By now you have probably read or heard about the upsetting 5.7% vote achieved by the party called the Swedish Democrats (in the U.S., voters tend to be so un-informed that the parties, if known, as they are here, as the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, and the Swedish Democrats, would all be confused with one another and voters would vote for one party while intending to vote for another one), who have their roots in Neo-Nazi-ism. They are NOT part of the center-right coalition I described in my last blog, and all of the major parties, no matter on the right or left, have furiously backed away from them. The fact is that 94% of Swedes did NOT vote for them, and so it's not as if they got a majority or anything like it. However, the fact that they won 5.7% of the vote means that they not only doubled their vote from the last election, but that they will have seats in Parliament. Since the "right" and "left" essentially split the rest of the vote, with the center-right coalition of 3 parties winning a slightly higher percentage of the remaining 94.3% than the left-coalition of 3 parties (but with the Social Democrats--the historic left party that dominated Swedish politics since the First World War ended until the LAST election--winning the largest percentage of votes out of all the parties running but at the same time winning its SMALLEST electoral share ever), the center-right coalition will remain in the Prime Minister's seat, and it is up to them to put together a government cabinet and a Parliament capable of passing legislation. Unfortunately, they will not be able to do so, even with their coalition of parties, since they did not win up a majority of the votes, so they need to negotiate with another small party to join them to make a majority. They have PROMISED to NOT do this with the neo-Nazi Swedish Democrats, and have made overtures to the Greens, which were part of the LEFT coalition and sharply criticized the center-right during the campaign. So far the Greens have said "no," but hopefully they will win some concessions from the governing coalition in order to join them in governing, because otherwise, they may break their promise and turn to the Nazi-types to pass legislation.
Many Swedes are horrified by the turn of events, and over 10,000 people turned out for an anti-racism rally (organized by a 17-year-old girl on Facebook, of course) in downtown Stockholm after the results were announced (by the way, the Swedes make it very easy to vote, as most countries do, by staging the election on a weekend --again, as most countries do--as well as allowing people to vote in the weeks leading up to it, so that the lines are not long. Why don't we do it that way? Answer, according to every single academic and politician who has analyzed it: Because it has always been important to PREVENT the majority of working Americans from voting, by holding it on ONE work day).
This seems to be a part of a problem the industrial world is having all over: the rise of racist, right-wing parties expressing anger, especially aimed at the immigrants who work in the worst jobs in each country, and/or who are seen as moving there to collect social services and not work at all, whether or not this is true. For example, even legal immigrants in the U.S cannot get most kinds of government assistance, and illegal ones pay into Social Security (because they often have fake Social Security cards) but cannot ever collect. They also work in the kinds of jobs that NO Americans will work in anymore, poultry processing, for example. But these kinds of facts are either not believed by many or do not matter; people believe what they hear, not what is true.
Interestingly, the European right-wing parties have different roots from each other. Some, such as the Norwegians, arose as anti-high-tax movements. In Sweden, however, there is no mass movement against the high tax system nor against the welfare state, which everyone pretty much supports (they only differ on defining and preventing "fraud" such as those who CAN work claiming disability to collect support, or those who supposedly move here from poorer countries in order to collect). It is very much, instead, a movement of anger against what are seen as those who threaten a pure Swedish identity, and especially against the Eastern Europeans (Polish, especially) and Muslims. This movement is made up largely of young Swedish males who don't know or don't care that the rhetoric being used is very similar to that used by the Nazis in Europe 70 -80years ago. And it appears to be fueled by rage against a changing economy that is viewed as threatening to their own place in the industrial workplace.
Part 2: My Own Political Fury
Meanwhile, instead of the disenfranchised, or even those THREATENED with economic disenfranchisement, rising up in fury at their poverty, their low chances of getting jobs or jobs that pay a decent wage, the starving of the social sector that has gone on in the U.S. for decades now, under the excuse that "times are hard, we can't afford it, we all must sacrifice," we are faced in the U.S. with a raging mass movement of the ENfranchised, of those who already have, who are furious at the idea that they might have to share their wealth with their fellow and sister citizens. The Tea Party's support does NOT come from the poor, or from young workers, or from young 20-somethings with college educations and no job prospects (the NINJA-Generation--No Income, No Job or Assets), or from the unemployed who have worked for decades and paid into unemployment benefits and are seeing those benefits threatened; no, it comes from the well-paid, already-well-housed, well-educated older Americans who do not realize that taxes are what are necessary in order for them to live in safety and to live in a society of educated, content, law-abiding people, that taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilization, instead of in chaos and violent anarchy. Millionaires and billionaires who think everyone ELSE has to sacrifice, while they deserve tax breaks simply for living, are who is bankrolling this movement of the rich and angry. Meanwhile, they claim that THEY need their tax breaks, while workers who have paid into social security and medicare all their lives can do without those services. Really!!1These same damn people are arguing both of these: "give me my tax breaks, and cut those people's unemployment benefits, because we can't afford them." They also want to privatize both social security and medicare by having everyone invest individually in the stock market to prepare for their old age and health care; think how well THAT would have worked over the last couple of years. But it's okay if OTHERS take risks; just not them. It's pretty much the same "ethic" that fueled the banking crisis: it's fine to screw over everyone else, because "I" have no responsibility for anyone else---but THEY have responsibility to "ME, " to make sure I stay rich. They never risk (because they get bailed out or get tax breaks for their losses), they never sacrifice, they never feel responsibility to anyone not related to them, and they NEVER acknowledge the debt to society THEY owe for the roads, bridges, ports, airports, schools, hospitals, R&D that they have benefited from and that WE all have funded, through OUR taxes. They've got theirs (and they insist, contrary to every fact, that they did it on their own. I once had a student insist that neither he nor his family should have to pay taxes, since they had earned it all on their own, while all the while he had gone to public school and was in public university, funded by taxpayers), and why should they make sure anyone else gets to have any, also? But everyone else can sacrifice to make sure THEY continue to be the richest people on the planet.
So the anger that is energizing the American right-wing political movement right now is NOT the same as that energizing the Swedish--or others'--right wing. However, this anger is also informed by anti-immigrant racism, and THAT emotion gives it a shared base with the non-elite Americans who do NOT need tax breaks for the wealthy. The wealthy politically USE these other AMericans who DO feel dis-enfranchised (whether or not they actually are. Survey after survey shows that it is white American males who are angriest about immigration and racial issues, as they feel less privileged than they feel they OUGHT to be, relative to women and racial and ethnic minorities. Even when they themselves are out-earning those women and minority men, they don't realize it, because they THOUGHT they'd be doing better than they are. And rather than blame corporations and the vastly wealthy for what they define as their predicament, they blame those BELOW them in the pay scale, as if THEY are to blame. Isn't this weird??? Why on earth DON'T Americans blame the rich and the CEOs for moving good jobs abroad, for wiping out unions, for fighting the minimum wage since it was first introduced in the early 20th century and at every single threatened increase in it since? Because American political rhetoric calls THAT kind of anger and blame (not the actual actions by the rich and by corporate owners against the working class) "class warfare," as if saying that corporations moved jobs first south and then abroad is a worse crime against the rich than the rich actually CUTTING those jobs and moving them to worse-paying areas is a crime against workers (poor victimized rich.). AND because our political rhetoric tells us that it's "welfare queens" who drive 40-year old Cadillacs who are to blame (25-30 years ago) or that it's hungry Central Americans whose lives back home are so horrible that they're willing to put up with jobs none of us would, just so they can send some money back home (exactly the way most of our ancestors did 100 or so years ago) who are to blame. The same privileged class that kept Hungarian and Irish miners at each others' throats, and southern whites and blacks at each others,' so that they wouldn't notice that THEY were cutting EVERYONE's wages, keeps telling us to blame each other for our woes, so that we won't notice that THEY are robbing us blind (think bank bail-outs, think tax breaks specifically for hedge-fund managers--the proposed ending of which one millionaire hedge-fund manager compared to the Nazi invasion of Poland, which is so grotesquely insulting to EVERYONE that he ought to have been chased from the scene. He was not. He said it at a banquet. Can you imagine? Ending the tax break for hedge-fund managers compared to the Nazi invasion of Poland? This man would play a Nazi in the movie). And meanwhile, tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires, which, face-it, none of us will ever be, will leave OUR nation impoverished. And then they will be able to say, "oh, but we HAVE to cut these services to veterans, to those otherwise-welfare-moms whom we sent to work and promised subsidized child care to, so their children wouldn't be left alone, to the unemployed, to schools; we can't possibly afford health care or that subsidized day care for poor moms, or to fix our roads or collapsing bridges, or to fund our state and national parks, or to clean up our environment, or make our borders safe, or to fix our roads and bridges and national parks, we can't possibly afford to have a jobs program....because the money just isn't there." And yet it WOULD have been there if we simply had the will to make them pay their share, instead of offering them breaks that the rest of us don't have. And we KNOW that "trickle-down" doesn't work; we KNOW from many studies that the very rich do NOT spend their tax cuts; we KNOW that they invest them into money-making schemes such as hedge-funds instead of into actual productive, employment-generating projects, such as into buying machinery to re-tool a factory so it can manufacture a new or improved product. We KNOW this. We also know that the population that actually uses any tax breaks by putting that money back INTO the economy is the poor and middle class, because, hey, they buy things with that money they otherwise can't afford to buy. And it IS, unfortunately, consumer spending that supports our economy, in a true trickle-down effect. All of this has been proven over and over again, by economists, for those who use facts, rather than ideology, to organize their political stances and voting behavior. These facts are readily available.
What angers me--even more than all of this--is that the Democratic Party has lost whatever balls it once may have had, and has turned into an ineffectual, running-scared group of politicians who care nothing about solving the nation's problems but only about getting re-elected (of course, the Republican party does the exact same thing, except that their FIRST concern is making Obama look bad, and they will do THAT at ANY cost, without caring a fig about the host of problems that beset us. Second is getting re-elected). We have a Congress made up of individuals who "govern" by ideology, not facts, and the Democrats seem incapable of even playing the rhetoric game against the Republicans, whose ability to define reality however they like is so eerily like "1984" that the book seems like prophecy. Obama continues to act like it's calm, fact-driven wonkiness that will win in the end, and unfortunately he has surrounded himself with "wonks" from the banking industry and those who made a killing in hedge-fund land, so his advisors create policies that profit the very people who will never vote for him or other Democrats, anyway.
Well who knew blogging could help a person vent? Now I know. Hopefully that will be it for my political blogging on here, as this is supposed to be a travel blog.
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