in-cite: real news for real people

Marjorie Greene, the QAnon anti-Semite gun fanatic who loves Israel

Michael F. Brown

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/marjorie-greene-qanon-anti-semite-gun-fanatic-who-loves-israel

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a right-wing Republican and pro-Israel candidate, may well be the next representative from Georgia’s conservative 14th district. Greene won a first round of voting in June by close to 20 percentage points, but failed to clear the 50 percent threshold and consequently faces John Cowan in an 11 August runoff.

The winner is widely expected to be the next representative for a district that voted overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016.

Greene is among a number of candidates who support the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Travis View, who has written about QAnon for The Washington Post, has described it as being “based upon the idea that there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything.”

Greene goes beyond conspiracy into outright bigotry. In June, Politico released video evidence of Greene voicing her racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views.

In one Facebook video she verbally attacked Muslims. “If you want Islam and Sharia law, you stay over there in the Middle East,” she inveighed. “You stay there, and you go to Mecca and do all your thing. And, you know what, you can have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want.”

Greene decried what she termed “an Islamic invasion into our government offices” following the 2018 elections. She also accused Muslim men of pedophilia.

In another video, she suggested Black people are held down by gangs and lack of education rather than by white people.

Greene contended that if she were Black she would feel “proud” to see Confederate monuments because they would show how far she had come.

She repeated a common right-wing anti-Semitic attack against George Soros, a Democratic contributor and founder of the Open Society Institute, when she stated, “George Soros is the piece of crap that turned in – he’s a Jew – he turned in his own people over to the Nazis.” This is a repugnant misrepresentation of reality.

Soros was a child at the time of the Second World War and was in profound danger of death from the Nazis.

Days before the runoff, she labeled Soros an “enemy of the people” on her campaign’s Facebook page.

In another recent post, she referred to Black Lives Matter and anti-fascists, saying that “Soros funds the destruction of America by supporting BLM /Antifa /Fake News Media, the true enemy of the American people.”

She added, “He’s bank-rolling left-wing movements worldwide who want to destroy Israel, one of the few friends the American people have.”

Greene posted a nearly 30-minute video following Trump’s election putting forward the theories of the internet commenter – or three commenters – known as Q.

She noted the theories could also be found at hate site 4Chan.

In the video, Greene speculates about the Washington elite’s involvement in pedophilia and Democratic Satanic worship. She cites Q as discussing a triangle involving Saudi Arabia, the Rothschilds and Soros.

These are supposedly “the puppet masters that fund this global evil.”

Greene adds, “I definitely would believe that.” She then says the triangle recently lost “one of its sides” – Saudi Arabia – around the time Trump visited the country to be honored there in 2017.

This is a clear mishmash of anti-Semitism and anti-Arab sentiment.
Anti-Semitic, but pro-Israel

Nonetheless, Greene trumpets her pro-Israel credentials in the apparent expectation that it will wipe away her anti-Jewish views.

In November 2018 she spoke up for George Papadopoulos, an adviser to Trump during the 2016 election campaign, and Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser, regarding their “stance on Israel.”

In fact, according to The New York Times, Flynn lied to the FBI about his discussion with Russian ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak regarding how Russia would vote on UN Security Council resolution 2334 in late 2016. The resolution condemns illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

Flynn is a QAnon supporter who tweeted himself taking the group’s oath on 4 July this year.

He has more than 855,000 followers on Twitter. Presumably, he anticipates that many will be taken in by this Satanist pedophilia conspiracy theory in the midst of a deadly pandemic that some believe is fake news.

Papadopoulos, for his part, announced at the time of Trump’s inauguration: “We are looking forward to ushering in a new relationship with all of Israel, including the historic Judea and Samaria” – calling the West Bank by the name Israel uses. He later served 12 days in federal prison for lying to the FBI.

Nearly four years later the Trump administration has signaled it might recognize Israel’s possible annexation of some of that West Bank territory in violation of international law.

Greene also supported moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and declaring it the capital of Israel. She has not displayed any understanding of the dispossession and occupation of the Palestinian people by Israeli forces.

Racist gun proponent

The aspiring House representative has made clear her disdain for Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, claiming that they and other members of Congress have “destroyed” the National Football League and are “destroying” the stock-car racing firm NASCAR – apparently for getting rid of the Confederate flag which for many Americans represents treason, the enslavement of Black people and Jim Crow racial discrimination.

She has gone so far as to make a claim of dual loyalty against Omar.

And she released a racist Facebook attack against Ocasio-Cortez and Omar that suggests they like the damage to American cities from recent protests over the killing of George Floyd because, in words falsely attributed to Omar, it feels “more like home.”

Greene is a staunch proponent of the second amendment which has made the US one of the most dangerous countries in the world, particularly for school children.

One of her campaign advertisements has her drive up in a Humvee before firing an AR-15 at signs saying “gun control,” “open borders,” the “Green New Deal” and “socialism.” The “open borders” shot is a clear threat to undocumented migrant workers crossing the southern US border and fits with the racism she has expressed elsewhere.

In another ad, she touts Trump as declaring antifa to be a “domestic terrorist organization.” Holding her AR-15, Greene hints at her capacity for violence when she warns “antifa terrorists” to “stay the hell out of northwest Georgia.”

The anti-science Greene is certain to promote conspiracy theories, a more gun-stuffed US and belligerent support for Israeli colonial expansion if she wins her August runoff and again in November. At the moment, there’s a strong possibility she will be in Washington in January as the next representative of Georgia’s 14th congressional district.

The ‘Free Market’ Wolves of the Pandemic

Vijay Prashad espouses confidence in rejecting the neoliberal capitalist framework, which arose against plenty of warnings over several decades and now exposes workers to the wolves of the “free market” during the pandemic.

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/07/covid-19-the-free-market-wolves-of-the-pandemic/

The novel coronavirus continues its march through the world, with 18 million confirmed cases and at least 685,000 deaths. Of these, the U.S., Brazil and India are the worst-hit, harboring about half of the world’s cases.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that these numbers are high because of higher rates of testing is not borne out by the facts, which show that it is not testing that has ballooned the numbers, but the paralysis of the governments of Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and India’s Narendra Modi and their failure to control the contagion. In these three countries, testing has been hard to access, and the test results have been unreliably reported.

Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi share a broad political orientation — one that leans so heavily towards the far right that it cannot walk upright. But beneath their buffoonish statements about the virus, and their reluctance to take it seriously, lies a much deeper problem that is shared by a range of countries. This problem goes by the name of neoliberalism, a policy orientation that emerged in the 1970s to stabilize a deep crisis of stagnation and inflation (“stagflation”) in global capitalism. We define neoliberalism plainly in the image below:

The tax strike by the very rich, the liberalization of finance, the deregulation of labor laws and the evisceration of welfare provisions deepened social inequality and reduced the role of the vast mass of the world’s population in politics. The demand that “technocrats” — especially bankers — run the world produced an anti-political sentiment amongst large sections of the world, who became increasingly alienated from their governments and from political activity.

Institutions of society that emerged to protect us from catastrophes of one kind or another were undermined. Public health systems were dismantled in countries such as the United States and India, while associated social services for childcare and eldercare were cut back or destroyed.

In 2018, a United Nations study found that only 29 percent of the global population has access to social protection systems (including income security, access to health care, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, old-age pensions, cash and in-kind transfers, and other tax-financed schemes).

A consequence of ending even meager social protection for workers (such as sick leave) and of failing to provide public universal healthcare is that in the case of a pandemic, workers can neither afford to remain at home nor can they access healthcare: they are left to the wolves of the “free market,” which is really a world designed around profit and not the well-being of people.

It is not as if there have not been warnings about the policy framework known as neoliberalism and the austerity project that it has driven. In September 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned about the deep cuts in public health spending — including the lack of hiring of public health workers — and the impact this would have if a pandemic were to break out. That was on the verge of this pandemic, although earlier epidemics (H1N1, Ebola, SARS, MERS) already showed the weakness of the public health systems to manage an outbreak.

From the onset of neoliberalism, political parties and social movements warned about the threats posed by these cuts; as social institutions are whittled away, society’s ability to withstand any crisis — be it economic or epidemiological — is damaged. But these warnings were dismissed, the callousness remarkable.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), founded in 1964, lit the red light of caution from the publication of its first “Trade and Development Report” (TDR) in 1981; this UN body tracked the new economic agenda premised on liberalized trade, debt-driven investment in the developing world and the slow emergence of a broad slate of austerity policies pushed by the IMF’s structural adjustment programs.

The austerity programs imposed on countries by the IMF and by the wealthy bondholders negatively impacted GDP growth and produced large fiscal imbalances. Growth in foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports did not necessarily mean an increase of incomes for people in the developing world. The TDR from 2002 explored the paradox that, while the developing countries were trading more, they were earning less; this meant that the trading system was rigged against these countries whose economies are largely reliant on exporting primary commodities.

The 2011 TDR looked closely at the after-effects of the 2007-08 credit crisis, which — it noted, “highlighted serious flaws in the pre-crisis belief in liberalisation and self-regulating markets. Liberalised financial markets have been encouraging excessive speculation (which amounts to gambling) and instability. And financial innovations have been serving their own industry rather than the greater social interest. Ignoring these flaws risk another, possibly even bigger, crisis.”

After re-reading the 2011 TDR, I wrote to Heiner Flassbeck, who was the chief of microeconomics and development at UNCTAD from 2003 to 2012, to ask him about that report and his feelings about it almost a decade later. Flassbeck re-read the report and wrote, “it seems to me that it is still a good guide into a new global order.”

Last year, Flassbeck wrote a three-part series of articles titled “The Great Paradox: Liberalism Destroys the Market Economy” in which he argues that neoliberalism destroyed the ability of economic activity to create jobs and wealth for the majority of the people. Now, Flassbeck wants to emphasize the importance of stagnant wages as an indicator of problems, as well as a place from which to develop solutions.

The 2011 TDR argued that “the forces unleashed by globalisation have produced significant shifts in income distribution resulting in a falling share of wage income and a rising share of profits.” The Seoul Development Consensus of 2010 had advised that “for prosperity to be sustained it must be shared.”

Apart from China, which developed a major scheme in 2013 to eradicate poverty and share growth, most countries saw wage growth fall short of productivity growth, which has meant that domestic demand grew more slowly than the supply of goods; nor were the possible solutions of relying on external demand or stimulating domestic demand with credit sustainable.

Flassbeck replied to Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research:

“The core of the matter is wages. That was missing in the TRD 2011. All attempts to stabilise our economies and bring them back to strong investment growth are futile if the wage question is not fixed. To fix it means to implement in all countries of the world strong regulation to make sure that wage earners are fully participating in the productivity growth of their national economies. In the developing world, this is understood in Eastern Asia but nowhere else. You need strong government intervention to force companies, national as well as international, to apply wage growth in line with productivity growth and the inflation target set by the government or the central bank. It can be pushed through by governments decisions about the increase of the minimum wage, as China did it, or by informal pressure on the companies, as Japan did it.”

In a recent report, Flassbeck argued that many developing countries — even in the midst of the coronavirus recession — look to the advanced capitalist countries, which are cutting wages, underspending, and pursuing failed policies of “labor market flexibility;” the IMF often forces along these policies, which are the “main hindrances to a better growth and development performance.”