"Sanctimony & Pseudoscience" as the Brexit aids EU Disintegration

Submitted by annieli on Sat, 06/25/2016 - 1:01pm

"The EU’s disintegration is now running at full speed.”

Like Wile E. Coyote going off the Dover Cliffs, anti-immigrant blather and the MOE made the destruction of the UK Tory party inevitable but can Labour and the left capitalize on this continuing devolutionary chaos.

The US has some of the elements of a “xenophobic, deflationary, 1930s-like abyss” made more possible with a GOP Congress and tehDonald in the 2017 White House.

Of 168 polls carried out since the EU referendum wording was decided last September, fewer than a third (55 in all) predicted a leave vote.

The actual result on the night came in at 51.9% leave, 48.1% remain. Just 16 of 168 individual polls predicted a 52:48 split in favour of leave…

Bookmakers also got the EU referendum wrong. Odds last week put remain around 1-4, implying an 80% probability of a victory for the pro-EU camp.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis sees disintegration down the road

BREXIT WON’T SHIELD BRITAIN FROM THE HORROR OF A DISINTEGRATING EU

Leave won because too many British voters identified the EU with authoritarianism, irrationality and contempt for parliamentary democracy while too few believed those of us who claimed that another EU was possible.

I campaigned for a radical remain vote reflecting the values of our pan-European Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25). I visited towns in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, seeking to convince progressives that dissolving the EU was not the solution. I argued that its disintegration would unleash deflationary forces of the type that predictably tighten the screws of austerity everywhere and end up favouring the establishment and its xenophobic sidekicks…

As of today, British and European democrats must seize on this vote to confront the establishment in London and Brussels more powerfully than before. The EU’s disintegration is now running at full speed. Building bridges across Europe, bringing democrats together across borders and political parties, is what Europe needs more than ever to avoid a slide into a xenophobic, deflationary, 1930s-like abyss.

If George could only get me my check… “Soros eschews the sanctimony and pseudoscience that frequently accompany commentary on the EU and gets right to the basic political conflicts and human foibles that underlie the union’s problems.”(www.foreignaffairs.com/...)

The decision will change the EU’s shape and character. Without the U.K., the bloc’s second-largest economy, the EU will become even more dominated by the continent’s largest economy, Germany. That in itself is an outcome unwelcome in Berlin. Northern European governments, including Germany, that largely prefer market-based solutions will lose leverage over southern economies like Italy and France that tend to be more protectionist and statist.

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Submitted by betterdemsonly on Sat, 06/25/2016 - 2:03pm

So Soros calls defense of

So Soros calls defense of environmental and labor standards, protectionism, and statism. Anyway, why is France and Italy gaining leverage over privatization favoring government of Germany a bad thing from a progressive point of view? As for Yanis. Well it is kind of difficult to convince people a better EU is possible when you're a paid enforcer for the one that is bad. Why he is not recognized properly as a phony is hard to understand.

Submitted by wetterau on Sat, 06/25/2016 - 3:58pm

Varoufakis an enforcer?

Varoufakis quit as finance minister of Greece rather than roll over for the EU mistreatment. He is fighting for a democratization of the EU rather than rule by unelected bureaucrats. You might enjoy reading his book "And the Poor Suffer What They Must?" It gives a rare look at economic decision making at the top. I was at his recent lecture in Seattle, and he strikes me as being the opposite of a paid enforcer, more like a cosmopolitan Bernie Sanders.

Submitted by Not Henry Kissinger on Sat, 06/25/2016 - 9:48pm

Varoufakis on Brexit

A good read:

Whether it makes sense for leftists to advocate exit hinges on whether a nation-state freed from EU institutions provides more fertile ground for cultivating a progressive agenda of redistribution, labor rights, and anti-racism. It also depends on the likely impact of an exit campaign on transnational solidarity. As I travel across Europe, advocating a pan-European movement to confront the EU’s authoritarianism, I sense a great surge of internationalism in places as different from one another as Germany, Ireland, and Portugal.

Change form within vs. change from without seems the dominant question among just about every lefty these days.

Personally, I think he's creating a false choice. Just because the Brits decide to leave he EU doesn't mean the left in England has abandoned the idea of cross-national solidarity on the issues he cites. Quite the contrary actually.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

Submitted by shaharazade on Sat, 06/25/2016 - 10:34pm

How can the EU be democratized

when it overrides democracy in favor of 'market based solutions'. Why are country's and people who reject the EU globally called protectionist and static?

Northern European governments, including Germany, that largely prefer market-based solutions will lose leverage over southern economies like Italy and France that tend to be more protectionist and statist.

As for Yanis I don't know what he's talking about. Those un-elected bureaucrat's you speak of are the EU. Yanis Varoufakis may have quit rather then roll over to the EU but the very concept of the EU is anti-democratic. They are the epitome of 1% global rule. They need to be gone daddy gone. So does the TPP and and the Thjird Way Democrat's who are totally on board with global corporate oligarchical collectivism. How absurd to think a bunch of banksters and

I respect Varoufakis I have bookmarked his writings. He's a Marxist who seems to be ass backwards at this point. Market solutions are the monkeys paw. They are what have brought us globally to this point. How much more technocratic and anti democratic can you get.

Look what the EU did to the Greek people after they voted in a leftist party to stop this austerity so Goldman Sachs and it's ilk can rule the world and get their pound of flesh via austerity. These free market disaster cappie fucker's look at democracy and the common good of humans as an impediment to their new world order.

I don't give a rats ass what ivory tower leftist says remain as it can be fixed. Nothing this rotten and vicious to human self determination can be fixed. Maybe Yanis is like Bernie and thinks that somehow a thoroughly anti-humanist technocratic New Word Order can somehow be revitalized and reformed to bring the worls as we know it to a better place.

Me I think the EU the Democratic third Way party and all these global killers be they economic or military need to be eradicated. Am I an isolationist ? No. am I a bigoted racist old fuck ? No. Centralization under this current lot of global western 1% assholes is nothing I can believe will ever lead to a better world. fuck them all including Yanis or Chomsky or any other academic economic theorist who plays this deadly political game with ordinary peoples lives.

Then they have the nerve to tell me I'm a racist, xenophobic, fascist, anti immigrant, dangerous populist like Trump or Le Pen. Where do these so called leftist's theorists live? Not in my life or anyone's who has to live under austerity so that the free market stays lucrative. People globally are tired of being leveraged to keep this sick economic world view as inevitable or better then.

Submitted by wetterau on Sat, 06/25/2016 - 11:30pm

Hey Shaz, I think Varoufakis

Hey Shaz, I think Varoufakis is on our side. He is academic, intellectual, etc., but his humanity overrides all that, and his background gives him the language and tools to argue convincingly against the Schaubels, LaGardes, and neolibs. He is aristocratic in the best sense: noblesse oblige requires that the privileged use their advantage for the common good. He is walking that walk, in my opinion.

Submitted by hecate on Sat, 06/25/2016 - 3:00pm

good stuff

I go to dKos solely to read your work. I wish you would post that work here.

Submitted by doh1304 on Sat, 06/25/2016 - 3:10pm

Oh really?

So if lower prices come from lower wages that's good, but if lower prices come from lower demand that's racism and protectionism and it must lead to austerity, which for some reason is now bad, when it is good if it means social service cuts.
So the people's will is good when it conforms to the neoconservative agenda, but when it doesn't it's catastrophic.
They aren't even trying to be coherent. Reminds me of Reagan.

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On to Biden since 1973

Submitted by Vayle on Sat, 06/25/2016 - 11:01pm

They're shipping the jobs out from under workers

...and they expect people to continue to support these policies which kill opportunity and jobs.

Democrats, Republicans, Free Trade (Free meaning free to destroy lives and families in the name of globalization)

This is why neither party gives a damn about jobs. They've already decided the working class is beneath them, and they've additionally decided that even college degrees mean nothing since jobs situation for millennials has been so difficult.

Go to school, go into debt severely, and then hope you can get a minimum wage job because a degree is pointless in an overburdened economy which can't even manage millions who are off the rolls and hurting, in some cases for years.

Don;t go to school but work your ass off in a trade, or build some solid experience in one or multiple fields, and you're in a difficult spot as well. You may not have college loans, but job prospects keep being shipped out from under these people as well.

And in service to the one percent, politicians gleefully screw over Americans in order to cater to the globalization elites and the monied interests who actually benefit from the loss of American jobs to foreign nations and their workers.

The single political party (consisting of center right conservative and moderate Democrats and far right Republicans) - which represents the one percent doesn't give a damn about an increasing number of people who simply no longer matter to them.

"Too many people in the developed world see only a loss of jobs to lower wage destinations," Lipton said. "Too many people fear that immigration is compromising their economic well-being. Too few see clearly the pay-offs —poverty reduction, the innovation that comes from shared ideas, higher living standards from greater access to trade and higher returns to the wealthy world from investment partnerships with developing countries."

But if they want to sell wary workers on the gains from integration -- to salvage a new era of globalization, instead of launching a new dawn of economic retrenchment -- public officials might need to be more honest with themselves about the trade-offs that come with deepening economic ties.

Harvard University economist Dani Rodrick dubs those trade-offs the "inescapable trilemma of the world economy." What that means is that we can have any two of these three things, but never all three: democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration. In other words, you can't have people voting their own interests, in a country that always places its own interests above the shared interests of the global community, while also stitching everyone's economies together seamlessly.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/25/great-britain-jus...