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      in Elections

      'This is our moment … I love you': Cori Bush's electrifying victory speech

      by

      I was running … I was that person running for my life across a parking lot, running from an abuser. I remember hearing bullets whizz past my head and at that moment I wondered: “How do I make it out of this life?”
      I was uninsured. I’ve been that uninsured person, hoping my healthcare provider wouldn’t embarrass me by asking me if I had insurance. I wondered: “How will I bear it?”
      I was a single parent. I’ve been that single parent struggling paycheck to paycheck, sitting outside the payday loan office, wondering “how much more will I have to sacrifice?”
      I was that Covid patient. I’ve been that Covid patient gasping for breath, wondering, “How long will it be until I can breathe freely again?”
      I’m still that same person. I’m proud to stand before you today knowing it was this person, with these experiences, that moved the voters of St Louis to do something historic. St Louis: my city, my home, my community. We have been surviving and grinding and just scraping by for so long, and now this is our moment to finally, finally start living and growing and thriving. So, as the first Black woman, nurse, and single mother to have the honor to represent Missouri in the United States Congress, let me just say this. To the Black women. The Black girls. The nurses. The single mothers. The essential workers. This. Is. OUR. Moment.
      Six years ago, St Louis captured the eyes and ears of the entire world during the Ferguson uprising. We could not stand the injustice any longer, so – in the tradition of every one of our ancestors who fought for a better world – we organized for Michael Brown, Jr. We organized for 400 days, side by side, arm in arm, St Louis strong. And now in the face of a global pandemic and relentless attacks on our right to vote, we organized all the way to the ballot box. We mailed in our ballots, we voted absentee, we reached our families, friends, neighbors, and peers – and we showed up … St Louis strong.
      For years, we’ve lived under leadership that shut us out of our own government. For years, we’ve been left out in the cold: protesting in the streets, sleeping in our cars or tents, working three part-time jobs just to pay the bills. And today, today, we, all of us, are headed to Congress – St Louis strong!
      My message today is to every Black, Brown, immigrant, queer, and trans person, and to every person locked out of opportunities to thrive because of oppressive systems; I’m here to serve you. To every person who knows what it’s like to give a loved one that “just make it home safely baby” talk; I love you.
      To every parent facing a choice between putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their head; I’m here to serve you. To every precious child in our failing foster system: I love you.
      To every teacher doing the impossible to teach through this pandemic; I’m here to serve you. To every student struggling to the finish line; I love you.
      To every differently abled person denied equal access; I love you.
      To every person living unhoused on the streets; I love you.
      To every family that’s lost someone to gun violence; I love you.
      To every person who’s lost a job, or a home, or healthcare, or hope; I love you.
      It is the greatest honor of my life to accept the responsibility to serve every single person across Missouri’s first congressional district, as your first-ever Black congresswoman-elect. This is our moment.
      Tonight, we the people are victorious. We, we the people are going to Congress. Because we the people have committed to a vision of America that works for all of us. An America that treats every person with respect. That recognizes healthcare as a human right. That believes every person deserves food to eat, a home to live in, and a dignified life. Our America will be led not by the small-mindedness of a powerful few, but the imagination of a mass movement that includes all of us. That is the America we are fighting for.
      Everything I do begins with those who have the least, who’ve suffered the worst, and who have the greatest to offer. Why? Because I myself have lived paycheck to paycheck. I struggled for years under the burden of student debt. I’ve been evicted by landlords. I’ve worried about how I was going to put food on the table for my two kids. I’ve been underinsured and uninsured. And for every one of those stories that I can tell you about my life, I know there are thousands more in our community. And those are the stories that I am carrying with me and will uplift in the People’s House as your congresswoman.
      It is my job now to serve you – not just lead, not just demand, but serve you.
      This moment is brought to us by us – by our movement for social, racial and economic justice. Now, our movement is going to Congress. And we will meet the challenges of this moment as a movement: side by side, arm in arm, and with our fists in the air – ready to serve each other until every single one of us is free.
      This is a written version of the victory speech Cori Bush gave on 3 November More

    • 200 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Whatever the final US verdict, we're mourning the ‘blue wave' that never was | Emma Brockes

      by

      In the aftermath of the 2016 election in the US, there was a hope among Democrats that rose to the level of conviction: the results were devastating, yes, but they were also surely anomalous. Donald Trump had won, it would be a lousy four years, then his celebrity would wear off, he would do a terrible job, and the argument of his awfulness would make itself. For the first time in history, people would soberly examine the evidence, come to their senses and, without need of a crushing military defeat, admit they’d been horribly wrong.Obviously that hasn’t happened. As the agonising creep towards a possible Joe Biden victory advances, the only certainty is that the “blue wave”, so anticipated on Tuesday night, hasn’t materialised. Not only have the Democrats failed to secure a resounding win, but in plenty of constituencies, support for Trump has actually increased. Early electoral data showed that in parts of Texas, for instance, while record numbers in the state voted – 6.6% more than in 2016 – in some rural communities, turnout for Trump more than doubled, and Biden lost counties won four years ago by Hillary Clinton. At the national level, whereas four years ago 35% of voters thought Trump had the temperament to govern well, exit polls this week indicated a rise in that figure to 44%.All of which, frankly, is staggering. Weeks of parsing and processing the data will follow, but in the first instance, the only possible response to all this is to scream: “My God, what is wrong with these people?” What has to happen, if alleged tax evasion, a rape accusation and the small matter of 234,000 dead Americans doesn’t tip them off that this guy is bad news? What can be said to be wrong with the people of Florida, 5.6 million of whom – just over half of those who voted in that state – voted for Trump? What’s in the water in rural Pennsylvania? After the election in 2016, there was a rush to understand and empathise with Trump’s supporters with a view to understanding exactly how this had happened. This time, there is only disgust.It isn’t purely emotional. (Although, three days after the election, it is still mostly emotional. A tweet put out by the Gap retail group this week featured a Gap sweater, half red and half blue, beneath the words “Together we can move forward”, inviting many spirited responses as to where precisely Gap and its sweater might be shoved.) But while it is dismal to feel such loathing towards large numbers of one’s countrymen, the deeper hit has been the dawning of what this election might mean. In 2016, Trump was a one-off, an aberration, a dumb novelty whose appeal would surely wane over time. You can’t say that any more. Trumpism – even to name it seems to give it a coherence it lacks – has taken seed, and if Biden wins, this election might still in some ways augur more doom than the last one.Meanwhile, the Trump machine rolls on. As with everything the man does, even at his worst he appears darkly comic. When, on Wednesday, Trump randomly declared victory in states where he had already lost, it had the mad, manic tone of Basil Fawlty denying the reality of a rat in his dining room. On cable news, there was the newly slimmed-down and full of beans Chris Christie, saying with relish that the Democrats would lose because black people didn’t vote. There were similar efforts by Republicans to set white Democrats against Hispanic voters, who on the earliest evidence marginally increased their support for the president.None of it made any sense beyond the knee-jerk Republican need to sow division. There may be small increases in the numbers of black and Hispanic voters for Trump, but those numbers are still dwarfed by support in what nobody calls the “white community”. In Florida in 2016, Trump won two out of 10 minority ethnic votes, a number that increased this week to three out of 10. But early polling data suggests that, as in 2016, Trump’s capture of the white vote held steady at six out of 10 – this in spite of practically every white person in power promising to “do the work”, stop being so racist, and log-jamming a bunch of books about antiracism on the bestseller list for most of the summer. So much for all that. On Wednesday, exit polls nationwide showed that while 55% of white women voted for Trump – up three percentage points from 2016 – some 58% of white men voted to re-elect the president. Men suck. White people suck. Everything sucks.So here we are, awaiting the final verdict, queasy with anxiety and mixed feelings. If, as looks increasingly likely (spit three times), Biden wins, we will celebrate, of course. There will be a huge collective sigh of relief. The country will start to correct and recover. But there remains a clenched sense that something has shifted, an argument has failed to be won, and that none of what has happened over the past four years is going away any time soon. More

    • 225 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Trump has not been repudiated – a Biden presidency would face obstruction at every level | Adam Tooze

      by

      Whatever else emerges from the US’s 2020 election, one thing is clear: it has not delivered a comprehensive repudiation of Donald Trump. The shock of 2016 has not been undone. There is nothing in the result to expiate the humiliation of the last four years, the disgraceful vulgarity and illegality. Even if Joe Biden is ultimately sworn in as president, the fact that Trump was not booed off the greatest stage in world politics in disgrace will be hard for Biden’s supporters to come to terms with. This is an inconvenient truth not for the US alone, it has implications for the rest of the world too.Rather than a rejection of Trump, the election results reshuffle the finely balanced and deeply polarised configuration that has prevailed in American politics since the days of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. As in 2016, Trump lost the overall vote, but he continues to command overwhelming majorities in small-town and rural white America. Despite his vituperative hostility towards immigrants, Trump made remarkable gains among the rather diverse group crudely lumped together under the label Latino. Confusingly, he did well not only with anti-socialist communities of Cubans and Venezuelans in Miami, but with Mexican-Americans in Texas too. And he continues to garner a majority of votes from white women and white men of all backgrounds.In the meantime no one, either inside or outside the country, should be under any illusion about the scale of the nationalist and xenophobic electoral bloc. The GOP has lurched into the territory of Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and, nevertheless, commands solid support. Indeed, for a sizeable minority of the electorate, it is precisely the stridency of Trump and the GOP that appeals. They love Trump’s aggression, and his gleeful slaughter of liberal sacred cows. Now he has modelled the style, there will be plenty of others who will want to follow.In a divided country, virtually every facet of reality is seen through a partisan lens. Not unreasonably, the Democrats tried to make the election into a referendum on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. But that did not prove to be a winning card. Almost half of Americans did not agree that Trump’s disastrous and irresponsible performance disqualified him from the presidency. This hardly bodes well for the effort to gain control of the disease, which would be the first task of a Biden administration.If there is no collective will to take preventive action, then everything continues to ride on a magic bullet: a vaccine. But even that will not guarantee success. Opinion polling suggests that no more than a bare majority will agree to be vaccinated, with Republican-leaning Americans particularly resistant. The implication is that the US will limp along, not effectively controlling the outbreak and going through repeated lockdowns. The impact on communities and small businesses is likely to be devastating.Even assuming the virus can be mastered, a Biden administration would face an uphill political battle. Its formidable foes are the GOP in Congress, led by Mitch McConnell, the sulphurous boss of the Senate Republicans. Ahead of the election, riding a wave of over-optimism about the likely result, Nancy Pelosi played a dangerous game. The House speaker held out for a gigantic second stimulus package in excess of $2tn, but no “blue wave” swept the Democrats to control of Congress. Now, with a diminished majority, Pelosi will have to return to the bargaining table to negotiate with McConnell. To the pleasure of Wall Street, he has announced that he is willing to make a deal, but this is an ominous sign. Any package that McConnell will agree to is more or less guaranteed not to meet the social crisis facing tens of millions of unemployed Americans, and struggling cities and states across the country. And yet, to save the economy from catastrophe, the Democrats may well be forced to accept McConnell’s terms.However necessary, any deal with McConnell should be regarded as a poison pill. Every item of Biden’s progressive agenda – health, childcare and education – would be on the block. The wider world would be pleased to see a Biden administration reverse Trump’s decision to exit the Paris climate agreement. But any talk of a Green New Deal would likely be cut off at the knees. The Republicans like to talk about infrastructure but in four years in office, Trump never delivered an investment programme. If Senate Republicans were won over to a Biden green energy plan, you can count on it being tailormade for the business lobby. There is no chance whatsoever that the Senate would grant Biden the formal ratification of the Paris agreement, a legal victory denied to Barack Obama as it was to Bill Clinton over the Kyoto protocol.This would leave the United States unable to credibly commit to carbon neutrality. The progress of technology and the falling cost of renewable energy may be the trump card, but a technical fix can only take you so far. Deep decarbonisation may in due course open the door to a new green growth model. But, in the medium term, it requires painful structural change that will have to be initiated from the top down.Any progress in the next four years would depend on administrative makeshift and painful compromise. The Obama administration delivered a masterclass in both the potential and the limits of that kind of governance. A Biden administration would no doubt benefit from this experience, but it would face what may be Trump’s most formidable legacy: a court system packed at every level with pro-business, anti-regulation judges. In a single term Trump managed to appoint a quarter of federal judges, who will be enacting his agenda for decades to come.Faced with obstruction in every direction, we should not be surprised if the de facto lead on economic policy continues to lie not with the elected executive branch, but with the Federal Reserve. The Fed chairman, Jay (Jerome) Powell, has been nothing if not accommodating. And, from the point of view of the rest of the world, Fed leadership may be no bad thing. Cheap dollars ease the pressure on the world economy. But there are distinct limits to what any central bank can do in responding to the economic shock caused by the virus. And there are seriously toxic side-effects of an endlessly expansionary monetary policy, notably in inflating speculative bubbles that benefit the fortunate minority who own shares.What the Fed cannot deliver is what the US desperately needs, a major upgrade in public services, starting with electoral machinery, childcare, healthcare and 21st-century infrastructure. Without that, the impasse of a divided American society and a dysfunctional politics will continue. That is the prospect that should most worry the rest of the world. Far from closing the book on the last four years, even if there is a change of incumbent in the White House, this election threatens to confirm and entrench the poisonous status quo. More

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      in World Politics

      Can America Restore Its Democracy?

      by

      You know about the five-second rule. According to conventional wisdom, food that has dropped on the floor can be safely eaten if retrieved within five seconds. Some scientists have even set up experiments to confirm this folk saying. Of course, all bets are off if your toast falls on the floor buttered side down and you haven’t mopped the kitchen in recent memory.

      How Do You Fix the Soul of the Nation?

      READ MORE

      Today, after a contentious election and with the results of the presidential race still uncertain, we are all now looking down at the ground. It’s been four years since Donald Trump dropped the buttered toast of our democracy onto the floor. After four years face down in the dirt, can our democracy be picked up, dusted off and restored to some semblance of integrity?

      The 2020 Election

      The polls made it look like Joe Biden would be an easy winner, maybe even in a landslide. The Democrats were expected to retake the Senate. The huge number of early votes — nearly 100 million — suggested that the 2020 turnout would be the greatest in more than 100 years. The Democratic Party is supposed to benefit from more souls at the polls.

      The polls were off. If Joe Biden wins, he will do so by a slender margin and only after considerable legal wrangling by both parties. The Democrats are now a long shot to win control of the Senate. And the huge turnout has translated into Donald Trump getting more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, more in fact than any Republican candidate in history.

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      Texas did not go blue. Neither did Florida or Ohio. The Republican Party went all in for Trump, and he delivered beyond his base. But Arizona may have flipped, and Georgia might as well. If the infamous “Blue Wall” holds — at least Wisconsin and Michigan if not Pennsylvania — then Biden will become the next president.

      Still, who in their right mind would want to lead the United States at this perilous moment? The pandemic is surging. The economy hasn’t climbed out of its hole. Donald Trump has applied his scorched-earth approach to both foreign and domestic policy. The Republican Party has demonstrated that it delights in playing dirty, refuses to compromise for the national good and embraces the most malign of Trump’s many fictions from the uselessness of masks to the myth of climate change.

      Exit polls, meanwhile, reveal a country divided by more than just party affiliation. Democrats, for instance, overwhelmingly want to contain the current pandemic while Republicans want to focus on reopening the economy. This dynamic explains why so many Trump voters believe the president better handles both the economy and the pandemic, even if the evidence of his mismanagement is obvious to everyone else.

      Trump’s “law and order” message also proved influential among Republican voters, despite the president’s blatant violations of law and disruptions of order. Heck, according to a recent judicial ruling, even the president’s Commission on Law Enforcement broke the law!

      Perhaps the most sobering conclusion from the election is that nearly half the country is indifferent to the actual mechanisms of democracy. They just don’t care that their president refused to endorse a peaceful transition of power if he loses. They don’t care that he has derided the very act of voting by insisting, as he did early Wednesday morning, on enlisting the Supreme Court in an effort to stop the counting of the remaining ballots (except in those states, like Arizona, where he hopes to catch up). Nor do they see anything wrong with the Republican Party’s efforts to keep certain groups of people away from the polls.

      That doesn’t bode well for the future of American democracy, especially if the country continues to abide by the Electoral College. For the last several decades, US presidential elections have resembled Groundhog Day — and I don’t mean the movie. Why should one groundhog determine the length of winter? Don’t the other groundhogs get a vote? Likewise, why should a voter in Pennsylvania matter more than a voter in Maryland or Wyoming?

      Trump is not the only culprit here. The ground was dirty before he dropped our democracy on it. The Democrats and their patronage systems, like Tammany Hall in New York and Richard Daley’s machine in Chicago, set some dismal precedents. But now it is the Republican Party that, to preserve its governing majority in the absence of a popular mandate, is warping the rules of the game and breaking the few rules that remain.

      People vs. Putative Adults

      Let’s say that Biden ekes out a victory. What’s the damage report on Trump’s four-year assault on democracy? After the 2016 election, the pundit class asserted that one man, however powerful, could not tear down the 250-year-old edifice of American democracy. There was much talk of “guardrails” and “adults in the room,” all of which were supposed to contain the ungovernable id in the White House.

      Over the course of four years, however, Trump systematically disposed of the supposed adults in the room — Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly — in favor of yes-men and one or two yes-women. In addition, through executive orders, judicial appointments and obsessive Twittering, he moved the guardrails so that he could steer America wildly off the road.

      Just before the 2018 midterm elections, I wrote, “it would be poetic justice if what’s left of the mechanisms of democracy — voting, the courts, and the press — can still be used to defeat a potential autocrat, his family, and all the putative adults he’s brought into the room to implement his profoundly anti-democratic program.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Over the last two years, those mechanisms were in fact on full display. Despite Trump’s full-court press, the judiciary has represented an important check on his power, blocking some of his attacks on immigrants, his efforts to withhold his financial information and to throw out ballots. The mainstream media, meanwhile, continued to nip at Trump’s ankles. The New York Times, for example, published one expose after another about Trump’s record on the pandemic, his taxes, his financial relations with China and so on.

      And now the voters have had their say. Despite all the efforts by the Republican Party to suppress the vote, around 67% of eligible voters turned out this year, the highest percentage since 1900. Trump supporters did what they could to push against that tide. They intimidated voters. They disrupted Democratic Party events and even tried to run a Biden bus off the road in Texas. They restricted the number of ballot drop-off locations. The post office, run by a Trump appointee, ignored a court order to locate 300,000 mail-in ballots at risk of not being delivered. But voters gonna vote.

      Let’s also salute all the people who have made that vote possible. Despite the pandemic, tens of thousands of people showed up to staff polling sites and count ballots. Then there are all the volunteers who participated in get-out-the-vote campaigns by knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending texts and doing grassroots fundraising to keep the operations going. Democracy, in other words, is not just about the politicians and the voters. It requires an immense effort by a veritable army of people. They, not the candidates, are the winners of the 2020 election.

      Democracy’s Future

      Trump is not done. Even if he doesn’t get his presumed entitlement of four more years, he has two more months to trash his frat house of a presidency before turning it over to the next administration. That means more executive orders like the recent ones that opened up Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and removed workplace protections from federal civil servants. If Biden manages to take his place in the Oval Office, he’ll likely face a Republican-controlled Senate that will block his every move, just like Republicans adopted a no-compromise position after the election of Barack Obama.

      Certainly, Biden aims to reverse many of Trump’s executive orders with his own ones. That will work in the foreign policy realm, for instance recommitting the United States to the Paris climate accords. But any domestic orders will face court challenges, and suddenly the Republican Party’s strategy of pushing through an unprecedented number of federal judges takes on an even more ominous cast. Popular will be damned. The Republicans will rely on senators, lawyers and judges to institutionalize Trump’s legacy.

      Unlike 2008, the Democrats will be hard-pressed this time to claim an overwhelming popular mandate after such a close election. Trump voters, meanwhile, are not going away. They’ll continue showing up with guns. They’ll refuse to wear masks. They’ll spread fake news and outlandish conspiracy theories.

      They’ll also challenge the federal government — now led by an adversary, not an ally — at every turn. Remember the 2016 standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, when a bunch of right-wing extremists seized government property and faced off against law enforcement? Expect an uptick in outright confrontations between federalists and anti-federalists during Biden’s presidency.

      Let’s face it: The democracy that Donald Trump dropped on the floor suffered a great deal from the experience. It’s going to take more than an election to put it right.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Why Populists at the Helm Are Bad for the Economy

      by

      Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a man on a mission. The goal: to make Turkey great again. Making Turkey great again, I guess, means wiping history clean of a series of humiliations, from the ignominious decline of the Ottoman Empire, dismissed as the “sick man upon the Bosporus” in the late 1800s, to the no less ignominious Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 that forced Istanbul to cede vast parts of its territory to France, the UK, Italy and Greece. The treaty not only marked the beginning of the empire’s demise, but also the origins of Turkish nationalism, which led to the establishment of the modern Turkish republic.

      President Erdogan is but the most recent and arguably most egregious expression of Turkish nationalism that seeks to restore past glory by gathering all Turkish peoples under one roof, similar to what once was known as pan-Slavism. This explains why Erdogan has been adamant in his support for Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Ironically enough, Erdogan has been amazingly sanguine with respect to the oppression of Muslim Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province. As so often, money trumps convictions while hypocrisy runs rampant.

      In an Era of Strongman Politics, Turkey Is Hard to Call

      READ MORE

      This is deplorable, but, as US President Donald Trump has put is so eloquently, albeit in a different context, “It is what it is.” In any case, the topic here isn’t Erdogan’s attempt to establish himself as the champion of pan-Turkish nationalism or his attempt to affirm his claim to champion the cause of Islam, exemplified in his recent attacks against French President Emmanuel Macron. Instead, the focus is on Erdogan as a typical exponent of contemporary authoritarian populism.

      Claim to Legitimacy

      Populists base their claim to legitimacy on the notion that they promote the interests of “ordinary citizens” against an aloof elite far removed from everyday life, an elite that could care less about people’s concerns and worries. Against that, populists maintain that if elected, they will make the concerns and wellbeing of ordinary citizens their main priority. This is how Erdogan, Trump, India’s Narendra Modi and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro swept into office. This is what has been their claim to legitimacy.

      Unfortunately, hard reality is a far cry from lofty promises. Decades of experience with populist regimes shows that populists in power have a disastrous economic track record. To make things worse, populists appear to be particularly resistant to taking advice from those who have studied populist economics or learning from the glaring mistakes made by populist regimes in the past.

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      There is, by now, a substantial record of serious analysis of populist economics, largely based on the experience of Latin American populism. Take, for instance, Jeffrey Sachs, who certainly is above any suspicion of harboring right-wing proclivities. In a paper from 1989, he analyzed what he called the “populist policy cycle”: Overly “expansionary macroeconomic policies,” he observed, “lead to high inflation and severe balance of payments crises.”

      In a similar vein, Rüdiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards noted in 1991, “Again and again, and in country after country, policymakers have embraced economic programs that rely heavily on the use of expansive fiscal and credit policies and overvalued currency to accelerate growth and redistribute income.” After a short-lived economic boom, problems emerge, engendering “unsustainable macroeconomic pressures that, at the end, result in the plummeting of real wages and severe balance of payment difficulties. The final outcome of these experiments has generally been galloping inflation, crisis, and the collapse of the economic system.” Ultimately, those supposed to benefit most from populist economic policies, i.e., the poor, end up worse off than they had been before the populists came to power.

      Recent developments in Turkey suggest that Erdogan’s regime might be heading in the same direction. Take, for instance, the evolution of the country’s currency, the lira. Over the past nine months, the lira has lost almost 25% of its value compared the US dollar and the euro. This reflects investor worries about rising inflation, depleting currency reserves and the fact that Turks appear to be fleeing into foreign currencies.

      Same Direction

      The concerns are hardly unfounded. In late September, the Turkish central bank raised interest rates by 200 basis points, from 8.25% to 10.25%, in an attempt to counter rising inflation. This marked a drastic reversal of previous policy. Starting in December 2019, it had successively slashed the interest rate, which at the time stood at 14%. The move was not entirely of the bank’s own making. In July, Erdogan, unhappy about the bank’s slow pace in cutting interest rates, dismissed its chief for not having “follow[ed] instruction.” His replacement dutifully embarked on a course of monetary easing, based on official projections that the inflation rate would fall to around 8% by the end of 2020.

      Monetary easing provoked a massive “credit binge” by both businesses and households, which, in turn, stoked the flames of inflation, far surpassing the projected 8% mark. In reality, inflation rose to around 12% in 2020. In response to monetary easing, private debt increased substantially, with often disastrous consequences. A prominent case in point is Turkey’s professional football clubs. The four most prominent ones — Besiktas, Galatasaray, Fenerbahce and Trabzonspor — have accumulated around €1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) worth of debt.

      The reason? In line with Erdogan’s goal to turn Turkey into a major global power, the country’s top football clubs endeavored to move into the Gotha of European football, on par with the likes of Real Madrid, Bayern München and Manchester City. In order to reach this goal, they borrowed heavily in euros and dollars in order to be able to attract international star players. The partial collapse of the Turkish lira, together with the drying up of revenues in the wake of COVID-19, has pushed all four clubs to the abyss of financial ruin.

      It would be going too far to suggest that this might be a preview of things to come for Turkey as a whole. In fact, the regime’s economic track record has been relatively successful in performing a balancing act between sane economic policy and populist inclinations. This has been due, to a significant extent, to the central bank’s relative independence, even if this has noticeably eroded over the past several years, constantly under pressure from the president to support the regime’s economic program. The recent rate hike might suggest, or so one might hope, that realism has once again gained the upper hand.

      This would certainly be a departure from business as usual as far as populist regimes are concerned. A recent extensive study by economists from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the University of Bonn in Germany provides an extensive and detailed account of the profound incompetence populist regimes have demonstrated when it comes to the basics of economics. Silvio Berlusconi’s tenure, for instance, did little to advance the life chances of ordinary Italians.

      Embed from Getty Images

      On the contrary, the upsurge in voter discontent and disenchantment that, for a short period of time, propelled the Five Star Movement to the top of Italian politics, reflects the opportunities wasted during Berlusconi’s reign. This has been particularly pronounced in Latin America, but not only there. In the medium and long run, as the study’s authors conclude, “virtually all countries governed by populists witness subpar economic outcomes evidenced by a substantial decline in real GDP and consumption.” It would be easy to dismiss these outcomes as the result of misguided policies, informed by good intentions but with disastrous consequences. My guess is, however, that this is only part of the story, and the less important one at that. Not for nothing those who have studied populism have emphasized the importance of the “common sense of common people” as a central trope in populist rhetoric, targeting expert “elites.”

      Unfortunately, more often than not, the common sense of the common people is completely wrong. Even more unfortunately, ignoring expert advice more often than not has disastrous consequences — in economics, as well as with regard to the coronavirus pandemic.

      Once again, Erdogan is a prominent example. Despite an upsurge in COVID-19 infections, the president has been more than reluctant to follow advice to impose stringent measures to contain the virus. At the same time, his political allies have accused Turkish medical experts of “treason,” reminiscent of similar slanders in the United States. To make matters worse, Erdogan’s shameful attack on President Macron in the wake of Islamicist-inspired terrorist attacks in France is hardly conducive to improving Turkey’s economic relations with Western Europe, a vital market for Turkish exports. So much for common sense.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      Even if Biden wins, the world will pay the price for the Democrats' failures | Owen Jones

      by

      How could the electoral circumstances for the US Democrats have been more favourable? A quarter of a million Americans have died in a pandemic bungled by the incumbent president, and at least 6 million have consequently been driven into poverty. The coronavirus crisis is the devastating climax of a presidency defined by hundreds of scandals, many of which alone, in normal circumstances, could have destroyed the political career of whoever occupied the White House.Despite having the active support of almost the entire US press, Joe Biden’s victory looks to be far narrower than predicted. During the Democratic primaries, Biden’s cheerleaders argued that his socialist challenger Bernie Sanders would repel Florida’s voters, and yet Donald Trump has triumphed in the sunshine state. They argued that his “unelectable” rival would risk the Senate and down-ballot races, yet the Republicans may retain control of the Senate, and Democrats are haemorrhaging seats in the House of Representatives.Without coronavirus, Trump would have undoubtedly secured another term and potentially dismantled an already flawed US democracy for a generation or more. This should have been a landslide, and now the world will pay the cost for the self-inflicted wounds of the Democratic establishment. Trump may be defeated; Trumpism lives on.While attention should now focus on resisting attempts by Trump and his allies to steal the election, the Democratic establishment must also understand why this entirely avoidable farce came to pass. As their phones lit up four years ago with notifications that he had become the 45th president of the American republic, Trump was, to self-styled Democratic “moderates”, a sudden hurricane that materialised under clear blue skies: an aberration; a glitch; a perverse accident to be undone so normality and civility could be restored.Many Democrats comforted themselves with the notion they had nothing to answer for: they had simply been cheated, Russia was to blame, and Hillary Clinton – whose hubristic campaign had initially wanted Trump as its preferred Republican nominee – had been tragically wronged. Rather than offering an inspiring alternative, Biden would bask in the reflected glory of Barack Obama, present himself as the “grownup” in the room, and focus on flipping erstwhile Trump voters on the grounds of competence alone. Striking, then, that not only did Trump win more votes than 2016, but 93% of Republicans opted for him this time around, up three points from that fateful election.Ample criticisms can be made of Biden’s candidacy, which limited its political horizons in deference to the Democrats’ corporate client base, when even Fox News exit polls showed that most Americans favoured a government-run healthcare plan. Democrats have taken Latino and black Americans for granted, an oversight that Trump ably exploited, winning (albeit from low numbers) increased support among both groups. But the roots of this failure go back decades. The Democratic establishment has long refused to embrace even the basic tenets of social democracy – not least taxing the better-off to fund programmes such as a comprehensive welfare state and universal healthcare.The political consequences of this failure have been devastating. In the 1960s, the Democratic president Lyndon B Johnson launched a series of “great society” programmes to tackle poverty. Yet while the tax burden of the average American family nearly doubled between the mid-1950s and 1980, taxes on corporate America have been successively slashed. Here was a resentment to be tapped into: that hard-working Americans, rather than the boss class, were subsidising those demonised as the “undeserving” poor.This fury became racialised as the struggle of black Americans – which was met with harsh white backlash – forced the federal government to introduce basic civil rights. When Ronald Reagan furiously denounced “welfare queens”, many blue-collar workers heard a dog whistle targeting often single black mothers, who their hard-earned tax dollars were supposedly subsidising. When Bill Clinton’s administration backed trade agreements that devastated industrial jobs in the rust belt, here was another grievance waiting to be mined. And it was, by the most unlikely figurehead, the former host of the Apprentice. Trumpism has exploited racism, and fury at economic grievances, successfully welding both forces together.In the aftermath of the financial crash, Obama’s presidential campaign appeared to offer a break with the failures of successive Republican and Democratic administrations. But while he rescued the banks and let financial executives off the hook for their role in the 2008 crash, wages for millions of Americans stagnated or declined. While the slice of national income belonging to middle Americans fell from 62% to 43% between 1970 and 2018, the number of billionaires has surged: from 66 in 1990 with a combined wealth of $240bn, to 614 today, with a total fortune of nearly $3tn. America is now a society in which one in every 11 black adult is either in prison, or on parole or probation – racial injustices that Black Lives Matter has urgently underlined.The Democratic establishment has proved itself politically bankrupt and unable to meet these challenges. The party lost against Trump in 2016, and has at best scraped a stillborn administration this time around. We will all pick up the tab for this failure. Although Biden committed to signing the world’s biggest polluter back up to the Paris climate accords, a failure to win the Senate will block a Green New Deal that is desperately needed to tackle the existential threat of the climate emergency. The world cannot afford another four years of inaction. With Biden’s likely presidency held hostage by a potentially hostile Senate and supreme court, the Republicans will be able to further gerrymander an already fatally compromised democratic system and, come mid-terms, tap into people’s disillusionment with an inevitably do-nothing government.That does not mean there is no hope. The so-called Squad of progressive Congressional Democrats – whose most famous member is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – has doubled in number, including the election of former nurse Cori Bush in Missouri and the first queer black Congressman, Mondaire Jones, in New York. The old Democratic establishment has failed to inflict the final reckoning on Trumpism that is deserved. It falls to this new generation of progressive leaders – predominantly working-class people of colour – to finish the job, not just for the United States, but for all of us.Join Guardian journalist Owen Jones, Labour MP Dawn Butler and academic Maya Goodfellow as they discuss the hostile environment and attitudes towards immigration in Britain. Tuesday 24 November, 7pm GMT Book tickets here More

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      in Elections

      Fox draws Trump campaign's ire after calling Arizona for Biden

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      When Donald Trump supporters gathered outside a vote-counting centre in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday night, they had a simple and perhaps unexpected chant: “Fox News Sucks!”
      Although the channel has become synonymous with Trump’s rise to power, in the last two days Fox News has become the focus of the Trump campaign’s anger after it made an early call on Tuesday night that the state of Arizona was going to Joe Biden.
      In the process, the channel switched the media’s attention away from Trump’s substantial success in Florida and undermined the president’s attempts to focus attention on the vote counting in Pennsylvania.
      Such was the level of fury within the Trump campaign at the call that his team reportedly attempted to have the decision overturned. According to the New York Times, this involved Jared Kushner contacting Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, while in Vanity Fair’s reporting it was the president himself who called the media mogul. Regardless of who was placing the calls, Fox has stuck by its decision – much to the anger of many of its viewers who have bombarded the channel with complaints.

      The decision to call the ultra-close Arizona race for Biden – a victory that was later also declared by the Associated Press, which provides results data to the Guardian – was made by Fox’s Arnon Mishkin, who runs the broadcaster’s decision desk. Before the election, Mishkin, a registered Democrat who has worked for Fox News for decades, had made clear that he would not be swayed by internal pressure in making calls for states.
      As a result, Mishkin has been portrayed as a defender of the truth, representing the uneasy balance that exists between Fox’s straight news division and the highly opinionated rightwing hosts who shape the external perception of the channel.
      On Thursday, Mishkin, who has become a target for angry Trump supporters, told the channel’s viewers that he would not be changing his mind on the basis that “we strongly believe that our call will stand, and that’s why we’re not pulling back the call”.
      Dismissing claims from Trump’s team that they could still edge ahead in the ultra-close race as more votes were counted, a visibly exasperated Mishkin pushed back and said the objections were like talking about what would happen “if a frog had wings”.
      “We’re confident that the data will basically look like the data we’ve noticed throughout the count in Arizona,” he said.

      Trump and his team have an increasingly complicated relationship with Fox News. Throughout his presidency he has been an obsessive watcher of the channel, often providing commentary on his Twitter feed about its audience ratings when he objects to its coverage and phoning in to dispute specific issues.
      On the day of the election he complained on air about the channel’s coverage not being sufficiently supportive: “Somebody said what’s the difference between this and four years ago, and I say Fox … In the old days you wouldn’t put ‘Sleepy Joe’ on every time he opens his mouth. You had Democrats on more than you had Republicans. I’m not complaining. I’m just telling people.”
      One of the bigger questions in US rightwing media is what happens if Trump loses the election, with longstanding speculation that he could be tempted to start his own media outlet in a bid to communicate directly with his supporters. More

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      in World Politics

      What Is Behind the Rise of Islamophobia in France?

      by

      On October 29, the French Ministry of Interior sent out a message on social media warning of “Violent radicalization, Islamism … If you have any doubts about someone you know, contact the toll-free number.” The situation in France has exploded into what is now increasingly reminiscent of 1930s Germany when Hitler sought informants on Jews.

      Muslims Will Not Kill God for Marianne

      READ MORE

      Samuel Paty, a schoolteacher who showed his students the derogatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad that inspired the 2015 attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, was killed by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee, Abdoullakh Anzorov. When French President Emmanuel Macron defended the display of the cartoons, which are considered by Muslims to be extremely offensive, as a matter of freedom of expression, the ongoing tension between the French state and its roughly 6 million-strong Muslim population (or 10%) is, in fact, a manifestation of a much deeper crisis, heralding what seems to be a growing trend across Western civilization.

      French Islam

      For France, the issue has its roots in the country’s domestic and international politics. The concept of radical assimilation has been a part of France’s governance tradition since its colonial reign. In the 19th and 20th centuries, in Francophone Africa, the natives were considered “French” and “civilized” as long as they rejected their own cultures in favor of that of the colonial power.

      The same mentality applies to the immigrants who have moved to France from former African colonies, particularly Algeria, Tunisia, and those countries across West Africa. This strict interpretation of the assimilation policy is further reinforced at home by the rigorous redefinition of French secularism, or laïcité, whereby the visibility of religion, particularly Islam, is suppressed in the public sphere, and the responsibility of immigrants, and Muslims in particular, is to demonstrate their attachment to French values and culture.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The suppression of religion in the public sphere has created enormous friction between the secular state and Muslims, whose faith requires observance around the clock. For example, the arrest of Muslims who have had to pray in the streets due to lack of mosques has become commonplace. In a striking display of French secularism, a Muslim woman was forced on a beach in Cannes in 2016 by police to remove her Islamic burkini and given a citation for “wearing an outfit that disrespects good morals and secularism.” France’s aggressive attempt to create nationwide equality has naturally led to repression of diversity, forcing Muslims to retreat to ghettoized suburbs. This in turn created discrimination and a fear of social rejection among France’s rapidly growing Muslim population.

      This brings us to how Islam is viewed in France. Much as across Europe, Islam is the fastest-growing faith in France. French Muslims are much younger and have considerably more children than other French nationals. Correspondingly, Christianity in France is in free fall. According to the survey by St. Mary’s University, London, only 25% of the French between the ages of 16 and 29 identify as Christian. What is even more concerning for the French state is that the number of people converting to Islam is on the rise as well. Out of France’s 6 million Muslims, 200,000 are estimated to be converts, among whom are celebrity figures such as the rapper Diam’s and footballer Franck Ribery. Conversion to Islam is particularly prevalent among women, which has created a body of research examining this trend.

      The increasing demographic disparity between Islam and Christianity, coupled with an increasing refugee influx from Muslim countries, has given rise to the notion that within two generations, Muslims are going to be the majority in Europe. Naturally, this argument has been used by right-wing politicians across Europe. France is no exception. Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, has skillfully used this argument throughout her political career. In the first round of the 2017 French presidential elections, Le Pen garnered a sizable 21.3% of the vote against Emmanuel Macron’s 24%, only to lose in the run-off election. The 2017 election clearly showed that right-wing politics are on the rise in France and elsewhere in Europe.

      Macron’s harsh stance toward French Muslims should also be seen from this angle. In the 2022 French presidential race, Macron is expected to seek a second term against Le Pen, his most likely contender. To the president’s dismay, the current polls suggest that at 26%, Le Pen has an edge over his 25%. This being the case, the incumbent Macron is clearly courting the far-right constituency by adopting Islamophobic policies that would be expected from a Le Pen presidency.

      More Problems

      The current atmosphere is highly conducive for a further rise of the far right across Europe. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by the Great Depression of 1929 and its devastating impact on Germany. Likewise, the 2008 global financial crisis jolted the West so much that we have been witnessing the demise of the center-left and the gradual rise of the radical right in Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the United States.

      Macron’s current effort to elevate Islam as France’s biggest problem should also be seen as an attempt to distract the public from his failures at home and abroad. The rapidly deteriorating economy, austerity measures, heavy taxation and the proposed pension reform have inspired the yellow vests movement that has been staging violent demonstrations against the government since 2018. Abroad, France appears to be bogged down in its never-ending wars in former African colonies as French casualties pile up. In Libya, Macron has failed to secure warlord Khalifa Haftar’s rule. In the East Mediterranean, France has failed to secure the interests of Greece, an ally.

      There is one country that France has had to unsuccessfully counter in the above-mentioned regions: Turkey. It is for this reason that Macron has consistently perceived Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his archrival and increased his anti-Turkey rhetoric. Furthermore, Erdogan, at the moment the most outspoken critic of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, is the only world leader who can influence Muslims in France, and Macron knows it. Erdogan’s call on Muslims for a worldwide boycott of French products prompted the French government’s plea to the Muslim world to denounce the boycott. While the economic effect of the boycott is not known yet, Macron seems to be softening his tone on the cartoon issue.               

      France’s unsuccessful assimilation policies, rapidly deteriorating economy, failed foreign policy alongside the ensuing rise of the far right have all contributed to the current demonization of Muslims in the country. As Western values such as democracy, human rights and equality are losing relevance, there is little hope that this trend will change any time soon.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More