Brexit Post-Mortem

The reason the neoliberal status quo has been around for as long as it has -- 40 years and counting, ten years longer than the social democratic consensus following World War Two -- is that it has proven agile at quickly adapting to threats.

Two recent examples. First, the Arab Spring, which, after stunning victories in Tunisia and Egypt, was completely rolled back thanks in large part to the export of jihad by the U.S. client states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Next, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was easily co-opted by Obama's 2012 presidential campaign, with a hefty assist from New York City's Finest.

What is happening in the case of Brexit is more of the same. The neoliberal status quo lost the vote last Thursday but has been winning ever since. The first significant casualty might have been Podemos in Spain's parliamentary elections on Sunday. Going into the vote, many predicted that Podemos would replace the Socialists as the number two party behind the ruling conservatives. It didn't happen. While Podemos didn't lose ground, neither did it gain any. The Popular Party actually picked up seats. The reason for Podemos' lackluster showing is being explained as voter risk-aversion following the currency and equity markets turmoil on Friday following the Brexit vote.

The markets have calmed since. Brexit will not be another Lehman Brothers. The narrative that is cohering to the point that it is close to being chiseled in stone is that the successful Leave campaigners, leaders like UKIP's Nigel Farage and Tories Boris Johnson (BoJo) and Michael Gove, have not a clue what Britain is to do now that its people have actually voted to separate from the European Union. This confusion is crystallized in a much-cited column written by BoJo for The Telegraph, "I cannot stress too much that Britain is part of Europe – and always will be," where he basically dismisses the reasons for a Leave vote by both the right and the left: Immigration will continue and so too will free trade. Britain will negotiate for itself a Norwegian membership in the common market.

Cameron must have been mindful of this dearth of leadership atop the Leave campaign. His 90-day exit is looking like the smart move at this point. Given another week like the last one, the Leave Tories will be so discredited they will not be able to govern. Cameron's Remainers will keep control of the Conservative Party, better able to join Labour's parliamentary putschists -- assuming they are somehow able to rid themselves of the troublesome Jeremy Corbyn as party leader (which I don't think they will be able to do) -- to finagle avoidance of Article 50, whether through a re-vote or artful negotiation.

The problem in all of this are those hard-shell anti-neoliberal voters, both left and right, who have grown deaf to the mellifluous hymns sung in praise of unfettered markets. Bigger is not better. And I would argue that a solid majority of voters in countries throughout the West have come to believe this, which is a real problem for the governing elite. This majority can be tamped down here and there by means of fear and focusing on division within its ranks, but it will not go away.

I would guess that over the next few years the major parties in the capitalist core will continue to splinter.

Brexit Winning + General Strike Tomorrow in France

Good news. Recent polls show the "Leave" campaign moving ahead in the upcoming June 23 Brexit referendum. Yves Smith summarizes in this morning's must read, "Why a Leave Vote May Not Result in a Brexit":

The officialdom in England and in much of the rest of the advanced world is suddenly in alarm over the possibility of a Brexit. US Treasury yields sank last Friday as investors ran for cover, and the flight to safety continued today as a surge in the yen led to a 3% fall in the Nikkei. 

The UK's elites had been confident that frequent, loud “Don’t Touch That Dial” warnings, with vivid descriptions of all of the horrors that would ensue, would herd voters into line well before the June 23 polling date. 

Instead, an online poll commissioned by the Independent showed the Leave campaign to be winning by a stunning 55% to 45%. That revelation coming on top of weak economic data from the US, put Mr. Market in a funk. The Financial Times’ “poll of polls” puts Leave in the lead by a smaller margin, 46% to 44%. 

Moreover, the sense is that with only 10 days to the decision date, the Leave campaign is gaining momentum. The Conservatives have realized that having a bunch of toffs, big banks, and intrusive foreign leaders tell British citizens how economically damaging a Brexit would be seems only to have persuaded voters at most that the people at the top of the food chain would take a hit. Voters seem to be in a bloody-minded enough mood to be willing to take a hit if they can inflict some pain on their putative leaders and take the banking classes down a notch or two. Another sentiment (and one that the elites appear to deny) is that voters are willing to pay an economic cost, even a large one, for more national sovereignty. So now Labor leaders have been moved to the front line of the sales campaign.

Smith goes on to describe the likely scenario of Brexit winning at the polls -- a re-vote after the EU grants a few more concessions. It has happened before in Denmark and Ireland.

I think Smith has it right. And it must noted that she was incredibly accurate last summer in her assessment of the phoniness of Syriza. So, as I said, good news. It looks as if the EU, feckless enabler of U.S. hegemony and enforcer of neoliberal orthodoxy, is about to sustain a body blow.

Smith quotes Peter Hitchens of the Daily Mail, "The British people have risen at last - and we're about to unleash chaos":

It has been a mystery to me that these voters stayed loyal to organisations that repeatedly spat on them from a great height. Labour doesn’t love the poor. It loves the London elite. The Tories don’t love the country. They love only money. The referendum, in which the parties are split and uncertain, has freed us all from silly tribal loyalties and allowed us to vote instead according to reason. We can all vote against the heedless, arrogant snobs who inflicted mass immigration on the poor (while making sure they lived far from its consequences themselves). And nobody can call us ‘racists’ for doing so. That’s not to say that the voters are ignoring the actual issue of EU membership as a whole. As I have known for decades, this country has gained nothing from belonging to the European Union, and lost a great deal. 

If Zambia can be independent, why cannot we? If membership is so good for us, why has it been accompanied by savage industrial and commercial decline? If the Brussels system of sclerotic, centralised bureaucracy is so good, why doesn’t anyone else in the world adopt it?

Compare Hitchens' piece with the shallow, laughable fear-mongering of NYT's cold warrior Roger Cohen, "Europe and the Unthinkable," and you understand what thin ice the reigning paradigm is erected upon. Cohen creates an image of a Putin bogeyman waiting eagerly for the Europe Union to come undone so he can swallow up the Baltic nations, and he celebrates the power and coherence of Atlanticism by describing Samantha Powers, one of the architects of R2P and the chaos in Libya, sharing the stage in Berlin with Dr. Strangelove:

I listened the other evening at the American Academy in Berlin as Henry Kissinger, the personification of realpolitik, insisted that the “necessity of the coherence of the Atlantic world” had become “even greater.” With him was the American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, the recipient of this year’s Kissinger Prize — and long the personification of liberal interventionist idealism. In many ways they formed a strange duo. But their togetherness was also a statement: That, until now, America’s postwar European and internationalist commitment has held across the foreign policy spectrum.

Realpolitik and idealism meet in the unity of Europe. The unthinkable, on both sides of the Atlantic, must be resisted before it is too late.

The unthinkable is that the status quo, based as it is on a paradigm that has been juiced out since the millennium, should be allowed to continue. In order to remain in power and keep the paradigm intact rulers are subjecting the planet to an increasing number of wars and failed states while the media monopoly engages in Goebbels-like crass propaganda.

Case in point, try to find some decent reporting of what is going on in France with all the strikes brought on by the El Khomri law. You won't find it in the mainstream media. You have to go to the Marxist press like the World Socialist Web Site or Workers World.

A general strike is set for tomorrow in France as the Senate begins debate today.

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.

Fast Food and the Political Mainstream

Two interesting items this morning that point in the same direction while dealing with different subjects -- political parties and fast food.

Support for mainstream, established political parties is collapsing in Europe (the same could be said of the United States) at the same time fast-food behemoth McDonald's is losing market share and engaging in a panicked makeover as a “modern, progressive burger company.”

Steven Erlanger addresses the former in the story "As Europe’s Political Landscape Shifts, Two-Party System Fades." A longtime Gray Lady foreign correspondent, Erlanger is presently based in London. His story looks at the May 7 general election in Britain, where Labour and the Conservatives are expected to win less than two-thirds of the vote, requiring the formation of another coalition to govern; but he ranges over the continent as well, providing helpful sketches of the rise of splinter parties in Germany, France, Italy and Spain:

The fragmentation of traditional party voting is increasing all over Europe. Fueled by the last recession and enabled by social media, issue-oriented or protest parties have cropped up everywhere in response to the failure of governments to deliver economic growth and security. The days of a “broad church” party and governments formed by a single party are fading. 

And turnout in national elections has been falling since the 1970s in most Western countries, raising new questions about the health of democracy as multinational corporations and institutions like the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund influence national decisions.

A.k.a., the triumph of neoliberalism:

Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, emphasizes the failure of the European center-left to keep its promise “to create growth and redistribute it to make a fairer society.” With the decline of the manufacturing sector and weaker unions, the left has been forced to buy into the orthodoxy of market economics, which “means their core support has been hollowed out here,” he said, as in France, Germany and Sweden.

“The center-left seems intellectually dead,” Mr. Grant said, little different from the center-right. “So you see alternatives on the far left like Die Linke, Podemos and Syriza,” he said, referring to the Left by its German name.

Meanwhile on the right, he said, politicians and elites are increasingly unpopular, blamed for the 2008 economic crash, the euro crisis, stagnant growth, austerity and the bailing out of bankers.

The combination of low economic growth, high debt, surging migration and increasing anti-Muslim sentiment provoked by terrorism has put the European Union itself under great strain, he said. There is a strong anti-austerity feeling on the left and a strong anti-immigration feeling on the right — and neither issue can be easily managed by national governments or coalitions.

The problem for those of us who are citizens of the United States is that we don't have a parliamentary system of government; instead we have one of the most corrupt, anti-democratic democracies in the world. The mainstream, established parties, the Democrats and Republicans, absent a mass uprising bordering on the revolutionary, cannot be broken. The barriers to third parties and independents are practically insurmountable. This means that the U.S. will not be able to communicate the general will of the people with the growth of a Syriza or a Podemos or a Sinn Féin.

Faced with this type of political stasis, perfectly captured by yet another Bush v. Clinton match-up, people will choose to stay home and not vote. My sense is that there is a little more juice in the GOP right now since they recently had to undergo an emergency Tea Party re-branding when all appeared lost with Obama 2008. So there is a decent chance that Scott Walker will beat Jeb, improving the party's hope to win the White House next fall. As for the Democrats, since they are truly "intellectually dead" and captive to big money, I don't see Hillary being beaten in the primary at this point.

Given the lack of meaningful outlets for people to express themselves politically in the U.S., change is being registered in patterns of consumption. There is a pervasive feeling that something is terribly wrong. We as a species are picking up warning signs, and in response we are choosing to alter what we eat, which is where Mark Bittman's morning column on troubles ("15 percent drop in its United States operating income in the last quarter of 2014") for Ronald McDonald comes in, "McDonald’s Turns ‘Progressive’":

McDonald’s can’t get a break. In the last two months, the company has made several well-publicized big announcements that were widely greeted with yawns or jeers. 

The first was a decision to phase out chickens raised using antibiotics meant to treat humans. The second was to unilaterally raise the salaries of those minimum-wage workers the company directly employs by at least a dollar an hour, granting a small amount of paid vacation time to company employees and financial assistance for education to all workers in its system. And the third was to begin referring to itself as a “modern, progressive burger company.”

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 What McDonald’s should do is go all in and really transform itself, because the effect of positive change would be immeasurable. Instead it tries to play it both ways, controlling what franchisees buy and sell but insisting that it cannot dictate how they treat employees. Thus the wage increase touches only around 11 percent of the chain’s workers, and workers immediately decried it as inadequate. (Even Walmart did better.) No one turns down a raise, but this one virtually guarantees that most of the company’s workers will remain eligible for food stamps, thus perpetuating the public subsidy for McDonald’s labor force.

That the nonantibiotic move has taken this long (Chipotle has tried to be antibiotic-free for more than a decade, as has Panera) and is so incomplete — that is, there’s no word about pork or beef, and the move is being phased in — also seems pathetic. (Even more pathetic is the refusal of the Food and Drug Administration to mandate the removal of nonmedicinal antibiotics from animal production, but that’s another story.)

These moves demonstrate that McDonald’s is hardly a “progressive” company but one that is merely trying in a halfhearted way to catch up with changing market norms and to anticipate inevitable regulation.

If McDonald’s were truly progressive, what would it do? It might revamp the menu in favor of sustainably sourced and fresher food (it’s worth noting that in Britain, McDonald’s uses free-range eggs and organic milk), and might increase its workers’ wages (and hours) to something approaching a living wage.

It may be that the biggest beneficiary of McDonald’s recent moves is the food movement, which, smelling blood, continues to apply pressure. (In response to the raise, some demonstrating workers chanted: “Hey McDonald’s, let’s be blunt/This is just a P.R. stunt.”) And that movement continues to gain credibility as it attends more to the rights of humans than those of animals — not that animals don’t matter, but it’s all relative.

It’s great that McDonald’s blinked. I’d love to see it become a truly progressive company — I’d even help them if I could — but if that’s not in the cards, it would be fine to see a continuing decline in its business. Either would be a satisfactory ending to the McDonald’s story.

The chances that McDonald's will become a truly progressive company are about as likely as the Democrats becoming a truly progressive party. It is not going to happen.

Gray Lady Discovers Reality of Syrian Civil War

The newspaper of record is finally trying to get atop of the Syrian civil war story. Ben Hubbard, who has been reporting from Cairo on the coup in Egypt, spells Beirut Bureau Chief Anne Barnard and provides a frontpage story, "Momentum Shifts in Syria, Bolstering Assad’s Position," that appears top of the fold right-hand side of this morning's New York Times national edition. In it, Hubbard gives a bird's-eye view of developments that have been well underway for several weeks but have been given short shrift by Barnard; the long and short of which is that the rebels are coming apart at the seams -- despised by local populations that they're purportedly liberating, fighting among themselves and distrusted by their state benefactors -- and that the Syrian government is steadily consolidating its territory on the battlefield.

To be sure, Hubbard doesn't abandon the Gray Lady's anti-Assad bias; but he does curb its enthusiasm for the rebels (Barnard consistently reports on the rebels through the rose-colored glasses of the Arab Spring). There are some choice passages:

Even fighters who had hoped that Mr. Assad would end up deposed, dead, jailed or exiled like other autocrats singled out in the Arab Spring uprisings have begun to acknowledge the emerging reality. 

“If the revolution continues like this, the people will revolt against us,” said a rebel commander from the central city of Homs, where Mr. Assad’s forces have made gains in recent days. 

The commander, who wanted only his first name, Ahmed, used to protect his family, criticized his fellow rebels for putting the interests of their brigades ahead of the wider anti-Assad struggle and accused them of hoarding powerful weapons or selling them for a profit. That lack of unity has prolonged the war and made their mission harder, he said. 

“If a regular Syrian comes and asks me what we have given him, I don’t know what to say,” Ahmed said.

Hubbard quotes Free Syrian Army leader General Salim Idris basically tossing in the sponge, saying the West wants to maintain al-Assad in power:

“They do not want the fall of this regime; that is why they are not helping,” said Gen. Salim Idris, the head of the Free Syrian Army, a loosely knit umbrella group that has been soliciting aid and that is supposed to funnel it to vetted groups while keeping it from extremists. 

General Idris accused the West of delaying with endless meetings, summits and requests for new “guarantees” that extremists would not get arms, and said this left the rebels at a huge disadvantage against Mr. Assad’s forces.

The reporting of the Times from Egypt has always been much stronger than the coverage of Syria, which is a testament to David Kirkpatrick. Barnard's reporting seems to follow the basic contours of the official position of the U.S. government. And while Hubbard's article is a welcome improvement, he does make one glaring omission. In recounting state support of the rebels, he mentions Saudi Arabia and Qatar; but he fails to mention the role the Central Intelligence Agency has played in providing logistical support as well as the rebel training base it runs in Jordan.

Hubbard, writing with Hwaida Saad, also has a story about yesterday's murder of al-Assad supporter Mohammed Darrar Jammo in southern Lebanon and the battle between the Wahhabis and the Kurds in the Syrian city of Ras al-Ain:

Along another Syrian border, fighting among Syrian rebels, extremist groups and Kurdish militias killed 29 fighters in Syria and at least one civilian in Turkey.

The clashes in the Syrian city of Ras al-Ain pitted Syrian rebels and extremists linked to Al Qaeda against Kurdish militias that have used the chaos of the civil war to push for greater autonomy.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict from Britain through a network of contacts on the ground, said the clashes began Tuesday when extremist fighters attacked a Kurdish patrol and took a Turkish militiaman captive.

On Wednesday, Kurdish fighters seized control of most of the town and the nearby border crossing with Turkey as fighting spread to nearby areas, the observatory said, adding that at least 29 combatants had been killed since Tuesday, 10 of them Kurds.

Reporting from London, Alan Cowell has more bad news for the Syrian opposition in his story "Britain Said to Step Back From Push to Arm Syrian Rebels":

After leading a determined push with France to remove legal hindrances to arming Syria’s rebels, Britain is apparently signaling a more cautious approach, even as British newspaper reports say Prime Minister David Cameron has retreated from the idea altogether.

The car bombs and mortar attacks will continue as the SAA continues operations. But at this point it appears the Syrian government has won the civil war.

European Carbon Trading in Trouble

The great God Market suffers another blow. "Europe Rejects Bid to Raise Cost of Carbon Emissions," a story this morning by Stanley Reed, reports that the European Parliament voted down a plan to raise the price of carbon credits.The cost of carbon credits has plummeted since 2008:

The Parliament turned down a proposal from the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, to bolster the price of carbon allowances by withdrawing about a quarter of the allowances scheduled to be auctioned through 2015. Even before the vote, the price of allowances had plunged from 25 euros a ton in 2008, to 7 euros a year ago, to less than 3 euros earlier this year. The main reason for the collapse is the economic crisis in Europe, which has meant reduced industrial activity and a glut of allowances.

Subsequently countries like Britain are burning 25% more coal than last year while taking offline cleaner natural-gas burning power plants. Without a withdrawal of the new auction the price of a carbon credit will soon be zero. This is an enormous blow for those who argue that capitalism is not in inherent conflict with environmental sustainability.

Don't Buy the Crocodile Tears

C.J. Chivers and Steven Erlanger each have important, informative stories in today's paper on the now two-year old uprising in Syria. If you've been overwhelmed in trying to keep up with the coverage, which is daily and substantial in the New York Times, as I have, this morning is a good time to dip back in.

Chivers, who usually provides a boots on the ground perspective, as he does in today's offering, "In Syrian Clash Over ‘Death Highway,’ a Bitterly Personal War," dissects rebel efforts to harry convoys aimed at resupplying government outposts:

As spring arrives in Syria, the civil war closes out its second year in a mosaic of vicious and widely scattered battles, like this one, where the Damascus-Aleppo highway crosses an open agricultural plain in the south of Idlib Province. 

Since late last spring, antigovernment fighters have wrested much of northern Syria from Mr. Assad’s control, overrunning military checkpoints and several bases, and pushing the army back. But the rebel tide, largely led in northwestern Syria by Islamic groups, moves slowly, checked by weapon shortages and by a lingering archipelago of government positions where the army and loyalist militias have settled in with powerful weapons, equipped for a long fight. Each of these military positions, and the roads between them, have become minifronts, an almost uncountable set of bloody battlefields where rebels try to silence government outposts, which are mostly arrayed around Syria’s main cities.

It's clear from Chivers' story that the rebels fighting the Assad government are mujahedeen. Not a good sign for a pluralist state post-Assad. I read a report on Counterpunch from a guy writing from Syria who says that public opinion has turned against the rebels and is aligning now with Assad. This is important to keep in mind when reading Erlanger's story, "Seeking to Aid Rebels in Syria, France Urges End to Arms Embargo." France and Britain, colonial behemoths of yore, are demanding that the European Union end its arms embargo of the rebels:

The European Union pact on the embargo and on sanctions against Syria must be renewed every three months. France is moving for the next review to be held this month, rather than in May. “We have to go very fast,” Mr. Fabius said, urging that the union try to shift the balance of forces in Syria in favor of the opposition before many thousands more people die.

Whenever leaders of great states start shedding tears over the plight of the people get ready to be bamboozled. I interpret this to mean that things must not be going well for the West; that the Counterpunch story must be accurate. The French and British argue that if the West arms the rebels to the teeth this will force Assad to the bargaining table; that right now Assad holds the upper hand because of assistance from Russia and Iran.

I don't see escalation solving the problem. One thing about Assad's Ba'athist Syria is that prior to the Arab Spring it's been an island of calm in a turbulent Middle East. You crack that state apart definitively, which is the gamble the old colonial powers seem to have now fully embraced, and you'll have a situation much worse than the blowback generated by Gaddafi's ouster; it'll be like having an Afghanistan in the heart of the Middle East. This is the direction in which we're headed; as Erlanger reports, Lebanon is already getting sucked in:

The Syrian government threatened Thursday to launch attacks on Lebanese territory to stop Lebanese anti-Assad militants from entering Syria, demonstrating how difficult it has become for Lebanon to stay out of the war consuming its larger, closely connected neighbor. The threat — the most pointed warning yet to the Lebanese government, which is divided on the Syrian conflict — was delivered in a diplomatic note that Syria’s ambassador to Lebanon, Ali Abdul Karim Ali, presented to Lebanese authorities, Syria’s state news agency, SANA, reported. 

At the same time, concerns are growing that the Lebanon-based militia Hezbollah, with Iran’s backing, is increasing its efforts to bolster the Assad forces. In a speech to a security gathering on Thursday, Israel’s chief of military intelligence asserted that Hezbollah was training a popular army in Syria that numbered 50,000 men, which Iran and Hezbollah could use to protect their Syrian interests if Mr. Assad fell.

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For a great example of the kind of reporting C.J. Chivers does, check out this video of a firefight in Misurata, Libya from the civil war there two years ago.