Thursday, May 7, 2020
Trump’s Nationalism Advances on a Predictable Trajectory to Violence. His Supporters Will Kill When They’re Told To.
Aleksandar Hemon
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/02/trump-nationalism-violence-yugoslavia/
EVER SINCE Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy and rank racism in 2015, those of us who’d witnessed the nationalist undoing in the Balkans at the end of the last millennium have found the subsequent rise of Trumpism frighteningly familiar. We quickly recognized a host of nationalist pathologies: the tactical importance of bigotry, since enemies must be ceaselessly identified and hated; relentless misogyny as a means of controlling women and their bodies, because the nation is a masculinist project where women serve as wombs for national reproduction; a profusion of lies, conspiracy theories, and plain nonsense, since reality is controlled by the enemies (fake news, deep state, the Jews, etc.) and must be perpetually undone and redone; the coalescing of a diverse political field around a leader and a stupidly conceptual goal (Greatness! Capitalism! Freedom!); loyalist cabals who are vetted, validated, and eliminated by the leader’s whims; and rampant venality combined with a criminal reconfiguration of the economy.
But the most important and troubling symptom is the open and ceaseless commitment to conflict meant to culminate in transformative, cathartic violence; this marks the beginning of collective self-actualization. As we bear witness to armed white American militias storming or protesting outside government institutions, it is clear that the chaos and tragedy of Covid-19 are being used by Trump and the GOP to enhance the conflict and accelerate the birth of a new, greater America. At the heart of every nationalist mythology is some kind of a rebirth, usually bloody and requiring sacrifices, preferably of the weak and the doubtful.
Because those who experienced the bloody undoing of Yugoslavia have already seen the havoc nationalism wreaked in their own lives and countries, it is hard not to worry about its symptoms again — or, as a Bosnian saying goes: If you were bitten by a snake, you’re scared of lizards. It would be wrong, of course, to ignore the differences between the histories, including the respective political conditions, in pre-dissolution Yugoslavia and in the United States in the last few years (or decades). Still, insisting there are no points of comparison means accepting the proposition at the root of every emanation of nationalism: that “our” nation is unlike any other, historically unique and incomparable. If one is not blinded by that kind of essentialist entitlement, the common practices of nationalism become recognizable across cultures and histories.
Take the nationalist conviction that the nation is oppressed by state structures controlled by (the) others and is therefore unable to fulfill its unique potential, which is why state structures need to be smashed, along with those who control them. Such a conviction is repeatedly fueled by Trump and widely shared by his supporters, not least by those brandishing assault rifles around the state legislatures of Michigan, Virginia, and Ohio, soon to arrive in your neighborhood.
Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader who in died in 2006 in the Hague while on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity committed in the 1990s in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, similarly framed his nationalist narrative. He insisted that the Serbian people made sacrifices for Yugoslavia but were instead cheated out of their victorious gains by those who controlled the federal state. He wanted to reshape Yugoslavia so that his people could rightfully dominate it and thus make Serbia great again, or greater. Similarly, for the Croat nationalists, led by Franjo Tudjman, once a general in the Yugoslav People’s Army, only an ethnically pure nation state could provide freedom and actualization. Milosevic and Tudjman were on opposing sides, but their projects were akin. Both strived to destroy the Yugoslav state by any means necessary. Pursuing a conflict that would irreversibly undo civic and governmental structures was essential to their nationalist projects.
The destructive urge was placed, however, onto the shoulders and arms of “the people” who needed to exhibit their anger and show that the current state could not respond to their unquenchable thirst for justice and liberty. A crucial role in the rise of millennial Serbian nationalism was played by rallies where masses of aggrieved Serbs protested against myriad injustices. The rallies were presented as spontaneous happenings of the people (deÅ¡avanje naroda, in Serbian), but were orchestrated by Milosevic’s proxies and underlings. These extra-systemic performances of mass infuriation were bludgeons with which the nationalists attacked weak state structures, as well as the doubters in their own ranks. The rallies also constituted loyalist spaces from which warriors and collaborators could be recruited for the future wars. What was invariably promised at the rallies, implicitly or explicitly, were revenge and punishment for those who “the people” believed wronged them. Milosevic’s nationalist project would carry out those promises, which eventually landed him at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Once he set out to follow the trajectory of destructive confrontation, there was no way or reason for him to stop until he reached its logical extreme: genocide.
The conflictual essence of Trumpism was made fully evident very early, in the course of the Republican primaries in 2016. While all the other GOP candidates tried to validate their garden-variety bigotry by importing fancy reactionary ideas and referring gratuitously to the Bible, the Framers, or some historical figure or another, the only thing Trump consistently offered was his pathological narcissism (exactly matching the popular belief in American exceptionalism) and his penchant for conflict and aggression. He promised, implicitly and explicitly, revenge and punishment for those who wronged white America. As we now know all too well, white America’s response to Trumpian revenge fantasies was quick and enthusiastic, and thus the GOP graduated from a routinely racist conservative party to one unquestionably committed to white nationalism, up to and including outright white supremacy.
In the meantime, Trump, the chosen tool of undoing, has been carrying out his promises, with the full and passionate support of the GOP and many of its rich donors. The claims of false and foolish pundits notwithstanding, at no point was Trump going to relent, change, or metamorphose into being “presidential,” for the simple reason that Trumpism is nothing without the constant perpetuation of conflict.
For many of my fellow ex-Yugoslavs, it was instantly clear that once the GOP and Trump committed to conflict and destruction, they could never afford to quit, for that would constitute a tactical error leading to an irreversible defeat. They now have no choice but to follow their trajectory to its logical extreme, which must be victory and rebirth at all cost. They will kill if they have to, or at least let Covid-19 do it.
When armed Trumpists pretend to be a happening of good people who demand the end of the lockdown, anti-fascist ex-Yugoslavs don’t necessarily see an American version of murderous Serbian paramilitaries. What we see with heart-clenching clarity is that the familiar nationalist strategy of perpetually inciting conflict is advancing along a predictable trajectory.
What is even more frightening is the hankering across the political range for a magical national correction, the indulging of a persistent fantasy that some essential American quality (decency, reasonability, checks and balances, etc.) will finally kick in and halt the Trumpist madness, thus allowing the country to snap out of its nightmare and revert to its good old national essence. That was never going to happen: The ongoing conflict is not a glitch but a process that cannot be stopped or resolved politically. With the GOP in death-cult mode, a steady destruction of checks and balances previously imagined to be fail-safe, the jelly-spined leadership of the Democratic Party, and the Soviet-grade purging of any disloyalty or disobedience in the federal systems, Trump has effectively destroyed American politics.
What the actual resolution might look like, I fear to envision, but I know it will not resemble anything Americans can remember or dare to imagine.
Fixing the bailout scammers: The Ten Percent Solution
from Dean Baker
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2020/05/06/fixing-the-bailout-scammers-the-ten-percent-solution/
The pandemic crisis created a rare economic opportunity. In effect, the whole economy was thrown up for grabs, with the winners and losers determined by who had the political power to get a nice bailout. Needless to say, those who were already rich got the big handouts, those at the bottom got crumbs, if anything at all.
Suppose we had let the market work its magic on the airlines, on the hotel chains, the restaurant chains, the aircraft industry (i.e. Boeing), and on the oil industry. With few exceptions, the big actors in these sectors would all have been bankrupt. The companies would have been reorganized, with the ones that were otherwise viable being restructured. Debtors would take large haircuts only collecting a fraction of what they had been owed. Shareholders would be wiped it, losing trillions of dollars of equity. Many top executives would likely been sent packing, and would no longer be able to count on paychecks in the millions or tens of millions.
Of course, things didn’t turn out this way because almost no one in policy circles actually believes in the market. That’s just something they tell children and liberal policy wonks. The people in power believe in using the government to give themselves as much money as possible. Usually they can do this through structuring the market so that money flows upward.
This is perhaps most clear in the case of government-granted patent and copyright monopolies. These government-granted monopolies in areas like prescription drugs, medical equipment, software, pesticides, fertilizers and other items likely transfer more than $1 trillion a year from the pockets of ordinary people to those who own these monopolies. Over the last four decades these monopolies have been made longer and stronger, with almost no one paying attention, in spite of the huge amount of money at stake.
It is easy to point to market structuring in other areas, most notably finance and corporate governance, which have allowed for the accumulation of great fortunes at the expense of the rest of us. Again, the rule changes that allow for massive upward redistribution were mostly done with little public attention, even though large amounts of money were at stake.
I go through these issues in more detail in Rigged [it’s free], but the point is simple: the rich have structured the market in ways that hugely increase their share of income. They pretend that this was just a natural market outcome. Many liberals accommodate this fiction, complaining that conservatives are “market fundamentalists” who dislike government.
Anyhow, the bailout from the pandemic required surrendering the illusion. The industries that were hardest hit rushed to Congress and the White House and demanded, and got, handouts. The sums involved were enormous. The airline industry got $17.5 billion (more than 10 million food stamp person years) in grants and another $7.5 billion in government subsidized loans. The cargo airline industry got $4 billion in grants and subsidized loans. The oil industry is getting a large bailout that is still be mapped out. Boeing was designated to get $17 billion in grants and subsidized loans.
This is all in full public view. While many workers will be left unemployed, with meager unemployment benefits (once the initial $600 a week bonus period ends), billionaire shareholders will have the value of their portfolios propped by the government. CEOs and other high level executives, who pocket millions or even tens of millions in pay annually, will remain secure in their high-paying jobs and will be able to maintain their lavish lifestyles as though nothing had happened.
Congress could have prevented this massive handout, either by requiring bankruptcies and supporting companies through the process, as happened with the auto bailout in the Great Recession, or by restricting executive pay and dividend payouts at companies that receive bailouts. As it turned out there were no effective restrictions imposed on these companies.
In fact, Congress decided to throw in a little something extra to help wealthy contributors get through the crisis. It put in a tax break for real estate investors, which will give $170 billion over the next decade to people in the top 1 percent of the income distribution. The beneficiaries of this gift include people like Jared Kushner and the Trump family.
While serious people should do their best to monitor the bailouts and limit the corruption, we have to recognize that the rich have largely won this battle. They have managed to ensure that most of them will not only be kept whole through this crisis, many will come out ahead. In a period where millions are losing jobs, with many struggling to be able to pay the rent and get enough to eat, the rich have managed to feast off the public purse.
If we can’t pull the rich away from the trough while Donald Trump is still in the White House, we can propose remedies that a Biden administration should pursue. There are two simple and easier ones: a special one-time tax for high income households and a corporate profit tax tied to stock returns.
For the one-time tax, we can add ten percentage points to the income tax for the top bracket of households for 2020 and 2021. (This would apply to income above roughly $300k for an individual and $500k for a couple.) This tax would be in addition to whatever longer-term changes to the tax code that a Biden administration might want to make. This tax should apply to all income, including capital gains, both realized and unrealized.
The latter would be a new innovation that many tax analysts have advocated for some time. There is no obvious reason to allow someone to defer their taxes on capital gains just because they choose not to sell their stock or real estate. The I.R.S. can gain valuable experience in assessing unrealized capital gains. One obvious mechanism would be to assign a value based on the gains in comparable assets (e.g. a stock index or changes in real estate prices in the area of the property held). The difference between the tax liability for the actual capital gain and the imputed gain can be corrected at the time the asset is sold.
This one-time tax should raise more than $350 billion a year which is a bit more than 1.5 percent of GDP or more than 200 million food stamp person years. In other words, it is real money, although a bit less than we would save if we had no patent monopolies on prescription drugs.
The other gift to the rich would be a 10 percentage point excess profits tax which would take the form of a tax tied to the returns on their stock. Since companies have gotten very good at hiding their profits from the I.R.S. this tax makes it easy for them. We simply tax away ten percent of returns to shareholders, either in the form of dividends or higher share prices, using the halfway point between the start of the year share price and crisis trough as a reference point.
This means that the companies can hide their profits wherever they want and it doesn’t affect their tax liability, unless they also manage to hide them from their shareholders. In that case, the I.R.S. would have a powerful ally in collecting the taxes it is owed. With a market capitalization of U.S. corporations near $40 trillion, if the stock gains under this formula average 8 percent annually over 2020 and 2021, it should net the government another $320 billion for each of these two years.
These two fun fixes should go a long way towards taking back the money that we gave to the rich in the bailout. I usually don’t look to taxes as the primary mechanism for addressing inequality, but rather restructuring the market so that it doesn’t generate so much inequality, but when we are creating massive inequality through direct government transfers to the very rich, it is entirely appropriate to look to taxes to take this money back.
We also don’t have to worry about the long-term impact of creating a massive tax evasion/avoidance industry since this is only a two-year story. We can still count on the rich to lie, cheat, and steal to get out of their taxes for these two years, but it doesn’t make sense for them to make long-term plans to avoid a one-time hit to their income.
I would not count on a Biden administration to be anxious to take back the bailout loot secured by the rich and powerful, but it is possible it can be pressured in this direction. The first step is to put the menu on the table.
This week, Lee Camp Ledger
We cannot allow this crisis to open the door for more suppression of privacy rights. Mass surveillance is already out of control — this week on Redacted Tonight
Some governments responded to this pandemic effectively, others such as the USA, took a far worse path — in my interview with Vijay Prashad on VIP
I take a look back to remind you all that Wall Street actively pushes investors to avoid financing cures because there’s more money in long-term treatments — in this installation of Moment Of Clarity
This crisis gives the surveillance state a cause to celebrate. It’s an opportunity for them to further encroach on our privacy — in my latest article on Consortium News
The sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden forced the Liberal establishment to expose themselves as cynical opportunists — get this story & more this week on my news podcast with Eleanor Goldfield, Common Censored
The rich are scared that China will produce a free coronavirus vaccine before a Western corporation can patent it for profit — on MintPress News
Julian Assange’s extradition hearing will continue in September once they’ve secured a safe courtroom — on Consortium News
A new study finds that in 50 years 1/3 of humanity could be living in an area with an unbearably hot climate — on Common Dreams
How to save economy and climate together
May 7th, 2020, by Kieran Cooke
“In the short term clean energy infrastructure construction is particularly labour-intensive, creating twice as many jobs per dollar as fossil fuel investments”
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/how-to-save-economy-and-climate-together/
LONDON, 7 May, 2020 − The warnings are stark. With the Covid-19 crisis wreaking global havoc and the overheating atmosphere threatening far worse in the long term, especially if governments rely on the same old carbon-intensive ways, both economy and climate will sink or swim together.
“There are reasons to fear that we will leap from the Covid-19 frying pan into the climate fire”, says a new report, Will Covid-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on Climate Change? Published by the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, UK, it says now is the time for governments to restructure their economies and act decisively to tackle climate change.
“The climate emergency is like the Covid-19 emergency, just in slow motion and much graver”, says the study, written by a team of economic and climate change heavyweights including Joseph Stiglitz, Cameron Hepburn and Nicholas Stern.
Economic recovery packages emerging in the coming months will have a significant impact on whether globally agreed climate goals are met, says the report.
“The recovery packages can either kill two birds with one stone – setting the global economy on a pathway to net-zero emissions – or lock us into a fossil system from which it will be nearly impossible to escape.”
The study’s authors talked to economists, finance officials and central banks around the world.
They say that putting policies aimed at tackling climate change at the centre of recovery plans makes economic as well as environmental sense.
“… Green projects create more jobs, deliver higher short-term returns per dollar spend and lead to increased long term-term cost saving, by comparison with traditional fiscal stimulus”, says the report.
“Examples include investment in renewable energy production, such as wind or solar.
“As previous research has shown, in the short term clean energy infrastructure construction is particularly labour-intensive, creating twice as many jobs per dollar as fossil fuel investments.”
Fundamental change coming
Covid-19 is causing great suffering and considerable economic hardship around the world. But it has also resulted in cleaner air and waterways, a quieter environment and far less commuting to and from work, with people in the developed countries doing more work from home.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a recent survey that Covid-19 and other factors were bringing about a fundamental change in the global energy market, with the use of climate-changing fossil fuels falling sharply and prices of oil, coal and gas plummeting. The IEA also projected that global emissions of greenhouses gases would fall by 8% in 2020, more than any other year on record.
The Oxford report says that with the implementation of the right policies, these positive changes can be sustained: by tackling climate change, many economic and other problems will be solved.
Sceptics have often said that public resistance to changes in lifestyle will prevent governments from taking any substantial action on the climate issue. The study begs to differ: “The (Covid-19) crisis has also demonstrated that governments can intervene decisively once the scale of an emergency is clear and public support is present.”
Economists and finance experts are calling for the UK to play a decisive role in ensuring that economies around the world do not return to the old, high-carbon ways but instead implement green recovery packages.
Climate conference
The UK is president and co-host of COP-26, the round of UN climate talks originally due to take place in November this year but now, due to Covid, postponed to early 2021.
The round is seen as a vital part of efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, now a finance adviser to the British prime minister for COP-26, says the UK has the opportunity to bring about fundamental changes in order to combat a warming world.
“The UK’s global leadership in financial services provides a unique opportunity to address climate change by transforming the financial system”, he says.
“To seize it, all financial decisions need to take into account the risks from climate change and the opportunities from the transition to a net zero economy.” − Climate News Network
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