The Fall of Cecil Rhodes and the Rise of Black Power in Africa

Veli Mbele

‘…anti-blackness more accurately captures the dehumanization and constant physical danger that black people face. The “anti” in “anti-blackness” is denial of black people’s right to life.’

– Michael Jeffries.

‘How we understand suffering and whether we locate its essence in economic exploitation or in anti-Blackness has a direct impact on how we imagine freedom; and on how we foment revolution’

– Frank B. Wilderson, III.

‘In South Africa, the passport of whiteness grants the holder rights to resources, privileges of learned ignorance to sustained racial injustice, acceptance as informal authority, as well as access to the benefits of a racially determined economic, political and social system. The system of racial injustice includes both the interpersonal racism but of even greater scrutiny is the system of exclusion that operationalizes the passport of white privilege’.

-Warren Phaahla

This essay seeks to examine the meaning of Cecil John Rhodes, 113 years after his death by looking at the following:

* His historical location within Europe’s global anti-Black white supremacist project;

* His family background and how he acquired ‘his’ fortune;

* The impact of the institutions he built, and the Glen Grey Act, on the status of Black people in South Afrika;

* His broad meaning to Black people, in historical and contemporary terms; and

* Situate the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ project within Black people’s historical quest for land repossession.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In a document called the Confession of Faith, Cecil John Rhodes says:

‘I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence; look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives. I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the future birth to some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence……’

He goes on to say:

‘Why should we not form a secret society with but one object: the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, and for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire?…Afrika is still lying ready for us; it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes: that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honorable race the world possesses…’

To appreciate and fully grasp the context of Rhodes’s thoughts, we must situate them within the broader context of Europe’s historically-evolved project of white supremacy. Like the Arabs, the Europeans had long identified Afrika’s natural resources and the bodies of Afrikans as crucial for their imperialist projects.

By the time the Trans-Atlantic slave trade started, almost 80 years before Columbus sailed to the Americas, around 1500, Portugal had extracted 700 tons of Afrikan gold, shipping it to Portugal and had kidnapped more than 80,000 of our ancestors into slavery. Afrikan men, women and children in chains were stacked on top of each other – on pallets in the holds of ships with the hideous stench of open pits of human waste.

One of the things that are rarely highlighted is that, as these ships sailed to the various slave plantations of the western world, hundreds of thousands of our ancestors died of disease or starvation, or were murdered for attempted resistance and thrown overboard. The ecology of the Atlantic Ocean was changed by the slave trade.

Schools of sharks would follow the slave ships to feed on the bodies of our ancestors who died and were murdered on board and thrown overboard. The trade in the bodies of Afrikans was the key ingredient in the triangular trade – bringing captives from Afrika as forced labour to the plantations of the Americas and transporting resources such as cotton, sugar, tobacco and rum to North America and to England.

Along with this assault on Afrika was the genocide against the indigenous people and the theft of their land and resources. This slaughter, genocide, rape and plunder of Afrika’s people brought unprecedented amounts of stolen wealth into Europe. This contributed immensely to the so-called industrial revolution and transformed Europe from feudalism to capitalism – not the ingenuity and innovation of Europeans as we are often told.

Therefore, a large portion of the economic wealth of today’s so-called First World European nations is a direct result of the bloody trade in the bodies of Afrikans or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘slave economy’. In fact, even the highly revered ‘founding fathers’ of the United States of America were brutal slave-masters, who orchestrated genocidal acts against the indigenous people of the U S. George Washington was known for his brutality and ‘owned’ more than 300 slaves, giving them meagre daily rations of a few ounces of grain and fish by-products.

WHERE DOES RHODES FIT INTO THIS NARRATIVE?

Fast forward to the 21st century. The month of March this year marks 113 years since the death of Rhodes. Rhodes’s posthumous reputation is just as complex and contentious as that of his life. This complexity and contention is evident in the debate that has been ignited by the rebellion of Black students at the Universities of Cape Town (UCT) and Rhodes against the perpetuation of Rhodes’s white supremacist legacy.

This rebellion by Black students has naturally elicited a number of reactions. Some of the reactions have been in the form of questions such as: are these students just a bunch of ignorant attention-seekers, who are hell-bent on spoiling the serene rainbow-nation facade of our country? Or are they a highly intelligent collective, who have a deep understanding of the ontology of Black people in the world as we know it? The other question that arose was: why should Black people in South Afrika (21 years into what others regard as democracy) be bothered by the statue of a white man from Europe, who died over hundred years ago?

I wish to add to these questions and ask: What would the consequences be for Black people if they were to choose to remain ignorant of the continued presence of the symbols of white supremacy in South Afrika?

Whatever our responses to the aforementioned and related questions, the presence of white supremacist symbols in our public and private spaces has a much more profound impact on our lives as Blacks than we can ever imagine – and this is also reflected in the contradictory responses that Blacks have offered to the protests against the symbolism of Rhodes.

WHO WAS CECIL JOHN RHODES?

Today, the name Cecil John Rhodes is more associated with academic and leadership excellence, scholarships and philanthropy. But is this really who Rhodes was? Born in 1853 in Bishop’s Stratford, England, Rhodes was an asthmatic teenager who during college vacations was regularly sent to ‘his’ brother’s cotton plantation in the Natal because the climate there was favourable for his condition.

Later, he and his brother became involved in the rush to exploit South Afrika’s diamond and gold deposits. Rhodes helped found the notorious DeBeers diamond cartel and at age 18, took over the diamond mines in the area that he and his imperialist cabal named Kimberley. By his early 20s he was a millionaire, but this didn’t stop him from furthering his imperialist project on our continent. By his 30s, he was a billionaire, and by 1891, he had amalgamated the De Beers mines under his control, giving him dominion over 90 per cent of the world’s diamond output.

He had also secured two other important positions. One was that of Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony. Addressing the House of Assembly in 1887, in Cape Town, he said:

‘…the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa’.

He also said: ‘I prefer land to niggers.’

His other position was that of President of the British South Africa Company (BSAC) – an organisation formed in 1889, along the same lines as the old slave–trading-land-stealing East India companies. In line with his ‘Cape to Cairo’ imperial vision, the BSAC orchestrated bloody land-grabs campaigns in Nyasaland (now Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Rhodes’s imperialist conquests in Southern Afrika are the direct cause of the anti-colonial land struggles waged by Blacks in the aforementioned countries.

Rhodes was both evil and visionary. He systematically used his stolen fortune to set up and inspire a number of white supremacist institutions, many of which are still in operation today. One such institution was the Round Table Movement. This Movement was used to set up what is today known as the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarship. To give these institutions legitimacy in Black eyes, in 2002, the name of Nelson Mandela was added to Rhodes’s scholarship and foundation, including naming a building in the Cape Town city centre after him and Mandela.

Rhodes’s Trust and Foundation were originally meant to recruit American and Commonwealth Anglophiles for imperialist projects in Afrika. The Round Table Movement later also spawned raw materials multinational giants such as Rio Tinto Zinc, Anglo-American, Lonrho and, of course, DeBeers. In this network, Lonrho is perhaps the most interesting of all these companies.

In May 1909, a mining conglomerate was formed in London and named the ‘London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company Limited’ or Lonrho in short. Note the specific mention of ‘Land’ and the fact that the name of this company contains the words ‘Rhodesian’- which is a derivative from ‘Rhodes’. Then in 1999, Lonrho changed its name to Lonmin. The latter as we know is the same company which in August 2012 connived with some within the leadership of the ANC to have over 34 Black workers killed-in defence of foreign-white monopoly capital.

Rhodes’s network of stolen wealth also helped set-up universities such as Rhodes, Witwatersrand, Pretoria and Cape Town. Rhodes University came into existence through a ‘donation’ from the Rhodes Trust, and UCT was built on land ‘donated’ by Rhodes. In fact, according to Rhodes’s architect, Herbert Baker, in reference to the building of UCT, Rhodes ‘proposed to build the university mainly from the profits – about £10 000 a year – of the Kaffir Compound System of De Beers Mines’ and joked that, ‘He meant to build the University out of the Kaffir’s stomach’.

Many of South Afrika’s ‘leading’ white universities have their genesis in the 1896 South African School of Mines in Kimberley, which under the direction of colonialists like Rhodes, Barnato, Southey, Lord Kimberley and others presided over Black genocide in South Afrika’s diamond- and gold-rich areas.

It should therefore not be surprising if the powerful interests that sustain universities like UCT, Wits, Rhodes, Pretoria, Stellenbosch or Free State – financially – resist the attempts to have white supremacist symbols like Rhodes removed from our public spaces. They are fully aware that these universities were built using stolen wealth and the blood of Black people, and their reason for existence was to bolster white supremacy in South Afrika. They also know that if Rhodes falls the other white supremacists (that are connected to other white universities) are also likely to fall.

WHAT IS RHODES’S LEGACY?

Rhodes paved the way for global capitalism and imperial expansion in Afrika in the 20th century. Today Rhodes is no more, but some of the imperial institutions and networks that he created persist, and the new imperialist institutions, which were created after his death, continue with his agenda of exploiting Afrika and her people.

One such institution is De Beers, which got its name from Diederik Arnoldus and Johannes Nicolaas de Beer. When Rhodes died, the De Beers diamond cartel was taken over by the Oppenheimer family. De Beers is a cartel which has a monopoly that controls every aspect of the diamond economy. De Beers controls not only mining but cutting, polishing, setting into jewellery, pricing and selling world-wide.

De Beers has spent millions of dollars on public relations campaigns that are aimed at giving the diamond trade this innocent and romantic image. This is all meant to conceal the dirty and bloody behind-the-scenes involvement of multi-nationals like De Beers in genocide, slavery, child labour and death, particularly in Afrika’s mineral-rich areas.

Some of the large gem-quality diamonds come from Sierra Leone, along with Angola, Namibia and Congo. De Beers was highly involved in the atrocities that took place in Sierra Leone and West Afrika in the 1990s. The concept of blood or conflict diamonds came about in reference to the brutal imperialist backed wars in Sierra Leone and West Afrika in the 1990s. As a survival strategy, the De Beers diamond cartel set up the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme that would supposedly determine if a diamond is ‘blood’ or ‘clean’ – essentially policing themselves.

The truth is that De Beers is the key figure behind the issue of blood diamonds. Under the ‘legitimate’ diamond mines of Sierra Leone – meaning that, in the De Beers and imperialist controlled mines – Afrikan miners are forced to work for almost nothing. Only a few workers actually get a salary from 30 cents to $2 a day. Yet according toForbes, Nicky Oppenheimer, the former Chairman of DeBeers and son of Harry Oppenheimer, is Afrika’s third richest man, with a net worth of $6.6 billion.

Like certain parts of Afrika, Sierra Leone has an abundance of natural wealth, yet today it is one of the most impoverished countries in the world. Most of the people live on less than a dollar a day. It has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world and the life expectancy for men is 38 years. Although the resources are on their land, the people of Sierra Leone are deeply impoverished. As in the rest of Afrika, the profits and benefits of Sierra Leone’s natural wealth go to Europe and North America.

Also, when the Revolutionary United Front of Foday Sankoh emerged in the 1990s, the people of Sierra Leone first thought they were fighting in their interests. They were horribly mistaken. The RUF was just another western-sponsored armed group that was fighting for the crumbs of the colonial plunder. They launched a brutal war against their own people – with about 50,000 murdered and tens of thousands of mutilations. It is believed that De Beers and Israel were the biggest benefactors of this proxy imperialist war.

In fact, diamonds have long played a role in entrenching neo-colonialism, through anti-Black violence in Afrika. De Beers and western foreign intelligence agencies used quislings like Jonas Savimbi and Mobutu Seseko to carry out a bloody project of white supremacy and capitalism in Afrika. With the connivance of US Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower, De Beers collaborated with the CIA to create a conducive climate for the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.

THE GLEN GREY ACT 1894

The legacy of Rhodes is not just palpable in the structure and function of South Afrikan and Afrikan economies but also in the persistence of Black landlessness. The position of the South Afrikan government that the critical moment in legislated Black land dispossession was 1913 is horribly misleading. The Native Land Act of 1913 was merely a perpetuation of the often ignored Glen Grey Act of 1894.

The Glen Grey Act, which was authored by Rhodes and his secretary, William Milton, was inspired by two commissions previously set up by the colonial government – the Cape Commission on Native Laws (1883) and the Glen Grey Commission (1893). It primarily sought to address three issues: land, labour and the franchise.

In practice, it provided for the division of all unalienated land in the district into locations. The locations were surveyed and divided into portions of about four morgens for each existing occupier and other claimants who were approved by the governor. Land could not be mortgaged and the remaining land was to serve as commonage. Alienation and transfer of land was to be approved by the governor.

There was to be no subletting or subdivision of the land and the principle of ‘one-man-one plot’ was to be applied. This Act was also influenced by the views of various colonial administrators in the Transkeian Territories and the Afrikaner Bond – all of which formed the basis for the Glen Grey Act. In essence, Rhodes’s view was that ‘natives’ must be treated differently from the Europeans. He claimed his intention, through this Act, was to: ‘give natives interest in the land, allow the superior minds among them to attend to their local wants, remove the canteens, and give them a stimulus in labour.’

He referred to the Glen Grey Act as the ‘Bill of Africa’ because he envisaged that it would be extended to cover not just the Transkeian territories and any district in the Cape Colony occupied by what he called an ‘aboriginal native’, but he ambitiously saw the Act being extended to other British colonies outside South Afrika.

The Glen Grey Act therefore systematically limited the number of Afrikan people who could live on and own their own land. It also pushed those who were deemed unqualified to acquire land to leave the area and look for work in farms or other forms of employment outside the Glen Grey District. This Act also implemented provisions to limit the number of Afrikans who qualified for the franchise.

However, the Glen Grey Act also saw gallant resistance from various freedom fighters from the Khoikhoi, San, amaXhosa and amaZulu. This resistance was inspired by preceding anti-colonial wars that were waged by the indigenous people against the Dutch in the so-called Cape. There is also evidence that there were instances of joint resistance from the various indigenous communities. One such joint campaign was the one waged by the Khoi and amaXhosa, under Autshumato and Makana.

It is also critical to note that, the narrative of our liberation struggle is terribly skewed. It is spectacularly biased towards a certain section of the liberation movement (the ANC), the twentieth century and places less emphasis on the resistance efforts of the Khoi and San. As a matter of fact, the Khoi and San were not just the first to be dispossessed by the Europeans, but they were also the first to wage armed resistance against European colonialists.

It is this resistance that gave birth to, amongst others, the Khoi-Dutch Wars of 1659-60 and 1673-77 and the Khoi Rebellion of 1799-1803. It is these resistance wars that produced the legendary Khoi Freedom Fighters such as the Strandloopers under the great Autshumato, the Goringhaiqua under Gogosa and Doman and later, David Stuurman.

THE DEEPER IMPLICATIONS OF THE GLEN GREY ACT

Even though it was passed over a hundred years ago, the Glen Grey Act of 1894 continues to have a profound and lasting impact on the position of Blacks in South Afrikan society. First, it laid the broad legislative basis for Black dispossession, physical dislocation and co-operation between the British and Dutch settlers, which would later make the formation of the white supremacist Union of South Africa, in May 1910, less difficult.

Second, by the time the white supremacist Union regime passed the Native Land Act of 1913, a huge section of Black land was already in white hands. The Glen Grey Act had essentially laid the basis for the various forms of legislated Black dispossession in the 20th century.

Third, the Native Land Act of 1913 was then used by successive white supremacist regimes (British and Dutch) to pass complementary anti-Black laws such as the Urban Areas Act of (1923), Natives and Land Trust Act of (1936) and the Group Areas Act of (1950) – all which strengthened land theft by whites, Black land-dispossession and the enslavement of Blacks as conceived by, amongst others, Jan Van Reebieck and Cecil John Rhodes.

Fourth, the Glen Grey Act drew heavily from the thinking of the British Secretary for Native Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone, whose recommendations for the establishment of ‘native reserves’ became the model for what is today known as townships.

Fifth, the aforementioned means that the post-1913 narrative that is being promoted by Section 25 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996) and Section 1 of the Restitution of Land Rights Act (1994) is not a just a gross falsification of the narrative of Black dispossession but it also proves that post-1994 land reform legislation was mainly designed to appease white land ‘owners’.

Furthermore, the complementary nature of the Glen Grey Act of 1894 and Native Land Act of 1913 shows how misleading it is to reduce the Black liberation project in South Afrika to an anti-apartheid project.

Sixth, and perhaps most critically, more than a hundred years after his death, the racist and anti-Black policies of Rhodes have ensured that, even after Black South Afrikans have formally proclaimed freedom, they are essentially a voting but landless and economically powerless majority.

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

Rhodes was essentially a ruthless-blood-thirsty-Black-hating white supremacist, who presided over a far-reaching project of genocide against Blacks on the Afrikan continent. His life epitomises the observation made by Omali Yeshitela, that: ‘…white people sit on the pedestal of the enslavement of African people and colonized and oppressed peoples around the world.’

In the name of the British Empire, Rhodes was responsible for the mass murder, rape and dispossession of millions of Black people for the benefit of whites in South Afrika and Europe. Even though it is now more than a hundred years after his deathit is critical that we interrogate the meaning of Rhodes (and others like him) to Black existence. This is necessary because, as stated earlier, the consequences of Rhodes’s white supremacist project continue to define the meaning of what it means to be Black, both in South Afrika and other parts of the Afrikan continent.

Furthermore, the calls for Blacks to engage in self-induced amnesia, that emanate from the red-wine-and-olives interactions, of Black-white liberal circles only serve to bolster the project of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and neo-liberalism in South Afrika today.

The liberal establishment wants Blacks to believe that the statue of Rhodes is just a harmless object, whose presence shouldn’t trouble Blacks. It is not for whites to decide whether or not the statue of Rhodes poses any harm to Blacks. This is exclusively a Black matter. It is Black people alone who must decide how they must respond to the violence that emanates from the white world. On this matter therefore, whites – and in particular white liberals – must just shut up!

Like Steve Biko put it:

‘There is nothing the matter with blacks. The problem is WHITE RACISM and it rests squarely on the laps of the white society. The sooner the liberals realise this the better for us blacks. Their presence amongst us is irksome and of nuisance value. It removes the focus of attention from essentials and shifts it to ill-defined philosophical concepts that are both irrelevant to the black man and merely a red herring across the track. White liberals must leave blacks to take care of their own business while they concern themselves with the real evil in our society – white racism.’

Rhodes’s statue is more than just a symbol of white supremacy. It serves as a daily reminder of how Blacks were continuously humiliated by foreigners in the land of their forebears. For the white world therefore, Rhodes’s statue is a symbol of immense pride and an integral part of the white identity, and this is why whites never saw the need to protest against this statue or similar ones in the first place.

By showering Rhodes’s statue with human excrement ( as alleged) the brave Black warriors at UCT have hit a raw nerve in the ‘sensitive’, ‘innocent’ and ‘pure’ white body. The Black world must therefore commend the bravery of the Black warriors at UCT and Rhodes University.

Theirs is a generational act of Black Consciousness which happens at a time when the older section of the Black political leadership has developed a treacherously cozy relationship with white capital. This act therefore resonates with other post-1994 grass-roots Black rebellions that seek a radical break with the hegemonic-anti-black-neo-liberal discourse in our country.

Like Andries Tatane, Mgcineni Noki, Ayanda Mabulu and Dookom, the Rhodes Must Fall project is discomforting because it seeks to disrupt the deceptive calm that was brought about by the 1994 settlement. At the phenomenological level, it seeks to make Blacks realise the vulgarity of the paradox wherein Blacks, as an indigenous majority, continuously complain about being ill-treated by what is essentially a foreign settler-minority. It therefore brings to the fore the problematic of Blacks as ontological absentees.

The deeper implications of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ project is that it re-opens the conveniently ignored issue of the white and colonial name and character of South Afrika. At a more fundamental level, this project inadvertently re-opens the discourse on a question that some within the older section of the Black political leadership are terribly afraid to ask openly, which is: Has April 27, 1994 resolved the National and Land Questions? The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ project is essentially an urgent call for Black people to rise up and reclaim their land. Yes! Rhodes must fall, but so must all the others (white and Black).

The Reflective Voter’s Fear

ANDREW LEVINE

Historians tell us that as the Year One Thousand approached, fear that the world was about to end engulfed the entirety of Christendom, not just the benighted precincts of the era’s functional equivalents of Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum voters.

As the Year Two Thousand (Y2K) approached, there was a more timely concern: that the world “as we know it” would end because many of the computers in operation at the time were not programmed to handle the transition.

Both fears proved unfounded, of course; but it is starting to look now as if the people who panicked as Y2K approached were onto something. The computers were fine, but something awful, something that would break the world as we knew it at the time, was, sure enough, about to happen.

What was about to happen was – George W. Bush.

We are only now beginning to appreciate the apocalyptic impact of his rise to power. It has long been plain that he broke the Middle East, but it is still far too soon to gauge the full effects of his malfeasance.

It is not too soon, however, to reflect on Y2K’s implications for the impending 2016 election.

On the face of it, the specter of Y2K puts wind in the sails of defenders of lesser evil voting – at least for anyone who thinks, as any sane person would, that in the year 2000, the lesser evil lost to a very great evil indeed.

But we must not rush to judgment.

* * *

It is hardly news that American voters don’t choose candidates the way democratic theorists say they should; candidates are sold to them, in much the way that consumer goods are.

A difference is that there are usually several varieties of, say, soap or refrigerators on the market; in American elections, there are, in practice, only two choices.

Another difference is that consumers can consume what gives them pleasure – or, rather, what they think will have that effect — given their tastes and their budgets. Voters typically find themselves choosing the lesser or two evils.

Also, in voting, brand loyalty matters more than it does with most consumer choices.

Most voters vote reflexively for one or the other semi-established party based mainly on cultural identifications — not reasoned arguments or examined ideological convictions.

It would be fair to say that, in Presidential contests especially, many, maybe most, Democrats would find voting for the Republican candidate unthinkable. Many, maybe most, Republican voters feel the same way about the Democrat.

Therefore, electoral sales campaigns are targeted at only a small part of the electorate – undecided voters in “purple” (swing) states.

Only the swing states matter because Presidents are elected by electors in the Electoral College, assigned, state-by-state, on a winner-take-all basis. In most states – roughly forty of them – the statewide outcomes are predictable enough that the electoral votes might as well be pre-assigned.

And so, voters in purple states are barraged with nonsensical political advertisements, while voters elsewhere escape the onslaught.   Or rather some of them do. Since media markets sometimes overlap state boundaries, not as many voters are spared the torment as the Electoral College numbers would suggest.

Democracy is the first casualty of this state of affairs. Serious political discourse follows close behind.

This is why, in practice, it hardly matters, for most citizens, how debates about lesser evil voting turn out. Americans vote, or not, as they see fit, without giving the matter much thought.

This may be irresponsible, but it may also be the wisest course, given how little democracy (real people power) Americans actually have.

Nevertheless, some voters are disposed, for whatever reason, to follow the arguments wherever they lead.   In some cases, those arguments may even affect how they vote.

Their main use, though, is for shedding light on the maladies afflicting politics in our time. For genuine and worthwhile change to happen, public consciousness of that is indispensable.

High on the list of maladies is the fact that thoughtful voters, choosing between Democrats and Republicans – that is, between evils of greater or lesser magnitudes – cannot avoid facing a deep problem that the Y2K election perspicuously illustrates.

On the one hand, lesser evil voting produces evil (very bad) outcomes. It also encourages a general decline in the political culture.   This is certain.

On the other hand, sometimes the lesser evil really is lesser – in ways that can matter catastrophically.

This doesn’t happen often because the candidates of both parties are usually so awful that it hardly matters, except at the margins, who wins.   Sometimes, though, it does.

The problem, however, is that it is clear only in retrospect, and sometimes only after a lot of time has passed, that the difference between the lesser and the greater evil truly was significant enough to matter.

In real time, we just can’t tell.

To gain some purchase on what this entails for thoughtful voters, an example will be helpful.

With the Y2K election, we have one at hand — with consequences that are still unfolding in ways that voters inclined to reflect seriously on what to do in 2016 cannot reasonably ignore.

* * *

No good will come from that election; no prediction could be more sure.

It is also sure that the candidates – Hillary Clinton (or, if we are lucky, some less noxious corporate Democrat) and Jeb Bush (or some certifiable whacko that the Republican base will like better) – are not the main reasons why.

Corruption American style – what corporate media call “campaign contributions,” and what the Supreme Court calls “free speech” – will play a far greater role.

So will systemic features of the electoral system itself. Some of these – the Electoral College, for example – are constitutionally required. Others, like the duopoly status Democrats and Republicans enjoy, are not.

But both kinds work to democracy’s detriment –at least insofar as “democracy” means rule of the demos, the people. Both kinds also tend to make outcomes worse than need be.

And then there is the leftwing of the duopoly, the Democratic Party. Its shortcomings are legion.

With Chuck Schumer about to take over as Senate Minority Leader, this point may seem too obvious to require stating. Yet, in liberal circles, the reality barely registers; faith in the Democratic Party’s rectitude is seemingly as unshakeable as ever.

And yet the Democrats are clearly part of the problem – an important part, in just the way that only center-right parties with center-left reputations can be.

By drawing potential opponents of the increasingly aggressive machinations of the one percent into their fold and then disabling them, and by fully participating in the neoliberal consensus, they enable the depredations the rest of us, the ninety-nine percent, endure.

These figures, one and ninety-nine percent, come from the short-lived Occupy movement of 2011. They make for good and inspiring slogans, but they are not quite exact.

The main beneficiaries of actually existing capitalism, the people who already own nearly everything there is to own, measure far less than one-percent.

And the ninety-nine percent number is probably a few percentage points too high, inasmuch as the “trickle down” effects neoliberal ideologists make so much of do exist – for people at the very top of the income and wealth distribution.

But the Occupy numbers are close enough.

Another obvious point, the most relevant of all for thoughtful voters, also needs making: that while the “winner” in 2016 won’t be good for much, she or he can do a great deal of harm.

This is the main reason, arguably the only one, why it matters who wins.

It mattered after the events of September 11, 2001. It mattered then that George W. Bush – and therefore Dick Cheney – had won the Presidential election the year before.

In fairness, “win” is not quite the right word; a divided Supreme Court handed the White House over to them. Even at the time, it was plain that Bush had lost the popular vote. We now know that if all the votes had been counted and all the rules obeyed, he would have lost Florida too. He would therefore have had fewer electoral votes than Al Gore, and would have been declared the winner.

Democrats would not even have been able to blame Ralph Nader for their own shortcomings!

But the people behind Bush were more capable and determined than the people behind Gore, enabling Republican Supreme Court Justices to get away with handing the winnings over to their man.

Thus five of nine Supremes will never themselves be brought to justice, but they plainly have much to answer for; thanks to their skullduggery, Bush and Cheney were let loose upon the world.

Nothing in recent history – perhaps nothing in American history – better illustrates the point that worse sometimes is catastrophically worse.

Because counter-factual claims are impossible to verify, we cannot be certain that a Gore administration would not also have broken the Middle East.

We can only be as sure as can be: not because Gore would have been a decent President – quite the contrary, he was another Bill Clinton in waiting — but because, like Bush the Father a decade earlier, and like Clinton too, he was reasonably astute, and would therefore have known enough not to act like a bull in a china shop.

Bush the son should have followed Poppy’s example. Instead, after 9/11, he set about putting that bull to shame.

He and his posse broke everything they stumbled into. The only way they could have done more harm would have been by tossing a nuke into the shop they had already wrecked.

Fortunately, there were enough grownups around – not in the White House or in the Vice President’s office, but in the “defense” and “intelligence” establishments — to insure that that wouldn’t happen.

We must not exaggerate, however: Bush and Cheney cannot be blamed for the rise of political Islam. Building on decades of groundwork encouraged and funded by the Saudi royal family and other reactionary Gulf State oligarchs and potentates, Zbigniew Brzezinski was responsible for that.

To this day, he boasts of his machinations, claiming they helped bring the Soviet Union down.

The Israelis helped politicize Islam too, though only in and near the territories they occupy. Back then, they tolerated and even encouraged Hamas — a godly and therefore biddable alternative, they figured, to the secular Palestinian national movement they feared.

Brzezinski’s shared their rationale – in part because, like many imperialists before him, he saw religion as a spent force and secular nationalism as a threat. But he was a Cold Warrior first and foremost.   His main goal was to draw the Russians into the functional equivalent of a Vietnam War. Afghanistan provided him with an opportunity.

He was wrong, of course; the Soviet Union’s involvement in Afghanistan did it no good, but neither did it bring it down. It imploded for other reasons altogether.

Brzezinski’s boasts are nearly as silly as Republican blather about how Ronald Reagan’s military spending and his speech at the Berlin Wall brought the “Evil Empire” to its knees.

But his diplomatic guile — and the guns and money he supplied to the mujahidin — did help get political Islam up and running.   It took a while before the realization dawned that, for both the dominators and the dominated, the cure is worse than the disease. For the American political class, it took 9/11.

Bush and Cheney made the problems associated with political Islam worse by many orders of magnitude, but their efforts to reshape the region did far more harm.

In view of the political fragility of the countries they stepped into, the guns and money they had at their disposal, and their ignorance of the world in general and the Muslim world in particular, the situation was bound to unravel – once they set their minds to making Afghanistan and Iraq and the rest of the Middle East accord with neoconservative designs.

And so it did.

They were hardly groundbreakers, even so. They were only inept continuators of what their predecessors had begun.

The Iraq War that Bush and Cheney launched – for no remotely defensible reason – was, in effect, a continuation of Bush’s father’s war a decade earlier.

He, at least, had a plausible pretext for that misadventure – the Iraqis, under Saddam Hussein, had invaded Kuwait. Also the father’s advisors – including Cheney at the time – had enough sense not to try to take the country over and run it themselves.

Their goal was not so much to make the world over as to make an example of Saddam Hussein – lest any other uppity leader get ideas about defying the Empire’s will.  This presumably was also the rationale behind the sanctions regime that the first Bush put in place.

The Clinton administration embraced those sanctions enthusiastically. Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, famously went so far as to say that she was not bothered by the premature deaths of the half million or so people the sanctions caused; she said it was “worth it.”

It isn’t clear what it was worth it for – except to make it easier to overthrow the Iraqi government ten years later, as George W. and Cheney went on to do.

It goes without saying that neither those two nor anyone around them had the slightest idea what to do next with Iraq. They broke it, but they could not put it back together.

It was much the same with the war they started against Afghanistan immediately after 9/11. Its purpose ostensibly was to punish the Taliban for harboring Al Qaida and its leader, Osama Bin Laden.

Its actual purpose was to get the war machine up and running, and to get public opinion riled up enough to support “taking down” Iraq, once the situation in Afghanistan was under control.

It is hardly surprising that some fourteen years later, the Afghanistan War is still not under control. Somehow, though, this plain fact did not stop Barack Obama from striking political pay dirt in the 2012 election for allegedly winding it down.

Obama and his Secretaries of State –first Hillary Clinton, then John Kerry — carried the Bush-Cheney wars on; apparently unconcerned that it had been clear since long before they took office that they were fighting lost causes and making a bad situation worse.

They added on a few additional wars as well.

The most egregious example is Libya, where their machinations broke that country just as surely as they and their predecessors had broken Iraq.

Libya too had a villainous dictator whom they overthrew without giving much thought to what would follow.

What followed, predictably, was civil war – proving, yet, again, that the empire’s ability to learn from its mistakes is nil, while its capacity for spreading murder and mayhem is limitless.

Obama’s main concern in both Afghanistan and Iraq was saving face – the bully’s first priority always. This is what he set about doing. For more than six years, he kept at it – “surging,” then winding down, then “surging” again.

His administration’s cluelessness rivaled his predecessors’; his strategy amounted to playing it by ear whenever problems arose.

It is therefore hardly surprising that even the War Party in Washington seemed to be losing interest. After all, what glory is there in in muddling along?

Obama’s preference for weaponized drones over “boots on the ground” helped quiet opposition at home.

It has also been a boon for radical Islamists — because nothing helps recruiting better than keeping entire populations under the shadow of sudden death descending without warning from the skies.

When there was still an anti-war movement in the United States – in other words, before Obama took office and liberals started cutting him slack – it was often pointed out that Bush and Cheney were the real terrorists. If liberals today would wipe the scales from off their eyes, they would see that, in the terror department, Bush and Cheney were small potatoes compared to President Drone.

But there is even less glory in turning murder into a video game played in safe retreats on the other side of the world than in sending economic conscripts out to be killed or maimed by roadside bombs.

This is why, in due course, even the pillars of the military-industrial-national security state complex had had enough. They wanted to move on to better things.

There are other causes too, but this was at least part of the motivation behind the Obama administration’s reckless efforts to provoke Russia into a sustainable Cold War.

And it was why Obama and Company were always on the lookout for new theaters of operation – on the Arabian Peninsula, in Africa, and wherever else they could make war without stirring up opposition at home.

Not much is known about them; the corporate media doesn’t tell.   But now that Yemen is broken too, we are likely to hear a lot more about what the Nobel Peace Prize winner has been up to.

It is already plain that he has put the entire Muslim world in jeopardy – just as radical Islamists had been hoping the West would do since even before 9/11. Our Commander-in-Chief is their Recruiter-in-Chief.

But Obama was only standing on George Bush’s shoulders. He has done a lot of harm and killed a lot of people; but, for a long time, nothing he did differed fundamentally from what they had begun.

This changed when the hopes raised by the Arab Spring turned sour. Responsibility for the Obama administration’s botched handling of the spontaneous eruptions of people power that swept the Middle East four years ago, and for America’s role as the reaction to it unfolded, is his alone.

Through it all, Obama’s foreign policy team, led by Hillary Clinton and comprised of barely disguised neocons and hapless humanitarian interveners, was in way over its head.

But had Obama’s predecessors not seen to it that so much of the Middle East was already broken, Team Obama’s incompetence would not have had the dire effects that it has.

They, not he, are the ones who are most to blame because they were the original bulls in the china shop. Their bungling was the condition for the possibility of his.

And, in his defense, it must be said that Obama had neither the backing nor the political skills to do much better than he did.

Also, it is his bad luck that it is on his watch that we are finally beginning to see the enormity of the mess Bush made. It took a long time for the full extent of it to come to light.

The problem is not just that the fires Bush and Cheney ignited are not easily extinguished or even that the sparks they throw off keep igniting new conflagrations. The new twist is that their wars, along with blunders that Obama and his team added on in their feeble efforts to make those wars go away, reinforce each other.

Now Syria is ground zero in the latest stage of the free fall Bush and Cheney set in motion.

After supporting the Syrian government and then opposing it, the Obama administration has taken to siding with it when it defends itself against some rebel militias, and siding against it when it fights others. Their strategy – or whatever we call it — is a mind-boggling mishmash.  Is anyone even trying to keep score?

Of course, the elephant in the room, in Syria and elsewhere, is Iran – America’s mortal enemy but also its indispensable ally. Iran is also Israel’s current “existential threat.”

In the Age of Obama, the Middle East is divided into two parts: those ruled by regimes that the American empire can count on for reliability, and those ruled by dubious stooges or outright foes. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states fall into the former category along with Egypt, now that its revolution has been overturned.

Everywhere else in the region falls into the other category. There, thanks both to drones and boots on the ground, instability reigns.

And there, enemies’ enemies are friends and enemies both – at the same time, though seldom also in the same place. There, alliances rise and fall with astonishing rapidity, often for the flimsiest of reasons or for no reasons at all.

Then, of course, there is Israel, still in a category by itself – no matter how strained personal relations between its leaders and the Obama administration become.

In the United States, as in Europe, though still to a lesser degree, public support for that ethnocratic settler state is rapidly diminishing.   Also, the reasons of state that brought Israel so thoroughly into the American ambit no longer obtain with the force they once did; arguably, they even pull in the opposite direction.

Nevertheless, the tail still wags the dog, and this is not likely to change any time soon.

In the near term, Israel is likely, instead, to complicate the Obama administration’s efforts to engineer a much-needed rapprochement with Iran, adding to the general incoherence of American policy in the region.

What a tangled web empires weave when they have guns and money to squander, and leaders without backbones — and advisors who don’t have the sense they were born with.

Just when it looked like it couldn’t get worse, it did.   The Islamic State (IS) emerged seemingly from nowhere, but actually out of the morass the Bush-Obama Iraq War created. In short order, it took over large swathes of Syrian and Iraqi territory.

Its goal, it claims, is to recreate a Muslim Caliphate, governed on principles that were already antiquated in the centuries following the Prophet Mohammed’s death.  Good luck on that!

But the danger their project poses to Shia communities in the region is incalculable. The Iranians, self-appointed protectors of the Shia faith, understand this perfectly.

Saudi Arabia, Iran’s rival for regional dominance, along with other Sunni majority states in the region, are fine with the peril Shia Muslims face. They have different reasons to oppose the IS. They, or rather their ruling circles, see it as a threat to their own powers and privileges.

The IS’s military prowess is evidently first rate, and, thanks to Western bungling, the organization is armed to the teeth. Its strategists are also adept at what anarchists used to call “propaganda of the deed.” But where anarchists were mindful of the requirements of morality, the IS’s thuggery knows no bounds.

For sheer monstrousness, neither Al Qaeda nor any other Islamist group comes close. Neither do the many Shia militia now engaged in the region’s battles — though, reportedly, some of them try, and sometimes come close to succeeding.

Meanwhile, the likelihood that events in the region will spin even more thoroughly out of control rises with each passing day.

Events now unfolding in Yemen are a sign of things to come; the U.S. endorsed Saudi intervention there could turn into the greatest leap forward for regional instability since Bush and Cheney got the ball rolling in the aftermath of 9/11.

So far, President Mansour Hadi, one of Washington’s most reliable stooges in the Arab world, is gone; Houthi rebels are in. The Saudis want them out; so does the United States. To that end, the Saudis are dropping bombs on Yemen; the Obama administration evidently approves.

The Houthis belong to the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam – not quite Tehran’s cup of tea, but close enough to worry the quasi-feudal leaders of Saudi Arabia. They are exponents of the Wahabi strain of Sunni Islam. They are also America’s favorite partner in the region – after Israel, of course.

From Riyadh’s standpoint, it just won’t do for Tehran to be the most influential power in Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and now in Sana’a, too.

And so, they plunged into the fray. They have quite a juggernaut at their disposal. Over the years, they bought it from America’s merchants of death — with money forwarded to them from American taxpayers and from oil consumers around the world.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian army – also supported by the United States and supplied with American arms – is eager to join in; eager to go after enemies more formidable than Egyptian citizens robbed of the democracy they fought so hard to obtain.

Does anyone in the White House or at Foggy Bottom appreciate the irony?

When the Saudis drop bombs on the Yemeni people, and threaten, along with Egypt, to invade – ostensibly to protect Sunni communities from Shia (or quasi-Shia) militias — the American government applauds.

But when Russia does much less to protect Russian-speaking communities in Ukraine – from forces set in motion with American help — they cannot object too strenuously or threaten enough.

The untrammeled incoherence of it all almost rises to the level of the sublime.

Our Nobel laureate is leading the way but, again, he couldn’t be doing it had Bush and Cheney not set the process in motion, and supplied it with the structure and direction it has taken on.

Ultimate responsibility for past and present catastrophes therefore lies with them.

Obama will have to do far worse than he already has before he will come close to being in their league – even for catastrophes yet to come.

* * *

When five retrograde Supreme Court Justices put Bush in office after the Y2K election, voters and other observers who considered Bush the greater evil, thought the situation disgraceful but not especially calamitous.

The “compassionate conservative,” was, after all, just a bumbling fool; Bush family fixers would keep him in line and, when all else failed, make his missteps right. They always had.

It didn’t quite turn out that way – he and his nefarious éminence grisemade more of a mess of more of the world than anyone would have thought possible. We still don’t know the full extent.

Dreadful as Hillary Clinton is, her Republican rival, even if it is only Bush’s younger – and reportedly more reactionary — brother, is likely to seem a greater menace than George W. did.

But will it matter who wins?

Most likely, it will not – not if history is any guide.

Nine times out of ten — maybe ninety-nine times out of a hundred — lesser evil voting itself does more harm than any Republican could – assuming, as right-thinking, lesser evil voters would, that the greater evil is the Republican candidate.

But then, there is the long shadow cast by the Y2K election, the election that gave us George Bush.

The specter of that year’s election has haunted every election since. It will haunt the 2016 election even more than any of the others, now that, thanks to what happened then, the Middle East is now falling apart, and world peace is in greater jeopardy than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

The case against lesser evil voting is compelling and, if only because there is no way, in real time, to know when another catastrophic outcome might result from the wrong choice, it survives even the lesson of Y2K.

But even the most reflective voter cannot entirely exorcise the fear that the very thought of another Y2K result elicits. The presence of yet another Bush in the race makes this even harder than it would otherwise be.

Now, more than ever, it is time to think hard about what to do, and to worry.

Criminality and Custom

JoAnn Wypijewski 

There is a scene in 12 Years a Slave upon which the camera rightly, excruciatingly lingers. Solomon Northrup is not quite hanged, though by any meaning of the word he is lynched. The plantation overseer has saved the owner’s property, a service that does not, however, require any kindness to the man. The hired hands who aimed to kill Northrup are driven off the land, threatened with murder themselves, but he is left trussed and in the noose, spared from extinguishment by stamina alone, propping himself up on tiptoe for hours, a whole day, while the business of the plantation proceeds: while his fellow enslaved go out to work in the morning and return at toil’s end, while the mistress steps onto the balcony for a breath, while others come and go, and candles are lit for the evening.

Torture at the center of a wide field of quotidian activity, undisturbed, is more than a metaphor. It is a symbol so searing as to be almost tangible, like a coin of the realm, stamped and passed on generation to generation, from slave time to Guantanamo and the dark contents of CIA files. In the movie, most of the people going through their paces are terrorized, some are indifferent, a few directly complicit. In long history, most figures on the periphery of the central crime carry around some mixture of indifference, itchy knowledge and their own relative bondage. About midway through this scene an enslaved woman hurries to Northrop and gives him a drink of water. We know she risks death or worse for this, so she represents rebellion.

It is enough to say that Hollywood was built on slavery because “the movies” are the effulgence of the modern world. There’s more to it than that, though, because Hollywood owes its modernism – its panoramas and stills, its original cued scores, night shots, panning shots, visual tricks, dramatic swells, even big budgets, high ticket prices and points in lieu of cash; such artistry and invention and blockbusterism as we recognize today – directly to the slaver’s sentiment.

Exactly 100 years ago D.W. Griffith began filming The Clansman. The movie that pioneered such heady territory, ultimately rechristened The Birth of a Nation, premiered on February 8, 1915, meaning its centenary will coincide with the movie industry’s season of self-congratulation next year. That scene of Northrup’s misery evokes as well what was going on in Hollywood over the 100 years that it took to produce a single epic film whose sole subject is the experience of the person suffering at the center.

We now wait (how long?) for an American film that ventures beyond the body in pain to tell a rebel’s tale, or to trace the ugliness from root to unexceptional branch – say, the slaver origins of insurance and, thus, generations of Aetna adjusters in Connecticut. Lucky for us, we still have books.

It was a failed book, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, published in 1817, that inspired a novella unheralded in 1855, Benito Cereno, that inspired a new work,The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World, which presents slavery as the thread-wire binding histories of liberty and subjugation; linking the known world to the unheeded past.

Amaso Delano, author of that first book, began his career as a Revolutionary soldier, a republican seafaring optimist keen to study the world but drawn by opportunity to the business of slaughtering seals. He died penniless and broken, with 700 unsold copies of his memoir. Herman Melville, author of the second, took Delano’s account of his unwitting and ultimately barbaric encounter with a shipboard slave revolt in 1805 as the subject for a chilling tale of the deceptions of freedom and slavery. He died largely ignored, his greatest works a commercial failure. Now comes Greg Grandin, centering his book on the rebel Africans’ experience, acknowledging in the process Delano’s tragedy, and complementing Melville’s genius with a history of adamantine brilliance.

Materially, the Empire of Necessity here is colonial South America in the late 1700s, early 1800s. Spain’s embrace of “free trade” led to “a slavers’ fever” that would hit the US South after 1812:

Enslaved peoples were at one and the same time investments…, credit…, property, commodities, and capital, making them an odd mix of abstract and concrete value. Collateral for loans and items for speculation, slaves were also objects of nostalgia, mementos of a fixed but fading aristocratic world even as they served as the coin of a new commercialized one. Slaves literally made money: working in Lima’s mint, they trampled quicksilver into ore with their bare feet, pressing toxic mercury into their bloodstream in order to amalgamate the silver used for coins. And they were money, at least in a way.

Grandin follows Babo, Mori and the other rebels from Africa to the Pacific and their seizure of The Tryal in such a way that nothing is left untouched by their presence – neither landscape nor law nor something as insignificant as a kid glove. The wealth that made the glove a trifling purchase, that filled ships’ cargos with Africans or cowhides, that remade Buenos Aires via a holocaust of animals and a workforce of free and enslaved butchers, also made liberty from colonial power possible, and more slave rebellion inevitable. It shaped the choices even of those who wanted no part in slaving, lashing their labor to economies of speculation, debt finance, manic extraction – thus turning the screw for more suffering and rebellion.

The Tryal rebels’ story ends with Mori’s head on a pike, another victim of the central crime, prefiguring Northrup and so many others on up to the hooded figure at Abu Ghraib, indicting ordinary custom that accommodates, or requires, such cruelty, and begging for an alternative.

* Our friend (and longtime CounterPunch) Greg Grandin was just awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his vitally important book: The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World. Congratulations, Greg!)

Crisis and Economics: a Love Story

Rob Urie 

Now

Since the onset of the post-Keynesian backlash of the 1970s economists have tended to put forward ‘political’ views that support one variation of crude capitalist ideology or another. The purgatory of the last seven years has forced assertion of economic contradictions that more closely approximate theoretical incoherence. On the one hand ‘the economy’ is either at long last, or has been for some considerable period of time, on the mend and on the other some nebulous malady— ‘secular stagnation’ or some such, precludes ‘normalization’ to a pre-crisis state of affairs. Policy prescriptions are meeting the facts of ongoing dislocations while political posturing forces improbable explanation through the filter of Party politics. And while implausibility has rarely been a hindrance to selling bad ideas, subsequent facts do occasionally place them in the context they deserve.

The back-and-forth of aggressively bland, quasi-academic, economic blather could be taken as a side show was it not for its implications. Federal Reserve policies are being framed in populist terms, as salvation for the forty-six million people receiving food assistance and the overwhelming majority of citizens living paycheck to paycheck, when the inside scoop is that bankers have re-taken the economy to the point where any effort to ‘normalize’ economic policies would quickly send the financial and financialized economies into crisis. The paradox of populist posturing in support of policies that knowingly or, worse yet, unknowingly support the forces of banker hell might be entertaining if millions of lives weren’t dependent on good outcomes.

Graph (1) above: in the larger scheme of things it is way past time for the fascination with finance to go away. In the meantime, restoring the value of stock prices relative to economic production illustrates the inflation that Federal Reserve rescue efforts have achieved while mainstream economists prattle endlessly on about negative real interest rates. While the national / international mix of economic production has shifted over time, it hasn’t gone so far that the graph illustrates other than wildly skewed social priorities. The ‘wealth effect’ of rising financial asset prices is the theory that the rest of us will get jobs as waiters in expensive restaurants and performing yacht maintenance if the rich are made even richer. Source: St. Louis Fed.

Left substantially unsaid is that current circumstance is a function of the irresolution of the last seven years, which itself is an outcome of the neo-capitalist revolution of the 1970s. The mainstream debate over trade ‘imbalances’ versus inadequate fiscal and monetary policies leaves unaddressed the disparity between the full recovery of corporate profits and ruling class incomes and bank accounts and the unrelenting grip that the Great Recession has on everyone else. Implied in the terms of the mainstream debate is that all is not well. And implied in the fact that all is not well is that the mainstream debate is wholly irrelevant to policies likely to be implemented. Put differently, why haven’t the Federal government and the Federal Reserve done for the rest of us what they’ve done for the rich?

Is there something fundamentally different about the incomes and wealth of the rich that makes their recovery easier to facilitate or have they recovered because they have been the central focus of recovery efforts? To split the policy debate difference, if some combination of trade imbalances and inadequate demand are perpetuating economic weakness, why has this only affected the poor and middle classes? And if a center – periphery frame is applied that places the rich in the center and the rest of us in the periphery, why would changing trade, fiscal and monetary policies to boost growth not also disproportionately benefit the already rich? Together these questions suggest that there might be good reasons why mainstream ‘advice’ is being ignored in official circles. This written, the actual reasons this advice is being ignored are unlikely to be the good reasons.

History

In history, the moment in 2008 – 2009 when there was a palpable sense that most of what was understood about the modern world had been an illusion was used to create the compound misconceptions that pass for explanation in the present. This is to take a walk through the tightly circumscribed political imagination used to restore political viability to demonstrably dysfunctional political economy. What came to the fore in the depths of crisis was precisely how thin the façade of official competence was and how dependent on the particular arrangement of circumstance it had become. This tattered façade is now put forward as economic substance as if image and substance were interchangeable.

The official explanations coming from Washington and Wall Street post- 2007 were selective in that they posed distinct categories of economic resilience, ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ when in fact the entire system would have spiraled into oblivion had it not been for state intervention. Press accounts touted the viable—Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor Company, while the facts were that these were among the most in need of state intervention for continued survival. And the reason why they were in need ties apparently disparate pieces to the broader economic system. The individual pieces were connected through interdependencies— cross liabilities and supply chains, which linked the viability of one to the viability of all. The apparent goal of official explanation was to create the illusion that select players were viable without government aid.

The difference is crucial— by facilitating the claim that only individual companies needed temporary aid in exigent circumstances the deception was maintained that the broader economic system remained viable. In fact, government bailouts went far broader and deeper than press reports ever came close to suggesting. The point is that Western capitalism is put forward as a system of economic Darwinism premised on corporations and individuals finding their own way when broad swaths of corporate America would have fallen by the wayside in 2008 – 2009 without government support. As with economic recovery for the rich and ongoing misery for everyone else, what is made apparent through selective government rescue efforts is that there are wildly divergent economic outcomes living inside of one economic mythology.

Politics

In the realm of politics, by the time of crisis George W Bush’s clueless hick routine had satiated the American taste for reckless whimsy and a more polished snake-oil salesman was needed to restore state-sponsored capitalism. Barack Obama restored the façade of competence and his twice won election proved him up to the task of effective misdirection. Between bank bailouts, automaker bailouts, scam mortgage relief programs, the ACA (Affordable Care Act), illegal surveillance, militarization of the police, ‘humanitarian’ interventions and trade agreements intended to undo environmental agreements, Mr. Obama proved himself a capable steward of façade restoration. The question of why he chose to ignore the advice of liberal economists is best answered by the economists— Mr. Obama clearly understands his own reasons for doing so.

The depth of Mr. Obama’s cynicism was placed in calculated relief by professional apologists through assurances that ‘the Republicans are worse.’ Left unconsidered is that had Mitt Romney’s, Jeb Bush’s or Hillary Clinton’s names been placed on Mr. Obama’s policies no surprise would have resulted. The bank bailouts restored corrupt and predatory bankers, the automaker bailouts restored executive salaries while cutting working class wages, the mortgage relief programs preyed on desperate homeowners for the benefit of bankers, the ACA brought new ‘customers’ into the most expensive and least effective health care system in the developed world and Mr. Obama is busy reversing his environmental policies with trade agreements. Needless to say, each of these policies has been given the patina of necessity by the very-same pundits now perplexed by economic policy inertia.

Trade and Environment

The latter point is illustrative in that ‘professional’ environmentalists have engaged themselves with the minutiae of environmental agreements that will be fully reversed by the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) rules in the TTP and TTIP ‘trade’ agreements that Mr. Obama is determined to see passed. As with the ACA (Obamacare) program that has liberals and progressives passionately defending a Heritage Foundation plan to preclude real health care reform through privatization of existing government programs, environmentalists are proclaiming Mr. Obama’s cynical sleight-of-hand a landmark pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when, even if taken at face value, the plan is a cynical hoax.

The year 2005 was chosen as the benchmark for U.S. greenhouse gas emissions because it is the highest level ‘achieved’ before the U.S. substantially outsourced emissions to countries with lax environmental regulations. Likewise, Mr. Obama’s plan to limit the amount of coal burned by U.S. utility companies has the now ‘excess’ coal being sold overseas as if location bore relation to its effect on global warming. Restrictions on emissions will cause the loss of real and prospective profits under ISDS rulings meaning that under Mr. Obama’s trade agreements taxpayers must pay corporations for restrictions on their ‘right’ to pollute. Mr. Obama is seeking fast-track approval for these trade deals so that they can’t be amended by Congress.

Sisyphus, Meet Ostrich

The choice for die-hard Democrats is that either Mr. Obama doesn’t understand the true effects of his policies or that he considers his constituency too stupid or preoccupied to understand them. With what is by now political custom, Mr. Obama’s policies will come into full effect after he has left office. As with George W Bush’s experience with Democrat Bill Clinton’s bank deregulation, Mr. Obama’s failure to resolve the outsized, predatory role of finance in the global economy will at some point come back to bite Hillary, Jeb or whatever corporate-state chair-warmer occupies the Presidency at the time. Were there the political will and the social mechanisms needed to lay responsibility for crisis where it belongs, the last crisis would have ended capitalism for our lifetimes.

That Mr. Obama’s policies are indifferentiable from those of other mainstream political candidates cuts both ways— other than general demeanor, what difference does it make which candidate holds office? As with the Supreme Court’s appointment of George W Bush to the Presidency in 2000, the background premise is that the status quo can hold its own no matter how pointless and destructive an American leader’s policies might be. Conversely, the conceit that façade is substance is demonstrated through restoration of the façade— leaving in place the same executives and bankers that so recently produced crisis. Doing so assumes they are mere placeholders in a larger game, that their actions are inconsequential to ‘ultimate’ outcomes.

Co-dependence between the major political Parties has produced the shift hard right of recent decades. What reads as hyperbole in the realm of the political, that Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton before him, represents radical capitalist interests, and with them the politics of the radical right, is simple analysis in more encompassing frames of economic possibility. With Democrats so openly representing the interests of the capitalist class Republicans have no direction to go but crazy. In response a cottage industry of Democrat apologists has arisen to call out the increasing implausibility of the Republican program without addressing the Democrat’s move hard right. Had left political economy been implemented by Mr. Obama its likely success would have rapidly brought Republicans back from the far fringes of Western thought. As things stand, the space between the radical right and the lunatic fringe has become the home of the American ‘center’ for some three decades now.

Resolution

The American tendency toward living in an ever-present is a Zen Armageddon of sorts. There is the capacity for mass destruction without the collective memory to prevent it. Where is the disjunction between official explanations and lived experience? The economists now making policy recommendations are modern day court pleaders, technocrats whose interest in the wellbeing of ‘the people’ is belied by their professional / career concern that keeps them tethered to an irrelevant ‘center.’ Ultimately these technocrats and ‘official’ explanations are vague assertion that help is on the way. The question back is why have those who least needed it already been helped? They didn’t need court pleaders and the policies enacted on their behalf were effective. From this point forward the policies that matter account for this difference.