John Feffer - What’s the Matter with Eastern Europe? Welcome to the Birthplace of Trumpism
(In America).. thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens
United decision in 2010, rich, right-wing, anti-liberal individuals
and foundations have had an outsized impact on politics. Buoyed by the support of
the Koch brothers and others, the Trump administration will do everything
possible over the next three years to bankrupt the economy through tax
“reform,” pack the courts with anti-liberal judges, shed federal personnel, gut
federal regulations, and otherwise ensure that the government it hands to its
successor will be as close to drowned as possible...
He was a rich businessman, an outspoken outsider with a love of conspiracy theories. And he was a populist running for president. In 1990, when Donald Trump was still beyond the furthest outskirts of American politics, Stanislaw Tyminski was trying to become the new president of post-communist Poland. He shared something else with the future Trump: nobody in the political elite took Tyminski seriously. That was a mistake. He was the standard-bearer for a virulent right-wing populism that would one day take power in Poland and control the politics of the region. He would be the first in a long line of underestimated buffoons of the post-Cold War era who started us on a devolutionary path leading to Donald Trump. Tyminski’s major error: his political backwardness was a little ahead of its time. In true Trumpian fashion, Stan Tyminski couldn’t have been a more unlikely politician. As a successful businessman in Canada, he had made millions. He proved luckless, however, in Canadian politics. His Libertarian Party never got more than 1% of the vote.
In 1990, he decided to
return to his native Poland, then preparing for its first free presidential
election since the 1920s. A relatively open parliamentary election in 1989, as
the Warsaw Pact was beginning to unravel, had produced a solid victory for
candidates backed by the independent trade union, Solidarity. Those former
dissidents-turned-politicians had been governing for a year, with Solidarity
intellectual and pioneering newspaper editor Tadeusz Mazowiecki as prime
minister but former Communist general Wojciech Jaruzelski holding the
presidency. Now, the general was finally stepping aside.
Running in addition to
Mazowiecki was former trade union leader Lech Walesa, who had done
more than any other Pole to take down the Communist government (and received a
Nobel Prize for his efforts). Compared to such political giants, Tyminski was
an unknown. All three made
promises. Walesa announced that he would provide every Pole with
$10,000 to invest in new capitalist enterprises. Mazowiecki swore he’d get the
Rolling Stones to perform in Poland. Tyminski had the strangest pitch of all.
He carried around a black briefcase inside which, he claimed, was secret information
that would blow Polish politics to smithereens.
Tyminski managed to
get a toehold in national politics because, by November 1990, many Poles were
already fed up with the status quo Solidarity had ushered in. They’d suffered
the early consequences of the “shock therapy” economic reforms that would soon
be introduced across much of Eastern Europe and, after 1991, Russia. Although
the Polish economy had finally stabilized, unemployment had, by the end of
1990, shot up from next to nothing to 6.5% and the country’s
national income had fallen by more than 11%. Though some were doing well in the new
business-friendly environment, the general standard of living had plummeted as
part of Poland’s price for entering the global economy. The burden of that had
fallen disproportionately on workers in sunset industries, small farmers, and
pensioners… read more:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176359/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_drowning_liberalism_in_the_bathtub/#more