Blue Wave 2020

Signs clearly point to another Blue Wave in 2020, none of which, to my mind, are bigger than the implosion of the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson. 

Johnson went "Full Trump" once he became prime minister, promising a crash out from the European Union on October 31, and was rewarded by losing control of parliament. BoJo now governs with a majority of minus-21. The bill delaying a crash out will become law on Monday, and Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, and Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, will determine when new elections are held, not Johnson.

Remember, three years ago Johnson fronted the successful Brexit campaign for Tory Leavers, prefiguring Trump's upset victory over Hillary Clinton five months later. For Johnson now to be reduced to a chained, buffoonish zombie in the run-up to a presidential election year augurs ill for Trump.

Another ill omen for the faux-populism of Johnson and Trump is the new M5S-DP government that took office yesterday in Italy. Matteo Salvini, the Italian Trump, made a huge blunder when he collapsed the M5S-League coalition government in order to trigger snap elections. Apparently Salvini could not foresee that the existential enemies of the Five Star Movement and the Democratic Party would nestle down together to keep him out of power.

Whatever hopeful, "Big Tent," anti-establishment, anti-war vibe which filled the Zeitgeist three years ago, uniting Alex Jones conservatives with Jacobin-reading leftists and giving us Brexit, Trump and an Italian government led by Beppe Grillo's M5S, no longer exists. It has been replaced by a rump hard-shell anti-immigrant Know Nothing nationalism overshadowed by an approaching anti-austerity, anti-neoliberal, anti-war Blue Wave. 

Former Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg is predicting a Blue Wave in 2020. But for the most part he is an outlier in the mainstream. Mainstream media continues to stem the tide. For instance, Disney's FiveThirtyEight is forever trying to explain away the progressive tilt of the Democratic Party.

Keep your eye on the UK general election. Great Britain is the Potemkin village for global neoliberal representative democracy. Tories and Blairites have run the show since the 1970s. For that to change in the next few months would be truly amazing.

Italy's New M5S-PD Government Not Quite a Done Deal

On Wednesday Italian president Sergio Mattarella gave his permission to recently resigned prime minister Giuseppe Conte to form a new government, this one, as Jason Horowitz describes,  "a populist/anti-populist coalition between Five Star and the center-left Democratic Party."

Beppe Severgnini, writing an opinion piece today for The New York Times, is skeptical that M5S-PD will be a lasting marriage:

Still, the outcome is not obvious. A new government is likely to be formed, in the next few days. But the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement are quite different, and so are their voters. If their strange marriage fails, President Mattarella — the coolest head in this whole mess — will have no choice but to dissolve Parliament and call for a general election in the autumn. So Italy is, once again, on the brink — a spot it occupies all too often. Will it manage to take a step back and avoid going over? It might. On three conditions.

First, the political agenda. A government is formed to do something, not to prevent someone else’s rise (even if that someone is Mr. Salvini). The Democratic Party stands for open society, open market, investments, Europe and NATO; Five Star has been toying with conspiracy theories and anti-vaxx propaganda, has ranted against the European Union and supported Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. The Democrats belong, in most respects, to the new moderate left; the Five Stars borrow many ideas from the old radical left. A good sign is that the most quarrelsome characters, such as Alessandro Di Battista, are not expected to be in the new government. And the outgoing (and incoming) prime minister just took control of the digital transformation of the notoriously labyrinthine Italian Civil Service.

In other words, what this "government waiting to be born" really is, more than a coalition of populist/anti-populist, as Horowitz formulated, is a coalition of neoliberal/anti-neoliberal. The Five Star Movement established itself criticizing neoliberal austerity and corruption.

David Broder thinks M5S is cravenly opportunistic, stands for nothing and its Rousseau online plebiscite a sham.

We'll see. Luigi Di Maio has promised to clear the new coalition with the M5S rank'n'file. According to Horowitz:

To allay the concerns of the Five Star base, Mr. Di Maio late Tuesday night announced that any government proposals would be subject to a vote on Five Star’s internet platform, where all their candidates and policies are approved.

The platform, called Rousseau, is owned by Davide Casaleggio, an unelected web entrepreneur, who has argued that representative democracy is passé and will soon be replaced by the internet. Party dissidents have said he personally decides the outcome of online votes and is the true power behind Five Star.

On Wednesday, Andrea Orlando, the deputy secretary of the Democratic Party, told reporters that it would be “unacceptable if the vote on Rousseau should enter into conflict with the procedures in the Constitution and on the decisions taken by the president.”

But in an interview Wednesday night, Pietro Dettori, a power broker within Five Star who is close to Mr. Casaleggio, said that while the date of a vote still hadn’t been set, it “will also be on the alliance.”

M5S-PD Coalition Set to Govern Italy

It took about 14 months for the Five Star Movement-League coalition government to burst apart, but explode it has. Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte resigned Tuesday ahead of a no confidence vote. The no confidence vote was brought about League firebrand and government interior minister Matteo Salvini withdrawing his support from the coalition.

The widely accepted view is that Salvini sees the late summer as his best opportunity to hold new elections, the result of which would be to make him prime minister. Over the last year the anti-immigrant League has replaced the Five Star Movement (M5S) as the most popular party in Italy. In May's European Parliament elections the League won 34% of the vote, whereas the M5S, with close to 33% in the national parliamentary elections last year, fell to 17%.

Today Italian president Sergio Mattarella will meet with party leaders to see if a new coalition can form a government. The main contender is M5S-Democratic Party (PD) combine; strange bedfellows given that M5S came to power relentlessly skewering the neoliberal austerity and Brussels group-think of the PD. But the bigger threat for both parties now is the dramatic rise of the Italian Trump, Salvini.

If Mattarella fails to find a successor coalition, something explained by Marianne Arens, he can always name a technocratic government:

The next step is at the discretion of the 78-year-old President Mattarella, who himself comes from the PD. If no new coalition is formed, he could also appoint a government of experts, which would then also require a parliamentary majority. If Mattarella opts for new elections, which is considered unlikely, they must take place within 60 days. One last possibility would be for the Lega and the Five Star Movement to resume their coalition.

The politics of the collapse of the M5S-League government has to do with writing a budget due in October. Arens explains,

The most immediate task of the next government is to present a budget that complies with European Union deficit guidelines by October 15, which will require massive cuts at the expense of the working class. If the PD and the Five Stars take on this task, Salvini and Lega, which would then nominally be in opposition, could be further strengthened.

The acidic Jason Horowitz  writing in the neoliberal NYT notes that "Some analysts speculated that Mr. Salvini actually wanted out in order to avoid the difficult budget cutting required in the coming months to avoid an automatic tax hike."

My guess is that the Democratic Party will aggressively pursue the coalition with M5S, confident that it can zombify the party in the next three years. M5S will likely go along because its fate at the polls looks particularly bleak now. The question is whether the online membership of the M5S will ratify a coalition with the PD.

Italy Beats France

The British press has been much more thorough in its coverage of the flourishing conflict between the governments of Italy and France. Last week, in what is being called an "unprecedented" move, France recalled its ambassador to Italy. Why? Because Italian deputy prime minister Luigi Di Maio traveled to France to meet with leaders of the Yellow Vest (gilets jaunes) insurgency (a suitable analogy would be if the Canadian prime minister had traveled to Zuccotti Park to meet with the Occupy Wall Street protesters). Reuters explains that

Di Maio's decision . . . to visit France and meet several representatives of the "yellow vest" movement, which for months has waged a sometimes violent campaign against Macron and his policies, was deemed a bridge too far.

"The idea that a (deputy) prime minister of an EU country would come to France without letting France know in advance ... It's not some harmless thing," said a French diplomatic source. "It's just not acceptable behavior within the EU ...

"One hopes (withdrawing the ambassador) will force some reflection among the political parties and Italian institutions. It cannot help but underline how serious the situation is."

Officials say the ambassador will probably be sent back soon, but tensions are likely to persist.

For the most part, the mainstream media rushed to defend French president Emmanuel Macron. Di Maio and his fellow deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini are routinely dismissed as anti-immigrant populists working to undermine European unity. Italy's torpedoing an EU statement endorsing the U.S.-led coup underway in Venezuela is more grist for the mainstream mill.

The principal bulwark erected around the enfeebled Macron is a demonization of the Yellow Vests as a violent mob. The Reuters headline for yesterday's protest has been the standard messaging for the last month-plus: "More violence in Paris as 'yellow vests' keep marching."

The Saturday gilets jaunes protests, ongoing since November, have maintained their robust size. But the mainstream media, originally balanced in its reporting, has pivoted to emphasizing the violent, destructive nature of the protests. Macron has been lauded, albeit backhandedly, for making concessions to the working class, as well as for launching his "Great National Debate" public relations campaign.

Now the spin, on display in The Guardian, is that Macron has turned things around. The frame here is EU parliamentary elections in May:

Opinion polls in France have suggested that the main impact of one or more gilets jaunes parties running in the European elections would be to reduce support for the far-right party of Marine Le Pen and the far left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

A survey last month by Elabé showed 13% of voters could vote for a gilets jaunes party, knocking three points off the score of Le Pen’s National Rally and 1.5 off that of Mélenchon’s France Unbowed, and extending the lead of Macron’s La République En Marche (LREM).

“A gilets jaunes party would likely mobilise people who do not usually vote, but also take votes from the National Rally and France Unbowed,” Emmanuel Rivière of he pollsters Kantar Public France told Le Monde. “Paradoxically, the principal beneficiary would be the party of the president.”

An Ifop opinion poll published on Wednesday showed Macron’s approval rating surging from 23% in December to 34% in February.

Macron is important to the neoliberal consensus because his victory in 2017 is the last great electoral achievement for the market orthodoxy camp. It took the Jiffy Popping of a brand new political party and a massive"Russian bogeyman" psyop, but a win is a win.

The crisis for the neoliberal elites who govern the globe is that TINA ("There Is No Alternative") no longer holds sway among voters. The Russia bogeyman only works on people already committed to TINA.

There is a very good think piece in The Independent by Kim Sengupta that looks at the diplomatic row between Italy and France through the lens of Libya:

There is a feeling in Italy, not just among the supporters of the current government, and not unjustified, that the country has borne a disproportionate number of refugees while other northern European states are not taking their fair share.

France is a particular target on this count, not just because it has sent refugees back to Italy but also because of its part in getting Nato to carry out the bombing campaign which led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, and the state of semi-anarchy in the country which made it a haven for people-smugglers. It is worth recalling that the European Union used to pay Col Gaddafi to ensure that his country was not a major conduit for the trade, and he had broadly kept his side of the bargain.

This is a rare mention of the role of perpetual war in creating the immigration crisis that has led to the growth of populism in Europe.

Salvini, painted as a anti-African racist in the prestige press, a Mussolini wannabe, has scored major points in the dust-up with Macron. Never before, at least to my recollection, has such a balanced synopsis of Italy's position on immigration vis-a-vis France appeared in The New York Times:

On Thursday, Mr. Salvini responded to the French ambassador’s recall with a series of complaints, including France’s closing of its border to stop illegal migrants passing through Italy.

‘‘Stop with pushbacks at the borders,’’ said Mr. Salvini, who leads the anti-immigrant League party, the Italian government’s coalition partner. ‘‘There have been about 60,000 since 2017, and those include children and women abandoned in the forest.’’

[snip] 

The dispute came to a boil last summer over the migrant issue. The Italians, having borne the brunt of the migrant wave since 2015, were outraged last year when Mr. Macron denounced the new Italian government for failing to take in hundreds of migrants aboard the Aquarius humanitarian rescue boat.

The Italian prime minister’s office reacted with fury, saying it could not “accept hypocritical lessons from a country that, on migration, has always preferred to turn its back on its partners.” And it was true that France has made a regular practice of blocking migrants crossing the Italian border.

“The Italians have been justified — a lot of Italians feel that France’s behavior, with its grand speeches but refusal to welcome migrants, is unacceptable,” Mr. Lazar said.

For this reason alone -- clarifying the dispute on immigration between Italy and France -- Salvini and Di Maio have come out ahead of Macron in this kerfuffle.

NYT Editorializes Against New Italian Government

The editorial page of The New York Times takes aim at Italy's nascent M5S-League government in "The Populists Take Rome." Its main purposes is to repeat previous slurs: Conte inflated his resume with universities he never attended; Di Maio is a college dropout; Salvini wears a sweatshirt (oh, my). It's exhausted and foolish. One imagines that these nameless editorial writers feel suffocated having to churn out attack after attack in defense of a status quo to which no one is devoted other than the rich and powerful.

The exhaustion is on display in the tepid concession paragraph:

Yet the new Italian government cannot be dismissed as just another in Italy’s long history of political crises. The shift of a core member of the European Union, one whose allegiance to the “European project” had not been in doubt, toward the new Central European members hostile to Brussels is a serious blow to the deeper European integration championed by President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The editorial doesn't mention that Merkel is on her way out and Macron is diminishing by the day. The political center as wishfully conceived by The New York Times does not exist.

Do You Remember Yanis Varoufakis and MH17? Two Huge Hurdles for New Italian Government

Yes, Italy's M5S-League Government = Reprise of Greece 2015. The issue is basically the same. Can a sovereign government engage in deficit spending to stimulate its economy without the eurocrats in Brussels and Frankfurt vetoing it by means of engineering a punishing banking crisis? And if the answer is no, then will the new government be brought to heel or, mixing metaphors, will it collapse in the crib?

Italy is much larger than Greece (like a cruiserweight vs. a middleweight). So it has more punching power at its disposal. Also, France has been allowed to run deficits without punishment. But the problem is that the marriage of the Five Star Movement and the League is one that M5S party fathers appear to have embraced out of fear that their electoral mandate is fast fading. A little counter-punching from Brussels and Luigi Di Maio might very well go down.

When in Doubt, Poke the Bear. Now that Giuseppe Conte has survived Jason Horowitz's smear and been asked by president Sergio Mattarella to form a government, and that government is firmly opposed to continuing EU sanctions on Russia, sanctions that were put in place following the media firestorm that accompanied the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and the death of all 296 passengers, it is no coincidence that the kangaroo "Joint Investigative Team" would hold a press conference to announce that Russia was responsible.

There is absolutely no new evidence provided.

"Prosecutors showed photos and videos of a truck convoy carrying the system as it crossed the border from Russia to Ukraine. It crossed back several days later with one missile missing. The vehicles had serial numbers and other markings that were unique to the 53rd brigade, an anti-aircraft unit based in the western Russian city of Kursk, they said.

It's the same several-years-old Eliot Higgins chicanery repeatedly debunked by the late Robert Parry. But it needs to be dusted off and spotlighted anew because Italy now poses a threat to continuing EU sanctions on Russia.

Jason Horowitz Now in Rome Up to His Usual Dirty Tricks

UPDATE: An absolutely damning piece on the M5S-League government in formation (Lib-Pop Politics: Italy’s New Government Is More Neoliberal Than Populist by Mario Pianta) was posted this morning by Yves Smith. Pianta's point is that M5S is rudderless while Salvini's League is on the ascent:

Current polls reflect this trend of a growing Lega and a stable Five Stars consensus; when Five Stars support weakens – as happened in the peripheries of Rome and Turin, run by weak Five Stars mayors – Salvini is set to grab a large part of their disappointed voters. Thus, the political outlook suggests Salvini as a likely winner of a real majority for the centre-right whenever new elections take place, giving him the upper hand in talks for the new government – the alternatives being an early vote in autumn or in May 2019 when they could be held together with the European elections.

That's something to think about: If Mattarella somehow tomahawks the nascent government, which is the drumbeat in the corporate press, and another round of elections is scheduled, Pianta argues that the League would be the clear winner with the center-right coalition likely able to form a government on its own.

The reason Pianta sees this as a problem is that the League is nothing more than Italian Trumpism, espousing tax cuts and bashing immigrants. Pianata concludes with this sobering assessment of the M5S-League program:

The asymmetry between a Lega with clear priorities – in terms of class and nation – and a Five Stars with its only concern to strike a deal, has produced a government programme that includes some general concerns of the Five Stars – on legality and minimum income – and most practical measures designed by the Lega – on taxes and migrants.

Demands for renegotiating European treaties and restoring national sovereignty in some areas are enough to open up a rhetorical confrontation with Brussels – and much attention from the media. But they have little concrete content.

The most important specific policy that will be introduced by the new government is the Italian version of the ‘flat tax’; firms and individuals will pay either 15 or 20% of income taxes, as opposed to the current 43% for the top income bracket.

It is clearly stated that no wealth tax will be introduced (Italy has often been criticized by the EU for having cancelled real estate taxes on home-owners). Tax controls on Italy’s large number of small firms and self-employed will be scaled down, basically legalising tax evasion for a large number of right-wing, medium and high-income voters.

For financial firms and banks no control or limit on their activities will be introduced. This will make Italy a neoliberal business paradise, competing with Ireland in the race to the bottom of business taxes in Europe, offering some room for the survival of Italy’s small businesses dramatically hit by a decade of crisis.

In this way, the transfer of income to the richest 20% of Italians will be huge, with the very rich benefiting the most. Berlusconi would have never been able with his past majorities to introduce such a pro-rich agenda.

Such measures are the easiest to implement, as they simply scale back state redistribution, leaving unequal outcomes of market processes untouched. More difficult is the implementation of the only ‘pro-poor’ measure long championed by the Five Stars: the so-called ‘citizen income’. In the programme this is reduced to an income support of €780 a month for a maximum of two years for unemployed Italians (no residents with foreign citizenship will obtain it) ready to accept any job offer; no figure for potential recipients or funding for implementing it is mentioned.

But the darkest success of the Lega in the government programme is the chapter on migrants, envisaging a stop to the flows of refugees, changes in European rules on asylum and free movement, and proposing the repatriation of the 500,000 immigrants with irregular status now present in Italy.

Combined with harsh measures on law and order, this policy caters to the ‘fear effect’ that is behind the growth of Lega’s support. In parallel the rise of the Five Stars was based on a ‘poverty effect’ – especially in the South (see here). The tragedy is that the poorest Italians have overwhelmingly voted for two political forces that are now creating the most pro-rich, pro-business government in Italy’s history. Even worse, Lib-pop politicscould be just the starter for an outright far-right political future.

****

My suspicion when Jason Horowitz was made bureau chief of Rome by The New York Times, a reward for his work in slandering Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, is that the flagship of neoliberal hegemony was positioning a poison pen to take out the biggest internal threat to the European Union, Italy's Five Star Movement (M5S).

Horowitz faced a tough pull during the run-up to parliamentary elections because the political center has absolutely collapsed in Italy. While he churned away with his typical attacks, it was all just so much piss in the wind because it was clear that the insurgent parties, M5S and Northern League, were going to kick ass. And kick ass they did. In France, the NYT praised a party of neophytes, Macron's En Marche! And anything tech based usually garners accolades aplenty from the Gray Lady. But M5S does not support the Washington Consensus. So it must not be allowed to govern.

Horowitz earned his supper the other day when he published an innocuous two paragraphs in "Italy’s Populists Offer Giuseppe Conte for Prime Minister; N.Y.U. Claim in Question" casting doubt on the M5S-League candidate for prime minister, Giuseppe Conte:

[Giuseppe Conte] lists research at famous universities around the world, including Yale, the Sorbonne in France and New York University, where he said he “perfected and updated his studies” while staying at the college for at least a month every summer between 2008 and 2012.

Asked about Mr. Conte’s experience at N.Y.U., Michelle Tsai, a spokeswoman, said Monday, “A person by this name does not show up in any of our records as either a student or faculty member,” adding that it was possible he attended one or two-day programs for which the school does not keep records.

Clearly Washington's plan is to strangle the M5S-League government in the cradle. Bloomberg has at least a story a day which all but beg the Italian president Sergio Mattarella to take over. It's fascism without the slightest hint of a mass base.

Libya and Italian Elections

A long rambling article by Jo Becker and Eric Scmitt, "As Trump Wavers on Libya, an ISIS Haven, Russia Presses On," which ends up going nowhere, seems intent on making the reader frightened of Russian influence in North Africa without every explaining why that is something of which we should be afraid. You have to travel all the way to the last paragraph to get an inkling of what that fear is:

To many Libyans, though, the Trump administration’s strategy looks a lot like the Obama administration’s post-Benghazi “lead from behind” approach: carrying out reactive strikes while leaving the difficult tasks of reconciliation to the latest United Nations envoy. 

Current and former Libyan and American officials say that while there are no ready solutions for resolving Libya’s woes, a more engaged and effective American policy would include more frequent, highly visible diplomatic engagements with Libyan leaders; a new United States special envoy with a mandate to work closely with the rival Libyan factions; a seasoned diplomat to replace Peter W. Bodde, who retired at year’s end as Washington’s ambassador to Libya; closer support for European and United Nations-led efforts to reconcile the warring parties; and a greater number of Special Operations advisers on the ground. 

“We have clearly delegated all of our foreign policy in the Gulf and Libya to a coalition of Emirates, Saudi and Egyptians,” said Jason Pack, executive director of the U.S. Libya Business Association. “That’s essentially letting the Russians win in Libya because they support exactly the same groups.” 

The consequences, Mr. Pack added, are far-reaching. “Libya is important because of where it sits. He who can project power into Libya has the ability to deluge Europe with migrants and bring right-wing populists to power there, interfere in the market price of oil, and more.”

In less than a month Italians go to the polls to elect a new government. Right now a rightist coalition led by Berlusconi's Forza Italia has the best chance of forming a government. According to Jon Henley writing for The Guardian:

The Five Star Movement is set to be the single largest party with between 27 and 29% of the vote, but it has long ruled out forming a coalition with any of the traditional parties. In recent days, however, it has said it could reconsider in the event of an inconclusive result.

Berlusconi’s Forza Italia is on between 16 and 18%. His coalition with the Northern League on 12 to 14%, the Brothers of Italy on five to 6% and possibly Us with Italy on two to 3% could come within spitting distance of 40%.

On the left, Renzi’s centre-left alliance should manage a combined 26-28%. The Democratic party is on between 22 and 23%, and More Europe, Together Italy and Popular Civic List between four and 5%. Free and Equal is polling at around 6%.

A regional election in Sicily in November saw a Berlusconi-backed candidate win nearly 40% and the Democratic party less than 20%. In regional elections in June, the centre-right were also the big winnersand the Five Star Movement fared badly.

Add to this the high proportion of still-undecided voters and it is all but impossible to predict who will be governing Italy later this year.

There is a good chance that whomever takes power in Italy is going to be willing to publicly work with Russia. Immigration is a huge issue for Italians. Libya is the main transit point for refugees. Russia is attempting to stabilize the country, when all the U.S. manages is an occasional drone strike.

When will the European Union withdraw its sanctions on Russia? Maybe after the Italians vote.

Change is Coming from Europe

If a blow is going to be dealt to American hegemony, we should look to Europe first. The U.S. is on a perpetual war footing. The Obama administration has picked fights with Russia, China; it is attempting to reassert control in South America, at the same time it is presiding over extensive military campaigns in the Greater Middle East (not to mention all its secret ops and special forces in Africa). The U.S. needs its enabling European sidekick in order to cope with its war mania.

But this war mania is what is splintering the electoral base of Europe's ruling parties. War mania creates refugees who attempt to immigrate to Europe. Merkel is losing consistently in Germany, and Le Pen is on her way this spring in France. Spring is also the time that Conservative Party leader Theresa May announced that Britain will trigger Article 50 and begin negotiating with the EU on an exit, which by statute must be concluded in two years. Spain might be headed for its third election in a year. Italy's Renzi is on the ropes.

At the very least, next year, when Europe is coming apart, it is going to be very hard for the U.S. to bluster and bully as it has for so long. Change is on the way, and it is coming from Europe.

Trump Needs a Miracle + Blows Against the Empire

This morning, the first post-convention Monday in the long march to the general election in November, is a good indication of why it will take a miracle for Donald Trump to win the White House. Stories with the most prominent placement are "Donald Trump’s Confrontation With Muslim Soldier’s Parents Emerges as Unexpected Flash Point" and "How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump." The former plays up Trump's bigotry and divisiveness; the latter, the new McCarythism. The media will tattoo Trump and the Trump campaign every day for the next three months. Trump will be unable to whittle down his disapproval rating and narrow the gender gap. Because the media monopoly has gone all in for Hillary, Trump is effectively in a box; absent the miraculous, there he will stay.

Then there is the issue of the daunting electoral map. Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman in "Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go" outline the harrowing journey ahead for The Donald. Basically he has to run the table on the big swing states -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida -- and hold North Carolina. Problem is, Trump is woefully underfunded at this point, not to mention that he has alienated a large part of the GOP machine. Even assuming a richly-funded, well-organized campaign, Trump's task ahead is Herculean. Given that he is having trouble raising money -- and it doesn't look like he is going to bankroll himself -- and his campaign infrastructure is skeletal, once again, a miracle is called for.

Nate Cohn limned the contours of this miracle in "Donald Trump’s Path: What Map Should Democrats Fear the Most?" Trump runs the big swings as well as the little swings -- Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire -- and ends up tied 269-269 with Hillary. The election gets dumped into the House of Representatives where Paul Ryan anoints Trump il Duce. Far-fetched? Absolutely.

True, Trump has proven he is a real wild card and not one to be counted out, but I think as we get deeper into August his limitations are going to catch up with his campaign and Hillary will get back to her four-to-five-point lead.

While we are hypnotized stateside with the Trump circus, the U.S. Empire is about to absorb some big blows:

1) Some sort of rapprochement is underway between Russia and Turkey. Putin and Erdogan are to meet next week in St. Petersburg. Turkey appears convinced that the U.S. had a hand in the recent coup attempt.

2) The jihadis are surrounded in Aleppo. Pro-jihadi think tankers are already licking their wounds and looking for some sort of silver lining. That silver lining appears to be "Just wait until Hillary gets here."

3) Italy is on the verge of a full-blown banking crisis. Renzi is on the ropes. Another anti-EU party, M5S, is looking strong.

4) Britain will likely continue to trod a rocky road as it becomes apparent that Theresa May plans on screwing the white working class that voted for Brexit.

Get ready. Crisis time approaches.

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.

Politics of Austerity in Italy and Greece

Italy formed a rare unity government last weekend, which was confirmed by both houses of Parliament this week. Today in an unsigned editorial, "Italy's New Government," the New York Times weighs in skeptically about Prime Minister Enrico Letta's possibility for success:

Given the muddled election results in February and the unwillingness of the third-place finisher, Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, to make any coalition deals, Mr. Letta has assembled the only possible majority. But it may not hold together long enough to enact the ambitious 18-month program Mr. Letta proposed this week. 

That agenda itself pulls in different, and often conflicting, directions. It calls for tax relief and an easing of austerity, but it also pledges continued commitment to severe European Union budget targets. It calls for economic reforms, which will be difficult to carry out in a time of recession and high unemployment, especially since Mr. Letta’s governing coalition depends on the votes of political parties that have blocked such reforms in the past. And it calls for electoral and political changes, but it must depend on the beneficiaries of the old, unreformed system to make them law. To pull Italy out of its economic and political crisis, Mr. Letta will have to change minds in Rome as well as Berlin.

In Greece, which has the highest unemployment in the EU at 27%, there was a general strike on May Day. Niki Kitsantonis and Alan Cowell report today in "Greeks Strike Against Austerity as World Observes Labor Day" that

The strike came just a few days after officials in the euro zone approved the release of 2.8 billion euros, or $3.7 billion, in rescue financing for Greece after Parliament ratified a new raft of economic reforms, including a politically contentious decision to lay off 15,000 civil servants by the end of next year. 

The financing had been due in March but was delayed after talks between the government and officials of Greece’s troika of foreign lenders — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — broke down over the troika’s demands for the civil service cuts. 

The country’s governing coalition, which has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity agenda, must now enforce agreed-upon measures, laying off 2,000 civil servants by the end of June and pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets. It faces strong opposition by its main political rival, the leftist party Syriza, which wants Greece to renege on its loan agreement with the troika and is neck and neck in opinion polls with the conservative New Democracy, the head of the shaky three-party coalition. 

The European Union and the International Monetary Fund have extended to Greece two foreign bailouts worth $317 billion over the past three years, meting out the aid in installments in exchange for austerity measures and overhauls.

Greece is further along in its destructive obeisance to austerity than Italy but the two countries have much in common: unity governments clinging for survival to the wreckage of a discredited status quo while a dissenting political formation -- Syriza in Greece; Five Star Movement in Italy -- gathers force. The Times Editorial Board's skepticism is well placed.

Capital Controls in Cyprus, Bank Lines Not as Long as Expected

Banks opened today in Cyprus. There were lines but not as long as some anticipated. The S&P 500 established a new record, 1569.19, breaking the old one set in October of 2007. I'd say it's time to start selling.

The capital controls in Cyprus include the following: funds cannot be electronically transferred to another country; a maximum of 3,000 euros in cash can be taken out of the country; allowable ATM withdrawals have been increased to 300 euros a day from 100 euros; credit and debit card charges are limited to 5,000 euros a person a month; banks will accept payroll checks as deposits but will not cash them. This info can all be found in Liz Alderman's story, "Cyprus Sets Up Tight Controls as Banks Prepare to Reopen," from this morning.

Imagine the same restrictions in the United States. There would be an armed insurrection.

The EU is coming under fire. As Alderman says,

Under European Union treaties, restricting the free movement of capital is forbidden. Critics say that what is happening in Cyprus shows that union rules will be flouted when the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and European Union leaders find it convenient to do so.

By imposing capital controls, European and Cypriot officials have effectively created two classes of euro: cash that can be freely spent, and cash that is locked up by capital controls, effectively diminishing its value.

“It has to be acknowledged that this is something entirely new,” said Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research group in Brussels, and a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “This will shape expectations in other countries, and the issue is whether capital controls can be avoided in future episodes.”

Borrowing rates for Italy and Spain increased yesterday.

Consensus: Cyprus Crisis Won't Spread

A consensus seems to be forming that the debt crisis underway in Cyprus will not spread to vulnerable, big eurozone countries like Italy and Spain. The reason? Cyprus is unique because of the outsize role played by money-laundering Russians. Here's how Andrew Ross Sorkin, a reliable Wall Street mouthpiece, puts it in his DealBook column today:

Cyprus is unique. Besides being tiny, its banking system looks different from those in most other countries. Much of the big money deposited in its banks is from foreign investors, including Russians who have long been suspected of money laundering. Those investors had fair warning that Cypriot banks were troubled. The issue has been simmering for six months. But those investors left their money in the bank, in part because they were gambling that the banks would be bailed out at no cost to them. If the current plan is approved, depositors will have lost that bet. 

Worse, the strategy employed in the bailout of Greece — in which bondholders of its sovereign debt were paid less than face value — will not work in Cyprus. Cyprus’s banks own much of the country’s debt, so any effort to reduce that debt by forcing debt holders to accept less would only make the banks more troubled. 

Given the brutal history between Russia and so much of Europe — and speculation that so much of the money is ill gotten — it is clear why it would be so politically unpalatable to countries in the euro zone, Germany in particular, to bail out Russian depositors. And even if the move were to create a run on the banks in Cyprus, the contagion would be limited. 

There is very little chance that politicians would ever choose to use the model they developed in Cyprus in a country like Italy or Spain, where a run on the banks would have such profound implications. By the way, if you’re wondering why investors left so much money in troubled Cypriot banks, here’s a trivia question: Would you have been better off leaving your money in a bank in the United States or in Cyprus over the last five years? 

The answer: You would have been better off in Cyprus, even after the bailout, when your money was “confiscated.” If you had 100,000 euros in a Cypriot bank account over the last five years, where the interest rate has averaged about 5 percent, you would have about 127,600 euros today. Even after the bailout, which would require you to give up 10 percent of your deposit — 12,760 euros — you would be left with 114,840 euros. The American bank? The $100,000 you deposited at Bank of America five years ago is about $105,100, at the going rate of about 1 percent interest a year.

Dismissing the bank run in Cyprus as a one-off because nearly a quarter of its deposits are held by Russians seems too convenient to me, too redolent of the old cold war. The issue isn't the Russians. The issue is getting a bailout through parliament, whether in Cyprus or in other eurozone countries.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Labour Party member and Dutch Minister of Finance who is the current head of the Euro Group, nationalized SNS Reaal in February, wiping out its shareholders. If he can take a hard line in the Netherlands why can't he do the same to a tiny country like Cyprus? The push back came from Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades -- as documented in today's frontpage story by James Kanter, Nicholas Kulish and Andrew Higgins -- who fought to keep confiscation on deposits of more than 100,000 euros below ten percent. This meant the small fry have to fork over more, which is the recipe for a bank run.

Contrary to Sorkin's dismissal of concern over Cyprus, it's unclear at this point that the contagion won't spread. This from today's story, "Second Thoughts in Europe as Anxiety Rises in Cyprus," by Liz Alderman and Landon Thomas Jr.:

While it is too early to tell if Italian, Spanish and Greek savers will pull out their deposits in response to the Cyprus tax, investors holding the bonds of banks in Spain and especially Italy are already taking action. 

In Italy, ravaged by a stagnating economy, banks are experiencing a steep increase in nonperforming loans — one of the highest rates in the euro zone — that worries regulators and has made an investment fad of betting against Italian bank bonds. 

For now, no one is predicting a European bailout of Italian banks. But just as problems with Spain’s smaller savings banks last year quickly escalated into a crisis requiring a European bank rescue, a growing number of analysts are warning that Italy’s most troubled banks could lead to a broader systemic threat to Italian banking.