Saturday, September 15, 2018
Zu Asche, zu Staub - Severija Janušauskaitė (English Subtitles)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF0Kg06dolw
Retrospectives of the Financial Crisis Are Leaving Out the Most Important Part--Its Victoms
BY DAVID DAYEN
Because I’m a masochist, I’ve
read as many retrospectives as I could about the 10th anniversary of the
fateful failure of Lehman Brothers, the emblematic event of the financial
crisis. And I can’t help but notice a gaping hole in the narratives.
I’ve heard from Lew
Ranieri, the Salomon Brothers trader who invented the mortgage bond in the
1980s, and now regrets it. I’ve heard bailout architects Ben Bernanke, Hank
Paulson, and Tim Geithner justify
their beliefs in doing whatever it took to save the banks. I’ve
endured you-are-there
narratives about bankers and policymakers racing to rescue the
financial system. Wonks, pundits,
and reporters have
all offered thoughts on the crisis’ origins, the response, and its ultimate
meaning.
It seems the only people not
consulted for their perspective were those most powerfully affected by the
crisis’ impact—the millions of families who suffered foreclosure and eviction.
Flip through the nation’s major newspapers and periodicals and you’ll strain to
find a single voice of a homeowner left adrift when the housing bubble
collapsed. They remain as invisible to the media and the culture as they were
to policymakers in 2008. And this tragic blind spot explains nearly everything
about how America conducted the bailouts, and for whose benefit.
Let me try to remedy this by
introducing you to Terrie Crowley of Deerfield, Illinois. She began seeking a
loan modification for her modest, 1,500 square-foot rancher in 2009. She’s been
in active litigation with her mortgage company, Wells Fargo, since 2011. And
she’s still fighting to keep her home. “It’s not just a $200,000 house,”
Crowley said in an interview. “It’s where I work, where my family is, where
we’re building memories. It’s what I worked so hard in my life to develop. I
will not let somebody steal my house under those terms.”
Unlike most people wrapped up
in the crisis, Terrie had experience in the financial industry. Her first job
was on the trading floor at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and she eventually
became a real estate broker in the 1990s. But that was one of many industries
that imploded when the bubble popped. Combine that with two emergency surgeries
in 2008 and the out-of-pocket expenses that came with them, and Terrie feared
that she wouldn’t be able to keep up with her mortgage.
So she called Wells Fargo,
which serviced the loan, for assistance. With an 800 credit score and a history
of paying her bills, Terrie thought she was a perfect candidate for a loan modification.
But Wells Fargo blew her off for months, Terrie said. Finally, in a recording
she was later able to obtain, a representative told Terrie that she had to miss
payments in order to get a modification. “I said what are you talking about,
I’m never late on my bills, that’s not who I am,” Terrie said. But with her
business drying up she had little choice.
After filling out the
modification applications, Terrie would use savings to get current on the loan,
unable to endure the stress of being late. But it wasn’t true that borrowers
had to be late on their mortgage to qualify for relief under the government’s
Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP. Wells Fargo didn’t help Terrie
even after she missed payments. The bank denied four applications, each for
questionable reasons. Once they cited $2,300 in credit card debt that Terrie
paid off years earlier.
What Terrie later found out
from her lawsuit is that Wells Fargo had already told the investor in the loan,
Fannie Mae, that they would be foreclosing on the house, despite the fact that
she was current on the mortgage at the time. The bank conducted four hard
credit checks to take Terrie’s credit score down to 660, making her ineligible
for alternatives like refinancing. The whole thing was a pretext, using a
government mortgage program to trap the borrower and capture the home.
Fannie Mae actually extended a
loan modification offer to Terrie, which Wells Fargo never let her see.
Instead, Wells Fargo gave her a “special forbearance” agreement, allowing her
to freeze payments for a trial period. But Wells Fargo never made the
modification permanent, asking her for the skipped mortgage payments after the
trial period ended. Terrie pre-emptively sued Wells Fargo in 2011, the bank
took her to court for foreclosure, and three attorneys later, she’s still
locked in battle.
Terrie has been telling
this story for years, and it’s at once unique and totally normal
activity during the foreclosure crisis. Rampant fraud plucked homes
from millions of borrowers who encountered struggle through no fault of their
own and tried to do the right thing. Yet those who bore this burden continue to
be forgotten.
In his retrospective,
the New York Times’ Neil Irwin gestured at the massive “human cost of
the foreclosure crisis.” But citing Rick Santelli’s rant against
bailing out “the loser’s mortgages,” Irwin lamented, “the politics of helping
troubled homeowners was more toxic than the crisis managers had foreseen.”
That’s something that can only be written by somebody who hasn’t sat down with
a foreclosure victim. It’s an excuse, used by policymakers and their enablers,
so they can live with their actions. The same people who moved heaven and earth
to secure extremely unpopular bank bailouts came up with all kinds of
constraints when it came to foreclosures.
But the politics of not
helping homeowners was far more toxic than Rick Santelli and the Tea Party have
ever been. Millions of people saw the biggest financial purchase of their
lives, the place they lived, the source of their stability, ripped away from them.
They saw their government ignore, if not outright abandon them in their time of
need. And they were fundamentally altered by the experience.
“I shed a lot of tears when I
go to court and see another family devastated,” Terrie told me. “I had a woman,
came out of court, she fell in my arms, saying ‘what am I going to do, my
husband left me, I lost everything.’ I didn’t know her! I saw a World War II
vet sitting to go in for an eviction date while his wife was dying of cancer.
You don’t walk into environments like that over and over and not have it change
you.”
These victims were segregated
from the halls of power, humiliated into silence about their plight.
Foreclosure victims don’t have lobbyists or liaisons that could grab the
attention of elites. Not only did this prolong economic pain, it created a stew
of anger and frustration, and lent evidence to the Reagan-era notion that
government is the problem and not the solution. It prepared the ground for
populist demagogues. It was a catastrophic mistake. And it’s impossible to
assess the financial crisis and its conclusion without remembering this broken
social contract, the moment the government chose to rescue Wall Street and
not Main Street.
Incredibly, despite all this,
Terrie Crowley is hopeful as she continues to fight for her home. “I’m past
that fury stage,” she said. “Maybe if so many of us keep going and are
successful, in some way it will educate people. I’m not going to change Wells
Fargo. But these cases do matter. We just don’t know how they matter yet.”
10 Books Every Student Should Read!
A definitive list of
books that you need to read: 50% off for the month of September.
03 September 2018
0 comments
Reading List
The start of the academic year
has got us thinking about the books that transformed our
thinking; classics from across our publishing that we think should be on
everyone's bookshelves.
Whether you are just starting
out, or your student days are far behind you, here is a definitive list of
books that you need to read: all 50% off for the month of
September.
See all our student
reading here!
Paperback
Ebook
Paperback
Paperback with free ebook
$19.95$9.9850% off
256 pages / September 2016 /
9781784786755
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“One of the greatest …
deserves still to be central to our thinking about the world.”
– T. J. Clark, London
Review of Books
The full magnitude of Benedict
Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined
Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of
nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of
Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work
in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty
translations.
Paperback
Ebook
Hardback
Paperback with free ebook
$19.95$9.9850% off
256 pages / January 2006 /
9781844670512
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“The best thoughts of a noble
and invigorating mind.”
– Observer
"A volume of Adorno is
equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature."—Susan Sontag
A reflection on everyday
existence in the 'sphere of consumption of late Capitalism', this work is
Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece.
Paperback
Ebook
Paperback
Hardback
Paperback with free ebook
$16.95$8.4850% off
224 pages / May 2017 /
9781786630681
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“The Origin of Capitalism was
one of those ‘Aha!’ moments. Wood was an extraordinarily rigorous and
imaginative thinker, someone who breathed life into Marxist political theory
and made it speak—not to just to me but to many others—at multiple levels:
historical, theoretical, political.”
– Corey Robin, Jacobin
How did the dynamic economic
system we know as capitalism develop among the peasants and lords of feudal Europe?
In The Origin of
Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a
clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the
birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state.
by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
et al.
Paperback
Ebook
Hardback
Paperback with free ebook
$17.95$8.9850% off
220 pages / January 2007 /
9781844675708
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“This is vital reading for
anyone concerned with the relationship between art and socialism.”
– John Fowles
No other country and no other
period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that
which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics
and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over
literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do
not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between
thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.
Paperback
Ebook
Paperback with free ebook
$17.95$8.9850% off
320 pages / February 2016 /
9781784782443
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“Reading a Wood essay is a
shock to the system, demanding the reader take a position, often leaving you
invigorated and slightly bruised in the process.”
– Michael Watson, Red
Pepper
Historian and political
thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that theories of “postmodern” fragmentation,
“difference,” and con-tingency can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism,
let alone subject it to critique. In this book she sets out to renew the
critical program of historical materialism by redefining its basic concepts and
its theory of history in original and imaginative ways, using them to identify
the specificity of capitalism as a system of social relations and political
power. She goes on to explore the concept of democracy in both the ancient and
modern world, examining its relation to capitalism, and raising questions about
how democracy might go beyond the limits imposed on it.
Paperback
Ebook
Hardback
Paperback with free ebook
$44.95$22.4850% off
912 pages / May 2014 /
9781781683170
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“One of the great French
intellectual activists of the twentieth century.”
– David Harvey
The three-volume text by Henri
Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern
capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers
and is now available for the first time in one complete volume. Written at the
birth of post-war consumerism, Critique was an inspiration for the
1968 student revolution in France. It is a founding text of cultural studies
and a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography,
sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. Lefebvre takes as his
starting point and guide the "trivial" details of quotidian
experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by
inauthenticity, yet remaining the only source of resistance and change. This is
an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and
optimism.
Paperback
Ebook
Hardback
Paperback with free ebook
$19.95$9.9850% off
304 pages / November 2014 /
9781781685594
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“A dizzying menagerie of
anti-capitalist thought.”
– PopMatters
This book–one of our Back to
University bestsellers–offers the first global cartography of the expanding
intellectual field of critical contemporary thought. A panoramic account of the
world’s leading writers and thinkers; more than thirty authors and intellectual
currents of every continent are presented in a clear and succinct manner. A
history of critical thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is also
provided, helping situate current thinkers in a broader historical and
sociological perspective.
Edited by Angela Y. Davis
Paperback
Ebook
Paperback with free ebook
$17.95$8.9850% off
288 pages / November 2016 /
9781784787691
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“Angela Davis taught me that I
did not have to tolerate the racism I was suffering in the playground, she told
me that I was not alone … it was in this book that I first came across the word
‘solidarity.’”
– Benjamin Zephaniah
One of America’s most historic
political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter
from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals
such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica
Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis’s incarceration and the
struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough
analysis of the prison system of the United State.
With race and the police once
more burning issues, this classic work from one of America’s giants of black
radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power.
by Nancy Fraser
Paperback
Ebook
Hardback
Paperback with free ebook
$24.95$12.4850% off
256 pages / April 2013 /
9781844679843
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
“Nancy Fraser is among the
very few thinkers in the tradition of critical theory who are capable of
redeeming its legacy in the twenty-first century.”
– Axel Honneth
Nancy Fraser’s
classic work traces the feminist movement’s evolution since the 1970s and
anticipates a new—radical and egalitarian—phase of feminist thought and
action. Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to
address the global economic crisis. Feminism can be a force working in concert
with other egalitarian movements in the struggle to bring the economy under
democratic control, while building on the visionary potential of the earlier
waves of women’s liberation. This powerful new account is set to become a
landmark of feminist thought.
by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
Paperback
Ebook
Paperback
Paperback
288 pages / / 9781784786793
Not in stock
Where to buy
“A classic of
twentieth-century thought.”
– Times Literary
Supplement
Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer are the leading figures of the Frankfurt School and this book is
their magnum opus. Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the most celebrated
works of modern social philosophy and continues to impress in its wide-ranging
ambition.
A classic of twentieth-century
thought, charting how society devours itself through the very rationality that
was meant to set it free.
How Nike Uses Liberal Multiculturalism to Hide Abuse
If people say your dreams are
crazy…” an unseen man says in the new Nike ad. On screen, a child wrestler with
a leg amputation goes for the win, a Muslim woman boxes and a refugee scores
for the national team. “Good,” the voice says. “Stay that way.”
The ad cuts to Colin
Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback blacklisted for kneeling during the national
anthem to protest the police killings of unarmed Black people. It is a
breathtaking moment. It is also a liberal alibi for massive, ongoing harm.
Behind the Nike swoosh is the
struggle of a million workers who stitch Nike shoes and gear. They are part of
the 70 million-strong global garment industry workforce, fighting for better
pay and conditions even as their jobs are automated. When we buy Nike’s
seemingly rebellious liberalism, we buy into reformist politics that excludes
their dream, which is to earn a living wage.
Express Yourself
“Yo man, your Jordans are
fucked up,” the friend taunted Buggin Out, whose Nikes were scuffed by a
passerby. Everyone in the theater laughed. It was 1989 and we sat spellbound by
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing because the scene reflected our
lives. People took their shoes way too seriously. It was why I never wore
Nikes. I had friends who were robbed at gunpoint and walked home in socks.
Why the violence? It’s not
just a ’90s
thing. It happens now.
The answer: People hunger for status. They stare at athletes and celebrities,
who float in a world of wealth. Stars wear nice clothes and glittering watches.
They drive cars like spaceships on wheels. If we can’t be them, we can at least
wear what they wear and borrow the décor of their lifestyles.
Since the 1920s advertising
revolution, capitalism has sold commodities by associating them with an
identity. Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations,” began this with
World War I propaganda and then sold his “psychological warfare” to American
companies. He framed their products not as things to answer needs but as
symbols to satisfy desires. He wrote in
his 1928 book Propaganda, “A thing may be desired not for its
intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because [a person] has unconsciously come to
see in it a symbol.”
Advertising sold people
symbols like instant food, which signified modern convenience, or soap
“scientifically” guaranteed to kill germs. Each generation found its desire for
safety or upward mobility or rebellion quickly commodified. In the television
series Mad Men, 1960s ad executive Don Draper’s meditation led to the “I
Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. A Coke is
just corn syrup and water in a bottle, but in the alchemy of advertising, it
was reborn as a symbol of the Hippie Counter Culture.
Six decades after the release
of Bernays’s book, Nike tapped into his propaganda model for its 1988 Just Do
It campaign. It made sneakers into symbols of American independence. The first
ad showed an
80-year-old man cheerfully jogging the Golden Gate Bridge. Nike sold
an athletic Horatio Alger story where normal people lift themselves up with
extreme effort. The human spirit shined through sweat-soaked faces.
Three decades later, Nike
relaunched the Just Do It campaign. Today, capitalism is global and it must
respond to the collective desire of an audience beyond America. Again, Nike
tapped into the Horatio Alger lift-yourself-up mythos, but now the achievement
is not just athletic prowess but a multicultural liberalism. In Nike’s new ad,
refugees become national superstars. A young woman is both homecoming queen and
football player. A young Black girl from Compton reigns supreme in tennis.
Finally, Colin Kaepernick looks into the camera and poof, Nike becomes a
symbol of justice.
Yet it isn’t. Take a look at
the label. You can read where the factories are located. They are where a
struggle involving millions of people won’t be made into any commercial.
Behind the Swoosh
Indonesia. Vietnam. Honduras.
I thumbed through labels at Macy’s. Every shoe had a Nike swoosh. Every shirt
had a number like Michael Jordan’s 23 or a famous American face on the front.
Yet when I looked inside, the labels all pointed back to Global South nations.
Nike sells rebellion to Global
North consumers through the faces of well-paid celebrities on its apparel while
its goods are made primarily by people in the Global South who barely eke out a
living. When they fight for better wages or working conditions, their heroism
does not make them eligible to become rebels, mythologized in Nike’s ads.
Nike is a criminal enterprise.
Capitalism is a system of theft and Nike is a near-perfect model of it. Phil
Knight, the founder and CEO has a net worth of nearly
$35 billion. Jordan earned $100
million from Nike and other deals. Lebron James signed a lifetime
deal with Nike worth over a billion. Now Kaepernick is next
in line for more ads, a sneaker line and jerseys — all of which will
add up to a pretty penny.
Where does this vast sum of
money come from? Nike is a corporate vacuum sucking up the surplus value from
workers. It has a million laborers, mostly women, in 42 nations, including
Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Each country gets paid its own rate. Workers
line up in rows near conveyor belts or sewing machines for long hours. In
Indonesia, the assemblers get paid
$3.50 per day. In Vietnam, they are paid around
$42 a week or $171 per month.
The workers receive anything
close to the product’s final value. When a Nike sneaker is put on the store
shelf, it gets a near 43 percent retail
markup and consumers in the Global North buy it for nearly a $100. Our
money goes to store employees, managers, regional managers, the CEO, celebrity
advertising and the accounts of stockholders. The workers — mainly women in the
Global South — who
are exposed to toxic chemicals, faint from heat, forced to work
overtime and whose wages are sometimes stolen — never see that much-needed
money.
This system has many
apologists, including among liberals. The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff
infamously wrote a series of articles saying in essence, sweatshops are good.
“People always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop,” he wrote in
a 2009 Op-Ed, “No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a
rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing
machine isn’t the bottom.”
He is right in the short term,
but his limited, liberal imagination doesn’t see the longer trajectory of
capitalism. Nike already has enough money to raise the pay of workers to more
than a living wage. Instead, it chose to move out of nations with rising wage
demands like China to go to Vietnam, where labor is cheaper.
Meanwhile, new 3D printing
technology is making fully automated factories possible. Sweatshops could
become obsolete — along with the workers who currently depend on them for
survival. Against this, people protest. They fight to
keep the jobs they have. In Indonesia, demonstrations against Nike cutting
orders were held in 2007. One sign read, “Nike is a Blood Sucking Vampire.” In
July 2017, workers and students held a Global Day of Action Against Nike after
a watchdog group, Workers Rights Consortium, got inside a
Nike plant in Hansae, Vietnam, and found wage theft, padlocked doors and
workers fainting from heat.
In San Pedro Sula, Honduras,
the SITRASTAR union protested outside
of the Nike factory and store after the company stopped production at their
factory. More than 350 union members were jobless. “If there is no peace for
us,” union leader Waldin Reyes shouted, “Let there be no peace for them.”
It shows the double bind of
Global South workers. They have to fight for higher pay and humane conditions
and fight to keep the sweatshops. Without them, they’d plummet into severe
poverty.
Unlike the customers buying
Nike for an imaginary status of rebellion, here are people fighting for a very
real goal: survival.
The People’s Shoe
“Don’t believe you have to be
like anybody,” Kaepernick says in the ad, “To be somebody.” We see a brain
tumor survivor who ran the Ironman race and Lebron opening a new school. Each
mini-story is a triumph over great odds. Kaepernick’s soulful stare sells the
ad because he sacrificed his career to silently protest innocent Black people
being killed by the state.
It worked. Once more,
Americans line up to buy Nike’s symbolic rebellion. Sales spiked after
the new ad. It makes me uneasy. In the ’90s, impressionable youth bought Nikes
because they represented athletic glory and status. Now I fear some will buy
them because they’re convinced by Nike’s suggestion that they represent the
struggle against anti-Black police violence.
Too often, they can’t afford
the sneakers. Nike’s CEO and the stockholders are at the center of a vast money
vacuum. They exploit low-wage workers at the factory floor and exploit
customers, many of whom are youth of color, who are desperate to buy meaning
for their lives.
Imagine a different ad. One
where a union leader like Waldin Reyes smiles on screen and proudly holds up
The People’s Shoe, a sneaker line made by a worker’s cooperative. No
billion-dollar CEO. No billion-dollar celebrities.
Instead the workers wave to
the camera as they leave the shop early to see their children. The camera
follows one woman to her brightly lit home. Her clothes are drying on the line
as her family sits at a long table, laughing and eating. She takes a People’s
Shoe, shows it to the camera and says, “Just Organize.”
Bernie Sanders calls for a new international left to fight Steve Bannon’s right-wing “Movement”
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Supposed genius Steve Bannon
thinks he can lure progressives into the nationalist right. Sanders says no
thanks
I wrote earlier in the week about Steve Bannon's ties to
far-right politicians in Europe. In fact, Bannon is in Italy right now
schmoozing with his newest political ally, Matteo Salvini, who's the interior
minister and leads the country's nationalist, anti-immigrant party. The New
York Times describes Salvini as "the most powerful figure in
Italy’s new populist government." He's an emerging far-right superstar
known for his puckish habit of owning the libs by quoting Benito Mussolini.
According to the Times,
Salvini has signed on to Bannon's new so-called organization, "The
Movement" in order to "help bring about a continent-wide populist
takeover during European Parliamentary elections next spring." Bannon will
offer a meeting space and supposed expertise in various aspects of campaigning
for far-right populist leaders. (Apparently, his three months of experience
working for Donald Trump in the flukiest presidential election in U.S. history
qualifies him as a political guru.)
Salvini has other things in
common with Trump and the Republicans besides Steve Bannon. He and his party
are being investigated by government prosecutors for allegedly stealing tens of
millions of euros. (Funny how all these "populists" are always
stealing money with both hands.) Just to make things even more interesting,
Buzzfeed report that Salvini's close aide,
Gianluca Savoini, "has links to mercenaries fighting alongside
pro-Russian and neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine." Savoini himself is the
leader of a pro-Russia "cultural organization" which Buzzfeed's
research showed has disseminated pro-Kremlin propaganda. He has been pushing
hard to remove Italian sanctions against Russia. What a small world.
Evidently, Salvini has
recently met with Hungary's nationalist anti-immigrant prime minister Viktor
Orbán, who is also interested in joining up with Bannon's new movement. Banding
together to defeat liberals across the continent is a curious form of
nationalism but that seems to be the plan.
Zack Beauchamp of Vox got a first-hand look at this
new movement when he went to Hungary to check out the Orbán government. His
report is chilling. He describes an authoritarian state with border fences,
byzantine bureaucracy designed to thwart democratic governance, a
stifled press overwhelmed with government propaganda and a kleptocratic
economy. He dubs it "soft fascism," which sounds better than it
actually is:
[A] political system that aims
to stamp out dissent and seize control of every major aspect of a country’s
political and social life, without needing to resort to “hard” measures like
banning elections and building up a police state.
He observes how this provides
a model for the U.S., not by dramatically imposing dictatorial rule but rather
through "a series of changes to electoral rules and laws imposed over time
that might individually be defensible but in combination with corruption and
demagogic populism creates a new system — one that appears democratic but
functionally is not."
Bannon has said that
Orbán, who has been in office since 2010, was “Trump before Trump.”
Bannon thinks
he's smarter than everybody else and often tries to co-opt the
populist left into his warped vision. He told CNN's Fareed Zakaria last June that he
believes he can peel off at least 25 percent of Bernie Sanders' followers to
form a nationalist governing majority. Just last week, he warned progressives that the establishment would
obstruct their agenda if a Democrat won the White House, just as he believes it
is staging a "coup" against Donald Trump.
I suspect many members of the
American left have been looking for their leaders to speak out on this.
On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders came through with a searing op-ed in the Guardian condemning this
far-right movement and calling it out for the serious threat it is. He calls it
"a global struggle taking place of enormous consequence. Nothing less than
the future of the planet – economically, socially and environmentally – is at
stake ... we are seeing the rise of a new authoritarian axis."
Sanders didn't use the term
"axis" by accident. He writes:
While these regimes may differ
in some respects, they share key attributes: hostility toward democratic norms,
antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious
minorities, and a belief that government should benefit their own selfish
financial interests. ... This trend certainly did not begin with Trump, but
there’s no question that authoritarian leaders around the world have drawn
inspiration from the fact that the leader of the world’s oldest and most powerful
democracy seems to delight in shattering democratic norms.
It is extremely important that
one of the most important leaders of the American left puts this is such stark
and evocative terms. He calls out the corrupt, authoritarian leadership
of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, China and more and makes the connections
among them clear, calling them part of a "common front" sharing
tactics and even some of the same mega-rich funders.
Sanders doesn't offer specific
policies to combat this threat, beyond his social-democratic economic agenda
and standard non-interventionist philosophy but that's not the important part.
He is issuing a wake-up call to the American left:
In order to effectively combat
the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international
progressive movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity,
security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global
inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.
Such a movement must be
willing to think creatively and boldly about the world that we would like to
see. While the authoritarian axis is committed to tearing down a post-second
world war global order that they see as limiting their access to power and
wealth, it is not enough for us to simply defend that order as it exists now.
We must look honestly at how
that order has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and how
authoritarians have adeptly exploited those failures in order to build support
for their agenda. We must take the opportunity to reconceptualize a genuinely
progressive global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes
that every person on this planet shares a common humanity, that we all want our
children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink
clean water, breathe clean air and live in peace.
Neither the American left nor
the international left is buying into Bannon and company's cramped, ugly,
Hobbesian worldview and it never will. The right-wing racists and nationalists
are on their own.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)