[Peace-discuss] News from Neptune for July 1

Wed Jul 6 16:25:30 UTC 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWS_OPugC-o&index=4&list=UUmBGzD97keBfCjV80jShRQQ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWS_OPugC-o&index=4&list=UUmBGzD97keBfCjV80jShRQQ>

News from Neptune for 1 July 2016 - a TRUMPING BREXIT edition - a Chomskyan take on the news from Urbana (IL) Public TV 

{Introduction} Good evening, & welcome to News from Neptune for the 26th week of 2016. I’m Carl Estabrook.

For a quarter century this program has been a weekly hour of spontaneous & unrehearsed discussion of the news of the week and its coverage by the media - first, on a so-called community radio station.

But I was ‘no-platformed’ there. (‘no-platforming’ is a recent coinage in the university and media. It means depriving someone of a place to speak because of what they’re saying.) I appreciate the chance to come to you now via Urbana Public Television, and YouTube.

Our program’s name, News from Neptune, comes from Noam Chomsky, who’s been writing sensible things about U.S. politics for MORE THAN half a century. Chomsky says that in the U.S. media, “Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from neptune.”

Tonight David Green, Ron Szoke and I will try to say some true things. 
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It's July 1, in a week in which Britain voted to leave the EU - a Brexit (British exit).

"...the vote to leave [was a] defeat of an attempt to rule 500 million people with what amounted to a capitalist dictatorship [of the EU troika - the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)], that was anti union and anti working class [as Greece demonstrated]. [The Brexit vote] was a victory for democracy and equality in Europe, and a rare blow, struck by ordinary people, without any very strong leadership, against the very powerful global forces of international supranational capitalism, against all the odds..." [Gregory Motton]

The vote in Britain to Leave the EU is a matter of class politics, but since the position of the USG and media is that class politics don’t exist - the vote has to be turned into a matter of identity politics - a result of British racism vs. immigrants - the now standard move from class politics to identity politics - on the soi-disant Left as well as the Right - is affirmed.
The neoliberal Labour party took the occasion of the Leave vote to stage a coup against its social democrat leader, Jeremy Corbyn (a coup similar in some ways to that against President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil).

Once again we have an illustration of how ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ are not gradations of one another but actively opposed. Corbyn is on the left - as are the people who elected him - and what we would call liberals in the Labour party (‘Blairites’) are trying to bring him down, not as they say because he might loose the next UK election but because he might win it, giving the UK a socialist government for the first time since they defeated Winston Chruchill (a racist warmonger) after WWII.

The Left should oppose the EU - and therefore support Brexit - for the same reason it opposes the trade pacts TPP and TTIP: they are anti-democratic, neoliberal institutions. The following is from Richard Tuck, in Dissent.
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"...the British left risks throwing away the one institution which it has, historically, been able to use effectively—the democratic state—in favor of a constitutional order tailor-made for the interests of global capitalism and managerial politics [the EU]…

"The early members of the Labour Party in England (who were more Marxist than their successors cared to admit) understood this, and believed that a properly organized working class, using representation in the House of Commons as its vehicle, could institute radical economic and social change. And compared with the life of the working class in the nineteenth century, working-class life after the growth of Labour vindicated their confidence. Indeed, the greatest achievement of the Labour Party, the creation of the National Health Service, would have been impossible in a country with strong constitutional constraints on the legislature, since it required the large-scale expropriation of private property in the shape of the old endowed hospitals. That is a major reason why so few countries have adopted the NHS model: in most of them it would have been illegal, just as similar proposals would be illegal in the EU today.

"In the 1980s, however, demoralized Labour politicians began to seek the shelter of continental-style constitutional structures. The most important of these was the EU, which functions as a set of constraints on the internal politics of its member states exactly as did the bourgeois constitutions of the mid-nineteenth century..."
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It’s important to see that that popular forces behind the Leave vote in the UK are quite similar to those behind the Sanders and Trump campaigns in the US. And the Neoliberal and Neocon political establishment, Republican and Democrat alike, is doing all it can, by foul means and fair, to stop that popular democratic uprising.

In this situation, here’s the outline of the speech Bernie Sanders should give at the Democratic convention; there are three points:
(1.) “Hillary Clinton represents the neoliberal and neoconservative policies that I [Bernie Sanders] have attacked throughout the campaign (and conversely): I cannot support those policies or her candidacy.”
(2.) “I urge those who’ve supported me to oppose her nomination in this convention - and, in the event that she is nominated, to defeat her candidacy in the general election.”
(3.) “To that end, I am seeking the most effective form of opposition - whether via a third party such as the Greens or by means of coming to agreement with the Trump campaign, which has declared its opposition to neoliberalism and neoconservatism - to the pro-war and pro-trade pact policies of the Clinton campaign.”

Trump broke with the neocons by rejecting the Obama administration's wars in the Mideast and its provocations of Russia. (The neocons immediately deserted the Republican party and scurried to the pro-war Clinton campaign.) Trump is now breaking with the neoliberals, who are also abandoning the Republicans for the pro-Wall St., pro-trade pact Democrats.

"The rift ... deepened Thursday when Trump called out the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by name for the second straight day and pilloried the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, two landmark trade agreements broadly supported by the GOP." [WaPo]

YOU’RE WATCHING NFN, A ‘TRUMPING BREXIT’ EDITION: https://archive.org/details/News_From_Neptune_-_Episode_306 <https://archive.org/details/News_From_Neptune_-_Episode_306>

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