‘Blairism, Clintonism help Donald Trump’, trade unions say

This video from the USA says about itself:

Trump‘s Republican Hitman Might Be Stealing Your Vote! (with Greg Palast)

10 May 2016

Greg Palast, Investigative Reporter-BBC News & The Guardian / Author, “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits”, joins Thom to talk about Trump‘s Republican hitman who’s stealing your vote.

By Daniel Marans in the USA:

World Labor Leaders Call For ‘Global New Deal’ To Combat Demagogues Like Trump

Alarmed that Trump’s populist message may appeal to members, unions want the Democratic Party to return to its roots.

05/10/2016 08:37 pm ET

WASHINGTON — Dozens of senior European labor union officials gathered this week at the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. federation of labor unions, to trade ideas for fighting a xenophobic far right ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic.

The conference on Monday and Tuesday, jointly organized by the AFL-CIO, Working America, the federation’s outreach arm to non-union workers, and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a social democratic foundation funded by the German government, illustrates the extent to which progressive movements across the developed world have begun to view the far right as a common, and urgent, threat.

But if the business-friendly wings of the Democratic Party and its European equivalents are hoping that the specter of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, or the rise of the Front National in France, or the U.K. Independence Party in Britain, will draw organized labor to their side, they are in for a disappointment. American and European participants in Tuesday’s panel discussions place a sizable share of the blame for the far right’s rise on mainstream center-left parties’ drift to the center (think Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and Tony Blair’s New Labour).

Those parties’ embrace of “neoliberalism,” a market-driven ideology that includes privatization and fiscal austerity, the labor stalwarts argued, diminished the public’s faith in the ability of labor unions and progressive politics to deliver for them — paving the way for far-right populism.

Instead, the American and European participants more or less agreed on the need to double down on the social-democratic economic policies that dominated the Western world in the decades after World War II.

“We must insist that the candidates and political parties we support back an ambitious program for broad-based economic growth driven by rising wages,” said Damon Silvers, director of policy at the AFL-CIO. “The labor movement must demand that the politicians we support offer, in place of neoliberalism and austerity, a global New Deal.”

While Trump is the best-known — and arguably most successful — right-wing demagogue on the world stage, Europe’s refugee crisis and prolonged economic slump are inspiring a new generation of reactionary xenophobes on the continent.

In fact, many have argued that Trump is a quintessentially European type of demagogue, marrying anti-immigrant xenophobia with looking-out-for-the-little-guy economic populism with a theatrical style. In addition to contemporary comparisons to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, there are more ominous parallels to figures like the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who the real estate mogul re-tweeted in February.

‘INSIDE THE CLINTON SPEECH MACHINE’ “A transcript of a private, $285,000 paid speech Bill Clinton delivered last year at the ‘China-U.S. Private Investment Summit’ in Austin, Texas, obtained by POLITICO, offers a glimpse behind the curtain of the Clintons’ controversial paid speaking gigs — and some insight into how the former president holds court out of sight of the press.” [Politico]

Decades of research indicates that economic insecurity fuels the racism that fuels Trump. (Zach Carter, HuffPost)

The State Department sought a land deal with a Nigerian firm with close ties to the Clinton Foundation. (James Rosen, Fox News)

New Zealand’s new [Labour, used to work for Tony Blair] prime minister called capitalism a “blatant failure”, before citing levels of homelessness and low wages as evidence that “the market has failed” her country’s poor: here.