Cassandra Voices

Category: Current Affairs

  • Post-Truth: People of the Lie

    Morality is the basis of things and truth is the basis of all morality.
    Mahatma Gandhi

    Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani was recently asked whether his boss had a case to answer arising from the conviction of his former associate Paul Manafort. He responded with the not-altogether-original, but nonetheless all-too-convincing argument that ‘truth is not truth.’ It seems we have entered a virtual reality nightmare.

    Of course times passed have been consumed with other disturbing ideologies such as, Social Darwinism, racism, Fascism and Communism. More recently we have seen neo-liberalism reign supreme, giving rise to Francis Fukayama’s foolhardy vision of an End to History.

    Just as Marxists shibboleths about the inevitability and finality of Revolution ignored reality, the neo-liberal world order is disintegrating before our eyes, a point which Fukayama now concedes; recently he meekly acknowledged there had been a decline in faith in democratic institutions, and that democracy was now moving backwards.

    So perhaps Post-Truth will be a passing affliction. Alas I doubt it.

    Post-Truth, or truth decay, has been coming for a while and its origins need to be traced as it dictates the activities of the Trump administration.

    I – Post Modern Nonsense

    First came the purveyors of nonsense, and incomprehensible prose, the Structuralists and Post Modernist poseurs of the Sorbonne.

    They united in rejection of universal values, while espousing a gospel of relativism, thereby ditching the inheritance of the Enlightenment. This led to the dismissal of evidence, rationality, science, rigour, precision, and all the integrative forces that holds society together.

    Noam Chomsky in this context wrote a passage worth quoting in full:

    It’s entirely possible that I’m simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I’m perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made — but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I’m missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it’s all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I’m just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I’m perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).

    Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I’m missing, we’re left with the second option: I’m just incapable of understanding. I’m certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.”

    It is, in other words, nonsense on stilts, that degrades our culture. But it has gained traction, and power, and should not be underestimated.

    Relativism, which should never have gone beyond those flaneurs, has been hijacked by the Populist Right, including Climate Change Deniers, Anti-Vaxxers  and Creationists, who insist on balanced coverage for their ludicrous views, each one as ‘valid’ as the other, in Post Modernist hell. This reaches an apogee in the churning garbage emanating from spokespeople for the Trump administration, especially the deranged President himself.

    The gospel of relativism brings contempt for truth, reason and evidence. It entails the rejection of scientific methods, order and the Rule of Law.

    The first point to note about Post Modernism is that it encourages distrust in established truth, and generates an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, where arguments are accorded even and equal weight, even if lacking any substance. The misplaced logic is that since all views are equal, all views should be aired and taken equally seriously.

    The late David Foster Wallace described this as ‘an epistemic free for all in which the truth is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda.’

    ‘Balanced coverage’ and ‘tolerance’ of opposing points of view in the media often leads to the elevation of nonsense, or lies.

    Balance should not permit the assertion that Climate Change is a fraud. Undue weight is being accorded to marginal opinions and minority views, which simply should not be given a platform. Abandoned is the quest for an elusive truth. The media is giving a microphone to divisive extremism.

    This nonsense is creeping into our culture, our media, our law courts and is a form of brainwashing.

    Relativistic and structuralist ideas, such as the indeterminacy of texts, alternative ways of knowing and the instability of language opens the way for Trump and his acolytes to say that every word he utters should not be taken literally. Just as a text by Derrida contradicts itself, Trump similarly can make contradictory statements, from one tweet to the next.

    II – Holding to Truth

    As a lawyer I have been trained to consider distinctions between fact and opinion. I understand how an apparently established fact can actually be the product of manipulation, distortion or outright fabrication.

    In my work for The Innocence Project in Ireland I found many instances of perjured evidence, false and fabricated claims and cognitive and confirmation bias by experts, or really pseudo-experts, leading to false conclusions and erroneous convictions. Innocent people are often incarcerated on the basis of lies and this false expertise.

    In this Post Modern zeitgeist we privilege opinion over knowledge, and feelings over facts. This includes confirmation bias where people rush to judgment and follow their prejudices, rather than properly evaluating sources.

    Indeed, with regard to so-called expert witnesses I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s famous comment, itself capable of multiple levels of interpretation: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent (Wittgenstein, 1922)

    As difficult as it is to establish the truth, and as complex as it may prove to be, we must continue to strive for it, and not succumb to relativism, or take refuge in Post-Truth nonsense.

    This pursuit is indispensable for penal and judicial decision-making, as well as the pursuit of social and economic justice. Acknowledging there truth helps inform political and personal choices arising from our interactions with banks or politicians, or indeed with respect to one’s health.

    The truth protects us against those who mislead, dupe or destroy us. Better to acknowledge ‘home truths’, and act accordingly, rather than be seduced by banalities. But it is often difficult to determine what is genuine when you are being bombarded with disinformation.

    As Pope Francis sagely remarked: ‘there is no such thing as harmless disinformation: trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.’

    So in a sane, rational universe that is how everything should and ought to be decided. Except that is not what confronts us today.

    III – Info-tainment

    Following the degradation of so many discourses, our media is too often consumed by ideological representations of alternative truths – and at worst utter nonsense – in a misplaced quest for balance, or pandering to vested interests.

    News programmes generally adopt a Punch and Judy format, rather than providing serious analysis. We are addicted to what Susan Jacoby termed ‘info-tainment’ (Jacoby, 2009).

    In this respect it was noticeable that the intellectual level of the Clinton-Trump Presidential debates had reached a nadir. For anyone who has listened to the Nixon-Kennedy debates of the early 1960s, or indeed many subsequent electoral ones in the US and Britain, it was simply not a debate.

    It was more like an episode of the Jerry Springer show. But the vaudeville act, the circus clown that is Trump, is actually now President of the United States, having manipulated a series of communications both in the debate, and the media, which were exercises in falsity, total inconsistency, randomness and communication in proto-fascist mode: lashing out at the outsider.

    People were brainwashed into believing that he would help them. The disenfranchised working and middle class reached out to him, and he responded by appointing three members of Goldman Sachs to his cabinet; a classic instance of what Zizek terms ‘ideological mis-indentification’ (Zizek, 1989) with the marginalised voting for self-destruction.

    Print media has also dumbed down. The reasons are obvious. Vested interests have to be appeased. In addition megalomaniac owners cannot be criticised. Things are known, or suspected, but left unsaid. Independent courageous reportage, beyond The Guardian or The New York Times is increasingly rare.

    The so-called text generation, drowning in email communication and other digital ephemera, exacerbate the problem.

    Admittedly, my own emails appear like hieroglyphics – ungrammatical and unpunctuated – so I am scarcely one to talk. But in my defence, I simply cannot take the medium seriously, whereas the rest of the world seems to have lost any interest in oral conversation, or expressing themselves in permanent written form.

    The Internet is a truly poisoned chalice: the major problem is that people feel free to utter whatever they like, however bizarre, extreme or libelous. This accentuates the disentangling of truth from fiction, and facts from lies.

    The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen has argued that the Internet has replaced genuine knowledge, but that is undifferentiated knowledge derived from the crowd, or mob, which blurs any distinction between fact and opinion.

    Established ideas are under threat and rationality jettisoned, replaced by subjectivism, the pseudo-expert, and elevation of the opinion of the equivalent of ‘the man on the Clapham Omnibus’. As Tom Nichols wrote: ‘every opinion on any matter is as good as every other (Nichols, 2017)’; I am also reminded of William Burroughs’s famous statement that: ‘Opinions are like assholes everyone has one.’

    Another problem is information overload. We are creatures of bounded rationality that can only absorb so much. We have to filter. The Internet presents us with a cacophony of competing voices, all clamouring for attention. This desensitises, and makes it impossible to disentangle valid arguments from nonsense. In effect we are being deceived by a web of deceit, semi-fact, mumbo jumbo and plain nonsense.

    III – Bad Education

    Perhaps most disturbingly, our education system is producing ill-informed, philosophically illiterate, and indeed often genuinely illiterate children. We are operating in a post-Gutenberg Galaxy, where even lecturers and teachers generally no longer read books outside their specialisms, and are insulated from intellectual cross currents. Goethe’s ideal of a civilised education, which inoculates against fascism, no longer abides

    A partial education breeds the self-righteousness of fascism. Why appeal to true argument when your thought processes stands unexamined and your prejudices go uncontradicted? In these circumstances, the gutter press finds a ready market.

    Information is not gleaned from the close reading of texts, but from online synopses. Superficial knowledge and semi-literacy accentuate the perversion that everyone has a right to express their opinion, no matter how ludicrous.

    Let us be clear, academic degrees and education are distinct from one another. We hand out qualifications like confetti, but true education is lacking. Yet, apart from foreign direct investment, the education sector appears to be the biggest growth industry in Ireland. But what kind of person is it producing?

    We find an emphasis on narrow technocratic skills and rote learning, where teachers slavishly adhere to syllabi. Books go unread, but instead are summarised on Internet sites. The standardization of learning outcomes breeds bullshit, piled on bullshit.

    As an established lecturer I have encountered increasing nonsense about balance and standardization. In the ivory tower the careful weighing up of argument has given way to an obsession with footnotes, and citation, and a narrowing in doctoral work; most baleful, is the decline of the academic as public intellectual.

    In this respect we should note the important contribution of perhaps the only acceptable Post Modernist, Michel Foucault. He argued that the more severe punishments of earlier times have been internalized, through insidious methods of control in schools, hospitals and factories.

    In a 1978 interview he remarked:

    In my book on the birth of the prison I tried to show how the idea of a technology of individuals, a certain type of power, was exercised over individuals in order to tame them, shape them and guide their conduct as a kind of strict correlative to the birth of a liberal type of regime. Beyond the prison itself, a carceral style of reasoning, focused on punishable deviations from the norm, thus came to inform a wide variety of modern institutions. In schools, factories, and army barracks, authorities carefully regulated the use of time (punishing tardiness, slowness, the interruption of tasks) activity (punishing inattention, negligence a lack of zeal); speech (punishing idle chatter, insolence, profanity); the body (punishing poor posture, dirtiness, lack in stipulated reflexes) and finally sexuality (punishing impurity, indecency, abnormal behaviour) (Foucault,1980).

    This leads to a social hygiene, wherein people are assessed not on what they have to say, or the quality of any service they may provide, but more on their attire; or whether they wear a uniform that conveys a false sense of expertise and arrogant authority; cleanliness next to a self-serving godliness. Give me someone with an occasional slovenly appearance and I see a degree of human fragility.

    Intolerance and contempt for human frailty, except of course by the power elite who act as they please, marginalises real authorities from making contributions to society.

    In our glorious colleges and universities and schools worse is happening. First and foremost there is a suppression of speech and discourse, with discussion confined within narrowing parameters, and divisive subjects omitted.

    We are in an age of conformity where obedience to authority has become a sine qua non of success. The great old days of uninhibited debate are disappearing from campuses.

    One aspect of this is the so-called ‘snowflake’ phenomenon, leading to anything remotely controversial being deemed offensive. This is used as a method of thought control, and heralds the gradual erosion of criticism of vested interests.

    Moreover, within the college structure promotion and preferment are linked to an increasingly controlled discourse, where ideas that cut across the norm are penalized. Those countervailing ideas often do not sit comfortably with elites, and are usually tinged with leftism or anti-authoritarianism, or involve discomforting truth-telling. Alas, the paradigm of discourse is neo-liberalism, and increasingly a knee-jerk conservatism, which is morphing into outright fascism.

    IV – No Platforming

    The academic community is also responsible for other outrages attacking freedom of speech. One truly sinister development is a phenomenon known as ‘no platforming’, whereby anyone presenting dissident views is barred from campus appearances.

    There are acceptable reasons for exclusion of errant views. For example the trash talk of the fascist historian David Irving, who condones the Holocaust, or at least intimates it never happened, is an obvious case in point. But he is a denier of truth, and his lies should be restrained.

    Recently the ‘no platform’ lobby barred the eminent feminist and author Germaine Greer from speaking in UK campuses, as she had argued many years ago that a man who becomes a woman can never fully understand what it is like to be a woman.

    The ‘no platform’ lobby which secured her ban was made up of transsexual academics. Take note, these are not necessarily trans-sexuals, but a lobby group. They are also proto-fascists and part of a new semi-literate cabal of arcane specialists.

    It is academic Stalinism, or Fascism if you prefer. Such groups use the immense power of blackmail, intimidation by social media and character assassination, to put fear into often squeamish academic authorities.

    V – Anti-Social Media

    Social media is unraveling our social fabric through lies, disinformation, smears and character assassination. As Pierre Omidyar, the founder of Ebay put it: ‘The monetization and manipulation of information is swiftly tearing us apart.’

    The use of trolls and bots to spread disinformation by Trump, Bannon and Cambridge Analytica undermined democratic institutions, as well as fact-based debates.

    Cambridge Analytica specialised in forms of artificial intelligence that look set to nurture a new species, a new form of human identity, who become bland consuming nodal points, and receptors of a barrage of disinformation and nonsense.

    This paradigm shift in our culture, will curtail necessary criticism and free thinking and is already afflicting the media. Before appearing on radio shows I myself have been told what I can and cannot say for fear of upsetting a vested interest. Instead, increasingly lobby groups of the most extreme nature are invited on shows and their views accorded credibility, when they have nothing of substance to say.

    We are creating a new generation of technocratic fascists: selfish, materialistic, ultra-conformist people receptive to Post-Truth. A new Dark Age looms with the Far Right gaining increasing authority, as the edifice of neo-liberalism crumbles, and social support structures are dismantled.

    Post-Truth has I fear already taken hold. The truth does not matter; what is important is convincing someone of the truth, often through advertising. Stories are planted and lines between fact and fiction disappear.

    People are buying the bullshit. The sensationalism and gossip of the gutter press is now being taken seriously. We are holding court to pseudo-expertise. Lies have become intrinsic to commercial and business interaction; The People of the Lie as in the title of the seminal book by M. Scott Peck in which he conflates evil with untruth. He contends that this undermines life and liveliness, transforming people into automatons.

    Such people are not up front but operate by covert means. Evil people, Peck argues, scapegoat others: since they consider themselves repositories of perfection, they must demonise ‘the other’.

    This leads, ineluctably, to hostility towards the foreigner and migrant, the recrudescence of tribalism, and a denial and rejection of reason; a veneration of the past and the equation of disagreement with treason; a ‘them and us’ universe.

    Evil people prevent us from exercising reasonable choices, where we grow in integrity, courage and self-esteem. Evil is also linked to a self-image of respectability and, as Peck defines it, the exercise of coercive power, often by those in authority, who undermine growth and development.

    Evil is surprisingly obedient to authority. The truly good in times of acute stress do not desert their integrity, maturity, sensitivity. They act on principle, not regressing in response to degradation, preserving empathy for the pain of others.

    *******

    Hannah Arendt would recognise our current descent:

    The ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exists.

    The ‘People of the Lie’, the powerful and corrupt, project their deviance and criminality onto others. Morality does not apply to them, and those they disagree with are deemed enemies of the people. All that matters now is to win, and to mask untrue intentions in order to survive.

    The really important values of truth, integrity, sincerity, depth, originality, creativity are being abandoned. Alas, the lunatics have by now taken over the asylum.

    Truth is not truth. The imitation game has won. How can we retain our individuality when fact is replaced by semi-fact or worse? When we are assailed by streams of advertising; nonsensically balanced coverage; relativism and Post Modernism; bogus standards in high places; putative expertise and ass-hole opinions?

    Instead jaded rituals, religious and secular, particularly in countries like Ireland, desensitise us to reality.

    References

    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Schocken Books, Berlin, 1951.
    Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (edited by Colin Gardner), Pantheon, New York, 1980.
    Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason, Pantheon, New York, 2009.
    Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017.
    M. Scott Peck The People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Keegan Paul, London, 1922.
    Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London, 1989.

  • There is Something Rotten in the State of Democracy

    On a recent visit to Athens I chanced upon the supposed tomb of Socrates near the Acropolis. Socrates chose to remain in the city after being found guilty on trumped up charges of corrupting youth. For this he was handed the ultimate sanction of a death sentence, to be self-inflicted with hemlock. By receiving his punishment he was making a statement to posterity to the effect that the Rule of Law was of greater importance than the individual injustice being inflicted on him. The operation of the law would just have to improve, the alternative being anarchic barbarity.

    Nearby, somewhat hidden and a tad derelict is perhaps the most historically-significant structure in Athens, the birthplace and site of Athenian democracy, and thus the birthplace of democracy itself, where the impassioned speeches of the great orator Pericles (died c. 450 BCE) set the small polity on the destructive course of the Peloponnesian War.

    More recently, Randy Newman’s song about America,‘In Defense of Our Country’ from Harps and Angels (2008) expresses a cautious, pre-Trumpian optimism that the political leaders of a decade ago were ‘hardly the worst / This poor world has seen.’ But presciently he references Caligula, the emperor which President Donald Trump best resembles at the fag end of American empire. But Trump actually democratically won the Presidential election, at least the electoral college, just as Hitler achieved power through elections, before dismantling the Rule of Law.

    I have expressed reservations in the past about democracy, and I despise demagoguery. But let me construct a few words in its defence.

    I – ‘Benevolent Authoritarianism’

    A comment often attributed to Churchill is that democracy is the least worst form of government, which I consider trite, and perhaps untrue. The enlightened despot may prove more effective, as the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed.

    Similarly, David Runciman in How Democracy Ends (Profile Books, 2018) endorses the concept of benevolent authoritarianism. Such is the luck of the draw, however, that a benevolent oligarchy almost invariably leads to despotism of the Right or Left, and utter disaster.

    Let us nonetheless lay out the positives of what Pericles effectively pioneered. First, in the immaculate expression of honest Abraham Lincoln ‘the rail splitter’ in his Gettysburg Address of 1863 it is governance by the people. On the scene of the Civil War battlefield that would eventually end slavery he resolved:

    these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

    So it is that “we the people” are sovereign, as opposed to governance by faceless corporations, multi-national banks and nefarious corporate law firms, purchasing our political class.

    We also find governance by the people for the people in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), the first modern constitutional statement of democracy.

    At least in theory. The problem is our public representatives are beholden to the crypto-fascist advocates of neo-liberalism. The Irish state, for example, is effectively run by Goldman Sachs, corporate law firms, Vulture Funds and banks for their own enrichment. The people are irrelevant, and many among the judiciary, mired in debt, seem to be in on the act.

    The people are drip-fed justifications by the establishment media for austerity, on behalf of these global parasites, and conditioned to accept inflated house prices, robber baron banks, besides substandard and ludicrously expensive rental accommodation. The abolition of pensions, and death on a hospital corridor are the new reality.

    Our Brave New World of the Internet is incubating a dangerously compliant and accepting population, reflected in Trump’s ability to win over the American people, who he persuaded to consent to their own demise. This, what Timothy Snyder called ‘anticipatory obedience’ (Snyder, 2017)  involves going with the flow of home seizures and deportation of untermenschen migrants, until at last they come for you, at which point there is no one left to protect you. As Pastor Neimoller put it under the Nazis:

    First they came for the socialist and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.

    So stand up and be counted. Hopefully it won’t require you to walk out in front of a tank, but be prepared.

    II – A Final Solution

    At the Wannasee Conference of 1942 the Nazis under Reynard Heydrich decided on the Final Solution, or genocide, of the Jewish people. The transcript is available, and captured on celluloid in Kenneth Branagh’s film Conspiracy (2001).

    A modern incarnation of this is the secretive and monastic meetings of the Bilderberg Group – once chaired by our own late unlamented Peter Sutherland – where the spoils of an utterly unsustainable and unequal economic system are divided.

    The modern Wanasee meetings are no doubt attended by a phalanx of pseudo-experts, or even genuine experts, working out what to do with the troublesome poor of the Earth.

    I suspect their plan is to to undermine democracy on behalf of the world’s corporate elite. People are commodified by banks and financial institutions: there are far too many of them, and their number needs to be reduced. Liquidation can occur by degrees: beginning with withdrawal of social support and evictions, which leads to suicide, addiction, health collapse and early death. In the Third World it will be far worse for those in coastal regions when the storms hit. Meanwhile, the good ol’ boys of Steve Bannon et al will continue to reap the harvest.

    People are often ill-informed and vote stupidly. Trump was elected on a ballyhoo of promising the disenfranchised working and middle class social protection, and job creation, after stoking fears about a foreign Other. What happened both with the election and since is the most nefarious soap job since the Nuremberg rallies.

    Trump appointed to his cabinet three Goldman Sachs officials, who were responsible for much of the mess that people find themselves in the first place. He has also appointed mad dog generals, and cosies up to vile dictators. The spectre is truly frightening.

    Trump immediately set about dismantling Obamacare and tore up the Paris Climate Change Agreement. With two strokes of the pen much of the Obama legacy was lost. The smooth-talking Obama is now a political eunuch.

    The elite are intent on making ‘difficult’ decisions, which will reduce the population of the world. This will require ‘strong’ government and the maintenance of ‘public order’ when disobedience appears.

    Neo-liberal policies will certainly not be in the interest of the people who voted Trump in. As the former Greek finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis put it, ‘And the weak suffer what they must.’

    The democratic problem is that ‘we the people’ did vote for neo-liberals in Ireland and for a long time in the U.S. Even Viktor Orban in Hungary has a democratic mandate, and Brazilians have voted for a New Age conquistador in Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile the National Front are on the threshold of power in France. Democracy is electing fascists.

    Why? Well genuine democracy requires mass literacy and proper education, which is diminishing, as is access to accurate information. Bannon and Cambridge Analytica have used artificial intelligence to influence voting patterns, and warp the human mind. We are witnessing the dissemination of disinformation, and what Zizek calls ‘Ideological Misindentification’. People are buying the bullshit, even though, at heart, they know it is untrue.

    Nonetheless, declining adult literacy and the use of sophisticated triggers have conditioned people into buying advertising as argument and substituting soundbites for subtlety and nuance. Hysteria, semi-baked nonsense and shrillness is replacing rational discourse.

    In the Post-Truth zeitgeist appeals to emotion have replaced the importance of facts, and fascists have always enjoyed rituals and symbols. Whenever anyone talks of nationalism or the national interest I am reminded of the adage that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’

    The Left are nostalgic and see opportunity in Austerity but, lest we forget, after the Wall Street Crash the Weimar Republic did not witness a Populist socialist insurgency but Nazism. Our present economic collapse is ineluctably leading towards a new form of corporate fascism.

    If the Left is to salvage democracy it must borrow the approach of Antonio Gramsci, the leader of the Communist Party of Italy in the 1920s, which is to construct a cultural hegemony with a receptive middle class (especially now as the distinction between working and middle class is being obliterated). This will involve an expansion of state institutions and husbandry of natural resources to bring an electable and progressive broad social democratic front to power.

    I do not think this is impossible, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human heart’ as Alexander Pope put it, but democracy needs leadership of a kind that is not apparent at this juncture.

    III – A Lost Leader

    On my plane journey to Athens I read an extract from a speech by Mr Obama about visiting the same birthplace of Periclean democracy I had visited. He expresses himself beautifully: precise, as is his want; erudite (something he is given too little credit for); and with pristine socially-democratic-convictions. But he is now disempowered, and his legacy is being dismantled by Trump.

    This brings us back to Roosevelt, and one major problem with U.S. democracy, at least. Obama was prevented from seeking a third term by rules introduced in the wake of Roosevelt’s becoming electorally unassailable, primarily because he was obviously acting in the interests of the people. If the rules had not been changed the American public would not have had to face the unenviable choice of Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump, with the former the lesser of two evils.

    We need a new Obama, or better still a new Roosevelt, a leader with vision and with purpose. We may need many of them, but few are apparent. Direct democracy and referenda by the people are also required.

    Further, we need to steel ourselves for civil disobedience to aid in the vitalisation of our democracy.  Instead we have a spectator democracy, or passive democracy, controlled by vested interests. When the institutions of state and the state itself act criminally the obligation for citizens is to fight back in proportion to the force they are confronted with.

    We also need proper information, and since it is not coming through mainstream media, which has been bullied into submission, the new radical press is the only drip feed available for the vitalization of the body politic, alongside similarly-motivated NGOs.

    The truth is indeed in some respects the only weapon as Havel put it while imprisoned under another dictatorship: ‘If the main pillar of the system is living a lie then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth (Havel, 1991).’

    IV – A False Dawn

    Ethical decisions are indeed complex: the suppression of fearless criticism is a negation of ethics. The obligation of professional ethics should be fearless truth-telling. Standing up to the power.

    Democracy dies when it denies the legitimacy of the opposition, when the Rule of Law is set aside, and when authoritarian politicians act subversively, and in a concerted fashion, to undermine civil liberties and human rights by criminalising and prosecuting dissent or opposition.

    Using the excuse of such shibboleths as national security, public order and the common good, rogue state institutions classify their enemies as criminals and subversives.

    Other characteristics of failing democracy include a breakdown in forbearance and the utilisation of constitutional hardball, such as Trump stacking and weaponizing the Supreme Court.

    Democracy is dying  because  our elected leaders rather than distancing themselves from extremists are embracing them. In fact they are the extremists. Let us be clear about this: we are seeing state fascism.

    There are insidious forms of subversion: a coup can really be governance by the grey, for the grey, where small but influential think tanks and special interests pull the strings.

    If it inconveniences these elites, the democratic will of the people is ignored, as in Greece, where Alexei Tsipras twice received a mandate to counter austerity but was ignored.

    Greeks must honour their debts even if they were induced into them by Goldman Sachs and its acolytes. The banal refrain is that Greeks do not pay their debts, but the same could be said for all the banks that have had their debts written off.

    While the Greek electorate recognised where their true interest lay, by electing a radical socialist, in most countries passivity has created a consumer model of democracy that has lost any bite.

    The real source of a failing democracy is found in vacuous digital communication, and the passivity wrought by blanket advertising. The false dawn of online democracy through social media is proving to be a chimera. The sharing of inconsequential thoughts in organisations that purport to be democratic, produce sound chambers that operate like cults as David Eggers splendid fictional book The Circle (Eggers, 2013) documents.

    A cult of mindless belonging to nothing is manifest, and it is not the only mindless cult around. We also have scientology, our esteemed religious traditions, and of course the neo-liberal cult itself.

    I fear that humans are becoming increasingly robotic, technical machines. Altruism, compassion and a concern for the plight of others is being eliminated.

    So leadership is what is needed but the Leader must like Churchill have ‘nothing to offer you but blood, sweat and Tears.’ And yet I retain faith that we will fight back against the fascism which Madeleine Albright, no less, believes has returned (Albright,2018).

    We are drifting towards this precipice incrementally, led by a coalition of interests inculcating robotic consumerism, passivity, environmental destruction and widening inequality. The democratic order has been subverted by rogue states and the corporatocracy.

    The Barbarian hordes are at the gates and a new Roosevelt must emerge to save democracy.

    References

    Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning. Collins, New York, 2018.
    Dave Eggers, The Circle, Knopf, New York, 2013.
    Vaclav Havel Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990, Faber and Faber 1991.
    Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2017.

  • The Slow Death of White Male Privilege

    The history books are laden with white men changing the world, from Alexander the Great to Churchill. Look at our religions- Jesus and all his disciples are white. Every saint painted on a fresco is white. The great explorers of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were all white. Every astronaut who landed on the moon has been white. Every statue we have from antiquity to the Renaissance is a thing of white marble beauty. Even the most famous wizards of all time–Merlin, Gandalf and Dumbledore–are all white old men. And of course movie stars have been white males from the Silent Era to the present. Finally, who runs and has run the Western governments since time immemorial, only old good ol’ white men.

    This may create a perception that white men are exceptional. Is it any wonder then that people of all races, religions, social status and nationalities look to white people to lead them? It’s the perception of trust that leads to a feeling of entitlement: ‘I can be President. I can be an astronaut.’ And the stereotype has been fed time and again by artists, the media, politicians, universities, military organizations, educational systems and now marketing departments.

    It has been established that people who are more attractive have a better chance of landing a job than those who are not. Given our heritage, what is sexier than a white male fueled by innate self-confidence.

    And what happens when we come across white men in history who may have noble ideals but end up killing millions?  We frame them as tragic figures with flaws that lead to disastrous outcomes (Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Richard Nixon) or misunderstood (Julius Ceasar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lenin) and a warning to other white men not to make the same mistakes. After all it is assumed that white men in power are basically good guys, who will do the right thing.

    Is it any wonder then that we feel secure at a reptilian level when we see a white guy in power? After all, we know the history of white guys and with it the frequent narrative of progress: haven’t they done a good job for the vast majority of humanity? And if they haven’t, who are we to trust? In any case we can always (at least in liberal democracies) get rid of the white guys that are bad apples, and replace them with white guys who will do better.

    Of course this is a very Eurocentric view of the world, but who can argue that our interconnected world is not a product of the Age of Discovery (circa 1500 to 1700), the Enlightenment (c. 1600-1800) and Colonialism (1600-1900), all led by governments, leaders, and thinkers that were white men?

    We can argue about their methods, and whether we would be better off without them, but we cannot argue against the proposition that they have been largely responsible for creating the modern world. The representation of white men from history, from art, to science, to commerce is long and well-rooted, and it is there that we find the root of white male privilege.

    As a white man the odds of you getting the job, education, spouse, bank loan or a role in a major motion picture acting role you aspired to were significantly higher than if you were from any other gender or ethnicity. That is the American Dream we talk about, although what we all know is that it is really the white man’s dream. How can we question whether there exists White Male Privilege then? Indeed, if you are a white male and not in a position of power or wealth, many people will assume there is something wrong with you.

    From this perspective can you see the appeal of Trump? A rich white guy, who promises to change a broken two party system run by white men. A white guy, who promises to come in and throw out the other white guys, who have been corrupted by power and wealth. A white guy, who blames women and minorities and immigrants for the country’s woes. The country was doing dandy under the white guys, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., until that black guy came into office and some white lady became speaker of the House. Conservatives (mostly white folks) want a return to the status quo and can you blame them? America has been great for white people so far.

    If you’ve come this far thinking I am Conservative, or worse, then this next bit is gonna be a let down. I am not. In fact, my argument is that this long history is starting to crack, and indeed will crumble over the next fifty to one hundred years. Our children and grand-children could be in for a real treat, as the world moves in fits and starts out of the Age of the White Man, and into the Age of, well, whatever we call it in two hundred years.

    We have already seen the beginning of this in the twentieth century. With some exceptions, every country in Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania has thrown off the yoke of colonial white masters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yeah, people of Spanish, English and Chinese heritage control some countries, but they were at least born in those countries and serve the inhabitants instead of a bureaucracy in Peking or London of Madrid. This means that new leaders who aren’t white are getting a chance to change the course of their country’s political history.

    How about Europe, where the leaders of he two biggest economies, U.K. and Germany are women?

    The world’s second and third largest economies? China and Japan (the EU doesn’t count as a country) are run by indigenous Chinese and Japanese.

    African and South American countries are run by local governments, increasingly at liberty to forge regional alliances that do not involve European powers.

    In the US there are black television channels (BET), Hispanic television channels (Univision), movies with all black production units and stars that are no longer on the fringes of society: they are mainstreaming.

    As for university curricula, well you can major in Spanish, Chinese, African, Asian, African American, and Women’s Studies at just about every place of higher learning in the US.

    Artists? Who are the biggest stars on the planet today? Lady Gaga, Dre Dre, Madonna, Taylor Swift, BTS? Who makes the best music? Kendrick Lamar (Pulitzer Prize). White crooners like Elvis, Sinatra, Harry Connick have disappeared, boy bands have crawled back under the rocks from whence they came, even the most popular singer-songwriters all seem to either non-white or female.

    I am not saying that white males don’t have a leg up anymore. But the system has been rigged in their favor for hundreds of years. It is going to take some time for that ebb away. Now that increasingly all kids can look up and see people of their own skin color, sex, sexual orientation, and religion make it, they can have the confidence to do so too. They will work harder knowing it is possible to succeed.

    And we are just starting to see how the crumbling of their privilege is affecting white men. The confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh is a perfect microcosm. Why were Conservatives in such a hurry? After all, there were plenty of conservative white men more qualified than Kavanaugh for the job.

    Midterms are coming up, and to start the confirmation process again risked hitting the speed bump of an altered Senate, where there is no guarantee that white conservative men will control either branch. They had to get this guy and they had to do it now.

    The white male fears run deeper. With a majority of white male conservatives on the Supreme Court, white men think they can now rest more easily, secure in the knowledge they may have one remaining ally in the years to come, when white people will not longer be a majority in the country, and when Blacks and Latinos and LBGTQ and women, and Indians, and Chinese will start to win districts that were were once the preserve white men.

    The Brahmans in Congress know their time is limited, and this was the last major push to keep a hold on a power they have enjoyed since the foundation of the state. So hats off to them, but it it won’t last.

    What we’re seeing now is the last wheezing breath of old white men in power, pathetically clinging to it like an addict who cannot quit, and refuses to die, because their vanity demands they go on using others.

    Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court, but the tide of history is too powerful at this point. Instead of leaving a legacy to be proud of, they will leave a stain we will all wash out eventually, so that instead of being remembered they will be forgotten, once new leaders with vision take over.

    In one hundred years you won’t read about Mitch McConnell or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump, but about Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Ruth Badar Ginsberg, Angela Merkel, Serena Williams, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Neil Degrasse Tyson. After all, they are who kids look up to these days, and certainly not George Bush or Donald Trump or Samuel Alito. Wanna know why? Because if you are white, male, grew up in Kentucky, and have an eighth-grade-education, your whiteness won’t get you where you want anymore. Republican policies will ensure you don’t have access to a proper education, healthcare, a healthy environment, or social services. Live in a city however, where you can hustle, make connections, go to college, and kill it in law school, and you will have a pretty good shot at making Partner one day, or even the Supreme Court.

    We will see the fading of trust in white power and a belief in leadership which is colour and gender blind. That is my hope anyway.

  • Leo-Liberal

    Leo Varadkar dismisses his father Ashok’s claim to be a socialist, which came in an interview after his son became Taoiseach. According to Leo he does not really know what the term means:

    You’ve probably seen stuff where he describes himself as a socialist but that’s total rubbish .. It’s not that he believes in high taxes or generous welfare, quite the contrary … Nor the nationalisation of the means of distribution of wealth or any of those sort of things (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.24).

    It is not simply that Ashok Varadkar has misrepresented his real position, but that socialism is to be rubbished. As he put it recently in the Dáil, ‘What the Socialists want … is to divide society into some people who pay for everything and qualify for nothing …’

    As a politician Leo has long represented those people who “pay for everything”, only to be preyed on by ‘parasitic’ socialists. It is a neat inversion of the Marxist argument that capitalism exploits workers, which has been used by conservatives in the United States with enduring success.

    The Fine Gael party has traveled some distance from the days of former Taoiseach John A. Costello, who urged in 1969: ‘to put upon your banners the Just Society, that Fine Gale is not a Tory party’ (McCullagh,, 2010, p.398). Under Enda Kenny Tory strategists were brought in as advisors, and Varadkar now firmly positions the party in the centre-right of Irish politics.

    I – The Young Turk

    Trenchant criticism of Fine Gael’s social democratic legacy helped Leo Varadkar make his name within the party. In a notorious speech in 2007, which he retrospectively considers ‘terrible, crass and disrespectful’, he described the beleaguered Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Brian Cowen as ‘a Garret FitzGerald’, who had ‘trebled the national debt and effectively destroyed the country (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.88)’.

    Garret FitzGerald was the leader of Fine Gael between 1977 and 1987, a two-term Taoiseach whose last administration was marked by soaring national debt, in part due to his reluctance to impose swingeing cuts, and also because of the presence within his coalition of the Labour Party, and opposition to austerity measures from the opposition Fianna Fáil, which changed its tune after winning the 1987 election.

    Away with the old – former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

    FitzGerald was identified with the Keynesian economic policy of using government spending to stimulate economic activity. This approach goes back to John A. Costello’s First Inter-Party Government, 1948-51, when balanced budgets were abandoned and a capital budget first introduced. There was, however, always a conservative wing within the party aligned with the legacy of the two Cosgrave (father and son, W.T. and Liam) administrations of 1922-32 and 1974-77, and subsequently influenced by Milton Friedman’s Monetarist approach, underpinning Thatcherism.

    MEP Brian Hayes remains an apologist for Varadkar’s speech: ‘There was a large part of Leo, me as well, who resents how the Garret FitzGerald government didn’t do the things they said they’d do to fix the economy. There were a lot of people in Fine Gael who were very disappointed [with the FitzGerald government] and he was trying to articulate that (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.87)’.

    From the outset Varadkar had cannily identified that cleavage within Fine Gael. This is clear from one of his early missives to the Irish Times, written in the wake of the debacle of Michael Noonan’s loss to Bertie Aherne’s Fianna Fáil in the 2002 general election. He described an ‘internal conflict between its conservative Christian democrat base (which it is set on deserting) and its liberal, social democratic base from the Fitzgerald era (which deserted it some time ago) (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.46).’

    In Varadkar’s view, the only strategic option was to appeal to that conservative, Christian Democratic base, and dispense with social-democratism altogether. This is consistent with rubbishing his father’s socialism today, but actually misrepresents the Christian basis of Fine Gael’s social-democratism, particularly that of John A. Costello’s son Declan Costello, the author of the Just Society.

    For Varadkar Christian Democratism was synonymous with right-wing conservative politics, which was evident in his thinking from the outset. Initial Progressive Democrat inclinations gave way to respect for the leadership qualities of John Bruton. Membership of Young Fine Gael followed, while studying medicine in Trinity College.

    This brought a Washington Ireland Programme for Service and Leadership internship in 2000, under Republican Congressman Peter King. The New York representative’s politics were centrist in American terms – where socialism is still a dirty word – but included an enduring commitment to state infrastructure, such as rail, while maintaining a conservative attitudes to same-sex marriage and abortion.

    Ironically, given his current identification with liberal causes such as marriage equality, and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, Leo appears to have initially drawn from the same conservative playbook. In 2010 he argued in relation to abortion services that ‘it isn’t the child’s fault that they’re the child of rape’; while on the question of marriage equality he once argued: ‘Every child has the right to a mother and father and, as much as is possible, the state should vindicate the right’. He even courted Ronan Mullen for a time, inviting him to address a constituency meeting in 2007 on the issue of civil partnerships (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 131, 169 and 170).

    Varadkar is a late convert to social liberalism, but he remains a fiscal conservative. In power he has evinced little enthusiasm for government investment, including describing rail travel as being for romantics. Thus far Leo-Liberalism has entailed doing very little to alter Irish society. Inactivity in office might be considered an attribute, but this predisposition suggests little will be done to tackle the current housing crisis, or address Ireland’s runaway Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

    II – Double-Jobbing?

    Leo Varadkar is a preternatural politician, an exotic insider who has, with great alacrity, climbed the greasy pole to become the youngest Taoiseach in the history of the state, while others around him floundered. In achieving this impressive feat he has displayed unmatched understanding of the dark political arts, which Niccolò Machiavelli believed necessary to advance a politician’s ends. But the Renaissance Italian warns his Prince to shun flatterers.

    A recent biography Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach casts Varadkar as ‘the tall, dark and handsome’ icon of the new Ireland, whose ‘photographic memory’ (a facility also once attributed to Garret FitzGerald) allowed him to waltz through a medical degree on this way to high political office (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 15 and 39). This ‘young foggy’ honed his abilities in the trenches of student politics alongside comrades, many of whom have now fallen by the wayside – a recurring theme throughout his career – such as Lucinda Creighton.

    The two young authors appear close to the subject, to the point where dispassionate assessment is not apparent: one, Niall O’Connor, was recently appointed a special adviser to the Ministry of Defence; the other Phillip Ryan is deputy political editor across the titles of the generally pro-government Independent Newspaper group, owned by Denis O’Brien.

    Call me Dave.

    The book was published by Biteback Publishing, partly owned by Tory grandee and billionaire Lord Ashcroft, which also released a biography of David Cameron Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron (Bitback, London, 2015), co-written by Ashcroft himself, alongside works attacking the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

    But as any historian is aware, an apparently tainted source may nonetheless yield valuable evidence. Time will tell whether our Prince has erred in allowing damaging material to enter the public domain.

    In his review of the book Diarmuid Ferriter drew attention to a passage explaining how Varadkar: ‘floated the idea to one TD of creating anonymous accounts to make positive comments under online stories on popular news websites.’ But it seems likely that this going on in political parties across the board.

    Far worse was Varadkar’s conduct while Minister for Social Protection (2016-17), where he launched an advertising campaign against welfare ‘cheats’. In the meantime he used the Department as a launchpad for his leadership bid, after first hatching an escape from the ‘Angola’ of Health.

    An unnamed adviser relates how visits to Intreos, Department offices located in every county, were used to further his ambition to lead Fine Gael: ‘Social protection was great for us … We travelled everywhere. We went to every parish hall. Every councillor we got to meet. The campaign indirectly started when we were meeting councillors’ (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.254)

    Masquerading as Department business, these were tours on what former Fianna Fáil leader Charlie Haughey called the ‘rubber chicken and chips circuit’ of constituency branches, all at the expense of the Irish taxpayer. Considering Varadkar’s attacks on ‘welfare cheats’, this double-jobbing is the height of hypocrisy. Such conduct may be normal in Irish politics, but that does not make it right.

    Unfortunately, doing little, while generating a lot of noise, marked Varadkar’s stint in the Department of Social Protection, as has been the case in his other roles.

    What also emerges is just how embedded many of the most influential journalists in the country appear to be. The authors unashamedly reveal how the ‘Taoiseach has made a virtue out of wining and dining journalists who accompany him on international trade missions’, believing, ‘it is important to spend time with them socially’.

    During one recent jolly in New York, ‘More than twenty guests, who included journalists from print and broadcast media, joined the Taoiseach and foreign affairs officials for a five-course, three-hour-long meal’. The authors, who may have been present, gleefully recall the guests devouring ‘French onion soup, foie gras, filet mignon and mushroom ravioli dusted with black truffles’, followed by further drinks in Fitzpatrick’s Manhattan Hotel in Midtown; all, we may assume, at the expense of the Irish taxpayer (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 321-322).

    Few journalists could resist the prospect of such intimacy with a sitting Taoiseach, fewer still could emerge from such lavish entertainments with objectivity intact.

    The attitude of one of his predecessors John A. Costello, who inveighed against ‘the era of the expense account … the era of the expensive restaurant (McCullagh, 2010, p.390)’, has long since fallen into abeyance.

    It should also raise an eyebrow that Ryan Tubridy, Miriam Callaghan (both of RTE) and Ursula Halligan (of TV3) endorse the book on the back cover.

    III – ‘Dr’ Varadkar

    In Irish society, as with many others, the position of doctor carries an unmatched aura of respectability. As the son of a respected G.P. Leo had an immediate advantage of name recognition, and respect, in his constituency when he began his political career.

    In the meantime he was studying for a medical degree himself, though he admits he was a dilettante student, and perhaps ought to have studied law, that other passport to bourgeois respectability. Nonetheless, training to be a doctor has given this career politician an enduring credibility, and mystique, which still impresses commentators.

    As a young councillor, we are told he would travel ‘straight from hospital to the chamber dressed in his medical attire, with a stethoscope around his neck’. He now denies the full extent of this, but the nickname of ‘Scrubs’ that emerged in the local media, was hardly damaging (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.52).

    His biographers claim that medicine is among the interests that Leo shares with his partner, Matthew Barrett, who is a practising cardiologist, but as Minister for Health Varadkar showed a discernible lack of interest in staying in the job. An anonymous cabinet colleague remains critical:

    The fact he walked away from it after such a short time, I think if you ask most of the parliamentary party, even some of his biggest supporters, they were disappointed with that. It was obviously done with a view to the leadership election. There was obviously a calculation made that you cannot go from health to the Taoiseach’s office. Certainly not in a contested election when you have to go around canvassing (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.235)

    One might have expected a young doctor to be brimming with ideas on how to address the major public health questions of our time – just as Dr Noel Browne spearheaded efforts to eradicate T.B. when he was Minister in the late 1940s – or even dismantle the expensive bureaucracy in the health service.

    Varadkar’s first decisive move, just two weeks into office, was to abandon the Coalition government’s promise, and long-term Fine Gael commitment, to universal health insurance (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.154). He went on to boast publicly that he had taken out his own private insurance, and urged other young people to follow suit.

    The two-tier system would remain, and nor was Varadkar prepared to reform what remained of public provision, and dispense with the Health Service Executive: that layer of bureaucracy insulating a Minister from direct criticism, bequeathed by one of his confidantes, former Minister for Health (2004-11) Mary Harney.

    After Kenny’s calamitous election campaign in 2015, when the party lost twenty seats, Varadkar knew his time was nigh. He forced his way out of Health by demanding ‘a large bag of cash and a mandate for sweeping change’, whereby he could bypass the rules surrounding recruitment (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.232). These were demands he knew Kenny would not be accede to. The doctor had more than Health on his mind.

    The Reluctant Taoiseach: John A. Costello.

    IV – ‘Murph’ and the Whistleblower

    It seems the Housing ministry has become the new ‘Angola’ among government Departments, with any Minister operating with fiscal and monetary constraints over which he has no control. The incumbent, whether Simon Coveney or Eoghan Murphy, appears like a hapless pilot frantically playing with the instruments on an already doomed vessel as it descends through the sky.

    To make real progress, the Ministry of Housing would have to be develop a construction agency headed by the minister, integrate with the Transport Department, and be given a direct line to Finance. Instead the Housing Building Finance Bill 2018 ‘will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.’

    Varadkar’s long-standing resistance to asking those who “pay for everything” to provide any more, does not appear to preclude a revival of the public-private partnerships which were a hallmark of Bertie Aherne’s tenure as Taoiseach.

    Yet the account of Eoghan Murphy that emerges in this biography does not align with the bumbling, statistic-addled media performer, labelled the ‘Craig Doyle of Irish politics’. He was Leo’s loyal fixer, largely responsible for Varadkar capturing an overwhelming share of the parliamentary party’s vote.

    Varadkar’s Fixer: Eoghan Murphy.

    According to one of his colleagues: ‘You had to have a multiple ways into people and no one moved into a “solid yes” unless Murphy was 100 per cent satisfied (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.277)’.

    Murphy was the founder of the so-called Five-A-Side Club of young Fine Gael TDs and at one point the sole member in Varadkar’s corner. As such, he was crucial to the latter’s rise (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.125).

    Murphy’s gregariousness compensated for Varadkar’s frank admission that he ‘probably should not be in politics at all; I am not really a people person (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.112)’. Unlike Varadkar however, and perhaps to his cost, Murphy appears quite serious in his attempts to govern. He will remain a lightning rod for dislike of the government, however, as long as the state continues to shirk a constitutional responsibility to provide affordable accommodation for citizens.

    When Enda Kenny finally resigned from office last year, apparently after egotistically ensuring he had surpassed John A. Costello as the longest-serving Fine Gael Taoiseach, Varadkar’s main rival Simon Coveney was hit with a political blitzkrieg, foreclosing any leadership race before a shot had been fired in anger.

    From his free-roaming position in Social Protection Varadkar had captured the vast majority of the parliamentary party, making the 65% of the vote Coveney received from the wider political party an irrelevance.

    What had brought Kenny down, along with two Ministers for Justice and two Garda Commissioners, is perhaps the greatest scandal in Irish public life since the turn of the century: the alleged framing on charges of child sex abuse of the Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe after he had revealed industrial scale non-prosecution of drink-driving charges. This has led to the appointment of the first Garda Commissioner from outside the state.

    In this regard at least, Varadkar has been on the right side of history, famously referring in the Dáil in 2015 to McCabe (who he had previously met and appraised) as an ‘honourable man’, after his conduct had been described as ‘disgusting’ by then Garda Commissioner Callinan.

    The one part of this narrative that rankles, however, flows from the toxic relationship that existed between Varadkar and Alan Shatter, who as Minister for Justice appears to have been mislead by senior Gardaí. Did Varadkar’s own ambitions inhibit him from reaching out to a cabinet colleague? The political cadavers the affair made of so many of the Fine Gael old guard certainly cleared the way for Varadkar.

    Nonetheless, Varadkar must be given credit where it is due, and many of his ideological opponents were impressed by his respect for Justice and the Rule of Law. This impression is bolstered by his rejection of an idea floated by the current Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan for a ban on Gardaí being photographed in the course of their duties.

    V – A Land of Opportunity?

    It seems de rigeur for any fiscally conservative politician to display a commitment to ‘opportunity-for-all’ when he ascends to high office. Thus, in his acceptance speech Varadkar urged ‘every proud parent in Ireland today’, to dream ‘big dreams for their children’.

    He said:

    Let that be our mission in Fine Gael, to build in Ireland a republic of opportunity, one in which every individual has the opportunity to realise their potential and every part of the country is given its opportunity to share in our prosperity (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.xi).

    Opportunity for Varadkar is distinctly upwardly mobile, along the lines of the American Dream, which has been fools’ gold for many. Nothing is said of those who inevitably fail to live up to their own, or parent’s, aspirations, and depend on the state for help. His approach seems at odds with John A. Costello’s Fine Gael being, ‘for all sections of the Irish people, but particularly for the poor and the weak and the distressed (McCullagh, 2010, p.398)’.

    Perhaps the one measure that would achieve the parity of opportunity which Varadkar claims a devotion to, would be to develop a truly equal educational system. But the best model for primary and secondary education seems to be found in Finland, where private schooling is effectively prohibited, and educational attainment among the highest in Europe. Instructively, this socialist society maintains an income tax rate in excess of fifty per cent.

    Varadkar has in the past opposed reforming the Irish education system, where the state pays the salaries of teachers in the private institutions, which achieve the highest grades in state examinations. In 2003, he said dividing Ireland ‘into a country of those who pay for everything and receive nothing and those who pay for nothing and receive everything, with only a small minority in between, would deal a fatal blow to what is left of Ireland’s social contract (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.52)’.

    There is perhaps no clearer statement by Varadkar of whose interests he would serve in fulfilling his “contractual” role: those who “pay for everything”, the wealthiest strata of society who have throughout the history of the state used educational attainment, including access to careers in medicine and the law, as a barrier to wealth and influence.

    That affiliation has been apparent from the beginning of his political career: with his excoriation of the social democratic tradition in his party; it proceeded through an inclination to work with the Republican Party, and sympathy for the Progressive Democrats; it showed in a willingness to dispense with a promise of universal healthcare and accept a two-tier system, and with the shaming of welfare ‘cheats’. It was also apparent in his entreaties on behalf of Donal Trump’s Doonbeg golf course, and open invitation to visit the country.

    Leo’s liberalism is uniquely adapted to further his ambitions, and take care of his supporters. The Prince appears to have no plan beyond the end of achieving power, and it trappings.

    In a revealing aside in this most beige of biographies we discover him telling colleagues ‘he feels at his most comfortable when holding meetings with other world leaders, some of whom he regularly texts’. Most worryingly perhaps, he has also ‘struck up warm relationships with’ among others the Far Right Hungarian President Viktor Orban (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.319).

    *******

    Times have changed in Irish politics, where once John A. Costello had to be persuaded to serve as Taoiseach, today a career politician unashamedly plots a course to power. Who would wish to enter this tawdry scene? Micheal O’Siadhail’s insight appears apt that ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy (O’Siadhail, 2018, p.149)’.

    Raising political standards in Ireland goes far beyond removing Varadkar, who is a product of a political system informed by clientalism. It requires an evolution in our understanding of the role of government, and a shared acceptance of the need for genuine equality of opportunity, beginning with educational reform.

    Varadkar’s own party is now what he and others aspired for it to become: a conservative party, untainted by social democratism, which wields power on behalf of the property-holding, private-school-attending, privately-medically-insured cohort of the population. As long as he remains in power those who “pay for everything” will remain ascendant.

    References

    David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Gill and MacMillan, Dublin, 2010.
    Philip Ryan and Niall O’Connor, Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach, Biteback Publishing, London, 2018.
    Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, Baylor, Waco, 2018.

  • Ryan Tubridy’s Ethical Flop

    Ryan Tubridy is the highest paid broadcaster in Ireland’s state broadcaster, RTÉ, earning close to half a million euro per annum. He presents an hour long radio show each weekday morning on Radio 1, as well as the station’s flagship Friday-night television show, The Late Late Show.

    To many he is the public face of the broadcaster – although he is a contractor rather than a direct employee for tax purposes – his mug regularly appearing on the cover of the in-house RTÉ Guide, the widest circulating magazine in the country.

    For these reasons, we believe a high ethical bar should be raised on potential conflicts of interest with his commercial and political endorsements. Any appearance of impropriety should be excluded, as others are likely to follow his lead. Alas, what we see is a Tubridy Flop, which like Dick Fobsbury’s legendary technique looks wrong, but does not appear to breach any rules.

    Unfortunately, because RTÉ refuses to disclose details of third party commercial arrangements its leading ‘stars’ enter into, we are compelled to make enquiries where there is a suggestion of inappropriate dealings. This comes, however, with the significant proviso that the officer may deny an application for such information where it is deemed advantageous to competitors, might result in financial loss to contractors, and potentially ‘prejudice RTÉ contractual negotiations in respect of future engagements with independent contractors’.

    Dick Fobsbury, no relation to Ryan Tubridy.

    Our recent enquiries into Ryan Tubridy emanate from his close connections to the motor industry, which we connected to a surprising attack on cyclists, and past receipt of a free car.

    The sight of Ryan Tubridy on the cover of the September edition of the RTÉ Guide sitting atop what is obviously a Vespa motor cycle appeared to be an example of ‘product placement’. As a result we submitted a  Freedom of Information Request to the relevant office in RTÉ was filed, reading as follows:

    I am requesting records (if they exist) of payments or payments in kind from Piaggio (the manufacturer of Vespa) or any of its agents or subsidiaries in Ireland to Ryan Tubridy over the course of 2018. I am making this request in response to photographs and an article that appeared in the September edition of the RTÉ Guide featuring Tubridy on his Vespa with the logo prominently displayed(see attached).

    Further to this I am seeking records (if they exist) of payments or payments in kind from Piaggio (the manufacturer of Vespa) or any of its agents or subsidiaries in Ireland to the RTÉ Guide arising from the same article.

    I believe it is in the public interest for any such inducements to RTÉ employees or contractors, or the in-house publication featuring same to be in the public domain.

    More photos from the shoot.

    The following email was received in reply:

    Dear [Sir],

    Thanks for your email yesterday. I have made inquiries and been advised that the Vespa belongs to a person in HR here in RTÉ. It was parked outside the building and the photographer just asked to use it as a prop for the photoshoot.

    On that basis it seems that your request is unlikely to turn up any records. Do you wish to proceed with your FOI request? It’s not a problem either way – I just wanted to pass on the information I received.

    Kind regards,

    […]

    FOI Officer, RTÉ .

    We chose to persevere with the application. On September .. we received a formal reply stating:

    I have contacted several individuals in RTÉ by email and in person to establish if the records you sought exist. I have been advised that they do not. Mr Tubridy does not have relationship with Piaggio or any of the agents or subsidiaries in Ireland where he receives or received payments or payments in kind.

    I have also been advised that there is no relationship between Piaggio or any of its agents or subsidiaries in Ireland and the RTE Guide.

    …

    As I outlined to you in an email on September 4th I was advised that the Vespa which was used in the photoshoot for the RTE Guide was actually owned by a member of staff in the Human Resources Department. The person was asked if it could be used as a prop and they agreed.

    This communication throws up a few questions. First, how could no one be aware that a commercial brand was so obviously apparent in the photos? Secondly, can the public have confidence in the Freedom of Information process within RTÉ , considering the aforementioned proviso?

    It is notable that when it came to the online version of the article the picture with the Vespa has been doctored to exclude the motor cycle.

    Political Connections

    Ryan Tubridy’s name crops up in another article published in this edition of Cassandra Voices, with his name, along with those of RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan and TV3’s Ursula Hannigan, appearing on the back of the recent publication Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach by Philip Ryan and Niall O’Connor. The book is by most measures a homage to the leaderships qualities of Taoiseach Varadkar, and published by Bitback Publishing a London-based house, owned by Tory donor Lord Ashcroft.

    Tubridy enthuses that the book:

    offers the reader and voter a fascinating insight into an intriguing and public figure that none of us really know. With incisive background detail coupled with up-to-date analysis, this is a very welcome account of a private man in the most public role in Ireland.

    This does not appear controversial, but we question whether it is appropriate for RTÉ’s leading man (and, arguably, woman) to endorse a book, one of whose authors works for the government; at least in a form that is not part of a serious review.

    It surely involved the publisher contacting Ryan Tubridy, and requesting a few words on the books. It seems fair to ask whether Tubridy received anything in return.

    In the original interview for the RTÉ Guide Tubridy lists Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 as one of his favourite books. A Catch 22 has been defined as a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule. Similarly, RTÉ solution to the problematic situation of employees and contractors receiving payments from third parties is to introduce a rule whereby potentially damaging material is withheld if it is commercial sensitive.

    Until RTÉ offers transparency regarding its code of conduct, and third party financial relationships, these questions will linger. Notwithstanding the Catch 22, if our readers come across further potential conflicts of interests we would invite you to email the relevant officer foi@rte, and send us any response (to admin@cassandravoices.com) you receive.

  • Alternatives to Italy’s Political Malaise

    Seemingly out-manoeuvred by more experienced, and ruthless, political ‘partners’, the Five Star Movement (M5S) has entered a crucial phase after forming a coalition government with the right wing La Lega. The key question is whether the issue of immigration will continue to dominate Italian political debate, or whether M5S can bring about meaningful social reforms. For the moment it is advantage La Lega.

    I – La Lega Leading the New Government

    After three months the new Italian government composed of M5S and La Lega is facing difficulties in aligning a complex mix of political leaders, many of whom are in power for the first time. The clash of conflicting ideas and constituencies, played out in newspaper articles and websites, brings to mind – not only to foreign observers – a stereotype of Italian political chaos.

    The ‘yellow’ (as MS5 are referred), having earned 32.4% of the national vote in the March election, on the basis of an economic platform leaning towards socialism, should be leading the coalition. But this mantle seems to have been usurped by the minority ‘green’ (La Lega) partner, which gained 17.6% of the vote. The has been achieved through Le Pen-ist propaganda, focusing on migration, security issues and Euro-scepticism, while winking to Trumpism (and esteem for Vladimir Putin).

    Matteo Salvini, the leader of La Lega has emerged as the public face (and sole heir of Lega father Umberto Bossi, following his forced retirement after charges of public finance misuse) of the government. He is Deputy Premier and Minister of the Interior; while his supposed ally, and interlocutor, Luigi Di Maio, the leader of M5S, is Minister for Labour and Economic Development. The factions are supposedly being coordinated by Premier Giuseppe Conte, the M5S nominee.

    Salvini has injected atavistic fears of a foreign ‘other’ into political debate, highlighting criminality and legality, loss of jobs and waste of resources, as well as undeserved social spending in a period of economic crisis. Within days of entering office he stated to the media that he wished to divert five billion euros from migrant reception and integration policies, while ramping up anti-EU rhetoric.

    In June 2018 he closed Italian ports – in particular the ports of Sicily – to the ‘Acquarius’, a ship from the fleet of the NGO ‘SOS Mediterranèe’ (MSF – ‘Doctors Without Borders’), sailing from Libya with six-hundred-and-twenty-nine migrants (including one-hundred-and-twenty-three unaccompanied minors) aboard, which had previously been prevented from entering La Valletta in Malta.

    Salvini invited the captain, ‘to continue the crusade with all its comfortable services along the Mediterranean costs’, as far as Valencia, Spain, where the new Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez authorized it to dock. He then told another ship the ‘Lifeline’ it had no chance of entering Italian ports, and went on to ask his EU partners to consider radical changes in EU migration policies.

    On August 2018, he created an internal conflict within the Italian Guardia costiera (‘Coastal Guard’), prohibiting another ship, the ‘Dicotti’, from unloading one-hundred-and-fifty migrants in Catania, Sicily, and then instigated what seems to have been a politically motivated investigation into the Agrigento public prosecutor Luigi Patronaggio on several charges, including abduction and segregation, illegal detention and abuse of public administration.

    At the end of August 2018 he met the anti-EU and Far Right leader of Hungary Viktor Orban, theorizing on the so-called Democratura, or ‘Authoritarian Democracy’, while endorsing the Hungarian leader’s policy of closing his country’s borders to migrants.

    Astonishingly, according to a majority of Italian commentators, in view of recent polls, Salvini had mastered the situation and, by escalating declarations, had emerged as a real political animal, front and centre of the political stage, to the detriment of the M5S.

    In reality Salvini has been in election mode since the formation of the government, as he awaits another opportunity to go to the polls, with surveys showing his party appealing up to 30% of the electorate. This could allow his party to reconcile with former allies, and enter a coalition with the former fascisti Fratelli d’Italia or Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.

    II – Transatlantic Connections

    But the rapture of opinion writers can be misleading. Another Matteo (Renzi)’s recent adventures have shown the volatility of Italian voting intentions in an era of social media. Nothing should be taken for grant at this early stage in the electoral cycle.

    Certainly Salvini’s political position has been strengthened by an axis with other Populist forces in Europe and throughout the world. Apart from reciprocal cuddles with Marine Le Pen, and the muscular chest-to-chest recognition by Putin, there are also bonds with the US Presidency. This has served to legitimate him and his party.

    Salvini and other Italian right-wing parties see the 2016 US Presidential election as a sign of a shift in Euro-Atlantic politics away from buonismo, and ‘human rights-oriented policies’ deemed to be weak, inefficient and unpopular

    Indeed, Attaccateve al Trump, a book by Paola Tommasi, with a degree of notoriety in Italy, credits the dissolution of the Italian Christian Democrats with the unlikely election, ‘Berlusconi-style’, of the outsider Trump.

    Steve Bannon – Trump’s former consultant and spin-doctor – has hailed La Lega as a part of the constellation of ‘Breitbart’ (and perhaps Cambridge Analytica?) declaring with some confidence that ‘the Italian fellows are doing a good job’. Subsequently, Trump, while fomenting against Trudeau (as he travelled back to Washington from last June’s G-7 in Canada), recognized Italy as a primary political partner and warmly welcomed the new Italian policy on migrants.

    Tellingly, both governments during their first days, created a storm over migration issues. Trump followed up victory by imposing visa restrictions on migrants arriving from selected countries, which generated street protests in the principal US cities. He has recently had to cope with a reversal in public approval on account of the shameful separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border, and incarceration in small cages, but his wife Melania’s apparent repentance was perhaps designed to balance the effect.

    Salvini’s declarations on migrants issues also unleashed an emotional wave, expressed in national press and television, where commentators weighed in to contest human rights violations and defend the previous government’s policies.

    But, as indicated, the overall effect on voting intentions appears to have been favourable for Salvini. Recent polls suggest his anti-intellectualism, and jibes about buonism, have galvanized a significant part of population. Many appear to appreciate his ‘muscular’ approach both in internal affairs, and in dealings with EU partners.

    III – Democratic Impasse

    The Democratic Party, out of Palazzo Chigi since the March elections, ending the premiership of Paolo Gentiloni, but with Matteo Renzi still on board, have proved ineffectual in opposition. A new leadership has still not emerged, and the old one never developed a comprehensive political platform for these challenging times, apart from to say: ‘we lost, it is up to them to govern’; meaning, in essence, ‘we remain on the side of the river hoping that corpses of political adversaries will pass by’.

    The new (transitional) political secretary Maurizio Martina – appointed after the electoral collapse to keep a steady course before the next congress – has, unsurprisingly, inveighed against Salvini. In parliament there have been many pious statements from ambitious Democrat deputies attacking the approach of the Lega leader, but meaningful initiatives have been lacking thus far.

    After falling from a high of 40% in the European elections of 2014 to just 19% in the March election a perception has emerged of a distinct lack of consensus in the Democratic Party. Energy has been wasted on strategies designed to compete with other party’s web presences, without producing any visible impact or, even worse, running an ‘opposition within an opposition’, against the left wing (‘former communists’), who are castigated for not toeing the leadership’s line.

    The fallen ‘Matteo’ underestimated the ill-effects of simplistic proposals on institutional reforms, investing too much rhetoric on the efficiency and rapidity of political outcomes. He remained devoted to a Blairite ‘third way’, without any deep reflection on the future of centre-left politics in an era of shifting economic and technological plates. There were no original policies on equality or redistribution of wealth, no weltanschaung for Democrats in the years to come.

    Affected by a curious ‘Zelig-style’ syndrome, leading to the party co-opting other parties’ proposals (on immigration, public funding of politics and cutting costs of institutions), the Democrats under ‘Matteo the 1st’ shared with ‘Matteo the 2nd’ a certain ‘muscularity’ in the tone adopted towards European partners, political adversaries (within and outside the Party), bureaucracies and allegedly ‘strong powers’. But they never renounced an associations with large corporations or the institutions of European financial orthodoxy, as they sought to retain the support of a shrinking constituency of moderates.

    As a result, left-wing supporters left the party in droves, especially to the M5S. Beffa delle beffe, though not unexpectedly, at the last elections even former moderates seemed to prefer the more consistent right-wing voice of La Lega.

    The Democratic ‘Matteo’ has divided his own party – and wider Italian society – pitching two sides against one another. One derives from the Catholic Democrazia Cristiana (later Popolari and Margherita), while the other stems from the former Partito Comunista Italiano (later Partito Democratico della Sinistra and finally Democratici di Sinistra).

    Aldo Moro – compromesso historico.

    After the election, ignoring the lesson of one of its greatest leader Aldo Moro – the great exponent of compromesso storico between Christian Democrats and Communists – he refused to countenance any convergence on social issues with the M5S.

    In this depressing scenario, a strong answer to Salvini came from Roberto Speranza, the young leader of Liberi e Uguali (‘Free and Equal’), the political party that emerged from those groups leaving the Democrats before the elections, under the leadership of Massimo D’Alema, former Premier and Communist leader, in opposition to Matteo Renzi. Speranza reported Salvini to the prosecutors’ office in Rome for instigating racial hatred.

    Indeed numerous public declarations and decisions taken by the green-yellow alliance appear inconsistent with constitutional values, and international laws to which Italy is bound by treaty.

    In the ‘Acquarius’ case, as in the more recent ‘Dicotti’ case, Sicily was the safest port to dock, rather than Valencia. Any practice by Italian military forces involving returning migrants to Libya before security and peaceful conditions have been restored runs contrary to the European Court of Human Rights-stated principle of ‘non refoulement’.

    IV – What does the M5S Stand For?

    As regards the M5S, which is based on the principle of digital democracy and contesting Italian ‘cast’ politics and patronage, it is not clear what it stands for.

    Doubts have been raised about its initial roots in a project of ‘community behavioural analysis’ by one of its founders, the ‘Internet guru’ Roberto Casaleggio, who died in 2016, but whose legacy has been carried on by his son Davide, with even greater efficiency.

    M5S is associated with a private consultancy firm that seemingly derives financial gains from political information and advertising. The firm can also organize political communication and harness the vote of M5S, contrary to democratic principles enshrined in the Italian Constitution, which predicates democratic participation on political organizations, and freedom of individual political consciousness.

    A stronger juridical stance against these new forms of political organization risks having any decision being twisted to reinforce populism. Moreover, any rejection by the court of such charges would be a sign of the failure of traditional constitutional instruments.

    A finding against M5S would solidify a public perception that public institutions are anti-democratic – just as when the government was being formed President Mattarella was accused by the ‘piazza’ of inappropriate interference over blocking the appointment of Paolo Savona as Minister of the Economy.

    What then for the new Matteo? Time runs fast but it is too early to appreciate the impact of Salvini’s strategies, in particular if he will last better than the ‘other Matteo’ on the prow of the Italian Government ship, and in the hearts of (certain) Italians. While a significant constituency has been galvanised by what appears to be a certain strength of personality, still the percentage of Italians who have ever gone as far as voting for La Lega amounts to a mere 5.6 million, out of over 51 millions of voters.

    Far more of Italy’s citizens are seeking new voices supporting civic ideals, under a new Democratic leadership.

    A turning point might be the opposition within the M5S to common political action with La Lega. This has already been seen at local level since the beginning of unnatural alliance: in June 2018, in response to Salvin’s repeated denunciation of migrants, Mr. Nicola Sguera, a city council member in Benevento, resigned declaring ‘We hoped for ‘Podemos’, now we have ‘Orban’’; for similar reasons Carlotta Trevisan resigned her role as deputy president of the city council in Rivoli.

    At a national level their leader Di Maio has hushed up criticisms declaring: ‘I want suggestions, not complaint: now we run the government’, and recently declared in Versilia, that ‘misunderstanding and conflicts are not surprising, we will do our best’, and that ‘blockages and ‘refoulments’ cannot be made with kindness’.

    However, the recent Roman meetings of M5S, before and after the summer parliamentary recess, witnessed further grumbling by the left-wing of the movement, led by Senate President Roberto Fico, who declared, contradicting Salvini and his leader Di Maio, that ‘Italian Ports shall remain open to NGOs, they are doing an essential job”.

    Moreover, Barbara Lezzi, Minister for the South, Senators Elena Fattori, Paola Nugnes and Luigi Gallo are among the deputies showing commitment to the idea that ‘refoulments’ are not a policy appropriate for a civilised country. Fico also came out against the meeting on August 28th between Salvini and Orban, declaring, ‘there’s no political leader more distant from me in Europe’.

    Worse still, after the meeting between the two Far Right leaders and the final declarations on a common stance in Europe (with the schizophrenic Salvini supporting the Orban position against migrant re-locations in the European Union, contrary the official position of his government), Prime Minister Conte leaked to the media that it was no longer possible to have an official public position.

    V – The Reality About Immigration

    The political context could easily evolve differently between the right-wing La Lega politics and the leftist M5S, which is animated in particular by opposition to the elitist politics of the Democrats, and is still rooted in the family photo album of la sinistra italiana.

    There is a compelling argument that the whole ‘immigration affair’ is a lot of hot air, and part of a complex public relations campaign being orchestrated by unscrupulous politicians ‘senza arte né parte’ (‘without any virtue nor strong political faith’), for whom the M5S is naively providing a stage and microphone.

    Its impact is increased by the inability of Italy and the EU more generally – blackmailed in part by their own constituencies – to agree on a real and effective common migration policy.

    According to official United Nations reports, collected in the World Population Prospects – and reported in the ‘Huffington Post’ in 2017 – migratory flows into Europe from 2000 to 2010 were 1.2 million people per year, which makes up a mere 0.2% out of a population of five hundred million inhabitants (one million have arrived in the United States over the same period).

    That figure then dramatically fell to 400,000 entries per year between 2010 and 2015 due to the Economic Crisis, which led to less money being remitted to sustain travel costs from Central, Western or Eastern Africa to Europe.

    According to ‘Liberazione’, these numbers will have declined further in 2018: 8% less have disembarked on the Italian coast than in the same period last year. Data from the Ministry of the Interior indicates that 14,441 people arrived in Italy by sea in the first six months of 2018, while 64,033 had arrived in the same period of the previous year. This is not to say international migration is not a genuine issue, but it puts it in perspective.

    In 2015 the United Nations said international migration had reached 244 millions per annum, 20 millions of whom were refugees. That number had grown from 154 millions in 1990 to 175 millions in 2000. Migrations will persist as long as economic cleavages exists between rich and poor countries. The real point is the small proportion of those, about one million, actually entering Europe, the biggest economy in the world (comprising 23.8% of the world’s GDP, against the 22.2% of the US), with 500 million inhabitants, compared to total migrations around the world.

    The essential issue is how to adopt efficient, humane and stable institutions for the governance of humanitarian emergencies and economic migration to Europe.

    Instruments to deal with economic migrations are not easy to be put in place. Decisions touch on political ties with foreign states, anachronistic colonial attitudes, distribution of military and security power, sovereignty over international waters, irrational beliefs and ancient fears, as well as normative politics.

    Meaningful measures are, however, on the table for European governments to discuss. For instance, Angela Merkel recently proposed a common EU force for border control. Indeed, even in the absence of intense passions, a European Agenda on Migrations has been debated since 2013 among EU leaders, and the Migration Compact proposed by the previous Italian Government envisaged a scheme for infrastructural investment in Africa.

    In this context, the EU’s ‘La Valletta Fund’ continues to provide financial support to projects tackling the ‘root causes’ of migrations in selected African countries. The new strategy of the European External Action Service – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the EU – includes closer ties and relationships with Europe’s ‘neighbours’, and the ‘neighbours of the neighbours’ from where migrants leave for Europe (not only North Africa, but also Sahara and Sahel countries).

    The EU social agenda, debated since 2015, also contemplates rules and measures for social integration of migrants, within a larger scheme tackling the labour concerns of all Europeans, which could reduce social tensions.

    VI – Three Scenarios

    A responsible Italian leadership would initiate debate on these issues with other EU Member States. In contrast, at the last EU Council meeting an apparent ‘political crisis’ between Conte and some EU partners (Macron, Merkel, and Borissov) was reported.

    The Dublin Regulation should be overhauled, but narrow nationalist politics is creating stasis in the Union, and the Italian government’s intransigence is not helping matters.

    The only positive news stemming from the muscular stance of the yellow-green alliance is renewed (enduring?) attention being paid to the migrant question, and to Italy as a strategic stronghold for a federal Europe, meaning the country could finally reap concrete political advantages as regards sharing the costs of receiving migrants.

    Salvini has gone so far as to warn that if the rules are not changed on migration then Italy will withdraw its annual contribution.

    It remains to be seen whether M5S leaders – presumably to the left of Di Maio – will be able to counterbalance this ‘green’ communication agenda. Can that faction defuse the ‘immigration affair’ and the radicalising narratives of La Lega? Will they succeed in reversing the positions they had to swallow to gain the levers of power, and finally make their 32% of electoral votes correspond with real political power?

    One opportunity for the inexperienced M5S and its leaders – in contrast La Lega as La Lega Norde was in local government from the 1980s and national politics from the 90s – is to implement their economic and social platform, from which Salvini’s ‘immigration issue’ has diverted attention.

    These include the reddito di cittadinanza (‘basic social income’) it promised voters, and long-standing environmental commitments, including the closure or modernisation of the ILVA iron plant in Taranto, and the blockage or relocation of the docking of the ‘Trans-Adriatic Pipeline’ in Puglia.

    The current route of the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline.

    There is also the issue of investment in social housing and infrastructures for workers, active employment policies and the restructuring of unemployment agencies, digitalisation and other services for SMEs, simplification of laws, and incentives for youth entrepreneurship.

    Recently Di Maio, now heading a monstre Ministry reuniting Labour with Economic Development (Industry), has initiated an investigation into the feasibility of basic income, against the indifference or opposition of his La Lega partners. On these points, the interests of the historical Lega constituencies and the expectations of M5S supporters might seriously diverge.

    La Lega’s leadership in the north of Italy, after years of regional and local governments, are perceived as guarantors of established commercial interests, tied to the former Forza Italia barons of the northern economy. Any M5S initiatives implying significant redistribution of public resources seem likely to create rifts.

    The more the M5S pursues social and economic priorities the greater the prospect of divergence with La Lega. But if M5S renounces these social policies they risk division into right and left factions, just like the Democratic Party before them, making its prospects in the next elections uncertain. Failure to act could generate new alliances before the next elections.

    Would this mean glory for the ‘green’ ‘Matteo’? Two scenarios present themselves to Italian citizens in the medium term. The first is an abrupt end to the coalition, involving a never-ending cycle of elections, in which La Lega pickpockets the right wing M5S votes, and attracts new voters from traditional centre-right parties; or perhaps restoring a political dowry to the prodigal son Silvio Berlusconi, and his centre-right Forza Italia heirs.

    The second scenario is a revitalized (inspired by Spain’s Socialists perhaps) ‘Democratic Party’ leadership emerging to end the short-lived Matteo II’s era in Italian politics, supporting dialogue with the M5S , under Fico, and reviving the social movements that Matteo I sank

    This could bring an end to the financial and economic stalemate which has ruined so many firms and families, unravelling a delicate social fabric so as to give an opportunity to demagogues like Salvini.

    Nothing is shaped until everything is shaped. A third scenario could play out where the M5S and La Lega develop ties at institutional levels, and become an inseparable Populist force. To the leadership of the Democrats, and the new forces emerging in Italian civil society, the hard task is to play the cards in front of them.

  • We Need Another ‘New Deal’ and Umbrella to Unite Under

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), U.S. President between 1933 and 1945, was born to enormous privilege. He came from one of the most aristocratic families in America. A distant cousin, Teddy, had even been elected President.

    In his youth FDR was a bon vivant and ladies man, who strayed from Eleanor, his saintly but still formidable wife. This blue blood seemed an unlikely person to buck the entire system of US capitalism. He remains a hate-figure for U.S. Conservatives today.

    Any account of his life should include the enormous personal tragedy of his incapacitation due to polio. He could not walk, and this disability may have broadened his empathy for others’ suffering.

    Roosevelt was elected President in 1932 on a platform of change: to provide a New Deal to the American people after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing global depression. The destitution of the American people is movingly depicted in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, where a group of ‘Okies’, led by Tom Joad, are ruined by dustbowl conditions, and the calling in of loans by ruthless bankers.

    Similarly, devastation arrived in the urban centres, captured in the lyrics of the song and Broadway musical E.Y. Yip Harpurg’s ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime’. Even brokers were forced to eat from soup kitchens, as erstwhile respectable folk were reduced to ‘hobos’.

    What had happened was that the bull market of speculation had simply collapsed. The unregulated free market had built mountains of sand out of folly and greed. A dominant economic philosophy of laissez faire had brought light touch regulation and government passivity, as with our own, similarly hegemonic, neo-liberalism.

    The view then, as today, was that government had no business interfering in private transactions and that wealth, growth and efficiency are best achieved by the operation of the invisible hand.

    The crash beginning in 2007 was not that different from the 1929 version, and the political consequences are increasingly similar too. A neo-liberal consensus endorses a shock doctrine allowing crisis to follow crisis, precipitating social and economic collapse.

    FDR adopted the seemingly paradoxical, and certainly heretical, advice of the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes that to save capitalism it was necessary for the government to intervene in the market. Thus Roosevelt set up national agencies and support structures for aid and assistance. It was a bailout to protect the poor and disenfranchised, not the rich.

    His New Deal was in the national interest. Not a shibboleth or paper mask, cloaked in woolly ideas, to protect vested interests.

    The Supreme Court initially blocked New Deal legislation, rejecting what the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes contemptuously branded social statistics in his dissenting opinion in Lochner Herbert Spencers. He insisted the court had no business varying contracts.

    ‘the switch in time’

    The assumption of liberty of contract is that anyone has the freedom to enter into a bargain under whatever terms they choose, and once a contract is struck they are bound by their word. But that is based on the pretence that the market is a level playing field, which it never has been. Many still sign on the doted line without fully understanding the implications. Moreover, neo-liberalism sells short term fixes which often fail.

    An exasperated Roosevelt informed the Supreme Court that if they did not approve his legislation he would appoint new judges, which soon led to a change of heart. This became known among wags as ‘the switch in time that saved nine’.

    Roosevelt displayed an ambivalence towards democracy, but was the best of all leaders: a benevolent dictator. He favoured those at the bottom of the social ladder, who were increasingly aware that democracy had been sabotaged by vested interests. At that time, just as is the case today, transnational corporations and law firms were dictating to governments.

    Roosevelt revived the U.S. economy, with Keynesian pump-priming: government expenditure increasing aggregate demand. It did not lead to a bail out of corrupt banks, but their nationalisation. This brought investment to help ordinary people, not the infliction of wanton cruelty in the form of perma-austerity, which runs contrary to even capitalist logic.

    The best evidence is that a mixed economy, combining private enterprise and public initiative, with social safety nets and public assistance for small enterprises, is a model that works best for society as a whole, rather than the cartelisation of wealth, under the voodoo promise of trickle down.

    Keynes was right then, and still is, but over time he became unfashionable and was derided.

    In late 1970’s Britain, in particular, the excesses of socialism were becoming obvious, with the three-day-working-week, litter on the streets, and the stranglehold of the Unions. With initiative thus stifled, Thatcher and Reagan championed the old formula of untrammelled free markets: new clothing for old and obsolete ideas of unregulated markets, conveniently referred to as neo-liberalism.

    The ideological underpinning came from the Austrian Friedrich Hayek and the Chicago school under Milton Friedman. The curious assumption was that wealth would trickle down like manna from heaven from rich to poor, if a market is left alone. Instead we got the yuppies, like Donald Trump, who siphoned off great wealth.

    Over time we have seen the dismantling of the welfare state; the removal of social protections and safety nets. More sinister developments are of a more recent vintage.

    ‘the new serfdom’

    Firstly, a rapidly declining percentile of the global population is controlling an ever-increasing share of the wealth and resources of the planet, with everybody else increasingly impoverished.

    As a result the distinction between working class and middle class is being eroded. The new class system is a reversion to a medieval pyramid of landlords and serfs: feudal capitalism.

    This blurring of class boundaries is an important point to appreciate, making Antonio Gramsci’s idea of an accommodation between working and middle class interests more compelling than ever. Old-fashioned Marxist class divisions no longer make sense, amidst corporate feudalism, where working and middle classes are both succumbing to serfdom.

    Conversely Hayek, one of the architects of neo-liberalism, actually called socialism the new feudalism or serfdom. It is ironic in the extreme therefore that his ideas have led precisely to what he sought to avoid. Socialist brainwashing has been replaced by neo-liberal.

    More to the point, the unprecedented banking collapse after 2007 led to bail-outs being award to those responsible who were responsible, and the infliction of austerity on the wretched of the earth. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stieglitz, referred to this false paradigm as ‘socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor’.

    Those countries which adopted ‘Roosveltean’ or Keynesian approaches, including nationalisating banks, such as Iceland have been vindicated. This brought stabilisation and recovery.

    Ireland achieved the worst of all possible ends. It established a bad bank NAMA, which cut deals with failed property speculators and lawyers and the congeries of the corrupt. As the IMF and Europe imposed austerity on the defenceless masses those responsible were bailed out and their debts cancelled.

    The fraudulent Irish banks had made their money on misrepresentations, and providing negligent lending advice about the value of stocks, investments and credit ratings. This had caused the economy to overheat and generated a property bubble that many had warned against.

    Now the institutions foreclose against the poor and defenceless, as sanctity of contract is insisted on. The perversion of the system it that the richer you are, the more easily you can cut a deal: the logic of ‘a bank too big to fail’.

    homo economicus

    The neo-liberal recasting of homo sapiens into homo economicus, also initiates a new form of Social Darwinism, permitting only the survival of the fittest or rather the most ruthless in a dog eat dog universe.

    We have seen a slippage in standards, where the young are habituated to lying, as deceit has become the norm among holders of high office. The lines between fact, semi-fact, lies and deceptions have been blurred entirely. Even in the courts of law fabricated cases have reached pandemic proportions.

    It has also led to increasingly vicious tactics against those who demure: like a plague the corruption of banks has spread to other private agencies and even state institutions, where those who blow the whistle or otherwise expose toxic levels of corruption are systematically destroyed.

    In this distorted universe the mugshots of those that should be acclaimed as heroes of our time, now feature in rogues’ galleries of infamy and subversion. The indicted include human rights lawyers, activists, whistleblowers, publicly-minded citizens, and anyone with a shred of a social conscience.

    It is a divisive ‘them’ and ‘us’ social setting. ‘Them’, the poor, the migrant, the displaced, the activist, the troublemaker, the public intellectual, are all marginalised and insidiously destroyed in increments or possibly state-sponsored murder, as in the case of journalists in Malta and Slovakia.

    Targeted assassination by the state is now the norm, and not just under Mr Putin.

    Making Hodge-Podge of Everything

    Even though I am a Harvard law graduate I doubt whether Mr. Trump would grant me leave to enter the United States right now. I am no longer one of ‘us’ but one of ‘them’, what Franz Fanon called The Wretched of The Earth. I should not have given unconditional praise to human rights activists, who impede capitalist interests.

    Our corporate suzerains lead people to safe issues around individual entitlements. We are all in favour of gay marriage, gender equity and not criminalising someone for puffing on a joint. But what about more fundamental rights intrinsic to human life, such as health care, housing and social support? If you argue in favour of this just see what happens.

    Around the world courts are rapidly evicting and rendering homeless surplus populations and in India dumping them on the streets. Housing, either buying or renting, is increasingly unaffordable, diminishing the prospect of human flourishing.

    The privatisation of health care has ineluctably led to life or death being a matter not of right or entitlement, but of affordability.

    There are other sinister ramifications. Those teachers, academics or professionals in badly paid but socially worthwhile occupations must toe the line, and are fired for exposing corruption. In order to survive they have to sing for their supper, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.

    The wise sensei or village elder is no longer looked up to, but instead the old are being asked to quietly await their death.

    Intelligence and achievement have to be costed and channelled into wealth producing activities. You are not a man if you do not descend to the mentality of the hunter.

    Short-termism both in contracts and thinking, has led to reactive decision-making, wherein people are desensitised to the suffering of others.

    In my view these depredations being heaped on society are deliberate. The tactics of social disruption peddled in Chile and Indonesia by the neo-liberals in the late 1970s are now being replicated in Ireland and Greece, among other places. It is a social experiment assessing what level of suffering is required to bring compliance to authority, and obedience to the will of the mega rich.

    This is accompanied by cuts in funding for socially useful public agencies, such as libraries, which are being gradually eliminated. There have also been huge cuts to legal aid, imperiling the ability of the innocent to defend themselves against criminal charges.

    It brings to mind the prescriptions of one Dostoyevsky’s Devils Pyotr Stepanovich who advocates the ‘systematic undermining of every foundation, the systematic destruction of society an all its principles’, which would: ‘demoralize everyone and make hodge-podge of everything’. Then, ‘when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical, and sceptical, but still with a desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self preservation’, his faction would, ‘suddenly gain control of it’.

    The New Deal

    We demand a New Deal. But what will that entail today, and how could it be feasible?

    1. Urgently in Ireland, and other neo liberal countries, the courts need to recognising housing (even without recourse to Article 45), including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as access to health care, as fundamental human rights. The courts need to show leadership and recognise the common good of protecting people against the corporate predation by vulture funds and transnational interests.
    1. We urgently require Keynesian stabilisation including support for small businesses, social safety nets and structural regulation of a wildcatting private sector.
    1. The EU needs to be streamlined to a form of looser associational ties, which do not impose austerity or globalisation of capital, but reinforce standards and regulatory protection of rights and resistance to the interventions of globalised capitalism. There is no point in Brexit if it is replaced by the interests of Steve Bannon and other American ranchers.
    1. The power of officers of the state needs to be strictly regulated. We are living in an age when an over powerful state and police force is intruding unconstitutionally in private lives of others, and state sponsored is increasingly apparent. Where subversion is emanating from the state, and where criminalisation is opaque and multi-faceted: where many of the real problems of criminality can be traced to the state itself.
    1. There is a paucity of political leadership at national and international level. The possibility now exists that various NGOs raising awareness on the impact of Climate Change awareness, miscarriages of justice and social and economic rights, band together in an alternative transnational organisation fronted by the good and the wise. To oppose internationalisation we need an alternative internationalisation lobbying not for growth but sustainability, conservation and a reverse to small is beautiful and artisanal livelihoods. We need to remould human nature to promote altruism, community and compassion for others, engendering a New Deal of collaborative and associative responsibilities.

    So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a New Deal for the world.

  • The Audacity of a Third Party Candidate

    The problem with writing about the U.S. Democratic Party, whether analytically, historically, or even as a matter of praxis, is that it has all been said or tried before.

    Want to run party candidates on a left-wing (or progressive, or whatever?) platform? Recall the so-called Alliance Yardstick, when the Farmers’ Alliance in 1890 held Democratic Party candidates it endorsed to its full program, including such items as the nationalization of the railroads, a progressive income tax, and significant monetary reform. They got hundreds of candidates elected — most of whom promptly abandoned the agreement.

    This led to the formation of the People’s Party in 1892, which did well by the standards of a third party, before largely getting gobbled up when the Democrats adopted one of their main planks (free silver) in 1896.

    Or, for that matter, the experiences of the Democratic Socialists of America in the 1970s and 1980s, when formerly third-party socialists led by Mike Harrington surmised that with the conservative white supremacist wing of the Democratic Party leaving in droves, what remained could be turned in a social-democratic direction. Problem was (among many others) the trade-union leaders, whose support the DSA was banking on, failed to lend their support, and aside from Ron Dellums in the Bay Area, the DSA devolved into an organization of long-in-the-tooth ex-New Leftists and left-talking trade-union bureaucrats, until the past few years pushed its membership north of 50,000, and its median age roughly millennial.

    So what does a socialist/leftist of any stripe do about this behemoth of an organization that isn’t leftist in any meaningful sense — even the crappy sort of continuous sell-out leftism of the Irish Labour Party variety — but nevertheless fills that space in a first-past-the-post system that naturally generates two main parties?

    Moreover, what are the chances of doing so in a political landscape that hasn’t seen a new major party emerge since the Republicans first ran John C. Frémont for president in 1856? This gets us to a dilemma facing any practitioner of reform politics in the United States: do you go into one of the old Parties and try to take it over from within, or do you set up a third party to oppose both the Democrats and Republicans?

    There are several advantages, at least perceived, of taking over an established party. In the first place, you already find an infrastructure. There is a central fund, precinct captains, name recognition. Many people vote out of habit, too, so habitual Democrats might well continue voting Democrat in spite of more radical candidates.

    Starting from scratch and taking on deep-seated traditional loyalties, moreover, can be daunting. The two major American political parties, after all, have remained a constant since the Civil War. Taking them on has not proven terribly easy, with the single-best showing for a third-party socialist candidate to date being that of Eugene Debs, who won 900,000 votes in 1912, which sounds impressive until one realizes that was roughly 6% of the total.

    The problems with capturing one of the two major parties for an insurgent political movement, though, flow from this same strength. Though the Democrats and Republicans are, to a certain degree, malleable, they are — and were — nonetheless well-established institutions. Taking them over was easier said than done. If one managed to capture either major party, one would probably not capture it all at the same time. Donations can dry up — or be used to win over politicians to return to the fold.

    Moreover, the considerable bureaucracy of each party can be wielded against internal dissent. Ask Bernie Sanders. Getting one’s own candidates nominated is only part of the battle.

    The creation of a third party has one considerable advantage, notwithstanding the need to create new machinery in the face of deep-seated party loyalties. Importantly, you retains control of your message. The party discipline affecting your elected officials is your own concern. Still, gaining and maintaining ballot access is fiendishly (and deliberately) difficult. When a reform-minded third party does shows up in mainstream debates it is usually as a swear word in the mouth of Democrats, who say you robbed them.

    This outrage, notably directed at Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016, is contemptible, particularly given the outrage, both muted and open, emanating from the establishment liberal punditocracy at Bernie Sanders running as a Democrat even though he isn’t a real Democrat! (Cue ugly crying, specious accusations of misogyny and racism, and behind-the-scenes machinations with the Clinton campaign.)

    If one works within the Democratic Party, one is engaging in a hostile takeover; if one works outside it, one is a spoiler. The nabobs of liberalism are, naturally, opposed to both because they are opposed to any kind of anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist politics.

    Seth Ackerman, writing in Jacobin, proposed something of a both/and strategy in an article entitled ‘A Blueprint for a New Party’. Noting that the Democrats, and Republicans, unusually for political parties in much of the world, are not really ‘parties’ in the way most people, most places think of such entities. He deserves to be quoted at length:

    Beneath our winner-take-all electoral rules, we also have a unique — and uniquely repressive — legal system governing political parties and the mechanics of elections. This system has nothing to do with the Constitution or the Founding Fathers. Rather, it was established by the major-party leaders, state by state, over a period stretching roughly from 1890 to 1920.

    Before then, the old Jacksonian framework prevailed: there was no secret ballot, and no officially printed ballot. Voters brought their own “tickets” to the polls and deposited them in a ballot box under the watchful eye of party workers and onlookers.

    Meanwhile, the parties — which were then wholly private, unregulated clubs, fueled by patronage — chose their nominees using the “caucus-convention” system: a pyramid of county, state, and national party conventions in which participants at the lower-level meetings chose delegates to attend the higher-level meetings….

    In the 1880s and 1890s, this cozy system was disrupted by a new breed of “hustling candidates,” who actively campaigned for office rather than quietly currying favor with a few key party workers. When informal local caucuses started to become scenes of open competitive campaigning by rival factions, each seeking lucrative patronage jobs, they degenerated into chaos, often violence.

    Worse, candidates who lost the party nomination would try to win the election anyway by employing their own agents to hand out “pasted” or “knifed” party tickets on election day, grafting their names inconspicuously onto the regular party ticket.

    Party leaders were losing control over their traditional means of maintaining a disciplined political army. Their response was a series of state-level legislative reforms that permanently transformed the American political system, creating the electoral machinery we have today.

    Ackerman’s argument is that with the state moving in to take over a key part of internal party life — the selection of candidates — via primaries, getting on the ballot if one is not in one of the major parties can be intensely time-consuming (This, however, depends to a degree on the state — as each one has different electoral laws).

    On the other hand, Ackerman acknowledges that the demands of a major party in regards to quid-pro-quo for any meaningful support can make that approach untenable too. Ackerman’s proposal for a new type of left-wing party also should be quoted at length:

    The following is a proposal for such a model: a national political organization that would have chapters at the state and local levels, a binding program, a leadership accountable to its members, and electoral candidates nominated at all levels throughout the country.

    As a nationwide organization, it would have a national educational apparatus, recognized leaders and spokespeople at the national level, and its candidates and other activities would come under a single, nationally recognized label…. In any given race, the organization could choose to run in major- or minor-party primaries, as nonpartisan independents, or even, theoretically, on the organization’s own ballot line.

    The ballot line would thus be regarded as a secondary issue. The organization would base its legal right to exist not on the repressive ballot laws, but on the fundamental rights of freedom of association.

    This is a deft, if perhaps conjunctural way around the problem — ballot party is explicitly not one’s real party. The challenge, though, is in the implementation.

    The case of DSA member and presumptive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is instructive. After scoring an upset against Queens Democratic Party satrap, and heir apparent to Nancy Pelosi, Joe Crowley, Ocasio-Cortez, an intelligent, charismatic twentysomething who, with the septuagenarian Sanders has become the face of ‘democratic socialism’ in the United States, seems at times unclear as to whether she is in the first place a Democrat or member of the ‘movement’ that propelled her to success.

    Upon being confronted on her entirely decent statement against the Israeli occupation of Palestine this July, she backtracked into wishy-washy and vague formulations like: ‘Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes. Oh I think — what I meant is that the settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes…’ and ‘I am not the expert at geopolitics on this issue. I am a firm believer in finding a two-state solution on this issue, and I’m happy to sit down with leaders on both of these — for me, I just look at things through a human-rights lens, and I may not use the right words. I know this is a very intense issue.’

    This is not, as many pundits both rightist and centrist have intimated, a matter of the pretty young lady not knowing what she is talking about. It is a matter of trying not to piss off the AIPAC-aligned majority of the Democratic Party, while not entirely throwing the Palestinians under the treads of a Merkava tank.

    In its own way, just as gratuitous was AOC’s slobbering Tweet when pro-war, corporate greedhead and all-around shitbag John McCain finally slipped this mortal coil. To wit: ‘John McCain’s legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service.’ Why don’t you tell us about how Princess Diana is ‘the People’s Princess,’ and a veritable ‘candle in the wind’, while you’re at it?

    The question of orienting towards a party whose leadership views even mild reforms such as single-payer healthcare and maybe taking, you know, a pass on a few of the major imperialist clusterfucks of the past nigh-on two hundred years has been a fraught one for the left for almost as long as there has been an American left.

    The AOC case illustrates that while being a self-described democratic socialist and having a (D) next to your name on television may not be mutually exclusive in an absolute sense, it is in tension. We shall see how she and a handful of other elected DSA members handle this, with some hope, and no small apprehension. It has gone horribly wrong before.

  • Steve Bannon’s Tour de Farce

    Donald Trump’s former confidante Steve Bannon has been on a latter-day American Grand Tour around Europe. But rather than making his peace ‘With learned Italian things / And the proud stones of Greece’, he embarked on an ideological excursion through the newly constituted enclaves of extreme right wing Populism; spreading a gospel on behalf of his erstwhile ally Mr. Trump, who unceremoniously dumped him last year.

    At one level this is a rapprochement with a mentor, who he praises gushingly when given the opportunity, and also an exercise in lobbying on behalf of the corporate interests he serves. All of this is treated as Populism, which originated as a recognition of the socio-economic rights of the working class.

    The U.S. Populist Party was a movement of the 1890s, involving Midwestern and Southern farmers and some labour unions, which denounced an economic system in which the fruits of the toil of millions has been stolen to build colossal fortunes for a few. It was also laced with religious fundamentalism. This latter is also an important ingredient to the Trump formula too: the rights of the poor are ultimately subordinate to the Never Never Land promise of an afterlife. Some consider Trump a latter-day Nebuchadnezzar, ‘sent by God to wreak vengeance on an idolatrous and wicked people’.

    In Europe Populist movements have also been left wing, and even Communist: including the Popular Front governments of France and Spain during the 1930s, which ultimately succumbed to Fascist invasions. Mr Bannon pretends to be unconcerned whether Populism is of the Right or Left; although Mussolini, who he praises for his virility, was also in some respects a Populist, having begun his political journey as a socialist.

    Usage was revived, erroneously, in the 1950s to describe the ‘Populist’ anti-Communist ‘witch hunt’ of Joseph McCarthy, reflecting how Populism had drawn closer to an appeal to prejudice and selfish sectional interest.

    On his recent tour Bannon sang the praises of recently elected Populist governments in Italy and Hungary, some of whom bear more than a family resemblance to fascists. Power to the people. As long as they vote for us of course.

    I – Ordinary Working Joe

    Bannon paints a picture of conflict in broad brush strokes, between a global elite and the Ordinary Working Joe. A distinction is drawn between populist nationalism, and the global establishment of what he terms ‘crony capitalism’.

    This passage from a recent Vanity Fair interview puts this in perspective:

    Bannon’s blue-collar upbringing and conservative Catholic faith undergird his populist ideas. He argues that his platform of economic nationalism has been misrepresented by critics that label it racist. Cutting immigration and erecting trade barriers will help people of color by tightening the labor market, thereby raising wages. In the White House, he argued to increase tax rates on the wealthy and has problems with the G.O.P. tax plan (although he ultimately supports it). Bannon also argued to end the country’s decades-long entanglement in Afghanistan and spend the money at home. “You could rebuild America! Do you understand what Baltimore and St. Louis and these places would look like?” And he told me he thinks the government should regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. “They’re too powerful. I want to make sure their data is a public trust. The stocks would drop two-thirds in value.

    I was reminded of the famous description of Richard Nixon being about as honest as a three dollar bill, and, as Noam Chomsky puts it: ‘language in the service of propaganda’.

    Let us ascertain what Steve Bannon is really saying: he wants national sovereignty reasserted against the global elite, but curiously Populist governments, such as his own, tend to favour the global elite in their tax programmes.

    There is ample resistance in Europe to transnational corporations, so Bannon’s real mission appears to be to retain European markets, and undermine the European Union, which brings unnecessary encumbrances to the interests of his sponsors: American elite capitalism; his cronies; his global elite; his gang.

    The real objection is to those global elites that threaten the agenda of Goldman Sachs and transnational U.S. capitalism. He does not appreciate the “crony capitalism” of those elites that are not his cronies.

    Superficially he favours the working man and protection of indigenous citizens. Meanwhile his mentor, after riding a wave of blue collar support, displayed his gratitude by dismantling ‘horrible’ Obamacare, ironically affecting his own constituency far worse than Democrat voters.

    By reneging on the Paris Climate Change agreement, and placing industry ‘yes men’ in the EPA, Trump and Bannon may precipitate another Dust Bowl in Middle America; creating new Grapes of Wrath, and accelerating the destruction of blue collar America, which voted for him under false pretenses.

    In the words of Zizek the working class are being sold ‘ideological misidentification’, which Marx understood as a form of brainwashing to vote contrary to one’s interests.

    II – The Scapegoat

    How better to pander to the working class than by invoking the threat of a Satanic Other, or enemy within, such as the Jews were defined by the Nazis. Today we have undocumented aliens stealing ‘our’ jobs, or foreigners polluting ‘our’ gene pool.

    Bannon emphasises sovereignty and economic autarky, but this should not prevent the free flow of ethnically-diverse American business people – commonly referred to as ex-pats – from selling into European markets.

    On the other hand, the surplus populations of the Global South and those fleeing war zones such as Syria – which he expressly invokes in the context of Hungary – are to be stopped at the borders and their human rights annihilated. The quid pro quo for adopting U.S. economic norms is that populist European states can maintain their ethnic cleanliness.

    Syrian refugees strike at the platform of Budapest Keleti railway station, September 2015.

    Their exile is of course the responsibility of the Military Industrial Complex that Bannon serves, which destabilised the Middle East. Although he criticises Bush and the GOP establishment, one wonders how much of this is a smokescreen.

    Those legal Hispanic and working class Blacks workers that are pandered to will be abandoned when their American Dreams turn to nightmares. They will remain poverty-stricken, working longer hours for less, without health insurance or pension entitlements: a source of cheap labour. ‘Power to the people’ is a carefully constructed ruse. They will have no power and be told what to do.

    Critical media has to be aligned with Globalised capitalism, or treated as an enemy of the people. They cannot be allowed to speak the truth to power, or at least to Mr Trump. Such people do not answer questions which are asked of them because they avoid them.

    Mr Bannon speaks and writes in carefully-crafted soundbites and pseudo-intellectualisms, which do not stand up to serious scrutiny. His new-found Populist narrative requires Bannon to ignore his long association with the handmaiden’s of globalisation, Goldman Sachs, while Trump’s administration comprises an assortment of cronies from the global elite.

    Ideological opposition to NAFTA, which serves certain U.S. interests, does not extend to supporting the EU’s current stance on the TTIP, which would allow American and other corporate interests to override national sovereignty, and sue the living daylights out of national governments and small businesses.

    Steve Bannon is against radicalisation, which is given an etiolated definition as anything that exposes his agenda. The new radicals he despises are liberal professors, human rights activists and journalists who expose the horrendous economic and environmental effects of neo-liberalism. In short, those who speak candidly on the media, and cannot be bought.

    The new generation of soft-skilled snowflakes cannot be exposed to what the likes of Steve Bannon has in store for them. They must be compliant and vote for the Right candidates. Self-immolation of the innocents.

    Interestingly, Bannon is now appealing to Bernie Sander’s constituency, as Sanders is the real deal and must be neutralised, and his ideological clothes appropriated. For a genuine Populist to represent working class interests would be disastrous.

    Bernie Sanders, the real deal.

    III – Calling a fascist a fascist

    In a very sinister way Steve Bannon talks about the inherent dangers of biotechnology and artificial intelligence and the challenges it presents. Yet he and his eccentric billionaire friend Robert Mercer have used artificial intelligence in Climate Change Denial through the Heartland Institute.

    Mercer funded Cambridge Analytica, whose advertising played on people’s emotions having profiled them to good effect, a key strategy in orchestrating Trump’s electoral success.

    Bannon opposes artificial intelligence and robots as China has stolen a march on his Capitalist cronies. He wants his artificial intelligence and his robots.

    I regard Steve Bannon as an ubermensch fascist who believes in Social Darwinism, and the control of the worker by the insanely rich. He does not care a jot about the working class, save as objects of exploitation to be duped.

    He is a shameless transnational capitalist, and only opposes it when regulation (referred to as red tape, as if polluting a river is just a matter of red tape) challenges his interests. He is a demagogue, who preys on the insecurities and prejudices of the working class to buttress his faction.

    He is aware of an impending environmental and economic meltdown, and is recommending compounds for the mega rich, who expect to be enriched further through his propagandistic grand tour to the now proto-fascist and compliant enclaves of Italy, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

    He is even more dangerous than Trump because he is cleverer, his rhetoric a disturbing marriage of psycho-babble and neo-liberalism.

    What is needed to counteract him is what he despises: fearless criticism, and genuine Populism divorced from religious fundamentalism. This is coming from Bernie Saunders, NGOs, human rights activists and anyone who still believes in a liberal education, the Rule of Law, and sees the dangers inherent in an appeal to the mob.

    *******

    The aspiring Emperor Bannon has no clothes, and offers hope in the manner of a quack doctor or false messiah.

    Behind the toxic combination of Neoliberalism and demagoguery, the presentation of relativistic half-baked shibboleths, is what Chomsky describes as the most dangerous organisation on earth: the right wing of the Republican Party, controlled by religious maniacs envisaging the end of days.

    Steve Bannon is of course carefully providing escape hatches for the mega rich to weather the coming storm in compounds away from the Populist mob, which they simultaneously exploit and undermine.

    Death on the installment plan, as mortgage owners in Ireland find out, or as George Orwell put it: How the Poor Die.

  • Inside the Heartland of Italy’s La Lega

    At the age of sixteen, in 2001, I took a job in a small factory which built appliances in Cardano al Campo, near Milan’s Malpensa airport. I worked there for four years.

    As with the majority of the manufacturing industries in the area, including the spring-making factory I had worked in the previous year, it was a family-run, small enterprise, with just a handful of clients. Much of the machinery dated from the first half of the twentieth century. Fortunately, as it turned out, they had invested in modern machinery that would allow them to diversify their offerings, and therefore survive the global economic crash, from 2008.

    I vividly recall the three newspapers that were delivered to the factory each morning: the Sole 24 Ore, the Italian equivalent of the Financial Times; La Prealpina, a local newspaper; and La Padania, the mouthpiece of the then rising Northern League (Lega Nord), which was allied at that time with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.

    I also remember my colleagues being outraged at the protestors defending Article 18, which governs labour rights, despite this being to their benefit. I heard comments such as ‘they are mainly students with nothing better to do than going about shouting in the streets and smashing shop windows.’

    Back then Northern Italy was still one of the most prosperous regions in the world, and probably still is. From 1979 to 1998, Italian industrial production actually outpaced Germany’s by more than ten per cent, and most of that was in the North. But when the crisis struck businesses similar to the one I had worked in began to cascade like dominoes.

    In that factory’s industrial district more than half of the businesses folded within five years. Today in their place are parking lots for Malpensa airport.

    II – Separatism

    Italy is a country with strong regional identities, although separatism has been rare throughout its history, apart from sporadic outbursts in Sardinia, Sicily and small Alpine enclaves of German speakers.

    When the Northern League emerged in the early 1990s it captured a lot of support in my region. The then leader Umberto Bossi was born in nearby Cassano Magnago.

    As the first cracks of an unsustainable economic model were becoming apparent – well before the earthquake hit – mistrust and cynicism towards the political establishment had become widespread. This was especially apparent among the working class in the kind of businesses that I worked for, which formed the backbone of the region’s, and arguably the nation’s prosperity.

    In the beginning the Northern League called for a federal model of government, inspired by nearby Switzerland, but the leadership soon became outspoken in their separatist aspirations. This was, however, quite different to nationalist movements elsewhere, such as in Sardinia, as the Northern League ceased to be a genuine threat to the territorial integrity of the country once they entered the labyrinth of national politics.

    Blaming Italian society’s ills on an enemy within was their main tactic for gaining support from the beginning: the corrupt political class from Rome, Roma Ladrona, the lazy Southerner and the parasitic Roma community were convenient scapegoats, at a time when political discourse had been coarsened under Berlusconi’s dominance.

    The Italian economy began to fragment in the wake of joining the euro, which did not allow for the periodic currency devaluations that had kept the country competitive. The government failed to control the price of consumer goods after the changeover, while salaries remained static. This eroded significantly the purchasing power of households.

    As the global banking system imploded, and businesses migrated to distant countries with lower labour costs, fortunes were lost, savings dried up and many were left unemployed. This coincided with a rapid rise in immigration; first from Eastern European countries such as Albania, then later from Africa and Asia.

    Almost overnight Italy became a multicultural society, and government services, especially in housing and education, were not prepared for the influx.

    The migrants who settled in Italy became symbolic of the global forces that had proved so ruinous to many. They became the new target for the Northern League, which under Matteo Salvini conveniently buried its difference with the South of Italy, re-branding itself as simply the League (La Lega), and finding new scapegoats.

    III – The New Government

    As I worked in the factory I managed to complete my high school education by night, which gave me the opportunity to travel and gain a greater perspective on the world. But I recognise from my region the kind of talk about foreigners that I hear now from Salvini, and others.

    How do we explain the rise of Salvini? In the last election his party emerged as the third largest in the country and the main party of the Centre-Right alliance, which included Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and other Centre and Right wing parties.

    After discussions which took months, an agreement was reached to form a government between the largest party, the Five Star Movement (M5S), which had insufficient representatives to form one alone, and the League. Crucially, Salvini was allowed to become Minister of the Interior, where he is in a position to implement xenophobic policies.

    Salvini seems to understand that power is increasingly located in the social media space and below-the-line commentaries on newspaper articles and videos. One tolerant commentator might find himself against ten online reactionaries, who in their normal lives may have a quite peaceful disposition. This kind of short-attention-span politics is an ideal breeding ground for racist stereotypes and armchair experts.

    When Salvini says we need to repatriate five hundred thousand illegal immigrants he receives a wave of online endorsement, despite this being a remote possibility without outrageous human rights violations being perpetrated.

    Likewise, he says that we will expel all illegal ‘Roma’, but ‘unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian ones’. The key word here is “unfortunately.”

    Of course it might just all be hot air. But he has tapped into an angry mood.

    III – Migrations

    I have been living beyond the borders of my native Italy for fourteen years now, but I am still transfixed by our dysfunctional politics as much as the next Italian, and have access to the world’s media. I have witnessed how state institutions fail and even persecute people, and could tell stories that only Italians would believe.

    Like many among my generation, born in the 1980s, I had begun to despair that politics would continue to be dominated by corrupt elites – complicit or just plain lazy members of the public administration –  and mafias with tentacles extending throughout every aspect of the Italian economic system.

    At the same time, Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire seemed to have made pulp out of our collective brains. His Forza Italia party took over from the Christian Democrats and the Craxian left-wing faction as the dominant force after the Mani Pulite (clean hands) scandal in the 1990s. But real power lay with global elites and organised crime.

    Not even the vestiges of our great civilisation and the Rule of Law could actually bring down Berlusconi. It was left to the European Community to deliver the coup de grâce. In return Italy was sentenced by its European partners to perma-austerity. Guess what: Berlusconi is still alive and kicking.

    Italy has been the first port of call for the majority of Africans seeking to make Europe their home, and they have been prevented from moving further afield due to the unfair Dublin Regulation of 2014. Many new arrivals have been reduced to virtual slave labourers, or become entangled in the mafias of the South.

    Meanwhile, in order to stanch the flow, the Italian government, along with its European partners-in-crime, entered into an agreement with the Libyan authorities, which has led to the establishment of internment camps for aspiring migrants, where NGOs report appalling abuses. Just last week, the European Community agreed to attempt to build further reception centres around Africa, and even within Europe. But reception of refugees by another state is on a voluntary basis, meaning nothing of any consequence will happen.

    The Trumpian use by Salvini of the migrants aboard the rescue ship the Aquarius as political pawns was an absolute disgrace, but it is worth bearing in mind that what we are not hearing about in the news is probably worse. Every minute of uncertainly for every migrant creates further unnecessary suffering.

    There are no easy solutions to the problems faced by Italy, and Europe. Migrants are entering what is already a densely populated country with an ineffective government. The absence of adequate accommodation makes migrants more visible, and an obvious target.

    George Soros is a hate figure for many Italians because of his support for migrant rights. But his proposal for the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for Africa makes a lot of sense. It would also be useful for Italians to understand that the country’s declining birth rates mean the economy will soon need more workers. But short-attention-span-politics makes that argument difficult to make.

    The hateful message of Salvini grows more powerful by the day.

    V – The Cuckoo in the Nest

    The emergence of the M5S seemed to offer the hope of revolutionary change in Italian society and politics. I followed Bebe Grillo’s blog from its inception, and it was a breath of fresh air, although I did not agree with everything he had to say.

    The appeal of M5S is analogous to the League’s. It is Populist, reflecting, right or wrong, what ordinary people think. In particular it challenges the elites.

    The question is whether the alliance which the M5S has entered into with the League is a pact with the Devil. But it was the only conceivable way for a government to be formed, once the Democratic Party stubbornly refused to enter negotiations to form a coalition. That party’s credibility faded when they embraced the politics of perma-austerity, and the sight of former leading figures like Elena Bosci cavorting with Berlusconi fills most left-leaning Italians with disgust.

    Recent polls and local election results show clearly that the big winners of the coalition have been the League, who are now the most popular party in the country. The Guardian has even referred to Salvini as Italy’s de facto prime minister, which only serves to bolster his legitimacy.

    But this is not true, and I remain hopeful that aspects of the M5S’s policies will be implemented, such as tackling the ridiculously high pensions awarded to retired officials. Grand infrastructural projects costing billions of euros, such as the Lyon to Turin high speed rail, which bring few benefits to the working class, may also be shelved. Perhaps too they can set about cleaning up the toxic poisoning of places such as Terra dei Fuochi, and just maybe challenge the extensive networks of organised crime.

    However, the agreement entered into between the parties is highly aspirational, ranging from a regressive plan for a flat tax and a guarantee of a basic income for all Italians.  It is difficult to see the government lasting very long, and the worry is that Salvini, with the wind in his sails, emerges as the big winner. Like the cuckoo in the nest.