Letter from America – Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams Tribune : January 20, 2016

It’s a long road from when I interviewed Bernie Sanders for Tribune as mayor of small town in Vermont, or as the only avowed elected socialist in Congress. There is a genuine special relationship between the progressive wings of British and American politics. The upsurge of support for Sanders among Democrats parallels the huge groundswell of support for Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour  leadership election. To a large extent we can thank the Bill Clinton/Tony Blair axis. The recently released notes of the conversations between the two show them spending a lot of time on the “Third Way,” planning global meetings of the New Labour/DLC Axis, the Centre Left.

Before they took up office, several of us met Blair in New York when he and Gordon Brown came to “learn from the Clinton campaign”. Disturbed, even then, by the uncritical enthusiasm for Bill, we remonstrated that he would sell his grandmother in the street for votes. Blair blurted: “But he wins elections!”

Reckless about the feelings of grandmothers, let alone the traditional constituencies, the poor and minorities and trade unionists, whose cause would be given away, let alone sold, to win elections, Clinton set the model for New Labour – ostentatiously disavowing calumniated “special interest groups”, while pandering to the right.  Unlike Clinton, the Blair administration did a lot of good work – but party bosses did not want anyone boasting about it, in case it alienated the financiers whom they hoped would replace the unions as bankrollers for the party.

In both cases, the plan was to hollow out the popular base of the parties, denying members effective input on policy or candidates, to reduce it to a PO box for corporate donations. As we saw in the Labour Party, it became a self-perpetuating career escalator for machine politicians that eventually ruthlessly weeded out any signs of dissent and any ties with the unions apart from  topping up the collection box.

New Labour tried to introduce primaries, copying US practice, but the plan foundered on the different political histories. It was the unforeseen consequence of this emulation of primaries that it allowed Jeremy Corbyn to tap into the deep reservoirs of disaffection with machine politicians,  whose main manifestation hitherto had been abstention at one level or another from the political process.

Continuing the parallels, neither the New Labour establishment, nor Hillary Clinton’s courtiers, cocooned as they were in their incestuous world, realised how disaffected the core constituencies and potential activists were, let alone that Sanders and Corbyn could tap that resentment and potential enthusiasm.

Hillary, following in her husband’s footsteps with the corporate begging bowl, thought politics was all a matter of collecting big cheques from Wall Street and Hollywood. Sanders actually raised more money than her, from millions of individuals who piled their widow’s mites into his campaign. In the unlikely event of bumping into Blair again, I could cheerily say: “But he wins redneck male support.” There are, for once, real lessons for the British Labour Party.  Sanders has made a virtue of saying the unsayable. He has attacked bankers, called for a universal healthy service, supported unions, called for higher wages and more protections for workers. Rather than let the media and political elite set his agenda, he has set his own, which resonates with millions of people. He calls himself a socialist, which effectively disarms the opposition. Where conventional wisdom made “higher taxes” a magic curse dooming any candidate, Sanders made it a battle cry against the rich.

There are differences. Sanders came from so far off-field the media did not know what to do with him and Hillary’s supporters hoped that if they ignored him, he would sink into obscurity. He didn’t, and now their attacks only galvanise his supporters. Attention has also transformed Corbyn from an obscure backbencher into a media titan, and it can allow him to stick to the Labour agenda, with the refreshing change that the public had few expectations of previous trimming incumbents but have been primed by the daily hate sessions from the media to expect Corbyn to propound a full Labour agenda. And Sanders is only vying to be the candidate – while Corbyn already is.

50 Shades of Grey remaindered: From Sanders to Syriza, Moving Right is Wrong for Democratic Socialists!

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Written By: Ian Williams

Published: July 11, 2015 Last modified: July 8, 2015

The worldwide triumph of mediocrity demands explanation. Across the globe, politics seems to have been abandoned to uncharismatic personalities who make the average bank manager look glamorous. Almost the only thing that makes the favourites’ line-up for the Labour Party leadership less yawnable is the Republican presidential primaries in the states, where there are so many runners that one Congressman issued a press release to announce he was not standing.

Surely it is time to revive the tale of the emperor’s new clothes: to point out and pillory the nakedness of the new statesperson. In fact, nudity would be an interesting step up for most them. One reason for the ubiquity of the 50 shades of grey among politicians is that our current imperial tailors are spin-doctors who weave their fabric from focus group fodder. They follow the Clintonian and Blairite principle of looking for a numerous enough group of people amidst whom to hoist their standards regardless of any political principles. Bashing unions, or immigrants, or the unemployed, if that’s what the tabloids want, they will chase then them down the foxhole.

This bizarre New Labour outlook is why so many candidates arrogantly assume they can ignore what members and voters say, and instead play to the media gallery, which is located in some alternative universe where There Is No Alternative to austerity and preferential taxation for plutocrats. The dismissive comments on Jeremy Corbyn’s lack of support among parliamentary apparatchiks is symptomatic of their unconcern for what members and traditional Labour supporters want. As New Labour fades into historical oblivion, like Alice’s Cheshire Cat, the last thing we will see is the smug smile on the face of the fat cats as they take their profits and run offshore.

Here in the United States, the Republican line-up is almost a vindication of market principles. Rarely has there been such a collection of spectacular market failures, usually rescued by family or government money. Donald Trump is the most outstanding blow-hard whose horrifying support among Republican voters typifies HL Mencken’s prediction. “On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Trump’s big defence of his business acumen is that he has never been personally bankrupt, and he can rely on the amnesia of the morons and the media to overlook the repeated collapse of his businesses, the Trump Plaza hotel, the Trump Shuttle airlines and the sundry casinos. That, in its way, is iconic. As with Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates, their business failures are all too oft interred with their nomination papers. Chris Christie of New Jersey, whose minions closed access from the George Washington Bridge to a town whose mayor would not endorse him as governor, wins the chutzpah award for his candidacy.

While these murky candidates, Labour or Republican, tend to get respectfully coverage, it is interesting to check out worldwide who is getting the crowds. In the US, media attention is overwhelmingly on the pundits’ choice, Hillary Clinton. She is well known, and a woman, so almost an automatic choice among the type of American liberals who overlook the historical gender triumphs of Ladies Macbeth and Thatcher. However, despite media bubble, the crowd puller on the hustings is not the former First Lady and accomplice to Clinton’s war on welfare, but Bernie Sanders. He is the only avowedly socialist senator, and running for the Democratic primary. It is perhaps a token of his potential that the Democratic machine in New York State is trying to keep him off the primary ballot there. While Hillary and the Republicans are tapping the usual billionaire suspects, Bernie has been very successful in raising lots of small donations from well-wishers.

It has to be said that while Bernie does not exactly have the glamour, nor even the oratorical skills of his rivals, he more than makes up for it with the sincerity of his democratic socialist ideals. And now we have an inspiration. The triumph of the Yes vote in Greece shows that, in the end, principles may be rewarded. Syriza should be an example to us all.

http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2015/05/ian-williams-40/

Elections Can Be Won

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: May 15, 2015 Last modified: May 13, 2015

While progressive Brits donned sackcloth and ashes at the prospect of another five years of David Cameron, there were some signs of rationality across the Atlantic. The same week, in New York, Dina Richardson, the candidate for the Working Families Party won a seat on the State Assembly from the Democrats – on a platform that included refusing to take any election donations from the real estate interests who tend to buy candidates and elections in the city.

In Alberta, the National Democratic Party had a landslide victory in the provincial elections. Alberta is Canada’s oil-rich equivalent of Texas. Based on ranching and oil, the province has been consistently conservative in its voting and has been a power base for Stephen Harper, the Conservative Prime Minister who has so successfully sullied Canada’s international reputation and has been busily trying to undo Canada’s welfare state.

The victory of the charismatic new NDP premier Rachel Notley confounds the pundit drive to the centre. It is true that the NDP, the party which dragged Canada into the civilised world with its single payer health service, has been influenced by the siren calls of the centre, but it has to a large extent resisted them.

After all, the Liberals were already there in the centre, so instead of a New Labour-style stampede to the right, the NDP had to find the sweet spot between attracting a majority and distinguishing itself from the Liberals. The Alberta result suggests it was successful. It was elected with calls for abolishing Alberta’s regressive flat tax and by challenging the various neoliberal economic shibboleths that have swept the industrialised world.

Many commentators compared the effect to Bernie Sanders winning Texas. Which leads gently to the self-avowed Socialist Senator announcing his bid in the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. The former first lady is being treated as the heir apparent for the nomination with, so far, little opposition from traditionally ambitious Democrats. For the right wing, the hatred for her is all-consuming. If you read their commentary, you would assume that she was on the verge of socialism. Such rumours are even less well-founded than those about Ed Milliband’s Bolshevism.

She is, in fact ,a comfortably corporate conservative, like her husband. While his manoeuvres looked like weak wobbles and she looks tough and decisive, for both of them the technique is the same. Getting votes from ordinary people by “feeling their pain” while inflicting that pain themselves on behalf of all the corporate donors.

So Hillary is presenting herself as deeply concerned with ordinary “middle class” voters as the Americans put it. But in reality, like Bill before, the campaign is shaking down corporate donors – who do not give money without expectations of adequate returns.

Hillary is raking in cash as fast as the bankers can write her cheques, and not releasing their names, even as she calls for a constitutional amendment to reduce the power of money in politics.

Bernie Sanders takes the Democratic whip in the Senate where he represents Vermont. But there is nothing in the rules to stop him running in a primary as the Democratic candidate – indeed, he could run for Republican primary! While the mainstream depicts him as the wild leftist, his reasonable analysis actually appeals to many ordinary Americans.

He is under attack on the left for not trying to break the two party tyranny in American politics but by standing in the Democratic primary, he can put forward his unabashed democratic socialist views much more effectively. Clinton is already trying to throw sops to the left of the Democrats because in the primary at least, she knows that is where she is vulnerable to attack. Then she would veer comfortably right in the general election in office. For the Clintons, like Tony Blair, the purpose of politics is to get them in office, no matter the cost to others.

Looking at this in the context of the line-up of yesterday’s men calling for a return to the centre for the Labour Party, one can see how much more adroit are the tactics of the Clintons, who at least pretend to cater to their core voters, compared with New Labour arrogance that lost us Scotland and the election. The Labour Party might do well to emulate Sanders and Notley not Blair and Peter Mandelson if it wants to return to power.

Neither Kilts nor Skirt Qualifies.

Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams

Tribune Published: July 27, 2014

Not long after Margaret Thatcher was elected, an otherwise progressive friend of mine confessed that she had voted Conservative, “Because Maggie was a woman.” I do hope that she has had some sleepless nights since then. We should be happy to see good women (and men) elected, but it is an unsustainable idea that estrogen any more than testosterone is in itself a qualification for high office. Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Angela Merkel might all have lactated at some time, but one does not associate them with the milk of human kindness, and they would all have been suitable for a casting call for Lady Macbeth.
Nothing became Barack Obama like his predecessor. As I wrote at the time: “His election might not be the Second Coming, but to pursue the eschatological metaphor, it would mark the end of the reign of the Anti-Christ.” However, despite the fawning press from the liberal punditocracy, if Obama disappointed you, just wait until you see Hillary Clinton. We are talking Tony Blair with boobs here.

Rarely can there have been a power couple more convinced of their self-importance than the Clintons, but within that couple it was Hillary who had more the messiah complex and stiffened the back of the invertebrate Bill when he wobbled in his fervor, as he so often did.
She stood by her man, and behind him, almost certainly urging him to “Do the right thing” to get the couple into the White House. That included flying back from the campaign trail to Arkansas as governor to sign the execution warrant for Ricky Ray Rector, the brain-injured condemned man who proved his unfitness for execution by saying Clinton seemed a nice guy – and asked to save the dessert from his last meal until afterwards. She was also an active partner in throwing black academic Lani Guinier to the neo-con wolves when they ran a campaign against her as a “quota queen”. Guinier had proposed a multi-member constituency system to allow minority representation without the ludicrous gerrymandering that blights American democracy. Nominated for an office by Clintons, her old friends, when the Wall Street Journal weighed in against her, they cut her loose politically and professionally.
Much praised for her forbearance in agreeing to work with  Obama when he so unforgivably defeated her, such forgiveness did not extend to defectors from her camp. It is clear that there is a little mental black book waiting for payback time for them. Bill Richardson, one of the more principled Clinton appointees, was saying only recently that his card was still marked, six years after he had endorsed Obama – and had had the decency to call Hillary to tell her what he was going to do. “Let me tell you”, he said then, “we’ve had better conversations.”
Hillary was notoriously responsible for making sure that the insurance companies got their pound of flesh in the Clinton healthcare proposals – and so bears some vicarious responsibility for excluding the single payer NHS option from Obamacare. After all, insurance companies are major healthcare donors. She backed her husband when the took huge steps to demolish FDR’s New Deal by supporting “welfare reform” that penalised poor and working families and put lifetime limits on unemployment benefits. She supported him as he rewrote the regulatory framework to allow the banks which had supported his campaigns so lavishly to reshape the financial system in ways that brought about the economic crash. And we are supposed to forget all this because it might end up with a president who, very occasionally, wears a skirt? Personally, I would rather have Prince Charles in a kilt.
The brouhaha about her is drowning out much more substantial candidacies on the left. Senator Elizabeth Warren has an appreciation for what is wrong with the country, and knows more is needed than just getting an ambitious and self-serving female in office.  She challenges the neo-liberal consensus, embraced by Hillary, which has led to disaster for the 99 per cent. And, beyond tokenism, Bernie Sanders is one of the few honest men to enter Capitol Hill and has the populist credentials to take on the Tea Party on its own ground with working-class and middle-class victims.
Choosing between a Hillary endorsed by oodles of expedient Wall Street cash and a Republican backed with crazed ideological money from the far right will be a tough choice.

Green Menace

From Comment is Free Guardian 14 April 2008

A small correction is in order, apparently the Senator is not actually a member of DSA, although he spoke at their convention and happily accepts donations _ Ian W.


In a country where many socialists seem to prefer sniping from academic ivory towers to active involvement in the political process, most Americans are blithely unaware of the US Senate's first and only avowed socialist. In Britain, Bernie Sanders would be a media celebrity like Tony Benn or Claire Short. In the US, the junior senator from Vermont is equally free with his strongly held opinions, but he would have to be caught tapping his feet in an airport toilet stall to hit the talk shows.

Brooklyn-born Sanders moved to Vermont in 1964, becoming mayor of Burlington in 1981. He represented the state in the House of Representatives from 1988 until 2006 when he won the Senate seat at the age of 65.

It's not as if he did it as a stealth socialist. Sanders is a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who represent the US at the Socialist International - but do not put up candidates of their own. Even so, his flat urban vowels, his challenged coiffure and couture, with his arresting look from behind his glasses combine to make him almost a stereotype of the earnest Brooklyn socialist intellectual who made his own way from the tenements.

But in Vermont, he is "Bernie", and hard work and palpable sincerity more than make for his serious demeanour and lack of gladhanding.

Perhaps fortunately for him, the tiny hard left in the US wants nothing to do with him and his pragmatic Old Labourish policies. When he (along with most of the European socialists) supported intervention in Kosovo, some of his staff resigned in protest.

Technically he is listed as "Independent", but he is no Lone Ranger. He takes the Democratic whip and co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus - a 72-member grouping of the lower house's most liberal members and the biggest such grouping on the Hill.

He speaks fondly of Harry Reid, Senate majority leader, discounting the suggestion that his five committees - "excellent assignments" for a junior senator - may be a consequence of his strategic importance to the wafer-thin Democratic majority. In his early terms in the House he used to tell his more conservative Democratic colleagues exactly what he thought of their timidity, but his approach has mellowed, not necessarily because they moved left, but because the Republicans went so far right.

Now, he sees some cause for optimism. "We've had probably the most right-wing government in the United States in modern history - perhaps forever," he says. "A year ago, extreme right wingers like Tom Delay and Bill Frist were running the Senate and House - but that's been pushed back."

But, as he often does, he immediately qualifies his enthusiasm: "I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said that a Democratic victory in the House or Senate gave us a progressive Congress. It's a lot better than a right-wing extremist government, but it is a centrist government over which big money has a lot of influence."

He concludes: "We still have a long way to go to develop a government which is going to represent the working families and middle classes of America." (British readers should note that the American "middle class" encompasses almost anyone with a regular job.)

Which leaves the question: what's so different about Vermont that it can send Sanders to the Senate? While admitting that on issues like healthcare, the example of nearby Canada helps, the senator does not think that his rural state is an aberration. "It about class," he declares. His electoral support is based on pragmatic and political attention to his constituents' economic interests. "In Vermont, and elsewhere, the most serious economic problem facing America is the collapse of the middle class. The vast majority of Americans have suffered a decline in their standard of living and we are engaged in a race to the bottom."

He shoots off the staccato statistics with the ease of frequent practice: since Bush took office, five million more Americans live in poverty, three million more have lost their pensions, seven million more have lost their health insurance and median household income is now $2,000 less. "That's the dynamic of the American economy. It's not talked about very often by the corporate media, not often discussed in Congress."

Implicitly he condemns many of his Democratic colleagues and suggests that their refusal to address such crass economic issues allows conservatives to trap them into fighting on the forlorn battlefield of social and cultural issues. He charges that "the media plutocracy in this country has tried to establish that you are liberal if you are pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-environment, and you are a conservative if you are against those."

Some liberals take him to task for voting against some gun-control legislation. "It's less of an issue now," he shrugs, and he points to Vermont's zero gun-control laws, high gun-ownership "and one of the lowest crime rates in the country".

So he opposed tort liability for gun makers and supports guns for hunting but voted against allowing "the import of assault rifles whose sole purpose is to kill people, and most hunters think so as well," which does not stop the NRA from giving him its lowest rating.

That does not mean he indulges in gratuitous red-neckery to win votes. "I'm probably one of the strongest environmentalists in the Senate," he notes, "and I have a 100% voting record on human rights and gay rights, civil rights," he declares matter-of-factly with no false modesty.

But, he returns inexorably to his theme, if the Democrats pounded away at the impoverishment of working Americans, the "tax breaks for the billionaires, the corporate welfare that goes to the oil industry and the banks and other big entities they could have a lot more success than they have had".

He explains their failure to do so: "As elections get more and more expensive, you have people in the Senate and House spending huge amounts of time raising money from the wealthiest people, listening to their concerns, and ignoring the needs of the middle class and working class."

But Sanders counters with his own example: "If you stand for something, you can raise money even in this corrupt campaign system." He relied on over 50,000 grassroots contributors to win two-to-one against a wealthy Republican "who spent more money per voter on the campaign than anyone else in the history of Senate elections". But he sadly accepts the likelihood of his colleagues going to the business interests, because that's where the money is.

Sanders points to real examples to demonstrate the feasibility of his programmes - "the many achievements that democratic socialist governments have made over the years in Europe and Scandinavia such as the various types of national healthcare systems. We're the only industrialised country in the world that does not have one, and yet we spend twice as much on healthcare as any other country."

He lists the benefits of European welfare states with envy at their achievement but indignation that "they are beyond anything the average American could dream of. In America, 18% of our children live in poverty, in Scandinavia it's 3 or 4 %."

So with a Democrat Senate, House, and an impending possible Democrat in the White House, can we expect a national health system soon? Sanders is careful to point out the obstacles: "I'm not much into speculation, but the power of the insurance companies is incredible and the power of the pharmaceutical companies is even more so - probably the most powerful lobby in the world. And they've spent hundreds of millions on lobbying and campaign contributions."

And in that context, he laconically ranks the major Democratic primary contenders. He considered John Edwards the "most progressive", but with Edwards having made an early exit he deems Barack Obama to be to Hillary Clinton's left. Although he thinks one of them is going to win the presidency, "even then, developing public policy that defends the middle class and working families will be extraordinarily difficult because of the power of big money over the Congress."