Month: July 2015

The Clinton Campaign Notices the Sanders Campaign, or How to Read the Media

by Gaius Publius

The 2016 primary contest won’t begin until early next year (schedule here), with the Iowa Democratic caucus on February 1 and the New Hampshire primary on February 9. On the one hand, that’s a still half a year away. On the other hand, that’s only half a year away. So poll numbers and crowd sizes are beginning to be significant.

As for the polls, Clinton appears to have peaked, though at a pretty high level, while Sanders is steadily gaining, as you’ll read below. But the biggest indicator — and certainly the most visibly convincing — are crowd sizes. Above you can see the surprising turnout for a recent Bernie Sanders event in Madison, Wisconsin. By all accounts, the stadium was full or nearly so:

Bernie Sanders has been running for president for two months, but Wednesday night in Madison, Wisconsin, his long-shot campaign got real.

When Sanders walked on stage at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, he was
greeted by a raucous, howling crowd of 9,600 people, according to
Sanders’ campaign aides and arena staff.

A clearly energized Sanders, who late last year was speaking to crowds of 50 people in Iowa classrooms, appeared taken aback by the reception he received.

“Whoa,” he said. “In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of people here.”

I’m among those who didn’t think this was a long-shot campaign. The “ready for Warren” frenzy that has gripped active and “paying early attention” Democrats made it obvious there was room for someone serious about overturning what I call “rule by the rich” and what Sanders calls control by the “billionaire class.” But I’m glad to see others, including the Clinton campaign, catching on.

Taking Apart the Insider Game

The most important thing to consider when thinking about the Sanders campaign is this. Everyone else who’s running, on both sides, is an insider playing within — and supporting — the “insider game,” the one that keeps insiders wealthy and outsiders struggling, the one where the wealthy and their retainers operate government for their benefit only. What sets Sanders apart is his determination to dismantle that game, to take it apart and send its players home (back to the private sector) or to jail.

Two examples should make this clear. One is Fast Track and the “trade” agreements being forced upon us. The pressure to pass these agreements is coming equally from mainstream Democrats like Barack Obama, a “liberal,” and from mainstream Republicans, supposed “conservatives.” They may differ on “rights” policy, like abortion rights, but not on money matters. Trade agreements are wealth-serving policies promoted by people in both parties who serve wealth, which means most of them. People like Sanders, Warren and others, by contrast, would neuter these agreement as job-killing profit protection schemes and turn them into something else.

A second example involves Wall Street banks, in particular, a policy of breaking them up, reinstating Glass-Steagall, and prosecuting Wall Street fraud. Can you imagine any announced candidate doing any of these things, save Bernie Sanders?

In both of these cases, Sanders would aggressively challenge the insider profit-protection racket, not just give lip service to challenging it. Which tells you why he is so popular. Many of us in the bleachers have noticed the insider game — after all, it’s been happening in front of us for decades— and most of us are done with it. Ask any Tea Party Republican voter, for example, what she thinks of the bank bailout of 2008-09. She’ll tell you she hated it, whether she explains it in our terms or not.

And that’s why Sanders, like Warren before him, draws such enthusiastic crowds. The pendulum has swung so far in the direction of wealth that the nation may well change permanently, and people know it. People are ready, just as they were in 2008, prior to eight years of betrayal. People have been discouraged about the chance for change lately, but they’re ready for the real thing if they see it.

The Clinton Campaign Notices Sanders

There’s been an attempt to downplay the Sanders candidacy since the beginning, to sink his campaign beneath a wave of silence. That ended a bit ago, and the press has begun to take notice, if snippily. Now the Clinton campaign is noticing, if the New York Times is to be believed. I found the following fascinating, for a number of reasons.

The piece first along with some news, then a little exegesis (my emphasis):

Hillary Clinton’s Team Is Wary as Bernie Sanders Finds Footing in Iowa

The ample crowds and unexpectedly strong showing by Senator Bernie Sanders are setting off worry among advisers and allies of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who believe the Vermont senator could overtake her in Iowa polls by the fall and even defeat her in the nation’s first nominating contest
there.

The enthusiasm that Mr. Sanders has
generated — including a rally attended by 2,500 people in Council
Bluffs, Iowa, on Friday — has called into question Mrs. Clinton’s early
strategy of focusing on a listening tour of small group gatherings and
wooing big donors in private settings. In May, Mrs. Clinton led with 60
percent support to Mr. Sanders’ 15 percent in a Quinnipiac poll. Last
week the same poll showed Mrs. Clinton at 52 percent to Mr. Sanders’s 33
percent.

“We are worried about him, sure. He
will be a serious force for the campaign, and I don’t think that will
diminish,” Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications
director, said Monday in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Some
of Mrs. Clinton’s advisers acknowledged that they were surprised by Mr.
Sanders’ momentum and said there were enough liberal voters in Iowa,
including many who supported Barack Obama or John Edwards in 2008, to
create problems for her there.

“I think we underestimated that Sanders would quickly attract so many
Democrats in Iowa who weren’t likely to support Hillary,” said one
Clinton adviser, who like several others spoke on the condition of
anonymity to candidly share views about the race. “It’s too early to
change strategy because no one knows if Sanders will be able to hold on
to these voters in the months ahead. We’re working hard to win them
over, but yeah, it’s a real competition there.”

I don’t want to quote the whole thing (well, I do, but I can’t). So I encourage you to read it. There’s much there worth noticing.

What to Look at When the Times Reports on Clinton

Now, some exegesis, meta-reading of the media, especially corporate media like the Times. My three main points are bulleted below.

■ First, when you expose yourself to any of the “liberal” U.S. outlets (as opposed to, say, The Guardian) be aware that because they are owned by establishment corporations they’re already pro-Clinton. Subtly, not blatantly, but certainly.

That sounds like prejudice, so let me explain. For one thing, neither the outlets nor their owning corporation can afford not to prepare their seat at the Clinton White House table. It’s just a fact. Media want access and corporations want government to smile on their profit schemes. At this point, currying favor with Sanders is on no one’s mind, and the Clintons are known to “have long memories … they punish their enemies and help their friends” (quoted here). The incentives are all aligned.

But also, mainstream insider corporations are completely aligned with the insider game for the obvious reason — they’re part of it. No one inside the game wants to see it damaged. Hayes and Maddow, as people, may or may not prefer Sanders over Clinton, but MSNBC has a clear favorite and if you listen carefully and consistently, it shows. Their owners, and all of the other big media owners, can’t afford (literally afford, as in, there’s major money at stake) to play this one straight. You may find some unskewed reporting, but not a lot of it.

In the present instance, for example, I read the story above (click through for all of it) as being pro-Clinton, and in fact, most stories like these will be painted that way, with a light brush or a heavy one, for some time to come. If you don’t spot this bias where present, you’re not reading the story as written.

In the same way that every New York Times story I read in the last two months, literally every one, used the inaccurate and propagandistic phrase “pro-trade Democrats” to describe Ron Wyden, Earl Blumenauer and the small handful of other Dems who defied their voters to support the White House and the wealthy — in that same way you’ll have a hard time finding mainstream Sanders or Clinton coverage that doesn’t in some way sell Clinton. If that’s not a fact, I’ll be eager to be proven wrong.

■ Second, be aware that much so-called reporting is the result of “placement,” a term from advertising. Ad placement is when you buy space in a publication or media program into which you can put your message. Campaigns, among other entities, frequently do the same with reporters. The reporter offers space, a container, into which the campaign can put its message. (The reward is usually “access.”)

It’s certainly true that many reporters and writers openly advocate; I’m often one of them and I’m not alone. But no one suspects open advocates of trickery. It’s much more subtle, and dangerous for readers, when the advocacy is hidden, as it is in supposed “straight news” articles.

In cases like these — certainly not all cases of reporting, but far too many — the reporter doesn’t “get” the news. The news “gets” the reporter. A campaign’s messenger comes to the reporter, offers the message, and the reporter builds a genuine and frequently interesting news story around it, including research from other sources, but always starting with the seed provided by the campaign or public official.

In the present instance, the article above, you should therefore ask:

• Is it really true that the Clinton campaign just now discovered Sanders’ popularity and that he may be a threat?
   
• Or could the following be true? That the Clinton campaign always knew a Warren-like opponent could gain ground but were publicly ignoring it; now, however, it’s time to appear to be noticing, so they approached a reporter with their take on the Sanders surge.

In other words, is the bolded part of the first sentence of the article its seed? Who approached whom? That first sentence again:

The ample crowds and unexpectedly strong showing by Senator Bernie Sanders are setting off worry among advisers and allies of Hillary Rodham Clinton …

I don’t have an answer to the bulleted questions above. Either could be correct. I’m a little suspicious though. First, by the obvious but subtle bias in the story — similar to the constant bias in all of the Times Fast Track reporting. Second, by the plurals above: “among advisers and allies of Hillary Rodham Clinton.” This isn’t one person speaking, but a coordinated effort by staffers and surrogates (“allies”) to say a coordinated single thing to the Times reporters.

Third, I’m made suspicious by this, a little further down:

“I think we underestimated that Sanders would quickly attract so many
Democrats in Iowa who weren’t likely to support Hillary,” said one
Clinton adviser, who like several others spoke on the condition of
anonymity to candidly share views about the race. “It’s too early to
change strategy because no one knows if Sanders will be able to hold on
to these voters in the months ahead. We’re working hard to win them
over, but yeah, it’s a real competition there.”

There’s obvious messaging, especially in the last part of the paragraph. But look at the bolded part. Of those in the campaign, the only ones quoted in the article by name are Clinton herself and Jennifer Palmieri, who spoke, not to the reporters, but to “Morning Joe.” Everyone else is off the record, speaking to these reporters “on the condition of
anonymity to candidly share views about the race.”

“Candidly” implies leaking, not messaging or spin, and here’s where the deception seems more clear. Have these reporters really found a minor army of leakers? If these are truly leakers, expect them to be fired soon.

So, scenario one: Sanders is surging, the Clinton campaign is caught by surprise, and two Times reporters find a bunch of anonymous campaign leakers who say (paraphrasing), “Sure, Sanders caught us by surprise. We’re aiming for one type of Democrat and he’s getting the other type. It’s too early to change strategy — the man could trip and fall — but yes, there’s now competition.”

(Did you notice that part about two kinds of Democrat? The actual quote says: “We underestimated that Sanders would quickly attract so many
Democrats in Iowa who weren’t likely to support Hillary.” I think the campaign knows exactly what kind of Democrat they were ignoring, and if you think about it carefully, you will too.)

Or, scenario two: The Clinton campaign is ignoring the Warren wing, giving them nothing but platitudes and (as in the case of Fast Track) avoidance. Now the “Sanders surge” is in the news and the campaign has to respond. They get their message together — “Yes, we’re surprised, and we have to admit that out loud. But it’s early days, and if we keep getting reporters to say ‘socialist’ and ‘anathema,’ we won’t have to counter his specifics with our specifics. So let’s round up some reporters and get ‘Morning Joe’ on the phone.”

Did the reference to “socialist” and “anathema” surprise you? Read on.

■ Finally, because of the two points above, you’ll find that in many cases the story supports the campaign, while justifying itself as “reporting.” Both bolded pieces are important.

Let’s look at each element above. First, “the story supports the campaign”:

Those who see Mrs. Clinton as being at risk in Iowa say she is still far
better positioned to win the nomination than Mr. Sanders, who lags by
double digits in Iowa polling. He also has far less money than she does,
and his socialist leanings are anathema to many Americans.

In the first sentence the campaign is being subtly and indirectly quoted. But the bolded phrases above are pretty strong language in a sentence that isn’t necessarily an indirect quote, and echoes open Clinton surrogates like Claire McCaskill. Even “leanings” lends an unsavory color, since it echoes the phrase “communist leanings.”

(The alternative to the last sentence above, by the way, and much more honestly sourced, would be something like this: “The anonymous campaign adviser also said, ‘Frankly, we think if we just keep saying ‘socialist’ whenever we can, we won’t have to change our strategy of being vague on the economic issues. At least we’re sticking with that for now.'” I would buy that as excellent honest reporting.)

Second, “justifying itself as reporting”: Once you present the core message as provided by the messengers, the reporter can then call around for other, non-Clinton-sourced comment. Thus the quotes, much further down from Joe Trippi, Carter Eskew and the Sanders campaign.

Add in a little of the reporters’ own analysis, much of it good:

“The enthusiasm that Mr. Sanders has generated — including a rally
attended by 2,500 people in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Friday — has called
into question Mrs. Clinton’s early strategy of focusing on a listening
tour of small group gatherings and wooing big donors in private
settings.”

and you have the makings of a news story friendly to Clinton built around a news hook and potentially “placed” elements. The hook, the “placed” elements (if they were placed), and some original analysis go at the top, and the rest of the story is built to follow that.

Bottom Line

If you like this exercise in reading behind the media, please read the article again with the above thoughts in mind. Is this
original reporting (i.e., reporters starting a conversation), or did
the campaign make the first approach? Does the article carry Clinton water, subtly support the campaign? Are any opposing viewpoints featured at the
top, or are they buried below the point where most people stop reading?

This Times story may be a completely honest exercise in independent journalism. There certainly is a Sanders phenomenon, and it’s detailed honestly and factually, so there’s value in reading it. But there’s an obvious bias toward Clinton messaging in the reporters’ own prose, so I’m suspicious, and you should be as well.

I’ll also say that most stories about campaigns operate this way, as do many other news stories involving public figures. What will make reporting the Sanders campaign different is what I wrote above — Sanders wants to take apart the insider game. What major media outlet will help Sanders do that, will shut the door to corporate favors, media access and other prizes from a future Clinton administration, in order to be even-handed?

My guess is few or none.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

.

“Victimless punishment”
by Tom Sullivan

Wall Street might be licking its wounds after yesterday’s hours-long trading shutdown, but for former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder the future is looking rosy.

Holder has gone back to his old D.C. law firm, Covington & Burling, where he can once again work to keep the rich and powerful from facing justice — just what he did for the Obama administration, but with a better pay package. Covington even held an office in its new building for him. Lee Fang wrote on Monday:

Holder’s critics charge that he made a career out of institutionalizing “Too Big to Prosecute” rules within the department. In 1999, as a deputy attorney general, Holder authored a memo arguing that officials should consider the “collateral consequences” when prosecuting corporate crimes. In 2012, Holder’s enforcement chief, Lanny Breuer, admitted during a speech to the New York City Bar Association that the department may go easy on certain corporate criminals if they believe prosecutions may disrupt financial markets or cause layoffs. “In some cases, the health of an industry or the markets are a real factor,” Breuer said.

In decamping the DoJ for Covington, Holder reinforces how thoroughly socialized Justice has become around business — in the Grover Norquist sense. But with Justice functioning as a kind of training school, DoJ attorneys with higher-paying aspirations learn more than how not to pee on the office furniture. David Dayen writes:

Holder is at least the sixth former Justice Department official who landed at Covington after leaving law enforcement. In addition to Breuer, Mythili Raman, who also ran the criminal division, went to Covington, as did partner Steven Fagell and special counsels Daniel Suleiman and Aaron Lewis. Holder’s Justice Department appears to have been a farm team for white-collar criminal defense, where the money gets made protecting illicit corporate actors.

Matt Taibbi elaborates:

Holder doesn’t look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world’s richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.

Taibbi details “five pillars” of that revolution, including failing to win “a single conviction in court for any crimes related to the financial crisis,” the concept of “collateral consequences” noted above, and ways to soften punishments for financial crimes:

Holder doubtless seriously believed at first that in a time of financial crisis, he was doing the right thing in constructing new forms of justice for banks, where nobody but the shareholders actually had to pay for crime. You’ve heard of victimless crimes; Holder created the victimless punishment.

All of which allowed the big banks to get bigger, their rich executives to get richer, and “Eric Holder himself to crash-land into a giant pile of money upon resignation.”

Sleazy work if you can get it.

One nation, indivisible

by digby

I know that a lot of the neo-confederates are sort of asking for it with their 150 year celebration of the South seceding from the union and all but there’s something wrong with these articles musing about what the US would be like if it weren’t for all those southerners. It’s just as distasteful to separate them out as it is to break down the voting patterns and say things like “if it weren’t for all those black and Hispanic people voting, the Republicans would win everything!” It’s irrelevant.

For better or worse we’re all Americans and the differences among us have been baked into the cake since the beginning. That is America, warts and all.  We even had a civil war over the whole thing and came out one country. That’s not going to change and I seriously doubt that if they thought it through anyone would really want it to.

.

Who are they afraid of offending?

by digby

.@POLITICO grants anonymity to “political journalists” to express opinions about Donald Trump: http://t.co/7AONHflIqk pic.twitter.com/qUhWI4tEXq

— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) July 8, 2015

I guess they don’t want to lose “access” the Trump campaign? Or the possibility of a job on one of the networks that are covering Trump?

I can’t help but notice that they seem to be perfectly willing to go on the record handwringing about Clinton’s inhuman rope line. But I guess they won’t lose any friends in high places or big time job opportunities if they do that. Quite the opposite, in fact.

.

QOTD: Jeb!

by digby

Wow:

“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it is 4% growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive. Workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. Means that people need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.”

WTH? More hours? Productivity’s not the problem Jeb!

Between 1979 and 2014, while the gross domestic product grew 150 percent and productivity grew 75 percent, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage of the median worker rose just 5.6 percent — less than 0.2 percent a year. And since 2002, the bottom 80 percent of wage earners, including both male and female college graduates, have actually seen their wages stagnate or fall.

Bull pile-up

by digby

Now that’s a metaphor:

pile-up during the #RunningOfTheBulls in #Pamplona pic.twitter.com/DZsSz42bda

— TrottReuters (@trottreuters) July 8, 2015

Meanwhile, we are assured by the government that all the online outages that happened today were unrelated “glitches.”

Tomorrow they will resume hysterical fearmongering about cyber-crime without missing a beat and demand that we all give up even more of our privacy.

.

Good news on criminal justice (but gird yourself for the backlash)

by digby

Watch right wing law ‘n order nuts’ heads explode”

[S]tarting next year, non-violent suspects in New York City won’t have to pay bail at all, New York City officials announced Wednesday. Instead, they’ll be diverted to rehabilitative services and supervisory alternatives.

According to the Human Rights Watch, roughly 90 percent of people behind bars awaiting trial are black or Latino. Judges will soon enforce daily check-ins, text-message reminders and required drug or behavioral therapy in lieu of bail.

The change follows mounting pressure to eliminate a bail system that disproportionately impacts low-income people of color who haven’t even been found guilty of a criminal offense — such as Browder. The supervision options are viable alternatives because the vast majority of defendants released under supervision — 87 percent — appear in court when required. Among those who missed their court date, less than 10 percent didn’t show up within 30 days.

Close to 15 percent of defendants — 45,500 — are held on bail in New York City annually. Those who are disproportionately imprisoned because of racially disparate arrest rates will be able to avoid jail time altogether. Today, the average bail amount is $2000 but 44 percent of defendants can’t even pay $500. More than one-third of Rikers inmates have not been convicted. Many of them are there simply because they cannot afford to get out.

And under the new system defendants in need of rehabilitative services will also have a chance to get that assistance, which will reduce the likelihood of committing crimes and cut jail costs.

This is such common sense it’s hard to believe it even got this far. I just hope everyone is prepared for the outcry the first time one of these defendants under “supervision” kill someone. (We’re already seeing how that works with the undocumented immigrant case in San Francisco.)

The sad truth is that the underlying reason for keeping all these people in jail has always had very little to do with what they are accused of doing and everything to do with who with are. It’s excellent that New York is trying to change that and obviously it’s the only decent (and economically prudent!) thing to do. But it’s going to be a bumpy ride I’m afraid.

.

Just one cranky right wing coalition…

by digby

Henry Farrell takes a look at Europe’s fundamental problem: the EU itself.

The Greek state is not the only one that is underdeveloped – the EU/Eurozone one is too, meaning that there isn’t any single actor that can strike deals, whether informal or formal, on the part of the collectivity. It’s not at all clear that anyone can quietly make a credible commitment to Greece to knuckle under in the expectation of better things in the long run, because it’s not clear that anyone on the other side of that bargain can push through a long term restructuring of debt given how toxic the politics have become. Even if the Greeks started behaving exactly as the rich eurozone countries want them to, it’s not clear that the latter countries’ publics will be willing to forgive what appears to them as vast amounts of taxpayers’ money – and under the current system as I understand it (happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, since much of the devil is in the detail), all that it takes is one member state with a cranky right wing coalition partner to refuse a deal.

To be clear – none of this conducts towards any specific recommendations for what Greece or the eurozone countries ought to do. It’s a lot more modest than that. If we treat Greek debt as a political instrument of control rather than a quantity that is going to be demanded from the Greek people over the shorter run, we should be arguing about the project for which that instrument is being deployed, and asking whether (a) it is fit for purpose, and (b) whether the kind of project that it’s being used for is one that’s going to work over the longer term. We should also be wondering (c ) about the endogenous ways in which the instrument of debt as a form of political control affects the actors on both sides of the relationship, and whether it makes some successful and mutually acceptable long term modus vivendi more or less likely. Obviously, I’m skeptical on all of these (and given past track record, I’d have expected Daniel to be more skeptical on (a) and (b) than he appears to be), but willing to hear counter-arguments.

I think this is right. This system that has largely unaccountable outside actors using debt as a means of political and social control (and yes, this is social control) isn’t democratic by any means and should be questioned on that basis. But perhaps we should be questioning whether it’s even working for the system itself. We watched the so-called Masters of the Universe almost kill their own golden goose just a few years ago and they only live today by the grace of people who bailed them out. They may not be able to see their own folly.

But this strikes me as well:

[U]nder the current system as I understand it (happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, since much of the devil is in the detail), all that it takes is one member state with a cranky right wing coalition partner to refuse a deal.

I know that the idea was to have a sort of loose “United States of Europe” that would eventually work through that sort of problem. But when you think about it, we’ve been doing it for over 250 years and we still don’t have that little problem cracked. It all depends on how willing (eager?) an extreme political faction is to push the envelope.

Interestingly, here in the US, it was the combination of the “extreme” factions of both the right and the left that stopped the US Government from cutting pensions in 2011. This was not because the cranky right wing doesn’t believe in austerity. They just obstruct anything that a Democratic Party wants to do. But in the end, this system depends upon some adherence to norms of democracy and common interest. When that breaks down, all hell can break loose.

.

Undercutters

by digby

It’s hard to believe these people are this nihilistic, but with these people, anything is possible:

Sessions told me GOP hasn’t decided whether to send Iran-style letter to undercut climate talks.  “We might. It’s something to consider.”

— Andrew Restuccia (@AndrewRestuccia) July 8, 2015

I would be curious to know if this “tactic” has ever been used before to hamstring foreign policy, specifically announcing in advance that treaties negotiated on certain issues or with certain actors will be abrogated by the Senate?

I suspect that in the past Senators would have been embarrassed to be such cretins as to admit that they will not even consider the document in questions, but maybe not. In any case, Senator Jeff Sessions and his cohorts are cretins. After all, if they want to vote against a treaty they can.  This is about telling the world that the president of the United States does not have the power to negotiate one in good faith.

But then they know very well that if a Republican president is elected he will not be subject to the same problem. This radicalism gives them tremendous power.

Greece, Ukraine and U.S. — Advancing the Neo-Liberal Project

by Gaius Publius

I recently did a piece about Greece that implied a number of similarities to Ukraine’s recent upheavals. There I said:

All of this loops the Greek story into the Ukraine story, which most people still don’t realize isn’t just about Putin, though that makes a convenient (and cartoonish) Us vs. The Villain cautionary tale. It’s about continuing the … yes, neo-liberal project … deeper into eastern Europe.

I want to explain some of that here, via three concepts — the cover story, the actual story, and the Putin element in each case — with a side look at “the neo-liberal project,” which both of these stories exemplify.

The Story in Greece

The CNN-ready cover story on Greece is is a story of punishing helpers or helping punishers — the audience can take the story either way, as it chooses. “Bad Greece” got itself in economic trouble and “good Europeans” — led by German and other elites — have offered a helping hand, but only if the Greek government makes painful adjustments, such as cutting pensions (their form of our Social Security) and privatizing much of their infrastructure, such as their airports and shipping facilities. Money, but with strings.

The Greeks deserve this treatment because bad (profligate, lazy) people deserve to suffer when they fall. Welfare, when given to “the wrong people,” should come with thorns; bailout money, when given to “the wrong people,” should come with some pain, with strings.

The actual story is that the forces of privatization on the “liberal left” in Europe have found a nation in a great deal of economic trouble, thanks in large part to looting from outside, and they’re offering a “helping” hand in order to further loot the country via those privatizing strings. In the minds of the looters (we’ll call them “neo-liberals” below) every government-owned operation (Athens airport, say) is a missed profit opportunity for someone rich enough to buy it, and the world would be better if everything were made private.

But airports and other revenue opportunities don’t privatize themselves; they have to be pried loose from government. Corruption will pry them loose, or friends on the inside. That’s how the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund and others got their hands on 75 years’ worth of revenue from the Chicago parking meters. They had a “friend,” Mayor Richard M. Daley, on the inside willing to sell it to them on the cheap.

“Shock Doctrine”-type operations will do it also. As Naomi Klein documents in her book of the same name, the shock of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation was the perfect opportunity to privatize (monetize) New Orleans’ public schools.

The Putin element is that Greece, if driven from the Eurozone by the Eurozone’s brutal (but “liberal”) hand, might accept aid from Russia, aid with fewer strings. In anticipation, the U.S. has reportedly told the Greek president it will not allow this, with militarized regime change on offer if he considers it — as opposed to the ballot-box regime change that the Eurozone is trying to force.

The “Neo-Liberal Project”

I call the above-described form of privatization (monetization) of government-held property the “neo-liberal project.” Notice that while neo-liberals share goals with big-money conservatives on the right, most of these privatizers are what we otherwise call “liberals” — like Mayor Richard Daley, for example; or the helpful people at the IMF and the European Central Bank; or Bill Clinton, who wanted to privatize Social Security in 1997, if it weren’t for a certain blue dress and the woman inside it:

Had it not been for Monica’s captivating smile and first inviting snap of that famous thong, President Bill Clinton would have consummated the politics of triangulation, heeding the counsel of a secret White House team and deputy treasury secretary Larry Summers. Late in 1998 or in the State of the Union message of 1999 a solemn Clinton would have told Congress and the nation that, just like welfare, Social Security was near-broke, had to be “reformed” and its immense pool of capital tendered in part to the mutual funds industry. The itinerary mapped out for Clinton by the Democratic Leadership Committee would have been complete.

We have this on the authority of high-ranking members of the Clinton Treasury who gathered in Harvard in the summer of 2001 to mull over the lessons of the 1990s. At that conclave it was revealed that on Clinton’s orders a top secret White House working party had been established to study in detail the basis for a bipartisan policy on Social Security that would splice individual accounts into the program. Such was the delicacy of this exercise that meetings of the group were flagged under the innocent rubric “Special Issues” on the White House agenda. …

The “Special Issues” secret team was set up by then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers (later elevated to Treasury Secretary and now President of Harvard) and Gene Sperling, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers.

It’s the same game, whether played from the left or the right, as the video below clearly shows.

When the game is played from the right, they call it Milton Friedman conservatism. When it’s played from the left, they call it neo-liberalism (“new” liberalism, like Tony Blair’s “New” Labour in the U.K.; like what it was, only not).

The privatizing game is mainly played from the left, because that’s where most of the players are. The Western world is mostly run by “liberals” like these. When Democrats vote for mainstream “liberals,” this is what they put into office.

The Ukrainian Story

There’s a parallel to Greece in the recent events in the Ukraine. The cover story is that Ukraine was ruled by “bad president Yanukovych” who was friendly to Russia; Ukraine had a revolution, an uprising; and it’s now ruled by “good prime minister Yatseniuk” under acting president Turchynov. Yatseniuk wants to take Ukraine out of the Russian orbit.

In this story, the Putin element comes at the beginning. The “good Europeans” wanted to lend a helping hand to Yanukovych and his government via loans and other inducements because Ukraine was in financial trouble (sound familiar?). Putin also offered a helping hand, so two deals were on the table. The Russian-leaning (“bad”) Yanukovych wanted to accept the Russian deal over the E.U. deal, but the uprising deposed him. When the new West-leaning government accepted the European offer instead, the cover story tells us that Putin got angry, invaded Crimea, and is provoking a crisis. At the moment, Ukraine is experiencing either an invasion or a civil war, depending on who you talk to.

The real story is detailed below. The bottom line is that the West’s offer of help was the standard neo-liberal offer — the strings were handcuffs. Putin actually presented a better offer, but the West worked covertly to install their own people (Yatseniuk in particular) to make sure that the European deal was accepted and Putin was spurned, even though much of the country is ethnically Russian and pro-Putin. The cover story also ignores Putin’s reaction to the advancing NATO encirclement of Russia, of which the Ukraine story is a part.

The ethnicity is complex. The economics are not.

Who was the provocateur in the Ukrainian uprising? The West had a huge hand in provoking (and financing) it. Here’s Chris Floyd with the story. Watch for the names Pierre Omidyar, billionaire founder of eBay; the innocently named USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, the “government agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid”; and the likewise innocently named National Endowment for Democracy.

Floyd begins:

Ukraine, Omidyar and the Neo-Liberal Agenda

The Western intervention in Ukraine has now [spring, 2014] led the region to the brink of war. Political opposition to government of President Viktor Yanukovych — a corrupt and thuggish regime, but as with so many corrupt and thuggish regimes one sees these days, a democratically elected one — was funded in substantial part by organizations of or affiliated with the U.S. government, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (a longtime vehicle for Washington-friendly coups), and USAID. It also received substantial financial backing from Western oligarchs, such as billionaire Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and sole bankroller of the new venue for “adversarial” journalism, First Look, as Pandodaily reports.

Yanukovych sparked massive protests late last year when he turned down a financial deal from the European Union and chose a $15 billion aid package from Russia instead. The EU deal would have put cash-strapped Ukraine in a financial straitjacket, much like Greece, without actually promising any path for eventually joining the EU. There was one other stipulation in the EU’s proffered agreement that was almost never reported: it would have also forbidden Ukraine to “accept further assistance from the Russians,” as Patrick Smith notes in an important piece in Salon.com. It was a ruthless take-it-or-leave-it deal, and would have left Ukraine without any leverage, unable to parlay its unique position between East and West to its own advantage in the future, or conduct its foreign and economic policies as it saw fit. Yanukovych took the Russian deal, which would have given Ukraine cash in hand immediately and did not come with the same draconian restrictions.

It was a policy decision. It might have been the wrong policy decision; millions of Ukrainians thought so. Yanukovych, already unpopular before the deal, would have almost certainly been ousted from office by democratic means in national elections scheduled for 2015. But the outpouring of displeasure at this policy decision grew into a call for the removal of the government. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Washington was maneuvering to put their preferred candidate, Arseniy Yatseniuk, in charge of the Ukrainian government, as a leaked tape of a conversation between Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state, and Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, clearly showed. It is worth noting that when Yanukovych was finally ousted from power — after the opposition reneged on an EU-brokered deal for an interim unity government and new elections in December — Arseniy Yatseniuk duly took charge of the Ukrainian government, as planned.

By all accounts, Viktor Yanukovych was an unsavoury character running an unsavoury government, backed by unsavoury oligarchs exploiting the country for their own benefit, and leaving it unnecessarily impoverished and chaotic. In this, he was not so different from his predecessors, or from many of those who have supplanted him, who also have oligarchic backing and dubious connections (see addendum below). But in any case, the idea of supporting an unconstitutional overthrow of a freely elected Ukrainian government in an uprising based squarely on the volatile linguistic and cultural fault-lines that divide the country seems an obvious recipe for chaos and strife. It was also certain to provoke a severe response from Russia. It was, in other words, a monumentally stupid line of policy[.]

The above-mentioned Victoria Nuland has a place in the Greece story as well; click and you’ll see her with the Greek president, explaining how things work.

About that neo-liberal intrusion into Ukraine, Floyd quotes Patrick Smith from a piece at Salon:

“[U.S.] foreign policy cliques remain wholly committed to the spread of the neo-liberal order on a global scale, admitting of no exceptions. This is American policy in the 21st century. No one can entertain any illusion (as this columnist confesses to have done) that America’s conduct abroad stands any chance of changing of its own in response to an intelligent reading of the emerging post–Cold War order. Imposing “democracy,” the American kind, was the American story from the start, of course, and has been the mission since Wilson codified it even before he entered the White House. When the Cold War ended we began a decade of triumphalist bullying — economic warfare waged as “the Washington Consensus” — which came to the same thing.”

And:

“Instantly after Yanukovych was hounded from Kiev, seduction began its turn to betrayal. The Americans and Europeans started shuffling their feet as to what they would do for Ukrainians now that Russia has shut off the $15 billion tap. Nobody wants to pick up the bill, it turns out. Washington and the E.U. are now pushing the International Monetary Fund forward as the leader of a Western bailout. If the past is any guide, Ukrainians are now likely to get the “shock therapy” the economist Jeffrey Sachs urged in Russia, Poland and elsewhere after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Sachs subsequently (and dishonestly) denied he played any such role — understandable given the calamitous results, notably in Russia — but the prescription called for off-the-shelf neoliberalism, applied without reference to any local realities, and Ukrainians are about to get their dosage.”

And regarding Pierre Omidyar:

Omidyar seems very much a part of the “neo-liberal order” which, as Patrick Smith noted above, the United States has been pushing “on a global scale, admitting of no exceptions.” So it is not surprising to see him playing a role in trying to spread this order to Ukraine, in tandem with the overt efforts and backroom machinations of the U.S. government. Omidyar is, openly, a firm adherent of the neo-liberal order — privitazing public assets for individual profit, converting charity and state aid to profitable enterprises for select investors, and working to elect or install governments that support these policies.

Billionaires helping governments help billionaires. One big happy family. Who needs left or right when everyone with real money works together?

Greece and Ukraine, the Bottom Line

So far, the U.S. has not had a direct hand in the upheaval in Greece, but it has had a hand in the upheaval in Ukraine, though unnoticed. In all other respects there are major parallels. In both cases an economically distressed country is targeted as prey (is there another word for this?) by Western elites bent on straitjacket economics (“off-the-shelf neoliberalism” is Chris Floyd’s term) and a deal that comes with a price. In the case of Ukraine, there was a counteroffer (Russia’s), so regime change by force was on the table early.

Will there be regime change by force in Greece? Many, like Joseph Stiglitz quoted here, think that’s already being attempted via the destruction of the leftist Syriza party’s credibility and policy options. If this piece at Naked Capitalism is correct, more direct intervention, with U.S. support, may be coming.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

.