The Daesh To Disaster

He had been in Libya. Of course. Thank you so very, very much, David Cameron. 

Ed Miliband didn't help, as I said at the time. But you, David Cameron, did it. 

I am horrified that Labour might support the bombing of targets in Syria, which the Americans are already doing to no effect.

By the time of the 2020 Election, the opposition to this intervention will have been proved right.

The Leader of the Labour Party will need to be someone who had been right all along.

Smashing

Even without troubling the plates, I ought to have got in a bottle of ouzo.

Whatever you have, pour yourself a glass, and raise it to Greek independence.

Private Charity, Public Benefit

In England, the commercial school sector inspects itself. Based on the members of the present Government, it would not appear to be very good. But no one really knows.

Therefore, let the condition of a commercial school's continuing charitable status be its having been adjudged satisfactory or better by Ofsted, using the same criteria as for state schools, with the reports published, and with the value-added measure applied, thereby requiring those schools to have demonstrated how they had improved pupils' abilities.

Andy Burnham, over to you.

But Apparently Not

Andy McSmith writes:

More than £215,000 of the vast sums that the Conservative Party poured into marginal seats in the run-up to the general election came from the mysterious United and Cecil Club.

In the Register of Members’ Interests, 51 Tory MPs declared donations to their constituency parties from the club, ranging from £1,000 to £10,000, in the first three months of this year.

Most beneficiaries are new MPs, though there are a few who won their seats in 2010 by narrow margins.

The three whose parties received £10,000 each were sitting MPs Kris Hopkins and David Morris and Ben Howlett, who took Bath from the Lib Dems.

United and Cecil is a members’ association with only one known purpose – to collect and disburse donations to the Conservative Party.

On the Election Commission registry, its address is given as a £2m private house near Slough.

Most of the MPs who have benefited from it give its address as a stables near Windsor, run by Tim Lord, former chief executive of the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association.

A few give its address as Munslows, an accountants’ firm in High Holborn, London, and one entry suggests it is based in the same building as the Carlton Club, a short walk from Parliament.

United and Cecil has no contact details and its membership list is not public.

It does not need to declare its sources of money as it comes in individual donations below £7,500.

Given the clamour the Tories raise about Labour’s union donations, you might think they would have qualms about being funded by a secretive organisation, but apparently not.

Frank

During a dispute among the exiled Russian Orthodox in Paris, one side once referred to the other side as "les orthodoxes latino-francs". As Professor Andrew Louth of Durham put it to me, "That is certainly one way to make friends and influence people." Ed West writes:

During the period of the crusades Greeks would refer to western Europeans by the generic term ‘Frank’, derived from the name of the leading barbarian tribe of the west.

The word still lives on as a name for white people in Urdu and Hindi – Firangi – as well as Thai and Vietnamese, for whom US soldiers were called Farang (or ‘black Farang’ for African-American troops).

According to Norman Stone’s history of Turkey, the word for syphilis in Turkish is likewise derived from Frank (it was also called ‘the French disease’ in 15^th century Italy).

‘Frank’ is a useful term that really needs to be brought back to illustrate the great divide between the Greeks and their opponents in this current crisis, the people of what is sometimes referred to as ‘core Europe’, roughly the boundaries of Charlemagne’s empire – France, Germany, the Low Countries and northern Italy.

As Greece collapses, why I am looking at maps of 9^th century Europe?

Because at the heart of the current tragedy is the inability of the ruling class to appreciate that history and culture matter (and because I’m weird, obviously).

The European Union was cobbled together on the premise that people are basically the same everywhere and therefore open borders would simply reduce costs and larger states would produce economies of scale.

But people across Europe, let alone outside it, really are different.

As this blog by Michael Story illustrates, because the ‘internationalised class’ tend to meet and socialise with people who are like them, they ignore how unusual people like them are.

He writes:

‘If everyone you meet from around the world has been screened to leave only the most sober, rational and future oriented people, then your heuristic sense of what people are like will be way off.

‘If you were an economist looking at Greece’s joining the Euro, you would examine their national data, plans for reform and economic growth and conclude that it might be a good idea- the Greek economists you are dealing with seem very sensible, there’s every reason to think that the proposed reform might work.

‘But what you’d be ignoring is that the non-economist Greeks might have a very different view.

‘This is the key finding from a fascinating study about a game in which players can profit by cooperating and punish players on their team who do not cooperate. 

‘What the researchers found is that cooperation and willingness to punish non-cooperators was highest in, well exactly the countries that you’d predict.

‘But most interestingly, in some parts of the world players actually chose not just to ignore those who were free-riding, but actively punish their own team-mates who were cooperating the most (the red bars).’

In Greece, for example.

What the paper shows is that people in different parts of the world act in very different ways, and these social norms have an impact on institutions – and the economy.

As Michael concludes:

‘Back in 2008, these researchers unearthed something crucial- that culture is actually pretty important.

‘Not just the culture at the top but particularly in democracies, the culture throughout society.

‘If Greek game players are not just willing to avoid contributing, but to actively punish those who try to help the team, what chance has the country of righting itself?

‘This is the sort of lesson that has to be relearned by the elite- that people are different, and you can ignore it at your peril.’

Trying to build a polity that includes both Greeks and Franks is obviously fraught with problems, because their cultural norms are so different.

Union barely works even in Italy, which has a vast gulf in culture between the north and the south (which was Greek-speaking for a lot longer than it has been ‘Italian’).

Across the whole of Europe it’s a hopeless idea.

As game theory shows, joining together corrupt and non-corrupt political cultures makes the latter behave more like the former.

Partly because such cultural differences were wilfully ignored, the Greek people are going through hell. But not to worry, for some enterprising Londoner aims to rescue the country by raising €1.6bn through crowdsourcing.

So far they’ve got about  €25,000, which is quite impressive, but with seven days to go they’ve some work to do.

The problem is that, as much as I like the Greeks and love Greek culture and civilisation, the country is 69^th on Transparency International’s Corruption Index (tied with those other non-Frankish countries, Bulgaria and Romania), so I may well spend my money on a bottle of ouzo for all the good it will do the poor Hellenes.

A Painful Yet Obvious Admission

Simon Shuster writes:

A few years ago, when Greece was still at the start of its slide into an economic depression, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz remembers discussing the crisis with Greek officials.

What they wanted was a stimulus package to boost growth and create jobs, and Stiglitz, who had just produced an influential report for the United Nations on how to deal with the global financial crisis, agreed that this would be the best way forward.

Instead, Greece’s foreign creditors imposed a strict program of austerity. The Greek economy has shrunk by about 25% since 2010. The cost-cutting was an enormous mistake, Stiglitz says, and it’s time for the creditors to admit it. 

“They have criminal responsibility,” he says of the so-called troika of financial institutions that bailed out the Greek economy in 2010, namely the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank. 

“It’s a kind of criminal responsibility for causing a major recession,” Stiglitz tells TIME in a phone interview.

Along with a growing number of the world’s most influential economists, Stiglitz has begun to urge the troika to forgive Greece’s debt – estimated to be worth close to $300 billion in bailouts – and to offer the stimulus money that two successive Greek governments have been requesting.

Failure to do so, Stiglitz argues, would not only worsen the recession in Greece – already deeper and more prolonged than the Great Depression in the U.S. – it would also wreck the credibility of Europe’s common currency, the euro, and put the global economy at risk of contagion.

So far Greece’s creditors have downplayed those risks. In recent years they have repeatedly insisted that European banks and global markets do not face any serious fallout from Greece abandoning the euro, as they have had plenty of time to insulate themselves from such an outcome.

But Stiglitz, who served as the chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000, says no such firewall of protection can exist in a globalized economy, where the connections between events and institutions are often impossible to predict.

“We don’t know all the linkings,” he says. Many countries in Eastern Europe, for instance, are still heavily reliant on Greek banks, and if those banks collapse the European Union faces the risk of a chain reaction of financial turmoil that could easily spread to the rest of the global economy.

“There is a lack of transparency in financial markets that makes it impossible to know exactly what the consequences are,” says Stiglitz. “Anybody who says they do obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

Over the weekend the prospect of Greece abandoning the euro drew closer than ever, as talks between the Greek government and its creditors broke down. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who was elected in January on a promise to end austerity, announced on Saturday that he could not accept the troika’s “insulting” demands for more tax hikes and pension cuts, and he called a referendum for July 5 to let voters decide how the government should handle the negotiations going forward.

If a majority of Greeks vote to reject the troika’s terms for continued assistance, Greece could be forced to default on its debt and pull out of the currency union.

Stiglitz sees two possible outcomes to that scenario – neither of them pleasant for the European Union.

If the Greek economy recovers after abandoning the euro, it would “certainly increase the impetus for anti-euro politics,” encouraging other struggling economies to drop the common currency and go it alone.

If the Greek economy collapses without the euro, “you have on the edge of Europe a failed state,” Stiglitz says. “That’s when the geopolitics become very ugly.”

By providing financial aid, Russia and China would then be able to undermine Greece’s allegiance to the E.U. and its foreign policy decisions, creating what Stiglitz calls “an enemy within.”

There is no way to predict the long-term consequences of such a break in the E.U.’s political cohesion, but it would likely be more costly than offering Greece a break on its loans, he says.

“The creditors should admit that the policies that they put forward over the last five years are flawed,” says Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University.

“What they asked for caused a deep depression with long-standing effects, and I don’t think there is any way that Europe’s and Germany’s hands are clean.

“My own view is that they ought to recognize their complicity and say, ‘Look, the past is the past. We made mistakes. How do we go on from here?’”

The most reasonable solution Stiglitz sees is a write-off of Greece’s debt, or at least a deal that would not require any payments for the next ten or 15 years.

In that time, Greece should be given additional aid to jumpstart its economy and return to growth.

But the first step would be for the troika to make a painful yet obvious admission: “Austerity hasn’t worked,” Stiglitz says.

Davos Woman

W. James Antle III writes:

Listen to Martin O’Malley’s campaign stump speech and you would think he was running against a candidate named Goldman Sachs.

Jim Webb insists the Democratic Party “could do better with white working people.” Bernie Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist.

Are the Democrats ready for Hillary?

The polling makes the question seem absurd. In four of the last five national polls of Democratic voters, the former secretary of state has taken at least 60 percent of the vote.

Even drops in Clinton’s ratings for honesty and overall favorability haven’t seemed to dent her support among the party rank-and-file.

In a late May CNN/ORC poll, Clinton was at 61 percent among liberals to Sanders’ 18 percent.

Senator Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden—who is unlikely to run—were the only alternatives breaking into the double digits.

Former Maryland Governor O’Malley, the declared Clinton challenger who most looks like a president, barely registered at 1 percent.

Ask the question another way: are Democrats ready for a return to neoliberalism?

Hillary may seem like a dove compared to Lindsey Graham or Marco Rubio, but she is more hawkish than Barack Obama.

You would be hard pressed to find a foreign intervention with bipartisan support that she has opposed since her youthful advocacy against Vietnam.

As secretary of state, she helped lead the country into yet another war of choice, this time in Libya.

What about neoliberal economics?

Despite her feminist background and stated desire to smash a glass ceiling on her own, it is difficult to untangle Hillary Clinton from her husband’s legacy.

Taken together, the Clintons have not really been known for their assaults on the 1 percent.

Democrats know this—which is why there was a constituency for the futile effort to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren into the presidential race—but they take heart in the fact that the Clinton of 2016 isn’t running as a centrist.

In fact, she was using Warren-like rhetoric about corporate America as far back as her first presidential campaign.

Clinton called for a 90-day foreclosure moratorium and a five-year freeze on subprime adjustable rate mortgages in 2007, both positions that put her to the left of Obama.

Clinton certainly isn’t making many feints toward social conservatism.

She has endorsed gay marriage, issuing a statement with her husband praising a Supreme Court decision gutting the Defense of Marriage Act that he signed into law and that she supported for over a decade

 Hillary Clinton once told Newsweek abortion is “wrong.” She now calls for changing “religious beliefs and structural biases” that stand in the way of access to abortion.

During her first run for president, Clinton opposed drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants. Today she supports them and is trying to outflank President Obama on deferred deportations.

Clinton’s campaign announcement video featured symbols of ascendant cultural liberalism even more prominently than the candidate herself.

Hillary Clinton is not Bill, progressives tell themselves. Moreover, Bill Clinton ran for president in a different time.

The Democratic Party had enduring political liabilities that made it possible to lose national elections even to politicians as lacking in charisma and electoral success as George H.W. Bush—before 1988, Bush had never managed to get elected to more than a House seat, which he held for two terms, without Ronald Reagan.

The Democrats’ perceived weakness on crime and foreign policy, their weirdness on cultural issues, and their presumed hostility to economic growth created a need for “New Democrats” to win presidential elections.

That’s why Bill Clinton was more supportive of war, Wall Street, deregulation, and the death penalty than your average liberal.

Those Sister Souljah moments distancing the Democratic nominee from the political liabilities of liberalism are no longer necessary.

The economic and ideological climate is different. The issues that drove the Democrats to neoliberalism are less salient, insofar as they remain important at all.

Demographics have changed to the point that the coalition behind George McGovern—which even Clintonite Democrats like Paul Begala not long ago dismissed as “eggheads and African Americans”—can now win national majorities.

Yet burrowed deep within the most progressive circles of the Democratic Party there is a sense of unease with the Clintons’ coziness with Wall Street.

Already there has been a New York Times best-selling book explaining, as the subtitle puts it, “How and why foreign governments and businesses helped make Bill and Hillary rich.”

Where Republican readers see potential high crimes and misdemeanors, principled progressives should at least sense danger.

Liberals generally detest the influence of special-interest money on politics. They speak of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision expanding permissible corporate political spending in terms conservatives reserve for Roe v. Wade.

If there were ever to be some insuperable wall between finance and government, the Clintons would not build that.

The Clinton Foundation, the gigantic nonprofit base for Hillary and Bill outside of government, has done plenty of bona fide charitable work, including some ambitious projects other less well-funded entities would have been hard pressed to undertake.

But as Richard Kim observed in The Nation, it is also a “global plutocrats’ social club,” a “Davos on the Hudson where corporate executives pledge millions for the privilege of rubbing elbows with celebrities and world leaders.”

The Clinton Global Initiative, founded in 2005, in particular thrives off corporate connections, accumulating tens of billions of dollars in pledges.

“For corporations, attaching Clinton’s brand to their social investments offered a major p.r. boost,” wrote Alec MacGillis in a detailed New Republic piece.

“As further incentive, they could hope for a kind word from Clinton the next time they landed in a sticky spot.”

The Clintons have partnered with Walmart, Goldman Sachs, Michael Bloomberg, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, and Tom Golisano of Paychex.

The big three soda makers—Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group—announced their commitment to help cut the sugary soft drink calories Americans consume through the Clinton Global Initiative.

“This is huge,” Bill Clinton boasted to the New York Times “I’ve heard it could mean a couple of pounds of weight lost each year in some cases.”

The Clintons also won a commitment from Coca-Cola to “economically empower five million women entrepreneurs by 2020,” in what the Clinton Foundation described as a “refreshing investment in women entrepreneurs.”

One needn’t find fault in any of these lofty objectives to ask if the links between the Clintons and corporations have really loosened since the 1990s.

People from far more privileged backgrounds than the Clintons, such as the Kennedys and the Rockefellers, have entered politics as self-styled champions of the poor and the working class. Bill Clinton comes from genuine poverty.

But the Clintons, as the old saying goes, have done well by doing good.

Their combined net worth is $55 million. Despite their poor-mouthing—regular references to Bill’s relative lack of wealth when he was elected president and the Clintons’ debt upon leaving office—whatever riches the Clintons once lacked, they have more than made up for in time.

The Clintons have even practiced a form of trickle-down economics. Some of the people around them have become quite wealthy too.

To cite just one example, former longtime Clinton aide Doug Band, whose initial duties included carrying bags and fetching Diet Cokes, was ultimately able to afford $8.8 million in Manhattan real estate holdings.

(Band’s relationship with the family crumbled as he worked his Clinton connections too aggressively even for the former president’s comfort.)

In the realm of policy, too, as opposed to pay-to-play, it is not clear that the Clintons’ neoliberalism has waned.

Former Bill Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers—a Third Way Democratic Leadership Council-type if there ever was one—has been advising Hillary Clinton.

His task? According to the New York Times, working with 200 experts to help the would-be 2016 Democratic nominee figure out “how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy.”

All this follows a great deal of commentary about how Hillary Clinton will win over the working class in next year’s presidential election.

She did well with working-class white Democrats in the 2008 primaries, winning places like Kentucky and West Virginia by landslide margins.

She was, of course, running against Obama, the candidate of “eggheads and African Americans.”

This might have had at least as much to do with her appeal as her penchant for downing drinks in front of the television cameras at blue-collar pubs.

Nevertheless, the Clinton dynasty was built by appealing to ordinary Americans who believe the system should reward people who “work hard and play by the rules.”

Even the welfare-reform proposals that irritated some Democrats to the Clintons’ left were premised on a working-class-friendly desire to shift resources from the indolent to the hard-working, deserving poor—making welfare a “second chance, not a way of life.”

More recently, however, Democratic candidates for the House won a scant 34 percent of the working-class white vote in 2014.

Democrats competing in key Senate races didn’t do much better, even in Iowa, a rare state where Obama managed to win whites without a college education in both 2008 and 2012.

“If Democrats can’t figure out how to appeal to today’s working-class voters, then they don’t deserve to lead,” Bill Clinton’s 1992 pollster Stan Greenberg told the Los Angeles Times Ruy Teixeira, a demographer known for his confident predictions about the Democrats’ long-term electoral prospects, put it in less moralistic terms.

“Democrats, to win regularly, not just the presidency but other levels of government, they need to do better among … noncollege whites than they’ve been doing,” he told National Journal last year. “You can’t … just rely on the coalition of the ascendant.”

Not all Democrats agree.

The noncollege white men who have been the biggest problem for the party in recent years are shrinking as a share of the electorate while minority voters are growing.

The latter delivered Obama a second term while many of the former either stayed home or voted Republican.

That’s good news for a party that hasn’t won the white vote in a presidential election since 1964—though when Democrats have won the presidency, they have at least been competitive with those voters while winning supermajorities of most minority voting blocs.

“The vote of a tattooed 20-something hipster in Des Moines is no less helpful than that of the 60-something farmer who lives a hundred miles north,” the liberal writer Paul Waldman observed in the Washington Post late last year.

The Democrats’ decline among working-class whites clearly hurts the party at the congressional level, however.

Minorities are concentrated in urban areas where the white working class is more broadly distributed. These white voters helped deliver Congress to the GOP in 2010 and 2014.

And it makes Democrats very dependent on high turnout among the “coalition of the ascendant” at the presidential level, something that only Obama has so far been able to deliver.

That’s why Hillary Clinton’s vaunted appeal to the white working class is one of her selling points.

Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who worked for Clinton’s 2008 campaign, told the that she “demonstrated a significant ability to not only win votes from working-class white women but to connect with them on a personal level.”

Perhaps.

But now effectively running with rather than against Obama, her numbers among working-class voters have returned to levels more typical of a 2010s Democrat.

According to a Wall Street Journal NBC News poll, Clinton went from a slight 43 percent to 44 percent deficit among whites without college degrees to being viewed positively by just 32 percent, with 48 percent having a negative view, in 2014.

Observing that working-class whites have been alienated by “an increasingly urban, culturally cosmopolitan” Democratic Party, National Journal’s Alex Roarty argues, “The most pressing need for Clinton, however, might be devising an economic agenda and message able to convince some of those voters to back Democratic candidates.”

Is there any candidate less equipped to do this than the Hillary Clinton of 2016?

The Clintons are the anti-Buchananites: culturally liberal, economically and politically globalist, hawkish on foreign policy, representing what Irving Kristol called the New Class to a far greater extent than they stand for anyone in Middle America.

Even Bill Clinton’s legacy is as much NAFTA and GATT, financial deregulation, and a not terribly Keynesian approach to economics—“Rubinomics” held that increased tax revenue would stimulate the economy by reducing the federal budget deficit and lowering interest rates—as welfare reform and an expanded earned income tax credit.

He was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win in places like Arkansas, Louisiana, and West Virginia, but he also cemented the party’s status among socially progressive upscale whites.

Despite her campaign’s hope to win over working-class “waitress moms”—a typically condescending description dreamed up by political consultants—Hillary Clinton represents all this without the charm.

She speaks for a strange new liberalism where the rich and the politically powerful rub elbows and exchange favors, where the rewards flow to the most affluent parts of the Democratic coalition while the inner cities remain worse off than the neighborhoods of the noncollege whites who have abandoned the party.

That might still be enough to beat a Republican.

But progressives may find once again that even in victory, they can only lose with a politician like Clinton.