Michael Hudson on the recent European elections:
The US press and newscasts make it appear that Europeans have voted against poor immigrants and foreigners. What they voted against the super-rich, the oligarchy. The “foreigners” being opposed include the United States insisting on drawing NATO into its wars in Libya,Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – and now, subsidizing Ukraine to confront Russia. The “nationalist” parties voted against the EU constitution written by the oligarchy to favor the banks against labor. It is a neoliberal constitution that prevents governments from running budget deficits of more than 3% of GDP – except of course to bail out banks and bondholders. It centralizes foreign policy in a US- and NATO-appointed bureaucracy of “technocrats.”
The US press characterized Sunday’s May 25 vote opposing this bureaucratic circumventing of democracy as a vote against “democratic Europe.” This is an Orwellian description of what happened.
….
This is not democracy. It is oligarchic extremism. And yet the anti-EU voters seeking to recover power for their national governments to run budget deficits to lower the unemployment rate below its current 10.5% is called extremist.
The underlying issue on May 25 was whether voters would support more economic austerity and privatization sell-offs. It is obvious that they didn’t.
They also didn’t want a new Cold War with Russia, or yet more contributions to NATO to support US unipolar world. So when the nominally Socialist parties joined with the right-center to support more financial austerity, and centralization of Eurozone policy in the hands of unelected bankers, they suffered a resounding defeat.
…
A century ago the socialist, labor and social democratic parties had an economic program. It included progressive taxation, taxation of land and natural resources, and public infrastructure investment so as to prevent monopolies from occurring. This included a public banking system.
Today, the left wing has reversed all these policies. Tony Blair led the British Labour Party to make a right-wing run around the Conservatives, even to the point of privatizing railways and the Public/Private Partnership giveaway to the City of London. In America, Bill Clinton abolished Glass Steagall and deregulated derivatives trade. Then Barak Obama achieved what a Republican president could not have done: He is leading the fight for the Trans-Pacific Partnership to dismantle financial regulation altogether, along with public environmental regulation. He has escalated the Cheney-Bush military policy seeking to grab foreign oil and gas resources, most recently in Ukraine where Secretary of State Kerry’s and Joe Biden’s families have taken a kleptocratic position in that poor country’s gas resources.
So where is the left?
Today’s political situation is much like 1968, when George Wallace – a “southern cracker” – was the only candidate talking about economic policy and urged withdrawal from Vietnam. He was shot.
via Michael Hudson
All true, and while it may be true that most Europeans were not voting against immigrants or foreigners, the only candidates on offer that are addressing their actual concerns are primarily interested in advancing a right wing agenda, which is very much, as always with the right, bottomed in racism. They can't cause too many problems if they hamstring the toothless European Parliament, but if the oligarchs do nothing about the recession (and they won't), then we can all look forward to a right wing lurch in European countries when it comes to voting for national Parliaments that do, indeed, have power.
It is truly amazing that our government, along with the European governments, seems oblivious to the dangers posed by the austerity regime. Cue John Fogarty.
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