By Prof Michael Hudson
In the week leading up to last Tuesday’s election the press was
busy writing obituaries for the Republican Party. This continued even
after Donald Trump’s “surprising” victory – which, like the 2008 bank-fraud
crash, “nobody could have expected.” The pretense is that Trump saw what no
other politician saw: that the economy has not recovered since 2008.
Democrats still seem amazed that voters are more concerned
about economic conditions and resentment against Wall Street (no bankers
jailed, few junk mortgages written down). It is a sign of their wrong path that
party strategists are holding onto the same identity politics they have used
since the 1960s to divide Americans into hyphenated special-interest groups.
Obviously, the bottom 95 Percent realize that their incomes
and net worth have declined, not recovered. National Income and Federal
Reserve statistics show that all growth has accrued to just 5 percent of the
population. Hillary is said to have spent $1 billion on polling, TV advertising
and high-salaried staff members, but managed not to foresee the political reaction
to this polarization. She and her coterie ignored economic policy as soon as
Bernie was shoved out of the way and his followers all but told to join a third
party. Her campaign speech tried to convince voters that they were better off
than they were eight years ago. They knew better!
So the question now is whether Donald Trump will really a
maverick and shake up the Republican Party. There seems to be a fight
going on for Donald’s soul – or at least the personnel he appoints to his
cabinet. Thursday and Friday saw corporate lobbyists in the Republican
leadership love-bombing him like the Moonies or Hari Krishna cults welcoming a
new potential recruit. Will he simply surrender now and pass on the real work
of government to the Republican apparatchiks?
The stock market thinks so! On Wednesday it soared
almost by 300 points, and repeated this gain on Thursday, setting a DJIA
record! Pharmaceuticals are way up, as higher drug prices loom for Medicaid and
Medicare. Stocks of the pipelines and major environmental polluters are
soaring, from oil and gas to coal, mining and forestry, expecting U.S.
environmental leadership to be as dead under Trump as it was under Obama and
his push for the TPP and TTIP (with its fines for any government daring to
impose standards that cost these companies money). On the bright side, these
“trade” agreements to enable corporations to block public laws protecting the
environment, consumers and society at large are now presumably dead.
For now, personalities are policy. A problem with this
is that anyone who runs for president is in it partly for applause. That was
Carter’s weak point, leading him to cave into Democratic apparatchiks in 1974.
It looks like Trump may be a similar susceptibility. He wants to be loved, and
the Republican lobbyists are offering plenty of applause if only he will turn
to them and break his campaign promises in the way that Obama did in 2008. It
would undo his hope to be a great president and champion of the working class
that was his image leading up to November 8.
THE FIGHT FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S FUTURE (DARE I
SAY “SOUL”?)
In her Wednesday morning post mortem speech, Hillary made a
bizarre request for young people (especially young women) to become politically
active as Democrats after her own model. What made this so strange is
that the Democratic National Committee has done everything it can to discourage
millennials from running. There are few young candidates – except for corporate
and Wall Street Republicans running as Blue Dog Democrats. The left has not
been welcome in the party for a decade – unless it confines itself only to
rhetoric and demagogy, not actual content. For Hillary’s DNC coterie the
problem with millennials is that they are not shills for Wall Street. The
treatment of Bernie Sanders is exemplary. The DNC threw down the gauntlet.
Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party’s ranks,
the blame game is burning. The Democrats raised a reported $182 million
dollars running up to the election. But when from Russ Feingold in Wisconsin
and other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania asked for help.
Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the lurch.
The election seemed to be all about her, about personality and identity
politics, not about the economic issues paramount in most voters’ minds.
Six months ago the polls showed her $1 billion spent on data
polling, TV ads and immense staff of sycophants to have been a vast exercise in
GIGO. From May to June the Democratic National Committee (DNC) saw polls
showing Bernie Sanders beating Trump, but Hillary losing. Did the Democratic leadership
really prefer to lose with Hillary than win behind him and his social
democratic reformers.
Hillary doesn’t learn. Over the weekend she claimed
that her analysis showed that FBI director Comey’s reports “rais[ing] doubts
that were groundless, baseless,” stopped her momentum. This was on a par with
the New York Times analysis that had showed her with an 84 percent
probability of winning last Tuesday. She still hasn’t admitted that here
analysis was inaccurate.
What is the Democratic Party’s former constituency of labor
and progressive reformers to do? Are they to stand by and let the party
be captured in Hillary’s wake by Robert Rubin’s Goldman Sachs-Citigroup gang
that backed her and Obama?
If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move.
The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim
was to persuade voters not to think of their identity in economic terms,
but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and
foremost, not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract
voters from economic policies has obviously failed.
It did not work with women. In Florida, only 51
percent of white women are estimated to have voted for Hillary. It didn’t even
work very well in ethnic Hispanic precincts. They too were more concerned about
their own job opportunities.
The ethnic card did work with many black
voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted for Hillary than had
showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight
years, blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other
grouping, according to the Federal Reserve Board’s statistics. But black voters
were distracted from their economic interests by the Democrats’ ethnic-identity
politics.
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they’re
being lied to. After eight years of Obama’s demagogy, pretending to
support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on
Wall Street. “Identity politics” has given way to the stronger force of
economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program
will no longer work.
If we are indeed experiencing a revival of economic class
consciousness, who should lead the fight to clean up the Democratic Party Wall
Street leadership? Will it be the Wall
Street wing, or can Bernie and perhaps Elizabeth Warren make their move?
There is only one way to rescue the Democrats from the
Clintons and Rubin’s gang. That is to save the Democratic Party from
being tarred irreversibly as the party of Wall Street and neocon brinkmanship.
It is necessary to tell the Clintons and the Rubin gang from Wall Street to
leave now. And take Evan Bayh with them.
THE DANGER OF NOT TAKING THIS OPPORTUNITY TO CLEAN OUT
THE PARTY NOW
The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on
economic issues – in a way that reverses its neoliberal stance under Obama, and
indeed going back to Bill Clinton’s pro-Wall Street administration. The
Democrats need to do what Britain’s Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony
Blair’s Thatcherites. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: “Change
cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution
against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution
by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and
every revolution has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and
Washington.”[1] Otherwise the Democrats will be left as
an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the
few other progressives who have not been kept out of office by the DNC to make
their move and appointing their own nominees to the DNC. If they fail, the
Democratic Party is dead.
An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party
leadership will fight against this change of allegiance is reflected in their
long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going back to Dennis
Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by
Hillary’s backer George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by
Bernie’s supporters, by backing Howard Dean for head of the DNC while
organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American “Maidan Spring.”
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their
Wall Street candidate Hillary than win with a reformer who would have edged
them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem was hubris.
Hillary’s coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that
hundreds of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters.
But eight years of Obama’s rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was
enough for most voters to see how deceptive his promises had been. And they
distrusted Hillary’s pretended embrace of Bernie’s opposition to TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing
Obama for the last two terms are not racist states. They voted for Obama
twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had lost faith in
her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama’s legacy. Last week’s vote
was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting Barack and Michelle Obama to
campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss of
death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to “save his legacy” by supporting
her as his Third Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the
banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance monopolies.
Most of all, it was Hillary’s asking voters to ignore her
economic loyalty to Wall Street simply to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like
accusations that Trump was “Putin’s candidate” (duly echoed by Paul Krugman).
On Wednesday, Obama’s former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that
“Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded.” It was as if the Republicans
and even the FBI were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to
cutting back Social Security and steering wage withholding into the stock
market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors.
Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people rise
as the main profit center that Obamacare has offered the health-insurance
monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn
look like a preemptive attempt to capture the potential socialist left for the
old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was defeated five
years ago when it tried to capture Occupy Wall Street to make it part of the
Democratic Party. It’s attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as
an urgent call to Bernie’s supporters and other “real” Democrats that they need
to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let “socialism” be
captured by the Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton
campaign.
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Notes.
[1] Paul Craig Roberts, “The Anti-Trump
Protesters Are Tools of the Oligarchy,” November 11, 2016.
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