Will Brexit spread?

The Full Monty, a film set in Sheffield England is a sad but whimsical account of how six unemployed steelworkers attempt to scare up some money by becoming strippers.  While taking off one's clothes is considerably easier than making steel, organizing an act that will actually pay is difficult enough and at the end of the movie when the steelworker-strippers are lustily cheered by a house full of drunken women, there is a sense of accomplishment that passes for a happy ending.

Of course, this happy ending is all fiction.  The real story of Sheffield is far more miserable.  This city had been the heart and soul of English steelmaking since they started making knives in the 14th century.  In the 1740s, Benjamin Huntsman perfected a superior method for making crucible steel and by the 1850s, Henry Bessemer had moved to town with his vastly improved steel process.  Steel was now a mass-produced product and by 1900, Sheffield's population had grown to 491,000.  In 1973, the UK joined the EU.  In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher "rationalized" Sheffield out of the steel business in an EU-wide restructuring of the industry.   Sheffield was probably targeted because of its long association with trade unionism. 120,000 people lost their jobs.  Sheffield lost its reason to exist.  And even if six of those ex-workers had managed a one-night payoff for going The Full Monty, that still leaves them suffering through an existential nightmare for over 30 years.


A.R. Heathcotes & Co - Steelworks

So guess what?  The people of Sheffield voted to leave the EU.  The vote was closer than in the surrounding countryside because Sheffield itself has become something of center for immigrant settlement.  But the folks who remembered what happened to their city and lives were still enough to carry the day.

The EU is failing for one simple reason. It is based on a ridiculously stupid idea—neoliberalism.  That idea set has been around since forever and can be directly implicated in such disasters as the Panic of 1873 and the Great Depression.  You can fill libraries with solid evidence why these crackpot ideas don't work.  Well, they do work for a tiny few who can afford to buy the economic conversation.  Explain to me how someone in Sheffield whose life is as disaster can EVER relate to people who spout meaningless neoliberal platitudes that were so carefully drilled into their heads as part of their "elite" educations.

What EU doesn't understand is that most people, if given a chance, would gladly throw their smug butts into a dungeon, but will at least vote to get them out of their lives.  Because while most detest the arrogance of our precious "elites," what really infuriates people is that they are so utterly incompetent at building a Europe that actually works for its citizens.

Some pretty good stuff is being written about Brexit.  The ruling class usually gets its way.  And goodness knows, they have a good chance of getting their way this time.  But for a brief moment, they have caught a glimpse of what a world looks like where they don't pick the outcome even after buying up the economics profession, the newspapers, and damn near all the politicians.  It's getting harder to bullshit people.  This is a story worth writing about.

• The first article today asks a most obvious question, "why does the so-called left defend the EU?"
• Alexander Mercouris speculates on the spread of Brexit, The US, the EU and the Spectre of Brexit
• Finally, Michael Hudson snickers about the vast fortunes lost by folks betting the wrong way on Brexit.

The Left and the EU: Why Cling to This Reactionary Institution?

by JOSEPH RICHARDSON, JUNE 22, 201

Why is it that many people who consider themselves left-wing have such difficulty grasping that the EU is a deeply reactionary institution? The mere fact that those running the EU present it as an internationalist venture dedicated to the creation of a world free of nationalist enmities does not make it so. If we want to examine the EU in its proper light, then we should ignore the high-flown rhetoric in which its supporters indulge, and consider its actual record. And what is the record of the EU, once we penetrate the obfuscatory rhetoric about ‘internationalism’ that surrounds EU policy? Without a doubt, that record is one that should cause those on the left now defending it acute embarrassment, as it starkly contradicts the ideals that the left has always claimed to uphold.

Across the Continent, the unelected officials who have usurped the power of national governments and asserted their right to determine the fates of countless millions, through their adherence to the damaging creed of neoliberalism, have wrought suffering on an unimaginable scale, casting millions into poverty and removing the last vestige of dignity people cling to in an economy that has fallen prey to the voracious claims of big business. They have foisted austerity on unwilling populations, creating a cycle of endless unemployment and ever increasing woe, compelling ordinary workers struggling to eke out an existence in the wake of the most painful recession in living memory to shoulder the burden of repaying a debt which was originally incurred as a result of the criminal behaviour of Europe’s financiers. With brazen contempt for the views of the peoples of Europe they claim to serve, they have connived to topple left-wing governments and deny the citizens of the countries most affected by austerity their one remaining means – their inalienable right to elect a government subservient to their will – of resisting the vicious policies that have reduced them to their present abject state.

It is worth detailing the ways in which the actual practice of the EU diverges sharply from the propagandistic image endorsed by elements of the left.

The Crushing of Greece

One word should be engraved on the minds of those who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, persist in believing that the EU is an inherently progressive body: ‘GREECE.’ What the EU did to Greece should have dispelled forever the fanciful idea that such an institution has as its fundamental aim the material welfare of ordinary Europeans. But such is the power of the delusional thinking which holds sway amongst the ‘liberal’ apologists for ‘internationalism’ that nothing it seems, not even the destruction of an entire country, the decimation of its industries, and the despoliation of its people, can shake their belief in the manifest virtues of the EU.

[major snip]

Paradoxically, however, the near monopoly of the right over the Brexit campaign is not proof that opposition to the EU is intrinsically right-wing, but testifies instead to the weakness of a left which has been steadily stripped of its commitment to economic justice. Thirty years ago the most forceful advocates of Brexit were to be found among the members of the Labour Party, not on the right, and calls for Britain to withdraw from the EU, or the EEC as it was then called, were considered a standard feature of Labour’s policy platforms. The great left-wing MP Tony Benn campaigned in the 1975 referendum for Labour to leave the EEC on the grounds that such an arrangement was contrary to the basic democratic principle that people should be allowed to vote on the policies affecting them. Events since 1975 have only proved the truth of Benn’s original argument, made all those years ago, that these undemocratic tendencies were destined to grow with time, posing a grave risk to our ability to decide the most basic of policy issues. Moreover, unlike the MPs campaigning for remain today, politicians like Benn understood that the lack of democracy at the heart of the EU was not an oversight on the part of its founders, but an essential component of a project which sought to supplant national governments with a supranational authority divorced from the concerns of ordinary people. So long as power was vested in national assemblies, these institutions, however imperfect, were at least answerable to their voters, but once power over economic policy was ceded to bureaucrats then the business elites which effectively governed Europe were easily able to overcome popular resistance to their policies by dispensing with the need for elections.

Unfortunately, this basic point has been forgotten by the members of the Labour Party now campaigning to remain. Thus, the left-wing opponents of Brexit frequently give the impression that they regard the EU’s democratic deficit as a minor flaw, something that could easily be rectified if only Britain stays within the EU and works with other countries to reform it. Not a few even deny that the EU is undemocratic, reasoning that because the Council of Ministers, which concludes the treaties which form the basis for the EU, is composed of elected government figures from the member states this amounts to an indirect form of democratic accountability. These supporters of remain seem oblivious to the fact that the whole purpose of enshrining in various treaties the neoliberal principles on which the EU rests, treaties which once concluded cannot be repealed except through the agreement of all 28 member states, is to ensure that such weighty questions are forever removed from the sphere of democratic debate. The electorate of a particular country can vote their government out, but they cannot revoke the set of laws that this government agreed to, nor exercise any control over the unappointed Commission which is granted broad discretion to implement these laws.

The referendum is perhaps the one chance that this generation will ever have to vote on our membership of an institution which now wields an inordinate amount of power. It is the only opportunity we will be given to affirm our democratic right to rule on the fundamental questions with which we are confronted, and at the same time administer a blow to the undemocratic vision of a corporate Europe, rooted in neoliberal economics and a disdain for workers, that has crushed underfoot the aspirations of so many Europeans who were never even offered the choice of agreeing to such a project. A vote to leave will not usher in an age of socialist egalitarianism, but it is nonetheless, as socialists agitating for Brexit have observed, a necessary steppingstone without which the fairer society we are striving to achieve will be rendered a more distant prospect.

Members of the mainstream left who are campaigning to remain have only been able to maintain their enthusiasm for the EU by averting their eyes from its shameful record, adhering instead to an exalted image of a progressive body which has never existed outside of their imaginations. Ordinary voters must spurn such consoling myths, and recognise the EU for what it is: a deeply reactionary institution that is holding back progress throughout Europe. more

The US, the EU and the Spectre of Brexit

ALEXANDER MERCOURIS, 25 JUN 2016

The Brexit referendum is the harbinger of more revolts to come as the EU has come to be used as a geopolitical project detached from the interests of the people of Europe.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre Brexit. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Merkel and Hollande, Draghi and Juncker, French Socialists and German police-spies.

How did it happen? The answer lies not in England, which outside London voted heavily for Brexit. It lies within the EU itself.

I have been a strong supporter of the EU for nearly all my adult life. However I am not blind to the realities. It has been obvious to me for a long time that things have been going seriously wrong.

First it is important to dispel certain myths about the EU. In the popular Eurosceptic imagination it is a remote and unaccountable bureaucracy based in Brussels that meddles and regulates every area of life. This is a misrepresentation. The EU bureaucracy is actually rather small and has only as much power as EU governments give it.

John Laughland in a recent RT Crosstalk called the EU more accurately a cartel of governments who conspire behind the scenes with each other to pass legislation without the need to consult with their democratically elected parliaments. Whilst that is closer to the truth, it is not the whole truth. Rather the EU, at least as it has become over the last decade, is best understood as a cabal of three governments, primarily those of the US and Germany, with France treated by the Germans (though not by the US) as a sort of junior partner, which make the decisions in secret that are binding on all the rest.

I appreciate that this description of the EU will meet with strong objections in some quarters, especially as by far the most powerful of these governments is that of the US which is not a member of the EU. However what I say is well known by all the relevant insiders. Indeed the facts speak for themselves and are hardly even concealed. On key issues EU policy is nowadays decided in private bilateral discussions between the US and the Germans, often involving the US President and the German Chancellor, with the Germans then telling the other Europeans what they should do.

In a recent article for Sputnik I described the process as it is used in connection with the sanctions issue:

“……..a source has told me US representatives routinely attend the EU’s Committee of Permanent Representatives (“COREPER”), though minutes of its sessions are edited to suppress the fact of their presence. However their regular attendance at sessions of a key institution of the EU — of which the US is not a member state — has been complained about on the floor of the European Parliament.

Since COREPER prepares the agenda for the EU’s Council of Ministers (the EU’s key law making body) and co-ordinates the work of some 250 EU committees and working parties — in effect the entire EU bureaucracy — US presence at its sessions gives the US a decisive voice in the making of EU policy.

Since the European Council decided to impose sectoral sanctions on Russia on 31st July 2014 every single decision to extend the sanctions has been taken not by the European Council but by COREPER, though COREPER’s legal authority to make such decisions is questionable to say the least.

What happens in reality is that US President Obama tells German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Hollande to extend the sanctions, the Commission drafts the decision, COREPER ratifies it, and it is then published without further discussion on the Europa website.

Italian Prime Minister Renzi has complained German Chancellor Merkel talks about EU decisions to French President Hollande and EU Commission President Juncker. They are then announced, and it is only then he learns about them.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote this procedure was at work again. The White House website confirms that apart from British Prime Minister Cameron the one EU leader US President Obama spoke to following the Brexit vote was German Chancellor Merkel – as if it were Chancellor Merkel who headed the EU! The information the White House has released about the call shows it was intended to “reassure” Merkel and Cameron of the US’s commitment to maintaining its partnership with the EU and Britain. Another way of putting it would be to say that it was intended to remind Merkel and Cameron of the US’s paramount interest in the EU’s and Britain’s affairs and in preserving its alliance with both of them.

As I have explained in many places, any European political leader who tries to hold out against this system risks finding their objections simply ignored whilst becoming the target of the wrath of the US and of the EU establishment. Thus in January 2015, shortly after the Syriza government came to power in Greece, it found that it was supposed to have agreed to the rolling over of sanctions against certain Russian individuals and businesses. In fact it had done no such thing. However when it dared to make its concerns public its leaders were warned through the European media that they were being investigated by the West’s intelligence agencies to see if they had Russian links. Faced by such a threat and caught up in difficult debt negotiations with the EU leadership, they caved in and the decision to roll over the sanctions was left to stand.

European leaders who object to the way things are now done in fact now run the risk of becoming the target of vicious smear campaigns in Europe’s overwhelmingly Atlanticist mass media, as well as attempts to engineer their removal from office. Along the way they also risk having their countries become the target of harassment and sometimes outright destabilisation carried out through the EU’s institutions. Thus Prime Ministers Berlusconi of Italy and Papandreou of Greece were ejected from office because they objected to aspects of the EU’s economic policies during the Eurozone crisis and in Papandreou’s case wanted to put an EU bailout proposal to the Greek people in a referendum; Prime Minister Tsipras of Greece experienced the illegal cutting off of credit to his country’s banks and efforts – which were ultimately successful – to force him to reform his government in a more “acceptable” direction; and Prime Minister Orban of Hungary is regularly branded in parts of the European media a fascist because he has objected to certain EU policies and wants better relations with Russia.

Beyond these campaigns are repeated – though usually veiled – threats to cut off an EU member state’s access to the EU structural funds or even to suspend its voting rights in the EU institutions if it refuses to toe the line. This is being currently done to Poland in relation to certain judicial changes that are being enacted there, it was done during the recent Austrian Presidential election in case the people of Austria voted the “wrong way”, it was done last autumn to force various East European states to toe the EU line during the migrant crisis and it was done – repeatedly – to Greece during the Grexit crisis last year.

Most notorious of all is of course the EU’s habit of simply ignoring the results of elections or referendums that go against its decisions. Most recently Greece and the Netherlands have conducted referendums – on Greece’s bailout and on the association agreement with Ukraine – that were simply set aside or ignored.

In such a situation, where a political leader’s chances of survival and ability to get things done depends so much on staying on the right side of the EU’s leadership – and ultimately of the US – rather than their own country’s voters, it is unsurprising that the quality of Europe’s political leadership has declined to so great a degree. In place of people like De Gaulle, Adenauer, Brandt and Thatcher, European political leaders today increasingly come over as colourless technicians distant from their own voters because the system allows for nothing else.

Germany is no exception to this phenomenon. It is a fundamental mistake to see Germany as the beneficiary of the system. Far from Germany being the imperial master of the system as is often claimed, Germany actually finds itself in the unhappy position of being paymaster and enforcer for policies decided on in the US with its leader spied on to make sure she toes the line. The result is that Germany regularly gets blamed for policies that are actually decided elsewhere and which – as in the case of the sanctions imposed on Russia – are often contrary to its own interests.

Take the issue that more than any other crystallised anti-EU sentiment in Britain during the Brexit referendum: the EU’s policy of unrestricted internal migration, which has resulted in large numbers of East European migrant workers coming to Britain.

Freedom of movement within the EU has always been a core principle of the EU. It was never an issue within the EU until the EU was expanded to include the much poorer countries of Eastern Europe. That expansion – as everyone knows – was driven not by European needs but first and foremost by US geopolitical strategies, being intended to anchor Eastern Europe in the US-led Western alliance system.

To that end the East European states were admitted into the EU long before their economic situations justified doing so. In order to seal the deal their elites were won over by promises of a seat at the EU top table. Huge sums were paid over to them principally by Germany through the so-called EU structural funds (originally conceived to foster development in the EU’s poorer regions but increasingly used in Eastern and Southern Europe as a form of legalised bribery to bind local elites). Lastly, their young people were won over with the promise of visa free access to the rest of Europe – thus creating the migrant situation that has been the cause of so much anger in Britain.

The implications were never thought through or discussed within Europe because EU expansion ultimately followed a US geopolitical agenda rather than a European one. The result is that despite increasing alarm across Europe at the consequences of the policy the EU bureaucracy continues to pursue the same policy towards other states the US wants to bring into the system like Turkey and Ukraine.

Or take another issue: the Eurozone crisis. The idea of European monetary union was originally conceived in the 1970s and was already firmly on the agenda by the late 1980s. Margaret Thatcher fell from power because she opposed it. The idea it was conceived following the fall of the Berlin Wall is wrong.

What has made the Eurozone crisis so intractable is its well-known structural problems – the fact a single currency was created to cover very different economies without a single treasury or tax system behind it – but also the contradiction between the US geopolitical ambitions that increasingly drive the EU and European needs if the Eurozone is to be managed properly.

Economic conditions in southern Europe – in Greece especially – point clearly to the need for at least some of these countries to exit the Eurozone, a fact that is well-understood within the German government. Yet that option is ruled out not just because of opposition within Europe itself but because again it goes against the geopolitical interest of the US, which is to keep these countries locked within the euro system, which in turn binds them to the Western alliance and therefore ultimately to the US itself. Thus at the height of the Grexit crisis last year German Chancellor Merkel abruptly reversed a previously agreed German position to support Grexit following a call from President Obama of the US who told her not to. The result is that instead of the Greek crisis being resolved once and for all in Europe’s and Greece’s interests – as German Finance Minister Schauble said it should be – it has instead been left to fester indefinitely.

The EU can work – as it did in the past – when it functions as a genuine community of economically and culturally compatible free democracies, which do not always agree with each other but which are nonetheless prepared to work closely with each other in certain areas in their mutual interest.

It cannot work as a crypto-imperial project of someone else – especially when that someone else is located far away on the other side of the ocean and can therefore have little idea of European wants and needs.

It was therefore inevitable that beyond a certain point such a crypto-imperial project would provoke resistance and it is entirely unsurprising that the first expression of that resistance should come in Britain, which has always been the country that was most skeptical of the EU in the first place.

In truth Britain has for some time now operated in an anomalous position within the EU. As Wolfgang Munchau has rightly said in an article in the Financial Times, Britain has in reality been at best a semi-detached member of the EU for some time, remaining in theory a member of the EU but refusing to commit itself to the Eurozone where the key decisions are now made.

Britain is not therefore a key member of the EU and Brexit is not the catalyst for a wider revolt within the EU that some say it is. Rather it is a harbinger of more revolts to come, which were already on the way, and which without a radical change of approach would in time happen irrespective of whether there were a Brexit vote or not. Already there are stirrings in Spain, Italy and France and increasingly even in Germany itself.

The EU leaders still have the time and political space to turn things round. Doing so however will require a degree of courage, intelligence and political imagination that in recent years has been in disastrously short supply. Above all what is needed is a renegotiation of Europe’s relationship with the US, changing it from a relationship of subservience into one of genuine equality and partnership.

The alternative is probably not the imminent disintegration of the EU. The economic and political bonds that hold it together make that unlikely. Rather it is one of an EU wracked by disagreement and crisis, with its population increasingly sullen and disaffected, and with its economy going nowhere.

In some respects that would be an even worse outcome – and betrayal of the people of Europe – than the EU’s disintegration, which would at least offer the possibility of a fresh start. As a European I devoutly hope it will not come to that. As a realist I have no conviction that it won’t. more

EU Bankster Contagion

By Michael Saturday, June 25, 2016

An interview with Chris Hedges on Truth Dig.

Chris Hedges: 2008 All Over Again

Summary: Great Britain’s decision to leave the EU presages a global financial meltdown that could resemble the 1930s. Banks will demand massive bailouts. We will be forced, if the banks are bailed out again, to endure harsher austerity and a prolonged depression.

Great Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has wiped out many bankers and global speculators. They will turn, as they did in 2008, to governments to rescue them from default. Most governments, including ours, will probably comply.

Will the American public passively permit another massive bailout of the banks? Will it accept more punishing programs of austerity to pay for this bailout? Will a viable socialism rise out of the economic chaos to halt further looting of the U.S. Treasury and the continued reconfiguration of the economy into neo-feudalism? Or will a right-wing populism, with heavy undertones of fascism, ascend to power because a failure on the part of the left to defend a population once again betrayed?

Whatever happens next will be chaotic. Global financial markets, which lost heavily on derivatives, are already in free fall. The value of the British pound has dropped by over 11 percent and British bank stock prices by over 25 percent. This decline has wiped out the net worth of many Wall Street brokerage houses and banks, leaving them with negative equity. The vote severely cripples and perhaps kills the Eurozone and, happily, stymies trade agreements such as The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). It throws the viability of NATO and American imperial designs in Eastern Europe and the Middle East into question. The British repudiation of neoliberal economics also has the potential to upend the presidential elections. The Democratic Party will, I expect, demand the rescue of Wall Street. Donald Trump and the Republicans by opposing this bailout can take power.

“A lot of banks in America and Europe that held their money in Great Britain just lost eleven percent at current exchange rates,” said economist Michael Hudson when I reached him in New York by phone. “They have probably not hedged it. There have probably been large Wall Street institutions that made bets believing that Britain would remain in the European Union. There are firms and banks, I suspect, which have lost hundreds of billions of dollars. There is talk of another Lehman Brothers. We don’t yet know who it will be.”

The Democratic Party, by rescuing Wall Street, will be unmasked as the handmaidens of the financial elite.

“I expect Obama to do whatever he is told to do by Wall Street,” Hudson said. “He has turned over management of the economy to his campaign contributors from Goldman Sachs and Chase Manhattan. He does not have views of his own, other than self-promotion. He wants his presidential library. He wants to have a big foundation like the Clintons. Most of the population will oppose a bailout, of course, and he will cry all the way to the bank.”

Economies built on scaffolds of debt eventually collapse. There comes a moment when the service of the debt, as we see in Greece, becomes unsustainable. More and more draconian austerity measures are used to pay banks and bondholders until these measures reach an intolerable and unsustainable level. The people revolt. The system crashes. This is what happened in Britain.

The war against international finance, and the array of inter-governmental systems and institutions used to enforce the predatory beast of global speculation, hasbegun. The question is who will win. Will it be the banks, which intend to continue to pillage economies? Or will be popular movements that will cancel debt and reinstatement economic and political sovereignty?

Hudson sees the crisis in Europe as, in part, spawned by the U.S. intervention in the Middle East.

“If there is anyone who is responsible for the Brexit it is Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,” he said. “They destroyed Libya. They turned over Libyan weapons to ISIS, Al Quaeda and Al Nusra. It was their war in Syria, where many of these weapons ended up, that created the massive exodus of refugees intoEurope. This exodus exacerbated nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Clinton and Obama are also responsible for a huge exodus of Ukrainians. This is all a response to American war policy the Middle East and Ukraine. In central Europe, with the expansion of NATO, Washington is meanwhile demanding that governments spend billions on weapons rather than on recovering the economy.”

The Eurozone prohibits central banks from financing government budget deficits. Countries in the Eurozone have, in effect, surrendered economic and political sovereignty. They cannot create money to finance budget deficits and pump money into theeconomy. This, Hudson said, has “turned the Eurozone into a dead zone since 2008.”

“The Eurozone now shrinks economies through debt deflation,” said Hudson, author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy (available from Amazon). “That is one of the factors that led the British and the Euro-skeptic parties to say. ‘We don’t want to be a part of a Europe run by banks that impose debt deflation. We want governments that can create their own money to re-inflate the economy and build economic recovery.’ As long as a country remains part of the Eurozone bankers will continue to lower wages and wipe out pension funds to pay bondholders. The Brexit vote reverses this rotten program. There are now calls from the Netherlands, France and Austria for a similar referendum as well.”

“The debt imposed on countries like Greece can never be paid off,” Hudson went on. “And the intention is that it can never be paid off. The banks use this inability to pay to insist that governments sell off more and more of the public domain and privatize. Debt is the lever used to force privatization. It takes away the power to carry out public investment and build a public infrastructure.”

“Some financial firms, banks and perhaps even governments will now default,” Hudson predicted. “The French and other European banks will try and pick up the banking business that operated out of London. There is going to be a huge loss by British banks. The taxes paid by these firms and banks will disappear from the British economy. Who is the British central bank going to create money for in this crisis? Is it going to put money into the economy, or is it going to pay for a new wave of quantitative easing so the banks can make up the losses on their bad bets?”

Britain’s withdrawal from the Eurozone will damage not only the international bankingsystem, but hamper Washington’s aggressive policies towards Russia and the Ukraine. Britain has long served as an American proxy in Europe. German Social Democratic Party leaders, who have accused NATO of warmongering, have already called for the lifting of the sanctions against Russia. And there is a growing reluctance to continue supporting endless war in the Middle East.

“By breaking with the European bankers you also ultimately break with the American domination of Europe through NATO,” Hudson said.

“At some point governments are going to have to put their own populations and economies above those of predators,” Hudson said. “The only question is how long it will take the political system to realize the debts imposed on them by the banks cannot be paid. How long will it take to turn this mathematical certainty into a political response?”

If the liberal class, embodied by the Democratic Party and bankrupt socialist parties in France, continue to serve the bankers the right wing will have an easy route to power. This will be true in Europe and the United States.

Trump, in Scotland, called the vote to leave the EU “a great thing.”

“People want to take their country back, they want to have independence in a sense, and you see it with Europe, all over Europe, and you’re going to have more than just, in my opinion, more than just what happened last night,” Trump said. “You’re going to have many other cases where people want to take their borders back, they want to take their monetary back, they want to take a lot of things back, they want to be able to have a country again.”

Hudson said such a stance could propel Trump and other rightists to power.

“I can see Trump winning the election if he opposes the coming bailout of Wall Street,” Hudson said. “By the time Obama leaves office the economy will probably be wrecked. I see us undergoing a slow crash. The economy will go down and down and down. If the Democrats give more money to Wall Street and creditors, if they say the debts have to be repaid, if they again use government to hand money to the one percent, they will be discredited. Economic chaos always leads to political chaos. The only way to stop this move to the right is for genuine socialist movements and parties, such as Podemos in Spain, to organize and challenge the international banking system and its enablers in the political establishment. And they need to do it now.” more