Joshua Mitchell — Donald Trump Does Have Ideas—and We’d Better Pay Attention to Them…

The post-1989 world order is unraveling. Here are 6 ideas Trump has to replace it.

If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.

These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided us toward, siren-like, since 1989.…

Politico

Donald Trump Does Have Ideas—and We’d Better Pay Attention to Them…

Joshua Mitchell | Professor of Political Theory at Georgetown University

Dimitri Konstantakopoulos — Nuland in Nicosia – towards “regime change” in Cyprus?

Many readers may think that what is happening in Cyprus, a small member-state of EU in Eastern Mediterranean, is of rather marginal importance. This is what mainstream media are implying by their (non) reporting on the real parameters of the Cyprus question. But, in reality the opposite is true. Cyprus, in spite of its magnitude, is too important to speak much of it!

What what will happen in Cyprus during the coming months may have huge consequences for the direction both the European and the Middle Eastern crises will take in the near future. It may determine EU-Turkey relations and it will also deeply affect Greek politics and Russian interests in the Mediterranean.

Why all this? First because the “solution”, now prepared, of the Cyprus conflict is tantamount to no more, no less than the … abolition of the state in Cyprus, something which will set an example for all nation-states in Europe. To make a long story short, the Annan plan – along the same lines will be the next proposal for Cyprus - was giving ultimate power in the island to three foreign judges and to dozens of other “international officials”, appointed by the General Secretary of the UN personally (without even the consent of members of the Security Council). Those judges and other “international officials” would be able even to appoint their successors!

Katehon
Dimitris Konstantakopoulos: Nuland in Nicosia – towards “regime change” in Cyprus?

Dimitri Konstantakopoulos | Journalist and writer, former Secretary of the Independent Citizens Movement, former member SYRIZA’s Central Committee, current editorial board member of the international magazine Utopia Review, ex-chief of the Greek Press Agency office in Moscow, formerly served as Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou’s adviser in East-West relations and arms control.

Bill Mitchell — The co-option of government by transnational organisations

Today, some more analysis of the debate about globalisation and the capacities of the nation-state. We consider the debates in the early 1970s about the power of transnational corporations and the claims that they undermined the capacity of the nation-state to further the interests of the population. On the one hand, the free-market liberals claimed that the emergence of the transnational corporation was a move towards increased global efficiency and the nation-state, which served narrower interests, would be swept aside, along with its regulative structures, by this trend. Global welfare (and solutions to international poverty) would be maximised by the demolition of national borders by transnational capitalism. This view considered the nation-state to be ‘dispensable’ – that it only served narrow interests and the global organisation of production no longer required national governments to operate in this way. The Marxist position was, understandably, at odds with this view. It considered the nation-state to be indispensable to the growing needs of international capital. This was in the sense that governments could provide essential stability to reduce the risk of transnational operations. My position is more in line with the latter view although it clearly recognises the relevance (and power) of the national governments in which they choose to operate. Further, these transnational corporations are typically very large firms within the nations they operate. it is hard to differentiate the political clout that being large exerted from the influence of being global. Certainly, the early literature was not clear on that issue.…

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The co-option of government by transnational organisations
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Phillip Cunliffe — Swapping one mirage for another: the Left’s turn away from social Europe

What's wrong with the European Left and what to do about it.

Cunliffe doesn't mention it but key to reclaiming national sovereignty in the EZ is a return to national currencies. As long as a nation is not the sole provider of its currency and doesn't incur obligations in a currency it does not issue it is not sovereign in its currency. And a nation that is not sovereign in its currency cannot exercise full national sovereignty.

Those with a stake in this are advised to read William F. Mitchell, Eurozone Dystopia (Elgar 2015) for an MMT analysis and solutions. Bill has arranged a discount of 35% for his blog readers. See his blog (scroll down to the bottom of the page for the code.)

The Current Moment
Swapping one mirage for another: the Left’s turn away from social Europe
Phillip Cunliffe

John Redwood, MP — The Greek people voted against austerity – why is the EU ignoring this?

Neil Wilson informs me that John Redwood is a right wing British Conservative MP and eurosceptic.The Guardian is a British liberal newspaper.

Worse still, where are the voices on the left who share my outrage that Greek democracy is overridden or ignored by the EU authorities? What part of the Greek condemnation of austerity policies did the EU not understand?

The left and I might not agree on what would propel Greece back to prosperity. What I think the remedy for the Greek economy might be is less relevant, as I am neither a voter nor an adviser to the government. Where we should agree is that the single-minded policy of cuts in the public sector, membership of the euro, strict monetary and banking controls, and an uncompetitive exchange rate is not working and needs revision....

Were the EU truly democratic, or were it still an association of democratic states, it would listen to Greek voters – the voters who have already crushed the parties of government that presided over the crisis. The tragedy is that they seem to have no impact on the rest of the EU, which now holds the fate of the Greek people in its hands. It is not just the Greek economy that faces a major challenge, Greek democracy itself is on trial.

Rather than saying, "Greek democracy itself is on trial," I would put it that democracy in the EZ and EU are on trial given the institutional arrangements and a neoliberal leadership that doesn't value democracy and sees it as an obstacle to economic liberalism based on propertarianism.

The Guardian | Comment Is Free
The Greek people voted against austerity – why is the EU ignoring this? 
John Redwood

ht Neil Wilson

Don Quijones — New TTIP Leak Confirms EU Proposal Is Covert Attack Against Basic Democratic Values

According to a leaked European Commission proposal in the ongoing EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, EU member state legislative initiatives will have to be vetted for potential impacts on private business interests.

The proposal forms part of a wider plan for so-called “regulatory cooperation”. Civil society groups have already denounced earlier iterations of this plan as being a tool to stop or roll back regulation intended to protect the public interest. The new elements in the leaked proposal expand the problem, according to civil society organisations.

Civil society groups have condemned the “regulatory exchange” plan as an affront to parliamentary democracy. “This is an insult to citizens, elected politicians and democracy itself”, says Max Bank of Lobby Control.

The “regulatory exchange” proposal will force laws drafted by democratically-elected politicians through an extensive screening process. This process will occur throughout the 78 States (50 U.S. states and 28 EU ones), not just in Brussels and Washington DC. Laws will be evaluated on whether or not they are compatible with the economic interests of major companies. Responsibility for this screening will lie with the Regulatory Cooperation Body, a permanent, undemocratic, and unaccountable conclave of European and American technocrats.

What's that about democracy and capitalism being joined at the hip as mutually necessary? Oh, right. More BS to dupe the rubes and scam the "the little people," you know, those that pay the taxes.

Aristotle observed that the only way to implement true democracy in a lasting way is through random selection among citizens, e.g., using a lottery. Anything short of this will inevitably degrade into oligarchy.

Raging Bull-Shit
New TTIP Leak Confirms EU Proposal Is Covert Attack Against Basic Democratic Values
Don Quijones

Scott Adams — Corporations versus Countries

Corporations keep getting bigger. Some have their own fleets of aircraft, ships, and sometimes even submarines. 

At the same time, the more problematic countries - in terms of spawning terrorism - are the ones that are shrinking, both in population and GDP. Syria is smaller now. Afghanistan and Iraq are smaller. 

At some point I believe it is inevitable that a corporation will go to war with a small, terror-spawning country.…

Interesting idea but in an empire, that's what the empire does for the interests that it represents.

Dilbert.com Blog

Corporations versus Countries

Scott Adams | Creator of Dilbert

Don Quijones — A Message to the Bilderberg Group from a Dead President

Building the global transnational corporate state .

This weekend, around 100 of the most powerful luminaries from the worlds of politics, business, finance and media will be converging on a luxury hotel in Denmark for two days of secret deliberations (you can see a full list of the attendees here). Among the rather ominous topics under discussion will be the “future of democracy”, privacy, intelligence sharing, the sustainability of the economic recovery, Ukraine and the “new architecture” of the Middle East.

There is no way for the public to know what is said behind the hotel´s closed doors, for all the guests and hotel staff are sworn to secrecy. And while the media is finally beginning to tentatively report on the Bilderberg Group after a universal blackout lasting decades, not a single mainstream publication will dare to address the massive conflicts of interests posed by our supposed elected representatives meeting clandestinely with the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful corporations.

Raging Bull-shit
A Message to the Bilderberg Group from a Dead President
Don Quijones

Ellen Brown — Monsanto, the TPP, and Global Food Dominance

Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.

Web of Debt
Monsanto, the TPP, and Global Food Dominance
Ellen Brown

Noam Chomsky — How Do We Defend Ourselves from the Corporate and Imperial Forces That Threaten Our Existence?

We need a worldwide struggle to preserve the global commons....

The blurring of borders and these challenges to the legitimacy of states bring to the fore serious questions about who owns the Earth. Who owns the global atmosphere being polluted by the heat-trapping gases that have just passed an especially perilous threshold, as we learned in May? Or to adopt the phrase used by indigenous people throughout much of the world, Who will defend the Earth? Who will uphold the rights of nature? Who will adopt the role of steward of the commons, our collective possession? That the Earth now desperately needs defense from impending environmental catastrophe is surely obvious to any rational and literate person. The different reactions to the crisis are a most remarkable feature of current history. At the forefront of the defense of nature are those often called “primitive”: members of indigenous and tribal groups, like the First Nations in Canada or the Aborigines in Australia - the remnants of peoples who have survived the imperial onslaught. At the forefront of the assault on nature are those who call themselves the most advanced and civilized: the richest and most powerful nations. 

AlterNet
Chomsky: How Do We Defend Ourselves from the Corporate and Imperial Forces That Threaten Our Existence?

Simon Johnson — Big Banks’ Tall Tales

As Bill Dudley, the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, put it recently, using the delicate language of central bankers, “The impediments to an orderly cross-border resolution still need to be fully identified and dismantled. This is necessary to eliminate the so-called ‘too big to fail’ problem.”

Translation: Orderly resolution of global megabanks is an illusion. As long as we allow cross-border banks at or close to their current scale, our political leaders will be unable to tolerate their failure. And, because these large financial institutions are by any meaningful definition “too big to fail,” they can borrow more cheaply than would otherwise be the case. Worse, they have both motive and opportunity to grow even larger.

This form of government support amounts to a large implicit subsidy for big banks. It is a bizarre form of subsidy, to be sure, but that does not make it any less damaging to the public interest. On the contrary, because implicit government support for “too big to fail” banks rises with the amount of risk that they assume, this support may be among the most dangerous subsidies that the world has ever seen. After all, more debt (relative to equity) means a higher payoff when things go well. And, when things go badly, it becomes the taxpayers’ problem (or the problem of some foreign government and their taxpayers).

Project Syndicate

Big Banks’ Tall Tales

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the IMF, is a professor at MIT Sloan, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics

Out of paradigm about "taxpayers," but it shows that cross-border resolution is an issue with transnationals.

David Fields — Globalization: A Fetish of (Post) Modernity

Throughout the enormous literature on ‘globalization’ there is a common theme that worldwide social, political, and economic transformations have contributed to reconfigurations and re-articulations of the world-system. The contention is that due to to recent technological revolutions in communication, media, and transportation, a ‘new international division of labor' has ensued a unique 'global' sociological imagination; the national 'state' as a principle of structuration is unsatisfactory for the social scientist - the 'space of flows' has replaced the 'space of places' (Ruggie, 1993). Dynamic connective configurations beget 'transnational' corporations omnipresent vertically disintegrated and horizontally integrated in an irresistible Gramscian transnational historic bloc of 'neoliberalism'.

This approach downplays the primary force driving globalization, which is financialization - the international transformation of future streams of (profit, dividend, or interest) income into tradeable financial assets. The systemic power and importance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions, and financial élites manifestly delink the national state from perceived social, political, and economic processes....

Naked Keynesianism
Globalization: A Fetish of (Post) Modernity
David Fields

Greg Palast — Robert Mundell, evil genius of the euro

For the architect of the euro, taking macroeconomics away from elected politicians and forcing deregulation were part of the plan

Read it at The Guardian (UK)
Robert Mundell, evil genius of the euro
by Greg Palast | guardian.co.uk

Palast Nails it, as usual. Turns out he knew Mundell and got the story from his lips to Palast's ear. If this doesn't knock your socks off, you aren't wearing any.

I have hammering on this for some time, as readers here know. The EZ "experiment is the neoliberal game plan for globalization that transcends democracy and establishes the rule of international institutions committed to neoliberal principles. Except when events go against their interests, then use their influence over government to force government bailouts of "an indispensible financial sector that transcends national boundaries." And yes, the US did bail out several foreign banks considered "to big to fail."

Here's what I wrote in comment over at MMR:

Tom Hickey June 27, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Mike, I have been warning for some time‚ decades, that the neoliberal thrust is for an international economic system that transcends governments and is controlled by the global elite. They don’t mind disasters occurring, since they never let crisis go to waste and even use crisis as a tool to advance their agenda.

The EZ-EMU is a brazen step in that direction, specifically designed for that purpose. Which is why the elite is resistant to any solution that does not move their agenda forward. While the breakdown of the EZ is “unthinkable,” it will happen if elites find that they cannot control the process any longer. They will just shift course and organize the rubble [I should have added here, at two cents on the dollar, euro, or whatever].

This may sound like the New World Order conspiracy theory but it is the opposite. The NWO conspiracy theory is aimed against world socialism and the UN as a world government that will deprive the US of national sovereignty.

This nwo is designed to make sovereignty irrelevant wrt multinational interests under the control of the global elite that controls “capital.’ National sovereignty remains in place legally but it doesn’t affect elite interests, since elites can manipulate govts through capture and just go above them in terms of economic-financial global infrastructure.

This is the opposite of “socialism” and the logical outcome of “capitalism” as monopoly capital.