[P2P-F] Fwd: [CommonGood] Fw: [aepf] Thomas Piketty & Naomi Klein Articles on Trump

Thu Nov 24 08:57:54 CET 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Birgit Daiber <bir.dai at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 1:43 PM
Subject: [CommonGood] Fw: [aepf] Thomas Piketty & Naomi Klein Articles on
Trump
To: "commongood at listi.jpberlin.de" <commongood at listi.jpberlin.de>

Dear Colleagues and Friends, Tina Ebro distributed to interesting articles
I want to share with you, Yours Birgit

------------------------------

*APOLOGIES IF CROSS-POSTING *
*ON TRUMP, DEMOCRACY, TRADE & GLOBALISATION*
Guardian Articles by Thomas Piketty & Naomi Klein

* November 16, 2016*

*Rising inequality is largely to blame for this electoral upset. Continuing
with business as usual is not an option. People have lost their sense of
security, status and even identity. This result is the scream of an America
desperate for radical change. People have a right to be angry, and a
powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it
belongs. Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein offer up interesting analysis*.

*Rethink Globalization, Or Trumpism Prevails*

*By Thomas Piketty*

*November 16, 2016*
*The Guardian (US)
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/16/globalization-trump-inequality-thomas-piketty>*

*Let it be said at once: Trump's victory is primarily due to the explosion
in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several
decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this.*

*Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with
the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies.
At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation
carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was
the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street - and the
inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the
Sanders vote.*

*Hillary won the popular vote by a whisker (60.1 million votes as against
59.8 million for Trump, out of a total adult population of 240 million),
but the participation of the youngest and the lowest income groups was much
too low to enable key states to be won.*

*The tragedy is that Trump's program will only strengthen the trend towards
inequality. He intends to abolish the health insurance laboriously granted
to low-paid workers under Obama and to set the country on a headlong course
into fiscal dumping, with a reduction from 35% to 15% in the rate of
federal tax on corporation profits, whereas to date the United States had
resisted this trend, already witnessed in Europe.*

*In addition, the increasing role of ethnicity in American politics does
not bode well for the future if new compromises are not found. In the
United States, 60% of the white majority votes for one party while over 70%
of the minorities vote for the other. In addition to this, the majority is
on the verge of losing its numerical advantage (70% of the votes cast in
2016, as compared with 80% in 2000 and 50% forecast in 2040).*

*The main lesson for Europe and the world is clear: as a matter of urgency,
globalization must be fundamentally re-oriented. The main challenges of our
times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore
implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges
and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development.*

*Agreements of a new type can, if necessary, include measures aimed at
facilitating these exchanges. But the question of liberalizing trade should
no longer be the main focus. Trade must once again become a means in the
service of higher ends. It never should have become anything other than
that.*

*There should be no more signing of international agreements that reduce
customs duties and other commercial barriers without including quantified
and binding measures to combat fiscal and climate dumping in those same
treaties. For example, there could be common minimum rates of corporation
tax and targets for carbon emissions which can be verified and sanctioned.
It is no longer possible to negotiate trade treaties for free trade with
nothing in exchange.*

*From this point of view, Ceta, the EU-Canada free trade deal, should be
rejected. It is a treaty which belongs to another age. This strictly
commercial treaty contains absolutely no restrictive measures concerning
fiscal or climate issues. It does, however, contain a considerable
reference to the "protection of investors". This enables multinationals to
sue states under private arbitration courts, bypassing the public tribunals
available to one and all.*

*The legal supervision proposed is clearly inadequate, in particular
concerning the key question of the remuneration of the
arbitrators-cum-referees and will lead to all sorts of abuses. At the very
time when American legal imperialism is gaining in strength and imposing
its rules and its dues on our companies, this decline in public justice is
an aberration. The priority, on the contrary, should be the construction of
strong public authorities, with the creation of a prosecutor, including a
European state prosecutor, capable of enforcing their decisions.*

*The Paris Accords had a purely theoretical aim of limiting global warming
to 1.5 degrees. This would, for example, require the oil found in the tar
sands in Alberta to be left in the ground. But Canada has just started
mining there again. So what sense is there in signing this agreement and
then, only a few months later, signing a highly restrictive commercial
treaty without a single mention of this question?*

*A balanced treaty between Canada and Europe, aimed at promoting a
partnership for fair and sustainable development, should begin by
specifying the emission targets of each signatory and the practical
commitments to achieve these.*

*In matters of fiscal dumping and minimum rates of taxation on corporation
profits, this would obviously mean a complete paradigm change for Europe,
which was constructed as a free trade area with no common fiscal policy.
This change is essential. What sense is there in agreeing on a common
fiscal policy (which is the one area in which Europe has achieved some
progress for the moment) if each country can then fix a near-zero rate and
attract all the major company headquarters?*

*It is time to change the political discourse on globalization: trade is a
good thing, but fair and sustainable development also demands public
services, infrastructure, health and education systems. In turn, these
themselves demand fair taxation systems. If we fail to deliver these,
Trumpism will prevail.*

*[Thomas Piketty is professor of economics at the Paris School of
Economics. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including
Capital in the Twenty-First Century.]*

*This piece was first published in Le Monde on 12 November 2016*

*It was the Democrats' Embrace of Neoliberalism That Won It for Trump*

*By Naomi Klein *

*November 9, 2016*
*The Guardian (UK)
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-class-sealed-americas-fate>*

*They will blame James Comey
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/06/fbi-director-james-comey-clinton-emails-trump>
and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/03/donald-trump-voter-suppression-campaign-north-carolina-florida>
and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/jun/11/bernie-sanders-voters-interview-hillary-clinton-video>
and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates.
They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social
media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.*

*But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare
in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview -
fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine - is no match for
Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what
sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that
mistake?*

*Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain.
Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and
corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They
have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety
net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for
their kids even worse than their precarious present.*

*At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a
hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders
who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who
make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which
they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising
wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and
powerlessness.*

*For the people who saw security and status as their birthright - and that
means white men most of all - these losses are unbearable.*

*Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to
that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer
it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies -
whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade
Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants
and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite
neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism
unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the
toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.*

*Trump's message was: "All is hell." Clinton answered: "All is well." But
it's not well - far from it.*

*Neo-fascist  responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going
to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do
battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump's support could
be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table.
An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use
the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of
well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities
to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers
to be retrained and fully included in this future.*

*It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic
inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade
deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original
protectors of the land, water and air.*

*People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left
agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic
solutions that will bring a frayed society together.*

*Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it
together under the banner of a people's agenda called The Leap Manifesto
<https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/>, endorsed by more than
220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and
some of our largest trade unions.*

*Bernie Sanders' amazing campaign went a long way towards building this
sort of coalition, and demonstrated that the appetite for democratic
socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure in the campaign
to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most
abused by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign
from reaching its full potential. Those mistakes can be corrected and a
bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.*

*That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively
wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From
Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie
campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring
progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are
"leaderful", as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.*

*So let's get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical
movement that has a genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the
Trumps of this world. Let's set aside whatever is keeping us apart and
start right now.*

*[Naomi Klein is the author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the
Climate <http://thischangeseverything.org/>. She tweets @NaomiAKlein.]*

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