The Failure of the New McCarthyism

Yesterday was a big news day. Italy's constitutional overhaul was handily defeated at the polls, prompting premier Matteo Renzi to say that he will tender his resignation today; the Standing Rock Sioux triumphed, at least temporarily, in blocking the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from being routed beneath a dammed section of the Missouri River; and the Freedom Party underwhelmed Austrian voters, failing to unseat Alexander Van der Bellen in a do-over of last spring's presidential election.

All good news, I would say, though it is a little troubling to read (Jack Healy and Nicholas Fandos, "Army Blocks Drilling of Dakota Access Oil Pipeline") that Dave Archambault is telling all the water protectors to pack up and go home:

“It’s wonderful,” Dave Archambault II, the Standing Rock tribal chairman, told cheering supporters who stood in the melting snow on a mild North Dakota afternoon. “You all did that. Your presence has brought the attention of the world.”

The decision, he said, meant that people no longer had to stay at the camp during North Dakota’s brutal winter. The Corps of Engineers, which manages the land, had ordered it to be closed, but the thousands of protesters had built yurts, tepees and bunkhouses and vowed to hunker down.

“It’s time now that we move forward,” Mr. Archambault said. “We don’t have to stand and endure this hard winter. We can spend the winter with our families.”

Clearly the Army can reverse itself, and is likely to do so, once Trump gets into office. Many are promising to stay camped through the winter. But if the chairman of the tribe wants people to go home, that puts the water protectors at odds with their host.

This victory was won because of the robust numbers the indigenous peoples were able to marshal, the coup de grace being the arrival of the veterans. Now, the camp will shrink, and in a month or two, there will be a nighttime raid, a la NYPD of Occupy Wall Street, and that, very likely, will be that.

An interesting aspect of Renzi's flame-out is that in the run-up to Sunday's referendum he resorted to the Fake News playbook, accusing the "no" camp of spreading Russian-inspired false stories to gain advantage at the polls. Jason Horowitz's "Spread of Fake News Provokes Anxiety in Italy" is case in point (Horowitz is one of the reporters that NYT assigned to do hatchet jobs on Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary):

As early as April, Mr. Renzi complained privately to his counterparts about Russia meddling in his country’s politics by supporting anti-establishment parties.

In November, he privately discussed the spread of fake news with other European leaders and President Obama at a meeting in Berlin. Mr. Obama forcefully assailed the phenomenon while standing beside Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who has warned of Russian misinformation campaigns that “could play a role” in her own re-election bid.

Mr. Renzi’s private concerns were relayed by several current and former officials with knowledge of the conversations who were not authorized to speak publicly.

His biggest domestic opponent has been the surging and anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which would benefit most should he lose Sunday’s referendum on streamlining Italy’s bureaucracy.

Laura Boldrini, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, said she had no information about whether the Five Star Movement trafficked in fake news or promulgated Russian propaganda. But she did say it was a growing problem in Italy.

“Fake news is a critical issue and we can’t ignore it,” she said this week. “We have to act now.”

On Wednesday, Ms. Boldrini met with Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy in Europe, to discuss ways Facebook could limit hate speech and fake news on its pages.

“They can’t pretend that they are just a platform,” Ms. Boldrini said. “They are giant media companies.”

Buzzfeed and the Italian newspaper La Stampa recently reported that blogs, social media accounts and websites in Russia connected to the Five Star Movement were spreading fake news harmful to Mr. Renzi across their vast virtual networks.

Russia has long had close relations with Italy, especially under Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister and media tycoon who was a personal friend of Mr. Putin.

The story goes on to paint the Five Star Movement (M5S) as Kremlin dupes.

Fake News is a sure sign of the weakness and desperation that has taken hold of the neoliberal ruling class. Absent any proof that dire warnings about Fake News are effective in keeping voters aligned with a bankrupt neoliberal orthodoxy, the New McCarthyism has spread from Washington to Rome and Berlin.

My sense is that the New McCarthyism will soon have to be scrapped. It is not working; worse still, it is generating a significant push-back.

Say Goodbye to the Unipolar World: The End of Neoliberal Orthodoxy as We Know It

This Sunday two big votes will take place in Europe: Italy's constitutional referendum, and a do-over in Austria of last spring's presidential election. A "no" vote in Italy combined with a win by Norbert Hofer and his far-right Freedom Party will provide further proof of a rising populist tide in Europe that is swamping the old, almost completely discredited governing neoliberal orthodoxy.

An editorial yesterday in The New York Times, "Italy's Turn to Vote," pleads with Renzi to stay on as prime minister (he has promised to resign) if the constitutional referendum fails. The failure of the referendum -- which basically does away with the senate, making it easier to ram through structural adjustments in labor and tax law (the standard neoliberal "Washington Consensus" playbook) -- appears to be inevitable.

A piece in The Guardian yesterday, "Italy referendum: all you need to know about Renzi's crunch vote," summarizes:

You seem to be predicting that Renzi is going to lose. Are you sure?No. But almost all of the available polls show Renzi is behind and the country seems to be fed up with him. You never know, though: a whole host of factors, including a simmering scandal in Sicily about M5S, could diminish turnout for no and hand Renzi a victory. He could also get overwhelming support from up to 4 million Italian voters abroad, which could tip the scales in his favour in a close election. It just seems unlikely.

If he does lose and there is a new election, would M5S win?
There is a strong chance M5S could win based on current polls, but it is not a certainty. The party’s lack of experience could give Italians pause. One senator, Francesco Palermo, thinks that whoever wins – including M5S – would be far to the right of Renzi, putting much more pressure on Italy’s relationship with the EU, and probably leading to big changes in the country’s handling of the migration crisis.

Some of Italy’s biggest banks are in bad shape. How will the referendum affect the banking sector?There is increasing alarm that the political upheaval created by a potential no victory would disrupt plans to recapitalise Italy’s most troubled banks, including Banca Monte dei Paschi of Siena. Shares in Italy’s beleaguered banking sector are down more than 20% since Brexit, in large part because investors are worried about the outcome.

The failure of Renzi is an important moment in the collapse of neoliberalism. Renzi was once the great young hope to reanimate hoary neoliberal shibboleths such as "creative destruction," "competitiveness," etc. (See the Council of Foreign Relation's "A Conversation with Matteo Renzi.") If Renzi loses Sunday, coming at the same time that a lamed Obama vacates the White House and that Justin Trudeau has just approved the expansion of a massive pipeline to transport Alberta tar sands to British Columbia, there will be no telegenic pitchman left to front the neoliberal orthodoxy.

What is to be done?

The elite are desperate. They see no path forward. Europe tucked firmly under the wing of the American eagle is how U.S. global hegemony works. Brexit is a slow-motion crisis for Pax Americana; likewise Trump. The New McCarythism and wails about "fake news" are a "back to the future" Hail Mary to keep the revolting masses fenced in on the neoliberal reservation while the media monopoly hemorrhages ad revenue month in and month out. (The only business model that makes sense for the big daily newspapers is government subsidy.)

The bottom will drop out this spring in France. In a way it already has. The Socialists, who hold their presidential primary in January, are kaput. This means that with the nomination of Francois Fillon last Sunday, the runoff will almost certainly feature two candidates -- Fillon and Marine Le Pen -- who favor ending trade sanctions against Russia.

The U.S. engineered coup in Kiev, part of a strategy to block Germany's Ostpolitik integration of Russian into Europe, can be declared a failure. Say goodbye to the unipolar world.

Five Star Movement + How Much Time Left for the Dominant Paradigm, Six Years or Six Decades?

With Hillary being feted this morning as the likely Democratic nominee for president, it might help to cast a glance elsewhere for hope. Good news comes from Italy.  The Five Star Movement's mayoral candidate in Rome, 37-year-old lawyer Virginia Raggi, is polling ahead after the first round of voting.

At about the same time Syriza was rising in Greece, the Five Star Movement (M5S) was on the ascent in Italy. Led by comedian and blogger Beppe Grillo, the new party seemed like the best hope in 2013 for exploding the Brussels hive mind.

Then Syriza captivated the media and the political left; this, combined with M5S's underwhelming showing in 2014 elections for the European Parliament, moved the party off the front burner.

Now -- after the spectacular failure of Syriza, the diffident performance of Spain's Podemos, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe (Austria's Freedom Party is challenging May's election loss), the triumph of the corporate media behemoth over Bernie Sanders' millennials, and many other disappointments -- besides the Scottish National Party, there seems little to celebrate in terms of elections in the West, other than the Five Star Movement. The Brexit vote coming up is a big deal. But the left is split on whether to stay in the EU or go. (I say go.)

I ask people I know who pay attention to the news the following question -- "How much longer can the dominant neoliberal paradigm last?" Everyone so far has replied, "A lot longer." Tariq Ali agrees.

The basic question as I frame it is "Six or 60?" Does the corporate-dominated predatory capitalist system which is vacuuming up all the wealth to the top of the pyramid and destroying the planet survive for six years, say early to middle 2020s, or six decades, at which time many agree that the effects of climate change -- sea-level rise and acidifying oceans -- will demand a huge, paradigm-shifting coordinated response?

The reason I favor the near-term shift is I can't see how the present system lasts beyond four years. First off, the party system throughout the West is collapsing. Granted, charismatic, rejuvenating leadership championing popular policies could rise from within the discredited mainstream Christian Democrats, Labourites, Tories, Socialists and Tea Party Republicans, but there is zero evidence for this. So sooner rather than later a minor party will rise to the top and lead, successfully or not, in such a way that it will create a fissure in the dominant paradigm. If not a Brexit on June 23, then Marine Le Pen in 2017 or Alternative for Germany. An EU subservient to U.S. global hegemony becomes much harder to imagine.

Secondly, the U.S.-led warfare state cannot keep multiplying and maintaining its many theaters of conflict. The fall of Saigon led to an adjustment and correction in the way that the U.S. conducted war. There was a decade-plus pause and reset. Does the fall of Kabul lead to the same type of timeout? Unlikely. But there is a limit to what the U.S. can manage in the way of mayhem. Already the blow black from its wars in the Middle East  and North Africa is diminishing support for the major parties of Europe.

Below is a helpful primer on the Five Star Movement that appeared a couple days ago on the Europe Online web site. Having kept an eye out for M5S over the last several years, I find it accurate:

No laughing matter: Italy's comedian-led Five Star Movement

Rome (dpa) - Italy‘s Five Star Movement (M5S) is one of the most successful anti-establishment parties in Europe, whose main rallying cries are clean politics, direct democracy, euroscepticism and basic income support for all.

"We are normal citizens like you, and this normality is scary" for the establishment, Virginia Raggi, who topped a first round of elections for the Rome mayoralty on Sunday, said at her closing campaign rally last week.

Founded in 2009 by Beppe Grillo, a stand-up comedian, and Gianroberto Casaleggio, a shadowy internet consultant who died in April, the M5S shot to national prominence after taking a surprise 25 per cent of the votes in the 2013 general elections.

The movement defies left-right categorizations, and shuns alliances with other parties, which it sees as fundamentally corrupt. It is also critical of banks, big corporations, free trade agreements and wants a referendum on Italy‘s exit from the eurozone.

The movement‘s defining characteristic is its reliance on internet consultations among its supporters to select its candidates and political priorities, which are communicated online via Grillo‘s blog.

But critics have accused Grillo and Casaleggio of using the system arbitrarily and quashing internal dissent. Out of the 163 M5S lawmakers elected in 2013, some 37 have either been expelled or have walked out of the party.

In 2014, the M5S hoped for an electoral breakthrough in elections for the European Parliament, which did not come. It won 21 per cent of the vote, against a record 41 per cent for the ruling Democratic Party (PD).

In this month‘s local elections, the M5S led polls in Rome and came a strong second in Turin, but fared poorly in other big cities like Milan and Naples, suggesting that it still has some way to go before building a strong national base.

In the EU assembly, M5S lawmakers have formed the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group with the British eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the German anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

The death of Casaleggio, who acted as a behind-the-scenes strategist, has raised questions about the future of M5S, but plans to prepare a younger cadre of party members to take over the leadership have been under way for some time.

After saying in 2014 that he was "a bit tired," Grillo has cut down on campaigning, giving more space to the M5S‘ rising stars, such as lawmakers Alessandro Di Battista and Luigi Di Maio. Tellingly, the 67-year-old comic stayed out of Raggi‘s campaign finale in Rome.

Di Maio, a 29-year-old deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament, is seen as the most likely M5S prime ministerial candidate for the next general elections, due within the next two years. Grillo has always refused to run for office.

Mainstream Wins in Austria, But for How Much Longer?

When all the absentee ballots were tallied yesterday, Austria ended up electing the pro-European presidential candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, over the ultra-nationalist Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer. It was close: 50.3% for Van der Bellen, compared to 49.7% for Hofer.

Like the National Front's performance in France's regional elections in December, Austria's Freedom Party wasn't able to follow up an impressive first-round showing by closing the deal with the voters in the final round. The mainstream media shields the status quo and is able to provide the margin of victory in close elections, as Alison Smale hints in "Austrian Far-Right Candidate Norbert Hofer Narrowly Loses Presidential Vote":

The parties of the center left and center right that governed for most of the past 30 years in ever-duller grand coalitions were trounced in the first round of the presidential elections last month, when Mr. Hofer stunned rivals by reaping 35.1 percent, well ahead of Mr. Van der Bellen with 21 percent. 

Sunday’s runoff turned into a cliffhanger as the popular vote was counted and showed an ever-narrowing lead for Mr. Hofer. The Austrian public broadcaster ORF projected that Mr. Van der Bellen would win by just 3,000 votes when the record number of requested mail-in ballots was counted on Monday. 

That projection — and the tone of some of the ORF reporting on the election — was heavily criticized by the Freedom Party. It was not clear if there would be legal consequences, but the party’s attitude illustrated the country’s deep divisions.

The same dynamic is discernible in the campaign against Brexit. Fear of the unknown is amplified. The specter of capital flight is sketched. The Leavers are cast as callous capitalist Bentley-driving playboy real estate moguls (Brit mini-Trumps). But nowhere is heard a sonorous call for a united Europe. Best to avoid the topic of what the European Union actually stands for. The European Dream that was peddled in the aughts turned out to be a grift. There must be a rupture, as Stathis Kouvelakis explains in "What’s Next for Nuit Debout?":

I also believe at a more programmatic level that this is the challenge we’re confronted with at the current moment: we cannot settle for an anti-neoliberal platform listing a set of immediate demands — in reality, a trade unionist–like program. What we need is a real political alternative, identifying the points knotting together the current situation and the class adversary’s own strategy. 

That means, for example, that we must absolutely aim at the end of presidentialism and of the Fifth Republic, but also at the dismantling of the European Union, which is capital’s genuine war machine at the continent-wide scale. Without a rupture with the EU we will never arrive at any solution, as the disaster of Syriza in Greece definitively confirmed.

Bernie Sanders must take his campaign all the way to Philadelphia, and we need a Chicago-'68 type of eye-opener there.

We're at a 50-50 split in the West. Corporate domination of the media adds weight to the status quo half creating the illusion of a majority.

But it can't last too much longer. The status quo isn't anywhere near granting even the smallest "trade unionist–like program" of reform that might buy the rulers a little wiggle room. The direction we are headed promises even more wars, more refugees and less stable employment. The economy coming our way is the gig economy where we compete with robots to do piece work organized by a smart phone app.

We might not be there yet in 2016, but the revolution, some kind of major upheaval, is coming.

Presidential Elections in Austria and the U.S.: There is No Longer a Majority in the Political Center

There is an interesting article, "Long Dominated by Center, Austria Splinters to Left and Right," by Alison Smale about this coming Sunday's presidential runoff in Austria between the far-right Freedom Party candidate Norbert Hofer and the independent former Green Alexander Van der Bellen.

What caught my eye is the passage that summarizes the vote totals of the two long-ruling, establishment parties in the first round -- the center-right People's Party and the center-left Social Democrats:

The forces that vaulted Mr. Hofer into the spotlight are evident across much of the Continent, where many traditional parties in the center are embattled and voters are signaling increased discontent with politics as usual. Austria could be a test case for how far voters will go to demand change as immigration joins with diminished economic security and resentment of entrenched elites to create a combustible political mix.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front is polling far ahead of the governing Socialists, and President François Hollande’s approval ratings have slumped as low as 13 percent a year before he faces another election.

To Austria’s east, Prime Minister Viktor Orban rules Hungary with an authoritarian touch, and a conservative government in Poland is molding the news media and the judiciary to its taste. Germany is confronting growing support for the right-wing Alternative for Germany party, and the British referendum in June on whether to leave the European Union is cleaving Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives. That vote could turn on many of the same issues rattling politics elsewhere, including immigration, nationalism and disenchantment with the European bureaucracy in Brussels.

But the disruption has been especially pronounced in Austria, the crossroads of a troubled Continent. Despite having dominated politics since 1945, or perhaps because of that dominance, the two major centrist parties could not muster even a quarter of the popular vote between them in the first round of the presidential contest.

Mr. Hofer won 35 percent. Behind him was the former Green Party leader, Alexander Van der Bellen, with 21 percent. There has not been any polling for the runoff, but all indications are that the race will be tight.

While what is happening in Austria seems astounding -- imagine the Republicans and Democrats unable to achieve 25% between the two -- something similar is in fact happening in the United States, which has a diabolically complex 50-state system guaranteeing that there is no multi-party democracy.

Establishment Republicans -- Kasich, Bush, Rubio -- won a fraction of the GOP vote compared with frontrunners Trump and Cruz. Hillary is good for half the Democratic electorate. So all told, let's say the U.S. political center is polling at 37% nationwide. Not altogether different from situation unfolding in Austria. I'm sure if the U.S. had Muslim war refugees pouring into Penn Station that 37% would be much closer to 25%.

As anti-capitalist protests continue in France, it is no coincidence that Cold War is being repackaged at a time of paradigm shift. The same thing happened in the 1970s when neoliberalism began its ascent and the "excess of democracy" of the 1960s was beaten back. Now that we are being herded into a digital version of the same old "Washington Consensus" structural adjustment, the Russian Bear and Chinese Dragon are coming in handy once again.

"Leading From Behind" and the Future of Europe

Read this AP blurb that appeared in yesterday's national edition of The New York Times and ask yourself whether Poland's triumphant Law and Justice Party couldn't win any election in any Western country:

Poland: Party’s Total Is Enough to Avoid a Coalition

The right-wing and anti-migrant Law and Justice party has won a majority of seats in Poland’s Parliament and can govern alone, the state election authority announced Tuesday. The party got 235 seats in the 460-seat lower house and 61 of 100 seats in the Senate — the strongest position any single party has ever had in post-Communist Poland. The party supports increasing state intervention in the economy to help families and the poor and has criticized the current governing party, Civic Platform, for agreeing to accept about 7,000 migrants as part of a European Union resettlement plan. Law and Justice has vowed to place higher taxes on large, foreign-owned corporations and banks to pay for benefits like free medications for people over 75 and a reversal of a higher retirement age. The departing government had increased the retirement age to 67; Law and Justice has said it will restore it to 60 for women and 65 for men.

There is no question. Poland's Law and Justice, with those positions, would win everywhere it competed.

Right below that AP blurb about Poland was the following Reuters blurb on Libya:

Libya: Officers Are Killed in Downing of Helicopter

A Libyan helicopter carrying military commanders from Tripoli’s self-styled government was shot down Tuesday by another armed faction west of the city, and at least 12 people were killed, the authorities and security sources said. A spokesman for the Tripoli government’s chief of staff said the helicopter was hit by antiaircraft fire and crashed into the sea. Libya is caught in a conflict involving two rival governments, based respectively in Tripoli and in the east, as well as myriad armed factions that back them in loose coalitions.

The two blurbs are connected. Some of the refugees streaming into Europe, whose numbers exceed any since the Second World War, come from Libya, a state cracked open when NATO facilitated the ouster of its longtime strongman leader Muammar Gaddafi. Obama termed this regime change operation "Leading from behind."

"Leading from behind" is another way of saying you're fucking someone in the ass, an obsession of the U.S. power elite and their sundry cronies in nation-states across the globe. Now, in the words of Malcolm X when he described the Kennedy assassination, the "Chickens are coming home to roost." Europe is starting to fray.

Austria is threatening to construct a border fence, and so too is Slovenia. Slovenia has become the new transit hot spot since Hungary finished construction of its fence and closed its border. Meanwhile the new EU refugee plan hatched last Sunday is yet to get off the drawing board.

As Melissa Eddy, Barbara Surk and Alison Smale report in "Austria and Slovenia Trade Threats as Tensions Over Migrants Grow":

Conservatives are growing increasingly restive, and the Christian Democratic Union, the political party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, has slipped five percentage points in opinion polls. [Anything above a five-point spread is conventionally considered a "landslide."]

Horst Seehofer, head of the Bavaria-only Christian Social Union party, has demanded that the chancellor reduce the influx of migrants, setting a deadline for Sunday when Ms. Merkel and the third leader of their governing coalition, Sigmar Gabriel, head of the center-left Social Democrats, have a meeting scheduled. 

“We need swift, immediate measures,” Mr. Seehofer said in Munich, after addressing legislators in Bavaria. “Above all, it is necessary to re-establish a situation in keeping with the rule of the law.” 

The developments highlighted the growing consequences of the European Union’s failure to forge a common solution to the problem of having hundreds of thousands of people from Syria, Afghanistan and other strife-ridden countries trek through the continent on their way to seeking new lives in the heart of Europe.

Despite plans by European Union leaders to build reception centers around the outer rim of the bloc to control the flow north and west, no progress has been made, and an amended plan that emerged at a summit meeting in Brussels last weekend appears doomed. The result has been that nations along the trail have had to fend for themselves, working together unofficially to allow the migrants to freely cross borders — as long as they also exited at the other end — on their way to Germany.

Germany has opened its arms to the new arrivals and has said it expects as many as a million to try to settle there this year. 

But Mr. Seehofer told the Bavarian lawmakers that if an agreement could not be reached with Ms. Merkel this weekend to limit the newcomers, he would examine “judicial and political measures,” although he did not get more specific.

Bavaria has borne the brunt of handling the tens of thousands of arrivals in Germany — 15,000 people alone over the past weekend — since the first trains began arriving in Munich this summer. There, with the help of volunteers, refugees begin the first steps of the asylum process and are then dispersed throughout the country.

The days of cheering welcomes, however, have given way to a palpable discontent, and Mr. Seehofer said many constituents had questioned whether the government has the situation under control.

This is blow back from the U.S. warfare state, the "leading from behind" policy of perpetual war that has become dominant during the administration of Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama. Insanity has finally found its boundary, and that is Europe.

The Sykes-Picot Middle East has been torn up. But its destruction is destroying the U.S. project of the European Union. I don't think the "ass-fucking" warmongering power elite saw this coming.

What happens now is that governments throughout Europe will be sent packing in favor of parties like Poland's Law and Justice, parties that will close borders and cut against the neoliberal grain by providing more generous social benefits for the native population.

Since border walls and fences are all the rage in Europe, you know what that means for the United States (assuming cousins stick together)? Trump will be the man in 2016.