It’s the Stupidity, Stupid: How Donald Trump is Beating the Democrats on Trade

By Theo Anderson

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7094973599737042371#editor/src=sidebar

“Our politicians are stupid,” Donald Trump said last August, at the first GOP presidential debate. “And the Mexican government is much smarter, much sharper, much more cunning.”

He was talking about immigration policy, but over the last several months, Trump has applied the same logic and language to trade deals. 

He has plenty of material to work with. Between 1993 and 2013, more than 850,000 jobs were displaced by the growing trade deficit with Mexico, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.

“Prominent economists and US government officials predicted that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would lead to growing trade surpluses with Mexico and that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be gained,” the report’s author, Robert E. Scott, wrote. “The evidence shows that the predicted surpluses in the wake of NAFTA's enactment in 1994 did not materialize.”

To say the least.

Opposition to “free trade” has become so closely tied to Bernie Sanders and the Left that it’s easy to underestimate the hostility aimed at NAFTA, China and now the Trans-Pacific Partnership within some segments of the Right. But it’s there, simmering, and it is dividing the GOP’s grassroots base from the party’s traditional power structures and ideology.

Consider Infowars, the influential right-wing website maintained by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. It published a piece in 2014 listing 20 ways NAFTA is “destroying the economy.” The author noted that, under NAFTA, the U.S. trade deficit had ballooned from about $30 billion to $177 billion. He added that “Barack Obama has been negotiating a secret treaty which would send the deindustrialization of America into overdrive. The formal name of this secret agreement is ‘the Trans-Pacific Partnership,’ and it would ultimately result in millions more good jobs being sent to the other side of the planet where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.”

That critique sounds a lot like what the Left has said about the TPP, of course. But there is also, on the Left, a recognition that pitting U.S. workers against foreign workers is ultimately counterproductive, and that we need not only better trade deals but a labor movement and living-wage standards that transcend national borders.

Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric is, by contrast, part of a broad nativist platform, and his success at winning the states most devastated by deindustrialization will probably determine whether he wins in November. In Ohio alone, nearly 300,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared since NAFTA became law in 1994. Manufacturing jobs accounted for nearly 24 percent of all private sector jobs in the state at the time. They’re now 15 percent.

The winner in Ohio has won the presidency in all but two elections since 1896. (It went for Thomas Dewey in 1944 and Richard Nixon in 1960.) Ohio is “more reflective of the national average than any other state,” as Kyle Kondik, author of The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President, has noted, and it is “home to members of many different American cultural and political tribes, but it is dominated by none of them.”

Several of the most recent polls show the race in Ohio is tied.

Hillary Clinton, for her part, has partially disowned her husband’s legacy on trade, telling United Auto Workers president Dennis Williams that she would renegotiate NAFTA if elected. She has also changed course on TPP. As secretary of state, she called it “cutting-edge” and “innovative.” She now claims to oppose it, even as President Obama aggressively promotes it. As he said in a press conference this week: “Right now, I’m president and I’m for it, and I think I’ve got the better argument.”

Whatever her actual intentions regarding NAFTA and TPP, though, Clinton seems incapable of acting as if she grasps the plight of people who’ve been left behind by the globalizing, greening economy. In a town-hall meeting in Columbus, Ohio, in March, she said that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Mindful that she should at least gesture toward empathy, Clinton dutifully added that “we don’t want to forget those people.” The only soundbite that most voters heard, though, was Clinton promising to put coal miners out of work.

The cold political calculation might be that Clinton simply doesn't need white working-class voters to win the election, and thus isn't all that concerned with reaching out to them. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ presumptive leader in the Senate when Harry Reid retires after the current term, reflected this logic recently.

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” he said, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Given that reasoning, it's not surprising that white working-class voters would give their loyalty to a candidate who at least acts like he gets it. As a writer for the Toledo Blade recently observed, “The once well-lighted towns of Ohio that have been turned into Appalachian basket cases have no lobby. No Marshall Plan is proposed for them. Their plight is not covered on the evening news. But they have Trump.”

With his steady output of outrage, Trump has often been his own worst enemy over the past year. But for Democrats, the primaries should be a reality check about the growing skepticism toward their recent trade agenda and about the unpredictability of the electorate. Clinton won the Democratic primary in Ohio by about 14 points. But in neighboring Michigan, where manufacturing jobs in the private sector have fallen from nearly 24 percent of the economy to 16 percent since 1994, Sanders’ economic populism delivered a remarkable upset. Several polls put Clinton’s lead at more than 20 points right up to election day. No poll had it at less than 5 percent. The Sanders victory there was “stunning,” as the website FiveThirtyEight put it.

In Columbus, Ohio, this week, during a news cycle dominated by Trump’s feud with the family of a Muslim solider killed in Iraq, Humayun Khan, Trump ignored that controversy and focused on economics, telling the crowd that “Hillary Clinton’s disastrous trade policies are responsible for the manufacturing job losses in Ohio.” NAFTA, he said, is a “bad, bad, bad deal.” But “I take bad deals and make ‘em great.”

Trump would almost certainly not honor that promise if elected. But will Clinton’s history of supporting “bad, bad, bad” trade deals be his trump card in November? That would be striking, but also—given the simmering disquiet across the heartland and the volatility of this political moment—not all that surprising. 

Theo Anderson

Theo Anderson, an In These Times staff writer, is writing a book about the historical and contemporary influence of pragmatism on American politics. He has a Ph.D. in American history from Yale University and teaches history and literature seminars at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

The Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing

August 4, 2016

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/08/04/the-danger-of-excessive-trump-bashing/

Exclusive: The prospect of Donald Trump in the White House alarms many people but bashing him over his contrarian views on NATO and U.S.-Russian relations could set the stage for disasters under President Hillary Clinton, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The widespread disdain for Donald Trump and the fear of what his presidency might mean have led to an abandonment of any sense of objectivity by many Trump opponents and, most notably, the mainstream U.S. news media. If Trump is for something, it must be bad and must be transformed into one more club to use for hobbling his candidacy.

While that attitude may be understandable given Trump’s frequently feckless and often offensive behavior – he seems not to know basic facts and insults large swaths of the world’s population – this Trump bashing also has dangerous implications because some of his ideas deserve serious debate rather than blanket dismissal.

Amid his incoherence and insults, Trump has raised valid points on several important questions, such as the risks involved in the voracious expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders and the wisdom of demonizing Russia and its internally popular President Vladimir Putin.

Over the past several years, Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment has pushed a stunning policy of destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia in pursuit of a “regime change” in Moscow. This existentially risky strategy has taken shape with minimal substantive debate behind a “group think” driven by anti-Russian and anti-Putin propaganda. (All we hear is what’s wrong with Putin and Russia: He doesn’t wear a shirt! He’s the new Hitler! Putin and Trump have a bro-mance! Russian aggression! Their athletes cheat!)

Much as happened in the run-up to the disastrous Iraq War in 2002-2003, the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies bully from the public square anyone who doesn’t share these views. Any effort to put Russia’s behavior in context makes you a “Putin apologist,” just like questioning the Iraq-WMD certainty of last decade made you a “Saddam apologist.”

But this new mindlessness – now justified in part to block Trump’s path to the White House – could very well set the stage for a catastrophic escalation of big-power tensions under a Hillary Clinton presidency. Former Secretary of State Clinton has already surrounded herself with neocons and liberal hawks who favor expanding the war against Syria’s government, want to ratchet up tensions with Iran, and favor shipping arms to the right-wing and virulently anti-Russian regime in Ukraine, which came to power in a 2014 coup supported by U.S. policymakers and money.

By lumping Trump’s few reasonable points together with his nonsensical comments – and making anti-Russian propaganda the only basis for any public debate – Democrats and the anti-Trump press are pushing the United States toward a conflict with Russia.

And, for a U.S. press corps that prides itself on its “objectivity,” this blatantly biased approach toward a nominee of a major political party is remarkably unprofessional. But the principle of objectivity has been long since abandoned as the mainstream U.S. media transformed itself into little more than an outlet for U.S. government foreign-policy narratives, no matter how dishonest or implausible.

Losing History

To conform with the neocon-driven narratives, much recent history has been lost. For instance, few Americans realize that some of President Barack Obama’s most notable foreign policy achievements resulted from cooperation with Putin and Russia, arguably more so than any other “friendly” leader or “allied” nation.

For instance, in summer 2013, Obama was under intense neocon/liberal-hawk pressure to bomb the Syrian military supposedly for crossing his “red line” against the use of chemical weapons after a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2103.

Yet, hearing doubts from the U.S. intelligence community about the Assad regime’s guilt, Obama balked at a military strike that – we now know – would have played into the hands of Syrian jihadists who some intelligence analysts believe were the ones behind the false-flag sarin attack to trick the United States into directly intervening in the civil war on their side.

But Obama still needed a path out of the corner that he had painted himself into and it was provided by Putin and Russia pressuring Assad to surrender all his chemical weapons, a clear victory for Obama regardless of who was behind the sarin attack.

Putin and Russia helped Obama again in convincing Iran to accept tight restraints on its nuclear program, an agreement that may mark Obama’s most significant foreign policy success. Those negotiations came to life in 2013 (not coincidentally after Secretary of State Clinton, who allied herself more with the bomb-bomb-bomb Iran faction led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had resigned and was replaced by John Kerry).

As the negotiating process evolved, Russia played a key role in bringing Iran along, offering ways for Iran to rid itself of its processed nuclear stockpiles and get the medical research materials it needed. Without the assistance of Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the landmark Iranian nuclear deal might never have happened.

Obama recognized the value of this Russian help but he also understood the political price that he would pay if he were closely associated with Putin, who was already undergoing a thorough demonization in the U.S. and European mainstream media. So, Obama mostly worked with Putin under the table while joining in the ostracism of Putin above the table.

Checking Obama

But Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment – and its allied mainstream media – check-mated Obama’s double-talking game in 2013 by aggressively supporting a regime-change strategy in Ukraine where pro-Russian elected President Viktor Yanukovych was under mounting pressure from western Ukrainians who wanted closer ties to Europe and who hated Russia.

Leading neocon thinkers unveiled their new Ukraine strategy shortly after Putin helped scuttle their dreams for a major bombing campaign against Assad’s regime in Syria. Since the 1990s, the neocons had targeted the Assad dynasty – along with Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq and the Shiite-controlled government in Iran – for “regime change.” The neocons got their way in Iraq in 2003 but their program stalled because of the disastrous Iraq War.

However, in 2013, the neocons saw their path forward open again in Syria, especially after the sarin attack, which killed hundreds of civilians and was blamed on Assad in a media-driven rush to judgment. Obama’s hesitancy to strike and then Putin’s assistance in giving Obama a way out left the neocons furious. They began to recognize the need to remove Putin if they were to proceed with their Mideast “regime change” dreams.

In late September 2013 – a month after Obama ditched the plans to bomb Syria – neocon National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman wrote in The Washington Post that Ukraine was now “the biggest prize” but also was a steppingstone toward the even bigger “regime change” prize in Moscow. Gershman, whose NED is funded by Congress, wrote:

“Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

By late 2013 and early 2014, with Gershman’s NED financing Ukraine’s anti-government activists and journalists and with the open encouragement of neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain, the prospects for “regime change” in Ukraine were brightening. With neo-Nazi and other Ukrainian ultra-nationalists firebombing police, the political crisis in Kiev deepened.

Meanwhile, Putin was focused on the Sochi Winter Olympics and the threat that the games could be disrupted by terrorism. So, with the Kremlin distracted, Ukraine’s Yanukovych tried to fend off his political crisis while limiting the violence.

However, on Feb. 20, 2014, snipers fired on both police and protesters in the Maidan square and the Western media jumped to the conclusion that Yanukovych was responsible (even though later investigations have indicated that the sniper attack was more likely carried out by neo-Nazi groups to provoke the chaos that followed).

A Successful Coup

On Feb. 21, a shaken Yanukovych agreed to a European-brokered deal in which he surrendered some of his powers and agreed to early elections. He also succumbed to Western pressure that he pull back his police. However, on Feb. 22, the neo-Nazis and other militants seized on that opening to take over government buildings and force Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives.

The U.S. State Department and its Western allies quickly recognized the coup regime as the “legitimate” government of Ukraine. But the coup provoked resistance from the ethnic Russian populations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, political uprisings that the new Kiev regime denounced as “terrorist” and countered with an “Anti-Terrorism Operation” or ATO.

When Russian troops – already in Crimea as part of the Sevastopol naval basing agreement – protected the people on the peninsula from attacks by the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, the intervention was denounced in the West as a “Russian invasion.” Crimean authorities also organized a referendum in which more than 80 percent of the voters participated and favored leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia by a 96 percent margin. When Moscow agreed, that became “Russian aggression.”

Although the Kremlin refused appeals from eastern Ukraine for a similar arrangement, Russia provided some assistance to the rebels resisting the new authorities in Ukraine. Those rebels then declared their own autonomous republics.

Although this historical reality – if understood by the American people – would put the Ukrainian crisis in a very different context, it has been effectively blacked out of what the American public is allowed to hear. All the mainstream media talks about is “Russian aggression” and how Putin provoked the Ukraine crisis as part of some Hitlerian plan to conquer Europe.

Trump, in his bumbling way, tries to reference the real history to explain his contrarian views regarding Russia, Ukraine and NATO, but he is confronted by a solid wall of “group think” asserting only one acceptable way to see this complex crisis. Rather than allow a serious debate on these very serious issues, the mainstream U.S. media simply laughs at Trump’s supposed ignorance.

The grave danger from this media behavior is that it will empower the neocons and liberal hawks already nesting inside Hillary Clinton’s campaign to prepare for a new series of geopolitical provocations once Clinton takes office. By opportunistically buying into this neocon pro-war narrative now, Democrats may find themselves with buyer’s remorse as they become the war party of 2017.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Zizek in conversation with Vakhtang Gomelauri via GCAS

GCAS Caputo/Crockett on Hegel/Zizek/Derrida

Hegel versus Spinoza

http://zero-books.net/blogs/zero/zero-books-57-hegel-vs-spinoza/

Gregor Moder teaches philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. The original plan for this episode was to discuss his paper about street theater and Althusser but the two of us hit it off so well, so easily fell into philosophical conversation, that my prepared questions on his paper were simply pushed aside as we entertained each other with a spontaneous conversation about Hegel, Spinoza, and, of all things, Donald Trump.

In the United States the reality TV show known as the presidential race is dominating our political imaginations as the hollowness, the silliness, and the unreality of the spectacle proves to have its own mesmerizing power. However, our aim at Zero Books shall be to, as much as possible, think and evaluate the problems this spectacle is designed to distract us away from even as we try to suss out what secret meanings even these distractions contain.

Having mentioned distractions I should also point out that listeners to this podcast might want to take a look at the 8 bit philosophy youtube channel. There is a video in the works about Alfie Bown’s book Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism as well as a fun vid about Donald Trump and the end of politics that’s online now.

In this episode you’ll hear a clip from Mel Brooks’ Hitler Rap, an excerpt from an old Diet Soap podcast wherein I describe Hegel’s phenomenology to my son Benjamin and my wife Miriam, the music of Cyriak, and Slavoj Zizek pontificating on Hegel. The music you’re hearing right now is from Cyriak’s video “Something” but in just a moment you’ll be listening to Gregor Moder and I talk about Hegel and Spinoza.




 

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