#reagan

Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. Captured Two Sides of Reagan’s America
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/10/bruce-springsteen-nebraska-born-in-the-usa-reagan-america

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/10094956/GettyImages-86103483-420x315.jpg

C’est bien lui qui a orchestré la répétition générale pour la prise du mur de Berlin par le peuple en 1989. Ronald Reagan n’a fait qu’itérer le geste berlinois obligatoire de chaque président US depuis Kennedy. Le vieil homme n’attirait plus les foules comme son légendaire prédecesseur. C’est Bruce Springsteen qui a injecté le venim de la liberté type USA dans les coeurs lors de son concert à Berlin-Est.

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXsQS2HbD2c

10.10.2023 by William Harris - Back in the old smug, condescending days, when boyish, prep school–faced conservative intellectuals wore bow ties and peered from lordly heights at pop culture, Washington Post columnist George Will stuffed wads of cotton in his ears and stood through the whole four-hour duration of a Bruce Springsteen concert. He arrived at a stadium in the suburbs of Washington, DC, without knowing how marijuana smelled or what Springsteen’s music sounded like, and emerged, still a bit puzzled about whether he’d been in the company of stoners, feeling as if he had the wind at his back. Here, at last, was a “wholesome cultural portent.” A star without even “a smidgen of androgyny.” An image of an ideal, made-for-Reagan working class. “Rock for the United Steelworkers” that didn’t languish in shuttered-factory blues, or export blame onto the rich, or “whine” and curl into helplessness. Springsteen was a greasy-denim, bandana-sporting dynamo — abruptly muscle-ripped, after a waifish early career — whose power cords and corn-fed “homilies” instructed fans to “‘downsize’ their expectations,” to buckle in for a lifetime of hard work, to embrace “family and traditional values,” and to well up with passion when they saw the stars and stripes.

▻https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiN-7mukU_REYdA_UUaejpJvf5nitRok9

“If all Americans — in labor or management, who make steel or shoes or cars or textiles,” Will wrote in his next column, “made their products with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism.” We lived in lazy, profligate times, fearful of the rest of the world’s productive capacity, but Springsteen — the “hardest working white man in show business,” one critic quipped — made music infused with the great American work ethic. It was the summer of 1984, and Springsteen wasn’t the only act on tour: Ronald Reagan, too, was out cruising the country, parading down the campaign trail. Will whispered his way into the president’s ear: it was time for the Republican Party to nourish itself on the hearty blue-collar patriotism of Born in the U.S.A.

Five days after Will’s column came out, the America Prouder, Stronger, Better tour, the follow-up to 1980’s Let’s Make America Great Again campaign, pulled its plush, dollar-soaked bandwagon into the slipshod center of New Jersey. Out came Reagan, striding into the gushy set of a Robert Altman movie. “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts,” he told the crowd. “It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire — New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.” Seven records in, Springsteen had just released his first truly superstar-level pop album; now he found himself sent off to fight in the culture wars.
Nebraska Death Trip

Young Springsteen wasn’t much for political statements. His first, nervous public pronouncement occurred on stage in 1980, the night after Reagan ascended to the White House. “I don’t know what you thought about what happened last night,” he told the student body at Arizona State University. “But I thought it was pretty frightening.”

Four years later, he hissed out another. After the DC show, the Born in the U.S.A. tour swung through the Rust Belt, stopping in Pittsburgh the night after Reagan’s New Jersey speech. Five songs in, Springsteen paused to let everyone know he’d heard the president’s words. “I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know. I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he was listening to this one.” Then he launched into the spare, spectral, quickstep acoustic haze of “Johnny 99.”

“Johnny 99” is both classic Springsteen and Bruce way out on the margins: it opens with an auto plant closing and ends with a convict pleading for a judge to exchange his ninety-nine-year sentence for the death penalty. The man’s job left; the bank kept hounding him about his mortgage; things kept boiling, until one night he mixed wine and gin and killed a stranger. All the rusty, nine-to-five New Jersey imagery, familiar from Springsteen’s early albums, returns here, but the old twilight avenues of hope and escape have shut down. No more Chuck Berry, no more open roads, no more hand-me-down vistas of rock ’n’ roll freedom. Just execution lines, judges, cops, cracked dreams, and lowercase bosses.

Gone, too, are the candied sax solos, the glistering piano, the alert straight-time drums, the revving electric melodies of Springsteen’s E Street Band — all subbed out for solo Springsteen, alone and acoustic and austere. And not really even Springsteen — he hides himself beneath a series of character masks, pared down to near invisibility, another nobody on an album filled with rootless, cruel, pummeled lives. Calm, confused murderers, singing from the electric chair; families fraying amid foreign wars and Midwest farm disasters; sad, wonder-filled children, crouching in corn fields below steel-gated, light-spangled mansions. This is the world of Nebraska, Springsteen’s seventh album, released in 1982 at the nadir of a recession let loose by Reagan’s crushing of the labor movement and Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s yanking up of the interest rate. An album right on time and out of it, stalking a ghost-thick past.

As Warren Zanes argues in his new book, Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the record stands as the essential hinge point in Springsteen’s career, uprooting the far left post of what a Springsteen album might sound like and planting it way out in the hinterland. Nebraska limned one hushed, saturnine, cult-worshipped half of where Springsteen’s music might go. The other half, represented by the huge pop splash of 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., couldn’t have been more different. It traded out noirish black and white for full-on florescent color, ghostly quiet for up-to-date synth and continent-sized snares, authorial vacancy for all Bruce, all the time.

Yet bafflingly, alluringly, these two twinned, polarized albums were cooked up in the same notebooks and studio sessions and even briefly planned together as a double album. The whole of Springsteen, stirring inside one record sleeve. And not just Springsteen: part of the retrospective magnetism of that legendary 1982–84 run is how much of our own time-trapped, culture war–haunted world of feeling still seems to live here, pinched within these wide, confining boundaries. Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A.: two records that caught a view of the future in the rearview.
The ’50s in the ’80s, the ’80s in the ’50s

After The River (1980), the suits at Columbia Records expected Springsteen’s star to keep rising. In the same market-saturating week, he’d already appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and he was coming off his first number-one album and first top-ten single, “Hungry Heart.” His writing had grown starker, more grounded and realist, deepening his music’s air of working-class authenticity without letting go of youth and romanticism — even tacking, at times, toward new frontiers of melody and pop-friendliness. Radio loved him; the live shows rocked all night. Critics poured in prophecies and execs laid down plans. He was half Dylan, half Elvis, born under a blistering James Brown sun — proof that rock ’n’ roll could keep its mainstream middle lane open, post-disco and post-punk.

Back in New Jersey, however, Bruce was planless. A bit mapless, too: few people, bandmates included, really knew where he lived. He’d rented a modest ranch house in Colts Neck, ill-furnished and thick with orange shag carpeting, and fell into a meditative sort of depression. He’d lost touch. His family had long ago packed up for California. He was single. His only friends were his employees. A radio DJ asked him whether he had a life outside of music, and he confessed that he didn’t, really, that he only had one non-biz friend, a guy named Matty who “owns a motorcycle shop.” He sat in the dark at night and watched whichever movies flashed onto his TV, falling into a trance over Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), a fictionalization of the Charles Starkweather murder spree in 1950s Nebraska. He pored over the gothic enigmas of Flannery O’Connor. He paged through WPA-era songbooks of old folk tunes and felt his mood mirrored in the desolate rural world of country and blues. Driving at night through Freehold, the dead-end town where he grew up, he’d stop his car in front of his grandparents’ old ramshackle house — the house he lived in, more or less without parental supervision, suffering and exploiting a kind of terrible freedom, until he was six. In a zig-zag, groping-in-the-dark way, he was working.

Back at home he would sit with his guitar at the edge of his bed and his feet on the orange shag carpet and sing. His roadie, Mike Batlan, had bought him a TEAC 144, a relatively cheap, newish piece of technology that captured multitrack recording on a simple cassette tape. It gave off only a lo-fi sound, but it suited Springsteen’s needs perfectly: he was just sketching, recording drafts that he planned to polish up in a sleek Manhattan studio with the E Street Band. With Batlan as a silent background presence, Springsteen entered a bedroom world of his own, singing rough songs into a cassette. He had no idea that he was recording Nebraska.

The songs came out as confessions, or testimonies, often sung from the perspective of first-person characters and addressed to some unreachable Kafkaesque authority, mixing intimacy and distance. They told stories of loneliness, of people whose communities collapse and whose moral compasses spin out of control: narrators who kill people without much immediate reason, or spend their days haunted by a bittersweet past.

Springsteen approached these characters with a sort of still, low-toned empathy: he presented their lives plainly, without judgment, framed by spare landscapes of context. He could do this because he felt they were a part of him. He, too, lived in a community-less vacuum. He, too, felt called back to a mysterious, melancholic childhood, where the air in his grandparents’ house hung stale with the never-finished grieving of a long-dead daughter, and where the lights in his father’s house were always shut off, obscuring a figure alone in the kitchen, drinking silently each night after long days at the factory.

Springsteen’s childhood memories brought him back to the 1950s, as did much of Nebraska’s source material: the Nebraskan serial killer Charles Starkweather, for instance, who murdered eleven people in the Great Plains between 1957 and ’58, inspired the album’s title and its opening song. These sources conjured up a menacing, alienated, depraved 1950s, a world of seething undercurrents and nighttime despondence far removed from the fizzy fountain drink, drive-in milkshake, jukebox imagery of old-time rock ’n’ roll lore.

This was a 1950s activated by the brash class war of Reagan’s 1980s: farmers in debt, workers fired, communities falling apart. The cusp of a new world. Leftist critics often knock Springsteen for being an unreconstructed New Deal liberal, nostalgic for an idealized set of historical images — proud male breadwinners, cozy class compromise, national glory days — that never really existed. But Nebraska strips the shine off this postwar myth. Spend time with this record, and you start to see the seeds of the neoliberal 1980s scattered all over the disquieting fields of the 1950s.
Bedroom Versus Studio

Really for the first time across the full stretch of an album, Nebraska brought Springsteen’s great mature theme into view: the confusion of public and private, the way the wider social world seeps into our personal lives. Never before had he turned out a suite of songs so thematically unified. Singing on the edge of his bed, Springsteen knew he had something good. But he also knew he had something different — too angular for Columbia Records, too quiet and darkly vulnerable for the E Street Band. And, anyway, he had a range of material, a promising but shaggy draft, much of it sitting oddly against the low-frequency landscape of barren heartland violence. He scribbled a light note, confident and uncertain and jokey, and sent the tape off to his manager, Jon Landau. Landau listened and felt concerned for Springsteen’s mental health — all this strange, bleak, unexpected material. Then he sent the lone copy of the tape back, rallied the band, and booked a studio at the Power Plant in Manhattan.

The sessions sailed. After three weeks they pretty much had an album recorded — the only catch being that the album wasn’t Nebraska. A handful of songs off that cheap, lint-covered cassette had pulled away under the band’s influence, shown the ability to nestle inside the synth-y smash of a snare or a cinematic orchestral swell and transform into something new. Those storm-dark Nebraska clouds parted, and things felt lighter, more electric and anthemic. On the demo tape, “Born in the U.S.A.” came across muted and depressed, a bitter song about a beat-down, jobless Vietnam vet born in a land of broken promises. Once E Street drummer Max Weinberg’s drum-machine-inspired snare crashed its way in, however, the track hit liftoff. It took on color and surge and pop-chart reverb and grew vexing, its music and lyrics waging a bewitching war.

New possibilities opened up, worlds away from anything the rural, recession-haunted demo conjured. Football stadium shows, car commercials, Prince- and Madonna-level fame, a biting lefty protest anthem that George Will, too, might play on repeat. Something everyone might love or resent without anyone, Bruce included, really understanding.

The studio filled up with pop dreams, and Springsteen only felt more confused. The band had worked its magic on a good portion of the cassette, but the majority of its songs stayed reticent. The cleaner, bigger, and more baroque these songs sounded, the more they lost their character. And their characters. As Springsteen says: “Every step I took in trying to make [the songs] better, I lost my people.” The songs and the people they portray only lived if they were given space, left a bit askew — no synth, no polish, just dusty harmonica, dark-fabled glockenspiel, and lonesome lo-fi distance.

In 1982, these jagged songs had Springsteen’s heart. At first, he thought he’d turn out a double album, presenting two radically distinct sides of the same artist: bright, polished rock scored by the E Street Band up against faintly lit solo folk-country. But in the end, he decided to halt the mixing process on the glamorous album that was shaping up to be Born in the U.S.A., and to go somewhere more lonely and baleful: the next Springsteen album was already here, in his pocket, on the cassette tape that he’d mixed with an old waterlogged boom box he’d left sitting on his couch in Colts Neck, half dead after a canoe trip. It would take months to master, proving all but impossible to translate this drugstore-shelf tape to studio-level technology so it could be pressed to vinyl, and impossible, too, to enhance the tape’s sound quality really at all — much more than Springsteen anticipated, the record had to remain quiet and echoey, poor and pebbled and gaunt. But for Nebraska’s fans, many of whom — Bruce included, Zanes reveals — view the album as Springsteen’s best work, contingency and imperfection made the record. The sad hiss of the bedroom trumped the studio’s clean automated perfection.

In a postmodern twist, the sonic texture of this ’50s-haunted, black-and-white-cover rural album offered a view of the future — musically, technologically, socially. Critics trace the origin of lo-fi music back to many possible sources — the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Paul McCartney’s McCartney — but Nebraska remains a perennial contender. A whole grainy, out-of-joint, DIY sound tumbled out of this record — the lean, half-haunted, zombied-out stuff of twenty-first-century nostalgia. A sound that doubled as a new at-home tech, bowling-alone way of life. Back in his bedroom, Springsteen presaged the solitary figure of the DJ, the end of the band, the rusted digital world. Bedroom beats and bedroom depression, thin and tinny and plugged in.
Postmodern Futures

This was the future Springsteen let us glimpse in ’82: communities vacuumed up, the working class in splinters. He returned in 1984 with a new picture. In between he’d suffered a breakdown, drove across the country with his one friend Matty looking for romantic salvation in the quaint communities his music idealized, and finally wound up in Los Angeles. He hid in the city’s anonymity and took on its routines. Therapy. Weight lifting. “I was a big fan of meaningless, repetitive behavior,” he told one biographer.

If Nebraska seemed like an odd-fitting anachronism that surreptitiously captured its era, Born in the U.S.A. was its through-the-looking-glass opposite: a plainly right-on-time album that nevertheless felt retrograde. On its cover, famously, were Springsteen’s Levi-clad ass cheeks, red bandanna hanging from a pocket and the American flag striped in the background. The music videos had him greased up underneath cars, driving into work at oil refineries, and operating huge drills at construction sites. Springsteen picked up Reagan-era imagery, populist and all-American and nostalgia-soaked, and played with it, catching himself in a tangle of ironies along the way: a crystallized, made-for-MTV portrait of the working class styled just as the late-century proletariat frayed into pictureless disorganization.

At best, Bruce in the hard hat offered a partial view of late-century workers; at worst, Born in the U.S.A.’s imagery played right into the Right’s post-’60s culture-war script, pitting flag-draped construction workers against stoned student-radical brats, macho jingoists and ordinary Real Men against down-with-the-patriarchy hysterics. Part of these images’ value lay in their playful showmanship, their wink and feint. But part of their power, too, rested in how they traded on authenticity, leaving the world stranded in a no-man’s-land between scare quotes and grounded belief.

Suspicious critics saw the record as Springsteen’s cynical attempt to cash in on the Reaganite moment. Springsteen countered, in frustration, that he’d been misunderstood, and that hucksters like Reagan and Will had exploited his art. As anyone who listens to the lyrics knows, “Born in the U.S.A.” indicts the US empire in a way few products of American pop culture ever have. The song is “not ambiguous,” Springsteen once said. But meanwhile, as anyone who hears the music and the way Springsteen sings the hook knows, the song traffics also in very different feelings: an unresolved alchemy where invective turns into pride, pride into spent bitterness, all swirled up in a confused, downtrodden euphoria. Contra Springsteen and Will, it’s hard to imagine a more ambiguous song. This is what gives it its power, its troubled cultural endurance.

As an album, Born in the U.S.A. is fun and uneven, a ridiculous stretch of hit after hit that plays well on a road trip but never reaches sustained depth or unity. As a leadoff song, however, festooned with the album’s lightning-rod imagery, “Born in the U.S.A.” haunts more than anything Springsteen’s ever done — in no small part because of the way it bears the mark of the Nebraska demo. You can still hear those ghosts smothered under its snares.

A whiff of ironic prophecy hangs about Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. Between them, these two albums’ joined-at-the-hip contrariness traced the outlines of our postindustrial, “new economy” cultural condition just as it was coming into formation. Somewhere drifting between their opposed sounds stalls a world lonely and backward-looking, image-obsessed and distrustful of images, disarrayed and yet held together by clapped-out archetypes that won’t leave us alone, pinballing around in our culture-war fever dreams. The self-divided compact of “Born in the U.S.A.,” the limit-case extremism of Nebraska: they leave us with the rug-pulling sense that we still don’t understand as much as we think we do, that we live in a cracked world in which identity can be pieced together through anything, shame and neglect mixing with pride.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the future seemed to be stirring in a thousand obvious subterranean musical worlds: the nighttime eeriness of David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s Berlin, the plastic mechanical mayhem of Devo’s gray, deindustrial Akron, the cold techno coming out of Detroit, or the gender- and race- synthesizing fun house of Prince’s freaky Paisley Park cyborg pop. And yet some sad, essential part of our time has been better captured by a body of music shorn of any futuristic trace: the neo-trad, contradiction-dense heartland rock of Bruce Springsteen.

#Berlin #DDR #USA #Reagan #néolibéralisme #musique

La situation aux États-Unis

►https://mensuel.lutte-ouvriere.org//2023/02/25/etats-unis-apres-les-elections-de-mi-mandat_521783.html

Les élections (de mi-mandat) de 2022 marquent une nouvelle forte poussée vers la droite

Parler de «  gauche  » et de «  droite  » à propos des #démocrates et des républicains n’est pas approprié. Ces deux grands partis ont été les seuls à alterner au pouvoir pour diriger l’appareil d’État de la bourgeoisie au cours des 166 dernières années. En effet le système électoral américain favorise le #bipartisme. Les termes «  gauche  » et «  droite  » sont devenus des étiquettes utilisées pour distinguer les discours et les électorats des deux #partis_bourgeois. Ainsi, les travailleurs se sont rangés dans le camp des démocrates pendant une bonne partie du 20e siècle et les couches plus aisées dans celui des républicains.

Quoi qu’il en soit, le soutien de la classe ouvrière aux démocrates ne cesse de diminuer depuis des années et, à l’approche des élections, cette tendance s’est confirmée  : le vote ouvrier pour les démocrates a baissé de près de 15 % en 2022.

Le glissement des travailleurs blancs vers le camp républicain n’est pas nouveau. Il remonte au moins à l’élection de #Reagan en 1980, voire plus loin encore. Mais, en 2022, l’écart en faveur des républicains a été de 33 points, soit 8 points de plus qu’en 2020.

Le recul des démocrates dans les électorats noir, latino et asiatique a été beaucoup moins important mais, à bien des égards, il pèse encore plus lourd. En grande majorité issus de la classe ouvrière, ces électeurs constituent depuis longtemps une sorte de socle sur lequel les démocrates comptent. En 2022, 80 % de l’#électorat_noir votait démocrate – ce qui reste considérable – mais ce résultat représente une baisse de sept points depuis les dernières élections de mi-mandat et s’inscrit dans la continuité de l’érosion qui a suivi la période 2008-2016, durant laquelle entre 90 et 97 % des Noirs votaient démocrate. Quant au vote hispanique, il s’est porté à environ 60 % sur les démocrates, soit une baisse de 10 points en quatre ans. Enfin, les électeurs d’origine asiatique ont voté démocrate à 64 %, soit une baisse de 7 points.

Les Démocrates  : un parti «  progressiste  » qui a longtemps ratissé large

[…] Le #Parti_démocrate s’est attribué le mérite des réformes et des avancées que ces mouvements ont arrachées à la bourgeoisie pendant la longue période où l’hégémonie de l’#impérialisme américain, générant un surplus de richesses, permettait cette redistribution. Quels qu’aient été les tensions et les antagonismes – et ils étaient nombreux – entre les différents groupes composant le monde du travail, leur regroupement au sein du Parti démocrate semblait offrir une voie sur laquelle chacun pouvait poursuivre la lutte pour «  le progrès  ». De 1932 à 1980, le Parti démocrate domina la scène politique, les républicains ne jouant un rôle significatif que pendant l’intervalle de la période du #maccarthysme, la chasse aux sorcières contre les communistes, au début des années 1950.

Avec le début de la crise économique en 1971, puis son aggravation à la fin des années 1970, la situation des travailleurs commença à se dégrader. Pour l’État de la bourgeoisie, l’heure n’était plus à distribuer des miettes pour maintenir la paix sociale. Frappée par la crise, la classe capitaliste attendait d’abord de l’État qu’il l’aide à maintenir ses profits, et cela impliquait d’abaisser le niveau de vie des travailleurs. Il fallait donc démanteler les #programmes_sociaux et les services publics créés pendant la longue expansion de l’après-guerre. Le Parti démocrate, en loyal serviteur de la bourgeoisie, fut en première ligne pour mener ces attaques.

L’une des premières attaques importantes fut la faillite de la ville de #New_York en 1975, qui frappa durement les employés, les programmes sociaux et les services municipaux. Cette attaque fut supervisée par deux maires démocrates successifs. En 1978-1979 puis dans les années 1980, des pressions furent exercées sur les travailleurs de l’automobile pour qu’ils acceptent toute une série de concessions lors du renouvellement de leurs contrats. D’abord présentées comme temporaires, ces concessions furent ensuite rendues permanentes, et rapidement étendues au reste de la classe ouvrière. Et, là encore, l’attaque fut conduite par des politiciens démocrates, qui justifiaient les nouveaux contrats au nom de la sauvegarde des emplois dans l’#industrie_automobile.

Pour décourager les travailleurs de faire valoir leurs revendications salariales au travers de grèves, les deux grands partis bourgeois se relayèrent. En 1981, les démocrates passèrent la main aux républicains, et #Ronald_Reagan mit tout le poids de l’État pour briser la grève des #contrôleurs_aériens. Les caciques du Parti démocrate et des syndicats prétendent que Reagan fut à l’origine du déclin constant qui s’est poursuivi jusqu’à aujourd’hui. En fait, la porte fut ouverte dès 1978, lorsque le président démocrate #Jimmy_Carter tenta d’utiliser la #loi_antisyndicale_Taft-Hartley, adoptée à l’ère McCarthy, pour briser une grève dans les mines de charbon qui dura 110 jours. Le dégoût des travailleurs envers Carter, après ce qui apparaissait comme une trahison, ne fut pas pour rien dans la victoire éclatante de Reagan en 1980.

Entre les travailleurs et la bourgeoisie, un fossé en passe de devenir un gouffre

La crise dans laquelle l’économie américaine est plongée depuis un demi-siècle a entraîné un effondrement du niveau de vie de la classe ouvrière.

En 2022, le salaire horaire minimum au niveau fédéral était de 7,25 dollars. S’il avait suivi le rythme officiel de l’inflation depuis le pic de sa valeur réelle en 1968, il aurait été de 12 dollars. Et s’il avait suivi le rythme de la croissance de la productivité depuis 1968, comme entre 1938 et 1968, il aurait été de près de 26 dollars en 2022.

L’évolution du #salaire_minimum illustre le fossé qui s’est creusé entre la #classe_ouvrière et les couches aisées au cours du dernier demi-siècle. Presque tous les gains de la croissance économique depuis le début de la crise ont été absorbés par la plus-value et les mille et une manières dont cette plus-value est répartie au sein des classes riches de cette société.

Cette évolution s’est poursuivie jusqu’aux élections de 2022. En 2021, dernière année pour laquelle on dispose de données, la marge bénéficiaire nette des entreprises a été de 9,5 %, soit la valeur la plus élevée jamais enregistrée. Cette même année, la rémunération moyenne des PDG des 350 plus grandes entreprises a été 399 fois plus élevée que celle des salariés. En 1965, elle n’était «  que  » 20 fois plus élevée.

La condition des travailleurs se détériore non seulement par rapport à celle des classes aisées, dont la situation s’améliore nettement, mais aussi en termes absolus

L’inflation a grignoté la valeur réelle des salaires. Selon le département américain du Travail, le salaire horaire médian réel est au même niveau qu’en 1973. Lorsqu’il y a eu des augmentations, elles ont presque toutes bénéficié au décile supérieur de l’échelle des revenus. Ceux qui se situent dans les 40 % inférieurs ont vu leurs salaires baisser. De plus, les chiffres de l’inflation sont trafiqués et donnent une image déformée de la situation. Qui plus est, ces chiffres ignorent tous les autres facteurs qui ont réduit le revenu réel des travailleurs, à commencer par l’élimination des pensions et d’autres avantages sociaux autrefois considérés comme faisant partie de la masse salariale, ainsi que l’énorme augmentation des frais médicaux, qui constituent une ponction sur les revenus.

Les statistiques gouvernementales masquent la réalité

En témoigne le taux de chômage officiel avant les élections de 2022, de 3,5 % de la population active. Or, 37 % de la population en âge de travailler est exclue de ce que le gouvernement considère comme la population active. De nombreuses personnes sont exclues de ce comptage  : celles qui s’occupent d’enfants en bas âge, dans un pays où il n’existe pas de structures d’accueil publiques  ; celles dont les compétences et diplômes sont insuffisants pour occuper les emplois disponibles, dans un pays où le système scolaire public est incapable d’apprendre à lire à 40 % des enfants des écoles des grandes villes  ; ou encore les personnes handicapées à la suite d’accidents du travail, en raison de maladies professionnelles, voire par le Covid long qui a touché des millions de personnes, les empêchant de travailler, dans le pays affichant le pire taux de décès par Covid de tous les pays développés. Sont également exclues de la population active les personnes trop âgées pour être embauchées, mais qui n’ont pas encore atteint l’âge pour toucher les maigres aides sociales versées aux seniors. Les entreprises de la high-tech, en particulier le commerce en ligne et ses entrepôts, recherchent des travailleurs jeunes, forts, agiles et rapides, dont une grande partie sont relégués à des emplois temporaires ou à temps partiel, à des contrats ou à des emplois de type Uber.

Les difficultés immédiates des travailleurs ont été aggravées par la dégradation sur le long terme des services publics et l’élimination ou la privatisation des services sociaux

Lors des élections de 2022, les services publics comptaient près d’un million de travailleurs de moins que juste avant la pandémie. La classe capitaliste, avide d’aspirer une part croissante des richesses produites, cherche à s’approprier une portion croissante des sommes que le gouvernement dépensait jusqu’alors pour les infrastructures, les programmes sociaux et les services publics. Derrière la vitrine de cette grande et riche démocratie américaine, il y a peu de lois qui limitent le temps de travail, il y en a encore moins qui prévoient le paiement des arrêts maladie, et il n’y en a aucune garantissant des congés payés. Autrement dit, tout cela dépend de la bonne volonté de chaque patron. On a pu voir comment cela se traduit concrètement en 2020, aux pires moments de la pandémie, lorsque la moitié des travailleurs des industries dites essentielles n’ont pas eu droit à un seul jour de congé payé. Voici donc un pays où le système de santé est de plus en plus contrôlé par des entreprises privées, qui peuvent refuser des soins médicaux à qui ne peut pas payer.

Telle est la réalité à laquelle est confrontée la population laborieuse aujourd’hui

Telle est la réalité à laquelle est confrontée la population laborieuse aujourd’hui. Ses conséquences sont dramatiques. L’espérance de vie moyenne a diminué de près de deux ans et demi depuis 2019, après une baisse de deux ans en 2015-2016. Cela est imputable au Covid, certes, mais seulement en partie. Il y a tous les autres décès, dont beaucoup sont appelés par les médias «  morts par désespoir  »  : suicides, homicides, overdoses, abus d’alcool… Au premier rang des victimes, les anciens combattants des guerres – déclarées ou non – menées par l’impérialisme américain, et leurs proches. Mais il y a aussi les jeunes gens abattus dans la rue après avoir intégré, faute de la moindre perspective d’avenir, tel ou tel gang de quartier. Il y a les quelque cinq mille personnes tuées chaque année dans des accidents du travail, et les milliers d’autres qui meurent de la mort lente causée par les fumées, les produits chimiques et les Un encouragement pour l’extrême droite

Faute d’une autre possibilité pour exprimer son mécontentement, la population s’est longtemps contentée de voter contre tous ceux qui semblaient diriger l’État. Dans un contexte où les démocrates étaient au premier plan pour imposer une détérioration des conditions de vie, et en l’absence d’un parti représentant la classe ouvrière, la porte était ouverte à un démagogue comme Trump.

Donald Trump a su jouer sur le ressentiment éprouvé par beaucoup de gens du fait qu’ils étaient de plus en plus pauvres, marginalisés et méprisés par ceux d’en haut. Il a su toucher une population en plein désarroi, plongée dans une crise économique grandissante. Il a instrumentalisé la colère et la frustration des travailleurs, en tournant en dérision les institutions prétendument civilisées qui leur donnent des leçons et les regardent d’en haut  : les chefs des deux grands partis politiques, les médias, les universités et leurs experts, les agences gouvernementales et leurs hauts fonctionnaires, voire les stars de Hollywood, etc. Il s’en est pris à tout le monde, sauf à ceux dont le contrôle sur la société a mené à la crise, c’est-à-dire à la classe capitaliste. substances toxiques présentes sur leur lieu de travail. Il y a les tragédies des violences domestiques, qui sont la conséquence et le signe des pressions indicibles qui s’exercent au quotidien sur la vie des travailleurs.

Un encouragement pour l’extrême droite

Faute d’une autre possibilité pour exprimer son mécontentement, la population s’est longtemps contentée de voter contre tous ceux qui semblaient diriger l’État. Dans un contexte où les démocrates étaient au premier plan pour imposer une détérioration des conditions de vie, et en l’absence d’un parti représentant la classe ouvrière, la porte était ouverte à un démagogue comme Trump.

#Donald_Trump a su jouer sur le ressentiment éprouvé par beaucoup de gens du fait qu’ils étaient de plus en plus pauvres, marginalisés et méprisés par ceux d’en haut. Il a su toucher une population en plein désarroi, plongée dans une crise économique grandissante. Il a instrumentalisé la colère et la frustration des travailleurs, en tournant en dérision les institutions prétendument civilisées qui leur donnent des leçons et les regardent d’en haut  : les chefs des deux grands partis politiques, les médias, les universités et leurs experts, les agences gouvernementales et leurs hauts fonctionnaires, voire les stars de Hollywood, etc. Il s’en est pris à tout le monde, sauf à ceux dont le contrôle sur la société a mené à la crise, c’est-à-dire à la classe capitaliste.

Trump a servi les capitalistes en mettant au grand jour toutes les idées violentes et dévalorisantes que renferme l’idéologie dans laquelle baigne la société  : suprématie blanche, nativisme anti-immigrants, misogynie, intolérance envers la manière dont les gens vivent leur intimité, machisme et violence. Autrement dit, il a incité implicitement les gens à s’en prendre les uns aux autres. Et il a emballé tout cela dans le drapeau américain, le serment d’allégeance et la croix chrétienne qui décoraient ses réunions publiques.

Rien de tout cela n’a commencé avec Trump. Il suffit de penser au rituel des réunions syndicales dans des salles ornées du drapeau américain

Ces réunions commencent par la prière d’un prêtre local, souvent chrétien, et par le serment d’allégeance, ce verbiage patriotard pondu lors de la période McCarthy pour renforcer les attaques contre les militants communistes et syndicalistes. Chaque réunion syndicale qui commence ainsi entretient la soumission des travailleurs et leur loyauté à l’égard des dominants, et renforce les attaques contre eux-mêmes et toute leur classe.

Trump a-t-il transformé le #Parti_républicain de manière temporaire ou permanente  ?

Les républicains eux-mêmes n’en savent rien. Mais la question va bien au-delà du Parti républicain. Trump a donné à ses partisans une sorte de programme  : se défendre en attaquant tous les «  autres  ». Ce faisant, il a courtisé consciemment l’extrême droite. Quand, après la série de rassemblements d’extrême droite à Charlottesville en 2018, il a dit qu’il y avait des «  gens bien  » dans cette foule (ce qu’il a répété plusieurs fois par la suite), il déroulait le tapis rouge au Ku Klux Klan, aux nazis et aux Proud Boys.

Le problème dépasse la personne de Trump

Dans un nombre croissant de pays, des démagogues de son espèce jouent un rôle très similaire. Cela signifie que quelque chose, dans la situation internationale actuelle, sur les plans politique et économique, favorise ce mouvement vers la droite, renforçant les formations d’#extrême_droite existantes.

Aux États-Unis, des organisations comme le #KKK, les nazis, la #Black_Legion, les Know Nothing, les mafias et les gangs font partie du paysage depuis longtemps. La plupart du temps marginales mais toujours là, elles ont périodiquement joué un rôle de supplétifs pour renforcer la violence étatique  : dans le Sud, pour réimposer l’esclavage pendant les décennies qui ont suivi la guerre de Sécession  ; dans les quartiers d’immigrants, pour maintenir un ordre que la police était incapable d’imposer  ; à #Chicago, où le gang #Black_P_Stone_Nation, de concert avec le maire démocrate Richard J. Daley, expulsa l’équipe SCLC de #Martin_Luther_King du ghetto du West Side  ; dans les régions minières, où les Pinkerton massacrèrent des mineurs comme les #Molly_Maguires  ; ou à Centralia dans l’État de Washington, où l’American Legion exécuta des militants de l’#IWW en 1919, et à #Minneapolis où elle assassina des grévistes  ; ou dans le Michigan en 1934, où la #Black Legion tua des militants du syndicat #UAW. Et puis tous ceux, de Jimmy Hoffa à Dow Wilson, qui furent tués par la mafia.

Ces forces marginales ont toujours existé aux États-Unis, mais #Trump leur a permis de gagner en crédibilité aux yeux de certains travailleurs. Si le climat devait à nouveau se détériorer, cette crédibilité pourrait leur donner un poids leur permettant d’amener une partie de la classe ouvrière à attaquer l’autre.

L’absence aux États-Unis d’un parti ouvrier, qui représenterait les intérêts tant immédiats qu’à long terme de la classe ouvrière, a constitué une opportunité pour un démagogue comme Trump, mais pourrait aussi jouer un rôle dans un développement de l’extrême droite au sein même de la classe ouvrière.

Une voix pour les travailleurs

Depuis l’époque d’#Eugène_Debs, il y a plus d’un siècle, il n’a pas existé d’organisation politique capable de s’adresser à tous les travailleurs, sur la base de leurs intérêts de classe immédiats et à long terme. Le Parti socialiste du temps de Debs ne le faisait pas, mais il constituait pour Debs une tribune qui lui permettait de s’adresser à la classe ouvrière à travers tout le pays, et il le fit avec un langage correspondant aux problèmes auxquels elle faisait face et aux possibilités dont elle disposait. Il affirmait qu’il avait confiance dans la capacité de la classe ouvrière à «  détruire toutes les institutions capitalistes qui asservissent et avilissent et à rebâtir des institutions libres et humaines  ». En pleine Première Guerre mondiale, lors du procès qui le conduisit en prison pour s’être opposé à l’entrée en guerre des États-Unis, il déclara  : «  Je ne suis pas un soldat capitaliste  ; je suis un révolutionnaire prolétarien… Je suis opposé à toutes les guerres, à une seule exception… et, dans cette guerre-là, je m’engagerai corps et âme… je parle de la guerre mondiale de la révolution sociale. Dans cette guerre, je suis prêt à combattre de toutes les manières que la classe dominante rendra nécessaires, même sur les barricades.  »

Aujourd’hui, il n’y a toujours pas de parti de la classe ouvrière. C’est même pire qu’à l’époque de Debs

Mais le but reste le même  : ceux qui veulent mettre en place une nouvelle société et ont confiance dans la capacité de la classe ouvrière à le faire doivent trouver les moyens de s’adresser à elle, en parlant des problèmes actuels des travailleurs, mais en le faisant à partir de la perspective du combat que la classe ouvrière devra mener pour diriger la construction d’une société socialiste.

C’est exactement ce que des militants ont tenté de faire en utilisant les élections de 2022 dans le #Michigan, le #Maryland et l’#Illinois pour parler au nom du #WCP (#Working_Class_Party – Parti de la classe ouvrière). Cette poignée de militants ne prétendent pas être le #parti_révolutionnaire dont on a besoin et qui n’existe pas encore. Ils ne peuvent certainement pas prétendre faire ce que Debs a pu faire grâce à sa propre expérience de la lutte des travailleurs et à l’activité de toute une génération de militants.

Mais ceux qui ont mené, dans ces trois États, la campagne pour un Parti de la classe ouvrière se sont au moins donné les moyens de dire ce qui devait l’être sur la dégradation de la condition ouvrière, sur la croissance des forces de droite et sur les possibilités dont dispose la classe ouvrière du fait de son rôle clé au cœur même du système de production et de tout ce qui lui est lié.

Il n’y aura pas de solution à la misère croissante tant que la classe ouvrière ne se préparera pas à la bataille

#capitalisme #États-Unis

The Origin of Student Debt: Reagan Adviser Warned Free College Would Create a Dangerous “Educated Proletariat”

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In 1970, #Roger_Freeman, who also worked for Nixon, revealed the right’s motivation for coming decades of attacks on higher education.

With the vociferous debate over President Joe Biden’s announcement that the federal government will cancel a portion of outstanding student debt, it’s important to understand how Americans came to owe the current cumulative total of more than $1.6 trillion for higher education.

In 1970, Ronald Reagan was running for reelection as governor of California. He had first won in 1966 with confrontational rhetoric toward the University of California public college system and executed confrontational policies when in office. In May 1970, Reagan had shut down all 28 UC and Cal State campuses in the midst of student protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. On October 29, less than a week before the election, his education adviser Roger A. Freeman spoke at a press conference to defend him.

reeman’s remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

“If not,” Freeman continued, “we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Freeman also said — taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism —“that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.”

Freeman was born in 1904 in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated to the United States after the rise of Hitler. An economist who became a longtime fixture in conservative politics, he served on the White House staff during both the Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon administrations. In 1970 he was seconded from the Nixon administration to work on Reagan’s campaign. He was also a senior fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution. In one of his books, he asked “can Western Civilization survive” what he believed to be excessive government spending on education, Social Security, etc.

A core theme of Reagan’s first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 was resentment toward California’s public colleges, in particular UC Berkeley, with Reagan repeatedly vowing “to clean up the mess” there. Berkeley, then nearly free to attend for California residents, had become a national center of organizing against the Vietnam War. Deep anxiety about this reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. John McCone, the head of the CIA, requested a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to discuss “communist influence” at Berkeley, a situation that “definitely required some corrective action.”

During the 1966 campaign, Reagan regularly communicated with the FBI about its concerns about Clark Kerr, the president of the entire University of California system. Despite requests from Hoover, Kerr had not cracked down on Berkeley protesters. Within weeks of Reagan taking office, Kerr was fired. A subsequent FBI memo stated that Reagan was “dedicated to the destruction of disruptive elements on California campuses.”

Reagan pushed to cut state funding for California’s public colleges but did not reveal his ideological motivation. Rather, he said, the state simply needed to save money. To cover the funding shortfall, Reagan suggested that California public colleges could charge residents tuition for the first time. This, he complained, “resulted in the almost hysterical charge that this would deny educational opportunities to those of the most moderate means. This is obviously untrue. … We made it plain that tuition must be accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation.”

The success of Reagan’s attacks on California public colleges inspired conservative politicians across the U.S. Nixon decried “campus revolt.” Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed that thanks to open admissions policies, “unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.”

Prominent conservative intellectuals also took up the charge. Privately one worried that free education “may be producing a positively dangerous class situation” by raising the expectations of working-class students. Another referred to college students as “a parasite feeding on the rest of society” who exhibited a “failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played [by] the reward-punishment structure of the market.” The answer was “to close off the parasitic option.”

In practice, this meant to the National Review, a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.”

In retrospect, this period was the clear turning point in America’s policies toward higher education. For decades, there had been enthusiastic bipartisan agreement that states should fund high-quality public colleges so that their youth could receive higher education for free or nearly so. That has now vanished. In 1968, California residents paid a $300 yearly fee to attend Berkeley, the equivalent of about $2,000 now. Now tuition at Berkeley is $15,000, with total yearly student costs reaching almost $40,000.

Student debt, which had played a minor role in American life through the 1960s, increased during the Reagan administration and then shot up after the 2007-2009 Great Recession as states made huge cuts to funding for their college systems.

That brings us to today. Biden’s actions, while positive, are merely a Band-Aid on a crisis 50 years in the making. In 1822, founding father James Madison wrote to a friend that “the liberal appropriations made by the Legislature of Kentucky for a general system of Education cannot be too much applauded. … Enlightened patriotism … is now providing for the State a Plan of Education embracing every class of Citizens.”

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” Madison explained, “and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Freeman and Reagan and their compatriots agreed with Madison’s perspective but wanted to prevent Americans from gaining this power. If we want to take another path, the U.S. will have to recover a vision of a well-educated populace not as a terrible threat, but as a positive force that makes the nation better for everyone — and so should largely be paid for by all of us.

▻https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan
#Roland_Reagan #Reagan #USA #Etats-Unis #histoire #origine #université #étudiants #endettement #dette_étudiante #how_it_begun #ESR #prolétariat #prolétariat_éduqué #educated_proletariat #classes_sociales #ascension_sociale #éducation #péril #sélection

Écologie, fiscalité, Covid : comment Biden ridiculise Macron | Loïc Le Clerc
▻http://www.regards.fr/monde/article/ecologie-fiscalite-covid-comment-biden-ridiculise-macron

Il n’aura fallu que 100 jours au président américain pour faire de son homologue français un dirigeant politiquement vieux et dépassé. Un leader conservateur dans une Europe conservatrice. Source : Relevé sur le Net...

Joe Biden und die Trickle-Down-Theorie
▻https://diasp.eu/p/12870063

Joe Biden und die Trickle-Down-Theorie

▻https://makroskop.eu/podcasts

▻https://cdn.podigee.com/media/podcast_13508_wohlstand_fur_alle_episode_443233_ep_91_joe_biden_und_die

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Joe Biden ist erst 100 Tage im Amt und hat bereits viel erreicht: Während in Deutschland erst jetzt ein wenig schneller geimpft wird, hat der US-Präsident sich selbst übertroffen. Anfangs versprach er 100 Millionen Impfungen in den ersten 100 Tagen, doch ihm gelang es, dass nun sogar mehr als 200 Millionen Impfdosen verspritzt sind. Außerdem werden 85 Prozent der Haushalte mit Schecks unterstützt. Bei seiner einstündigen Rede im Kongress machte Biden Ende April weitere große Schritte nach vorn: 2,3 Billionen Dollar werden für die Infrastruktur und die Transformation der Wirtschaft versprochen. (...)

Brut FR sur Twitter : ""La théorie du #ruissellement n’a jamais fonctionné." Joe Biden veut taxer les super-riches et les grandes entreprises pour lutter contre les #inégalités. Voilà ce qu’il a annoncé lors de son premier discours présidentiel devant le Congrès américain." / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/brutofficiel/status/1387743855160795136

▻https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1387742992094597122/vid/720x1280/yTwUGxi8Ra1u2DCt.mp4?tag=14

Why All US Politicians Should Earn Minimum Wage | Francesca Fiorentini
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/why-all-us-politicians-should-earn-minimum-wage-francesca-fiorentini

Biden’s Stimulus Bill & The History of Failure

Full 56min Interview on Biden’s Stimulus Bill ► ▻https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-56min-2tn-48822377

Check Out & Support Francesca’s Work ►...

Immigration Enforcement and the Afterlife of the Slave Ship

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Coast Guard techniques for blocking Haitian asylum seekers have their roots in the slave trade. Understanding these connections can help us disentangle immigration policy from white nationalism.

Around midnight in May 2004, somewhere in the Windward Passage, one of the Haitian asylum seekers trapped on the flight deck of the U.S. Coast Guard’s USCGC Gallatin had had enough.

He arose and pointed to the moon, whispering in hushed tones. The rest of the Haitians, asleep or pretending to be asleep, initially took little notice. That changed when he began to scream. The cadence of his words became erratic, furious—insurgent. After ripping his shirt into tatters, he gestured wildly at the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) watchstanders on duty.

I was one of them.

His eyes fixed upon mine. And he slowly advanced toward my position.

I stood fast, enraptured by his lone defiance, his desperate rage. Who could blame him? Confinement on this sunbaked, congested, malodorous flight deck would drive anyone crazy—there were nearly 300 people packed together in a living space approximately 65 feet long and 35 feet wide. We had snatched him and his compatriots from their overloaded sailing vessel back in April. They had endured week after week without news about the status of their asylum claims, about what lay in store for them.

Then I got scared. I considered the distinct possibility that, to this guy, I was no longer me, but a nameless uniform, an avatar of U.S. sovereignty: a body to annihilate, a barrier to freedom. I had rehearsed in my mind how such a contingency might play out. We were armed only with nonlethal weapons—batons and pepper spray. The Haitians outnumbered us 40 to 1. Was I ready? I had never been in a real fight before. Now a few of the Haitian men were standing alert. Were they simply curious? Was this their plan all along? What if the women and children joined them?

Lucky for me, one of the meanest devils on the watch intervened on my behalf. He charged toward us, stepping upon any Haitians who failed to clear a path. After a brief hand-to-hand struggle, he subdued the would-be rebel, hauled him down to the fantail, and slammed his head against the deck. Blood ran from his face. Some of the Haitians congregated on the edge of the flight deck to spectate. We fastened the guy’s wrists with zip ties and ordered the witnesses to disperse. The tension in his body gradually dissipated.

After fifteen minutes, the devil leaned down to him. “Are you done? Done making trouble?” His silence signified compliance.

Soon after, the Haitians were transferred to the custody of the Haitian Coast Guard. When we arrived in the harbor of Port-au-Prince, thick plumes of black smoke rose from the landscape. We were witnessing the aftermath of the CIA-orchestrated February coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the subsequent invasion of the country by U.S. Marines under the auspices of international “peacekeeping.” Haiti was at war.

None of that mattered. Every request for asylum lodged from our boat had been rejected. Every person returned to Haiti. No exceptions.

The Gallatin left the harbor. I said goodbye to Port-au-Prince. My first patrol was over.

Out at sea, I smoked for hours on the fantail, lingering upon my memories of the past months. I tried to imagine how the Haitians would remember their doomed voyage, their detention aboard the Gallatin, their encounters with us—with me. A disquieting intuition repeated in my head: the USCG cutter, the Haitians’ sailing vessel, and European slave ships represented a triad of homologous instances in which people of African descent have suffered involuntary concentration in small spaces upon the Atlantic. I dreaded that I was in closer proximity to the enslavers of the past, and to the cops and jailors of the present, than I ever would be to those Haitians.

So, that night, with the butt of my last cigarette, I committed to cast my memories of the Haitians overboard. In the depths of some unmarked swath of the Windward Passage, I prayed, no one, including me, would ever find them again.

In basic training, every recruit is disciplined to imagine how the USCG is like every other branch of the military, save one principle: we exist to save lives, and it is harder to save lives than to take them. I was never a very good sailor, but I took this principle seriously. At least in the USCG, I thought, I could evade the worst cruelties of the new War on Terror.

Perhaps I should have done more research on the USCG’s undeclared long war against Haitian asylum seekers, in order to appreciate precisely what the oath to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” would demand of me. This war had long preceded my term of enlistment. It arguably began in 1804, when the United States refused to acknowledge the newly liberated Haiti as a sovereign nation and did everything it could to insulate its slaving society from the shock waves of Haiti’s radical interpretation of universal freedom. But in our present day, it began in earnest with President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12324 of 1981, also called the Haitian Migrant Interdiction Operation (HMIO), which exclusively tasked the USCG to “interdict” Haitian asylum seekers attempting to enter the United States by sea routes on unauthorized sailing vessels. Such people were already beginning to be derogatorily referred to as “boat people,” a term then borrowed (less derogatorily) into Haitian Kreyòl as botpippel.

The enforcement of the HMIO and its subsequent incarnations lies almost entirely within the jurisdiction of federal police power acting under the authority of the executive branch’s immigration and border enforcement powers. It does not take place between nations at enmity with one another, but between vastly unequal yet allied powers. Its strategic end is to create a kind of naval blockade, a fluid maritime border around Haiti, which remains under ever-present threat of invasion by a coalition of U.S. and foreign military forces.

Adding to its asymmetry, the “enemies” to be vanquished on the battlefield are also unconventional: they are not agents of a state, but rather noncombatant individuals who are, in one sense or another, simply acting to save their own lives. During their incarceration aboard USCG cutters, they automatically bear the legal status of “economic migrant,” a person whom authorities deem to be fleeing poverty alone and therefore by definition ineligible for asylum. The meaning of this category is defined solely by reference to its dialectical negation, the “political refugee,” a person whom authorities may (or may not) deem to have a legible asylum claim because they are fleeing state persecution on the basis of race, creed, political affiliation, or sexual orientation. These abstractions are historical artifacts of a half-baked, all-encompassing theory of preemptive deterrence: unless USCG patrols are used to place Haiti under a naval blockade, and unless botpippel are invariably denied asylum, the United States will become flooded with criminals and people who have no means of supporting themselves. By 2003 John Ashcroft and the Bush administration upped the ante, decrying botpippel to be vectors of terrorism. On January 11, 2018, President Donald Trump, during efforts to justify ending nearly all immigration and asylum, described Haiti (which he grouped with African nations) as a “shithole country” where, as he asserted several months prior, “all have AIDS.”

Haiti is now facing another such crisis. Its president, Jovenel Moïse, having already suspended nearly all elected government save himself, refused to step down at the end of his term on February 7, 2021, despite widespread protests that have shuttered the country. Moïse’s administration is currently being propped up by criminal syndicates, but they are slipping his grasp, and kidnapping for money is now so prevalent that people are terrified to leave their homes. So far, the Biden administration’s response has not been encouraging: though it has instructed ICE to temporarily halt deportations to Haiti, naval blockades remain in force, and the U.S. State Department has expressed the opinion that Moïse should remain in office for at least another year, enforcing the sense that Haiti is once again a U.S. client state.

With regard to the Coast Guard’s longstanding orders to block Haitians seeking asylum, the modality of killing is not straightforward, but it is intentional. It consists of snatching the Haitian enemy from their vessel, forcing them to subsist in a state of bare life, and finally abandoning them in their home country at gunpoint. Of course, many may survive the ordeal and may even attempt another journey. But especially during acute phases of armed conflict and catastrophe, it is just as likely that—whether at the behest of starvation, disease, or violence—a return to Haiti is a death sentence.

This banal form of murder is analogous to what Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers as her definition of racism in Golden Gulag (2007): “the state sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Based on the extant documentary record, I estimate that the USCG has interdicted at least 120,000 botpippel since the HMIO of 1981 took effect. Those who fell prey to an untimely demise following deportation died because the United States, though repeatedly responsible for undermining Haitian democracy and economic stability, nonetheless refuses to acknowledge that these actions have made Haiti, for many, mortally unsafe. The true death toll will never be known. Countless botpippel have simply disappeared at sea, plunged into a gigantic watery necropolis.

Since 2004 U.S. officials have brought their forms of border policing strategies and tactics against Haitians to bear on land-based immigration and refugee policies against non-white asylum seekers. One of the most significant technical innovations of enforcement against Haitians was the realization that by detaining them exclusively within a maritime environment, the United States could summarily classify all of them as economic migrants—whose claims for asylum de facto have no standing—and prevent them from lodging claims as political refugees, which are the only claims with any hope of success. They were thus proactively disabled from advancing a request for asylum in a U.S. federal court, with all claims instead evaluated by an INS-designated official aboard the USCG vessel. The New York Times recently reported that, since late 2009, similar techniques have been adopted by Customs and Border Control agents patrolling sea routes along the California coast, which has resulted in a notable escalation of CBP naval patrols and aerial surveillance of the region. And in fact, the USCG has cooperatively supported these efforts by sharing its infrastructure—ports, cutters, and aircraft—and its personnel with CBP. All of this has been with the aim of making sure that asylum seekers never make it to the United States, whether by land or by sea.

The Trump administration made the most significant use of this set of innovations to date, insisting that asylum claims must be made from camps on the Mexican side of the U.S. border—and therefore automatically invalid by virtue of being limited to the status of economic migrant. Thus, hundreds of thousands of non-white asylum seekers fleeing material precariousness, yes, but also the threat of violence in the Global South are, and will continue to be, caught in carceral webs composed of ICE/CBP goon squads, ruthless INS officials, and perilous tent cities, not to mention the prison guards employed at one of the numerous semi-secret migrant detention centers operating upon U.S. soil for those few who make it across.

From the perspective of Haitian immigrants and botpippel, this is nothing new. Thousands of their compatriots have already served time at infamous extrajudicial sites such as the Krome detention center in Miami (1980–present), Guantanamo Bay (1991–93), and, most often, the flight decks of USCG cutters. They know that the USCG has long scoured the Windward Passage for Haitians in particular, just as ICE/CBP goon squads now patrol U.S. deserts, highways, and city streets for the undocumented. And they know that Trump’s fantasy of building a “Great Wall” on the U.S.–Mexico border is not so farfetched, because the USCG continues to enforce a maritime one around Haiti.

The Biden administration has inherited this war and its prisoners, with thousands remaining stuck in legal limbo while hoping—in most cases, without hope—that their asylum claims will advance. Opening alternative paths to citizenship and declaring an indefinite moratorium on deportations would serve as foundations for more sweeping reforms in the future. But the core challenge in this political moment is to envision nothing less than the total decriminalization and demilitarization of immigration law enforcement.

Botpippel are not the first undocumented people of African descent to have been policed by U.S. naval forces. The legal architecture through which the USCG legitimates the indefinite detention and expulsion of Haitian asylum seekers reaches back to U.S. efforts to suppress the African slave trade, outlawed by Congress in 1807, though domestic slaveholding would continue, and indeed its trade would be not only safeguarded but bolstered by this act.

This marked a decisive turning point in the history of maritime policing vis-à-vis immigration. Per the Slave Trade Acts of 1794 and 1800, the United States already claimed jurisdiction over U.S. citizens and U.S. vessels engaged in the slave trade within U.S. territorial borders (contemporaneously understood as extending three nautical miles into the ocean). By 1808, however, the United States sought to extend its jurisdiction over the sea itself. Slaver vessels operating around “any river, port, bay, or harbor . . . within the jurisdictional limits of the United States” as well as “on the high seas” were deemed illegal and subject to seizure without compensation. The actual physical distance from U.S. soil that these terms referred to was left purposefully vague. To board a given vessel, a Revenue Cutter captain only had to suspect, rather than conclusively determine, that that vessel eventually intended to offload “international” (i.e., non-native) enslaved people into the United States. The 1819 iteration of the law further stipulated that U.S. jurisdiction included “Africa, or elsewhere.” Hence, in theory, after 1819, the scope of U.S. maritime police operations was simply every maritime space on the globe.

Revenue Cutter Service captains turned the lack of any description in the 1808 law or its successive iterations about what should be done with temporarily masterless slaves into an advantage. They did what they would have done to any fugitive Black person at the time: indefinitely detain them until higher authorities determined their status, and thereby foreclose the possibility of local Black people conspiring to shuttle them to freedom. During confinement, captured Africans were compelled to perform labor as if they were slaves. For instance, those captured from the Spanish-flagged Antelope (1820) spent seven years toiling at a military fort in Savannah, Georgia, as well as on the local U.S. marshal’s plantation. As wards of the state, they were human only insofar as U.S. officials had a duty to force them to remain alive. Of those “rescued” from the Antelope, 120 ultimately died in captivity and 2 went missing. Following litigation, 39 survivors were sold to U.S. slaveowners to compensate Spanish and Portuguese claimants who had stakes in the Antelope and her enslaved cargo. Per the designs of the American Colonization Society, the remaining 120 Africans were freed upon condition that they be immediately deported to New Georgia, Liberia.

This anti-Black martial abolitionism was therefore a project framed around the unification of two countervailing tendencies. While white planters consistently pushed to extend racial slavery into the southern and western frontiers, white northern financiers and abolitionists were in favor of creating the most propitious conditions for the expansion of free white settlements throughout America’s urban and rural milieus. Black people were deemed unfit for freedom not only because of their supposed inborn asocial traits, but because their presence imperiled the possibility for white freedom. To actualize Thomas Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty,” the United States required immigration policies that foreshortened Black peoples’ capacities for social reproduction and thereby re-whitened America.

This political aim was later extended in legislation passed on February 19, 1862, which authorized President Abraham Lincoln—who intended to solve the contradictions that led to the Civil War by sending every Black person in America back to Africa—to use U.S. naval forces to capture, detain, and deport undocumented people of East Asian/Chinese descent (“coolies”) while at sea. Henceforth, “the free and voluntary emigration of any Chinese subject” to the U.S. was proscribed unless a ship captain possessed documents certified by a consular agent residing at the foreign port of departure. At the time, the principal means for Chinese emigrants to obtain authorization would have been at behest of some corporation seeking expendable, non-white laborers contractually bound to work to death in mines and on railroads on the western frontiers—Native American lands stolen through imperialist warfare. White settlers presupposed that these Asians’ residency was provisional and temporary—and then Congress codified that principle into law in 1870, decreeing that every person of East Asian/Chinese descent, anywhere in the world, was ineligible for U.S. citizenship.

Twelve years later, An Act to Regulate Immigration (1882) played upon the notion that non-white immigration caused public disorder. Through the use of color-blind legal language, Section 2 of this law specified that the United States must only accept immigrants who were conclusively not “convict[s], lunatic[s], idiot[s], or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The burden of proof lay on non-white immigrants to prove how their racial backgrounds were not already prima facie evidence for these conditions. Section 4 also stipulated that “all foreign convicts except those convicted of political offenses, upon arrival, shall be sent back to the nations to which they belong and from whence they came.” By which means a non-white person could demonstrate the “political” character of a given conviction were cleverly left undefined.

It was not a giant leap of imagination for the United States to apply these precedents to the maritime policing of Haitian asylum seekers in the 1980s. Nor should we be surprised that the logic of anti-Black martial abolitionism shapes present-day U.S. immigration policy.

Political philosopher Peter Hallward estimates that paramilitary death squads executed at least a thousand supporters of Lavalas, President Aristide’s party, in the weeks following Aristide’s exile from Haiti on February 29, 2004. The first kanntè (Haitian sailing vessel) the Gallatin sighted one morning in early April had likely departed shortly thereafter.

The first people from our ship that the Haitians met were members of the boarding team, armed with pistols, M-16s, shotguns, and zip ties. Their goal was to compel the hundred or so aboard the kanntè to surrender their vessel and allow us to deposit them on the flight deck of our ship. Negotiations can take hours. It is not uncommon for some to jump overboard, rather than allow boarding to occur uninhibited. If immediate acquiescence is not obtained, we will maneuver ourselves such that any further movement would cause the small boat to “ram” the Gallatin—an attack on a U.S. military vessel.

On the Gallatin, we waited for uptake, outfitted with facemasks and rubber gloves. One at a time, we aided the Haitian adults to make the final step from the small boat to the deck of the cutter. We frisked them for weapons and then marched them to the fantail to undergo initial processing. Most of them appeared exhausted and confused—but compliant. Some may have already been in fear for their lives. One night aboard the USCGC Dallas, which hovered in Port-au-Prince Bay as a deportation coordination outpost and as a temporary detention site for Haitians awaiting immediate transfer to Haitian Coast Guard authorities, my friend and his shipmates asked their Kreyòl interpreter how he managed to obtain compliance from the botpippel. “I tell them you will hurt or kill them if they do not obey,” he joked, “so, of course, they listen.”

Boarding all the Haitians took from midday until midnight. One of the last ones I helped aboard, a man dressed in a suit two sizes too large, looked into my eyes and smiled. He gently wept, clasped my hand tightly, and embraced me. I quickly pushed him off and pointed to the processing station at the fantail, leading him by the wrist to join the others. He stopped crying.

Three things happened at the processing station. First, Haitians deposited the last of their belongings with the interpreter, ostensibly for safekeeping. Who knows if anyone got their things back. Second, a Kreyòl translator and one of the officers gave them a cursory interview about their asylum claims, all the while surrounded by armed sentries, as well as other Haitians who might pass that intelligence onto narcotics smugglers, paramilitary gangs, or state officials back in Haiti. Lastly, they received a rapid, half-assed medical examination—conducted in English. So long as they nodded, or remained silent, they passed each test and were shuffled up to the flight deck.

We retired for the night after the boarding team set fire to the kanntè as a hazard to navigation. The Haitians probably didn’t know that this was the reason we unceremoniously torched their last hope for escape before their very eyes.

About a week later, we found another kanntè packed with around seventy Haitians and repeated the process. Another USCG cutter transferred a hundred more over to the Gallatin. Our flight deck was reaching full capacity.

We arrived at one kanntè too late. It had capsized. Pieces of the shattered mast and little bits of clothing and rubbish were floating around the hull. No survivors. How long had it been? Sharks were spotted circling at a short depth below the vessel.

The Gallatin’s commanders emphasized that our mission was, at its core, humanitarian in nature. We were duty-bound to provide freshwater, food, and critical medical care. During their time aboard, Haitians would be treated as detainees and were not to be treated, or referred to, as prisoners. The use of force was circumscribed within clear rules of engagement. The Haitians were not in any way to be harmed or killed unless they directly threatened the ship or its sailors. Unnecessary violence against them could precipitate an internal review, solicit undue international criticism, and imperil the deportationist efficiency of INS officials. We were told that our batons and pepper spray were precautionary, primarily symbolic.

It sounded like all I had to do was stand there and not screw anything up.

Over the course of several watches, I concluded that, in fact, our job was also to relocate several crucial features of the abysmal living conditions that obtained on the kanntè onto the Gallatin’s flight deck. Though the flight deck was 80 feet by 43 feet, we blocked the edges to facilitate the crew’s movement and to create a buffer between us and the Haitians. Taking this into account, their living space was closer to 65 feet by 35 feet. For a prison population of 300 Haitians, each individual would have had only 7 feet 7 inches square to lie down and stand up. On the diagram of the eighteenth-century British slaver Brooks, the enslaved were each allocated approximately 6 feet 10 inches square, scarcely less than on the Gallatin. (Historian Marcus Rediker thinks that the Brooks diagram probably overstates the amount of space the enslaved were given.)

Although some cutters will drape tarps over the flight deck to shield the Haitians from the unmediated effects of the sun, the Gallatin provided no such shelter. We permitted them to shower, once, in saltwater, without soap. The stench on the flight deck took on a sweet, fetid tinge.

The only place they could go to achieve a modicum of solitude and to escape the stench was the makeshift metal toilet on the fantail. (On slave ships, solitude was found by secreting away to a hidden compartment or small boat to die alone; the “necessary tubs” that held human excrement were contained in the slave holds below deck.) They were permitted to use the toilet one at a time in the case of adults, and two at a time in the case of children and the elderly. For what was supposed to be no longer than five minutes, they had an opportunity to stretch, relax, and breathe fresh sea air. Nevertheless, these moments of respite took place under observation by the watchstander stationed at the toilet, not to mention the numerous Haitian onlookers at the rear of the flight deck.

Despite our commanders’ reticence on the matter, the ever-present fear of revolt hovered underneath the surface of our standing orders. We were to ensure order and discipline through counterinsurgency protocols and techniques of incarceration that one might find in any U.S. prison. The military imperative aboard the Gallatin was to produce a sense of radical uncertainty and temporal disorientation in the Haitians, such that they maintain hope for an asylum claim that had already been rejected.

In this context, there were four overlapping components to the security watch.

The first component of the ship’s securitization was constant surveillance. We were not supposed to take our eyes off the Haitians for one moment. During the watch, we would regularly survey the flight deck for any signs of general unrest, conspiracy, or organized protest. Any minor infraction could later contribute to the eruption of a larger riot, and thus needed to be quickly identified and neutralized. We also had to observe their behavior for indications that one of them intended to jump overboard or harm another Haitian. All that said, we found a used condom one day. Surveillance is never total.

The second was the limitation we placed on communication. We shrouded all USCG practices in a fog of secrecy. Conversing with the Haitians through anything other than hand signals and basic verbal commands was forbidden; physical contact was kept at bare minimum. Nonofficial speech among the watch was proscribed. Watchstanders were stripped of their identity, save their uniform, from which our nametags were removed. It was critical that botpippel forever be unable to identify us.

Secrecy preemptively disabled the Haitians from collectively piecing together fragments of information about where our vessel had been, where it was now, and where it was going. Officially, the concern was that they might exploit the situation to gather intelligence about our patrol routes and pass this information to human or narcotics smugglers. We militated against their mapping out how the ship operated, its layout and complement, where living spaces and the armory were located, and so on. These were standard tactics aboard slaver vessels. As freed slave and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano observed, “When the ship we were in had got in all her cargo . . . we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel.”

On the Gallatin, the command also strove to maintain strict control over the narrative. They blocked sailors’ access to the open Internet and censored letters from home that contained news of global or domestic politics (and even just bad personal news). Knowledge of whether a particular asylum claim had failed or succeeded was hidden from all. A watchstander harboring political solidarity with—as opposed to mere empathy and pity for—the Haitians might compromise operational capacities, good judgment, and core loyalty to the USCG.

Our third securitization strategy was to produce false knowledge of the future. The Haitians were led to believe that they were merely waiting aboard the ship because their asylum claims were still being vigorously debated by diplomatic entities in Washington. Their continued compliance was predicated on this differential of knowledge. They could not realize that they were moving in circles, being returned slowly to Haiti. If they lost all hope, we presumed they would eventually resist their intolerable conditions through violent means.

Hence, our fourth securitization measure: USCG personnel were permitted to inflict several limited forms of physical and symbolic violence against the Haitians, not only in response to perceived noncompliance, but also as a means of averting the need to inflict even greater violence in the future.

If it were not classified as a matter of national security, we might have a better grasp of how many times such instances occur aboard USCG vessels. I open this essay with a story of how we subdued and punished one person for resisting the rules. But it is known that punishment is sometimes inflicted on entire groups. A telling example took place on January 30, 1989, when the USCG captured the Dieu Devant with 147 Haitians aboard. One of them, Fitzroy Joseph, later reported in congressional hearings that, after they expressed a fear of being killed if returned to Haiti, USCG personnel “began wrestling with the Haitians and hitting their hands with their flashlights.” This was followed by threats to release pepper spray. Marie Julie Pierre, Joseph’s wife, corroborated his testimony, adding:

[We were] asked at once if we feared returning to Haiti and everyone said yes we did. We said ‘down with Avril, up with Bush.’ We were threatened with tear gas but they didn’t use it. Many people were crying because they were so afraid. [Ti Jak] was hit by the officers because he didn’t want to go back. They handcuffed him. The Coast Guard grabbed others by the neck and forced them to go to the biggest boat. My older brother was also hit and treated like a chicken as they pulled him by the neck.

Counterintuitively, our nonlethal weapons functioned as more efficient instruments of counterinsurgency than lethal weapons. Brandishing firearms might exacerbate an already tense situation in which the Haitians outnumbered the entire ship’s complement. It could also provide an opportunity for the Haitians to seize and turn our own guns against us (or one another). In contrast, losing a baton and a can of pepper spray represented a relatively minor threat to the ship’s overall security. In the event of an actual riot, the command could always mobilize armed reinforcements. From the perspective of the command, then, the first responders on watch were, to some extent, expendable. Nevertheless, sentries bearing firearms were on deck when we approached Haiti and prepared for final deportation. That is, the precise moment the Haitians realized their fate.

Like the enslaved Africans captured by the Revenue Cutter Service, botpippel were human to us only insofar as we had to compel them, through the threat or actuality of violence, to remain alive. The Haitians ate our tasteless food and drank our freshwater—otherwise they would starve, or we might beat them for going on a hunger strike. They tended to remain silent and immobile day and night—otherwise they would invite acts of exemplary punishment upon themselves. The practices of confinement on the Gallatin represent a variant of what historian Stephanie Smallwood describes as a kind of “scientific empiricism” that developed aboard slave ships, which “prob[ed] the limits to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within.” Just as contemporary slavers used force to conserve human commodities for sale, so does the USCG use force to produce nominally healthy economic migrants to exchange with Haitian authorities.

The rational utilization of limited forms of exemplary violence was an integral aspect of this carceral science. Rediker shows how slaver captains understood violence along a continuum that ranged from acceptably severe to unacceptably cruel. Whereas severity was the grounds of proper discipline as such, an act was cruel only if it led “to catastrophic results [and] sparked reactions such as mutiny by sailors or insurrection by slaves.” In turn, minor acts of kindness, such as dispensing better food or allowing slightly more free time to move above deck, were conditioned by these security imperatives. Furthermore, they exerted no appreciable change to the eventuality that the person would be sold to a slaveowner, for kindness was a self-aggrandizing ritual performance of authority that intended to lay bare the crucial imbalance of power relations at hand. This was, Rediker maintains, “as close as the owners ever came to admitting that terror was essential to running a slave ship.”

The USCG’s undeclared long war against Haitian asylum seekers is but one front of a much longer war against people of African descent in the Americas. The entangled histories of the African slave trade and anti-Black martial abolitionism reveal how this war intimately shaped the foundations and racist intentions that underlay modern U.S. immigration and refugee policy writ large. And the Gallatin, her sailors, and the Haitians who were trapped on the flight deck, are, in some small way, now a part of this history, too.

The Biden administration has the power to decisively end this war—indeed, every war against non-white asylum seekers. Until then, botpippel will continue to suffer the slave ships that survive into the present.

▻https://bostonreview.net/race/ryan-fontanilla-immigration-enforcement-and-afterlife-slave-ship

#esclavage #héritage #migrations #contrôles_migratoires #Haïti #gardes-côtes #nationalisme_blanc #USA #Etats-Unis #migrations #frontières #asile #réfugiés #USCG #Haitian_Migrant_Interdiction_Operation (#HMIO) #botpippel #boat_people

#modèle_australien #pacific_solution

ping @karine4 @isskein @reka

Les origines néolibérales de l’antiglobalisme

« Globalistes » contre « Nationalistes », cette nouvelle ligne de fracture politique masque la vérité : les nationalistes populistes cherchent moins à défendre un modèle social qu’à s’affranchir des contraintes internationales imposés par les règles du #libre-échange. Leur but est en réalité d’aller vers plus de #capitalisme, et de contester le droit des nations non-blanches à intégrer équitablement le jeu du libre-échange mondial.

Depuis que Trump a installé le conflit entre les « nationalistes » et les « globalistes » comme l’antagonisme politique central, il a été repris en chœur par tous les « populistes » sans exception, de Farage à Orban en passant par Salvini et Bolsonaro. Marine Le Pen a ainsi déclaré dans un récent entretien accordé à Breitbart (le média auparavant dirigé par Bannon) : « Le globalisme est un esprit post-national […] Il porte en lui l’idée que les #frontières doivent disparaître, y compris les protections que ces frontières apportent habituellement à une #nation. Elle repose sur l’idée que ce sont les #marchés tout puissants qui décident de tout. Ce concept de globalisme est poussé par des technocrates qui ne sont jamais élus et qui sont les personnes typiques qui dirigent les choses à Bruxelles dans l’Union européenne. Les gens qui croient aux nations – les nationalistes – c’est exactement le contraire. Ils croient que les nations sont le moyen le plus efficace de protéger la #sécurité, la #prospérité et l’#identité nationales pour s’assurer que les gens prospéreront dans ces nations. »

À l’intérieur de cette opposition, le « nationalisme » est implicitement compris comme la défense des populations attaquées par la #globalisation_économique, le retour de la #souveraineté de l’#Etat-nation et le « #protectionnisme ». Dans un entretien accordé l’an passé au Figaro, #Emmanuel_Todd estimait qu’un renversement était en train de se produire, aux États-Unis avec le protectionnisme de #Trump : « Une génération avait mis à bas, avec le néolibéralisme de Reagan, la société qu’avait instaurée l’#Etat-providence rooseveltien ; une nouvelle génération d’Américains est en train de balayer aujourd’hui le modèle des années 1980 » ; et au #Royaume-Uni, avec le #Brexit où, alors que « Thatcher était une figure du néolibéralisme aussi importante que Reagan, […] notre plus grande surprise a été de voir la #droite conservatrice assumer le Brexit et discuter à présent ses modalités, et même s’engager à tâtons dans un #conservatisme de “gauche” ».

Mais la rupture produite par les populistes va-t-elle effectivement dans le sens annoncé par Todd, d’une limitation du #libre-échange, d’un recul du néolibéralisme et d’un #conservatisme_social ? Rien n’est moins sûr dès que l’on s’intéresse à la provenance de ce #nationalisme_anti-globaliste.

De Thatcher au Brexit : nations souveraines et #libre_entreprise

Avant d’être soutenu par une partie des ouvriers britanniques déclassés, le Brexit trouve ses origines dans l’#euroscepticisme du Parti conservateur britannique dont la figure de proue a été… #Thatcher. C’est son célèbre discours devant le Collège de l’Europe à Bruges en septembre 1988 qui a fait émerger le think-tank du « Groupes de Bruges » réunissant des Tories eurosceptiques dont #Alan_Sked et #Nigel_Farage, et dont bientôt sortirait le #UKIP conduisant le Royaume-Uni au Brexit. Thatcher tançait dans son discours le « super-État européen exerçant une nouvelle domination depuis Bruxelles », elle opposait l’Europe existante de la #communauté_économique_européenne, celle de la #bureaucratie, du #centralisme et du #protectionnisme à l’#Europe de la #libre-entreprise, du #libre-échange et de la #déréglementation qu’elle appelait de ses vœux.

Il fallait surtout en finir avec le protectionnisme à l’égard du monde extra-européen de façon à réconcilier les nations européennes avec les « marchés réellement globaux ». La critique de l’Europe ne portait cependant pas seulement sur les contraintes pesant sur la #libre_entreprise, la recherche d’une identité européenne transcendante faisait aussi courir le risque d’une disparition des #identités_nationales avec leurs coutumes et leurs traditions. Contre ce « méga-État artificiel », il fallait concevoir l’Europe comme une « famille de nations ».

Le libre-échange d’une part et le nationalisme d’autre part que Thatcher opposait à la bureaucratie régulatrice de Bruxelles, n’étaient du reste pas séparés, mais bien d’un seul tenant : « Je n’eus d’autre choix, affirme-t-elle dans ses mémoires, que de brandir le drapeau de la #souveraineté_nationale, de la #liberté_du_commerce et de la #liberté_d’entreprise – et de combattre ». On se situe donc à mille lieux d’un nationalisme qui chercherait à s’établir en rempart contre la #mondialisation économique et le libre-échange : c’est au contraire la récupération de la #souveraineté_nationale qui, en s’affranchissant des contraintes supranationales européennes, doit permettre aux peuples de se réconcilier avec le libre-échange mondialisé.

Or cette position nationale-néolibérale, qui veut faire de la nation britannique l’actrice directe de son inscription dans la #mondialisation_économique, est celle de tous les principaux brexiters, Farage en tête, mais aussi de tous les défenseurs d’un « hard brexit » parmi l’establishment Tory, de #Boris_Johnson à #Jacob_Ress-Mogg en passant par #Steven_Baker et #Dominic_Rabb. Au deuxième semestre 2018, une enquête de Greenpeace a révélé que #David_Davis, l’ancien secrétaire au Brexit de #Theresa_May, #Owen_Paterson, l’ancien secrétaire à l’agriculture et à l’environnement de David Cameron, et #Shanker_Singham, un expert commercial de l’Institute of Economic Affairs, s’étaient rendus en Oklahoma au cours d’un voyage financé par le lobby agro-industriel américain pour préparer avec des membres de l’administration Trump un accord commercial bilatéral post-Brexit, prévoyant notamment l’importation en Angleterre de #poulet lavé au chlore et de #bœuf aux hormones.

Paterson, en déplorant qu’un tel accord soit impossible dans le cadre actuel des réglementations de l’Union européenne, a tweeté qu’il était essentiel que « le Royaume-Uni ait le contrôle de ses tarifs et de son cadre réglementaire ». C’est peu de dire qu’on est loin du « #conservatisme_de_gauche » … Au contraire, comme l’avait anticipé Thatcher, la récupération de la souveraineté nationale face à l’#Union_européenne est le moyen de plus de #déréglementation et de libre-échange.

Anti-globalisme et libre-échangisme mondialisé chez #Rothbard

Qu’en est-il aux États-Unis ? « La génération qui est en train de balayer le modèle des années 1980 » est-elle, à la différence du Royaume-Uni, en rupture avec le néolibéralisme de Reagan ? La droite radicale qui a contesté l’héritage de Reagan pour finalement aboutir à l’élection de Donald Trump s’est construite au tournant des années 1990 dans les marges du Parti républicain. Réunissant des « paléo-libertariens » autour de #Murray_Rothbard et #Lew_Rockwell et des « paléo-conservateurs » autour de Patrick Buchanan, ce mouvement s’appelait « paléo » parce qu’il revendiquait un retour à la #Droite_originaire (#Old_Right) du Parti républicain entre les années 1930 et 1950 qui défendait l’#isolationnisme et les intérêts de la nation américaine (#America_First) contre l’#interventionnisme_militaire, mais aussi la #liberté_individuelle, le gouvernement minimal et la propriété privée contre le #New_Deal et le #Welfare_state. Il s’était formé pour contester la prise du pouvoir sous #Reagan puis l’hégémonie sous Bush des néoconservateurs et leur imposition du #Nouvel_ordre_mondial. Leur critique s’est incarnée dans les campagnes des primaires républicaines de #Buchanan en 1992 et 1996.

Ce que ciblaient les paléo dans le Nouvel ordre mondial, c’était un super-étatisme internationaliste, un système mondial de Welfare-warfare state, où l’importation de la « démocratie globale » partout dans le monde par l’interventionnisme américain sous l’égide de l’ONU se conjuguait à un gouvernement économique mondial de type keynésien. Les termes de « globalisme » et de globaloney étaient utilisés notamment par Rothbard au début des années 1990 pour décrier ce système et ils étaient empruntés au vocabulaire de la Old Right pour qui ils désignaient déjà ce complexe internationaliste de l’interventionnisme extérieur onusien et de la perspective d’un New Deal global que ses membres critiquaient dans les politiques de Franklin Roosevelt et Harry Truman.

Rothbard puisait notamment son inspiration chez un historien révisionniste de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dont il avait été proche, Harry Elmer Barnes. De plus, dans les années 1970, alors que la Guerre du Vietnam était encore en cours, des anti-impérialistes avec qui il collaborait avaient déjà remis au goût du jour la critique du globalisme. Lorsque la globalisation économique se concrétisa dans la première moitié des années 1990 avec l’Alena puis la création de l’OMC, ces nouveaux éléments devinrent partie intégrante de sa critique et les nouvelles cibles de l’attaque contre le « globalisme ». Rothbard dénonçait l’Alena comme du « commerce bureaucratique réglementé » conçu par « un sinistre Establishment centriste dont le dévouement à la liberté et au libre-échange s’apparente à celui de Leonid Brejnev ». L’Alena entraînait en particulier une harmonisation des législations vers le haut qui allait contraindre les entreprises américaines à se soumettre aux normes environnementales et au droit du travail contraignants des législations canadiennes et mexicaines contrôlées par des syndicalistes et des socialistes.

Tout ce « mercantilisme » ne signifiait rien d’autre selon lui que la spoliation que les élites politiques mondiales opéraient sur le libre-échange véritable au détriment de la masse des gens qui ne pouvaient en jouir directement. Il alertait sur la perte de souveraineté que représentait l’Alena qu’il comparait au « super-étatisme de la Communauté européenne » car cet accord imposait la mise sur pied d’« institutions d’un super-gouvernement internationaliste arrachant la prise de décision des mains des Américains ». Face à cette « politique globaliste » (globalist policy), une « nouvelle coalition populiste » et « un nouveau nationalisme américain » devaient être définis : il fallait abroger l’Alena, se retirer de toutes les agences gouvernementales supranationales (ONU, OIT, UNESCO, etc.), stopper l’aide au développement et durcir les conditions d’immigration qui provoquaient l’élargissement de l’État social, au nom d’authentiques marchés libres.

Comme chez Thatcher, on est à l’opposé d’une critique du libre-échange ; le nationalisme est au contraire là aussi un moyen de sauver le libre-échange mondialisé qui est confisqué par les institutions supranationales bureaucratiques et socialisantes – en un mot « globalistes ».

Lorsque les populistes s’attaquent au « globalisme », ils emboîtent le pas d’une critique qui ne visait pas à l’origine la mondialisation des échanges de biens et de services, mais au contraire le super-étatisme des élites politiques mondiales qui parasitent le fonctionnement du libre-échange mondialisé. Une distinction conceptuelle s’impose donc entre le « globalisme » et le « mondialisme », puisque dans les cas des héritages de Thatcher ou de Rothbard, l’anti-globalisme va de pair avec un mondialisme libre-échangiste absolument revendiqué.
Anti-globalisme et hiérarchie des nations de Buchanan à Trump

Aux États-Unis, après la seconde campagne de Buchanan pour les primaires républicaines de 1996, les premiers doutes des libertariens ont cependant laissé place à la rupture avec les paléo-conservateurs autour de la question du protectionnisme et des barrières tarifaires. La rupture fut définitivement consommée en 1998 avec la publication du livre de Buchanan The Great Betrayal. How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrified to the Gods of the Global Economy. C’est dans ce livre que Buchanan affirme son attachement au « nationalisme économique » et qu’il fait du « conflit » entre les « nationalistes » et les « globalistes » le « nouveau conflit de l’époque qui succède à la Guerre froide »[1], définissant la ligne que reprendront littéralement Bannon et Trump. Soutenant le protectionnisme industriel, il déplace le contenu de l’anti-globalisme dans le sens de la défense des intérêts économiques nationaux contre la mondialisation du libre-échange.

Cependant, l’opposition simple entre le nationalisme économique à base de protectionnisme industriel et le libre-échange illimité mérite d’être approfondie. D’abord, Buchanan est toujours resté un adversaire résolu de l’État-providence et The Great Betrayal est surtout une défense de l’économie américaine pré-New Deal où l’existence de barrières tarifaires aux importations a coïncidé avec une période de croissance. Pour autant, cette période a été marquée par de fortes inégalités économiques et sociales.

Ensuite, dans le cas de Trump, l’usage qu’il fait du protectionnisme est pour le moins pragmatique et ne relève pas d’une position de principe. Lorsqu’il a baissé drastiquement fin 2017 l’impôt sur les sociétés, il a montré que sa défense de l’emploi américain ne convergeait pas nécessairement avec la « justice sociale ». Ciblant certaines industries correspondant à son électorat comme l’automobile, il se sert surtout des barrières tarifaires aux importations comme d’une arme parfois purement psychologique et virtuelle, parfois effective mais temporaire, dans une guerre commerciale qui peut aboutir à davantage de libre-échange.

Dans l’USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement), l’accord de l’Alena renégocié, si 75% des composants d’une automobile devront être fabriqués aux États-Unis pour qu’elle soit exemptée de barrières douanières (contre 62, 5% avec l’Alena), en revanche le marché laitier canadien sera davantage ouvert aux fermiers américains, tandis que Trump a récemment supprimé les barrières aux importations d’acier et d’aluminium venant du Mexique et du Canada, pour inciter ces pays à ratifier l’USMCA. S’il continue de se servir des droits de douane punitifs dans la guerre commerciale avec la Chine, il a recherché davantage de libre-échange avec l’Union européenne.

Enfin, lorsque des journalistes demandèrent à Buchanan de quel économiste il s’inspirait, il répondit qu’il s’agissait de Wilhelm Röpke[2], l’un des principaux fondateurs de l’ordo-libéralisme, la forme prise par le néolibéralisme en Allemagne qui inspira la politique économique de Ludwig Erhardt sous Adenauer. Or Röpke n’était pas un thuriféraire, mais bien au contraire un opposant farouche au « nationalisme économique » et au « protectionnisme » qui représentait des fléaux pour l’ordre économique international qu’il cherchait à construire[3]. Cependant, il estimait que le libre-échange mondial ne pouvait intégrer les nations postcoloniales, car il n’avait été possible avant la première guerre mondiale que parmi le cercle des nations occidentales partageant un même ordre de valeurs culturelles et religieuses.

Cette insistance sur des conditions extra-économiques morales et spirituelles au développement économique fait qu’il revendique une « troisième voie » appelée « économie humaine » entre le libre-échange purement fondé sur la concurrence et la social-démocratie. En cohérence avec cette « économie humaine », il s’engagea publiquement en faveur du maintien de l’apartheid en Afrique du Sud parce que les Noirs sud-africains se situaient « à un niveau de développement qui excluaient la véritable intégration spirituelle et politique avec les Blancs hautement civilisés »[4].

Son nationalisme n’était finalement pas dirigé contre le libre-échange, mais pour un ordre hiérarchique international fondé sur des conditions de développement économiques différenciées, ne laissant pas aux nations non blanches les moyens d’intégrer le libre-échange mondial. Lorsque Buchanan tempête contre l’immigration et la reconquista économique mexicaine menaçant la culture américaine, il se situe effectivement dans le sillage de la position nationale-néolibérale de Röpke. Dans un débat télévisé en vue des élections européennes de 2019, Marine Le Pen promettait elle aussi, du reste, d’opposer au « capitalisme sauvage » une « économie humaine ».

Lorsque des universitaires ou des commentateurs, y compris à gauche, insistent sur les aspects économiques positifs pour les populations, du nationalisme anti-globaliste, ils se méprennent absolument sur les origines comme sur les politiques menées par les populistes nationalistes. Ceux-ci revendiquent la récupération de la souveraineté nationale et critiquent les règles transnationales de la globalisation économique, non pour protéger leur modèle social et le droit du travail de leur population, mais pour s’affranchir de ce qui resterait en elles de contraintes environnementales ou sociales, et s’en servir comme tremplin vers plus de capitalisme et de libre-échange, ou pour contester le droit des nations non-blanches à intégrer équitablement le jeu du libre-échange mondial. Dans cette bataille, ce sont les national-néolibéraux qui affrontent les globalistes néolibéraux, dans une course qui pousse le monde dans une direction toujours plus mortifère, et ne comporte pas le moindre aspect positif.

▻https://aoc.media/analyse/2019/10/28/les-origines-neoliberales-de-lantiglobalisme

#nationalisme #globalisme #anti-globalisme #néolibéralisme #néo-libéralisme #populisme #discours_de_Bruges #industrie_agro-alimentaire #boeuf

ping @karine4

Offshoring the Border : The #1981 United States–#Haiti Agreement and the Origins of Extraterritorial Maritime Interdiction

Extraterritorial maritime interdiction is a common tactic used by destination states to keep unwanted migrants from reaching their borders. But it is problematic, raising legal concerns about #refoulement as well as political concerns about sovereignty. Where did extraterritorial interdiction come from, and how has it become so widespread? This article draws on archival sources and contemporaneous legal opinions from within the #Reagan administration to tell the origin story of the pivotal 1981 United States–Haiti agreement that pioneered this model of border control. Even at the time of adoption, this agreement faced legal challenges, and was viewed as a solution of last resort. Yet many of the legal challenges of modern extraterritorial interdiction trace back to the unique circumstances shaping this first agreement—including the need to cooperate with countries of embarkation, anticipatory determination of attempted entry and the offshoring of protection responsibilities. They were locked in by path-dependent feedback mechanisms domestically and then diffused internationally.

▻https://academic.oup.com/jrs/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrs/fez005/5310345
#USA #Etats-Unis #Haïti #externalisation #origine #interdiction_extraterritoriale #contrôles_frontaliers #migrations #asile #réfugiés #frontières #externalisation #externalisation_des_frontaliers #accord #push-back #souveraineté

via @isskein

ajouté à cette métaliste sur l’externalisation des contrôles frontaliers :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/731749

l’histgeobox : « 99 luftballons » de Nena ou le spectre de l’apocalypse nucléaire en chanson.
▻http://lhistgeobox.blogspot.com/2018/09/nena99-luftballons-de-nena-ou-le.html

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HNgxrGA_nkU/WzO6ZxG_J3I/AAAAAAAAfH4/4aEAjSe5thw-nPrwGG8n3U-5_mJjtwJZQCLcBGAs/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/C13571-8a.jpg

Les négociations en vue d’une réduction des armes nucléaires s’avèrent très difficiles. A peine élu, le nouveau président américain Reagan qualifie l’Union soviétique d’"Empire du mal", quand son homologue soviétique Andropov l’accuse de négocier « en alternant les grossièretés et les sermons hystériques. »

Un peu en vrac, la question de la politique de l’#excision de l’#Australie (#excision_territoriale):

La première excision (2001), celle des îles, et contenu dans ce document législatif:
▻https://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2004A00887

Et puis ils ont décidé d’exciser tout le territoire australien pour l’arrivée par bateau, en 2013:

“The effect of this change, while it has been discussed as the ‘excision of the Australian mainland from the migration zone’, in fact only excises the mainland for those who arrive to Australia by boat. Previously, only those who were intercepted in waters on the way to Australia and then transferred to Christmas Island, or arrived at Christmas Island or another “excised offshore place”, became an offshore entry person and were thereby excluded from making a Protection application by section 46A of the Migration Act. Following this amendment, all those who arrive by boat, including those who actually land on Australia’s shores, are now barred by section 46A. Any person arriving by boat to seek asylum in Australia must have this bar lifted by the Minister personally, in circumstances where the Minister finds it is in the public interest to do so. All boat arrivals are now also subject to Australia’s offshore processing regime and can be transferred to a regional processing country under section 198AD of the Migration Act, even if they first land on the Australian mainland. Any asylum seeker arriving by plane is still able to lodge a protection application and is not subject to the regional processing arrangements. These changes also ensure that all boat arrivals are subject to mandatory detention, are to be taken to a regional processing country, and cannot institute or continue certain legal proceedings in Australia.”
▻http://www.iarc.asn.au/_blog/Immigration_News/post/excision-of-the-australian-mainland-for-boat-arrivals

▻http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-16/parliament-excises-mainland-from-migration-zone/4693940

Il y a aussi un wiki sur cela:
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_migration_zone#cite_note-abcnews-5

Et une vignette:

http://www.kudelka.com.au/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/OZED121219-300x180.jpg

#Australie #migrations #asile #externalisation #réfugiés

cc @reka

Une autre histoire de l’amérique, par Oliver stone.
Série de documentaires en 10 épisodes. Passionant !

▻http://rutube.ru/video/person/720865

#vidéos #USA #Roosevelt #Wallace #Truman #Churchill #Staline #Eisenhower #Johnson #Nixon #Reagan #Gorbatchev #Bush #Obama

The case for Darth Vader as the most Reaganesque presidential candidate in 2016: ▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/25/the-most-reaganesque-candidate-in-2016-will-be #Reagan #StarWars #Vader #politics #USA

Spanish prime minister uses military law to get airports moving again | The Observer
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/05/spain-airports-reopen-controllers-strike?CMP=twt_iph

“#Zapatero has taken as a model Ronald #Reagan's 1981 confrontation with American air controllers, when he also sent the military in and broke the union.”

#Espagne #grève

Cable Viewer - France
►http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/2005/08/05PARIS5335.html

Sarkozy:
“said that France needed to a go through
a period similar to the U.S. under Reagan, the UK under
Thatcher, and Spain under Gonzalez”