Pope Francis is correct about the failures of market capitalism. But there's a small problem ...

The current Pope's economic critiques make a great deal of sense. So much so that even as an atheist, it means I'm tempted to make common cause with the Church. The problem is the Pope's theological obligations, which tend to take away what the Holy Father's economic platform giveth. We pagans tend to be burned first. 

But I'll give Francis major props for daring to tackle the prevailing neoliberal dogma, even while being sure I'll hear about it, probably from the economists first.

Pope Francis Laments Failures Of Market Capitalism In Blueprint For Post-COVID World, by Sylvia Poggioli (NPR)

Pope Francis has presented his blueprint for a post-COVID-19 world, covering a vast number of issues from fraternity and income inequality to immigration and social injustice.

The document, released Sunday, is his third encyclical — the most authoritative form of papal teaching.

Its title is Fratelli Tutti, and it is a scathing description of laissez faire capitalism and a meditation on the coronavirus pandemic that has swept across the globe.

More dismal than Ayn Rand? "Meet the Hidden Architect Behind America's Racist Economics."

Photo credit: Slate.

Meet the man credited with public choice theory -- which means being given little real choice when it comes to oligarchs keeping you down for their further enrichment.

Meet the Hidden Architect Behind America's Racist Economics, by Lynn Parramore (Institute for New Economic Thinking)

Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean

Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, Democracy in Chains, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are locked into place, there may be no going back ...

Bourbonism can't help us. Neoliberal frauds be gone. Greg Fischer is clothesless, and he should resign, now.

"The coronavirus crisis has revealed the fragility of a system built on decades of financialisation and globalisation."

Photo credit: The Independent.

Excellent magazine, equally fine article.

Tribune is a democratic socialist political journalism founded in 1937 and published in London. While it is independent, it has usually supported the Labour Party from the left. From 2009 to 2018, it faced serious financial difficulties until it was purchased by Jacobin in late 2018, shifting to a quarterly publication model.

Tear it down.

Coronavirus Has Exposed Capitalism’s Weaknesses, by Costas Lapavitsas

The coronavirus crisis has revealed the fragility of a system built on decades of financialisation and globalisation – but the task for the Left is to offer a real alternative, argues Costas Lapavitsas.

The coronavirus crisis represents a critical moment in the development of contemporary capitalism. To be sure, the crisis has longer to run — and its full impact on the USA, the EU, China, Japan and developing countries remains to be seen. But there is no doubt that it has posed the threat of a massive depression across the world economy. The systemic failures of financialisation and globalisation were starkly revealed by the public health emergency, and the state has become ever more implicated in sustaining this failing system. However, the character of its interventions give no reason to think that there will be a transformation at the top of the political and social hierarchy resulting in policies that favour the interests of working people.

The US government’s decision massively to augment its deficit — and thus its borrowing — while simultaneously expanding the supply of money and driving interest rates to zero, is essentially the same as after 2007–9. Even if a depression is avoided, the medium-term results are also likely to be the same, since the underlying weakness of capitalist accumulation is not confronted. But there will certainly be political contradictions arising from defending the neoliberal order, not least given the demonstration of nation states’ power to intervene in the economy. These will be particularly important in the EU, where the fiscal and health emergency response to the crisis has so far come from individual nation-states rather than the collective institutions.

Casting a harsh light on the inadequacies of neoliberal capitalism, this crisis has directly posed the issue of democratic reorganisation of both economy and society in the interests of workers. There is an urgent need to confront the chaos of globalisation and financialisation by putting forth concrete radical proposals. That also requires forms of organisation capable of altering the social and political balance in favor of working people.

The pandemic has brought to the fore vital issues of social transformation. It has vividly illustrated the imperative of having a public health system that is rationally organised and capable of dealing with epidemic shocks. It has also posed the urgent need for solidarity, communal action, and public policies to support workers and the poorest faced with lockdowns, unemployment, and economic collapse.

More broadly, it has reasserted the historic need to confront a declining system that is locked in its own absurdities. Unable rationally to transform itself, globalised and financialised capitalism instead keeps resorting to ever-greater doses of the same, disastrous, palliatives. The first requirement, in this respect, is to defend democratic rights from a threatening state and insist that working people have a powerful say in all decision making. Only on this basis could radical alternatives be proposed, including large-scale measures such as designing industrial policy to address the weakness of production, facilitating a green transition, dealing with income and wealth inequalities, and confronting financialisation by creating public financial institutions.

The coronavirus crisis has already transformed the terms of political struggle — and socialists must urgently respond.

ON THE AVENUES: I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling.

Aimlessness, ennui, and frustration.

These three words don’t begin to describe my mood during the year or so immediately following high school graduation in 1978. You’d need to add measures of angst, disaffection and frustration to the mix, not to mention an ongoing, crippling shyness.

To be more succinct, I was an extremely unhappy camper -- and then, as now, I detest camping. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was supposed to do with my life.

Small wonder The Who’s quintessential Quadrophenia album spoke to me so insistently at the time.

I am not the actor
This can't be the scene
But I am in the water
As far as I can see

Of course it’s been 42 years since then, and honestly I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. The difference between now and before is sheer stagecraft. I’m much better adjusted to performing. As an adult I've become the actor. At some point along the way I learned that people can be shy extroverts, and there’s no law against faking it until you make it.

In fact, faking it has served me quite well.

But in 1978, I was at sea. For my inaugural semester at Indiana University Southeast, I signed up for four evening classes. It was a disastrous foray into academia. I failed one and managed somehow to beg an incomplete out of another. Such was my dysfunction that I derived no solace from solid academic performances in the other two, English Composition and Intro to Philosophy.

In fact, these two courses were harbingers of a future pathway forward, even if I couldn’t see it. In retrospect, I just didn’t know myself. Self-knowledge came only with time.

I’m a slow learner, which means that almost always, I’m also a late bloomer. If you want fast, decisive decisions, look elsewhere, because I may not be the best choice. I’ll hoard every last second you give me to think about it, then run the variations through my head multiple times.

Once focused, that’s where I remain. Getting focused can be an ordeal.

In addition, that horrid shyness made post-high school life challenging. The IUS class I failed in the fall of 1978 was Public Speaking. I should have refused the option when the counselor suggested it to me, but I couldn’t find the words to express my terror. I didn’t know what to say to myself, much less to other people.

To be truthful, coping mechanisms for shyness didn’t become clear until I was well into my twenties. In the beginning, I needed barriers to survive: a teacher’s desk between the students and me, the counter separating the liquor store clerk from his customers, and a nice row of taps like a picket fence from behind the bar.

I’ve proven to be a patient adult, and things gradually fell into place, although four decades ago shyness made it excruciatingly hard to find new friends. At first my friends after high school were the same as during high school, at least the ones who stuck around and didn’t go away to university.

Maybe all of us who stayed here had certain socialization issues.

---

The year following my high school graduation, I joined with a few of these friends to stage what we referred to at the time as a “commando raid.” It was juvenilia to such a brain-dead degree that my adult brain fairly recoils from the memory.

It seems that rudimentary steel gates had been installed at the roadway entrances to Floyd Central, our alma mater. This struck us as the first step toward a future police/education state; a blow needed to be struck for freedom of mobility, and who better to do it than us?

Besides, we were underemployed, bored and profoundly misdirected. Our bizarre conclusion was to advocate freedom of movement by preventing the school buses from leaving. The gang pooled pocket change, bought a few padlocks and coordinated our watches.

Just as the closing bell sounded one spring afternoon, we descended from three directions and padlocked the gates shut, reasoning this would make us famous.

A senior mole still on the inside subsequently reported a farcical outcome as annoying as it was utterly predictable. The bus drivers saw everything as it unfolded, and our cheap padlocks were no match for humongous bolt cutters wielded by yawning janitors who came trotting from the building within seconds of our getaway.

The whole episode lasted a few minutes at the very most, and we looked so foolishly impotent that the administrators didn't even bother tracking us down. For me, the exercise actually generated a learning point, which was profound embarrassment. I no longer was in high school, and evidently needed to broaden my horizons.

After all these years, and quite apart from the youthful idiocy of our ill-fated stunt, the stated purpose of those schoolyard gates recently has come back to me. They were supposed to help secure the grounds at night and on weekends, when no one needed to be reposing on school property anyway.

However, if my memory is to be trusted, the gates seldom were used. It quickly became obvious that school activities ran seemingly around the clock, and students, teachers and staff were coming and going at all hours. The gates soon were padlocked open, and started rusting. Taxpayers griped in letters to the newspaper: why waste a thousand bucks on gates that weren’t being used?

All of it -- the gates, those objections and our commando raid -- seems ridiculously quaint looking back from the vantage point of 2020.

Nowadays when topics of school security and safety arise, we're no longer talking about three or four flimsy gates, but armed guards, weapons, x-ray machines and in all likelihood quite soon, the micro-chipping of humans in the same way we did our cat at the vet last week.

Not to mention mental health services and counseling, the proposed funding for which comprise the bulk of monies being sought in 2020 by the school corporation via the current “safety” referendum ballot issue.

Damn straight; we do live in a different world. See what four decades of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and proliferating neoliberalism can do to a society’s sanity? When RayGun took office in 1981, the disassembling of America began in earnest. Joe Biden’s dementia-accented ascendancy this week seems calculated to assure there’ll be a two-party continuance of the fundamental neoliberal rot, with maybe a symptom or two addressed in passing before the inevitable veto by Amazon, Wall Street and the gendarmes of capital accumulation.

It's a good thing we still have books.

---

Coincidentally, the late Mark Fisher’s amazing Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? closed out March atop my nightstand, from whence I devoured it in three sittings.

In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”

It isn’t acceptable, is it?

Maybe it’s a fast food diet of pure sugar, the plastic fragments coursing through our veins, or the modern global economy’s reduction of work to frantic kaleidoscopic gigging.

Fischer’s view is that when alternatives to robber baron capitalism can no longer even be imagined, bat-shit craziness is the logical outcome for all except the 1%.

(In retrospect, listening to Joy Division while writing these words may not have been my best idea ever.)

I’ll never be entirely sure whether my inner turmoil during high school and shortly thereafter was the usual hormonal accompaniment to acne and masturbation, or something deeper. The odds overwhelmingly favor the former, but it strikes me as useful in the context of a public education that young people have access to mental health services.

Far more useful would be immediate and pervasive revolution against neoliberalism, and yet I understand how few Americans are in a position to undertake the corrective measures. I’m a patient man, and I trust that in time, they will, even if it’s after my time.

In the interim, allow me to state publicly that I’ve no issues with the school corporation’s referendum. I’ll campaign neither for nor against it, but if you have strong feelings either way, please submit them for publication. My blog is your blog.

In the main, my fellow baby boomers have been major bummers; my generation of unreconstructed narcissists has acquiesced in a greed-driven economic system built to benefit engorgement for the few, with the expense of a natural by-product of mental (and often physical) illness left to be borne by the many.

I’m for doing what we can to mitigate the effects, and while I'm on the topic, remember to vote for Bernie Sanders early and often. Maybe soon we can prevent this institutionalized insanity instead of slap bandages on the contusions produced.

---

Recent columns:

February 27: ON THE AVENUES: There is a complete absence of diversity among regular News and Tribune columnists.

February 20: ON THE AVENUES: For downtown New Albany, escaping reality might soon be a bridge too far.

February 13: ON THE AVENUES: War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

February 6: ON THE AVENUES Alas, New Albany is less of a place without a bookstore.

"Russell: What is the Right to Remain?": Root Cause Research Center's series is about Louisville, but it might as well be addressing New Albany, too.

Because: Jeff Gahan didn't pull his public housing putsch idea from the passive ether. He copied it from the progressive-pretend playbook of his political idol, Greg Fischer (current backer of Mike Bloomberg, which pretty much says it all about Fischer's enduring cluelessness).

Sound familiar, nominal Democrats of New Albany?: "How hiding poverty and displacement is a violent strategy to become a competitive city."

Earlier tonight I read the first three installments in the Root Cause Research Center's series about Louisville's Russell neighborhood. I recommend you do the same -- and don't forget this coming event.

The Root Cause Research Center and Actor's Theatre are bringing Ananya Roy to speak on "Housing Justice: Racial Banishment & a Right to the City."

I know, I know; a day at Recbar 812 is so much more fun. But these topics are reality, and it you're serious about getting to the heart of the matter, it might just require deeper understanding than comic book movies and Facebook memes.

---

Russell: What is the Right to Remain? Part 1
“African Americans experience homeownership in ways that rarely produce the financial benefits typically enjoyed by middle-class white Americans... The real estate market is so structured by race that Black families will never come out ahead." - Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor from Race For Profit

Russell: What is the Right to Remain? Part 2
Louisville wins at the expense of vulnerable black communities: How hiding poverty and displacement is a violent strategy to become a competitive city.

Russell: What is the Right to Remain? Part 3
Housing, neoliberalism, and financialization: What REALLY happens when the private sector controls public assets.

Reich: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

"I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system – I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause."
-- Robert Reich

I'm confused. Reich's analysis appears to be broadly correct, but nonetheless, I still feel the pressing need to take a shower. I asked Jeff Gillenwater for his thoughts.

Yes. A few quibbles - marking the erroneous white working class bit again - but generally correct. An overwhelming majority of “professionals” are complicit, hoarding opportunities and not standing up while outwardly claiming to be very liberal just as long as the financial and social order favors them. As a country, we’re not in overall possession of the self-awareness, intelligence, and fortitude to own up to that. While actual discrimination remains a serious problem, much of the virtue signaling lately serves the same role as “but I have a black friend” did previously. It’s more cover than impetus for genuine self-reflection within realistic social and economic frameworks.

Reich says: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

And, as I write, these same Democrats are frantically undermining radical democratic reform in a desperate attempt to install a fully complicit nitwit like Joe Biden as the party's candidate.

The Democratic Party's engorged elites never learn; on second thought, that's a redundancy.

Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump, by Robert Reich (The Guardian)

... In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – angry at their employers, the government, Wall Street.

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’ magnetism or Trump’s likeability
Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. Most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before, in terms of purchasing power.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism”.

These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. A few had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement ...

Enough Absurdity: "Neoliberal globalization and Third Way politics are plainly not up to the task, and the historical Left has, for the most part, gone missing."

"After almost three years of Trumpian rule, it has come to this. The worst American president ever, along with a bunch of embarrassingly servile flunkies, are calling the shots; while the opposition party’s establishment is working overtime to stifle changes that would undo the conditions that made Trumpism all but inevitable."
-- Andrew Levine

And yet still I'm told by "left" centrists (is that contortion possible?) that if I don't publicly support one of their Democratic presidential candidates -- any candidate, whether his or her platform jibes with my own world view or not -- then I'm guilty of abject failure to properly resist Trump.

Pfui. Why is it that I'm always the one who must alter my dictates of conscience/consciousness to suit the Lighter Shade of Republicans? Why must my principles be the ones forever mutable?

I'm no longer sure it matters. This circling of the drain began long ago, and the cycle probably will be compelled to play out. Circa the year 1987, writer Gore Vidal spoke briefly and eloquently about the reality of the day.

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie “answers” questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

Pretty much, dog. Pretty much right now.

Enough Absurdity: Time To Get Smart, by Andrew Levine (CounterPunch)

... We got into this fix because our political and economic elites never quite figured out how to execute a soft landing in a world in which “the American century” was becoming undone by demographic changes, geopolitical exigencies, and the increasingly evident dysfunctionality of our overripe capitalist system.

Neoliberal globalization and Third Way politics are plainly not up to the task, and the historical Left has, for the most part, gone missing. Thus, a large segment of the general population is left without constructive means for addressing a host of justifiable grievances.

A reconstructed Left is the solution, but its first intimations are still in their infancy. This could change quickly, for better or worse, but for the time being, there is just not enough there there.

And so, all over the world, “populists,” rightwing nationalists essentially, have rushed in to fill the void, just as their counterparts did nearly a century ago, after the revolutionary upsurge that followed the Bolshevik revolution sputtered out, only to be swamped before long by forces of darkness even more odious than the ones now on the rise.

This process has been in the works at least since the dark days of the Reagan administration; it has taken its toll in both the Republican and Democratic parties, causing them to drift, or, in the Republican case, to gallop to the right.

The idea that, in America, there is only a middleclass has been another casualty of these on-going transformations. Thus, it has become harder than it used to be to deny the existence of a ruling class, or to deny that, at least in some quarters, working-class politics has revived.

As they say, “what goes around comes around.” There are two reasons, though, why the stakes are a little different this time around, and a lot more urgent ...

"Barack Obama is using his post-presidency to attack the Left and protect the status quo."

In the beginning, I was a fan, but in the end, one must allow facts to be facts. It isn't always easy. Maybe we learn something, maybe not. Barack Obama disappointed while in office, and continues to do so amid his post-presidency.

The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself, by Luke Savage (Jacobin)

Barack Obama is using his post-presidency to attack the Left and protect the status quo. The historical myth believed by so many liberals that Obama was a progressive leader who was hemmed in by the presidency's political constraints is collapsing fast.

... Equipped with fame, wealth, and a vast reservoir of residual goodwill Obama now has more power to do good in an hour than most of us do in a lifetime. The demands of etiquette and propriety notwithstanding, he no longer has intransigent Blue Dog senators to appease, donors to placate, or personal electoral considerations to keep him up at night. When he speaks or acts, we can be reasonably certain he does so out of sincere choice and that the substance of his words and actions reflect the real Barack Obama and how he honestly sees the world.

It therefore tells us a great deal that, given the latitude, resources, and moral authority with which to influence events, Obama has spent his post-presidency cozying up to the global elite and delivering vapid speeches to corporate interests in exchange for unthinkable sums of money.

(snip)

When Obama has spoken about or intervened in politics, it’s most often been to bolster the neoliberal center-right or attack and undermine the Left. Having emerged from seclusion to endorse the likes of Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau, Obama also rang up Britain’s austerity-loving Conservative prime minister Theresa May on election night in 2017 to offer reassurance and trash the Labour Party’s electoral prospects. Only last week, while denouncing the Democratic Party’s “activist wing,” the former president who had once introduced himself to the nation as a progressive, community-minded outsider inveighed against those pushing for a more ambitious direction — contemptuously instructing a group of wealthy donors not to concern themselves too-much with the irrational zealotry of “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds.”

Even without Trump's one-percenters and Boris's Brexiteers, "Neoliberalism has reached its Brezhnev phase."

Because the way out from detrimental neoliberalism isn't more of the same.

What we are finding with Neoliberalism Economicus is that it is not adaptive for individuals or societies. Rather it works like a parasite that bleeds energy away from its host with false stories that appear beneficial at first but are ultimately deadly. The virus grows by perpetuating fictions. These fictions are attractive because their appeal does not rely on facts but rather on the need for power and status. The neoliberal narrative has remained compelling in part because it appeals to powerful interests in society and those who emulate them.

Can someone find us a big-ass trash can, ashcan, ash heap, dustbin, dust heap or garbage heap? We'll be needing one, the other or them all to deposit the remains of neoliberalism.

The insidious ideology pushing us towards a Brexit cliff-edge, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

At first sight it’s incomprehensible. Why risk everything for a no-deal Brexit? Breaking up their own party, losing their parliamentary majority, dismantling the UK, trashing the economy, triggering shortages of food and medicine: how could any objective, for the Conservative and Unionist party, be worth this? What good does it do them?

Yes, some people will benefit. To judge by recent donations to the Conservative party, some very rich people approve of Boris Johnson’s policies. A no-deal Brexit might favour hedge funds that thrive on uncertainty, financiers seeking to short the pound, vulture capitalists hoping to mop up cheap property if markets collapse. But the winners are likely to be greatly outnumbered by the losers, among whom are many powerful commercial interests.

We make a mistake when we assume that money is the main motivation. Our unreformed, corrupt and corrupting political funding system ensures it is an important factor. But what counts above all else is ideology, as ideology successfully pursued is the means to power. You cannot exercise true power over other people unless you can shape the way they think, and shape their behaviour on the basis of that thought. The long-term interests of ideology differ from the short-term interests of politics.

This, I believe, is the key to understanding what is happening today. The Brexit ultras in government are not just Brexit ultras. They are neoliberal ultras, and Brexit is a highly effective means of promoting this failed ideology. It’s the ultimate shock doctrine, using a public emergency to justify the imposition of policies that wouldn’t be accepted in ordinary times. Whether they really want no deal or not, the threat of it creates the political space in which they can apply their ideas ...

"Here are some leading examples of the dwindling currency of neoliberal thinking."

We can only hope.

The Sunset of Neoliberalism, by Max B. Sawicky (Jacobin)

To anyone who lived through the Clinton years — or merely remembers the Obama era — the discrediting of neoliberal ideas that were once sacrosanct among Democrats is nothing short of astonishing.

Cheer up. The Left is winning the battle of ideas. Ideas are the basis for organization, and organization is prior to change. The signs are in the evolution of statements and platforms presented by Democratic presidential candidates. As the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, eighty and some years ago:

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

It’s our “madmen” (and women) who are more in evidence these days — not as public personalities, but in the guise of campaign commitments offered by leading Democratic politicians. Their ascendance parallels the decline of neoliberal ideology.

In this essay, I’d like to give credit where it is due for the raising of consciousness. In the process, I would like to foster a keener appreciation for the difference between progressive and neoliberal doctrine. What does it mean to be left these days? Everybody knows the extreme point — wholesale socialization of the commanding heights of the economy. But where is the separation between hackneyed liberalism, “woke” and otherwise, and emerging progressive platforms?

snip

As this article was being written, the Sanders campaign released additional, detailed plans pertaining to labor rights, the Green New Deal, and how law enforcement deals with race. In this respect, his opponents are invariably more fated to play catch-up than to reject his proposals. The few who tried to plant a flag on their opposition to socialism are passing from the scene. It’s as if Democratic voters have been thirsting for progressive proposals for decades, and now they will drink as much as can be offered. No candidate so far has proven willing to rain on this parade.

That’s why I say we are witnessing the sunset of neoliberalism.

Deep reading, premises readied for questioning: "Money must become our servant, rather than our master."

Gahan's okay with money as we know it. 

Just about the first lesson any philosophy student learns is to question all the premises. Do the things one takes for granted survive scrutiny? I became a philosophy student at IU Southeast in the fall of 1978, it got real very quickly: Do grades mean what we think they do?

We gathered at a classroom in Hillside Hall, and Prof. McCarthy greeted us with a warning, which I now paraphrase:

“Welcome to Philosophy 101. If you’ve chosen the university experience as a means of compiling a perfect 4.0 GPA, then I recommend you drop this class and choose another, because I do not award perfect scores. There is no such thing as perfection, and if you disagree with me, be prepared to argue your case logically. It won’t matter, because you’ll still not receive an A for this class. Would anyone like to discuss the nature of perfection?”

Does money mean what we think it does?

Neoliberalism has tricked us into believing a fairytale about where money comes from, by Mary Mellor (The Conversation)

There is nothing natural about money. There is no link to some scarce essential form of money that sets a limit to its creation. It can be composed of base metal, paper or electronic data – none of which is in short supply. Similarly – despite what you may have heard about the need for austerity and a lack of certain cash-generating trees – there is no “natural” level of public expenditure. The size and reach of the public sector is a matter of political choice.

Which puts austerity, the culling of expenditure in the public economy, under some question. For some countries, such as Greece, the impact of austerity has been devastating. Austerity policies still persist despite numerous studies arguing that they were entirely misconceived, based on political choice rather than economic logic. But the economic case for austerity is equally mistaken: it is based on what can best be described as fairytale economics ...

Here's a scrap for the AdamBot: "The One Thing Trump Gets Right About Tariffs."

"For the past few decades, policymakers have embraced neoliberalism, a broadly open-market political philosophy whose effects have been to redirect more power toward the economically powerful and marginalize the economic majority. Things may be changing."

I don't make it a habit to read Politico, but this one's sensible.

The One Thing Trump Gets Right About Tariffs, by Jennifer M. Harris and Todd Tucker (Politico)

 ... Much as it pains their colleagues—and as hard as it is for Washington to process this—Trump and his backers have a real point. Not about his immigration policies, which are part of a harmful cultural war and stand a real chance of inflicting long-term damage on the American economy. But the administration’s use of tariffs to push its foreign policy goals is not as irrational as Trump’s enemies make it seem. It shouldn’t be this way, but in 2019, if the United States wants to fix some of the big policy arguments it has with its trading partners, it has left little leverage besides the blunt tool of tariffs.

For that, the blame lies with Democratic and Republican administrations alike, including Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, who collectively have let U.S. economic policy shrink in ambition—a battle fought on a narrower and narrower field, leaving us with so few weapons that tariffs have become the most useful last resort.

A nation as powerful as the United States would traditionally be expected to have a fully developed economic and industrial policy, one that integrates incentives and priorities on the domestic front with carrots and sticks for foreign partners. In that universe, Mexico’s own immigration enforcement might be part of a much wider package of goals negotiated between the two nations, one that creates strong incentives for Mexico to comply, without hurting American consumers and companies the way tariffs would.

This fuller agenda, which some experts call economic statecraft, has been the norm for much of the country’s history. But unlike America's competitors, the United States has largely shelved this kind of economic thinking. President Obama, for instance, pitched the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement as a way to ensure that America, rather than China, would write the rules of the global economy. But under the hood, it was never a very compelling economic argument for the United States: The rules that China negotiates in its own trade deals overlapped considerably with the American proposal, meaning that the TPP was more a matter of diplomatic gamesmanship than a real plan to advance workers here at home

To politicians like Obama, raised in the heyday of global free-market consensus, government industrial policy is a thing of the past, and trade relationships are really just a matter of opening as many markets as possible—regardless of whether the benefits actually outweigh the losses for a given country. The evidence now strongly suggests that consensus has been wrong. To take just one problem, the magnitude of corporate tax evasion made possible by modern trade agreements should make all of us question whether the traditional lifting-all-boats assumptions of trade efficiency still hold up.

With Trump's election, it's now acceptable to at least name the problems the U.S. has confronted on the world stage, ranging from coercive Chinese requirements over our manufacturers to corporations invoking their global supply-chain decisions as a reason we can’t fundamentally rethink U.S. trading rules. But Trump’s solutions to those problems suffer just as much from an absence of creative ambition ...

Monbiot on neoliberalism: "The freedom we were promised turns out to be freedom for capital, gained at the expense of human liberty."

I'm happy that Monbiot made it through his illness. His frequent contributions toward the excoriation of neoliberalism are much appreciated as well as being valuable reminders that both Democrats and Republicans have worked together to foist this idiocy on America.

Neoliberalism promised freedom – instead it delivers stifling control, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Creeping privatisation is rolling back the state to create a new, absolutist bureaucracy that destroys efficiency

My life was saved last year by the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skillful procedure to remove a cancer from my body. Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from the floor. I’ve just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. Many of the staff had objected to a decision by the National Health Service to privatise the hospital’s cancer scanning. They complained that the scanners the private company was offering were less sensitive than the hospital’s own machines. Privatisation, they said, would put patients at risk. In response, as the Guardian revealed last week, NHS England threatened to sue the hospital for libel if its staff continued to criticise the decision.

(snip)

The dominant system of political thought in this country, which produced both the creeping privatisation of public health services and this astonishing attempt to stifle free speech, promised to save us from dehumanising bureaucracy. By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced.

Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence.

(snip)

 ... The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself.

Its perversities afflict all public services. Schools teach to the test, depriving children of a rounded and useful education. Hospitals manipulate waiting times, shuffling patients from one list to another. Police forces ignore some crimes, reclassify others, and persuade suspects to admit to extra offences to improve their statistics. Universities urge their researchers to write quick and superficial papers, instead of deep monographs, to maximise their scores under the research excellence framework.

As a result, public services become highly inefficient for an obvious reason: the destruction of staff morale. Skilled people, including surgeons whose training costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, resign or retire early because of the stress and misery the system causes. The leakage of talent is a far greater waste than any inefficiencies this quantomania claims to address.

And we arrive at the overarching point.

The freedom we were promised turns out to be freedom for capital, gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no argument or complaint.

---

Democratic mayoral candidate David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing, and NA Confidential advocates just such a deep civic cleansing. 

After eight years on the job, Mayor Jeff Gahan's list of stunning "achievements" is long, indeed: tax increases, budgetary hide 'n' seek, self-deification, daily hypocrisy, public housing takeover, non-transparency, pay-to-play for no-bid contracts, bullying city residents and bullying city employees. Eight years is enough. It's time to drain Gahan's swamp, flush his ruling clique and take this city back from Gahan's Indy-based special interest donors. 

NA Confidential supports David White for Mayor in the Democratic Party primary, with voting now through May 7. 

Yellow vest protests: "Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular."

We needn't worry here. BOW would refuse the parade permit.

The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

The yellow vest protests are more nuanced than American pundits want to admit

“What’s wrong with elitism?” asked Washington Post columnist Max Boot this week on Twitter. Boot posed this in a discussion about the merits of centrism, raised in the context of the “yellow vest” protests against the government of Emmanuel Macron in France.

American media seems to be confused by the protests. Few seem to understand what protesters want, or even who they are. Some outlets describe protesters as Trump-like nationalists aligned with Marine Le Pen, others as antifa-style leftists aligned with Jean-Luc Melenchon.

The marchers actually cut across all political lines, and if anything, both Le Pen and Melenchon are trying to attach themselves to something independent of them. Unifying factors seem to be hatred of Macron and a desire to express this in profane fashion (the New Yorker noted that many of the protest slogans are colorful variations on the theme of people being literally screwed by Macron).

snip

Macron has a 23 percent approval rating, Paris seems to be on fire, and people are even spray-painting the Arc de Triomphe. How, Boot asked, could all this be happening to such a cool politician? When an online commenter suggested “centrism” was just another word for “elitism,” Boot was again puzzled.

What’s wrong with elitism? Don’t we all want the best at the helm? You wouldn’t want an un-elite airline pilot, would you?

This was the Spinal Tap version of neoliberalism: what’s wrong with being elite?

The inability of pundits to make sense of the plummeting popularity of “centrism” is a long-developing story in the West.

Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular.

See: NAFTA, the creation of the WTO and GATT, deregulation of the banking sector, multiple unnecessary wars, tax holidays and other corporate subsidies like bans on drug re-importation, mass construction of prisons during an era of sharply declining crime (coupled with broad non-enforcement of white-collar offenses), and so on.

Allow me to recommend supplemental reading.

The Marxist Pop-Culture Theorist Who Influenced a Generation, by Rob Arcand (The Nation)

Through his blog, k-punk, Mark Fisher pioneered a different kind of cultural criticism.

... Across three books, numerous magazine pieces, and hundreds of short essays, Fisher established a vast and totalizing worldview defined by his thoughts on capitalism, media, and the afterlife. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Fisher coined the term “capitalist realism” to describe a specific belief increasingly common with politicians in both the UK and North America, that no matter how bad things were under capitalism, the roughly 300-year-old political and economic system had become the only viable option—with it all but impossible to imagine any realistic alternative to the current global marketplace.

Building on the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, Fisher regarded the expression that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” as more than mere Marxist fatalism; his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism, approached film, literature, and music as a lens into the phenomenon for which it was named—a manifesto for some lasting alternative to global capitalism, inspired by the art he loved. But before their inclusion in Capitalist Realism, almost all of the writing here existed in earlier forms as essays and posts on Fisher’s blog, k-punk.

Long read, necessary read: "Systemic, collaborative localization is ultimately the most effective antidote to authoritarianism."

James Dean Bradfield sings Nicky Wire's lyrics in the opening track of Resistance is Futile, the Manics' new album: "There is no theory of everything," or in other words, no comprehensive equation to describe the entire universe.

(I've just now realized The Theory of Everything is the title of a Stephen Hawking biopic; as noted previously, I'm good for a handful of movies a year at best.)

I think Nicky's just being poetic. For my money, this article is about as close as we'll get to a theory of everything as it pertains to globalization. It's long, it's deadly, and we mustn't forget to follow the money.

Localization: A Strategic Alternative to Globalized Authoritarianism, by Helena Norberg-Hodge (Transnational Institute via Common Dreams)

In order to see how corporate deregulation has led to a breakdown of democracy, to increasing fundamentalism and violence, and to the rise of far-right political leaders, it is vitally important that we see the broader connections that mainstream analyses generally ignore.

For those who care about peace, equality and the future of the planet, the global political swing to the right over the past few years is deeply worrying. It has us asking ourselves, how did this happen? How did populism turn into such a divisive and destructive force? How did authoritarianism take over the political scene once again?

From my 40 years of experience working in both industrialized and land-based cultures, I believe the primary reason is globalization. When I say globalization, I mean the global economic system in which most of us now live – a system driven by continual corporate deregulation and shaped by neoliberal, capitalist ideologies. But globalization goes deeper than politics and the economy. It has profoundly personal impacts.

Under globalization, competition has increased dramatically, job security has become a thing of the past, and most people find it increasingly difficult to earn a livable wage. At the same time, identity is under threat as cultural diversity is replaced by a consumer monoculture worldwide. Under these conditions it’s not surprising that people become increasingly insecure. As advertisers know from nearly a century of experience, insecurity leaves people easier to exploit. But people today are targeted by more than just marketing campaigns for deodorants and tooth polish: insecurity leaves them highly vulnerable to propaganda that encourages them to blame the cultural “other” for their plight ...

In New Albany and the world: "Systemic, collaborative localization is ultimately the most effective antidote to authoritarianism."

It's a solid long read for a sultry Sunday.

Localization: a Strategic Alternative to Globalized Authoritarianism, by Helena Norberg-Hodge, (Resilience -- originally published by Local Futures)

For those who care about peace, equality and the future of the planet, the global political swing to the right over the past few years is deeply worrying. It has us asking ourselves, how did this happen? How did populism turn into such a divisive and destructive force? How did authoritarianism take over the political scene once again?

From my 40 years of experience working in both industrialized and land-based cultures, I believe the primary reason is globalization. When I say globalization, I mean the global economic system in which most of us now live – a system driven by continual corporate deregulation and shaped by neoliberal, capitalist ideologies. But globalization goes deeper than politics and the economy. It has profoundly personal impacts.

Under globalization, competition has increased dramatically, job security has become a thing of the past, and most people find it increasingly difficult to earn a livable wage. At the same time, identity is under threat as cultural diversity is replaced by a consumer monoculture worldwide. Under these conditions it’s not surprising that people become increasingly insecure. As advertisers know from nearly a century of experience, insecurity leaves people easier to exploit. But people today are targeted by more than just marketing campaigns for deodorants and tooth polish: insecurity leaves them highly vulnerable to propaganda that encourages them to blame the cultural “other” for their plight.

Let me illustrate how this happened in Ladakh, or Little Tibet, where I first visited as a young woman and where I have worked for over four decades ...

snip

 ... To reverse this trend, neither a politics of identity, nor of conventional ‘left’ versus ‘right’ politics, is sufficient. Instead, we need to fundamentally change the structural economic forces at the root of the problem. Those forces have been unleashed by the deregulation of global banks and corporations, and reversing that process is our best hope for peace and stability.

In order to see how corporate deregulation has led to a breakdown of democracy, to increasing fundamentalism and violence, and to the rise of far-right political leaders, it is vitally important that we see the broader connections that mainstream analyses generally ignore.

snip

The rise of authoritarianism is just one of many interrelated impacts of economic globalization. Today’s global economy heightens economic insecurity, fractures communities, and undermines individual and cultural identity – thereby creating conditions that are ripe for the rise of authoritarian leaders. If globalization’s environmental costs – climate change, desertification, flooding – are allowed to rise, we can expect ever larger waves of refugees that will further destabilize nation-states while straining their willingness, as well as their ability, to act humanely.

The most strategic way to address all of these crises is to immediately begin scaling down and decentralizing economic activity, giving communities and local economies the ability to meet as many of their own needs as possible, including the human need for connection.

The movement for economic localization will require many facets of strategic change-making: the spread of awareness, dynamic political campaigning, enlightened grassroots action and international collaboration. This may seem inadequate to the scale of the crises we face, but the banner of localization has the potential to engage huge numbers of people from both sides of the traditional political spectrum, and to bring together hundreds of single-issue campaigns. It enables us to move past the “blame game” and the antagonistic divisions caused by confusion and fear-mongering, instead uniting us in a common cause underpinned by big picture understanding of the common roots of our many crises. In this way, systemic, collaborative localization is ultimately the most effective antidote to authoritarianism.

The education debate: "Sitting at the heart of it is an ever-present attack (stated or not) on the liberal arts and humanities."

At LEO Weekly, Dr. Ricky L. Jones' hammer finds the center of the nail with, "What Kentucky's education debates are really about."

This is really about the overarching philosophies of a few powerful and elected people in Kentucky and their views on how society should be constructed. Education is not the real core issue. The more cogent interrogation is how particular ideas on education bleed out of those paradigms and fit into a retrograde ideological machine. Let me try to explain by stepping away from one issue and collectively looking at them all from a higher altitude.

Even cursory historical knowledge proves Mr. Bevin has a view of education that is not new. It is a philosophy centering on trade and industrial skills popularized in 19th century America. Sitting at the heart of it is an ever-present attack (stated or not) on the liberal arts and humanities. Such thinkers see them as superfluous. Even though research proves the opposite, Mr. Bevin even argues that college is overrated. If higher education degrees are attained, they should only be in particular areas to elevate chances for life success. For example, he has argued the state really needs “more plumbers and electricians.” By extension, not more historians, philosophers, artists, political scientists or intellectuals. It is a strange approach, indeed, for a man whose college major was East Asian Studies… and became a governor.

Next, as a reminder:

ped·a·go·gy
ˈpedəˌɡäjē
noun
the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept.

Public intellectuals (not to mention progressives) are about as rare hereabouts as engineering companies without direct deposit into the mayor's campaign finance account. But this is a fine, albeit long, article from a writer unafraid to question public intellectuals and progressives as to what they've been missing in the fight against neoliberalism.

Educated Hope in Dark Times: The Challenge of the Educator-Artist as a Public Intellectual, by Henry A. Giroux (Truth Out)

 ... Reclaiming pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility. If young people, artists, and other cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity.

snip

The crisis of economics and politics in the Trump era has not been matched by a crisis of consciousness and agency. The failure to develop a crisis of consciousness is deeply rooted in a society in that suffers from a plague of atomization, loneliness, and despair. Neoliberalism has undermined any democratic understanding of freedom, limiting its meaning to the dictates of consumerism, hatred of government, and a politics in which the personal is the only emotional referent that matters. Freedom has collapsed into the dark abyss of a vapid and unchecked individualism and in doing so has cancelled out that capacious notion of freedom rooted in bonds of solidarity, compassion, social responsibility, and the bonds of social obligations. The toxic neoliberal combination of unchecked economic growth and its discourse of plundering the earth's resources, coupled with a rabid individualism marked largely by its pathological disdain for community and public values, has weakened democratic pressures, values, and social relations and opened the door for the election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency. This collapse of democratic politics points to an absence in progressive movements and among various types of public intellectuals about how to address the importance of emotional connections among the masses, take seriously how to connect with others through pedagogical tools that demand respect, empathy, a willingness to listen to other stories, and to think seriously about how to change consciousness as an educative task. The latter is particularly important because it speaks to the necessity politically address the challenge of awakening modes of identification coupled with the use of language not merely to demystify but to persuade people that the issues that matter have something to do with their lived realities and daily lives. Pressing the claim for economic and political justice means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.

The nature of the diversion: "Noam Chomsky Diagnoses the Trump Era."

It's a long interview, and I've chosen to excerpt only the first question, and to underline a few key passages. In large measure, Chomsky articulates reality in a way that informs my daily perusal of headlines, most of them idiotic.

In fact, this is what I'm thinking as I read these headlines: This is idiotic, and you're missing the point.

My overall position is that the main "problem" probably isn't the topic you're currently screaming about. Rather, it's the escalating accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of the very few, as opposed to the many. You are marginalized by this fact on a daily basis, and yet we're arguing about proper respect for the flag.

And: The very few remain delighted that you choose to eviscerate one another over diversions, rather than seek balance.

Noam Chomsky Diagnoses the Trump Era, by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian (The Nation)

The president has abetted the collapse of a decaying system; Chomsky explains how.

David Barsamian: You have spoken about the difference between Trump’s buffoonery, which gets endlessly covered by the media, and the actual policies he is striving to enact, which receive less attention. Do you think he has any coherent economic, political, or international policy goals? What has Trump actually managed to accomplish in his first months in office?

Noam Chomsky: There is a diversionary process under way, perhaps just a natural result of the propensities of the figure at center stage and those doing the work behind the curtains.

At one level, Trump’s antics ensure that attention is focused on him, and it makes little difference how. Who even remembers the charge that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton, depriving the pathetic little man of his Grand Victory? Or the accusation that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower? The claims themselves don’t really matter. It’s enough that attention is diverted from what is happening in the background. There, out of the spotlight, the most savage fringe of the Republican Party is carefully advancing policies designed to enrich their true constituency: the Constituency of private power and wealth, “the masters of mankind,” to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase.

These policies will harm the irrelevant general population and devastate future generations, but that’s of little concern to the Republicans. They’ve been trying to push through similarly destructive legislation for years. Paul Ryan, for example, has long been advertising his ideal of virtually eliminating the federal government, apart from service to the Constituency—though in the past he’s wrapped his proposals in spreadsheets so they would look wonkish to commentators. Now, while attention is focused on Trump’s latest mad doings, the Ryan gang and the executive branch are ramming through legislation and orders that undermine workers’ rights, cripple consumer protections, and severely harm rural communities. They seek to devastate health programs, revoking the taxes that pay for them in order to further enrich their constituency, and to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed some much-needed constraints on the predatory financial system that grew during the neoliberal period.

That’s just a sample of how the wrecking ball is being wielded by the newly empowered Republican Party. Indeed, it is no longer a political party in the traditional sense. Conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have described it more accurately as a “radical insurgency,” one that has abandoned normal parliamentary politics.

Much of this is being carried out stealthily, in closed sessions, with as little public notice as possible. Other Republican policies are more open, such as pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, thereby isolating the US as a pariah state that refuses to participate in international efforts to confront looming environmental disaster. Even worse, they are intent on maximizing the use of fossil fuels, including the most dangerous; dismantling regulations; and sharply cutting back on research and development of alternative energy sources, which will soon be necessary for decent survival.

The reasons behind the policies are a mix. Some are simply service to the Constituency. Others are of little concern to the “masters of mankind” but are designed to hold on to segments of the voting bloc that the Republicans have cobbled together, since Republican policies have shifted so far to the right that their actual proposals would not attract voters. For example, terminating support for family planning is not service to the Constituency. Indeed, that group may mostly support family planning. But terminating that support appeals to the evangelical Christian base—voters who close their eyes to the fact that they are effectively advocating more unwanted pregnancies and, therefore, increasing the frequency of resort to abortion, under harmful and even lethal conditions.

Not all of the damage can be blamed on the con man who is nominally in charge, on his outlandish appointments, or on the congressional forces he has unleashed. Some of the most dangerous developments under Trump trace back to Obama initiatives—initiatives passed, to be sure, under pressure from the Republican Congress.

The most dangerous of these has barely been reported. A very important study in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published in March 2017, reveals that the Obama nuclear-weapons-modernization program has increased “the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.” As the analysts point out, this new capacity undermines the strategic stability on which human survival depends. And the chilling record of near disaster and reckless behavior of leaders in past years only shows how fragile our survival is. Now this program is being carried forward under Trump. These developments, along with the threat of environmental disaster, cast a dark shadow over everything else—and are barely discussed, while attention is claimed by the performances of the showman at center stage.

Whether Trump has any idea what he and his henchmen are up to is not clear. Perhaps he is completely authentic: an ignorant, thin-skinned megalomaniac whose only ideology is himself. But what is happening under the rule of the extremist wing of the Republican organization is all too plain.

A Jacobin doubleheader: "The Case for Single-Payer" and "Bernie vs. the Washington Consensus."

Thinking, drinking and surveying the landscape, there is serious doubt in my mind that I can ever again identify with an American political party, especially the two biggest political monopolies.

I’m also no longer interested in fealty to symbols. I genuinely respect YOUR superstitions and addictions, so long as they don’t intrude on my space. I won’t whistle or splutter karaoke. By the same token, my butt and knee are mine, not yours. Open your eyes and see the world around you. Follow the money.

But I digress. Insofar as the various branches of Let's Pretend We're Democrats can get aboard with ideas like the two that follow, all the better. I might yet vote for them on occasion.

Otherwise, the tag "independent" largely summarizes my lot in life. So be it, although running for a council seat as a Sanders-style indie "genuine" Democrat still might be great fun, only if I can suppress the gag reflex at the thought of  the party's local management.

The Case for Single-Payer, by Timothy Faust (Jacobin)

Winning Medicare for All would allow us to take a giant step toward health justice.

Last month, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders introduced his Medicare for All Act — a bill that, if passed, would establish a federal, universal, single-payer health care system in the US. The legislation stands against a cruel summer of “repeal and replace” blood lust, most recently championed by senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, and years of mewling, milquetoast non-ideas from mainstream Democrats.

Toward Health Justice

The United States may be a country where Saudi princes can fly to get a heart transplant, but it remains a place where poor men die fourteen years earlier than rich men. In a land of resplendence, the powerful condemn the marginalized to chronic illness, because it’s not profitable to provide nutritious food or adequate shelter.

Fragmented and commodified, the present model treats health care as something that only happens when people are insured, not a holistic process spanning an entire life. Single-payer could begin to change this. Once the federal actor bears the costs of providing care and not providing care, it could finally be a tool for realizing health justice.

If people are getting sick and dying because they don’t have a place to live, or if the places they live are unsafe, then housing is health care, and you build housing to bring health care costs down. If people don’t have access to healthy food to eat, then food is health care, and you provide them with affordable or free food options to bring health care costs down. If people live in fear of their personal safety — if they are assaulted or beaten at home, at work, by the police, or by their domestic partners — then safety is a form of health care, and you provide safe havens for them to bring health care costs down.

In other words, a single-payer program is not the goal. Single-payer on its own cannot be the goal. Single-payer does not solve the biggest sin of commodified health care: that taking care of sick people isn’t profitable, and any profit-driven insurance system thus disregards the most vulnerable.

Sick people, people with disabilities, poor people, pregnant people, trans people, people of color — all of them are valuable to insurance markets only inasmuch as profit can be extracted from them; afterward, they are drained, discarded, abandoned to charity care, or, absent that, to the carceral state. Corporations have proven themselves unable and unwilling to look these problems in the eye, and people suffer while Democrats use public money to bribe corporations into trying to ameliorate the health care crisis.

Single-payer alone does not solve these problems. But it gives us a fighting chance to square up against them ...

Then there's this wonderful opening sentence.

Bernie vs. the Washington Consensus, by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

Yesterday, Bernie Sanders showed his commitment to a sharp break from the foreign policy platforms of both the Democratic and Republican establishments.

It connects to a long overdue foreign policy rethink ... but the robber barons aren't going to like it.

Breaking from the Consensus

Perhaps most significantly, Sanders used his speech to rebuke not just the neoconservative worldview, but some of the core precepts of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, like the concept of American exceptionalism and the projection of “toughness” through a willingness to use force.

“Blustery threats of force, while they might make a few columnists happy, can often signal weakness as much as strength, diminishing US deterrence, credibility, and security in the process,” he said in a thinly veiled dig at Trump, currently in the midst of an unnecessary contest of brinkmanship with the North Korean dictator.

Going further, Sanders declare the death of the concept of a US “benevolent global hegemony” — a notion embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike and often used to justify meddling in foreign countries. Events like the Iraq War, he said, “have utterly discredited that vision.”

In a rather remarkable section of his speech, Sanders went further than just about any mainstream US policymaker in rattling off a list of the US government’s past misdeeds — some of which, he noted, the US public would probably be aghast to learn about for the first time. To justify his point that intervention and force are the wrong approach, he cited events like the Iraq and Vietnam wars as well as the 1973 military coup in Chile. He particularly stressed the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government, engineered by both the US and British governments, which, as he noted, ultimately resulted in the country’s 1979 revolution and the anti-American hostility the US contends with today.

“What would Iran look like today if their democratic government had not been overthrown?” he asked the audience. “What consequences are we still living with today?”