Bernie, Bernie, Bernie

First off, to be quite clear, I don't like Hillary Clinton.  I don't trust Hillary Clinton, and never have.  I see Hillary Clinton, and Bill Clinton as well for that matter, as the very representation of the right-wing corporate takeover of the Democratic Party*.  I fear the very idea of Hillary Clinton as president, though not nearly so much so as the multitude of maniacs running for the Republican nomination.  I am not pro-Hillary or in any way inherently anti-Bernie.  And other, than that with his particular support amongst younger progressives, I may skew slightly older, I am generally exactly in line demographically with the majority of his supporters, and ideologically, if anything, perhaps a little to his left.  I like Bernie Sanders.  I support most of his economic proposals.  But....


So...Bernie Sanders.  I mentioned him a few times last year, including my praise of a speech he gave at Liberty University, in which I mentioned again his continuing failure to break out of his largely white support-base, a subject I had discussed in one of my earlier mentions of his candidacy also.  When I wrote the latter, I certainly never expected Sanders to still be running so strongly in the race by now, days away from the Iowa Caucus, let alone seemingly with a shot at winning the early primaries, if not the nomination for the Democratic Party for the presidency.

A lot of time has passed since then, there's been a lot of discussion amongst the pundit-classes about Sanders, there have been a few** debates and townhalls between the five, then three*** candidates on the Democratic side, and Bernie even found time to give a major speech on so-called 'Democratic Socialism' (in which he continued his apparent complete confusion between mainstream Social Democratic policy, and the attainment of a purely Socialist society, with public ownership of the means of production by democratic methods).  So much time, and perhaps the reason I haven't felt compelled to add anything here is that...my opinion of Sanders hasn't changed a jot.

I'm a little bit more optimistic with the polls coming out that some element of Sanders' Occupy Wall Street-style rhetoric and progressive economic policies could have a long-term impact on policy and direction for the Democratic party, but I still think Clinton will win the nomination, and I still can't see Sanders becoming president, even if he were to clinch the nomination, despite Clinton's monetary advantage, establishment-connections, and early lead in super-delegates.  And that's despite what is happening with the Republican nomination, currently being contested primarily between a far-right bomb-throwing theocratic ideologue, and an apparent out-and-out fascist.

I've watched Sanders give the same speech, the same talking points over and over and over again.  Wall Street, corruption, the one percent, only developed nation without universal healthcare, free college, the middle class, hard working Americans, economic inequality, fairness, too much money in politics, political revolution...  I've heard the breathless praise from his supporters, be they on Twitter or in independent media.  I've watched the fucking debates, I've seen the man's style, I've seen the large (mostly white) crowds he attracts, and I've heard over and over again how I should 'feel the Bern.'

Except I don't.  Never liked the slogan, never felt it six months to a year back, when his candidacy seemed a harmless irrelevancy, and still not feeling it now.  I still see an angry old white guy shouting platitudes at the audience, an aged social warrior whose lifelong-rhetoric happens to now, in his mid-seventies, match the popular zeitgeist of the post-Great Recession era.  I don't see a great leader, I don't see a future president, I don't see any evidence of this political revolution he wants, no matter how much enthusiasm he may inspire amongst college-students.  I don't see, perhaps more importantly, any evolution, even having gone through the protests and conflicts with Black Lives Matter protesters, of Bernie Sanders from a walking OWS-parody into a serious general-election candidate for the presidency.

It's almost as if he still doesn't quite take it seriously, close as he's getting, as if like Carly Fiorina on the Republican side, he were really running for a VP slot, or like Ben Carson or Mike Huckabee, just wanting to sell a book.  Almost, but not quite.  I think he must genuinely believe there's going to a mass uprising of Americans any time now in support of this great progressive revolution he keeps going on about.  Any time now.  As if almost half the country's electorate weren't in thrall to the right-wing radicalism of Tea Party Republicans.  As if in denial about his continuing inability to make inroads in support amongst blacks, and other peoples of colour.  As if forgetting the fact that older voters tend to have famously high turnout, and younger college-age voters notoriously low turnout.

We had a presidential candidate running on a quite progressive series of promises (some of which he has managed to keep, some not) back in 2008, with the slogan of 'Hope and Change'.  An extraordinarily well-spoken and charismatic candidate, who united white progressives, members of the Democratic establishment, blacks and Hispanics, rich and poor, the LGBT community, the young & the older.  If Barack Obama hadn't been able to assemble the broad coalition of support he did, hadn't especially been able to achieve the historically high turnout amongst black voters, what are the chances he would have got near the presidency ?  Sanders isn't remotely the charismatic unifying figure Obama managed to be back in 2008, and a coalition of young college-age progressives and white progressives simply isn't going to cut it, whatever the pollsters may say.

The right in American politics is far more motivated, far angrier, historically more likely to turn out, and likely to represent a very solid potent political bloc, unless Donald Trump manages to somehow split the party.  The growing numbers who increasingly call themselves Independents (which would include myself as it happens) are harder to gauge, but I suspect that the majority of that growth is actually amongst Tea Partiers who eschew the label 'Republican', but would never ever ever vote for a Democrat.  As for the polling again, Donald Trump especially polls badly amongst self-identified Independents, but...people lie.  People lie about their politics all the times, especially to pollsters, and especially when it comes to matters such as race, which has become the most contentious element in the current Republican fearmongering rhetoric regarding various 'Others', such as Muslims, blacks, immigrants...

I want to believe that a President Donald Trump or Ted Cruz is a fantasy, but the longer I spend in the company of American politics, and the more I know of the American people, the less surprised, the less shocked I am when there is such amazing support for extreme right-wing demagogues.****  I really wouldn't rule out a maniac like Trump or Cruz getting elected, and, especially with a Republican Congress, and the likelihood to cement right-wing control of the Supreme Court for decades to come, the result of such a presidency would be utterly disastrous for the United States, and ultimately, the whole planet.  This upcoming election frankly scares the crap out of me, even as I want to believe that Sanders' policies, if not his actual candidacy have some chance in the future of the Democratic party.  Which I desperately do.

We're still for now in primary season, but Sanders needs to be defining himself more clearly on the likes of foreign policy.  As of this moment, after all this time, I haven't a clue what kind of president Sanders would be outside of economic justice, because it's...all...he...ever...fucking...talks about.  No matter what the question, what the context, always, always, always he pivots back to his comfort zone of talking about the 99% percent versus the 1%, as if incapable of talking about anything else.*****  I get it Bernie.  I agree.  You're talking to the converted here.  But Iran, Russia, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Saudia Arabia, Turkey, China ?  The migrants ?  ISIS ?  And I'm not going to get started on Black Lives Matter and racial justice.  'Not my wheelhouse' as they say.******  The latter, not even a matter for pivoting in the near future, as GE nears, but a pivot he needed to have made months ago, given Hillary's lead amongst black and minority ethnic voters.

If Sanders is serious, truly truly serious about running for President, I'd love to see him show it.  You need black voters, Bernie, you need older voters, you need to be addressing people's concerns about foreign policy, including terrorism, need to counter Hillary's claims of superior experience with something more than 'judgement' of voting against the War in Iraq.  And you need to understand, in the United States at least, with generations of right-wing corporatist brainwashing, that saying you are going to raise peoples' taxes, but blah...blah...blah...better off in the long term isn't enough, that accusations of being a 'socialist' isn't something you can shrug off, especially as you don't seem to understand (or perhaps care) what the term even fucking means...You need to explain again and again and again, even as you try to build a case for yourself as something more than a one-trick pony, something more than a one-issue candidate.  You signed up for this shit, you brought this on yourself, and your work is cut out for you now.  This if fucking serious, and the consequences, if as the Democratic candidate, you fuck up, utterly dire for the whole world.  I was familiar with 'Occupy' Bernie's rhetoric a year ago, but you need to evolve to face the full scope of the challenges ahead of you and truly 'bring it' if you're serious about this.  I want to be convinced.  By all means, make me feel the Bern...*******



* I'm inclined to think that as for Hillary herself, she never ceased to be a Goldwater Republican (which would admittedly put her still to the left of the GOP today, so far rightwards has it slid, as Goldwater himself predicted), and merely pretended a political conversion for the sake of her marriage and her husband's political career.

** Thanks Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.  Not trying to rig the electoral process in favour of your bud. and presumptive front-runner...at...all...

*** Who are we kidding, this is a two-person race, and long has been.  Not fair, and largely a result of media-bias, but what can one do ?  Now, if only we could combine Clinton's tenacity and political acumen, with Bernie's principles, and O'Malley's personality and good looks...Damn, that would be a fearsome candidate indeed...

**** Yes, I could and would say much the same of many European countries.

***** Oh, and climate change.  We should deffo. do something about that.  Millions & millions of green jobs sprouting magically out of the ground.  A Yuuuge economic opportunity...

****** Fucking hate the expression, but seems to be the phrase du jour, at least in US culture.

******* All this said, who would I be supporting, if I were in the Iowa caucuses or New Hampshire primaries ?  Absolutely, it would be Bernie.  But I'm not the one that really needs convincing.  My support or lack thereof doesn't matter a whit.  As I said earlier, a coalition of young college-age progressives and white progressives simply isn't going to cut it.  A focus on economic inequality isn't going to do it either.  The brief half-hearted reaction to Black Lives Matter is the only time I've seen any willingness on behalf of Sanders' campaign to even try to expand beyond his core economic message.  It he wants to go all the way, it just isn't enough.




Update: Hoped to post this earlier, and almost seems inappropriate now (morning of 2-2-2016) when the result in Iowa is neck-and-neck with Hillary, but the video in question wasn't available when I checked previously.  There's much to praise about Sanders' perfomance in this interview for MSNBC, but Sanders' response to Hayes' question at 4'32 on foreign policy is a perfect example of what I was talking about.  Hayes provides Sanders an opportunity to answer the sceptics on his foreign policy credentials, and even hands him on a platter a specific topical subject: the current Saudi assault on Yemen.

Here, Sanders could have gone into detail on his opinion regarding, and proposals for dealing with that particular conflict, or any other that took his fancy.  Hell, all he really had to do was show an awareness of the situation, and he could have given us just about any generic politician-speak (oh, it's a terrible tragedy what's currently happening in Yemen...blah blah blah...complicated situation...blah blah blah diplomacy...blah blah talk with our enemies...blah blah maintaining relations with allies...blah blah).  Instead, he segues from telling us how serious an understanding of foreign policy is for any would-be president ('life and death stuff') to retreating yet again behind the defence of his 'judgement' compared to Hillary Clinton's on the vote to go to war in Iraq.

Chris Hayes is about as friendly an interviewer as could be imagined for Bernie here, and he handed Bernie a perfect opportunity to prove himself on foreign policy.  I'm sick of hearing about the Iraq War vote already.  What about Yemen ?  What about the South China Sea ?  What about Boko Haram, say ?  Pick one, not 'the many many crises that exist all over the world', dammit.

I want to believe in ya Bernie, but I've been burned before, and I'm no political naïf.  Your answer here wasn't Donald Trump-level bad, but it was similarly insubstantive.  At this stage of the campaign, your supporters, and your country deserve better.

The New Statesman on Robots & Capitalism

Laurie Penny:

Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that’s obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. “If machines produce everything we need,” Hawking wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, “everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared – or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.”

As technology advances, the question is no longer whether or not robots are coming for your job. The question is whether or not you should let them take it. 

...

We’ve seen this pattern before. In successive waves of technological innovation from the industrial revolution to the automative leaps of the 1950s, millions of working people found themselves replaced by machines that would never inconvenience their owners by getting sick or going on strike. This time, however, it’s not just working class jobs that are threatened. It seems that Robespierre was right – it’s the prospect of angry unemployed lawyers and doctors that really prompts the elite to panic, or at least to produce urgent hardbacks and suggest to major news outlets that wealth redistribution might not be such a bad idea after all.

There is little to argue with in Kaplan and Ford’s basic predictions. Whatever happens, it seems that by the time most of us reach retirement, machines will be doing far more of the jobs that nobody really wanted to do in the first place. In any sane economic system, this would be good news. No longer will millions of men and women be stuck doing boring, repetitive, often degrading work for the majority of their adult lives. That’s fantastic. Or it should be. Did you really want the job those thieving android scabs are about to take from you? Wouldn’t you rather be writing a symphony, or spending time with your kids, or plucking your nose-hair? All else being equal, don’t you have better things to do than spending most of your life marking time at work to afford the dignity of not starving?

All else, however, is very far from equal – and that’s the problem. Technology is not the problem. The only reason that the automation of routine, predictable jobs is not an unmitigated social good is that the majority of the human race depends on routine, predictable jobs, and the wages we get for them. The rioting textile workers who smashed their weaving machines in the eighteenth century did not do so because they simply loved working twelve-hour days in dangerous, dirty conditions. They did it because they had been given a stark choice between drudge work and starvation. Two hundred years after the Luddite rebellions, most of us, when you get down to it, would not work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for forty years if we had a choice – but the necessity of earning a wage gives us no other option. In fact, advanced automation should for some time have made it unnecessary for any of us to work more than a handful of hours a week, as originally foreseen generations ago by thinkers like John Maynard Keynes – but somehow, most of us are working longer hours for lower wages than our grandparents.

The problem is not technology. The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we’ve created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a single parent, an unemployed veteran or an unpaid intern – the logic of late capitalism grants you no right to live unless you are making money for someone else. If our economic system defines the basis of human worth as the capacity to do drudge work for someone else’s profit then the question that has troubled science fiction writers for a century is solved: not only are robots human, they may soon be more human than us. ...

No comment needed here really.  I had some shit written for another recent post from the New Statesman (regarding the absurd Tory policies on housing as it happens), but in this case, I don't disagree with enough of anything in this piece to even attempt a commentary.  Just read it if you haven't already.*


* Steph's take here, since I featured her cartoon: http://skewednews.net/index.php/2015/08/31/robots-step-aside-gravediggers-capitalism-still-flesh-blood-workers/

New Statesman: The retreat of social democracy

Leader: The retreat of social democracy

Throughout Europe, the populist right is becoming more acceptable to many. Meanwhile, social democrats are failing to adapt to globalisation.

...in Europe and throughout the west, social democracy is in crisis or retreat. The centre left is locked out of power in parliamentary systems in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, of course, the United Kingdom. On the Continent, the experience is the same for the centre left in Germany, the Netherlands, Portu­gal, Spain, Hungary and now also Denmark, following the defeat of the centre-left bloc, which had been led by Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

The British left once looked to Scandinavia for inspiration and guidance. “If you want the American dream – go to Finland,” Ed Miliband observed. Yet Finland turfed out its centre-left coalition two months ago; three of the four Nordic countries now face being run by governments of the right. Only in Sweden is the centre left in power.

When Mr Miliband was elected as Labour leader in 2010, he was convinced that the world would turn left after the financial crisis. He gambled his entire leadership on this belief (and it was no more than that) – and he lost. Voters were certainly disturbed by widening inequality but just as important were desires for fiscal rectitude, balanced budgets and tighter controls on immigration.

The mainstream centre left has also produced an anaemic response to the rise of identity politics. It is true that parties of the radical left – such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain – have capitalised on a general mood of disenchantment but, significantly, both are Eurosceptic. More frequently, nationalism has been channelled by the mainstream centre right as well as populist insurgencies. Indeed, it was the rise of the right-wing Danish People’s Party – a Scandinavian version of the UK Independence Party – that contributed significantly to the defeat of the centre-left bloc in Denmark.

Throughout Europe, the populist right is becoming more acceptable to many. Meanwhile, social democrats are suffer­ing from what the political scientist Peter Mair termed “indifference on the part of both the citizenry and the ­political class: they are withdrawing and disengaging from one another”. To many voters, the feeling of solidarity between fellow citizens so crucial to social democracy has become increasingly meaningless in an age of globalised mass migration: parties of the centre left have failed to adapt to globalisation and the collapse in trade union membership. Most fundamentally, they have not convincingly answered the existential question of what the left is for when parties of both left and right are committed to cutting public spending.

Yah.  Which speaks to both the more left-leaning parties' failings on questions of immigration, and the perennial threat of nationalistic appeals against the vaguely defined 'other' undermining more progressive appeals to unite the have-nots against the haves.  Increasingly, Europe, if not the Western world generally, seems poised to re-live the 1930's.  And if you're not scared, you're probably not paying attention.

Last Words on Labour for a While...I Hope

Lots of people giving (mostly unwanted) advice to the Labour Party in the UK Media.  So I'll join the club and throw in my two penneth...Just make up your fucking minds already.

Are you the party of the working classes or not ?  Are you a socialist party, a social democratic party, a liberal party, or, as all the evidence would suggest, a wolf in sheep's clothing: a Right-wing party pretending at still having some vague slightly left-of-centre connections.

Either:

1. Just join the Tories already and have done with it.
2. Embrace fully your nominal socialist roots (and yes, quite possibly electoral oblivion)
3. Join the Lib-Dems in trying to resurrect the party of opposition that once was. *
4. Create an entirely new political party...or
5. Resign from politics and shut the fuck up.

You already shat all over multiple generations of Labour-supporters in the Blair/Brown era.  Now you seem determined to convince a new generation of an ever-more vague 'middle way' in which you  from day-to-day somehow represent some hypothetical slightly left-of-whatever-the-Tories-currently-espouse politics, and, you know what....it will fail.  You will fail.  It is pointless.  You, increasingly, are pointless.  If you don't like the name of your party, change it; Or better yet, just change parties.

For Jeremy Corbyn, choice two would seem obvious.

For the rest of the candidates for leadership, were they honest, and not terrified at what that might do for their careers, I'd guess at choice one for the lot.  Were they decent human beings, perhaps choice five.  Were they truly committed to principles rather than political power, maybe choices three or four.

Oh, and for the record, no, I am not a Labourite.  Poor Ed is the closest I ever came, and at this rate, the closest I ever will.  And my personal choice of those I posted above, would...I have to say, however reluctantly, be number three.  The forces of (to use slightly inflammatory language) anti-fascist resistance in British politics have been divided for far too long.  And the term 'fascist' is looking ever less hyperbolic what with the hyper-nationalism, the constant othering of minorities, the renewed snoopers' charter, the indefinite detentions, the torture, the endless war, the corrupt corporate influence, the abuses in the name of the so-called 'war on terror', and so on.

There.  Said my fill.  Now, I'll shut up.**


* Actually, attracting the generally populist but anti-immigrant-supporters of UKIP might be your biggest challenge in said hypothetical coalition.

** Well, on just that subject, obviously...

That Tax-Haven Trolling in the Telegraph

Far be it from me to suggest the central paradox of leftism, but the recent election campaign seemed to highlight it better than ever. If you believe so passionately in the redistribution of wealth, shouldn’t you also believe in the creation of some wealth to redistribute? But Labour knows that would defeat its fundamental object of building a client state that would obediently vote for it. If you have policies that encourage wealth creation, you encourage job creation, and a rise in real earnings. Then you don’t need a massive welfare state, and you end up with a clientele too small to be politically effective. Simples, as the meerkat says.

...

Even the Tory party believes in redistribution of wealth – if it didn’t it would be unable to fund the NHS, state schools, care services and welfare provision that a civilised society requires....

Erm, there's honest ideological purity, and then there's just blatant lying.

...And you only raise the money to fund those services by having successful businesses that pay taxes and put millions of people in work.

It is time to become aggressive about this point, even though the election is won, because it is fundamental to the difference between conservatism and socialism; and it is not appreciated enough by a public for whom the narcotic spell of the welfare state has yet to be thoroughly broken. Again, it is simple. You don’t tax a loss. You only tax a profit. If you want to raise revenue, business has to be profitable. If you want to cut public spending, business has to be profitable too, because when it is making money it adds people to its payroll.

...

Mr Osborne should raise the 40 per cent tax threshold considerably this year, and every year of this parliament. Currently 4.6m people pay 40p in the pound, and the present threshold is £41,900. HM Revenue and Customs forecast that even if the threshold reached £50,000 by 2020 an additional 900,000 people would be paying it. This is a brake on aspiration and enterprise. It is also a brake on incentive and therefore on productivity, and low productivity is the most poisonous problem in our economy today. He should also abolish the 45p rate, which raises hardly any extra revenue but gives enormous amounts of work to accountants, and take as many low-paid people out of taxation as possible, to encourage their aspiration.

Some public spending is always necessary. But it is not a good in itself. The state has fundamental responsibilities, but providing employment for the masses is not one of them.

...

Indeed, I can’t see what is wrong with making the whole country a tax haven: for I have yet to visit a tax haven where the people are mired in poverty. If Mr Osborne makes that his aim for July 8, he won’t go far wrong.

This piece by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph is fairly blatant Tory Trolling, complete with all the expected requisite buzzwords.  But it does rather beg the question: What if the City, the part of the economy with which Heffer is presumably most enamoured, were itself, alone to become a separate country ?  It already acts virtually as a haven from tax, law, and decency, with the inconvenience of having to drag the long tails of regular England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland behind it.

The new tax-haven city-state would lose guaranteed access to the outside workforce, infrastructure, and so on, but might soon be attracting ever more criminal plutocratic elements away from places such as Switzerland and the far-east.  And the remaining UK, (with or without Scotland, and minus the all-destroying black-hole that is central London, why not, with ?) would have to get over the short-term tax-losses from the City, in so far as such taxes were being paid in the first place, but might learn again what it is to build a real economy -- One based upon the creation & sale of actual physical goods and real (legal) services, rather than the manipulation by corrupt bankers & traders of mere digits in a database.  And one dedicated to the employment, the welfare, and betterment of all its citizens, and not just the get-ahead-at-any-costs City-strivers with the club tie, the firm handshake, and the knife always at the ready.*

It might be a better future for everyone in question.


* Pink Floyd, obvs.  http://www.metrolyrics.com/dogs-lyrics-pink-floyd.html  Although not also finding a way to mention the 'Pigs' in the same sentence rather spoils the metaphor perhaps.

Is Labour Listening to This ?

A fine speech from the unofficial opposition in Westminster, by a former member of the Labour party.