Brexit boost for Sanders, set back for Clinton

Brexit boost for Sanders, set back for Clinton and Free Trade

A slap in the face for those who support Hillary Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders to beat Donald Trump who claims to be against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (During Democratic Party platform talks on June 24, 2016 the Clinton campaign once again supported the TPP, after she had talked against it on the campaign trail). 

Why? Unless Sanders becomes nominated in Philadelphia as Democratic candidate, Trump now owns the economic card and, surprise, has been handed the democratic rights card by Clinton decisively. 

Building a grassroots movement is great, but don't you agree the nomination fight is over when its over after the super delegates vote, and not before? They may be corrupt, I grant you that, but they might also get more scared by the hour? 

The opportunity for a Henry Wallace - Bernie Sanders kind of a President may deflect into space not to return in a 1000 years! A lot can happen in a month's time especially if indy media and avantgarde are not throwing in the towel prematurely, not losing courage to give Sanders a fair chance for President.

A battle can be lost, but what are chances next time if this fight is not carried down to the wire, measuring out the opponent close enough so one might win or get hurt? Predictabilities have gone out the window for good.

With impeccable timing only days before Brexit and Clinton's disastrous overconfidence in reasserting her never seriously shaken bow to TPP, Trump doubled down against unlawful and chaotic free trade deals:

"Hillary Clinton has also been the biggest promoter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will ship millions more of our jobs overseas – and give up Congressional power to an international foreign commission."

That's right, he has clued in on Investor State Dispute Settlement, multinationals legislating by extorting from the people severe financial penalties against democratic laws in illegal offshore arbitration panels.

Think about it, phoney free trade deals in the November US election will be much more commandeering than with Brexit. Trump fires straight back the ammunition Clinton hands him without even needing anymore his trademark distortions.

Thus, in the complicit, neoliberal process legitimate civic and economic grievances are transformed into chaotic reasoning, irrational racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, all of which are coming to a head.

Brexit happened without blunders and betrayals on the Clinton scale.
There are other lenses into discussing and learning from Brexit, but undemocratic free trade is a constant, not chaotic one, and it works without platitudes and slogans.  

The right-wing agenda of Brexit figurehead Boris Johnson, similar to Trump, syndicates well in much of the corporate-controlled mainstream media. The Lexit (left-wing exit) campaign never gained traction.

Neither one is the editorial outlook of the British Guardian. Nick Dearden, on April 16, seemed to have his finger on people’s pulse months before the vote:

“The problem for the [Britain-visiting] U.S. president is selling TTIP [Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership] the EU-U.S. equivalent of EU-Canada free trade deal Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement – CETA – at the same time as trying to warn against the dangers of Brexit.

“This is a tough task because TTIP has been a godsend for Brexit campaigners, who argue the deal is a major reason to cut loose from Brussels.

It's true that TTIP is a symbol for all that is wrong with Europe: dreamed up, by corporate lobbyists, TTIP is less about trade and more about giving big business sweeping new powers over our society.

It is a blueprint for deregulation and privatization. As such, it makes a good case for Brexit.”

“CETA is probably dead,” according to the Huffington Post and Christopher Sands from the Centre for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

Lame-duck British Prime Minister David Cameron is an ideological free trader who many in the EU and in Britain are happy to get rid off as upside of the Brexit disaster.

He was the only allied leader left in Europe for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama to push the ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) by which multinationals can de facto overrule Germany’s and France’s frack ban e.g.) into the Atlantic free trade, CETA and TIPP.

On the artificial stage of the free trade show, Cameron, Trudeau, Clinton and Obama have a point. The Atlantic free trade ISDS, a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Chapter 11 copycat provision, is what free trade is all about; without it, no deal is needed. The rest is filler fluff.

It is true because removals or adjustments of trade tariffs, without an undemocratic agenda, are simply added on to GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs).

Cameron’s pro-fracking, pro-carbon tax and carbon trade stance against renewable policies are on the Brexit bill.

So is the austerity starving of the Greeks, if anybody paid attention to Boris Johnson’s sweeping tirades.

Brexit is an EU identity crisis as much as it is a British one. One part still learns that empires die more slowly than they are born, and the other shouldn’t aspire to become one.

Today, the pro-peace and anti-corporate-rule origins of the EU are widely forgotten.

The project Europe originally had two French fathers, entrepreneur Jean Monnet and early post-war foreign minister Robert Schumann.

They had made a persuasive argument to the socialist/conservative mix of French leadership and conservative German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The core idea the two had dreamt up, already between world wars and initiated from 1950 onward, succeeded like this.

French and German steel and coal industries were to be so closely co-overseen by both governments that war preparations against each other had forever become physically impossible.

Strong labour rights, civic foundations and democratic controls of corporations across the board were core positions of all six founding nations guaranteeing peace, which was laid down in the 1957 Treaty of Rome.

The EU had been founded on peace and democracy, not economics, in explicit and intentional opposition to always closely-linked corporatism and militarism. It also turned out to be a good plan for prosperity.

The brittling of EU principles and cohesion, in shape of EU-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) package deals to Eastern European countries as measure of a renewed anti-Russian cold war escalation, had started long before Brexit and the crushing of Greece.

In the fields of Ramstein, a small German town close to the French border with cheerful timber frame houses, one of the largest drone bases plays a role in killing children in Pakistan. EU weapons manufacturers export death throughout the world.

Early poison in the heart of the EU became an event that is remembered as the 1973 Basel Committee process.

Quasi as neoliberal kickstarter publicly-owned National Banks were secretively privatized into rogue financier operations with an innocuous title change as so-called central banks.

It was a long game kind of a profiteering racket, and to have eventually devastating results for democracies and economies of the kind we are observing now.

The Big Short, a theme-related docudrama movie, is guaranteed to knock the reader’s socks off.

Solid awareness and honesty about EU failures to be reformed and EU successes made Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn perhaps the most effective Remain campaigners.

This is despite problems Landslide Corbyn has with the disloyal and now completely unelectable Blairites in the House of Commons, some of whom apparently did more harm than good to the Remain campaign.

These neoliberal fossils of so-called New Labour still worship Tony Blair, the alleged war-criminal and sworn Corbyn enemy.

Sir Ken Macdonald, a former UK director of public prosecutions, and other legal heavies are working toward prosecuting Blair.

Filmmaker and journalist Paul Mason’s column headline in the Guardian has a message to the forlorn Blairists in parliament: “Corbyn delivered the Labour vote for remain – so let’s get behind him.”

Perhaps to be remembered as a hero of political tragicomedy, David Cameron had called the Brexit referendum.

His fate energizes democratic populism as well as semi-fascist movements together with storm warnings for neoliberal elitists like Trudeau, like Obama solidifying his negative legacy and Hillary Clinton (neoliberal equals colonialism under market disguise).

All four seem strong contenders, past and ongoing ones, in the satirical Darwin Awards competitions that recognize outstanding achievements of successful self-elimination from social and political evolution.

(There is a related story on Clinton’s road out of the presidential election in the Whitehorse Star archives or at yukonblogger.)

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.