In 1984 I wrote a hostile (to both music and words) review of U2’sUnforgettable Fire. Some weeks later, I found myself dragooned (by a force too absurd to mention) into a late afternoon conversation with Bono. It wasn’t an interview. He wanted to talk one-on-one about why I’d written such a negative estimation of the record.

I arrived bemused, only to become more so when I was sent to the hotel’s penthouse. I knew this hotel, the Who made it their New York headquarters (Keith Moon got the suites about to be remodeled to save on demolition costs). I’d interviewed some other famous rockers in their rooms there, too. But I had never been to the penthouse. Yet here sat a young Irish star, who’d never had a top ten album or a top 20 single in the States.

[pullquote] Elvis. He didn’t. “Because, if you read it, you’ll know pretty much exactly what I think about Elvis,” I said. “But I’ve listened to that song, ‘Elvis Presley and America,’ a dozen times and I still can’t figure out what you’re trying to say.”  He didn’t have anything much to add. Or subtract.

This is the part that’s hardest to believe: For roughly the next ten years, every time I ran into Bono, he tried to re-engage me about that review. Once, backstage at Madison Square Garden, he walked the circumference of a small knot of people that included Sting, Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel, in order to pursue Moby Reviewer. It was dumbfounding.

But after reading Harry Browne’s The Front Man: Bono (In the Name of Power), I think I understand. I had said no. The review called him out as at worst a fraud or at least an incompetent. Face to face, it may never have happened again in the last three decades.

The Front Man is about a boy who never grew up or faced facts. Through very careful accretion of detail it left me feeling that Bono resembled no entertainment or arts figure nearly as much as that other sad, sheltered boy, George W. Bush. In fact, what surprised me most about my reaction to the book was how my response changed as I read. At first, the prose seemed too reserved, too cautious, incapable of capturing the outrageousness of Bono, one part talent to nine hubris. But as the pages turned, what engrossed me was another portrait: Bono as that little boy in man’s boots, surrounded by forces he fathoms no more than a five-year-old fathoms the perils of the sea. In the end, Harry Browne’s Bono is not so much a huckster as a sucker; not a con man so much as a victim of the world’s greatest con artists; not an egomaniac but someone so insecure he has found ways to be shielded from almost all harsh realities (well, at least his own). If this were a movie, you might be able to measure the price paid just by the way he looks at himself in the mirror.

Most less than adulatory writing about Bono, including my own, is a blend of anger, contempt, condescension and frustration. The Front Man recognizes all these instincts, but keeps them under tight command. For instance,  Browne allows himself to be angrier (in tone) at Bono’s wife, Ali, whose business machinations are real but comparatively trivial, than at Bono, himself.  There’s kind of a shadow behind such moments, as if we’re meant to glean that the book’s protagonist can’t be judged like other men, not because he is extraordinarily gifted or brave or empathetic, but because he’s so lost, frightened and pathetic.

Bono may be the personification of all that’s evil about contemporary celebrity culture and all that’s worse than bankrupt about liberal capitalism (and liberal capitalists) but there’s also a real person in there, and he’s spent most of a lifetime making himself what history must surely judge—perhaps not with as much restraint as the author—as a fool.

Does this make Harry Browne’s Bono less easy to despise? Probably but it also makes him easier to understand. Here, Bono becomes less the many-sided symbolic figure and more a fallible (sometimes likable, sometimes detestable) human. Think of the former Paul Hewson as the first self-created one dimensional man (all front, no back). Browne’s dug past the PR and the rhetoric and found…a Mad Men cliché for our times.

But that’s not why you need to read The Front Man. You do need to. Not because you want to better understand Bono, let alone empathize with his plight, but because what topples is not only Bono’s stature but the excuses his chosen trade, liberal philanthropic paternalism, makes for itself. Langston Hughes wrote that the animal that should be chosen to represent liberals is not a donkey or an elephant but an ostrich. This book could be subtitled Bono (With His Head in the Sand).

The Unforgettable Fire was just sort of a second-rate record by a pretty good but not great rock band, one of maybe a hundred records I reviewed that year. I wasn’t a U2 fan. I was disappointed because I thought the previous album was better. But U2, not its front man was my concern as a critic.

So I didn’t start writing about Bono—not U2, Bono– and talking about him on the radio because he seems charismatic.  (Too desperate for attention and adulation for that.) Bono proves a useful tool for understanding the forces around him because his behavior exemplifies the way that liberals, especially neoliberals from Clinton and Blair to Obama, not only played into the hands of reactionaries but vanished every time they got a chance to act like liberals are supposed to act.

Liberals have usually not lived up to their rep. They derive the bulk of their glory by taking credit for the achievements of radicals. The current crop, whose respect for civil liberties is nil and whose attitude toward the suffering is STFU, sets new lows. It is now easier to name a liberal Supreme Court Justice who thinks Roe V. Wade a mistake than to find one who will make any meaningful effort to stop illegal detention, de facto segregation in everything (schools, housing, jobs, the Obama cabinet), or prevent the incarceration, even murder, of political opponents without trial. Liberals claim the entirety of the moral high ground as their turf, but at best, they’re absentee landlords.

Harry Browne reserves his sense of outrage in The Front Man for a rendition of the liberal and neoliberal subversion of human rights. He pays special attention as that subversion is accomplished under cover of noble goals as articulated by Bono and his guru, the austerity (for others) loving pinhead  Jeffrey Sachs, one of the early proponents of TINA (there is no alternative). The TINA doctrine almost literally forms the wool over Bono’s eyes. It boils down to the rich should rule the world, and the richest become the most powerful. The portrait here of how Bono, a man of only marginally inconceivable wealth, has been passed around, mostly without compensation to the suffering or often even himself, resembles a nonfiction Sister Carrie. If I knew how to get my remaining liberal friends to accept evidence-based political journalism, I’d say this book has redemptive power. Alas, there is that ostrich and an abundance of sand, already forming a dune around the person of the former Goldwater volunteer.

The Front Man is, in addition to being an important book about Bono and celebrity, one of the few books about contemporary music that understands issues of colonialism and white privilege, especially in regard to Africa. But Browne doesn’t spend enough time on religion, and in defining the Christian humanism that informed all of Bono’s early work and still empowers his evangelical rhetoric about TINA. This is why Bono is not a unique figure. Actually, he’s a type and the type is not all that new. Consider a paragraph that C.L.R. James wrote in 1950:

“The Christian Humanists have a systematic political economy. They propose decentralized self-governing corporations of private property with every worker in his place. They have a philosophy of history. They believe in the eternal ambiguities of the human situation and the impossibility of ever attaining human freedom on earth. They have a theory of politics. The natural and ideological elite must rule, the masses must not have absolute sovereignty. Since evil and imperfection are eternal, they say, the alternatives are either limited sovereignty or unmitigated authoritarianism.” (From State Capitalism and World Revolution)

Even Browne has given us no better way to account for why Bono misunderstands the meaning of his own successes (there have been some, and not only onstage) and why he cannot recognize his most significant failures, either as a rock star or as a political figure.

Browne also doesn’t talk enough about music, which is especially disappointing because he’s insightful where he does. He was probably prevented by neoliberal copyright laws from quoting many of Bono’s lyrics (a mixed curse in this case) but there are elements of the group’s music, the way it is powered and the way it is manipulated, the sources it draws upon and who it is (and is not) aimed at that merit inclusion in this discussion. So far, no copyright act prevents one from describing and drawing conclusions from guitar licks and drum beats and vocal phrasing. So far.

But that’s not  much to complain about. For the activist beginning to confront the obstacles neoliberalism places under all of our footsteps, as well as the rock fan trying to imagine a world without charity records and broadcast benefit concerts, and especially for those who still revere Bono and his many works, The Front Man serves as both an effective cautionary tale and an excellent how-to-book on avoiding the traps of neo-liberalism. On top of that, it offers the tale of a mannish boy who’s genuinely incapable of grasping why some folks just plain don’t like his act.

Maybe Bono himself will read it. It might be painful but even that couldn’t hurt.

Dave Marsh edits Rock & Rap Confidential, one of CounterPunch’s favorite newsletters, now available for free by emailing: rockrap@aol.com. Dave blogs at http://davemarsh.us/

In his capacity as a consultant to the governor of Kirov, Navalny is accused of having embezzled up to €500,000 from the state-owned Kirovles wood company. He is threatened with a prison sentence of up to 10 years, and if convicted could no longer stand in the presidential elections as planned.

[pullquote]  Navalny does not speak for the broad mass of the Russian population who live in bitter poverty. According to polls, he would only receive 1 percent of the vote in a presidential election.  He represents a section of the Russian ruling elite that is dissatisfied with the division of wealth at the top of society. They accuse Putin and his closest allies of having arbitrary control over the economy, while they strive to develop closer ties with international finance capital. Navalny is no democrat and is a liberal only on economic issues. He defends right-wing political positions and has repeatedly collaborated with fascists. Navalny was born into a family of the privileged Soviet middle class that was close to the bureaucracy in 1976 near Moscow. Both his parents were party members; his mother was an economics expert, while his father was an officer in the Red Army. His parents built up a company during the period of capitalist restoration in the 1990s—while workers were plunged into poverty and barbaric social conditions. [/pullquote]

The Colbert Busch campaign against Mark Sanford in the First District of South Carolina has to be the least strategic special election of the current season. If you’ve ever given a nickel to a Democratic candidate for Congress, you’ve been bombarded in recent weeks by frantic emails pleading for your spare cash, breathlessly announcing how close the race is, and cynically playing on your fervent desire to “seriously embarrass” John Boehner and Eric Cantor. And if those messages don’t separate you from some ‘disposable’ income, the operatives behind them can’t help but remind you that, yes, Colbert Busch is “Stephen’s sister!”

Mitt Romney won the district by 18 percentage points. The district is “ruby red.” A Republican from the district served in the House for the past 32 years. “Democrats 2014,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, “Left Action,” “House Majority PAC,” and the Colbert Busch campaign itself tell us that we “can’t trust” Mark Sanford, and that he’s “unfit for duty.” Duh. Sadly, Alternet and Mother Jonesrented out their email lists for use by the Democrats.

One might think that Boehner and Cantor could find a better candidate than Mark Sanford. The polls as of May 3, nevertheless, have Sanford tied with Colbert Busch at 46%. Sanford’s messiness hasn’t stopped a who’s who of South Carolina and national politicians from endorsing the disgraced real estate developer (including Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Lindsay Graham, Boehner, Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Larry Flynt). Sanford held the seat from 1995-2001 before serving two terms as South Carolina Governor. While a Congressman, the Cato Institute crowned Sanford the most fiscally conservative member of the House. While In DC, Sanford joined “The Family,” that shadowy fellowship of conservative Christian lawmakers operating out of a townhouse on C Street (and that includes likeminded power players around the world, notably gay-baiting Ugandan President Museveni).

Governor Sanford could not get along with his own Republican-dominated state legislature; it routinely overrode the numerous vetoes. During his second term as governor, Sanford stupidly rejected stimulus funds from Washington with the state unemployment rate at 9.5%; the South Carolina Supreme Court forced him to reverse course and accept the funds (most of which, of course, came from taxpayers in blue states). Sanford’s life spiraled out of control after his bizarre week long disappearance in June 2009.

Sanford told his wife and children, his chief of staff, and his security detail that he’d spend the week hiking the Appalachian Trail. Instead, he jetted off to Argentina to meet his “soul mate,” Argentine former TV reporter María Belén Chapur (now his fianceé). Ambushed by a reporter at the airport upon his return, pressured by both friends and enemies with impeachment proceedings in the state legislature, and an awkward, tearful press conference or two later, Sanford admitted the affair, but did not resign.

Sanford’s wife moved out of the governor’s mansion, and divorced him. A couple months ago, in the midst of his electoral comeback, Jenny Sanford charged him with trespassing at her home for sneaking around without permission, contrary to the divorce decree to watch the Superbowl with one of their sons.

Wouldn’t it be great if Colbert Busch unseated Sanford? No. Why not? Because even if Colbert Busch beats Sanford this time, she’s sure to lose the next election. Remember Scott Brown—who took Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat for a partial term—in Massachusetts. The seat reverted to a Democrat after the national Tea Party wave ebbed, and strong contender Elizabeth Warren appeared. Remember Scott Murphy, the Blue Dog Democrat appointed to Kirsten Gillibrand’s House seat following her appointment to the US Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Murphy lost at his earliest opportunity to a just-retired career Army officer, a first-time Republican candidate new to the district. Gillibrand herself only held on to the seat, through one special and one routine election, because her voting record was nearly indistinguishable from that of a Republican.

This is not to suggest that left-liberal Democrats rather than Blue Dogs ought never challenge conservative Republicans in safe seats. Democrats of any hue have structural advantages over third party challengers like Eugene Platt, the Green in the Sanford-Colbert Busch race (who was shut out of the debate and ignored by the media). Long shot challengers can raise neglected issues, educate voters, and attempt to move the discussion leftward. It’s only to say that working folks aren’t represented well by Democrats-In-Name-Only. And that Democratic Party projects like the Colbert Busch campaign are a waste of scarce resources.

The ONLY reason Republicans control the House is because their brethren back home, state legislators and governors, conspire to draw district lines that favor the GOP. Had they any strategic sense, any concern for the long-run, the various Democratic outfits hawking Colbert Busch would concentrate their/your money, time, and grassroots organizing on fighting the right-wing procedural and financial sliminess that constitutes Republican campaigns today. What are the Dems doing at this very moment to stop the well-funded Republican efforts to institute voter ID requirements, carve up the Electoral College to insure victory, protect Citizens United, forestall public financing of campaigns, and solidify winner-take-all gerrymandering across the country? Not all that much except to ask adherents to sign petitions.

Steve Breyman served as campaign treasurer for a Green Party candidate in a New York State Senate contest, and as speechwriter for a New York Green Party gubernatorial candidate. While a Common Cause/New York Board member he testified before the New York State Assembly on behalf of a nonpartisan process to draw electoral district lines, and worked for public financing of campaigns. Reach him atbreyms@rpi.edu

Some revelations come as little surprise. It’s not really news that some politicians love money and like to spend time with those who have lots of it. Or that they sometimes behave like a caste that is above the law. Or that the tax system favours the affluent, and that the free circulation of capital enables them to stash their cash in tax havens.

The disclosure of individual transgressions should lead to scrutiny of the system that created them. But in recent decades, the world has been changing at such a pace that it has outstripped our analytical capacity. With each new event — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emergence of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), technological advances, financial crises, Arab revolutions, European decline — experts have fallen over themselves to announce the end of history or the birth of a new world order.

Beyond these premature birth and death notices, three main, more or less universal, tendencies have emerged which warrant initial exploration: the marked rise in social inequality, the disintegration of political democracy and the decline of national sovereignty. Every new scandal is like a pustule on a sickly body: it allows us to see each element of this trio re-emerge separately and operate together. The overall situation could be summed up thus: governments allow their political systems to drift towards oligarchy because they are so dependent on the mediation of an affluent minority (who invest, speculate, hire, fire and lend). If governments balk at this abandonment of the popular mandate, international pressure from concerted financial interest ensures they topple.

[pullquote]Serge Halimi is one of those rarities that defy analysis: a brilliant and honest journalist helming a mainstream publication that tells it like it is. Le Monde Diplomatique is a vital resource for social activists around the world. —Eds[/pullquote]

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” As we all know only too well, the first article of the Declaration of Human Rights has never been strictly observed. Differences between people’s lots have always been due to other things than the common good: where you have the good (or bad) fortune to be born, your parents’ status, your access to education and healthcare and so on. But the belief that social mobility could overcome inequalities of birth sometimes alleviated the burden of these differences. For Alexis de Toqueville, such a hope, more common in the US than Europe, helped Americans tolerate greater disparities in income than were found elsewhere. A junior accountant from Cleveland or a young Californian without a degree could dream that his talent and dedication would take him to the position of a John Rockefeller or a Steve Jobs.

“Inequality per se has never been a big problem in American political culture, which emphasises equality of opportunity rather than of outcomes,” says Francis Fukuyama. “But the system remains legitimate only as long as people believe that by working hard and doing their best, they and their children have a fair shot at getting ahead, and that the wealthy got there playing by the rules” (1). All over the world this age-old faith, whose effect can be calming or anaesthetising, is evaporating. President François Hollande, asked six months before his election how the “moral recovery” he was calling for might be achieved, spoke of the “French dream. It’s linked to the republican narrative which has enabled us to progress in spite of wars, crises and divisions. Until recently, we have had the conviction that our children would have a better life than us.” But, he added, “this belief has gone” (2).

Fear of Losing Status

The myth of social mobility is being replaced by the fear of losing status. A manual worker no longer has much chance of becoming a boss, journalist, banker, academic or politician. France’s elite tertiary education institutions, thegrandes écoles, are even less accessible to working-class students than when Pierre Bourdieu published Les Héritiers (The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture) in 1964. The same is true of elite universities worldwide, where fees have rocketed. A young woman in Manila, unable to keep paying her fees, recently committed suicide. And two years ago an American student explained: “I have about $75,000 in student loans. I will default soon. My co-signer, my father, will be forced to take my loans. He will default as well. I’ve ruined my family because I tried to rise above my class” (3). He had wanted to live the American dream, to go from rags to riches. Now his family are heading in the opposite direction.

When the winner takes all (4), income inequalities can be indicative of a social pathology. Thirty years ago the Walton family, who own the giant Walmart corporation, had a fortune 61,992 times greater than the median US income. Today it’s 1,157,827 times greater. The Waltons have amassed as much money as America’s 48,800,000 poorest families. Last year the Bank of Italy said “the ten wealthiest individuals have as much money as the poorest three million Italians” (5).

And now China, India, Russia and the Gulf states are catching up in the billionaire stakes. When it comes to the concentration of wealth and exploitation of workers, the West has nothing to teach them; indeed they can give the West some lessons in brutal neoliberalism. In 2003 Indian billionaires owned 1.8% of the nation’s wealth; five years later they held 22% of the wealth of a nation of over a billion people (6). That must give one pause. India’s wealthiest man, Mukesh Ambani, may ponder this from his glittering 27-storey home looking down on Mumbai, where half the inhabitants still live in slums.

Even the IMF is getting concerned: after long proclaiming that “income disparities” drive imitation, efficiency and dynamism, it noted that 93% of the growth gains achieved in the US in the first year of the economic upturn profited only America’s richest 1%. That was too much even for the IMF. Leaving aside moral considerations, how can you assure the development of a country if its growth increasingly profits a tiny group who don’t buy much as they already have everything? And who consequently either save or speculate with their money, further fuelling an already parasitic financial economy. Two years ago an IMF study conceded that favouring growth and reducing inequality were “two sides of the same coin” (7). Economists are moreover noticing that industrial sectors which depend on middle-class consumption are beginning to struggle in a world in which global demand — when not throttled by austerity policies — prefers either luxury goods or bargain products.

According to advocates of globalisation, widening social inequalities result above all from particularly rapid technological development, which penalises society’s least educated, mobile, flexible and agile citizens. And they have a ready answer: education and training for those who lag behind. Last February, The Economist,summed up this legitimist fairy tale in which politics and corruption play no role: “The top 1% have seen their incomes soar because of the premium that a globalised high-tech economy places on brainy people. An aristocracy that gambled its money away on ‘wine, women and song’ has been replaced by a business-school-educated elite whose members marry one another and spend their money wisely on Mandarin lessons and Economist subscriptions for their children” (8).

So apparently the wisdom of attentive parents training their offspring to read the (only) periodical worthy of their time explains soaring wealth… There are competing hypotheses, however. For example, wealth, which is taxed less than work, is able to plough some of the financial benefits it accrues from favourable measures back into the task of consolidating its political support: accommodating tax regimes; the rescue of large banks which held small savers to ransom; entire populations who are put under pressure so that creditors are repaid; public debt, which the rich view as another investment opportunity (and means of exerting pressure). Wealth’s complicity with politics ensures it will continue to be less heavily taxed than work. In 2009 six of the US’s 400 highest earners paid no tax at all; 27 paid under 10%; none paid over 35%.

In short, the rich use their fortunes to increase their influence, and their influence to increase their fortunes. This is how Fukuyama sums it up: “Over time, elites are able to protect their positions by gaming the political system, moving their money offshore to avoid taxation and transmitting these advantages to their children through favoured access to elitist institutions.”

The inequality machine is reshaping the whole planet: a globalised economy in which the winner takes all; national unions going to the dogs; the lightest taxation for the highest income. The 63,000 people — 18,000 in Asia, 17,000 in the US and 14,000 in Europe — who have a fortune of over $100m collectively own $39,900bn. Making the rich pay may no longer be simply symbolic.

The economic policies which have so favoured a minority have nonetheless rarely transgressed the democratic forms of the government of the majority. There’s an apparent paradox here. One of the most famous judges in the history of the US Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis, put it like this: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” True democracy is not solely about respecting its formal features (pluralist ballot, the voting booth and ballot box). It means more than resigned participation in an election which won’t change anything: it means passion, an educated electorate, a political culture, the right to demand accountability and get rid of politicians who betray their mandate. In a famous report published by the Trilateral Commission, the conservative thinker Samuel Huntington expressed the concern that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups” (9). It’s no coincidence that he said this in 1975, at a time of political ferment, collective optimism, international solidarity and social utopias. Mission accomplished…

The Trilateral Commission has just celebrated its 40th anniversary by enlarging the circle of its guests to include former European Socialist ministers (Peter Mandelson, Elisabeth Guigou, David Miliband) and Chinese and Indian guests. It has no cause to be ashamed of its progress. In 2011 two of its members, Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos, both former bankers, were propelled by a troika of non-elected institutions — the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank (ECB) — to the head of the Italian and Greek governments. Yet voters whose “measure of apathy” is insufficient still balk. So when Monti tried to convert the troika’s suffrage into universal suffrage, he suffered a disastrous defeat. French philosopher Luc Ferry has expressed his disappointment: “What saddens me, because I am a democrat at heart, is the consistency with which the people in times of crisis choose without fail if not the worst, then at least those who most skilfully and completely conceal the truth from them” (10).

EU denial of the electorate

The simplest defence against this sort of disappointment is to pay no heed to the electorate’s verdict. The European Union, which gives lessons in democracy to the whole planet, has made this denial one of its specialities. This is no accident since, for 30 years, the ultraliberals who call the shots ideologically in the US and Europe have been drawing inspiration from economist James Buchanan’s public choice theory.

This intellectual school — which is fundamentally distrustful of democracy, “the tyranny of the majority” — postulates that political leaders are inclined to sacrifice the general interest (indistinguishable from the initiatives of business leaders) in favour of satisfying their clienteles and guaranteeing their own re-election. The sovereignty of such irresponsible people must consequently be strictly curtailed. That is the role of coercive mechanisms that currently provide the inspiration for the European project (the independence of central banks, the 3% budget deficit ceiling, the stability pact), and in the US the automatic amputation of public credit (budget sequestration).

It’s hard to imagine that neoliberals have anything left to fear from politicians, given how well the latter’s economic and social reforms match the demands of the business world and financial markets. At the highest level of the state, this convergence of interests is additionally reinforced by the over-representation of the upper tier of the middle class and the ease with which they move between public and private sectors. When, in a country such as China, where average annual income is little more than $2,500, the parliament contains 83 billionaires, it’s clear that China’s rich don’t lack a sympathetic ear at the highest level. On this point at least, the American model has met its match, even if — lacking elections — Beijing doesn’t yet distribute choice ambassadorial posts to the most generous donors in presidential campaigns as Washington does.

Collusion — and conflicts of interest — between politicians and billionaires now operate across borders. When he was president, Nicolas Sarkozy reserved special favours for the Qataris (including a tax exemption on their highest-value property purchases). Qatar is now prepared to back him in starting a private equity fund. “The fact that he is a former president doesn’t mean he should become a Trappist monk,” said former interior minister Claude Guéant in his defence (11). Nor does a vow of chastity apply in the cases of other former leaders: Tony Blair advises J P Morgan, Belgian Jean-Luc Dehaene is on the Dexia payroll and Italy’s Giuliano Amato works for Deutsche Bank. Is it possible to defend the public good while simultaneously avoiding displeasing feudal foreign regimes or financial institutions which may become one’s future employers? When, in a growing number of countries, such a self-interested calculation involves both main parties, they become, as far as the people are concerned, what novelist Upton Sinclair called “the two wings of the same bird of prey”.

Demos sought to gauge the effects of the close relationship between government officials and the economic oligarchy. Two months ago it published a report detailing “how the dominance of politics by the affluent and business undermines economic mobility in America” (12). Their conclusion: in matters of social and economic policy and labour law, the wealthiest citizens share priorities which are largely different from those of the majority of their fellow citizens. But of course the rich have unusual means by which to bring their aspirations to fruition.

Opinions diverge

So, while 78% of Americans reckon that the minimum wage should be indexed to the cost of living and be high enough to prevent recipients falling below the poverty line, only 40% of the highest-rate tax payers share this view. They are also less favourably disposed towards unions and laws that encourage union activity. The vast majority of people meanwhile would like to see wealth taxed at the same rate as labour and accord foremost priority to overcoming unemployment (33%), not deficit reduction (15%).

Which group prevailed? The minimum wage has lost 30% of its value since 1968; there has been no law to facilitate setting up a union in a workplace, despite Obama’s campaign promise; work is still taxed twice as heavily as wealth (39.6% versus 20%). Finally, Congress and the White House are vying with each other over budget cuts in a country in which the proportion of the population who are actively employed is close to a historic low.

How better to convey the huge footprint the rich leave on the state and the political system? They vote more often, finance electoral campaigns more than others and — in particular — exert constant pressure on politicians. The widening inequalities in the US owe a great deal to the very low level of taxation on wealth, a state of affairs in part sustained through the permanent lobbying of Congress, though 71% of its cost to all US taxpayers only benefits America’s wealthiest 1%.

The refusal to create an active employment policy is another manifestation of the same class choice, transmitted through the same oligarchical system. In January 2013, the unemployment rate among (mainly middle-class) Americans with at least a first degree was just 3.7%. By contrast, it stood at 12% for those without a degree, who are much poorer — and whose views count for less in Washington than the views of the business community. Or the views of Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the billionaire Republican couple who gave more to last year’s elections than the total population of 12 US states. “Under most circumstances,” the Demos study concluded, “the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.”

“Do you want me to resign? If so, tell me!” Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades apparently said to IMF director Christine Lagarde when she requested the immediate closure one of the biggest banks on the island, a large provider of jobs and revenue (13). French minister Benoît Hamon also seemed to concede that his government’s sovereignty (or influence) was limited, since “under pressure from the German right, austerity measures are being imposed which all over Europe are translating into rising unemployment” (14).

Left or right, same ingredients

In their implementation of measures which consolidate the censitary power of wealth and profit, governments have always known how to use the pressure of non-resident “voters” whose power is deemed irresistible: the troika, the credit-rating agencies and the financial markets. Once the formality of national elections is out of the way, Brussels, the ECB and the IMF send their road map to the new leaders so that particular campaign promises can be ditched immediately. Even The Wall Street Journal could not conceal its bafflement last February: “The French, Spanish, Irish, Dutch, Portuguese, Greeks, Slovenians, Slovakians and Cypriots have to varying degrees voted against the currency bloc’s economic model since the crisis began three years ago. Yet economic policies have changed little in response to one electoral defeat after another. The left has replaced the right; the right has ousted the left. Even the centre right trounced Communists (in Cyprus) — but the economic policies have largely remained the same: governments will continue to cut spending and raise taxes. The problem facing newly elected governments is that they operate within the institutions of the Eurozone. National governments must follow macroeconomic directives set by the European Commission. All of which means that, after the sound and fury of an election, national governments have little room for manoeuvre on economic policy” (15). “You get the impression,” Benoît Hamon admitted sadly, “that a leftwing policy or a rightwing one just administers different quantities of the same ingredients” (16).

When a senior official from the European Commission attended a meeting between his colleagues and the head of the French Treasury, he reported:  “It was stunning: they [the Eurocrats] behaved like schoolmasters telling a poor student what to do. I was very impressed that the director of the Treasury kept his cool” (17). This scene brings to mind the fate of Ethiopia and Indonesia at the time when their leaders were reduced to the role of administering punishments which the IMF had decided to impose on their countries (18). Now Europe is getting a taste of the same medicine: in January 2012, the Commission in Brussels instructed the Greek government to cut nearly €2bn from its public expenditure within five days or face a fine.

No sanction threatens the president of Azerbaijan, the former Mongolian finance minister, Georgia’s prime minister, the wife of Russia’s deputy prime minister or the son of the former Colombian president. Yet all of them have tucked away some of their wealth — ill-gotten or simply stolen — in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands, where there are 20 times more companies registered than inhabitants. Or the Cayman Islands, which has as many hedge funds as the US. Not forgetting in Europe, Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg, thanks to which the continent is a volatile mix of harsh austerity policies and tax evasion industries.

Growing pressure

Not everyone is unhappy about permeable borders. Bernard Arnault, who owns a luxury-goods multinational and is the tenth richest person on earth, has even expressed delight at democratic governments’ loss of influence: “Businesses, especially international ones, have ever greater resources and in Europe they have acquired the ability to compete with states… Politicians’ real impact on the economic life of a country is more and more limited. Fortunately” (19).

By contrast, the pressure states are under is growing, exerted simultaneously by creditor countries, the ECB, the IMF, credit ratings agencies and financial markets. Jean-Pierre Jouyet, current president of the Banque Publique d’Investissement (Public Investment Bank), conceded two years ago that in Italy the markets “exerted pressure on the democratic mechanism. It’s the third government to fall at their initiative through excessive debt. The spike in interest rates on Italian debt was the markets’ way of casting their vote. Ultimately, citizens will revolt against this de facto dictatorship.”

But de facto dictatorship can count on the mainstream media to come up with diverting subjects to delay, and then misdirect, collective revolt, and to personalise and thereby depoliticise the most shocking scandals. Illuminating the real workings of what happens, the mechanisms through which wealth and power have been captured by a minority who control both markets and states, requires a constant effort to educate the public. It would remind people that any government ceases to be legitimate when it allows social inequalities to grow, ratifies the crumbling of political democracy, and accepts the subordination of national sovereignty.

Every day, there are signs of the people’s rejection of illegitimate governments — at the ballot box, in the streets, in the workplace. Yet despite the severity of the crisis, they are groping for alternative proposals, half believing they do not exist, or else would come at too high a price. Thus the growing frustration and despair. Fresh ways out are urgently required.

SERGE HALIMI is director of Le Monde Diplomatique. He has written several books, including one  on the French press, Les nouveaux chiens de garde and another on the French left in the 20th century – Quand la gauche essayait – both are fine works.  He can be reached at Serge.Halimi@monde-diplomatique.fr

Translated by George Miller.

(1) Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011.

(2) La Vie, Paris, 15 December 2011.

(3) Tim Mak, “Unpaid student loans top $1 trillion”,Politico, 19 October 2011.

(4) Robert Frank and Philip Cook, The Winner-Take-All-Society, Free Press, New York, 1995.

(5) Guillaume Delacroix, “L’Italie de Monti, laboratoire des ‘mesures Attali’” (Monti’s Italy: the laboratory for ‘Attali measures’), Les Echos, Paris, 6-7 April 2012.

(6) “India’s billionaires club”, Financial Times,London, 17 November 2012.

(7) “Income inequality may take toll on growth”, New York Times, 16 October 2012.

(8) “Repairing the rungs on the ladder”, The Economist, London, 9 February 2013.

(9) Samuel Huntington, The Crisis of Democracy,New York University Press, New York, 1975.

(10) Luc Ferry, Le Figaro, Paris, 7 March 2013.

(11) Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Camilla Hall, “Nicolas Sarkozy’s road from the Elysée to private equity”, Financial Times, London, 28 March 2013.

(12) David Callahan and J. Mijin Cha, “Stacked deck: How the dominance of politics by the affluent business undermines economic mobility in America”, Demos; the data which follows is taken from this study.

(13) “Le FMI et Berlin imposent leur loi à Chypre” (The IMF lays down the law in Cyprus), Le Monde,26 March 2013.

(14) RMC, 10 April 2013.

(15) Matthew Dalton, “Europe’s institutions pose counterweight to voters’ wishes”, The Wall Street Journal, 28 February 2013.

(16) RTL, 8 April 2013.

(17) “A Bruxelles, la grande déprime des eurocrates” (In Brussels, the great Eurocrat depression), Libération, Paris, 7 February 2013.

(18) See Joseph Stiglitz, “La preuve par l’Ethiopie”,Le Monde diplomatique, April 2002.

(19) Bernard Arnault, La Passion créative: Entretiens avec Yves Messarovitch, Plon, Paris, 2000.