We need an alternative to Trump's nationalism. It isn't the status quo

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 23, 2017 at 11:20:07 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] We need an alternative to Trump's nationalism. It isn't the status quo
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> We need an alternative to Trump's nationalism. It isn't the status quo
> The answer to neoliberalism’s Waterloo cannot be a retreat to barricaded nation-states and the pitting of ‘our’ 
> people against ‘others’ fenced off by high walls 
> By Yanis Varoufakis
> Jan 22 2017
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/22/trumps-nationalism-response-not-globalization>
>
> A clash of two insurgencies is now shaping the west. Progressives on both sides of the Atlantic are on the sidelines, 
> unable to comprehend what they are observing. Donald Trump’s inauguration marks its pinnacle.
>
> One of the two insurgencies shaping our world today has been analysed ad nauseum. Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine 
> Le Pen and the broad Nationalist International that they are loosely connected to have received much attention, as 
> has their success at impressing upon the multitudes that nation-states, borders, citizens and communities matter. 
>
> However, the other insurgency that caused the rise of this Nationalist International has remained in the shadows: an 
> insurrection by the global establishment’s technocracy whose purpose is to retain control at all cost. Project Fear 
> in the UK, the troika in continental Europe and the unholy alliance of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the 
> surveillance apparatus in the United States are its manifestations. 
>
> The era of neoliberalism ended in the autumn of 2008 with the bonfire of financialisation’s illusions. The 
> fetishisation of unfettered markets that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan brought to the fore in the late 1970s 
> had been the necessary ideological cover for the unleashing of financiers to enable the capital flows essential to a 
> new phase of globalisation in which the United States deficits provided the aggregate demand for the world’s 
> factories (whose profits flowed back to Wall Street closing the loop nicely). 
>
> Meanwhile, billions of people in the “third” world were pulled out of poverty while hundreds of millions of western 
> workers were slowly sidelined, pushed into more precarious jobs, and forced to financialise themselves either through 
> their pension funds or their homes. And when the bottom fell out of this increasingly unstable feedback loop, 
> neoliberalism’s illusions burned down and the west’s working class ended up too expensive and too indebted to be of 
> interest to a panicking global establishment. 
>
> Thatcher’s and Reagan’s neoliberalism had sought to persuade that privatisation of everything would produce a fair 
> and efficient society unimpeded by vested interests or bureaucratic fiat. That narrative, of course, hid from public 
> view what was really happening: a tremendous buildup of super-state bureaucracies, unaccountable supra-state 
> institutions (World Trade Organisation, Nafta, the European Central Bank), behemoth corporations, and a global 
> financial sector heading for the rocks.
>
> After the events of 2008 something remarkable happened. For the first time in modern times the establishment no 
> longer cared to persuade the masses that its way was socially optimal. Overwhelmed by the collapsing financial 
> pyramids, the inexorable buildup of unsustainable debt, a eurozone in an advanced state of disintegration and a China 
> increasingly relying on an impossible credit boom, the establishment’s functionaries set aside the aspiration to 
> persuade or to represent. Instead, they concentrated on clamping down.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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