In her receipt of massive corporate donations from US media companies and in a recent speech Hillary Clinton shows the extreme nationalistic attitudes which characterise the corporatism of the right (neocon) and the supranational elitism of the left (democon) and which dominate the political establishments in NATO/EU.
“The United States is an exceptional nation…..I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of Earth . . . And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that we are also an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead.”
In fact as Russia, reacting to aggression by the so called “democracies”, makes military alliances and economic and energy pacts around the world (South Africa, India, Japan, China) it is the USA which is now seen by international opinion polls (disgracefully, given its role in freeing the World from German and Japanese imperialism and European Fascism just 70 years ago) as the greatest threat to world peace. How has that come about?
Equally Europe in the 25 years after the second world war witnessed a condemnation of imperial conquest and fascist systems, an economic miracle, gradual adoption of democratic structures and principles, peaceful co-operation and free trade between former fierce enemies. Then suddenly between 1970 and 2016 the EU, with NATO’s help, produced a desert of mass unemployment, social collapse, ethnic cleansing, financial bankruptcy, depopulation of states as their young emigrate to find work, the deliberate break up of nation states like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the resurrection of fascist movements and a German dominated Europe pushing ever Eastwards in a way which past imperial and totalitarian leaders would applaud. How has that come about?
The degradation of both sides of the Atlantic were intimately linked as the corporatist and leftist (or “liberal” as Russians and Americans would call them!) establishments did the bidding of the centralised collectives of State, capital and labour and the pseudo intellectual professions which feed off them. The latter, educated by the increasingly privileged State and trained by the large corporations, looked down on “ordinary” individuals, families, entrepreneurs, small businesses and regional identities and exploited them to the full.
These non corporatists used to have a vote which meant something. They used to work in democratic markets in which competition gave them employment and opportunity to save and grow and invest. But the new corporatist/fascist establishments denied them their vote by the simple expedient of uniting the left, right and centre in the same philosophy. You could have a vote – but no choice!
90% of US citizens since 1970 have seen a fall in their incomes under both Republican and Democratic regimes. Since the early 1990s the witless Tory John Major gave way to the left corporatist Europhile, Tony Blair and then the self proclaimed “heir to Blair”, David Cameron, who joined in Government with the classic corporatist/leftist and supremely mis-named “Liberal Democrats”. Taxes rose and were increasingly applied to turnover not profit (so the State’s income and its middle class privileged employees never suffered from the economic decline they caused) and 90% of the British have suffered in the same way as their American cousins.
In Germany the artificially low exchange rate of the Euro (compared to the Deutschmark) and uncontested supranational impositions by the EU provided a massive boost to German industry, but not to Germans. In France, Spain and Italy the unemployment came without the industrial success. Complete basket cases like Greece, Portugal and Ireland were able to relieve the disaster only by exporting their unemployed to Germany and the UK (not in the Euro)
With their own “lesser people” under control and their unearned corporatist privileges secured in contracts signed by themselves – or people like themselves – the corporatist right and the elitist left started spreading their wings supra-nationally. After all, if things were so wonderful for them why not impose their brilliant recipes on the whole world? What they mistook for democracy and prosperity at home (but which was just corporatist/leftist debt-ridden elitism with the corporate right avoiding taxes and the left imposing their Islamophilia, feminism, multiculturalism and destruction of Christian morality and marriage) they used the supranational EU and the UN with their elitist and rarely elected committees to impose their power on the world.
When the “stupid” voters defeated the “Remain in the EU” corporatists in Britain these destroyers of peoples, parliaments and democracies received their first bloody nose.
FASCISTS ARE LEFT AND RIGHT – AND ESPECIALLY CENTRE
The left accepted big business and the big State because they enjoy their privileges and see the same supranational institutions which business requires to make profits ideal for imposing their own leftist political agendas. Mass migrations for instance mean cheap labour for business but also the break down of nations, parliaments and “bourgeois democracy” for leftist elites.
Corporatist fascism or national socialism is a mixture of the power of the State and collectives of capital and labour. The Clintons in the USA and the Blairs in the UK personify this corruption. Both families have become obscenely rich in a very few years as their time in office provided access to the corporate elites of left and right. They have not earned their tens of millions, they have manipulated it out of businessmen who bought them while in office (or in the case of Hillary Clinton in case she gets into office) and politicians who see in the Blairs and Clintons good contacts for their own future wealth!
Fascism and corporatism and national socialism always were and continue to be a fatal mixture of socialism and big business – Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben and the German Labour Party (which became Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party) and Fiat, Marconi and other Italian corporations and the Italian Socialist Party which Mussolini turned into the Fascist Party describing Fascism as:
“for the fascist, everything is in the state, and no human or spiritual thing exists, or has any sort of value, outside the state.”
In the so-called “centre” of western democracies we find the “third way” corporatists who fervently believe in supranational corporatism, leftism (not for the working class but their own administrative class) and sharing power with those they have never met but who must be better than their own electorate! The former leader of the British centrists Paddy Ashdown recently said the Brexiteers were “brownshirts” (Nazis) but of course it was the only Liberal Prime Minister we ever had – Lloyd George – who said that “Hitler is the greatest living German and it is a pity there are not more like him in Britain”!
Few of the millions of workers, entrepreneurs, private individuals, small businesses, savers, pensioners and regions outside the central cores of London, Washington or Berlin/Brussels will not regard themselves today as alienated and outside that State privilege. Corporatist leftism has made them of “no sort of value” in Mussolini’s words.
AND NOW THE BACKLASH
But now the backlash. It stretches from the German Alternative fur Deutschland, the UK Independence Party, Syriza in Greece, Podemus in Spain, the Five Star movement in Italy and to Donald Trump in the USA and many others. It is uncoordinated, simplistic to an extent, confused but fundamentally correct! Whether they are left or right or neither they are against that corrupt system which has deprived their peoples of both their votes and their economic opportunities. The anti fascists in all parties are conducting revolutions against the fascists in all parties.
The only way Britons, French, Germans and Italians could protest was to do so OUTSIDE the major established parties and that is what they have done. Only in the United States is there a Trump revolution which remains (with great difficulty) inside an established party – the Republicans. I think that is because the USA is a vast country with dispersed and independent minded communities who have thriving local democracies, far from Washington. And the average American worker and his communities have suffered terribly from the purchase of cheap migrant labour by the corporations and cheap voting fodder for the Clintons’ Democratic party.
Also Trump is a capitalist not a corporatist. He is an entrepreneur who actually employs people, who saved and invested and provides jobs. Unlike Clinton who stokes (and preys on) the fears of Mexicans in the USA, Donald Trump actually employs thousands of them and knows what effect illegal mass immigration has on ordinary US workers.
Every day Trump’s businesses must serve the consumer or he goes bankrupt. We may not greatly admire the products and services which make him money but they reflect the wants of the people whom Clinton’s education system has produced.
IMPERIAL CORPORATISM VERSUS THE PEACEFUL ENTREPRENEUR
Trump’s people, like him, do not dictate their goods and services, they offer them. That is true of the artisans (electricians, plumbers, carpenters), the self employed and the small and medium sized and family businesses. It is true of small communities. The Democracy of serving their fellow citizens in competitive markets is the same process as offering goods and services in free trade overseas.
But that is not how the corporatist behaves. He has the ear of big government. He can get special treatment. He can get subsidies when he loses money. He can get protection when someone else challenges his market. And if foreign markets get a bit difficult he calls on his government again to apply tariffs on their exports. If his investments go wrong overseas he seeks a special law for businesses like his own to decide what those countries’ laws towards business should be.
And when the political class make an enemy of other countries they see profit in arms manufacture, in supplies and eventually in occupation and exploitation of natural resources. How attractive, for instance, the Ukraine must seem to big US agricultural corporations!
Trump’s policies are to question supranational corporatism, the TPP, the TTIP, excessive industrial regulation (which tend to act as a comparative benefit to large corporations over small businesses) bring more trade cases before the World Trade Organisation, to “get on with” Russia, shift tax from working families to the wealthiest tax avoiders and corporations and attack currency manipulation as a form of trade subsidy.
While Clinton has in the past tried to contact Putin and failed but has close ties with Ukrainian oligarchs, Trump has had no favours in Russia – but rightly admires Putin. The omens are good.
THE CHOICE
So that is the choice, not just in the US Presidential election, but in the conduct of international affairs and the NATO/EU’s military confrontation with Russia – a grotesque, unnecessary, ignorant, confrontation which lacks just a spark before it turns into a conflagration.
The pattern is similar to Weimar Germany, except we are fortunate to have in the wings a Trump, not a Hitler – a 5 Star Movement not an Italian fascist Party and a UKIP and not a euro-fascist Oswald Mosley! The only surviving institutional appeaser of 1930s fascism is the BBC! (see my book “And into the Fire…..”)
One thing is crystal clear. No one would vote for a Clinton who could utter the self important, aggressive nationalism contained in the second paragraph of this article. No one could vote for a corporatist fascist US Democrat Party which has learned nothing from history – or even the consequences of their recent interventions in the Middle East.
“We will no longer surrender America or its people to the false song of globalism” Donald Trump, Speech April 27th 2016
