We Won't Get Anywhere Until We Realize How Many Sanders Supporters Are Neoliberals in Populist Clothing

The definition of neoliberalism has changed over time, but for Americans in 2016, it boils down to doing what's profitable in the name of doing what's right--whether it's right or not.

Hillary Clinton will support green energy as soon as the people behind it are willing to give her more money than the fracking industry. Until then, you can expect neoliberals to insist that there's a profound moral difference between Donald Trump's refusal to acknowledge climate change and Clinton's refusal to do anything about it.

Barack Obama will support reforming police departments throughout the country as soon as doing so becomes more profitable than oppressing communities of color on a nationwide scale. Until then, you can expect him and his neoliberal media apologists to pay lip service to the problem by providing highly controlled and emotionally loaded (but politically impotent) coverage of Black Lives Matter and Mothers of the Movement.

Joe Biden and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz will support the war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex until someone pays them more to leave non-violent U.S. citizens alone than they're currently being paid to support locking folks up. Until then, they'll keep telling us that forcing Americans to rot in jail is the only way to protect us from ourselves.

Dianne Feinstein will continue to support spying on citizens until it becomes more profitable for Silicon Valley to protect the privacy of consumers than it is to compromise that privacy. Until then, she'll keep telling us that the slightest possibility of cyber-terrorism justifies the U.S. government's decision to terrorize its own population through constant surveillance.

Andrew Cuomo will continue to support attempts to quash the BDS movement until it becomes more profitable to recognize the humanity of Palestinians than to support their oppression. Until then, he'll keep equating empathy for human beings in Palestine with anti-semitism.

Loretta Lynch will continue to support prosecution of Edward Snowden for the crime of exposing the criminal behavior of our government until it becomes more profitable for her to protect the Fourth Amendment than it currently is for her to subvert it. Until then, expect her to keep insisting that national security considerations require us to treat the exposure of crime as a more grievous offense than the perpetration of it.

None of these arguments stand up to scrutiny, but the neoliberals can make them because the neoliberal media refuses to challenge such nonsense. However, thanks to the Sanders insurgency, more Americans are "woke" in 2016 than I ever thought possible.

More precisely, I believe we were always woke. We just had no idea how many of us there were until Sanders exposed us to each other.

Our problem is that with Sanders out of the race for the presidency, we're not sure what to do with our collective energy. Some of us are supporting Jill Stein and the Green Party. Others are more interested in Brand New Congress. Still others are throwing themselves into local politics. The one thing all of us have in common is a growing awareness that we're not using the current lull in the political cycle as effectively as we should be.

Even if we're aware, as Anoa Changa is in this video, that we have to go through the growing pains associated with figuring out how best to organize ourselves, that doesn't necessarily make us feel less frustrated about the fact that what was once a clear plan ("Let's get Sanders elected!") has become much murkier ("Let's continue the political revolution!").

So I want to call everyone's attention to an insight that Tim Black shared last night in a live broadcast on YouTube:

Tim is absolutely right to observe that if this disappointing time is good for nothing else, it is good for revealing who our true friends and allies are. We're learning that many of the people who seemed to be champions of the Sanders movement (such as Robert Reich, Shaun King, and Jim Hightower) are plainly less committed to the cause than they pretended to be.

Here's the problem with our fair-weather friends: Focusing on the danger that Trump poses to the present is simply a distraction from the danger that Clinton poses to the future. When Reich calls Chris Hedges nonsensical for pointing out the many policy particulars that are identical between Trump and Clinton, he is engaging in the same sort of neoliberal water-carrying as King and Hightower when they choose to become alarmist about connections between Trump and Russia.

Even if we don't all agree on what we should do next, I think most of us do agree about what we have to recognize, which is that neoliberalism is the chief threat to our future and that the people who insist on tilting at neoliberal windmills are not trying to help.

Instead of arguing with them, we need to figure out how to move forward without them.The question isn't whether the neoliberal powers that be are going to install Clinton. They are. The question is: What are we going to do about it? We won't find an answer by lamenting the betrayals of presumed allies; we'll find it by debating amongst ourselves, which is why it's even more important to pay attention to YouTubers such as Black and Changa now than it was before Sanders dropped out.

New World Progress Has Become Old World Obstructionism

The Solar Impulse (a zero-fuel airplane) successfully completed its transatlantic flight earlier this week when it landed in Seville, Spain on Thursday after taking off from New York on Monday.

Pilot Bertrand Piccard remarked after the landing: "The Atlantic has always been this symbol of going from the Old World to the New."

The jarring thing about Piccard's comment is that in the strict geographical sense, he didn't travel from the Old World (Eurasia) to the New (the Americas). He plainly went from the New World (New York) to the Old (Spain).

But if we look at the world through the lens of energy paradigms, there's a sense in which Piccard got things exactly right.

Only in America (the New World) do we have significant numbers of people (with an even more significant amount of political clout) who deny that carbon emissions from fossil fuels are impacting the global climate.

Our fossil fuel lobbyists (and the political machinery that they fund and keep in place) have seen to it that America does everything possible to keep the entire world trapped in the fossil fuel era despite the fact that billions of human beings recognize that energy paradigm for the destructive and unhealthy process that it is.

Clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels pose an economic threat not only to America's energy corporations, but to the banking industry that supports those interests and the war profiteers who use conflicts in the Middle East and Latin America to tinker with oil prices worldwide.

If the world ran on clean energy, the recent coup in Brazil would have been impossible (because the bankers and their political puppets would have had no motive to conspire with the petroleum companies to subvert democracy). If the world ran on clean energy, Dick Cheney would never have had a motive to embroil the U.S. in a war with Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. If the world ran on clean energy, the American approach to global finance and diplomacy would simply be unrecognizable compared to what it is today.

But since the special interests that benefit from the current state of affairs are determined to perpetuate that state of affairs for as long as possible, the American government has become a tool for trapping the entire world in the status quo. The nation that once stood as a beacon of progress and democracy now serves as a bastion of stasis and oligarchy.

All the accusations that previous generations of Americans leveled against Europe and the Old World (e.g. being mired in systems of political corruption and cronyism) now apply to the current generation of U.S. citizens and the political machinery that is beyond their control.

So I don't think Piccard could have put things more accurately. America has become the Old World, the world of stifling and entrenched power structures that serve only to squelch new ideas and deter progress in the name of ensuring that the profit pipelines of crony capitalists continue to spew dollars into their coffers (and, of course, the wallets of the puppet politicians who do their bidding).

The progressive and democratic ideals that will lead us out of our current self-destructive path will have to come from the other side of the Atlantic or the Pacific--because America has become too old and crotchety to consider changing its ways.