they had a common denominator
in needing jobs with decent pay – and, to achieve that, opposing Wall Street’s
replacing the government as central planner – the Democrats depict every
identity constituency as being victimized by every other, setting themselves at
each other’s heels. Clinton strategist John Podesta, for instance, encouraged
Blacks to accuse Sanders supporters of distracting attention from racism.
Pushing a common economic interest between whites, Blacks, Hispanics and LGBTQ
always has been the neoliberals’ nightmare.
No wonder they
tried so hard to stop Bernie Sanders, and are maneuvering to keep his
supporters from gaining influence in their party.
When Trump was
inaugurated on Friday, January 20, there was no pro-jobs or anti-war
demonstration. That presumably would have attracted pro-Trump supporters in an
ecumenical show of force. Instead, the Women’s March on Saturday led even the
pro-Democrat New York Times to write a front-page article reporting that white
women were complaining that they did not feel welcome in the demonstration. The
message to anti-war advocates, students and Bernie supporters was that their
economic cause was a distraction.
The march was
typically Democratic in that its ideology did not threaten the Donor Class. As
Yves Smith wrote on Naked Capitalism:
“the track record
of non-issue-oriented marches, no matter how large scale, is poor, and the
status of this march as officially sanctioned (blanket media coverage when
other marches of hundreds of thousands of people have been minimized, police
not tricked out in their usual riot gear) also indicates that the officialdom
does not see it as a threat to the status quo.”[1]
Hillary’s loss
was not blamed on her neoliberal support for TPP or her pro-war neocon stance,
but on the revelations of the e-mails by her operative Podesta discussing his
dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders (claimed to be given to Wikileaks by
Russian hackers, not a domestic DNC leaker as Wikileaks claimed) and the FBI
investigation of her e-mail abuses at the State Department. Backing her
supporters’ attempt to brazen it out, the Democratic Party has doubled down on
its identity politics, despite the fact that an estimated 52 percent of white
women voted for Trump. After all, women do work for wages. And that also is
what Blacks and Hispanics want – in addition to banking that serves their
needs, not those of Wall Street, and health care that serves their needs, not
those of the health-insurance and pharmaceuticals monopolies.
Bernie did not
choose to run on a third-party ticket. Evidently he feared being accused of
throwing the election to Trump. The question is now whether he can remake the
Democratic Party as a democratic socialist party, or create a new party if the
Donor Class retains its neoliberal control. It seems that he will not make a
break until he concludes that a Socialist Party can leave the Democrats as far
back in the dust as the Republicans left the Whigs after 1854. He may have
underestimated his chance in 2016.
Trump’s effect on
U.S. political party realignment
During Trump’s
rise to the 2016 Republican nomination it seemed that he was more likely to
break up the Republican Party. Its leading candidates and gurus warned that his
populist victory in the primaries would tear the party apart. The polls in May
and June showed him defeating Hillary Clinton easily (but losing to Bernie
Sanders). But Republican leaders worried that he would not support what they
believed in: namely, whatever corporate lobbyists put in their hands to enact
and privatize.
The May/June
polls showed Trump and Clinton were the country’s two most unpopular
presidential candidates. But whereas the Democrats maneuvered Bernie out of the
way, the Republican Clown Car was unable to do the same to Trump. In the end
they chose to win behind him, expecting to control him. As for the DNC, its
Wall Street donors preferred to lose with Hillary than to win with Bernie.
They wanted to
keep control of their party and continue the bargain they had made with the
Republicans: The latter would move further and further to the right, leaving
room for Democratic neoliberals and neocons to follow them closely, yet still
pose as the “lesser evil.” That “centrism” is the essence of the Clintons’
“triangulation” strategy. It actually has been going on for a half-century. “As
Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere quipped in the 1960s, when he was accused by
the US of running a one-party state, ‘The United States is also a one-party
state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them’.”[2]
By 2017, voters
had caught on to this two-step game. But Hillary’s team paid pollsters over $1
billion to tell her (“Mirror, mirror on the wall …”) that she was the most
popular of all. It was hubris to imagine that she could convince the 95 Percent
of the people who were worse off under Obama to love her as much as her
East-West Coast donors did. It was politically unrealistic – and a reflection
of her cynicism – to imagine that raising enough money to buy television ads
would convince working-class Republicans to vote for her, succumbing to a
Stockholm Syndrome by thinking of themselves as part of the 5 Percent who had
benefited from Obama’s pro-Wall Street policies.
Hillary’s
election strategy was to make a right-wing run around Trump. While
characterizing the working class as white racist “deplorables,” allegedly
intolerant of LBGTQ or assertive women, she resurrected the ghost of Joe
McCarthy and accused Trump of being “Putin’s poodle” for proposing peace with
Russia. Among the most liberal Democrats, Paul Krugman still leads a biweekly
charge at The New York Times that President Trump is following Moscow’s orders.
Saturday Night
Live, Bill Maher and MSNBC produce weekly skits that Trump and General Flynn
are Russian puppets. A large proportion of Democrats have bought into the fairy
tale that Trump didn’t really win the election, but that Russian hackers
manipulated the voting machines. No wonder George Orwell’s 1984 soared to the
top of America’s best-seller lists in February 2017 as Donald Trump was taking
his oath of office.
This propaganda
paid off on February 13, when neocon public relations succeeded in forcing the
resignation of General Flynn, whom Trump had appointed to clean out the neocons
at the NSA and CIA. His foreign policy initiative based on rapprochement with
Russia to create a common front against ISIS/Al Nusra seems to be collapsing.
Tabula Rasa
Celebrity Politics
U.S. presidential
elections are no longer much about policy. Like Obama before him, Trump campaigned
as a rasa tabla, a vehicle for everyone to project their hopes and fancies.
What has all but disappeared is the past century’s idea of politics as a
struggle between labor and capital, democracy vs. oligarchy.
Who would have
expected even half a century ago that American politics would become so
post-modern that the idea of class conflict has all but disappeared. Classical
economic discourse has been drowned out by junk economics.
There is a covert
economic program, to be sure, and it is bipartisan. It is to make elections
about just which celebrities will introduce neoliberal economic policies with
the most convincing patter talk. That is the essence of rasa tabla politics.
Can the Democrats
lose again in 2020?
Trump’s November
victory showed that voters found him to be the Lesser Evil, but all that voters
really could express was “throw out the bums” and get a new set of lobbyists
for the FIRE sector and corporate monopolists. Both candidates represented
Goldman Sachs and Wall Street. No wonder voter turnout has continued to plunge.
Although the
Democrats’ Lesser Evil argument lost to the Republicans in 2016, the
neoliberals in control of the DNC found the absence of a progressive economic
program to less threatening to their interests than the critique of Wall Street
and neocon interventionism coming from the Sanders camp. So the Democrat will
continue to pose as the Lesser Evil party not really in terms of policy, but
simply ad hominum. They will merely repeat Hillary’s campaign stance: They are
not Trump.
Their parades and
street demonstrations since his inauguration have not come out for any economic
policy.
On Friday,
February 10, the party’s Democratic Policy group held a retreat for its members
in Baltimore. Third Way “centrists” (Republicans running as Democrats)
dominated, with Hillary operatives in charge. The conclusion was that no party
policy was needed at all.
“President Trump
is a better recruitment tool for us than a central campaign issue,’ said
Washington Rep. Denny Heck, who is leading recruitment for the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).”[3]
But what does
their party leadership have to offer women, Blacks and Hispanics in the way of
employment, more affordable health care, housing or education and better pay?
Where are the New Deal pro-labor, pro-regulatory roots of bygone days? The
party leadership is unwilling to admit that Trump’s message about protecting
jobs and opposing the TPP played a role in his election. Hillary was suspected
of supporting it as “the gold standard” of trade deals, and Obama had made the
Trans-Pacific Partnership the centerpiece of his presidency – the free-trade
TPP and TTIP that would have taken economic regulatory policy out of the hands
of government and given it to corporations.
Instead of
accepting even Sanders’ centrist-left stance, the Democrats’ strategy was to
tar Trump as pro-Russian, insisting his aides had committed impeachable
offenses, and mount one parade after another. “Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio told
reporters she was wary of focusing solely on an “economic message” aimed at
voters whom Trump won over in 2016, because, in her view, Trump did not win on
an economic message. “What Donald Trump did was address them at a very
different level — an emotional level, a racial level, a fear level,” she said.
“If all we talk about is the economic message, we’re not going to win.”[4]
This stance led
Sanders supporters to walk out of a meeting organized by the “centrist” Third
Way think tank on Wednesday, February 8.
By now this is an
old story. Fifty years ago, socialists such as Michael Harrington asked why
union members and progressives still imagined that they had to work through the
Democratic Party. It has taken the rest of the country half a century to see
that Democrats are not the party of the working class, unions, middle class,
farmers or debtors. They are the party of Wall Street privatizers, bank
deregulators, neocons and the military-industrial complex. Obama showed his
hand – and that of his party – in his passionate attempt to ram through the
corporatist TPP treaty that would have enabled corporations to sue governments
for any costs imposed by public consumer protection, environmental protection
or other protection of the population against financialized corporate
monopolies.
Against this
backdrop, Trump’s promises and indeed his worldview seem quixotic. The picture
of America’s future he has painted seems unattainable within the foreseeable
future. It is too late to bring manufacturing back to the United States,
because corporations already have shifted their supply nodes abroad, and too
much U.S. infrastructure has been dismantled.
There can’t be a
high-speed railroad, because it would take more than four years to get the
right-of-way and create a route without crossing gates or sharp curves. In any
case, the role of railroads and other transportation has been to increase real
estate prices along the routes. But in this case, real estate would be torn
down – and having a high-speed rail does not increase land values.
The stock market
has soared to new heights, anticipating lower taxes on corporate profits and a
deregulation of consumer, labor and environmental protection. Trump may end up
as America’s Boris Yeltsin, protecting U.S. oligarchs (not that Hillary would
have been different, merely cloaked in a more colorful identity rainbow). The
U.S. economy is in for Shock Therapy. Voters should look to Greece to get a
taste of the future in this scenario.
Without a
coherent response to neoliberalism, Trump’s billionaire cabinet may do to the
United States what neoliberals in the Clinton administration did to Russia
after 1991: tear out all the checks and balances, and turn public wealth over
to insiders and oligarchs. So Trump’s best chance to be transformative is
simply to be America’s Yeltsin for his party’s oligarchic backers, putting the
class war back in business.
What a truly
transformative president would do/would have done
No administration
can create a sound U.S. recovery without dealing with the problem that caused
the 2008 crisis in the first place: over-indebtedness. The only one way to
restore growth, raise living standards and make the economy competitive again
is a debt writedown. But that is not yet on the political horizon. Obama’s
doublecross of his voters in 2009 prevented the needed policy from occurring.
Having missed this chance in the last financial crisis, a progressive policy
must await yet another crisis. But so far, no political party is preparing a
program to juxtapose the Republican-Democratic austerity and scale-back of
Social Security, Medicare and social spending programs.
Also no longer on
the horizon is a more progressive income tax, or a public option for health
care – or for banking, or consumer protection against financial fraud, or for a
$15-an-hour minimum wage, or for a revived protection of labor’s right to
unionize. Or environmental regulations.
It seems that
only a new party can achieve these aims. At the time these essays are going to
press, Sanders has committed himself to working within the Democratic Party.
But that stance is based on his assumption that somehow he can recruit enough
activists to take over the party from Its Donor Class.
I suspect he will
fail. In any case, it is easier to begin afresh than to try to re-design a
party (or any institution) dominated by resistance to change, and whose idea of
economic growth is a pastiche of tax cuts and deregulation. Both U.S. parties
are committed to this neoliberal program – and seek to blame foreign enemies
for the fact that its effect is to continue squeezing living standards and
bloating the financial sector.
If this slow but
inexorable crash does lead to a political crisis, it looks like the Republicans
may succeed in convening a new Constitutional Convention (many states already
have approved this) to lock the United States into a corporatist neoliberal
world. Its slogan will be that of Margaret Thatcher: TINA – There Is No
Alternative.
And who is to
disagree? As Trotsky said, fascism is the result of the failure of the left to
provide an alternative.
Notas:
[1] Yves Smith,
“Women Skeptical of the Women’s March,” Naked Capitalism, February 10, 2017.
[2] Radhika
Desai, “Decoding Trump,” Counterpunch, February 10, 2017.
[3] “Pelosi
denies Democrats are divided on strategy for 2018,” Yahoo News, February 10,
2018.
[4] ibid
