by Vladimir Danilov

 

After more than 19 years of its failed war against the Taliban, the Americans’ rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan is looking a lot like the situation in Saigon in 1975, following the US defeat in the Vietnam war. In addition to the departure of US troops, Washington is also saying there’s a possibility that it will be forced to evacuate its diplomatic staff from the country in the event of an escalation of anti-American aggression on the part of the Taliban (banned in Russia), and, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, as it’s already drawing contingency plans to do this.

As the Pakistani newspaper The Nation, points out, the Afghan national army, armed and ‘trained’ by the US, is abandoning its military hardware and weaponry to the Taliban at an alarming rate, with whole battalions retreating without putting up a fight in anticipation of the impending collapse of the government as US and NATO forces continue to withdraw their forces from the country. In the announcement on the withdrawal of troops, issued in April, Joe Biden, while recognizing that he is powerless to control the situation that has been caused by the US’s failed policies in Afghanistan, called on Russia, China, India and Pakistan to “step up” and do more to “support Afghanistan.”

General Austin S. Miller, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, has criticized Joe Biden’s policies in relation to the country and has admitted that the Taliban is launching increasingly large-scale operations throughout the country and may make an attempt to seize power despite its peace talks with the US. Speaking in Bagram air base in an interview with the US broadcaster ABC, Miller described the security situation in Afghanistan as unsatisfactory. He repeated his previous statement that he does not believe that any party is able to win in the country through military means. However, he added that things are getting dangerous, and “we are seeing the beginning of a situation which will not be good for Afghanistan”, with all the conditions for a revolution that may provoke a new wave of bloodletting in the unending Afghan conflict.

Following such a critical appraisal of the US administration’s policies, it is unsurprising that on July 3 Lloyd Austin, US Minister of Defense, clearly acting on instructions from the White House, announced General Miller’s removal from his post as leader of the mission in Afghanistan, and his replacement with General Frank McKenzie, head of the United States Central Command.

Meanwhile, on July 2 the last US and allied troops left Bagram, their key base located 60 km north-west of Kabul, and following its closure only about a thousand US troops remain posted in the country, tasked with guarding Kabul airport and the US Embassy. And according to the Associated Press their number may soon fall to about 650 (however, Washington has said nothing about the size of the US and NATO private military companies remaining in Afghanistan).

As the US and NATO troops depart, the Taliban (banned in Russia) forces have been scaling up their attacks and are clearly on the advance, gaining new territory day by day. Fearful of violence from the Taliban over the last few days soldiers from the government army have fled from their attacks and, on a number of occasions have been forced to seek safety across the border in neighboring Central Asia. For example, on June 22 more than 130 Afghan soldiers crossed over to Tajikistan following a battle against the Taliban, on June 23 more than 50 Afghan border guards and resistance fighters crossed over to Uzbekistan, while on July 5 more than a thousand soldiers from the government army crossed over to Tajikistan in search of refuge.

These border crossings and military activity by the Taliban in the country’s northern provinces have raised concerns in Central Asia, Russia and China. Among other leaders, Emomali Rahmon, president of Tajikistan, is currently involved in negotiations on this issue with Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, his counterparts in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. And on July 2 the heads of Afghanistan’s and Tajikistan’s Interior Ministries, Mirwais Nab and Muzaffar Huseinzod, met in Tashkent to discuss the situation in the north of Afghanistan.

In view of the current situation, the urgent evacuation of Afghan citizens who have been working with the US during its mission in Afghanistan was the subject of particularly heated discussion. According to Washington, they number approximately 18,000. Recently the US President Joe Biden emphasized that they would not be left behind. “They will be welcome here just like anyone else who risked their lives to help us,” he said during a visit to Washington by an Afghan delegation headed by President Ashraf Ghani. It is proposed that the Afghan interpreters and other staff be given Special Immigration Visas that would allow them to claim asylum status in the US. The US Congress has capped the total number of SIVs for refugees and migrants at 26,000, but in June Anthony Blinken requested that an additional 8,000 SIVs be approved for the Afghan staff. According to Bloomberg some 9,000 persons have already submitted applications for SIVs.

In response to the problems posed by the current situation, the USA recently contacted the leaders of three Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, asking them to commit to providing a temporary refuge to some 9,000 Afghan citizens who had assisted the US in the fight against the Taliban. As reported by Bloomberg Washington is hoping that these agreements will form part of a broader deal to establish further cooperation between the US and the Central Asian nations, which will cover issues relating to the regulation of the situation in Afghanistan.

The proposed agreement is clearly part of the US’s Plan B, which will allow it to retain a military presence in the region despite the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. The participants in the negotiations emphasize that the category of “Afghans who helped the US” is not restricted to technical staff in military bases, as might be assumed, but also includes members of independent local militias (or “Arbaki”) opposing the Taliban who were trained and armed by the US. They included fighters from local groups not reporting to the government and former militants from the Taliban and DAESH (both organizations are banned in Russia).

Washington has clearly learned from Turkey’s experience in Syria, and intends in the future to rely on these “new forces” in the region, which will form the core of an independent “Arbaki” militia force in the north of Afghanistan that will not owe allegiance to the government in Kabul, no longer supported by most Afghans. This new force will also serve to put pressure on the Taliban or other regional players should other countries such as China, Pakistan or China send troops to Afghanistan.

Naturally, these “new forces” would need bases in Central Asia, and while apparently trying to organize “refugee camps” the true goal of the US is to establish three military bases in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The US also wants to ensure that it has access to these facilities in order to provide humanitarian support, or so it claims – in reality it is likely that they will be used to coordinate the operations of the new Anti-Taliban League. These “camps” are also intended to serve as electronic intelligence centers, officially for the purpose of monitoring the situation in Afghanistan, but which could also be used to spy on Russia and China.

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have already informed Washington that they refuse to host US military bases, but the new “agreements” being promoted by the US still provide for the creation of bases, although under a different name.

Moscow and Beijing have rejected such proposals by Washington, and their opposition is quite natural as allowing the US to establish de-facto military bases and providing it with intelligence capabilities in Central Asia would be a serious breach of their obligations as members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).

The current situation is also complicated by the fact that the Central Asian nations have traditionally, and not without reason, feared incursions into their territory by militants and terrorist organizations from Afghanistan, or from the Middle East via Afghanistan. This includes not only the Taliban, but also Central Asians who have joined various terrorist or extremist organizations, including anti-Taliban groups.

The USA hopes to take advantage of the visit to Washington by Abdulaziz Kamilov, the Uzbekistan Foreign Minister, and Sirojiddin Muhriddin, his Tajik counterpart, to get the agreement signed. According to Bloomberg, Washington is insisting that those nations allow it to carry out intelligence operations from their territory – thus in effect using them as points of influence in the region following its withdrawal from Afghanistan.

To reassure Russia, China and the Central Asian nations themselves, the White House has stated that while applications for resettlement to the USA are being considered, other options for temporary asylum in third countries are also being considered. The locations proposed include the Pacific island of Guam. However, Washington has said nothing to the Central Asian nations or to anyone else about what will happen to those Afghans who are refused SIVs to stay in the US – by which time many Afghans will already be living in the so-called “refugee camps”.

The Central Asian nations, as well as Russia and China have expressed concern about the situation in Afghanistan.  China has a 76-kilometer border with Afghanistan, and in May Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, warned that the US’s “hasty withdrawal” from the war that is pulling Afghanistan apart will “severely affect the peace process” and “have a negative impact on regional stability”. On July 2 Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister reiterated his concern about the situation in Afghanistan, warning that DAESH (banned in Russia) jihadists were clearly gathering in the north of Afghanistan, and adding that Moscow would discuss this situation with its allies in the CSTO.

The rapid deterioration of the security situation has raised fears that the US is trying to get Russia, China and the former Soviet Central Asian republics, among others, mired in a long-drawn out conflict in Afghanistan.

Vladimir Danilov, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/07/07/why-is-the-us-creating-a-nexus-of-regional-instability-around-afghanistan/

 

Putin highly concerned after US pulls out troops from Afghanistan

31.05.2011 20:20 (Updated: 05.07.2021 19:02)

World » Former USSR

Moscow is prepared to provide both bilateral support and assistance to Tajikistan within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) due to the escalating crisis on the border with Afghanistan, President Vladimir Putin said.

 

The state of affairs in Afghanistan, which borders on Tajikistan, formerly a Soviet republic and currently a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS, has complicated recently after the withdrawal of US troops from the war-torn country. 

Putin discussed the question in a telephone conversation with Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, a message posted on the Kremlin's website said. 

Russia and Tajikistan are members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Under the terms of the CSTO, in the event of a threat to security, stability, territorial integrity and sovereignty of a party to the treaty, all CSTO member countries undertake to immediately put into operation mechanisms of joint consultations in order to coordinate their positions and agree on required assistance.

In addition, if a party to the treaty is attacked, all other members of the treaty shall provide necessary assistance, including military one, to the affected party. 

Russia has largest army base in Tajikistan

The Russian military is stationed on the territory of Tajikistan as part of the 201st military base. This is Russia's largest military base in a foreign state. The base is located in the cities of Dushanbe and Bokhtar. In 2012, it was decided that the base would remain in Tajikistan until 2042. Motorized rifle, artillery, reconnaissance, anti-aircraft missile and other military units are stationed on the base. An aviation group joined the Russian base in Tajikistan in 2015. 

The crisis on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan has escalated recently after the United States and its allies completed the withdrawal of their troops from Afghanistan, in particular from the main army base in the country - Bagram. The military contingent has been staying in Afghanistan since 2001. A small number of military personnel was left in the country to guard key facilities.

After the withdrawal of US and NATO troops, the Taliban movement (recognized as terrorist organisation in Russia, its activities are banned) went on a large-scale attack on government forces. The Afghan government announced national mobilization and started distributing weapons to volunteers.

The Afghan military fighting with the Taliban were forced to retreat towards the territory of Tajikistan.

Editor: Dmitry Sudakov

Читайте больше на https://english.pravda.ru/news/world/118072-putin_afghanistan/

 

assangex

 

ExxonMobil continues to fight efforts to tackle climate change in the United States, despite publicly claiming to support the Paris climate agreement, an undercover investigation by Unearthed has found.

A senior lobbyist for Exxon told an undercover reporter that the company had been working to weaken key aspects of President Joe Biden’s flagship initiative on climate change, the American Jobs Plan.

He described Biden’s new plan to slash US greenhouse gas emissions as “insane” and admitted that the company had aggressively fought early climate science through “shadow groups” to protect its investments.

Keith McCoy – a senior director in Exxon’s Washington DC government affairs team – told the undercover reporter that he is speaking to the office of influential Democratic senator Joe Manchin every week, with the aim of drastically reducing the scope of Biden’s climate plan so that “negative stuff”, such as rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions and taxes on oil companies, are removed.

Last week – after weeks of bipartisan talks – President Biden conditionally endorsed a scaled-back version of his infrastructure plan, which eliminates hundreds of billions of dollars of proposed support for climate initiatives.

During the undercover meeting, which took place via Zoom in May, McCoy suggested that Exxon’s public support for a carbon tax as its principal climate policy is an “advocacy tool” and “great talking point” that will never actually happen.

“Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that but it gives us a talking point that we can say, well what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,” McCoy said.

A second Exxon lobbyist, Dan Easley – who left the company in January after working as its chief White House lobbyist throughout the Trump administration – laughed when asked by an undercover reporter if the company had achieved many policy wins under Trump, before outlining victories on fossil fuel permitting and the renegotiation of the NAFTA trade agreement.

“The wins are such that it would be difficult to categorise them all,” he said, adding that the biggest victory was Trump’s reduction in the corporate tax rate, which was “probably worth billions to Exxon”.

Unearthed reporters posed as recruitment consultants looking to hire a Washington DC lobbyist for a major client and approached McCoy and Easley for meetings over Zoom. During the meetings, the undercover reporter asked about Exxon’s current and historical lobbying on environmental issues.

It is important to note that neither McCoy nor Easley were necessarily seeking a new job, but each was willing to talk and provide information to the purported recruiters.

Over the coming days, Unearthed, will also reveal:

• Claims that Exxon covertly fought to prevent a ban on toxic chemicals
• How Exxon is using its playbook on climate change to head-off regulations on plastic

California Congressman, Rep. Ro Khanna, told Unearthed: “For decades, fossil fuel companies have lied to the public, to regulators, and to Congress about the true danger posed by their products. Today’s tape only proves our knowledge that the industry’s disinformation campaign is alive and well. In the coming months, I plan to ask the CEOs of Exxon, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies to come testify before my Environment subcommittee. We can no longer allow Exxon, or any other companies, to prevent our collective action on the climate crisis.”

A spokesman for ExxonMobil said that the allegations put to them: “contained a number of important factual misstatements that are starkly at odds with our positions on a variety of issues, including climate policy and our firm commitment to carbon pricing.”

 

Denial and delay

Exxon claims to support global effort to tackle climate change, but it hasn’t always. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the company orchestrated a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign that manufactured doubt regarding the link between global warming and the burning of fossil fuels.

 

It did so through a concerted strategic communications and lobbying push, which provided fringe scientists who denied climate science with funding and a platform, via Exxon-placed op-eds, advertisements, and political briefings.

Exxon also helped to found and lead a powerful cross-industry group, the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), which spent tens of millions of dollars campaigning against a binding global climate agreement ahead of the 1997 UN climate summit in Kyoto.

The organisation spent $13 million dollars on one advertising campaign alone, aiming to weaken US support for an agreement in Kyoto.

The efforts were successful: the US Congress refused to ratify Kyoto and Exxon later lobbied the Bush administration to pull out of the protocol altogether. This left global efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions in tatters.

Fighting science

Exxon continues to deny having misled the public on climate change, and no serving Exxon executive has ever admitted that the company fought climate science to protect the company’s financial interests – until now.

McCoy told an undercover Unearthed reporter that although he didn’t believe Exxon had buried its own science, the company had cast doubt on the scientific consensus: “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science, absolutely not. Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments, we were looking out for our shareholders.”

The reference to “shadow groups” is likely to relate to a powerful network of think tanks and pressure groups through which Exxon fought both the science and political action on climate change. Between 1998 and 2014, the company spent at least $30 million funding climate denial groups, such as the Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Heritage Foundation.

This network played a critical role in shifting the Republican Party from a position of support for action to cut emissions in the 1980s to its near-total opposition to tackling climate change from the mid-1990s to today.

Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard University who has written a number of scientific papers on Exxon’s efforts to mislead the public on climate change, told Unearthed: “I don’t believe the company has ever publicly acknowledged its role in climate denial… to have active employees of the company acknowledge its past behaviour is significant and certainly relevant to ongoing litigation and investigations against the company.”

Supran continued: “The company has thrown up the straw man argument that they never hid or ‘covered up’ the science, but that’s never actually been our point. The point is that they misled the public about climate change by contributing quietly to climate science but loudly to promoting doubt about it, so what this person said seems exactly consistent with that.”

 

Read more:

https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/06/30/exxon-climate-change-undercover/

 

See also:

canada faces up to the reality of global warming...

 

not holding a hose...

 

the minister is wet behind the ears...

 

and many other comments on this website...

 

See also: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/06/30/bombshell-secret-footage-exxonmobil-lobbyists-sparks-calls-action-congress

 

assange

 

Neoliberalism Has Always Been a Threat to Democracy

BY

ALDO MADARIAGA

 

Neoliberalism has been with us now for more than three-quarters of a century. Since the Mont Pelerin Society’s efforts to reinvent old-fashioned liberalism in the 1940s, neoliberalism has taken various forms, be it the Chicago School and German ordoliberalism, the Pinochet-led Chilean coup of 1973, the Thatcher–Reagan revolutions, the IMF and World Bank–driven structural adjustments, or the European Third Way.

The topic of neoliberalism has produced a veritable cottage industry of commentary, which has only expanded in the last decade as pundits try to make sense of an increasingly contested and slippery term. Many of those who write about neoliberalism are now extolling what they believe to be its last waltz on the world stage: amid transformations brought about by the 2008–9 financial crisis, the rise of protectionist authoritarian governments, and the need for large-scale public policy solutions in the age of COVID-19, many have proclaimed that neoliberalism is indeed on its last legs.

But is that really the case? Or is neoliberalism simply lumbering on — in even more virulent forms?

As I have argued elsewhere, neoliberalism isn’t dying but is instead undergoing important transformations that make it especially dangerous for today’s democracy. Indeed, it’s this very threat to democracy that is the key to understanding neoliberalism’s resilience: its capacity to endure crises and rival systems is not so much a consequence of the enduring appeal of free markets and economic competition. Instead, neoliberalism has survived by altering the very foundations of our democratic institutions and organizations.

In doing so, neoliberalism has allied with forces — dictators and technocrats — equally contemptuous of democracy. This core aspect of the neoliberal project is what is setting the stage for a new breed of radical right leaders across the globe. Today, there is an emerging alliance between neoliberals and big capital drawing on the support of nationalists, social conservatives, and authoritarian populists. It is this alliance that may well pose one of the greatest threats to democratic politics.

Neoliberalism Is a Political Project

For many, neoliberalism is a set of economic ideas that touts the superiority of markets as a form of social coordination among individuals. Read in this way, the thinking is that neoliberalism is capable of seducing, convincing, and ultimately prevailing over rival ideas like state planning. For those who subscribe to this definition of neoliberalism, suggestions that the state is making a “comeback” are taken as proof that the pendulum is swinging back toward a social consensus that rejects neoliberalism.

 

Neoliberalism is thus commonly understood as the ideology that puts markets over states and individuals over societies. However, decades of research have proved what Philip Mirowski calls the “double truth” behind the neoliberal doctrine: while offering freedom of choice and liberation from oppressive state regulations, neoliberals were always aware of the need for a strong, very often coercive state.

This has meant two things. First, neoliberals were less interested in markets per se (and even less in market competition) than in what could be achieved through them. Though neoliberals usually aim to eliminate any state intervention that interferes with the free decisions of private enterprise, they are not opposed to allforms of state intervention. Neoliberals are, of course, less concerned with forms of state intervention that redistribute to core business groups (through generous tax exemptions or massive bailouts during financial crises) than they are with the kind of intervention that mandates redistributive measures for the working class. Similarly, neoliberals vow to extend markets and market logics to all forms of social and political life but are less concerned if this ends up leading to unfair competition or outright monopoly.

Second, it is now well understood that neoliberals need strong states to impose — and enforce — their free markets, even if it takes the form of outright repressive state measures.

Neoliberalism, then, is much more than just a set of ideas about free markets. It’s a political project that aims not only to reduce the power of the state but, more concretely, to undermine the efforts of any collective actor — be it states, labor unions, political parties — to interfere with the decisions of private enterprises. This project to alter the balance of power is the key to its resilience.

Neoliberalism Versus Democracy

To understand the relation between neoliberalism and democracy, we need to look to neoliberals’ age-old fear of the tyranny of the propertyless majority and the possibility that their democratic ambitions might impinge on economic liberty. James Buchanan, one of the most revered exponents of the neoliberal tradition, explained this neatly in his famous coauthored book, Democracy in Deficit.

 

There, his focus was not on free competition, proper market operations, or even on criticizing state intervention. It was on “the political institutions through which economic policy must be implemented.” Applying this logic, Jaime Guzmán, the mastermind behind Chile’s Pinochet-inherited political and economic architecture, reasoned that political institutions should be arranged in a way that “if the adversaries were to govern, they [would be] constrained to take actions not so different from those that one would desire.” As explained by Walter Lippmann, the grandfather of the Mont Pelerin Society, “the crux of the question is not whether the majority should rule but what kind of majority should rule.”

Neoliberalism constrains democratic politics by altering the balance of power among its supporters and opponents with the ultimate aim of constricting available space for politics and policy. From a study of neoliberalism and democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe, we can identify three concrete mechanisms at work.

 

The first involves creating a new business class by privatizing former state assets and allowing new business opportunities in the now deregulated sectors. It has long been held that the logic of dismantling the social state was all about maximizing efficiency and growth. However, in countries where neoliberalism has thrived, targeted privatization and deregulation primarily aimed to create or empower those businesses most likely to lend support to the broader neoliberal project.

This was especially the case in the financial sector, among competitive exporting firms and multinationals. Businesses with vested interests in neoliberalism’s perpetuity have used the structural advantage afforded them to push back against reformist attempts, ranging from taxation, industrial policy, and social measures to environmental and labor protections.

Second, neoliberalism has survived by keeping anti-neoliberal political forces from gaining a foothold. Neoliberalism’s assault on union organizations and collective bargaining rights is well documented. Less so is the way that our political institutions have been designed so as to block any credible political opposition. This has included increasing the power of the executive to circumvent more representative parliaments, the institutionalization of nonelected veto players able to overrule majority decisions, and more. The most successful of these tactics have been those affecting patterns of political representation, such as electoral engineering and gerrymandering.

This was the case in Chile, where in 1989 the electoral system and district magnitudes (the number of elected representatives in a given district) were designed in order to give the Right one-half of all representatives in parliament (up from its customary one-third). It was this move that kept the Left without representation for twenty years, while pushing the more moderate Left into a long-term alliance with centrist forces that watered down their otherwise reformist stances. Together with required supra-majoritarian thresholds to change basic features of Chile’s Pinochet-designed institutions, these actions were key in preventing any meaningful reform during four consecutive center-left governments during the 1990s and 2000s.

In other cases, efforts to limit representation included the outright disenfranchisement of large swaths of the population. This was the case in Estonia, where neoliberalism found common cause with the most radical expressions of the nationalist independence movement against the former Soviet Union. Neoliberals successfully exploited the Estonian people’s fears that the large Russian population in the country (about 40 percent in 1989) would block independence to leave ethnic Russians without voting rights. And they did so all while pushing through one of the most far-reaching neoliberal projects implemented in Eastern Europe.

As a consequence, those most hurt by these reforms either did not have the right to vote or voted on nationalistic, not socioeconomic, grounds. Eventually, this prevented the forming of social democratic forces capable of at least tempering the neoliberal onslaught, as was the case in most other Eastern European countries.

Finally, neoliberals have insulated policymakers from popular demands through what’s sometimes termed “constitutionalized lock-in,” meaning that key aspects of a country’s economic policy are kept out of reach of democratic deliberation, lest they be in Buchanan and Richard E. Wagner’s words, “left adrift in the sea of democratic politics.” Independent central banks and fiscal policy rules, for example, are key instruments in keeping monetary and fiscal policy away from democratic deliberation. Anchoring inflation as the key macroeconomic objective reduced the capacity of central banks to use monetary policy to soften economic crises and privilege employment considerations over price stability ones. Conversely, fiscal rules like balanced-budget procedures severely reduced government’s overall spending capacity. In addition, the establishment of high constitutional thresholds to change these arrangements locked key aspects of elected government’s economic policy tool kit out of their reach.

In neo-Gramscian terms, a multiparty social bloc rooted in specific business sectors has successfully defended the neoliberal project thanks to these concrete economic and institutional resources reducing the space available for politics and policy. And the direct consequence of this has been a stark decline in the representative character of our democracies.

Neoliberalism and Populist Reason

Considering neoliberalism’s hostile relation to basic democratic institutions, it is not hard to understand the elective affinity between neoliberalism and today’s radical populist right. In contrast to what Wendy Brown has argued, the radical right is not emerging “from the ruins” of neoliberalism but from the concrete possibilities that arise when the core tenets of neoliberalism are “hybridized” with populism.

In the 1970s to ’80s, neoliberal ideals were aligned with authoritarian doctrines to create some of the most sweeping reforms — and dictatorships — the world had ever seen.

How did this hybrid emerge? In the 1970s to ’80s, neoliberal ideals were aligned with authoritarian doctrines to create some of the most sweeping reforms — and dictatorships — the world had ever seen. Later, during the 1990s and 2000s, neoliberals conquered the hearts and minds of technocratic “third way” elites wanting to impose market discipline on irresponsible governments. Similarly today, the core principles of neoliberalism are prone to form alliances with the radical populist right.

These alliances are not based on a shared interest in market freedoms but on a common contempt for democratic politics and the perceived need to further limit representative democratic institutions (not to mention, an individualized conception of the social). Hence, despite claims that populism and neoliberalism are antagonistic tendencies, populist attempts to hamper basic democratic liberties and institutions actually reinforce neoliberalism’s antidemocratic project.

Almost everywhere, neoliberalism has been associated with enhanced executive authority and the delegation of democratic power to unaccountable bureaucratic institutions. Often, neoliberals have altered electoral systems and patterns of political representation to favor “economic liberty,” similar to how the radical populist right undermines democracy today.

The radical populist right does embrace a moralizing and nationalistic worldview, which would appear to be at odds with neoliberalism’s individualism and incredulous stance toward society in general. Whenever neoliberals have made appeals for broad social support, it has usually come in the form of the potential benefits of mass individual consumption brought about by freer markets. Populist mobilization, by contrast, has been said to re-politicize an increasingly apathetic and individualized society.

However, as Melinda Cooper’s research has shown, there are strong connections between neoliberalism and social conservatism. And as Wendy Brown reminds us, Hayekian-style neoliberalism aimed at protecting traditional hierarchies as much as it did economic liberties. Chief among these hierarchies were family values and the traditional division of domestic labor. This resonates strongly with the populist right’s drive to rally around the figure of the traditional family.

If we look beyond Western Europe and the founding OECD countries, the connections between neoliberalism and another core characteristic of the radical right, nativism, are nothing new. Nationalistic chauvinism was already present in the 1990s neoliberal-cum-populist leaders of Latin America and Eastern Europe, the paradigmatic cases being Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Lech Wałęsa in Poland — as well as Estonia.

What lies behind these elective affinities is an individualized conception of society that makes for easy appeals to a vacuous notion of “the people.” “The people,” in right-wing populism, is not a foundational unit of society nor is it based on a common set of bonds; it is constructed through an individual’s internal identification with the populist leader’s discourse. This is why Ernesto Laclau calls this construction an “empty signifier” that can be filled with a diversity of unspecific conservative, authoritarian, and nativist appeals. Observing the rise of a new type of radical right in 1960s Germany, the philosopher Theodor Adorno noticed precisely that their appeal rested not so much on ideas like the demos or the nation but rather on an individual’s authoritarian personality traits and a longing for authority and discipline. In that same sense, while the populist “re-politization of society” may lead to angry mobs, it does not give way to the type of organized collective power that the proprietor class truly fears.

In fact, populists have not empowered the workers they vow to protect, much less reduced the power of the business class in general, nor finance in particular. If anything, the alliance between neoliberals and populists seems to be about wresting control of the neoliberal project from third way technocratic elites: whereas third way technocrats may begrudgingly recognize the excesses of neoliberalism, increase social protections, and allow for greater accountability from technocratic bodies, true neoliberals understand that their project rests on the continued limitation of representative democratic institutions.

Neoliberalism’s alliance with the radical populist right is hastening the decline of democratic politics and stoking a desire for authority, order, and social conservatism, while also unleashing capital’s tendency toward unbounded accumulation. Whether neoliberalism and the radical populist right can manage to form a stable hybrid will depend on structural and institutional factors — that is to say, on politics. It is only once we recognize the concrete economic, political, and institutional mechanisms that make neoliberalism so resilient that we can begin to sketch some ideas about how to halt its forward march while defending democracy and equality.

 

Read more:

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/neoliberalism-democracy-populist-right

 

see also: https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/40983

 

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prison

 

by Nebojsa Malic

 

Protesters worldwide waving US flags as ‘symbol of freedom,’ I have bad news for you – it now stands for Snitch Nation

 

There is a special kind of irony at work when Cuban protesters demanding “freedom” are waving about American flags, while in the actual US, the government is rolling out retro-style repression in the name of Our Democracy. 

Large anti-government protests over the weekend saw Cubans chanting “freedom, food, vaccines.” The government blamed US “meddling” and decades-long blockade. One video from the protests showed someone holding up an American flag, prompting a Cuban-American commentator to declare, “Never forget what America represents to millions across the world.”

While some Cubans may think the US is a bastion of freedom based on the images and narratives that reach them from Miami, it’s not clear what is the excuse of many Americans who believe so in the face of observable reality.

Over the same weekend, conservative columnist James Bovard was out for a walk in a park near Washington,DC when he was warned – by men who looked like plainclothes police – that “photographing landmarks and the police are two warning signs of terrorists.”

“Having a scruffy beard is a third warning sign,” the impressively bearded Bovard replied, and they nervously laughed it off.

It wasn’t a laughing matter, though. On Sunday, the FBI tweeted out a call for “family members and peers” to “spot suspicious behaviors and report them” in order to “prevent homegrown violent extremism.” 

The actual resource they linked was barely repurposed from the Bureau’s playbook for countering Islamic State terrorists. The machinery built to wage the “global war on terror” has now been turned on the domestic population –  just as journalists like Glenn Greenwald had warned back in January.

This was right after the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. In the narrative of Our Democracy – which has apparently replaced the old American constitutional republic – that was an “insurrection” and the greatest threat to government ever. People who believe this – and they’re firmly in charge in Washington, even if the rest of the country may be slipping through their fingers – don’t care that facts go against their narrative. They’re determined to secure the power they worked so hard to “fortify,” after all.

The FBI’s call for family and friends to snitch to the government has been compared to the East German Stasi and its tactics, or the Soviet KGB. The resemblances are indeed spooky. Add to this the role of the US intelligence community in the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory – and sabotage of an elected government based on it – and the picture becomes, well, alarming.

It’s not just the US government being shady, either. Last week, Facebook started warning users about possible exposure to “extremist” content. What qualifies as such content? It can be anything, really, as the Menlo Park behemoth is keeping its definition vague. When you consider its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions to “fortify” the 2020 election, though, it’s not hard to guess.

Our Democracy is such a paragon of freedom that the same people who howled about walls and fences  being immoral and evil quickly put up a barrier around the Capitol after the January 6 riot – and kept it there for six months. The same people who denounced the calls for the National Guard to quell the deadly 2020 riots brought 25,000 troops to secure Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. The last of them didn’t leave until late May. 

All of these are tactics the US has itself denounced, as emblematic of systems that Washington had spent the better part of the XX century actively fighting around the world – including in Cuba. A special kind of irony, indeed.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/529024-snitch-nation-american-flag/

 

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