No is Not Enough

I spent the holiday weekend reading Naomi Klein's latest book, No is Not Enough. It is good, better I think than This Changes Everything.

No is Not Enough argues that we can't simply vote out Trump, replace him with a neoliberal Democrat and expect all to be well. We need to start articulating utopian manifestos, which Klein did in Canada with the Leap Manifesto.

Klein seems hopeful that a progressive political movement is on the verge of taking power. She points to the surprising performances of Bernie Sanders and Jean-Luc Mélenchon as proof.

But what is surprising to me is the recent success of a zombie neoliberalism in France where Macron has successfully pared back the Code du Travail in favor of business. The change is being sold as necessary to reduce unemployment, but the result will be an increase in inequality. Yesterday on the op-ed page of The New York Times two academics argued for industry-wide pattern bargaining as a way to address endemic income inequality in the United States, the very fix that Macron just eliminated in French labor law.

With Merkel headed for a fourth term, the neoliberal world order that seemed headed for the dustbin last year plods on. I hope Klein is right that a huge progressive, socialist movement is being born. But my sense is that the shocks that neoliberalism uses to expand its control of the public sphere are going to have to become so severe that they exceed the ability of the political order to manage them.

So to answer the question, Socialism or barbarism? I think to get to socialism things are first going to have to become even more barbaric.

Does Populism Change Everything?

I'm reading Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything. It is fantastic but dispiriting. It provides a historical account of how collective recognition of climate change corresponded with a corporate-dominated globalized free trade system -- the latter effectively negating a plan for addressing the former. In fact, the primacy of trade was memorialized at the outset at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.

One theme that Klein stresses throughout is localism. In order to deal with the planet's changing climate we are going to have to craft local solutions. The problem is that the neoliberal global trade architecture that has been erected the last 25 years makes localism illegal. Local goods and services cannot be privileged over those from foreign countries.

And this is why there is such hostility from the neoliberal center towards the populism that is rising throughout the West. At root this fast-growing populism is a rejection of corporate-managed international trade and banking. Being anti-immigrant is just the flower of the populist plant that has taken root.

This morning online, which means it will be printed in tomorrow's national edition, The New York Times has a good, long article by Alissa Rubin, "Geert Wilders, Reclusive Provocateur, Rises Before Dutch Vote," devoted to the "Dutch Trump":

Geert Wilders, far-right icon, is one of Europe’s strangest politicians, not least because he comes from the Netherlands, one of Europe’s most socially liberal countries, with a centuries-long tradition of promoting religious tolerance and welcoming immigrants. 

How he and his party fare in the March 15 elections could well signal how the far right will do in pivotal elections in France, Germany and possibly Italy later this year, and ultimately determine the future of the European Union. Mr. Wilders (pronounced VIL-ders) has promised to demand a “Nexit” referendum on whether the Netherlands should follow Britain’s example and leave the union.

“The Netherlands is kind of a bellwether, a lot of trends manifest themselves here first,” said Hans Anker, a Dutch political strategist who has worked both in the Netherlands and the United States. 

“I wouldn’t rule out that Wilders could be prime minister,” he added. “This one is fundamentally unpredictable.”

The problem for Wilders, even if he wins, will be forming a government:

Right now Mr. Wilders’s party looks set to win more seats than any other or to come in second. However, he has historically polled better before elections than he has performed in them. [Same problem that Le Pen and the National Front have.] Still, after pollsters underestimated the likelihood of both Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump last year, no one is relying on predictions.

The bigger question is whether even if Mr. Wilders comes in first or second, he would be willing to form or join a governing coalition. For more than 20 years, no one party has had a majority. Other parties say they will not work with him and he has shown little interest in compromise and working with others.

What I find curious is how balanced Rubin's story is compared to, say, The Times' reporting on Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, which is always dismissive. It is as if the neoliberal center sees a possibility of collaborating or co-opting the rising populism. This is the dance underway with Trump. And at this point I think it should be apparent to all of us that Trump is willing to play along with the neoliberal center.

There are of course contradictions. The future of the EU is problematic. A Wilders wins means a Nexit vote, as a Le Pen win means a Frexit. The Trump talking point is that capitalism, for all intents and purposes, is contained in one country, and that is the United States. Multilateral trade agreements will be scrapped in favor of bilateral negotiations. Easier said than done. Globalized free trade is the key to the neoliberal unipolar world; that, and full spectrum U.S. military dominance. A kaleidoscope of bilateral trade agreements leads to a multipolar world.

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For a good assessment of the Thomas Perez's election over Keith Ellison this weekend to lead the DNC, read Glenn Greenwald's "Key Question About DNC Race: Why Did Obama White House Recruit Perez to Run Against Ellison?"

The answer? Money, of course. It doesn't bode well for Democrat hopes of picking up seats at the midterm.

Thatcher Economics

Apropos the earlier post this morning about the application of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine to Europe, here's a paragraph from Joseph Gregory's frontpage obit of Margaret Thatcher:

Mrs. Thatcher's prescription for change was based on the ideas of the conservative economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Hayek believed that political and economic freedom were inseparable; Friedman argued that economic productivity and inflation were determined by the amount of money the government put into the economy, and that the heavy government spending advocated by Keynesian economics distorted the natural strength of the marketplace.

"Shock Doctrine" Applied to Europe

Jacob Lew was in Brussels yesterday where he appeared at a press conference with Herman Van Rompuy, head of the European Council. Annie Lowrey covers it in a story, "In Effort to ‘Rebalance,’ Europe Appears Committed to Austerity Plan," that appears in this morning's paper:

“Our economic recovery is gathering strength,” Mr. Lew said. “The U.S. economy has expanded for 14 consecutive quarters, and although the pace of job creation is not as fast as we would like, the private sector has added jobs for 37 straight months.”

In contrast, the euro zone continues to struggle with shrinking economies and rising unemployment, with Germany, France and Spain all contracting in the fourth quarter of 2012. That has made meeting Europe’s goals of reducing fiscal deficits even harder.

Van Rompuy stuck to the austerity script:

But Mr. Van Rompuy reaffirmed the Continent’s strategy, rather than indicating a change in direction despite the rising unemployment and worse than expected contraction. 

“The European economies face a high level of debt, deep structural medium-term challenges and short-term economic headwinds that we need to confront,” he added. “There is no room for complacency.”

We've always been told in this country that Europe, because of its parliamentary system and strong labor unions, has a richer social democracy than the United States. Well, the welfare state in Europe is being dismantled, and this is bad news for the rest of us wherever it is that we live.

The financial system failed, but it is the social safety net that must be cut. It's a complete validation of the Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine. Crises provide cover to implement neoliberal "reforms," even when neoliberal reforms create the crises to begin with (such as the repeal of Glass-Steagall). It's not clear that we have a way out of this circle of cannibalization. If Europe can't do it, we're in serious trouble.

The fact that Portugal's constitutional court pushed back against austerity is good news. Possibly the judiciary can do what the people's representatives in the legislature and executive have up until now failed to do -- halt the cannibalization. Raphael Minder's story today, "Portugal Warns Citizens of More Economic Pain," reports on plutocratic worries over developments in Portugal as revealed in a Fitch report from yesterday:

The decision has now called into question how the government can meet its budgetary goals in the near term and raised the broader issue of just how much austerity will be tolerated, not only by disgruntled citizens but also by justices who often act as the guardians of the Continent’s cherished social welfare system.

“The ruling could be interpreted as saying that all public spending cuts that affect civil servants are unconstitutional,” Fitch, the credit rating agency, wrote on Monday. “If that interpretation is correct, the ruling represents a setback to future fiscal adjustment efforts in Portugal.” 

It added, “This is a greater concern than its immediate impact.”