In an essay by Adam Johnson, originally appearing on the website ALTERNET and republished on the website rawstory.com, American mainstream media—the collective guardians of the modern corporate order—have gone apoplectic over recent political developments in the United Kingdom.
“Yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn won the vote for Britain’s Labour
leadership election – basically the equivalent to the American Democratic Party
primary – in a blowout, garnering almost 60% of the vote while the runner-up,
Andy Burnham could only muster 19% of the vote. Jeremy Corbyn, a self-described
socialist, outflanked his opponents to the left on many issues, including
militarism, immigration, unions – breaking ranks on a whole host of centrist
orthodoxy that Labour had embraced since the mid-90’s.
The American media, perplexed as to how someone labeled
with the dreaded “s” word could not only capture a major party nomination but
do so with the largest mandate in the history of the party, went into full
smear mode:
First up, Reuters who led with tabloid “Karl Marx Admirer”:
This headline was used everywhere form NBC News to Yahoo
News who reprinted the story.
Centrist conventional wisdom factory the Daily Beast
circled the wagons, inexplicably lumping Corbyn in with Donald Trump and
accusing him of spreading the politics of “hate” and “spite” despite being
unable to cite a single example of Corbyn demonstrating either.
Time magazine, another centrist conventional wisdom
factory, insisted Corbyn couldn’t win the general election. Mind you they cited
no polls showing this, only spouted the same old trope that “hard-leftists”
couldn’t win. You know, the same argument peddled by those who said he wasn’t
going to win the Labour party leadership.
Neoliberal Vox, insisted on calling him “radical”:
Even though someone with a large swath of mainstream
support cannot, by definition, be “radical”. The LA Times, Slate, CTV in
Canada, and ABC10 Los Angeles went with “Divisive far-left” entirely on their
own
It’s mystifying how a man who had the largest mandate of
any party leader ever can be called “divisive” but so it goes in a corporate
media which conflates elite conventional wisdom for the will of the people. The
reality is Corbyn’s win isn’t just a rejection of standard neoliberal orthodoxy
— it’s an indictment of it. For years we’ve been told the will of the people is
to be anti-union, pro-austerity, and pro-corporate takeover of pensions and
education. Now the tide is shifting dramatically and the cognitive dissonance
of those in charge of our media is too great to compute. They must at once
report on Corbyn’s record victory while insisting he’s fringe.
The goal of cheap smears like “Karl Marx admirer” (not that
there’s anything wrong with that, but the goal is to red-bait) and “far left”
and divisive” is the same as those leveled against Bernie Sanders:
“unelectable”, “socialist”, “far left”. Though Corbyn’s positions are
demonstrably more to the left of Sanders’, both pose an existential threat to
the pro-corporate position of the establishment left of the UK and US
respectively and thus, must be dismissed as anomalies. Increasingly however, it
appears they are anything but.” (1)
The
movement by Britain’s Labour Party to reject the legacy of Tony Blair, and the
concurrent movement within America’s Democratic Party to purge itself of the discredited
legacy of Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council, are indeed encouraging
coming along with news that Australia has just ousted its Murdock-backed prime
minister in favor of someone within the conservative movement seen as less
noxious by the voting public. The
nascent trends in industrial countries toward the rejection of the tired old
neo-liberal (or neo-conservative depending on the country), ideologies in favor
of more community and ‘collectivist’ oriented proposals, programs and
leadership, demonstrate perhaps the beginning of a world-wide movement that
will finally bring to heel the riot of greed and avarice that has come to
plague this planet in recent decades.
It will
take a coordinated world-wide movement to accomplish this task, for capital has
long since ‘flown the coop’ and is now beyond the reach of mere national
governments. Already the Catholic
Church—long a bastion of conservatism and bulwark against social justice—now finds
itself led by a pontiff who has taken the moniker “Francis”—after St. Francis
of Assisi, and is now advocating world-wide redistributions of the planet’s
wealth. Elsewhere we find now in
Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States the re-awakening of long
dormant populist movements rising to challenge the entrenched
establishments.
The
elites have been caught off-guard, not knowing and not possessing the language
with which to respond. Labeling these
movements ‘extreme’ and ‘out of the mainstream’ now only further confirms their
legitimacy among the long alienated and exploited working classes throughout
the world.
Meanwhile
Hillary responding with vague ideals is met with a truly populist response that
is now demanding specific actions. On
the conservative side, establishment candidate JEB Bush tells his audience that
the woman he would chose to put on the U.S. ten dollar bill is none other than Margaret Thatcher, forgetting that the ‘Iron
Maiden’ had become so onerous that she was toppled by her own party in favor of
a former circus barker.
One
senses that the high tide of conservatism has passed, that the global grip
about the throats of those who produce the wealth as represented by the
Reagan-Thatcher political tryst is finally weakening as conservatives seek a
reassurance and the Labour and Democratic parties move respectively to recover
their lost souls.
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(1). Johnson,
Adam “America’s mainstream media freaks
out after Socialist wins UK Labour leadership” http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/americas-mainstream-media-freaks-out-after-socialist-wins-uk-labour-leadership/
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