The Class War is Back

In a manner of speaking. See this splendid piece here by Paul Embery:

Paul Embery, “The Demonisation of the Working-Class Shames Our Nation,” HuffPost Politics, 1 July, 2016.

Except the new class war is being waged against the working class by an arrogant, metropolitan, snobbish, middle-class leftist elite that rules the left at the moment, with hordes of young university-educated leftists in tow.

The elite is, to a great extent, influenced by economic neoliberalism (think: New Labour).

The mass of supporters and especially the young are steeped in Postmodernism and all its rotten ideas (cultural relativism, truth relativism, moral relativism, identity politics, etc.). Their core beliefs stand in stark contrast to an older generation of leftists like Noam Chomsky, who in his heyday had utter contempt for their ideology. The worst elements of them are what can be called the regressive left.

A core element of this leftism is its quasi-religious faith in open borders and mass immigration, which is becoming politically toxic all over the Western world, for its deleterious economic and social consequences. Nor can you ignore the cultural problems caused by mass immigration either (though, admittedly, it does tend to bring out the far right and so-called “Alt Right” bigots and needs a diplomatic and light touch in discussion).

Even self-identified, university-educated Marxists are mostly part of the regressive left these days, because – let’s face it – Marxism seems to have been taken over by cultural leftism and to have succumbed to the cult of open borders as well.

Ask yourself: when was the last time a middle-class, university-educated Marxist made the principled, socialist case against mass immigration?

Of course, there are people who have an irrational view of immigration per se or an irrationally bigoted attitude to foreigners. But the correct response here is to quietly and even politely but strongly disagree with such people, and carefully and respectfully point out why they are wrong, rather than simply scream abuse at the top of one’s lungs.

The issue of such people shouldn’t be allowed to dominate the discussion and the best tactic of the left is to boldly seize the issue of mass immigration, take it away from the right, and urge sensible policies that will satisfy voters while crippling support for the right on this issue.

Now the EU has an Italian Banking Crisis

This has been brewing for some time and the full effects of it are unclear, but see here:

Aoife White, “EU Approves $166 Billion Liquidity Guarantee for Italy Banks,” Bloomberg.com, July 1, 2016.

Valentina Pop, Gabriele Steinhauser and Giovanni Legorano, “European Commission Authorized Italian Government to support Banks,” Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2016.

The Italian banks reportedly have €360 billion of non-performing loans on their books, and the European Commission – apparently shooting down Angela Merkel’s recent rejection of such a measure – approved a special Italian government scheme to provide as much as 150 billion euros to keep the banks liquid, as well as a separate plan to recapitalise weak banks with 40 billion euros (see here). Sources familiar with the plans said they have been designed to deal with investor panic and even a potential bank run in Italy (!!).

But these measures do not deal with the need to restructure or write off the non-performing loans, and are seen by some as a stop-gap solution.

Indeed, some analysis I have read claims that many Italian banks are technically balance-sheet insolvent already.

The problem seems to be that EU rules prohibit more aggressive government interventions to bail out and fix the banks in an effective manner, and if a really serious banking crisis happens this will empower the anti-EU political forces in Italy to push for a referendum on EU membership, which is already a demand of the Italian Northern League and the “Movimento 5 Stelle” (Five Star Movement) party (which won a number of local elections earlier in June).

With the EU pushing for more austerity in Portugal as well (see here), one has to wonder how long this rotten union is going to last once a new recession hits Europe and nationalist political forces in the south push for political independence or, at the very least, abandoning the Euro.