{"id":139208,"date":"2019-08-05T12:01:43","date_gmt":"2019-08-05T11:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=139208"},"modified":"2019-08-12T10:39:40","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T09:39:40","slug":"killer-clowns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/08\/killer-clowns\/","title":{"rendered":"Killer Clowns"},"content":{"rendered":"

30 Jul 2019 – <\/em>Why are so many nations now led by extravagant buffoons? Because the nature of capitalism has changed.<\/p>\n

Seven years ago the brilliant impressionist Rory Bremner complained that politicians had become so boring<\/a> that few of them were worth mimicking: \u201cThey\u2019re quite homogenous and dull these days \u2026 It\u2019s as if character is seen as a liability.\u201d Today, his profession has the opposite problem: however extreme satire becomes, it struggles to keep pace with reality. The political sphere, so dull and grey a few years ago, is now populated by preposterous exhibitionists.<\/p>\n

This trend is not confined to the UK \u2013 everywhere the killer clowns are taking over. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Erdogan, Viktor Orban and a host of other ludicrous strongmen \u2013 or weakmen as they so often turn out to be \u2013 dominate nations that would once have laughed them off stage. The question is why? Why are the deathly technocrats who held sway almost everywhere a few years ago giving way to extravagant buffoons?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Boris Johnson – UK<\/p><\/div>\n

Social media, which is an incubator of absurdity, is certainly part of the story. But while there has been plenty of good work investigating the means, there has been surprisingly little thinking about the ends. Why are the ultra-rich, who until recently used their money and newspapers to promote charisma-free politicians, now funding this circus? Why would capital wish to be represented by middle managers one moment and jesters the next?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Donald Trump – USA<\/p><\/div>\n

The reason, I believe, is that the nature of capitalism has changed. The dominant force of the 1990s and early 2000s \u2013 corporate power \u2013 demanded technocratic government. It wanted people who could simultaneously run a competent, secure state and protect profits from democratic change. In 2012, when Rory Bremner made his complaint, power was already shifting to a different place, but politics had not caught up.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rodrigo Duterte – Philippines<\/p><\/div>\n

The policies that were supposed to promote enterprise \u2013 slashing taxes for the rich, ripping down public protections, destroying trade unions \u2013 instead stimulated a powerful spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation<\/a>. The largest fortunes are now made not through entrepreneurial brilliance but through inheritance, monopoly and rent-seeking: securing exclusive control of crucial assets, such as land and buildings<\/a>, privatised utilities and intellectual property, and assembling service monopolies<\/a> such as trading hubs, software and social media platforms, then charging user fees far higher than the costs of production and delivery. In Russia, people who enrich themselves this way are called oligarchs. But this is not a Russian phenomenon, it is a global one. Corporate power still exists, but today it is overlain by \u2013 and is mutating into \u2013 oligarchic power.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jair Bolsonaro – Brazil<\/p><\/div>\n

What the oligarchs want is not the same as what the old corporations wanted. In the words<\/a> of their favoured theorist Stephen Bannon, they seek the \u201cdeconstruction of the administrative state.\u201d Chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism<\/a> on which the new billionaires thrive. Every rupture is used to seize more of the assets on which our lives depend. The chaos of an undeliverable Brexit, the repeated meltdowns and shutdowns<\/a> of government under Trump: these are the kind of deconstructions Bannon foresaw. As institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode, the oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense.<\/p>\n

The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the kleptocrats fleece us<\/a>, we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons, who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists.<\/p>\n

The oligarch\u2019s interests always lie offshore: in tax havens and secrecy regimes<\/a>. Paradoxically, these interests are best promoted by nationalists and nativists. The politicians who most loudly proclaim their patriotism and defence of sovereignty are always the first to sell their nations down the river<\/a>. It is no coincidence that most of the newspapers promoting the nativist agenda, whipping up hatred against immigrants and thundering about sovereignty, are owned by billionaire tax exiles, living offshore.<\/p>\n

As economic life has been offshored, so has political life. The political rules that are supposed to prevent foreign money from funding domestic politics have collapsed<\/a>. The main beneficiaries are the self-proclaimed defenders of sovereignty, who rise to power with the help of social media ads bought by persons unknown, and thinktanks and lobbyists that refuse to reveal their funders<\/a>. A recent essay<\/a> by the academics Reijer Hendrikse and Rodrigo Fernandez argues that offshore finance involves \u201cthe rampant unbundling and commercialisation of state sovereignty\u201d and the shifting of power into a secretive, extraterritorial legal space, beyond the control of any state. In this offshore world, they contend, \u201cfinancialised and hypermobile global capital effectively is<\/em> the state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s billionaires are the real citizens of nowhere<\/a>. They fantasise, like the plutocrats in Ayn Rand\u2019s terrible novel Atlas Shrugged<\/a>, about further escape. Look at the \u201cseasteading\u201d venture<\/a> funded by Paypal\u2019s founder Peter Thiel, that sought to build artificial islands in the middle of the ocean, whose citizens could enact a libertarian fantasy of escape<\/a> from the state, its laws, regulations and taxes, and from organised labour. Scarcely a month goes by without a billionaire raising the prospect of leaving the Earth altogether, and colonising space pods<\/a> or other planets.<\/p>\n

Those whose identity is offshore seek only to travel further offshore. To them, the nation state is both facilitator and encumbrance, source of wealth and imposer of tax, pool of cheap labour and seething mass of ungrateful plebs, from whom they must flee, leaving the wretched earthlings to their well-deserved fate.<\/p>\n

Defending ourselves from these disasters means taxing oligarchy to oblivion. It\u2019s easy to get hooked up on discussions about what tax level maximises the generation of revenue. There are endless arguments about the Laffer curve<\/a>, that purports to show where this level lies. But these discussions overlook something crucial: raising revenue is only one of the purposes of tax. Another is breaking the spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation.<\/p>\n

Breaking this spiral is a democratic necessity: otherwise the oligarchs, as we have seen, come to dominate national and international life. The spiral does not stop by itself: only government action can do it. This is one of the reasons why, during the 1940s, the top rate of income tax in the US rose to 94%, and in the UK to 98%. A fair society requires periodic corrections on this scale. But these days the steepest taxes would be better aimed at accumulated unearned wealth.<\/p>\n

Of course, the offshore world the billionaires have created makes such bold policies extremely difficult: this, after all, is one of its purposes. But at least we know what the aim should be, and can begin to see the scale of the challenge. To fight something, first we need to understand it.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>About George Monbiot: Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency. Here is what I fear: other people\u2019s cowardice. My<\/em> new book<\/em> How Did We Get into This Mess? is published by Verso.<\/em><\/p>\n

Published in the <\/em>Guardian 26th<\/sup> July 2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 monbiot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 Jul 2019 – Everywhere the killer clowns are taking over. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Erdogan, Viktor Orban and a host of other ludicrous strongmen \u2013 or weakmen as they so often turn out to be \u2013 dominate nations that would once have laughed them off stage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":139210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,49],"tags":[276,260,109,287,75,1321],"class_list":["post-139208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","category-current-affairs","tag-democracy","tag-history","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-world","tag-world-leaders"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}