Anti-Fascist Roundup: Europe

I'm so glad Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, wrote his column about the death of Liberalism ("How Liberalism Loses")—

In Australia a week ago, the party of the left lost an election it was supposed to win, to a conservative government headed by an evangelical Christian who won working-class votes by opposing liberal climate policies. In India last week, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, won an overwhelming electoral victory. And as of this writing, Europeans are electing a Parliament that promises to have more populist representation than before.

—just in time to anticipate the European results, in which the Liberals in the strict sense were by far the biggest gainers, alongside the Greens, or in general those on the more-or-less left with a strong commitment to European integration, as opposed to the more-or-less left that couldn't make up its mind about Europe in Britain and France in particular, and the pro-Europe Merkel conservatives, who endured the biggest losses.

Via The Guardian.

Anti-European reactionaries and nationalists did indeed increase their seat numbers, but in a clearly divided way between the proper hard right "Nationalists" in the chart) of Matteo Salvini's Lega in Italy and Marine Le Pen's Ralliement Nationale in France and the silly right "Freedom and Direct Democracy") of Nigel Farage's Brexit party, sadly the top vote-getter in the UK, and the Movimento Cinque Stelle in Italy which isn't really "right" at all; and plainly at the expense of the less Liberal.

Catastrophic, I'm sorry to say, for the SPD in Germany, which finished third behind the brilliantly performing Greens

They broke the Brexit

Don't buy this house without a thorough inspection! Via Syracuse.com.

Conservative MP Bin Afolami from Hitchin and Harpenden, North Herts, a Remainer constituency, who voted to Remain but supports the prime minister now, sort of, on NPR yesterday morning, offering his view in the current chaos, which is that the Norway solution is still in some way available, and that he rejects the idea of a People's Vote that would give the population an opportunity to do a retake, though he's opposed to referenda in general—at one point in the fall he was arguing that you couldn't do a retake because the 2016 referendum wasn't legally binding:

the nexus between the triggering of article 50 and the referendum is weaker than if the referendum had been legally binding. Does that not weaken the case for the referendum result to be overturned or for article 50 to be rescinded, because Parliament is making an even more independent judgment than would otherwise have been the case?

Anyway I was struck by his more elaborated reasons for not doing it, in the NPR interview:

And I don't believe, if you - if you go down the route of having referendums - and I personally don't think they're a very good idea. But once you've gone through that, to then say, well, you know, we've tried it for a couple of years, it's all been a bit difficult; let's do it again, is something that is profoundly difficult for a lot of people, the majority of whom voted to leave.

They will say, we voted to leave. We gave the - our politicians a simple instruction, to get that done, and you've manifestly failed to do so. What that does to trust, not just in politicians themselves, but also to our political system, that if you vote for something very clearly, that you at least get that, I think that's very difficult.

"We made an awful mistake, so we mustn't do anything to try to fix it, because that would just make people cynical."

Goodbye to All That

Via DepositPhotos.

There was some news from Britain with a kind of family resemblance to good news, if you read it all together, starting with the report this morning from The Mirror, as members of the Labour Party converged on Liverpool for the annual party conference, that leader Jeremy Corbyn is ready to accept the party's will on the question of whether to have a second Brexit referendum, what they're calling a "People's Vote", if they demand it at the conference, as they apparently will; confirmed later on in the Telly Graf:

Labour is poised to back a second referendum after Jeremy Corbyn confirmed he is prepared to commit to a major policy shift if the party’s members vote for it.

On the eve of Labour's annual conference, Mr Corbyn said he was "bound by the democracy of our party" and would "adhere" to "what comes out of conference", although he insisted he would rather bring about a general election.

The general election in question was one he was said to be planning to force by joining with the violent Conservative faction of Jacob Rees-Mogg to defeat Prime Minister May's "Chequers proposal" for the Brexit, in which Britain was going to get a relationship with Europe something like Canada's, except for Northern Ireland, which would sort of remain in Europe for certain purposes—a proposal which, I should add, has already been totally rejected by the European Union, as well as May's own Secretary of Brexit, which seems to be a new cabinet department, Dominic Raab, so don't ask me why the hell Parliament should be voting on it. I know, as we anglophiles like to say, a dead proposal, and I'm looking at one right now. That proposal is definitely deceased. Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleeding choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PROPOSAL!!!

Bresurrexit?

It would be funny if Trump were to actually drive the UK back into the European Union:

The possibility of signing a trade agreement with the US was sold by Leave campaigners (and still is) as one of the big potential benefits of withdrawing from the EU. And, as a last resort, there was an assumption that the UK would be able to benefit from the baseline rules of the World Trade Organisation. But, in the current climate, those assumptions are being severely tested. Yesterday’s decision to increase tariffs is but the latest in a long line of protectionist measures adopted by a Trump presidency that is deeply distrustful of existing structures, which underpin the international trading system. (Billy Araujo Melo, MetroUK)

Image via BBC.

Not that it's going to happen, but if the Conservatives were smart, it could.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, [International Trade Secretart Liam] Fox said the UK was still seeking exemptions from the tariffs.

"We will still be making that case throughout this week," he said.

He added: "The United States believes, I believe wrongly and illegally, that this is a national security matter for the US.

"Given that we export some pretty complex steel products to the United States which are part of their national security programmes themselves, this reasoning that is given is wrong and therefore we believe unlawful."

Hatred for Trump is beginning to work as an international unifying factor. Kind of the way they used to feel about North Korea, in fact. You were always safe hating on the Kim of the day. Russians and Chinese pretended to care, you could tell they couldn't stand them as much as the rest of us. Nowadays South Koreans say pretty explicitly that whatever you say about the current Kim, and it's all true, he's still more reliable than Trump.

Friday Friday

Via L'avenir en commun, website of the Jean-Luc Mélenchon campaign.

I've felt pretty dispirited about the French election, and was heartened by this Mélenchon campaign cheer by one key supporter, Olivier Tonneau, in The Guardian, which may help talk you out of any fears inspired by reportage from the bothsiderist mafia that the only plausible leftist candidate is where Left meets Right around the back of the circle if you believe in that particular myth, or that Mélenchon is a Putinist or that he wants to destroy Europe:

we don’t plan to leave the EU: we aim to force the renegotiation of its treaties by means of unilateral disobedience. From the moment we come to power, we will implement a massive, environmentally focused Keynesian stimulus funded via a public bank, thus kickstarting the French economy and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

We will not apply privatisation directives. We will opt out of the posted workers programme, but we will not reduce freedom of movement. We will implement a salary scale: the highest salary will never be more than 20 times the lowest. We will cap revenues at €400,000 a year. We will regularise the situation of all working illegal immigrants, and we will not implement quotas for refugees.

Cosmopolitans are the *real* bigots

Borgo Cassati, portrait of Captain Sir Richard Burton in his disguise as "Mirza Abdullah of Bushire, a vendor of fine linen, calicoes and muslins", which enabled him to enter the no-go zone of Mecca in 1851-53. Image via somebody's abandoned Pinterest.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, offers his own take ("The Myth of Cosmopolitanism") on the Great Realignment theme introduced this week by James Traub and David Brooks:

NOW that populist rebellions are taking Britain out of the European Union and the Republican Party out of contention for the presidency, perhaps we should speak no more of left and right, liberals and conservatives. From now on the great political battles will be fought between nationalists and internationalists, nativists and globalists. From now on the loyalties that matter will be narrowly tribal — Make America Great Again, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England — or multicultural and cosmopolitan.

If you think there's something going on there where Shakespeare's John of Gaunt (Richard II, act 2 scene 1) is getting presented as Trump with a classy English accent, you're right.

Who invented the single market?

The Custom House, New York, 1799, via Wikimedia Commons.

The first time a continent-wide bunch of independent countries decided to form a single-market customs union, more than three decades before the various German statelets and principalities started toying with the concept of the Zollverein in ca. 1819, was in North America in 1787.

Because as everybody knows the War of Independence was not fought on behalf of one nation but 13 nations, which as the Declaration says "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States", note the careful deployment of the plural there. As the dust settled after the war they worked out their Articles of Confederation under that assumption, giving each full autonomy in matters of taxation, after the fashion of the Dutch United Provinces.

West of Eden: Lede, exhumed

The Fallujah caravanserai, ca. 1914. Via Wikipedia.

Maybe I just wasn't reading carefully enough, but when the Iraqi government forces were reconquering the Anbar city of Fallujah from Da'esh, culminating over the weekend, I never saw the news that interested me most until I got to Professor Cole's wrapup of the operation: namely, who those government forces were, and whether they included any Sunni soldiers, which it turns out they did, in the form of tribal levies from the

clans of the Dulaym in al-Anbar Province who opposed Daesh just as many of them had opposed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the predecessor of Daesh that was organized to fight the US military occupation of the country. Tribes are kinship units in rural Iraq, and while they are religiously conservative they typically are not fundamentalists, and they dislike Daesh for condemning their Muslim traditionalism in favor of a hyper-fundamentalism.

They also included Shi'ite militias including some, such as the Badr Corps, that are directly backed by Iran, and Cole seems to think that the actual Iraqi regular army, a mess, was probably the least useful element. There are allegations of bad behavior among the militias, that they have been razing buildings in the city to punish the Sunni residents. But the fact that the Sunni tribal levies participated and played an important part is a really good sign that Prime Minister al-Abadi may finally be beginning to work effectively towards integration, and that Obama's policy of handing out US assistance in a way that encourages it is finally starting to pay off. Cole is dubious, but not hopeless:

Annals of Derp: McMegan, afterthoughts

I put together a quick infographic summarizing the demographics of the Brexit vote by age. pic.twitter.com/UTEvmPVTc3

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) June 24, 2016

Commenter StringOnAStick writes, in response to yesterday's Twitter battle,

Having recently gone through their own stay or leave (the UK) drama, I suspect the Scots have already put a good deal of thought into the economic issues at hand. Well, certainly more than the various anecdata stories of Leavers who now say they "just wanted to send a message, not actually leave".

It seems most Brexit postmortems are fixated on immigration (bad economy? Blame furriners!) and nationalism, because admitting that austerity has caused the lower classes significant pain would rather give the game away regarding the ongoing wealth transfer to the elites, no? Plus those most economically wounded might stop voting for the bastards doing the wounding if they didn't think flag waving solves everything.

It's amazing McArdle thought Scotland might have gone through the whole independence campaign in 2014 without anybody ever thinking of the points she "raises". She's really remarkably stupid sometimes.

Annals of Derp: McMegan on Scotland

McArdle delighted by the English revolt against the "elites" in the "remote capital" and their burdensome regulation of the struggling and oppressed capitalist class.

Not so pleased, on the other hand, by the prospect of Scots revolting against English imperialism, or what you and I would call elite rule from a remote capital, where they extract profits out of the land and leave the people in need, when Scotland wants to keep enjoying some of that Brussels regulation and the open borders that go along with it. McArdle thinks the economic sufferings Brexit will bring to the UK are a trivial matter, but issues dark warnings on the economic dangers for the Scots if they separate from UK to be a member of the EU on their own. Which are totally wrong, of course. At least as far as I know; she hasn't replied to my last Tweet yet.

.@asymmetricinfo @RameshPonnuru In fact almost certainly not. https://t.co/uRJGMDk1cu Google is your friend you know.

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) June 25, 2016

.@asymmetricinfo @RameshPonnuru But they win oil and gas revenues just as prices begin to rise https://t.co/0el7T9F8J3

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) June 25, 2016

I told her about Google, too!

E pluribus multum

"Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do." But little England couldn't ever imagine it. #pecksniff

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2016

I'm literally grieving. This should not have happened. If the European Union isn't democratic enough, the point ought to be to democratize it, not to retire into your island fastness.

Western pond turtle, via Aquarium Tidings.

Across the Pondering

Members of the Not In My Name campaign, a group dedicated to opposing the so-called Islamic State, in Luton, Bedfordshire. None of these men is an immigrant from the European Union.

Megan McArdle finally found herself!

This past weekend, I found myself in the British borough of Luton, pondering a British exit from the European Union. “How did you find yourself in Luton?” you will ask, and I will reply, “That is a long story, and alas, a very dull one"...

Shit Megan, you sound just like fucking Thackeray. That British air has such a bracing effect upon one's literary style!

Though there's a clue to the mystery, in that

this dull story involved many hours spent in a horrible third-tier European airport with middle-class Britons heading home from their holidays.

"I'll tell you, Watson, I suspect the Luton episode of this supposedly long, dull story involves an episode of travel from England to the United States." "Good God, Holmes, how do you deduce that?" "Elementary: travel is an almost constant concomitant of presence in airports." As turns out to be the case; she had a long layover there on an EasyJet flight, and the main point of the story may well be a complaint about Bloomberg's stinginess with the expenses.

So there she was, at one of an apparently inadequate number of phone-charging stations,

Dancing in the hurricane

Image via.

That's Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Archmustache of Cloudberry, taking a new provisional book title out for a test drive, perhaps.

He was in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan, guest-of-honoring the annual Sulaimani Forum at the American University of Iraq (he doesn't mention it, but it's not hidden, and Dr. Google and I got there in under a minute), and offering them some Friedmaniacal gnomic advice:

he pointed out how the world is changing ever faster, mainly as a result of the dominance of The Internet in all aspects of life, comparing this rapid change to a hurricane. “You can dance in a hurricane when you stand in the eye,” he told his audience, “but then you need an anchor of good governance and good communities” -- then wishing his “good friend Barham Salih [MP and former prime minister in the Kurdistan regional government, founder of the American University of Iraq in 2006] good luck in building an eye to the hurricane.” (via rudaw.net)

I think part of the problem is that if the hurricane is Internet-driven socioeconomic change, then the eye is either where you can't get online or change isn't occurring or both, so if you focus on dancing in it, you're going to be missing a lot. Also, you need to be aware that the eye of a hurricane is moving, and if you just stand there dancing, you'll be back in the wind in a couple of hours.

West of Eden: Brussels doubts

Syrian family in Istanbul. Photo by Jonny Hogg/Reuters (?) on Flickr.

Trump doubled down on his torture advocacy yesterday, naturally:

The billionaire businessman said authorities "should be able to do whatever they have to do" to gain information in an effort to thwart future attacks.

"Waterboarding would be fine. If they can expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding," Trump said on NBC's "Today" program, adding he believed torture could produce useful leads. "You have to get the information from these people."

That would almost be funny, if it wasn't so horrible, coming at the time it does. On Monday, as Belgian police were talking about the fantastic cooperation they were getting from Salah Abdeslam, without the benefit of torture ("worth his weight in gold," said his lawyer), they happened to mention one of the leads they'd acquired, the false name Soufiane Kayal being used by Najim Laachraoui, a suspect in November's Paris attacks; on Tuesday, the Brussels bombings took place, and today we are learning that that same Laachraoui is a member of the team that did yesterday's slaughter, probably the bomb-maker. The Belgian authorities might well have been able to capture Laachraoui and prevent the attack, thanks to their humane and effective interrogation practice,  if they had been a little luckier.

Breaking: Radical international organization condemns "unsustainable" Greek debt deal

Yes, the International Monetary Fund:

The financing need through end-2018 is now estimated at Euro 85 billion and debt is expected to peak at close to 200 percent of GDP in the next two years, provided that there is an early agreement on a program. Greece’s debt can now only be made sustainable through debt relief measures that go far beyond what Europe has been willing to consider so far. 

Via BBC. The IMF has officially (in a leaked document completed before the agreement was signed Monday—the IMF is not a direct party to the agreement, but can stop it from going forward)  come out with most respected economists against the deal, even as the Greek parliament is trying to approve it today; because it's too harsh, will not lead to Greece being able to pay its debts (in particular to the IMF, which is the creditor for about 10% of the total), and isn't even properly fleshed out:

The IMF study said European Union countries would have to give Greece 30-years to repay all its European debt, including new loans, and a dramatic extension on the maturity of its debts. Without such extensions creditors might have to accept "deep upfront haircuts" on existing loans, the IMF added.

One senior IMF official said the fund would only participate in a third bailout for Greece if EU creditors produce "a clear plan".

The current deal "is by no means a comprehensive, detailed agreement", the official said.

Meanwhile, how much more evidence do we need? The German/EU views on Greece are not rational.

Bundeskanzlerin. Via Fnord.

Brussels louts

Updated 6/28/2015

Image via Wikipedia.

I'll get to Greece presently, but first I want to whip you around Friedman-style for a minute.

Remember the story 20 years ago of how the EU was going to force all the member countries to make cheese exclusively from pasteurized milk, thus basically destroying the ancient and glorious tradition of French, Spanish, English, and Italian raw-milk cheeses that are to dairy products what the symphony orchestra is to music? Have you ever wondered how that went down, or why your Camembert doesn't taste any different, although come to think of it it never has tasted quite the way it did that time you were in France?

The whole thing was bullshit. There was never any such EU plan, it was a stupid rumor. That particular bureaucrat in Brussels doesn't exist. Your Camembert isn't any better than you think it is, but it's because of the US authorities, who forbid the sale of any raw-milk cheese that has been aged less than 60 days, meaning

The rectification of paragraph structure

Members of the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra performing at a construction site in the city's Metro, August 2014.

A cogent example of how good reporting gets mowed under by obnoxious editorial practice, in which it's not a story unless it's some kind of drama of personal conflict, from today's Times.

Lede: Who's winning?

The new Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and his leftist Syriza party were elected last month as insurgents, promising to end austerity in Greece and inspire a broader backlash across Europe. But to avoid a banking crisis and keep the loan money flowing, Mr. Tsipras discarded his confrontational stance and is now committed to pushing through structural reforms and tougher tax collections: positions long advocated by European creditors.

Drama Syriza

Image by Rainer Hachfeld via cagle.com.

Krugman offers a really helpful analogy for the Greek crisis from Weimar Germany, which we always remember for the hyperinflation of 1923 when we ought to be thinking of the terrible deflation brought on by the austerity policies (cutting wages and welfare payments, tightening credit, and raising taxes) of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in 1930-32, which was a decisive factor in bringing you-know-who into power in 1933. Austerity was a really bad idea for Germany, and has been a really bad idea for Greece so far.

An earlier and deeper cause of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, he goes on to note, was the terrible burden of debt imposed on Germany after the Great War by France and England under the terms of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, and the fruitless attempts of the Powers throughout the 1920s to collect this money (which they never came close to doing, even when French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr district in 1923-25 with the idea of taking it out directly in the form of coal).

I believe in Slovenia

Beppe Grillo of the Movimento Cinque Stelle, at a press conference.

As the world began fretting today over the fascist takeover of the European Parliament (which is not in fact going to happen, I'm glad to say; the elections results are bad and no doubt very embarrassing to a lot of people, especially in France and England, but there will be maybe 87 anti-Europe MEPs at the most out of the 751 total seats, not enough to bring the edifice down), it occurred to me that the election results provided the data for a little test of a hypothesis I'm interested in: the idea that high voter turnout tends to benefit the left but may also benefit the extreme right. Especially because nobody was talking about turnout except to observe, vapidly, that it was higher this year than in 2009 (43.1% overall compared to 43.0% last time, which is about as significant as—well, probably not very significant).

Anyway I found the results with turnout figures by country at the Parliament's own website, and used them to construct the chart below, which cost me many hours and probably brain cells that could have been useful as I slouch toward senility, and probably still contains some serious errors:

Hook that drive and you could land in the moral hazard

If somebody were to turn over a very large amount of cash to me, I could not only pay off all my credit card debt and the mortgage, but buy a new, much larger apartment, with a washer and dryer, and a big pantry with a chest freezer.

Sausage. From Free-Extras (?).

Then I'd do my basic shopping at Costco, and buy a whole free-range chestnut-fed pig from a gentleman farmer and make my own sausage, and that's not all. I'd start getting really
good clothes—especially shoes—so that I wouldn't have to buy them so often, and season tickets to the opera and the Philharmonic, and memberships in all the museums. Jesus, being rich can save you so much money!

All the people with power keep telling us that a national economy is just like a family, meaning that the nation has to sit down around the kitchen table (assuming it can afford [jump]