Vijay PRASHAD

A decade has now slipped by since a man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid on Dec. 17, 2010.

Bouazizi, a street vendor, took this extreme step after policemen harassed him for trying to survive. Not long after, thousands of people in this small Tunisian town gathered in the street to express their anger. Their outburst spread to the capital city, Tunis, where trade unions, social organizations, political parties and civic groups marched into the avenues to overthrow the government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Demonstrations in Tunisia inspired similar outbreaks around the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Spain, the chant of Cairo’s Tahrir Square — ash-sha’b yurid isqat an-nizam  (“the people want to overthrow the regime”) — redolent with the emotion of hundreds of millions.

People poured into the streets, their sentiment captured by the Spanish term indignados: indignant, or outraged. They came to say that their hopes were being crushed by forces both visible and invisible. The billionaires of their own societies and their cozy relationship with the state — despite the global downturn spurred by the credit crisis of 2007-08 — were easy to see.

Meanwhile, the forces of finance capital that had eroded the capacity of their governments (if they were favorable to the people) to provide humane policies were much harder to see, but no less devastating in their consequences.

The sentiment that fueled the slogan overthrow the regime was shared widely by large majorities of people who had become dulled by the futility of voting for evils and lesser evils; these people were now seeking something beyond the horizon of the election games which seemed to bring so little change. Politicians ran for elections saying one thing, and then did the exact opposite when they took charge.

In the United Kingdom, for instance, the student protests that broke out in November-December 2010 were against the betrayal by the Liberal Democrats of their pledge not to raise fees; regardless of who they voted for, the outcome was that the people suffered.

“Greece, France: now here too!,” chanted the students in the U.K. They could have added Chile, where the students (known as los pingüinos, or “the penguins”) took to the streets against the education cuts; their protests would pick up again in May 2011 and last almost two years in el invierno estudiantil chileno, the “Chilean Student Winter.”

U.K. student protesters mount traffic lights in central London, Dec. 9, 2010. (bobaliciouslondon, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

In September 2011, the Occupy Movement in the United States would join this wave of global outrage, emerging out of the gross failure of the U.S. government to address mass evictions spurred by the mortgage calamity that morphed into the credit crisis of 2007-08. “The only way to experience the American Dream,” someone wrote on the walls of Wall Street, “is while sleeping.”

Overthrow the regime was the slogan because faith in the establishment had weakened; more was demanded of life than what was on offer from the neoliberal governments and the central bankers. But the point of the protests was not simply to overthrow the government alone, since there was widespread recognition that this was not a problem of the governments: it was a deeper problem about the kind of political possibilities that remained open to human society.

A generation or more had experienced austerity cuts by governments of different kinds, even social democratic governments that were told that the rights of the wealthy bondholders – for instance – were far more important than the rights of the totality of the citizens. It was bewilderment at the failure of what appeared to be progressive governments, such as the Syriza coalition in Greece later in 2015, to deliver on their basic promise of no more austerity that spurred this kind of attitude.

Global Scope 

The uprising had a truly global character. A million people in Red Shirts in Bangkok on March 14, 2010, took to the streets against a state of the military, the monarchy and the monied sections; in Spain, half a million indignados marched in the streets of Madrid on  October 15, 2011.

The Financial Times ran an influential article calling it “the year of global indignation,” with one of its leading commentators writing that the revolt pitted “an internationally-connected elite against ordinary citizens who feel excluded from the benefits of economic growth, and angered by corruption.”

“‘The only way to experience the American Dream,’ someone wrote on the walls of Wall Street, ‘is while sleeping.’”

A report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) from October 2008 showed that between the 1980s and the 2000s, inequality rose in each of the 20 richest countries in the world who are members of the OECD. The situation in the developing world was catastrophic; a report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 2008 showed that the share of national consumption by the poorest fifth of the population in developing regions had declined to 3.9 percent from 4.6 percent between 1990 and 2004.

This was gravest in Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, where the poorest fifth accounted for merely 3 percent of national consumption or income.

Whatever funds had been gathered to help the banks stave off a serious crisis in 2008 did not translate into any income redistribution for the billions of people who saw their lives become increasingly precarious. This was the major spur for the uprisings of that period.

A Sign of Hope 

It is important to point out that in all these statistics there was a hopeful sign. In March 2011, Alicia Bárcena, the head of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), wrote that despite the high levels of income inequality, poverty rates in the region had dropped due to the social policies of some of the governments in the region.

Bárcena had in mind the social democratic governments such as in Brazil under President Lula da Silva, with schemes such as the Bolsa Familia, and left governments such as in Bolivia under President Evo Morales and Venezuela under President Hugo Chávez. The indignant in these parts of the world had entered government and were driving a different agenda for themselves.

How swiftly the wealthy turned from the language of “democracy promotion” to the language of law and order, sending in the police and the F-16s to clear out public plazas and to threaten countries with bombardment and with coup d’états.

The Arab Spring, which drew its name from the 1848 revolts across Europe, quickly turned cold as the West encouraged a hot war between regional powers (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) with the epicentres in Libya and Syria. The destruction of the Libyan state by the 2011 NATO attack sidelined the African Union, suspended all talk of the Afrique as a currency to substitute for the French Franc and the U.S. dollar, and drew in a massive French and U.S. military intervention along the Sahel region from Mali to Niger.

Berliners waving revolutionary flags in March 1848,  painter not identified. (Wikimedia Commons)

Immense pressure to overthrow the government in Syria began in 2011 and deepened in 2012. This fragmented Arab unity, which had been growing after the illegal U.S. war on Iraq in 2003; made Syria the frontline of a regional war between Iran and its adversaries (Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates); and diminished the centrality of the cause of the Palestinians.

In Egypt, General Mohamed Ibrahim, the interior minister in a new government of generals, said coldly, “We are living a golden age of unity between the judges, the police, and the army.” The North Atlantic liberals rushed behind the generals; in December 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron honored Egypt’s president – a former general – Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest award.

In Latin America, meanwhile, Washington instigated a series of shenanigans to overthrow what was known as the Pink Tide. This ranged from the attempted coup against the Venezuelan government in 2002 to the 2009 coup in Honduras and the hybrid war prosecuted against every progressive government in the American hemisphere from Haiti down to Argentina.

A decline in commodity prices — especially oil prices — spluttered economic activity in the hemisphere. Washington used this opportunity to exert information, financial, diplomatic and military pressure on the left governments, many of which could not withstand the pressure. The coup against the government of Fernando Lugo of Paraguay in 2012 was a harbinger for what was to come against President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil in 2016.

Front right: Grave in Tunisia of Mohamed Bouazizi, hailed by Arab commentators as one of the “heroic martyrs of a new Middle Eastern revolution.” (Thijs Roes, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Every inch of hope to change the economic and political system was driven underfoot by war and coups and by immense pressure from organizations such as the IMF. Older language of “tax and subsidy reform” and “labor market reform” re-emerged to suffocate attempts by states to provide relief to the unemployed and the hungry.

Long before the coronavirus, hope had become calcified and rottenness had become normal as migrants drowned in seas and sat in concentration camps while dead money slipped across borders to tax havens (offshore financial centers hold upwards of $36 trillion, an astronomical amount).

A glance backward to the uprisings of a decade ago requires that we pause at the door of the prisons in Egypt, where some of the young people who had been arrested for their hopefulness remain incarcerated. Two political prisoners, Alaa Abdel El-Fattah and Ahmed Douma shouted to each other between their cells, a conversation which was published as Graffiti for Two. What did they fight for?

“We fought for a day, one day that would end without the suffocating certainty that tomorrow would replicate it as all days had been replicated before.” They sought an exit from the present; they sought a future. Revolutionaries, when they rise, Alaa and Ahmed wrote, care “for nothing but love.”

In their prison cells in Cairo, they hear stories of the Indian farmers, whose struggles have inspired a nation; they hear of the striking nurses from as far afield as Papua New Guinea and the United States; they hear of striking factory workers in Indonesia and South Korea; they hear that the betrayal of the Palestinians and the Saharawi people provoked street actions around the world.

For a few months in 2010-2011, the “suffocating certainty” that there is no future was set aside; a decade later, the people on the streets seek a future that is a break from the insufferable present.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research via consortiumnews.com

Since Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination four years ago, mainstream media across the political spectrum have warned us about the rise of “populism.” The standard narrative goes something like this: those on the political extremes — especially the far-right but also the far-left—are rapidly gaining ground and subverting liberal democracy across the globe, ushering in a new age of authoritarianism.

“What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao,” explained former George W. Bush speechwriter turned #Resistance leader David Frum in 2017. “Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.”

When it comes to right-wing nationalists like Trump and others — Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, to name just a few — this critique has largely proved correct. Trump’s authoritarian impulses are undeniable, and he has expressed his fundamental disdain for democratic norms, the free press and the rule of law on an almost daily basis. The former game show host has done extraordinary damage to America’s already deeply flawed institutions, and there’s no telling how much more he would do with another four years in office.

Whatever truth there is to this argument, however, there has always been something deeply disingenuous about veteran neoconservatives and neoliberals positioning themselves as defenders of democracy. Some of the loudest critics of this “new authoritarianism” were devoted supporters of Bush II, who was arguably an even more effective demagogue than Trump. Along with Frum, Bill Kristol, Thomas Friedman, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot and Jonathan Chait all supported the Iraq War and an unprecedented expansion of executive power. President Obama, of course, consolidated and strengthened that power by broadening the surveillance state that is now under Trump’s control. None of the aforementioned pundits felt compelled to speak up about these developments before 2017.

It’s not so much Trump’s authoritarianism that centrists object to then but the crude and impudent manner of its implementation. Three years after his election, they still regard him as a kind of aberration. Never has this been clearer than in the mainstream media’s recent embrace of Michael Bloomberg. With former vice president Joe Biden’s campaign in a death spiral, the former mayor of New York City has emerged as an appealing alternative for establishment types who despise Trump but cannot bear the thought of supporting a genuine social democrat like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The irony is that Bloomberg fits perfectly into Frum’s definition of authoritarianism, which he argues is built on “rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.” Not only does the billionaire own a media outlet that bears his name, but as his purchased endorsements make clear, he’s all too willing to subvert our political system for his personal gain. Indeed, he has staked his entire candidacy on his ability to do just that.

Bloomberg is notorious for disregarding rules and norms, infamously strong-arming New York’s City Council to overturn the mayorship’s term limits so that he could run for a third term. “Rules, in the Bloombergian universe, only apply to people with less than ten zeros in their net worth,” observed Joel Kotkin in The Daily Beast last month, adding that he is a “far more successful billionaire with the smarts, motivation and elitist mentality not only to propose but actually carry out his own deeply authoritarian vision should he be elected president.”

As mayor of New York City, Bloomberg governed as an authoritarian, from his draconian and racist stop-and-frisk policy to his heavy-handed crackdown on Occupy Wall Street. “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world,” Bloomberg once bragged. While evicting Occupy protesters from Zuccotti Park in 2011, he even made sure to prevent journalists from documenting police brutality, closing airspace in lower Manhattan to block any possible aerial footage.

The former mayor’s disregard for civil liberties and disdain for popular movements is a matter of public record. But whereas Trump’s behavior is almost atavistic, Bloomberg employs what The New Republic’s Alex Pareene calls a “polite authoritarianism.” Comparing the two, Pareene writes that the latter “has explicitly argued that ‘our interpretation of the Constitution’ will have to change to give citizens less privacy and the police more power to search and spy on them. In fact, he does not seem to believe that certain people have innate civil rights that the state must respect.”

That so many talking heads have rallied around somebody like Bloomberg as an alternative to left- and right-wing populism should come as no surprise. A paper from political economist David Adler indicates that contrary to the dominant media narrative, centrists are uniquely hostile to democratic values. “Respondents at the center of the political spectrum are the least supportive of democracy, least committed to its institutions, and most supportive of authoritarianism,” writes Adler, whose findings were based on data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey.

Per his research, less than half of self-identified centrists in the U.S. believe that free elections are “essential to democracy.” Perhaps more troubling, they tend to view basic civil rights as non-essential. While dissatisfaction with democracy is high on both the left and right, Adler is careful to point out that this does not necessarily indicate these groups are ready to abandon it altogether; rather, they want their government to be more democratic than they are at present. There is a difference, he notes, between support for democracy and satisfaction with existing institutions. And while he found “moderate levels of satisfaction” with the current system among centrists, they are the least disposed toward democratic reforms.

What these people fear and abhor, ultimately, is any kind of threat to the status quo and the entrenched power of elites. As Jeet Heer recently argued in The Nation, those on the extremes of the political spectrum are more likely to criticize a state whose violence they frequently bear the brunt of, while centrists who are “safely ensconced in mainstream society and hold positions of high social status, are more likely to take an uncritical view of trampling on democratic norms, since they have the comfort of knowing that the authorities are unlikely to go after reputable figures.”

Bloomberg would govern as a well-mannered neoliberal autocrat, and his assault on American democracy would be more insidious—and perhaps more dangerous—than Trump’s in the long run. He let his mask slip last year when he commented that China’s Xi Jinping is not, in fact, a “dictator,” since he “has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive.” The Uighur Muslims currently residing in concentration camps might disagree, but then again Bloomberg never did care much about the civil liberties of Muslims or people of color.

Sanders, the current Democratic front-runner, offers a very different view of Xi. “In China,” he wrote in 2018 article for The Guardian, “an inner circle led by Xi Jinping has steadily consolidated power, clamping down on domestic political freedom while it aggressively promotes a version of authoritarian capitalism abroad.” Unlike Bloomberg and his toadies, Sanders is committed to expanding democracy and understands that the neoliberal status quo of the past several decades has fueled the rise of authoritarianism throughout the world today.

Here lies the crucial difference between those who denounce Trump from their armchairs and leftists who join popular movements fighting for radical change. With Bloomberg now set to challenge Sanders for the Democratic nomination, the divide couldn’t be starker. And for those who truly reject authoritarianism, the choice should be easy.

truthdig.com

A truth about movements is, they move. They morph, evolve and move around a country or even around the globe. This occurs over months and often over years.

The US Occupy encampment era occurred ten months after the Arab Spring and six months after the Spanish Indignado movement – early versions of occupy. It started in New York and then spread across the United States and to other countries. It was a global revolt against the 1% that changed politics in the United States and continues to have impacts today.

The Yellow Vest (Gilets Jaunes) movement in France is having a major impact and gaining international attention, already spreading to other nations, with some nations like Egypt banning the sale of yellow vests to prevent the protest from spreading there. The movement is showing that disrupting business-as-usual gets results. Will it come to the United States? What form would it take here? What could spark the equivalent of the Yellow Vests in the US?

The ‘gilet jaune’ (‘yellow vest’) wave from France reached the centre of Brussels on Friday. Yves Herman/Reuters

Social Movements Create Global Waves Of Protest

It is common for a protest to develop in one part of the world and move to another country. This is even more common in modern times as the economy has become globalized and communication across different countries has become easier.

The US revolution against Great Britain was part of the Age of Enlightenment, which questioned traditional authority and emphasized natural rights of life, liberty, and equality as well as sought self-government and religious freedom. The French Revolution followed 13 years after the US in 1789. It led to political changes in the UK, Germany and across Europe. This coincided with the Great Liberator, Simon Bolivar, freeing colonies from the Spanish Empire including Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru. They became independent and briefly united as a single nation.

The democratic revolutions of 1848, known as the Springtime of Peoples, were part of a widespread revolutionary period that impacted 50 nations in Europe, beginning in France and spreading without any evident coordination. The issues were about democratic and worker rights, as well as human rights and freedom of the press. It led to the abolition of serfdom in some nations and ended monarchy in Denmark. The French monarchy was replaced by a republic, constitutions were created, and empires were threatened by countries seeking sovereignty.

In the era of Decolonization of Africa and Asia, 1945 and 1960, three dozen new states achieved autonomy or outright independence from their European colonial rulers. In Africa, a Pan-African Congress in 1945 demanded an end to colonization. There were widespread unrest and organized revolts in both Northern and sub-Saharan colonies. Protests, revolutions and sometimes peaceful transition ended the era of colonization.

The 1960s were an era of protest that peaked in 1968 around the world. Multiple issues came to the forefront including for labor rights and socialism, the feminist movement, protests against war and militarism, and against racism and environmental degradation. Protests occurred in the United States, Europe, the Soviet Bloc, Asia, and Latin America.

More recently, economic globalization and the Internet have accelerated global protests. An example of this is the anti-globalization movement itself. As corporations took control of trade agreements and began to write trade for transnational corporate profits, people around the world saw how this impacted their communities and fought back.

The Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico on January 1, 1994, was an uprising that coincided with the beginning of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Zapatista Army of National Liberation was an uprising by the indigenous, local population against being exploited by global trade. Their action was an inspiration to others and an anti-NAFTA movement developed in the United States, growing into an anti-globalization movement.

The 1997 financial crisis in Southeast Asia, followed by the International Monetary Fund restructuring the debt in ways that brought austerity, led to protests across the region in Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand against economic globalization and the undue influence of transnational capital.

These combined into the Battle for Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization meetings where 50,000 people from the US and around the world protested on the streets of Seattle for four days shutting down the meetings. This was a movement of movements moment that united many single-issue groups into a force too powerful for the elites to overcome. WTO meetings since then have been met with mass protests as have IMF and other economic meetings. This evolved into making it very difficult to pass corporate trade agreements in the United States, e.g. the people stopped the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Trump will have difficulty getting NAFTA-2 approved. Join the campaign to stop Trump Trade’s NAFTA-2.

“The Yellow Vests will win” written on L’Arc de Triomphe in Paris. AFP

The Yellow Vest Movement

The French Yellow Vest movement is made up of working people who are protesting the unfair economy every Saturday.  The 8th “Act,” held this Saturday, was larger than expected as the government and media were claiming the movement was dying down over the holidays, despite the movement saying they were not over and were just getting started.

The movement began as a protest against a gasoline tax, but it quickly became evident that this was just the final straw against a series of policies that have made people economically insecure.  President Macron has aggressively pursued a neoliberal agenda on behalf of the wealthy, lowering their taxes while cutting social services.

Macron has responded with the elimination of the fuel tax, raising the minimum wage, and cutting taxes on pensioners, but they continue to call for the “president of the rich” to step down. Macron’s popularity is down into the twenties in polls, while a majority of French people want the Yellow Vest protests to continue. The movement is exposing contradictions in France that cannot be solved by the current economic and political systems.

Macron, while making concessions, has also called the protesters thugs and agitators. Police tactics have been aggressive and violent, in the face of mostly nonviolent protests. They arrested a Yellow Vest participant, Eric Drouet, who the media has labeled a “leader,” on flimsy charges of protesting without a permit, stoking more outrage. The media calls him a leader while saying the leaderless movement will fail because it lacks a leader. This reminds us of similar treatment during Occupy.

The movement has blown up political divides because there are people from the extreme left, extreme right and everywhere in-between participating. It includes young and old, male and female. It shows people uniting in a revolt over the unfair economic system and its impact on workers.  They are also calling for participatory democracy by demanding citizen initiatives where people can vote on legislation, firing political appointees or even changing the constitution if they gather enough signatures. The Yellow Vests are showing system-wide problems that require both the economic and political systems to change.

Will ‘Yellow Vest’ Protests Come to the United States?

Many of the problems the French people suffer are also felt in the United States. The US economy has been designed for the wealthy for decades and billionaire President Trump-era policies have made that reality worse. People never fully recovered from the 2008 economic collapse when millions lost houses and jobs, got lower income and higher debt.

The globalized economy that has been designed for transnational corporations has not served the people in the United States well.  The fly-over states of the Midwest have been left hollowed out. Rural hospitals are closing as the economy disappears. In urban areas across the country, decades of neglect and lack of investment have created impoverished conditions. Racist and violent policing have been used to prevent rebellion and contain the unrest. People are struggling. Addiction and suicide rates are up. There is vast hopelessness and despair.

An economic collapse is on the horizon. As Alan Woods writes in New Year, New Crisis, “The question is not if it will happen, only when.” The US economy is dominated by Wall Street, which ended the year in crisis. Citigroup’s share price declined 30 percent from where it started the year, Goldman Sachs declined 35 percent, Morgan Stanley 24 percent, Bank of America 18 percent and JPMorgan had a 10% loss. Woods points to China’s economy slowing as is Germany’s and problems in other European nations all point to a global slow down, which those in power do not have tools to respond to as interest rates are already low and government debt is already high.

When the recession hits, the economic insecurity of the people will worsen. Like the people in France, the rich are getting obscenely richer and avoiding taxes by hiding billions offshore. And, the government is doing the opposite of what is needed, e.g. reducing taxes on the wealthy when there should be a millionaire’s tax of 70%, and blocking the Green New Deal.

And, when the economic crisis hits, people will blame Trump. Many voters supported him because he promised to break from a system that is designed to favor the wealthy. They will know from their own experience that he did the opposite. Stop Trumpism! will become an even louder rallying cry and a president whose popularity always hovered around 40% will find himself in polls at 30% or lower, as a presidential campaign kicks into high gear.

The economy is often the trigger event, as it was for Occupy, and we already know there are going to be mass teacher strikes in 2019, indeed plans to strike in LA are expected to escalate more broadly. The 40,000 people who lose their jobs as a result of four US General Motors factories closing could face losing their homes and have other economic stresses causing them to revolt. Congress refusing to take National Improved Medicare for All seriously when tens of thousands of people are dying every year simply because they are uninsured could light the spark.

People in the US might not be wearing yellow vests, but we know from other recent protest movements, people are willing to shut down streets and highways and stop business as usual. More may participate if a radicalizing moment ensues now that they have seen the model work in France.

There are many triggers that are likely to spark aggressive mass protests in 2019. Get ready.

popularresistance.org