Monday, December 16, 2019
India adopts Hindu supremacist citizenship law
By Rohantha De Silva and Keith
Jones
13 December 2019
In the face of widespread
popular opposition and warnings that India is rending its “secular”
political-constitutional order, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) government have rammed through legislation that effectively
redefines Indian citizenship in Hindu supremacist terms.
Tabled in the lower house of
India’s bicameral parliament only on Monday, the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill,
2019 or CAB was given presidential assent last night.
Passage of the CAB sets the
stage for the BJP to proceed with its plans to draw up a National Register of
Citizens (NRC), under which all of India’s more than 1.3 billion residents will
have to prove, to the authorities’ satisfaction, that they are Indian citizens.
Those unable to do so will be declared stateless and subject to detention and
expulsion.
The NRC’s ostensible purpose
is to identify “illegal immigrants.” In truth—and the CAB makes this manifestly
evident—the aim of the NRC will be to harass, intimidate, and victimize India’s
Muslim minority.
Adding insult to injury, the
BJP is cynically trying to dress up the CAB, to use Modi’s words, as an act of
“compassion and brotherhood.”
The CAB grants Indian
citizenship to non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who
entered India prior to 2015, on the grounds that Hindus, Sikhs, Jains,
Buddhists, and Christians in those countries have been subject to religious
persecution.
Conspicuously left off the
list are members of minority Muslims groups, such as Pakistan’s Ahmadiyas or
Afghanistan’s Shia Hazaras, who are victims of state discrimination and/or
communal violence. Also, notably absent are the Rohingya, more than one million
of whom had to flee Myanmar (Burma), which borders India to the east, in late
2016. Claiming the Rohingya are a “security threat,” the BJP government has
held those that fled into India in detention camps and is deporting them to
Myanmar.
When coupled with the CAB, the
NRC’s essentially fascistic anti-Muslim purpose becomes clear.
Given that much of India’s
population is illiterate and impoverished and state services are limited to
non-existent, hundreds of millions of people will likely find it difficult to
come up with the papers needed to “prove” their Indian citizenship. But only
Muslims will face the threat of being rendered stateless, with all that
entails, for the others will be accorded citizenship under the discriminatory
terms of the CAB.
With its CAB, wrote Indian Express columnist
Harsh Mander, “the government is clearly messaging that if people of any
identity except Muslims are unable to produce the required documents, they will
be accepted as refugees and given citizenship. This means that the real burden
to prove that they are Indian citizens (under the NRC) … is only thrust on
Muslims, because only they risk statelessness. Most Indians would find it
impossible to muster the required documents to prove their citizenship, but
only document-less Muslims will face the prospect of detention centres, or
being stripped of all citizenship rights.”
The NRC in Assam
A foul taste of what the Modi
government intends has already been provided by recent events in the
northeastern state of Assam. On the orders of the Supreme Court, and in keeping
with the terms of a reactionary agreement the Rajiv Gandhi Congress Party
government entered into in 1985 to end an exclusivist Assamese agitation, the
state’s 30 million residents were forced to prove that they or their ancestors
lived in India prior to the March 1971 eruption of the Bangladesh national
struggle against repressive Pakistani rule.
Millions suffered
psychological torment, financial hardship, and official abuse as they struggled
to “prove” they are Indian citizens. Not only did they have to prove their
citizenship claim to the satisfaction of ethno- and Hindu chauvinist officials.
Under the terms of the NRC, third parties have the right to challenge an
individual’s claim to citizenship. The All Assam Students Union (AASU) and
other groups filed close to 200,000 such objections.
Ultimately, when the “final”
NRC was published last summer, 1.9 million people, most of them poor Muslims,
were excluded—i.e., deemed non-citizens. Of these, the overwhelming majority
had been born in India (See: India labels
1.9 million Assam residents “foreigners” as prelude to their mass expulsion).
However, this outcome failed
to satisfy either the Hindu supremacist BJP or the ethno-exclusivist Assamese
organizations like the AASU. The former was angered that up to a third of those
left off the NRC were Hindus; the latter that “only” 1.9 million of Assam’s
residents were declared illegal migrants.
Now the NRC is to be extended
across India. Speaking in Monday’s debate on the CAB in the Lok Sabha, the
lower house of India’s parliament, Modi’s chief henchman, Home Minister Amit
Shah, vowed the government will rapidly move forward with the national NRC.
Shah, who has repeatedly described “illegal” Muslim “immigrants” as “termites,”
told the Lok Sabha, “Once the NRC is implemented, we will ensure no infiltrator
remains in the country.”
As part of the national NRC,
and in accordance with the newly enacted CAB, the Modi government is also
intending to redo the NRC process in Assam.
Taken together the CAB and NRC
effectively reduce India’s 200 million Muslims to second-class citizens.
Despite having implemented the
reactionary communal partition of South Asia at independence in 1947, into an
expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India, India’s Congress
Party-led government rejected the demand of the BJP’s Hindu supremacist
precursors, the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, that India be declared a Hindu
Rashtra or Hindu nation. The 1955 Citizenship Act, which the CAB amends,
made territoriality (i.e., birth in India or the pre-1947 British Indian
empire), not religion, the criteria of citizenship.
The Hindu right has always
rejected this, claiming that India is a first and foremost a Hindu nation. V.D.
Savarkar, the principal ideologue of Hindutva and hero of the
contemporary Hindu right, argued that India’s Muslims were not true Indians,
because for them—unlike India’s Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists—India is
their “motherland,” but not their “holy land.” During the late 1930s Savarkar
urged India’s Hindus to treat Muslims like the Nazis treated the Jews. If he
dropped such rhetoric during World War II, it was only because he and the Hindu
Mahasabha were hoping to form an “Anglo-Hindu” alliance with the British
colonial state so as to combat the Muslim “menace.”
In according preferential
treatment to non-Muslims from select neighbouring states, while setting up a
process whereby only Muslims must establish their Indian citizenship, the BJP
government has gone a long way to realizing the Hindu right’s longstanding
goals of asserting Hindu dominance and making religion and not territoriality
the criteria of citizenship.
The inclusion of Christians
who migrated or fled to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan among
those to be accorded citizenship under the CAB is a ruse. It is meant to
camouflage the legislation’s Hindu supremacist motivation, no doubt with an eye
to currying favor with the White House and the US Christian right.
Shah defended the concept of
“religious-based” citizenship in the Lok Sabha debate on the CAB, claiming it
“has been happening in India since the partition of this country.” Revealing
more of his mindset than he perhaps intended, he also declared, “India will
never be Muslim mukti (free).”
The BJP’s campaign of Hindu
supremacist assertion
Since winning re-election last
May, the Modi government has moved aggressively to realize key elements of the
agenda of the Hindu right. In this it has had either the explicit support or
acquiescence of the other institutions of the Indian state and the rest of
India’s venal ruling elite,
On August 5, Modi and Shah
working in close tandem with the top brass of the military and intelligence
agencies carried out a constitutional coup, abrogating the special
semi-autonomous status of India’s lone Muslim-majority state, Jammu and
Kashmir, and reducing it two Union Territories, thus placing the contested
region under permanent central government control.
Modi’s coup against Kashmir
has been enforced with a security clampdown that has seen thousands, including
much of the traditional pro-Indian Muslim Kashmiri elite, detained without
trial; the deployment of tens of thousands of additional security forces to
what is already one of the world’s most heavily militarized regions; and a
months-long communications blackout, including the suspension of internet and
cellphone service.
Bowing to the wishes of the
BJP and the RSS, India’s Supreme Court last month instructed the government to
oversee the construction of a Hindu temple on the site where the Babri
Masjid mosque stood until Hindu activists at the instigation of top BJP leaders
razed it to the ground on December 6, 1992. This crime provoked the bloodiest
wave of communal violence since Partition.
Modi and Shah are
systematically whipping up communal hostility against Muslims with the aim of
channeling the social tensions produced by rapacious social inequality and a
rapidly deteriorating economy behind reaction and a bellicose foreign policy,
and splitting an increasingly restive and militant working class.
With the passage of the CAB
and its vow to rapidly launch the NRC, the BJP is dramatically accelerating its
drive to transform India into a Hindu rashtra and reduce Muslims to
second-class citizenship. This is giving some sections of the ruling elite
pause. They fear the Modi government’s actions will incite mass opposition,
discredit and delegitimize the Indian state, and destabilize key state
institutions, including the military.
Already the government has
rushed troops to Assam, imposed an indefinite curfew on the state capital,
Guwahati, and suspended cellphone service in ten Assam districts after mass
protests erupted against the CAB. The protests are being led by Assam
ethno-chauvinist organizations opposed to the CAB’s granting of citizenship to
Bangladeshi Hindu migrants, some of whom were victims of communal violence.
According to press reports, at least two people were killed and many injured
Thursday when security personnel fired at protesters defying the Guwahati
curfew.
Having promoted communalism
and casteism for decades as a key strategy for politically controlling and
suppressing India’s workers and toilers, transformed the toxic Hindu
supremacist BJP into its largest party, and attacked democratic rights, the
Indian bourgeoisie and its political representatives are entirely complicit in
the growth of Hindu supremacism and the putrefaction of Indian “democracy.”
To defeat communal reaction
and defend democratic rights, the working class must be mobilized as an
independent political force, rallying the oppressed toilers behind it in the
fight against capitalist rule and on the basis of a socialist internationalist
program.
The authors also recommend:
Modi’s assault
on Kashmir and the Indian working class
[5 November 2019]
[5 November 2019]
[5 September 20119]
The Generals’ Long Con on Afghanistan
DEC 13, 2019
So now we know that which many
of us long surmised. The generals
lied, repeatedly; in fact, the whole damn Afghan War was a
lie. I wish I could take some pleasure in the vindication, but I can’t seem
conjure any. Too many of my own boys died in, or took their own lives after,
that ongoing nightmare of a war. Deep melancholy seems, for an Afghan veteran,
the only appropriate response. No amount of “I-told-you-so’s” will bring
back the 2,440 American
soldiers, and more than 30,000 Afghan
civilians who’ve perished (so far), in that aimless, endless conflict.
What, then, can one learn from
The Washington Post’s recent release of the Afghanistan
Papers? Perhaps this: Forever war is a bipartisan enterprise (the lies
spanned three administrations) and more importantly, the time has come to stop
trusting the generals—although I’m not sure we Americans ever will. The latest
revelations most certainly count as the (remarkably similar) Vietnam-era, Pentagon
Papers of my generation.
In 1971, there was a large,
active antiwar movement in the streets, and Daniel Ellsberg’s leaked documents
enflamed it. Today, in the absence of a broad military
draft, and with President Trump’s impeachment-as-entertainment hearings
dominating the media, I doubt the Afghanistan Papers will amount to much in the
way of results.
If, as an activist-writer, I
felt a touch vindicated, and as a career soldier, I felt sad, then as a
historian, I can’t say I was surprised by the Post’s disclosure. Back in
the Vietnam
War, successive commanding generals—most famously William Westmoreland just
before the massive enemy Tet Offensive—had assured the White House and the
American public that there was “light at the end” of the conflict’s “tunnel.”
Similarly, throughout the
Afghan War, and across all the countless theaters of America’s expansive
post-9/11 theaters, literally dozens of generals provided optimistic
predictions that the U.S. military had “turned the corner.” For almost
two decades, Washington insiders and an entertained-to-death public took the
resplendently dressed, strong-jawed flag officers at their word. The
Afghanistan Papers should, but probably won’t, break the spell.
In the wake of the
revelations, the most famous Afghan War commander, former four-star general and
CIA Director David Petraeus, couldn’t help but take the bait and
self-righteously defend himself within a day. His defense made me want to vomit
in my mouth a bit. “I stand by the assessments I provided as the commander in
Afghanistan,” Petraeus said in a
statement emailed to The Daily Beast. He said he believes “the
security gains, while very hard fought and fragile, were indisputable. We
clearly reversed the momentum the Taliban had on the battlefield.”
Is he serious?
The self-styled intellectual,
“enlightened” general sounds, in this mea culpa, like a defensive,
impetuous child. Just as “King
David” never divined that his own stated purpose in the Iraq surge—to
create space and time for an ethno-sectarian political settlement—hadn’t come
to pass, he can’t seem to admit that a temporary lull in Taliban violence was
irrelevant. Sorry, general, but if Afghanistan is worse
off today than it was when you left, well then, your pet
counterinsurgency strategy—by its very
definition—failed. You lost … deal with it. The whole damn military, myself
included, lost.
Sure, maybe I do have
a vendetta, of sorts, against Petraeus. Why shouldn’t I? I met the prima donna
general back in mid-2007 in Iraq. In preparation for his visit, my squadron set
up for hours, repeatedly practiced our stock briefings, so he could proceed to
pay no attention to us as he devoured the snacks we’d prepared—“the general
loves fresh fruit,” one of his aides had told me—then treat us to one of his
anodyne, canned lectures on counterinsurgency theory.
On a grander scale, Petraeus
must stand as the biggest, most unapologetic villain of all. No one better
personifies the gilded military culture of the “terror wars.” Under his
carefully self-promoted veneer lay defeat in the two wars he led, his wrong-on-all-counts Vietnam
War Ph.D., and a profound moral
scandal—a criminal conviction for sharing classified data with his young
mistress-come-biographer. Symbolically, at least, Petraeus is the
forever war.
Nonetheless, he’s not the only
vacuous general or senior intelligence official to blow smoke up our proverbial
you-know-what’s. Consider recently retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen.
Joseph Dunford. It wasn’t too long ago that this clown—in an impressively Orwellian
stretch of the English language—claimed it
was “premature” (after 18 years!) to discuss withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Let that sink in. The hard truth is, all of us officers in that war
were complicit—up and down the chain of command—by deceiving each other about
the “progress” on the ground.
To please the bosses, keep
them away from my outpost and protect my troopers, I, too, played
the game.
Promotions, especially for
general officer careers built on the terror wars, depended on the
illusion of success. Senior colonels and budding flag officers had a status,
and a pecuniary interest in reporting improvement in their sectors. The
Afghanistan Papers prove, indisputably, that the generals lied to us. But it’s
far more complicated (and unsettling) than all that. I truly believe they also
lied to each other, to themselves. They had to believe, wanted to
believe, needed to believe, that their wars could be won. A good
number graduated from West Point, where we were forced to memorize General
Douglas MacArthur’s famous mantra: “There is no substitute for victory.”
Seen in that light, the entire
war was, for those who led it, one grand delusion. Thus, when the statistical
measures of effectiveness—unsustainable Afghan Army casualties and the
number of districts contested by the Taliban—proved inconvenient, the generals
had them classified, or they simply quit counting. Perhaps that’s why it took
The Washington Post so long to
compile these documents; to force the U.S. government to release them.
Yet there’s something else at
work here that society must grapple with: Why are Americans so apt to
trust the generals when, throughout modern U.S.
history, they’ve been wrong time and again? I, for one, blame the
contemporary (post-Vietnam) penchant for—rather dangerous—public military
adulation.
Take, for example, the charade
that is generals’ testimony before Congress. Whether it’s Petraeus—who absolutely
reveled in the spotlight—or another senior general, the military man shows up
in an intimidating dress uniform replete with a “fruit salad” chest-full of
superfluous medals. Frankly, they look sharper than the poor schlub legislators
attired like country lawyers. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, when those
congresspeople veritably kowtow before the generals–fawningly “thanking” them
for their service both before and after they are questioned.
It is not supposed to be
that way. Congresspeople are the bosses. The generals are supposed to answer
to them, and by extension, to the People. Legislative oversight, hearings
and questioning, are by design meant to be like legal trials, confrontational.
So, assuming it’s the fancy uniforms intimidating the congresspeople, I’ve got
a ready proposal: Until further notice, generals summoned to Capitol Hill must
wear rumpled, ill-fitting, Bernie-style civilian suits. Let them win a few wars
and speak some hard truths before they earn their snazzy attire back.
By the way, there’s precedent
for this. In a far more modest era, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George
Marshall—architect of victory in World War II—wore
civilian clothes at government meetings in Washington, D.C.,
declaring: “I didn’t want to antagonize the public and the Congress with the
easily aroused feelings toward the military that always existed.” Let us bring
back a tad bit of that humility.
I, for one, doubt that I’ll
ever again trust the assertions and promises of most generals. And I’m not in
bad company. Recall that some 56 years ago, President John F. Kennedy, himself
a heroic young officer in the Second World War, mistrusted his senior military
advisers. After they, to a man, all recommended outrageously pugnacious
policies almost certain to cause worldwide nuclear war during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, JFK flippantly—but correctly—reflected that “These brass
hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what
they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were
wrong.”
Will we never learn?
Britain's Grim Lesson for America
DEC 13, 2019
Andrew O'Hehir / Salon
British general elections have
a tendency to deliver last-minute surprises, and the U.K.’s third in less than
five years did not disappoint. Unfortunately for the Labour Party, the British
left and the anti-Brexit forces, the surprise of 2019 appears to be a
catastrophic wipeout.
Polls leading into Thursday’s
election had suggested a tightening race that could end in a “hung parliament.”
Lines — sorry, queues — at polling places were lengthy, and British social
media buzzed with the possibility that left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
might win just enough seats to forge a coalition government with the Scottish
National Party, ousting preening, Trump-flavored Prime Minister Boris Johnson
and the Conservative Party and paving the way for a second Brexit referendum.
None of that will happen now.
As Johnson told a cheering crowd at Conservative Party headquarters in London,
the Tories had won a “stonking” victory, which will ensure that the U.K. leaves
the European Union sooner rather than later, and will lock down the right’s
hold on power in Britain for the next several years.
With most votes counted early
on Friday morning, the BBC reports that
the Tories will win an outright majority of roughly 364 seats in the 650-seat
House of Commons, a gain of 47 from the indecisive 2017 election.
If possible, the news for
Labour and Corbyn, its controversial leader, is even worse than that. While the
Conservative vote share is only slightly higher than it was in 2017, Labour’s
vote has declined by roughly 8 percent. After gaining 30 seats in 2017 for a
total of 261 — its biggest electoral gain for 20 years — Labour stands to lose
57 or 58 seats this time around, potentially its worst overall election result
since World War II.
There are several interesting
footnotes to this election, including a big comeback by the Scottish National
Party, who have won at least 48 seats, virtually wiping out both Labour and the
Tories north of the border and reigniting the push for Scottish independence.
The centrist Liberal Democrats, who had hoped to thrive by being the only party
clearly against Brexit, remain irrelevant, with party leader Jo Swinson losing
her seat to the SNP.
But for Labour and the overall
British left, no sugarcoating is possible. This election is an unmitigated
disaster.
As author
and journalist David Kogan told me in a recent interview, the British
left saw Corbyn’s unexpected victory in the Labour leadership campaign of 2015
as a historic opportunity to pursue systemic progressive change. That
opportunity is gone now, and for years to come. Let’s take a moment to
acknowledge that for many people in Britain and around the world, this is a
crushing blow.
Whatever you make of Jeremy
Corbyn, he is a person of great moral decency and unbending principle, who
engaged and aroused a generation of young activists. For practical purposes his
political career is now over: Late on Thursday, Corbyn said he intended to
remain as leader for a period of “reflection,” although many in the party would
clearly prefer he quit immediately. He certainly will not try to lead Labour
into another election.
Exactly why did this election
go so badly south for Labour, and what lessons does this debacle hold for
Americans who yearn to defeat Donald Trump next November? It’s way too early to
offer definitive answers to those questions — especially from thousands of
miles away — but if you spent any time on political Twitter on Thursday
evening, you know that plenty of people gave it a try.
The fairest answer is probably
that damn near everything went wrong for Labour, and that outside observers
will draw whatever lessons they like, mostly the ones that support whatever
they already believe. Democratic “moderates” in the U.S. are already using the
Corbyn catastrophe, for instance, to warn darkly that their own party must not
take a chance on a leftist or progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders or
Elizabeth Warren in 2020. Whatever the merits of that argument, it doesn’t have
much to do with what just happened across the pond.
It’s perfectly true that
Corbyn was the most prominent leftist leader of any major political party in
any major Western democracy over the last several years, and that he pushed an
unrepentant progressive agenda. But that agenda — expanding public services and
ending the era of austerity — was widely popular in almost every detail, and
was not the reason Labour lost this election so badly.
Corbyn himself, as a political
personality, is another matter. Four years as party leader have exposed the
fact that he was a lifelong activist with no management experience. He has
alternately seemed too weak and too autocratic — and has also been subjected to
relentless vilification by the pro-Tory press. Fairly or not, people in Britain
who didn’t adore him had largely come to fear and dislike him. So far, it seems
that many Labour candidates think Corbyn’s presence at the top of the party is
the biggest reason they lost, but not necessarily because middle-ground voters
perceived him as too radical.
It was hugely damaging that
Corbyn refused to take a clear position on Brexit, the overarching political
issue that dominated this election. To be fair, he didn’t have great
options, and his promise to act as a “neutral referee” on Brexit reflected an
awkward split within his party’s base. To oversimplify the equation slightly,
traditional working-class Labour voters in the north of England tended to
support Brexit, while affluent, cosmopolitan Labour voters in and around London
overwhelmingly opposed it. Still, if the party’s leader had taken a clear
position and stuck with it (as in fact he did in the 2017 campaign), the
results might have been different.
Corbyn also appeared
indecisive, or somewhat worse than that, when it came to Labour’s burgeoning
anti-Semitism scandal, in which some Jewish Labour MPs or candidates were
targeted for abuse by pro-Palestinian leftists. As David Kogan puts it, there
was no evidence that Corbyn himself harbored hateful views, but also no
evidence that he cared about the problem all that much or understood how badly
it had damaged the party’s reputation.
There are no precise parallels
to either of those things in American politics, although there are certainly
echoes. To this point, allegations of anti-Semitism against Democratic members
of Congress have done no lasting damage — largely because their source, one
might say, is compromised. But Brexit, I suppose, is metaphorically similar to
Donald Trump’s border wall, which is more or less the instrument he used to pry
Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania away from the
Democrats.
In both cases, we’re talking
about a political party struggling to adapt to rapid change, so far without
success. One analysis of the British election I encountered late on Tuesday
night suggested that Labour might actually gain a few previous Tory seats in
London, while losing many more longtime Labour seats in what was once the
party’s working-class northern heartland. (This appears accurate so far.) That
would be England’s version of the Big Sort, in which geography, educational
level and generational identity — along with race, of course — become the
dominant social dividing lines and political signifiers.
Jeremy Corbyn and the British
left just experienced a painful illustration of this cultural and demographic
shift in action, and of how it nourishes a politics of rage and resentment that
can undermine and endanger democracy. Americans already know about this: You
can feel certain you’re on the right side of history, and still end up, shocked
and dismayed, on the wrong side of electoral arithmetic. The trick, of course,
is to find a way to win without sacrificing your essential principles. Does
anyone ever do that?
The Wrong People Are Really Excited About Pete Buttigieg’s Campaign
DEC 13, 2019
Max Moran / Independent Media
Institute
A senator from California, a
senator from New York, and a nationally known Texan congressman have all
clocked out of the 2020 Democratic primary. Yet the little-known mayor of the
fourth-largest city in Indiana is not only staying alive, but thriving.
At least he was, until early
December. Pete Buttigieg is currently receiving the media scrutiny expected of
a front-runner, and his multilingual Midwestern golden boy routine isn’t
holding up very well. After a horrific ProPublica-New York Times expose put the
spotlight squarely on Buttigieg’s old employer McKinsey, he has struggled to justify his silence on what exactly he
did for the firm, and squirmed under broader scrutiny of his corporate
funders and bundlers. That’s also brought his tight-lipped attitude toward his actual record in
South Bend—as well as South Bend’s racist policing, and Buttigieg’s own dismissive politicking toward African Americans—back
to the spotlight.
My organization, the Revolving
Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, was one of the first to call out this election cycle’s
broad lack of bundler transparency, but there’s another, even simpler data
point about the South Bend mayor that we’re surprised hasn’t penetrated the
broader discourse. Just look at the actual figures lining up behind the South
Bend mayor, and it becomes clear that he’s an actor for the well-connected.
On December 5, while the
McKinsey story was gaining steam, Buttigieg’s campaign triumphantly announced the endorsement of former chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee. When former White House officials
make early endorsements like these, they’re often overtures toward getting
their former jobs back. Especially since Goolsbee isn’t backing Joe Biden,
Obama’s natural heir, he’s likely angling for a senior position in the
Buttigieg administration. Goolsbee said in his endorsement, “It has been a
while since I have seen the kind of excitement on the ground in Iowa that Mayor
Pete has generated, and the last time worked out pretty well.”
To hear Goolsbee recall
Obama’s campaign promises should make all voters groan, and the Midwest seethe.
On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama harshly criticized the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for hollowing out Rust Belt factories, and even agreed
to consider withdrawing the United States in a debate with Hillary Clinton. Yet
at the same time, Goolsbee sent a back-channel memo to the Canadian embassy
that Obama’s criticisms of NAFTA were “more reflective of political maneuvering than
policy.” Later in office, as the American auto industry crumpled under the
recession, Goolsbee favored letting Chrysler fail rather than “siphon
market-share from Ford and GM,” according to contemporaneous reports.
Goolsbee departed the White
House in June 2011 to return to the University of Chicago. In January
2013—while Obama was still in office—he picked up a new job that should raise
even louder alarm bells about his priorities and worldview. While ostensibly a
full-time professor, Goolsbee now leads the Economic Intelligence practice at
32 Advisors, a firm founded by fellow Obama alum Robert Wolf. What does 32
Advisors do? It does the two things most revolving-door figures do to get rich:
influencing and investing.
On influencing, 32 Advisors
makes no effort to hide what it’s up to. While Obama was still in office, the
32 Advisors website advertised that it “helps companies navigate the
intricacies of government regulations and develop strategies to build strong
relationships.” Goolsbee’s Economic Advisory department advertised “unparalleled insights into the future of
the economy and its influence on businesses,” including “Geo-Political
Briefings & Ad-Hoc Email Insights.” It’s not your average consultant who
can offer geopolitical insights from a former Cabinet adviser and longtime
confidante of the then-sitting President of the United States. It also says
something about a person’s character to offer that insider take to the highest
bidder. (Goolsbee was unlikely to starve on his salary as a professor at the
University of Chicago School of Business.)
Meanwhile, 32 Advisors also
runs its own investing arm called 32 Ventures. This has echoes of Bain and Company’s relationship with Bain
Capital, a former Obama punching bag in the 2012 campaign. 32
Advisors’ relationship with 32 Ventures is even closer: instead of separate
firms, the consultancy and investment wing are different divisions of the same
company.
Nowadays, 32 Advisors’
consulting arm is called Strategic Worldviews, which offers—for the right
price—insights from Goolsbee, Glenn Hubbard (a George W. Bush economic adviser
who’s now on the board of private equity titan KKR), and others. Here’s the
twist: Strategic Worldviews is “a joint venture between 32
Ventures and Anthony Scaramucci’s SALT Ventures.”
Yes, that Anthony Scaramucci.
Other highlights from the 32
Ventures portfolio: Blade, a “digitally powered short-distance aviation
company” that puts more recreational planes in the air to gobble up our carbon
budget; the cannabis-related companies 14th Round and High Beauty, both of
which have white founders, and one of whom is previously wealthy (read about the race and class
issues in the legal cannabis industry here); and Chanticleer Holdings, the parent company of …
Hooters.
Yes, that Hooters.
So we have a man who wanted to
let the Rust Belt collapse, who revolved out to the influence and investment
industries, and who literally works with The Mooch, throwing his support behind
the Midwestern mayor. And the mayor is proud of this endorsement! The
whole thing speaks to a fundamental tension about Buttigieg.
He is an elitist’s idea of a
small-town Indiana mayor. Buttigieg wants us to see his lack of national
experience as an asset instead of a liability. Everyone hates Washington, after
all. But if he is truly alien to the Washington way of doing things, why is a
swamp figure like Goolsbee throwing support to Buttigieg instead of established
moderates like Amy Klobuchar or Cory Booker? If Buttigieg actually is—to use a
meaningless word D.C.-types love—“electable,” what will he say to an Ohio
autoworker wondering why he’s cozying up to the forces who were ready to leave
him out in the cold in the recession? Why is Buttigieg jet-setting between Wall
Street and Silicon Valley for funding, instead of talking to the average voters
(who hate both finance and tech) he supposedly represents? How can a Harvard
and Oxford-educated ex-McKinseyite who has never taken up arms against
corporate corruption credibly claim to be anything other than elitist in the
first place?
And who better understands
what a Buttigieg administration would actually do—MSNBC pundits impressed by
Buttigieg’s down-to-earth persona, or revolving-door insider Austan Goolsbee?
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