By Diana Johnstone
in Paris 
Special to Consortium News

Planned obsolescence has been the dominant policy of the Western elite toward the working class since the neoliberal power seizure of the 1980s, a message that comes through in a new song suddenly sweeping the world. 

The song “Rich Men North of Richmond” is a personal lament, a cry of pain and despair over the state of the “new world”. 

The fact that Oliver Anthony’s powerful voice and frank lyrics immediately resonated with millions of listeners tells each of us something about the rest of us. On the simple but deep level of sensibility, millions of very different people found they shared something in common. 

Exactly what this might be and where it might lead is a mystery, but there is potential political meaning in the subjective unity aroused by this song. 

No, not unity but division! – promptly decreed liberal establishment opinion-makers. It’s the “right wing” that loves it, ruled The Guardian and the rest. Scrutinizing the lyrics for rightwing extremist stigmata, critics jumped on just these lines. 

Lord, we got folks in the street
Ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare

But God if you’re five foot three
And you’re three hundred pounds
Taxes ought not to pay
For your bags of fudge rounds

North of Richmond, where lobbyists and legislators play, this may seem to be all about welfare payments, good on the left, bad on the right. But in its way, this is a poem, and as such it calls for a more poetic interpretation. 

[After 40 million views on YouTube, Edward Snowden tweets that Oliver likely already has an FBI file.]

Here the author is pointing to a paradox, the coexistence of having nothing to eat and suffering from obesity. This contrast is observed and experienced with growing frequency in the working class. 

Anxiety, despair, substance abuse and binge eating, homelessness and bad nutrition, not to mention poor health and lowered life expectancy come together in these apparently opposing phenomena. All, including welfare itself, reflect the misery of the contemporary working class.

And if we stand back and look for causes and effects, we can drop the minor matter of too many fudge rounds and get to the great big root causes of the whole picture behind Oliver Anthony’s rapid sketch. 

The Planned Obsolescence of the Working Class

The plight of the contemporary Western ruling class goes back roughly forty years, to the political takeover of public policy by financial capital. Financial capital makes the investment decisions that shape society, and governments, to lure those precious investments, began to cede more and more freedom to those decision-makers. The social impact was enormous. 

Capitalist rulers not only chose measures to increase the share of stockholder profits over remuneration to employees for their productive work, but began to plan the obsolescence of the Western working class altogether. Automation and outsourcing diminished the political influence of labor, further weakened by uncontrolled immigration of potential substitute job fillers. 

The plain truth is that planned obsolescence has been the dominant policy of the Western elite toward the working class since the neoliberal power seizure of the 1980s.

And what about the political left in all this, the political thinkers and activists who under Marxist influence once championed the working class as both the agents and the beneficiaries of historic progress?

To a significant extent, the American intellectual left settled into the ivory tower of academia, where it thrived following a trajectory in harmony with the obsolescence of the working class. Ensconced in humanities departments, the intellectual left more or less forgot about class as they theorized society in terms of a new array of human categories, racial and sexual. As befits a left, it actively promotes progress, championing oppressed identity categories as it once championed theoretically oppressed wage earners.

Now, when a working class stiff, who suffered a bad accident working in a paper mill, comes along with his complaint, representatives of this contemporary left don’t get it. What is he complaining about? Is he racist? 

It is not just the present that causes suffering. Somehow the Western working class can feel that at more than one level, its future has been taken away from it. 

Today’s official left doesn’t capture this discontent because it has essentially abandoned the working class and is no longer interested in ownership of the means of production, or even production, which may be bad for the planet. 

The academic left see the whole world as classrooms and conference halls. It asserts its values by championing diversity, equity and inclusion in math classes and corporate board rooms. It wants fair distribution within its own elite and other elites as well. 

It doesn’t care about the identity distribution of workers in a paper mill, which probably should be shut down anyway, for the sake of the environment. Yes, society is bitterly divided, but it sure ain’t the fault of Oliver Anthony.

“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

So I can sit out here and waste my life away

Drag back home and drown my troubles away.

It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to

For people like me and people like you

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is.

Livin’ in the new world

With an old soul

These rich men north of Richmond

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control

Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do

And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do

‘Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end

‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond.

I wish politicians would look out for miners

And not just minors on an island somewhere

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat

And the obese milkin’ welfare.

Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground

‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.”

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/08/25/diana-johnstone-a-voice-heard-in-the-land/

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MOSCOW (Sputnik) - A group of Columbia University students walked out of a lecture by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to protest antisemitism accusations brought against some of them for the condemnation of Israel's policy towards Palestine, US news outlet reported.

Last week, a number of Columbia University students were publicly shamed for signing a public statement in which they laid part of the responsibility for the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on "the Israeli extremist government." Photos of the students with the caption "Columbia's Leading Antisemites" were later shown on video screen panels near campus, the newspaper reported.

READ MORE: https://sputnikglobe.com/20231102/students-leave-hillary-clintons-lecture-to-protest-antisemitism-accusations---reports-1114660248.html

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By the time the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) 2024 reconvened on September 23 in New York City, Volodymyr Zelensky had already arrived in the US to present his "victory plan" to President Joe Biden.

Nonetheless, the issues of Ukraine, its leadership and its crises were noticeably absent on this year's CGI agenda. No Ukrainian political or social leaders took the stage during the Clintons' 2024 event.

This raised the eyebrows of those who remember how the Clintons woed the Zelenskys in 2022 and 2023. 

Hillary Clinton attended the public launch of the foundation formed by Volodymyr Zelensky's spouse, Olena, in September 2022. A few months later Olena Zelenskaya received the Hillary Rodham Clinton Award for exceptional leadership.

In September 2023, the Clintons announced a joint Ukraine Action Network initiative to solicit funds together with Olena during the CGI 2023 where she received the Clinton Global Citizen Award.

Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel suggested that Volodymyr Zelensky has become "radioactive" for the Clintons.

Why is that?

The pundit drew attention to the fact that Zelensky lost his legitimacy under Ukrainian law after his presidential term expired in May.

The Kiev regime's corruption has become so notorious that even US mainstream press that used to tout Zelensky as a "new Churchill" is now bashing his cabinet for not doing enough to stop the embezzlement of foreign funds.

Ortel does not rule out that the funds from the widely advertised CGI Ukraine Action Network may have met the same fate as other Western funds which weren't sufficiently supervised by any government or independent watchdogs.

The Pew Research Center's July survey found that confidence in Zelensky has dropped in the US and several European countries compared to last year.

Washington has been allegedly working on options to replace Zelensky with "a more manageable and less corrupt figure," as the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) revealed in mid-August.

Apparently, under these circumstances, the Clintons may have decided that any further bromance with the Zelensky family wouldn't correspond to their interests, according to the analyst.

One should bear in mind that the Clintons themselves appear "to specialize in monetizing their public service for illegal private gain," said Ortel, who has carried out a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation's alleged fraud for several years.

"Despite at least two FBI investigations (2001-5 and 2016 forward), Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, to date, have not been punished for their charity frauds, based in New York, even though the Trump family has been punished twice for far smaller offenses, in my view following extensive review of their many false and materially misleading public filings," the pundit told Sputnik.

Reconstruction of Ukraine Not as Easy & Profitable as Seemed

The CGI 2024 silence on Ukraine is especially remarkable given the Clintons longstanding ties with the country's politicians and tycoons, including oligarch Viktor Pinchuk and his wife Olena — daughter of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.

"The Clinton Foundation, in various guises, has operated in Ukraine since 2004 and powerful citizens there have donated sizable sums, ostensibly, towards purported arms of this public charity," the pundit said.

Last year Ortel suggested that the Clintons' reinvigorated interest in Ukraine stemmed from their apparent desire to cash in on "a mammoth rebuilding package" once the hostilities ended.

"[The Clintons] are positioning themselves, as they did in Haiti and India, to get close to the rebuilding capital pools that likely will be funded by the US and allies," the Wall Street analyst presumed at the time.

However, this year has seen Russia thriving economically and advancing militarily in Ukraine. It has become clear that the conflict is unlikely to end on Washington's terms. Furthermore, the damage is huge and the Ukraine project might not offer immediate financial gains for investors, according to the analyst.

"Too much of Ukraine’s population has fled and likely never will return. Damage, to date, has been devastating. From Western perspective, an investment case for rebuilding necessary infrastructure is not possible to make, other than by lying about important assumptions," Ortel said.

Apparently, those circumstances prompted the Clintons to shift their focus to health, Africa and racial equity in order to solicit new funds.

Likewise, if presidential candidate Kamala Harris manages to win in 2024, she and her team are likely to turn their back on Ukraine too, the pundit believes.

"Judging from what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think a Harris Administration will just turn the page and shift focus to some other, more lucrative war and try to blame the mess in Ukraine on Trump," Ortel concluded.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240926/clintons-turn-page-on-ukraine-and-radioactive-zelensky--wall-street-analyst-1120302991.html

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