The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic will be unprecedented. Even if the American and global economy manages to achieve some stabilization post-COVID-19 through central bank stimulus packages and countermeasures, many small and medium-sized businesses will not survive. In addition to the millions of lost jobs in the United States alone, thousands of family-owned and medium-sized corporations and businesses are going under.

What Comes Next?

What comes next is exactly what everyone thinks: consolidation and big companies getting bigger. Larger businesses like Amazon, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, airlines, government contractors, massive grocery chains and all manner of other giant corporations will continue to scoop up any smaller fish in the pond as they grow to grotesque proportions. The end result post-COVID-19 will be a world in which large, tax-loophole-exploiting corporate behemoths who thrive under corporate socialism and government bailouts will be the only place to get a job.

Starting a business will be an impossibility for those struggling out from mountains of COVID-19 economic damage, not to mention even getting the financial liquidity to go up against market-dominating players who have actually been boosted as a result of the pandemic.

Profits Over People

The harsh and obvious truth is that governments care much more about their donors and economic partners than they do about their citizens. The US government got warmed up in 2008 and 2009 with its bank bailouts, and this time it’s the same approach on a larger scale and not focused on financial institutions — although large banks have made tens of billions in processing fees paying out emergency government loans to small businesses who are trying to stay afloat. Even when the government offers some help the middlemen manage to turn it to their advantage. It’s a win-win for the giant banks and corporations and a lose-lose for working people.

As Nassim Taleb put it of the last big bailout: “That was a blatant case of corporate socialism and a reward to an industry whose managers are stopped out by the taxpayer. The asymmetry (moral hazard) and what we call optionality for the bankers can be expressed as follows: heads and the bankers win, tails and the taxpayer loses. Furthermore, this does not count the policy of quantitative easing that went to inflate asset values and increased inequality by benefiting the super rich. Remember that bailouts come with printed money, which effectively deflate the wages of the middle class in relation to asset values such as ultra-luxury apartments in New York City.”

COVID-19 Has Been Great for Billionaires

While ordinary people including the upper-middle class and many who might be termed conventionally “rich” are suffering immensely during the pandemic, the ultra-rich and managerial “superclass” (as David Rothkopf coined them) are doing swimmingly. These are the folks who call the shots at a fairly senior level and work to shift entire economies and industries and they number around 6,000 worldwide. The pandemic hasn’t hurt billionaires like this for the most part. In fact, billionaire wealth has boomed significantly during this crisis. The panic and isolation of those in lockdown is only an opportunity for individuals like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who has made over $25 billion just since March, to increase their profits.

Unsurprisingly, the head of Zoom Eric Yuan also saw a big jump in his earnings and is now worth around $3 billion and Bill Gates spent a recent interview with Fareed Zakaria chuckling as they talked about how unprepared the United States had been for COVID-19 and smirking and admitting Microsoft could do pretty well in the coming digital work gold rush while Zakaria talked about the economic suffering people will experience. Supposed free market global capitalism has slowly morphed into a worrying fusion of big government and big business that is starting to look vaguely similar to authoritarian movements of the past century and modern-day China which fused the military, government and corporate power into fascistic and communistic juggernauts of centralized surveillance and control.

Corporate Socialism

The reality of many “free market” economies is that they function as a sort of feeding trough for large, connected corporations to monopolize, risk capital within and then collect lifesaving funds if they fail. This essentially means bailouts, tax breaks and special rules for the largest corporations and industry leaders and an up-by-the-bootstraps rhetoric of tough luck and homeless shelters for working families employed by many of those large corporations and small or medium companies who go under during tough times or find the bottom-of-the-barrel wages they are offered insufficient. It is not as if workers haven’t noticed that their mega corporations are profiting off their backs while offering them peanuts, with a mass strike of Amazon, Wal-Mart, Whole Foods and Instacart workers planned for May 1.

While the occasional $1,200 stimulus check may indeed help out struggling individuals during these hard times, it is nothing compared to the yearly subsidies and tax breaks of giant corporations or for the scope of their market dominance. Regular businesses work to innovate products, services and reputation as they expand and branch out: mega-corporations seek to become the actual market itself and force merchants to do business on their terms and under their supply chains. Are you a small business that sells household items online? Well you can pump money into advertising and get a trickle of customers or you can join Big Daddy Bezos’ Fun Farm and give him the commissions he demands in return for a steady stream of purchases and product exposure.

Survival of the Biggest

Many wars, revolutions, crises and social shifts in history have been accompanied by, and even partly caused by, enormous economic change and changing economic needs of industry leaders and the ruling class. The Protestant Reformation, the American Revolution, World War One and Two, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the list goes on. Think of a social, military or political upheaval and you will find a significant economic aspect. However, it would be naive to imagine that money or profit is the primary factor driving economic concerns at the upper level, even if it drives them on the lower level. For the very wealthiest and most connected, particularly those linked to the actual creation of money by central banks, money is merely a means to an end. That end is, generally speaking, stability, control and a specific social and political vision. If one thinks back to even several decades ago, there seemed to be numerous different brands of soft drinks, for example, headquartered in different areas if you read the fine print and with different prices and styles. Now almost every can or bottle you pick up despite its surface brand is owned by Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Consolidation and control is the name of the game: in governance and sociopolitical engineering just as in the food industry.

Join or Die

The post-COVID-19 world will be different and it will have even less illusion of choice than the Google-run techtropolis that preceded it. There is no time for “future shock” because the future is already here. Whether it is the government or its affiliated mega-corporations the reality will be simple, especially for those who have fallen on particularly hard times as a result of the pandemic with their health, insurance costs and lost work. The message of the emerging technocracy will be simple: work at our companies, eat our food, take our vaccines, believe our news, live in our plural cities where the jobs are all located, or else face the consequences of being banned. Make sure you don’t fall prey to the siren song of that ultimate evil of populism: you wouldn’t want to lose your government check or be forced to stay out in no man’s land where the new, worse viruses and looters are, right? Like a twisted shadow version of Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary War cartoon, the writing of the consolidated corona-nomics economic future will be on the wall for all to see. Join or die. 

L'articolo Corona-nomics proviene da InsideOver.

Uttering the name Boris Johnson alongside the epithet blue-collar would have been incongruous, to say the least until just a few months ago. As mayor of London 2008-16, Johnson positioned himself as a liberal Conservative who advocated an amnesty for illegal immigrants, touted his green credentials and attacked Trump after his controversial comments in 2015 about the Islamification of London. The Prime Minister, who attended Eton College before going on to study at Balliol College, Oxford, had earlier gained notoriety for insensitive and snobbish comments about the residents of Liverpool in 2004 that necessitated a public apology. Johnson’s slightly German appearance, without doubt, has its origins in his Bavarian ancestors of the von Pfeffel family some of whose members were ennobled in the nineteenth century. On the face of it, then, the former editor of the Spectator magazine would seem an improbable champion of Leave-voting Labour supporters outside the metropolitan bubble.

Realignment

The shift from the largely class-based politics of the twentieth century to a world marked by the new fault lines of patriotism vs. globalism and traditionalism vs. cosmopolitanism is, however, creating some strange bedfellows as doors open to politicians who can make this realignment work to their advantage. In December 2019 Johnson, following in the tracks of Donald Trump and others, proved particularly adept at superseding the old divisions of his country. A glance at the electoral map before and after 12 December makes this abundantly clear. What had become known as Labour’s red wall crumbled as Leave-voting seat after Leave-voting seat in the North, the Midlands and Wales fell to the Conservative Party.  The constituency of Wrexham in North East Wales, purely by way of example, had never delivered a Conservative member of parliament since the advent of universal suffrage in 1928, having been Liberal, Labour, Social Democrat and Labour. All in all the Conservatives gained 57 seats from Labour across the country.

Labour’s electoral base

In Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, political parties inevitably represent coalitions of views and sections of the electorate. To understand the outcome of the general election of 12 December 2019 it is necessary to understand the coalition that had been the Labour party before that date. At the risk of oversimplification: in the one corner stood the socially conservative patriotic white working class that are left-wing to the extent they support Britain’s free at point of delivery national health service, the welfare state, workers’ rights and, with varying degrees of intensity, the trade union movement; in the opposite corner stood middle-class progressives in the metropolitan areas, woke graduates, champagne socialists, ethnic minorities and Muslims. Ultimately, the gulf between the two different parts of the coalition proved impossible to bridge, especially given the large metropolitan middle-class leadership of the Labour Party.

Snobbery and the metropolitan elite

The widening cultural gap between Labour’s metropolitan leadership and its base was nicely exemplified by an episode that occurred during the Rochester by-election of 2014. As Labour MP Emily Thornberry was campaigning on an estate in the Kent town she noticed a house draped in English flags with a white van parked outside. The MP for Islington South in London tweeted an image of the scene. Accused of snobbery and condescension she resigned from the Labour Shadow Cabinet later in the day. During the 2019 election, Thornberry was again at the centre of controversy when she allegedly called Leave voters in a pro-Brexit colleague’s constituency “stupid”. Thornberry denied the allegations and brought legal action against the Labour MP who made them. These episodes had echoes of the notorious incident in the 2010 election campaign when the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, called a Labour-supporting pensioner, who challenged him on the street about immigration in her home town of Rochdale, a “bigoted woman”. Brown was subsequently forced into a grovelling apology.

Somewheres and anywheres

Using the terminology of the British political scientist David Goodhart, the divisions within the Labour electoral base reflects the division of British society into the two camps of “Anywheres” and “Somewheres”. By “Anywheres” Goodhart means those individuals who are well-educated and value openness, fluidity and personal autonomy. They are mobile and have, or at least purport to have a cosmopolitan mindset. “Somewheres” on the other hand value rootedness, a sense of locality, familiarity, security and patriotism. Anywheres, according to Goodhart, are generally graduates and affluent people who make up around just a quarter of the population but this value block has in recent decades dominated political discourse through cultural hegemony in the education system, the civil service, the media and the arts. The two worlds collided in the Brexit debate.

One Nation Tory-ism

The chaos of the 2017-19 Remain dominated Parliament, the Labour Party’s shift towards support for a second referendum and the threat of the Brexit Party produced a seismic shift in the December 2019 election. Indeed, the election itself was in some ways reminiscent of the 2016 Leave Campaign as the Conservatives focused relentlessly on Brexit and funding for the National Health Service. For the moment at least Boris Johnson seems to have brought about a new settlement in British politics, bringing together an electoral coalition between the working class of Labour’s old industrial heartland and the Tory voting shires. Further, Johnson’s “One Nation” rhetoric alludes to the Disraelian conservatism of the 1860s and 1870s that sought to unite the country around social reform, patriotism and opposition to soulless utilitarianism.

The outlines of Johnson’s One Nation Toryism or what his detractors label as populist nationalism, then, are taking shape: Brexit, greater funding for the NHS, a substantial increase to the minimum wage, increased public spending in the north, a clampdown on foreign criminals, an extension of police stop and search powers and symbolic acts such as reducing the UK presence at globalist glamour events like the Davos World Economic Forum. Such measures may not please some on the corporatist-globalist wing of the Conservative Party but the prospect of a very long period in government thanks to the new dispensation may assuage their concerns.

L'articolo Boris Johnson and Blue-Collar Conservatism proviene da InsideOver.

Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing leader that the Labour Party has had since Michael Foot in 1980-83, is the candidate for leadership of the United Kingdom and he is one of the symbols of the European left.

L'articolo Who is Jeremy Corbyn proviene da InsideOver.

The 9th of November marks the completion of thirty years since that autumn afternoon, when the Berlin communist authorities announced the lifting of travel restrictions for the citizens of the German Democratic Republic, signalling the beginning of the end of the socialist regime a few months later.

Thousands of people flocked in front of the Brandenburg Gate, the most distinctive point of the divided German capital, bursting with excitement in the face of the apparent access restoration to freedom. People’s dreams and hopes for a better life seemed to already come true with the detachment of the first 15-kilometre-long wall’s piece.

One generation afterwards, the first truly free in name and essence, the first without the memories of the socialist ideal, the nightmare of surveillance and the shortages of basic goods, the question about whether the expectations created by the reunification of a nation (and with it of a whole continent) were fully met remains unanswered.

History has repeatedly shown that it disregards any human prediction, let alone when it hastens to prejudge its end. History is a narrative, and that of the present era may not have condemned the socialist past with the uttermost certainty that one would expect three decades ago.

In today’s united Germany of exemplary social and economic planning, the contradictions remain alive: freedom and uncertainty, perspective and inequality, new and old, us and others. The euphoria of reunification was succeeded by the burden of reconstruction, the re-establishment of institutions and nation-wide convergence. Nowhere is this dual character of the present-day German state more characteristically reflected than its vibrant capital, where politics and art, development and poverty, cosmopolitanism and social exclusion compose an extremely dynamic portrait on a canvas of unparalleled cultural diversity.

For contemporary German youth, the notions of socialism, two German states and Stasi are not much more than demonized terms of a seemingly recent but empirically alien and ultimately incomprehensible historical period. For the elders, who have either lived in full or in part the most successful application of real socialism, an unexpected feeling of nostalgia shakes the coveted capitalist dream. Weren’t things finally what we imagined? Did the perpetual human feeling of dissatisfaction or incessant propaganda finally overshadow the self-evident conquests of the era that today seem utopian, such as universal employment, free housing, and education? Have the phenomena of secret surveillance, human rights violations, doping, party favouritism disappeared in our free society? Were we too quick to celebrate the end of illusions?

30 years after the wall fell, an invisible barrier remains between east and west, as large numbers of East Germans feel like second-class citizens. Two million people, mainly youngsters and women, have left the region since reunification in 1990, while the east is still lagging in terms of employment and income. This sense of insecurity and inferiority provides fertile ground for extreme parties, such as the far-right AfD and the far-left Die Linke.

The city of Berlin is fervently preparing for the anniversary celebrations. Among different events, an aquatic light installation will draw borderlines on the Spree River as numerous flashing rescue lamps will be used to symbolize a borderline between Kreuzberg (formerly West Berlin) and Friedrichshain (formerly East Berlin), a bright reminder of a dark past at a time when seemingly forgotten ghosts seem to revive. The message they send is more timely than ever: in man’s struggle for freedom, the greatest enemy is ourselves.

L'articolo 30 Years Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Tainted Legacy proviene da InsideOver.