On 06/25/2016 03:56 AM, Keith Hart wrote:
For some time now Europe's political leaders and financial cities have
threatened to abolish the City's immunity. That was the issue. The City
wanted out, but didn't wish to make it obvious. See Nicholas Shaxson's
Treausure Islands for the gruesome story of the offshore system and the
City's part in it.
Keith, this is a strong and surprising interpretation, I am totally
curious what you base it on. I have read Nicholas Shaxson and agree it
is a great book. Indeed, the last thing the City wants is even the
slightest regulation - and more broadly, the capitalist world economy
has always thrived on cutthroat competition between national capitals,
which is an inevitable outcome of any breakdown of the the EU and a
relatively familiar position for the City, you're right about that. Yet
the big money in the City bet on Remain, and all the figureheads
campaigned for it! What's more, a lot of press claims that voters
rejected the financial elites who did the continual campaigning (the
famous "experts"). I am totally willing to revise my view, but I guess I
would need some more convincing...
On 06/24/2016 08:43 PM, Michael H. Goldhaber wrote:
> But what about the fact that those under 50 voted to stay by sizable
margins?
Well, it shows that a majority of those born since the Sixties are not
dreadful nationalist bigots! Thank heavens!
But the danger and promise of democratic systems is that decisions are
made by the numerical majority of those who vote in any given election.
And when you lose, you lose. Right now the Left is losing, despite a few
positive signs. I think a progressive egalitarian ecological politics is
waiting to be invented. It's useless to grasp at this or that straw.
There's a basic problem, we have to face it.
The proletarian Old Left is almost meaningless in the developed world,
the minoritarian New Left is relatively vibrant but still a small
minority, and the cyberlibertarian politics of the Nineties is just a
delusion, since the "weary giants" of the old industrial nation-states
still rule through the very networks that were supposed to displace
them. The developed countries face yet another classic capitalist crisis
of automation, deskilling and widespread redundancy, and the reactions
of racist fear and nationalism are as crude as ever. But the traditional
liberal cure - industrial expansion through increased global trade
driven by volatile finance - now risks killing the patient. Ecology has
become a matter of survival, but survival can only be won through a new
political economy, with all the programmatic rationality, and also, all
the rhetorical appeal that characterized the old one.
What's really crucial - and maybe this is what you're getting at,
Michael - is how do younger people analyze this disastrous situation? Do
they fall back on the capitalist reflex embodied by Hillary Clinton that
says, push through the recession to another growth wave that will solve
all the problems? Or do they create a genuine response to the current
situation?
I'm over fifty, so I would rather put it this way: Can we cut across all
the identity divides, interest groups and zip-code blocks to constitute
a majority around a viable logic of development? The answer so far is
clearly no. But it's really the only thing worth working on.
In response to the last poster, maybe I'll use my next art-funded junket
to the UK for exactly those purposes!
best, Brian
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