Moving Past Neoliberalism Is a Policy Project

Moving Past Neoliberalism Is a Policy Project: In order to test whether improving people’s lives can convince them to support Democrats, you have to, well, improve people’s lives.

A Tale of Two Disasters

 

Kuttner on TAP

A Tale of Two Disasters

The Titan submersible tragedy has overshadowed the sinking of a boat carrying hundreds of impoverished migrants.

Note from Bob Kuttner: While away in Europe, I’ve invited François Furstenberg to write today’s On TAP post. When the Titan submersible disappeared in the North Atlantic last Sunday, with passengers who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the risky voyage, the world took notice—and mobilized. A multinational force immediately launched into action to search the site, some 900 miles off Cape Cod. The U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, and the Canadian Coast Guard established a unified command the morning after the distress was reported, and French and British ships with deep-sea capabilities soon joined. By Wednesday, they were combing a search zone about twice the size of Connecticut, as deep as 2.5 miles under the surface. Medical personnel equipped with a hyperbaric recompression chamber stood ready to help. Private actors joined the effort as well. Within 20 hours of being notified, a Cape Cod–based company specializing in sub-sea research expeditions assembled a team; three U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft transported them to Newfoundland on Tuesday. Within hours, they were sailing on board a Canadian ship. Later that day, some 60 hours after the Titan was first reported in distress, rescuers discovered a debris field confirming the implosion of the submersible and the death of all five occupants. The tragedy, as The New York Times put it, had "mesmerized people worldwide for days." The same can’t be said about a tragedy that unfolded just a few days earlier in the Mediterranean. There, up to 750 Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian, and Palestinian migrants had jammed aboard a rusty fishing trawler to undertake a perilous journey from Libya to Italy. Five days into the voyage, the ship was in severe distress. Food and water had run out. "People were dying. People were fainting," recalled one refugee. As the boat floated helplessly off the coast of Greece, with at least six dead refugees on board and hundreds more locked in the hold below, passengers sent out calls of distress. Few, however, bothered to respond. On June 13, two merchant vessels approached the ship to offer supplies before sailing off. The Greek Coast Guard arrived that day, but did not intervene. (Indeed, just a few weeks earlier, Greek authorities had been filmed kidnapping recently arrived migrants on the island of Lesbos and towing them back out to a life raft. European officials in Brussels had expressed that they were "concerned" by the images.) Early on the morning of June 14, as the Greek Coast Guard ship looked on, the rickety fishing trawler lurched and began to sink. With only one ship deployed, the Greek Coast Guard was ill-prepared to help. Only thanks to the arrival of a $175 million superyacht were around 100 survivors saved from drowning. An estimated 650 desperate migrants, many of them women and children, went down to the sea depths.

The divergent responses should trouble anyone who ponders the contrast, even for a moment. They tell us a great deal about the entrenched and interrelated inequalities of the world over the last few decades. With a U.S., French, or British passport, countries will spare no resource to save you. Hold a Pakistani, Egyptian, or Syrian passport, and those same countries will make every effort—building walls across vast terrestrial borders, flying you to Rwanda, or towing you out to the middle of the sea—to keep you out. The wealthy victims of the Titan tragedy have well-reported identities. Readers and viewers were invited to empathize. The identity of the migrants, by contrast, remains mostly unknown—even those who survived. As for the ones who perished, we are unlikely to ever know who or even how many disappeared. Both voyages involved extreme risk. The passengers on the fishing boat undertook their journey out of necessity; for the passengers on the submersible, it was a choice. Space on the rickety trawler cost far less in monetary terms than space on the advanced submersible. But as a share of the passengers’ total wealth, the refugees paid far more. It’s worth asking about the extent to which the wealth of billionaires who adventure deep underwater—or into space, for that matter—results from the poverty of global billions. Did those Pakistanis on the trawler flee the climate catastrophe in their country, made so much worse by the developed nations that burned up the fossil fuels to enrich a few billionaires? How much has the soaring concentration of wealth in the United States and in other developed countries resulted from the ability to exploit workers in the developing world? It’s worth asking, too, to what extent the extreme inequalities of wealth within developed nations fuel anti-migrant sentiment and right-wing backlash, which generates perilous obstacles for refugees, forcing them into ever-greater risks in their quest for a better life for themselves and their children. The spectacle of impoverished migrants sinking with the ship while every resource is mobilized to save the wealthy few certainly recalls a past maritime tragedy—the very one whose wreckage the submersible went to explore. Why did the original Titanic hold such a grip on the popular imagination? Why is it that, more than a century later, people will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to visit the wreckage? Wasn’t it at least in part because it stood as a parable of the hubris of modernity in our last Gilded Age? Martin Luther King famously said that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Perhaps he was right, but it can also bend the other way. Maybe the moral of the Titanic tragedy was that, rich or poor, we all sail on the same ship, and we will all sink or survive together. Well, now we have our own parable, updated for the 21st century. It’s up to us to decide what meaning we want to make from it. François Furstenberg teaches history at Johns Hopkins University.

Chipmaker’s Scramble to Build Marred by Mistakes and Injuries

Chipmaker’s Scramble to Build Marred by Mistakes and Injuries: TSMC’s $40 billion semiconductor facility in Phoenix, an open shop that resisted signing an agreement with labor unions, has been tainted with accidents, alleged wage theft, and costly setbacks.

Anti union building in Arizona, subsidized by you and I as taxpayers, 

Choosing Democracy: Poverty and the Moral Majority

Choosing Democracy: Poverty and the Moral Majority:   Moral Poverty Action Congress is underway, and California is in the house! The PPC’s Moral Poverty Action Congress kicked off this past Mo...

Is This Fascism ?

 The Washington Post calls Trump’s vision for a second term “authoritarian.” That vision includes mandatory stop-and-frisk. Deploying the military to fight street crime, break up gangs and deport immigrants. Purging the federal workforce and charging leakers. 

“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

How do we describe what Trump wants for America? “Authoritarianism” isn’t adequate. It is “fascism.” Fascism stands for a coherent set of ideas different from — and more dangerous than — authoritarianism. To fight those ideas, it’s necessary to be aware of what they are and how they fit together.

Borrowing from cultural theorist Umberto Eco, historians Emilio Gentile and Ian Kershaw, political scientist Roger Griffin, and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, I offer five elements that distinguish fascism from authoritarianism.

1. The rejection of democracy, the rule of law, and equal rights under the law in favor of a strongman who interprets the popular will.

“The election was stolen.” (Trump, 2020).

“I am your justice. … I am your retribution.” (2023).

Authoritarians believe society needs strong leaders to maintain stability. They vest in a dictator the power to maintain social order through the use of force (armies, police, militia) and bureaucracy. 

By contrast, fascists view strong leaders as the means of discovering what society needs. They regard the leader as the embodiment of society, the voice of the people. 

2. The galvanizing of popular rage against cultural elites.

“Your enemies” are “media elites,” … “the elites who led us from one financial and foreign policy disaster to another.” (Trump, 2015, 2016).

Authoritarians do not stir people up against establishment elites. They use or co-opt those elites in order to gain and maintain power. 

By contrast, fascists galvanize public rage at presumed (or imaginary) cultural elites and use mass rage to gain and maintain power. They stir up grievances against those elites for supposedly displacing average people and seek revenge. In so doing, they create mass parties. They often encourage violence. 

3. Nationalism based on a dominant “superior” race and historic bloodlines.

“Tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border … The United States has become a dumping ground for Mexico and, in fact, for many other parts of the world.” (Trump, 2015)

“I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” (2019)

“Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival … If we allow the Marxists and Communists and Socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.” (Trump, 2022)

Authoritarians see nationalism as a means of asserting the power of the state. They glorify the state. They want it to dominate other nations. They seek to protect or expand its geographic boundaries. They worry about foreign enemies encroaching on its territory. 

By contrast, fascists see a nation as embodying what they consider a “superior” group — based on race, religion, and historic bloodlines. Nationalism is a means of asserting that superiority. They worry about disloyalty and sabotage from groups within the nation that don’t share the same race or bloodlines. These “others” are scapegoated, excluded or expelled, sometimes even killed.

Fascists believe schools and universities must teach values that extol the dominant race, religion, and bloodline. Schools should not teach inconvenient truths (such as America’s history of genocide and racism).

4. Extolling brute strength and heroic warriors.

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong. (January 6, 2021).

“I am your warrior.” (2023).

The goal of authoritarianism is to gain and maintain state power. For authoritarians, “strength” comes in the form of large armies and munitions. 

By contrast, the ostensible goal of fascism is to strengthen society. Fascism’s method of accomplishing this is to reward those who win economically and physically and to denigrate or exterminate those who lose. Fascism depends on organized bullying — a form of social Darwinism.

For the fascist, war and violence are means of strengthening society by culling the weak and extolling heroic warriors. 

 5. Disdain of women and fear of non-standard forms of gender identity and sexual orientation.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” (Trump, 2005)

“You have to treat ‘em like shit.” (Trump, 1992)

I will “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers and celebrating, rather than erasing, the things that make men and women different.” (Trump, 2023)

Authoritarianism imposes hierarchies; authoritarianism seeks order. 

By contrast, fascism is organized around the particular hierarchy of male dominance. The fascist heroic warrior is male. Women are relegated to subservient roles. 

In fascism, anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order. Fascism seeks to eliminate homosexuals, transgender, and queer people because they are thought to challenge or weaken the heroic male warrior. 

***

These five elements of fascism reinforce each other. 

Rejection of democracy in favor of a strongman depends on galvanizing popular rage. 

Popular rage draws on a nationalism based on a supposed superior race or ethnicity.

That superior race or ethnicity is justified by a social Darwinist idea of strength and violence, as exemplified by heroic warriors. 

Strength, violence, and the heroic warrior are centered on male power. 

These five elements also find exact expression in Donald Trump and the White Christian National movement he is encouraging. It is also the direction most of the Republican Party is now heading.

These are not the elements of authoritarianism. They are the essential elements of fascism. 

America’s mainstream media is by now comfortable talking and writing about Trump’s authoritarianism. In describing what he is seeking to impose on ]America, the media should be using the term “fascism.” 

Robert Reich,  6/15/2023

 

 

Trump's Indictment

 It is the first time in American history that a former president has been indicted on federal charges. 

Robert Reich,

But this fact alone doesn’t come close to signifying the gravity of the situation. 

Today (Friday) federal prosecutors unsealed the indictment, which charges that Trump illegally kept hold of documents concerning “United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack,” and the nation’s vulnerabilities to military attack, and that he shared a “plan of attack” against Iran with visitors.

This, my friends, is treason. “Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced,” Special Counsel Jack Smith said this afternoon. “Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”

The charges also include obstruction of justice, false statements, and conspiracy — all of which carry the potential for years in prison if he is found guilty. 

Trump will appear in federal court in Miami for an arraignment on Tuesday.

Trump and his defenders — and there will be many (such as nearly every lawmaker in the Republican Party) — will argue that Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton did the same as Trump did, and yet only Trump is being subject to a Justice Department indictment. 

Rubbish. 

There is no evidence anywhere that Hillary Clinton jeopardized national security. As to Biden, he came forward to volunteer that he had found classified documents among his private possessions. 

Trump’s willful violation of the law isn’t just any willful violation; it is a violation that has potentially compromised the security of the United States. 

Since he was elected in 2016, Trump has displayed the character of a classic authoritarian (fascist) leader who sees no difference between himself and the nation he is supposed to lead. Add to this Trump’s sociopathic narcissism, and you begin to see why he considers the top-secret documents as belonging to him rather than to the American people. Trump believes that he himself is America. 

Many Republicans consider national security the highest and most sacred goal of the Republic. A large number have served in the armed forces, many with distinction. How can they abide a former president who has so egregiously risked the security of the nation? 

Part of me wishes that instead of this being the first federal indictment of Trump, it would have been for his seditious conspiracy against the United States when he instigated a coup. 

But this indictment comes very close. If these charges are proven, they are diabolically consistent with seditious conspiracy.

***

Robert Reich,

Sanders and Barber for $ 17 Minimum Wage

 

Bernie Sanders and William Barber 

Announce Rallies for $17 Minimum Wage

 

Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, plans to join Sanders to 'make the moral case for raising wages.'

 

By Jessica Corbett 

COMMONDREAMS via Truthout

 

May 29, 2023 - On the heels of launching an effort to raise the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour over five years, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday announced upcoming rallies to demand the pay hike in three states, where he will be joined by Bishop William Barber II.

 

Barber — Repairers of the Breach president, Poor People’s Campaign co-chair, and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School — plans to join Sanders (I-Vt.) to “make the moral case for raising wages.”

 

https://www.commondreams.org/news/sanders-barber-17-minimum-wage-rally