This was written in 2011 but it summarizes Obama presidency pretty nicely, even today. Betrayer
in chief, the master of bait and switch. That is the essence of Obama legacy. On "Great Democratic betrayal"...
Obama always was a closet neoliberal and neocon. A stooge of neoliberal financial oligarchy, a puppet,
if you want politically incorrect term. He just masked it well during hist first election campaigning
as a progressive democrat... And he faced Romney in his second campaign, who was even worse, so after
betraying American people once, he was reelected and did it twice. Much like Bush II. He like
another former cocaine addict -- George W Bush has never any intention of helping American people, only
oligarchy.
Notable quotes:
"... IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. ..."
"... We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues. ..."
"... These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community, opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power. ..."
"... Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to lead us back ..."
"... he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality, where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all Americans. ..."
"... I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator. ..."
"... Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson, have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed are even worse off than my family is. ..."
"... So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not the leader I thought I was voting for. ..."
"... I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans ..."
"... He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people. That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible, avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation. ..."
"... I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the country as Republicans are. ..."
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans
were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost
their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even
the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment,
with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what
they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that
he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and
suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes,
was a story something like this:
"I know you're scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This
was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated
with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated
regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn't work out. And
it didn't work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods,
with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we
will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting
money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity
to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can't promise that we
won't make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that
your government has your back again." A story isn't a policy. But that simple narrative - and the
policies that would naturally have flowed from it - would have inoculated against much of what was
to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands.
That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given
Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans
and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement.
It would have made clear that the problem wasn't tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit - a deficit
that didn't exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest
Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant
narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters,
but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut
themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share
for it.
But there was no story - and there has been none since.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of
his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his
first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had
happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president
had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building
the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis
out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden,
he thundered, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate
as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred."
When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best
exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a
major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial
one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power
in the wealthy. That's what we saw in 1928, and that's what we see today. At some point that power
is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform
ensues - and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt
started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the
trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation's food supply,
and protect America's land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.
Those were the shoes - that was the historic role - that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill.
The president is fond of referring to "the arc of history," paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s famous statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics
- in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness
and just punch harder the next time - he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for
at least a generation.
When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait
for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking
with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police
dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or
a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his
true and repugnant face in public.
IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic
inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack
Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the
people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that
decision to the public - a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind
it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story
of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them
for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem
other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer
confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked
the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his
temperament just didn't bend that far.
Michael August 7, 2011
Eloquently expressed and horrifically accurate, this excellent analysis articulates the frustration
that so many of us have felt watching Mr...
Bill Levine August 7, 2011
Very well put. I know that I have been going through Kübler-Ross's stages of grief ever since
the foxes (a.k.a. Geithner and Summers) were...
AnAverageAmerican August 7, 2011
"In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of
what they had just been through, what caused it,...
Unfortunately, the Democratic Congress of 2008-2010, did not have the will to make the economic
and social program decisions that would have improved the economic situation for the middle-class;
and it is becoming more obvious that President Obama does not have the temperament to publicly
push for programs and policies that he wants the congress to enact.
The American people have a problem: we reelect Obama and hope for the best; or we elect a Republican
and expect the worst. There is no question that the Health Care law that was just passed would
be reversed; Medicare and Medicare would be gutted; and who knows what would happen to Social
Security. You can be sure, though, that business taxes and regulation reforms would not be in
the cards and those regulations that have been enacted would be reversed. We have traveled this
road before and we should be wise enough not to travel it again!
Brilliant analysis - and I suspect that a very large number of those who voted for President
Obama will recognize in this the thoughts that they have been trying to ignore, or have been trying
not to say out loud. Later historians can complete this analysis and attempt to explain exactly
why Mr. Obama has turned out the way he has - but right now, it may be time to ask a more relevant
and urgent question.
If it is not too late, will a challenger emerge in time before the 2012 elections, or will
we be doomed to hold our noses and endure another four years of this?
Very eloquent and exactly to the point. Like many others, I was enthralled by the rhetoric
of his story, making the leap of faith (or hope) that because he could tell his story so well,
he could tell, as you put it, "the story the American people were waiting to hear."
Disappointment has darkened into disillusion, disillusion into a species of despair. Will I
vote for Barack Obama again? What are the options?
This is the most brilliant and tragic story I have read in a long time---in fact, precisely
since I read when Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt. When will a leader emerge with a true moral
vision for the federal government and for our country? Someone who sees government as a balance
to capitalism, and a means to achieve the social and economic justice that we (yes, we) believe
in? Will that leadership arrive before parts of America come to look like the dystopia of Johannesburg?
We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity
and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse
labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues.
These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones
that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government
to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community,
opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed
the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power.
Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at
GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to
lead us back to America's traditional position on the global economic/political spectrum.
He's brilliant and eloquent. He's achieved personal success that is inspirational. He's done some
good things as president. But he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality,
where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all
Americans.
Taxes, subsidies, entitlements, laws... these are the tools we have available to achieve our
national moral vision. But the vision has been muddled (hijacked?) and that is our biggest problem.
-->
I voted for Obama. I thought then, and still think, he's a decent person, a smart person, a
person who wants to do the best he can for others. When I voted for him, I was thinking he's a
centrist who will find a way to unite our increasingly polarized and ugly politics in the USA.
Or if not unite us, at least forge a way to get some important things done despite the ugly polarization.
And I must confess, I have been disappointed. Deeply so. He has not united us. He has not forged
a way to accomplish what needs to be done. He has not been a leader.
I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate
someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader
does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator.
Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than
trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats
who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson,
have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed
are even worse off than my family is.
So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not
the leader I thought I was voting for. Which leaves me feeling confused and close to apathetic
about what to do as a voter in 2012. More of the same isn't worth voting for. Yet I don't see
anyone out there who offers the possibility of doing better.
This was an extraordinarily well written, eloquent and comprehensive indictment of the failure
of the Obama presidency.
If a credible primary challenger to Obama ever could arise, the positions and analysis in this
column would be all he or she would need to justify the Democratic party's need to seek new leadership.
I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures
to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins
of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans,
he said "we don't disparage wealth in America." I was dumbfounded.
He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters
who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people.
That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who
acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible,
avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws
which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation.
I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict
averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political
and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the
country as Republicans are.
This was written in 2011 but it summarizes Obama presidency pretty nicely, even today. Betrayer
in chief, the master of bait and switch. That is the essence of Obama legacy. On "Great Democratic betrayal"...
Obama always was a closet neoliberal and neocon. A stooge of neoliberal financial oligarchy, a puppet,
if you want politically incorrect term. He just masked it well during hist first election campaigning
as a progressive democrat... And he faced Romney in his second campaign, who was even worse, so after
betraying American people once, he was reelected and did it twice. Much like Bush II. He like
another former cocaine addict -- George W Bush has never any intention of helping American people, only
oligarchy.
Notable quotes:
"... IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. ..."
"... We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues. ..."
"... These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community, opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power. ..."
"... Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to lead us back ..."
"... he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality, where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all Americans. ..."
"... I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator. ..."
"... Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson, have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed are even worse off than my family is. ..."
"... So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not the leader I thought I was voting for. ..."
"... I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans ..."
"... He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people. That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible, avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation. ..."
"... I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the country as Republicans are. ..."
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans
were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost
their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even
the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment,
with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what
they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that
he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and
suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes,
was a story something like this:
"I know you're scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This
was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated
with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated
regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn't work out. And
it didn't work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods,
with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we
will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting
money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity
to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can't promise that we
won't make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that
your government has your back again." A story isn't a policy. But that simple narrative - and the
policies that would naturally have flowed from it - would have inoculated against much of what was
to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands.
That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given
Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans
and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement.
It would have made clear that the problem wasn't tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit - a deficit
that didn't exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest
Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant
narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters,
but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut
themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share
for it.
But there was no story - and there has been none since.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of
his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his
first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had
happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president
had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building
the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis
out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden,
he thundered, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate
as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred."
When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best
exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a
major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial
one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power
in the wealthy. That's what we saw in 1928, and that's what we see today. At some point that power
is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform
ensues - and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt
started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the
trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation's food supply,
and protect America's land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.
Those were the shoes - that was the historic role - that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill.
The president is fond of referring to "the arc of history," paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s famous statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics
- in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness
and just punch harder the next time - he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for
at least a generation.
When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait
for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking
with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police
dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or
a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his
true and repugnant face in public.
IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic
inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack
Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the
people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that
decision to the public - a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind
it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story
of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them
for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem
other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer
confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked
the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his
temperament just didn't bend that far.
Michael August 7, 2011
Eloquently expressed and horrifically accurate, this excellent analysis articulates the frustration
that so many of us have felt watching Mr...
Bill Levine August 7, 2011
Very well put. I know that I have been going through Kübler-Ross's stages of grief ever since
the foxes (a.k.a. Geithner and Summers) were...
AnAverageAmerican August 7, 2011
"In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of
what they had just been through, what caused it,...
Unfortunately, the Democratic Congress of 2008-2010, did not have the will to make the economic
and social program decisions that would have improved the economic situation for the middle-class;
and it is becoming more obvious that President Obama does not have the temperament to publicly
push for programs and policies that he wants the congress to enact.
The American people have a problem: we reelect Obama and hope for the best; or we elect a Republican
and expect the worst. There is no question that the Health Care law that was just passed would
be reversed; Medicare and Medicare would be gutted; and who knows what would happen to Social
Security. You can be sure, though, that business taxes and regulation reforms would not be in
the cards and those regulations that have been enacted would be reversed. We have traveled this
road before and we should be wise enough not to travel it again!
Brilliant analysis - and I suspect that a very large number of those who voted for President
Obama will recognize in this the thoughts that they have been trying to ignore, or have been trying
not to say out loud. Later historians can complete this analysis and attempt to explain exactly
why Mr. Obama has turned out the way he has - but right now, it may be time to ask a more relevant
and urgent question.
If it is not too late, will a challenger emerge in time before the 2012 elections, or will
we be doomed to hold our noses and endure another four years of this?
Very eloquent and exactly to the point. Like many others, I was enthralled by the rhetoric
of his story, making the leap of faith (or hope) that because he could tell his story so well,
he could tell, as you put it, "the story the American people were waiting to hear."
Disappointment has darkened into disillusion, disillusion into a species of despair. Will I
vote for Barack Obama again? What are the options?
This is the most brilliant and tragic story I have read in a long time---in fact, precisely
since I read when Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt. When will a leader emerge with a true moral
vision for the federal government and for our country? Someone who sees government as a balance
to capitalism, and a means to achieve the social and economic justice that we (yes, we) believe
in? Will that leadership arrive before parts of America come to look like the dystopia of Johannesburg?
We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity
and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse
labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues.
These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones
that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government
to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community,
opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed
the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power.
Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at
GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to
lead us back to America's traditional position on the global economic/political spectrum.
He's brilliant and eloquent. He's achieved personal success that is inspirational. He's done some
good things as president. But he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality,
where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all
Americans.
Taxes, subsidies, entitlements, laws... these are the tools we have available to achieve our
national moral vision. But the vision has been muddled (hijacked?) and that is our biggest problem.
-->
I voted for Obama. I thought then, and still think, he's a decent person, a smart person, a
person who wants to do the best he can for others. When I voted for him, I was thinking he's a
centrist who will find a way to unite our increasingly polarized and ugly politics in the USA.
Or if not unite us, at least forge a way to get some important things done despite the ugly polarization.
And I must confess, I have been disappointed. Deeply so. He has not united us. He has not forged
a way to accomplish what needs to be done. He has not been a leader.
I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate
someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader
does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator.
Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than
trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats
who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson,
have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed
are even worse off than my family is.
So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not
the leader I thought I was voting for. Which leaves me feeling confused and close to apathetic
about what to do as a voter in 2012. More of the same isn't worth voting for. Yet I don't see
anyone out there who offers the possibility of doing better.
This was an extraordinarily well written, eloquent and comprehensive indictment of the failure
of the Obama presidency.
If a credible primary challenger to Obama ever could arise, the positions and analysis in this
column would be all he or she would need to justify the Democratic party's need to seek new leadership.
I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures
to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins
of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans,
he said "we don't disparage wealth in America." I was dumbfounded.
He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters
who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people.
That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who
acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible,
avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws
which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation.
I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict
averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political
and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the
country as Republicans are.
"Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Donald Trump"
Yeah, that seems like a clear statement, but when you consider that the vast majority of people
do not habitually read closely and interpret things literally, I can see how this would easily
be misinterpreted.
Russia tampered with the election to help Donald Trump. That's a fairly well established fact.
It's not the same as "tampered with vote tallies" but an inattentive poll respondent might assume
the question was about the former. And most people are inattentive.
"Russia tampered with the election to help Donald Trump. That's a fairly well established fact."
You are funny. Especially with your "well established fact" nonsense.
In such cases the only source of well established facts is a court of law or International
observers of the elections. All other agencies have their own interest in distorting the truth.
For example, to get additional funding.
And that list includes President Obama himself, as a player, because he clearly was a Hillary
supporter and as such can not be considered an impartial player and can politically benefit from
shifting the blame for fiasco to Russia.
Also historically, he never was very truthful with American people, was he? As in case of his
"Change we can believe in!" bait and switch trick.
There were several other important foreign players in the US elections: for example KAS and
Israel. Were their actions investigated? Especially in the area of financial support of candidates.
And then FYI there is a documented history of US tampering in Russian Presidential election
of 2011-2012 such as meetings of the US ambassador with the opposition leaders, financing of opposition
via NGO, putting pressure by publishing election pools produced by US financed non-profits, and
so on and so forth. All in the name of democracy, of course. Which cost Ambassador McFaul his
position; NED was kicked out of the country.
As far as I remember nobody went to jail in the USA for those activities. There was no investigation.
So it looks like the USA authorities considered this to be a pretty legal activity. Then why they
complain now?
And then there is the whole rich history of CIA subverting elections in Latin America.
So is not this a case of "the pot calling the kettle black"?
I don't know. But I would avoid your simplistic position. The case is too complex for this.
At least more complex that the narrative the neoliberal MSMs try to present us with. It might
be Russian influence was a factor, but it might be that it was negligible and other factors were
in play. There is also a pre-history and there are other suspects.
You probably need to see a wider context of the event.
"... Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer, journalist and media analyst. She has lived and traveled extensively in the US, Germany, Russia and Hungary. Her byline has appeared at RT, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, The BRICS Post, New Eastern Outlook, Global Independent Analytics and many others. She also works on copywriting and editing projects. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook or at her website www.danielleryan.net. ..."
According to the anonymous sources inside the anonymous US intelligence agency,
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, but the whole thing began as a "vendetta"
against Hillary Clinton because she said some mean things about him a few
times. Putin is also an "immature 12 year-old child," a former US official with
links to the defense industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed
(with high confidence).
The high level, anonymous and completely trustworthy sources also told a major
US news agency that Putin himself had piloted a specially-designed Russian spy
plane across the Atlantic to personally direct the still-ongoing hacking
operations from the air.
via GIPHY
Satellite images seen by a separate anonymous NASA whistleblower are believed
to show Putin in the cockpit of the spy plane alongside his co-pilot Boris, a
lifelike robotic bear which has been under secret development in the depths of
Siberia and has been programmed to attack Putin's enemies on command using a
variety of lethal methods.
The NASA whistleblower did not provide journalists with photographic evidence,
but the editors had a chat about it in their morning meeting and concluded that
it's probably still true.
In fact, the American news agency could not verify any of the claims from the
officials who commented for the story, but given that their sources used the
term "high confidence" they took this to mean the evidence must be "nearly
incontrovertible" and relayed the information to the public with this
implication. An understandable decision, since, as we all know, only 100
percent factual information is ever released by anonymous intelligence
officials.
Okay, let's rewind.
Obviously that bit about the bear and the plane was
fake news. And maybe a few other bits, too. But it all demonstrates a point.
I've provided you with about the same amount of evidence as NBC has in its
story this week
claiming Putin personally rigged
the US election:
I made some allegations, I cited anonymous sources and then I conveyed it to
you readers as "nearly incontrovertible" and suggested no further digging or
investigation, or even a bit of healthy skepticism, was necessary.
Journalism is dying
There was a time when journalists needed more than 'maybes' and 'probablys'
before deciding what their sources told them was "incontrovertible" and
delivering half-baked conspiracy theories to the public. That time has
apparently long gone.
Imagine for a moment that RT published a story about, oh, let's say Barack
Obama personally hacking into Putin's computer. Now imagine the only evidence
RT provided was "anonymous FSB officials" and told its readers the story was
therefore practically indisputable because these anonymous sources were
"confident" in the legitimacy of their secret evidence. Imagine the laughs that
would get from sneering Western journalists. Well, that's pretty much exactly
what NBC did. And they're not alone. The
Washington Post
has been at
it too,
reporting on a "secret" CIA assessment that Russia worked to get Donald
Trump elected, quoting anonymous "top officials" and like NBC, providing no
evidence.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but for something to be presented to the
public as indisputable fact, there must be evidence made available to back it
up. Neither the CIA or the FBI have provided any such evidence to the public.
Perhaps the saddest thing though is having to acknowledge that all our debates
over fake news and real news really don't matter because the very people we are
told to trust are the people who will most adeptly use the public's concerns
over fake news to manipulate them. The CIA, for example, is hardly known for
its long history of telling the truth. Its employees are literally trained in
the art of deception and disinformation. They are hardly averse to creating a
bit of fake news or making up 'evidence' where needed. Anything they say or do
can be forgiven once someone utters the words "national security".
NBC's story claimed Putin not only wanted to embarrass Clinton with the DNC
leaks, but to highlight corruption in the American political system; the emails
showing, for example, how the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign to ensure
Clinton, not Bernie Sanders, would be the Democratic nominee.
Now, what better way to encourage people to ignore the corruption in
the system than to focus their attention on the idea that Putin is the one who
told them about it? Are people really reading these stories and convincing
themselves that the CIA is the most credible source of public information on
what the Russians are doing?
Clinton's long-shot
We've been hearing about Russian hacking for months, long before the election
results in November, so why the sudden confidence in all this new and secret
evidence? Why the new assertions that Putin himself directed the hacking? Look
at your calendar. The Electoral College votes on Monday and it may be Clinton's
last hope. It's a long shot, but in true Clinton character, she won't go down
without a fight to the last gasp. Her best hope is to convince the Electoral
College that Trump's win was influenced by a foreign power, is therefore
illegitimate and that national security will be at stake if he takes office.
Amazingly, in the midst of all this, while Clinton's camp is still trying to
get her elected through back-door tactics, Obama has pretty much called the
election results
legitimate .
Members of the Electoral College are expected to vote the way their states
voted, but they are not required to. If Clinton can get enough members to flip
their votes, Trump is deprived of the 270 votes he needs to become president.
That's what this is really all about - and the media is serving as Clinton's
willing accomplice.
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer, journalist and media analyst.
She has lived and traveled extensively in the US, Germany, Russia and Hungary.
Her byline has appeared at RT, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, The BRICS Post,
New Eastern Outlook, Global Independent Analytics and many others. She also
works on copywriting and editing projects. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook or
at her website www.danielleryan.net.
"... this will probably be in tomorrow's washington post. "how putin sabotaged the election by hacking yahoo mail". and "proton" and "putin" are 2 syllable words beginning with "p", which is dispositive according to experts who don't want to be indentified. ..."
"... [Neo]Liberals have gone truly insane, I made the mistake of trying to slog through the comments the main "putin did it" piece on huffpo out of curiosity. Big mistake, liberals come across as right wing nutters in the comments, I never knew they were so very patriotic, they never really expressed it before. ..."
"... Be sure and delete everything from your Yahoo account BEFORE you push the big red button. They intentionally wait 90 days to delete the account in order that ECPA protections expire and content can just be handed over to the fuzz. ..."
"... It's a good thing for Obama that torturing logic and evasive droning are not criminal acts. ..."
"... "Relations with Russia have declined over the past several years" I reflexively did a Google search. Yep, Victoria Nuland is still employed. ..."
"... With all the concern expressed about Russian meddling in our election process why are we forgetting the direct quid pro quo foreign meddling evidenced in the Hillary emails related to the seldom mentioned Clinton Foundation or the more likely meddling by local election officials? Why have the claims of Russian hacking received such widespread coverage in the Press? ..."
"... I watched it too and agree with your take on it. For all the build up about this press conference and how I thought we were going to engage in direct combat with Russia for these hacks (or so they say it is Russia, I still wonder about that), he did not add any fuel to this fire. ..."
"... The whole thing was silly – the buildup to this press conference and then how Obama handled the hacking. A waste of time really. I don't sense something is going on behind the scenes but it is weird that the news has been all about this Russian hacking. He did not get into the questions about the Electoral College either and he made it seem like Trump indeed is the next President. I mean it seems like the MSM was making too much about this issue but then nothing happened. ..."
this will probably be in tomorrow's washington post. "how putin sabotaged the election
by hacking yahoo mail". and "proton" and "putin" are 2 syllable words beginning with "p",
which is dispositive according to experts who don't want to be indentified.
[Neo]Liberals have gone truly insane, I made the mistake of trying to slog through the
comments the main "putin did it" piece on huffpo out of curiosity. Big mistake, liberals come
across as right wing nutters in the comments, I never knew they were so very patriotic, they never
really expressed it before.
Be sure and delete everything from your Yahoo account BEFORE you push the big red button. They
intentionally wait 90 days to delete the account in order that ECPA protections expire and content
can just be handed over to the fuzz.
I don't think I've looked at my yahoo account in 8-10 years and I didn't use their email; just
had an address. I don't remember my user name or password. I did get an email from them (to my
not-yahoo address) advising of the breach.
I was amazed as I watched a local am news show in Pittsburgh recommend adding your cell phone
number in addition to changing your password. Yeah, that's a great idea, maybe my ss# would provide
even more security.
I use yahoo email. Why should I move? As I understood the breach it was primarily a breach
of the personal information used to establish the account. I've already changed my password -
did it a couple of days after the breach was reported. I had a security clearance with DoD which
requires disclosure of a lot more personal information than yahoo had. The DoD data has been breached
twice from two separate servers.
As far as reading my emails - they may prove useful for phishing but that's about all. I'm
not sure what might be needed for phishing beyond a name and email address - easily obtained from
many sources I have no control over.
So - what am I vulnerable to by remaining at yahoo that I'm not already exposed to on a more
secure server?
Yeah, it isn't like Mr. 'We go high' is going to admit our relationship has declined because
we have underhandedly tried to isolate and knee cap them for pretty much his entire administration.
Are you referring to Obama's press conference? If so, I am glad he didn't make a big deal out
of the Russian hacking allegations - as in it didn't sound like he planned a retaliation for the
fictional event and its fictional consequences. He rose slightly in stature in my eyes - he's
almost as tall as a short flea.
With all the concern expressed about Russian meddling in our election process why are we forgetting
the direct quid pro quo foreign meddling evidenced in the Hillary emails related to the seldom
mentioned Clinton Foundation or the more likely meddling by local election officials? Why have
the claims of Russian hacking received such widespread coverage in the Press?
Why is a lameduck
messing with the Chinese in the South China sea? What is the point of all the "fake" news hogwash?
Is it related to Obama's expression of concern about the safety of the Internet? I can't shake
the feeling that something is going on below the surface of these murky waters.
I watched it too and agree with your take on it. For all the build up about this press conference
and how I thought we were going to engage in direct combat with Russia for these hacks (or so
they say it is Russia, I still wonder about that), he did not add any fuel to this fire.
He did
respond at one point to a reporter that the hacks from Russia were to the DNC and Podesta but
funny how he didn't say HRC emails. Be it as it may, I think what was behind it was HRC really
trying to impress all her contributors that Russia really did do her in, see Obama said so, since
she must be in hot water over all the money she has collected from foreign governments for pay
to play and her donors.
The whole thing was silly – the buildup to this press conference and then
how Obama handled the hacking. A waste of time really. I don't sense something is going on behind
the scenes but it is weird that the news has been all about this Russian hacking. He did not get
into the questions about the Electoral College either and he made it seem like Trump indeed is
the next President. I mean it seems like the MSM was making too much about this issue but then
nothing happened.
Unfortunately the nightly news is focusing on Obama says Russia hacked the DNC and had it in
for Clinton!!! He warned them to stay out of the vote! There will be consequences! Russia demands
the evidence and then a story about the evidence. (This one might have a few smarter people going
"huh, that's it?!?!")
I do like the some private some public on that consequences and retaliation thing. You either
have to laugh or throw up about the faux I've got this and the real self-righteousness. Especially
since it is supposedly to remind people we can do it to you. Is there anyone left outside of America
who doesn't think they already do do it to anyone Uncle Sam doesn't want in office and even some
they do? Mind you I'm not sure how many harried people watching the news are actually going to
laugh at that one because they don't know how how much we meddle.
"... Shorter Paul Krugman: nobody acted more irresponsibly in the last election than the New York Times. ..."
"... Looks like Putin recruited the NYT, the FBI and the DNC. ..."
"... Dr. Krugman is feeding this "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. He comes across as increasingly shrill and even unhinged - it's a slide he's been taking for years IMO, which is a big shame. ..."
"... It is downright irresponsible and dangerous for a major public intellectual with so little information to cast the shadow of legitimacy on a president ("And it means not acting as if this was a normal election whose result gives the winner any kind of a mandate, or indeed any legitimacy beyond the bare legal requirements.") This kind of behavior is EXACTLY what TRUMP and other authoritarians exhibit - using pieces of information to discredit institutions and individuals. Since foreign governments have and will continue to try to influence U.S. policy through increasingly sophisticated means, this opens the door for anyone to declare our elections and policies as illegitimate in the future. ..."
"... Any influence Russian hacking had was entirely a consequence of U.S. media obsession with celebrity, gotcha and horse race trivia and two-party red state/blue state tribalism. ..."
"... Without the preceding, neither Trump nor Clinton would have been contenders in the first place. Putin didn't invent super delegates, Citizens United, Fox News, talk radio, Goldman-Sachs, etc. etc. etc. If Putin exploited vulnerabilities, it is because preserving those vulnerabilities was more important to the elites than fostering a democratic political culture. ..."
"... It's not a "coup". It's an election result that didn't go the way a lot of people want. That's it. It's probably not optimal, but I'm pretty sure that democracy isn't supposed to produce optimal results. ..."
"... All this talk about "coups" and "illegitimacy" is nuts, and -- true to Dem practice -- incredibly short-sighted. For many, voting for Trump was an available way to say to those people, "We don't believe you any more. At all." Seen in that light, it is a profoundly democratic (small 'd') response to elites that have most consistently served only themselves. ..."
"... Post Truth is Pre-Fascism. The party that thinks your loyalty is suspect unless you wear a flag pin fuels itself on Post Truth. Isnt't this absurdity the gist of Obama's Russia comments today!?! ..."
"... Unless the Russians or someone else hacked the ballot box machines, it is our own damn fault. ..."
"... The ship of neo-liberal trade sailed in the mid-2000's. That you don't get that is sad. You can only milk that so far the cow had been milked. ..."
"... The people of the United States did not have much to choose between: Either a servant of the Plutocrats or a member of the Plutocratic class. The Dems brought this on us when they refused to play fair with Bernie. (Hillary would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway.) ..."
"... The Repubs brought this on, by refusing to govern. The media brought this on: I seem to remember Hillary's misfeasances, once nominated, festering in the media, while Trump's were mentioned, and then disappeared. (Correct me if I'm wrong in this.) Also, the media downplayed Bernie until he had no real chance. ..."
"... The government brought this on, by failing to pursue justice against the bankers, and failing to represent the people, especially the majority who have been screwed by trade and the plutocratic elite and their apologists. ..."
"... The educational system brought this on, by failing to educate the people to critical thought. For instance: 1) The wealthy run the country. 2) The wealthy have been doing very well. 3) Everybody else has not. It seems most people cannot draw the obvious conclusion. ..."
"... Krugman is himself one of those most useful idiots. I do not recall his clarion call to Democrats last spring that "FBI investigation" and "party Presidential nominee" was bound to be an ugly combination. Some did; right here as I recall. Or his part in the official "don't vote for third party" week in the Clinton media machine....thanks, hundreds of thousands of Trump votes got the message. ..."
"... It's too rich to complain about Russia and Wikileaks as if those elements in anyway justified Clinton becoming President. Leaks mess with our democracy? Then for darn sure do not vote for a former Sec. of State willing to use a home server for her official business. Russia is menacing? Just who has been managing US-Russia relations the past 8 years? I voted for her anyway, but the heck if I think some tragic fate has befell the nation here. Republicans picked a better candidate to win this thing than we Democrats did. ..."
"... The truth of the matter is that Clinton was a very weak candidate with nothing to offer but narcissism ("I'm with her"). It's notable that Clinton has still not accepted responsibility for her campaign, preferring to throw the blame for the loss anywhere but herself. Sociopathy much? ..."
[ I find it terrifying, simply terrifying, to refer to people as "useful idiots" after all
the personal destruction that has followed when the expression was specifically used in the past.
To me, using such an expression is an honored economist intent on becoming Joseph McCarthy.
]
To demean a person as though the person were a communist or a fool of communists or the like,
with all the personal harm that has historically brought in this country, is cruel beyond my understanding
or imagining.
Well, not really. For example he referred to "the close relationship between Wikileaks and Russian
intelligence." But Wikileaks is a channel. They don't seek out material. They rely on people to
bring material to them. They supposedly make an effort to verify that the material is not a forgery,
but aside from that what they release is what people bring to them. Incidentally, like so many
people you seem to not care whether the material is accurate or not -- Podesta and the DNC have
not claimed that any of the emails are different from what they sent.
ZURICH - If Putin the Thug gets away with crushing Ukraine's new democratic experiment and
unilaterally redrawing the borders of Europe, every pro-Western country around Russia will be
in danger....
Yup, like the other elections, the bases stayed solvent and current events factored into the turnout
and voting patterns which spurred the independent vote.
When people were claiming Clinton was going to win big, I thought no Republican and Democratic
voters are going to pull the lever like a trained monkey as usual. Only difference in this election
was Hillary's huge negatives due entirely by her and Bill Clinton's support for moving manufacturing
jobs to Mexico and China in the 90s.
To Understand Trump, Learn Russian http://nyti.ms/2hLcrB1
NYT - Andrew Rosenthal - December 15
The Russian language has two words for truth - a linguistic quirk that seems relevant to our
current political climate, especially because of all the disturbing ties between the newly elected
president and the Kremlin.
The word for truth in Russian that most Americans know is "pravda" - the truth that seems evident
on the surface. It's subjective and infinitely malleable, which is why the Soviet Communists called
their party newspaper "Pravda." Despots, autocrats and other cynical politicians are adept at
manipulating pravda to their own ends.
But the real truth, the underlying, cosmic, unshakable truth of things is called "istina" in
Russian. You can fiddle with the pravda all you want, but you can't change the istina.
For the Trump team, the pravda of the 2016 election is that not all Trump voters are explicitly
racist. But the istina of the 2016 campaign is that Trump's base was heavily dependent on racists
and xenophobes, Trump basked in and stoked their anger and hatred, and all those who voted for
him cast a ballot for a man they knew to be a racist, sexist xenophobe. That was an act of racism.
Trump's team took to Twitter with lightning speed recently to sneer at the conclusion by all
17 intelligence agencies that the Kremlin hacked Democratic Party emails for the specific purpose
of helping Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton. Trump said the intelligence agencies got it wrong
about Iraq, and that someone else could have been responsible for the hack and that the Democrats
were just finding another excuse for losing.
The istina of this mess is that powerful evidence suggests that the Russians set out to interfere
in American politics, and that Trump, with his rejection of Western European alliances and embrace
of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, was their chosen candidate.
The pravda of Trump's selection of Rex Tillerson, head of Exxon Mobil, as secretary of state
is that by choosing an oil baron who has made billions for his company by collaborating with Russia,
Trump will make American foreign policy beholden to American corporate interests.
That's bad enough, but the istina is far worse. For one thing, American foreign policy has
been in thrall to American corporate interests since, well, since there were American corporations.
Just look at the mess this country created in Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and
the Middle East to serve American companies.
Yes, Tillerson has ignored American interests repeatedly, including in Russia and Iraq, and
has been trying to remove sanctions imposed after Russia's seizure of Crimea because they interfered
with one of his many business deals. But take him out of the equation in the Trump cabinet and
nothing changes. Trump has made it plain, with every action he takes, that he is going to put
every facet of policy, domestic and foreign, at the service of corporate America. The istina here
is that Tillerson is just a symptom of a much bigger problem.
The pravda is that Trump was right in saying that the intelligence agencies got it wrong about
Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
But the istina is that Trump's contempt for the intelligence services is profound and dangerous.
He's not getting daily intelligence briefings anymore, apparently because they are just too dull
to hold his attention.
And now we know that Condoleezza Rice was instrumental in bringing Tillerson to Trump's attention.
As national security adviser and then secretary of state for president George W. Bush, Rice was
not just wrong about Iraq, she helped fabricate the story that Hussein had nuclear weapons.
Trump and Tillerson clearly think they are a match for the wily and infinitely dangerous Putin,
but as they move foward with their plan to collaborate with Russia instead of opposing its imperialist
tendencies, they might keep in mind another Russian saying, this one from Lenin.
"There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience," he wrote. "A scoundrel may be
of use to us just because he is a scoundrel."
Putin has that philosophy hard-wired into his political soul. When it comes to using scoundrels
to get what he wants, he is a professional, and Trump is only an amateur. That is the istina of
the matter.
If nothing else, Russia - with a notably un-free press - has shrewdly used our own 'free press'
against US.
RUSSIA'S UNFREE PRESS
The Boston Globe - Marshall Goldman - January 29, 2001
AS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION DEBATES ITS POLICY TOWARD RUSSIA, FREEDOM OF THE PRESS SHOULD BE
ONE OF ITS MAJOR CONCERNS. UNDER PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN THE PRESS IS FREE ONLY AS LONG AS IT
DOES NOT CRITICIZE PUTIN OR HIS POLICIES. WHEN NTV, THE TELEVISION NETWORK OF THE MEDIA GIANT
MEDIA MOST, REFUSED TO PULL ITS PUNCHES, MEDIA MOST'S OWNER, VLADIMIR GUSINSKY, FOUND HIMSELF
IN JAIL, AND GAZPROM, A COMPANY DOMINATED BY THE STATE, BEGAN TO CALL IN LOANS TO MEDIA MOST.
Unfortunately, Putin's actions are applauded by more than 70 percent of the Russian people. They
crave a strong and forceful leader; his KGB past and conditioned KGB responses are just what they
seem to want after what many regard as the social, political, and economic chaos of the last decade.
But what to the Russians is law and order (the "dictatorship of the law," as Putin has so accurately
put it) looks more and more like an old Soviet clampdown to many Western observers.
There is no complaint about Putin's promises. He tells everyone he wants freedom of the press.
But in the context of his KGB heritage, his notion of freedom of the press is something very different.
In an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, he said that that press freedom excludes the
"hooliganism" or "uncivilized" reporting he has to deal with in Moscow. By that he means criticism,
especially of his conduct of the war in Chechnya, his belated response to the sinking of the Kursk,
and the heavy-handed way in which he has pushed aside candidates for governor in regional elections
if they are not to Putin's liking.
He does not take well to criticism. When asked by the relatives of those lost in the Kursk
why he seemed so unresponsive, Putin tried to shift the blame for the disaster onto the media
barons, or at least those who had criticized him. They were the ones, he insisted, who had pressed
for reduced funding for the Navy while they were building villas in Spain and France. As for their
criticism of his behavior, They lie! They lie! They lie!
Our Western press has provided good coverage of the dogged way Putin and his aides have tried
to muscle Gusinsky out of the Media Most press conglomerate he created. But those on the Putin
enemies list now include even Boris Berezovsky, originally one of Putin's most enthusiastic promoters
who after the sinking of the Kursk also became a critic and thus an opponent.
Gusinsky would have a hard time winning a merit badge for trustworthiness (Berezovsky shouldn't
even apply), but in the late Yeltsin and Putin years, Gusinsky has earned enormous credit for
his consistently objective news coverage, including a spotlight on malfeasance at the very top.
More than that, he has supported his programmers when they have subjected Yeltsin and now Putin
to bitter satire on Kukly, his Sunday evening prime-time puppet show.
What we hear less of, though, is what is happening to individual reporters, especially those
engaged in investigative work. Almost monthly now there are cases of violence and intimidation.
Among those brutalized since Putin assumed power are a reporter for Radio Liberty who dared to
write negative reports about the Russian Army's role in Chechnia and four reporters for Novaya
Gazeta. Two of them were investigating misdeeds by the FSB (today's equivalent of the KGB), including
the possibility that it rather than Chechins had blown up a series of apartment buildings. Another
was pursuing reports of money-laundering by Yeltsin family members and senior staff in Switzerland.
Although these journalists were very much in the public eye, they were all physically assaulted.
Those working for provincial papers labor under even more pressure with less visibility. There
are numerous instances where regional bosses such as the governor of Vladivostok operate as little
dictators, and as a growing number of journalists have discovered, challenges are met with threats,
physical intimidation, and, if need be, murder.
True, freedom of the press in Russia is still less than 15 years old, and not all the country's
journalists or their bosses have always used that freedom responsibly. During the 1996 election
campaign, for example, the media owners, including Gusinsky conspired to denigrate or ignore every
viable candidate other than Yeltsin. But attempts to muffle if not silence criticism have multiplied
since Putin and his fellow KGB veterans have come to power. Criticism from any source, be it an
individual journalist or a corporate entity, invites retaliation.
When Media Most persisted in its criticism, Putin sat by approvingly as his subordinates sent
in masked and armed tax police and prosecutors. When that didn't work, they jailed Gusinsky on
charges that were later dropped, although they are seeking to extradite and jail him again. along
with his treasurer, on a new set of charges. Yesterday the prosecutor general summoned Tatyana
Mitkova, the anchor of NTV's evening news program, for questioning. Putin's aides are also doing
all they can to prevent Gusinsky from refinancing his debt-ridden operation with Ted Turner or
anyone else in or outside of the country.
According to one report, Putin told one official, You deal with the shares, debts, and management
and I will deal with the journalists. His goal simply is to end to independent TV coverage in
Russia. ...
"Unfortunately, Putin's actions are applauded by more than 70 percent of the Russian people"
Exactly; the majority of people are so stupid and/or lazy that they cannot be bothered understanding
what is going on; and how their hard won democracy is being subjugated. But thank God that is
in Russia not here in the US - right?
"Pravda" is etymologically derived from "prav-" which means "right" (as opposed to "left", other
connotations are "proper", "correct", "rightful", also legal right). It designates the social-construct
aspect of "righteousness/truthfulness/correctness" as opposed to "objective reality" (conceptually
independent of social standards, in reality anything but). In formal logic, "istina" is used to
designate truth. Logical falsity is designated a "lie".
It is a feature common to most European languages that rightfulness, righteousness, correctness,
and legal rights are identified with the designation for the right side. "Sinister" is Latin for
"left".
If you believe 911 was a Zionist conspiracy, so where the Paris attacks of November 2015, when
Trump was failing in the polls as the race was moving toward as you would expect, toward other
candidates. After the Paris attacks, his numbers reaccelerated.
If "ZOG" created the "false flag" of the Paris attacks to start a anti-Muslim fervor, they
succeeded, much like 911. Bastille day attacks were likewise, a false flag. This is not new, this
goes back to when the aristocracy merged with the merchant caste, creating the "bourgeois". They
have been running a parallel government in the shadows to effect what is seen.
There used to be something called Usenet News, where at the protocol level reader software could
fetch meta data (headers containing author, (stated) origin, title, etc.) independently from comment
bodies. This was largely owed to limited download bandwidth. Basically all readers had "kill files"
i.e. filters where one could configure that comments with certain header parameters should not
be downloaded, or even hidden.
The main application was that the reader would download comments in the background when headers
were already shown, or on demand when you open a comment.
Now you get the whole thing (or in units of 100) by the megabyte.
A major problem is signal extraction out of the massive amounts of noise generated by the media,
social media, parties, and pundits.
It's easy enough to highlight this thread of information here, but in real time people are
being bombarded by so many other stories.
In particular, the Clinton Foundation was also regularly being highlighted for its questionable
ties to foreign influence. And HRC's extravagant ties to Wall St. And so much more.
The media's job was to sell Trump and denounce Clinton. The mistake a lot of people make is thinking
the global elite are the "status quo". They are not. They are generally the ones that break the
status quo more often than not.
The bulk of them wanted Trump/Republican President and made damn sure it was President. Buffering
the campaign against criticism while overly focusing on Clinton's "crap". It took away from the
issues which of course would have low key'd the election.
Not much bullying has to be applied when there are "economic incentives". The media attention
economy and ratings system thrive on controversy and emotional engagement. This was known a century
ago as "only bad news is good news". As long as I have lived, the non-commercial media not subject
(or not as much) to these dynamics have always been perceived as dry and boring.
I heard from a number of people that they followed the campaign "coverage" (in particular Trump)
as gossip/entertainment, and those were people who had no sympathies for him. And even media coverage
by outlets generally critical of Trump's unbelievable scandals and outrageous performances catered
to this sentiment.
First, let me disclose that I detest TRUMP and that the Russian meddling has me deeply concerned.
Yet...
We only have assertions that the Russian hacking had some influence. We do not know whether
it likely had *material* influence that could have reasonably led to a swing state(s) going to
TRUMP that otherwise would have gone to HRC.
Dr. Krugman is feeding this "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. He comes across
as increasingly shrill and even unhinged - it's a slide he's been taking for years IMO, which
is a big shame.
It is downright irresponsible and dangerous for a major public intellectual with so little
information to cast the shadow of legitimacy on a president ("And it means not acting as if this
was a normal election whose result gives the winner any kind of a mandate, or indeed any legitimacy
beyond the bare legal requirements.") This kind of behavior is EXACTLY what TRUMP and other authoritarians
exhibit - using pieces of information to discredit institutions and individuals. Since foreign
governments have and will continue to try to influence U.S. policy through increasingly sophisticated
means, this opens the door for anyone to declare our elections and policies as illegitimate in
the future.
It is quite clear that the Russians intervened on Trump's behalf and that this intervention had
an impact. The problem is that we cannot actually quantify that impact.
"We only have assertions that the Russian hacking had some influence."
Any influence Russian hacking had was entirely a consequence of U.S. media obsession with
celebrity, gotcha and horse race trivia and two-party red state/blue state tribalism.
Without the preceding, neither Trump nor Clinton would have been contenders in the first
place. Putin didn't invent super delegates, Citizens United, Fox News, talk radio, Goldman-Sachs,
etc. etc. etc. If Putin exploited vulnerabilities, it is because preserving those vulnerabilities
was more important to the elites than fostering a democratic political culture.
But this is how influence is exerted - by using the dynamics of the adversary's/targets organization
as an amplifier. Hierarchical organizations are approached through their management or oversight
bodies, social networks through key influencers, etc.
I see this so much and it's so right wing cheap: I hate Trump, but assertions that Russia intervened
are unproven.
First, Trump openly invited Russia to hack DNC emails. That is on its face treason and sedition.
It's freaking on video. If HRC did that there would be calls of the right for her execution.
Second, a NYT story showed that the FBI knew about the hacking but did not alert the DNC properly
- they didn't even show up, they sent a note to a help desk.
This was a serious national security breach that was not addressed properly. This is criminal
negligence.
This was a hacked election by collusion of the FBI and the Russian hackers and it totally discredits
the FBI as it throwed out chum and then denied at the last minute. Now the CIA comes in and says
PUTIN, Trump's bff, was directly involved in manipulating the timetable that the hacked emails
were released in drip drip form to cater to the media - creating story after story about emails.
It was a perfect storm for a coup. Putin played us. And he will play Trump. And God knows how
it ends. But it doesn't matter b/c we're all screwed with climate change anyway.
"It was a perfect storm for a coup. Putin played us. And he will play Trump. And God knows how
it ends. But it doesn't matter b/c we're all screwed with climate change anyway."
It's not a "coup". It's an election result that didn't go the way a lot of people want.
That's it. It's probably not optimal, but I'm pretty sure that democracy isn't supposed to produce
optimal results.
All this talk about "coups" and "illegitimacy" is nuts, and -- true to Dem practice --
incredibly short-sighted. For many, voting for Trump was an available way to say to those people,
"We don't believe you any more. At all." Seen in that light, it is a profoundly democratic (small
'd') response to elites that have most consistently served only themselves.
Trump and his gang will be deeply grateful if the left follows Krugman's "wisdom", and clings
to his ever-changing excuses. (I thought it was the evil Greens who deprived Clinton of her due?)
Post Truth is Pre-Fascism. The party that thinks your loyalty is suspect unless you wear a
flag pin fuels itself on Post Truth. Isnt't this absurdity the gist of Obama's Russia comments
today!?!
"On Wednesday an editorial in The Times described Donald Trump as a "useful idiot" serving Russian
interests." I think that is beyond the pale. Yes, I realize that Adolph Hitler was democratically
elected. I agree that Trump seems like a scary monster under the bed. That doesn't mean we have
too pee our pants, Paul. He's a bully, tough guy, maybe, the kind of kid that tortured you before
you kicked the shit out of them with your brilliance. That's not what is needed now.
What really is needed, is a watchdog, like Dean Baker, that alerts we dolts of pending bills and
their ramifications. The ship of neo-liberal trade bullshit has sailed. Hell, you don't believe
it yourself, you've said as much. Be gracious, and tell the truth. We can handle it.
The experience of voting for the Hill was painful, vs Donald Trump.
The Hill seemed like the least likely aristocrat, given two choices, to finish off all government
focus on the folks that actually built this society. Two Titans of Hubris, Hillary vs Donald,
each ridiculous in the concept of representing the interests of the common man.
At the end of the day. the American people decided that the struggle with the unknown monster
Donald was worth deposing the great deplorable, Clinton.
The real argument is whether the correct plan of action is the way of FDR, or the way of the industrialists,
the Waltons, the Kochs, the Trumps, the Bushes and the outright cowards like the Cheneys and the
Clintons, people that never spent a day defending this country in combat. What do they call it,
the Commander in Chief.
My father was awarded a silver and a bronze star for his efforts in battle during WW2. He was
shot in the face while driving a tank destroyer by a German sniper in a place called Schmitten
Germany.
He told me once, that he looked over at the guy next to him on the plane to the hospital in
England, and his intestines were splayed on his chest. It was awful.
What was he fighting for ? Freedom, America. Then the Republicans, Ronald Reagan, who spent the
war stateside began the real war, garnering the wealth of the nation to the entitled like him.
Ronald Reagan was a life guard.
Anthony Weiner
Podesta
Biden (for not running)
Tim Kaine (for accepting the nomination instead of deferring to a latino)
CNN and other TV news media (for giving trump so much coverage- even an empty podium)
Donna Brazile
etc.
The people of the United States did not have much to choose between: Either a servant of the
Plutocrats or a member of the Plutocratic class. The Dems brought this on us when they refused
to play fair with Bernie. (Hillary would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway.)
The Repubs brought this on, by refusing to govern. The media brought this on: I seem to
remember Hillary's misfeasances, once nominated, festering in the media, while Trump's were mentioned,
and then disappeared. (Correct me if I'm wrong in this.) Also, the media downplayed Bernie until
he had no real chance.
The government brought this on, by failing to pursue justice against the bankers, and failing
to represent the people, especially the majority who have been screwed by trade and the plutocratic
elite and their apologists.
The educational system brought this on, by failing to educate the people to critical thought.
For instance: 1) The wealthy run the country. 2) The wealthy have been doing very well. 3) Everybody
else has not. It seems most people cannot draw the obvious conclusion.
The wealthy brought this on. For 230 years they have, essentially run this country. They are
too stupid to be satisfied with enough, but always want more.
The economics profession brought this on, by excusing treasonous behavior as efficient, and
failing to understand the underlying principles of their profession, and the limits of their understanding.
(They don't even know what money is, or how a trade deficit destroys productive capacity, and
thus the very ability of a nation to pay back the debts it incurs.)
The people brought this on, by neglecting their duty to be informed, to be educated, and to
be thoughtful.
Anybody else care for their share of blame? I myself deserve some, but for reasons I cannot
say.
What amazes me now is, the bird having shown its feathers, there is no howl of outrage from
the people who voted for him. Do they imagine that the Plutocrats who will soon monopolize the
White House will take their interests to heart?
As far as I can tell, not one person of 'the people' has been appointed to his cabinet. Not
one. But the oppressed masses who turned to Mr Trump seem to be OK with this.
I can only wonder, how much crap will have to be rubbed in their faces, before they awaken to
the taste of what it is?
Eric377 : , -1
Krugman is himself one of those most useful idiots. I do not recall his clarion call to Democrats
last spring that "FBI investigation" and "party Presidential nominee" was bound to be an ugly
combination. Some did; right here as I recall. Or his part in the official "don't vote for third
party" week in the Clinton media machine....thanks, hundreds of thousands of Trump votes got the
message.
It's too rich to complain about Russia and Wikileaks as if those elements in anyway justified
Clinton becoming President. Leaks mess with our democracy? Then for darn sure do not vote for
a former Sec. of State willing to use a home server for her official business. Russia is menacing?
Just who has been managing US-Russia relations the past 8 years? I voted for her anyway, but the
heck if I think some tragic fate has befell the nation here. Republicans picked a better candidate
to win this thing than we Democrats did.
The truth of the matter is that Clinton was a very weak candidate with nothing to offer
but narcissism ("I'm with her"). It's notable that Clinton has still not accepted responsibility
for her campaign, preferring to throw the blame for the loss anywhere but herself. Sociopathy
much?
This has made me cynical. I used to think that at least *some* members of the US political
elite had the best interests of ordinary households in mind, but now I see that it's just ego
vs. ego, whatever the party.
As for democracy being on the edge: I believe Adam Smith over Krugman: "there is a lot of ruin
in a nation". It takes more than this to overturn an entrenched institution.
I think American democracy will survive a decade of authoritarianism, and if it does not, then
H. L. Mencken said it best: "The American people know what they want, and they deserve to get
it -- good and hard."
The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian
cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election,
three American officials said on Monday.
While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA's analysis
of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive
evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials,
who declined to be named .
An ODNI spokesman declined to comment on the issue.
"ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can't prove intent," said
one of the three U.S. officials. "Of course they can't, absent agents in on the decision-making in
Moscow."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose evidentiary standards require it to make cases that
can stand up in court, declined to accept the CIA's analysis – a deductive assessment of the available
intelligence – for the same reason, the three officials said
But all of them, without exception, accept that the Democrats' server was hacked by Russia, and
that it was Russia who leaked the information through Wikileaks, and that Russia also hacked the
Republicans but declined to release incriminating or influential material it had in its possession.
There is, to my knowledge, no evidence of this, either.
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives ..."
"... This Russia stuff isn't about Trump but about the Democrats pleading with people not to look at the man behind the curtain. ..."
"... Propaganda only works when people are aware there is no curtain. At this point, the Wizard of Oz has been revealed, and unlike Baum's creation, he has no redeeming qualities. Telling everyone to look at the big giant head again fails. ..."
"... Putin is not the one responsible for manipulating Democrats into an intensely pro-Wall Street, anti-working class political posture that loses elections. ..."
"... The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income. ..."
"... The baggage you speak of actually began with Reagan when from a government position of high privilege he actually sneered at government as the employer of last resort with his statement belittling "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." Which a subservient press took and ran with to make sure it settled into everyone's subconscious. It's helpful to revisit the rise of Ronald Reagan, and to remember that Obama took him as his role model, not FDR. ..."
"... The New Democrats will likely go the way of the blue dog Democrats. Their Republican voters will ask themselves why should they vote for a powerless Republican-lite, and they will simply die politically. ..."
"... New Democrats are really moderate republicans. For the democrat party to survive and get back their base, they have to adopt progressive democrat ideas. Electing Schumer as their senate leader is a mistake. He represents all that is bad about the democrat party. ..."
December 12, 2016 by
Yves Smith By
Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of
economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published with
New Economic Perspectives
On December 10, 2016, a New York Times
article entitled "Democrats Have a New Message: It's the Economy First" that unintentionally
revealed that the Party's "centrist" leadership and the paper remain clueless about how to improve
the economy and why the "centrist" leadership needs to end its long war against the working class.
This is how the paper explained the five "centrist" leaders' framing of the problem.
It was a blunt, plain-spoken set of senators who gathered last Monday at the Washington home
of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota, dining on Chinese food as they vented frustration
about the missteps of the
Democratic Party .
To this decidedly centrist group, the 2016 election was nothing short of a fiasco: final proof
that its national party had grown indifferent to the rural, more conservative areas represented
by Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of
Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, who attended the dinner. All face difficult re-election races
in 2018.
This non-centrist group was a gathering of five New Democrats. President Obama self-identified
himself as a New Democrat. The Clintons and Al Gore are leaders of the New Democrats. The leadership
of the Democratic National Committee was, and remains, New Democrats. On economic issues such as
austerity, jobs, and full employment, the New Democrats are far more extreme than the (stated) views
of Donald Trump. The New Democrats are infamous for their close ties with Wall Street. This means
that the paper's description of the Chinese nosh is as clueless as the five New Democrats kvetching
about policy "missteps" that they championed for decades. Of course, neither the paper nor the non-centrists
mentioned that critical fact. The blindness of the non-centrists to the fact that it is their policies
that launched the long war by the New Democrats against the working class is matched by the blindness
of the paper.
The kvetching may have been "blunt," but it was also dishonest. The five New Democrats know that
they will likely be replaced in the 2018 elections by Republicans who share the New Democrats' anti-working
class dogmas. What was really going on was an extended cry of pain about the five senators' fear
of losing their jobs.
Note that the paper never tells you what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as the New
Democrats' "missteps" or what new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based on sources
that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this meeting over
Chinese food. That combination of supposed frankness from the sources gained by the grant of anonymity
so them could describe in detail the purported bluntness by the gang of five should have produced
some epic, specific condemnations of the Democratic Party's leadership by the New Democrats. Instead,
it produced mush. Focusing on the "economy" is the right general idea for any political party, but
it is so general a word that it is close to meaningless without identifying the specific policy changes
that the five New Democrats now support and oppose. The mushy reportage provides a thin gruel to
the reader.
Most of all, they lamented, Democrats had simply failed to offer a clarion message about the
economy with appeal to all 50 states.
"Why did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?" Mr. Manchin said in
an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner conversation.
And the "clarion message about the economy" that they proposed that the Democratic Party make
was? You would have thought that little detail would (a) be critical to the article and (b) would
be something that the five New Democrats would have been eager to publicize without any need for
anonymity. Conversely, if even after the disastrous election, from their perspective, the five New
Democrats could not compose that "clarion" call, then the real problem is that the New Democrats'
economic dogmas prevent them from supporting such a "clarion" pro-worker policy.
The second sentence of the quotation is equally embarrassing to the New Democrats. It purportedly
recounts "the tenor of the dinner conversation." The first obvious question is – how did each of
these five New Democrats answer that that question? That is what the readers would want to know.
Even with the grants of anonymity to multiple sources the paper inexplicably presents only the vaguest
hints as to the five Senators' explanation for why the New Democrats waged their long war on the
working class.
Notice also the unintentional humor of the five New Democrats finally asking themselves this existential
question in 2016 – after the election. The New Democrats began their long war on the working class
over 30 years ago. Tom Frank published his famous (initial) book warning that the New Democrats'
war on the working class would prove disastrous in 2004. The five New Democrats are shocked, shocked
that the working class, after 30 years of being abused by the New Democrats' anti-worker policies
and after being vilified for decades by the New Democrats, overwhelmingly voted against the Nation's
most prominent New Democrat, Hillary Clinton. None of the five New Democrats appears to have a clue,
even after the 2016 election, why this happened.
The article and the five New Democrats fail to discuss the anti-working class policies that they
have championed for decades. Job security is the paramount issue that drives voting by many members
of the working class. The New Democrats and the Old Republicans share a devotion to the two greatest
threats to working class job security – austerity and the faux free trade deals. This makes
it ironic that the paper sought out the Party faction leaders who have been so wrong for so long
as supposedly being the unique source of providing the right answers now. If the five New Democrats
had engaged in introspection and were prepared to discuss their disastrous, repeated policy failures
that would have been valuable, but the New Democrats admit to making zero errors in the article.
The paper's understanding of economics and jobs is so poor that it wrote this clunker.
But even liberals believe Democrats must work harder to compete for voters who lean to the
right, if only to shave a few points off the Republican Party's margin of victory in rural America.
In some cases, they said, that may mean embracing candidates who hold wildly different views from
the national party on certain core priorities.
First, the phrase and the implicit logic in the use of the phrase "even liberals" reverses reality.
It is progressives who have consistently called for the Democratic Party to return to its role as
a party that champions working people.
Second, the issue is generally not who "leans to the right." Indeed, the 2016 election should
have made clear to the paper the severe limits on the usefulness of the terms "right" and "left"
in explaining U.S. elections. Jobs are not a right v. left issue.
Third, the paramount policy priority – jobs – is the same regardless of whether one focuses on
economic or political desirability. So, how long does it take for the article, and the five New Democrats
to discuss "jobs?" Given the fact that they vented at length about the fear that they would begin
to lose their jobs within two years, the subject of job security should have been paramount to the
five New Democrats. The article, however, never even mentioned jobs or any of the related critical
concepts – austerity, the faux trade deals, or the refusal to provide full employment. Further,
the article did not comment on the failure of the New Democrats to even mention these any of these
four concepts.
"A Clarion Message about the Economy with Appeal to all 50 States"
Here is UMKC's economics department's long-standing proposal to every American political party:
Our party stands for full employment at all times. We will make the federal government the
guaranteed employer of last resort for every American able and wanting to work. We recognize that
the United States has a sovereign currency and can always afford to ensure full employment. We
recognize that austerity typically constitutes economic malpractice and is never a valid excuse
for rejecting full employment. The myth that we help our grandchildren by consigning their grandparents
and parents to unemployment is obscene. The opposite is true.
The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income. Working class people overwhelmingly
want to work. Working class males who are unable to find secure, full time work often become depressed
and unmarriageable. If you want to encourage marriage and improve the quality of marriages, full
employment and job security are vital policies. There are collateral advantages to providing full
employment. Full employment can reduce greatly the "zero sum" fears about employment that can tear
a society apart. Each of these outcomes is overwhelmingly supported by Americans.
Good economics is not a "right" v. "left" issue. Austerity is terrible economics. The fact that
we have a sovereign currency is indisputable and there is broad agreement among finance professionals
that such a currency means that the federal government budget is nothing like a household. The major
party that first adopts the federal full employment guarantee will secure a critical political advantage
over its rivals. Sometimes, good economics is good politics.
It is critical that existing Democrat leadership goes into retirement. Finagling the Clintons
back into the WH, delays this by 4, 8 or more years. Besides generating immense animosity. This
could be easily accomplished if all Democrat leadership retires at 65 immediately, to live on
their Social Security and Medicare (if they think those are still important).
ah, but there was a "clarion message". It was "we care not even about the 1%, but the 0.01%.
The rest of you can piss off".
Which is why Dems got dumped.
I suspect this meeting was functionally similar to the ecclesiastic kvetching when folks began
to believe the world was a sphere some 600 years ago. I can imagine them thinking: unemployment
(as they measure it) is low, housing prices are jumping, and boy, look at that stock market –
how did our base constituency lose its way?
As long as the Democratic Party leadership thinks
this way, the party is useless and should be abandoned. I might suggest that Bill, Yves, Randy
Wray, and others get to work educating them, but like flat-earthers, these folks not only live
in willful ignorance, they would very much like to cast that crowd on the pyre of false-news purveyors
lest they lead even more of the faithful astray.
I have to fully agree with Prof. Black's assessment; thought this when they reelected Nancy
"my son works at Countrywide" Pelosi and doubled down on their identity politics. (David Harvey
disposes of identity politics in a single sentence in his latest book.)
But in this Lewis Carroll universe, "Work harder to compete for Republican votes" doesn't mean
steal Trump's jobs-related thunder but give in on things like fracking a la Madame Heitkamp, or
discover an enthusiasm for guns like Manchin, or run anti-abortion stalwarts like Donnelly. That's
why the reporter couldn't depart from the vague mush–the "centrists'" solution to the Democrats'
debacle is to become Republicans.
My folks are bible thumping, Fox News watching, prolife, and anti-gay marriage voters.
They were all set to vote for Bernie, not because they agreed with him on everything, but because
he was fighting for people like them and he was honest. They would have burned in H-E-double-hockey-sticks
before voting for Clinton though. Judging by the polls during the primaries and the eventual outcome,
they were far from alone in their assessment. Too bad the dimwit DC Dems can't be bothered to
actually talk to people like them.
They sort of do talk to people like your relatives, but partisanship is strong. Plenty of local
Democrats can diagnose and propose solutions caused by the GOP but will worship Trump if he had
a "D" next to his name. Claire McCaskill probably receives enough praise from partisan plebes
for no payment she assumes all the plebes should love her. For conservative types, Sanders not
being in the other tribe was a huge selling point.
The fundamental power diagram of politics is that groups of donors select groups of politicians
to fight for the interests of the donors. The complication in democracy is that the voters select
which politicians will rule. So the donors are like a client, the politicians like a lawyer and
the voters are like a jury. A talented politician is one who can cunningly convince voters to
set her guilty donors free.
So all these New Democrats are doing is suggesting ways to better plead to the jury. But they
are in no way questioning the donors or whether they should continue to push policies that only
serve the donors' best interests
One revolutionary feature of Donald Trump's campaign was that he was his own donor and so was
very free to directly appeal to what is in the best interests of the working class voters he targeted:
economic nationalism.
Conversely the most problematic feature of the Trump campaign was that he was running as the
head of a party that did have plenty of donors and he was openly contradicting plenty of these
donors' interests. But Trump correctly calculated that the only way to power in America was to
hijack one of the two legacy parties.
In some ways Bernie Sanders attempted a similar feat, although I remain skeptical about whether
he really was trying to win. If Sanders had become President, he would be facing the same problems
that Trump now faces; how to rule a party whose policies fundamentally diverge in many areas from
what you have promised to deliver.
And so until the Democrat change donors – specifically by announcing that as a party they will
only accept small donations and adopt some of the Trump tactics to reduce campaign spending –
nothing will change except the sound bites. Many working class people realized exactly how flawed
Trump was but they rolled the dice for one reason only – no one owned Trump. Or as
Henry Kissinger put it:
"This president-elect, it's the most unique that I have experienced in one respect. He has
absolutely no baggage," Kissinger told CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS." "He has no obligation to
any particular group because he has become president on the basis of his own strategy."
Kissinger is smart so he makes these words sound blasé but I can assure you they strike fear
into the hearts of America's elite. But only when we hear these same elites expressing fear of
the entire Democratic party (like they did about Bernie Sanders) will we know something fundamental
has changed for the better.
Some very good insights. I would be curious to know your thoughts on when the repub/Trump split
comes, which way will FOX tilt? Right now FOX is all Trump, but after a year or two of insinuations
that Trump is a Pro Putin commie, I suspect the masterful propagandists that make so much of our
beliefs will either cause the actual downfall of Trump, or will more than neuter him.
Trump was selected by Republican voters despite Fox not being his BFF. Trump is the GOP, and
Republican voters support their own. 41 called Reagan a practitoner of Voodoo economics. Yes,
this was an appeal to the Southern strategy. Attacks on Trump that say he's not a "true conservative"
will never work. Trump is a known clown. He can't embarrass himself, and I think it's important
to remember Iraq happened. What did the average Republican voter take from that? Putin Fear Fest
is very similar to the events of 2002.
Periodically, new tribal arrangements need to be made. Romney was given a chance. He failed,
so the GOP voters selected someone new. Republicans hate Democrats. Attacks levied by Democrats
will always be brushed off.
Videos could emerge of Trump swearing allegiance to Putin at an orgy, and Republican voters
wouldn't care.
This Russia stuff isn't about Trump but about the Democrats pleading with people not to look
at the man behind the curtain.
Yes Republicans stick together plus they think Trump is most likely to accomplish their "small
government" goals and so they support Trump (this is probably true, the establishment supported
Hillary, but many a Republican votes party line for one of their own).
Hillary did well with defense contract related Republicans, but they are clustered. The ones
in hideously over priced McMansions in Virginia and Maryland are terrified of spending being redirected.
They have mortgages to pay, and if Trump thinkers with defense spending whether through cutting
cutting or moving, Northern Virginia will become a land of white elephants. Northern Virginia
might have incomes, but outside of old town Alexandria, it's a dump of out of control suburban
sprawl.
No one sane would live there by choice. The costs are too high to relocate a corporate operation
or even grow one. Republicans in Wisconsin don't care.
Oh, I agree with your overall points. I was just wondering specifically about Murdoch and if
his contrariness will make FOX pro Russian ((in the face of overwhelming repub foreign policy
establishment against Trump)), or will FOX be the "repub" anti Russain brand. It will be interesting
when being "conservative" means you like Putin .
And I remember how many rabidly anti communists where having conniptions when Reagan met with
Gorbachev in Iceland. But Reagan was well ensconced in the establishment. Can Trump alone end
the red menace?
? – "Trump was selected by Republican voters despite Fox not being his BFF. " Hannity and O'Reilly
segments this past cycle were one hour propaganda news feeds for Trump.
As far as Fox goes from what I understand they are currently split - with Kelly Megyn (I know),
Brit Hume, and Chris Wallace being anti-Trump while Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs are pro-Trump bigly.
This is a smart balancing of Fox's short term need for viewers versus their longer-term policy
requirements. But there can be no doubt that Rupert Murdoch is rabidly anti-Trump - he even gave
that raving NeverTrump lunatic Louise Mensch a website called HeatStreet.
From glancing at the National Review it seems the GOPe think they are being generous by admitting
defeat and magnanimously getting behind Trump's cultural agenda while insisting conservatives
stay in charge of economic and foreign policy. But this is no change at all since the Republicans
have always been offering the working classes empty cultural issues.
I imagine the Republicans see this as a Tour de France with them being the huge peloton while
Trump is a lone breakaway attacker who they will soon swallow back up and totally co-opt.
I don't think the MSM are that good at propaganda; if they were Trump wouldn't be President!.
For example now they have launched this Trump + Putin campaign but Trump responds by picking a
fight with China. But the MSM is aghast and totally support the Chinese position! So they accuse
Trump of carrying water for Russia put there's the entire MSM all lined up with buckets of Chinese
water on their heads!
I suppose at some point several top GOP Senators (McCain, Flake) and a bottom (Lindsey Graham)
will leave the party and caucus with the Democrats to ensure legislative gridlock. I believe if
Trump really tried he could get a House of Representatives that supports him. I don't see how
he herds the Senate though.
Propaganda only works when people are aware there is no curtain. At this point, the Wizard
of Oz has been revealed, and unlike Baum's creation, he has no redeeming qualities. Telling everyone
to look at the big giant head again fails.
The msm and the Democrats don't know how to function moving forward because building trust
will take years of effort, and many of the specific personalities are done. They can never be
attached to a competitive effort without undermining the effort. If they hope to retake their
spot, when FB seemed trendy and not a mom hangout, they need people to forget about the curtain,
but it's impossible. Instead they will whine about wicked witches of the North.
Even Trump won because the GOP misfits were sheepdogs for Jeb. Whatever else Trump was, he
wasn't part of Jeb's curtain. Shouting Trump is a fraud doesn't work as long as you then scream
"pay no mind to the strings on my back." I think Rufio could have made more noise if he wasn't
such an obvious beta as he attacked Jeb, but one could argue he betrayed Jeb. People don't like
that kind of thing.
Bernie proved that there is plenty of money for candidates with the right intent and policies.
What you say, that dems can't win without its moneyed donor class, is a notion that has been
used to bludgeon democrats into conservatism and passivity.
Bernie blasted your assertion about campaign finance to bits.
As to the dems "figuring something out," the dem leadership doesn't need to figure anything
out. They are perfectly happy serving the 1%. It's the rest of the democrats who need to figure
that out about their leadership and take action, whether it is tossing the leadership or starting
a new party.
According to an NYT article about his campaign, Sanders was not running to win until after
his popularity started to skyrocket. Initially he was still attending the Senate and was not campaigning
fulltime.
It was just an attempt to spread his liberal policy message nationwide. But how to control
the party as President when it's opposed to him on policy? That's what "political revolution"
meant. If Congress opposed Trump, he will have a rally of thousands in the district of any difficult
legislator blaming him or her for not letting Trump make America great again.
Similarly Sanders
can campaign to either get a Dem majority, it he hadn't got one in 2016, by 2018. Or to increase
it or make it more liberal. This is what he did when the city council opposed him in Burlington,
Vermont. Within a year he got one which was much more pliable. The progressives never got a majority
but he went from Obama-style gridlock to a working government.
One correction: Bernie Sanders is not a liberal. He is a democratic socialist. It's not a minor
point, particularly because liberals deliberately obfuscate the difference to con voters.
Liberals believe in hierarchy. I'm pretty confident Bernie Sanders is an egalitarian. That
matters, when it comes to policy and governance, as well as core values.
Putin is not the one responsible for manipulating Democrats into an intensely pro-Wall Street,
anti-working class political posture that loses elections.
I agree - if the "old" parties act like the old neoliberal parties, they can't solve our current
predicament. While our predicament isn't a new one, just a new version of an old problem, retreading
the past 20 or 30 years isn't going to do the trick.
Gov't as employer as last resort is a huge leap from the goals of full employment and job security.
This is promoted here and elsewhere without any rationale. Someone will have to explain why this
is the only possible solution.
Plus the quality of the jobs in the private sector is often horrible (of course not all but
many). There is a reason everyone wants a government job. And unless the government sector forces
the private sector to improve the quality of their jobs (ie living wages and ACTUALLY enforce
overtime and safety and etc. not to mention all the contract work going on that isn't EVEN jobs)
it will remain so. Quality of jobs matters.
Not really, but try explaining the opposite. How can we have full employment without gov't
employment as last resort? Granted you can have "goals" all you want if you ignore them, but we'll
put that aside and assume you are not disingenuous.
Everything else has been tried and failed, miserably. Companies sit on piles of cash without significant
hiring. Tax incentives get gamed easily.
Offering employment is the simplest, most targeted solution that effectively cuts the rest of
the employers out of the hostage taking business.
The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income.
I rather like the term used here instead of jobs , people want a livelihood. In the
USA, that get's shortened into jobs, and then later short changed again into things like minimum
wage. One could have fully employment and terrible livelihood. Only the Japanese could put up
with 50+ years of being economic animals. Anyone who thinks full employment is going to solve
issues like income inequality has been eating mushrooms picked from the cow pasture.
I just don't even like the idea of "good jobs" - so limited and so American.
For example, Jobs won't save us from Climate Change, it's not just a money issue. Hence Livelihood,
as in lets make sure the bastards who made this mess die before we do, then we;ll have some justice
to make our miserable end more bearable.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/links-121216.html#comment-2725938
Full employment is the growth argument. Both would be beneficial but I would prefer the switch
to income/leisure. Shorter work week, more leisure activities, less consumption, less growth.
Ditto. Government doesn't need to provide jobs where people go to the office and get paid to
sit on their rear end all day – we already have enough of those in the public and private sectors.
I'd like to see a basic income guarantee with some sort of mandatory work required to get it.
Something like the draft where people are called up to work for a certain period of time on a
rotating basis but also giving them some say in what sort of job they get to do. One year you
work at job x for a period of time, train your replacement and then get a bunch of time off. The
next year you can try something different at job y.
Mandatory work everything is work. Yes, you can have call up for people who want to do a stint/internship
learning large scale community construction, infrastructure, plumbing, electrical, etc.
Still, there needs to be jobs where people sit on their back sides part of a day some prefer
working in offices and some are only able to work in offices.
But stretch the imagination: Community service runs the gamut: people to clean up streets,
keep gutters open, scrape up weeds, maintain plantings, paint, repair; assisting children, seniors
and animals; art etc. I am not a musician nor actor but would appreciate having free/low cost
local enrichment programs. Public schools (the ones left) could be used in the evening for free
classes: electronics, woodworking, engine/household repair, cooking, nutrition, etc.
And yes, there will be a need for people who sit on their rear ends to help organize and track
activities. :)
And don't get me wrong about the rear end sitting – I don't mean those types of jobs shouldn't
exist, I just mean that when you show up at the office you ought to have some actual work to do.
And going to meetings deciding what work others should be doing doesn't count. I've worked at
a few where I was required to be there for eight hours a day but only had four hours of work to
do, and not for lack of asking.
One can only read the whole internet so many times a day ;)
What nonsense it is to generalize what the working class as a whole wants (and really this
probably should include everyone who works for a living). Some want jobs, some income. If everyone
only wanted jobs no mothers would ever stay home to raise children etc..
Everything is work, everything is a job. If you take care of an elderly relative, it's duty
(unpaid labor), if you take care of an elderly stranger it's a job. If you raise your own children,
it's duty (unpaid labor), if raise others children, it's a job.
Elites are claiming more and more work is duty and of course it should be unpaid not to mention
volunteerism.
If there was an income guarantee, most would labor their days away as work contributes to social
connection and provides personal satisfaction.
If there was an income, I imagine social life would be richer as more people could be artists
(festivals!), performers (community theater!), work in schools (art, music, construction classes)
etc.
And, of course, it is the government that is the issuer of this sovereign currency that they
cannot run out of. Or are you suggesting that the government give the $$ to the private sector,
which will, of course, trickle it on down? We could call it, I don't know, how about 'quantitative
easing'?
Another reason to prefer the government (which, after all, is "us") to administer jobs-for-all
is providing jobs that do useful things for society which could not be provided on a for-profit
basis. Um, like daycare, medical care, public utilities, eldercare, voter registration, education,
making things that are repairable, and then repairing them when they need it, organic agriculture,
humane animal husbandry, saving the monarch butterflies, *manual* residential snow shoveling -
all those things that 'cost too much' for a for-profit business to do.
Exactly, HotFlash. And, notice that so many of these livelihoods, child and eldercare, teaching,
repair persons, garbage collectors, snow plow operators, have been relegated to the level of 'minimum
wage jobs,' and the people that perform these necessary services consigned to the ranks of 'too
dumb to be innovators or investment bankers.'
We have been conned into mumbling to our military, 'thank you for your service,' as they get
to board flights before us. Why not honor trash collectors and the women who clean the toilets
in our workplaces and the workers who are out on the county roads and interstates at 2am in a
blizzard, keeping the roads clear so we don't have to be inconveniences? Where would our society
be without them?
Douglas Adams was only being partially facetious when he had the an advanced civilization wiped
out because
they shipped out their phone cleaners on rocket-ships (ala the Marching Morons). It was his
subtle rebuke to both Kornbluth and the Ayn Randian/neo-conservative of that time, as well as
the general vapid consumerist society.
As to the military, I always favored the Coast Guard, they risk their lives to save other humans,
not help the MIC and Empire.
I think explaining govt-as-employer-of last-resort becomes easy once a few misconceptions are
corrected and a few realities sink in. But it's no small thing for the realities to sink in -
everything we've been taught, or encouraged to assume, is working against us. Conventional, responsible
wisdom is that the wealth one has that didn't come from the government is "earned" and any activity
that "earns" money is inherently productive and being productive is good - it makes one worthy.
People think of "money" as the stuff passed around in big green wads in the movies, that comes
into being through work an ingenuity (unless the govt commits the sin of "just printing it").
Distribution may not be "fair" but it at least follows certain intuitive laws or forces, that
have a vague sense of morality associated with them (e.g., money is earned through productivity
which means whoever has it by definition earned it, e.g. MH point on FIRE sector). It is a tautology
- but a powerful one. People don't think of money as the product of accounting, a two
sided coin created literally from a balance sheet - debits and credits, assets and liabilities
- and that commercial banks can conjure "money" - pump it into circulation - simply by marking
an asset in their ledger. People don't know that banks issue loans (create assets) out of nothing
all the time (i.e., loans without corresponding deposits or reserves, loaning what they don't
"have"). The asset becomes revenue-generating through interests and fees, which, if non-liquidating,
are the precise opposite of "productive."
It is so difficult for this to sink in because our society organizes itself as if this weren't
true. Speaking personally, it takes a persistent, systematic re-organization of how we process
facts and arguments. We hear something like a "sovereign currency can never run out" as a justification
for universal income or govt-as-employer-of-last-resort, and it triggers a deeply embedded sense
that somehow this would send the economy spinning of the rails. But once it sinks in that "money"
is just an asset/liability, and its entry into private circulation is purely a matter of public
policy (not private "productivity"), at least then you're asking the right question: how should
a sovereign inject currency into private circulation? Maybe no one answer is universally right
at all times and in all circumstances .. but at this point debt is outpacing actual productivity,
which means it must be written down (MH argument) and/or there needs to be an injection on the
debtor side to try to catch up (e.g., jobs program or universal income). Which is why it is so
nonsensical for the govt to "print money" in the form of transferring assets in the form of increasing
bank reserves, as if bank lending depends on reserves at all it's like trying to fill a pool
but flooding your sink). At least that's how I make sense of it still may botch the details,
but at least once you strip away the cultural/social/moral baggage, it becomes more of a matter
of simple economic logic that doesn't need a larger explanation. If you want to fill the pool,
fill the pool, not the sink. But the baggage is real - which is why it really does seem to be
a matter of letting the realities sink in.
The baggage you speak of actually began with Reagan when from a government position of high
privilege he actually sneered at government as the employer of last resort with his statement
belittling "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." Which a subservient press took
and ran with to make sure it settled into everyone's subconscious. It's helpful to revisit the
rise of Ronald Reagan, and to remember that Obama took him as his role model, not FDR.
This battle has been ongoing in American politics probably since way back before the Great
Depression, but that's as far back as some of us remember our parents telling us about. I love
Bill Black because he's the kind of Democrat I thought I was. This new crowd makes me sick. It's
appropriate that Obama's murder weapons are called drones. That's what the New Democrats are:
drones.
The New Democrats will likely go the way of the blue dog Democrats. Their Republican voters
will ask themselves why should they vote for a powerless Republican-lite, and they will simply
die politically.
They care about staying a Senator. They care about themselves first and only, and will suck
up to and serve whoever provides the money that allows them to hold onto their seats.
Voters in these red states voted for change, above all else. They voted for a nut job because
they finally heard a candidate speaking to their issues and concerns, something their Senators,
apparently, have not done.
There will soon be so few democrats remaining that we should give some serious consideration
to a sequestration solution of giving them their own land, with no fossil fuel degradation, clean
water from the glaciers, a tiny house, a pouch of seeds, and a sustainable truck garden, no cars
trucks or bicycles, a fig tree in the middle of town. They could either pay taxes or not, as they
felt motivated, and provide their own services regardless as not to be a burden. We could gather
them up and have a long march to their new home; it would be hravenly! The rest of us could peacefully
proceed to hell.
This is mind blowing. Granted I didn't follow the link to the full story - but how on earth
is this even news , even under the pathetic standards of election post mortems? New dems
concoct self-admiring story, posture as the ones who "get it." Feed it to reporter, who agrees
to attribute anonymously of course (so it has the feel of insiders and not high schoolers). I'm
guessing what these courageous centrists really mean with the confused prescription to court voters
who "lean right" is to appeal on social/cultural issues. Scold "elitist identity politics" of
the national party as a distraction from the "economic message" (which of course will be the same
assault on decency it always has been). So "economy first" would mean attack/exploit social liberalism
and call it a "fight" for the economic plight of the every-man/woman. The beauty is you get to
sound angry on behalf of voters without an iota of accountability or reflection, without ever
having to answer for shallow, self-serving policies and abject failure.
Note that the paper never tells you what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as
the New Democrats' "missteps" or what new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based on sources
that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this meeting over
Chinese food. . .
The five New Democrats were: Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill
of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, at a dinner held at the Washington
home of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota.
So, not anonymous at all.
Here is the key part to understanding the plight of the politician / narcissist that feels
the wrath of voters.
. . . All face difficult re-election races in 2018.
There is nothing worse than being ignored, but fail to understand that what they themselves
fear, being ignored with no jawb, the peasants have been living with for decades. Hypocrite is
the word and these are vacuous human beings that care only about themselves no matter what emotional
fakery they use.
Um . what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as the New Democrats' "missteps" or what
new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party
Um, noun (subject)-verb-object. what (noun) was identified as (verb) "missteps" and "'policies"
(objects) eg. the 5 did not identify the missteps or policies.
Comical. The first line in Bill's post gets the NYT headline wrong.
On December 10, 2016, a New York Times article entitled "Democrats Have a New Message: It's
the Economy First"
The actual headline is "Democrats Hone a New Message: It's the Economy Everyone ". A small
detail for sure, which implies from The NYT it's a purveyor of fake news, because honing implies
a refinement of a message already being said, and is contradicted within two words, by the word
"new". It is possible that the headlines keep changing and that Bill's was up when he quoted them,
which would solidify their reputation of fake news purveyors.
Getting back to the meat of Bill's post.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based
on sources that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this
meeting over Chinese food. That combination of supposed frankness from the sources gained by the
grant of anonymity so them could describe in detail the purported bluntness by the gang of five
should have produced some epic, specific condemnations of the Democratic Party's leadership by
the New Democrats. Instead, it produced mush . . .
Going to the NYT article here is the reference to anonymous sources, so I freely admit to being
wrong about Bill's anonymous Chinese food eating party (or wake) attendees being the fatuous five.
The party, these senators said, had grown overly fixated on cultural issues with limited
appeal to the heartland. They criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan, "Stronger Together,"
as flat and opaque, according to multiple people present at the dinner, some of whom spoke on
the condition of anonymity .
This is the NYT's only reference to anonymity and furthers it's reputation of a fake news purveyor
as the word "some" implies that some would go on record but either couldn't be found or weren't
asked.
The rest of the article segues into a pity party, from those that weren't there.
Moderate Democrats are not alone in their sense of urgency about honing a new economic message.
After a stinging loss to Donald J. Trump, liberals in the party are also trying to figure out
how to tap into the populist unrest that convulsed both parties in 2016. Only by making pocketbook
issues the central focus, they say, can Democrats recover in the 2018 midterm elections and unseat
Mr. Trump in 2020.
"We need to double down and double down again on the importance of building an economy not
just for those at the top, but for everyone ," said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts,
a high-profile progressive who is seen as a leading potential opponent for Mr. Trump.
Elizabeth Warren doesn't realize that those at the top stole it from everyone else, and quadrupling
down on building an economy that works for those at the top won't work for those at the bottom
or anyone else except for those at the top.
Beyond that, they expect wide variance in how officeholders handle Mr. Trump and his agenda,
from moderates who seek out accommodation to blue-state leaders who pursue total war . Their emerging
message is likely to focus on protecting Medicare and Social Security, attacking income inequality
and political corruption , and blocking legislation that might restrict access to health care.
"Likely" and "might" are weasel words. How likely are those that live and breath corruption
to cut off their own supply?
The whole article is a mix of real and fake news and some days I like my comedy, black.
"So, how long does it take for the article, and the five New Democrats to discuss "jobs?" Given
the fact that they vented at length about the fear that they would begin to lose their jobs within
two years, the subject of job security should have been paramount to the five New Democrats."
I'm still chuckling. It's sort of like five roosters in a chicken coop that only has room for
one, all vying to become Chanticleer.
We in the UK had thirteen years of ' New Labour ' which was Tony Blair's repositioning of the
old Labour Party to turn it into a right of centre Thatcherite, neoliberal, let's privatise everything
party, thus abandoning the working class in the process . Exactly as Bill Black describes re the
Democrats . The problem as I see it is hydra headed , but here are the headings as it were :
1. A political shift to the right is also a psychological one, separating the ' doing okays
' from the ' left behinds ' and in the process reducing ( if not eliminating ) empathy from the
' doing okays ' for the ' left behinds ' . So intentional or otherwise this is a ' divide and
rule ' policy, by government that has given rise to Global Trump_vs_deep_state. In the process the electability
of a left-wing candidate as a leader – Saunders, Corybyn – has been made impossible under the
present set up.
2. Automation. The power of labour hasn't just been weakened by this rightward shift . It has
been severely weakened by the onward march of capital embracing new technologies of every type
and as we all know none of the productivity gains from this have benefitted labour, nor will they
in the future.
3. Bill Black is right a government is not like a household, but the daily message that we
' tax in order to spend ' is a deeply rooted belief system and just trying ( as I do ) to explain
why this is not the case is, I imagine , like Copernicus trying to explain the actual motion of
the earth around the sun. They just don't get it. It goes against common sense .
The election of Trump is not the beginning of the end it is end of the beginning. This is not
a polite, dinner party conversation, it's going to turn ugly rather quickly and, just like the
Crash of 2008 no-one will have seen it coming.
Re automation: I know the CEOs are pushing replacing people with robots. But none of them can
give you an answer to this question: Which robots are going to buy your products? And the fact
that none of them can even think this far ahead means they are just as clueless as the New Dems.
Maybe they can't see it coming but plenty of us can. I keep telling my friends they better start
preparing for any and all emergencies because the future ain't gonna be pretty.
The Times writes: "Why did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?" Mr.
Manchin said in an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner conversation.
This is the same Joe Manchin whose daughter, Heather Bresch, heads up Mylan of recent EpiPen
monopoly pricing fame.
Maybe Democratic voters are realizing that the elected Democrats are concerned about taking
care of their own well-connected class, but working people are a group ignored most of the time
and catered to, verbally, only 2/4/6 years.
Can we get a re-post on a previous BB primer on MMT? I studied (bachelors) econ, I have read
L. Randal Wray's MMT book but I find the concepts of a sovereign currency hard to explain to
outsiders who are mostly inundated with globalism, "free trade" etc.
Wray, whatever his importance to the MMT world as a theorist, is a terrible explainer. Cullen
Roche (who disagrees with the UMKC economists on the prescriptive points of the theory, such as
the job guarantee) does a far better job explaining it to the beginner on his site Pragmatic Capitalism.
Sometimes it does not matter how well you explain that a sovereign country need not raise taxes
before spending can take place because some people will never change their beliefs no matter how
well those beliefs are challenged. It is almost as difficult as trying to change someone's religious
beliefs.
U.S. level sovereign countries. Russia could do it. Brazil and Indonesia could, but most "sovereign"
countries would have problems with international trade if they tried this. Iran maybe could do
it.
I fear many people believe the U.S. is a higher character version of the UK or France, so when
you try to explain this, they don't quite grasp the U.S. is a continent spanning power and don't
grasp why the dollar has value. The U.S. isn't the indispensable nation. It's the nation that
can check out. Other nation states don't have this luxury. Despite the decline of industrial production,
the U.S. makes that or could easily. American exceptionalism isn't the moral garbage Obama pushes.
It's sovereignty in the modern world.
For people without a background in Econ I highly recommend theses youtube playlists. They are
filtered into different categories and are very good explainers.
The Dems are hoping that they'll be back in office as soon as the Repubs screw up. And it's
quite possible since people don't have a choice other that the duopoly. We have to start building
other parties to give ourselves a choice. But will we do it? How?
They didn't lose because more people voted rep.
They lost because 10mm that voted for big o in 2008 stayed home, didn't vote for anybody for pres,
or went 3rd party in other words, ABC, or anybody but Clinton.
A few will some day emulate Bernie, but this leap of faith means no banker money. Not many of
these senior dems
new blood, please!
I find the spectacle of these despicable excuses for Senators being deeply concerned for their
own job security quite heart-warming. Thanks, Prof Black, goes great with coffee.
But why, oh why, if they are that scared about their jobs, can't they get a clue? Are they
still afraid of Hillary? Afraid that they would have to do honest work? Or do they still truly
believe that the working class is just muttons?
There aren't corporate board jobs waiting for losers without years of direct labor on behalf
of corporate backers. Backbenchers who simply enjoy the celebrity of DC and follow corporate directives
aren't relevant once they lose.
Certain ones retire to avoid the stench of losing (Evan Bayh, now officially a loser) and can
manage decent jobs, but what does a loser bring to corporate pr especially when they are replaceable
faces? A retired astronaut will come cheaper and present far less chance of scandal.
And the Democrats already keep trying that same old trick of hating their base. Heidi Heitkamp
is about as far right as one can go. What's next? Resurrecting Pinochet to run in Florida?
I did click on the link, and the Krugman's first sentence was "The CIA, according to The
Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to
tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump."
At least Krugman didn't write, "According to reliable sources" as many people would not view
the CIA and WaPo as reliable sources.
The thrust of the Krugman op-ed is that Clinton lost by such a small margin in some states,
it could have been the alleged Russian influence that made the difference.
And it could have been because she was a lousy candidate with many concerns about her judgment
and ethics (Libya, Iraq, Clinton Foundation, 150K Wall Street speeches, possible selling of favors
during SOS, email evidence destruction, cheating on a debate with prior knowledge of debate questions
from Donna Brazile, for TPP then against it.).
Krugman should be taking the Democratic leadership to task for foisting their marginal candidate
on the electorate and the failure of the existing Democratic President to do much for the voters
in his eight years in office.
I remember going to a lecture/book signing by Paul Krugman about 12 years ago and he seemed
to be a decent and thoughtful academic.
Perhaps winning the Nobel branded economics prize was not good for him?
Or maybe there is something in the drinking water at the Times, that like the Shadow, has the
ability to "cloud men's minds"?
I view Krugman the same way I view the inquisitors of the Holy Roman Empire – they are the
"true" believers, and as such have a duty to defend the sacredness of the church (i.e., the democratic
party – it is INCAPABLE OF ERROR).
Krugman's indoctrination into the religion of economics would
put the indoctrination of Jesuits to shame. Krugman is simply incapable of examining his indoctrination
and in that respect can't even match Greenspan, who at least owned up to the flaw in his (Greenspan's)
ideology.
Democrats are perfect, ergo any critique of Obama, ACA, employment, droning, et al is racism and
any critique of Hillary is sexism – Krugman: ANY disagreement means your stupid.
"Working class people overwhelmingly want to work. Working class males who are unable to find
secure, full time work often become depressed and unmarriageable"
As always, Bill Black is spot-on, but the above sentence can be extended by eliminating the
words "working class." The reason Trump won is not only because of blue collar workers. White
collar workers in jeopardy of losing their job due to H-1B visas heard Trump's promise that he
would stop visa abuse.
And Democratic leaders still have not realized that a non-criminal candidate, e.g. Jim Webb,
would have trounced Trump due to his sheer normality. They were in too much of a hurry to crown
their queen. Joe "more of the same" Biden is not the answer.
The Democratic Party might disappear for the most part unless it dumps identity politics and
re-embraces workers and unions.
The problem can be stated quite simply: New Democrats pay close attention to the ministrations
of George Soros, AIPAC, and Wall Street. The policies flow from the dollars these entities provide.
It's the rationale solution. I believe even indirect elections would produce a better class
of Senators. The pomp of the Senate is corrupting. Each Senator fancies himself or herself President.
If Hillary could almost make it and an empty suit such as Obama could make it, the Senator from
the great state of (insert state) definitely could, so they need to keep the money spigots open
and not offend voters in other states.
Indirectly elected Senators would likely be former state house Speaker types or people who
have had more than back benching jobs and never felt the thrill of winning statewide. They wouldn't
entertain delusions of becoming President.
An added benefit is people would pay more attention to state house races. Fixing potholes would
not be sufficient for reelection.
Senate corruption is not about pomp as it is really about Citizens United. That senators have
weak malleable egos that money easily corrupts is disguised by the pomp of the Senate.
Anyone who has ever run for local or state public office knows that local races are treated
like the bush leagues and minor leagues of baseball where the campaign manager acts like a scout
for the party apparatus. Each party has their loyalists and, to borrow a great metaphor, Inquisition-era
Klugmans, who guard the gates and dole out monies to influence the local media and voters.
Thrown to the wayside are the actual beliefs of democracy; as the religion of money is the
only thing recognized. The rationale decision is to reconnect with the ideas of principal. It's
not going to be easy. As this article demonstrates, everyone involved in it is completely void
of any principal thought.
And yet I wonder. Bill Black's critique and commentators on this post provide evidence that
general principals are thought about. How then, could indirect elections tap into this vein and
eschew our vacuous and archaic Senator class?
The House Democrats re-elected Pelosi and company virtually unchallenged. I think they are
so used to losing that they view keeping majorities in the east and west coast states as victory.
HEY! THAT MEANS THAT ANY CATEGORY OF WORKERS DEFINED OUTSIDE THE FED SETUP IS ELIGIBLE FOR
SEPARATE STATE LABOR ORGANIZING SETUP!!!!!!!!!!!!
State labor setup could add something oh, so every day practicable. State NLRB substitute could
MANDATE certification elections upon a finding of union busting. States should also take union
busting as seriously in criminal law as fed takes taking a movie in the movies - that FBI warning
on your DVD comes alive and you are gone for couple of years if caught.
But mandating certification elections has so much more an everyday, natural businesslike feel
that it could sail relatively smoothly through state legislatures. Nota bene: Wisconsin mandates
re-certification of public employees unions annually (51% of membership required; not just voters)
- nothing too alien about mandating union elections.
State set up might ACTUALLY go the last practical mile and actually force employers to actually
bargain with certified unions - which refusal to bargain remains the last impassable barrier associated
with the fed no-enforcement mechanism. See Donald Trump in Vegas.
So I think one of the main issues out there is even understanding what middle-class means.
A key example of this can be found in this piece where the difficulties that Swiss watch makers
are facing is because of the struggling middle-class. Completely baffling I have never known anybody
in the "middle class" to even be thinking of buying a Rolex Oyster watch. There are many other
things that they would do with $5k before buying a watch.
I think the media and policy makers are mistaking the struggles of people who are making over
$250k a year (or local equivalent) as the struggles of the middle class.
I think this is an interesting column discussing whether or not economists should be focused
as much on income distribution as total income growth. I think what the Democratic party has completely
missed is that the period fo time that the Trump voters view as "When America Was Great" was a
period when GDP growth was high (3%-4%) but more importantly, a record percentage of it was being
allocated to the middle-class.
Trump's big challenge will be routing the current 3% GDP growth to his voters as he has promised
to. I have not seen or heard any concrete policy proposals that will accomplish this, so there
should be a yawning wide door for the Democrats to march through 2 and 4 years from now if they
can figure out how to turn on the light to discover where that door is. Right now the Democrats
are just fighting with the Republicans on how the money should be distributed among the top 10%
instead of looking at revisiting their policies form scratch.
Sanders was on the right track, but went to far on key things such as free university. I think
most Americans would agree that college should have some value that is paid for, but it should
be much less than $60k/year tuition. The rest of the developed world doesn't have massive student
debt issues because their colleges and universities are typically in the $3k to $20k/year tuition
and many professional programs (lawyers, doctors etc.) are structured as long undergraduate programs
instead of 4-year undergraduate program just being a weeding out process before you even get into
the professional program.
Free college is popular. Most people went to free public schools. Your argument against college
is the same argument against elementary school. If you want more STEM graduates as a society,
pay for it.
One small quibble: IMHO it is an issue of left vs. right. Unfortunately the US has no `left'
and the only options ever presented are right vs. even-further-right.
"Second, the issue is generally not who "leans to the right." Indeed, the 2016 election should
have made clear to the paper the severe limits on the usefulness of the terms "right" and "left"
in explaining U.S. elections. Jobs are not a right v. left issue."
Until Democrat Party leadership disavows their neoliberal, financial strip-mining, progressive
voters are challenged by identity politics. How can one remain a Democratic loyalist under those
circumstances?
The video begins with the March of Dimes funded development of the polio vaccine. Edward Murrow
asks Jonas Salk, "Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" Salk famously answered, "The people, I'd
say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
The video ends with his Salk's son repeating what his father said to him: "What is more important?
The human value of the dollar or the dollar value of the human?"
These questions are not valid when corporate oligarchs control the puppet strings of both political
parties.
Presumably, that's because neoliberals have bought into the Chicago School theory of human
capital, "the stock of knowledge, habits, social and personality attributes, including creativity,
embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital
Since economic value is intended for the shareholder, neoclassical and neoliberal policies
are intended to achieve the same outcome: to decrease the dollar value of the human.
Prof Black says that Al Gore is "the [co]leader of the New Democrats." That was true in 1988-1992.
But some people sometimes learn a thing or two over a quarter-century. In Gore's case, he learned
something yuuuge: that global warming is the central issue of our time for *everyone*. Yet Prof.
Black, the Democrats new, old, and middleaged, every single commenter on this posting, not to
mention the Five coal-state Senators whining about "the economy," not a one of all of them had
a single word about the most important (perhaps the *only* important issue) of our times. Does
anyone doubt that, had the Democrats been forced to nominate him in the contested convention that
I had so hoped for, the campaign, its outcome, and our present discussion would be quite different?
I believe Gore was a less talented version of his father under the spell of Tipper who was
usually on a crusade against naughty language. Left to his own devices, Gore is alright, but it
takes him a while. He was garbage in 2000.
Wow! I respect Bill Black,so much so that if I was a billionaire respite with household name
recognition to promote my ascension to the big house, my cabinet would have hopefully been blessed
with his inclusion. I get the monetary sovereignty reality and am equally frustrated over the
disconnect most people have digesting the difference between public and private debt. Unfortunately
long standing cultural beliefs continually propogandized are hard to change, so without a very
established credentialed leader, like maybe some of those new democats, and a host of other well
respected influential cohorts supporting this counter intuitive reversal of perception, the reality
that our governments finances are nothing akin to a households will only be reckognized by a very
small group of open minded heterodox academics and truth seeking objective journalists, like the
folks here at Naked Capitalism. I assume some unsavory corporate benefactors of energy , banking,
and the sometimes comically nefarious cast of charachters running the various military industrial
enterprises, obviously dependent upon government accomodations, contracts, and unlimited revolving
door exposures, must have some inherent comprehension of the governments monetary sovereignty.
Though i am sure, just like justice and law, to them its two tier. Whether we want to admit it
or not, class is a big divider, and those benefitting from our current insanity stand on some
shaky shoulders. They need institutions that are self affirming and equally prescribed to regardless
of class. Religion helps the downtrodden with hope and morality; equally comforting to the plutocrats
that be are the multiple arenas upholding assumptions espousing limited federal government coffers,
conforming the masses to be humble and aquiescent, but more importantly incentivizes a hard working
competitive ethic that the powers that be easily exploit for ever more profits.
Now the divergence between me and Professor Black comes where he implores that people just want
to work, anotherwords have a secure job. What that job is and what it pays isnt the priority,
the idea they have a structured format to adhere to and anchor their societal existence is whats
paramount. I dont buy it! . I get it, here at Naked Capitalism isnt the place for anecdotal exploits,
so i dont want to bore anybody with my angry history. But experiences do correspond to attitudes
and policy persuasions. Briefly, I own a small business, I hate it, I simply have to continue
with it because otherwise I am in the street. The Great Recession gutted my savings, opportunities,
and networks, while age, personal obligations, and finances precludes any restructuring. Surely
many middle aged middle class americans share my frustrations, and the future isnt looking any
brighter. That being said, work for the sake of doing something integrated for a minimal pay check
to stay relevant and in the "system" isnt what's needed. Productive opportunities that engage
those that are idle and prone to self destructive behaviors might be socially responsible, and
obviously our federal government can provide funding for that, even though this cooperative idea
might sound too much like socialism. Young people surely need educational opportunities and structured
paths to engage in that will lead to either being productive or aid searching for better sustainable
ventures that balance our proclivity to turn nature into profits for the few. Point is, obviously
society is a growth in progress and each new generation needs guidance finding ways to spend time
assuring they and their societal members are continuing to build upon and improve the quality
of everybodies lives. Sometimes profit can be a great motivator for this, and other times not.
I am not sure if Prof. Black is expanding his definition of work. Maybe instead of getting into
debt for an education, vocational or academic, people should be paid a living wage to receive
an education at the beginning of their occupational lives, or like me, they need help restructuring
due to public policy that destroyed their economic and occupational existences.. Bernie tried
to introduce these concepts, but fear of deficits and lacking funds took center stage. Bernie,
who obviously knows the truth because of Stephanie Kelton, got cold feet with regards to attempting
an honest discusion, reverting instead to increased taxing to find funding. Sorry , until the
definition of "work" is broadened, i'm not in favor of collectively indoctrinating unfortunate
able bodied persons into a government work program that serves as a wage floor for some make for
work job. Something like the Orange Oompa Loompa's proposed border wall? The entire concept sounds
way too Orwelian for me.
New Democrats are really moderate republicans. For the democrat party to survive and get back
their base, they have to adopt progressive democrat ideas. Electing Schumer as their senate leader
is a mistake. He represents all that is bad about the democrat party. People are tired of being
screwed by Neoliberal policies. We need a new deal for the 99%. Those voters that were conned
by Trump are in for a rude awaking, and it won't take too long. American voters are very fickle.
Not long ago the republican party was portrayed as on life support. It didn't take long for that
to change. If democrats are smart they will quit living in the past and become more progressive.
They only need to support their base to make big changes happen.
"... "Jake Sullivan, Clinton's policy director, was the only one in Clinton's inner circle who kept saying she would likely lose, despite the sanguine polling," Glenn Thrush says, citing Sullivan's friends. ..."
"... "He was also the only one of the dozen aides who dialed in for Clinton's daily scheduling call who kept on asking if it wasn't a good idea for her to spend more time in the Midwestern swing states in the closing days of the campaign." ..."
"... Clinton herself had a spat with other top party officials who wanted to run against Trump as emblematic of where crazy repubs were headed. Clinton said, 'no, be nice to republicans, only Trump matters and we want their voters.' ..."
"... The Clintons happily sacrificed the whole party to save themselves and in the end, they couldn't even accomplish THAT. What amazes me is that the chokehold that the Clintons had(still have?) was so tight that the party let it happen! ..."
Decent read from a democrat candidate in NC who ran for congress and got no help from DCCC. Makes
larger point about how they need to built out the organization with training, infrastructure for
campaigns. One remarkable bit is how there was a seat in TX district that hillary clinton won and
the party didn't even field a candidate!
A similar story about the final days of the SS Clintanic :
"Jake Sullivan, Clinton's policy director, was the only one in Clinton's inner circle who kept
saying she would likely lose, despite the sanguine polling," Glenn Thrush says, citing Sullivan's
friends.
"He was also the only one of the dozen aides who dialed in for Clinton's daily scheduling call
who kept on asking if it wasn't a good idea for her to spend more time in the Midwestern swing
states in the closing days of the campaign."
"They spent far more time debating whether or not Clinton should visit Texas and Arizona, two
states they knew she had little chance of winning, in order to get good press," Thrush says. Just
a week before Election Day, Clinton made a campaign stop in Tempe, Arizona.
Who knows whether the NYT's ten months of daily fake news about "inevitable Hillary" misled the
campaign, or the campaign misled the NYT?
One is reminded of the old nautical story about an imperious captain sailing on into a wall of
clouds, as the worried navigator watches the barometer dropping to 28 inches of mercury.
The NYT's job is to inject more mercury - problem solved! (we thought)
Building on lambert's favorite quote from atrios "they had ONE job!". Anecdotes like this from
politico really emphasize how they literally stopped trying to elect other democrats. It was ALL
about clinton and little else mattered. There was NO plan B!
Clinton herself had a spat with other top party officials who wanted to run against Trump as emblematic
of where crazy repubs were headed. Clinton said, 'no, be nice to republicans, only Trump matters
and we want their voters.'
The Clintons happily sacrificed the whole party to save themselves and in the end, they couldn't
even accomplish THAT. What amazes me is that the chokehold that the Clintons had(still have?) was
so tight that the party let it happen!
Personally I would like to see the Democratic Party go the way of the Whigs. They don't deserve
my time and effort when the elite go out of their way to stack the deck.
"... Greenwald's take down is another hammer meets nail piece. The CIA are systemic liars. In fact, that's their job to move around in the shadows and deceive. They literally lie about everything. They lied about Iran/Contra, torture programs, their propensity for drug smuggling and dealing, infesting the media with agents, imaginary WMDs that launch war and massacre, mass surveillance of citizens, just to name a few. ..."
"... This is the agency who are in secret and anonymity, with no verifiable evidence, whispering rumors in the WaPoo and NYTimes' ears that the Russians made Hillary lose. What moron would take the CIA at its word anymore? Much less a major newspaper? Did I miss something, is it 1950 again? Methinks I've picked up the scent of fake news ..."
"... Apparently, all the morons who are still screaming about Trump, as if he alone will be in charge of the government and not his GOP handlers. Please keep in mind that the ardent Clinton supporters quite clearly reveal cult behavior, and anything that allows them to continue embracing their belief in their righteousness will be embraced without question or qualm. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The upside of these overtly political battles among intelligence agencies is that we are eroding away the idea that these are non-partisan institutions without overt political agendas. ..."
"... What Stengel and various mainstream media outlets appear to be arguing for is the creation of a "Ministry of Truth" managed by mainstream U.S. media outlets and enforced by Google, Facebook and other technology platforms. ..."
"... In other words, once these supposedly responsible outlets decide what the "truth" is, then questioning that narrative will earn you "virtual" expulsion from the marketplace of ideas, possibly eliminated via algorithms of major search engines or marked with a special app to warn readers not to believe what you say, a sort of yellow Star of David for the Internet age. ..."
"... The NC lawsuit against WaPo, like the lawsuit of Hedges et al. against provisions of the NDAA, marks a watershed moment for defending free speech in our country! I hope that my oft-expressed belief -- that we will soon need to revive samizdat ..."
"... According to a recent posting on Wolf Street, according to records, the Treasury has borrowed 4 trillion more between 2004-15, than can actually be accounted for in spending. This is because it is the borrowing and thus public obligations, which really matter to the powers that be. The generals just get their toys and wars as icing on the cake. It doesn't matter if they win, because there would be less war to spend it on. Eventually they will use "public/private partnerships" to take their piles of public obligations and trade for the rest of the Commons. ..."
"... Money needs to be understand as a public utility, like roads. We no more own it than we own the section of road we are using. It is like blood, not fat. ..."
"... The CIA whinging about a right wing president being installed by a foreign power might just be the greatest self-awareness fail ever! ..."
"... LOL at that! You'd think they were afraid trump might turn out to be the next Hugo Chavez! They must really, really love their program to help al Qaeda in Syria. ..."
"... The CIA lies as a matter of course, and now they're being propped up as the paragons of honesty, simply out of political expediency. Crazy days. ..."
"... Modern Democrats simply aren't a political party but fanatics of a professional sports club. If it wasn't the Russians, it would be referees or Bill Belichick at fault. I'm surprised they aren't mentioning "Comrade Nader" at all times. ..."
"... In fact, Trump's coalition looks remarkably similar to the one that Scott Walker put together in 2014. ..."
"... Obama in Spartanburg, SC in 2007: And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner. ..."
"... And the Dems wonder why the working class feel betrayed. ..."
Meet the Democrats' proto-Trumps Politico. "In three major states with a governor's
mansion up for grabs in 2018, a big-name, politically active billionaire or multimillionaire
is taking steps toward a run - [Democrat] donors looking to take matters into their own
hands after 2016's gutting losses."
The Evidence to Prove the Russian Hack emptywheel. The headline is a bit off, since the
post's subject is really the evidence required to prove the Russian hack. Some of
which does exist. That said, this is an excellent summary of the state of play. I take issue
with one point:
Crowdstrike reported that GRU also hacked the DNC. As it explains, GRU does this by sending
someone something that looks like an email password update, but which instead is a fake
site designed to get someone to hand over their password. The reason this claim is strong
is because people at the DNC say this happened to them.
First, CrowdStrike is a private security firm, so there's a high likelihood they're talking
their book, Beltway IT being what it is. Second, a result (DNC got phished) isn't "strong"
proof of a claim (GRU did the phishing). We live in a world where 12-year-olds know how to
do email phishing, and a world where professional phishing operations can camouflage themselves
as whoever they like. So color me skeptical absent some unpacking on this point. A second post
from emptywheel,
Unpacking the New CIA Leak: Don't Ignore the Aluminum Tube Footnote , is also well worth
a read.
Greenwald's take down is another hammer meets nail piece. The CIA are systemic liars.
In fact, that's their job to move around in the shadows and deceive. They literally lie about
everything. They lied about Iran/Contra, torture programs, their propensity for drug smuggling
and dealing, infesting the media with agents, imaginary WMDs that launch war and massacre,
mass surveillance of citizens, just to name a few.
They murder, torture, train hired mercenary proxies (who they are often pretending to oppose),
stage coups of democratically elected govt.'s, interfere with elections, topple regimes, install
ruthless puppet dictators, and generally enslave other nations to western corporate pirates.
They are a rogue band of pirates themselves.
This is the agency who are in secret and anonymity, with no verifiable evidence, whispering
rumors in the WaPoo and NYTimes' ears that the Russians made Hillary lose. What moron would
take the CIA at its word anymore? Much less a major newspaper? Did I miss something, is it
1950 again? Methinks I've picked up the scent of fake news
Conclusion: It isn't the Russians that are interfering with U.S. kangaroo elections, it's
the professionals over at the CIA
Apparently, all the morons who are still screaming about Trump, as if he alone will
be in charge of the government and not his GOP handlers. Please keep in mind that the ardent
Clinton supporters quite clearly reveal cult behavior, and anything that allows them to continue
embracing their belief in their righteousness will be embraced without question or qualm.
I've tried to point out on other blogs just how shaky that story in the Washington Post
is, and the response I get is something along the lines of, well, other outlets are also
reporting it, so it must be true. It does me no good to point out that this is the same tactic
used by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. People will believe what they
want to believe.
It may help to point to the history of CIA influence at WaPoo. Counterpunch had a short
piece reminding everyone of Operation Mockingbird (going from memory on that name) where CIA
had reporters on staff at the paper directly taking orders and simultaneously on CIA payroll.
If questioned about CIA's motivation for hating trump, my best guess is that it is because
trump is undermining their project to overthrow assad in syria using nusra rebels. And also
because trump wants to be nice to russia.
I think there's some people in the cia that think they played a major role in winning the
cold war through their support for mujahadeen rebels in afghanistan. I suspect they think they
can beat putin in syria the same way. This is absolutely nutty.
The upside of these overtly political battles among intelligence agencies is that we
are eroding away the idea that these are non-partisan institutions without overt political
agendas.
There's a large number of people that will see through the facade. Right now, Trump supporters
are getting a lesson in how much resistance there can be within the establishment. I'm no Trump
supporter, but I think seeing what these institutions are capable of is a useful exercise for
all involved.
Apologies if this analysis by Robert Parry has already been shared here:
"What Stengel and various mainstream media outlets appear to be arguing for is the
creation of a "Ministry of Truth" managed by mainstream U.S. media outlets and enforced
by Google, Facebook and other technology platforms.
In other words, once these supposedly responsible outlets decide what the "truth"
is, then questioning that narrative will earn you "virtual" expulsion from the marketplace
of ideas, possibly eliminated via algorithms of major search engines or marked with a special
app to warn readers not to believe what you say, a sort of yellow Star of David for the
Internet age.
And then there's the possibility of more direct (and old-fashioned) government enforcement
by launching FBI investigations into media outlets that won't toe the official line. (All
of these "solutions" have been advocated in recent weeks.)
On the other hand, if you do toe the official line that comes from Stengel's public diplomacy
shop, you stand to get rewarded with government financial support. Stengel disclosed in
his interview with Ignatius that his office funds "investigative" journalism projects.
"How should citizens who want a fact-based world combat this assault on truth?" Ignatius
asks, adding: "Stengel has approved State Department programs that teach investigative reporting
and empower truth-tellers."
The NC lawsuit against WaPo, like the lawsuit of Hedges et al. against provisions of
the NDAA, marks a watershed moment for defending free speech in our country! I hope that my
oft-expressed belief -- that we will soon need to revive samizdat techniques to preserve
truth– may turn ou to be overly pessimistic.
Keep in mind the basis of this capitalist economy is Federal debt. They have to spend it
on something. The government doesn't even budget, which is to list priorities and spend according
to need/ability. They put together these enormous bills, add enough to get the votes, which
don't come cheap and then the prez can only pass or veto.
If they wanted to actually budget, taking the old line item veto as a template, they could
break these bills into all their various items, have each legislator assign a percentage value
to each one, put them back together in order of preference and the prez would draw the line.
"The buck stops here."
That would keep powers separate, with congress prioritizing and the prez individually responsible
for deficit spending. It would also totally crash our current "Capitalist" system.
According to a recent posting on Wolf Street, according to records, the Treasury has
borrowed 4 trillion more between 2004-15, than can actually be accounted for in spending. This
is because it is the borrowing and thus public obligations, which really matter to the powers
that be. The generals just get their toys and wars as icing on the cake. It doesn't matter
if they win, because there would be less war to spend it on. Eventually they will use "public/private
partnerships" to take their piles of public obligations and trade for the rest of the Commons.
Money needs to be understand as a public utility, like roads. We no more own it than
we own the section of road we are using. It is like blood, not fat.
LOL at that! You'd think they were afraid trump might turn out to be the next Hugo Chavez!
They must really, really love their program to help al Qaeda in Syria.
There are so many eye-rolling ironies in all this I think my eyeballs might just pop out
of their sockets. And the liberals going out of their way to tout the virtues of the CIA the
very same organization that never shied from assassinating or overthrowing a leftwing president/prime
minister it galls. The CIA lies as a matter of course, and now they're being propped up
as the paragons of honesty, simply out of political expediency. Crazy days.
Modern Democrats simply aren't a political party but fanatics of a professional sports
club. If it wasn't the Russians, it would be referees or Bill Belichick at fault. I'm surprised
they aren't mentioning "Comrade Nader" at all times.
My guess is donors are annoyed after the 2014 debacle and are having a hard time rationalizing
a loss to a reality TV show host with a cameo in Home Alone 2.
And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and
collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes
myself, I will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.
Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.
And the Dems wonder why the working class feel betrayed.
That ProPublica piece (
Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the U.S. Pro Publica)
is brutal. Not only do we have to be the shittest corrupt country in the world but we have
to be a safe haven for ever other corrupt politician in the world as long as they have $$.
Can someone just make it all end? Please. There needs to be a maximum wealth where anything
you earn past it just gets automatically redistributed to the poor.
Thanks for the link – really important and scary things are going in congress concerning
'fake news' and Russian propaganda and HR 6393 is particularly bad. The EU is also taking steps
to counter 'fake news' as well. Obama claimed that some form of curation is required – and
it is happening quickly. People are suggesting that propornot has been debunked. That does
not matter anymore. The Obama regime and the MSM don't care – that have gotten the message
out.
And the people behind this are really deranged – check out Adam Schiff calling Tucker Carlson
a Kremlin stooge for even suggesting that there is no certainty that Russia leaked the emails
to Wikileaks.
After all, the media went all in for Hillary and spent huge amounts of time explaining why
Trump is unfit. But they lost.
And now our efforts on behalf of al Queada are failing in Syria and more hysteria ensues.
See for example:
The email saga lost a provable set of sources a long time ago. Before the files were given
to Wikileaks it was already too late to determine which people did it. So-called forensic evidence
of these computers only tell us that investigators either found evidence of a past compromise
or that people want us to believe they did. Since the compromise was determined after the fact,
the people with access could have done anything to the computers, including leave a false trail.
The core problem is that since security for all of these machines, including the DNC's email
server and most likely many of those from Team R, was nearly non-existent nearly nothing useful
can be determined. The time to learn something about a remote attacker, when it's possible
at all, is while the machine is being attacked – assuming it has never been compromised before.
If the attacker's machine has also been compromised then you know pretty much nothing unless
you can get access to it.
As far as physical access protection goes. If the machine has been left on and unattended
or is not completely encrypted then the only thing that might help is a 24 hour surveillance
camera pointed at the machine.
Forensic evidence in compromised computers is significantly less reliable than DNA and hair
samples. It's much too easy for investigators to frame another party by twiddling some bits.
Anyone that thinks that even well intentioned physical crime investigators have never gotten
convictions with bad or manipulated evidence has been watching and believing way too many crime
oriented mysteries. "Blindspot" is not a documentary.
As for projecting behaviors on a country by calling it a "state action", Russia or otherwise,
implying that there is no difference between independent and government sponsored actions,
that is just silly.
"... What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if the fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or reason to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her. ..."
"... This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the Democratic Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate Republicans. This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities for elite blacks, women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism. ..."
"... I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what to do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see. ..."
"... The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's long-term political project since the '90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the nominally "left" party becomes a de facto ruling party representing the center-left and center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously long leash to move the nominally "right" party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style fascist party, and ideally leaving a shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological hostage of the center. ..."
"... Both Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back from Corbyn have been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely decided to remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship to a "left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal centrism. ..."
"... He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration would have done them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create the perception of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports vouchers for religious private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for Education Reform) and in some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center doesn't particularly care about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like abortion rights, about which he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate opportunistic interest). ..."
"... appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of authority at institutions like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment that doesn't make either major US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other. ..."
Dec 07, 2016 | http://crookedtimber.org/2016/11/28/the-day-after-brexit/#comment-699954
The Democratic left does not exist. Sanders is an independent who would never have been nominated
except to help rubber-stamp the inauguration of the donor-class candidate.
The Democrats do not have a left-candidate, or a slate of 'left candidates' around whom a left
might coalesce. That's the consequence of national Democratic priorities and the take-over of
the party by the Clinton crime family. There are no 'up and coming' Democrats. Those who are talented
are spotted and co-opted into the Clinton-controlled machine. The quid pro quo manner of doing
business is transparent. Very large sums change hands and almost always according to the laws,
in so far as the actual pay-offs are 'incidental' rather than clearly causal.
How many doctoral candidates in their thirties get paid $600 k per year for part-time work
and another $300 k per year plus stock options?
All of them, if the doctoral candidate happens to be named Chelsea Clinton. As I noted earlier,
Democrats regard outsourcing their interactions with young people and rural voters to Bernie Sanders
as a 'solution.'
What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if
the fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or
reason to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her.
Yes, it was close. But let's not forget who won and why and how. The president-elect has already
stolen parts of the Dem base and now he's after the rest. The traditional Dem coalition is already
fractured and if the new president does half as well as he did destroying two political dynasties
then Democrats may find themselves in an even deeper whole in 2018.
Like Labour, Democrats need to figure out whether they are the party of the working class,
or not.
There was no (or not much) 'working class surge' for Trump.
Well, there was, in that the internal composition of the Republican vote changed to be more white
non-college rural working class and a little less urban college-educated Republicans. I don't know
what the numbers are.
This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating
back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the Democratic
Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate Republicans.
This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities for elite blacks,
women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism.
I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege
except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs
to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what to
do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see.
Hidari @ 108, Matt Christman of the podcast Chapo Trap House made almost this exact point in
a recent interview with NYU historian David Parsons
on Parsons' podcast The Nostalgia Trap. (Both
excellent podcasts, by the way.)
The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's long-term political project since the
'90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as
an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the nominally "left" party becomes a de facto
ruling party representing the center-left and center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously
long leash to move the nominally "right" party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style
fascist party, and ideally leaving a shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological
hostage of the center.
Both Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back
from Corbyn have been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely
decided to remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship
to a "left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal
centrism. (Of course this is also pretty close to Quiggin's three-party system critique, depending
on the extent to which one treats the distinction between center-left and center-right as ever having
been particularly meaningful in the first place.)
Faustusnotes, bob mcmanus brings up more or less the same litany of actual tangible policy decisions
that I and others have brought up in the past, a kind of litany to which a typical center-leftist
response is obstinately ignoring it.
Another point US leftists have been making for many months now is that Trump himself isn't
actually a fascist, he's only pretending to be one , which you treated as a novel discovery at
#79 and to which your response was that Trump's neoliberal administration in practice will make neoliberal
Democrats somehow leftist by comparison, which is absolutely incorrect.
He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration would have done
them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create the perception
of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports vouchers for religious
private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for Education Reform) and in
some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center doesn't particularly care
about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like abortion rights, about which
he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate opportunistic interest).
But appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of authority at institutions
like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment that doesn't make either major
US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other.
I want to see a political decision to abandon the working class
NAFTA & TPP etc, big bank bailout no prosecutions, no mortgage relief, grossly inadequate structured
and targeted stimulus, low inflation low gov't spending with many gov't jobs cut, insurance and
provider friendly whirlpool of an expensive health care plan
The Democratic left does not exist. Sanders is an independent who would never have been nominated
except to help rubber-stamp the inauguration of the donor-class candidate.
The Democrats do not have a left-candidate, or a slate of 'left candidates' around whom a left
might coalesce. That's the consequence of national Democratic priorities and the take-over of
the party by the Clinton crime family. There are no 'up and coming' Democrats. Those who are talented
are spotted and co-opted into the Clinton-controlled machine. The quid pro quo manner of doing
business is transparent. Very large sums change hands and almost always according to the laws,
in so far as the actual pay-offs are 'incidental' rather than clearly causal.
How many doctoral candidates in their thirties get paid $600 k per year for part-time work
and another $300 k per year plus stock options?
All of them, if the doctoral candidate happens to be named Chelsea Clinton. As I noted earlier,
Democrats regard outsourcing their interactions with young people and rural voters to Bernie Sanders
as a 'solution.'
What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if the
fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or reason
to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her.
Yes, it was close. But let's not forget who won and why and how. The president-elect has already
stolen parts of the Dem base and now he's after the rest. The traditional Dem coalition is already
fractured and if the new president does half as well as he did destroying two political dynasties
then Democrats may find themselves in an even deeper whole in 2018.
Like Labour, Democrats need to figure out whether they are the party of the working class,
or not.
bob mcmanus 12.03.16 at 4:00 pm There was no (or not much) 'working class surge' for Trump.
Well, there was, in that the internal composition of the Republican vote changed to be more
white non-college rural working class and a little less urban college-educated Republicans. I
don't know what the numbers are.
This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating
back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the
Democratic Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate
Republicans. This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities
for elite blacks, women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism.
I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege
except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs
to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what
to do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see.
Hidari @ 108, Matt Christman of the podcast Chapo Trap House made almost this exact point in
a recent interview with NYU historian David Parsons on Parsons' podcast The Nostalgia Trap.
(Both excellent podcasts, by the way.) The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's
long-term political project since the '90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US
and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the
nominally "left" party becomes a de facto ruling party representing the center-left and
center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously long leash to move the nominally "right"
party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style fascist party, and ideally leaving a
shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological hostage of the center. Both
Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back from Corbyn have
been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely decided to
remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship to a
"left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal centrism.
(Of course this is also pretty close to Quiggin's three-party system critique, depending on the
extent to which one treats the distinction between center-left and center-right as ever having
been particularly meaningful in the first place.)
Faustusnotes, bob mcmanus brings up more or less the same litany of actual tangible policy
decisions that I and others have brought up in the past, a kind of litany to which a typical center-leftist
response is obstinately ignoring it. Another point US leftists have been making for many months
now is that Trump himself isn't actually a fascist, he's only pretending to be one , which
you treated as a novel discovery at #79 and to which your response was that Trump's neoliberal
administration in practice will make neoliberal Democrats somehow leftist by comparison, which
is absolutely incorrect. He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration
would have done them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create
the perception of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports
vouchers for religious private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for
Education Reform) and in some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center
doesn't particularly care about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like
abortion rights, about which he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate
opportunistic interest). But appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of
authority at institutions like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment
that doesn't make either major US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other.
"... If I was in charge of the DNC and wanted to commission a very cleverly written piece to exonerate the DLC and the New Democrats from the 30 odd years of corruption and self-aggrandizement they indulged in and laughed all the way to the Bank then I would definitely give this chap a call. ..."
"... I would ask the Author to start with the Powell memo and then make an investigation as to why the Democrats then and the DLC later decided to merely sit on their hands when all the forces the Powell memo unleashed proceeded to wreak their havoc in every established institution of the Left, principally the Universities which had always been the bastion of the Progressives. That might be a good starting point. ..."
If I was in charge of the DNC and wanted to commission a very cleverly written piece to exonerate
the DLC and the New Democrats from the 30 odd years of corruption and self-aggrandizement they
indulged in and laughed all the way to the Bank then I would definitely give this chap a call.
I mean, where do we start? No attempt at learning the history of neoliberalism, no attempt
at any serious research about how and why it fastened itself into the brains of people like Tony
Coelho and Al From, nothing, zilch.
If someone who did not know the history of the DLC read this piece, they would walk away thinking,
'wow, it was all happenstance, it all just happened, no one deliberately set off this run away
train'. Sometime in the 90s the 'Left' decided to just pursue identity politics. Amazing.
I would ask the Author to start with the Powell memo and then make an investigation as to why
the Democrats then and the DLC later decided to merely sit on their hands when all the forces
the Powell memo unleashed proceeded to wreak their havoc in every established institution of the
Left, principally the Universities which had always been the bastion of the Progressives. That
might be a good starting point.
"... Judging by the people who Trump has appointed, it is looking like an ugly situation for the US. If he actually hires people like John Bolton, we will know that a betrayal was certain. While I think that it is probable that he is the lesser evil, he was supposed to avoid neoconservatives and Wall Street types (that Clinton associates herself with). ..."
"... I think it would be a mistake to attribute too much "genius" to Trump and Kushner. It sounds like Kushner exhibited competence, and that's great. But Trump won in great measure because Democratic Party governance eviscerated those communities. ..."
"... This is akin to how Obama got WAY too much credit for being a brilliant orator. People wanted change in '08 and voted for it. That change agent betrayed them, so they voted for change again this time. Or, more accurately, a lot of Obama voters stayed home, the Republican base held together, and Trump's team found necessary little pockets of ignored voters to energize. But that strategy would never have worked if not for Obama's and Clinton's malfeasance and incompetence. Honestly, Hillary got closer to a win that she had a right to. That ought to be the real story. ..."
Does anyone else get the overwhelming impression that the US is heading for an impending collapse
or serious decline at least, unless it puts a fight it against the status quo?
Judging by the people who Trump has appointed, it is looking like an ugly situation for
the US. If he actually hires people like John Bolton, we will know that a betrayal was certain.
While I think that it is probable that he is the lesser evil, he was supposed to avoid neoconservatives
and Wall Street types (that Clinton associates herself with).
I find it amazing how tone deaf the Clinton campaign and Democratic Establishment are. Trump
and apparently his son in law, no matter what else, are political campaigning geniuses given their
accomplishments. For months people were criticizing their lack of experience in politics like
a fatal mistake..
I think that no real change is going to happen until someone authentically left wing takes
power or if the US collapses.
I think it would be a mistake to attribute too much "genius" to Trump and Kushner. It sounds
like Kushner exhibited competence, and that's great. But Trump won in great measure because Democratic
Party governance eviscerated those communities.
This is akin to how Obama got WAY too much credit for being a brilliant orator. People
wanted change in '08 and voted for it. That change agent betrayed them, so they voted for change
again this time. Or, more accurately, a lot of Obama voters stayed home, the Republican base held
together, and Trump's team found necessary little pockets of ignored voters to energize. But that
strategy would never have worked if not for Obama's and Clinton's malfeasance and incompetence.
Honestly, Hillary got closer to a win that she had a right to. That ought to be the real story.
It is not clear to me what exactly a collapse entails. The US doesn't have obvious lines to
fracture across, like say the USSR did. (I suppose an argument could be made for "cultural regions"
like the South, Cascadia etc separating out, but it seems far less likely to happen, even in the
case of continuing extreme economic duress and breakdown of democracy/civil rights).
The US is and has been in a serious decline, and will probably continue.
A crisis of legitimacy . People are fed up with politics. Do not blame globalisation for
that. Sep 27th 2001 | From the print edition. Timekeeper. Add this article to ...
Legitimacy: Legitimation Crises and Its Causes - Political Science Notes www.politicalsciencenotes.com/
legitimacy / legitimacy -legitimation- crises -and-its.../797
Causes of Legitimation Crisis : There are several causes or aspects of legitimation crisis
. Habermas and several other neo-Marxists, after studying all the aspects of capitalist
societies, have concluded that a number of factors are responsible for the legitimation crisis
The Global Crisis of Legitimacy . Geopolitical Weekly. May 4, 2010 | 08:56 GMT. Print. Text
Size. By George Friedman. Financial panics are an integral part of ...
by GE Reyes - 2010 -
Cited by 1 -
Related articles Theoretical basis of crisis of legitimacy and implications for less
developed countries: Guatemala as a case of study. TENDENCIAS. Revista de la Facultad de ...
by A Mattelaer - 2014 -
Related articles Mar 21, 2014 - generalised crisis in legitimacy , our democracies
face a crisis of legitimation: political choices are in dire need of an explanatory narrative
that.
The Legitimacy Crisis | RealClearPolitics www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/08/the_
legitimacy _ crisis _126530.html
May 8, 2015 - American government - at all levels - is losing the legitimacy it needs to
function. Or, perhaps, some segments of the government have ...
The third dimension of the crisis that I identify is the crisis of legitimacy of US hegemony.
This, I think, is as serious as the other two crises, since, as an admirer of ...
The Crisis of Legitimacy in Africa. Abiola Irele ▫ Summer 1992. A bleak picture emerges
from today's Africa. One glaring aspect is the material deprivation ...
It is the end of neoliberalism and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all
need to come together to stamp out the authoritarian part.
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberalism has been disastrous for the Rust Belt, and I think we need to envision a new future for what was once the country's industrial heartland, now little more than its wasteland ..."
"... The question of what the many millions of often-unionized factory workers, SMEs which supplied them, family farmers (now fully industrialized and owned by corporations), and all those in secondary production and services who once supported them are to actually do in future to earn a decent living is what I believe should really be the subject of debate. ..."
"... two factors (or three, I guess) have contributed to this state of despair: offshoring and outsourcing, and technology. ..."
"... Medicaid, the CHIP program, the SNAP program and others (including NGOs and private charitable giving) may alleviate some of the suffering, but there is currently no substitute for jobs that would enable men and women to live lives of dignity – a decent place to live, good educations for their children, and a reasonable, secure pension in old age. Near-, at-, and below-minimum wage jobs devoid of any benefits don't allow any of these – at most, they make possible a subsistence life, one which requires continued reliance on public assistance throughout one's lifetime. ..."
"... In the U.S. (a neoliberal pioneer), poverty is closely linked with inequality and thus, a high GINI coefficient (near that of Turkey); where there is both poverty and a very unequal distribution of resources, this inevitably affects women (and children) and racial (and ethnic) minorities disproportionately. The economic system, racism, sexism, and xenophobia are not separate, stand-alone issues; they are profoundly intertwined. ..."
"... But really, if you think about it, slavery was defined as ownership, ownership of human capital (which was convertible into cash), and women in many societies throughout history were acquired as part of a financial transaction (either through purchase or through sale), and control of their capital (land, property [farmland, herds], valuables and later, money) often entrusted to a spouse or male guardian. All of these practices were economically-driven, even if the driver wasn't 21st-century capitalism. ..."
"... Let it be said at once: Trump's victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this. ..."
"... Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote. ..."
"... Regional inequality and globalization are the principal drivers in Japanese politics, too, along with a number of social drivers. ..."
"... The tsunami/nuclear meltdown combined with the Japanese government's uneven response is an apt metaphor for the impact of neo-liberalism/globalization on Japan; and on the US. I then explained that the income inequality in the US was far more severe than that of Japan and that many Americans did not support the export of jobs to China/Mexico. ..."
"... I contend that in some hypothetical universe the DNC and corrupt Clinton machine could have been torn out, root and branch, within months. As I noted, however, the decision to run HRC effectively unopposed was made several years, at least, before the stark evidence of the consequences of such a decision appeared in sharp relief with Brexit. ..."
"... Just as the decline of Virginia coal is due to global forces and corporate stupidity, so the decline of the rust belt is due to long (30 year plus) global forces and corporate decisions that predate the emergence of identity politics. ..."
"... It's interesting that the clear headed thinkers of the Marxist left, who pride themselves on not being distracted by identity, don't want to talk about these factors when discussing the plight of their cherished white working class. ..."
"... The construction 'white working class' is a useful governing tool that splits poor people and possible coalitions against the violence of capital. Now, discussion focuses on how some of the least powerful, most vulnerable people in the United States are the perpetrators of a great injustice against racialised and minoritised groups. Such commentary colludes in the pathologisation of the working class, of poor people. Victims are inculpated as the vectors of noxious, atavistic vices while the perpetrators get off with impunity, showing off their multihued, cosmopolitan C-suites and even proposing that their free trade agreements are a form of anti-racist solidarity. Most crucially, such analysis ignores the continuities between a Trumpian dystopia and our satisfactory present. ..."
"... Race-thinking forecloses the possibility of the coalitions that you imagine, and reproduces ideas of difference in ways that always, always privilege 'whiteness'. ..."
"... Historical examples of ethnic groups becoming 'white', how it was legal and political decision-making that defined the present racial taxonomy, suggest that groups can also lose or have their 'whiteness' threatened. CB has written here about how, in the UK at least, Eastern and Southern Europeans are racialised, and so refused 'whiteness'. JQ has written about southern white minoritisation. Many commentators have pointed that the 'white working class' vote this year looked a lot like a minority vote. ..."
"... Given the subordination of groups presently defined as 'white working class', I wonder if we could think beyond ethnic and epidermal definition to consider that the impossibility of the American Dream refuses these groups whiteness; i.e the hoped for privileges of racial superiority, much in the same way that African Americans, Latin Americans and other racialised minorities are denied whiteness. Can a poor West Virginian living in a toxified drugged out impoverished landscape really be defined as a carrier of 'white privilege'? ..."
"... I was first pointed at this by the juxtapositions of racialised working class and immigrants in Imogen Tyler's Revolting Subjects – Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain but this below is a useful short article that takes a historical perspective. ..."
"... In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that "aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government - but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s." ..."
"... Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, "there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved." The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote: "the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate." ..."
"... In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.' ..."
"... In any case, as I pointed out before, given that the US is increasingly an urbanised country, and the Electoral College was created to protect rural (slave) states, the grotesque electoral result we have just seen is likely to recur, which means more and more Presidents with dubious democratic legitimacy. Thanks to Bush (and Obama) these Presidents will have, at the same time, more and more power. ..."
"... To return to my original question and answer it myself: I'm forced to conclude that the Democrats did not specifically address the revitalization – rebirth of the Rust Belt in their 2016 platform. Its failure to do so carried a heavy cost that (nearly) all of us will be forced to pay. ..."
"... This sub seems to have largely fallen into the psychologically comfortable trap of declaring that everyone who voted against their preferred candidate is racist. It's a view pushed by the neoliberals, who want to maintain he stranglehold of identity politics over the DNC, and it makes upper-class 'intellectuals' feel better about themselves and their betrayal of the filthy, subhuman white underclass (or so they see it). ..."
"... You can scream 'those jobs are never coming back!' all you want, but people are never going to accept it. So either you come up with a genuine solution (instead of simply complaining that your opponents solutions won't work; you're partisan and biased, most voters won't believe you), you may as well resign yourself to fascism. Because whining that you don't know what to do won't stop people from lining up behind someone who says that they do have one, whether it'll work or not. Nobody trusts the elite enough to believe them when they say that jobs are never coming back. Nobody trusts the elite at all. ..."
"... You sound just like the Wiemar elite. No will to solve the problem, but filled with terror at the inevitable result of failing to solve the problem. ..."
"... One brutal fact tells us everything we need to know about the Democratic party in 2016: the American Nazi party is running on a platform of free health care to working class people. This means that the American Nazi Party is now running to the left of the Democratic party. ..."
"... Back in the 1930s, when the economy collapsed, fascists appeared and took power. Racists also came out of the woodwork, ditto misogynists. Fast forward 80 years, and the same thing has happened all over again. The global economy melted down in 2008 and fascists appeared promising to fix the problems that the pols in power wouldn't because they were too closely tied to the existing (failed) system. Along with the fascists, racists gained power because they were able to scapegoat minorities as the alleged cause of everyone's misery. ..."
"... None of this is surprising. We have seen it before. Whenever you get a depression in a modern industrial economy, you get scapegoating, racism, and fascists. We know what to do. The problem is that the current Democratic party isn't doing it. ..."
"... . It is the end of neoliberalism and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all need to come together to stamp out the authoritarian part. ..."
"... This hammered people on the bottom, disproportionately African Americans and especially single AA mothers in America. It crushed the blue collar workers. It is wiping out the savings and careers of college-educated white collar workers now, at least, the ones who didn't go to the Ivy League, which is 90% of them. ..."
"... Calling Hillary an "imperfect candidate" is like calling what happened to the Titanic a "boating accident." Trump was an imperfect candidate. Why did he win? ..."
"... "The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians." ..."
"... "It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Party is in shambles as a political force. Not only did it just lose the White House to a wildly unpopular farce of a candidate despite a virtually unified establishment behind it, and not only is it the minority party in both the Senate and the House, but it is getting crushed at historical record rates on the state and local levels as well. Surveying this wreckage last week, party stalwart Matthew Yglesias of Vox minced no words: `the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that's essentially a smoking pile of rubble.' ..."
"... "One would assume that the operatives and loyalists of such a weak, defeated and wrecked political party would be eager to engage in some introspection and self-critique, and to produce a frank accounting of what they did wrong so as to alter their plight. In the case of 2016 Democrats, one would be quite mistaken." ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... "At the end of World War II, the United States and its allies decided that sustained mass unemployment was an existential threat to capitalism and had to be avoided at all costs. In response, governments everywhere targeted full employment as the master policy variable-trying to get to, and sustain, an unemployment rate of roughly four percent. The problem with doing so, over time, is that targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable itself-a phenomenon known as Goodhart's law. (..) ..."
"... " what we see [today] is a reversal of power between creditors and debtors as the anti-inflationary regime of the past 30 years undermines itself-what we might call "Goodhart's revenge." In this world, yields compress and creditors fret about their earnings, demanding repayment of debt at all costs. Macro-economically, this makes the situation worse: the debtors can't pay-but politically, and this is crucial-it empowers debtors since they can't pay, won't pay, and still have the right to vote. ..."
"... "The traditional parties of the center-left and center-right, the builders of this anti-inflationary order, get clobbered in such a world, since they are correctly identified by these debtors as the political backers of those demanding repayment in an already unequal system, and all from those with the least assets. This produces anti-creditor, pro-debtor coalitions-in-waiting that are ripe for the picking by insurgents of the left and the right, which is exactly what has happened. ..."
"... "The global revolt against elites is not just driven by revulsion and loss and racism. It's also driven by the global economy itself. This is a global phenomenon that marks one thing above all. The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun." ..."
"... They want what their families have had which is secure, paid, benefits rich, blue collar work. ..."
"... trump's campaign empathized with that feeling just by focusing on the factory jobs as jobs and not as anachronisms that are slowly fading away for whatever reason. Clinton might have been "correct", but these voters didn't want to hear "the truth". And as much as you can complain about how stupid they are for wanting to be lied to, that is the unfortunate reality you, and the Democratic party, have to accept. ..."
"... trump was offering a "bailout" writ large. Clinton had no (good) counteroffer. It was like the tables were turned. Romney was the one talking about "change" and "restructuring" while Obama was defending keeping what was already there. ..."
"... "Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html ..."
"... Clinton toward the end offered tariffs. But the trump campaign hit back with what turned out to be a pretty strong counter attack – ""How's she going to get tough on China?" said Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro on CNN's Quest Means Business. He notes that some of Clinton's economic advisors have supported TPP or even worked on it. "" ..."
The question is no longer her neoliberalism, but yours. Keep it or throw it away?
I wish this issue was being seriously discussed. Neoliberalism has been disastrous for
the Rust Belt, and I think we need to envision a new future for what was once the country's industrial
heartland, now little more than its wasteland (cf. "flyover zone" – a pejorative term which
inhabitants of the zone are not too stupid to understand perfectly, btw).
The question of what the many millions of often-unionized factory workers, SMEs which supplied
them, family farmers (now fully industrialized and owned by corporations), and all those in secondary
production and services who once supported them are to actually do in future to earn a decent
living is what I believe should really be the subject of debate.
As noted upthread, two factors (or three, I guess) have contributed to this state of despair:
offshoring and outsourcing, and technology. The jobs that have been lost will not return,
and indeed will be lost in ever greater numbers – just consider what will happen to the trucking
sector when self-driving trucks hit the roads sometime in the next 10-20 years (3.5 million truckers;
8.7 in allied jobs).
Medicaid, the CHIP program, the SNAP program and others (including NGOs and private charitable
giving) may alleviate some of the suffering, but there is currently no substitute for jobs that
would enable men and women to live lives of dignity – a decent place to live, good educations
for their children, and a reasonable, secure pension in old age. Near-, at-, and below-minimum
wage jobs devoid of any benefits don't allow any of these – at most, they make possible a subsistence
life, one which requires continued reliance on public assistance throughout one's lifetime.
In the U.S. (a neoliberal pioneer), poverty is closely linked with inequality and thus,
a high GINI coefficient (near that of Turkey); where there is both poverty and a very unequal
distribution of resources, this inevitably affects women (and children) and racial (and ethnic)
minorities disproportionately. The economic system, racism, sexism, and xenophobia are not separate,
stand-alone issues; they are profoundly intertwined.
I appreciate and espouse the goals of identity politics in all their multiplicity, and also
understand that the institutions of slavery and sexism predated modern capitalist economies.
But really, if you think about it, slavery was defined as ownership, ownership of human capital
(which was convertible into cash), and women in many societies throughout history were acquired
as part of a financial transaction (either through purchase or through sale), and control of their
capital (land, property [farmland, herds], valuables and later, money) often entrusted to a spouse
or male guardian. All of these practices were economically-driven, even if the driver wasn't 21st-century
capitalism.
Also: Faustusnotes@100
For example Indiana took the ACA Medicaid expansion but did so with additional conditions that
make it worse than in neighboring states run by democratic governors.
And what states would those be? IL, IA, MI, OH, WI, KY, and TN have Republican governors. Were
you thinking pre-2014? pre-2012?
To conclude and return to my original point: what's to become of the Rust Belt in future? Did
the Democratic platform include a New New Deal for PA, OH, MI, WI, and IA (to name only the five
Rust Belt states Trump flipped)?
" Let it be said at once: Trump's victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic
and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive
governments to deal with this.
Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization
launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial
and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though,
was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the
Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote. "
What should have been one comment came out as 4, so apologies on that front.
I spent the last week explaining the US election to my students in Japan in pretty much the
terms outlined by Lilla and PIketty, so I was delighted to discover these two articles.
Regional inequality and globalization are the principal drivers in Japanese politics, too,
along with a number of social drivers. It was therefore very easy to call for a show of hands
to identify students studying here in Tokyo who are trying to decide whether or not to return
to areas such as Tohoku to build their lives; or remain in Kanto/Tokyo – the NY/Washington/LA
of Japan put crudely.
I asked students from regions close to Tohoku how they might feel if the Japanese prime minister
decided not to visit the region following Fukushima after the disaster, or preceding an election.
The tsunami/nuclear meltdown combined with the Japanese government's uneven response is an
apt metaphor for the impact of neo-liberalism/globalization on Japan; and on the US. I then explained
that the income inequality in the US was far more severe than that of Japan and that many Americans
did not support the export of jobs to China/Mexico.
I then asked the students, particularly those from outlying regions whether they believe Japan
needed a leader who would 'bring back Japanese jobs' from Viet Nam and China, etc. Many/most agreed
wholeheartedly. I then asked whether they believed Tokyo people treated those outside Kanto as
'inferiors.' Many do.
Piketty may be right regarding Trump's long-term effects on income inequality. He is wrong,
I suggest, to argue that Democrats failed to respond to Sanders' support. I contend that in
some hypothetical universe the DNC and corrupt Clinton machine could have been torn out, root
and branch, within months. As I noted, however, the decision to run HRC effectively unopposed
was made several years, at least, before the stark evidence of the consequences of such a decision
appeared in sharp relief with Brexit.
Also worth noting is that the rust belts problems are as old as Reagan – even the term dates
from the 80s, the issue is so uncool that there is a dire straits song about it. Some portion
of the decline of manufacturing there is due to manufacturers shifting to the south, where the
anti Union states have an advantage. Also there has been new investment – there were no Japanese
car companies in the us in the 1980s, so they are new job creators, yet insufficient to make up
the losses. Just as the decline of Virginia coal is due to global forces and corporate stupidity,
so the decline of the rust belt is due to long (30 year plus) global forces and corporate decisions
that predate the emergence of identity politics.
It's interesting that the clear headed thinkers of the Marxist left, who pride themselves
on not being distracted by identity, don't want to talk about these factors when discussing the
plight of their cherished white working class. Suddenly it's not the forces of capital and
the objective facts of history, but a bunch of whiny black trannies demanding safe spaces and
protesting police violence, that drove those towns to ruin.
And what solutions do they think the dems should have proposed? It can't be welfare, since
we got the ACA (watered down by representatives of the rust belt states). Is it, seriously, tariffs?
Short of going to an election promising w revolution, what should the dems have done? Give us
a clear answer so we can see what the alternative to identity politics is.
basil 11.19.16 at 5:11 am
Did this go through?
Thinking with WLGR @15, Yan @81, engels variously above,
The construction 'white working class' is a useful governing tool that splits poor people
and possible coalitions against the violence of capital. Now, discussion focuses on how some of
the least powerful, most vulnerable people in the United States are the perpetrators of a great
injustice against racialised and minoritised groups. Such commentary colludes in the pathologisation
of the working class, of poor people. Victims are inculpated as the vectors of noxious, atavistic
vices while the perpetrators get off with impunity, showing off their multihued, cosmopolitan
C-suites and even proposing that their free trade agreements are a form of anti-racist solidarity.
Most crucially, such analysis ignores the continuities between a Trumpian dystopia and our satisfactory
present.
I get that the tropes around race are easy, and super-available. Privilege confessing is very
in vogue as a prophylactic against charges of racism. But does it threaten the structures that
produce this abjection – either as embittered, immiserated 'white working class' or as threatened
minority group? It is always *those* 'white' people, the South, the Working Class, and never the
accusers some of whom are themselves happy to vote for a party that drowns out anti-war protesters
with chants of USA! USA!
Race-thinking forecloses the possibility of the coalitions that you imagine, and reproduces
ideas of difference in ways that always, always privilege 'whiteness'.
--
Historical examples of ethnic groups becoming 'white', how it was legal and political decision-making
that defined the present racial taxonomy, suggest that groups can also lose or have their 'whiteness'
threatened. CB has written here about how, in the UK at least, Eastern and Southern Europeans
are racialised, and so refused 'whiteness'. JQ has written about southern white minoritisation.
Many commentators have pointed that the 'white working class' vote this year looked a lot like
a minority vote.
Given the subordination of groups presently defined as 'white working class', I wonder
if we could think beyond ethnic and epidermal definition to consider that the impossibility of
the American Dream refuses these groups whiteness; i.e the hoped for privileges of racial superiority,
much in the same way that African Americans, Latin Americans and other racialised minorities are
denied whiteness. Can a poor West Virginian living in a toxified drugged out impoverished landscape
really be defined as a carrier of 'white privilege'?
I was first pointed at this by the juxtapositions of racialised working class and immigrants
in Imogen Tyler's Revolting Subjects – Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain but
this below is a useful short article that takes a historical perspective.
The 'racialisation' of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of 'class'
as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one.
.
This is not to deny the existence of working-class racism, or to suggest that racism is
somehow acceptable if rooted in perceived socio-economic grievances. But it is to suggest that
the concept of a 'white working class' needs problematizing, as does the claim that the British
working-class was strongly committed to a post-war vision of 'White Britain' analogous to the
politics which sustained the idea of a 'White Australia' until the 1960s.
Yes, old, settled neighbourhoods could be profoundly distrustful of outsiders – all outsiders,
including the researchers seeking to study them – but, when it came to race, they were internally
divided. We certainly hear working-class racist voices – often echoing stock racist complaints
about over-crowding, welfare dependency or exploitative landlords and small businessmen, but
we don't hear the deep pathological racial fears laid bare in the letters sent to Enoch Powell
after his so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968 (Whipple, 2009).
But more importantly, we also hear strong anti-racist voices loudly and clearly. At Wallsend
on Tyneside, where the researchers were gathering their data just as Powell shot to notoriety,
we find workers expressing casual racism, but we also find eloquent expressions of an internationalist,
solidaristic perspective in which, crucially, black and white are seen as sharing the same
working-class interests.
Racism is denounced as a deliberate capitalist strategy to divide workers against themselves,
weakening their ability to challenge those with power over their lives (shipbuilding had long
been a very fractious industry and its workers had plenty of experience of the dangers of internal
sectarian battles).
To be able to mobilize across across racialised divisions, to have race wither away entirely
would, for me, be the beginning of a politics that allowed humanity to deal with the inescapable
violence of climate change and corporate power.
*To add to the bibliography – David R. Roediger, Elizabeth D. Esch – The Production of Difference
– Race and the Management of Labour, and Denise Ferreira da Silva – Toward a Global Idea of Race.
And I have just been pointed at Ian Haney-López, White By Law – The Legal Construction of Race.
FWIW 'merica's constitutional democracy is going to collapse.
Some day - not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change
forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies - there is going to be a collapse of the
legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent.
If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better,
more robust, political system. If we're less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen .
In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that "aside from
the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional
continuity under presidential government - but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s."
Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly
important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the
Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When
they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, "there is no democratic principle on the
basis of which it can be resolved." The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote:
"the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly
legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate."
In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing
of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found,
a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a
period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative
and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.'
Given that the basic point is polarisation (i.e. that both the President and Congress have
equally strong arguments to be the the 'voice of the people') and that under the US appalling
constitutional set up, there is no way to decide between them, one can easily imagine the so to
speak 'hyperpolarisation' of a Trump Presidency as being the straw (or anvil) that breaks the
camel's back.
In any case, as I pointed out before, given that the US is increasingly an urbanised country,
and the Electoral College was created to protect rural (slave) states, the grotesque electoral
result we have just seen is likely to recur, which means more and more Presidents with dubious
democratic legitimacy. Thanks to Bush (and Obama) these Presidents will have, at the same time,
more and more power.
nastywoman @ 150
Just study the program of the 'Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland' or the Program of 'Die
Grünen' in Germany (take it through google translate) and you get all the answers you are looking
for.
No need to run it through google translate, it's available in English on their site. [Or one
could refer to the Green Party of the U.S. site/platform, which is very similar in scope and overall
philosophy. (www.gp.org).]
I looked at several of their topic areas (Agricultural, Global, Health, Rural) and yes, these
are general theses I would support. But they're hardly policy/project proposals for specific regions
or communities – the Greens espouse "think global, act local", so programs and projects must be
tailored to individual communities and regions.
To return to my original question and answer it myself: I'm forced to conclude that the
Democrats did not specifically address the revitalization – rebirth of the Rust Belt in their
2016 platform. Its failure to do so carried a heavy cost that (nearly) all of us will be forced
to pay.
This sub seems to have largely fallen into the psychologically comfortable trap of declaring
that everyone who voted against their preferred candidate is racist. It's a view pushed by the
neoliberals, who want to maintain he stranglehold of identity politics over the DNC, and it makes
upper-class 'intellectuals' feel better about themselves and their betrayal of the filthy, subhuman
white underclass (or so they see it).
I expect at this point that Trump will be reelected comfortably. If not only the party itself,
but also most of its activists, refuse to actually change, it's more or less inevitable.
You can scream 'those jobs are never coming back!' all you want, but people are never going
to accept it. So either you come up with a genuine solution (instead of simply complaining that
your opponents solutions won't work; you're partisan and biased, most voters won't believe you),
you may as well resign yourself to fascism. Because whining that you don't know what to do won't
stop people from lining up behind someone who says that they do have one, whether it'll work or
not. Nobody trusts the elite enough to believe them when they say that jobs are never coming back.
Nobody trusts the elite at all.
You sound just like the Wiemar elite. No will to solve the problem, but filled with terror
at the inevitable result of failing to solve the problem.
One brutal fact tells us everything we need to know about the Democratic party in 2016:
the American Nazi party is running on a platform of free health care to working class people.
This means that the American Nazi Party is now running to the left of the Democratic party.
Folks, we have seen this before. Let's not descend in backbiting and recriminations, okay?
We've got some commenters charging that other commenters are "mansplaining," meanwhile we've got
other commenters claiming that it's economics and not racism/misogyny. It's all of the above.
Back in the 1930s, when the economy collapsed, fascists appeared and took power. Racists
also came out of the woodwork, ditto misogynists. Fast forward 80 years, and the same thing has
happened all over again. The global economy melted down in 2008 and fascists appeared promising
to fix the problems that the pols in power wouldn't because they were too closely tied to the
existing (failed) system. Along with the fascists, racists gained power because they were able
to scapegoat minorities as the alleged cause of everyone's misery.
None of this is surprising. We have seen it before. Whenever you get a depression in a
modern industrial economy, you get scapegoating, racism, and fascists. We know what to do. The
problem is that the current Democratic party isn't doing it.
Instead, what we're seeing is a whirlwind of finger-pointing from the Democratic leadership
that lost this election and probably let the entire New Deal get rolled back and wiped out. Putin
is to blame! Julian Assange is to blame! The biased media are to blame! Voter suppression is to
blame! Bernie Sanders is to blame! Jill Stein is to blame! Everyone and anyone except the current
out-of-touch influence-peddling elites who currently have run the Democratic party into the ground.
We need the feminists and the black lives matter groups and we also need the green party people
and the Bernie Sanders activists. But everyone has to understand that this is not an isolated
event. Trump did not just happen by accident. First there was Greece, then there was Brexit, then
there was Trump, next it'll be Renzi losing the referendum in Italy and a constitutional crisis
there, and after that, Marine Le Pen in France is going to win the first round of elections. (Probably
not the presidency, since all the other French parties will band together to stop her, but the
National Front is currently polling at 40% of all registered French voters.) And Marine LePen
is the real deal, a genuine full-on out-and-out fascist. Not a closet fascist like Steve Bannon,
LePen is the full monty with everything but a Hugo Boss suit and the death's heads on the cap.
Does anyone notice a pattern here?
This is an international movement. It is sweeping the world . It is the end of neoliberalism
and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all need to come together to stamp
out the authoritarian part.
Feminists, BLM, black bloc anarchiest anti-globalists, Sandernistas, and, yes, the former Hillary
supporters. Because it not just a coincidence that all these things are happening in all these
countries at the same time. The bottom 90% of the population in the developed world has been ripped
off by a managerial and financial and political class for the last 30 years and they have all
noticed that while the world GDP was skyrocketing and international trade agreements were getting
signed with zero input from the average citizen, a few people were getting very very rich but
nobody else was getting anything.
This hammered people on the bottom, disproportionately African Americans and especially
single AA mothers in America. It crushed the blue collar workers. It is wiping out the savings
and careers of college-educated white collar workers now, at least, the ones who didn't go to
the Ivy League, which is 90% of them.
And the Democratic party is so helpless and so hopeless that it is letting the American Nazi
Party run to the left of them on health care, fer cripes sake! We are now in a situation
where the American Nazi Party is advocating single-payer nationalized health care, while the former
Democratic presidential nominee who just got defeated assured everyone that single-payer "will
never, ever happen."
C'mon! Is anyone surprised that Hillary lost? Let's cut the crap with the "Hillary
was a flawed candidate" arguments. The plain fact of the matter is that Hillary was running mainly
on getting rid of the problems she and her husband created 25 years ago. Hillary promised criminal
justice reform and Black Lives Matter-friendly policing policies - and guess who started the mass
incarceration trend and gave speeches calling black kids "superpredators" 20 years ago? Hillary
promised to fix the problems with the wretched mandate law forcing everyone to buy unaffordable
for-profit private insurance with no cost controls - and guess who originally ran for president
in 2008 on a policy of health care mandates with no cost controls? Yes, Hillary (ironically, Obama's
big surge in popularity as a candidate came when he ran against Hillary from the left, ridiculing
helath care mandates). Hillary promises to reform an out-of-control deregulated financial system
run amok - and guess who signed all those laws revoking Glass-Steagal and setting up the Securities
Trading Modernization Act? Yes, Bill Clinton, and Hillary was right there with him cheering the
whole process on.
So pardon me and lots of other folks for being less than impressed by Hillary's trustworthiness
and honesty. Run for president by promising to undo the damage you did to the country 25 years
ago is (let say) a suboptimal campaign strategy, and a distinctly suboptimal choice of presidential
candidate for a party in the same sense that the Hiroshima air defense was suboptimal in 1945.
Calling Hillary an "imperfect candidate" is like calling what happened to the Titanic a
"boating accident." Trump was an imperfect candidate. Why did he win?
Because we're back in the 1930s again, the economy has crashed hard and still hasn't recovered
(maybe because we still haven't convened a Pecora Commission and jailed a bunch of the thieves,
and we also haven't set up any alphabet government job programs like the CCC) so fascists and
racists and all kinds of other bottom-feeders are crawling out of the political woodwork to promise
to fix the problems that the Democratic party establishment won't.
Rule of thumb: any social or political or economic writer virulently hated by the current Democratic
party establishment is someone we should listen to closely right now.
Cornel West is at the top of the current Democratic establishment's hate list, and he has got
a great article in The Guardian that I think is spot-on:
"The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph
of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded
to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians."
Glenn Greenwald is another writer who has been showered with more hate by the Democratic establishment
recently than even Trump or Steve Bannon, so you know Greenwald is saying something important.
He has a great piece in The Intercept on the head-in-the-ground attitude of Democratic
elites toward their recent loss:
"It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Party is in shambles as a political
force. Not only did it just lose the White House to a wildly unpopular farce of a candidate despite
a virtually unified establishment behind it, and not only is it the minority party in both the
Senate and the House, but it is getting crushed at historical record rates on the state and local
levels as well. Surveying this wreckage last week, party stalwart Matthew Yglesias of Vox minced
no words: `the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that's essentially a smoking pile of
rubble.'
"One would assume that the operatives and loyalists of such a weak, defeated and wrecked
political party would be eager to engage in some introspection and self-critique, and to produce
a frank accounting of what they did wrong so as to alter their plight. In the case of 2016 Democrats,
one would be quite mistaken."
Last but far from least, Scottish economist Mark Blyth has what looks to me like the single
best analysis of the entire global Trump_vs_deep_state tidal wave in Foreign Affairs magazine:
"At the end of World War II, the United States and its allies decided that sustained mass
unemployment was an existential threat to capitalism and had to be avoided at all costs. In response,
governments everywhere targeted full employment as the master policy variable-trying to get to,
and sustain, an unemployment rate of roughly four percent. The problem with doing so, over time,
is that targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable itself-a phenomenon
known as Goodhart's law. (..)
" what we see [today] is a reversal of power between creditors and debtors as the anti-inflationary
regime of the past 30 years undermines itself-what we might call "Goodhart's revenge." In this
world, yields compress and creditors fret about their earnings, demanding repayment of debt at
all costs. Macro-economically, this makes the situation worse: the debtors can't pay-but politically,
and this is crucial-it empowers debtors since they can't pay, won't pay, and still have the right
to vote.
"The traditional parties of the center-left and center-right, the builders of this anti-inflationary
order, get clobbered in such a world, since they are correctly identified by these debtors as
the political backers of those demanding repayment in an already unequal system, and all from
those with the least assets. This produces anti-creditor, pro-debtor coalitions-in-waiting that
are ripe for the picking by insurgents of the left and the right, which is exactly what has happened.
"In short, to understand the election of Donald Trump we need to listen to the trumpets blowing
everywhere in the highly indebted developed countries and the people who vote for them.
"The global revolt against elites is not just driven by revulsion and loss and racism.
It's also driven by the global economy itself. This is a global phenomenon that marks one thing
above all. The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun."
You don't live here, do you? I'm really asking a genuine question because the way you are framing
the question ("SPECIFICS!!!!!!) suggests you don't. (Just to show my background, born and raised
in Australia (In the electoral division of Kooyong, home of Menzies) but I've lived in the US
since 2000 in the midwest (MO, OH) and currently in the south (GA))
If this election has taught us anything it's no one cared about "specifics". It was a mood,
a feeling which brought trump over the top (and I'm not talking about the "average" trump voter
because that is meaningless. The average trunp voter was a republican voter in the south who the
Dems will never get so examining their motivations is immaterial to future strategy. I'm talking
about the voters in the Upper Midwest from places which voted for Obama twice then switched to
trump this year to give him his margin of victory).
trump voters have been pretty clear they don't actually care about the way trump does (or even
doesn't) do what he said he would do during the campaign. It was important to them he showed he
was "with" people like them. They way he did that was partially racialized (law and order, islamophobia)
but also a particular emphasis on blue collar work that focused on the work. Unfortunately these
voters, however much you tell them they should suck it up and accept their generations of familial
experience as relatively highly paid industrial workers (even if it is something only their fathers
and grandfathers experienced because the factories were closing when the voters came of age in
the 80s and 90s) is never coming back and they should be happy to retrain as something else, don't
want it. They want what their families have had which is secure, paid, benefits rich, blue
collar work.
trump's campaign empathized with that feeling just by focusing on the factory jobs as jobs
and not as anachronisms that are slowly fading away for whatever reason. Clinton might have been
"correct", but these voters didn't want to hear "the truth". And as much as you can complain about
how stupid they are for wanting to be lied to, that is the unfortunate reality you, and the Democratic
party, have to accept.
The idea they don't want "government help" is ridiculous. They love the government. They just
want the government to do things for them and not for other people (which unfortunately includes
blah people but also "the coasts", "sillicon valley", etc.). Obama won in 2008 and 2012 in part
due to the auto bailout.
trump was offering a "bailout" writ large. Clinton had no (good) counteroffer. It was like
the tables were turned. Romney was the one talking about "change" and "restructuring" while Obama
was defending keeping what was already there.
"Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the
automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable
labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.
Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html
So yes. Clinton needed vague promises. She needed something more than retraining and "jobs
of the future" and "restructuring". She needed to show she was committed to their way of life,
however those voters saw it, and would do something, anything, to keep it alive. trump did that
even though his plan won't work. And maybe he'll be punished for it. In 4 years. But in the interim
the gop will destroy so many things we need and rely on as well as entrench their power for generations
through the Supreme Court.
But really, it was hard for Clinton to be trusted to act like she cared about these peoples'
way of life because she (through her husband fairly or unfairly) was associated with some of the
larger actions and choices which helped usher in the decline.
Clinton toward the end offered tariffs. But the trump campaign hit back with what turned
out to be a pretty strong counter attack – ""How's she going to get tough on China?" said Trump
economic advisor Peter Navarro on CNN's Quest Means Business. He notes that some of Clinton's
economic advisors have supported TPP or even worked on it. ""
What is the Democratic Party's former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do?
Are they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary's wake by Robert Rubin's Goldman
Sachs-Citigroup gang that backed her and Obama?
The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade
voters not to think of their identity in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or
as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This
strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed...
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years of
Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his
financial backers on Wall Street. 'Identity politics' has given way to the stronger force of
economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer
work."
By Michael Hudson
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
..................
The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party now
The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues – in a way that reverses
its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton's pro-Wall Street administration.
The Democrats need to do what Britain's Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair's Thatcherites.
As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class
is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every
revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution
has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington." Otherwise the Democrats
will be left as an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not
been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move by appointing their own nominees to the DNC.
If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead.
An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change
of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going
back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary's backer
George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie's supporters, by backing Howard
Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American "Maidan
Spring."
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than
win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem
was hubris. Hillary's coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds
of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama's
rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his
promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary's feigned embrace of Bernie's opposition to the TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not
racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had
lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama's legacy. Last week's vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting
Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss
of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to "save his legacy" by supporting her as his Third
Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance
monopolies.
Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply
to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed
by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama's former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that
"Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded." It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI
were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering
wage withholding into the stock market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors.
Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people. This was the profit center
Obamacare offered the health-insurance monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to
capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was
defeated five years ago when it tried to enlist Occupy Wall Street as part of the Democratic Party.
It's attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie's supporters
and other "real" Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let
"socialism" be captured by Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign.
"Reconstructed" might be a better term. But barging full steam ahead with the Wall Street-friendly
Chuck Schumer, as though nothing has happened, seems particularly obtuse on the part of the Democrats
to me.
There is now a growing movement among the Berniecrats to join the Democratic Socialists of America
and build it up into a much larger and more influential organization capable of exerting real political
pressure on the political process.
"without shutting out the wealthy, business interests, or US Corporations"
I should have been less opaque and simply added that America is a Capitalist based nation and
shutting out its Capitalists, who risk their capital for profit, is exactly like biting the hand
that feeds.
Obviously there are evil wealthy people such as that rich women who was caught asking Mitt Romney
about 'eliminating, reducing or cutting off benefits to the 47% who refuse to work and earn a living'
so her taxes would be cut. Obviously there are evil businesses that are predators and take and do
not give back. Obviously there are evil MNC corporations, Apple is in my sites, that refuse to pay
their fair share of taxes to run this nation.
But, as obviously there are super kind and nice wealthy people, businesses, and corporations that
go out of their way to give back to their communities and the vote for Democrats.
The wealthy, American businesses, and MNC corporations will always be lead, in most places on
earth, by those who want lower taxes and less regulation, that's built into the nature of having
more and the desire to control it rather than give it to a government. IT IS NOT EVIL.
Accept that concept and you know why I believe the Democrat Party must be a welcoming home for
the Capitalist Risk Takers, without any acrimony or embarrassment, but with open arms and respect
for what they've accomplished with their lives.
Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination
By Jonathan Chait
February 5, 2016
8:54 a.m.
The initial stupefaction and dismay with which liberals greeted Donald Trump's candidacy have
slowly given way to feelings of Schadenfreude- reveling in the suffering of others, in this case
the apoplectic members of the Republican Establishment. Are such feelings morally wrong? Or can liberals
enjoy the spectacle unleavened by guilt? As Republican voters start actually voting, is it okay to
be sad - alarmed, even - by the prospect that the Trump hostile takeover of the GOP may fail?
There are three reasons, in descending order of obviousness, for a liberal to earnestly and patriotically
support a Trump Republican nomination. The first, of course, is that he would almost certainly lose.
Trump's ability to stay atop the polls for months, even as critics predicted his demise, has given
him an aura of voodoo magic that frightens some Democrats. But whatever wizardry Trump has used to
defy the laws of political gravity has worked only within his party. Among the electorate as a whole,
he is massively - indeed, historically - unpopular, with unfavorable ratings now hovering around
60 percent and a public persona almost perfectly designed to repel the Obama coalition: racial minorities,
single women, and college-educated whites. It would take a landscape-altering event like a recession
for him to win; even that might not be enough.
Second, a Trump nomination might upend his party. The GOP is a machine that harnesses ethno-nationalistic
fear - of communists, criminals, matrimonial gays, terrorists, snooty cultural elites - to win elections
and then, once in office, caters to its wealthy donor base. (This is why even a social firebrand
like Ted Cruz would privately assure the billionaire investor Paul Singer that he wasn't particularly
concerned about gay-marriage laws.) As its voting base has lost college-educated voters and gained
blue-collar whites, the fissure between the means by which Republicans attain power and the ends
they pursue once they have it has widened.
What has most horrified conservative activists about Trump's rise is how little he or his supporters
seem to care about their anti-government ideology. When presented with the candidate's previous support
for higher taxes on the rich or single-payer insurance, heresies of the highest order, Trump fans
merely shrug. During this campaign, Trump has mostly conformed to party doctrine, but without much
conviction. Trump does not mouth the rote conservative formulation that government is failing because
it can't work and that the solution is to cut it down to size. Instead, he says it is failing because
it is run by idiots and that the solution is for it to instead be run by Trump. About half of Republicans
favor higher taxes on the rich, a position that has zero representation among their party's leaders.
And those Republicans are the most likely to support Trump.
Trump's candidacy represents, among other things, a revolt by the Republican proletariat against
its master class. That is why National Review devoted a cover editorial and 22 columns to denouncing
Trump as a heretic to the conservative movement. A Trump nomination might not actually cleave the
GOP in two, but it could wreak havoc. If, like me, you think the Republican Party in its current
incarnation needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt anew, Trump is the only one holding a match.
The third reason to prefer a Trump nomination: If he does win, a Trump presidency would probably
wind up doing less harm to the country than a Marco Rubio or a Cruz presidency. It might even, possibly,
do some good.
The Trump campaign may feel like an off-the-grid surrealistic nightmare, The Man in the High Castle
meets Idiocracy. But something like it has happened before. Specifically, it happened in California,
a place where things often happen before they happen to the rest of us, in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger
won the governorship. At the time, the prospect of Schwarzenegger governing America's largest state
struck many of us as just as ghastly as the idea of a Trump presidency seems now. Like Trump, Schwarzenegger
came directly to politics from the celebrity world without bothering to inform himself about public
policy. He campaigned as a vacuous Man of Action in opposition to the Politicians, breezing by all
the specifics as the petty obsessions of his inferiors.
I think the takeaway is that Republican politicians lie and lie and lie and lie even about recent
history. The exasperating thing to me is the complete inability of a Democratic politician to effectively
counter these lies with facts. I wasn't that impressed with Sanders ability to argue effectively
to be honest.
My mind goes back to the abortion question in the last debate. Trump's accusation that Clinton
wanted to rip babies out of mother's wombs at 9 months has no basis in medical science or actual
practice. However, despite being someone who should be an "expert" on women's issues could not articulate
accurately how medically preposterous this notion was or even the facts behind late term abortions
and why women need them at all. Surely a politician of Clinton's "skill" would at least have an anecdote
ready about a woman who had a late-term abortion.
" The exasperating thing to me is the complete inability of a Democratic politician to effectively
counter these lies with facts. "
Yes but the election isn't just about that. Hillary was the establishment candidate and the establishment
isn't delivering. Trump was the outsider - he took over the Republican party - and it didn't matter
that he lies or is obnoxious to a certain type of voter.
Obama is the establishment candidate. However, Obama has charisma and I think we need more politicians
like this. I'm past caring whether or not they are great at policy (apparently Hillary was and she
still couldn't argue effectively against Trump!) I want someone who can effectively argue the case
for progressive policies. We know progressive policies are the right ones we just need someone who
can fight for those policies. They need an encyclopedic knowledge of the shit Republicans have done,
why it is wrong and how progressive policies have worked for the betterment of the 99 percent.
The unheard winning and bold economic agenda
Findings from Roosevelt Institute's Election night survey
....................
Economic change election and the working class vote
Throughout this election cycle, polling conducted on behalf of the Roosevelt Institute and others
revealed the potential of a "rewrite the rules" narrative, message and bold policy agenda to win
broad and deep public support. It fit the times where voters wanted change and were tired of corporate
interests dominating politics at the expense of the middle class.
It was also appealing to swing groups including white college graduates and white working class
women. True, Trump always enjoyed big margins among the white working class men who identified with
him, and they turned out for him early and in growing numbers. But there were points where Clinton
was outperforming Obama with white working class women.
The data does not support that idea that the white working class was inevitably lost, as polls
showed fairly resilient support with white working class women, until the Clinton campaign stopped
talking about economic change and asked people to vote for unity, temperament and experience and
to continue on President Obama's progress. As we shall see, both the Democratic base and white working
class voters are struggling economically and would demand change in their own ways.
Three Myths About Clinton's Defeat in Election 2016 Debunked
Posted on November 14, 2016
By Lambert Strether
This post is not an explainer about why and how Clinton lost (and Trump won). I think we're going
to be sorting that out for awhile. Rather, it's a simple debunking of common talking points by Clinton
loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives; the sort of talking point you might hear on Twitter,
entirely shorn of caveats and context. For each of the three talking points, I'll present an especially
egregious version of the myth, followed by a rebuttal.
Clinton's responses to the charges about NAFTA were incredibly weak. This is strange considering
she must have known that topic was going to be raised - why was she so unprepared?
llary Clinton was an extraordinarily terrible candidate for the Democrats to run in 2016.
Donald Trump's approval rating is 38 percent. President Obama's just bumped up to 57 percent.
No amount of furious dissembling from humiliated Clinton partisans will convince me that Obama -
and very probably Bernie Sanders* - wouldn't have beaten Trump handily.
So what gives?
Let me start by noting that the overall polls were off, but not by that much. They predicted a
Clinton victory by about about 3 points. And in the popular vote, that prediction was reasonably
close. Clinton is ahead by a bit less than 1 percent nationally, with many votes still to count.
What tipped the election was about 100,000 votes spread across just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan,
and Pennsylvania. Here's where the polls did seriously botch things. Trump won these states by 1,
0.3, and 1.2 points respectively (assuming the close result in Michigan holds). The poll averages
showed Clinton winning these states by roughly 6 points, 3 to 7 points, and 2 to 5 points respectively,
depending on who you ask.
Some people did correctly point to this outcome being a possibility. Remarkably, most of them
relied heavily on gut-check analysis. Zach Carter and Ryan Grim wrote way back in February that Trump
could win by peeling off Rust Belt states, based on little more than intuitions about trade and general
voting patterns. Michael Moore hypothesized something similar. Nathan J. Robinson wrote around the
same time that Clinton would lose because she is a wooden, uninspiring campaigner who was almost
uniquely vulnerable to Trump-style attacks on character and integrity.
Van Jones was perhaps most prescient of all. In June, he argued that Trump would not gaffe himself
out of the election, because outrageous statements help him get attention on social media; that tut-tutting
about his lack of realistic policy would not work, because voters neither know nor care about that;
and that he could potentially win over Rust Belt whites attracted to Trump's anti-trade messaging,
because "we're not paying attention to a big chunk of America that is hurting - that would accept
any change, the bigger the better."
With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can add a couple more factors to the pile. First is
the self-deception of the Clinton campaign and its media sycophants. She did not visit Wisconsin
at all between April and the election, and largely abandoned Obama's working-class message from 2012
in favor of portraying Trump as a dangerous, woman-hating maniac.
They were enabled in this by pro-Clinton publications, which churned out endless slavish portrayals
of Clinton as some kind of wizard of politics and policy, whose grasp of fine detail would surely
deliver the electoral goods. In fact, it turned out that her vaunted algorithm-driven turnout machine
was contacting tons of Trump voters. Paul Romer points to the problem of "mathiness" in economics,
where complicated and intimidating theoretical symbolism is built up without establishing clear linkages
to the real world. Lots of computers, theories, and datasets might be the most sophisticated way
to attack voter turnout, or it might be a way to simply appear sophisticated while dismissing people
whose ideas don't come packaged with a science-y veneer. (Something similar seems to have happened
to the wonky election-simulator people.)
Then there is the Clintons' omnipresent aura of scandal and corruption, which is about 50 percent
unfair double standard and 50 percent totally their fault. The political media has been obsessed
with the Clintons for 20 years to a frankly psychotic degree, particularly given how much worse the
stories about Trump were. On the other hand, the Clintons enable that coverage with a paranoid and
secretive attitude, and an obvious hatred of the press. The Clinton Foundation coverage was unfair
compared to the much worse Trump Foundation, but then again, there was some genuinely skeezy stuff
in there. There's a good chance that FBI Director James Comey's vague letter about emails to congressional
Republicans, which led to an extremely ill-timed media firestorm, tipped the election to Trump. But
then again, she might have avoided the whole story by following the dang rules in the first place.
I always assumed that if Clinton were nominated for president, the race would be dominated by
some weird quasi-scandal that dragged on for month after month. It's not fair, but it is simply the
reality of the Clintons. At some point, one simply has to take that into account.
That brings me to a final point: Clinton's general political affect. She is not a great campaigner
(by her own admission), a rather robotic speaker, and most of all, a dynasty politician who very
obviously got the nomination because the party elite cleared the decks for her. Given how the party
has evolved, her political history was filled with devastating indictments of her judgment and priorities.
Even after getting a reasonably good party platform (after just barely beating back about the most
unlikely primary challenger imaginable), she was a non-credible vehicle for it. Without Obama's mesmerizing
charisma and political energy, her image was defined by things like taking millions of dollars for
secret speeches to Wall Street banks and refusing to release the transcripts. She simply was not
a good fit for the party, and a terrible avatar of the party in a country furious at self-dealing
elite institutions of all kinds.
Hillary Clinton was a heavily compromised candidate and bad campaigner who grossly misjudged the
political terrain, and thus bled just enough of the Obama coalition to let Trump sneak past. If we
ever get to vote again, let's hope the party learns from this epic disaster.
And that, now, is the key question: Where do the Democrats go from here?
This 1000 word article traces the impact of Keynesian theories on the 20th century.
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has created awareness of the great gap between academic models
and reality. IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard said that modern DSGE macroeconomic models currently
used for policy decisions are based on assumptions which are profoundly at odds with what we know
about consumers and firms. More than seven different schools of macroeconomic thought contend with
each other, without coming to agreement on any fundamental issue. This bears a striking resemblance
to the post-Depression era when Keynes set out to resolve the "deep divergences of opinion between
fellow economists which have for the time being almost destroyed the practical influence of economic
theory."
Likewise, today, the inability of mainstream economists to predict, understand, explain, or find
remedies for the Global Financial Crisis, has deeply damaged the reputation of economists and economic
theories. Recently, World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer stated that for more than three decades,
macroeconomics has gone backwards. Since modern macroeconomics bears a strong resemblance to pre-Keynesian
theories, Keynesian theories have fresh relevance, as described below.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, economic misery was a major factor which led to the
Russian Revolution and the rise of Hitler in Germany. Conventional economic theory held that market
forces would automatically and quickly correct the temporary disequilibrium of high unemployment
and low production in Europe and USA. Keynes argued that high unemployment could persist, and government
interventions in the form of active monetary and fiscal policy were required to correct the economic
problems. Many have suggested that Keynes rescued Capitalism by providing governments with rationale
to intervene on behalf of the workers, thereby preventing socialist or communist revolutions. There
is no doubt that strong and powerful labor movements in Europe and USA derived strength from the
economic misery of the masses, and also took inspiration from the pro-labor and anti-capitalist theories
of Marx. While it is hard to be sure whether Keynes saved capitalism, we can be very sure that Keynes
and Keynesian theories were extremely influential in shaping the economic landscapes of the 20th
Century.
Keynes actually met Roosevelt (FDR) to try to persuade him of the necessity of an aggressive fiscal
policy and of running budget deficits, in order to lift the US economy out of recession. He was only
partially successful. FDR, like nearly all political leaders as well as economists of the time, was
convinced of the necessity of balancing budgets: this is the same 'austerity' being touted today
as the cure for economic problems. Leading economists like Lionel Robinson and Friedrich Hayek argued
in favor of austerity, and said that Keynesian remedies were dangerously wrong. They held the view
that the Great Depression had been caused by excessively easy monetary policies in the pre-Depression
period, and Keynesian interventions in the form of further easy monetary and fiscal policies would
only prolong the agony.
FDR was not quite convinced by Keynes, but was politically savvy enough to announce that he would
not balance the budget on the backs of the American people. Accordingly, he did go against his personal
convictions, as well as his campaign promises of balancing the budget, which he believed to be a
sound and necessary economic policy. Keynes felt that the economic policies of FDR were timid and
hesitant, and prolonged the recession un-necessarily. In light of contemporary experience of the
tremendously aggressive expansionary monetary policy in the post-GFC era, we can see that bolder
steps by FDR would not have caused the harms that he was afraid of. In fact, after the economy recovered
somewhat, FDR went back to conventional wisdom and started reducing budget deficits in 1936. This
created a mini-recession which has been labelled the "Roosevelt Recession of 1937". Duly chastened,
FDR embraced Keynesian policies with greater conviction, and increased deficit spending right up
to the second World War. It was the effectiveness of Keynesian policies that led even arch-enemy
Friedman to state that "We are all Keynesians now," though he later recanted. Indeed, he master-minded
the Monetarist counter-revolution in the 1970's which eventually led to a rejection of Keynesian
insights, and a return to the pre-Keynesian ideas of austerity as a cure for recessions. Forgetting
the hard-learned lessons of Keynes led to a recurrence of problems very similar to those faced by
Keynes in the form of GFC 2007.
Following the GFC, there has been a resurgence of interest in Keynes and Keynesian Theories. In
the "Return of Depression Economics", Krugman argued for the continuing relevance of Keynes, and
stated that we could end the Great Recession immediately by implementing Keynesian policies. China
implemented Keynesian policies, and used a fiscal stimulus of $586 billion spread over two years,
to successfully combat the global recession created by the GFC. Unlike countries forced to implement
austerity, which further wrecked their economies, the Chinese economy was able to perform well in
the aftermath of the GFC. The Shanghai index had been falling sharply since the September 2008 bankruptcy
of Lehman Brothers, but the decline was halted when news of the planned stimulus leaked in late October.
The day after the stimulus was officially announced, the Shanghai index immediately rose by 7.3%,
followed by sustained growth. Speaking at the 2010 Summer Davos, Premier Wen Jiabao also credited
the Keynesian fiscal stimulus for good performance of the Chinese economy over the two years following
the GFC.
Meanwhile, even IMF acknowledged the failure of austerity, the anti-thesis of the Keynesian policy.
Massive damage was caused to Greece, Ireland, Portugal and other economies which were forced to tighten
budgets in response to the recession. In the see-saw battle between Keynesians and Monetarists, after
three decades of darkness, the Keynesian star seems to be rising. Strange as it may seem, many fundamental
insights of Keynes were never actually absorbed by conventional economists. Keynes himself said that
he had the greatest difficulty in escaping the habits of thought created by an economics education.
Mainstream economists never made this escape. As a result, Keynesian theories remain an undiscovered
treasure offering deep insights into current economic conditions.
The Glaring Contradiction at the Heart of Donald Trump's
Economic Policy
http://nyti.ms/2eJFsw4
via @UpshotNYT
NYT - Neil Irwin - November 17
Campaign promises are easy. Governing is hard.
It is a truism that Donald J. Trump and his team will soon learn. And a fascinating example has
emerged since the election, courtesy of global currency markets. It is a study in the kind of complex
trade-offs that Mr. Trump rarely grappled with during his campaign but will face many times a day
in the Oval Office.
A centerpiece of Mr. Trump's campaign was the United States' trade deficits. He pledged to eliminate
them and create a resurgence in American manufacturing.
He has also pledged tax cuts, infrastructure spending and deregulation. That set of policies has
led markets to expect speedier economic growth and thus higher interest rates in coming years. That,
in turn, is driving the value of the dollar higher on currency markets. Since Election Day, the dollar
is up 2.6 percent against an index of six other major currencies. The value of the Mexican peso has
fallen 10 percent against the dollar, a remarkable swing for the United States' third-largest trading
partner.
You don't need to be an economist to see what that means: A pricier dollar makes it harder for
American manufacturers to compete overseas; it gives an advantage to companies that locate operations
elsewhere; and it will, all else being equal, tend to make the trade deficit higher rather than lower.
This is not to suggest that the shift in the currency so far is a major disaster for American
manufacturers and other exporters (though those that ship their goods to Mexico will feel the brunt
of it). There was a bigger rise in the dollar in 2014 and 2015 that damaged export sectors even more.
Photo
A board displaying the exchange rate for the Mexican peso and the dollar in a bank in Mexico City
this week. Credit Henry Romero/Reuters
But let's imagine that Mr. Trump follows through on the policy mix he's hinted at so far: a combination
of loose fiscal policy (think more spending on defense and infrastructure, and tax cuts) and tighter
monetary policy (the Federal Reserve raising interest rates faster than
had seemed likely before the election). At that point, the dollar could move more decisively higher,
creating a tension that the president and his advisers would have to resolve one way or the other.
As a rule of thumb, said Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International
Economics, a 10 percent rise in the dollar would be expected to increase the current account deficit
(a broader concept than trade deficit, but closely related) by 1 to 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in the
ensuing two to three years.
In that scenario, Mr. Trump's pledge to eliminate the $500 billion United States trade deficit
would have just become $180 billion to $270 billion harder.
This is the kind of dilemma presidents face all the time. The Oval Office debate might go something
like this: The Commerce Secretary complains, "Mr. President, this strong dollar is just killing our
manufacturers; they can't compete with this kind of appreciation." The Treasury Secretary, who is
in charge of the currency, responds, "It's a necessary evil, Mr. President; our economy is booming
so much that global investors just can't get enough of United States assets."
When there are these kinds of disputes, the president has to decide. And when a president tries
to find a solution that answers both concerns, there are always complex ripples. For example, "let's
appoint Fed officials who will cut interest rates" might temporarily let you have both a booming
domestic economy and a competitive export sector, but would mean an increase in inflation - which
will make both the bond market and many retired Americans living on fixed incomes unhappy.
The tension between currency policy and trade policy is just one example. Mr. Trump's promises
to repeal Obamacare while keeping some of its most popular features would be hard to carry out in
practice. Virtually every issue in tax policy, diplomacy and regulatory policy features similar complex
trade-offs.
None of this is to say that these tensions are unsolvable, or that Mr. Trump won't overcome his
lack of a policy background to arrive at good solutions. But he will almost certainly find out soon
that "Make America Great Again" is a slogan, not an answer.
So the post-mortem begins. Much electronic ink has already been spilled and predictable fault
lines have emerged. Debate rages in particular on the question of whether Trump's victory was driven
by economic factors. Like Duncan Weldon, I think Torsten Bell gets it about right – economics is
an essential part of the story even if the complete picture is more complex.
Neoliberalism is a word I usually try to avoid. It's often used by people on the left as an easy
catch-all to avoid engaging with difficult issues. Broadly speaking, however, it provides a short-hand
for the policy status quo over the last thirty years or so: free movement of goods, labour and capital,
fiscal conservatism, rules-based monetary policy, deregulated finance and a preference for supply-side
measures in the labour market.
Some will argue this consensus has nothing to with the rise of far-right populism. I disagree. Both
economics and economic policy have brought us here.
But to what extent has academic economics provided the basis for neoliberal policy? The question
had been in my mind even before the Trump and Brexit votes. A few months back, Duncan Weldon posed
the question, 'whatever happened to deficit bias?' In my view, the responses at the time missed the
mark. More recently, Ann Pettifor and Simon Wren Lewis have been discussing the relationship between
ideology, economics and fiscal austerity.
I have great respect for Simon – especially his efforts to combat the false media narratives around
austerity. But I don't think he gets it right on economics and ideology. His argument is that in
a standard model – a sticky-price DSGE system – fiscal policy should be used when nominal rates are
at the zero lower bound. Post-2008 austerity policies are therefore at odds with the academic consensus.
This is correct in simple terms, but I think misses the bigger picture of what academic economics
has been saying for the last 30 years. To explain, I need to recap some history.
Fiscal policy as a macroeconomic management tool is associated with the ideas of Keynes. Against
the academic consensus of his day, he argued that the economy could get stuck in periods of demand
deficiency characterised by persistent involuntary unemployment. The monetarist counter-attack was
led by Milton Friedman – who denied this possibility. In the long run, he argued, the economy has
a 'natural' rate of unemployment to which it will gravitate automatically (the mechanism still remains
to be explained). Any attempt to use activist fiscal or monetary policy to reduce unemployment below
this natural rate will only lead to higher inflation. This led to the bitter disputes of the 1960s
and 70s between Keynesians and Monetarists. The Monetarists emerged as victors – at least in the
eyes of the orthodoxy – with the inflationary crises of the 1970s. This marks the beginning of the
end for fiscal policy in the history of macroeconomics.
In Friedman's world, short-term macro policy could be justified in a deflationary situation as
a way to help the economy back to its 'natural' state. But, for Friedman, macro policy means monetary
policy. In line with the doctrine that the consumer always knows best, government spending was proscribed
as distortionary and inefficient. For Friedman, the correct policy response to deflation is a temporary
increase in the rate of growth of the money supply.
It's hard to view Milton Friedman's campaign against Keynes as disconnected from ideological influence.
Friedman's role in the Mont Pelerin society is well documented. This group of economic liberals,
led by Friedrich von Hayek, formed after World War II with the purpose of opposing the move towards
collectivism of which Keynes was a leading figure. For a time at least, the group adopted the term
'neoliberal' to describe their political philosophy. This was an international group of economists
whose express purpose was to influence politics and politicians – and they were successful.
Hayek's thesis – which acquires a certain irony in light of Trump's ascent – was that collectivism
inevitably leads to authoritarianism and fascism. Friedman's Chicago economics department formed
one point in a triangular alliance with Lionel Robbins' LSE in London, and Hayek's fellow Austrians
in Vienna. While in the 1930s, Friedman had expressed support for the New Deal, by the 1950s he had
swung sharply in the direction of economic liberalism. As Brad Delong puts it:
by the early 1950s, his respect for even the possibility of government action was gone. His grudging
approval of the New Deal was gone, too: Those elements that weren't positively destructive were ineffective,
diverting attention from what Friedman now believed would have cured the Great Depression, a substantial
expansion of the money supply. The New Deal, Friedman concluded, had been 'the wrong cure for the
wrong disease.'
While Friedman never produced a complete formal model to describe his macroeconomic vision, his
successor at Chicago, Robert Lucas did – the New Classical model. (He also successfully destroyed
the Keynesian structural econometric modelling tradition with his 'Lucas critique'.) Lucas' New Classical
colleagues followed in his footsteps, constructing an even more extreme version of the model: the
so-called Real Business Cycle model. This simply assumes a world in which all markets work perfectly
all of the time, and the single infinitely lived representative agent, on average, correctly predicts
the future.
This is the origin of the 'policy ineffectiveness hypothesis' – in such a world, government becomes
completely impotent. Any attempt at deficit spending will be exactly matched by a corresponding reduction
in private spending – the so-called Ricardian Equivalence hypothesis. Fiscal policy has no effect
on output and employment. Even monetary policy becomes totally ineffective: if the central bank chooses
to loosen monetary policy, the representative agent instantly and correctly predicts higher inflation
and adjusts her behaviour accordingly.
This vision, emerging from a leading centre of conservative thought, is still regarded by the
academic economics community as a major scientific step forward. Simon describes it as `a progressive
research programme'.
What does all this have to with the current status quo? The answer is that this model – with one
single modification – is the 'standard model' which Simon and others point to when they argue that
economics has no ideological bias. The modification is that prices in the goods market are slow to
adjust to changes in demand. As a result, Milton Friedman's result that policy is effective in the
short run is restored. The only substantial difference to Friedman's model is that the policy tool
is the rate of interest, not the money supply. In a deflationary situation, the central bank should
cut the nominal interest rate to raise demand and assist the automatic but sluggish transition back
to the `natural' rate of unemployment.
So what of Duncan's question: what happened to deficit bias? – this refers to the assertion in
economics textbooks that there will always be a tendency for governments to allow deficits to increase.
The answer is that it was written out of the textbooks decades ago – because it is simply taken as
given that fiscal policy is not the correct tool.
To check this, I went to our university library and looked through a selection of macroeconomics
textbooks. Mankiw's 'Macroeconomics' is probably the mostly widely used. I examined the 2007 edition
– published just before the financial crisis. The chapter on 'Stabilisation Policy' dispenses with
fiscal policy in half a page – a case study of Romer's critique of Keynes is presented under the
heading 'Is the Stabilization of the Economy a Figment of the Data?' The rest of the chapter focuses
on monetary policy: time inconsistency, interest rate rules and central bank independence. The only
appearance of the liquidity trap and the zero lower bound is in another half-page box, but fiscal
policy doesn't get a mention.
The post-crisis twelfth edition of Robert Gordon's textbook does include a chapter on fiscal policy
– entitled `The Government Budget, the Government Debt and the Limitations of Fiscal Policy'. While
Gordon acknowledges that fiscal policy is an option during strongly deflationary periods when interest
rates are at the zero lower bound, most of the chapter is concerned with the crowding out of private
investment, the dangers of government debt and the conditions under which governments become insolvent.
Of the textbooks I examined, only Blanchard's contained anything resembling a balanced discussion
of fiscal policy.
So, in Duncan's words, governments are 'flying a two engined plane but choosing to use only one
motor' not just because of media bias, an ill-informed public and misguided politicians – Simon's
explanation – but because they are doing what the macro textbooks tell them to do.
The reason is that the standard New Keynesian model is not a Keynesian model at all – it is a
monetarist model. Aside from the mathematical sophistication, it is all but indistinguishable from
Milton Friedman's ideologically-driven description of the macroeconomy. In particular, Milton Friedman's
prohibition of fiscal policy is retained with – in more recent years – a caveat about the zero-lower
bound (Simon makes essentially the same point about fiscal policy here).
It's therefore odd that when Simon discusses the relationship between ideology and economics he
chooses to draw a dividing line between those who use a sticky-price New Keynesian DSGE model and
those who use a flexible-price New Classical version. The beliefs of the latter group are, Simon
suggests, ideological, while those of the former group are based on ideology-free science. This strikes
me as arbitrary. Simon's justification is that, despite the evidence, the RBC model denies the possibility
of involuntary unemployment. But the sticky-price version – which denies any role for inequality,
finance, money, banking, liquidity, default, long-run unemployment, the use of fiscal policy away
from the ZLB, supply-side hysteresis effects and plenty else besides – is acceptable. He even goes
so far as to say 'I have no problem seeing the RBC model as a flex-price NK model' – even the RBC
model is non-ideological so long as the hierarchical framing is right.
Even Simon's key distinction – the New Keynesian model allows for involuntary unemployment – is open
to question. Keynes' definition of involuntary unemployment is that there exist people willing and
able to work at the going wage who are unable to find employment. On this definition the New Keynesian
model falls short – in the face of a short-run demand shortage caused by sticky prices the representative
agent simply selects a new optimal labour supply. Workers are never off their labour supply curve.
In the Smets Wouters model – a very widely used New Keynesian DSGE model – the labour market is described
as follows: 'household j chooses hours worked Lt(j)'. It is hard to reconcile involuntary unemployment
with households choosing how much labour they supply.
What of the position taken by the profession in the wake of 2008? Reinhart and Rogoff's contribution
is by now infamous. Ann also draws attention to the 2010 letter signed by 20 top-ranking economists
– including Rogoff – demanding austerity in the UK. Simon argues that Ann overlooks the fact that
'58 equally notable economists signed a response arguing the 20 were wrong'.
It is difficult to agree that the signatories to the response letter, organised by Lord Skidelsky,
are 'equally notable'. Many are heterodox economists – critics of standard macroeconomics. Those
mainstream economists on the list hold positions at lower-ranking institutions than the 20. I know
many of the 58 personally – I know none of the 20. Simon notes:
Of course those that signed the first letter, and in particular Ken Rogoff, turned out to be a more
prominent voice in the subsequent debate, but that is because he supported what policymakers were
doing. He was mostly useful rather than influential.
For Simon, causality is unidirectional: policy-makers cherry-pick academic economics to fit their
purpose but economists have no influence on policy. This seems implausible. It is undoubtedly true
that pro-austerity economists provided useful cover for small-state ideologues like George Osborne.
But the parallels between policy and academia are too strong for the causality to be unidirectional.
Osborne's small state ideology is a descendent of Thatcherism – the point when neoliberalism first
replaced Keynesianism. Is it purely coincidence that the 1980s was also the high-point for extreme
free market Chicago economics such as Real Business Cycle models?
The parallel between policy and academia continues with the emergence of the sticky-price New Keynesian
version as the 'standard' model in the 90s alongside the shift to the third way of Blair and Clinton.
Blairism represents a modified, less extreme, version of Thatcherism. The all-out assault on workers
and the social safety net was replaced with 'workfare' and 'flexicurity'.
A similar story can be told for international trade, as laid out in this excellent piece by Martin
Sandbu. In the 1990s, just as the 'heyday of global trade integration was getting underway', economists
were busy making the case that globalisation had no negative implications for employment or inequality
in rich nations. To do this, they came up with the 'skill-biased technological change' (SBTC) hypothesis.
This states that as technology advances and the potential for automation grows, the demand for high-skilled
labour increases. This introduces the hitch that higher educational standards are required before
the gains from automation can be felt by those outside the top income percentiles. This leads to
a `race between education and technology' – a race which technology was winning, leading to weaker
demand for middle and low-skill workers and rising 'skill premiums' for high skilled workers as a
result.
Writing in the Financial Times shortly before the financial crisis, Jagdish Bagwati argued that those
who looked to globalisation as an explanation for increasing inequality were misguided:
The culprit is not globalization but labour-saving technical change that puts pressure on the wages
of the unskilled. Technical change prompts continual economies in the use of unskilled labour. Much
empirical argumentation and evidence exists on this. (FT, January 4, 2007, p. 11)
As Krugman put it:
The hypothesis that technological change, by raising the demand for skill, has led to growing inequality
is so widespread that at conferences economists often use the abbreviation SBTC – skill-biased technical
change – without explanation, assuming that their listeners know what they are talking about (p.
132)
Over the course of his 2007 book, Krugman sets out on a voyage of discovery – 'That, more or less,
is the story I believed when I began working on this book' (p. 6). He arrives at the astonishing
conclusion – '[i]t sounds like economic heresy' (p. 7) – that politics can influence inequality:
[I]nstitutions, norms and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income
– and impersonal market forces matter less – than Economics 101 might lead you to believe (p. 8)
The idea that rising pay at the top of the scale mainly reflect social and political change,
strikes some people as too much at odds with Economics 101.
If a left-leaning Nobel prize-winning economist has trouble escaping from the confines of Economics
101, what hope for the less sophisticated mind?
As deindustrialisation rolled through the advanced economies, wiping out jobs and communities, economists
continued to deny any role for globalisation. As Martin Sandbu argues,
The blithe unconcern displayed by the economics profession and the political elites about whether
trade was causing deindustrialisation, social exclusion and rising inequality has begun to seem Pollyannish
at best, malicious at worst. Kevin O'Rourke, the Irish economist, and before him Lawrence Summers,
former US Treasury Secretary, have called this "the Davos lie."
For mainstream macroeconomists, inequality was not a subject of any real interest. While the explanation
for inequality lay in the microeconomics – the technical forms of production functions – and would
be solved by increasing educational attainment, in macroeconomic terms, the use of a representative
agent and an aggregate production function simply assumed the problem away. As Stiglitz puts it:
[I]f the distribution of income (say between labor and capital) matters, for example, for aggregate
demand and therefore for employment and output, then using an aggregate Cobb-Douglas production function
which, with competition, implies that the share of labor is fixed, is not going to be helpful. (p.596)
Robert Lucas summed up his position as follows: 'Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics,
the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.'
It is hard to view this statement as more strongly informed by science than ideology.
But while economists were busy assuming away inequality in their models, incomes continued to diverge
in most advanced economies. It was only with the publication of Piketty's book that the economics
profession belatedly began to turn its back on Lucas.
The extent to which economic insecurity in the US and the UK is driven by globalisation versus
policy is still under discussion – my answer would be that it is a combination of both – but the
skill-biased technical change hypothesis looks to be a dead end – and a costly one at that.
Similar stories can be told about the role of household debt, finance, monetary theory and labour
bargaining power and monopoly – why so much academic focus on 'structural reform' in the labour market
but none on anti-trust policy? Heterodox economists were warning about the connections between finance,
globalisation, current account imbalances, inequality, household debt and economic insecurity in
the decades before the crisis. These warnings were dismissed as unscientific – in favour of a model
which excluded all of these things by design.
Are economic factors – and economic policy – partly to blame for the Brexit and Trump votes? And
are academic economists, at least in part, to blame for these polices? The answer to both questions
is yes. To argue otherwise is to deny Keynes' dictum that 'the ideas of economists and political
philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly
understood.'
This quote, 'mounted and framed, takes pride of place in the entrance hall of the Institute for Economic
Affairs' – the think-tank founded, with Hayek's encouragement, by Anthony Fisher, as a way to promote
and promulgate the ideas of the Mont Pelerin Society. The Institute was a success. Fisher was, in
the words of Milton Friedman, 'the single most important person in the development of Thatcherism'.
The rest, it seems, is history.
Obomber's new conference with Ms. Merkel. The peace prize winner who ordered 25000 bombing sorties
in 2015 against places US is not warring against.
Per Obomber Assad caused all that suffering in Syria, despite US arming al Qaeda since 2010 to
replace him with the kind of guys who rammed a bayonet through Qaddafi's rectum, and sending assassinated
Qaddafi's weaponry through Benghazi at the time Clinton got her envoy killed there.
The greater threat to American democracy is the bizarre world of the US fighting for the Sunnis
in the middle east. Also known as Obomber's Stalinist definitions of atrocities versus fictions about
fascists.
Why would one of Qadaffi's own
citizens do such a nasty deed on the
sadly misunderstood guy who brought down
Pan Am flight #103 over Lockerbie Scotland
killing 259 passenger & crew, previously
killing three people & injuring around
230 in La Belle discothèque in Berlin,
& why do you keep bringing this up?)
"President-Elect Donald Trump Gets to Work Betraying His Backers"
'Millions of voters who thought they'd elected a populist hero will soon find out that men who
live in golden penthouses are rarely heroes'
by Joy-Ann Reid...11.17.16...1:00 AM ET
"I should probably get out of the predictions business, having so misjudged the country before
the recent election. But I will hazard two more. The first: Donald Trump will turn on his supporters.
The second: The Democrats will turn on theirs, too.
Trump got a head start this week, floating the names of Iraq war supporters and promoters of a
grand, global war with Islam like John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani for the job of secretary of state.
Trump voters who claimed that Hillary Clinton would bring on World War III might be surprised by
some of the views of Clinton and John Kerry's likely successor (and Giuliani is a vigorous neocon,
too.)
Trump is now part of a global ring of ethno-nationalist leaders of far-right parties in thrall
to Vladimir Putin's Russia. National security experts are shuddering at the demeanor of the people
surrounding the next president who are busy mounting what Republican leakers are calling a "Stalinesque
purge" of the insufficiently loyal. With the transition team in chaos, and experienced hands reluctant
to join such an administration, who knows what kind of bizarre cabinet he'll wind up assembling.
Meanwhile, to the extent that he is doing something other than trying to figure out what a president
does Trump-or rather the people around him who know how to take advantage of an opportunity-are preparing
to stack his team with Wall Street and big-business friendly insiders and establishment cronies poised
to raid the treasury on behalf of the one percent.
Working-class voters who thought they'd elected a populist hero will soon find out that men who
live in golden penthouses are rarely populists, and even more rarely heroic. Trump, who in his own
history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust
Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.
No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who've left in search of cheaper labor
to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper
robots.) Even if he manages to slap massive tariffs on Chinese-made goods, the only outcome will
be much higher prices at Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, anyone still wondering why Paul Ryan quietly slipped on his MAGA cap during the election
will soon understand. On the off chance Trump pulled off an improbable win, Ryan knew he would be
on track to enact his life's dream: turning Medicare into a voucher program and forcing future of
the most popular government program since Social Security into private insurance HMOs. According
to Josh Marshall, who cites Ryan's own website, the "phasing out" of Medicare begins in March.
Trump's tax plan will sock it to single mothers, by ending the ability to file as head of household
and thus raising taxes on unmarried filers. The tax hikes will be higher the more children you have.
Anyone who doesn't itemize deductions will likely get a onetime check for a few hundred dollars,
the way George W. Bush did his "middle class tax cut." Count that as bill money.
Trump's trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where
trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices. Trump's North
Dakota pipeline (in which he is personally financially invested) will flood more oil onto an already
glutted world market, further forcing down prices and putting both the Lone Star state in an unpleasant
economic position.
But not to worry, Republicans have a fix, to ensure there is no voter backlash against them.
They are already preparing to reverse their opposition to earmarks, with three red state Senators
(from Florida, Alabama and of course, Texas) pushing to revive the kind of spending that helps members
go back to their districts with something to show for their time in Washington, and which long greased
the skids of congress. You see, most in the GOP never really objected to government spending. They
just objected to government spending that might make their constituents look more favorably on Barack
Obama's tenure.
Also watch as the objections to raising the debt ceiling and to infrastructure spending-so vehement
during the Obama years-vanish into thin air. This will be a big spending administration, with the
full backing of congress. The small number of conservatives preparing to fight back are likely to
cave, eventually, in the interests of party unity and maintaining total Republican control.
All the while, Trump fans can maintain their euphoria over taking America back from the multiculturalists,
the politically correct, leftie Hollywood and Beyoncé, by purchasing clothing and jewelry from Ivanka
Trump's retail line, which she'll dutifully model during television appearances, after which her
staff will inform the media on where faithful followers can "shop the look." The Trump children,
armed with security clearances and still in charge of the family business and the ephemeral "foundation"
will be in a position to stuff the family coffers for four years, African dictator style, with the
possible aid of information marked "secret" and thus unavailable to their competitors. And if you
expect the fearsome House Republicans who hounded Hillary Clinton over her emails to lift a finger
to investigate what already look to be spiraling conflicts of interest, you don't understand the
Republican Party.
But it isn't just Trump who is poised to betray those who voted for him. Some Democrats and their
allies are already rushing to get their Trump tattoos, knowing that the coming spending boom helps
them too. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia excoriated Harry Reid, the out-going minority leader,
who alone came out forthrightly to defend the black and brown women, men, children, businesses and
even churches being brutalized by gleeful Trump supporters from the GOP's white supremacist wing,
in cities around the country. Reid, whose Nevada Democratic Party operation was actually successful
in the 2016 elections, including getting a Latina elected to his seat, has bravely called out the
white nationalists and anti-Semites of the alt-right and stood against the normalization of people
like soon-to-be Trump senior counselor Stephen Bannon. But Reid is a lonely voice standing athwart
anti-history yelling, "stop," while his party and the mainstream media fall into a swoon of presidential
succession pageantry.
Even Bernie Sanders couldn't rush fast enough to get on the Trump side of the line, declaring
himself a member of the white working class (his and his wife's three homes and high six-figure income
aside) and cautioning Democrats-who belong to a party of which he is still not a member-to start
focusing on these voters too. Sanders ran a campaign that echoed Trump's in many ways; appealing
to a majority white, populist audience that hated Hillary Clinton more than it disdained Republicans.
A majority of Black Americans were unimpressed, which is why he didn't become the nominee, and they
should be unsurprised that he is dropping them faster than he and his supporters wrote off "the South"
as insignificant during the primary campaign.
Bernie is not alone. Think pieces are already being written admonishing Dems to throw black and
brown, LGBT, Muslim and Hispanic voters and progressive women under the bus in favor of the never-ending
chase for the Pabst Blue Ribbon vote. Democrats continue to practice "identity politics" at their
peril, they say; demanding that issues around rape culture, Black Lives Matter and merciful immigration
policy be scotched in favor of bucking up men, dialing back blunt talk on race, policing and DREAMers,
and emphasizing things like border security. In other words, Democrats must learn to talk more like
Republicans and marginalized groups must learn to be quiet. The party has been here before, and ironically,
that kind of thinking is what produced Bill Clinton, whose surname, and wife, the very people hawking
this prescription loathe.
The message to African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, LGBT people (well, mostly Trans folks, since
Trump has declared his movement can live with "the gays") and women, who stand in the crosshairs
of the coming "retail authoritarian" presidency, is that you're on your own. Your party will not
come to your aid. They'll be too busy trying to ride the Trump train, or to least avoid being tied
to the tracks and run over by it in the next election.
There are small green shoots of hope. The coming battle for DNC chair, which could come down to
two black candidates: Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison and South Carolina Democratic Party chair
Jamie Harrison, is a proxy for whether the party will push a message of Sandersian working class
populism or press forward on the ongoing fight for racial justice, voting rights and the rights of
the poor. Perhaps one of these men can help the party find a way to do both.
And despite her immediate statement of conciliation to Trump, one can only hope Elizabeth Warren
will hold strong on issues concerning Wall Street, once Republicans begin the process of dismantling
restrictions on bankers' worst practices, restoring the robber baron era in lower Manhattan and on
the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the "tea party movement" was born amid furious presumptions
that Obama would dare to help struggling homeowners instead of their mortgage note holders. We'll
just have to wait and see.
In the end, the lessons of American history, from Reconstruction to the Fusion movement of the
late 19th century; that an openness to the aspirations of racial, ethnic and religious minorities
will always produce a fierce backlash among the country's majority population and cost the party
dearly, have proven thrice true in the modern era-in the bloody political aftermath of Lyndon Johnson,
Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama. All three marched the country forward on race, culture and economics,
only to cede federal and state governmental power for years to the Republican right, which quickly
proceeded, each time, to reward the rich and the powerful on the backs of their working class supporters
who just wanted to feel like winners again.
In a sense, who can blame the Democrats for running away? But run they will. Count on it."
McDonald's gets fancy, says table
service coming to US locations
NEW YORK - McDonald's says it plans to offer table service across its U.S. stores to make the
ordering process less stressful, but did not say when the overhaul will be complete.
The world's biggest burger chain says about 500 of its more than 14,000 domestic stores have been
testing table service and ordering kiosks for people who do not want to wait for the cashier. People
in those stores order at the counter or kiosks, then sit and wait for an employee to bring them their
food.
Early next year, McDonald's says it will expand the offering in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco,
Seattle and Washington, D.C. ...
McDonald's gets fancy, says table
service coming to US locations
NEW YORK - McDonald's says it plans to offer table service across its U.S. stores to make the
ordering process less stressful, but did not say when the overhaul will be complete.
The world's biggest burger chain says about 500 of its more than 14,000 domestic stores have been
testing table service and ordering kiosks for people who do not want to wait for the cashier. People
in those stores order at the counter or kiosks, then sit and wait for an employee to bring them their
food.
Early next year, McDonald's says it will expand the offering in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco,
Seattle and Washington, D.C. ...
'Democrats on the Hill began soul searching this week-but the process appears to be longer for
some than others'
by Matt Laslo...11.17.16...1:00 AM ET
"The Democratic Party is at a crossroads, but everyone on Capitol Hill seems to have a different
roadmap.
Democrats, still in shock over Hillary Clinton's surprise loss to president-elect Donald Trump,
are faced with a stark new reality: they are not only the minority party in all corners of Capitol
Hill and across the nation-but there are cracks in places where their foundation was thought to be
very strong.
The party is debating how it got here and whether it's time to tack left, in the Bernie Sanders'
vein of populism, or to go back to the middle, which is how they won in the nineties and regained
control of the House in 2006.
The change didn't come overnight. The party has been devastated in the past three election cycles,
losing more than 900 state legislative seats and 11 governorships since President Barack Obama took
office.
But it was Clinton's string of losses in the Rust Belt-Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio-that
caused the soul searching in the party.
"So you can't conclude anything else but that our message is wrong. Our values aren't wrong, but
our message is wrong," Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) told The Daily Beast. "The one thing we must commit
to is that whatever our message is going forward must be different than what we had in the past because
that one has failed."...
"Rep. Tom Price Reveals Republicans Eyeing Medicare Overhaul In 2017"
By Lauren Fox...November 17, 2016...12:13 PM EDT
"Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), the chairman of the budget committee, told reporters on Thursday that
Republicans are eyeing major changes to Medicare in 2017.
Price, who is being floated as a possible Health and Human Services Secretary in the next administration,
said that he expects Republican in the House to move on Medicare reforms "six to eight months" into
the Trump administration.
Privatization of Medicare has been a central feature of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's budget
proposal for years, and the House GOP has voted in favor of it multiple times. Ryan himself said
last week that Medicare would be on the table in the new Congress, signaling it could be taken up
early in the new year. Price's comments suggest privatization won't be part of the first round of
legislative initiatives rolled out by the Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress.
Price also noted that Republicans are eyeing using a tactic known as budget reconciliation to
make the change. That process allows Republicans to pass bills with a simple majority in the U.S.
Senate.
When asked by TPM about timing for changes to Medicare, Price said "I think that is probably in
the second phase of reconciliation, which would have to be in the FY 18 budget resolution in the
first 6-8 months."
Republicans plan to tackle the Affordable Care Act in the first budget reconciliation process,
which could take place as early as January. Tackling Medicare reform and Obamacare repeal at the
same time could prove too high a risk for Republicans who have yet to reveal a clear plan to replace
Obamacare with.
During his weekly press conference House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) remained vague about the timing
for such reforms, saying only that those discussions are still underway."
Privatizing Medicare will be a disaster it can only end in the service being worse. I'm sure they
have plans to go after Social Security too. Getting rid of Obamacare won't hurt the white middle
class too bad but even there too most people will know someone with a preexisting condition who can't
get medical insurance. Good luck with all that Republicans!!
The 3 month Treasury interest rate is at 0.43%, the 2 year Treasury rate is 1.03%, the 5 year
rate is 1.72%, while the 10 year is 2.29%.
The Vanguard Aa rated short-term investment grade bond fund, with a maturity of 3.2 years and
a duration of 2.6 years, has a yield of 1.63%. The Vanguard Aa rated intermediate-term investment
grade bond fund, with a maturity of 6.4 years and a duration of 5.5 years, is yielding 2.37%. The
Vanguard Aa rated long-term investment grade bond fund, with a maturity of 23.0 years and a duration
of 13.6 years, is yielding 3.75%. *
The Vanguard Ba rated high yield corporate bond fund, with a maturity of 5.6 years and a duration
of 4.4 years, is yielding 5.40%.
The Vanguard unrated convertible corporate bond fund, with an indefinite maturity and a duration
of 4.1 years, is yielding 2.04%.
The Vanguard A rated high yield tax exempt bond fund, with a maturity of 6.8 years and a duration
of 6.4 years, is yielding 2.66%.
The Vanguard Aa rated intermediate-term tax exempt bond fund, with a maturity of 5.4 years and
a duration of 4.8 years, is yielding 1.59%.
The Vanguard Government National Mortgage Association bond fund, with a maturity of 5.7 years
and a duration of 3.4 years, is yielding 2.05%.
The Vanguard inflation protected Treasury bond fund, with a maturity of 8.8 years and a duration
of 8.3 years, is yielding - 0.21%.
* Vanguard yields are after cost. Federal Funds rates are no more than 0.50%.
"Consumer prices show big increase on rising gasoline costs and rents"
Reuters...November 17, 2016...5:27 PM
'Consumer prices show big increase'
"Consumer prices recorded their biggest increase in six months in October on rising gasoline costs
and rents, suggesting a pickup in inflation that potentially clears the way for the Federal Reserve
to raise interest rates in December.
Prospects for a rate hike next month also got a boost from other data on Thursday showing first-time
applications for unemployment benefits tumbling to a 43-year low last week and housing starts surging
to a nine-year high in October.
The reports painted an upbeat picture of the economy early in the fourth quarter and came as Fed
Chair Janet L. Yellen told lawmakers that the U.S. central bank could lift borrowing costs "relatively
soon."
The Labor Department said its consumer price index increased 0.4 percent last month after rising
0.3 percent in September. In the 12 months through October, the CPI advanced 1.6 percent, the biggest
year-on-year increase since October 2014. The CPI increased 1.5 percent in the year to September.
Underlying inflation continued to slow last month as health-care costs moderated after recent
hefty gains. But with rents pushing higher, that trend is unlikely to be sustained.
The so-called core CPI, which strips out food and energy costs, climbed 0.1 percent last month
after a similar gain in September. That slowed the year-on-year increase in the core CPI to 2.1 percent
from a 2.2 percent rise in September.
The Fed has a 2 percent inflation target and tracks an inflation measure that is now at 1.7 percent.
In another report, the Labor Department said initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped
19,000 to a seasonally adjusted 235,000 for the week ended Nov. 12, the lowest level since November
1973.
Claims have now been below 300,000, a threshold associated with a healthy labor market, for 89
straight weeks. That is the longest run since 1970, when the labor market was much smaller.
With the labor market firming and rents rising, housing is getting a lift. In a third report,
the Commerce Department said housing starts jumped 25.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual pace
of 1.32 million units last month, the highest level since August 2007."
"Federal Reserve Chair Throws Cold Water On Trump's Economic Plan"
by Chris Arnold...November 17, 2016...5:25 PM ET
"President-elect Donald Trump has pledged a $1 trillion infrastructure spending program to help
jump-start an economy that he said during the campaign was in terrible shape.
Speaking on Capitol Hill Thursday, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen warned lawmakers that
as they consider such spending, they should keep an eye on the national debt. Yellen also said that
while the economy needed a big boost with fiscal stimulus after the financial crisis, that's not
the case now.
"The economy is operating relatively close to full employment at this point," she said, "so in
contrast to where the economy was after the financial crisis when a large demand boost was needed
to lower unemployment, we're no longer in that state."
Yellen cautioned lawmakers that if they spend a lot on infrastructure and run up the debt, and
then down the road the economy gets into trouble, "there is not a lot of fiscal space should a shock
to the economy occur, an adverse shock, that should require fiscal stimulus."
In other words, lawmakers should consider keeping their powder dry so they have more options whenever
the next economic downturn comes along.
Trump was harshly critical of Yellen during his campaign. But testifying before the Joint Economic
Committee, Yellen said she is not going to quit just because Trump won the election. Rep. Carolyn
Maloney, D-N.Y., asked Yellen, "Can you envision any circumstances where you would not serve out
your term as chair of the Federal Reserve?" "No, I cannot," answered Yellen, "It is fully my intention
to serve out that term." Yellen's appointment goes through January 2018.
Another target of Trump's during the campaign came up at the hearing: the Dodd-Frank Wall Street
Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio, cited Trump's criticism that the Dodd-Frank
banking rules were stifling lending and stunting the economy. But Yellen gave her support to Dodd-Frank,
saying:
"We lived through a devastating financial crisis, and a high priority for all Americans should
be that we want to see put in place safeguards through supervision and regulation that result in
a safer and sounder financial system, and I think we have been doing that and our financial system
as a consequence is safer and sounder and many of the appropriate reforms are embodied in Dodd-Frank."
Yellen added, "We wouldn't want to go back to the mortgage lending standards that led to the financial
crisis."
She also said she thought banks were actually willing to lend to small businesses, but that sales
haven't been growing sufficiently fast to justify borrowing, suggesting the demand for loans was
the real problem.
As far as the ever-present question about when the Fed will raise interest rates, Yellen signaled
that she didn't see any reason to alter the Fed's prior guidance now that Trump has been elected
as the next president."
"Facebook fake-news writer: 'I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me'"
by Caitlin Dewey...The Washington Post
"What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common?
For starters, they're all make-believe - and invented by the same man.
Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off
viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he's British graffiti
artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. "South Park" lawsuit
last year.
But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political
and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump's son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey
Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner's faux-articles. His stories have also appeared
as news on Google.
In light of concerns that stories like Horner's may have affected the presidential election, and
in the wake of announcements that both Google and Facebook would take action against deceptive outlets,
The Washington Post called Horner to discuss his perspective on fake news.
Q: You've been writing fake news for a while now - you're kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer.
Well, I'd call it hoaxing or fake news. You'd call it parody or satire. How is that scene different
now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating
the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?
A: Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks
anything anymore - I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people
believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because
they'd already accepted it. It's real scary. I've never seen anything like it.
Q: You mentioned Trump, and you've probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news
somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that?
A: My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House
because of me. His followers don't fact-check anything - they'll post everything, believe anything.
His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made
that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
Q: Why? I mean - why would you even write that?
A: Just 'cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at
their rallies, and that's just insane. I've gone to Trump protests - trust me, no one needs to get
paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually
believed it.
I thought they'd fact-check it, and it'd make them look worse. I mean that's how this always works:
Someone posts something I write, then they find out it's false, then they look like idiots. But Trump
supporters - they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he's in the White
House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels (bad).
Q: You think you personally helped elect Trump?
A: I don't know. I don't know if I did or not. I don't know. I don't know.
Q: I guess I'm curious, if you believed you might be having an unfair impact on the election -
especially if that impact went against your own political beliefs - why didn't you stop? Why keep
writing?
A: I didn't think it was possible for him to get elected president. I thought I was messing with
the campaign, maybe I wasn't messing them up as much as I wanted - but I never thought he'd actually
get elected. I didn't even think about it. In hindsight, everyone should've seen this coming - everyone
assumed Hillary (Clinton) would just get in. But she didn't, and Trump is president.
Q: Speaking of Clinton - did you target fake news at her supporters? Or Gary Johnson's, for that
matter? (Horner's Facebook picture shows him at a rally for Johnson.)
A: No. I hate Trump.
Q: Is that it? You posted on Facebook a couple weeks ago that you had a lot of ideas for satirizing
Clinton and other figures, but that "no joke in doing this for six years, the people who clicked
ads the most, like it's the cure for cancer, is right-wing Republicans." That makes it sound like
you've found targeting conservatives is more profitable.
A: Yeah, it is. They don't fact-check.
Q: But a Trump presidency is good for you from a business perspective, right?
A: It's great for anybody who does anything with satire - there's nothing you can't write about
now that people won't believe. I can write the craziest thing about Trump, and people will believe
it. I wrote a lot of crazy anti-Muslim stuff - like about Trump wanting to put badges on Muslims,
or not allowing them in the airport, or making them stand in their own line - and people went along
with it!
Q: Facebook and Google recently announced that they'd no longer let fake-news sites use their
advertising platforms. I know you basically make your living from those services. How worried are
you about this?
A: This whole Google AdSense thing is pretty scary. And all this Facebook stuff. I make most of
my money from AdSense - like, you wouldn't believe how much money I make from it. Right now I make
like $10,000 a month from AdSense.
I know ways of getting hooked up under different names and sites. So probably if they cracked
down, I would try different things. I have at least 10 sites right now. If they crack down on a couple,
I'll just use others. They could shut down advertising on all my sites, and I think I'd be OK. Plus,
Facebook and AdSense make a lot of money from (advertising on fake news sites) for them to just get
rid of it. They'd lose a lot of money.
But if it did really go away, that would suck. I don't know what I would do.
Q: Thinking about this less selfishly, though - it might be good if Facebook and Google took action,
right? Because the effects you're describing are pretty scary.
A: Yeah, I mean - a lot of the sites people are talking about, they're just total BS sites. There's
no creativity or purpose behind them. I'm glad they're getting rid of them. I don't like getting
lumped in with Huzlers. I like getting lumped in with the Onion. The stuff I do - I spend more time
on it. There's purpose and meaning behind it. I don't just write fake news just to write it.
So, yeah, I see a lot of the sites they're listing, and I'm like - good. There are so many horrible
sites out there. I'm glad they're getting rid of those sites.
Ellison is a dud, Bernie tweets support for Schumer "there's nobody I know better prepared
and more capable of leading our caucus than Chuck Schumer"!
Well there's a good chunder maker in that statement eh? Hope dashed!
There are no doubt many who are better informed, more progressive and principled, more remote
from Wall Street and oligarchic capture than Chuck Schumer and Ellison. So there you have it –
this is reform in the Democrats after a crushing defeat.
Vale democrats, and now the journey becomes arduous with these voices to smother hope. A new
party is urgently needed (I know how difficult that is) and these voices of the old machine need
to be ignored for the sake of sanity.
"... The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek to side-step and disable
their dominance. ..."
"... It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the neoliberal
turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution of income
between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist commitments. In Europe,
the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle. ..."
"... When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features of
his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading money
center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the New York Federal
Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury in the Obama Administration,
but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank. The crisis served
to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top five banks, but it seemed also to transfer political
power entirely into their hands as well. Simon Johnson called it a coup. ..."
"... Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980 drove
both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. ..."
"... It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences
were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified
this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility for
economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces" that just happened,
in a meteorological economics. ..."
"... This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could aid
the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting constraints.
..."
"... No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and draw
attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization
of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes the political
problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational clarity or
coherence. ..."
"... If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of power,
Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional
critters re-elected. So, again, if the stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected,
Obama isn't really trying. ..."
"... Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism, because
it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference. ..."
At the center of Great Depression politics was a political struggle over the distribution of
income, a struggle that was only decisively resolved during the War, by the Great Compression.
It was at center of farm policy where policymakers struggled to find ways to support farm incomes.
It was at the center of industrial relations politics, where rapidly expanding unions were seeking
higher industrial wages. It was at the center of banking policy, where predatory financial practices
were under attack. It was at the center of efforts to regulate electric utility rates and establish
public power projects. And, everywhere, the clear subtext was a struggle between rich and poor,
the economic royalists as FDR once called them and everyone else.
FDR, an unmistakeable patrician in manner and pedigree, was leading a not-quite-revolutionary
politics, which was nevertheless hostile to and suspicious of business elites, as a source of
economic pathology. The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek
to side-step and disable their dominance.
It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the
neoliberal turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution
of income between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist commitments.
In Europe, the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle.
In retrospect, though the New Deal did use direct employment as a means of relief to good effect
economically and politically, it never undertook anything like a Keynesian stimulus on a Keynesian
scale - at least until the War.
Where the New Deal witnessed the institution of an elaborate system of financial repression,
accomplished in large part by imposing on the financial sector an explicitly mandated structure,
with types of firms and effective limits on firm size and scope, a series of regulatory reforms
and financial crises beginning with Carter and Reagan served to wipe this structure away.
When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features
of his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading
money center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the New
York Federal Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury
in the Obama Administration, but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan
Chase and Citibank. The crisis served to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top five
banks, but it seemed also to transfer political power entirely into their hands as well. Simon
Johnson called it a coup.
I don't know what considerations guided Obama in choosing the size of the stimulus or its composition
(as spending and tax cuts). Larry Summers was identified at the time as a voice of caution, not
"gambling", but not much is known about his detailed reasoning in severely trimming Christina
Romer's entirely conventional calculations. (One consideration might well have been worldwide
resource shortages, which had made themselves felt in 2007-8 as an inflationary spike in commodity
prices.) I do not see a case for connecting stimulus size policy to the health care reform. At
the time the stimulus was proposed, the Administration had also been considering whether various
big banks and other financial institutions should be nationalized, forced to insolvency or otherwise
restructured as part of a regulatory reform.
Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980
drove both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. Accelerating
the financialization of the economy from 1999 on made New York and Washington rich, but the same
economic policies and process were devastating the Rust Belt as de-industrialization. They were
two aspects of the same complex of economic trends and policies. The rise of China as a manufacturing
center was, in critical respects, a financial operation within the context of globalized trade
that made investment in new manufacturing plant in China, as part of globalized supply chains
and global brand management, (arguably artificially) low-risk and high-profit, while reinvestment
in manufacturing in the American mid-west became unattractive, except as a game of extracting
tax subsidies or ripping off workers.
It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences
were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified
this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility
for economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces" that
just happened, in a meteorological economics.
It is conceding too many good intentions to the Obama Administration to tie an inadequate stimulus
to a Rube Goldberg health care reform as the origin story for the final debacle of Democratic
neoliberal politics. There was a delicate balancing act going on, but they were not balancing
the recovery of the economy in general so much as they were balancing the recovery from insolvency
of a highly inefficient and arguably predatory financial sector, which was also not incidentally
financing the institutional core of the Democratic Party and staffing many key positions in the
Administration and in the regulatory apparatus.
This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could
aid the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting
constraints.
No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and
draw attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization
of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes
the political problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational
clarity or coherence.
The short version of my thinking on the Obama stimulus is this: Keynesian stimulus spending is
a free lunch; it doesn't really matter what you spend money on up to a very generous point, so
it seems ready-made for legislative log-rolling. If Obama could not get a very big stimulus
indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen
spending on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again,
if the stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really
trying.
Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism,
because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
Great comment. Simply great. Hat tip to the author !
Notable quotes:
"… The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek to side-step and
disable their dominance. …"
"… It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the
neoliberal turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution
of income between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist
commitments. In Europe, the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle. …"
"… When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features
of his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading
money center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the
New York Federal Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury
in the Obama Administration, but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan
Chase and Citibank. The crisis served to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top
five banks, but it seemed also to transfer political power entirely into their hands as well.
Simon Johnson called it a coup. … "
"… Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980
drove both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. …"
"… It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences
were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified
this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility
for economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces"
that just happened, in a meteorological economics. …"
"… This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could
aid the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting
constraints. …"
"… No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and
draw attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization
of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes
the political problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational
clarity or coherence. …"
"… If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of
power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending on pork barrel projects is popular
and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again, if the stimulus is small and the Democratic
Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really trying. …"
"… Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism,
because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
…"
"... "Welcome to the world of strategic analysis," Ivan Selin used to tell his team during the Sixties, "where we program weapons that don't work to meet threats that don't exist." Selin, who would spend the following decades as a powerful behind-the-scenes player in the Washington mandarinate, was then the director of the Strategic Forces Division in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis. "I was a twenty-eight-year-old wiseass when I started saying that," he told me, reminiscing about those days. "I thought the issues we were dealing with were so serious, they could use a little levity." ..."
"Welcome to the world of strategic analysis," Ivan Selin used to tell his team during the
Sixties, "where we program weapons that don't work to meet threats that don't exist." Selin, who
would spend the following decades as a powerful behind-the-scenes player in the Washington mandarinate,
was then the director of the Strategic Forces Division in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis.
"I was a twenty-eight-year-old wiseass when I started saying that," he told me, reminiscing about
those days. "I thought the issues we were dealing with were so serious, they could use a little
levity."
####
While I do have some quibbles with the piece (RuAF pilots are getting much more than 90 hours
a year flight time & equipment is overrated and unaffordable in any decent numbers), it is pretty
solid.
"... I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. ..."
"... I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn't know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil ..."
"... Two-thirds of Americans would have difficulty coming up with the money to cover a $1,000 emergency, according to an exclusive poll released Thursday, a signal that despite years after the Great Recession, Americans' finances remain precarious as ever. ..."
"... These difficulties span all incomes, according to the poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Three-quarters of people in households making less than $50,000 a year and two-thirds of those making between $50,000 and $100,000 would have difficulty coming up with $1,000 to cover an unexpected bill. ..."
"... Even for the country's wealthiest 20 percent - households making more than $100,000 a year - 38 percent say they would have at least some difficulty coming up with $1,000 ..."
"... Chronicle for Higher Education: ..."
"... Meanwhile, 91% of all the profits generated by the U.S. economy from 2009 through 2012 went to the top 1%. As just one example, the annual bonuses (not salaries, just the bonuses) of all Wall Street financial traders last year amounted to 28 billion dollars while the total income of all minimum wage workers in America came to 14 billion dollars. ..."
"... "Between 2009 and 2012, according to updated data from Emmanuel Saez, overall income per family grew 6.9 percent. The gains weren't shared evenly, however. The top 1 percent saw their real income grow by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent only saw a 0.8 percent gain, meaning that the 1 percent captured 91 percent of all real income. ..."
"... Adjusting for inflation and excluding anything made from capital gains investments like stocks, however, shows that even that small gains for all but the richest disappears. According to Justin Wolfers, adjusted average income for the 1 percent without capital gains rose from $871,100 to $968,000 in that time period. For everyone else, average income actually fell from $44,000 to $43,900. Calculated this way, the 1 percent has captured all of the income gains." ..."
"... There actually is a logic at work in the Rust Belt voters for voted for Trump. I don't think it's good logic, but it makes sense in its own warped way. The calculation the Trump voters seem to be making in the Rust Belt is that it's better to have a job and no health insurance and no medicare and no social security, than no job but the ACA (with $7,000 deductibles you can't afford to pay for anyway) plus medicare (since most of these voters are healthy, they figure they'll never get sick) plus social security (most of these voters are not 65 or older, and probably think they'll never age - or perhaps don't believe that social security will be solvent when they do need it). ..."
"... It's the same twisted logic that goes on with protectionism. Rust Belt workers figure that it's better to have a job and not be able to afford a Chinese-made laptop than not to have a job but plenty of cheap foreign-made widgets you could buy if you had any money (which you don't). That logic doesn't parse if you run through the economics (because protectionism will destroy the very jobs they think they're saving), but it can be sold as a tweet in a political campaign. ..."
"... The claim "Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent to overt racism" is incomplete. Trump's coalition actually consists of 3 parts and it's highly unstable: [1] racists, [2] plutocrats, [3] working class people slammed hard by globalization for whom Democrats have done little or nothing. ..."
"... The good news is that Trump's coalition is unstable. The plutocrats and Rust Belters are natural enemies. ..."
"... Listen to Steve Bannon, a classic stormfront type - he says he wants to blow up both the Democratic and the Republican party. He calls himself a "Leninist" in a recent interview and vows to wreck all elite U.S. institutions (universities, giant multinationals), not just the Democratic party. ..."
"... Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism, because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference. ..."
Eric places the blame for this loss squarely on economics, which, it seems to me, gets the analysis
exactly right. And the statistics back up his analysis, I believe.
It's disturbing and saddening to watch other left-wing websites ignore those statistics and
charge off the cliff into the abyss, screaming that this election was all about racism/misogyny/homophobia/[fill
in the blank with identity politics demonology of your choice]. First, the "it's all racism" analysis
conveniently lets the current Democratic leadership off the hook. They didn't do anything wrong,
it was those "deplorables" (half the country!) who are to blame. Second, the identity politics
blame-shifting completely overlooks and short-circuits any real action to fix the economy by Democratic
policymakers or Democratic politicians or the Democratic party leadership. That's particularly
convenient for the Democratic leadership because these top-four-percenter professionals "promise
anything and change nothing" while jetting between Davos and Martha's Vineyard, ignoring the peons
who don't make $100,000 or more a year because the peons all live in flyover country.
"Trump supporters were on average affluent, but they are always Republican and aren't numerous
enough to deliver the presidency (538 has changed their view in the wake of the election result).
Some point out that looking at support by income doesn't show much distinctive support for Trump
among the "poor", but that's beside the point too, as it submerges a regional phenomenon in a
national average, just as exit polls do. (..)
"When commentators like Michael Moore and Thomas Frank pointed out that there was possibility
for Trump in the Rust Belt they were mostly ignored or, even more improbably, accused of being
apologists for racism and misogyny. But that is what Trump did, and he won. Moreover, he won with
an amateurish campaign against a well-funded and politically sophisticated opponent simply because
he planted his flag where others wouldn't.
"Because of the obsession with exit polls, post-election analysis has not come to grips with
the regional nature of the Trump phenomenon. Exit polls divide the general electorate based on
individual attributes: race, gender, income, education, and so on, making regional distinctions
invisible. Moreover, America doesn't decide the presidential election that way. It decides it
based on the electoral college, which potentially makes the characteristics of individual states
decisive. We should be looking at maps, not exit polls for the explanation. Low black turnout
in California or high Latino turnout in Texas do not matter in the slightest in determining the
election, but exit polls don't help us see that. Exit polls deliver a bunch of non-explanatory
facts, in this election more than other recent ones." http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/11/11/23174/
"Donald Trump performed best on Tuesday in places where the economy is in worse shape, and
especially in places where jobs are most at risk in the future.
"Trump, who in his campaign pledged to be a voice for `forgotten Americans,' beat Hillary Clinton
in counties with slower job growth and lower wages. And he far outperformed her in counties where
more jobs are threatened by automation or offshoring, a sign that he found support not just among
workers who are struggling now but among those concerned for their economic future."
Meanwhile, the neoliberal Democrats made claims about the economy that at best wildly oversold
the non-recovery from the 2009 global financial meltdown, and at worst flat-out misrepresented
the state of the U.S. economy. For example, president Obama in his June 1 2016 speech in Elkhart
Indiana, said:
"Now, one of the reasons we're told this has been an unusual election year is because people
are anxious and uncertain about the economy. And our politics are a natural place to channel
that frustration. So I wanted to come to the heartland, to the Midwest, back to close to my
hometown to talk about that anxiety, that economic anxiety, and what I think it means. (..)
America's economy is not just better than it was eight years ago - it is the strongest, most
durable economy in the world. (..) Unemployment in Elkhart has fallen to around 4 percent.
(Applause.) At the peak of the crisis, nearly one in 10 homeowners in the state of Indiana
were either behind on their mortgages or in foreclosure; today, it's one in 30. Back then,
only 75 percent of your kids graduated from high school; tomorrow, 90 percent of them will.
(Applause.) The auto industry just had its best year ever. (..) So that's progress.(..) We
decided to invest in job training so that folks who lost their jobs could retool. We decided
to invest in things like high-tech manufacturing and clean energy and infrastructure, so that
entrepreneurs wouldn't just bring back the jobs that we had lost, but create new and better
jobs By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the
beginning of my presidency. That's the truth. That's true. (Applause.) It's true. (Applause.)
Over the past six years, our businesses have created more than 14 million new jobs - that's
the longest stretch of consecutive private sector job growth in our history. We've seen the
first sustained manufacturing growth since the 1990s."
None of this is true. Not is a substantive sense, not in the sense of being accurate, not in
the sense of reflecting the facts on the ground for real working people who don't fly their private
jets to Davos.
The claim that "America's economy is the strongest and most durable economy in the world" is
just plain false. China has a much higher growth rate, at 6.9% nearly triple the U.S.'s - and
America's GDP growth is trending to historic long-term lows, and still falling. Take a look at
this chart of the Federal Reserve board's projections of U.S. GDP growth since 2009 compared with
the real GDP growth rate:
"[In the survey] [t]he Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer:
47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling
something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who
knew?
"Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.
" I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know
what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can
pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account
levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5-literally-while I wait for
a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs.
I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new
bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell
my daughter that I didn't know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether
something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters
because my wife and I ran out of heating oil ."
" Two-thirds of Americans would have difficulty coming up with the money to cover a $1,000
emergency, according to an exclusive poll released Thursday, a signal that despite years after
the Great Recession, Americans' finances remain precarious as ever.
" These difficulties span all incomes, according to the poll conducted by The Associated
Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Three-quarters of people in households making less
than $50,000 a year and two-thirds of those making between $50,000 and $100,000 would have difficulty
coming up with $1,000 to cover an unexpected bill.
" Even for the country's wealthiest 20 percent - households making more than $100,000 a
year - 38 percent say they would have at least some difficulty coming up with $1,000 .
"`The more we learn about the balance sheets of Americans, it becomes quite alarming,' said
Caroline Ratcliffe, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute focusing on poverty and emergency savings
issues."
The rest of Obama's statistics are deceptive to the point of being dissimulations - unemployment
has dropped to 4 percent because so many people have stopped looking for work and moved into their
parents' basements that the Bureau of Labor Statistics no longer counts them as unemployed. Meanwhile,
the fraction of working-age adults who are not in the workforce has skyrocketed to an all-time
high. Few homeowners are now being foreclosed in 2016 compared to 2009 because the people in 2009
who were in financial trouble all lost their homes. Only rich people and well-off professionals
were able to keep their homes through the 2009 financial collapse. Since 2009, businesses did
indeed create 14 million new jobs - mostly low-wage junk jobs, part-time minimum-wage jobs that
don't pay a living wage.
"The deep recession wiped out primarily high-wage and middle-wage jobs. Yet the strongest employment
growth during the sluggish recovery has been in low-wage work, at places like strip malls and
fast-food restaurants.
"In essence, the poor economy has replaced good jobs with bad ones."
And the jobs market isn't much better for highly-educated workers:
New research released Monday says nearly half of the nation's recent college graduates work
jobs that don't require a degree.
The report, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, concludes that while
college-educated Americans are less likely to collect unemployment, many of the jobs they do have
aren't worth the price of their diplomas.
The data calls into question a national education platform that says higher education is better
in an economy that favors college graduates.
Don't believe it? Then try this article, from the Chronicle for Higher Education:
Approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to
2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled-occupations where many participants
have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our
nation's stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a
bachelor's degree or more.
As for manufacturing, U.S. manufacturing lost 35,000 jobs in 2016, and manufacturing employment
remains 2.2% below what it was when Obama took office.
Meanwhile, 91% of all the profits generated by the U.S. economy from 2009 through 2012
went to the top 1%. As just one example, the annual bonuses (not salaries, just the bonuses) of
all Wall Street financial traders last year amounted to 28 billion dollars while the total income
of all minimum wage workers in America came to 14 billion dollars.
"Between 2009 and 2012, according to updated data from Emmanuel Saez, overall income per
family grew 6.9 percent. The gains weren't shared evenly, however. The top 1 percent saw their
real income grow by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent only saw a 0.8 percent gain, meaning
that the 1 percent captured 91 percent of all real income.
Adjusting for inflation and excluding anything made from capital gains investments like
stocks, however, shows that even that small gains for all but the richest disappears. According
to Justin Wolfers, adjusted average income for the 1 percent without capital gains rose from $871,100
to $968,000 in that time period. For everyone else, average income actually fell from $44,000
to $43,900. Calculated this way, the 1 percent has captured all of the income gains."
Does any of this sound like "the strongest, most durable economy in the world"? Does any of
this square with the claims by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that "By almost every economic
measure, America is better off "? The U.S. economy is only better off in 2016 by disingenuous
comparison with the stygian depths of the 2009 economic collapse.
Hillary Clinton tied herself to Barack Obama's economic legacy, and the brutal reality for
working class people remains that the economy today has barely improved for most workers to what
it was in 2009, and is in many ways worse. Since 2009, automation + outsourcing/offshoring has
destroyed whole classes of jobs, from taxi drivers (wiped out by Uber and Lyft) to warehoues stock
clerks (getting wiped out by robots) to paralegals and associates at law firms (replaced by databases
and legal search algorithms) to high-end programmers (wiped out by an ever-increasing flood of
H1B via workers from India and China).
Yet vox.com continues to run article after article proclaiming "the 2016 election was all about
racism." And we have a non-stop stream of this stuff from people like Anne Laurie over at balloon-juice.com:
"While the more-Leftist-than-thou "progressives" - including their latest high-profile figurehead
- are high-fiving each other in happy anticipation of potential public-outrage gigs over the next
four years, at least some people are beginning to push back on the BUT WHITE WORKING CLASS HAS
ALL THE SADS!!! meme so beloved of Very Serious Pundits."
That's the ticket, Democrats double down on the identity politics, keep telling the pulverized
middle class how great the economy is. Because that worked so well for you this election.
= = = mclaren@9:52 am: The rest of Obama's statistics are deceptive to the point of being
dissimulations -[ ] Only rich people and well-off professionals were able to keep their homes
through the 2009 financial collapse. = = =
Some food for thought in your post, but you don't help your argument with statements such as
this one. Rich people and well-off professionals make up at most 10% of the population. US homeownership
rate in 2005 was 68.8%, in 2015 is 63.7. That's a big drop and unquestionably represents a lot
of people losing their houses involuntarily. Still, even assuming no "well-off professionals"
lost their houses in the recession that still leaves the vast majority of the houses owned by
the middle class. Which is consistent with foreclosure and sales stats in middle class areas from
2008-2014. Remember that even with 20% unemployment 80% of the population still has a job.
Similarly, I agree that the recession and job situation was qualitatively worse than the quantitative
stats depicted. Once you start adding in hidden factors not captured by the official stats, though,
where do you stop? How do you know the underground economy isn't doing far better than it was
in the boom years of the oughts, thus reducing actual unemployment? Etc.
Finally, you need to address the fundamental question: assuming all you say is true (arguendo),
how does destroying the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare help those in the economically
depressed areas? I got hit bad by the recession myself. Know what helped from 2010 forward? Knowing
that I could change jobs, keep my college-age children on my spouse's heath plan, not get hit
with pre-existing condition fraud, and that if worse came to worse in a couple years I would have
the plan exchange to fall back on. Kansas has tried the Ryan/Walker approach, seen it fail, doubled
down, and seen that fail 4x as badly. Now we're going to make it up on unit sales by trying the
Ryan plan nationally? How do you expect that to "work out for you"?
WLGR 11.16.16 at 4:11 pm
mclaren @ 7: "high-end programmers (wiped out by an ever-increasing flood of H1B via workers
from India and China)"
I'm on board with the general thrust of what you're saying, but this is way, way over
the line separating socialism from barbarism. The fact that
it's not even true is beside the point, as is the (quite frankly) fascist metaphor of "flood"
to describe human fucking beings traveling in search of economic security, at least as long as
you show some self-awareness and contrition about your language. Some awareness about the insidious
administrative structure of the H1-B program would also be nice - the way it works is, an individual's
visa status more or less completely depends on remaining in the good graces of their employer,
meaning that by design these employees have no conceivable leverage in any negotiation
over pay or working conditions, and a program of unconditional residency without USCIS as a de
facto strikebreaker would have much less downward pressure on wages - but anti-immigration rhetoric
remaining oblivious to actual immigration law is par for the course.
No, the real point of departure here from what deserves to be called "socialism" is in the
very act of blithely combining effects of automation (i.e. traditional capitalist competition
for productive efficiency at the expense of workers' economic security) and effects of offshoring/outsourcing/immigration
(i.e. racialized fragmentation of the global working class by accident of birth into those who
"deserve" greater economic security and those who don't) into one and the same depiction of developed-world
economic crisis. In so many words, you're walking right down neoliberal capitalism's ideological
garden path: the idea that it's not possible to be anticapitalist without being an economic nationalist,
and that every conceivable alternative to some form of Hillary Clinton is ultimately reducible
to some form of Donald Trump. On the contrary, those of us on the socialism side of "socialism
or barbarism" don't object to capitalism because it's exploiting American workers , we
object because it's exploiting workers , and insisting on this crucial point against all
chauvinist pressure ("workers of all lands , unite!") is what fundamentally separates our
anticapitalism from the pseudo-anticapitalism of fascists.
Maclaren: I'm with you. I well remember Obama and his "pivot to deficit reduction" and "green
shoots" while I was screaming at the TV 'No!! Not Now!"
And then he tried for a "grand bargain" with the Reps over chained CPI adjustment for SS, and
he became my active enemy. I was a Democrat. Where did my party go?
Just chiming in here: The implicit deal between the elites and the hoi polloi was that the economy
would be run with minimal competence. Throughout the west, those elites have broken faith with
the masses on that issue, and are being punished for it.
I'm less inclined to attach responsibility to Obama, Clinton or the Democratic Party than some.
If Democrats had their way, the economy would have been managed considerably more competently.
Always remember that the rejection of the elites wasn't just a rejection of Democrats. The
Republican elite also took it in the neck.
I'll also dissent from the view that race wasn't decisive in this election. Under different
circumstances, we might have had Bernie's revolution rather than Trump's, but Trump's coalition
is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent to overt racism.
I find the discussions over identity politics so intensely frustrating. A lot of people
on the left have gone all-in on self-righteous anger
Identity politics (and to some extent probably the rhetorical style that goes with it) isn't
a 'left' thing, it's a liberal thing. It's a bête noire for many on the left-see eg. Nancy Fraser's
work.
The Anglo/online genus what you get when you subtract class, socialism and real-world organisation
from politics and add in a lot of bored students and professionals with internet connections in
the context of a political culture (America's) that already valorises individual aggression to
a unique degree.
As polticalfoorball @15 says. The Democrats just didn't have the political muscle to deliver on
those things. There really is a dynamic thats been playing out: Democrats don't get enough governing
capacity because they did poorly in the election, which means their projects to improve the economy
are neutered or allowed through only in a very weakened form. Then the next election cycle the
neuterers use that failure as a weapon to take even more governing capacity away. Its not a failure
of will, its a failure to get on top of the political feedback loop.
@15 politicalfootball 11.16.16 at 5:27 pm
"Throughout the west, those elites have broken faith with the masses on that issue, and are being
punished for it."
Could you specify some "elite" that has been punished?
'the economic theories and programs ascribed to John M. Keynes and his followers; specifically
: the advocacy of monetary and fiscal programs by government to increase employment and spending'
– and if it is done wisely – like in most European countries before 2000 it is one of the least
'braindead' things.
But with the introduction of the Euro – some governmental programs – lead (especially in Spain)
to horrendous self-destructive housing and building bubbles – which lead to the conclusion that
such programs – which allow 'gambling with houses' are pretty much 'braindead'.
Or shorter: The quality of Keynesianism depends on NOT doing it 'braindead'.
Cranky Observer in #11 makes some excellent points. Crucially, he asks: "Finally, you need to
address the fundamental question: assuming all you say is true (arguendo), how does destroying
the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare help those in the economically depressed
areas?"
There actually is a logic at work in the Rust Belt voters for voted for Trump. I don't
think it's good logic, but it makes sense in its own warped way. The calculation the Trump voters
seem to be making in the Rust Belt is that it's better to have a job and no health insurance and
no medicare and no social security, than no job but the ACA (with $7,000 deductibles you can't
afford to pay for anyway) plus medicare (since most of these voters are healthy, they figure they'll
never get sick) plus social security (most of these voters are not 65 or older, and probably think
they'll never age - or perhaps don't believe that social security will be solvent when they do
need it).
It's the same twisted logic that goes on with protectionism. Rust Belt workers figure that
it's better to have a job and not be able to afford a Chinese-made laptop than not to have a job
but plenty of cheap foreign-made widgets you could buy if you had any money (which you don't).
That logic doesn't parse if you run through the economics (because protectionism will destroy
the very jobs they think they're saving), but it can be sold as a tweet in a political campaign.
As for 63.7% home ownership stats in 2016, vast numbers of those "owned" homes were snapped
up by giant banks and other financial entities like hedge funds which then rented those homes
out. So the home ownership stats in 2016 are extremely deceptive. Much of the home-buying since
the 2009 crash has been investment purchases. Foreclosure home purchases for rent is now a huge
thriving business, and it's fueling a second housing bubble. Particularly because in many ways
it repeats the financially frothy aspects of the early 2000s housing bubble - banks and investment
firms are issuing junks bonds based on rosy estimates of ever-escalating rents and housing prices,
they use those junk financial instruments (and others like CDOs) to buy houses which then get
rented out at inflated prices, the rental income gets used to fund more tranches of investment
which fuels more buy-to-rent home buying. Rents have already skyrocketed far beyond incomes on
the East and West Coast, so this can't continue. But home prices and rents keep rising. There
is no city in the United States today where a worker making minimum wage can afford to rent a
one-bedroom apartment and have money left over to eat and pay for a car, health insurance, etc.
If home ownership were really so robust, this couldn't possibly be the case. The fact that rents
keep skyrocketing even as undocumented hispanics return to Mexico in record numbers while post-9/11
ICE restrictions have hammered legal immigration numbers way, way down suggests that home ownership
is not nearly as robust as the deceptive numbers indicate.
Political football in #15 remarks: "I'll also dissent from the view that race wasn't decisive
in this election. Under different circumstances, we might have had Bernie's revolution rather
than Trump's, but Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent
to overt racism."
Race was important, but not the root cause of the Trump victory. How do we know this? Tump
himself is telling us. Look at Trump's first announced actions - deport 3 million undocumented
immigrants who have committed crimes, ram through vast tax cuts for the rich, and end the inheritance
tax.
If Trump's motivation (and his base's motivation) was pure racism, Trump's first announced
action would be something like passing laws that made it illegal to marry undocumented workers.
His first act would be to roll back the legalization of black/white marriage and re-instate segregation.
Trump isn't promising any of that.
Instead Trump's (bad) policies are based around enriching billionaires and shutting down immigration.
Bear in mind that 43% of all new jobs created since 2009 went to immigrants and you start to realize
that Trump's base is reacting to economic pressure by scapegoating immigrants, not racism by itself.
If it were pure racism we'd have Trump and Ryan proposing a bunch of new Nuremberg laws. Make
it illegal to have sex with muslims, federally fund segregated black schools and pass laws to
force black kids to get bussed to them, create apartheid-style zones where only blacks can live,
that sort of thing. Trump's first announced actions involve enriching the fantastically wealthy
and enacting dumb self-destructive protectionism via punitive immigration control. That's protectionism
+ class war of the rich against everyone else, not racism. The protectionist immigration-control
+ deportation part of Trump's program is sweet sweet music to the working class people in the
Rust Belt. They think the 43% of jobs taken by immigrants will come back. They don't realize that
those are mostly jobs no one wants to do anyway, and that most of those jobs are already in the
process of getting automated out of existence.
The claim "Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent
to overt racism" is incomplete. Trump's coalition actually consists of 3 parts and it's highly
unstable: [1] racists, [2] plutocrats, [3] working class people slammed hard by globalization
for whom Democrats have done little or nothing.
Here's an argument that may resonate: the first two groups in Trump's coalition are unreachable.
Liberal Democrats can't sweet-talk racists out of being racist and we certainly have nothing to
offer the plutocrats. So the only part of Trump's coalition that is really reachable by liberal
Democrats is the third group. Shouldn't we be concentrating on that third group, then?
The good news is that Trump's coalition is unstable. The plutocrats and Rust Belters are
natural enemies. Since the plutocrats are perceived as running giant corporations that import
large numbers of non-white immigrants to lower wages, the racists are not big fans of that group
either.
Listen to Steve Bannon, a classic stormfront type - he says he wants to blow up both the
Democratic and the Republican party. He calls himself a "Leninist" in a recent interview and vows
to wreck all elite U.S. institutions (universities, giant multinationals), not just the Democratic
party.
Why? Because the stormfront types consider elite U.S. institutions like CitiBank as equally
culpable with Democrats in supposedly destroying white people in the U.S. According to Bannon's
twisted skinhead logic, Democrats are allegedly race traitors for cultural reasons, but big U.S.
corporations and elite institutions are supposedly equally guilty of economic race treason by
importing vast numbers of non-white immigrants via H1B visas, by offshoring jobs from mostly caucasian-populated
red states to non-white countries like India, Africa, China, and by using elite U.S. universities
to trawl the world for the best (often non-white) students, etc. Bannon's "great day of the rope"
includes the plutocrats as well as people of color.
These natural fractures in the Trump coalition are real, and Democrats can exploit them to
weaken and destroy Republicans. But we have to get away from condemning all Republicans as racists
because if we go down that route, we won't realize how fractured and unstable the Trump coalition
really is.
The short version of my thinking on the Obama stimulus is this: Keynesian stimulus spending is
a free lunch; it doesn't really matter what you spend money on up to a very generous point, so
it seems ready-made for legislative log-rolling. If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed
thru a Democratic Congress long out of power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending
on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again, if the
stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really trying.
Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism,
because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
Ps. Should prob add that identity politics isn't the same thing as feminism, anti-racism, LGBT
politics, etc. They're all needed now more than ever.
What we don't need more of imo is a particular liberal/middle-class form of those things with
particular assumptions (meritocratic and individualist), epistemology (strongly subjectivist)
and rhetorical style (which often aims humiliating opponents from a position of relative knowledge/status
rather than verbal engagement).
I don't know why I'm even having to say this, as it's so obvious. The "leftists" (for want of
a better word) and feminists who I know are also against neoliberalism. They are against the selloff
of public assets to enterprises for private profit. They want to see a solution to the rapidly
shrinking job market as technology replaces jobs (no, it's not enough for the Heroic Workers to
Seize the Means of Production – the means of production are different now and the solution is
going to have to be more complex than just "bring back manufacturing" or "introduce tariffs".)
They want to roll back the tax cuts for the rich which have whittled down our revenue base this
century. They want corporations and the top 10% to pay their fair share, and concomitantly they
want pensioners, the unemployed and people caring for children to have a proper living wage.
They support a universal "single payer" health care system, which we social democratic squishy
types managed to actually introduce in the 1970s, but now we have to fight against right wing
governments trying to roll it back They support a better system of public education. They support
a science-based approach to climate change where it is taken seriously for the threat it is and
given priority in Government policy. They support spending less on the Military and getting out
of international disputes which we (Western nations) only seem to exacerbate.
This is not an exhaustive list.
Yet just because the same people say that the dominant Western countries (and my own) still
suffer from institutionalised racism and sexism, which is not some kind of cake icing but actually
ruin lives and kill people, we are "all about identity politics" and cannot possibly have enough
brain cells to think about the issues I described in para 1.
The slow recovery was only one factor. Wages have been stagnant since Reagan. And honestly,
if a white Republican president had stabilized the economy, killed Osama Bin Laden and got rid
of pre-existing condition issue with healthcare, the GOP would be BRAGGING all over it. Let's
remember that we have ONE party that has been devoted to racist appeals, lying and putting party
over country for decades.
Obama entered office as the economy crashed over a cliff. Instead of reforming the banks and
punishing the bankers who engaged in fraudulent activities, he waded into healthcare reform. Banks
are bigger today than they were in 2008. And tell me again, which bankers were punished for the
fraud? Not a one All that Repo 105 maneuvering, stuffing the retirement funds with toxic assets
– etc. and so on – all of that was perfectly legal? And if legal, all of that was totally bonusable?
Yes! In America, such failure is gifted with huge bonuses, thanks to the American taxpayer.
Meanwhile, homeowners saw huge drops the value of their homes. Some are still underwater with
the mortgage. It's a shame that politicians and reporters in DC don't get out much.
Concurrently, right before the election, ACA premiums skyrocketed. If you are self-insured,
ACA is NOT affordable. It doesn't matter that prior to ACA, premiums increased astronomically.
Obama promised AFFORDABLE healthcare. In my state, we have essentially a monopoly on health insurance,
and the costs are absurd. But that's in part because the state Republicans refused to expand Medicaid.
Don't underestimate HRC's serious issues. HRC had one speech for the bankers and another for
everyone else. Why didn't she release the GS transcripts? When did the Democrats become the party
of Wall Street?
She also made the same idiotic mistake that Romney did – disparage a large swathe of American
voters (basket of deplorables is this year's 47%.)
And then we had a nation of voters intent on the outsider. Bernie Sanders had an improbable
run at it – the Wikileaks emails showed that the DNC did what they could to get rid of him as
a threat.
Well America has done and gone elected themselves an outsider. Lucky us.
"... 'A big part of Bill's anger toward Hillary was that he was sidelined during the entire campaign by her advisers,' said the source. 'He can't be effective if he sees himself as just another hired hand. He wasn't listened to and that infuriated him. After all, he knows something about campaigns, and he told me in early October that Hillary and her advisers were blowing it. ..."
"... 'Hillary wouldn't listen. She told Bill that his ideas were old and that he was out of touch. In the end, there was nothing he could do about it because Hillary and her people weren't listening to anything he said.' ..."
'Bill always campaigned as a guy who felt your pain, but Hillary came across as someone who was
pissed off at her enemy [Trump], not someone who was reaching out and trying to make life better
for the white working class.'
'Bill also said that many African Americans were deeply disappointed with the results of eight
years of Obama,' the source continued.
'Despite more and more government assistance, black weren't economically any better off, and black-on-black
crime was destroying their communities. He said Hillary should have gone into the South Side of Chicago
and condemned the out-of-control violence.'
'A big part of Bill's anger toward Hillary was that he was sidelined during the entire campaign
by her advisers,' said the source. 'He can't be effective if he sees himself as just another hired
hand. He wasn't listened to and that infuriated him. After all, he knows something about campaigns,
and he told me in early October that Hillary and her advisers were blowing it.
'Hillary wouldn't listen. She told Bill that his ideas were old and that he was out of touch.
In the end, there was nothing he could do about it because Hillary and her people weren't listening
to anything he said.'
"... Of course, the DNC was too busy trying to blow the Sanders campaign to smithereens and Hillary decided that comforting the Democrat Party's donor base was more important than attracting working class voters in the Rust Belt. ..."
I read all of these points and conclude that Bernie Sanders would have defeated Trump in the
general election. Sanders would have held all of the Democratic strongholds, and he would have
beaten Trump in the Midwest.
Of course, the DNC was too busy trying to blow the Sanders campaign to smithereens and
Hillary decided that comforting the Democrat Party's donor base was more important than attracting
working class voters in the Rust Belt.
This is evidence that the elites in the Democrat Party would rather lose with a ' made ' candidate
than win with an outsider.
"... Clinton's defeat is more than anything else a rejection of Obama. Obama descended into the fray to bolster her campaign and witnessed the rejection of his own presidency. Conquered, in the 2008 electoral campaign, with a pledge of support not only for Wall Street but also "Main Street", that is, the ordinary citizen. Since then, the middle class has witnessed its conditions deteriorate, the rate of poverty has increased while the rich have become even richer. Now, marketing himself as the champion of the middle class, the billionaire outsider, Donald Trump, has won the presidency. ..."
"... As her e-mails make clear, when she was Secretary of State, she convinced President Obama to engage in war to demolish Libya and to roll out the same operation against Syria. She was the one to promote the internal destabilization of Venezuela and Brazil and the US "Pivot to Asia" – an anti-Chinese manoeuvre. And yet again, she also used the Clinton Foundation as a vehicle to prepare the terrain in Ukraine for the Maidan Square putsch which paved the way for Usa/Nato escalation against Russia. ..."
"... Given that all this has not prevented the relative decline of US power, it is up to the Trump Administration to correct its shot, while keeping its gaze fixed on the same target. There is no air of reality to the hypothesis that Trump intends to abandon the system of alliances centered around US-led Nato. ..."
"... Trump could seek an agreement with Russia, an additional objective of which would be to pull it away from China. China: against which Trump announces economic measures, accompanied by an additional strengthening of US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region. ..."
"... Here you have the colossal financial groups that dominate the economy (the share value alone of the companies listed on Wall Street is higher than the entire US national income). ..."
"... Then you have the multinationals whose economic dimensions exceed those of entire states and which delocalize production to countries offering cheap labour. The knock-on effect? Domestically, factories will close and unemployment will increase, which will in turn lead to the conditions of the US middle class becoming even worse. ..."
"... It is 21st century capitalism, which the USA expresses in its most extreme form, that increasingly polarizes the rich and poor. 1% of the global population has more than the other 99%. The President[-elect], Trump, belongs to the class of the superrich. ..."
Clinton's defeat is more than anything else a rejection of Obama. Obama descended into the
fray to bolster her campaign and witnessed the rejection of his own presidency. Conquered, in the
2008 electoral campaign, with a pledge of support not only for Wall Street but also "Main Street",
that is, the ordinary citizen. Since then, the middle class has witnessed its conditions deteriorate,
the rate of poverty has increased while the rich have become even richer. Now, marketing himself
as the champion of the middle class, the billionaire outsider, Donald Trump, has won the presidency.
How will this change of guard at the White House change US foreign policy? Certainly, the core
objective of remaining the dominant global power will remain untouched. [Yet] this position is increasing
fragile. The USA is losing ground both within the economic and the political domains, [ceding] it
to China, Russia and other "emerging countries". This is why it is throwing the sword onto the scale.
This is followed by a series of wars where Hillary Clinton played the [lead] protagonist.
As her authorized biography reveals, she was the one as First Lady, to convince the President,
her consort, to engage in war to destroy Yugoslavia, initiating a series of "humanitarian interventions"
against "dictators" charged with "genocide".
As her e-mails make clear, when she was Secretary of State, she convinced President Obama
to engage in war to demolish Libya and to roll out the same operation against Syria. She was the
one to promote the internal destabilization of Venezuela and Brazil and the US "Pivot to Asia" –
an anti-Chinese manoeuvre. And yet again, she also used the Clinton Foundation as a vehicle to prepare
the terrain in Ukraine for the Maidan Square putsch which paved the way for Usa/Nato escalation against
Russia.
Given that all this has not prevented the relative decline of US power, it is up to the Trump
Administration to correct its shot, while keeping its gaze fixed on the same target. There is no
air of reality to the hypothesis that Trump intends to abandon the system of alliances centered around
US-led Nato. But he will of course thump his fists on the table to secure a deeper commitment,
particularly on military expenditure from the allies.
Trump could seek an agreement with Russia, an additional objective of which would be to pull
it away from China. China: against which Trump announces economic measures, accompanied by an additional
strengthening of US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
Such decisions, that will surely open the door for further wars, do not depend on Trump's warrior-like
temperament, but on centres of power wherein lies the matrix of command on which the White House
itself depends.
Here you have the colossal financial groups that dominate the economy (the share value alone
of the companies listed on Wall Street is higher than the entire US national income).
Then you have the multinationals whose economic dimensions exceed those of entire states and
which delocalize production to countries offering cheap labour. The knock-on effect? Domestically,
factories will close and unemployment will increase, which will in turn lead to the conditions of
the US middle class becoming even worse.
Then you have the giants of the war industry that extract profit from war.
It is 21st century capitalism, which the USA expresses in its most extreme form, that increasingly
polarizes the rich and poor. 1% of the global population has more than the other 99%. The President[-elect],
Trump, belongs to the class of the superrich.
Talking Point: The Clinton Campaign Was Well-Managed
Here are two examples of the talking point. From the Washington Post (November 10, 2016):
At Brooklyn headquarters on Wednesday, Podesta expressed his gratitude and support for the
team, and for Mook. "We have the No. 1 campaign manager," he said, in a staffwide gathering
in the afternoon. "I've been doing this since 1968, and I've never seen a culture and a spirit
like we created in this campaign." On the conference call with thousands of staff across the
country, Clinton also called in [how kind] and thanked her team for their dedication.
Mook tried to end the campaign on a high note.
"What you've created is going to live on," he told his troops. "Leaders all over this country,
local networks around the nation, future candidates who are going to step forward. Someone
in this room is going to manage a presidential campaign one day."
Talking Point: The Clinton Defeat Had Nothing To Do With Economics
Here's an example of the talking point. From, naturally,
Amanda Marcotte (November 11, 2016):
(The subtext here is usually that if you don't retweet approvingly, you're a racist yourself,
and possibly a racist Trump supporter.) There are four reasons why this talking point is false.
... .... ...
To be fair, Clinton is correct that "there are lots of reasons," in an election this close. However,
to me, blaming Comey is like blaming the last pebble in an avalanche of #FAIL. Sanders asks the
right question.
Talking about the Comey letters
, Sanders said:
"It's not a question of what happens in the last week. The question is that she should have
won this election by 10 percentage points.
"... The "my way" or the highway rhetoric from Clinton supporters on the campaign was sickening. When Bush was called a warmonger for Iraq, that was fine. When Clinton was called a warmonger for Iraq and Libya, the Clintonites went on the offensive, often throwing around crap like "if she was a man, she wouldn't be a warmonger!" ..."
"... On racism: "what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city, winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine as long as they acted exactly like us." ..."
"... I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive. And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone has replied to this with a comment saying, "You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!" Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit, at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities." ..."
"... And the rural folk are called a "basket of deplorables" and other names. If you want to fight racism, a battle that is Noble and Honorable, you have to understand the nuances between racism and hopelessness. The wizard-wannabe idiots are a tiny fringe. The "deplorables" are a huge part of rural America. If you alienate them, you're helping the idiots mentioned above. ..."
Erm, atheist groups are known to target smaller Christian groups with lawsuits. A baker was sued
for refusing to bake a cake for a Gay Wedding. She was perfectly willing to serve the couple,
just not at the wedding. In California we had a lawsuit over a cross in a park. Atheists threatened
a lawsuit over a seal. Look, I get that there are people with no life out there, but why are they
bringing the rest of us into their insanity, with constant lawsuits. There's actually a concept
known as "Freedom from Religion" – what the heck? Can you imagine someone arguing about "Freedom
from Speech" in America? But it's ok to do it to religious folk! And yes, that includes Muslims,
who had to fight to build a Mosque in New York. They should've just said it was a Scientology
Center
The "my way" or the highway rhetoric from Clinton supporters on the campaign was sickening.
When Bush was called a warmonger for Iraq, that was fine. When Clinton was called a warmonger
for Iraq and Libya, the Clintonites went on the offensive, often throwing around crap like "if
she was a man, she wouldn't be a warmonger!"
The problem with healthcare in the US deserves its own thread, but Obamacare did not fix it;
Obamacare made it worse, especially in the rural communities. The laws in schools are fundamentally
retarded. A kid was suspended for giving a friend Advil. Another kid suspended for bringing in
a paper gun. I could go on and on. A girl was expelled from college for trying to look gangsta
in a L'Oreal mask. How many examples do you need? Look at all of the new "child safety laws" which
force kids to leave in a bubble. And when they enter the Real World, they're fucked, so they pick
up the drugs. In cities it's crack, in farmvilles it's meth.
Hillary didn't win jack shit. She got a plurality of the popular vote. She didn't win it, since
winning implies getting the majority. How many Johnson votes would've gone to Trump if it was
based on popular vote, in a safe state? Of course the biggest issue is the attack on the way of
life, which is all too real. I encourage you to read this, in order to understand where they're
coming from:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully
unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind
of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and
avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd
barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and
doing an astounding $125 billion in damage. But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy
about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally
important. It matters. To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through
the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"
On racism: "what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always
one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black
people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they
passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city,
winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned
alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine as long as they
acted exactly like us."
"They're getting the shit kicked out of them. I know, I was there. Step outside of the city,
and the suicide rate among young people fucking doubles. The recession pounded rural communities,
but all the recovery went to the cities. The rate of new businesses opening in rural areas has
utterly collapsed."
^ That, I'd say, is known as destroying their lives. Also this:
"In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical
degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts
aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town - aspiring to
that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the
job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The "downtown" is just the corpses of
mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart's blast crater, the "suburbs" are trailer parks.
There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.
I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive. And if you dare complain, some liberal elite
will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone
has replied to this with a comment saying, "You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!"
Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away
white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit,
at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities."
And the rural folk are called a "basket of deplorables" and other names. If you want to fight
racism, a battle that is Noble and Honorable, you have to understand the nuances between racism
and hopelessness. The wizard-wannabe idiots are a tiny fringe. The "deplorables" are a huge part
of rural America. If you alienate them, you're helping the idiots mentioned above.
...In fact, the entire Democratic Party has mainly ceased to campaign on issues-choosing instead
to invest heavily in identity politics. The message to black voters is: vote for us because you are
black, not because of anything we are going to do. Ditto for Hispanics. And women. And the LGBT community.
And others. Hillary does have an agenda. More on that in a future post. But she didn't campaign on
it.
As for the mainstream media, I have never seen an election in which the media was so biased. And
not just biased. The media's entire view of the election was Hillary Clinton's view. Even on Fox
News, the entire focus on election night and in the days that followed was on identity politics.
How many blacks were voting? How many Hispanics? How many women?
As if demography were destiny.
Now, as it turns out, a greater percentage of blacks voted for Trump than voted for Romney. The
same thing is true of Hispanics. In fact, Trump did better among minorities than any Republican since
Ronald Reagan. He even got a majority of white female votes.
Why were all these people doing something they weren't supposed to do? On network television and
even on cable television, no one had an answer.
Putting the media aside for the moment, do you know what Hillary's position is on trade deals
with other countries? Of course, you don't. And neither does anyone else. When she spoke about the
issue at all, she said one thing behind closed doors and another in public. The reason this doesn't
matter on Wall Street (or to the editors of the New York Times ) is that they assume she
has no real convictions and that money and special interest influence will always win out.
What about Hillary's solution to the problem of illegal immigration? Do you know what that is?
How about her position on corporate tax reform? Or school choice? Or Obamacare? Or opportunities
for blacks in inner cities?
I bet you don't know her positions on any of these topics. But I bet you do know Donald Trump's.
Not in detail, of course. But I bet you know the general way in which he differs from Obama administration
policies.
"... Judging by the volume of complaints from Clinton sycophants insisting that people did not get behind Clinton or that it was purely her gender, they won't. Why would anyone get behind Clinton save the 1%? Her policies were pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and at odds with what the American people needed. Also, we should judge based on policy, not gender and Clinton comes way short of Sanders in that regard – in many regards, she is the antithesis of Sanders. ..."
"... "Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The only question is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility" I disagree. In my view, it is not a question at all. They have never taken responsibility for anything, and they never will. ..."
"... What would make Democrats focus on the working class? Nothing. They have lost and brought about destruction of the the Unions, which was the Democratic Base, and have become beholden to the money. The have noting in common with the working class, and no sympathy for their situation, either. ..."
"... What does Bill Clinton, who drive much of the policy in the '90s, and spent his early years running away form the rural poor in Arkansas (Law School, Rhodes Scholarship), have in common with working class people anywhere? ..."
"... Iron law of institutions applies. Position in the D apparatus is more important than political power – because with power come blame. ..."
"... I notice Obama worked hard to lose majorities in the house and Senate so he could point to the Republicans and say "it was their fault" except when he actually wanted something, and made it happen (such as TPP). ..."
"... Agreed with the first but not the second. It's typical liberal identity politics guilt tripping. That won't get you too far on the "white side" of Youngstown Ohio. ..."
"... Also suspect that the working-class, Rust-Belt Trump supporters will soon be thrown under the bus by their Standard Bearer, if the Transition Team appointments are any indicator: e.g. Privateers at SSA. ..."
"... My wife teaches primary grades in an inner city school. She has made it clear to me over the years that the challenges her children are facing are related to poverty, not race. She sees a big correlation between the financial status of a family and its family structure (one or more parents not present or on drugs) and the kids' success in school. Race is a minor factor. ..."
"... The problem with running on a class based platform in America is, well, it's America; and in good ol' America, we are taught that anyone can become a successful squillionare – ya know, hard work, nose-to-the-grindstone, blah, blah, blah. ..."
"... The rags to riches American success fable is so ingrained that ideas like taxing the rich a bit more fall flat because everyone thinks "that could be me someday. Just a few house flips, a clever new app, that ten-bagger (or winning lottery ticket) and I'm there" ("there" being part of the 1%). ..."
"... The idea that anyone can be successful (i.e. rich) is constantly promoted. ..."
"... I think this fantasy is beginning to fade a bit but the "wealth = success" idea is so deeply rooted in the American psyche I don't think it will ever fade completely away. ..."
"... If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy - which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog - you will come to an awful realization. It wasn't Beijing. It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn't immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn't any of that. ..."
"... Nothing happened to them. There wasn't some awful disaster. There wasn't a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence - and the incomprehensible malice - of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain't what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. ..."
"... The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. ..."
"... White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America ..."
"... Poor or Poorer whites have been demonised since the founding of the original Colonies, and were continuously pushed west to the frontiers by the ruling elites of New England and the South as a way of ridding themselves of "undesirables", who were then left to their own resources, and clung together for mutual assistance. ..."
"... White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative. The very existence of such people – both in their visibility and invisibility – is proof that American society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice. "They are not who we are". But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history, whether we like it or not". ..."
"... "To be sure, Donald Trump did make a strong appeal to racists, homophobes, and misogynists " ..."
"... working class white women ..."
"... Obama is personally likeable ..."
"... History tells us the party establishment will move further right after election losses. And among the activist class there are identity purity battles going on. ..."
"... Watch as this happens yet again: "In most elections, U.S. politicians of both parties pretend to be concerned about their issues, then conveniently ignore them when they reach power and implement policies from the same Washington Consensus that has dominated the past 40 years." That is why we need a strong third party, a reformed election system with public support of campaigns and no private money, and free and fair media coverage. But it ain't gonna happen. ..."
"... Obviously, if the Democrats nominate yet another Clintonite Obamacrat all over again, I may have to vote for Trump all over again . . . to stop the next Clintonite before it kills again. ..."
Ultimately the Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The
only question is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility for what happened.
Judging by the volume of complaints from Clinton sycophants insisting that people did not
get behind Clinton or that it was purely her gender, they won't. Why would anyone get behind Clinton
save the 1%? Her policies were pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and at odds with what the American people
needed. Also, we should judge based on policy, not gender and Clinton comes way short of Sanders
in that regard – in many regards, she is the antithesis of Sanders.
Class trumps race, to make a pun. If the left doesn't take the Democratic Party back and clean
house, I expect that there is a high probability that 2020's election will look at lot like the
2004 elections.
I'd recommend someone like Sanders to run. Amongst the current crop, maybe Tulsi Gabbard or
Nina Turner seem like the best candidates.
"Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The only question
is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility" I disagree. In my view, it is not a
question at all. They have never taken responsibility for anything, and they never will.
What would make Democrats focus on the working class? Nothing. They have lost and brought
about destruction of the the Unions, which was the Democratic Base, and have become beholden to
the money. The have noting in common with the working class, and no sympathy for their situation,
either.
What does Bill Clinton, who drive much of the policy in the '90s, and spent his early years
running away form the rural poor in Arkansas (Law School, Rhodes Scholarship), have in common
with working class people anywhere?
The same question applies to Hillary, to Trump and the remainder of our "representatives" in
Congress.
Without Unions, how are US Representatives from the working class elected?
What we are seeing is a shift in the US for the Republicans to become the populist party. They
already have the churches, and with Trump they can gain the working class – although I do not
underestimate the contempt help by our elected leaders for the Working Class and poor.
The have forgotten, if they ever believed: "There, but for the grace of God, go I".
Iron law of institutions applies. Position in the D apparatus is more important than political
power – because with power come blame.
I notice Obama worked hard to lose majorities in the house and Senate so he could point
to the Republicans and say "it was their fault" except when he actually wanted something, and
made it happen (such as TPP).
We know that class and economic insecurity drove many white people to vote for Trump. That's
understandable. And now we are seeing a rise in hate incidents inspired by his victory. So obviously
there is a race component in his support as well. So, if you, white person, didn't vote for Trump
out of white supremacy, would you consider making a statement that disavows the acts of extremist
whites? Do you vow to stand up and help if you see people being victimized? Do you vow not to
stay silent when you encounter Trump supporters who ARE obviously in thrall to the white supremacist
siren call?
Agreed with the first but not the second. It's typical liberal identity politics guilt
tripping. That won't get you too far on the "white side" of Youngstown Ohio.
And I wouldn't worry about it. When I worked at the at the USX Fairless works in Levittown
PA in 1988, I was befriended by one steelworker who was a clear raving white supremacist racist.
(Actually rather nonchalant about about it). However he was the only one I encountered who was
like this, and eventually I figured out that he befriended a "newbie" like me because he had no
friends among the other workers, including the whites. He was not popular at all.
I've always thought that Class, not Race, was the Third Rail of American Politics, and that
the US was fast-tracking to a more shiny, happy feudalism.
Also suspect that the working-class, Rust-Belt Trump supporters will soon be thrown under
the bus by their Standard Bearer, if the Transition Team appointments are any indicator: e.g.
Privateers at SSA.
My wife teaches primary grades in an inner city school. She has made it clear to me over
the years that the challenges her children are facing are related to poverty, not race. She sees
a big correlation between the financial status of a family and its family structure (one or more
parents not present or on drugs) and the kids' success in school. Race is a minor factor.
She also makes it clear to me that the Somali/Syrian/Iraqi etc. immigrant kids are going to
do very well even though they come in without a word of English because they are working their
butts off and they have the full support of their parents and community. These people left bad
places and came to their future and they are determined to grab it with both hands. 40% of her
class this year is ENL (English as a non-native language). Since it is an inner city school, they
don't have teacher's aides in the class, so it is just one teacher in a class of 26-28 kids, of
which a dozen struggle to understand English. Surprisingly, the class typically falls short of
the "standards" that the state sets for the standardized exams. Yet many of the immigrant kids
end up going to university after high school through sheer effort.
Bullying and extreme misbehavior (teachers are actually getting injured by violent elementary
kids) is largely done by kids born in the US. The immigrant kids tend to be fairly well-behaved.
On a side note, the CSA at our local farmer's market said they couldn't find people to pick
the last of their fall crops (it is in a rural community so a car is needed to get there). So
the food bank was going out this week to pick produce like squash, onions etc. and we were told
we could come out and pick what we wanted. Full employment?
The problem with running on a class based platform in America is, well, it's America; and
in good ol' America, we are taught that anyone can become a successful squillionare – ya know,
hard work, nose-to-the-grindstone, blah, blah, blah.
The rags to riches American success fable is so ingrained that ideas like taxing the rich
a bit more fall flat because everyone thinks "that could be me someday. Just a few house flips,
a clever new app, that ten-bagger (or winning lottery ticket) and I'm there" ("there" being part
of the 1%).
The idea that anyone can be successful (i.e. rich) is constantly promoted.
I think this fantasy is beginning to fade a bit but the "wealth = success" idea is so deeply
rooted in the American psyche I don't think it will ever fade completely away.
I'm recalling (too lazy to find the link) a poll a couple years ago that showed the number
of American's identifying as "working class" increased, and the number as "middle class" decreased.
It is both. And it is a deliberate mechanism of class division to preserve power. Bill Cecil-Fronsman,
Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina identifies nine classes
in the class structure of a state that mixed modern capitalist practice (plantations), agrarian
YOYO independence (the non-slaveowning subsistence farms), town economies, and subsistence (farm
labor). Those classes were typed racially and had certain economic, power, and social relations
associated with them. For both credit and wages, few escaped the plantation economy and being
subservient to the planter capitalists locally.
Moreover, ethnic identity was embedded in the law as a class marker. This system was developed
independently or exported through imitation in various ways to the states outside North Carolina
and the slave-owning states. The abolition of slavery meant free labor in multiple senses and
the capitalist use of ethnic minorities and immigrants as scabs integrated them into an ethnic-class
system, where it was broad ethnicity and not just skin-color that defined classes. Other ethnic
groups, except Latinos and Muslim adherents, now have earned their "whiteness".
One suspects that every settler colonial society develops this combined ethnic-class structure
in which the indigenous ("Indians" in colonial law) occupy one group of classes and imported laborers
or slaves or intermixtures ("Indian", "Cape Colored" in South Africa) occupy another group of
classes available for employment in production. Once employed, the relationship is exactly that
of the slaveowner to the slave no matter how nicely the harsh labor management techniques of 17th
century Barbados and Jamaica have been made kinder and gentler. But outside the workplace (and
often still inside) the broader class structure applies even contrary to the laws trying to restrict
the relationship to boss and worker.
Blacks are not singling themselves out to police; police are shooting unarmed black people
without punishment. The race of the cop does not matter, but the institution of impunity makes
it open season on a certain class of victims.
It is complicated because every legal and often managerial attempt has been made to reduce
the class structure of previous economies to the pure capitalism demanded by current politics.
So when in a post Joe McCarthy, post-Cold War propaganda society, someone wants to protest
the domination of capitalism, attacking who they perceive as de facto scabs to their higher incomes
(true or not) is the chosen mode of political attack. Not standing up for the political rights
of the victims of ethnically-marked violence and discrimination allows the future depression of
wages and salaries by their selective use as a threat in firms. And at the individual firm and
interpersonal level even this gets complicated because in spite of the pressure to just be businesslike,
people do still care for each other.
This is a perennial mistake. In the 1930s Southern Textile Strike, some organizing was of both
black and white workers; the unions outside the South rarely stood in solidarity with those efforts
because they were excluding ethnic minorities from their unions; indeed, some locals were organized
by ethnicity. That attitude also carried over to solidarity with white workers in the textile
mills. And those white workers who went out on a limb to organize a union never forgot that failure
in their labor struggle. It is the former textile areas of the South that are most into Trump's
politics and not so much the now minority-majority plantation areas.
It still is race in the inner ring suburbs of ethnically diverse cities like St. Louis that
hold the political lock on a lot of states. Because Ferguson to them seems like an invasion of
the lower class. Class politics, of cultural status, based on ethnicity. Still called by that
19h century scientific racism terminology that now has been debunked - race - Caucasoid, Mongoloid,
Negroid. Indigenous, at least in the Americas, got stuck under Mongoloid.
You go organize the black, Latino, and white working class to form unions and gain power, and
it will happen. It is why Smithfield Foods in North Carolina had to negotiate a contract. Race
can be transcended in action.
Pretending the ethnic discrimination and even segregation does not exist and have its own problems
is political suicide in the emerging demographics. Might not be a majority, but it is an important
segment of the vote. Which is why the GOP suppressed minority voters through a variety of legal
and shady electoral techniques. Why Trump wants to deport up to 12 million potential US citizens
and some millions of already birthright minor citizens. And why we are likely to see the National
Labor Review Board gutted of what little power it retains from 70 years of attack. Interesting
what the now celebrated white working class was not offered in this election, likely because they
would vote it down quicker because, you know, socialism.
Your comment reminded me of an episode in Seattle's history.
Link . The
unions realized they were getting beat in their strikes, by scabs, who were black. The trick was
for the unions to bring the blacks into the union. This was a breakthrough, and it worked in Seattle,
in 1934. There is a cool mural the union commissioned by,
Pablo O'Higgins , to
celebrate the accomplishment.
Speaking of class, and class contempt , one must recall the infamous screed published
by National Review columnist Kevin Williamson early this year, writing about marginalised white
people here is a choice excerpt:
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my
own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and
alcohol addiction, the family anarchy - which is to say, the whelping of human children with
all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog - you will come to an awful realization. It wasn't
Beijing. It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn't immigrants from
Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn't any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn't some awful disaster. There wasn't a war or a famine
or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very
little to explain the dysfunction and negligence - and the incomprehensible malice - of poor
white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain't what it used to be. There is more to
life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the
factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.
Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap
theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory
towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your
goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American
underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used
heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.
Now it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to state that Williamson's animus can
be replicated amongst many of the moneyed elite currently pushing and shoving their way into a
position within the incoming Trump Administration. The Trump campaign has openly and cynically
courted and won the votes of white people similar to those mentioned in Williamson's article,
and who – doubtlessly – will be stiffed by policies vigourously opposed to their welfare that
will be enacted during the Trump years. The truly intriguing aspect of the Trump election is:
what will be the consequences of further degradation of the "lower orders' " quality of life by
such actions? Wholesale retreat from electoral politics? Further embitterment and anger NOT toward
those in Washington responsible for their lot but directed against ethnic and racial minorities
"stealing their jawbs" and "getting welfare while we scrounge for a living"? I sincerely doubt
whether the current or a reconstructed Democratic Party can at all rally this large chunk of white
America by posing as their "champions" the class divide in the US is as profound as the racial
chasm, and neither major party – because of internal contradictions – can offer a credible answer.
[In addition to the growing inequality and concomitant wage stagnation for the middle and working
classes, 9/11 and its aftermath has certainly has contributed to it as well, as, making PEOPLE
LONG FOR the the Golden Age of Managerial Capitalism of the post-WWII era,]
Oh yeah, I noticed a big ol' hankerin' for that from the electorate. What definition could
the author be using for Managerial Capitalism that could make it the opposite of inequality? The
fight for power between administration and shareholders does not lead to equality for workers.
[So this gave force to the idea that the government was nothing but a viper's nest full of
crony capitalist enablers,]
I don't think it's an 'idea' that the govt is crony capitalists and enablers. Ds need to get
away from emotive descriptions. Being under/unemployed, houseless, homeless, unable to pay for
rent, utilities, food . aren't feelings/ideas. When that type of language is used, it comes across
as hand waving. There needs to be a shift of talking to rather than talking about.
If crony capitalism is an idea, it's simply a matter for Ds to identify a group (workers),
create a hierarchy (elite!) and come up with a propaganda campaign (celebrities and musicians
spending time in flyover country-think hanging out in coffee shops in a flannel shirt) to get
votes. Promise to toss them a couple of crumbs with transfer payments (retraining!) or a couple
of regulations (mandatory 3 week severance!) and bring out the obligatory D fall back- it would
be better than the Rs would give them. On the other hand, if it's factual, the cronies need to
be stripped of power and kicked out or the nature of the capitalist structure needs to be changed.
It's laughable to imagine liberals or progressives would be open to changing the power and nature
of the corporate charter (it makes me smile to think of the gasps).
The author admits that politicians lie and continue the march to the right yet uses the ACA,
a march to the right, as a connection to Obama's (bombing, spying, shrinking middle class) likability.
[[But emphasizing class-based policies, rather than gender or race-based solutions, will achieve
more for the broad swathe of voters, who comprehensively rejected the "neo-liberal lite" identity
politics]
Oops. I got a little lost with the neo-liberal lite identity politics. Financialized identity
politics? Privatized identity politics?
I believe women and poc have lost ground (economic and rights) so I would like examples of
successful gender and race-based (liberal identity politics) solutions that would demonstrate
that identity politics targeting is going to work on the working class.
If workers have lost power, to balance that structure, you give workers more power (I predict
that will fail as unions fall under the generic definition of corporatist and the power does not
rest with the members but with the CEOs of the unions – an example is a union that block the members
from voting to endorse a candidate, go against the member preference and endorse the corporatist
candidate), or you remove power from the corporation. Libs/progs can't merely propose something
like vesting more power with shareholders to remove executives as an ameliorating maneuver which
fails to address the power imbalance.
[This is likely only to accelerate the disintegration of the political system and economic
system until the elephant in the room – class – is honestly and comprehensively addressed.]
For a thorough exposition of lower-class white America from the inception of the Republic to
today, a must-read is Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in
America . Poor or Poorer whites have been demonised since the founding of the original
Colonies, and were continuously pushed west to the frontiers by the ruling elites of New England
and the South as a way of ridding themselves of "undesirables", who were then left to their own
resources, and clung together for mutual assistance.
Thus became the economic and cultural subset of "crackers", "hillbillies", "rednecks", and
later, "Okies", a source of contempt and scorn by more economically and culturally endowed whites.
The anti-bellum white Southern aristocracy cynically used poor whites as cheap tenant farming,
all the while laying down race-based distinctions between them and black slaves – there is always
someone lower on the totem pole, and that distinction remains in place today. Post-Reconstruction,
the South maintained the cult of white superiority, all the while preserving the status of upper-class
whites, and, by race-based public policies, assured lower-class whites that such "superiority"
would be maintained by denying the black populations access to education, commerce, the vote,
etc. And today, "white trash", or "trailer trash", or poorer whites in general are ubiquitous
and as American as apple pie, in the North, the Midwest, and the West, not just the South. Let
me quote Isenberg's final paragraph of her book:
White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative. The very
existence of such people – both in their visibility and invisibility – is proof that American
society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice. "They
are not who we are". But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history,
whether we like it or not".
Presenting a plan for the future, which has a chance to be supported by the electorate, must
start with scrupulous, unwavering honesty and a willingness to acknowledge inconvenient facts.
The missing topic from the 2016 campaigns was declining energy surpluses and their pervasive,
negative impact on the prosperity to which we feel entitled. Because of the energy cost of producing
oil, a barrel today represents a declining fraction of a barrel in terms of net energy. This is
the major factor in sluggish economic performance. Failing to make this case and, at the same
time, offering glib and vacuous promises of growth and economic revival, are just cynical exercises
in pandering.
Our only option is to mange the coming decline in a way that does not descend into chaos and
anarchy. This can only be done with a clear vision of causes and effects and the wisdom and courage
to accept facts. The alternative is yet more delusions and wishful thinking, whose shelf life
is getting shorter.
To be fair to the article, Marshall did in fact say:
"To be sure, Donald Trump did make a strong appeal to racists, homophobes, and misogynists
"
IMO the point Marshall is making that race was not the primary reason #DJT
won. And I concur.
This is borne out by the vote tallies which show that the number of R voters from 2012 to 2016
was pretty much on the level (final counts pending):
2016 R Vote: 60,925,616
2012 R Vote: 60,934,407
(Source:
US Election Atlas )
Stop and think about this for a minute. Every hard core racist had their guy this
time around; and yet, the R's could barely muster the same amount of votes as Mittens
in 2012. This is huge, and supports the case that other things contributed far more than just
race.
Class played in several ways:
Indifference/apathy/fatigue: Lambert posted some data from Carl Beijer on this yesterday in his
Clinton Myths piece yesterday.
Anger: #HRC could not convince many people who voted for Bernie that she was interested in his
outreach to the working class. More importantly, #HRC could not convince working class white
women that she had anything other than her gender and Trump's boorishness as a counterpoint
to offer.
Outsider v Insider: Working class people skeptical of political insiders rejected #HRC.
If black workers were losing ground and white workers were gaining, one could indeed claim
that racism is a problem. However, both black and white workers are losing ground – racism simply
cannot be the major issue here. It's not racism, it's class war.
The fixation on race, the corporate funding of screaming 'black lives matter' agitators, the
crude attempts to tie Donald Trump to the KKK (really? really?) are just divide and conquer, all
over again.
Whatever his other faults, Donald Trump has been vigorous in trying to reach out to working
class blacks, even though he knew he wouldn't get much of their vote and he knew that the media
mostly would not cover it. Last I heard, he was continuing to try and reach out, despite the black
'leadership' class demanding that he is a racist. Because as was so well pointed out here, the
one thing the super-rich fear is a united working class.
Divide and conquer. It's an old trick, but a powerful one.
Suggestion: if (and it's a big if) Trump really does enact policies that help working class
blacks, and the Republicans peel away a significant fraction of the black vote, that would set
the elites' hair on fire. Because it would mean that the black vote would be in play, and the
Neoliberal Democrats couldn't just take their votes for granted. And wouldn't that be a thing.
that was good for 2016. I will look to see if he has stats for other years. i certainly agree
that poor whites are more likely to be shot; executions of homeless people by police are one example.
the kind of system that was imposed on the people of ferguson has often been imposed on poor whites,
too. i do object to the characterization of black lives matter protestors as "screaming agitators";
that's all too reminiscent of the meme of "outside agitators" riling up the local peaceful black
people to stand up for their rights that was characteristically used to smear the civil rights
movement in the 60's.
I might not have much in common at all with certain minorities, but it's highly likely that
we share class status.
That's why the status quo allows identity politics and suppresses class politics.
Having been around for sometime, I often wonder what The Guardian is going on about in the
UK as it is supposed to be our left wing broadsheet.
It isn't a left I even recognised, what was it?
I do read it to try and find out what nonsense it is these people think.
Having been confused for many a year, I think I have just understood this identity based politics
as it is about to disappear.
I now think it was a cunning ploy to split the electorate in a different way, to leave the
UK working class with no political outlet.
Being more traditional left I often commented on our privately educated elite and private schools
but the Guardian readership were firmly in favour of them.
How is this left?
Thank god this is now failing, get back to the old left, the working class and those lower
down the scale.
It was clever while it lasted in enabling neoliberalism and a neglect of the working class,
but clever in a cunning, nasty and underhand way.
Thinking about it, so many of these recent elections have been nearly 50% / 50% splits, has
there been a careful analysis of who neoliberalism disadvantages and what minorities need to be
bought into the fold to make it work in a democracy.
Women are not a minority, but obviously that is a big chunk if you can get them under your
wing. The black vote is another big group when split away and so on.
Brexit nearly 50/50; Austria nearly 50/50; US election nearly 50/50.
So, 85% of Blacks vote Hillary against Sanders (left) and 92% vote Hillary against Trump (right),
but is no race. It's the class issue that sends them to the Clintons. Kindly explain how.
Funny think about likeability, likeable people can be real sh*ts. So I started looking into
hanging out with less likeable people. I found that they can be considerably more appreciative
of friendship and loyalty, maybe because they don't have such easy access to it.
Entertainment media has cautiously explored some aspect so fthis, but in politics, "nice" is
still disproportionately values, and not appreciated as a possible flag.
Watch out buddy. They are onto you. I have seen some comments on democratic party sites claiming
the use of class to explain Hillary's loss is racist. The democratic party is a goner. History
tells us the party establishment will move further right after election losses. And among the
activist class there are identity purity battles going on.
Watch as this happens yet again: "In most elections, U.S. politicians of both parties pretend
to be concerned about their issues, then conveniently ignore them when they reach power and implement
policies from the same Washington Consensus that has dominated the past 40 years." That is why
we need a strong third party, a reformed election system with public support of campaigns and
no private money, and free and fair media coverage. But it ain't gonna happen.
Well it certainly won't happen by itself. People are going to have to make it happen. Here
in Michigan we have a tiny new party called Working Class Party running 3 people here and there.
I voted for two of them. If the Democrats run somebody no worse than Trump next time, I will be
free to vote Working Class Party to see what happens.
Obviously, if the Democrats nominate yet another Clintonite Obamacrat all over again, I
may have to vote for Trump all over again . . . to stop the next Clintonite before it kills again.
"... We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all become so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social conscience. . . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man; and that it cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God... ..."
"... The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." ..."
"... You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time- but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. ..."
"There are two theories of prosperity and of well-being: The first theory is that if we make
the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest
of us. The second theory - and I suppose this goes back to the days of Noah - I won't say Adam
and Eve, because they had a less complicated situation - but, at least, back in the days of
the flood, there was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure,
their prosperity will rise upward, just as yeast rises up, through the ranks...
We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all
become so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social
conscience. . . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man;
and that it cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God...
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have
much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the
time- but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
"... Democrats still seem amazed that voters are more concerned about economic conditions and resentment against Wall Street (no bankers jailed, few junk mortgages written down). It is a sign of their wrong path that party strategists are holding onto the same identity politics they have used since the 1960s to divide Americans into hyphenated special-interest groups. ..."
"... Obviously, the bottom 95 Percent realize that their incomes and net worth have declined, not recovered. ..."
"... On the bright side, these "trade" agreements to enable corporations to block public laws protecting the environment, consumers and society at large are now presumably dead. ..."
"... Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party's ranks, the blame game is burning. The Democrats raised a reported $182 million dollars running up to the election. But when democratic candidates from Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania asked for help. Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the lurch. The election seemed to be all about her, about personality and identity politics, not about the economic issues paramount in most voters' minds. ..."
"... Six months ago the polls showed her $1 billion spent on data polling, TV ads and immense staff of sycophants to have been a vast exercise in GIGO. ..."
"... If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade voters not to think of their identity in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed. ..."
"... It did not work with women. In Florida, only 51 percent of white women are estimated to have voted for Hillary. It didn't even work very well in ethnic Hispanic precincts. They too were more concerned about their own job opportunities. ..."
"... The ethnic card did work with many black voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted for Hillary than had showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight years, blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other grouping, according to the Federal Reserve Board's statistics. But black voters were distracted from their economic interests by the Democrats' ethnic-identity politics. ..."
"... This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years of Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on Wall Street. "Identity politics" has given way to the stronger force of economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work. ..."
"... The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary. ..."
"... Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed by Paul Krugman). ..."
"... The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. ..."
In the week leading up to last Tuesday's election the press was busy writing obituaries for the Republican
Party. This continued even after Donald Trump's "surprising" victory – which, like the 2008 bank-fraud
crash, "nobody could have expected." The pretense is that Trump saw what no other politician saw:
that the economy has not recovered since 2008.
Democrats still seem amazed that voters are more concerned about economic conditions and resentment
against Wall Street (no bankers jailed, few junk mortgages written down). It is a sign of their wrong
path that party strategists are holding onto the same identity politics they have used since the
1960s to divide Americans into hyphenated special-interest groups.
Obviously, the bottom 95 Percent realize that their incomes and net worth have declined, not recovered.
National Income and Federal Reserve statistics show that all growth has accrued to just 5 percent
of the population. Hillary is said to have spent $1 billion on polling, TV advertising and high-salaried
staff members, but managed not to foresee the political reaction to this polarization. She and her
coterie ignored economic policy as soon as Bernie was shoved out of the way and his followers all
but told to join a third party. Her campaign speech tried to convince voters that they were better
off than they were eight years ago. They knew better!
So the question now is whether Donald Trump will really a maverick and shake up the Republican
Party. There seems to be a fight going on for Donald's soul – or at least the personnel he appoints
to his cabinet. Thursday and Friday saw corporate lobbyists in the Republican leadership love-bombing
him like the Moonies or Hari Krishna cults welcoming a new potential recruit. Will he simply surrender
now and pass on the real work of government to the Republican apparatchiks?
The stock market thinks so! On Wednesday it soared almost by 300 points, and repeated this gain
on Thursday, setting a DJIA record! Pharmaceuticals are way up, as higher drug prices loom for Medicaid
and Medicare. Stocks of the pipelines and major environmental polluters are soaring, from oil and
gas to coal, mining and forestry, expecting U.S. environmental leadership to be as dead under Trump
as it was under Obama and his push for the TPP and TTIP (with its fines for any government daring
to impose standards that cost these companies money). On the bright side, these "trade" agreements
to enable corporations to block public laws protecting the environment, consumers and society at
large are now presumably dead.
For now, personalities are policy. A problem with this is that anyone who runs for president is
in it partly for applause. That was Carter's weak point, leading him to cave into Democratic apparatchiks
in 1974. It looks like Trump may be a similar susceptibility. He wants to be loved, and the Republican
lobbyists are offering plenty of applause if only he will turn to them and break his campaign promises
in the way that Obama did in 2008. It would undo his hope to be a great president and champion of
the working class that was his image leading up to November 8.
The fight for the Democratic Party's future (dare I say "soul"?)
In her Wednesday morning post mortem speech, Hillary made a bizarre request for young people (especially
young women) to become politically active as Democrats after her own model. What made this so strange
is that the Democratic National Committee has done everything it can to discourage millennials from
running. There are few young candidates – except for corporate and Wall Street Republicans running
as Blue Dog Democrats. The left has not been welcome in the party for a decade – unless it confines
itself only to rhetoric and demagogy, not actual content. For Hillary's DNC coterie the problem with
millennials is that they are not shills for Wall Street. The treatment of Bernie Sanders is exemplary.
The DNC threw down the gauntlet.
Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party's ranks, the blame game is burning. The Democrats
raised a reported $182 million dollars running up to the election. But when democratic
candidates from Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania
asked for help. Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the lurch. The
election seemed to be all about her, about personality and identity politics, not about the economic
issues paramount in most voters' minds.
Six months ago the polls showed her $1 billion spent on data polling, TV ads and immense staff
of sycophants to have been a vast exercise in GIGO. From May to June the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) saw polls showing Bernie Sanders beating Trump, but Hillary losing. Did the Democratic leadership
really prefer to lose with Hillary than win behind him and his social democratic reformers.
Hillary doesn't learn. Over the weekend she claimed that her analysis showed that FBI director
Comey's reports "rais[ing] doubts that were groundless, baseless," stopped her momentum. This was
on a par with the New York Times analysis that had showed her with an 84 percent probability
of winning last Tuesday. She still hasn't admitted that here analysis was inaccurate.
What is the Democratic Party's former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do? Are
they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary's wake by Robert Rubin's Goldman Sachs-Citigroup
gang that backed her and Obama?
If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016 election sounded the death
knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade voters not to think of their identity
in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost,
not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies
has obviously failed.
It did not work with women. In Florida, only 51 percent of white women are estimated to have voted
for Hillary. It didn't even work very well in ethnic Hispanic precincts. They too were more concerned
about their own job opportunities.
The ethnic card did work with many black voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted
for Hillary than had showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight years,
blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other grouping, according to the
Federal Reserve Board's statistics. But black voters were distracted from their economic interests
by the Democrats' ethnic-identity politics.
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years
of Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial
backers on Wall Street. "Identity politics" has given way to the stronger force of economic distress.
Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work.
If we are indeed experiencing a revival of economic class consciousness, who should lead the fight
to clean up the Democratic Party Wall Street leadership? Will it be the Wall Street wing, or can
Bernie and perhaps Elizabeth Warren make their move?
There is only one way to rescue the Democrats from the Clintons and Rubin's gang. That is to save
the Democratic Party from being tarred irreversibly as the party of Wall Street and neocon brinkmanship.
It is necessary to tell the Clintons and the Rubin gang from Wall Street to leave now . And
take Evan Bayh with them.
The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party now
The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues – in a way that reverses
its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton's pro-Wall Street administration.
The Democrats need to do what Britain's Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair's Thatcherites.
As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class
is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every
revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution
has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington."
[1] Otherwise the Democrats will be left as an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not
been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move and appointing their own nominees to the DNC.
If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead.
An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change
of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going
back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary's backer
George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie's supporters, by backing Howard
Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American "Maidan
Spring."
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than
win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem
was hubris. Hillary's coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds
of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama's
rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his
promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary's pretended embrace of Bernie's opposition to TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not
racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had
lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama's legacy. Last week's vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting
Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss
of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to "save his legacy" by supporting her as his Third
Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance
monopolies.
Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply
to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed
by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama's former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that
"Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded." It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI
were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering
wage withholding into the stock market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors.
Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people rise as the main profit
center that Obamacare has offered the health-insurance monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to
capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was
defeated five years ago when it tried to capture Occupy Wall Street to make it part of the Democratic
Party. It's attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie's supporters
and other "real" Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let
"socialism" be captured by the Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign.
Notes.
[1] Paul Craig Roberts, "The Anti-Trump Protesters Are Tools of the Oligarchy," November 11,
2016.
Michael Hudson's new book,
Killing
the Host is published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by
Islet
. He can be reached via his website, [email protected]
Liberal democracy has always depended on its relationships with an illiberal Other of one
sort or another, and all too often "liberal progressivism" merely means responding to such
relationships in one's own society, the capitalist exploitation of a domestic proletariat,
by "outsourcing" our illiberal tendencies to consist largely of the imperial domination
and subjugation of foreigners.
(Which can even happen inside one's own borders, as long as it remains suitably "illegal";
notice how much less ideologically problematic it is to document the presence and labor of
the most brutally exploited migrant workers in e.g. China or the Gulf Arab states than in more
liberal societies like the US or EU.)
It's the height of either hypocrisy or obliviousness for those who consider themselves
liberal progressives to then act surprised when the people charged with carrying out this domination
and subjugation on our behalf - our Colonel Jessups, if you will - demand that we stop hiding
our society's illiberal underbelly and acknowledge/celebrate it for what it is , a demand
that may be the single most authentic marker of the transition from liberalism to fascism.
In Pareto "elite rotation" terms, the election of Trump definitely means rotation of the US
neoliberal elite. "Status quo" faction of the elite was defeated due to backlash over globalization
and disappearance of meaningful well-paid jobs, with mass replacement of them by McJobs and temps/contractors.
Whether openness about domination and subjugation is an "authentic marker of the transition
from [neo]liberalism to fascism" remains to be seen, unless we assume that this transition (to
the National Security State) already happened long ego.
In a way illegal immigrants in the USA already represented stable and growing "new slaves"
class for decades. Their existence and contribution to the US economy was never denied or suppressed.
And even Greenspan acknowledged that Iraq war was about oil. So Trump put nothing new on the table
other then being slightly more blunt.
Neoliberalism and neo-imperialism show pretty much the contradictions of the older globalist
orders (late 19th c), they are just now distributed so as re-intensify the differences, the combined
etc, and concentrate the accumulation.
And elites are fighting over the spoils.
Yes, neoliberalism and neo-imperialism are much better and more precise terms, then fuzzy notions
like "liberal progressivism" . May be we should use Occam razor and discard the term "[neo]liberal
progressivism". The term "soft neoliberals" is IMHO good enough description of the same.
As for contradictions of the "older globalist orders (late 19th c)" the key difference is that
under neoliberalism armies play the role of "can opener" and after then the direct occupation were
by-and-large replaced with financial institutions and with indirect
"debt slavery". In many cases neoliberal subjugation is achieved via color revolution mechanism,
without direct military force involved.
Neo-colonialism creates higher level of concentration of risks due to the greed of financial
elite which was demonstrated in full glory in 2008. As such it looks less stable then old colonialism.
And it generates stronger backlash, which typically has elements of anti-Americanism, as we see in
Philippines now. Merkel days might also be numbered.
Also TBTF banks are now above the law as imposing judgments on them after the crisis can have
disastrous economic externalities. At the same time the corruption of regulators via revolving door
mechanisms blocks implementing meaningful preventive regulatory reforms.
In other words, like with Soviet nomenklatura, with the neoliberal elite we see the impossibility
of basic change, either toward taming the TBTF or toward modification of an aggressive
neocolonial foreign policy
with its rampant militarism.
"... The affluent and rich voted for Clinton by a much broader margin than they had voted for the Democratic candidate in 2012. Among those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, Clinton benefited from a 9-point Democratic swing. Voters with family incomes above $250,000 swung toward Clinton by 11 percentage points. The number of Democratic voters amongst the wealthiest voting block increased from 2.16 million in 2012 to 3.46 million in 2016-a jump of 60 percent. ..."
"... Clinton's electoral defeat is bound up with the nature of the Democratic Party, an alliance of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus with privileged sections of the upper-middle class based on the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation ..."
"... Over the course of the last forty years, the Democratic Party has abandoned all pretenses of social reform, a process escalated under Obama. Working with the Republican Party and the trade unions, it is responsible for enacting social policies that have impoverished vast sections of the working class, regardless of race or gender. ..."
The elections saw a massive shift in party support among the poorest and wealthiest voters. The share
of votes for the Republicans amongst the most impoverished section of workers, those with family
incomes under $30,000, increased by 10 percentage points from 2012. In several key Midwestern states,
the swing of the poorest voters toward Trump was even larger: Wisconsin (17-point swing), Iowa (20
points), Indiana (19 points) and Pennsylvania (18 points).
The swing to Republicans among the $30,000 to $50,000 family income range was 6 percentage points.
Those with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 swung away from the Republicans compared to 2012
by 2 points.
The affluent and rich voted for Clinton by a much broader margin than they had voted for the
Democratic candidate in 2012. Among those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, Clinton benefited
from a 9-point Democratic swing. Voters with family incomes above $250,000 swung toward Clinton by
11 percentage points. The number of Democratic voters amongst the wealthiest voting block increased
from 2.16 million in 2012 to 3.46 million in 2016-a jump of 60 percent.
Clinton was unable to make up for the vote decline among women (2.1 million), African Americans
(3.2 million), and youth (1.2 million), who came overwhelmingly from the poor and working class,
with the increase among the rich (1.3 million).
Clinton's electoral defeat is bound up with the nature of the Democratic Party, an alliance
of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus with privileged sections of the upper-middle
class based on the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation.
Over the course of the last forty years, the Democratic Party has abandoned all pretenses
of social reform, a process escalated under Obama. Working with the Republican Party and the trade
unions, it is responsible for enacting social policies that have impoverished vast sections of the
working class, regardless of race or gender.
British diplomat John Glubb wrote a book called "The Fate of Empires and Search For Survival."
Glubb noted that the average age of empires since the time of ancient Assyria (859-612 B.C.)
is 250 years. Only the Mameluke Empire in Egypt and the Levant (1250-1517) made it as far as
267 years. America is 238 years old and is exhibiting signs of decline. All empires begin,
writes Glubb, with the age of pioneers, followed by ages of conquest, commerce, affluence,
intellect and decadence. America appears to have reached the age of decadence, which Glubb
defines as marked by "defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners,
the welfare state, [and] a weakening of religion."
The most important is probably the fact that the ideology of the current US empire -- neoliberalism
(called here "liberal progressivism") -- became discredited after 2008. What happened after the
collapse of the Marxist ideology with the USSR is well known. It took 46 years (if we assume that
the collapse started in 1945 as the result of victory in WWII, when the Soviet army has a chance
to see the standard of living in Western countries). Why the USA should be different ? Decline
of empires is very slow and can well take a half a century. Let's say it might take 50 years from
9/11 or October 2008.
One telling sign is the end of "American hegemony" in the global political sphere. One telling
sign is the end of "American hegemony" in the global political sphere. As Lupita hypothesized
here Trump might be the last desperate attempt to reverse this process.
Another, the deterioration of the standard of living of the USA population and declining infrastructure,
both typically are connected with the overextension of empire. In Fortune (
http://fortune.com/2015/07/20/united-states-decline-statistics-economic/
) Jill Coplan lists 12 signs of the decline.
Trump election is another sign of turmoil. The key message of his election is "The institutions
we once trusted deceived us" That includes the Democratic Party and all neoliberal MSM. Like was
the case with the USSR, the loss of influence of neoliberal propaganda machine is a definite sign
of the decline of empire.
Degeneration of the neoliberal political elite that is also clearly visible in the current set
of presidential candidates might be another sign. Hillary Clinton dragged to the car on 9/11 commemorative
event vividly reminds the state of health of a couple of members of Soviet Politburo .
"... Because the following talking points prevent a (vulgar) identity politics -dominated Democrat Party from owning its loss, debunking them is then important beyond winning your Twitter wars. I'm trying to spike the Blame Cannons! ..."
"... Remember, Trump won Wisconsin by a whisker. So for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that black voters stayed home because they were racist, costing Clinton Wisconsin. ..."
"... These former Obama strongholds sealed the election for Trump. Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House, a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump . ..."
"... The Obama-Trump counties were critical in delivering electoral victories for Trump. Many of them fall in states that supported Obama in 2012, but Trump in 2016. In all, these flipped states accounted for 83 electoral votes. (Michigan and New Hampshire could add to this total, but their results were not finalized as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.) ..."
"... And so, for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that counties who voted for the black man in 2012 were racist because they didn't vote for the white women in 2016. Bringing me, I suppose, to sexism. ..."
"... These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump's unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he'd be the greatest job producer who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill's. ..."
"... pink slips have hit entire neighbourhoods, and towns. The angry white working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum. They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, who participate in their remaindered pain. I t is everywhere in the interviews. "My dad lost his business", "My husband hasn't been the same since his job at the factory went away" . ..."
"... So, for this talking point to be true, you have to believe that sexism simultaneously increased the male vote for Trump, yet did not increase the female vote for Clinton. Shouldn't they move in opposite directions? ..."
"... First, even assuming that the author's happy but unconscious conflation of credentials with education is correct, it wasn't the "dunces" who lost two wars, butchered the health care system, caused the financial system to collapse through accounting control fraud, or invented the neoliberal ideology that was kept real wages flat for forty years and turned the industrial heartland into a wasteland. That is solely, solely down to - only some , to be fair - college-educated voters. It is totally and 100% not down to the "dunces"; they didn't have the political or financial power to achieve debacles on the grand scale. ..."
"... Second, the "dunces" were an important part of Obama's victories ..."
"... Not only has polling repeatedly underplayed the importance of white voters without college degrees, it's underplayed their importance to the Obama coalition: They were one-third of Obama votes in 2012. They filled the gap between upper-class whites and working-class nonwhites. Trump gained roughly 15 percentage points with them compared to Romney in 2012. ..."
"... "No, you are ignorant! You threw away the vote and put Trump in charge." Please, it will be important to know what derogatory camp you belong in when the blame game swings into full gear. *snark ..."
"... 'Stupid' was the word I got very tired of in my social net. Two variant targets: ..."
"... 1) Blacks for not voting their interests. The responses included 'we know who our enemies are' and 'don't tell me what to think.' ..."
"... Mostly it was vs rural, non-college educated. iirc, it was the Secretary of Agriculture, pleading for funds, who said the rural areas were where military recruits came from. A young fella I know, elite football player on elite non-urban HS team, said most of his teammates had enlisted. So they are the ones getting shot at, having relatives and friends come back missing pieces of body and self. ..."
"... My guy in the Reserves said the consensus was that if HRC got elected, they were going to war with Russia. Not enthused. Infantry IQ is supposedly average-80, but they know who Yossarian says the enemy is, e'en if they hant read the book. ..."
This post is not an explainer about why and how Clinton lost (and Trump won). I think we're going
to be sorting that out for awhile. Rather, it's a simple debunking of common talking points by Clinton
loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives; the sort of talking point you might hear on Twitter,
entirely shorn of caveats and context. For each of the three talking points, I'll present an especially
egregious version of the myth, followed by a rebuttals.
How Trump won the presidency with razor-thin margins in swing states
Of the more than 120 million votes cast in the 2016 election, 107,000 votes in three states
[Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania] effectively decided the election.
Of course, America's first-past-the-post system and the electoral college amplify small margins
into decisive results. And it was the job of the Clinton campaign to find those 107,000 votes and
win them;
the Clinton operation turned out to be weaker than anyone would have imagined when
it counted . However, because Trump has what might be called an institutional mandate - both
the executive and legislative branches and soon, perhaps, the judicial - the narrowness of his margin
means he doesn't have a popular mandate. Trump has captured the state, but by no means civil society;
therefore, the opposition that seeks to delegitimize him is in a stronger position than it may realize.
Hence the necessity for reflection; seeking truth from facts, as the saying goes. Because
the following talking points prevent a
(vulgar) identity politics -dominated Democrat Party from owning its loss, debunking them is
then important beyond winning your Twitter wars. I'm trying to spike the Blame Cannons!
Trump's win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism
The subtext here is usually that if you don't chime in with vehement agreement, you're a racist
yourself, and possibly a racist Trump supporter. There are two reasons this talking point is false.
First, voter caring levels dropped from 2012 to 2016, especially among black Democrats
.
Carl
Beijer :
From 2012 to 2016, both men and women went from caring about the outcome to not caring.
Among Democratic men and women, as well as Republican women, care levels dropped about 3-4
points; Republican men cared a little less too, but only by one point. Across the board, in
any case, the plurality of voters simply didn't care.
Beijer includes the following chart (based on Edison exit polling cross-referenced with total
population numbers from the US Census):
Beijer interprets:
White voters cared even less in 2016 then in 2012, when they also didn't care; most of that
apathy came from white Republicans compared to white Democrats, who dropped off a little less.
Voters of color, in contrast, continued to care – but their care levels dropped even more,
by 8 points (compared to the 6 point drop-off among white voters). Incredibly, that drop was
driven entirely by a 9 point drop among Democratic voters of color which left Democrats
with only slim majority 51% support; Republicans, meanwhile, actually gained support
among people of color.
Urban areas, where black and Hispanic voters are concentrated along with college-educated
voters, already leaned toward the Democrats, but Clinton did not get the turnout from these
groups that she needed. For instance, black voters did not show up in the same numbers they
did for Barack Obama, the first black president, in 2008 and 2012.
Remember, Trump won Wisconsin by a whisker. So for this talking point to be true, we have to
believe that black voters stayed home because they were racist, costing Clinton Wisconsin.
Second, counties that voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016 .
The Washington Post :
These former Obama strongholds sealed the election for Trump. Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House,
a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump
.
The Obama-Trump counties were critical in delivering electoral victories for Trump. Many
of them fall in states that supported Obama in 2012, but Trump in 2016. In all, these flipped
states accounted for 83 electoral votes. (Michigan and New Hampshire could add to this total,
but their results were not finalized as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.)
Here's the chart:
And so, for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that counties who voted for the
black man in 2012 were racist because they didn't vote for the white women in 2016. Bringing me,
I suppose, to sexism.
Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Sexism
Here's an article showing the talking point from
Newsweek :
This often vitriolic campaign was a national referendum on women and power.
(The subtext here is usually that if you don't join the consensus cluster, you're a sexist
yourself, and possibly a sexist Trump supporter). And if you only look at the averages this claim
might seem true :
On Election Day, women responded accordingly, as Clinton beat Trump among women 54 percent
to 42 percent. They were voting not so much for her as against him and what he brought to the
surface during his campaign: quotidian misogyny.
There are two reasons this talking point is not true. First, averages conceal, and what
they conceal is class . As you read further into the article, you can see it fall apart:
In fact, Trump beat Clinton among white women 53 percent to 43 percent, with
white women without college degrees going for [Trump]
two to one .
So, taking lack of a college degree as a proxy for being working class, for Newsweek's claim
to be true, you have to believe that working class women don't get a vote in their referendum,
and for the talking point to be true, you have to believe that working class women are sexist.
Which leads me to ask: Who died and left the bourgeois feminists in Clinton's base in charge of
the definition of sexism, or feminism? Class traitor
Tina Brown is worth repeating:
Here's my own beef. Liberal feminists, young and old, need to question the role they played
in Hillary's demise. The two weeks of media hyperventilation over grab-her-by-the-pussygate,
when the airwaves were saturated with aghast liberal women equating Trump's gross comments
with sexual assault, had the opposite effect on multiple women voters in the Heartland.
These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an
occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump's
unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he'd be the greatest job producer
who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill's.
Missing this pragmatic response by so many women was another mistake of Robbie Mook's campaign
data nerds. They computed that America's women would all be as outraged as the ones they came
home to at night. But pink slips have hit entire neighbourhoods, and towns. The angry white
working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum.
They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers,
who participate in their remaindered pain. I t is
everywhere in the interviews. "My dad lost his business", "My husband hasn't been the same
since his job at the factory went away" .
Second, Clinton in 2016 did no better than Obama in 2008 with women (although she did
better than Obama in 2012). From
the New York Times analysis of the exit polls, this chart...
So, for this talking point to be true, you have to believe that sexism simultaneously increased
the male vote for Trump, yet did not increase the female vote for Clinton. Shouldn't they move
in opposite directions?
Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Stupidity
Here's an example of this talking point from
Foreign Policy , the heart of The Blob. The headline:
Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally
And the lead:
OK, so that just happened. Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated,
low-information white people. As Bloomberg Politics reported back in August, Hillary Clinton
was enjoying a giant 25 percentage-point lead among college-educated voters going into the
election. (Whether that trend held up remains to be seen.) In contrast, in the 2012 election,
college-educated voters just barely favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Last night we saw
something historic: the dance of the dunces. Never have educated voters so uniformly rejected
a candidate. But never before have the lesser-educated so uniformly supported a candidate.
The subtext here is usually that if you don't accept nod your head vigorously, you're stupid,
and possibly a stupid Trump supporter. There are two reasons this talking point is not true.
First, even assuming that the author's happy but unconscious conflation of credentials with
education is correct, it wasn't the "dunces" who lost two wars, butchered the health care
system, caused the financial system to collapse through accounting control fraud, or invented
the neoliberal ideology that was kept real wages flat for forty years and turned the industrial
heartland into a wasteland. That is solely, solely down to - only some , to be fair
- college-educated voters. It is totally and 100% not down to the "dunces"; they didn't have the
political or financial power to achieve debacles on the grand scale.
Second, the "dunces" were an important part of Obama's victories. From
The Week :
Not only has polling repeatedly underplayed the importance of white voters without college
degrees, it's underplayed their importance to the Obama coalition: They were one-third of Obama
votes in 2012. They filled the gap between upper-class whites and working-class nonwhites.
Trump gained roughly 15 percentage points with them compared to Romney in 2012.
So, to believe this talking point, you have to believe that voters who were smart when they
voted for Obama suddenly became stupid when it came time to vote for Clinton. You also have to
believe that credentialed policy makers have an unblemished record of success, and that only they
are worth paying attention to.
By just about every metric imaginable, Hillary Clinton led one of the worst presidential campaigns
in modern history. It was a profoundly reactionary campaign, built entirely on rolling back the
horizons of the politically possible, fracturing left solidarity, undermining longstanding left
priorities like universal healthcare, pandering to Wall Street oligarchs, fomenting nationalism
against Denmark and Russia, and rehabilitating some of history's greatest monsters – from Bush
I to Kissinger. It was a grossly unprincipled campaign that belligerently violated FEC Super PAC
coordination rules and conspired with party officials on everything from political attacks to
debate questions. It was an obscenely stupid campaign that all but ignored Wisconsin during the
general election, that pitched Clinton to Latino voters as their abuela, that centered an entire
high-profile speech over the national menace of a few thousand anime nazis on Twitter, and that
repeatedly deployed Lena Dunham as a media surrogate.
Which is rather like running a David Letterman ad in a Pennsylvania steel town. It must have seemed
like a good idea in Brooklyn. After all, they had so many celebrities to choose from.
* * *
All three talking points oversimplify. I'm not saying racism is not powerful; of course it is.
I'm not saying that sexism is not powerful; of course it is. But monocausal explanations in an election
this close - and in a country this vast - are foolish. And narratives that ignore economics and erase
class are worse than foolish; buying into them will cause us to make the same mistakes over and over
and over again.[1] The trick will be to integrate multiple causes, and that's down to the left; identity
politics liberals don't merely not want to do this; they actively oppose it. Ditto their opposite
numbers in America's neoliberal fun house mirror, the conservatives.
NOTES
[1] For some, that's not a bug. It's a feature.
NOTE
You will have noticed that I haven't covered economics (class), or election fraud at all. More
myths are coming.
Lambert Strether has been blogging, managing online communities, and doing system administration
24/7 since 2003, in Drupal and WordPress. Besides political economy and the political scene, he blogs
about rhetoric, software engineering, permaculture, history, literature, local politics, international
travel, food, and fixing stuff around the house. The nom de plume "Lambert Strether" comes from Henry
James's The Ambassadors: "Live all you can. It's a mistake not to." You can follow him on Twitter
at @lambertstrether. http://www.correntewire.com
"No, you are ignorant! You threw away the vote and put Trump in charge." Please, it will be
important to know what derogatory camp you belong in when the blame game swings into full gear.
*snark
'Stupid' was the word I got very tired of in my social net. Two variant targets:
1) Blacks
for not voting their interests. The responses included 'we know who our enemies are' and 'don't
tell me what to think.'
2) Mostly it was vs rural, non-college educated. iirc, it was the Secretary of Agriculture,
pleading for funds, who said the rural areas were where military recruits came from. A young fella
I know, elite football player on elite non-urban HS team, said most of his teammates had enlisted.
So they are the ones getting shot at, having relatives and friends come back missing pieces of
body and self.
My guy in the Reserves said the consensus was that if HRC got elected, they were going
to war with Russia. Not enthused. Infantry IQ is supposedly average-80, but they know who Yossarian
says the enemy is, e'en if they hant read the book.
"There are two theories of prosperity and of well-being: The first theory is that if we make the
rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us.
The second theory - and I suppose this goes back to the days of Noah - I won't say Adam and Eve,
because they had a less complicated situation - but, at least, back in the days of the flood,
there was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure, their prosperity
will rise upward, just as yeast rises up, through the ranks...
We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all become
so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social conscience.
. . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man; and that it
cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God...
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it
is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time-
but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
"... "Democrats have focused too much with a liberal elite" while ignoring the working class. ..."
"... How does it happen that they win elections and Democrats lose? I think what the conclusion is, is that that is raising incredible sums of money from wealthy people … but has ignored to a very significant degree, working class, middle class, and low income people in this country. ..."
Sunday on CBS's "Face The Nation," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said President-elect Donald Trump
won because "Democrats have focused too much with a liberal elite" while ignoring the working
class.
Sanders said, " How does it happen that they win elections and Democrats lose? I think
what the conclusion is, is that that is raising incredible sums of money from wealthy people …
but has ignored to a very significant degree, working class, middle class, and low income people
in this country. "
Lost control of the Senate
Lost control of the House of Representatives
Lost control of dozens of state legislatures and Governorships.
The Republicans control 36 States of America - One more and they could in theory amend the Constitution.
In Wisconsin (notionally Democrat) the Legislature and Governor are both Republican controlled.
And Clinton didn't even campaign there when it was pretty obvious the State was not trending towards
her.
"... So-called [neo]liberals and leftists in the US and around the world, are now wailing and gnashing their teeth in reaction to Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat. They are, however, the first to blame for the outcome of the US presidential elections. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, was the embodiment of a totally corrupt political system. She is a hypocrite par excellence, talking to the bankiers of Wall Street behind closed doors differently than to the American people. Her rhetoric for the rights of women and blacks and other minorities sounded disingenuous. ..."
"... The Clinton Foundation received large donations from Saudi-Arabia and Qatar, countries rewarded in return by huge arms transfers overseen by her as Secretary of State. Her involvement in this corruption was no theme for the media. ..."
"... According to emails published by WikiLeaks, her campaign manager John Podesta was or is on the payroll of the Saudis. ..."
"... the Clinton team stole the primary elections to prevent the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the media demonized Donald Trump. ..."
"... An American President is not a free and politically independent person. From day one, a President-elect can't anymore go around the corner and grab a hot dog or a hamburger. He is reigned in by a military and security establishment that holds the President fit for public consumption. Trump, as any other president, can be expected to follow their rule and political suggestions. ..."
"... I doubt very much that Trump will keep the promises of his election campaign, such as building a wall along the American-Mexican border, deport all illegal immigrants or ban Muslims from immigrating into the US. I even doubt that he will go after Hillary Clinton and her husband's dubious foundation. There exists a code of honor among thieves. ..."
"... Trump won precisely because of the shrill one-sided media propaganda and because of his rhetoric against the Washington establishment , including his own Republican Party. Now, this Republican establishment dominates both houses of Congress. Trump belongs also, however, to the US establishment but of another sort. Nobody should believe that the Washington establishment will follow Trump's lead. ..."
"... Whether Trump will stop American adventurism in the Middle East remains to be seen. His close ties with Netanyahu do not bode well for the Palestinians ..."
"... And while he has promised to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I doubt that he will carry out this provocation against international law and the entire Muslim world. ..."
"... Chancellor Angela Merke l sent the President-Elect Trump a warning in the guise of a congratulation. Her political impudence was garbed within obsequious blabber about the allegedly honorable nature of German-American ties ..."
"... Germany's Foreign Minister Steinmeier called Trump a "preacher of hate" ..."
"... During the election campaign, Trump called Merkel's mass-immigration policy "insane" and "what Merkel did to Germany" a "sad shame". ..."
"... The media and the political class should at this point stop pontificating. Their double morals and unprofessional coverage of the US elections should prompt them to more humility. They should rather blame themselves for their biased reporting, which led directly to Clinton's defeat. ..."
So-called [neo]liberals and leftists in the US and around the world, are now wailing and gnashing
their teeth in reaction to Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat. They are, however, the first to blame
for the outcome of the US presidential elections. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, was the embodiment
of a totally corrupt political system. She is a hypocrite par excellence, talking to the bankiers
of Wall Street behind closed doors differently than to the American people. Her rhetoric for the
rights of women and blacks and other minorities sounded disingenuous.
The Clinton Foundation received large donations from Saudi-Arabia and Qatar, countries rewarded
in return by huge arms transfers overseen by her as Secretary of State. Her involvement in this corruption
was no theme for the media.
According to emails published by WikiLeaks, her campaign manager John
Podesta was or is on the payroll of the Saudis. All of this was not considered worth reporting by
the media. Virtually all national media in the United States supported Clinton's candidacy. Instead
of reporting how the machinery of the Democratic Party and the Clinton team stole the primary elections
to prevent the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the media demonized Donald Trump.
I do not wish here to defend Donald Trump. He made numerous stupid, racist, sexist, and anti-Islamic
statements that were rightly criticized. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was treated with kid
gloves while her huge criminal political record was glossed over. Instead of coming to grips with
their abject failures, the liberals and their media continue in slandering Donald Trump. Trump's
first declarations show already that he has conquered new frontiers.
An American President is not a free and politically independent person. From day one, a President-elect
can't anymore go around the corner and grab a hot dog or a hamburger. He is reigned in by a military
and security establishment that holds the President fit for public consumption. Trump, as any other
president, can be expected to follow their rule and political suggestions.
I doubt very much that Trump will keep the promises of his election campaign, such as building
a wall along the American-Mexican border, deport all illegal immigrants or ban Muslims from immigrating
into the US. I even doubt that he will go after Hillary Clinton and her husband's dubious foundation.
There exists a code of honor among thieves.
Trump won precisely because of the shrill one-sided media propaganda and because of his rhetoric
against the Washington establishment , including his own Republican Party. Now, this Republican establishment
dominates both houses of Congress. Trump belongs also, however, to the US establishment but of another
sort. Nobody should believe that the Washington establishment will follow Trump's lead. Even his
positive statements about Vladimir Putin or his suggestion to discard NATO, will probably vanish.
But what I do hope is that he stands to his rejection of TPP and TTIP and his pragmatic view of Vladimir
Putin.
Whether Trump will stop American adventurism in the Middle East remains to be seen. His close
ties with Netanyahu do not bode well for the Palestinians. He sees Zionist colonization of the rest
of Palestine as no hindrance to peace. And while he has promised to move the US Embassy from Tel
Aviv to Jerusalem, I doubt that he will carry out this provocation against international law and
the entire Muslim world.
The German political and media class was not only surprised by the results of the US elections,
but did not even try to hide its revulsion against the choice of the American people. The entire
political class in Germany perceived and presented the Trump campaign in the same one-sided manner
as American media did. Chancellor Angela Merke l sent the President-Elect Trump a warning in the
guise of a congratulation. Her political impudence was garbed within obsequious blabber about the
allegedly honorable nature of German-American ties:
"Germany and America are bound by common values - democracy, freedom, as well as respect for
the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person, regardless of their origin, skin color,
creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views. It is based on these values that I wish
to offer close cooperation, both with me personally and between our countries' governments."
Other German politicians did not even attempt to hide their disdain for American voters by diplomatic
language. Germany's Foreign Minister Steinmeier called Trump a "preacher of hate", and Deputy Chancellor
Gabriel cartooned Trump as a
"trailblazer of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international movement… [who wants] a rollback
to the bad old times in which women belonged by the stove or in bed, gays in jail and unions at
best at the side table."
During the election campaign, Trump called Merkel's mass-immigration policy "insane" and "what
Merkel did to Germany" a "sad shame".
The media and the political class should at this point stop pontificating. Their double morals
and unprofessional coverage of the US elections should prompt them to more humility. They should
rather blame themselves for their biased reporting, which led directly to Clinton's defeat. Ordinary
Americans are not as stupid as the Establishment wants us to believe. Established parties and media
would be well advised to give the new US President a chance to prove his worth. There will be, without
doubt, many occasions in the future for fact-based criticism.
"... Understand something, the caricature of Trump and his supporters is all fiction! It was the wallpaper inside the bubble of the elites that kept them from having to face the fact they are being rejected by the people of this country. ..."
"... It is not racist to want to control our borders and stem the influx – for a period – of people from other lands. It is not racist to note that Islam has a violent element willing to kill innocents at any time and any place. Just like one bad cop can give all cops a bad rap, so can a handful of bloody insane Muslims. It is not racist or nativist to deport immigrants who have committed serious felonies. ..."
The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.
… The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn't
just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling
the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of
the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must
own that failure herself.
Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked
giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school,
every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was
their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense
of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008,
only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people
who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed
anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral
College. These people didn't know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media
thought they did.
This is a grueling but necessarily treatise on how the Political Elite played God and got burned.
The essence here is wake up and fix the Democrat Party.
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly
or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump's victory.
More than that and more importantly,
we also missed the story , after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense
of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism's great moral and intellectual failing:
its
unbearable smugness . Had Hillary Clinton won, there's be a winking "we did it" feeling in
the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate,
it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones
who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the
people who cover it.
Trump
knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering
him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances.
We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or
policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
Understand something, the caricature of Trump and his supporters is all fiction! It was the wallpaper
inside the bubble of the elites that kept them from having to face the fact they are being rejected
by the people of this country.
It is not racist to want to control our borders and stem the influx – for a period – of people
from other lands. It is not racist to note that Islam has a violent element willing to kill innocents
at any time and any place. Just like one bad cop can give all cops a bad rap, so can a handful of
bloody insane Muslims. It is not racist or nativist to deport immigrants who have committed serious
felonies.
The media over stated the drivers behind these views to propel their candidate to victory. They
were not reporting facts.
The last good perspective was from the Morning Joe show:
"... he Clinton camp, the media and the pollsters missed what we had anticipated as "not Clinton". A basic setting in a part of the "left" electorate that remember who she is and what she has done and would under no circumstances vote for her. Clinton herself pushed the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" into that camp. This was a structural change that was solely based in the personality of the candidate. ..."
"... Even then polls and their interpretation will always only capture a part of the story. Often a sound grasp of human and cultural behavior will allow for better prediction as all polls. As my friend the statistician say: "The best prognostic instrument I have even today is my gut." ..."
"... NeverHillary turned out to be bigger than NeverTrump. Hillary got less than 6 million votes compared to Obama. Trump got nearly as much as Romney. ..."
"... A good indicator was the size of the crowds each candidate drew to their rallies. Clinton tended to show more "bought" TV-ready extras. Bernie blew the walls out at his rallies, as did Trump. You can't look at that and say the polls are even close to accurate. ..."
"... When the Democrats unleashed thugs on Trump supporters while the media studiously looked away, it was not sensible to openly identify with Trump. ..."
"... On Wednesday after the election, I heard an interview with a woman reporter who worked with the 538 polling group. She said that it was impossible for most reporters to really investigate how voters in certain areas of the country were feeling about the election bcz newspapers and other news organizations, including the Big Broadcasters, did not have the ability to pay for enough reporters to actually talk to people. ..."
"... the Los Angeles Times polls were correct (although the paper was pro-Clinton); can't get the link now, but they explained how they weighted their polls on the basis of the enthusiasm displayed for the preferred candidate, and Trump supporters were more "charged" ..."
"... I read many stories about how the polls were fixed for Clinton for months before the election. ..."
"... The pollsters took the % of voters from the Obama election but they also added more Democrats than were representative in the 2012 election, thereby skewing the polls for Clinton. Many believed that the reason they did this was to try to manipulate the voting machines in Clinton's favour and have the polls match the result. ..."
"... i go back to what my sociology of the media instructor said.. polls are for massaging people's brains.. unless one knows who pays for them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda tool for use.. ..."
"... It has been known for a long time in the polling world that polling numbers are getting more and more unreliable because fewer and fewer people are willing to complete polls. ..."
"... theory would also explain the newspaper polls largely rigged to correspond to the planned vote theft, as well as the idiotic magnitude of overconfidence seen in the Pol-Est/MS Media/Wall Street complex. ..."
"... 1. IBD/TIPP (A collaboration of Investors Business Daily and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence). TechnoMetrica was consistent throughout – final poll for election day had Trump leading by 2%. Also predicted the last presidential elections back to 2004. ..."
"... This election candidates' crowd draw was a good indicator. It was very difficult to pre-program the Diebold machines. MSM polls were in the bag for Hillary, had her ahead. It backfired. ..."
"... A bit about polling methodology explains the bias we've seen this election cycle. Typically, the polling samples are not big enough to be representative, so the results are corrected (weighted) based on the participant responses. The polls assume certain turnout percentages for different groups (Democrats, Republicans, Independents, rural, urban, ethnicity, gender etc.). A lot of the polls were weighting the polls with turnouts similar to 2012, corrected for the expected demographic changes over the last 4 years. ..."
"... Poll weighing is a tricky business. This is why most polling has a 4% error margin, so it does not produce as accurate picture as is typically presented by the media. The error is not randomly distributed, it is closely related to the poll weighting. The weighting error was favouring Clinton in the polls as it assumed higher Democratic turnout, which ended up not being the case, she underperformed 2012 significantly and lost the election. ..."
"... Are the polls done to discover "what's up", or are they done to project the view that one side is winning? ..."
"... I go with the second view. That's what the 'corrections' are all about. The 'corrections' need to be dropped completely ..."
"... This. There was a Wikiliks Podesta email in whdich Clinton operatives discussed oversampling certain groups to inflate the poll in her favor. ..."
"... Hmm ... what can I say that no-one else has already said except to observe that the polling and the corporate media reporting the polling statistics were in another parallel universe and the people supposedly being polled (and not some over-sampled group in Peoria, Iowa, who could predict exactly what questions would be asked and knew what answers to give) live on planet Earth? ..."
"... I most certainly did not predict Trump would win. But I did question the polls. What I questioned a few weeks ago was the margin of victory for Hillary. ..."
"... This is because most of the polls were weighting more Democratic (based on the 2012 election), which overestimated Clinton's support. ..."
"... So the difference between the poll and the actual result is 1.2% in favour of Trump (1.7% lead to Clinton in poll vs. 0.5% in the election). All are well within the error of the poll, so 1.2% difference between the election and the poll is well within the stated 3% error margin of the poll. ..."
"... You assume public polls are conducted by impartial actors who wish to inform and illuminate..... your assumption is incorrect. ..."
"... The New York Times recent admission that it writes the narrative first, then builds the story to suit says about everything for me regarding polls. ..."
"... According to reports, the first leader Trump spoke to on the phone after his election victory was the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Sisi congratulated him on the election victory, a spokesman for the Egyptian leader said. ..."
"... It may be unfortunate, but I can see Trump & Erdogan getting along very well. Although, if they bring Putin into that triumvirate that could actually be very beneficial for the Middle East. ..."
Today I discussed the U.S. election with a friend who studied and practices statistics. I asked
about the failure of the polls in this years presidential election. Her explanation: The polls are
looking at future events but are biased by the past. The various companies and institutions adjust
the polls they do by looking at their past prognoses and the real results of the past event. They
then develop correcting factors, measured from the past, and apply it to new polls. If that correcting
factor is wrong, possibly because of structural changes in the electorate, then the new polls will
be corrected with a wrong factor and thus miss the real results.
Polls predicting the last presidential election were probably off by 3 or 5 points towards the
Republican side. The pollsters then corrected the new polls for the Clinton-Trump race in favor of
the Democratic side by giving that side an additional 3-5 points. They thereby corrected the new
polls by the bias that was poll inherent during the last race.
But structural changes, which we seem to have had during this election, messed up the result.
Many people who usually vote for the Democratic ticket did not vote for Clinton. The "not Clinton"
progressives, the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" who voted Obama in the last election stayed home,
voted for a third party candidate or even for Trump. The pollsters did not anticipate such a deep
change. Thus their correction factor was wrong. Thus the Clinton side turned out to be favored in
polls but not in the relevant votes.
Real polling, which requires in depth-in person interviews with the participants, does not really
happen anymore. It is simply to expensive. Polling today is largely done by telephone with participants
selected by some database algorithm. It is skewed by many factors which require many corrections.
All these corrections have some biases that do miss structural changes in the underlying population.
The Clinton camp, the media and the pollsters missed what we had anticipated as "not Clinton".
A basic setting in a part of the "left" electorate that remember who she is and what she has done
and would under no circumstances vote for her. Clinton herself pushed the "bernie bros" and "deplorables"
into that camp. This was a structural change that was solely based in the personality of the candidate.
If Sanders would have been the candidate the now wrong poll correction factor in favor of Democrats
would likely have been a correct one. The deep antipathy against Hillary Clinton in a decisive part
of the electorate was a factor that the pseudo-science of cheap telephone polls could not catch.
More expensive in depth interviews of the base population used by a pollster would probably have
caught this factor and adjusted appropriately.
There were some twenty to thirty different entities doing polls during this election cycle. Five
to ten polling entities, with better budgets and preparations, would probably have led to better
prognoses. Some media companies could probably join their poll budgets, split over multiple companies
today, to have a common one with a better analysis of its base population.One that would have anticipated
"not Hillary".
Unless that happens all polls will have to be read with a lot of doubt. What past bias is captured
in these predictions of the future? What are their structural assumptions and are these still correct?
What structural change might have happened?
Even then polls and their interpretation will always only capture a part of the story. Often
a sound grasp of human and cultural behavior will allow for better prediction as all polls. As my
friend the statistician say: "The best prognostic instrument I have even today is my gut."
An equally interesting question about polls: what about the exit polls? If Greg Palast and others
are right, exit polls indicate that the voting was rigged. What does your statistics friend think
about that?
After the 1948 election, statisticians started to get rid of the quota sampling for electoral
polls. After this election, it's time to reassess Statistics.
A good indicator was the size of the crowds each candidate drew to their rallies. Clinton
tended to show more "bought" TV-ready extras. Bernie blew the walls out at his rallies, as did
Trump. You can't look at that and say the polls are even close to accurate.
I suspect that the future of polling isn't as dire as you're painting it, b. There was huge anti-Trump
bias in the Jew-controlled Christian-West Media from the beginning of the campaign. You drew attention
to negative MSM bias yourself in the post which pointed out how consistently wrong the Punditocracy
had been in predicting the imminent failure of the Trump campaign - thereby rubbing their noses
in their own ineptitude and tomfoolery.
One factor which seemed important to me was occasionally hilighted at regular intervals by
commenters here at MoA... The (apparent) fact that Trump addressed more, and bigger, crowds than
Mrs Clinton. I accepted those claims as fact, and didn't bother to check their veracity. But nevertheless
crowd size and frequency seems to have played a pivotal role in the outcome (as one would expect
in a political campaign).
Exit polls have provided checks on the accuracy of the vote count -- but are liable to the same
problem as the opinion pols, people who don't admit to their real position.
I'm not surprised that the polls fail badly in this presidential election. When the Democrats
unleashed thugs on Trump supporters while the media studiously looked away, it was not sensible
to openly identify with Trump. Even Trump was saying so through out the campaign.The Democrats
together with their media partners truly believed that Donald Trump's alleged character flaws
would be enough to win the election. Despite the fact that it was obvious to anyone without a
blinker on that the momentum was on the side of Trump all along. Obama's phenomenon of 08 was
nothing compared to Trump's phenomenon of this year, but because neither the MSM nor the Pollsters
liked him they transferred their biases to their jobs. In any case I'm sure happy that the result
of the election turned out different from the skewed prognosis.
On Wednesday after the election, I heard an interview with a woman reporter who worked with
the 538 polling group. She said that it was impossible for most reporters to really investigate
how voters in certain areas of the country were feeling about the election bcz newspapers and
other news organizations, including the Big Broadcasters, did not have the ability to pay for
enough reporters to actually talk to people.
Since statistics had worked so well, and were cheaper to deal with, they won the day. And lost
the battle.
Now, most people at this site seemed to base their decisions of whom to vote for based on stands
on issues and known actions of the various candidates. But, even so, we probably paid attention
to the polling results. I know I took into consideration that Hillary would win big in NJ, leaving
me free to vote for Jill Stein. Based on known actions of Trump I could not vote for him, even
tho' I hoped he would kill TPP and have better relations with Russia. I feared and still do fear
his nominations to the Supreme Court. (I am not religious, but if I were I would pray daily, perhaps
hourly, for the continued good health of the Justices Kennedy, GInsburg, and Breyer. I would hope
the other Dem appointed justices would take care to avoid, oh, small airplanes....
Would Hillary have adjusted her campaign if she could have seen the rising disappointment of
the working class Dems (even middle class to higher income Dems)? I don't know. I do know that
her husband ran his first campaign on the famous "It's the economy, stupid" reminder.
Somehow, I don't think it would have registered enough.
And Obama ran on Hope and Change, but was always the Corporatist Dem Wall Street wanted. What
a waste. And now we have four more years of doing essentially nothing aboug climate change. It
was have been a strategy to put off even regulatory actions to lessen CO2 emissions until near
the end of his second term, but, dang, it makes it easier for Trump to negate those efforts.
Again, what a waste. But I didn't vote for Obama for either term bcz I saw that his actions
as IL state senator and as US senator were always looking out for the Big Money, Big Corporations,
and seldom worked for anyone below the middle class, more the top of the middle class.
A long explanatory report which signifies nothing critical. "The polls were wrong??" No. The polls
reported by MSM were wrong.
Big time, including from those from Clinton loving CBC here in Canada, which for an extended
time was reporting Hillary with an 11% lead. That number was far beyond any minor adjustments,
for sure.
There were polls, such as Rasmussen, itself suspected of fiddling, which were reporting ups
and downs of 2%, and ended up tied election day.
So, please schemers, please do not try to cover up the MSM's deliberate attempt to influence
results by using garbage numbers. Figures can lie, and liars can sure figure.
the Los Angeles Times polls were correct (although the paper was pro-Clinton); can't get the
link now, but they explained how they weighted their polls on the basis of the enthusiasm displayed
for the preferred candidate, and Trump supporters were more "charged"
I disagree with your friend, b. I read many stories about how the polls were fixed for Clinton
for months before the election.
The pollsters took the % of voters from the Obama election but they also added more Democrats
than were representative in the 2012 election, thereby skewing the polls for Clinton. Many believed
that the reason they did this was to try to manipulate the voting machines in Clinton's favour
and have the polls match the result. I think that Trump crying foul so early got them worried
that they might be caught. Remember, voting machines in 14 states are run by companies affiliated
with Soros.
i go back to what my sociology of the media instructor said.. polls are for massaging people's
brains.. unless one knows who pays for them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda
tool for use..
It has been known for a long time in the polling world that polling numbers are getting more
and more unreliable because fewer and fewer people are willing to complete polls.
I have a weird conspiracy hypothesis that I mainly made up on my own;
The last FBI "reopening" and the quick subsequent "close-down" felt all too counter-intuitive
and silly, when examined solely based on their face value.
However, what if there was more to this? What if this was a final threat from FBI to the Soros-Clinton
mafia to "quickly unrig the voting machines" OR we will arrest the lot of you? Which, once the
promises were made by "allow fair play", required FBI to pull back as their part of the deal?
This - admittedly conspiracy - theory would also explain the newspaper polls largely rigged
to correspond to the planned vote theft, as well as the idiotic magnitude of overconfidence seen
in the Pol-Est/MS Media/Wall Street complex.
I find it interesting b that you and your friend didn't seem to talk at all about the polling
questions....at least that you shared with us. It is my experience and education that even with
a "beauty contest" that we just had, that the structure of the polling questions make all the
difference in how people being polled respond.
Polls are funded by parties with agendas and the questions, assumptions and biases are baked
in to the result......IMO, they are all worthless or worse than that because folks see them, like
the media as being something of an authority figure and therefore believable which we know is
total BS.
Polls are just another propaganda tool of those rich enough to use them in their quiver of
control.
Timid Trumpists is the major factor, I would think. A factor already well known in UK. People
who are going to vote for a non-PC solution hesitate to admit it to poll questions.
All of the above is true, but - in addition - polls are used to manipulate campaigns.
People sympathize with someone who is considered a winner and when someone is considered likely
to lose people lose interest.
To get the vote out polls have to be tight. In addition to that polls are used to motivate
donors. In the end there has to be a reason pollsters get paid.
But even if polls would be done for purely scientific reasons, this election was impossible
to poll. The correct question would have been "Do you hate/fear candidate x enough to motivate
you to queue for voting for canditate y, or are you too disgusted to bother at all"
In the end, it was not the wrong polls that sank Clinton but the strategy to leave the anti-elitist
populist stuff to Trump and - unsuccessfully concentrate on winning the elitist Republican anti
Trump vote. That way she lost more of the Democrat Sanders vote than she could gain right wing.
The other factor was her reliance on television ads and media ties (they all backed her), a
reluctance to talk to large audiences and an inability to communicate via social media.
It is possible though she never had a chance against a well established reality show brand.
The good news is that after this election campaigns will be done mainly low cost social media.
The bad news is that these campaigns will be more fact free than ever and that the age of independent
quality newspapers is over.
So, you're saying that the age of independent quality newspapers has just ended, like about
now. Interesting pov...
Somehow, the last few years of the MSM coverage of the NATO-Salafist War on Syria have had
me convinced that the "independent quality newspapers" have become a*rse-wipe material a long
time ago. Instead, we get the Sorosoid ZioTakfirism.
But, yeah, maybe it's all Trump's fault. Hey I also blame Hezbollah for kicking Yisrael's arse
north of Litani in 2006. If they didn't piss of the Yivrim this much, maybe they wouldn't have
punitively collapsed the faith in the Western Society from the inside.
Ultimately, it's all Putin's fault. He started it all by beating the pro-Saudi Chechens into
a pulp back in 1999, and started the NATOQAEDA self-destruction.
1. IBD/TIPP (A collaboration of Investors Business Daily and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence).
TechnoMetrica was consistent throughout – final poll for election day had Trump leading by 2%.
Also predicted the last presidential elections back to 2004.
Methodology
"Traditional Telephone method" includes cell –live interviews by Region; Age; Gender; Race;
Income; Education; Party; Ideology; Investor; Area Type; Parental Status; White – men, women;
Black/Hispanic; Women-single, married; Household description –Upper/Middle-Middle, Working, Lower;
Religion; Union Household; Intensity of Support.
This election candidates' crowd draw was a good indicator. It was very difficult to pre-program
the Diebold machines. MSM polls were in the bag for Hillary, had her ahead. It backfired.
Is Newsweek embarrassed yet? They forgot some history. Truman-Dewey. Madam President! How appropriate.
Some of b's posts regarding US politics seems naive but I chalk that up to his not being American.
But this technocratic excuse for the polling is just wrong. b, what happened to your skeptical
view of Western media????
virgile @ 9: An excerpt: " It was about the union men who refused to sell out their futures and
vote for a Democrat who is an agent of the One Percent."
And now, I fear, they still have no future.
James @ 15 said.." polls are for massaging people's brains.. unless one knows who pays for
them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda tool for use..
How true..
Trumps choices for his cabinet don't leave much room for positive change, for the millions
of disaffected voters who put him in office. We'll see!
A bit about polling methodology explains the bias we've seen this election cycle. Typically,
the polling samples are not big enough to be representative, so the results are corrected (weighted)
based on the participant responses. The polls assume certain turnout percentages for different
groups (Democrats, Republicans, Independents, rural, urban, ethnicity, gender etc.). A lot of
the polls were weighting the polls with turnouts similar to 2012, corrected for the expected demographic
changes over the last 4 years.
Poll weighing is a tricky business. This is why most polling has a 4% error margin, so
it does not produce as accurate picture as is typically presented by the media. The error is not
randomly distributed, it is closely related to the poll weighting. The weighting error was favouring
Clinton in the polls as it assumed higher Democratic turnout, which ended up not being the case,
she underperformed 2012 significantly and lost the election.
It is important to stress that the election results ended up within the margin of error
(+-4%). The polls were not wrong, it is the media and the analyst who over-interpreted the data
and gave Clinton the win where she did not have a statistically significant (<4%) lead. This is
why if Nate Silver at 538 was consistently writing that the polls in many of the swing states
were within the error margin, although favouring Clinton, and their election prediction still
gave Trump a ~30% chance of victory. Other analysts were more careless (hello Huffington Post)
and even made fun of 538 for giving Trump any chance of victory.
There is no way to make more accurate polling for the future elections as the accuracy of the
poll is tied in to poll weighing, which is guesswork (although somewhat educated by the historical
data). Short of forcing everyone to vote, election-to-election turnout will change and affect
the accuracy of the polls.
Instead of interpreting every single of those Polls as plausibly biased on one side, why don't
you take the entire population of Western MSM Polls, and see if their median predicted outcome
vs actual final outcome difference is statistically significant?
I'd say you'd find their entire population to be likely biased at least to six-sigma level.
(I have no time to show this myself, just proposing someone's hypothesis, as a research idea
for someone's M Sci thesis for example)
I have lived in the D.C. area for the past 22 years with a land line phone and am listed in the
White Pages. I have never been called by a pollster, although I am often called by political campaigns.
I do not know anyone who has been called by a pollster.
More expensive in depth interviews of the base population used by a pollster would probably
have caught this factor and adjusted appropriately.
No more 'adjustments' allowed. A desire to actually discover the lay of the land and to publish
it is what's required. Good luck on getting that from the political class and/or their captive
msm. Everything they do is a lie, calculated to keep themselves in power.
The polls were obviously blatantly skewed towards urban Blue zones, and did not include working
adults in Red zones, then were 'massaged' by reporting media in clearly a Rodham-paid PAC marketing
campaign to brand the sheeples 'Wear Rodham!'
Only Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight even came close, but he had to rely on those same skewed
polls. After all, since 1990, you can buy a CD set of American voting records by street address,
it's not rocket science to be able to 'algo' that into a 'poll' that skews whichever way the highest
bidder's (Rodham) quants tell you to. https://www.facebook.com/viralthread/videos/598130190359668/
As if on cue, or something. All of a sudden, S.U.R.P.R.I.S.E,… a litany of polls released today
show Donald Trump ahead in key battleground states (Ohio and Florida), and tied –or closer
than the margin of error– in new national polls…. […]
Remember what we stated on October 20th: […]
The real battle is the battle for your mind. The peak U.S. media false polling cycle is
thankfully in the rear-view mirror.
It was because I followed that right-wing blog that I ignored all polls other than the LA Times
tracking poll. (I didn't know about the IBD/TIPP poll until after the election.)
Hmm ... what can I say that no-one else has already said except to observe that the polling
and the corporate media reporting the polling statistics were in another parallel universe and
the people supposedly being polled (and not some over-sampled group in Peoria, Iowa, who could
predict exactly what questions would be asked and knew what answers to give) live on planet Earth?
I most certainly did not predict Trump would win. But I did question the polls. What I questioned
a few weeks ago was the margin of victory for Hillary.
There were two big variables that the pollsters had to guess at. One was the voter turnout
numbers for those precincts that had many working class people with a high school or less education
level. As it turns out those people came out in higher numbers than they have in elections over
the past two decades. The other was voter turnout for many precincts that supported Obama in 2008
and 2012. What happened here was many of those voters who did turn out voted for Trump, instead
of the Democrat. There was a third uncertainty here that no on has yet figured out. That was those
people who would never admit to a stranger that they were going to vote for Trump and simply lied
to the pollster.
In any case those three uncertainties worked in directions that none of the pollsters really
picked up on.
This is because most of the polls were weighting more Democratic (based on the 2012 election),
which overestimated Clinton's support. For example, the Rasmussen poll, which traditionally
weights more Republican, gave Clinton 1.7% lead, 44.8% to 43.1% (3% margin of error), so fairly
close to the election results (47.3% to 47.8%).
So the difference between the poll and the actual result is 1.2% in favour of Trump (1.7%
lead to Clinton in poll vs. 0.5% in the election). All are well within the error of the poll,
so 1.2% difference between the election and the poll is well within the stated 3% error margin
of the poll.
When you mention 6 sigma, you really don't really know what you are talking about. Typical
polling error is 3 - 4% and the election result was within this error for most polls in all of
the states. Standard deviation (sigma) that you mention is a random uncertainty associated with
a measurement and it does not apply here. As I tried to convey, the errors in polling tend to
be systematic, not random, because they are tied to weighting of the polls, not to the sample
of the population as this is mostly corrected by the weighting. So because most of the MSM polls
use similar weighting methodology based on the same historical data, they will all be off, there
will be no random distribution of some for Trump, some for Clinton. Weighing based on different
historical data skews the whole picture one way, it's not a random error. This is why pollster
slap a relatively large 3 - 4% error on their polls, it is meant to cover any systematic bias
of the weighting as well as random errors.
those three uncertainties worked in directions that none of the pollsters really picked
up on.
Have a loook at the
LA Times
tracking poll . It had Trump ahead by 3.2% on election day, which is close to the margin of
error. The graph there is interesting, because dates of various events, such as the debates are
marked. The poll figures moved in response to those events as one would expect.
Before the election, the people who do that poll said that they did best at predicting the
2012 election. Oh, in a
post about the
election's outcome, Alexander Dugin singled out that poll for praise.
I have a better idea--how about we stop the stupid polling altogether since there is only one
poll that really matters? Then the media would have to focus on the issues rather than the horserace.
Oh, the humanity!
Hypothesis A - that it's all explainable by random distribution of their samples.
If you use Hypotethesis A, and then disprove it in it's own game (be it 3, or 6 sigma), then
you have to suggest an alternative.
I don't know what the alternative is. I don't even claim I do. But you can more easily disprove
the veracity that the polls could have mostly been non-biased by showing that hypothesis is unlikely
to be RIGHT. That's where sigmas make absolute sense.
Furthermore, what you are proving here is that the POPULATION of ALL COMBINED polls has a mean
that must be different from the POPULATION of all actual voters, not of disproving the polls one
by one.
I think you've totally ignored my point, you keep looking at individual polls as trees, I am
looking at the poll forest and saying the entire forest is buggered if almost all polls erred
on one side, regardless of their individual margins of error.
The New York Times recent admission that it writes the narrative first, then builds the story
to suit says about everything for me regarding polls. 'Hey, my editor needs someone to come
out and say something, can you say this...?' <-- Now, if that is standard practice in journalism
at 'the paper of record', then skewing polls to suit a common agenda is a given, again in my opinion.
This of course is great news for sites like MofA.
Also impossible to capture The Don's campaign playing the electoral college system like an
old mandolin, as it turns out. 306 Trump bts 232 Hillary it looks like in the wash up. That's
old school work rate doing the job. Fair play. Great to see all the student debt laden brainwashed
libtards out there doing there nut. They don't even know what a bullet they dodged + shite like
the TPP is now dead. Some gratitude.
Hopefully in 2020 there are some more scientific polls like the USC Dornslife/LA Times poll,
each having their own differing methodologies preferably. This should give the punters a better
'feel' for the electorate.
In other news...
Assange is being interviewed tomorrow by Swedush police (for the 2nd time I should add). There
are and were no charges laid. I suspect their will be no charges brought tomorrow.
...so what happened...? Did The Rule of Law just...magically appear...?
The most extraordinary thing I learned about polls is that exit polls are altered as soon as the
official election or primary vote is in-- to match it.
According to reports, the first leader Trump spoke to on the phone after his election victory
was the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Sisi congratulated him on the election victory,
a spokesman for the Egyptian leader said.
Ireland's government said the taoiseach, Enda Kenny, had a 10-minute call with Trump, and
was invited to visit the White House on St Patrick's Day.
Mexico's president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has said he and Trump agreed in their call to meet
before Trump takes office, while Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was invited to
the White House.
Other leaders to have a chat with Trump so far include the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe – they
reportedly talked for 20 minutes and agreed to meet soon in New York – and South Korea's president,
Park Geun-hye.
Australia's prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was reported to have chatted with Trump about
security and trade in their call.
No surprises there.
It may be unfortunate, but I can see Trump & Erdogan getting along very well. Although,
if they bring Putin into that triumvirate that could actually be very beneficial for the Middle
East.
Concur with all your points. And yes, the timing of the Swedes finally deciding to interview
Assange is funny.
I never thought that Hillary would become president, btw., from the moment she declared
for 2016. Which is not to say that I was not concerned that the demonization of Trump might throw
the election. We'll never know, but it is possible that Trump wouldn't have won without Wikileaks.
And the two sets of leaks were very well timed.
To return to polls. It's not just most media polls that were off. The Clinton campaign's internal
polls were off, too. They didn't have much doubt that they would win. (The same thing happened
with Romney of course, but in their case, their internal polls differed from the media polls.)
Apparently, they really did believe they have a firewall, with redundancies no less.
But Democrats had a simpler answer for why Clinton lost. As one Democratic strategist close to
Clinton told The Post, it all came down to "one word: Comey." Too bad for Democrats there are
zero electoral votes in the State of Denial. FBI Director James Comey didn't use a private e-mail
server to conduct official State Department business and put 110 classified e-mails on that unsecured
server. Comey didn't fail to turn over some 14,900 e-mails to the FBI after assuring Americans
that "I turned over everything I was obligated to turn over."
Comey didn't lie to the American people about Benghazi, publicly blaming the attacks on "inflammatory
material posted on the Internet." Comey didn't tell Democratic voters he was against free-trade
deals, but then tell Brazilian bankers that his dream was for "hemispheric . . . open trade and
open borders."
Comey didn't have a foundation that accepted millions of dollars in donations from foreign
governments during his tenure as secretary of state. He didn't give, as I wrote last month, "special
treatment to Clinton Foundation donors after the Haiti quake, asking for them to be identified
as 'FOBs' (friends of Bill Clinton) or 'WJC VIPs' (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs)."
Why did Hillary Clinton lose? Not because of Comey. She lost because exit polls showed that
54 percent of voters believe she is "corrupt."
To the elites in Washington, her corruption was apparently no big deal, at least not compared
with their horror at the prospect of a Trump presidency. But Americans correctly saw her corruption
as corrosive to our democracy.
This election was a popular repudiation of Clinton's corruption and deceit - and she owns that.
But there is one person besides herself whom she can blame: President Obama. Because while Clinton
may have lost to Donald Trump, it was Obama who created him.
"... Hillary lost not merely because she misread the "real" people, she decided to run a very divisive
and nasty negative campaign, which has fueled the violence ever since. According to WikiLeaks emails
from campaign John Podesta, Clinton colluded with the DNC and the media to raise what they thought would
be the extreme right among Republicans to then make her the middle of the road to hide her agenda. ..."
"... Clinton called this her "pied piper" strategy, that intentionally cultivated extreme right-wing
presidential candidates and that would turn the Republicans away from their more moderate candidates.
..."
"... The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee along with mainstream media all called
for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right."
Clinton's camp insisted that Trump should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media outlets should
be told to "take them seriously." ..."
"... The Clinton strategy was all about manipulating the Republicans to nominate the worst candidate
Clinton called for forcing "all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions
that will hurt them in a general election." ..."
"... It was not Putin trying to rig the elections, it was Hillary. Clinton saw the Republican field
as crowded and she viewed as "positive" for her. "Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to
move the more established candidates further to the right." Clinton then took the strategic position
saying "we don't want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more 'Pied Piper' candidates
who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party." ..."
"... "We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and
tell the press to them seriously." ..."
"... This is by far the WORST campaign in history and it was all orchestrated by Hillary to be intentionally
divisive for the nation all to win the presidency at all costs. She has torched the constitution and
the country. ..."
"... Any Democrat who is not angry at this is clearly just a biased fool. Wake up and smell the
roses. You just got what you deserve. ..."
"... It's one thing to be ruthless & evil. It's another to be ruthless, evil and stupid. Brexit
should have been a huge eye-opener for the elites that they should seek to field two establishment candidates
as usual at any cost rather than risk elevating an outsider. ..."
"... It's incredibly fortunate they were too dumb to realise that the former middle class and independents
cognisant of NWO would create huge momentum for exactly those type of candidates & that this was absolutely
the worst time in history to attempt that strategy. Lack of competition at the top of the food chain
has made her ilk slow and out of touch. Evolution is a bitch. ..."
"... Personally, I find this hilarious. She schemes and connives to push forward the most "unelectable"
republican, and that republican wins mostly because she vastly underestimates the dislike of Americans
for her. ..."
"... Excellent article. Truly, the definition of "hubris" was Hillary during this election. ..."
"... What she underestimated was the ability for most to see thru her true contempt of people. That's
the bottom line of Hillary- she just sees herself as royalty, and we just got tired of seeing it again
and again. ..."
"... from the tone of the leaked emails it is clear they realized she was the worst candidate ever.
..."
"... This mirrors her naive approach to foreign policy of "create a controlled burn (Arab spring)
and get rid of your enemy". Without realizing someone would move in to the void left afterwards. (I
need to drink more - In whiskey, veritas). Or as in this case, the wind changes direction. ..."
"... It is interesting that there is no mention of any strategy to promote her ideas or positive
qualities. In fact the "muddy the waters" statement shows they knew scandals would come up and they'd
have to play defense. ..."
"... Remember how Hitlery called US working white men just a deplorable POS. Furthermore, her allies
could easily falsify the voter counting process but again they were so arrogant and self confident that
they fucked up themselves. ..."
"... People, stop be so naive and stupid. The life is not fair to losers since only winners always
write the history! ..."
"... Finally, if Trump will follow an advice to be good to everybody being a unifier then he will
be destroyed. This is why he must continue the strategy that brought his the victory. One never can
win follow a defensive strategy! ..."
"... unfortunately, the MSM is continuing without a break in cadence their lock-step call for bipartisan!
compromise! and let's be "REASONABLE" . DAMMIT. The time for reasonable is past. ..."
"... If Trump puts in a lot of NEOCON insiders in his cabinet I say we need to hammer it again home
that this is our last chance. If trump doesn't deliver the JOBS and Economic turnaround then the conservatives
are GONE. We won't get another chance. ..."
Meanwhile, Hillary lost not merely because she misread the "real" people, she decided to run
a very divisive and nasty negative campaign, which has fueled the violence ever since. According
to WikiLeaks emails from campaign John Podesta, Clinton colluded with the DNC and the media to raise
what they thought would be the extreme right among Republicans to then make her the middle of the
road to hide her agenda.
... ... ...
Clinton called this her "pied piper" strategy, that intentionally cultivated extreme right-wing
presidential candidates and that would turn the Republicans away from their more moderate candidates.
This enlisted mainstream media who then focused to Trump and raise him above all others assuming
that would help Hillary for who would vote for Trump. This was a deliberate strategy all designed
to propel Hillary to the White House.
The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee along with mainstream media all called
for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the
right." Clinton's camp insisted that Trump should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media
outlets should be told to "take them seriously."
If we look back on April 23, 2015, just two
weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a message
on straregy to manipulate the Republicans into selecting the worse candidate. They included this
attachment a "memo for the DNC discussion."
The memo was addressed to the Democratic National Committee and stated bluntly, "the strategy
and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican
presidential field." Here we find that the real conspiracy was Clinton manipulating the Republicans.
"Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is
intended to put those ideas to paper."
"Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same:
to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate."
The Clinton strategy was all about manipulating the Republicans to nominate the worst candidate
Clinton called for forcing "all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative
positions that will hurt them in a general election."
It was not Putin trying to rig the elections,
it was Hillary. Clinton saw the Republican field as crowded and she viewed as "positive" for her.
"Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to
the right." Clinton then took the strategic position saying "we don't want to marginalize the more
extreme candidates, but make them more 'Pied Piper' candidates who actually represent the mainstream
of the Republican Party."
Her manipulative strategy was to have the press build up Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.
"We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell
the press to them seriously."
This conspiracy has emerged from the Podesta emails. It was Clinton conspiring with mainstream
media to elevate Trump and then tear him down. We have to now look at all the media who endorsed
Hillary as simply corrupt. Simultaneously, Hillary said that Bernie had to be ground down to the
pulp. Further leaked emails showed how the Democratic National Committee sabotaged Sanders' presidential
campaign. It was Hillary manipulating the entire media for her personal gain. She obviously did not
want a fair election because she was too corrupt.
What is very clear putting all the emails together, the rise of Donald Trump was orchestrated
by Hillary herself conspiring with mainstream media, and they they sought to burn him to the ground.
Their strategy backfired and now this is why she has not come out to to speak against the violence
she has manipulated and inspired.
This is by far the WORST campaign in history and it was all orchestrated by Hillary to be
intentionally divisive for the nation all to win the presidency at all costs. She has torched the
constitution and the country. No wonder Hillary could not go to the stage to thank her supporters.
She never counted on them and saw the people as fools. The entire strategy was to take the White
House with a manipulation of the entire election process. Just unbelievable. Any Democrat who
is not angry at this is clearly just a biased fool. Wake up and smell the roses. You just got what
you deserve.
Notveryamused -> Charles Wilson •Nov 12, 2016 9:12 PM
It's one thing to be ruthless & evil. It's another to be ruthless, evil and stupid. Brexit
should have been a huge eye-opener for the elites that they should seek to field two establishment
candidates as usual at any cost rather than risk elevating an outsider.
It's incredibly fortunate they were too dumb to realise that the former middle class and
independents cognisant of NWO would create huge momentum for exactly those type of candidates
& that this was absolutely the worst time in history to attempt that strategy. Lack of competition
at the top of the food chain has made her ilk slow and out of touch. Evolution is a bitch.
Personally, I find this hilarious. She schemes and connives to push forward the most "unelectable"
republican, and that republican wins mostly because she vastly underestimates the dislike of Americans
for her.
Could there be a more fitting slap in the face to someone of such enormous hubris and arrogance?
jcaz -> Automatic Choke •Nov 12, 2016 9:47 PM
Excellent article. Truly, the definition of "hubris" was Hillary during this election.
What she underestimated was the ability for most to see thru her true contempt of people.
That's the bottom line of Hillary- she just sees herself as royalty, and we just got tired of
seeing it again and again.
MalteseFalcon -> espirit •Nov 12, 2016 10:47 PM
Hillary Rodent fashions herself as some kind of leader who is a Christian (Methodist) and loves
America ("Need to unify!!"). So let the Rodent get on TV and tell these bought and paid for rioters
to stop. "Not in my name" should be the Rodent's plea.
<crickets>
She's a fraud.
Joe Davola -> MalteseFalcon •Nov 12, 2016 11:44 PM
It truly was the worst campaign in history (topping Mondale 84). If only they'd put half the
effort into their campaign that they put into dirty tricks. Then again, from the tone of the
leaked emails it is clear they realized she was the worst candidate ever.
They were so busy playing it like a parlor game, they forgot to actually provide real reasons
to vote for her - beyond it was her turn.
This mirrors her naive approach to foreign policy of "create a controlled burn (Arab spring)
and get rid of your enemy". Without realizing someone would move in to the void left afterwards.
(I need to drink more - In whiskey, veritas). Or as in this case, the wind changes direction.
FreedomGuy -> Joe Davola •Nov 13, 2016 12:44 AM
It is interesting that there is no mention of any strategy to promote her ideas or positive
qualities. In fact the "muddy the waters" statement shows they knew scandals would come up and
they'd have to play defense.
It is never about how good they are. It is about how bad you/the other side is.
caconhma -> jcaz •Nov 12, 2016 10:31 PM
War is war. The goal is to win by destroying an opponent. Therefore, any actions and any strategy
leading to a victory are totally justified!
Consequently, one cannot blame Hitlery for her actions. Hitlery has done the right things but
Jewish arrogance that guided and executed her election campaign negated and destroyed all advantages
she had. Remember how Hitlery called US working white men just a deplorable POS. Furthermore,
her allies could easily falsify the voter counting process but again they were so arrogant and
self confident that they fucked up themselves.
People, stop be so naive and stupid. The life is not fair to losers since only winners always
write the history!
Finally, if Trump will follow an advice to be good to everybody being a unifier then he
will be destroyed. This is why he must continue the strategy that brought his the victory. One
never can win follow a defensive strategy!
hardmedicine -> caconhma •Nov 13, 2016 3:46 AM
unfortunately, the MSM is continuing without a break in cadence their lock-step call for
bipartisan! compromise! and let's be "REASONABLE" . DAMMIT. The time for reasonable is past.
If Trump puts in a lot of NEOCON insiders in his cabinet I say we need to
hammer it again home that this is our last chance. If trump doesn't deliver the JOBS and Economic
turnaround then the conservatives are GONE. We won't get another chance.
Grosvenor Pkwy -> Chris Dakota •Nov 13, 2016 6:29 AM
Long-term drug and alcohol abuse slowly destroys the brain. She was definitely smarter 20 years
ago. "first we have to bring them to heel..."
"... Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably. ..."
"... Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." ..."
"... let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that's about to begin. ..."
"... Everyone must stop saying they are "stunned" and "shocked". What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. ..."
"... You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there's climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don't want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. ..."
"... Finally, speaking of Saturday Night Live sketches, we can't wait to see how the liberal "comedy" show - which just like the NYT existed in a world of its own throughout the presidential campaign - spins the election results tonight. ..."
Then there was ultraliberal Michael Moore, who in a
facebook post
urged to "Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative
they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same
bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." They will pull more hooey
like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off."
Morning After To-Do List:
1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.
2. Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative
they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those
same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." They will pull
more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.
3. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn't wake up this morning ready to fight, resist
and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years
must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness
and the madness that's about to begin.
4. Everyone must stop saying they are "stunned" and "shocked". What you mean to say is that
you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair.
YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system
only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them
all "You're fired!" Trump's victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only
strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own
that.
5. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: "HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR
VOTE!" The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period.
Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don't. The majority
of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he's president is because
of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we'll
continue to have presidents we didn't elect and didn't want. You live in a country where a majority
of its citizens have said they believe there's climate change, they believe women should be paid
the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don't want us invading countries,
they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care
system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the "liberal"
position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above).
* * *
There were countless more such examples of prominent liberals accusing the press of bias and propaganda
long after the fact, even as the press itself refuses to admit any guilt, while itself blaming others,
and so the circle continues to turn, and nothing changes in a world in which nobody knows what happens
next now that the status quo has been crushed by the people.
Finally, speaking of Saturday Night Live sketches, we can't wait to see how the liberal "comedy"
show - which just like the NYT existed in a world of its own throughout the presidential campaign
- spins the election results tonight.
"... The party elites--the superdelegates--committed to Clinton from the beginning. They decided it was her turn. And despite all the evidence showing they were supporting a weak, vulnerable, and heavily disliked candidate, they stuck with it anyway. This Trump presidency, and the Republican sweep in the House and Senate, is entirely on the shoulders of 300 insider Democrats. ..."
"... Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. ..."
"... But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine. ..."
No shit, Sherlock. Sanders would have beaten Trump. We are living in extreme times, and in
extreme times centrism and political 'triangulation' doesn't work.
This result will be repeated next year in France with the National Front. Mark my words. And when
it does, France will vote to leave the EU and the house of cards will come crashing down.
You can thank the Democrats, a party that used to represent working people, for at least part
of that. Their billionaire backers picked Clinton because she'd ensure their wealth would remain
untouched. I wonder what they're feeling now?
Aaron Jackson -> NathAldridge 4d ago
How do you figure? Clinton won the Democratic primary by less than the margin of superdelegates.
She had a MASSIVE lead in funding, institutional support, and (at the least) insider bias--though
it was likely more than that, given that nearly every single election anomaly in that primary
bounced her way.
The DNC intentionally limited the debates and scheduled those they did have for off times to try
to limit the damage Sanders could do to Clinton, and big media refused to cover Bernie Sanders
except in the context of Clinton.
And even with all of that, Sanders pulled within 300 delegates of winning the Democratic Nomination
by working through a grassroots, positive campaign. The momentum was entirely on his side, too!
And national polls showed him performing MUCH better against Trump than Clinton. And, of course,
he had no scandals (real or imagined) to leverage.
The party elites--the superdelegates--committed to Clinton from the beginning. They decided
it was her turn. And despite all the evidence showing they were supporting a weak, vulnerable,
and heavily disliked candidate, they stuck with it anyway. This Trump presidency, and the Republican
sweep in the House and Senate, is entirely on the shoulders of 300 insider Democrats.
NathAldridge 4d ago
The Guardian in a nutshell!
Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as
strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from
the editorial and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's
enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three
times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started
to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white,
a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren't real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren't supporting Trump. And if they were, it was only because
they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the
Republican candidate.
dynamic22 4d ago
"But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when
the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country
wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine."
You said everything really.
Watchman80 -> dynamic22 4d ago
Yup.
Also, see this. Note the date (and the imagined Trump speech)
Maybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness,
shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.
I couldn't have put it better. I could have put it with more swear words in though.
BigBlue80 4d ago
Maybe there is a bright side to a Trump victory. After all, there was a reason that tens
of millions of good people voted for him yesterday, and maybe he will live up to their high
regard for him.
If you assume that election victory (not even a majority as apparently Clinton will win the
popular vote) legitmises everything, you are right. But if you believe that there are western
values that should not be sacrificed than you are wrong. Eventually, this will be the end of democracy
- it will kill itself by electing a fascist. I happened before and it looks ever more likely.
The you US with ist overbearing nationalism, its leader-orientation and glorification of the military
was always close to fascism, but now it might have taken the final leap into the abyss.
atuocool 4d ago
"[Neo]Liberals" are a type of conservative who never convince me of the sincerity of their
"progressive" values. What was progressive about Hillary? What would she have actually done for
the poor? How would she have moved America away from being a corporate plutocracy? We all know
the answer is nothing. Trump is a nightmare, but he represents a bizarre, retrograde change while
Clinton represented a vacuous status quo.
with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to
feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station
Correct, it is censorship and suppression of contrary opinion and enormously biased towards "The
Chosen One"
Once again it proves that the Guardian is against the tide of History.
It is not bad to be contrarian or representing an alternative opinion or "voice" however provided
you still maintain some sense of integrity and journalistic professionalism, providing content,
news and information that is fair, balanced without indulging in gratuitous character assassination,
presenting controversial issues of public importance in a manner that is honest, equitable, and
balanced.
The Guardian during the American election as with Brexit and many other controversial issues
has consistently aligned itself with policies and opinion that many would consider left-wing or
liberal yet is neither as the viewpoints they support betrays the liberty and freedom of the ordinary
citizen.
As I said before the election regardless who win or lose the media has already lost by showing
its hand and exposed itself as not a true independent source of news and information, but pursuing
definite agendas and siding with corporate news media's opinions and politics.
According to the Guardian's own view liberalism will have to be remade in a post-liberal age.
It is their own peculiar set of values they believe that is important and not the very principles
the left originally defended. Pursuing a certain "metropolitan liberal creed".
An metropolitan liberal elite who believe they are more educated, more intelligent and talented,
more enlightened, more able to comprehend what society needs than the slow, slobs, the wasters
and good for nothings with their prejudices, that do not know what is good for them.
Their brand of Liberalism has been the complete antithesis of allowing people to take control
of their lives. It has been a dictatorial imposition of the beliefs of the least liberal nature.
Equating the tendencies of so-called "social justice warriors" and so-called "identity politics"
and equating them somehow with liberalism you're a long way from the truth have little to do with
liberalism and no, that's not "left" either.
The establishment in the mainstream media believe they are economically liberals - though privately
they look more kindly on monopolies than old school liberals would have. Yet these "liberals"
want to happily embrace Brussels' legalistic regime of rules that range from the petty and impractical
to a punitive and autocratic dictatorship.
Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil
liberties and political freedom with representative democracy under the rule of law and emphasizes
economic freedom.
It is no secret what the problem is, lack of jobs, lack of opportunities, people who feel they
have no future or rights in their own country anymore.
Ask yourself is what you identify with or support contributing towards a more peaceful, harmonious
society where all have a sense of having a place and a future in their own country where they
feel they fit in and contribute towards a more safe, secure and prosperous society?
An metropolitan liberal elite who believe they are more educated, more intelligent and talented,
more enlightened, more able to comprehend what society needs than the slow, slobs, the wasters
and good for nothings with their prejudices, that do not know what is good for them.
This is not a new problem. The social elites (self-appointed) of all political persuasions are
always bemoaning the stupidity of the plebs in not bowing to their superior understanding of all
things. That this unfounded hubris is an amazing exemplar of denial of reality (who just won this
election, for example) doesn't seem able to take root in the bubble of acceptable thought in their
minds. How could they possibly be talking out of their bottom when it comes to damn near everything?
(All evidence aside.)
We need the voice of the 'common people' to be heard, without being filtered by the elites. Fake
democracy is not going to work -- we'll end up with a bigger fiasco, such as Jamie Dimon vs Kim Kardashian
in the next US Presidential contest. Way past time for those in power to wake up to the fact that
they're not in control, and real change that involves the great unwashed in the process is necessary.
Trump is one dumb guy, but he has managed to figure out how to use this frustration to get his misogynist,
racist, backside into the chair in the Oval Office.
- Election of Trump is not just another routine changing of the guards in the US two-party
system (although it is that too). This is a significant deviation in the business-as-usual model
of politics, and there will be substantial repercussions that will explicitly manifest themselves
somewhere down the line.
- The Founding Dudes and the Framers of the US Constitution had set up the system so as to
preclude the possibility of ascendance of someone like Trump.
- The Founding Dudes and the Framers of the US Constitution had set up the system so as to
eventually make possible the ascendance of someone like Trump.
- Sanders was right. That having had had been said, he would have still lost to Drumpf if he
were the D's nominee instead of HRC.
- That is because RealAmerica_a spoke more vocally this time around, overwhelming the voice
of RealAmerica_b.
- Judging by geographical size alone, RealAmerica_a is Real America.
- It is simply unimaginable that the enlightened citizenry will elect someone as destructive
and unqualified as Reagan in 1980. Such a possibility is not conceivable in any logical space,
and even fiction writers are wary to contemplate such an impossibility.
- Election of Reagan is not just another routine changing of the guards in the US two-party
system (although it is that too). This is a significant deviation in the business-as-usual model
of politics, and there will be substantial repercussions that will explicitly manifest themselves
somewhere down the line.
- Trump's victory is a repeat of the interplay of the socioeconomic forces that made Dubya's
presidency possible in 2000. Eight more years of this worldview and we will have another Obama-type
candidacy afterwards to clean up the mess and make the world safe again for the staggering-but-still-dominant
neoliberal order.
- People will be just too exhausted after eight years of Trump's presidency, and they will
be so relieved after the election of the next Obama-type president as to retreat to their homes
and let the new savior continue cuddling the big economic players and attempting to reach a Grand
Bargain with the Republicans to further erode the threadbare social safety net holding up the
people, of course for the good of the people themselves and in the name of Serious Politics.
-The dominant position in our society will continue to be the generalization of Alan Grayson's
observation: Don't fall down, if you do disappear quickly.
- Setting aside the status quo status of Clinton's policy prescriptions (she a competent steward
of the Washington Consensus), Trump's victory also signals the provisional victory of the manly
men of RealAmerica_a (and the women who love them) over women (and minorities, and the LGBT, and
immigrants, and etc).
- The same way that most people don't know or care about the wavelengths associated with colors,
they don't know or care about the underlying forces affecting their lives as long as the politicians
put on a good Reality TV show and pull effectively at their heartstrings.
- In other words, F science, F reality.
- In other words, long live Realty TV, the rule of Kardashians, the Apprentice,
WWE/WWF , etc. Constant exposure
to these things matter.
- Constant exposure to these things don't matter.
- Tomorrow the Sun will come up as before, and the Earth will go around it at a steady pace
as before, and the already enfeebled welfare state will continue to fray as before, and millions
of US citizens will continue their steady fall into precariousness as before (especially Trump
supporters in RealAmerica_a), and millions will continue to lose steady jobs and be pushed into
the the gig economy, and the 1% will continue raking in the loot as before under the benevolent
gaze of their new leader.
- If HRC had won, all above would still occur, but probably at a lower rate (except for the
Sun and Earth thing).
I feel lots of parallels can be drawn with brexit, particularly the points made at the end. amazingly
people dont like being insulted and talked down to by party elites, the gop base has been totally
transformed by trumps campaign.
that said has anyone else noticed that trump supporters only ever say 'hes going to do so much
for us' and trump says we are going to reopen the mines/factories/get a better deal but never
said how. he has promised unicorns and rainbows to people dealt a shit hand by the economic changes
of the last 30 years.
The political class amongst US liberals are neo-liberals
Neoliberalism from Reagan to [Bill] Clinton .
written in 1998 the review of this book ends with
" Michael Meeropol's damning indictment of the economic direction of the Clinton presidency demonstrates
that nowhere is the need for a new movement more pressing than in the United States".
Well Bush & Obama & Hillary, had she been elected, were continuations of that economic direction.
If America has needed a new movement to win since 1999 then I guess they got really desperate
which is why they voted for something as bad as Trump. Yes , the liberals or more specifically
neo-liberals an be held responsible
Frank has been making exactly this point since 1997. Others worth reading on this issue include
Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph L. Reed, Jr.
Unfortunately, in a lot of fora where this message sorely needs to be heard right now, this
article would be summarily dismissed on the basis that Frank used the word "shrill," which is
out of bounds in liberal discourse. Which of course just illustrates Frank's point.
The DNC put President Trump into the White House. The DNC, fixated on the anointed, untouchable
HRC, lost its moral compass and the good work of Bernie and Warren, now amounts to a big fat ZERO.
Laughable, how out of touch - meaningless motherhood cliches cannot pay the bills.
It is a case in point that the MSM have completely lost touch with a population that often relies
on the internet for its news. In the old days, the newspaper that was closest to your political
viewpoint was delivered to your door as your primary source of information, now every news outlet,
blog and forum in the world is delivered directly to your tablet.
The media, like the Government has considerably less influence than a decade or two ago.
Good article and, as one poster put it, encapsulates the Guardian's editorial line in a nutshell.
The FT seems to be to the left of this paper these days, forced to be more hard nosed about
the world. This from its columnist Wolfgang Munchenau some days ago:
"What led the centre-left on to such a self-destructive path? The answer is a combination
of the following: a false belief that elections are won from the centre; the lure of ministerial
limousines; an inferiority complex about not being able to run "responsible fiscal policies";
and a belief that voters of the left have nowhere else to go. .. The main issue is not
whether a Keynesian policy response would be economically correct. The more important point
is that if the centre-left does not offer it, the populists will. Unless the centre-left returns
to its Keynesian roots, I think there is a good chance that the politics of insurrection will
succeed."
You live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is
kind of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting, and that's why
every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called
the middle class loves Trump. He is the human molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for.
The human hand grande that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from
them.
the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda
station.
That's a very accurate summary. The first step to winning next time is to understand why you
lost this time. The establishment view was that people were going to get Hillary Clinton whether
they liked it or not. Next time try listening to people who are angry that their pay has fallen
in real terms for 10 years. Try listening to people whose views you disagree with rather than
'no platform' them lest your delicate sensibilities be offended.
The list of celebrities and pundits and surrogates taking his side on the campaign trail was extremely
short.
I often wonder is having a celebrity endourse you counter productive. I saw many celebs appear
on TV and social media telling people they shouldn't vote for Trump. Some went as far as to call
people who might vote for Trump idiots. How many people got fed up with rich, famous people telling
them how they should vote? If you're someone sitting in America's rust belt, no job or low paid
crap job, being told by someone you think probably owns a Hollywood mansion and does very little
work, would you not feel a little resentful being told by them how to vote? Wouldn't you take
a dislike to a candidate who appears on stage with these celebs and yet you feel ignores you?
Just a thought.
If you have the right to vote, the responsibility is to think through the implications of using
that vote for X or Y candidate, to work out for yourself what will happen to you, your family,
your community and your country if you vote for X or Y.
If you vote for Y because you feel "resentful" that someone is using their freedom of speech
to urge voting for X rather than Y - perhaps you shouldn't really be voting at all. Just a thought.
More than just an odd thought my friend. The sight of a procession of wealthy, smug and self entitled
celebs, often utter hypocrites, expecting to deliver their Facebook followers to a politician
is nauseating and angers more than a few. Few of these celebs are famous for their brains so being
called an idiot by a halfwit with money hardly endears them. But still society is in thrall to
the concept of celebrity following. It begs the question of what all these followers are actually
following. Perhaps Lady Gaga et al have confused the pathological need for an entertainment fix
with an adoration of their thoughts and outlook.
Killing off the neo-liberal virus in the Democratic Party would be a start, but won't be enough,
if the Democrats simply put the American equivalents of Jeremy Corbyn in its place. What's desperately
needed here are fresh ideas--something analogous to the Keynesian ideas that gave intellectual
underpinning to the New Deal.
The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent
professional (who really wasn't all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone
who didn't accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it's time to consider whether
there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status,
that turns people away.
I think this is a very succinct assessment and goes most of the way to explaining this result,
and the Brexit result too. People don't want to be lectured, they want to be listened to (yes,
even if you think they're wrong).
You see, their sneering attitude to the British working class, their name-calling, their bogus
judgements about the working class for not wanting any more of their rights and opportunities
taken away from them.
The 'liberals' are hated as much as the toffs. Brexit was a great example of the bile and hatred
the 'liberals' spew out at the disadvantaged working class.
It wasn't the 'liberals' housing and schools, communities and healthcare, employment rights
and opportunities that was being eroded though was it? No. But that didn't stop the 'liberals'
branding the working class as 'racists' and 'stupid' and 'blind' did it.
Maybe you now can see yourself, on this poxy 'liberal' website and see how YOU have created
a situation where the working class want ANYTHING other than more of your poison.
Look at the people bleating about Brexit: the 'liberals', the politicians, the bankers, big
business, the judges...my goodness, doesn't that tell a story of the haves and have nots. All
the bleaters are the scum that have never had the working class' best interests in mind and yet
you think we, the working class, should take heed of their fatuous, aquisitive, vile, whimpers?
Really?
Multi-Billionaire Media Barons controlling the news on both sides of the Atlantic (the same
Baron in the case of Murdoch) and they in turn backed by the Trillionaire old and true establishment
who are the exact same families as a hundred years ago and hundreds of years before that in many
cases.
Very well written and I agree to a large extent - the problem is.. are people like Trump and blood
Boris Johnson going to be any more cognisant of the lives and problems of the working class than
the liberals? And are they likely to do anything about those problems unless they simultaneously
line their own pockets? If, and it's a very big if, the interests of the working class and the
interests of Trump et al align somehow then there is a silver lining. If not, then the best we
can hope for is that liberals start to reconnect with the people they purport to represent.
the problem is.. are people like Trump and blood Boris Johnson going to be any more cognisant
of the lives and problems of the working class than the liberals?
No. But maybe, just maybe, the 'left-wing' parties will wake and remember what they are supposed
to be for.
Here's the other thing. Clinton and her mates at the New York Times and the Guardian are always
lecturing us on the need to be compassionate and welcoming towards refugees from faraway places
who would like to come and live among us, but there's never a moment of compassion for the people
who are already here and suffering miserably on the margins of our already unequal societies -
the unemployed and badly employed, the badly housed and homeless, those working sixty hours a
week on the minimum wage for some crappy agency. So, guess what. That's why people are voting
for stuff like Brexit and Trump.
If you lot in the metropolitan elite can't see this then you are doomed to keep repeating the
same mistakes.
Just like Silvio Berlusconi, Trumps opponents were incapable to escape the trap of trying to sling
shit at a candidate made out of teflon.
The Clinton camp tried to fight a war in the trenches...but Trump feeds of negativity, they
should have learnt early that nothing was too outrageous or controversial to tarnish him.
The closest they got was the misogyny accusations and even they didn't stick. Just like Berlusconi,
Trump the lover of pageantry and beautiful women was being portrayed as a woman hater but he cleverly
made it sound like he was hater of feminists instead of women.
The problem with Clinton is that she tried to play the integrity card but that was easily debunked
by Trump with email gate.
The voice of sanity. Thank you, Mr. Frank.
The Democratic Establishment didn't give a hoot about what Bernie had to say, because his presidency
would not have served their ambitions. They're more interested in getting nice jobs at Goldman
Sachs than controlling the finance industry. And their sons and daughters will not fight in all
the wars Clinton&Co see as great business opportunity.
The Dem establishment has failed the people, and now we all reep the whirlwind.
I agree with Frank's analysis though not his use of the word 'liberal' which has confusingly different
meanings. I think the same analysis could be used to explain Brexit.
The problem is a political class which wishes to maintain the status quo of a neo-liberal,
globalised economy. For 35 years this economy has redistributed wealth from the poor to the rich
and massively damaged the environment. It has thus disadvantaged the great majority of the people
in the USA, the UK and indeed people across the world. People are quite reasonably fed up with
the lies behind this 'trickle-down' economics. They are angry and want something different. The
vacuum created by the failure of the left to recognise this, and come up with a new solution,
has resulted in Trump, UKIP, Marine LePen etc.
No. I really think liberals have been their own worst enemies during this election.
They have treated ordinary white Americans as if they are shit, spoken about them in ways that
should make them hang their heads in shame and behaved as if they are living in a oligarchy where
they can call the shots instead of a democracy and now they are paying the price.
You can only kick a dog so many times before it turns around and bites you.
I would also question the term"liberals" to describe people who are happy seeing jobs moved
offshore, causing unemployment at home and slave labour conditions abroad; encouraging mass immigration
to bring wages down and create a powerless and easily exploitable servant class and globalisation
that provides them with a luxury lifestyle on the cheap while making it harder for just about
everyone else.
The only "liberal" thing about these people is their attitudes towards trivial personal issues
like sexuality and lifestyle choices.
Wise words from Frank - I hope the Guardian opinionators are made to read it
Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as strange
that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial
and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's enthusiasm
that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times
a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started
to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a
super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren't real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren't supporting Trump.
And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable
reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.
Absolutely right. And I'm willing to wager the liberal response to this will be to double
down on the identity politics, double down on the victimhood narratives, double down on the march
toward globalism, and double down on the cries for open borders and ever-increasing levels of
immigration. They simply never learn.
It's very clear what happened this morning. Trump won because he picked up the white working
class vote in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, all of which had previously voted for Obama in
both 2008 and 2012. The people in these states didn't magically become racist over the past four
years. They saw a candidate (Clinton) who represented "business as usual", and they rejected her.
Excellent article. Summarises both Brexit as well as Trump's victory.
The stats are showing that Trump polled higher amongst African and Hispanic Americans. I am
not surprised. The Democrats, like the UK Labour party, like to think they OWN ethnic voters and
they are merely another 'special interest' group alongside women, gays, etc. They don't and us
ethnic voters have the same concerns as any other working or middle class voters. And NO ONE appreciates
being told they are wrong, racist and unintelligent.
This shows Social liberialism is dead and rotten. Well past its used by date, time to chuck
it out. It went off when supposed social justice warriors got into business with big business
and fickle finance.
The elites may be well educated but that they couldn't even bare to bring themselves to understand
the perspectives of another reveals how broadminded they really are - the journalists, academics
etc. They believed in democracy where only one way of thinking and the status quo could be permitted
to flourish. This is the most intelligent article to capture the social change that far too many
liberals are denying. How are they going deal with reality, ie. Are the majority of Americans
and British really racists? The greatest irony is this article is published within the vanguard
of what ordinary people are democratically retaliating against.
When you reach rock bottom the only way is to look up. The problem for the Liberalism of the Democratic
Party of the last three decades is that it has become a social scientific morality of the well
connected and completely unable to deal with the naked populism of Trump let alone the half baked
morass of crony capitalism of George Bush.
Lets be opportunistic. This gives it a chance to wipe the slate clean and at the very least rid
themselves of the influence of the Clintons who from the removal of Glass-Steagal Act demonstrated
their only concerns were with the needs of the Super Rich rather than the majority of the population.
Unfortunately you have that feeling that they are not even capable of doing that.
"Trump... a folly so bewildering, an incompetence so profound ..."
Har, har, har, the foolish and incompetent Trump is now president elect and you are a wise
and competent journalist who foresaw the future clearly.
Maybe you're the foolish incompetent, not Trump. Maybe you should examine the foolish certainty
which made you write your Guardian article headlined "With Trump certain to lose, you can forget
about a progressive Clinton" and many others based on foolish and incompetent assumptions, reasoning
and conclusions
Maybe you and all the rest of the useful idiots on the left should examine all of your convictions
about the world. You might discover how often you have been hoodwinked by your own folly into
believing trash like Trump will lose to Hillary, AGW is a real problem which can be corrected
by funneling trillions to crony capitalist alternative energy companies, fracking is dangerous
and the unlimited immigration of millions of young, able bodied, violent, low IQ men is a good
thing.
Trump will achieve nothing of what he's said he wants to do. Reversing the 'reverse colonisation'
of the white western world will fail, especially in the USA where, after all, the Afro-black population
didn't ask to move to in the first place (though I'll bet tend dollars dollars not a single Afro-black
American would opt for emigrating back to Africa, however much they complain about racial prejudice
in the USA - the financial advantages of living in the developed world are FAR too valuable for
that!).
As for the Hispanics, I doubt even a wall would stop them. The mass population of Central and
South America is far, far greater than that of 'white western America' and their third world economics
keep the USA and the developed world a desperate magnet for them (and I can't blame them - I'd
fight tooth and nail to get in to the rich west as well!)
Nope, the Trump victory is a sad, hopeless rearguard action against the triumph of twenty-first
century 'reverse colonisation' and that is that. The white western world is finished - the only
question is, can it 'westernise' the immigrant population in time to save the developed world,
or are we doomed to another Dark Ages of Global Third Worldism? (Maybe China will take over as
Islam did post Roman Empire, while Europe went savage...)
When you separate identity politics - race and gender - from inequality and class, which is what
Obama and Clinton both did, you end up with Donald Trump moving into the White House ......
The liberal argument has always been about the equality to exploit not an end to exploitation.
It was at the heart of New Labour as well as Obama/Clinton Democrats ...
For the last 30 odd years the liberal left have claimed class no longer mattered. Now the "white"
working class have twice given them a kicking in 2016. When you're at the bottom class really
matters!
And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness
to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each
of which Trump exploited to the fullest.
I really like Thomas Frank, but I wish in this diatribe that he wouldn't cheapen the countless
(because the Americans don't count them) who have paid the price for Hillary's 'fondness for war'
by referring to it like that, in passing, as if it was a fondness for muffins.
I wish that he had a bit more righteous fury about how the crazed neocon warmongers who effectively
rule America and for whom Hillary was the latest acceptable face, with her almost total sense
of entitlement, based on the fact that she was a woman, acted like she was heading for a coronation.
Yes it would be great if a woman had been elected president, I can think of at least two others
one running, and one not, but doesn't even the most basic tenet of critical thinking require us
to ask searching questions, about the specific woman ?
He has run one of the lousiest presidential campaigns ever. In saying so I am not referring
to his much-criticized business practices or his vulgar remarks about women. I mean this in a
purely technical sense: this man fractured his own party.
But did he really 'fracture' his own party? From the superficial point of view, one might have
thought so. Many Democrats hope so.
But I'll suggest this. Anybody who is holding out the faint hope that he will work badly with
the GOP in Congress is going to be very disappointed. He's going to put his signature to virtually
everything they want. They're going to have a lot of fun together.
Even stuff which directly contradicts what he ran on and which upset many in the Republican establishment.
I'm thinking foreign policy and trade agreements.
And those in movement conservatism who didn't like him, like Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson?
Watch them do a 180 over the next six months.
Excellent article, about six months late, but hopefully not too late for liberals everywhere to
wake up to the idea that if you claim to want to help improve the lives of the working class you
better listen to them first, and connect with them second. I always thought laughing and sneering
at Trump and particularly his supporters was never going to work. And sure enough it didn't. Nobody
likes being patronised.
Sometimes you've got to have the courage to move beyond a rotting status quo and into a brave
new world. If you don't you leave the door open for something potentially much much worse to take
that opportunity.
How about doing a piece on how the press keep getting it wrong all the time, how you keep misjudging
the mood of the people, the zeitgeist, how afraid you are of change and how as a result you keep
siding with the establishment when the vast majority of people are fed up with its incessant inaction
and bullshit?
Youre letting the fascists in through the open door because youre too afraid to give up your priviledges
and go towards healthy change. You deserve what youre going to get because you spent too much
time on here waffling bullshit and not enough time on the streets listening to what people want.
Total cognitive dissonance. Social media is no good for assessing the mood of the people, its
for pussy cat photos and selfies.
The republicans feared change, but winning was more important to them. As incongruous as it may
seem, a billionaire businessman reached out to voters disenfranchised by some 30 years of partisan
parlour games. Maybe it'll dawn on the Democrats who they should be reaching out to and maybe
it'll dawn on the Republicans that there's more to being a politician than banging on about God
and being against abortion.
I don't like the guy and find some of his views abhorrent and would even have preferred HC,
but... but... this may be a wake up call for politics in America. Not sure it will be because
after Brexit, the finger was pointed at the London middle classes and older voters whereas the
strength of the vote came from the post-industrial heartland destroyed by Thatcher and virtually
ignored by both parties ever since. Still, we'll see.
"With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary
views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War
propaganda station. "
Spot on analysis.
Let the soul-searching amongst the mainstream journalistic elites begin.
People have rspecially started to notice the "with nuance and all contrary views deleted" part.
That is part of the problem and part of the reason Trump got elected as a sort of collective middle
finger to the establishment by ordinary people who are sick of being told what to think and how
to think by unelected elites whose job it is supposed to be to report the FACTS, and not to dictate
what people are allowed to say or think. Because as a great person once said "Facts are sacred."
And as JS Mill said in his famous essay 'On Liberty' - we should not censor unpopular views because
even though the unpopular view may be incorrect we may come to a better understanding of why our
own view is correct by seeing its collision with error. (Quite apart from the fact that the unpopular
view is not always correct and by suppressing it we may never know the truth.)
I hope the mainstream media learn from this disaster and start living up to the ideals of the
intellectual founders of our liberal democracies such as JS Mill who would no doubt be appalled
at the lerhaps well intentioned but counterproductive censorsgip of views which run counter to
that of the prevailing orthodoxy.
It's because they believe we are stupid. The intellectual snobbery of the oxbridge set, think
they are better than us. Little suspecting that most of us can't be arsed with that shite.
The thing that keeps coming back to me with this election, as with Brexit, was the established
candidates ignoring what people were saying. In Brexit, the remain side utterly ignored immigration,
whilst the leave side focused on it. I don't think the remain side realised that immigration wasn't
just conjured up by Daily Mail headlines but was a genuine issue for many people.
In the US, Trump spoke openly about jobs; bringing them back and preventing outsourcing. Looking
again at trade deals to make sure American jobs were protected. Clinton's team ignored this.
Take heed for the future, politicians. Listen to what people actually say, not just the bits
they say that you agree with.
Indeed, that's the problem, a narrow political elite expecting the population to vote as they
think, rather than as the population think. The disconnect between the consensus and the politicians
is wide, the left in particular withdraws to the safety of it's narrow agenda when threatened
leaving the centre wide open.
"Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
- Hillary was virtually without flaws.
- She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women
and children, a warrior for social justice.
- Her scandals weren't real.
- The economy was doing well / America was already great.
- Working-class people weren't supporting Trump.
- If they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only
conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate."
Funny how all of these points were constantly touted in the Guardian... oh the ironny
The neoliberals weren't listening and probably still aren't listening. They will be blaming the
white working class rednecks but there isn't enough of white working class rednecks to cause this
upset. Professional neoliberal policians have neither the insight nor the intelligence to figure
out they are the problem, they alienated the people they ignored while looking after the rich.
We see the same problem in the Labour Party here. The neoliberal Blairites spent 13 years using
identity politics as a way to pretend to be radical while showing utter contempt for the white
(and black) working class. When they lost two elections and Scotland, they blamed the left, as
though no one could reject neoliberalism. Sorry professional neoliberal politicians, your days
of your front trotters in the trough are almost up, you are being rejected and anyone but you
seems to be the preference.
You, Sir or Madam, are a genius. Your analysis - like the analysis of the article - is spot on
and your prose is punchy, concise and grammatically correct. You should be pick of the day.
The neoliberals weren't listening and probably still aren't listening. They will be blaming the
white working class rednecks but there isn't enough of white working class rednecks to cause this
upset. Professional neoliberal policians have neither the insight nor the intelligence to figure
out they are the problem, they alienated the people they ignored while looking after the rich.
We see the same problem in the Labour Party here. The neoliberal Blairites spent 13 years using
identity politics as a way to pretend to be radical while showing utter contempt for the white
(and black) working class. When they lost two elections and Scotland, they blamed the left, as
though no one could reject neoliberalism. Sorry professional neoliberal politicians, your days
of your front trotters in the trough are almost up, you are being rejected and anyone but you
seems to be the preference.
You, Sir or Madam, are a genius. Your analysis - like the analysis of the article - is spot on
and your prose is punchy, concise and grammatically correct. You should be pick of the day.
Very interesting, and striking, parallels with Brexit. A disaffected majority, who don't believe
they are listened to, rally round people who speak their language, engage with their fears and
concerns and give them easy solutions to difficult problems.
Both decisions are tragically wrong, in my view, but its clear there is a huge disconnect between
those on the left (notional or otherwise) and their usual target voters.
Absolutely spot on. And broadly applicable right across the western world. It wasn't Hillary the
personality, or Hillary the crook, or Hillary the incompetent who lost the election.
It was the Hillary the archetypal representative of the smug 'n' shabby liberal stitch-up that's
done us all over, basking in its meritocratic delusions, and raising all the ladders (and greasing
the sides) to the lifeboats in which those delusions were acted out to delusional acclaim...
...even as it was busy handing the world over first (greedily) to transnational capitalism
and now (stupidly) to the marauding squads of pinhead fascists that'll be everywhere in the US
within weeks, maybe days. A couple of million George fucking pinhead Zimmermans.
"Socialism or Barbarism" (rings truer and truer!) is a choice that excludes liberalism only
because liberalism is too morally and aesthetically insubstantial to make the cut. Imagine the
choice in the form of a movie, and liberalism would be the twitching little grass who betrays
the hero for the price of a bottle of White Lighting.
(In real life it's not a bottle of cider, of course: it's more likely a nice old house in a
gentrified area that still holds on to the charming character of the people it displaced,
some of whom spend 5 hours a day on the bus to come back and work in the charming shops
and eateries, or as nannies and cleaners....).
This is a very good piece (as you'd expect from a cultural critic as smart as Frank is), but it
really needs to be read alongside Adolph L. Reed's
excoriating
article in Harper's from 2014, "Nothing Left: The Slow Surrender of American Liberals":
The left has no particular place it wants to go. And, to rehash an old quip, if you have
no destination, any direction can seem as good as any other. The left careens from this oppressed
group or crisis moment to that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source
of political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the
Zapatistas; the urban "precariat"; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT "community"; the grassroots,
the netroots, and the blogosphere; this season's worthless Democrat; Occupy; a "Trotskyist"
software engineer elected to the Seattle City Council) to another. It lacks focus and stability;
its métier is bearing witness, demonstrating solidarity, and the event or the gesture. Its
reflex is to "send messages" to those in power, to make statements, and to stand with or for
the oppressed.
We are in a very bad place right now, in terms of ideas and arguments. The opposition, in pretty
much every western hemisphere country, has been colonised by the same people: professional politicians,
upper-middle-class in social background, educated at the same small group of elite universities,
reflexively committed to meritocratic ideology. They're very good at expressing sympathy for the
marginalised, at saying the right words, at, as Reed says, "sending messages" and engaging in
representational politics. But all those gestures do nothing for the constituencies they supposedly
represent. They're ultimately selfish -- focussed on their own career advancement and the narrow
class interests of the meritocratic-professional elite itself. The opposition, as Frank himself
once said, "has ceased to oppose" in any economically meaningful sense. (Although they're very
good at symbolic forms of opposition on cultural and historical issues.)
And now their constituencies have noticed and have withdrawn their votes.
according to exit polls every section of white America, old, young, affluent, low-income, educated/not
voted Trump, all bar 'young college educated white females', older college educated white females
also voted Trump.
Same here with Brexit, voting patterns show the all white groups voted out, nothing to do with
education levels, income or age.
The pundits write about 'the crisis of liberalism',, hhmmm, I think it should more be 'the rejection
of illiberal openess'. When we say 'immigration needs to be reduced' the 'elites' reach for the
favourite fall back 'you're a white that's racist/fascist/backward/uneducated' etc etc etc response.
Well, turns out, the white part is right, the rest is just class based ignorance. Clinton was
the absolute embodiment of this type of ignorance and arrogance. That basket of deplorables thing
was disgusting, I felt personally insulted by it myself (i'm in the UK). Absolute standard 'elite'
arrogance and hatred of those that don't agree with you. She's just paid for that hate by alienating
absolutely EVERY SINGLE section of white America.
Trump's politics is a rejection of a globalism that has damaged the interests of so many, we're
all far far too open to the forces of the world coming in at us from all directions, Catholics
in Eastern Europe are not allowed their Christian values, are smeared as backward and ordered
by foreign 'elites' in Brussels to drop all that they hold dear or face fines. We've all watched
as the Remoaners showed to the world just exactly how 'tolerant' and 'accepting' they are of those
they don't agree with, erupting into a torrent of class based ignorance and venomous hatred.
Well, they've all been at all this for far too long, and we're all pushing back against it. Spew
race based hate at those that don't agree with you, BBC journalists shouting 'Nazi, fascist, racist'
at any slight tightening up of immigration, Hilary Clinton labelling most white working-class
a basket of fascist deployarables and hey presto, you lose to a repulsive cartoon like Trump.
They need to start thinking on about just exactly who it is in reality that's the race haters.
Most are on the Left.
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Given that Republicans have been opposed to intervention by Big Government at least since the
Great Depression if Trump gets the go ahead for some of his ideas it will be a case of 4 legs
good 2 legs better.
With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and
contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in
to a Cold War propaganda station.
Quite so. And now the elitist corporate media which got everything wrong, including their highly
confident predictions about the result, will now tell you in a highly confident manner all the
things that are going to happen as a result of the thing they said wouldn't happen. First to dash
off a thousand words of hyperventilating predictions?
Jonathan Freedland , so top marks to him for speed, if nothing else.
Interesting article, and in a way I sensed it coming unfortunately, at least in the meaning that
I have always felt that certain liberal and "progressive" thoughts are just too alien from basic
human nature, and are being forced to enter the mainstream a bit too fast, and that this is a
huge risk in the sense that when people decide they are not ready for these and it's time to reject
them properly, then all the valuable, truly liberating and forward-thinking ideas will be drained
along with them and that means dark times ahead indeed.
I am from Eastern-Europe, and, while I don't have a lot of personal memories of the communist
times myself, most of the liberal bits of my cultural heritage comes from the counter-culture,
a lot of the things we value today in my country were, albeit not necessarily all illegal as such,
certainly more of the taboo sort, than they would have been in the West. Now it looks like that
with all this Brexit and America, the West will have to learn to use the liberal thinking to serve
as meaningful criticism of the system that will be built in the future by these new people. It's
the Westerner's turn now, to learn to read between the lines and produce culture with purpose
other than entertainment (if there is any positive side to this, then it should be the rise of
new, creative movies and the end of the high-budget superhero era, and the birth of music with
lyrics worth listening to lol, that's what I keep telling myself as my silver lining for now at
least.)
It's obviously difficult to compare, nothing, in the entire world at the time was this commercialised
and business and technology and life and everything was obviously very different. And, crucially,
whilst the commies declared themselves to be ruling in the name of the common working people,
they had their own breed of intellectuals, at least in my country, there was an approved bunch
of scientists, artists etc, who could stretch it and provide some sense. So, worryingly enough,
from this point of view I wouldn't say they were comparable to the type of anti-intellectualist
mob rule seemingly putting these people into power, and that is my real fear, that these new rulers
will not even have their own bunch of approved scientists who might not approve the views of atheists
or feminists or whatever, but would at least be ready to provide these new governments with sound
advice on the environment, education, health, etc.
I'm not sure how avoidable this could have been in reality, but it should have been, because
we have no time for such ideological bullsh*t games (excuse my words), the damage we are doing
to our own, living planet is becoming irreparable, and we really, absolutely, from all backgrounds
and cultures must work together to basically stay alive.
The arrogance and snotty mindedness of the progressive liberal establishment has be dealt a righteous
slap in the face which they have been asking for, for decades. The Revolt of the Deplorables.
This was the winter of our discontent. Now it is our turn.
Time will tell whether this upset is the beginning of a much better era in the U.S.
I voted for Trump not because I like him (personally I find him repulsive) but because he was
a wrecking ball and a sledge hammer to be used against the liberal progressives that have been
running the U.S. into the ground for decades.
This the Moment of the Ticked Off Deplorables.
This is also a surprise. This is the most exciting time since Truman defeated Dewey.
Except it was the Republicans (not the "white collar liberals") who deregulated the Wall Street
banks. It was the Republicans who gave tax breaks to the wealthy 1% and it was the Republicans
who got rid of welfare. The biggest con of all? That the majority of uneducated Americans who
just voted Republican, think that the GOP represent thier interests and it's all the fault of
the "liberals". We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
And about time, too! That said, you are right about the GOP being the party of deregulation,
tax-breaks for the rich etc. but since in the 35 years since Reagan, when bank deregulation began
in earnest (I know, Nixon repealed the Gold Standard), we have had 16 years of Democratic rule,
and NOTHING has been done to reverse it; in fact, quite the opposite. Most of the damage was done
between Clinton (who repealed Glass-Steigel) and his chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan.
We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
And about time, too! That said, you are right about the GOP being the party of deregulation,
tax-breaks for the rich etc. but since in the 35 years since Reagan, when bank deregulation began
in earnest (I know, Nixon repealed the Gold Standard), we have had 16 years of Democratic rule,
and NOTHING has been done to reverse it; in fact, quite the opposite. Most of the damage was done
between Clinton (who repealed Glass-Steigel) and his chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan.
Thomas Frank is right on the money. People voted for Trump precisely because both parties represent
business as usual and people are sick of it. Same with Brexit.
ank is right on the money. People voted for Trump precisely because both parties represent
business as usual and people are sick of it. Same with Brexit.
The silent majority,the ones who go to work pay their taxes and quietly get on with life have
spoken. Don't underestimate us. We're intelligent, humble and caring. We're entitled to a view.
We've had enough, we don't have to bully scream and shout to get our way, we go down to the polling
station and we put a cross in the box we feel passionately about and we go home back to our quiet
lives-job done.Well done the people of America,you have had the equivalent to our Brexit and now
let's get the world back to how it should be. One of the most satisfying parts is listening to
the Lefties,Luvvies and BBC crying their eyes out. The times they are a changing.
It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its
own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system.
Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!
Amen to that. Thank you, Thomas Frank, for articles such as this one. A lone voice of progressive
reason at the Guardian (neo)liberal circus.
We need to overhaul the DNC, as well as the Guardian and NYT editorial boards.
She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would
have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch.
Spot on. And this is exactly the misery that infects both wings of the Labour Party.
People in politics jostling for power and status, like it's a hobby for them, a kind of shoot-em
up where the consequences of policy affect only other people.
Cameron and Johnson and all the slime of the Tory party suffer from the same disease.
Why do you want to be prime minister, you spam faced Tefal foreheaded dilettante?
"Well, I think I'd be rather good at it."
Well, you weren't. You were awful at it, because you had no basic guiding principles, just
like all the other dilettantes from Eton and all the other posh boy Petri dishes where hubris
is cultivated.
Trump took what should have been democrats' issues. Clinton should simply have tried
to take all of Sanders positions, working with Sanders, and then position Trump as the faker who
was taking the dems positions. Alas, she did not.
Clinton made her usual lame, transparent attempts to co-opt Sanders' positions, but being
Clinton, few people **believe** her.
Sanders backers always said that Clinton was almost uniquely capable of losing to a fraud like
Trump, and here, apparently -- tragically -- we are.
And believing Dems will learn not one goddam thing. Expect the special pleading and blame-shifting
to amp up to jet engine levels. Already Saint Krugman has smeared the Greens for Clinton's loss
in Florida, which seems to mathematically impossible by an order of magnitude.
Clinton lost **Pennsylvania**, for Christ's sake! She seems to have lost Philly!! How does
an even semi-competent candidate pull that off?!?!?
...And Clintonians spent decades claiming neoliberalism was necessary to get moderate voters
who went for Reagan, and that liberalism is too unpopular to win an election. They stuck to that
script in post-Great Recession America, which is not post-Reagan America.
And they stuck with a candidate who has zero ability to get independent voters. Her leftward
moves in response to Sanders on college tuition and more funding for health clinics (which Sanders
said would achieve free primary care in the US) would have got out the vote, but she preferred
to talk in infuriating platitudes and smear Trump as a Russian puppet to get the patriotic vote.
"... but she preferred to talk in infuriating platitudes and smear Trump as a Russian
puppet to get the patriotic vote."
This, I think, is a valid criticism. Hillary and the older Dems were truly out of touch
on this issue and failed to understand how poorly it played with the electorate (which is sad,
because there are some real serious issues with Russia right now). Likewise, they failed to grasp
how desperate Millennials / Rural whites have gotten and thus how important fixing the economy
was for them.
Fix that on "we came, we saw, he died......" with a post up his you know where! Or the no fly
zone thing to give another country to the foundation donors' terrorists. You all missed the point!
All the people don't see what you want us to! You could fool enough of the people when you
needed to!
The Russia nonsense was always overblown, typical Dem tactical ineptitude. I wouldn't be
surprised if it backfired to Trump's advantage.
Dems never stopped to consider that
Any mention of foreign data leakage had to remind people of Clinton's FOIA-avoiding server
escapades, and
You can find lots of Dem "consultants" and "strategists" who themselves have lucrative
histories with sleazy overseas characters (Podesta, Biden's son, etc.).
"The Russia nonsense was always overblown, typical Dem tactical ineptitude. I wouldn't
be surprised if it backfired to Trump's advantage."
From a campaign prospective, right conclusion. Wrong reason. Pushing the Russia connection
damaged Hillary because it played up her "War Hawk" and "Military Industrial complex" ties for
the public, which in turn strengthened the corporocrat accusation.
Worse, to the informed it smelled like W's push for war, and thus reminded everyone of Hillary's
vote on Iraq. And those things hurt.
Clinton is with Bill unmitigated war mongering neoliberalNeocon/ The Clinton Iraq vote
was purely animus! Stepping away is prevarication. What went into Qaddafi was pure evil sent by
Obama and his SecState.
Clinton was more into Sunni/GCC money and influence peddling. The Russian/Putin thing was
fantasy! The main stream media [Stalinist] propaganda did not sell in the 5 key states that went
red from blue.
No, the point is the dems are crooked, Clinton was selected by the DNC (calling it crooked
is repeating myself). I am convinced the US dodged a very severe mistake by electing Trump!
I thought Obama blew it in his first hundred days, when he refused to take on Wall Street,
and instead played idiotic bipartisanship games with totally (and obviously) intransigent Republicans.
But more recently I figured that at least he got the Iran deal going, and that looked like a significant
gain for sanity. Now, if I understand Trump's ramblings on every other Tuesday, the deal is vulnerable.
You mean declare martial law and send the Marines into capture Wall Street, and ship them to
Gitmo? Or didn't you notice the Republicans legalizing financial fraud over the past 40 years?
If you like I can detail the dozen major steps beginning circa 1970 like the camel nose unto
the tent. Step one: retail money market funds as an alternative to bank savings accounts. They
were a big fraud: "safer than FDIC bank savings accounts".
Yes, totally agree with the point that Obama did not understand the strategic moment and
instead aligned himself in a way that legitimized the opposition's points.
Simpson Bowles was benighted. TPP was senseless. How could a party that stood for working
people give away social security and then try to give away jobs some more. Strategists should
have been screaming that this was positioning the party in a way that was opposite to what the
party had stood for in opposition to the republican elite.
Of course, Clinton was the wrong candidate as she is a archetype, tied to Trade deals, Glass
Steagel and even the Iraq war.
I would like to see the democratic party stand fir work in the US.
"Simpson Bowles was benighted. TPP was senseless. How could a party that stood for working people
give away social security and then try to give away jobs some more...."
Just wanted to say, good tactical analysis there.
srbarbour -> sglover... , -1
"I thought Obama blew it in his first hundred days, when he refused to take on Wall Street, and
instead played idiotic bipartisanship games with totally (and obviously) intransigent Republicans."
Hard to say, 2009 had a very different atmosphere and there was a very real desire in the electorate
to return to bipartisanship. Plus, bipartisanship was kind of a major Obama campaign promise.
That said, the only gain Dems got from that was a general fuzzy, awareness the Republican partisanship
is one-sided. A boon that is now tactically useless because the Republicans will control every
branch of the government. So in hindsight, pure fail. However, forgiveable in context.
Anybody but the brain dead could see HRC ran a lazy campaign focused on a non-issue. It's clear
she expected certain quarters of the population's loyalty in voting but offered them nothing.
One hopes these libs begin to wake up.
DemoRats lost working class votes. may be forever (or as long as they stay neoliberal DemoRats).
This is an important defeats of Bill Clinton, who sold the party to wall Street.
Notable quotes:
"... On Thursday night, People for Bernie, a tech-savvy progressive group with ties to Sanders, told CNN it was backing Ellison as a first step in displacing Clinton loyalists with "a leadership untainted by cozy relationships to Wall St. moneymen, corporate behemoths, dictators, or monarchs." ..."
"... In a jab at Dean, People for Bernie co-founder Charles Lenchner added, "Any 50-state strategy must begin with a 50-state accountability project; we reject any effort to unite the party behind the agents of a failed leadership." ..."
As Democrats reel in the wake of Donald Trump's stunning victory, a new storm is brewing inside
the party as competing factions begin to grapple for its leadership.
Howard Dean, who ran the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, announced on Thursday he
would again seek its top role. Soon after he announced, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his top allies
began pushing Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison for the role.
But other politicos expressed interest in the job Friday. Former presidential candidate Martin
O'Malley announced that he is throwing his hat in the ring.
"Since the election, I have been approached by many Democrats who believe our party needs new leadership,"
said the former Maryland Governor. "I'm taking a hard look at DNC Chair because I know how badly
we need to reform our nominating process, articulate a bold progressive vision, recommit ourselves
to higher wages and a stronger middle class, and return to our roots as a nationwide, grassroots
party."
New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman and DNC Vice Chair Ray Buckley is exploring a run, according
to the Boston Globe.
... ... ...
Sanders -- a registered independent who caucuses with Democrats and fought a lengthy primary battle
for the party's nomination this year -- and top allies are touting Ellison for the job. The Muslim-American
congressman currently co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
... ... ...
On Thursday night, People for Bernie, a tech-savvy progressive group with ties to Sanders,
told CNN it was backing Ellison as a first step in displacing Clinton loyalists with "a leadership
untainted by cozy relationships to Wall St. moneymen, corporate behemoths, dictators, or monarchs."
In a jab at Dean, People for Bernie co-founder Charles Lenchner added, "Any 50-state strategy
must begin with a 50-state accountability project; we reject any effort to unite the party behind
the agents of a failed leadership."
The current head of the DNC is Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic operative and former CNN contributor,
who is leading in an interim capacity after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned on the eve of the convention.
Hacked emails appeared to show Wasserman Schultz and other since-departed DNC officials discussing
ways to undermine Sanders' effort to oust Clinton in the primary.
DemoRats lost working class votes. may be forever (or as long as they stay neoliberal DemoRats).
This is an important defeats of Bill Clinton, who sold the party to wall Street.
Notable quotes:
"... But aides said the Clinton campaign's top strategists largely ignored the former president, instead focusing on consolidating the base of voters that helped elect President Barack Obama to the White House. In the closing days of the campaign, Clinton targeted young people, Hispanics and African-Americans with laser like focus, casting Trump as a racist who only sought the presidency to benefit himself. ..."
The campaign communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, said in a statement Friday that "no one
anticipated" losing. She said many factors were at work, but she listed Comey as chief among them.
"We didn't blame everyone but ourselves," Palmieri said. "We acknowledged a lot of challenges we
faced, plenty of mistakes made along the way, some challenges we weren't able to overcome."
She added: "What changed in the last week that made his turn out go up and our's go down? The only
thing apparent was Comey. It was one thing too many. Could not overcome it."
Democrats close to Bill Clinton said Thursday that one mistake Clinton's top aides made was not listening
to the former president more when he urged the campaign to spend more time focusing on disaffected
white, working class voters.
Many in Clinton's campaign viewed these voters as Trump's base, people so committed to the Republican
nominee that no amount of visits or messaging could sway them. Clinton made no visits to Wisconsin
as the Democratic nominee, and only pushed a late charge in Michigan once internal polling showed
the race tightening.
Bill Clinton, advisers said, pushed the campaign early on to focus on these voters, many of whom
helped elected him twice to the White House. The former president, a Clinton aide said, would regularly
call Robby Mook to talk about strategy and offer advice.
But aides said the Clinton campaign's top strategists largely ignored the former president,
instead focusing on consolidating the base of voters that helped elect President Barack Obama to
the White House. In the closing days of the campaign, Clinton targeted young people, Hispanics and
African-Americans with laser like focus, casting Trump as a racist who only sought the presidency
to benefit himself.
"... Some of those applications are coming from the #NeverTrump crowd, the source said, and include former national security officials who signed one or more of the letters opposing Trump. ..."
"... Fifty GOP national security experts signed an August letter saying Trump "would put at risk our country's national security and well-being" because he "lacks the character, values and experience" to occupy the Oval Office, making him "the most reckless president in American history." ..."
"... Another bipartisan letter cited concern about potential foreign conflicts of interest Trump might encounter as president, and called on him to disclose them by releasing his tax returns. Trump has refused to do so, saying he is under audit and will make the returns public only once that is done. ..."
The extraordinary repudiation -- partly based on Trump's rejection of basic US foreign policy
tenets, including support for close allies -- helped spark the hashtag #NeverTrump. Now, a source
familiar with transition planning says that hard wall of resistance is crumbling fast.
There are "boxes" of applications, the source said. "There are many more than people realize."
Some of those applications are coming from the #NeverTrump crowd, the source said, and include
former national security officials who signed one or more of the letters opposing Trump. "Mea
culpas" are being considered -- and in some cases being granted, the source said -- for people who
did not go a step further in attacking Trump personally.
... ... ...
Fifty GOP national security experts signed an August letter saying Trump "would put at risk
our country's national security and well-being" because he "lacks the character, values and experience"
to occupy the Oval Office, making him "the most reckless president in American history."
Another bipartisan letter cited concern about potential foreign conflicts of interest Trump might
encounter as president, and called on him to disclose them by releasing his tax returns. Trump has
refused to do so, saying he is under audit and will make the returns public only once that is done.
It remains to be seen what kind of team Trump will pull together, how many "NeverTrumpers" will apply
for positions and to what degree the President-elect will be willing to accept them.
There's a fight underway within the Trump transition team about whether to consider "never Trumpers"
for jobs, one official tells CNN. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is leading the transition
team, has been working to persuade Trump and other top officials to consider Republicans who openly
opposed his campaign. That has caused some friction with those who see no place for people who didn't
support their candidate.
"... At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want. ..."
"... Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money. ..."
"... Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. ..."
"... Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it. ..."
"... Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency. ..."
"... The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump. ..."
What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It
is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.
At the core of that structure are the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives,
and fundraisers; the major media, centered in New York and Washington DC; the country's biggest corporations,
their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks,
their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington;
and the wealthy individuals who invest directly in politics.
At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and
Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of
these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced
political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The presidency was won by Donald Trump,
who made his fortune marketing office towers and casinos, and, more recently, starring in a popular
reality-television program, and who has never held elective office or had anything to do with the
Republican party. Hillary Clinton narrowly won the popular vote, but not enough of the states and
their electors secure a victory.
Hillary Clinton's defeat is all the more remarkable in that her campaign vastly outspent the Trump
campaign on television and radio advertisements, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Moreover, her campaign
had the support in the general election not of only the kingpins of the Democratic party but also
many leading Republicans, including most of the politically active denizens of Wall Street and the
top executives of America's largest corporations, and even former Republican president George HW
Bush. Her campaign team was run by seasoned professionals who knew the ropes. She had the visible
and forceful backing of Barack Obama, whose popularity has soared in recent months, and his popular
wife. And, of course, she had her husband.
Trump, by contrast, was shunned by the power structure. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential
candidate in 2012, actively worked against Trump's nomination. Many senior Republicans refused to
endorse him, or even give him their support. The Republican National Committee did not raise money
for Trump to the extent it had for other Republican candidates for president.
What happened?
There had been hints of the political earthquake to come. Trump had won the Republican primaries,
after all. More tellingly, Clinton had been challenged in the Democratic primaries by the unlikeliest
of candidates – a 74-year-old Jewish senator from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist
and who was not even a Democrat. Bernie Sanders went on to win 22 states and 47% of the vote in those
primaries. Sanders' major theme was that the country's political and economic system was rigged in
favor of big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.
... ... ...
The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn't
take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely
content with the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better
off than they've been in years."
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most
Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do
the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining
real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers
without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile,
have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate
subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference
by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and
they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party
has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused
instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from
upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years
had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class
wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements
without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new
ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class –
failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help
workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from
22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and the working
class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy's gains.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that
large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising
result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration –
has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft
the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his
presidency.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners
as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism
will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost
jobs and lower wages.
The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself
off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that would
mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.
I'm in agreement with RR, as far as he goes. He could have gone further, but it's probably not
the time or place for that, anyway, that road is depressing.
Trump's an opportunist, certainly, but a very, very, successful one indeed. He has, after all,
made an awful lot of money that way, so he's not that lacking in intelligence and ruthlessness.
If only Sanders had been more ruthless and willing to stick the knife into the Democratic Party
when he had the chance.
Trump, essentially ran as an independent. First he needed to defeat the Republican Party's
establishment, which he did, take over the party and only then was he ready to challenge the Democrats
and beat them down. He succeeded in his strategy, beating both of them, which is an astonishing
feat, historic in character.
It actually gets worse for liberals. Trump also took on the liberal media and despite their
best efforts to destroy him, brazenly supporting Clinton and ridiculing Trump and his supporters...
Trump didn't just survive the onslaught, but crushed the media as well. Vast swathes of the population
hate and despise the media as much as they loathe the political elite. People simply don't believe
the media anymore, so most of their attacks on Trump were useless and ineffective when they came.
And it really isn't Trump that's important here. It's the character of the wave he surfed
on and lifted him into the White House. But the media ignored the wave and have done for years
and years. Now, the fascist chickens have really come home to roost and much of the responsibility
lies with the incredible ignorance, arrogance and mind-numbing stupidity that characterizes so
much of the media.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more."
And they haven't since Bill Clinton had his way with the party in the 90s.
As much as the right enjoys calling the Clintons liberals, they're not.
They're neo-liberals, which is a whole different philosophy.
The Dems abandoned those who supported them for generations and we are all living in the ever-worsening
result of that betrayal.
So Robert Reich spent the past year enthusiastically encouraging us to vote for a candidate who
embodied every last bit of the formula that he now tells us was a sure loser. Should he perhaps
have warned his long-time good friend Hillary that she was on the wrong road? That being the servant
of Wall Street and promising the status quo with incremental progress was a recipe for failure?
As you say, sir:
"The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself
off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that
would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump."
This includes Obama's role as enabler.
Ironic, that Obama was a charismatic campaigner who failed entirely to become a charismatic president.
And he lost to a candidate who had another sort of charisma: That of a lying, sneering, insulting,
self-important clown.
Shows how bad things have become for a once hard-working & productive middle class now set adrift.
The same power structure that has for decades ignored the plight of millions in favour of it's
own elitist wealth building, little wonder this election result. The neo liberals by their arrogance
and lack of empathy have brought us to this setting us back decades. Clinton was definately does
not hold any sympathy for the downtrodden, she cannot, she's in another class, the billionaire
type. That is why we must never trust them or ever look again to people with this background to
help us. They are responsible for the descent towards fascism and the people are responsible for
their utter gullability in believing them in the first place.
Obama is the worst president and most divisive. he is the master race baiter as well.
Nov 11, 2016 | Pinterest
How the 2016 US election night unfolded
The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn't
take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely
content with the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better
off than they've been in years."
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most
Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor
do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant
or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers
without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile,
have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate
subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference
by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and
they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the
party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who
have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting
votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those
years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline
in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed
for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their
jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class
– failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them,
or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership
sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and
the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy's gains.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that
large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising
result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration
– has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft
the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his
presidency.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners
as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism
will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost
jobs and lower wages.
The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself
off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that
would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.
I've known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for
her. In my view, she's the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now
have.
But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should
have, because he's leading a political movement for change.
The upcoming election isn't about detailed policy proposals. It's about power – whether
those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. [...]
Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation's
heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in
the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump.
At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as
I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end "crony capitalism."
They detested "corporate welfare," such as the Wall Street bailout.
They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for
hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers.
End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. [...]
You don't care about the details of proposed policies and programs.
You just want a system that works for you.
If you click his name at the byline you'll see how many articles published in 2016. Now think
about the number of pieces published that pushed the pro-Clinton argument of more of the same.
"Third-Way" Democrats made an art form of triangulating a position between the old-line liberal
Democrats the positions made by the mainstream corporate Republican party. By tacking as far right
as possible, these corporate Democrats could scrape off enough of the business friendly, socially
progressive Independents and Republicans to stymie any sort of Republican Presidential bid. Corporate
America gave to both parties, but loves first and foremost to be on the side of the winner, where
its influence can manifest itself in business friendly legislation, politically friendly appointments,
no prosecutions for criminal behavior. no enforcement of labor or business legislation and no
break-ups of monopolies using the still existent anti-trust legislation.
One of the things that made Republicans furious during Bill Clinton's term was that he was skilled
in the extreme at taking issues the Republicans were pushing and getting out in front of them
and making the issue his own, making the result at least somewhat palpable to the old liberals
of the world.
The Democrats became the other war party, the other big business party, the other big banking
party, the other big agriculture party, the other big oil party, the other big communications
party, the other international exploitation party, the other anti-union party the other big medical
party, the other big pharmaceutical party, the other international trade deal party.
Bill Clinton sat down with Alan Greenspan and agreed to be the other austerity party. He supported
low tax rates on the billionaires and corporations and low tariffs. That led to lower services
for the public and small businesses and the tax burden being borne by the long suffering middle
class and working poor. The non-working poor suffered as well with no welfare, more stringent
unemployment benefits, and a stagnant job market for meaningful jobs. At the same time, law enforcement
was focusing on them, putting them in prison for extreme amounts of time for often trivial matters.
But Bill had an overall good economy because of the Computer Generation, so the economy grew and
he was able to deliver to George W. Bush a budget surplus, which, if maintained, would have entirely
paid off the national debt by now.
Unfortunately all those economic gains were being funneled to the top. Overall wages of working
people actually declined since Ronald Reagan came in to begin the austerity measures while the
wealth of the top 1% quadrupled. Working people were losing good paying jobs and having to have
both wage earners in a family work lesser jobs to make up for hemorrhaging income. These lesser
jobs not only had less wages, they had less benefits. Against an out of control health care industry,
banking industry, communications industry and investment industry they were being sucked dry well
before retirement. No amount of savings could stand up to catastrophic illness. People's 401K
plans were repeatedly slaughtered while the big guys who precipitated the mess ended up owning
more and more of the means of generating wealth in our country. Remember the absolutely sinful
Republican law that made student debt unforgivable at the same time that school costs were skyrocketing?
It was so unpopular, Republicans needed help from Joe Biden and other corporate Democrats to get
it passed.
Never mind the corporate media and Republican lies about Barack Obama being a "Liberal", he was,
in fact, another version of corporate Democrat. Since he was black, the racist Republicans could
do the unprecedented in America politics: they decided to block everything. For no good reason.
Other than he was black and no one would hold them accountable. He went along with the austerity
plan because he had no other option. Able enough manager, he was able to drastically reduce the
national deficit virtually on his own. But he kept up the wars. Hell, he and Hillary Clinton started
wars for oil and natural gas. Just like the Republicans. Along with the very expensive war and
secret intelligence budget and police state budget. He has restarted the nuclear weapons program,
never mind that we already have enough nukes to destroy the world 100 times over. He also longed
for hanging his hat on another record-breaking Trans Pacific Partnership international trade deal
encompassing 40% of the world's Gross Domestic Product. Like Bill Clinton/George HW Bush's NAFTA
on steroids. Jobs would be flowing out to low wage countries and waves of filthy international
profits would come flowing back in to: the top 1%, where presumably the fraud of trickle down
economics would waged on the American worker once again.
Yup the elites got hammered Tuesday. Even though they say they are for democracy, they aren't.
The elites want open borders and the people at the bottom of the wage scale are having to compete
against these low wage border jumpers.
How can the elites say they are for open borders and for raising wages. It isn't possible.
It is the law of supply and demand. Sure the government could pass minimum wage increases but
that will drive businesses to automate as much as possible. That ain't going to help these people
either!
Wikileaks proved that the Democrat party is the party of the ruling class elites, no question.
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders? Give me a break, These two phonies are owned lock stock and
barrel by Wall Street and the Big Banks. Warren's Consumer Protection racket is like Dodd-Frank
- a Potemkin village of fake reforms designed to kill off any competition to the ruling class
oligarchs.
A better analysis than the hysterical white/kkk/racist/woman hater etc pieces that have been flooding
the pages lately.
Its "dont piss on my back and tell me its raining" stuff, Obamacare has stung those in work,
in some cases badly, and those out of work see no hope or change either.
No-one went to jail for screwing the world economy.
Even the government agencies who had oversight, and failed to see one single indicator of trouble
saw no-one demoted, just a call for more power.
And lastly importing more people to compete for low skilled jobs from overseas does keep downward
pressure on wages, and make jobs harder to find for the native born. Pretending otherwise in some
misguided sense of international "solidarity" is punishing your own people for outsiders advantage.
The roles of the two parties have been interchanged over the years, but they both ended up the
same way -- serving the Davos community.
Some have suggested the formation of a third party as a possible remedy. I don't think that
is the solution. As long as campaigns are financed through private contributions, the politicians
elected would be beholden to the rich, regardless of the number of parties involved. The voice
of the less privileged voters will not be heard. To have a truly representative body of elected
officials, private (including corporate) campaign contributions should be eliminated from politics.
Candidates should disseminate their message and platform in publicly funded campaigns. So I would
say don't worry about the number of parties. Just get rid of Citizens United and limit spending
for political campaigns to public funding.
The present Republican-controlled government will not do that. HRC had promised to get rid
of Citizens United. The only remedy now is to organize and try to give the House in 2 years to
whoever will do so.
If was the duffus you worked for Mr. Reich who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act ushering in the
tech bubble, the housing bubble and now the 'everything' bubble. A financialization of our economy
that has benefited only the top 10 to 15 percent of the population.
I don't usually agree w Sex Reich but he mostly right here. The Democratic Party has been corrupted
& a tool of Goldman Sachs, Wall Street, Big Banks, & Corrupt Democrat billionaires ...
Wall Street does care if the kill growth & jobs as long as they keep interest rates at Zero
& Print trillions to fuel the market & fill their pockets. Same w the banks.
The Democrats have Total comtempt for working Americans out here in what they call flyover land.
You know... IW WI MI OH. So Reich is right there but more Gov, more socialism is not the answers.
Economic growth & free Enterprise w sound monetary policy to crest jobs & raise incomes is what
we need & what Trump will provide.
There's definitely a failure of government to do its job: to ensure that the market economy works
to improve the lives of all people (they instead ensure that they get a job at a Goldman Sachs
or a Morgan Stanley once they leave government). Robert Reich points out in the article that the
government never steps in to prevent anti-monopoly practices. To his point, one has only to look
at the over-valued market capitalizations of the financial and pharmaceutical sectors to see that
these guys are getting a free ride. Since not everyone can be a Paul Volcker, one may have to
raise the pay grade of civil servants to attract the best talents.
Whether he's a Democrat or a Republican, the white voter is a bit lost, unable to find his
way in a world where the white man no longer dominates. This doesn't apply to the working or middle
class.
This said, it's not because we want change that we're going to cast our vote for a monster
like Trump. We know what happened in 1933 in Germany, in 1917 in Russia. Whether it's gas chambers
or the Goulag, these psychopaths (Hitler, Stalin) can go very far. The worst ones are the toned-down
versions: a Hitler Light. I sure won't vote for Marine Le Pen.
It's truly a worrying time for the intelligent citizen. Democrats fail the middle class, yet for
all my life there's only been one party who would throw their own mother on hot coals and walk
over her body to give a rich man a tax cut: the Republican Party. I hope it's true that Trump
represents their defeat just as much as the Democrats. They've sold out their base for decades
now, peddling condescending lies and culture war excuses for their greed and cronyism. Not a single
Republican used to be an expert scientist until reducing pollution was going to cost their donors
a few dollars, then all of sudden they all knew better than a PhD how the climate worked. Their
last President started a war and gave no-bid government contracts to his friends, and even tried
to privatize Social Security so business associates could skim off the top of that too, consequences
be damned. When neither side is either willing or able to save you, what can you do?
Mr. Reich, you can't see the forest for the trees. Hillary promised that AFTER you lost your job
to bad trade deals, she'd help you to retrain to become a 7-11 night clerk. In essence, she was
offering to bury your job in a fine casket. Donald offered to fight for your job and shake up
America's trade deals if he had to in order to level the playing field and keep our manufacturing
here. And oh yea, bring some jobs back home too. He also said he would protect them from cheap
labor pouring across the border legally and illegally. Illegal Latinos don't all work picking
lettuce - some drive trucks, do construction, are plumbers, carpenters, electricians, shipyard
workers, you know - jobs our own citizens want. It's not about whether you can strangle another
company with union demands, it's about the lack of jobs period. So in essence, Hillary wanted
open borders and all of our jobs going to Latinos. Donald wants the opposite.
Wonder what makes you Einsteins think the republicans are now suddenly for the working man? Republicans
have always been on the side of big money interests, and nothing has changed. Trump is just there
to placate the mid western rubes. 'Mericuns are so naive. (no tolerance for propaganda like the
Euros or Russians seem to have.) Trump is just a head fake. Its business as usual. He's just gonna
pick up where Obama and Shrub left off. Seen this trick before.
The Guardian needs to publish an editorial apologizing for being part of this problem. During
the Sanders-Clinton race, the Guardian was nothing but derisive towards Sanders, and elevated
Clinton as the responsible and adult choice to stop Donald Trump. They even compared Sanders to
Nader as a spoiler from 2000, not realizing that all the warning signs were there that Clinton
would play the role of John Kerry in 2004.
There were comments in the comment section with people saying "I still don't fully understand
the difference between Clinton and Sanders, can someone please explain it to me?" That was the
Guardian's job. For the record, here is the correct explanation.
For decades the Democratic Party has abandoned working people and embraced globalization at
their expense. Clinton was the candidate of continuity with that policy, Sanders was the candidate
of "Hey, that was actually a bad idea, our mistake, we'll start caring about your issues as well."
It was obvious that Clinton would be vulnerable in a general election against anyone who ran a
populist platform, which Trump was doing.
This train wreck was obvious from a mile away. The DNC and the media need to own this blunder.
You are correct. I would add that electing trump has ended the dlc Democratic party. Of course
my conjecture remains to be proved by events going forward. Still this rightwing shift has a real
chance now to remain in power like the collapsed dlc Clinton Obama clique for a considerable period
ahead. And besides that a restive U.S. working class is in motion with little obvious direction
to the left right now. I would expect though a left opposition is coming rather soon.
The US is a country with a lot of very angry and unhappy people. The nation is in decline and
the people are fearful; they know something is terribly wrong but they do not have the political
acumen to deal with the situation. The two political parties, co-opted if not largely owned by
the plutocracy-, offer no respite from the oppression of which, in fact, they are the instruments
being vassals of their plutocratic masters.
Unfortunately, the plutocracy and their subservient mass media have convinced about half of
the population to vote, to their own destruction, for continual transfer of wealth and power to
the corporations and plutocrats-. The Trumpers, arguably less educated, politically ignorant and
naive, easily manipulated, and riddled with fear fueled with bigotry, are the leading edge of
the discontent and fright. However, their blindness to reality is a severe obstacle to any possibility
of getting that nation back on the track. The plutocrats-, like all parasites, will drain the
nation of its lifeblood and then move on to another country to exploit.
As long as the Trumpeters and those of their ilk can be so easily duped and manipulated, it
is unlikely that there will be any common ground. In fact, common ground is not what is needed.
Rather, what is needed is an aggressively progressive agenda to restore democracy, economic recovery
and re-establishment of a rapidly disappearing middle class.
Politicians like Clinton and Obama give paid speeches behind closed doors on Wall St, whom they
bailed out at the expense of the people. They throw $10k-a-plate fundraisers with celebrities,
and cozy up to the profit-over-people industries like big pharmaceutical and big oil. They are
for hedge fund managers, payday lenders, defense contractors, and credit card companies. Then
they have the gall to send out "tweets" saying we must overturn Citizens United.
I realize the Republicans are no better, in fact, they're even worse, but everyone knows who
and what they are. They make no bones about it, they don't dress up in wolf's clothing and pretend
they are for the working man.
Democrats do. Democrats are like the Republicans from 30 years ago. Over the last 3 decades,
the left has moved to the right and the right has moved into an insane asylum. So now it's the
Democrats who do the red-baiting (see their treatment of Sanders) and the RNC are accusing neoliberal
centre-right politicians like Obama of being a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal.
You are forgetting to add in the "for profit' colleges. How much did Debbie Dearest get from *that*
lobby? How many millions did Bill get to sit on their boards? These political grifters got paid
big money by the very entities which were foreclosing on homes, suffocating kids with student
loan debt, and tanking the economy via Wall Street schemes. The Dems thought we weren't paying
attention?
Trump is offering a solution, that's all. Can he implement it, probably not, but no one else is
even talking about re negotiating NAFTA, penalizing China or anything else to bring back millions
of good paying factory jobs.
Our politicians are out of touch, and corrupted by the oceans of money thrown at them. The 58
million people who voted for Trump want anyone to talk to them about what has happened to their
lives and opportunities and address their problems.
Hillary may in fact be the most competent politician, but that is the problem. She never came
across as a leader who would lead us out of our problems. So we elected a lying misogynist who
is, at least, not a politician!
Reich debated Chris Hedges on democracynow before the election, Hedges pointed out
to him that under Ronald Ray-Gun the levers of power were given over to all the
corp's of the world, there isn't a DNC or a RNC, it's a less than one percent secure hold
on all power, Trump is just another puppet --
The last two paragraphs are absolutely dead on with what happened. You can't cater to minorities
and expect the majority to stick with you forever as they suffer. The Democrats are so blind they
didn't understand why Bernie surged or why Trump won but this writer has real clarity and speaks
the truth absolutely on it. If you ignore the majority, which is mostly working class or rural
citizens, you lose election after election with never ever holding total power for long. Trump
truly needs to be a Teddy Roosevelt up there and set the barn on fire to chase all of the rats
out and rebuild it.
That's what we need and at least there is the tiniest sliver of hope he will, whereas with
Hillary we would have received more establishment politics which always include purposeful half-truths
and omissions at the working class's expense. Seriously, Schumer and Pelosi need to be investigated
with Hillary Clinton because the way they act up there is exactly what made America a stagnant
decaying landscape.
I think it's time we get to the real issues the majority and minority citizens face together
and stop beating to death your four issues that are inconsequential to the other 90 % of us in
one way or another. That goes for both parties too. It makes me wonder if they ever talk to anyone
but the people who have money. It would seem so and it needs to change now because them people
live in a bubble and bubbles always burst. Drag the swamp Donald on both sides of the isle and
you will be my hero forever. Fail and you will be my most hated president yet.
And on a final note, thank god the Guardian has pulled back from the left some now and is being
a good news source again. Thank you for this article and a big thank you to this writer for telling
it like it
Once the Democratic Party was the party of the working man. The union member. Blue collar.
Trying to get higher wages for the working man.
The Republican Party was the party of capital. Bankers. Corporate types. Millionaires.
The Democrats abandoned the working man for the underclass.
Now it seems to becoming that the Republicans are the party of people who work for a living
at a private job, along with the business owners.
The Democrats represent those who either don't work, or those who work for the State: welfare
recipients, students, public union members, most every staffer in DC. Hollywood types. Millionaires,
especially dot com ones.
Despite calling it racist over and over, unfettered immigration holds wages down. Free trade
with China and Mexico guts unions and makes the proposed $15/hr minimum wage a joke when factories
have all moved to Mexico or China. It's a fine thing with Britain, Germany or Canada, but a big
loser with low wage countries. Especially with China who puts barriers in place for OUR exports.
It also didn't help when Katy Perry, Madonna and J.Lo endorsed Hillary. It sent more people
towards the Republicans looking for people who looked like them. Who got up in the morning to
go to work.
If U.S. Democrats have any sense, they'll kick the DNC leadership losers out and let Bernie and
Elizabeth Warren lead the Party. Then we'll have at least one party that represents the interests
of Workers.
Trump has two years to make the lives of his supporters substantially better. Looking
at the people around him, that's not likely to happen. I can't wait to see him make the case that
more tax cuts for Huuge corporations will somehow help Working People! If they try more of the
same, then the market crash will happen on their watch.
Good luck in 2018 then. Dems re-take House & Senate, with Bernie & Elizabeth Warren leading
the way...
We are living through the death of "growth", the death of capitalism. The 1% are using the 99%
as human shields to buffer themselves from the collapse of their religion and their Gawd, horded
wealth. Trump will sellout his Chumps worse than Obama... And the idea that the TwoParty will
ever move to meet the social needs of humanity is a pipe dream. The only way we will get this
is by Direct Democracy. The 99% votes policy. The government are employees who implement those
policies... or they are fired.
Nearly every single elected politician currently in office on both sides is bought and paid for
and works in the best interest of large corporations, not in the best interest of we the people.
A complete purge, a system flush is required if we are to take our country back.
It seams like a monumental task, it looks like an impossible mission when you look at the sheer
amount of money and power in play but it is actually simple and it's all on us, all we need to
do is stop voting for Repocrats and start voting for people of integrity outside of these two
establishment parties.
That is the only way to quickly affect real change and if everyone did that we'd have our country
back in no time. So stop bashing the people who are voting third party and independent, stop telling
them that their vote is wasted or a vote for the "other side", realize that there are no two sides
really and join them in voting the Repocrats out of everything and voting in the people who will
overturn Citizens United, outlaw lobbying and pass a new campaign finance law that will take the
money complete out of politics and allow us to elect the congress and the president that will
work for us, not the Wall Street or MIC.
Is Trump's election really a rejection of the "power structure"? How could that be since that
power structure, whether Democrat or Republican, remains intact decade after decade? I don't think
Trump's victory is a rejection of the power structure. The rejection of the power structure was
embodied, if anywhere, by the Sanders campaign, but it was defied by the Clinton's and by actors
like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and by the fraud employed by those actors during the primaries.
In a system of only two parties voting for one or the other can simply be a vote based in anger
about an excluded middle, or a non-existent "left". These frustrating complaints tell you more
about the result than does "the power structure" who could care less which party wins, so long
as their interests are served.
Some sanity at last amidst the demented ragings of the identity politics crowd that STILL does
not understand that it was them who put Trump in the White House. Not white male rage. Not the
shy white female vote. Not any other race/gender/sexuaity category that you wish to dream up.
What put Trump in the White House was a deeply dysfunctional political system. The fact that
the symbol of this deeply dysfunctional political system happened to be female is neither here
nor there. Understand this. Understand this and learn.
Ditch the identity politics. Become a real progressive, not a fake progressive deriving fatally
deluded ideas from exclusio
Reich has some points, but is ignoring several key circumstances, such as the 72K$ median income
among Trump supporters, but mainly hostile legislators blocking anything more than incremental
changes as to wealth redistribution such as the ACA. Neither Obama nor Clinton have supernatural
powers to get progressive measures passed through republican congress.
The Guardian once represented the working class. Not any more.
The next president had been decided. The elites, the lobbyists, the corporate bosses, and the
media all decided the next president. Only one thing missing. The voters. They weren't playing
ball! Those pesky working class voters! Now the media get to pretend they were with us all along!
"In an article out today at The Washington Post, Freddie DeBoer makes this case. He points
out that Sanders during the Democratic primary won in key states, like Michigan and Wisconsin,
that Clinton lost in the general, and that Sanders was able to attract independent voters. He
also notes Sanders's higher favorability and popularity ratings. Of course, such arguments are
entirely speculative. We don't know how Sanders would have fared under Republican attacks. And
we can't forget that Sanders lost the primary, by a not insignificant amount.
"But one of the biggest arguments made by Clinton and her supporters was that she was pragmatic
and electable-the safe candidate. Sanders's campaign, with its proposals for a $15 minimum wage
and universal health care, was derided as pie-in-the-sky, and the candidate himself painted his
platform as an electoral disaster. I suspect that more than a few Democrats went with their heads
instead of their hearts when casting their votes for Clinton. But we found out that playing a
safe and moderate campaign (i.e., picking Tim Kaine, the most forgettable man in existence) doesn't
necessarily translate into a winning one. Clinton failed to pick up moderate Republicans and white
women. And many of her supporters skated over her extreme unfavorability ratings and her inability
to generate excitement.
"There is no concrete evidence that Sanders would have won. But we were sold a candidate who
we were told was electable, when most of the signs pointed to the fact that she wasn't."
Democratic party turned into a party of identity politics painting by the numbers. Here is how
they assemble their base by pandering to each group specifically:
*women - check
*blacks - check
*latino - check
*lgbt -check
*millenials - check
*educated white collar progressives - check
But then it turns out these groups are not one-dimensional and their voting is not based on
just a single identity. They are complex people. And this is how the Democratic voting base splintered.
There was no message unifying them.
First Brexit, now Trump ... world politics are not going the way that Guardianistas envisaged!
So where has it all gone wrong for the left?
What Rubin says about the democrats abandoning the working class in the US could equally apply
to Labour in the UK.
Serves the Washington and London elites f***ing well right, you might say.
But whereas the Washington/New York democrats will just have to lump it, the London elites don't
want to accept Brexit because they didn't get the result they wanted, and they will try to do
anything to stop it.
If they do, and they might because they will stop at nothing, it will destroy any fleeting idea
of democracy in Britain.
And for what?
To remain a member of a corrupt and bankrupt euro project that is running off the rails?
The euro elite is as bent as they come. What they did and are doing to the greeks is unforgivable.
Yanis Varoufakis was against Brexit not because he supports the Brussels autocrats, but because
he thinks that the best way to combat the world's biggest threats - i.e., climate change - is
through combined efforts (not much point in one country trying to combat climate change on its
own if no one else bothers).
The euro project is doomed. The 28 or 30 countries can agree on nothing (response to refugee crisis?),
except to punish those that dissent
Trump & the GOP don't represent the working class [either]. All the misguided "uneducated, poor
white folk" will find that out soon enough when the new regime is allowed to ride roughshod over
all the gov't support programs they've relied on.
Think he served one year and resigned. He was too much of an idealist as came from educational
system and could not enough accomplished to justify himself being in that position as per what
I saw him say many years ago.
Yes Reich was a Clinton appointee. He wrote a book about his four years as Secretary of Labor.
It is an interesting read. My take from that book was how Bill gutted labor influence inside his
admin.
The Clintos and Obama watched as their fellow blue-class and middle class workers were gobbled
up by larger and larger corporations, and now they are surprised that they refuse to vote for
them? Trumps message to African Americans was simple and so painfully true: "Vote for me, what
do you have to lose?". In the end, most voters decided "what do I have to lose?"
Because four million people voted for someone even more right wing then trump. If you think Gary
Johnson is a supporter of expanded government services, then you're entirely unfamiliar with his
career as new mexico's governor.
Thomas Ferguson granted an interview this morning. In it he said,
(in a paper from 2014 he predicted that) "Hillary Clinton would have a lot of trouble putting
together the old coalition of effectively Wall Street and if you'll allow me to speak quickly
and directly for the sake of communication, identity politics. They're really interesting to study.
You can see for example in the white college age women that Hillary only got 6% more of those
than Trump did which is sort of unbelievable. But let me come to what I think is probably the
heart of the matter. I think we really are at the end of the classical democratic formula of the
Clinton period which was Wall Street plus identity politics. I think this is it. You're never
going to be able to put that humpty dumpty back together again. If the democrats want to win they're
going to actually have to make a strong appeal to working class Americans. Now you know the problem
this is going to create. There's a ton of money in the democratic party. It is not going to sit
there and tolerate candidates like Sanders. They just really despised and hated Sanders. So we're
now going to have a very interesting situation where you've got a top heavy party with cash at
the top and no mass at the base at all, or very little."
The interesting thing about Ferguson is he doesn't speak or write that often as he dislikes
arguing, but when he does come to a conclusion he is willing to share he is seldom wrong.
I think you, Reich and Ferguson are spot on. It is very hard to argue against "identity" politics
since it is basically arguing that minorities (racial, sexual, religious, whatever) have rights.
Unfortunately these "identity" groupings somehow left out the working class. So the Democratic
Party ended up representing a coalition that involved Wall Street (at its center) and many other
small minority groups. What was left out of this coalition was any voice for the working class.
Now that is a classical example of divide and conquer. And yes this is a case of the big money
of capitalism dividing America's workers.
Fifty years ago organized labor unions had a seat at the table who could speak for American
workers (whatever small group the individual worker may have belonged to). Today that is gone.
Hopefully in the coming years the Democratic Party can restore its roots and begin to represent
that class of Americans who actually work for a living. These workers can be divided into hundreds
of different groups -- white, black, male, female, straight,gay, wonks, blue collar, hispanic,
many others. But together they can have a voice in the national dialogue. If electing Trump is
the way to educate the Democratic Party honchos on what is required then perhaps Trump's win will
serve a useful purpose.
Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the right. Although rejected by the GOP (racism) Obama
continued that move. Hillary could have easily won the election by reaching out to the millions
disenfranchised for more than 30 years, but failed to do so. What and who made her stick to a
campaign of 'Not Trump' and elitism is puzzling but not an enigma.
My guess is Bill and Wall Street created the plan, and it went down in a blaze.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more".
A good article which explains the route the Democrats have taken over the years. Faced with
the Republican victories of Ronald Reagan from 1981-1989 the democrats chose to move to the right,
the party having a previous lineage with ordinary workers back to FDR and further. Bill Clinton
in 1992 took onboard the third way calling itself the New Democrats. In the UK Tony Blair copied
this following on after the tories Margaret Thatcher and John Major with his New Labour transformation
of the party into a virtual copy of the tories.
Just like the 2010 election in the UK with Labour, many people who would have voted Democrat
simply did not turn out for Hilary Clinton and did not vote at all. With complete establishment
backing including Wall Street and the MSM she lost to Donald Trump. Many would have voted for
him anyway but a sizeable percentage must have used him as an anti Clinton vote. Jill Stein called
Hilary Clinton corrupt. Clinton is a war hawk she supported the Iraq war and doesn't appear to
have learnt from the disaster as she was mainly responsible for the catastrophy in Libya. She
loves to boast, we came, we saw, he died, meaning Col. Gaddafi she is more reserved about the
later deaths of the ambassador Christopher Stevens and some of his colleagues in the Libyan embassy
as a direct result of supporting the jihadis. While still secretary of state she said that she
would arm anyone fighting against President Assad thats turned out well. She supported the coup
in Honduras and was instrumental in laying the ground out for the coup in Ukraine. The recent
wikileaks indicated she knew the Saudis were financing ISIS but she said nothing as they were
contributing to the Clinton Foundation.
Hillary Clinton Lies About Attending Bilderberg While In Denver
An excellent analysis. Clinton was an awful candidate. She represents the establishment in every
possible way; the same establishment that has stood shamelessly by while the US working and middle
classes have been abandoned.
She offered precisely nothing other than not being Donald Trump. Her campaign resembled a coronation.
This sheer hubris and arrogance cost the Democrats the presidency. Forget the tiresome shrieks
of racism and fascism for a minute: Trump won because Clinton failed to get support among the
masses of underemployed and unemployed industrial working class in the Rust Belt; because she
offered nothing new, no answers other than more of the same.
They failed to address the very real concerns and fears of everyday Americans. They have no
one to blame but themselves for this disaster.
Nonsense.The article nails it. A failure to address the Economic Vampirism that Clinton champions.Sure,
there are plenty of racists and misogynists in the GOP, but willfull ignorance couched in identity
rhetoric is how the party lost so much.until establishment dems realize that, things will continue
to get bleaker for them.
This is a very good article, but it doesn't pay enough attention to the human, emotional aspect
of political leadership. The really sad thing is that the Democrats had somebody in Bernie Sanders
who could have beaten Trump, as all polls earlier this year indicated, but the determination of
Hillary to be President combined with the vast web of Clinton connections led to the result we
have. Everybody knew about her problems going into the primary campaign, but the attraction of
electing a female President combined with unease with Sanders' roots and radicalism (actually,
not such big difficulties) led to her rock-solid "super-delegate" support and sufficient voter
support in the primaries. I doubt the DNC "dirty tricks" were quite enough to cause Sanders' defeat,
but the Party establishment support no doubt swayed some voters, too. Unfortunately, Sanders will
be too old to carry the torch, as is Elizabeth Warren; they should now lead the battle in the
Senate and write the books so needed to shape American progressive thought in the coming years.
The Democrats need to completely rebuild, so that in eight years they can be ready again for executive
power, with the essential support of Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. It's not
worth their while winning the Presidency without control of Congress. It means building a real
party, a social movement and organization, not just a label, with leaders who can connect emotionally
with citizens.
"Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped shift power away from the people towards corporations..."?
What about the landslide shift of power to corporations, lobbyists, and the rich under the
Bush and Reagan regimes?
I always agree with you, Mr Reich, and gain insight from your writings/columns, but I think
you're really missed the boat here. A demagogue told the big lie to people, and many bought it!
For all the Democrats' (many shortcomings), the BLAME for the sad state of the middle-class,
working class, and non-1% is on the Republicans' heads!
And the war on unions is one of the right-wing's key rallying points
Clinton is at least partly responsible for Brexit.
1) She led the US into invading Libya. Persuaded Obama, who was initially against it, and now
calls it his biggest mistake as president.
2) As Gaddafi predicted, his regime was the "cork in the bottle of Africa" (Assange's words)
since Libya was patrolling the region. Removing him opened the first front of the European migrant
crisis.
3) Destabilizing Libya provided a base for ISIS and other factions, which helped destabilize
Syria, opening the second front of the European migrant crisis.
4) The European migrant crisis was one of the primary drivers of Brexit.
Well regular Joe Blow has been mocked and ignored for years. Joe Blow might not live in a trailer
park, he might have some nice house but he and Jane Blow are working double shifts to pay for
it. Joe and Jane have long given up on politics because 'it does not change a thing anyways',
they have never seen a politician outside the election phase to descend to their rather unremarkable
town in the middle of nowhere. Unions are nowhere to be seen, no one actually gives a damn about
them and no one listens to their concerns.
But they understand. They do not have a college degree so those people from NY or Detroit might
be right that they do not understand the big picture, watching the news they see that their elected
officials have much more important things to take care of. Gender neutral bathrooms, organizing
community hours to paint the safe space at the nearby college, giving debt and tax reliefs to
the same banks threatening the two of them to foreclose their house, apparently they are really
busy.
But now, after years, someone is coming around and listens. He might not really care and only
pretend to but he DOES listen. For the first time ever.
And we really wonder about the outcome of this election?!
Reich's article pretty much nails it. The Democratic bigwigs preferred the company of corporate
fat cats, facilitated their greed and lost touch with their base....
This is one of the few articles that provides any insight into the 2016 presidential election.
The reality is that Americans don't like either political party and don't trust politicians. American
voters identify with political parties far less than voters in other countries, and most Americans
assume that politicians are crooks. That's just the way it is.
Presidential candidates hire consultants to provide marketing expertise to their political
campaigns. Trump, by contrast, is himself a marketing expert. As a young man in his twenties,
he had the insight that he could increasing the value of real estate by branding it, just as luxury
automobiles are branded.
The people who have been mocking Donald Trump for being a real estate magnate and reality show
TV impresario fail to realize that those are pursuits where it is impossible to succeed without
understanding what the consuming public wants. Many people find Trump to be outrageously offensive,
but that is part of a persona he has developed over decades in his property development and TV
enterprises in order to attract large numbers of people to his golf courses and hotels, and to
attract viewers to The Apprentice.
In politics, Trump's persona translated into a vicious political style that led his opponents
to focus on his persona rather than his message. The message was that the increasing deemphasis
on national borders (in the form of globalized trade, illegal immigration, and arguably even international
terrorism) should be dialed back because it is changing America for the worse. That message resonated
with a large number of people and resulted in his election.
Throughout the 2016 election cycle, Trump's opponents failed to address his message and focused
instead on his persona. Every opponent who tried to take out Trump by attacking his outrageous
and offensive persona was destroyed in the process. During the Republican primary, candidates
were talking about Donald Trump so much that they were defining themselves in terms of Donald
Trump. Hillary Clinton made the same mistake the 16 unsuccessful Republican primary candidates
made. Her campaign was a social message that used Donald Trump as a bogeyman.
The appeal to social interest groups did not address the objective and important issues that
Trump was (arguably inarticulately) articulating, which are the issues that really attracted voters
to him attracted voters to him. Like Britain, America has a lot of towns where the local economy
has been destroyed by the closing of, for example, a steel mill. Trump knew how to address the
voters in those towns, and that's how he got elected.
The missing piece from your comment is Trumps use of media that was relatively new compared to
prior presidential elections. In Trump's case this was Twitter and Twitter bot accounts re-tweeting
messages to smartphones. Obama did well harnessing social media, just as Reagan used taped video
feeds appearing to be live (have to remember how primitive color transmissions were not that long
ago), Kennedy used television, and earlier presidents won harnessing radio.
That is true, as well. Trump's campaign was arguably the American equivalent of the Twitter revolutions
that swept North Africa and the Ukraine a few years ago. One question is whether that use of social
media is why Trump won or whether it is more narrowly why his win was not predicted by pollsters.
This may also be relevant to the unexpectedness of the results of the Brexit referendum.
It's also a reminder to those who shout "power to the people" in the expectation that empowered
people will return a particular result. With Trump, and with Brexit, the people appear to have
repudiated those who see themselves as empowerers of the people. It's worth some reflection.
This is an excellent article. In a perverse way it was those zealously anti Trump wailers who
unwittingly made him the 45th president of the USA.
Words of wisdom for those disappointed by the result: Understand why those who voted for Trump
did. Don't just write them all of as racist/xenophobic. The majority are not. They are angry because
politicians, including and especially those Democrats who were supposed to be on their side, sold
their souls to the devil - globalisation, big corporations etc.
In fact one may argue that Bill Clinton signing the NAFTA free trade agreement back in 1994
sowed the seeds for this current situation. Think about it
Exactly! These people are suffering, and instead of getting help from the Democratic Party they
were just all labeled as a bunch of racists, xenophobes. homophobes, etc. Most people who voted
for Trump didn't vote for the man. They voted for the hope that they could take their country
back from a bunch of elitist, corporatists, and rich bankers who have stolen it from them. You
aren't going to win them back by denigrating them further.
Yet the mainstream media will persist in explaining the Trump disaster in terms of race or gender
issues, never in terms of economic class.
This is how they keep us divided.
Yes. I live in rural Missouri, and I absolutely agree with this analysis. The bit that worries
me is that none of the embryonic "plans" suggested by Trump -- the wall, the deportations, the
repeal of the Affordable Care Act -- will do anything but make the less well-off less well-off
in every way. Does anyone really believe, for example, that lowering the tax on business will
induce any businessman with any sense to rebuild an old factory in a small, crumbling midwestern
town with an uneducated workforce? Let alone allow a union to form, provide decent salaries, pensions
and healthcare like their grandfathers had from companies like Ford, General Motors, Caterpillar,
John Deere etc? Of course, there's always a war as a last resort: that used to get the economy
going, using up lots of materials and lots of surplus young men, didn't it? But I'm afraid the
Chinese don't want to fight us, they want to buy us. There's still so much useable, badly-tended
space in the middle of America ...
"The bit that worries me is that none of the embryonic "plans" suggested by Trump -- the wall,
the deportations, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act -- will do anything but make the less
well-off less well-off in every way."
Actually, GETTING ELECTED was the best thing he could have done. At least it's a CHANCE for
the Democratic Party to wake the **** up and see the working class (not the WHITE working class,
the WHOLE working class) has been slipping away from them and at an accelerating rate. And they
are FURIOUS at getting the shaft while their union "leaders" ORDER them to "vote blue no matter
who" and are bullied and browbeaten if they so much as DARE to ask what happened to all those
empty promises from last campaign season that have been DOWNGRADED yet again into something even
smaller and less ambitious, only to be silenced with "the other guys will be the apocalypse so
don't you dare ask any questions you dirty racists!"
My husband and two friends and I traveled from SF to Philly to protest the DNC convention.
The protestors - most of whom were under 35 - were corralled in FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT PARK.
The delegates lounged in WELLS FARGO CENTER. They even shut down the subway station used by both
groups so that only delegates could use it. They did this even though at the end of the day a
torrential electrical storm was drenching the protesters. Nope, folks. That PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
IS FOR THE DNC ONLY.
Did Hillary really think we didn't NOTICE?? Did she think that making FIVE TIMES the average
annual income of Americans for a 45 minutes speech to Gold In Sacks would be ignored? That we
didn't care that she and Bill RENEGED on the deal with Russia that Bush One made re NATO is pushing
Europe to the brink of war? That she loves loves loves the TPP?
Just how fucking stupid did Hillary think we were NOT to notice her Wall Street/MIC worshiping
history and positions?
Trump is a domestic disaster. We'll have to deal with that. But I am at least slightly comforted
that he wants to stop this war machine (bon chance) and does not support the treasonous, sovereignty-killing
TPP - which Hillary SUPPORTED.
The only one who got Trump elected was HILLARY CLINTON and her arrogant followers.
i hope mr reich can help to clear out the faux liberal power elites from the democratic
party ... the wall street apparatchiks and senior officials that preside over the various electoral
'plantations' for the clintons: millenials, blacks, lgbt/trans and hispanics
this type of politics is regressive because it provides cover for vested interests (that
derive their wealth through ownership of capital) to colonise democracy against the vast majority
of people that depend upon wages for a living
the power structure at the top of the democratic party is corrupt and corrupting ... the way
this organisation has sought and cultivated minority votes (not in the pursuit of some higher
class goal) but to enhance the career prospects of an 'out of touch' political class on capitol
hill is the ultimate form of betrayal
in particular, the way impoverished black communities across america have been used by a 'praetorian
guard' of senior black democratic leaders to support the dynastic ambitions of the clinton family
must come to an end
it is down to enlightened thinkers like mr reich to ensure that the democratic party transitions
from being the 'last plantation owner in america' (and trader in chief of minority votes) towards
a champion of working people and their class interests
this would be a good start: i would fire most senior black leaders in the democratic party
... (you know, the likes of donna brazile!) for activities incompatible with representing the
class interests of working americans - period
One problem the left has to overcome is the sheer seductiveness of the argument that the Farages
and Trumps of this world put forward - they tell those who have not fared well under capitalism
that the fault is not their own, that the real problem is immigrants - it is a cynical but effective
lie that those who feel left behind find hard to resist.
In truth the problem is that the system they - Trump and Farage - actually favour is utterly
dependent on workers who will work for very little whether they are immigrants or not. The tragic
irony is that the right has absolutely no intention of improving the lot of the poor fools who
vote for them.
In a multi party parliamentary system the US labor unions and the US' left-leaning social justice
voters would not be represented by the same party.
Too many people make the mistake of thinking labor in the US is a left-wing movement. It hasn't
been for decades. US labor unions don't fight for workers rights, they fight for their workers
pocketbooks and nothing else.
In 1972 labor abandoned the Democrats when they chose a too-progressive candidate for president.
Since that time the relationship between progressives and the working class has been a nothing
but a marriage of convenience. That marriage seems to have broken up.
17% of American indusrtry is union. There wasn't much of a marriage to break up. Factory mechanization
was accompanied by moving out of the rust belt into anti-union Southern states. Later, they left
for China.
The value of unions to Democrats has little to do with the voters in their ranks. Unions have
long been the Democrat's counterbalance against Republican wealth - they can't buy as many ads
but they can provide nearly unlimited free labor to the Democrats canvassing and telephone campaigns.
WIthout unions the Democrats would have even fewer seats in the House and Senate and Woodrow Wilson
would probably have been their last president.
No, the democrats no longer represent the working classes in the US . As the Labour party here
no longer does. I listened to Ed Miliband this morning on the radio and when asked whether he
supported Brexit he said he was worried about coloured people, Muslims, transgender and almost
everyone else, but he didn't mention the working class at all.
This is why the Tories can get away with doing whatever they want, because Labour is finished
in most working class areas. They became a party for minorities and encouraged mass immigration.
Now they mean less than nothing to most ordinary, indigenous people in this country!
We don't need a Trump, we've got the Tories and UKIP instead!
That would be because the classical working class is an 1860s-1970s phenomenon. It's not describing
any meaningful "class" of people anymore. Some people may "feel" working class, but the truth
of the matter is that for everyone who feels that way, there's someone with similar living conditions
who doesn't.
While I find much to agree with in analyses like Reich's and Frank's, I find that they tend to
romanticize the white working class and ignore the elephants in the room, those being racism,
xenophobia, homophobia, and the rest. I feel I can say this because I come from a white working-class
background in small-town Arkansas (Bill Clinton's hometown and mine were thirty-five miles apart).
Believe me, Robert, there is a virulent strain of racism among many of those folks, and It's something
that needs to be better addressed by analyses such as yours and Tom Frank's. It's not just something
that GOP fear mongering conjured out of thin air. It has deep historical roots and cannot be brushed
easily aside by discussions based solely on economic arguments. (See, for example, Stacy Patton's
article:
http://www.damemagazine.com/2016/11/01/why-i-have-no-sympathy-angry-white-men .)
My GF comes from a similar background. I posted this earlier on this thread.
I know the "working classes" in the USA, especially the midwestern variety. Dumb, ill informed,
incurious. Obsessed with macho posturing, weapons, military exploits.
Rampant racism, misogyny, extreme religiosity. Birtherism, creationism, paranoia, you name
it. You have to read the anti-Obama and Clinton vitriol from people lke that to believe it.
From people who do not have a pot to piss in.
My GF hails from some dot in the middle of nowhere in IA. She describes being raised there
as living in a cult. She had to come to Long Island to realise that there actually were still
jews alive today. She more or less thought they were like the Hittites and the Sumerians, something
you read about in the bible. To this day she loves to watch documentaries on TV because the
education she received in school was so poor and narrow minded.
A lot of that rascism, xenophobia, homophobia etc is born out of the frustration that the working
class find themselves in. Many believe, rightly or wrongly, that foreigners, the LGBTQ community,
Arfrican Americans, Latino's, Asians and so on, are given special treatment. These groups have
jumped to the front of the cue to reach the American Dream, while the working class have been
stuck in line at the back for years and they have become frustrated and angry. It doesn't excuse
those views, but if you look at it from their perspective you can see why they hit out.
Additionally, these views are held right across the demographic makeup of the US, not just
the Working Class.
hopefully once the dust has died down this is the sort of considered writing that we will see
in the Guardian - not the ludicrous outpourings of bile we have seen in the past few days.
I listened to the live radio account from the BBC and noted the evident discomfiture as the
result differed from the script. At the end of a presidential election the assembled studio experts
should have more to say about a candidate than bewailing perceived racism, perceived misogyny
(I doubt that Trump is a true misogynist!) and Mexican walls yet listening to the BBC since then
it's as if the programme presenters are working to a script. Likewise. I'm afraid, The Guardian.
What I find truly remarkable is the analogous positions of Trump and Corbyn: both outsider
candidates who relied on votes from outside their respective Establishments to win through. Trump
had little to do with the Republicans in the past. Corbyn was best known for voting against his
party. Both have been reviled by their own party elites (and by the Guardian). Corbyn has faced
a coup rumoured to have been organised from outside the PLP. Leading Republicans wore the fact
that they had not voted for their own candidate as a badge of honour. Of course this was solely
intended to save their political necks, but in the event did no harm whatsoever to Trump or Corbyn
- indeed it may have positively assisted them. Had Corbyn been positively endorsed by say, Harriet
Harman, he would possibly never have survived.
The US and UK political elites set great store by their acceptance of other faiths and ethnicities
yet seem curiously intolerant to the outsiders in their own milieu.
Clinton, Blair and Schroeder came up with the third way. Snake oil salesmen that all profited
from sucking up to the corporations and selling their influence. Schroeder signed a deal with
the Russians supply gas to Germany before joining Nordstream the company set up to do so. As for
Clinton and Blair the list is long a sto how they have lined their pockets. The third way has
never been about the ordinary working man. Wages have not risen in Germany in real terms for years
as they havent in the US. In the UK easy credit has masked the real situation and now peple are
suffering.
What Robert Reich has written has hit the nail on the head.
Schroeder signed a deal with the Russians supply gas to Germany before joining Nordstream
the company set up to do so.
Except he merely served on the supervisory board.
The third way has never been about the ordinary working man. Wages have not risen in Germany
in real terms for years as they havent in the US.
"The working man" is waffling. Contrary to propaganda, Schroeder's reforms have contributed
massively to Germany not being hit as hard by the financial crisis as others - and contrary to
legends, it has improved the situation of the poor. It's the people peddling those legends, devoid
of any understanding how the situation was before, who contribute to the unemployed feeling outcast.
It's the 21st century. Wake up. Waffling about the "Working Man" is the same as waffling about
Cowboys and believing cattle farming is still being done like in 1850.
Guardian columnists such as Hadley Freeman, Lucia Graves, Wolff, Abramson, Freedland and company
should be forced to read this article. These columnists very rarely if ever talk about the Gilded
Age style inequality levels in the West, and the USA in particular. Instead it is all about identity
politics for them. Can these individuals start writing about the disastrous chasm between the
very rich and the rest please?
Definitely. Identity politics has been coopted by the neoliberal technocracy to divert attention
from wealth inequalities, the operation of big corporations in politics and the general lack of
democratic accountability in governance.
Thank you Mr Reich. Best article I have read for months.
The vote for Trump was a protest vote. It was a non violent revolution. A significant part
of the US electorate were angry. They saw their quality of life eroded. They saw little change
of their children having a chance of a better life. Trump was the perfect outsider. He was not
part of the "corrupt system". If you are living on your knees why not vote for someone who might
bring the whole corrupt rotting edifice crashing down?
THe usual media suspects have been trying to explain what happen in their normal closeted,
university educated, urban, smug, condesending manner. But when people are angry, when they are
protesting they want action, they want change , they don't want the status quo. During the French
revolution the mobs didn't ask "whats your policy on gender based minorities?"...they just shouted
"off with their heads"
Until the media, the politicians, the policy makers, the wealthy elite start properly listening
to the people left behind, then we will continue to see more Trumps and Brexits.
Excellent analysis . Mr Reich was Labour secretary under Clinton and so she shares the responsibility
of his policies. Of note is media complicity including so called liberal progressive media no
heavy weights. It seems that 'generating ' money / growth/ markets etc etc seem to be the all
important factors . Citizens' solidarity and the needs of the most vulnerable are at the bottom
of the checklist if it is ther at all. These progressives have fallen or perhaps fallen into the
trap of believing that talking about 'progressive' topics e.g. misogyny and gender etc is enough
to earn the badge of 'progressives and liberals '.
It is very strange indeed in the midst of all this ther is no mention of JC and McDonnel and
co and their ' old 'foolish' 'defunct' types of policies that no one wants to vote for because
.......
Finally it is curious to note that many US citizens voted for Trump because of the disillusionment
with political establishment. The odd thing is that ' those in the know ' did not know about their
anger -- To complicate matters further and using this an example does US and the West really know
what ordinary citizens in Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest of ME Asia and Africa really think about
the ruinous roles of the West in making their lives and their children's lives and their countries
and their future a waste . Just because ther are strategic and national security and economic
interests of West and their local reps. Do we have to believe the stories and features of the
natives and their 'backgrward ' oppressors or just believe ( as US election showed ) what we want
to believe that the natives, want , deserve and should get --
And yes we are in 21 st century and using all the powers of Internet and modern society to
be acquainted with the outside world -- Doh --
This article and simon Jenkins article on trump are the best two articles I've read in the guardian
for a long time! Spot on .keep reminding people that gw bush supported h. Clinton ,bush whose
personal vendetta against Saddam cost thousands of lives ,Iraqi ,us ,UK ,etc! And how million
american workers were put on the dole by bill clinton !ill
The Clintons also helped corrupt the Democratic party to deny Bernie Sanders the opportunity
to put many of these popular views to the test on Tuesday.
That also meant denying the voters the chance of having someone like Tulsi Gabbard as vice-president:
Exactly. Messrs Thatcher/Major/Blair/Cameron followed the same path here and that is why we have
decided that we , the people , want to take back control and showed it by voting to recover our
sovereignty by leaving the EU .
Remember, Trump used to be a Democrat. The fact that he has led the Republicans to peers suggests
very little difference between establishment parties, as in the U.K. Trump is a savvy enough schemer
to play to the fears and feelings of the dispossed. Let's see what he can deliver. I doubt much.
All I can hope is that he recruits right wing Us Supreme Court justices in the vein of Scalia.
Mr Justice Scalia, by his verdict in the Citizens United case, sold US politics to the highest
bidder. He and his devout followers have done more harm to their country than any other supreme
Court Justice. A man who supposedly believed in the 10 commandments, but who lacked the integrity
to hear any death penalty cases. A hypocrite.
Glass-Steagall, which was used to protect ordinary savers from high risk investment banking, was
removed by Clinton, not GWB. Sure, Congress and House were dominated by Republicans, but the Democrats
had Bill Clinton and could have filibustered (see how effective the Republicans have been since).
Instead, Gramm-Leach-Biley passed with bipartisan support. And let's not even talk about
NAFTA.
The Socialist bread van resprayed in a liberalism, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, political
correctness, globalism and liberal interventionism pretty colour by the Blairites, the Clintonites
and EU political elites, was still the same old failed product under the bonnet.
Guaranteed whenever it is taken out on the roads to breakdown and take a Nation or Federal
Superstate to the brink of bankruptcy before the passengers(electorate) see it for what it really
is - they had been sold a clapped out old banger with a new coat of paint!
UK Socialists, memorably described by Margaret Thatcher as people who when in power always
run out of other peoples money, are mostly a well meaning lot, but their bread van which crashed
spectacularly in the 1970's and got taken to the scrap yard as beyond repair, was years later
deviously bought(hijacked) as a 'damaged repairable', by a small group of liberal metropolitan
elite scam artists who had quietly infiltrated the Labour Party.
After a little tinkering under the bonnet(parachuting their own candidates into Labour heartland
seats) and a new touchy feely PR paint job, they relaunched it onto the streets as a New Model
'Green' Socialist vehicle, when in reality it just a bunch of second hand car dealers in sharp
suits operating an industrial scale 'cut and shut' job scam of Madoff proportions on hoodwinked
buyers(the electorate).
Working hand in glove with Goldman Sachs and big business, they made themselves extremely rich
but now have a lot to answer for, as they're responsible for the rise of the left and right wing
populist genie out of the bottle. Once out, like the inflation genie it is a devilishly difficult
task to put back in.
As evidenced by the latest utterances of a beaming Nigel Farage, aka Mr Brexit, following the
Trump Presidential winning campaign:
"Brexit, and now Trump, and now the wagons roll on to the rest of Europe for all the elections
next year," Farage said, smiling like a cheshire cat. "This is a really exciting time. As someone
who has now become a demolitions expert I'm thoroughly enjoying what's going on."
With bold, brash, crass, in your face characters like Trump and Farage at the forefront of
the political stage, the next few years, like a fairground ride could be rather wild and bumpy,
but never dull.
What so you're saying Trump and Farage lied? ....They're not going to protect our lifestyles and
western living standards using left wing socialist protectionism? ....who woulda thunk it?
It may be a repudiation of the American power structure, or the result of building certain perceptions
in the American public over the years by the mainstream media that Trump pounced upon and crudely
exploited to the hilt. The US media couldn't steer the beast it had created when it wanted to.
Think it's wishful thinking that we're not in for a period of great upheaval, possibly tragedy.
We saw what happened during the Bush presidency, an ugly war with a tally of tens of thousands
of lives and global financial meltdown. This time it could be much, much worse.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades
the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters
who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives
and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Change "Democratic" for "Labour", "Washington" for "Westminster", "Wall Street" for "the City",
and it still rings true. Corbyn and the swing to the left isn't the cause of the crisis, it's
a response. What happens with Sanders and his base next will be pivotal.
Compulsory reading for all who formed & remain part of what is described with forensic precision,
including many contributing journalist to this paper. To be taken seriously, not immediately denounced,
Robert Reich could only put pen to paper with confidence after Trump won so decisively, & why
we are still reeling from reality about to unfold from success of the Brexit campaign. Fundamental
change in reactionary maverick hands.
Both Trump & UKIP/Farage/ Tory right engaged willingly, without shame, in a campaign of authoritarian
demagoguery, with elevation of racist, xenophobic sentiments to being new national virtue of saying
it as it is.
Existing power structures with their intricate connections, web of back rubbing fundraising, &
legislation to enable profit accumulation to continue unhindered by challenges from 'shopfloor'
labour groups, failed to see what was under their noses. Insulated, blinkered privileged they
dismissed as unelectable what was coming down on them like a ton of bricks.
Great piece, well worth reading more than once.
It is more an indictment of the mainstream political parties than the electorates that politicians
like Trump, Farage, Le Pen and all the other hate preachers are attracting so much support. It
is equally an indictment of the leftist media that they cling to the discredited leaders of the
so called centre left parties. But then they have personally done very nicely out of the cozy
relationships they have with leaders who are held in as much contempt by the ordinary voters as
the misnamed liberal media holds them.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades
the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters
who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives
and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
That is the most relevant paragraph I've seen here in recent months. exactly the same for the
UK Labour party, Nobody with any real prospect of power represents the working class. The only
shadows left are the unrealistic promises of Trump, or Brexit that we know will be ignored once
the vote is cast. But what else is there?
The "lumpenproletariat" that brought the social democratic parties in europe to power and made
the european communist political parties a force to reckon with no longer exist. The old working
classes have been superseded by an underclass who do the truly unskilled work, and a middle class,
the successful children of the former workingclass who now are nurses, administrators, middle
managers, etc.
Steel, mining, ship building, car manufacturing, etc, used to employ thousands or even tens of
thousands of people in a single plant. Those days are over. Everywhere. To exclusively focus on
the 20% of the population that are truly left behind is political suicide. And why a guy like
Corbyn will never see an electoral win.
And then one needs to keep in mind that the American working class are much more right leaning
than their european counterparts.
First past the post does have benefits e.g., stable governments that last 4-5 years, manifesto's
printed up-front rather than debated behind closed doors, prevention of extremist parties achieving
influence via balance of power.
UK, USA main two parties are actually 'large tents/broad churches' where multiple views exist
rather than narrow dogma.
Democracy is not perfect - but the peaceful transfer of power - in the UK, US is to be commended
and not taken for granted.
(ps I agree with gerrymandering in US but that's a result of the States vs Federal system. Also
one more thing - FPTP is the only way to choose a President whether by Electoral College or popular
vote).
Stable governments that don't represent voter's views or needs. Manifestos that are manifestly
ignored at the earliest convenience, policies that were never announced or publicised, pursued
in the interests of political lobbyists, donors or corporations. Politicians whose default position
is to lie if it serves them better than the truth and the electorate offered the only opportunity
to dismiss them at the next election, when they can reliably expect to be rewarded with a seat
in the Lords or any number of sinecures in the form of directorships and consultancies.
The system is not fit for purpose and that's just the way our political class likes it.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Secy. Reich. I cannot say enough!
Yes, Sir no one can fool all the people all the time. The Clintons were masters at this game
and believed they could get the people to believe that 2+2=5 assisted with their unlimited corporate
money, Wall St. influence, and the dissemination of misinformation aided by the media.
There would not have been any need for organizations like Wikileaks, if journalists had a modicum
of integrity.
As for the Guardian, it had to have their favorite, and the most corrupt, candidate defeated
at the elections resoundingly in order to have voices, the like that of Secy. Reich express his
views in this otherwise skewed newspaper. With the increase in corruption in public office, journalistic
integrity followed that same path.
The frustration of the people with establishment politics rose to such a level where they did
not care even if the opposing non-establishment candidate was Donald Trump or Donald Duck who
groped other ducklings.
The Guardian was one of Clinton's loudest barking dogs, following the Goldman Sachs playlist to
the letter. Adverse comments BTL about her or the Guardian's election coverage were deleted.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not anymore "
Republicans never represented the working class but the working classes continued to vote them
into office.
The destruction of the trade union movement has always been one of the highest priorities for
Conservatives – the success they have had in large part due to the concerted efforts of Ronnie
and Maggie (who are now engaged in a torrid posthumous affair).
In the UK there is a sinister parallel between zero hour contracts and workers during the depression
standing in the streets hoping to pick up a day's work.
Apparently "job security" is a threat to the prosperity of the nation and so it goes on.
Now that the unions have been dealt with the Tories in the UK have set their sights on dismantling
the NHS (by incrementally starving it to death) and there is presently nothing to stop them.
Trump clearly tailored his message to reach the disenfranchised but unfortunately there
doesn't appear to be any evidence that (a) he really cares about them and (b) anything substantial
is about to improve their lot.
Its quite ironic that right-wing, neo-lib ideology, created what we have now, and at the same
time its the right and far right that are getting all the gains. The popularity of Trump. Farage
and this movement tells you how utterly and totally the left and liberals in general have failed
in connecting with the working classes and offer something different.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped shift power away from the people towards corporations.
It was this that created an opening for Donald Trump
Sums things up succintly. If you're concentrating on stealing their clothes, they can steal
yours, especially when you only wave them about listlessly yet refuse to wear them.
That's been happening since Reagan. I get the blame on Clinton & Obama in the context of "Dems
played the same game as GOP", but not in a more open context. This has been happening for 35 years
with trickle down economy. It also happens to "coincide" with the widening of wealth gap...
It was a repudiation of President Barack Obama and his leftist [neoliberal] policies that decimated
middle class jobs, health insurance and the respect for the rule of law.
Obama just nailed the whole working class with a massive Obamacare rate hike. What did they expect
was going to happen? You cannot provide free healthcare to the poor on the backs of the working
class while the upper mids and wealthy pay nothing. The upper mids already have employer insurance,
people, and they do not get an opinion. OCare is hitting me for $400 a month for insurance with
a $13,000 deductible! That is fraud! I am a working class liberal- Obama broke every campaign
promise he ever made to us, and Clinton has done nothing to shed her 'corrupt DNC insider' image
or distance herself from Obama's treacherous policies. ALL of the reasons the Trump people are
giving for voting for Trump are VALID and we can blame this one on THE DNC. BERNIE WOULD HAVE
WON.
I find it poetic that the Guardian, which seemed this past year to be competing with the other
US majors in the grotesque sidelining and marginalizing of Bernie Sanders, is now On their hands
and knees with their contribution drive. I will never give a dime to these hacks. What's funny
is that had they stuck to their principles of fearless reporting I have no doubt a huuuge number
of readers would have jumped at the opportunity to make a worthwhile contribution. Like the DNC,
they had a clear thoroughbred in the stable and they drowned it in the backyard. i have no sympathy
for this rag. I have contempt for it.
Just as after Brexit, this paper is flooded with articles claiming how 'minority' groups, BMEs,
LGBTQ...s, and even women, are now being attacked in numbers and how vulnerable they feel.
I follow the MSM and have seen nothing of substance that backs this up.
Nor do I feel that Trump is going to mount major campaigns against such groups.
Interestingly I believe it true that 29% of the 'Hispanic' minority actually voted for Trump.
Similarly was the figure for white women not c.50% ?
Many fewer blacks did, but should Trump's economics actually bring back jobs for the 'working
class' why would blacks in this group of both (all ?) sexes not benefit also and if that is the
case watch how their voting patterns change next time.
Thankfully there are articles like this.
Media other than Guardian who don't care to give this thought the time of the day, slip into irrelevance.
I mean the MSMs here who all embody Trotzkism.
Trotzkism dictates that the livelihoods of people ought to be taken away to make them pliable.
China bought US-TBs (for US government aggrandizement) upon US shipping jobs over there. Feeding
the hungry? With the Fed going into overdrive. Banks together with govt concocted the financial
crisis to profit off bear strategies that mortals can't do. In following years, the elite coined
high-flying ideals such as globalization, which is good for them because they sit in govt, teach
in universities or are detached ueber-owners of businesses. Joe Blow was screamed at when he would
ask: How am I gonna pay for stuff that the big wigs have now manufactured overseas, when we now
make, or get as welfare, $10 instead of $25 an hour?
Hard to reverse the destruction, but worth a try.
I never thought I would be in agreement with Robert Reich but I am today. Every election cycle
the Democratic Party spouts happy talk about being the people's party and the worker's party (in
contrast to the supposedly blue blooded, monied Republican Party.) While that may once have been
a somewhat accurate portrayal, it has long since become a sham of an image.
Today's Democratic Party is the party of the corporate billionaires, the tech titans, and the
globalist elitists who don't want a simplistic notion like that of national borders to get in
the way of their profit seeking. Naturally, the entertainment and media stars gravitate toward
their corporate masters and shill for the Democrats. Throw in a fixation on divisive identity
politics and the Democratic establishment and its less loud and proud Republican counterpart thought
that the authentic voice of the American people could forever be drowned out. The success of Bernie
Sanders (done in by the rigged Democratic Party rules) and Donald Trump demonstrates that the
people will no longer be silenced.
Hey GUARDIAN, where is that 99% chance of Hillary winning???
I personally know three people that didnt vote because they thought she had a win in the bank.
Shame on the Guardian.
Those pollsters along with GUARDIAN should be summarily FIRED.
And don't let the door hit them in the a$$.
Thank you for your voice of intelligence & grounded wisdom. As I read elsewhere, the treaties
that Mr. Clinton & Obama have backed have unravelled the middle class. And let's not forget Mr.
Reagan who reversed high tax rates on the wealthy and broke the back of unions. Neither party
represents working people anymore. Certainly Mr. Trump does not. And playing to that disenfranchisement
won him the election---but I fear that he has no interest in redeeming the middle class. He was
interested in getting elected and telling people anything they want to hear.
The western first world dominance is coming to an end. People in the west like to think they are
the top of the food chain but reality is the second world of Asia and the far east is rapidly
stepping into their shoes. Capitalism dictates that maximum profits are returned for minimum outlay
so if you can make a product for minimal cost i.e. wages, and sell for the maximum price then
you have a successful business model. Protectionism has been tried before and Trump's version
trying to roll back globalisation will be no more successful. ..same applies to brexit. It'll
get even worse as robotics take over more and more, the only solution will be social control mechanisms
to ensure that suppliers have consumers to sell their products to. It's going to take a while
for this realism to sink in...but it's unavoidable.
Sense at last in a Guardian article.
But still not enough sense to say clearly what a weak campaigner and what a poor choice of candidate
Hillary Clinton was.
Oh well... maybe the Guardian will use the period between now and January 20 to reflect on
how they cheer-led for a candidate who didn't have what it takes to win an election.
Or maybe not. Maybe they will continue to print and post stories that are tinged with hurt surprise
that democracy means one -and only one- vote for every citizen who cares to cast it. How can
democracy function if all those white unemployed and immiserated vote against the candidates
that the rich have prepared for them?
As is usual Mr. Reich hits the nail squarely on the head.
The working class had long been the backbone of the Democratic Party electorate. They no longer
are because the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class. The banks, the upscale
suburban liberals, minorities and specific issue oriented groups are the people that matter most
to the Democratic Party. The working class support has been taken for granted for far too long
by the Dems. I can't remember how many times I have heard said, or seen written, by Democratic
insiders "where else do they have to go (for candidates to support)?"
The working class has to be a part, and an important part, of the left's coalition going forward
or risk seeing more shock election results like this. Their lots have not improved in this brand
new global economy championed by both parties. And while their numbers aren't as large as when
Reagan was elected (and before) there are more than enough of them to be an election decider.
It also will be helpful to choose candidates who will not to insult them like who, for example,
call them all a "basketful of deplorables".
the biggest factor in the Trump victory,and in the Brexit mayhem,is quite simply Globalization.
it is Globalization that has exported jobs,and skills out of the western world. it is responsible
for ghost towns in the industrial and manufacturing heartlands. western governments have had no
strategy for regeneration on anything like a great enough scale. unless the consequences of globalization
are addressed and reversed, the West faces ever falling living standards and huge unrest.
Yes, what we call "globalization" is quite simply the universalizing of a certain set of relations
between capital and labor -- it's clear that if the process is allowed to proceed without proper
safeguards, capital will be greatly favored, while labor will be reduced to the lowest possible
level. Marx pointed out a long time ago that the tendency of capitalism is to squeeze the greatest
amount of "surplus value" out of the workforce while granting them only as much money as necessary
for them to scrape by from day to day. Essentially, under capitalism, he wrote, people exist to
produce things and are less important than the things they produce. Marx may have been wrong about
the viability of "scientific socialism," but he was often spot-on as an analyst of the way capitalism
works and who it really benefits.
Trade is wonderful, but only when it doesn't proceed by reducing us all to wage slaves. Maybe
Dems who keep supporting bullshit neoliberal trade deals need to go read some of old Uncle Karl's
delightfully sarcastic works. Capital, Vol. 1 would be a fine start: see in particular
the chapter, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof." It's a masterpiece.
Can anyone turn back the tide of globalisation and power of the corporations? What is the role
of MSM? Are they all part of the problem? Interesting times. Maybe Trump will be force for good.
We certainly need stronger leadership from our politicians, on both sides of the pond.
Yes, I think of lot of that sort of stuff is misplaced. True, there are some despicable people
supporting Trump -- the Klan, neo-Nazi types, and so forth. But most people who voted for him
aren't like that. It's probably more the case that they put aside considerable disdain for Trump's
wretched behavior and voted for him based on his promise to "unforget" the working class. Personally,
I think he's a brazen demagogue who doesn't give any more of a rat's bottom about the poor and
the working class than Hitler did in Germany, what with all his "national socialist" promises
of "two chickens in every pot." But it isn't hard to understand the appeal of such populist rhetoric
when people are suffering and insecure. The American Left needs to rediscover its proper role
as a moderator of the harsher side of capitalism -- it has forgotten that role, and the bill for
that forgetfulness just came due. I don't blame Hillary personally -- Secretary Reich is right
to frame the problem in much broader terms, i.e. as having to do with the Democratic leadership
as a whole.
The business of government has morphed into the government for businesses.
Take a hint from what President Xi of China is doing, in managing the PRC. A good yardstick of
good governance comes from the analects of Confucius.
For instance, once upon a time in Germany, social democrats represented the working class.
Not anymore. People couldn't care less about Germany's wonderful economic growth either, as most
of the surplus goes to the top.*
The "social democrat" Schröder demolished the welfare state and introduced a new low wage sector,
much beloved by his corporate buddies. Thanks to his and Angela Merkel's efforts, numbers of working
poor and food banks are increasing. So is the wealth gap.* Thanks to an ongoing media hate campaign
against the meritocratic losers, most people suffered in silence. And now everyone acts shocked
and confused that a right-winged populist party is on the rise.
Well, thank you Angela Merkel, these are the fruits of your beloved austerity. The next vote
in Germany is going to be interesting. And just for the record: austerity was employed by Brüning
to boot. And that turned out so well, didn't it?
Capitalism is the best economic system we have but it becomes increasingly self destructive and
unstable if it is not managed properly. The moderate left and right would both agree on this normally
but the left would prioritise the interests of workers and the right the interests of capitalists.
However both, self interestedly, would support policies and institutions that kept the system
stable and growing.
Unfortunately hubris and market fundamentalism has turned the right's head and allowed the
rich and greedy to destructively run rampant. This is in no-one's longer term interest as the
impoverishment of the middle class and destruction of a prosperous mas market will eventually
undermine even most of the wealthy. The economic elite need to be dragged back under control.
Theodore Roosevelt broke up the trusts in the 20s and Franklin brought in the New Deal in the
Great Depression. It has been done before. It needs to be done again.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners
as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism
will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost
jobs and lower wages.
Exactly, and the parallels with the Brexit vote and against an EU corporate bureaucracy set
up to benefit the wealthy are stark. You could apply the same phrasing here in the UK:
Now British voters have rebelled by supporting a campaign that wants to fortify the UK against
foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Brexit's
isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most British workers couldn't care less about growth
because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens
in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.
The Democrats have more or less sold out the working class to the rich and powerful. They are,
in large part, the rich and powerful as this article points out. If the left wants to counter
right wing populists such as Trump it will need to address the growing anger of the white working
class towards policies that have put them in a position where they will be a minority in their
own country where they have historically been a large majority. It will also have to look after
the unemployed, working and middle classes at the expense of Wall Street, big tech and big business
generally. Ironically the right needs to do exactly the same thing. And both need to do these
things while protecting the well-being of minorities. Will these mainstream politicians be able
to escape the orbit of the rich? It is difficult to be optimistic.
Maybe so, but the only solution offered here is more Unions... if you think that's a solution
to the stagnating earnings of the bottom half of the population then I'm afraid you are way off
the mark.
The problem, and it's one that Trump will utterly fail to address and strikes at the heart
of our beliefs, is that a modern economy has little use (and places little economic value) on
low and unskilled labour. There is not a thing that can't be done cheaper by foreign factories
and machines (computers/robots/automation). This is deeply unpalatable and I do not like it, but
without a solution to how we ensure fair treatment of people who are, day by day, becoming less
economically valuable to the modern economy, this issue will not go away. Trump is a reaction,
but he is not the solution but he will set out to blame every minority, foreign government, trade
agreement he can because he can't or won't address this issue, and that will be very bad for everyone.
Its much worse than that. The modern economy places no real value on labour at all. Over the coming
years about 1/3 of all jobs are considered at risk of automation, including doctors, lawyers (already
happening), journalists (already happening) etc. The liberal elite in some of these jobs are like
lobsters in a slowly heating pot - they are too busy congratulating themselves on how toasty warm
their situation is to realise what is going on, and so all too happy to applaud the status quo.
Certainly it's a rising tide that threatens to wash away at everyone, though the higher skilled
the safer you are likely to be, at least for now.
I think the challenges are ultimately going to affect everyone, the question is going to be
who benefits politically. The left (which is where my political sympathies lie) is currently in
a real funk and lacks meaningful answers, the right is reducing it's message to 'blame the others,
they take your job, benefit at your expense etc'. No real answers.
P.S. I think your reference to the 'liberal elite' is misplaced, I'm not sure if the local
GP or bloke who writes wills in the local high street really count as an elite, just ordinary
people doing relatively well for themselves. The risk in this kind of language is that the tendency
is to think they are some kind of other who are to blame for all this, when what's happening is
actually far more wide ranging and fundamental.
And the liberal elite are by definition to blame for this because they are the ones whose privilege
got them the managerial and leadership positions they hold yet whose ideology and political views
have meant they have carried out these roles so badly.
I agree that neither side has the answers because both sides are in effect faces of the same
coin, cut from the same metal, imbued with the same flaws. Corbyn no more has answers than Trump.
What Trump has done is prove that no politician can go forward ignoring the questions. Hillary
firmly expected to.
Mirrored exactly with the new labour. Billionaires and celebrities rubbing shoulders with the
political elite, little wonder why we became disillusioned with them. For years now, the government
neglected the working class. Industries and jobs vanished ever since replaced with ZHC jobs and
low pay, keeping the broken system going on the back of a 'trickle-down effect' lie.
The Democrats had their party, Perry turned up, endorsed by lines of celebrities, we are looking
back with perplexed bemused expressions. If we elect her, it would be more of the same. The free
market shite started off a few decades ago, heavily entrenched by corporations and billionaires,
the scandal of offshore trust funds, we are dumped and forgotten.
What struck me as a tourist to San Francisco in 2014 were the sheer numbers of very visible homeless
on the streets, begging or just looking beaten . Yet all around them there were mass preparations
for the annual Gay Pride celebration. Obviously I am not decrying Gay Pride but the sense of priorities
seemed strange and I was forced to think that America is a pretty insane place. It is going the
same way here, a lot easier to celebrate identity than to tackle systemic injustice. That used
to be Governments` job but they have largely abandoned their historic responsibilities. Time for
Labour to bring those fundamental responsibilities back --
All told, San Francisco spends close to three quarters of a Billion dollars every year on "homeless"
of which close to $200 million is a specific department and budget item. As such, many flock to
San Francisco, which is also well known for lack of enforcement of many laws. Many of the beggars
are already housed at taxpayer expense and prefer to generate additional income outdoors on a
schedule of their choice, which is where they also purchase and consume items never sold in stores.
The working classes have been stripped of their dignity, whole communities have become wastelands
and virtual ghettos. The working class don't trust the left to sort things out for them and that
is why and how a figure like Trump can come along and say 'I will save you all' and become President.
Meanwhile, the socialist left sit around scratching their heads, unable to work out what has happened
and squabble about the spirit of socialism and ideology that in all honesty, most working class
people don't give a toss about. They just want jobs that pay a decent wage, a nice house to own,
nice food on the table, two cars and nice holidays. They want to be middle class in other words.
But democrats are not left. They right wing too. If Americans think that Democrats are left, they
don´t know what left is at all. And what socialist goverment has USA had. I see Americans saying
tthat Democrats are socialists, really?.Hillary left and socialist?. Trump and Hillary are both
right wing, only that Trump is more extreme.
A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely content with
the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better off than
they've been in years."
The political elite of *both* parties are completely out of touch with the citizenry. The economy
has been restructured over the last 20-30 years to completely de-value labor and prioritize the
rich and corporations.
Having said that, I believe people just want to be heard. Voting for Trump was seen as voting
against the status quo, and voting for Hillary was voting for the big establishment. Much like
Brexit, I don't think voters were thinking through the long-term consequences of their decision.
Monday morning quarterbacking of the worst kind. That the Democrats have lost the white working
class is obvious. But to blame the Democrats, such as Hillary, is misplaced. It is the Dems who
have attempted to help the working poor and propose improvements in health care and child care
and tax redistribution. It is not a lack of concern that is the issue. What Reich ignores is that
voters are voting an ideology and not self-interest. They have bought into the notion that getting
rid of immigrants and taking care of the rich will solve all problems.
The voters had a clear choice and they chose the demagogue peddling a non-solution. They wanted
to believe that they are wonderful people and problems can be solved by a wealthy idiot who promises
to turn the clock back. In Democracy sometimes it is the voters who get it wrong.
The analysis is correct more of less , the issue here is class , the Republicans and Democrats
are the two wings of the same party. The party of property and money and the powerful , the vote
for Trump is one of those events that happens much like Obama being elected twice after the Republicans
stole the two previous elections via the supreme court and election fraud. It can happen but the
system remains the same , there is no serious challenge to the supremacy of the ruling class.
The one analysis you will not hear in the media is a class one and if it is then it will be
howled down lest it gain currency and the wage slaves realise they have been conned yet again
, Trump is not unusual in his attitudes or views , it's just that the campaign gave them wide
publicity.
In the UK the same kind of thing has happened to Labour , they lost Scotland and the 2010 election
and the remain vote because ordinary working people are tired just as they are in the US of seeing
the rich get every richer and their own living standards fall and nothing in the future but more
pain and misery. They vote UKIP/SNP here as a cry in the wilderness and they voted for Trump for
the same reason because they aren't what they've had before , the real problem will come when
the right wing populists have been in power for a while and nothing has really improved.
For the last thirty years, there has been no left or right wing governments - not economically
or fiscally. Third way centrism (liberal progressiveness) embraced the primacy of unfettered market
capitalism and corporate globalism, and focused exclusively on using political power as a tool
to win the culture war instead. That's fine if you've done materially very well out of unfettered
market capitalism and corporate globalism, and all that therefore matters to you is social justice
issues. But if you were once in a secure job with a decent income and decent prospects for your
children, and all of that has been ripped away from you by unfettered market capitalism and corporate
globalism, and the people responsible for preventing that - or at least fixing it when it happens
- are more concerned with policing the language you use to express your fears and pain, and demonstrating
their compassion by trying to improve the life chances of people on other continents, then social
justice issues become a source of burning resentment, not enlightenment. There has been a crushing
rejection of globalism and corporate plutocracy by Western electorates. The Western progressive
left will only survive if it has the courage to recognise that, and prioritises the fight for
economic and fiscal policies that promote the interests and prospects of its own poor and middle
class, over and above the cultural issues that have defined it for a quarter of a century. We
should always remain vigilant, but the truth is that the culture war is won. It would be tragic
beyond words if that victory was reversed by an explosion of resentment caused by the left's determination
to guard old battle fields, while ignoring the reality that its thinkers and activists are needed
to right new injustices. Trump's success doesn't represent the victory of hate over hope, it just
represents the loss of hope. The left has to see that or its finished.
It's not quite as simple as that. Some things like clothes are certainly still made by people
(in horrific conditions for terrible pay) but more and more factories are automated with a bare
skeleton staff running the show. The BBC series 'Inside the Factory' was an eye opener for me.
The UK food manufacturing industry for example is heading toward almost full automation - I'd
imagine the US industry is even further down the automated road. This is why the UK and US have
moved to services and these areas are the vast bulk of unskilled jobs now.
The Democratic party once represented the working class
Now it sneers at them as a "basket of deplorables". The same has happened in the UK; only this
morning Owen Jones was asking the left to reach out to the working class, and in the very same
article labelled them as racist, misogynist homophobes.
The consequences of this disdain are entirely predictable
Re: "basket of deplorables" -- if you care about accuracy, she didn't sneer at them as a basket
of deplorables; she sneered at *half* of them as a basket of deplorables. In the same paragraph,
she described the other half as having legitimate concerns that weren't being addressed.
As far as her criticisms of half of Trump's voting base -- politically, stupid as hell. But
valid? Well, what do carefully-taken public opinion polls from the 15 months before the election
tell us? 2/3 of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim who was born in another country. 63%
want to amend the Constitution to eliminate citizenship for people born in the U.S. 40% consider
African-Americans lazier than white people. A third of Trump supporters believe that the internment
of Japanese-Americans during WW2 was a good thing. 31% believe in banning homosexuals from entering
the United States. A quarter of them believe that Antonin Scalia was murdered in a conspiracy.
A quarter believe that vaccines cause autism. 16% believe that whites are a superior race, and
another 14% just aren't sure.
I don't see a very strong case that she was wrong.
It's the same problem the UK had with brexit. People feel squeezed, invariably because of neoliberalist
policies that benefit the wealthy, and the rising wage and wealth gap drives resentment because
of it.
Suddenly, you get populists who spring up with "solutions" to such problems, but rather than
being actual solutions seem to scapegoat totally unrelated factors, such as immigration, free
trade, power blocs, specific groups of people who may be out of favour at the moment, rather than
the actual correct causes in the first place.
Your post actually chimes with what I've been saying. There was a big moment for the left, that
came in 2008 in the USA. A mixed race opponent of the Iraq War, sounding plausibly leftish leaning,
praised public healthcare, accused relentlessly by the right of being a communist/socialist, of
being a muslim, of not born in the USA. And he won. So only 8 years ago, there was a moment where
American electorate shifted left, it'd seem. But instead Obama brought back Rubin, Summers, Geithner,
same old 1990's wall street cabal. FDR he was not.
There'll be a moment within a decade for things to move left, who will head 'the left' (Clinton
and Blair types?) will tell whether things actually do move in that direction.
"... Specifically, she adduced the Clinton Foundation, with its $600,000 salary to Chelsea Clinton, and Hillary's receipt of cash from Saudi Arabia and Morocco, as well as complaining about Benghazi and something that I took to be death panels. ..."
I talked to an elated Trump voter today. She had little to say about Trump, other than "Give
him a chance." No, her elation was at the defeat of Hillary, and the attendant possibility that
opened up to get rid of the corruption in Washington. Specifically, she adduced the Clinton
Foundation, with its $600,000 salary to Chelsea Clinton, and Hillary's receipt of cash from Saudi
Arabia and Morocco, as well as complaining about Benghazi and something that I took to be death
panels.
HClinton outspent (campaign + SuperPACs) Trump by 45% ($534M to $367M per the election Wiki
page, given preliminary FEC reports currently available) in the election, yet lost. Perhaps the
most clear sign as to what a horrible candidate HClinton was, both in policies & campaign tactics.
When was the last Pres election the top fundraiser did NOT win? How many times has this happen,
say since the 1980 Reagan election or since the 1948 post-WW2 election? IIRC, Thomas Ferguson
with his Investment Theory of Politics shows that in the vast majority (90%+ ?) of US elections
(Fed/State/Local), the biggest fundraiser wins.
"... "Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism's unfairness.
Then what? Then Trump's response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad.
Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet - and this is key - the noise in his message increases the apparent
value of what's clear about it. The ways he's right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the
ways he's blabbing." ..."
"... "But Trump's people don't use suffering as a metric of virtue. They want fairness of a sort,
but mainly they seek freedom from shame. Civil rights and feminism aren't just about the law after all,
they are about manners, and emotions too: those "interest groups" get right in there and reject what
feels like people's spontaneous, ingrained responses. People get shamed, or lose their jobs, for example,
when they're just having a little fun making fun. Anti-PC means "I feel unfree." ..."
bob mcmanus 11.10.16 at 1:45 pm I thought someone above talked about Trump's rhetoric
1) Tom Ferguson at Real News Network post at Naked Capitalism says (and said in 2014) that the
Democratic coalition of Wall Street (Silicon Valley) + Identity Politics is imploding, because it
can't deliver populist goodies without losing part of it's core base.
Noted no for that, but for my equation of Neoliberalism (or Post-Capitalism) = Wall Street + Identity
Politics generated by the dematerialization of Capital. CDO's are nothing but words on paper or bytes
in the stream; and identity politics has much less to do with the Body than the culture and language.
Trumpists were interpellated as White by the Democrats and became ideological. Capital is Language.
2) Consider the above an intro to
Lauren
Berlant at the New Inquiry "Trump or Political Emotions" which I think is smart. Just a phrase
cloud that stood out for me. All following from Berlant, except parenthetical
It is a scene where structural antagonisms - genuinely conflicting interests - are described in
rhetoric that intensifies fantasy.
People would like to feel free. They would like the world to have a generous cushion for all their
aggression and inclination. They would like there to be a general plane of okayness governing social
relations
( Safe Space defined as the site where being nasty to those not inside is admired and approved.
We all have them, we all want them, we create our communities and identities for this purpose.)
"Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism's unfairness.
Then what? Then Trump's response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad.
Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet - and this is key - the noise in his message increases the
apparent value of what's clear about it. The ways he's right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief
against the ways he's blabbing."
(Wonderful, and a comprehension of New Media I rarely see. Cybernetics? Does noise increase the
value of signal? The grammatically correct tight argument crowd will not get this. A problem I have
with CT's new policy)
"You watch him calculating, yet not seeming to care about the consequences of what he says, and
you listen to his supporters enjoying the feel of his freedom. "
(If "civil speech" is socially approved signal, then noise = freedom and feeling. Every two year
old and teenage guitarist understands)
"But Trump's people don't use suffering as a metric of virtue. They want fairness of a sort,
but mainly they seek freedom from shame. Civil rights and feminism aren't just about the law after
all, they are about manners, and emotions too: those "interest groups" get right in there and reject
what feels like people's spontaneous, ingrained responses. People get shamed, or lose their jobs,
for example, when they're just having a little fun making fun. Anti-PC means "I feel unfree."
The Trump Emotion Machine is delivering feeling ok, acting free. Being ok with one's internal
noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter. Internal Noise Matters. " …my emp
Noise again. Berlant worth reading, and thinking about.
I watched one of Trump's last speeches before the election. In it, he said, "Tomorrow, the
working class takes back this country." I was struck. No contemporary Democratic politician would
(or could, credibly) say those words. Afraid of scaring off their donors or being red-baited,
most Democrats won't even utter the phrase "working class"-preferring the capacious and increasingly
meaningless "middle class" or, at best, "working families."
But Trump said it. His rural and exurban white supporters have a class consciousness of
sorts. They despise elites. They feel that the system is rigged. But that antipathy is entirely
entangled with their fear of a black president, of eroding racial and gender hierarchies, and
their perception that multi-cultural elites are helping minorities at their expense. Trump can
say "working class" because everyone in his audience hears the unsaid word "white" preceding it.
It is, as it has ever been, the left's task to build a mass political movement where there are
no words silently preceding the term "working class." It's not hyperbole to say that everything
depends on it.
I'm going to be as diplomatic as I can about the lack of gravitas clearly displayed in the comments
here as I can, whilst at the same timing reviewing some of the data that many clearly missed.
One of the key reasons I remained confident that Hillary would lose irrespective of what the
FBI did, or did not do, if you're interested, is that I was keenly interested in the attitudes
of African-American voters from the outset of this election. As I've said throughout, I do not
regard Trump as a 'Republican' in anything like the conventional sense of the word, but rather
see him as a New York celebrity vulgarian with liberal inclinations. Trump from the outset had
a clear plan to appeal to African-American voters, even it was far from fleshed-out. And given
the 'of course, African-American voters will support the Democrat' attitude of practically every
white supporter of Hillary, I was confident Trump wouldn't need much of a plan beyond saying:
'vote for me, what have you got to lose?' to do fairly well no matter how badly he was smeared.
Turns out I was right. Low black turn-out numbers in key states, such as Michigan, NC, and
Florida came as no surprise to me because I watched Leslie Wimes one week before the election
explain that it was 'already over' for Hillary in Florida.
Not one to mince words, Ms. Wimes, who voted early for Clinton, reports that she warned the
Clinton campaign and the DNC as early as September that black voters in Florida were not, repeat
not, going to be turning out in sufficient numbers to permit Hillary to carry this critical state.
But nobody wanted to hear. Funny, that.
Layman 11.11.16 at 11:13 am
266
mclaren: "No, what I was pointing out is that the two candidates who set the electorate on fire
were the two populist candidates, Trump and Sanders."
You're abusing the term 'the electorate'. 'The electorate' in a primary (or a caucus!) is a different
thing than 'the electorate' in a general election, and results in one don't translate into results
in another. The point of the Obama Idaho 2008 example is this: Obama beat Clinton by 60 points in
that caucus, but this did not mean he was going to win Idaho in a general election, and in fact he
got trounced there in the general election. This is because, again, 'the electorate' is a different
thing in those two contests. No one knows if Sanders would have done better in this general election,
and primary results don't provide an answer to that question.
Sorry, but I do not see in this thread any attempt to discuss Hillary extreme militarism and jingoism
as well as attempt to make Russophobia a part of the platform of the Democratic Party, effectively
positioning it as yet another War Party.
In some areas of foreign policy Hillary looks like John McCain in the pantsuit. There is no military
intervention that she did not like, and she was always prone to the most hawkish positions on any
war related issues, trying to outdid her male counterparts in jingoism, as if overcompensating her
hidden sense of inferiority.
That might be another negative factor affecting the elections results. Few people outside military
industrial complex lobbyists are exited about the possibility of unleashing WWIII (for example via
enforcing "no fly zone" in Syria) even with conventional weapons. And a lot of people, especially
among more educated part of electorate, still remember her role in the destruction of Iraq, Libya
and Syria. Especially the latter (
moonofalabama.org)
The people loyal to the Syrian government are happy with Donald Trump winning the U.S. election:
At the passport counter, a Syrian officer's face lit up when he saw an American traveler.
"Congratulations on your new president!" he exclaimed, giving an energetic thumbs up. Mr. Trump,
he said, would be "good for Syria."
The first significant step of the new administration comes while Trump is not even in offices.
Obama, selfishly concerned with his historic legacy, suddenly makes a 180 degree turn and starts
to implement Trump polices. Lets consider the initial position:
Asked about Aleppo in an October debate with Clinton, Trump said it was a humanitarian disaster
but the city had "basically" fallen. Clinton, he said, was talking in favor of rebels without
knowing who they were.
The rebels fighting Assad in western Syria include nationalists fighting under the Free Syrian
Army banner, some of them trained in a CIA-backed program, and jihadists such as the group formerly
known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
The Obama administration, through the CIA led by Saudi asset John Brennan, fed weapons, training
and billions of dollars to "moderate rebels". These then turned around (vid) and either gave the
CIA gifts to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al Nusra) or joined it themselves.
The scheme was no secret at all and Russia as well as Syria pointed this out several times.
The Russian foreign Minister Lavrov negotiated with the U.S. secretary of State Kerry who promised
to separate the "moderate rebels" from al-Qaeda. But Kerry never delivered. Instead he falsely
accuse Russia of committing atrocities that never happened. The CIA kept the upper hand within
the Obama administration and continued its nefarious plans.
continued its nefarious plans.
likbez 11.12.16 at 3:20 am
289
Another interesting question that needs to be discussed is the "cleansing" of DNC from Clinton
loyalists (the word "super delegate" smells of corruption) and thus weakening the dominant neoliberal
wing of the party:
"You can't tell working people you're on their side while at the same time you're raising money
from Wall Street and the billionaire class," Sanders said. "The Democratic Party has to be focused
on grass-roots America and not wealthy people attending cocktail parties."
Sanders acknowledged the need for the party to continue its function as a fundraising vehicle
but suggested a model akin to his presidential campaign, which raised much of its money from small-dollar
donors.
… … …
Leaders of several progressive groups, who had been courting Clinton as a potential ally on many
of their causes, have expressed anger in the aftermath of the election, arguing that the result
was a repudiation of a campaign driven by the Democratic establishment.
"The Democratic establishment had their chance with this election," said Stephanie Taylor,
co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "It's time for new leadership of the
Democratic Party - younger, more diverse and more ideological - that is hungry to do things differently,
like leading a movement instead of dragging people to the polls."
… … …
Neil Sroka, a spokesman for the liberal group Democracy for America, said Ellison would be "a
potentially phenomenal choice" as DNC chairman, but said the organization was open to other choices,
provided they weren't part of the party establishment.
"I think Tuesday night was a tremendous loss that must sit at the feet of the political establishment
of a Democratic Party that preordained the primary process from the very beginning," said Sroka,
whose group backed Sanders in the primaries. "The folks that enabled the loss need to step back
and let the grass roots lead it."
In a sign of tension at the DNC, a staff meeting there was interrupted Thursday by a staff
member who stood up and blamed Trump's win on Brazile, the Huffington Post reported.
One telling comment:
PackersFanWisconsin
The Democrats abandoned Midwestern working voters and now they want us back??? Dream on! My
town voted Dem for years, they used to care about us, then they want all bonkers social justice
white people are all bad and sent all our jobs overseas. We will never vote Democrat again, Democrats
betrayed us and they had the nerve to think we wouldn't notice!
Suzanne 11.11.16 at 4:24 pm
284
Agreeing with everything said by LFC in#280. Certainly many people are still not in a good place
after eight years of slow recovery; in this respect Clinton's defeat can also be seen as a partial
rejection of her boss, since traditionally putting the heir in power has been a marker for a popular
presidency.
Also, @246, don't forget that some of us where also whingeing about sexism.
@239: Clinton is a decent Democrat who ran to the left of Obama. She is not and never has been
the superstar he was. The Democratic Party has a perennial issue with getting portions of their base
out when it's an off-year election and also when the presidential candidate is okay but doesn't send
a thrill up their leg.
What we need to focus on now is the obvious question: what the hell went wrong? What species
of cluelessness guided our Democratic leaders as they went about losing what they told us was
the most important election of our lifetimes?
There are several excerpts from the news media since Tuesday night that help drive home the point
I make in that title about Trump and the Democrats in the immediate future. But the excerpts are
about Clinton, not Trump:
There are several excerpts from the news media since Tuesday night that help drive home the
point I make in that title about Trump and the Democrats in the immediate future. But the excerpts
are about Clinton, not Trump:
There are vast rural, small-town or post-industrial areas of the country where Barack Hussein
Obama will have greatly outperformed Clinton
– twitter.com/AlecMacGillis of Pro Publica, Nov. 8, late evening
The left-behind places are making themselves heard, bigly
– twitter.com/AlecMacGillis of Pro Publica, Nov. 8, late evening
From Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, industrial towns once full of union voters who for decades
offered their votes to Democratic presidential candidates, even in the party's lean years, shifted
to Mr. Trump's Republican Party. One county in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, Trumbull, went to
Mr. Trump by a six-point margin. Four years ago, Mr. Obama won there by 22 points.
– Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment , Matt
Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro, New York Times, yesterday
Clinton and her operatives went into the race predicting her biggest problems would be inevitability
and her age, trying to succeed a two-term president of her own party. But the mood of the country
surprised them. They recognized that Sanders and Trump had correctly defined the problem-addressing
anger about a rigged economy and government-and that Clinton already never authentically could.
Worse still, her continuing email saga and extended revelations about the Clinton Foundation connections
made any anti-establishment strategy completely impossible.
So instead of answering the question of how Clinton represented change, they tried to change
the question to temperament, what kind of change people wanted, what kind of America they wanted
to live in. It wasn't enough.
Using Trump as a foil and a focus, she hit on a voice and an argument for why she should actually
be president that perhaps only she could have, and that she'd struggled for so long to find on
her own. That wasn't enough either.
Meanwhile, her staff harnessed all the money and support they could to out organize, first
in the primaries and then in the general, grinding out victories while her opponents had movements.
None of it was enough, though all of it should have been, and likely would have been for another
candidate. She couldn't escape being the wrong candidate for the political moment.
Interviews over the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign with members of Clinton's innermost
circle, close advisers and other aides reveal a deep frustration with their failure to make a
dent, a consuming sense that their candidate's persecution paranoia might actually be right, and
a devastating belief that they might never persuade Americans to vote for her.
"There was no way to generate momentum," one top adviser said.
Any positive storyline from Clinton "was always fragile," admitted that adviser, and issues
related to the emails inevitably stripped away any uptick in Clinton's favorable ratings.
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her
team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.' , Edward-Isaac Dovere, Politico, yesterday
To several top aides, the best day of this whole campaign was a year ago, before the Sanders
headache or the Trump threat really materialized, when the House of Representatives hauled Clinton
and her emails in with the single aim of destroying her candidacy over Benghazi. …
She delivered tirelessly [that day], knocking back the Republicans one by one, complete with
facial expressions that have launched GIFs that have been all over Democrats' Facebook and Twitter
feeds ever since. She renewed her shaken team's faith that she was the leader they wanted to follow
into what was already shaping up to be a dejecting primary battle.
"It reminded people of everything they like about her," said one of her senior advisers. "It's
toughness, but also a calm, adult presence of someone you can actually see being president of
the United States."
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her
team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.'
Bill Clinton had his own problems, but never that one [his gender], and neither did Trump,
who openly disparaged women throughout his campaign and still prevailed. The result was at once
unfathomably difficult for the Clintons and yet not entirely surprising to Bill. He saw the signs
all along the way of this campaign. He knew the people who were voting for Trump, and also the
people who during the primaries were voting not for his wife but for Bernie Sanders. He saw the
anger and the feelings of disconnection, but he did not know how he, or his wife's campaign, could
connect to it effectively without resorting to demagoguery or false populism, something Hillary
was not good at even if she was disposed to try.
– The Clintons were undone by the middle-American voters they once knew so well , David
Maraniss, Washington Post, today
Last year, a prominent group of supporters asked Hillary Clinton to address a prestigious St.
Patrick's Day gathering at the University of Notre Dame, an invitation that previous presidential
candidates had jumped on. Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had each addressed the group, and
former President Bill Clinton was eager for his wife to attend. But Mrs. Clinton's campaign refused,
explaining to the organizers that white Catholics were not the audience she needed to spend time
reaching out to.
As it became clear on Tuesday night that Mrs. Clinton would lose to Donald J. Trump, supporters
cast blame on everything from the news media to the F.B.I. director's dogged pursuit of Mrs. Clinton
over her personal emails, and to a deep discomfort with electing a woman as president.
But as the dust settled, Democrats recognized two central problems of Mrs. Clinton's flawed
candidacy: Her decades in Washington and the paid speeches she delivered to financial institutions
left her unable to tap into the antiestablishment and anti-Wall Street rage. And she ceded the
white working-class voters who backed Mr. Clinton in 1992.
Though she would never have won this demographic, her husband insisted that her campaign aides
do more to try to cut into Mr. Trump's support with these voters. They declined, reasoning that
she was better off targeting college-educated suburban voters by hitting Mr. Trump on his temperament.
Instead, they targeted the emerging electorate of young, Latino and African-American voters
who catapulted Mr. Obama to victory twice, expecting, mistakenly, that this coalition would support
her in nearly the same numbers. They did not.
– Hillary Clinton's Expectations, and Her Ultimate Campaign Missteps , Amy Chozick,
New York Times, yesterday
And then there is this:
Clinton picked Mook, instead of promoting a campaign manager out of loyalty from her own inner
circle. She persuaded Podesta, who had kept his distance in 2008 because he didn't get along with
polarizing top strategist Mark Penn, to join as the guiding hand and the buffer for all the "friends
of" who streamed in with advice and second-guessing.
But that didn't mean there weren't serious problems. Bill Clinton complained throughout that
Mook was too focused on the ground game and not enough on driving a message-based campaign. Without
a chief strategist in the mold of Penn or David Axelrod, the campaign was run by a committee of
strong-willed aides struggling to assert themselves in the same space. Longtime consultant Mandy
Grunwald and Palmieri grappled at points over message control as Palmieri worked her way into
the inner circle. Mook and strategist Joel Benenson barely spoke to each other for the month of
April, battling over their roles.
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her
team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.'
And here it is, in summation of all of the above:
Whoever takes over what's left of the Democratic Party is going to have to find a way to appeal
to a broader cross section of the country. It may still be true that in the long term, Republicans
can't win with their demographics, but we found out Tuesday that the long term is still pretty
far away. Democrats have to win more white voters. They have to do so in a way that doesn't erode
the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable. If
only there were a model for this. [Link in original. Do click it.]
The few Democratic leaders who remain are going to say that it was just a bad note struck here
or there, or the lazy Bernie voters who didn't show up, or Jim Comey, or unfair media coverage
of Clinton's emails, to blame for this loss. I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral
College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for
decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue "wall."
They will say, just wait for Republicans to overreach. Then we'll be fine.
Don't listen to any of this. Everything is not OK. This is not OK.
– The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished , Jim Newell, Slate, yesterday
Among all the email exchanges leaked from Podesta's hacked email account-the ones I read; I read
a couple of articles quoting from each group of releases-the most revealing, in my opinion, were
two sets of exchanges released about a week before the Comey outrage. Both were from early 2015,
a few weeks before Clinton was scheduled, finally, to announce her candidacy in mid-April.
One shows newly hired campaign manager Robby Mook asking for John Podesta's and Huma Abedin's
help in persuading Clinton to ask her husband to cancel a $225,000 speech to Morgan Stanley scheduled
for a few days after her announcement and while she was scheduled to be in Iowa on her inaugural
campaign trip.
The difficulty wasn't resistance from Bill; it was resistance from Hillary, at whose instance
the speech had been arranged. The email exchanges indicate that Hillary could not be persuaded to
all the cancellation, because it had been arranged personally by her and Tom Nides, a top aide to
Clinton at the State Dept. and by then a top executive at Morgan Stanley.
Finally it was decided that Abedin would get Bill to agree to cancel the speech, and she would
tell Hillary that Bill (who apparently did have qualms about the speech) was the one who decided
to cancel it. Abedin reported back to Podesta and Mook that Clinton was angry about it for a couple
of days but then moved on.
The other one is from about the same time and is somewhat similar. This series of exchanges was
among Mook, Abedin, Podesta and Neera Tanden, and concerned Hillary's appearance in early May, shortly
after her campaign announcement, at a massive Clinton Global Initiative gala in Morocco paid for
by the king of Morocco, a friend of Clinton's, who all told would donate $12 million to the foundation.
This, too, had been arranged by Hillary, and was not strongly supported by Bill or anyone else at
the foundation.
Abedin's emails suggest (without saying outright) that she and perhaps others had tried to dissuade
Clinton from arranging this, and then, once Clinton had set the date of mid-April for her campaign
announcement, tried to persuade Clinton to cancel it. But by the time of this email exchange with
Mook and Podesta, Abedin said it was so late and Clinton had had earlier opportunities to cancel
but instead had assured her presence there, that it will break a lot of glass" (or some such phrase)
for Clinton to cancel. Mook did manage to get Clinton's agreement to have Bill attend instead of
her.
These instances illustrate what was a constant throughout: Mook and two or three others, including
Podesta, having to put on a full court press to stop Clinton from acting as though she weren't a
candidate for president. Or a candidate for anything. Both Podesta and Tanden complained about Clinton's
"instincts," a euphemism for "I'm completely unaware of the overarching mood of the public in this
election cycle. Or, I don't give a damn about the overarching mood of the public in this election
cycle. And I certainly don't give a damn about down-ballot Dems. Or about Dems. Or about anything
other than what I want to do."
Clinton arranged to clear the Democratic field of anyone thought in early 2015 to have chance
against her in the primaries. She just wasn't willing to swear off anything else she wanted, besides
the presidency, in order to reduce the chance that she would lose the general election.
This wasn't Lent, after all. And anyway, Clinton isn't Catholic.
Had Mook not killed that $225,000 speech to Morgan Stanley by Bill Clinton in April 2015, Bernie
Sanders-whom Clinton could not clear the field of until June 6, 2016-would have won the nomination
and would be president-elect now, accompanied by a newly elected Senate, and maybe House, Democratic
majority. That fee would have been identified in the Clintons' tax returns, filed presumably in last
April and (presumably) released shortly afterward.
In early 2015, when Hillary was arranging for Bill to give that speech-undoubtedly arrangements
made shortly after Elizabeth Warren removed any doubt that she would run-Clinton looked to be free
of any challenge from the left. So it didn't bother her one whit that this would be revealed during
the primary season.
Nor, since she expected her general election opponent to be Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, did it concern
her that this would be known during the general election campaign. It wasn't as if Bush wasn't a
wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Or Rubio owned by other highly unpretty financial interests.
And even if it did, well, it was worth the risk. After all, after the general election, the gravy
train for both her and her husband would stop. And it wasn't blue collar workers in the Rust Belt
who were her target votes, so it wasn't all that big a risk anyway.
So we were saddled with a Democratic presidential nominee whose decades in Washington and the
paid speeches she delivered to financial institutions left her unable to tap into the antiestablishment
and anti-Wall Street rage. Someone who had to cede the white working-class voters who backed Barack
Obama in 2008 and again in 2012, because the only way someone who'd taken so very much money from
Wall Street as personal income for doing so very little-someone who was selling her anticipated presidency
to Wall Street-had no avenue with which to connect effectively with working class Rust Belters without
resorting to demagoguery or false populism, something she was not good at even if she was disposed
to try.
The answer then was to highlight her high status and the importance she placed on connections
with celebrities and the pillars of the establishment in various venues, by campaigning hardly at
all, by spending August secluded in the Hamptons, by parading with entertainment celebrities at the
few rallies she had.
And by incessantly rolling out ever more names of the most elite establishment people to endorse
her or at least make clear that they, too, recognized that her opponent is unfit to hold the office
of the presidency. Because even though the targeted audience has access to the same information on
that the elite establishment did, and were reminded by Clinton and her ad campaign of these lowlights
so often that they lost their resonance, there might be a few people whose decision would turn on
the opinion of these elites.
They just weren't the people the blue collar Rust Belters who, it seemed clear all along would
play an outsize role in the outcome of the election. As they had in 2008 and 2012.
Nor, apparently, did she have any avenue to point out whom Trump's financial campaign backers
actually were, who was writing his budget and regulatory proposals, who was selecting his court and
agency-head nominees, his SEC, FTC and NLRB member nominees, and why. They're not people with labor
union backing, nor do they have the interests of blue collar folks at heart. Their interests are
diametrically opposite those of blue collar workers. And Trump wasted not so much as a day in handing
over to them the entire panoply of powers of the federal government.
But having sold her avenue for informing people of this, to Wall Street and any other huge-money
interest waiving a mega-check around in exchange for a 45-minute-long speech by or question-and-answer
session with, the likely president she was limited to reminding voters of what they themselves saw,
and assuring them that elites viewed him just as they did. Which may be why her campaign manager,
Mook, wasn't as focused on messaging as Bill Clinton wished. Normally, a candidate has one.
This candidate had foreclosed to herself the message she needed to have, and had nothing much filling
in for it. That wasn't Mook's fault.
Trump wasn't going to co-opt Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were
going to co-opt Trump. All the indications were that that is what would happen. And that, Trump has
made unabashedly clear now, is what will happen. Our nominee couldn't-or at least wouldn't campaign
on this anything resembling consistency.
The way to contain this is for high-profile Democrats to make clear to the public what is happening.
And to threaten massive campaigns on this in none other than the Rust Belt, in the 2018 election
cycle. And to start very, very soon. People who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 aren't Donald Trump's
base. Most of them would have flocked to Sanders or to Elizabeth Warren in this election.
The latter should be shoved in anyone's face who starts blathering about sexism hurting Clinton
among the hoi polloi . The former should answer the question about whether racism was
part of the appeal to the voters who put Trump over the top, by one per cent, in Michigan, Wisconsin
and Pennsylvania, and came within barely more than a point of doing son in New Hampshire and, of
all states, Minnesota. All states went comfortably for Obama, and all except Pennsylvania went for
Sanders in the primary, as did Indiana. And had Warren instead of Sanders been Clinton's primary
challenger, she like Sanders would have voted for her.
People who claim otherwise on either point don't know the region. It is not the South and it is
not the Southwest. Trump's racism and xenophobia did not win those states for Trump. Nor did Clinton's
gender.
The first step is to appoint a strong Sanders backer in charge of the DNC. Jeff Weaver, maybe.
Or Jim Dean. No war for the soul of the party. That ship sailed on Tuesday.
Recognize that.
And join me in wishing Hillary and Bill Clinton a happy jaunt in their retirement as they luxuriate
in the massive wealth that, while possibly still not quite enough to sate them, we are about to pay
very dearly for.
People have lost their sense of security, status and even identity. This result is the scream
of an America desperate for radical change
They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will
blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They
will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and
WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.
But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find
ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine
– is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed
our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies
of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined
precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net
that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than
their precarious present.
At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of
banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood
celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they
were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly
connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.
For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most
of all – these losses are unbearable.
Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of
the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote
economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade
Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour,
vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because
neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of
the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.
Trump's message was: "All is hell." Clinton answered: "All is well." But it's not well – far from
it.
Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what
we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk
of Trump's support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table.
An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green
new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed
resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers
to be retrained and fully included in this future.
It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate
change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous
people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.
People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger
where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.
Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner
of a people's agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace
Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.
Bernie Sanders' amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and
demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure
in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused
by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential.
Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.
That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate
neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni
who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive
leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are "leaderful", as many in the Movement for
Black Lives say.
So let's get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a
genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let's set aside whatever
is keeping us apart and start right now.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal
policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards
have declined precipitously.
You forgot to mention identity politics. Neoliberalism and identity politics go hand in
hand. I don't think it's a surprise that after the 50's and the Second Red Scare, HUAC, McCarthyism
and the John Birch Society the socialist, communist and other left-wingers were gone from the
US and identity politics became ascendant.
We don't see SJW being dragged in front of Congress and them losing their jobs, nor
do we see the National Guard coming in to break up Slut Walks. Instead, we see them in the highest
positions of power and with governments and corporations embracing their ideas. The reason is
simple; identity politics and SJWs are no threat to people in power.
Keep people divided into ever smaller identities and they can't fight back. Keep demonizing
people for objecting, calling them sexist and racist for speaking up, and you muzzle the opposition.
If someone wants to take on neoliberalism then they need to abandon identity politics.
Glass-Steagal was repealed, Wall St. stole itself rich, people wanted change (Yes we can!). But
not a single bankster megathief was even investigated and in the rust belt and elsewhere millions
suffered. They were told that they needed to shut up because they were evil privileged white males
who needed to be HRC's blue wall because she owned them. Refusal to comply meant they were racist
misogynists.
So now they are racist misogynists and proud of it.
And why all this? Because Hillary's ego is so large that it bumps into the edges of the universe.
She calls that her class ceiling.
Thanks Hillary. You brought us Trump. You and that bunch of privileged DNC-ers that are in
bed with Wall Street.
The left's reflections are getting closer, but we're still not quite there it seems.
... ... ...
The visible, real-life consequences of globalisation and modern capitalism are those targets
picked out (hardly by coincidence) by Trump and Farage. The most obvious sign of globalisation
is not a billionaire's yacht, but that when you call to sort out being overcharged or crappy service,
you finally get through to an outsourced offshored call centre. And when the right attacks them
and the left inevitably and correctly defends them - that immigrants do contribute to the economy,
but are still disadvantaged economically, that women are paid less for the same work, that muslims
face discrimination every day - we're infact subliminally reinforcing Trump/Farage's blunter message:
that the left's priority constituents are immigrants, people of colour, muslims and women.
And then we criticise a 50 year old white unemployed or zero-hour-contract man for being "selfish"
and "stupid" when he votes for the only candidate who *appears* to put him first, when we seem
to ask him to put everyone else first.
The left is losing the argument because our answers to modern problems are removed from everyday
experience. Correct, but complex. Trump and Farage understand KISS. If we think the solution is
to just keep saying the same thing louder, like an English tourist abroad, we'll carry on losing.
"It was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump"
Yes indeed, I have seen this coming since the mid nineties, when the -fairly high tech- Company,
where I worked for at the time, became a victim of globalization, 120 people got fired, a.o. me.
Gladly I was able to still find a job at 50, a hell of a lot of others did not.
Besides, I have been active in International business since the early 1960's until recently,
so I know what I am talking about.
We are spoiling 200 years of social economic improvement to the short term interests of capital
at supersonic speed. (modern communication and transport, the free movement of capital)
Both the republicans and the democrats made that happen (as their followers did in Europe)
The Globalizing, Outsourcing, Monetary, Laissez-Faire, Supply side economy.
That is the one thing that I was in agreement with, with Trump, for the rest, by the way he
is talking now, it looks very much as if we will be having to deal with a liar. (and a cheat?)
After all he did say a lot of different things while selling himself in the campaign from the
image that he seems to depict now..
The worst things are in my opinion his wish to destroy the livelyhood of lots of people world
wide by not accepting the human influences on the climate, this besides lots of others things
is in my opinion extremely selfish, especially seen the fact that a green economy can be -at least-
as profitable (in work and money) as the fossil one was.
And of course the repeal of Obamacare, one of the few successes that Obama could materialize
in his mainly obstructed time in office.
What is 'Neoliberalism'
Neoliberalism is a policy model of social studies and economics that transfers control of economic
factors to the private sector from the public sector. It takes from the basic principles of
neoclassical economics, suggesting that governments must limit subsidies, make reforms to tax
law in order to expand the tax base, reduce deficit spending, limit protectionism, and open
markets up to trade. It also seeks to abolish fixed exchange rates, back deregulation, permit
private property, and privatize businesses run by the state.
Liberalism, in economics, refers to a freeing of the economy by eliminating regulations
and barriers that restrict what actors can do. Neoliberal policies aim for a laissez-faire
approach to economic development.
"It's a belief that the human social system works best if there's almost no government, and
almost everything is done through markets... and also it says there should be no trade unions,
no tariffs, remove all the controls and the economy will work better.
Now that's only true of a system if it is inherently stabilizing, it's like saying 'this ship
will go a lot faster if you take off all the stuff that's there to stabilize it.' Yeah it will
but it'll go upside down at some point and sink."
From the British perspective this is true here as well. After a number of high powered meetings
over a fifteen year period, the Labour Party embraced NeoLiberalism and paid when it failed. Those
meetings where pretty big and millions turned up. Those meetings took place in 19779, 983, 1987
and the final one was in 1992. The general public announced that no one would elect anyone who
did not support wholesale privatisation, free markets at every turn with a special emphasis on
labour market laws. Any devience, under any circumstances from Tory ideology was punished at the
ballot box. Labour was forced to drop clause four as a sop to get elected.
And when this neo liberal wet dream started to crumble in the form of crippling PFI schemes,
light touch banking, zero hour agency work and possibly bigger than the light touch banking collapse,
the free movement of Labour for the biggest companies in the UK. Who did the public blame for
these Tory driven Liberalism? The Tories? Themselves for forcing the Labour Party to adopt these
flawed policies? The Newspapers who condemned anything other than free market ideology? Nope,
the blamed the very people who had been campaigning against Tory policies all along. The people
who got blamed for the banking collapse was not the people who DEMANDEDbanks be deregulated, not
the Party who carried out the deregulation, but the poor saps in power when it blew up.
Who gets blamed for the importing of labour? The political ideology that people had supported
for thirty years? Nope, again the Party that bent over backwards to accommodate the Tesco, ASDA
and sports direct et al.
And guess what? After punishing anything to the Left of Reagan or questioning free trade at
the ballot box, and dismissing it as 'Socailism' it turns out they voted for a protectionist who
is opposed to free trade and multi Nationals. The Party who are opposed to free trade, multinationals
and 'What is good for GM is good for America'? The protector of jobs and regulated labour markets?
Why the GOP of course. The Party whose DNA has all this time been at the heart of protecting jobs
who shun free trade agreements and are at the very heart of the socialist movement are the Republican
movement. And nobody even said anything. We all just moved into a parallel universe where the
Republican movement have been campaigning against free trade for two hundred years.
"The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades,
have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security
of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade,
Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the
poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims
of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much - when they caused a ruckus
- and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious,
global game of meritocracy."
"Neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade..." Are you
sure those are neoliberal policies? They sound exactly like conservative Republican mainstays
to me. Didn't Trump run on these very things?
Exactly, they are virtually the same, with the difference being that the GOP adds "nostalgic nationalism
and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade
agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants
and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women".
In difficult times, people want relief as fast as possible and they want to blame *anyone*
for their plight. This is what a demagogue offers; it's why Trump is in the White House. Prepare
yourselves, and never give in to Trump's cynicism.
Warren sold Sanders out. Sanders sold his supporters out for Debbie Wasserman Shultz, who incidentally
was reelected. Hillary was forced on the ticket by the oligarchy. Change will not come from Trudeau,
or Obama, or Trump, or Sanders or Warren. These people have betrayed what they said. Where do
we go from here? Which is the way that's clear? Dunno, but all of the above have shown to be frauds.
Whose next?
In this election, Donald Trump was the lesser evil, so I am glad that he won. There won't be nu
clear war on Iran or wherever, and better relations with Russia, China, and hopefully, the rest
of the world.
As for domestic politics, we'll take care of those issues ourselves, forcefully protesting
against, if necessary. It'll be few and far between, I project.
In this election, Donald Trump was the lesser evil, so I am glad that he won. There won't be nu
clear war on Iran or wherever, and better relations with Russia, China, and hopefully, the rest
of the world.
As for domestic politics, we'll take care of those issues ourselves, forcefully protesting
against, if necessary. It'll be few and far between, I project.
"...a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring
badly needed resources and opportunities to communities ... and insist that polluters should pay
for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future."
That is, at least, the only positive suggestion that's been made. I think it's a good one the
needs to be developed. I'm far from an economist but perhaps we need also to start thinking about
blended economic systems rather than just one type as well.
What I don't agree with is the continuation of identity politics. It's suffering badly from
overuse and also from its juxtaposition with the application of economic pain to those who are
also consistently abused with every vile epithet known to man. In brief, people have been operant
conditioned to either worship at its feet or loathe it with most or all of their being. It's past
its use-by date and needs to grow into the real expression of its stated aims.
As an example, Merkel is quoted as saying, ""Germany and America are connected by values of
democracy, freedom, and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin
colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political views."
The words are just positive framing. We all know now that 'democracy' (defined by the UN as
extreme terrorism to be fought and eliminated when iit involves public voting) refers to voting
by an elite group. For the rest of it, Junckers right hand man was quoted this week as saying
it's to be achieved by 'elimination of all national, cultural, ethnic, and faith identity'.
There is a unbridgable gulf between those two concepts, and the first one is simply dishonest.
But journalists never explain that.
The way forward is to treat all people with dignity and respect, as long as they're not harassing
or killing each other, and stop trying to brainwash them. If someone is a racist and content to
keep that to themselves, leave them alone. Likewise with all the other -isms and -obias. The law
and institutions need to treat people equally indeed. No negative and no positive discrimination.
'Indigenous peoples' could have a special role- but not to dispossess, sponge off, or lord it
over others. Religious holidays need to be observed for all religions, not for none. I can hear
the business howls now but the reality is we need to be decreasing industrial pollution and having
less 'stuff', not increasing it.
I wanted Trump to win but if I saw someone(including him) harassing someone else racially,
homophobically, or any other -ism or -obia, I would defend the victim to the death as long as
they were in my presence. That includes male victims of domestic violence. Everything has its
day and identity politics is in that category.
We need a new way and it needs to honour the reality described in the fraudelent rhetoric of
the recent past globalist, multiculturalsit, and liberalist concepts. We need a completely new
economic system or blend of the old which serves the needs of all the people, al the time. And
we need democratic systems which empower constant feedback from those people on how far its succeeding.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal
policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards
have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much
of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their
kids even worse than their precarious present.
Agree 100% with this, but am at an utter loss to grasp why this is chalked up to the hip new lingo
of "neoliberalism." Bullshit. It's as pure a distillation of conservatism as has ever been penned.
This obsession with renaming things for the sake of confusion serves no one well. This is prime
Trickle Down and the Conservative Manifesto through and through.
I am afraid the author is correct in describing the problem as Neo Liberalism - It is not Conservatism
or Capitalism.
This is Neo Liberalism - You are the CEO of a plant employs 5,000 people that makes widgets.
You don't know how to make a better widget but you want to increase profits so you decide to close
down your plant and outsource 4,000 of the jobs to a low wage economy where workers don't have
the same rights (remember China doesn't have democracy or freedom of speech).
Now your making widgets cheaper but you still aren't making enough money so you offshore the
tax liability to a tax haven - There goes schools, roads, hospitals.
Now your making so much more money for the company what do you do? You give yourself a pay
rise. Not any old pay rise. You pay yourself five or ten times as much.
And then you buy shares because the share price goes way up.
And then you donate to politicians and they tell the great unwashed (that's you and me) this
wheeze is FREE TRADE, or conservatism or capitalism or trickle down.
It isn't its Neo Liberalism and both left and right in most of Europe and the USA has embraced
it to the detriment of its citizens.
Naomi Klein: The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate
neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned.
It starts by having the DNC follow its own rules. The superdelegates were dutifully counted
as Hillary supporters from Day One of the primaries. Something like 507 to begin with! When Sanders
won successive states, more and more superdelegates mysteriously appeared supporting Hillary.
People understand what a rigged game means. This was Thumb-On-The-Scale tactics and people saw
through it. The Party chose Hillary and that was that. That's not democracy. The Democratic Party
needs a complete transformation from root to branch.
But yes, the bigger picture must be a focus on institutional reform. Not just for America but
everywhere.
I agree with Klein's take on neoliberalism, its Panglossian economic model, as a cause of much
angst in the world, but the remedy is simple in the US -- regulation. Break up the big banks,
end monopolies based on third-party payments, licensing and credentialing (health care, the universities,
etc.), and levy higher taxes on the wealthy. I truly believe that race relations among Americans
have never been better, and that most "problems" have largely been manufactured. What America
is crying out for is good, pragmatic government.
Naomi is spot on. She is speaking a truth that too many have no wish to hear because it tampers
with their idealize status quo. They have theirs and to hell with everyone else. That time has
past and the groaning of the privileged- people who do not CARE (which does not include many people
with means- that is stupid to relegate the carers to hell with the criminals) is so LOUD right
now. They are spinning bank reports and market doom and gloom.
It has been said that HALF of the USA is a 'basket of deplorables' - WOW that is reductionist
logic and it explains nothing.
I am not American and yet, what I know is that PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE- human beings- so please-
what a bullshit argument- that you have tried all too often with Brexit (its not working for you
so who is the insane one? Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing
the same thing over and over while expecting a different result?
RESEARCH says that people are usually very informed about the issues of their own lives. All
they have left is their lives and the lives of their children. A LITTLE respect would be nice.
Many creatures can only see things that are moving. Maybe some people are like that once they
trust. WE ALL trusted government, police, agencies because we wanted to believe in a common good.
That trust was ABUSED. The last grasping woke people up. They saw that grab very clearly.
And this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNqMV4Bgs
(I was married to a cop at that time and the interviewee is one of the most staid journalists
in Canada with a program on public television.
Someone has to OWN those facts before casting aspersions on mankind. The voters are not stupid
ESPECIALLY when it comes to SURVIVAL and it is brink time.
You expect them to DIE QUIETLY? Dream on in your precious nightmare.
And people have been saying that for decades but no one has been listening, least of all the
trendy neoliberals who thought they had found the final economic solution.
You cannot strip away a person's identity, life and loves, without them losing their dignity
-totally. You must prepare and assist every one of them for change over realistic time scales
dealing with every consequence as it happened. None of that was done because all of what has happened
is the product of opportunism - cash today think about it tomorrow.
These trendy neoliberals have cheated us all, not once, not twice, but all the time, and they
show no guild, no guilt at all. They will continue to pay the price until they listen to us and
change.
Naomi is spot on. She is speaking a truth that too many have no wish to hear because it tampers
with their idealize status quo. They have theirs and to hell with everyone else. That time has
past and the groaning of the privileged- people who do not CARE (which does not include many people
with means- that is stupid to relegate the carers to hell with the criminals) is so LOUD right
now. They are spinning bank reports and market doom and gloom.
It has been said that HALF of the USA is a 'basket of deplorables' - WOW that is reductionist
logic and it explains nothing.
I am not American and yet, what I know is that PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE- human beings- so please-
what a bullshit argument- that you have tried all too often with Brexit (its not working for you
so who is the insane one? Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing
the same thing over and over while expecting a different result?
RESEARCH says that people are usually very informed about the issues of their own lives. All
they have left is their lives and the lives of their children. A LITTLE respect would be nice.
Many creatures can only see things that are moving. Maybe some people are like that once they
trust. WE ALL trusted government, police, agencies because we wanted to believe in a common good.
That trust was ABUSED. The last grasping woke people up. They saw that grab very clearly.
And this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNqMV4Bgs
(I was married to a cop at that time and the interviewee is one of the most staid journalists
in Canada with a program on public television.
Someone has to OWN those facts before casting aspersions on mankind. The voters are not stupid
ESPECIALLY when it comes to SURVIVAL and it is brink time.
You expect them to DIE QUIETLY? Dream on in your precious nightmare.
Perfect. Thank you, Naomi, for the best column on the 2016 election. Democrats are proving to
be sore losers but they can come around if they all or most read your take on the outcome of our
presidential election. Neoliberal has been our downfall but still most Americans are not aware
of even the word. Times to get explanation of the ideology and the negative effect on the world.
It has been so cruel and so horrible since Jimmy Carter who started this whole thing but the Clintons
were the cruelest of all. I am so glad Hillary did not win. I could not vote for Trump so voted
for Jill Stein.
It was also their (and the left in general's) embrace of identity politics. Welcoming the whiny
'social justice warrior' attitude that puts everyone into little groups and puts those groups
into little lanes, and no one can ever leave their group or lane. Calling people racist or bigoted,
not for actual racism or bigotry, but for merely expressing a different opinion. White privilege-
trying to shut down the opinions of white people. Cultural appropriation- witch-hunting people
for wearing a certain hairstyle or costume. Safe spaces- creating echo chambers and segregating
people from even hearing opposing opinions or ideas. Microagressions- claiming offense over perceived
slights and insults in harmless remarks. not to mention trying to police, ban, and control speech.
I'm a liberal, I lean left, my ideals and values and principles and what I stand for are more
in line with left-wing ideology, but if they want to be taken seriously and have a chance at winning
again, the left needs to let identity politics die.
An ideology that believes that if you give rich people absolutely unfettered ability to make
even more money, they'll magically look after everyone else.
The center left's shameful, braindead acceptance of Thatcher-Reaga, Dumbonomics has been a
worldwide plague.
The EU, supposedly a bulwark of common sense, is still officially austerian and neoliberal,
even though some hard thinking is going on.
Anger-fuelled adoption of far right policies and economics is a further lurch in the same direction:
deregulation, unchecked corporate power, quashing of workers' rights.
A bad time for the disenfranchised all over the world, now being used as electoral cannon fodder
by their owners.
As an English woman who lived in America for some years, it was perfectly clear to me that voters
there have a choice between cuddly-right and hard-right.
There is no "left" in America, and there is none in the UK either in any meaningful, workable
sense. All we have is the soft-right and an unreconstructed 70s Trot. Brilliant.
Nice as it might seem, " The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace
Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions" sounds like yet another
loose coalition of pressure groups with no cohesive platform or plan. Same old, same old.
Absolutely spot on. I remember, as a rare liberal working at a GOP-run Enron, how disheartened
I was watching Bill Clinton pander to the GOP elites and shove NAFTA through a GOP-run Congress
while the majority of Democrats voted against it. He also sought, for political expediency, many
neoliberal solutions that doomed the working class to subsistence. The GOP crowed that Reagan
won the Cold War when actually it was the shift of wealth from the West to the 3rd world as a
bribe that ultimately brought us to the globalized mess we find ourselves in. This was during
Clinton's presidency. Unfortunately Obama did a u-turn and continued GW's disastrous tenure in
what really matters: wars, globalization, abandonment of the working class. Why didn't the Democratic
elite not remind voters that the GOP was behind globalization and the shift of wealth from the
middle class to overseas?
A Message from the Rust Belt: It's the NAFTA, Stupid
The road to President Trump began with the enactment of NAFTA, a heinous betrayal by the Democratic
Party of its blue collar base and of it's most basic principles, taking it from the party of the
New Deal to the party of the Brave New Global World Order Deal, screwing it's most loyal constituents
in favor of Wall Street.
The next step on the road to the Trump House was the Clinton's reckless deregulation, culminating
in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, yet again in the name of a bigger, more profitable, more
powerful Wall Street at the peril of Main Street.
But perhaps the most decisive factor in sending blue collar rust belt America into the arms
of an orange-haired demon is what happened when they put their faith, heart and souls into electing
Barack Obama, a man who ran as a progressive, promising hope and change, but who then immediately
governed as a neo-lib.
I know what some of you are saying right now, that given the fierce opposition he was up against,
he accomplished what he could; but that's a bunch of bull, as we say in the Midwest.
No one forced him to appoint, immediately upon taking office, Wall Street insiders to his cabinet
and make Larry Summers (the architect of deregulation, neo-lib style) his chief economic adviser.
No one forced him to appoint corporate toady, Common Core loving, privatization loving (through
charter schools) Arne "teach to the test" Duncan to Secretary of Education.
No one forced him to immediately abandon, in the fight for Obamacare, the public option.
No one forced him to ultimately come up with a health care plan, that at its base, is of by
and big Pharma and the insurance industry, one that lowers costs not by controlling them but by
rationing care (that's what those huge deductibles and co-pays are for and they're working--working
Americans, even while insured, don't dare visit the doctor, except when at death's door, for fear
the doctor will order tests they can't afford to pay.)
Most now use their insurance as catastrophic policies to be used only in emergencies. This
is why Obamacare is so hated in America--not because it's socialist, but because it isn't. (Remember,
they voted for hope and change)
No Republican cabal forced Obama to embrace TPP, NAFTA on steroids and so univerally hated
here in the heartland.
Ah, but you say, Hillary has come out against it. But only after praising it and only in cagey
language, about not approving it in its present form (and she has yet to comment on the viscerally
hated NAFTA forever linked to the Clintons and the Democrats).
Much is made (and rightly so) of Trump's threats to constitutionality and the rule of law.
Yet Democrats seem blissfully unaware of their own full-frontal assaults on the Constitution.
For elected officials who have taken an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United
States, supporting NAFTA and TPP, which sign over US sovereignty to unelected, unaccountable (corporate
controlled) international tribunals, giving them the power to, in essence, overturn any US, state
or federal, is nothing less than an act of treason. You might as well just take the Constitution,
rip it to shreds, and throw it up in the air like confetti.
(It's so easy to see Trump's threats to the Constitution, so difficult for Democratic elites
to see their own obliteration of it.)
Why is the hatred of NAFTA, of TPP (and of the Clintons) so visceral in rust-belt America?
I know people who watched the plants they worked in dismantled piece by piece and shipped off
to Mexico. I've spoken to people who've had the humiliating experience of going to Mexico to train
their replacements. I've talked to union members who've reported that employers, at the bargaining
table, have demanded huge cuts in pay and benefits, saying that unless they concede, they're moving
to Mexico.
It's personal.
It's not like blue collar, rust-belt America hasn't given the Democrats chance after chance.
They've been voting Democratic since 1992.
They gave Obama two chances, believing his promises of hope and change, only to witness his
championing of TPP.
Time and again, the Clintonian Democrats have deceived and betrayed their blue collar, rust-belt
base. Time and again rust-belt blue collar America has supported them, nonetheless, hoping, like
Charlie Brown, that this time they wouldn't have the football pulled away.
But the accumulating decay, the devastation of the great recession (and the feeble, corporate
oriented Democratic response) have left them with no hope left. The vote for Donald is a howl
of rage and desperation. He was the only way left for them to vent their rage (after the Democratic
elites dispensed with Bernie Sanders).
The next four years are going to be hell. But for heartland rust-belt America, the last thirty-five
years have been hell (and they have nothing left to lose).
On the one hand you don't want immigrants in your mist because they undercut local workers.
And in the other hand you don't want those same people to get good jobs in their own country,
because they undercut your own workers.
You think you have a God given right to jobs for which you aren't productive enough.
In other words you don't want to compete.
You want to sell us your stuff allright ( NAFTA slaughtered the Mexican farming sector, specially
subsistence farming) but you would rather don't buy Mexican stuff, unless it is raw materials
so you can add value and sell it back to us.
NAFTA has made countless articles cheaper to all of you, and has slowed down illegal immigration
which has been in the decline for a while.
But you want it all, no matter how unrealistic.
Having you cake and eat it. While riding an unicorn please.
Why Klein doesn't mention Jews in her list of targets of this right wing hate and reaction is
surprising. In defining the reason neo-liberalism failed so many people, she states "At the same
time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and
tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities
who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not
invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected
to their growing debts and powerlessness." And this paragraph directly applies to how the Trumpettes,
the KKK, who endorsed him, the Alt-right who he played a major role of normalizing, sees JEWS.
Central to the ideology of the extreme right is their hatred of Jews. How Klein missed that is
really baffling.
Naive comment. The "lefts" criticism of Israel is largely unrelated to the growing right's hostility
to Jews. It's the latter you need to be concerned about.
What right's hostility in the US? Where are they. There isn't a single Republican member of Congress
who is hostile to Israel. David Duke ran for senate in Lousiana and got 3% of the vote.
Naomi: "But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we
now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism."
Is this completely correct, leaving out as it does something that has grown since at least
the last days of WWII and throughout the Cold War, something that some call the "Deep State?"
Here's one view of it, written by a former Republican congressional staffer but in an essay
found on the Bill Moyers and Company's website (Bill Moyers is definitely neither a Republican
nor a conservative):
"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of
Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according
to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by,
the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of
a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and
its operators mainly act in the light of day."
Lofgren's description is not exhaustive, not really focusing on the darkest heart within the
"military industrial complex" that is intimately associated with the deep state, namely the covert,
classified areas of the intelligence and security components. (I find the fact that the present
president recently renewed the illegal and unconstitutional 9/11 State of Emergency Act for the
eighth year in a row, just as his predecessor did every year he was in office after
the Act was first signed in September, 2001, telling.)
Still, it's good starting point.
It looks to me that this huge beast is more about empire than Neoliberalism (or even NeoConservatism
-- it encompasses both; it's not necessarily "left" or "right" as most use the terms, not truly
Democrat or Republican).
Hillary has promised to be a president for everyone…that is, everyone who contributes to 'The
Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation'.
According to the Foundation's website, it is a 'non-profit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.'
The easiest way to make an organisation non-profit is to pay out all earnings - seven-figure director
fees, first class travel, Fifth Avenue offices…oh how you can spend your way to a luxurious non-profit
outcome! And whatever is left over after your personal indulgences have been satisfied, you can
spend on a few pet projects.
The Clintons are seen as money grubbers who'd sell their own family members for the right price.
Hillary is a despised person.
Trump is no better. The only difference between him and Hillary is that he is openly corrupt.
Whereas Hillary hides her corruption behind a cloak of establishment respectability.
The dumbest thing about the response to this is is how everyone is just shoehorning their own
narrative into this. If this was just about neoliberalism, nobody would have voted for the Republican
party. Trump won for a variety of factors. It wasn't that he was against globalisation, it's that
he lied that he could change it. These people believed his "we'll bring back all the jobs" over
concrete plans.
Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner
of a people's agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from
Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.
I hang around in liberal circles in Toronto and even there, Black Lives Matter is hardly popular.
I know socialists see the result and think that they can be next, but they won't be.
The political class assiduously serves the needs of the wealthy, while the working people fend
for themselves. The banks get a bailout, the bankers get a bonus, and the consumer gets his house
foreclosed on. The oil companies and hedge funds get loopholes built into the tax code, and the
middle class hears that they might not be able to draw their Social Security until they're seventy.
It's not hard to see why people are unhappy, and Trump was unafraid to call the system rigged
and the players corrupt. You can analyze the results of this election until you're blue in the
face, but I think what it ultimately comes down to is that the working people have been thrown
under the bus in favor of corporate profit for far too long.
True enough, but Trump's "solutions" will just make it worse for the same group of people and
continue to support corporations and the wealthy. Sadly yet again the voters have been duped.
Probably. The only hope I have is that Trump is a vanity candidate, so I expect he really will
try to do the best job he can for as many people as he can. He genuinely has no love for the political
class and our campaign finance or lobbying systems. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that
something half decent might yet come of his election. Probably not any of the big issues, and
it's a shame about the environment and the Supreme Court, but you never know... Or so I'll keep
telling myself.
1] Since the Eighties the powerless left have been saying that the solutions are on the left
... while the voters kept moving right. Repeating the same thing but louder doesn't make it work
any better.
2] Since the Eighties every faction of the left has been calling unto the other flavours of left
to 'unite' ... whereas as what they usually meant was 'join us'. Even now I see no evidence that
the left is capable of running a 'united-self' ... let alone capable of uniting and healing the
deep rift in the society of Trumpian-US or Brexit-UK.
This ship has sailed! The Modern Left has failed to prevent this fascist take-over every bit
as much as 'Old Left' failed to stand-up in the Europe of the 1930's and 'Older Left' failed to
withstand the nationalist fervor of '14-'18. No, I am afraid that, as in all previous episode,
this fascism must be fought. We better start preparing while we still can.
But the problem with your story is that the left were defeated some time back. What we've had
since are liberals (i.e. the neo-liberal right) tacking ever-rightward, constantly insisting that's
the only way to avert the hard populist right. The result has been complete failure, as all that
right-ward movement by liberals has achieved is to further create the conditions that lead to
the rise of the right.
Its pretty much the same thing that happened in Russia post-communism. Neo-liberalism/liberalism
(they are, in fact, the same thing) led to the rise of watered-down kind of fascism.
The modern pro-capitalist/non-populist right has failed to prevent this fascist take-over every
bit as much as 'Old Right' failed to stand-up in the Europe of the 1930's...
This article is spot on. Neoliberalism creates its own hierarchy which has no place for the peole
who voted for Trump. Two quotes from US voters (with acknowledgements to Sky News).
1. A black man who voted for Trump...'most blacks have more in common with white woeking class
families trying to make ends meet than they do with the democrats'
2. A well heeled white democrat man in shock....'trying to come to terms with an election which
has shown me a side of America I was unaware of...'
Shock horror....Trump was elected by ordinary people.
It was interesting to see that nearly each and every newspaper in the US and the UK and everywhere
else and nearly all the TV channels started a barrage of anti-Trump rhetoric always repeating
his sexual escapades and his racist and sexist comments. Only a few alternative blogs or news
channels dared to criticise Hillary or question her integrity.
Now that Trump has won has shocked all these news channels and everybody is asking who voted for
him ? All those "deplorable" people as mentioned by Hillary or all those sexist, racist or uneducated
whites ? Were they angry ? If so, why ? Was it a protest vote ? Why ?
It is interesting to read Charles Hugh Smith's writing "The source of our rage" below and wonder
why all these "expert" commentators got it wrong -- https://goo.gl/VuEGZy
Turn on your television or pick up a paper. Listen to a radio or read the online news. There's
always someone telling us how we should think, and what we should do.
The belief that they know better - that they are superior to the rest of us - permeates every
corner of our lives. Those that disagree with and challenge the 'consensus' are considered ignorant
or uneducated.
This is the argument that's been trotted out since Brexit. The poor old folks didn't know what
they were doing. That somehow, those who grew up under the black cloud shadowing post-Second World
War Britain couldn't comprehend the implications of seeking to regain control of their economy
and borders.
That's the way society has gone - the megaphone minority blasting away in our ear. The elites
who believe their values and opinions are the only ones that matter. Pity the poor taxpayer who
picks up the tab.
The international 'specialist' who flies in for a couple of days to lecture us on what they
think we're doing wrong. From how farmers should manage their land, the type of energy we should
use, through to how to control our borders. How these self-appointed experts love to enlighten
the great unwashed. It happens at the local level as well. It could be the council dictating something
as simple as the colour a homeowner is allowed to paint their fence.
There's the local action group. After moving into an area and setting themselves up as they
see fit, they seek to restrict who can join them, and what their fellow residents can do.
A paddock that once held a herd of sheep has been subdivided, and then subdivided again. Yet the
new owner places a placard on their new fence protesting against any future developments.
The events of yesterday in the US have turned the world on its head. World leaders are struggling
to know how to respond, to Trump's victory.
While so much of the commentary and analysis by the experts has been about the two personalities
involved, the US election results reflect something much more basic than that.
It's that the ones who do the lifting - that is, those who set their alarms early and go off
to work - are tired of subsidising those that are the recipients of the public purse. They've
had enough of paying for the lifestyles of those who look down on them. This includes the political
class who lecture them, and everyone else.
The commentariat are putting their spin on the US election result. Much like Brexit, they're
arguing that the poor uneducated folks didn't know what they were doing. The result is a two-fingered
salute to the political elite who sign off on trade agreements with little regard for those that
will lose their jobs. It's a protest against those elected to represent the voters' interests
but rarely, if ever, visit the factory floor.
But it's not only the political class who left the majority behind. The result also reflects
the great chasm that continues to grow between the wealthy elite - Wall Street - and those on
the other side where wages have gone nowhere for years.
The post-GFC world has only pumped more money into the top few percent, while everybody else
has been left a long way behind. While the Dow Jones Industrial Index has increased more than
two-and-a-half times since the lows of 2009, real wages have barely increased a dime.
Nobody knows how the Trump presidency will play out. I doubt he even knows himself. And as
the elites predict, it might turn out to be one of the US' great follies.
Some are calling the result a swing back to conservatism. But the result illustrates ever so strongly
how the so-called 'silent majority' are deciding to reclaim the way their lives are governed.
It's a major blow to elitism, and is a trend that will only grow.
Perhaps if The Guardian and every other major left media site would have been understanding this
the past few years instead of ignoring Bernie, plugging for Clinton, and pushing the SJW stuff
there wouldn't have been a Trump presidency. Everyone shares a bit of blame for his win. Hopefully
we can not get so obsessed with blind Dem support and identity politics going forward.
Ya think? Finally someone says something sensible. Neo-liberal economic policy and neo-con foreign
policy I might add. There is a German blogger who is a polyglot. He speaks German, French, Italian,
English and Russian. He reads the romance languages at least I don't know about Russian. He monitors
how different news events are spun to the various populations. Which facts are presented, which
omitted, obfuscations, lies and who's controlling the narrative. Because of the time difference
he went to bed before the election results were known and woke up after. The opening sentence
on his piece that morning was, "So I just woke up and found that the world has changed. World
War III was called off."
Which in my estimation is accurate. Perhaps not WWIII but certainly another major war. And
what's the result over here in America? It's the Hillary supporters who are behaving violently.
Rioting, destroying property, assaults, interfering with transportation etc. Not covered in your
press of course because it is the republicans who were supposed to be the violent monsters and
it doesn't fit the narrative.
First, neo-con warring, an essential subcomponent of neoliberalism, for when CIA manipulation
of political strife isn't possible. Indonesia versus Iraq, for example.
Second, Hillary supporters rebelling is in the news this morning, though they aren't a) airing
it as an alarming event, nor b) having the same paramilitary police response to it.
Third, R has been pushing for warring and I've no idea where you'd (they'd?) come up with an all
R Washington isn't going to jump right in. Particularly, post election, when congress refuels
the "campaign donation" money laundering machine, defense contractors (Northrop, etc.) and infrastructure
(Parsons Brinckerhoff, etc.), with the gifting of federal contracts, which will no doubt run way
over budget as cost plus contracts.
There's a whole lot of less than Whole Truth used to manipulate. Some intentional, some due to
ignorance.
Long ago I asked, what is the difference between ignorance and arrogance, and about the only thing
I can come up with is ignorance is unintentional while arrogance is confident ignorance.
And people like Trump never went to Davos? Republicans don't do that? Yes, a lot of people are
in economic pain, and the Democrats and Clinton share that blame. I agree that the Democratic
party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be
abandoned, but Trump's victory is not just about economic pain. It's also about fear of the diverse
country we are becoming. You want to know who is to blame for the election of Donald Trump? The
people who voted for him. They are the ones who fell for the con that he was their solution.
What you say is correct, but the point is that it is expected that the GOP will protect business
interests and profit at the expense of people. That is why they exist. The Democrats have historically
been the party that protects the working class. As the author points out, they have abandoned
that role during the last 40 years, leaving the working class without protection from the concentration
of corporate wealth, power and influence. Working class whites, Latinos and blacks should be allies,
not competitors for the scraps left after the Davos party. The conservative right in America is
successful because they have successfully pitted these natural allies against each other, but
they have been aided the the embrace of corporate neoliberalism by the Democratic party leadership.
Bill Clinton gave us Bush the Younger thanks to having the self control of an adolescent chimpanzee.
Now the Democrat establishment aided by another Clinton gave us Trump. When are we going to stop
buying into the neo-liberal bullshit. They have played us like suckers since the revolution the
French won for us. Speaking of the French, their revolution scared the shit out of the "founding
fathers" especially the parts about equality and fraternity. I saw Trump coming a long time ago,
but I thought someone would stand up. It wasn't as if we weren't warned. Instead all the talking
fucking heads are telling us it's time to heal to work together. Right, like the way the Republicans
worked with Obama. Are we going to work together, are we going to fight? Nah. We"ll find someone
new to bomb in the name of liberty and some new shinny thing will come along and we'll just stay
bent over. But never forget, we are the greatest and the most exceptional.
Good post. But it was also Obama who recently led us here. He didn't do anything. Sure he was
stymied by the Republican congress. But he didn't even use the bully pulpit.
He seemed to me to want to work for the rest of the world more than he did the U.S. He couldn't
even see that the trade agreements are a problem for our citizens. And I supported him more than
any previous presidential candidate, because I thought he cared.
Generally speaking, American and British media supports neoconservative foreign policy (regime
change in Libya and Syria, military confrontation with Russia and China, expanded funding for
NATO, the Iraq War WMD lies, etc.). At the same time, it tends to support neoliberal trade policies
(free flow of capital, offshoring manufacturing to sweatshop zones) that enrich billionaires while
impoverishing the middle class.
The only real difference between "conservative" and "liberal" media outlets is in their take
on identity politics; this is why people view media as propaganda that tries to point people away
from the more important issues of global war and wealth inequality. It's a distraction tactic.
Naomi Klein is right about the neoliberalism that played such a huge role in the creation of massive
wealth inequality in the United States, but the other issue is that Hillary Clinton embraced the
Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras,
Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel).
In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in
2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration.
Obama shares much of the blame - despite coming in with Congress in Democratic hands, he quickly
abandoned his populist base in favor of pro-Wall Street agendas; he expanded the domestic mass
surveillance program and persecuted whistleblowers like nobody before him; and he was seduced
by the CIA's regime change/drone assassination program. His peace prize is now the punchline of
a joke. He didn't help out homeowners who'd been targeted by Wall Street; he instead pushed for
a massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street - and minority homeowners in particular were hit hard
by the banks. As far as all the young people who supported him? He did nothing to alleviate student
loan debt; that's not what Wall Street wanted. As far as renewable energy? He did little if anything
on that front; instead he quietly OK'd offshore oil drilling, oil exports, and pipelines like
Dakota Access. He betrayed his base and served Wall Street, and of course that's what Hillary
Clinton would have done as well.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, had good policies on all these issues and would have won the primary
if it hadn't been rigged by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the corporate media.
The Democratic Party reforms needed are obvious:
(1) A fixed number of debates in the primary (Sanders vs. Clinton? 9 debates. Obama vs. Clinton?
26 debates).
(2) Elimination of the superdelegate system. (In Feb 2008, Clinton had 241 to Obama's 181; in
Feb 2016, Clinton had 451 to Sander's 19)
(3) Opening the primaries to independent voters in places like New York, at the very least allowing
last-minute party registration for independent voters.
That all takes power away from Wall Street-tied party elites, who will otherwise continue to
pick losers that will serve Wall Street interests in exchange for big donations - but who are
unpopular with the general public. That rigged process is why Bernie Sanders, who would obviously
have beaten Trump with enthusiastic millenial support, was prevented from winning the Democratic
Primary.
The other party in this debacle, the corporate media - they deserve to be broken up by anti-trust
legislation. TimeWarner, Disney, etc. should all be forced to break up into a hundred independently
owned news outlets, otherwise it'll be an endless stream of Wall Street propaganda from them.
" Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary
of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for
Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who
crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration."
Very much so. Hillary Clinton to me was pretty indistinguishable from George Bush. I never
voted for Bush and I wasn't going to vote for a female version of him.
"They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will
blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They
will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn,
and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry."
And in the Guardian, of course, they'll work out some way to blame Jeremy Corbyn...
We need to ask why the polling was wrong. People who normally vote did not, and people who
normally don't vote did. Clinton really did rig the election as proven by Wikileaks, and lots
of Bernie supporters could not bring ourselves to vote for her ; and Clinton called Trump's
redneck base "a basket of deplorables", and many of those folks who would have watched the election
from a bar stool got up to kick her ass. Naturally the same persons who pretended that Clinton
did not rig the election want to continue to pretend. But Naomi, she really did.
I too believe Clinton and the DNC sealed their own fate. But the "bucket of losers" accusation has
proved to be false, the product of a spoof Podesta email.
So in other words Naomi Klein admits that "rampant insecurity and inequality exist" and that something
is required to be done to correct this - which I think many of us realise is a balancing of the needs
of national autonomy and globalisation, but then Naomi has the audacity to attribute these "responses
" to "neo fascists" So suffer on you poor under privileged unwashed. but should you rise up then
we ( the enlightened) know that you are being prodded by neo fascists !! A totally ridiculous idea
which can only be explained as the last desperate gasp of the politically correct whose credibility
is not only on the line but is now clearly beyond the pale
Beautifully said. Eight years of neo-liberal acting/progressive talking Barack Obama and the prospect
of more of the same from the deeply flawed Hillary Clinton was enough to hand the presidency to the
grotesque Donald Trump. The Democratic party is smoldering and needs to be rebuilt as Naomi says
by and for the 99%.
Naomi Klein is right about the neoliberalism that played such a huge role in the creation of massive
wealth inequality in the United States, but the other issue is that Hillary Clinton embraced the
Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras, Haiti,
Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition,
she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were
never criminally charged by the Obama Administration.
Obama shares much of the blame - despite coming in with Congress in Democratic hands, he quickly
abandoned his populist base in favor of pro-Wall Street agendas; he expanded the domestic mass
surveillance program and persecuted whistleblowers like nobody before him; and he was seduced by
the CIA's regime change/drone assassination program. His peace prize is now the punchline of a joke.
He didn't help out homeowners who'd been targeted by Wall Street; he instead pushed for a massive
taxpayer bailout of Wall Street - and minority homeowners in particular were hit hard by the banks.
As far as all the young people who supported him? He did nothing to alleviate student loan debt;
that's not what Wall Street wanted. As far as renewable energy? He did little if anything on that
front; instead he quietly OK'd offshore oil drilling, oil exports, and pipelines like Dakota Access.
He betrayed his base and served Wall Street, and of course that's what Hillary Clinton would have
done as well.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, had good policies on all these issues and would have won the primary
if it hadn't been rigged by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the corporate media.
The Democratic Party reforms needed are obvious:
(1) A fixed number of debates in the primary (Sanders vs. Clinton? 9 debates. Obama vs. Clinton?
26 debates).
(2) Elimination of the superdelegate system. (In Feb 2008, Clinton had 241 to Obama's 181; in Feb
2016, Clinton had 451 to Sander's 19)
(3) Opening the primaries to independent voters in places like New York, at the very least allowing
last-minute party registration for independent voters.
That all takes power away from Wall Street-tied party elites, who will otherwise continue to pick
losers that will serve Wall Street interests in exchange for big donations - but who are unpopular
with the general public. That rigged process is why Bernie Sanders, who would obviously have beaten
Trump with enthusiastic millenial support, was prevented from winning the Democratic Primary.
The other party in this debacle, the corporate media - they deserve to be broken up by anti-trust
legislation. TimeWarner, Disney, etc. should all be forced to break up into a hundred independently
owned news outlets, otherwise it'll be an endless stream of Wall Street propaganda from them.
" Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary
of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi
Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed
the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration."
Very much so. Hillary Clinton to me was pretty indistinguishable from George Bush. I never voted
for Bush and I wasn't going to vote for a female version of him.
While I'm troubled by many of the implications of this electoral result, I think the main story is
that the Democrats have bled so many votes that an extremely unpopular Republican candidate was able
to win simply by holding on to most of the votes that Romney managed to get 4 years ago and flipping
a few swing voters. When the final tally comes in, Hillary Clinton will likely have received over
8 million fewer votes than Obama in 2008 and nearly 5 million less than he got in 2012. Trump got
fewer still, and he'll now be president because he managed to sway just enough voters in the rust
belt to win several of those states.
It could not be clearer that Sanders' approach would have been the better one for this election
by far. He spoke to the anger at the economic hollowing out of so much of this country while offering
prescriptions that were in the best interests of the vast majority of people and framed the discussion
in a way that made it clear race was not at the center, that the unchecked pursuit of the class interests
of the wealthy & well-connected was responsible for so much of the human devastation that can easily
be observed in so many parts of the country.
Anyone who zealously advocated for this view was derided as a "Bernie bro" or mocked with sneering
suggestions that Bernie was only a viable candidate in white states. (Nevermind that being
absolute bunkum) Clinton supporters and other DNC hacks falsely equated working class white people
in states like Wisconsin and Ohio supporting a more left-leaning economic program that placed a lesser
emphasis on racial & identity issues to engaging in some sort of insidious white male identity politics-
and they did so deliberately, to muddy the waters.
They forced a widely reviled, ethically challenged, evasive servant of the establishment who deemed
TPP "the gold standard" of trade agreements, supported the Iraq war, was content to let the financial
sector completely off the hook for the last financial meltdown and engineered the disastrous Libya
intervention down everyone's throat on the premise that Americans didn't have a choice. Anyone who
expressed their fear that this would result in a loss to Trump, much less voiced a slight preference
for Trump over Clinton (even if absolutely de minimis), was vilified to such a degree that I am confident
that it stifled some of the public discussion about how to electorally confront Trump. The only acceptable
answer was voting for Hillary Clinton without reservation, even accepting that many criticisms of
her were valid was tantamount to enabling fascism.
Look where we are now. There's a lesson in this: you cannot rely on progressive issues on a few
social positions as a fig leaf to cover up a massive failure to challenge the systemic rot of our
economy, our governmental institutions and our legal system. Standing up for a person's right to
peace, security and opportunity irrespective of race, ethnicity or creed is absolutely the right
thing to do. Same goes for women's right to make family planning decisions or the rights of gay people
to marry and live free of discrimination. None of these can begin to mask massive system-wide failures,
that we are seemingly hopelessly chained to an economic paradigm that is grossly indifferent- even
actively hostile- to the welfare of the majority of our citizens.
I think Sanders' response to Trump's election is entirely appropriate. If Trump does follow through
on some of his challenges to globalization, lobbyists or modernizing and improving our infrastructure,
we should offer our qualified support. If he attempts to push through massive deregulation, lopsided
tax cuts for the wealthy, stripping of environmental protections, or anything to stoke the flames
of bigotry and division we should unite in principled, civil opposition.
Excellent and intelligent post. I especially agree with your last sentence. Trump may have saved
us from an insane war with Russia. But mass resistance is called for if he and the blood-red Congress
try to turn us into Christo-fascist serfs.
Absolutely on target, thanks Naomi! The DLC (Democratic Leadership?? Council) won this for Trump.
They may have taken a couple of presidencies--mostly on false promises--but their wishywashy presidents
did nothing for real people and worked solely for the rich oligarchs and imperialists. The "Leadership"
was only toward the Right. This election was the Revolt of the Rustbelt and the Dead Small Towns.
But Drumpf will do nothing for them except postpone, then forget, and finally turn against any who
dare complain.
And just think--if not for the DLC stuffed shirts and Wall Street bootlickers who held power in
the Dem establishment, we might be happy that Bernie & Jane Sanders--AUTHENTIC feminists and genuine
reformers--were going to the White House. I'm 80 years old, may not be around to see the young people's
victory, so I get sick thinking of how much we almost gained, but was lost by the DLC Beltway minds
and the GOP (Greedy Oil Party) solipsists. We lost more than Trump can guess, until his Miami properties
are all swallowed by the sea. It takes a heavy knock on his orange noggin to get that egomaniac's
attention.
I firmly believe that we must bring down BOTH of our over-age, limping, idiot-led political parties,
or reform them from the grassroots up! (If they can be saved, which I doubt.) It's time to revive
the LaFollette Progressive Republicans and the New Deal Democrats, but under different names--and
this time NOT just for privileged, "entitled" white males. Yes, I know Bob LaFollette tried to be
inclusive, but the time is way past when our children and grandchildren must support and empathize
with the entire HUMAN race, not just the paleface branch who've grabbed all the goodies.
As for the macho white males, offer the cowboys a chance to put their he-man cravings to work
at the top of wind-powered electric generators 200 feet tall out in the deep ocean, or avoiding glass
slashes from large solar trombe wall collectors or even small glass solar cells, or staying alive
around unexpected flares of methane, or getting caught in the ebb of a massive tidal bore and swept
out to sea. All of these are renewable energy generating systems, safe for the planet but requiring
daredevils who would marvel at how comparably un-scary mining and lumberjacking were back in the
Olden Days.
Trump was born into the 1% and has stayed there; inherited wealth don't ya know. His policies and
those of the Republican hierarchy include : union busting, lower taxes at the top, austerity at the
bottom, financial deregulation below 2008 levels, and privatization of government services. Democratic
policies are the complete opposite in each of these cases.
Trump doesn't stand for less neoliberalism but more.
"People have lost their sense of security, status and even identity."
That's about the only part that's correct. Globalisation and the threat of open borders is what
does that. Everyone wants to feel secure in their home, individually or collectively, without the
threat that anyone who likes your home better than theirs can invite themselves over and redecorate.
Canada's elite smugly refuse to recognize that its seeming imperviousness to "ethnophobic nationalism"
is precisely because it has secure borders and an immigration policy that selects immigrants.
Obama was elected twice in very recent history. If the country consisted mostly
of bigots, that would have never happened. To chalk this up to bigotry is
exactly the wrong thing to do - it makes one feel all smug and superior without
bothering to engage with the real issues, like the ones that Klein is discussing.
The Democrats have failed as a party of the middle and working classes. They
are the party of Wall Street bankers and the MIC and the Hollywood elite, who
are more concerned with eating organic arugula and with the bathroom rights of
transgender people than they are with the economic plight of the majority of
people in this country. And they nominated the one person who almost perfectly
embodies this establishment: Clinton - a war mongering, corrupt establishment neoconservative who
revels in Hollywood fund raisers with $50,000/person
tickets, gets paid a quarter of million dollars by Goldman Sachs for an 1-hour
speech, and salivates at the prospect of starting more wars in the middle east
and poking Putin in the eye. That's why the lost, not because of bigotry.
This piece is exactly right. The infiltration of the neoliberals has poisoned mainstream politics
and hijacked the left. It is given form by the Washington Consensus:
1. Fiscal policy discipline, with avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP;
2. Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward
broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health
care and infrastructure investment;
3. Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;
4. Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5. Competitive exchange rates;
6. Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of
quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively
uniform tariffs;
7. Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8. Privatization of state enterprises;
9. Deregulation: abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except
for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudential oversight
of financial institutions;
10. Legal security for property rights.
Trump is planning to tear up a lot of this, and he is quite right to do it, even if for the wrong
reasons. Globalisation has screwed working people in the developed world and enabled multinationals
to form an unholy alliance with the chinese communists to exploit the chinese people to make bigger
profits, whilst the old manufacturing base in the developed economies has been hollowed out and sent
to China.
The Democratic Party changed fundamentally under Carter/Clinton in the 1980s/1990s. Very much like
Labour in the UK changed during the same period under Blair. During that period, both parties morphed
from domestic worker's parties into global capitalist parties with (somewhat) progressive social
agendas. In both instances, the move away from core left economic values was justified by electability.
The sweeping elections of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the early 1990s won the argument and relegated
the original base of the parties (workers) to the periphery.
Now that neoliberals are no longer electable, what's the justification for their continued existence?
No one on the left is happy with their core policies (deregulation, privatization, free trade, unfettered
immigration, coziness with corporations/banks, etc.). If they aren't advancing progressive social
issues y winning elections, why should we continue putting up with the neolibs co-opting our economic
policies?
Ideally, Democrats would use this opportunity to revert back into being a domestic worker's party
with genuine progressive/leftist values (much like Labour did in the UK by electing Corbyn). It almost
happened with Sanders. Given the enthusiasm/turnout he generated, that's clearly the way forward.
Sadly, if I were betting, I'd imagine the Democratic establishment will do exactly what the Labour
establishment did in the UK post Brexit...circle the wagons and double down. And with the anger being
directed at Trump rather than the Democratic establishment's malpractice in this botched election,
they may get away with it (unlike the Blairites in the UK).
The New Democrats (neoliberals) have been circuling the wagons for awhile now. They have tried to
shoot down progressive candidates running in primaries for office and support the neoliberal ones.
The guy who lost to Rubio was a former republican who became a New Democrat while the party shut
down any progressives.
It will take alot of battles to change the party back to their New Deal roots. The party saw the
reaction to the true son of the New Deal, Bernie Sanders. Instead of taking lessons from that and
what the democratic voters craved, they did everything to undermine him and shut him down.
It will take very heavy equipment to remove the entrenched neoliberals from the party and put true
democrats in their rightful place
It's strange to watch...the UK seems to be about half an election cycle ahead of us in its rejection
of neoliberalism. Everything happening in UK politics is echoed over here about 6 month's later.
Down to the fact that, in both countries, wealthy orange haired baboons somehow managed to speak
to the disaffected working class. If Gove hadn't snaked Boris Johnson at the death, both countries
would currently be led by said orange haired baboons. I mean, what are the odds?
Granted, it is the Year of the Monkey per the Chinese calendar...so there might be something in
that after all.
Relatedly, I cannot wait until the UK's new Secretary of State has a photo op with our President
elect. Which one is the doppelganger?
This is a very decent article, indeed the mainstream left made a deal with the devil and now he's
getting his due. But on the other hand I think it's terribly optimistic to assume everything boils
down to kick starting a new democratic-socialist movement, raking in all those votes that have just
been waiting for it to happen(and only voted for a right wing populist because it didn't yet, sure)
and fixing everybody's problems forever.
For one, the neoliberals managed to singlehandedly to make the left look like even more of a villain
in the eyes of those who already eschewed it, alienate those who believed in a left solution but
were not diehard about it, and fracture the remaining group into niches who refuse to engage in dialogue
or even in recognize each other as fellow lefties. Managing to form a stable coalition is a beginning
but it only deals with the latter problem, the left still has a huge public image problem to solve
before it can make a return.
And for another, the very idea of safety nets and benefits seems to have fallen out of fashion with
the electorate: the "I had to climb the hill both ways to get here, so nobody dare cut a tunnel through
it" mentality has been on the rise lately. It seems the neoliberals' failures somehow managed to
make us all even more individualist, if only a bit more tribal too. Thus, for a new left to rise
it wouldn't be enough to restore trust among all the isolated left groups, but also among society
as a whole.
But, when you have people homeless, starving, falling through society's cracks you have a rise in
crime.
Many who are suffering are not shiftless. Many are working but, don't make enough to pay bills and
put food on the table.
Many do not have access to healthcare.
Children go to bed without food.
When society is uncaring, mean and causes undue suffering, society falls apart and into haves and
have nots.
All the money that went to help people is the same money that now lines the pockets of the uber wealthy.
Our schools cannot teach with rats and cockroaches, ceillings falling in and no heat. When children
cannot get a lunch anymore, how do they learn?
When we cannot pay teachers or even support them, you end up with the bottom of the barrel teaching
the upcoming generation inadequately.
You can tell the strength of a society from how it cares for its poor and in need.
Ours is a 'i got mine' selfish shallow society now.
And it is violent and people are filled with hate.
Maybe because we have stopped caring and making sure people have opportunities and jobs and education
and help when they fall on hard times.
Agreed, except for the major actors who started this globalization's depression ofN. American and
European workers-- the Reagan and the Bush corporate supporters and puppet masters. Clintons and
other neolibs have followed suit because they wrongly believed that they could beat them by joining
them yet still do a bit of good for their voters. Wrong. But yes, the Revolution continues. Whether
it can save the planet -- the environment, however, is doubtful, and nothing matters nearly as much.
For years on is far to late.
Yes it was the Democrats promotion of neo-liberalsim aided by such claptrap as this opinion from
another Guardian scribbler.
"Centrism has failed these and many other voters. Clinton was not handpicked by the Democratic
party's elite: she defeated an unexpectedly successful challenge by self-described socialist Bernie
Sanders, partly because of his failure to inspire African Americans. "
That a closet Clinton supporter should have the temerity to write something like this to explain
Clintons defeat is beyond belief, when we know from Wikileaks e-mails that the DNC actively opposed
Sanders.
The reality is that all politics is dominated by the golden rule: he who has the gold rules.
Well meaning scribblers like Naomi can scribble all they want it will never change the situation.
Even revolution will not change the situation for the simple facts are "the oppressed are potential
oppressors".
The achievement of dominance and superiority seems to be built into human genes, and why not it is
so in the rest of the animal world.
Forget Richard Dawkins, dominance is certainly not universal among living creatures. If a species
exists with a plentiful supply of food, domination and competition are unnecessary. Think of the
cooperative bonobo and the symbiosis of insects and field flowers. On the other hand, where resources
are scare, competition begins and we have social structures like the baboons and leafy trees that
kill competitive seedlings by their own shade.
However, throughout evolution cooperation outweighs competition. If it didn't we'd still be solitary
single-celled amoebae. As things are, our own bodies are well-furnished with microscopic critters
from RNA through viruses and bacteria, many of whom run the shop in the background. Cooperation,
whether vestigial, symbiotic or by choice, is the way that leads to life. Competition is the way
of violence and death. That's not Marxism. It's nature.
"Forget Richard Dawkins, dominance is certainly not universal among living creatures. If a species
exists with a plentiful supply of food, domination and competition are unnecessary."
There is a plentiful supply of food for the human species.
So how can you explain the general situation that exists on the planet whereby governing elites control
and enjoy the major part of all that human labour creates to the detriment of over 50% of the human
population ?
"Neo-fascist responses"? Get over yourself Klein. Trump won because the Clinton's "own" the Democrat
Party and they and Goldman Sachs were confident she would be the nominee and millions of gullible
Americans would vote for Hillary.
By far the best candidate was Bernie Sanders but the Clintons had him run off the road by "Super
Delegates". Oh and by the way is it not odd that the Democrats did not change the electoral system
when they were in power?
House of Cards comes close to showing us just how ruthless the Clintons really are.
Well, that it is worthwhile reading. At the beginning I thought: good that someone pointed that out.
People haven't forgotten NAFTA and Hillary's speeches in closed wall street circles and so on. I
just wanted to remark that it was probably a multitude of reasons that explain the Democratic loss.
Comey's interference and other stuff that is outright dismissed by the author also played a role.
However, as I read on I couldn't help but realize that there seems to be another person who wasn't
even aware that Bernie and Elizabeth supported Hillary and wasn't aware of their arguments or the
Democratic platform Bernie Sanders fought so hard for. The last two paragraphs speak volumes of Ms.
Klein's realism or rather the lack thereof.
And how clear does it have to be that "the Network" is and has been purely supra and post-national?
How many trillions in dark loot in shadow banks and other asset dumps which the Panama Papers only
show a fraction of?
These Fokkers and Fuggers, what drives them? How much is enough? There's always been this cadre
of people who figure out how to scam and manipulate and "transcend boundaries," but to the extent
that exists today? With the habitability of the planet in question?
But then I have to remember that these people are into self-pleasing on a gargantuan scale, are
what we call sociopaths, who have been with the species since "we" figured out how to grow grains
and build granaries and walls to protect the granaries and warriors to man the walls and attack the
neighbors and take their stuff, and artisans to make the weapons and "improvements," and kings to
issue the orders, and priests to justify it all as the Hand and Will of God -- what we call "civilization."
And the people at the top have known since forever that if they insulate themselves adequately from
the rabble, they face no consequences for their predations, and can live out their lives of looting
and indulgence and die comfortably, cared for by loving nurses and doctors who will ease their passing
(unlike what the rest of us now face). Because as they have known since forever, "Apres ils le deluge,"
"IBG-YBG,"
http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html ,
And what are the rest of us going to do when they have passed on, or fled like the Nazis with
the gold from the teeth of millions and the art treasures and other portable wealth of demolished
and decimated nations, to live out their lives as CIA "assets" or in comfortable temperate South
American and African places? Dig up their corpses and desecrate them, or try to find their "cremains"
and burn them again? They do not care what happens to their children, even.
I wish us ordinary people all the luck in the world trying to create and maintain a different
order that will let everyone eat only to their honest hunger and drink only to their reasonable thirst...
Couldn't agree more. The neo-liberalism orthodoxy instead of suddenly knocking at the door has come
silently home to roost. The Democrats in America and Labor in UK were hand in glove with elites in
the greatest robbery the history has ever seen. The concentration of wealth in one percent which
was rationalized as panacea of all economic ills has turned out to be an opening of mythical Pandora's
box unleashing evils of racism, xenophobia, misogyny etc. The abhorrent echo of "too big to fail"
is still heard by the those who were let down by the same oligarchs. I have yet to find an answer
to the vexing question as to why enormous benefits of human knowledge and scientific advances be
exclusively extracted by one percenters.
Guardian commentators use identity politics and cries of "racism, sexism and xenophobia" to try and
distract the working class from noticing how internationalism, globalization and immigration has
stagnated their wages, moved meaningful jobs oversees and stoked up asset prices allowing a homeowner
in London to earn more by twiddling their thumbs than their Polish cleaner gets paid in a year.
No matter how shrill the likes of Owen, Jonathan, Paul, Polly and Hadley try and distract us with
their daily dribble of identity politics, we increasingly see them as just another faded facet of
the corporatist, internationalist status quo.
The union excesses (which have largely been killed off and the union and former and would-be union
workers looted and impoverished along with the rest of the "lower orders) are just part of the disease
-- which is corruption, and self-pleasing at the expense of everyone else. Union "leaders," absent
disinterested "regulation" by government (which has been mostly corrupted too) and thanks to cooptation
by "capitalists," definitely screwed the ordinary people (who one must acknowledge included quite
a few rank-and-file that aspired to leadership so they could join the looting).
There probably is stuff that needs to be built and manufactured (not the 7,000 pound SUVs and
big Dodge and GMC and Ford F-series and "TUNDRA" trucks) to try to keep the species and culture alive.
But killing the ability of ordinary people to organize, essentially making unions illegal except
in tiny niches, just makes the end-game even worse. And continuing to punch down on working people
on account of some 1962 wages (NOT "salaries," these were hourly payrolls, with "benefits" that in
may cases like pension funds were subsequently looted by "private equity" vampire-squids and captured-government
actions) just makes it harder for ordinary people to come together AS A CLASS and fight the 0.01%
for a decent future.
my post on Facebook that mirrors Naomi:
My thoughts about last night:
Bill Clinton's New Democrats were incinerated last night...arrogant, ivy league, sleeping with Wall
Street, multinational corporations, insurance companies... and thinking that if they wrap themselves
in the social issues from abortion to gay marriage that wage starved workers with enormous bills
and debts, evaporating opportunities, disappearing pensions, shit schools and deteriorating infrastructure
wouldn't notice they were overlooked and forgotten. This election underscores that Economic injustice
is color blind
What I want to know though is that, given the reality of what you are saying, did none of this
occur to the Democratic party prior t the election?
If they knew all this why did they not respond to it instead of continuing to plough the same
old furrow regardless of the likely consequences for ordinary voters?
Why? Because the Dem Elites knew that with Hillary their perks, access, power, etc. was secure. They
wanted status quo and, just as they have behaved the past years, failed to listen to their constituencies,
ignored them. They should have known just by seeing Bernie's exceptional campaign and the enthusiasm
that fueled it, giving him more money than what Hillary often raised from her wealthy donors each
month, that no one was excited about more of the same. Arrogantly, they chose to ignore and minimize
what was before their eyes.
The most cogent analysis I have read so far. Bravo Ms. Klein. In a year where the country was screaming
for populist change, the Democratic party establishment who had their own highly effective populist
candidate, CHOSE to offer up possibly the most "establishment" candidate in history. Fly-over America
responded with a sharply erect, if ignorantly self-destructive middle finger.
Spot on diagnosis. People are angry that neolibralism has failed them and does not given a damn about
them. Clinton offered nothing but the same to too many people. Trump was a molotov cocktail, warts
and all, that they got to throw into Washington.
I don't buy the racist argument. People that elected Obama in 2008 and 2012, but Trump in 2016
are not racist. At the same time I acknowledge that all the KKK people did vote Trump.
Question is, does the left have an answer that is palatable to the people? It would be good if
it did, but I'm not holding my breath. Corbyn isn't it, that you can be certain of.
Clinton was a comically bad choice that made no sense whatsoever. The left often gets told that it
has to endlessly suffer centrist/neo-liberal "lesser evil" candidates in order to defeat the right
as they're more electable, which is an argument that at least makes some logical sense under some
circumstances, even if I disagree with it. But in the case of this election, everyone has known
for years that Clinton is wildly unpopular, and there was a radical alternative to her available
who consistently out-polled her against Trump in the form of Sanders.
Now her backers, such as Hadley Freedman on here today, rather than admitting their massive and
obvious mistake in supporting her against Sanders and generally backing the "centrist" policies that
brought us to this point, are suggesting nonsense such as the idea that those who voted for Trump
should be "held responsible." What does that even mean? What are you going to do, elect a new people?
You could have had a radical candidate who unlike Clinton could have brought about real change, and
unlike Clinton would have attracted many of Trump's blue collar supporters and, you know, won
.
All that lesser evil neoliberal politics gives us is a lack of change that allows the right to
make even more radical changes during the periods they're in power and eventually leads to the rise
of people like Trump, and it's particularly stupid when it throws up deeply unpopular and unelectable
people like Clinton, Miliband or the various empty suits lined up against Corbyn. It's time this
paper decisively turned its back on the concept.
I don't have a lot of confidence in the prospect of political ideologies forged in the Industrial
Age - "left", "right", "conservative", liberal" - being able to meet the challenges of this post-Industrial
age and the future beyond.
Western societies are fracturing into ever-smaller social groups defined by different, complex
combinations of social/economic/national/ethnic/topographical/sexual/religious factors which mushrooming
sub-groups all create their own realities based on the unregulated information they they select from
divisive, self-reflexive social media sources rather than inclusive "mainstream" news media which
have become increasingly corrupted and not trusted.
Fragmentation, disintegration of societies - these lead to paranoia and aggression aimed at the
"other" - and we can see this on both the "left" and the "right" in the blame-games that have followed
Brexit and Trump's victory. The 19th century liberals and conservative who provided the foundations
for the institutions of Western Democracy didn't foresee the emergence of global corporations and
banks with interests that could defy "the national good" or disrupt the moderately equitable distribution
of wealth and replace it with a massive diversion of wealth to a tiny global elite (So long affluent
workers! Goodbye aspiring middle-class!) - while placating most of the population with a consumerist,
material lifestyle mostly funded by debt. The old system is broken.
In both the Brexit referendum and the US election the most striking split was between the old
- the over-50s, clinging to the past - and young people, disconnected in their social media silos,
wanting a different future but, as a generation, not able to organize and politically express their
unhappiness and their hopes for the future because inadequate conventional Left/Right political thinking
doesn't chime with the reality of their lives.
Not everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist or a misogynist. Not everyone who voted for
Hillary Clinton has no sympathy with an unemployed factory worker in a mid-west town whose future
has been written off. However, everywhere you look - people are anxious and fearful that "the others"
are trying to stop them getting what they solipsistically feel they deserve.
Donald Trump won't be able to get Apple of Walmart to switch their product sourcing from China
to the US, nor will he be able to halt the long-term economic decline of the US any more than Theresa
May will be able to prevent post-Brexit economic decline in the UK: the challenges our dysfunctional
political institutions face are too complex for politicians who are strong on rhetoric and promises
but intellectually feeble and cowardly when it comes to decision-making and execution.
We need education, public-service-based information, new political ideas and new political parties
that can cut through the destructive white noise of Twitter and Facebook and focus on values that
bring people together and counter the greed of the supra-national elites - something more powerful
than divisive, out-dated concepts like Left and Right.
What a lot of words to say bugger all.
Why do people with no answers always say we need more education ?
We have to get rid of this notion that we US and UK are post industrial.
We have made a huge mistake offshoring our industry and must relocate the more essential parts. We
cannot be a service economy without making things.
Bashing metal turning wood molding plastics must be part of our future.
We cannot be a nation of management consultants and hairdressers.
The boom in population during the Boom didn't help. We are overpopulated, and our current economic
structure cannot support the material lifestyles and the narratives of freedom that we grew up living
with or dreaming about. That's the education that's needed.
Until we accept our current situation, we cannot understand or construct new political ideas,
parties, or narratives.
Neoliberal globalization is the worst kind of socialism, whether or not it is actually socialism.
It's what we're going to get if young people don't become collectively more informed and quickly.
There is an attitude of entitlement among young people that drives towards a socialist mentality
and the left has picked up the scent. They're going to chase that vote and those disaffected voters
are going to chase that lie right down the rabbit hole eventually. If Hillary and Obama have their
way, the riots that are being orchestrated right now will start the process immediately.
A very confused article. Neo liberalism is unfettered Global Capitalism given a nice sounding name.
It is an invention of the right. To think that the most extreme Republican President ever, will improve
the lot of the common man is quite simply bizzare.
A good chunk of Trump's support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive
agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use
the money for a green new deal
Particularly as Trump himself is a member of that billionaire class and clearly has no interest
in redistributing wealth away from himself, or in doing anything to overhaul the economic system
that has made him very rich.
Trump was elected US President by riding the same wave of anger & disaffection that fuelled Brexit.
Many of those who were disappointed by the result were quick to console themselves with the (wishful)
thought that he will not attempt to implement his more radical proposals, or that, if he tries, he
will be thwarted by the Republicans (who now hold majorities in both the House and the Senate). It
is important to bear in mind however, that any who dare oppose him will know that they do so at the
risk of their seats.
The "Inconvenient Truth" is that the politics of Donald Trump has much in common with movements like
Attack and Occupy Wall Street, and hence with Naomi Klein. They both want to stop, or put a break
on, international trade. Donald Trump wants to revive local production through protectionism. Klein
sees international trade as a source of both environmental and social degradation.
Naomi, thus, carries some responsibility for Donald's success.
The combined Trump/Klein policies would see the old rust belt workers boarding self driven electrical
buses to go to work in the new windmill factories. These windmills, normally, would be both more
expensive and less effective than if the business was subject to international competition, hence
the electricity they produced would be more expensive, giving domestic business a disadvantage.
The new environmental businesses would require support from the public purse (if not, we would
already have had them). The taxpayers seem in no mood for such grand scale subsidies.
History does not repeat itself, but in the 1930s the industrial nations raised barriers to trade
in order to protect their work forces. As a result, everybody got poorer and reacted by electing
extremist politicians.
Michael Moore outlines his post-election strategy. Point 1 is Take over the Democratic Party and
return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.
Exactly the same as what is happening in the Labour Party. But in that case The Guardian supports
neoliberalism and seeks to undermine the ones who are trying to change things.
Sadly I think the electorate in some western societies are in danger of becoming just as ineffective
as 'the proles' in 1984, while the vice like grip of the military/industrial complex is just as tenacious
as that exerted by Big Brother and the party.
Since the entire political class, or least those with any clout all sing from the same hymn sheet
while moderate, or leftist figures, like Corbyn, or Sanders, are bound to be shredded by their own
party and by the media, then what hope, eh, unless that hope is something new and outside of party
politics?
Thank you, thank you, thank you Naomi. Even after an unbelievable defeat, the neoliberals still don't
get it. Blame game articles are starting already but no self reflection.
The role of the media (The Guardian included big time) have a responsibility and offended people's
intelligence and sensitivity about democracy, elites etc. Now they are running for cover. Today,
Hadley Freeman writes "Misogyny won the US election – let's stop indulging angry white men". Disgrace,
offensive and arrogant. Also, Hadley Freeman with "The US has elected its most dangerous leader"...No
remorse, no responsibility, blaming American people for being angry, for swallowing the same medicine
again...
Compare the Guardian and AP (recall who called California early and rigged the pre-selection against
Sanders?) and Waleed Aly here: (
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/us-election-2016-its-not-about-racism-or-sexism-its-about-class-warfare-20161109-gslxzs.html)...What
options did the "forgotten", vast majority, the "insignificant other", the disadvantaged, the
powerless have? When one is drowning, the relatively privileged onlooker has a duty to help rather
than blame the one drowning for "pulling our hair". Of course the future looks terribly bleak for
democracy, gender/racial relations etc...
Seriously, could Clinton be an answer for the family that struggles to pay rent, the homeless,
the unemployed, those scared of terrorism or a WWIII, the working poor, those in debt due to college
fees, those who lost their house and jobs for the sake of "free trade"...These are many, many people
folks...real people with flesh, dreams and humanity...
Understanding their pain and their lack of options (thanks to NDC & the Media) does not mean one
identifies with Trump and the ugly fascist monsters creeping behind him...It's not about us or one's
dream about equality, freedom...It's about survival & human dignity for millions of US people...
Did the demonizing of many working people send them straight to Trump land? Waleed Aly: "progressives
have treated the working class largely as a source of xenophobia ... ignore it at our peril" --
Excellent article much of which could have been written during the past thirty years.
We all know hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I was puzzled as to why Mrs Clinton seemed to
cold shoulder Bernie Sanders. He had already connected with many of the 'left behind' by putting
a Social Democratic view opposite to Mr Trump's views. Both had identified the problems that the
Chicago economists and neoliberalism had caused, but not having Mr Sanders involved or even accepting
that his views would be part of her next administration, Mrs Clinton left the field open to her opponent.
If only she had remembered her husband's slogan 'Its the economy, stupid', it may have turned fire
on Trump's campaign.
There is an irony that although it was right wing politicians who bought in the neo liberal policies
which have impoverished working people, it is the social democratic parties on both sides of the
Atlantic who have suffered by trying to make neoliberalism work. They could not demonstrate however
how 'trickledown' benefitted the poorest and the image left was of rich people sucking up more wealth
and more influence over politicians as Ms Klein points out.
On our side of the Atlantic Mrs Thatcher ensured that the right have a strong supportive press
due to her ownership reforms and the right is gradually weakening our BBC so that any opposition
views will be stifled. Mr Corbyn has already been character assassinated. It remains to be seen if
Mr Trump carries out his threats to the American press supporters of Mrs Clinton to reinforce only
right wing views.
The smell of authoritarian regimes is now appearing in many places.
There was an almost dynastic arrogance in the Clinton's assumption that they would carry the day.
I have often been impressed with Bill's eloquence and Hillary's tough fight for a rational health
and insurance system, but have never heard a word of self-criticism about the dire effects of deregulation
and the financial crisis. The democrats missed their chance for radical measures when they had control
of Congress just after Lehman Bros.
Still, for international affairs, climate change, any sane kind of approach Trump is an unmitigated
disaster. Hillary has much experience in international affairs, but her opportunism in the wake of
9/11 had led her to support the intervention in Iraq. Of course we were all opposed to Saddam's régime,
but not with those means and in that kind of way, made much worse of course by Bush jr. Islamic State
is a direct consequence of the chaos and unemployment in Iraq created under the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld
administration.
"Neo-fascist responses"
"Trump-style extremism"
"they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women"
You call my right to vote the way I choose "stupid".
You just don't get it. Millions of Americans voted exactly this way. A big middle finger to the establishment,
media, Wall Street, "experts", and yes moral posturing know-it-alls is a great way to use your vote.
You completely misunderstand Trump. He is far more for the working man than Clinton. The poor
voted for him in droves. And for good reason.
I am an angry white male, and I am not a misogynist, as this paper would have it.
I am fully aware of the appalling nature of Donald Trump.
On the other hand, I fully understand the bureaucratic nature of the Democrat Party, the embedded
interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex in that bureaucracy, the dirty tricks
that that bureaucratic machinery got up to in order to extinguish Bernie Sander's campaign.
I am aware of how that machinery has been ramping up a situation of global conflict, shamelessly
recreating an aggressive Cold war Mk II situation with Russia and China, which is simply cover for
the US racist colonial assumption that the world and its resources belongs to it in its sense of
itself as an exceptional entity fulfilling its manifest destiny upon a global stage that belongs
to its exceptional, wealthy and powerful elites.
And I am aware of how Hillary was so keen to service this reality and American image of itself.
And to go beyond that, and bomb Libya for 6 months, killing thousands of civilians (Middle eastern
unpeople) and, may I suggest, doing nothing whatsoever for the women of Libya. Quite the opposite!
Michael Moore, in a talk in which he predicted the victory of Trump before the election, notes
how Trump went into an American car factory and told the executives of that company that if they
relocated to Mexico, he would put a huge tax on their cars coming into America. Not all was misogyny
in the vote for Trump. Whether he delivers on his threat or not, unlike the democrat bureaucratic
machinery, he showed he was actually listening to working class Americans and that he was ;prepared
to face up to company executives.
What has this paper got to say about Hillary and the Democrat Party's class bigotry – its demonstrable
contempt for 10s of millions of Americans whose lives are worse now than in 1973, while productivity
and wealth overall has skyrocketed over those 43 years.
What has this paper got to say about the lives of African American women, which have been devastated
by Republican/Democrat bipartisan policy over the last 43 years?
What has Hadley Freeman got to say about Hillary's comment that President Mubarek of Egypt was "one
of the family? A president whose security forces used physical and sexualised abuse of female demonstrators
in the Arab Spring?
A feminist would need more than a peg on their nose to vote for Hillary – a feminist would need
all the scented oils of Arabia. Perhaps Wahhabi funded Hillary can buy them up.
Great article, but Hilary was hardly responsible for privatization and austerity in the USA. She
only had 2 terms in the senate (and was only one of 450+ in congress). She was in fact mildly center-left
and at least nominally and aginst the TPPA. She could have led a progressive congress (as in the
Johnson year) if her coattails were long enough.
I have never in my long life ever seen a politician so demonized... not by the mainstream media,
but by the new media run mostly by the alt-right and funded by the likes of the Koch brothers. It
worked.
The climate accord is now finished ..any movement towards single payer or paid parental leave,
minimum wage increase ...gone. - military spending is now going up, and Trump is proposing tolls
on all roads -all to be privatized to pay for tax cuts for the top earners. and this is tip of the
iceberg...and not including the racist upswing.
That said, the DNC has a lot to answer for with its undemocratic superdelegates and documented
undemining of Sanders...as did the media who either ignored him or unfairly lambasted him. The RealClearPolitics
average from May 6-June 5 had Sanders at 49.7% to Trump's 39.3%, a 10.4-point cushion...polling that
included independents. In that same time frame, Trump was polling close to Clinton and was even ahead
in multiple polls. Most people were well aware of Sander's so-called "socialist" label since October
the previous year, so I'm unclear if that would have been a factor in the general election.
An analysis of the media is long over due : It was remarkable to see the media, including American
media, go into shock mode and scramble to reorganise the script and the thinking to run a perspective
on what was happening on the night the votes were counted. The media had conditioned themselves to
a Clinton win. Clearly the editors and the reporters were not out on the streets and in the hustings
getting all the messages. The Guardian is in shock mode after the British Referendum and the American
Presidential Election. The most politically dangerous person is a discontented voter with a ballot
paper. How could the media have not spotted in advance what was happening ? I do not buy the lazy
perspective that the voters deceived the media into their voting intentions. Personally, I think
the media have got fat and lazy and need to come out from behind their editorial desks.
Naomi, has omitted one very important detail: automation, i.e. the use of AI to replace
jobs.
This absolutely requires us to restructure society to provide security and purpose to each every
one of us who is not part of the super rich owners.
For example we will see driving jobs rapidly disappearing within the next five to ten years.
I also notice that where the worst effects of rampant capitalism are ameliorated there appear
to be fewer issues. I'm thinking of many Western European nations where the issues do not yet seem
to have the over fifty percent traction that they have in the US and the UK. If Australia were suffering
a similar economic slow down it may well join the US and UK. But what's happening in Canada and New
Zealand?
The problem with centre left parties throughout the western world is that they sold out to corporate
capitalism, which forced people who rejected neoliberalism to go to the extremes to protest. The
question is, once someone's loyalty has been broken, it is that much more difficult to win loyalty
back, if it is possible at all.
And you're right - the neoliberal capture of centre-left legacy parties from the Democrats to
the German SPD and French Socialist Party has created an exceptionally unpromising landscape and
public mood. Trust has been broken. Responsibilities betrayed. Intellectual traditions traduced,
distorted, or simply cast aside.
In moments of humiliation or defeat - and make no mistake, this was both - there needs to be reflection
and a willingness to return to first principles as well as evolving new strategies and insights appropriate
to the present.
Economic realities shape cultural and social relations. The left should always listen to the experiences
of people and build a consensus based on solidarity between groups and not the alienated support
of different self-interested demographics. Exploitation is the corner-stone of capitalism when it
is left to run unchecked. Without regulation, capitalism tends towards monopolies that end up subverting
democracy itself.
These are the issues Bernie Sanders raised and the enthusiasm with which it was greeted is testimony
to the fact that there are white working class voters hungry for a politics of positive, radical
social change. Intoning with robotic piety that the people have never had it so good despite overwhelming
evidence to the contrary is a form of deceit; when it comes from the mouths of corporate Democrats,
it is political obscenity.
In moments of humiliation or defeat - and make no mistake, this was both - there needs to be
reflection and a willingness to return to first principles
I think what I've realised from the Brexit and Trump results is how desperate people are for something
to believe in. What used to be called 'the vision thing'.
For decades we've had to choose between different forms of managerialism and variations on a theme
of 'there is no alternative to rule by the market'. We just had to put up and shut up, there was
nothing to get excited about. Nobody's ever jumped up and down shouting "What do want? Trickle-down
economics! When do we want it? Now!"
The thing about demagogues is they offer that emotional release. What we need is principled political
movements that also enable it.
Absolutely right. One of the by-products of There Is No Alternative, though, is that managerialism
and wonkiness have been fetishised. Hillary Clinton's devastatingly uninspiring offer to the American
people was hailed by some as a mark of her "maturity", "experience", and "competence". Bernie Sanders,
by contrast, was attacked for firing people up, for inspiring them to believe change was possible
- by implication, of course, such attacks rest on the belief that change is in fact not possible
at all. It is a bleak nihilism that states the best that can be hoped or organised for is a slightly
better management of existing structures.
There is a hypocrisy, too, when someone like Clinton derides Trump's economic plans as "Trumped-up
trickle-down". In reality, they were arguing simply over who would offer the *bigger* tax cuts. The
notion that there were alternative visions on the economy, on climate change, on racial equality
or healthcare and education, not to mention foreign policies, was almost completely absent.
This is why I wrote that in some ways Hillary Clinton was the greater evil in this election. It
is one thing to hark backwards to a mythical past, as Donald Trump did. It is quite another to put
such tight constraints on the entire notion of what is possible in the future. Trump offered nostalgia.
Clinton offered the tyranny of low expectations - forever.
But that is all in the past now - for the future, I agree with you that there needs to be a willingness
to offer radical, inspirational and visionary alternatives to a system that has simply not worked
for the majority of people who through no fault of their own find their quality of life, possibilities
and security in decline while wealth flows ceaselessly upwards and into the pockets of those already
insulated from the harm their favoured politicians unleash.
Bernie showed what can be done - he also showed that people are willing to finance such campaigns
and thus liberate the political process from the death-grip of corporate donations. Personally, I
am sceptical of whether the Democratic Party is an appropriate vehicle for such politics (I know
that Bernie doesn't agree with me!) Regardless, his campaign should provide somewhat of a model for
what can be done - and likewise his statement from today. Amidst the headlong rush - in this paper
as well - to denigrate and smear voters for failing to advance bourgeois liberal interests, it is
imperative that deprived, working class voters of all races are listened to properly and not labelled
racists and bigots. A few no doubt are. But these are, in many instances, the same people that helped
elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. They are crying out for something to organise around. Hillary
Clinton failed because she was not and never has been a person capable of, even interested in, offering
that.
This is a great article. Alas, I fear it is all too late.
Everyone knew what was wrong with Clinton and the whole rotten DNC operation, but they supported
her anyway. When her flaws were pointed out, people kept saying 'but she's a woman.' As if that even
mattered.
Fundamentally the left has to abandon its obsession with identity politics, embrace national identity
and individual liberty. Then it will be able to get over its economic message and win the day.
What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times,
truly didn't understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in
the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound,
so scary yet ludicrous.
We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had
become vastly more open and tolerant over time.
We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.
It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people - white people,
living mainly in rural areas - who don't share at all our idea of what America is about. For them,
it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many
other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to
vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.
I don't know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly
possible.
After all, Clinton is not going to make it into the Oval Office unless she can secure the votes of
those who backed the far-more progressive Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.
Clinton's camp have wielded various sticks to beat these voters into submission. Not least they
have claimed that a refusal to vote for Clinton is an indication of one's
misogyny . But it has not been an easy task. Actor Susan Sarandon, for example, has
stated that she is not going to "vote with my vagina". As she notes, if the issue is simply about
proving one is not anti-women, there is a much worthier candidate for president who also happens
to be female: Jill Stein, of the Green Party.
Sarandon, who supported Sanders in the primaries, spoke for a vast swath of voters excluded by
the two-party system when she told BBC Newsnight:
I am worried about the wars, I am worried about Syria, I am worried about all of these things
that actually exist. TTP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] and I'm worried about fracking. I'm worrying
about the environment. No matter who gets in they don't address these things because money has
taken over our system.
Given that both Donald Trump and Clinton represent big money – and big money only – Clinton's
supporters have been forced to find another stick. And that has been the "lesser evil" argument.
Clinton may be bad, but Trump would be far worse. Voting for a non-evil candidate like Jill Stein
– who has no hope of winning – would split the progressive camp and ensure Trump, the more evil candidate,
triumphs. Therefore, there is a moral obligation on progressive voters to back Clinton, however bad
her track record as a senator and as secretary of state.
There is nothing new about this argument. It had been around for decades, and has been corralling
progressives into voting for Democratic presidents who have still advanced US neoconservative policy
goals abroad and neoliberal ones at home.
America's pseudo-democracy
So is it true that Clinton is the lesser-evil candidate? To answer that question, we need to examine
those "policy differences" with Trump.
On the negative side, Trump's platform poses a genuine threat to civil liberties. His bigoted,
"blame the immigrants" style of politics will harm many families in the US in very tangible ways.
Even if the inertia of the political system reins in his worst excesses, as is almost certain, his
inflammatory rhetoric is sure to damage the façade of democratic discourse in the US – a development
not to be dismissed lightly. Americans may be living in a pseudo-democracy, one run more like a plutocracy,
but destroying the politics of respect, and civil discourse, could quickly result in the normalisation
of political violence and intimidation.
On the plus side, Trump is an isolationist, with little appetite for foreign entanglements. Again,
the Washington policy elites may force him to engage abroad in ways he would prefer not to, but his
instincts to limit the projection of US military power on the international stage are likely to be
an overall good for the world's population outside the US. Any diminishment of US imperialism is
going to have real practical benefits for billions of people around the globe. His refusal to demonise
Vladimir Putin, for example, may be significant enough to halt the gradual slide towards a nuclear
confrontation with Russia, either in Ukraine or in the Middle East.
Clinton is the mirror image of Trump. Domestically, she largely abides by the rules of civil politics
– not least because respectful discourse benefits her as the candidate with plenty of political experience.
The US is likely to be a more stable, more predictable place under a Clinton presidency, even as
the plutocratic elite entrenches its power and the wealth gap grows relentlessly.
Abroad, however, the picture looks worse under Clinton. She has been an enthusiastic supporter
of all the many recent wars of aggression launched by the US, some declared and some covert. Personally,
as secretary of state, she helped engineer the overthrow of Col Muammar Gaddafi. That policy led
to an outcome – one that was entirely foreseeable – of Libya's reinvention as a failed state, with
jihadists of every stripe sucked into the resulting vacuum. Large parts of Gadaffi's arsenal followed
the jihadists as they exported their struggles across the Middle East, creating more bloodshed and
heightening the refugee crisis. Now Clinton wants to intensify US involvement in Syria, including
by imposing a no-fly zone – or rather, a US and allies-only fly zone – that would thrust the US into
a direct confrontation with another nuclear-armed power, Russia.
In the cost-benefit calculus of who to vote for in a two-party contest, the answer seems to be:
vote for Clinton if you are interested only in what happens in the narrow sphere of US domestic politics
(assuming Clinton does not push the US into a nuclear war); while if you are a global citizen worried
about the future of the planet, Trump may be the marginally better of two terribly evil choices.
(Neither, of course, cares a jot about the most pressing problem facing mankind: runaway climate
change.)
So even on the extremely blinkered logic of Clinton's supporters, Clinton might not be the winner
in a lesser-evil presidential contest.
Mounting disillusion
But there is a second, more important reason to reject the lesser-evil argument as grounds for
voting for Clinton.
Trump's popularity is a direct consequence of several decades of American progressives voting
for the lesser-evil candidate. Most Americans have never heard of Jill Stein, or the other three
candidates who are not running on behalf of the Republican and Democratic parties. These candidates
have received no mainstream media coverage – or the chance to appear in the candidate debates – because
their share of the vote is so minuscule. It remains minuscule precisely because progressives have
spent decades voting for the lesser-evil candidate. And nothing is going to change so long as progressives
keep responding to the electoral dog-whistle that they have to keep the Republican candidate out
at all costs, even at the price of their own consciences.
Growing numbers of Americans understand that their country was "stolen from them", to use a popular
slogan. They sense that the US no longer even aspires to its founding ideals, that it has become
a society run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny wealthy elite. Many are looking for someone to
articulate their frustration, their powerlessness, their hopelessness.
Two opposed antidotes for the mounting disillusionment with "normal politics" emerged during the
presidential race: a progressive one, in the form of Sanders, who suggested he was ready to hold
the plutocrats to account; and a populist one, in the form of Trump, determined to deflect anger
away from the plutocrats towards easy targets like immigrants. As we now know from Wikileaks' release
of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's emails, the Democats worked hard to rig their own primaries
to make sure the progressive option, Sanders, was eliminated. The Republicans, by contrast, were
overwhelmed by the insurrection within their own party.
The wave of disaffection Sanders and Trump have been riding is not going away. In fact, a President
Clinton, the embodiment of the self-serving, self-aggrandising politics of the plutocrats, will only
fuel the disenchantment. The fixing of the Democratic primaries did not strengthen Clinton's moral
authority, it fuelled the kind of doubts about the system that bolster Trump. Trump's accusations
of a corrupt elite and a rigged political and media system are not merely figments of his imagination;
they are rooted in the realities of US politics.
Trump, however, is not the man to offer solutions. His interests are too close aligned to those
of the plutocrats for him to make meaningful changes.
Trump may lose this time, but someone like him will do better next time – unless ordinary Americans
are exposed to a different kind of politician, one who can articulate progressive, rather regressive,
remedies for the necrosis that is rotting the US body politic. Sanders began that process, but a
progressive challenge to "politics as normal" has to be sustained and extended if Trump and his ilk
are not to triumph eventually.
The battle cannot be delayed another few years, on the basis that one day a genuinely non-evil
candidate will emerge from nowhere to fix this rotten system. It won't happen of its own. Unless
progressive Americans show they are prepared to vote out of conviction, not out of necessity, the
Democratic party will never have to take account of their views. It will keep throwing up leaders
– in different colours and different sexes – to front the tiny elite that runs the US and seeks to
rule the world.
"... Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets. ..."
"... It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies. ..."
"... The only consolation is that clearly a Dem or Repub president doesn't really matter, given the corporatocracy (or oligarchy, take your pick). So the bonus this year is that Drump destroyed the Bush dynasty and most of the RNC. And Clinton has burnt all her bridges and allies and the liberal MSM in getting to her (assumed) victory. ..."
"... remember whatever happens the world will go on and one US president or another will screw the serfs domestically and bomb Middle Eastern countries. ..."
"... Unless Hillary and the gung-ho neocons decide that we really should see just how far Putin can be pushed. ..."
"... I don't care which one wins, all I know is that the rest of us in the 90% will be screwed either way. But I will settle down in the evening, have a cuppa, and hope that TV will provide me with some schadenfreude. ..."
"... We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state…. ..."
"... "I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists." ..."
"... "It is not my job to support someone who makes for a better Republican than they can come up with themselves." ..."
"... I will never again vote for the 'lesser of two evils'. Did it once for Obama (against Sarah Palin). Never again. It just encourages more crapification. ..."
"... I've read exactly one compelling argument for voting Hillary, by Jim Kunstler, who thinks it best if the crew responsible for the mess is still holding the bag when things really go south. ..."
Best pro-Trump piece I've seen: "The GOP's 'Ungrateful Bastard' Caucus" [
American Greatness ].
Best pro-Clinton piece remains: "Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It's Important" [
Common Dreams ].
The best reasons I can think of to vote for each candidate (as opposed to against the
other candidates). In no particular order:
Trump: A realist foreign policy Clinton: More of the same Stein: Break the two-party duopoloy
Johnson: Sanity on marijuna legalization
These reasons are, of course, entirely incommensurate.
"The American Conservative Presidential Symposium" [
The American Conservative ]. Michael Tracey: "Trump might be better than Hillary on foreign
policy (my top issue), but he's far too volatile to conclude that with any certainty, and he may
well end up being catastrophically worse. The Clintons' outrageous stoking of a war fervor over
Russia is quite simply depraved and should disqualify them from reentering the White House…. Democrats
deserve punishment for nominating a candidate with such severe legal problems, stifling a genuine
populist insurgent in the most craven possible fashion (I supported Bernie Sanders but find his
recent hectoring pro-Clinton conduct highly off-putting). Their shambolic, 'rigged' primary process
can't be countenanced, nor can the 2016 electoral debacle as a whole, so I'll do my small part
in rejecting this horror show by declining to vote."
Realignment
"America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired" [
Of Two Minds ]. "The last failed remnants of the state-cartel hierarchies left over from World
War II must implode before we can move forward. Healthcare, defense, pharmaceuticals, higher education,
the mainstream media and the systems of governance must all decay to the point that no one can
be protected from the destructive consequences of their failure, and no paychecks can be issued
by these failed systems." Tellingly, the author omits the FIRE sector. So I would say their definition
of elite is odd.
"[E]ducation levels are a more significant factor this year. Obama won a majority of those
with a high school diploma (or less) in 2012, while Romney won college-educated voters. This year
the numbers are reversed. Among white voters with only a high school education, Trump leads by
over 25 points. Among whites with a college degree, Clinton leads by about 10 percent. This is
the first time since serious polling began in 1952 that this has happened [
RealClearPoltiics ]. And when I ask myself who sent the United States heading toward Third
World status, it's not those without college degrees. In fact, it's Clinton's base.
[M]illions of Americans trudge through a bleak round of layoffs, wage cuts, part-time jobs
at minimal pay, and system-wide dysfunction. The crisis hasn't hit yet, but those members of
the political class who think that the people who used to be rock-solid American patriots will
turn out en masse to keep today's apparatchiks secure in their comfortable lifestyles have,
as the saying goes, another think coming. Nor is it irrelevant that most of the enlisted personnel
in the armed forces, who are the US government's ultimate bulwark against popular unrest, come
from the very classes that have lost faith most drastically in the American system. The one
significant difference between the Soviet case and the American one at this stage of the game
is that Soviet citizens had no choice but to accept the leaders the Communist Party of the
USSR foisted off on them, from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev, until the system
collapsed of its own weight…
If George W. Bush was our Leonid Brezhnev, as I'd suggest, and Barack Obama is our Yuri
Andropov, Hillary Clinton is running for the position of Konstantin Chernenko; her running
mate Tim Kaine, in turn, is waiting in the wings as a suitably idealistic and clueless Mikhail
Gorbachev, under whom the whole shebang can promptly go to bits. While I don't seriously expect
the trajectory of the United States to parallel that of the Soviet Union anything like as precisely
as this satiric metaphor would suggest, the basic pattern of cascading dysfunction ending in
political collapse is quite a common thing in history, and a galaxy of parallels suggests that
the same thing could very easily happen here within the next decade or so. The serene conviction
among the political class and their affluent hangers-on that nothing of the sort could possibly
take place is just another factor making it more likely.
"Why Trump Is Different-and Must Be Repelled" [Adam Gopnik,
The New Yorker ].
For the past months, and into this final week, as for much of the past year, many New Yorkers
have been in a position that recalls parents with a colicky baby: you put the baby down at
last, it seems safely asleep, grateful and unbelievably exhausted you return to bed-only to
hear the small tell-tale cough or sob that guarantees another crying jag is on the way. The
parents in this case, to fill in the metaphorical blanks, are liberal-minded folk; the baby's
cries are any indicators that Donald Trump may not be out of the race for President-as he seemed
to be even as recently as last week-and may actually have a real chance at being elected. Disbelief
crowds exhaustion: this can't be happening. If the colicky baby is a metaphor too sweet for
so infantile a figure as the orange menace, then let us think instead, perhaps, of the killer
in a teen horror movie of the vintage kind: every time Freddy seemed dispatched and buried,
there he was leaping up again, as the teens caught their breath and returned, too soon, to
their teendom.
Of course, Gopnik - who should really stick to writing sweetly atmospheric pieces about Paris
- is both passive-aggressive and infuriatingly smug. To "fill in the metaphorical blanks," but
for realz, both the "colicky baby" and the teen horror movie villain are infantilized and
displaced versions of a working class Other: The Trump voter that Eurostar-rider Gopnik hates
and fears, because he's afraid they're going to come and kill him and take his stuff. In short,
he has the guilty conscience of a classic liberal.
Democrat Email Hairball
"Dow surges 300 points as FBI clears Clinton on eve of election" [
USA Today ]. Hmm. Insiders go to HappyVille!
Our Famously Free Press
"Vox Scams Readers Into Thinking Prescient World Series Tweet Was A Scam [Update]" [
DeadSpin ].
Guillotine Watch
"Too Smug to Jail" [Matt Taibbi,
Rolling Stone ]. "As we reach the close of an election season marked by anger toward the unaccountable
rich, The Economist has chimed in with a defense of the beleaguered white-collar criminal."
[T]his is the crucial passage:
"Most corporate crime is the result of collective action rather than individual wrongdoing-long
chains of command that send (often half-understood) instructions, or corporate cultures that encourage
individuals to take risky actions. The authorities have rightly adjusted to this reality by increasingly
prosecuting companies rather than going after individual miscreants."
Yikes! This extraordinary argument is cousin to the
Lieutenant Calley defense , i.e., that soldiers bear no responsibility for crimes they were
ordered to execute. The Economist here would have you believe that there's no such thing
as an individual crime in a corporate context.
Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear
as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets.
It involves moving power from
public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated
financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies.
Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or
Amazon.
Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism
is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies.
"Uncovering Credit Disparities among Low- and Moderate-Income Areas" [
Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis ]. "Eggleston found that LMI [lower abd middle-income] neighborhoods
with relatively better credit tend to be in metros with a larger percentage of white residents, and
they are typically found in the East, West and parts of the upper Midwest. They also tend to be in
metros that have lower poverty rates."
Look at reddit r/politics. Did Hillary/Brock stop paying to downvote all anti-Hill posts/comments?
Reaction to the Daily Beast telling readers "YOU MUST VOTE HILLARY" was at 11,000. Maybe, Hillary
and Co are trying to get a handle on real voter sentiment?
Or they don't care now that it is in the bag.
LOL I was going to post (well, I guess I am doing so) that the finger I am counting down on
is my middle finger, which I shall extend to the DNC, the RNC, the MSM, and the rest of the corrupt
US oligarchy that brought us here. Especially the MSM - and note of course that it was Bill Clinton
who deregulated the media so it went from one hundred or so to the SIX corporate behemoths that
control 90%+ of the news that the average American consumes.
FU!
The only consolation is that clearly a Dem or Repub president doesn't really matter, given
the corporatocracy (or oligarchy, take your pick). So the bonus this year is that Drump destroyed
the Bush dynasty and most of the RNC. And Clinton has burnt all her bridges and allies and the
liberal MSM in getting to her (assumed) victory.
My humble advice for tomorrow: have a case of beer, wine, whiskey, or green tea at hand, relax,
play some good music, ignore the MSM, and remember whatever happens the world will go on and one
US president or another will screw the serfs domestically and bomb Middle Eastern countries.
Oh yeah, I will extend my own middle finger right back at them tomorrow. Voting for Stein will
at least give me the inner peace and comfort of knowing that I did not vote for the "lesser evil"
represented by Madame Secretary. I don't care which one wins, all I know is that the rest of us
in the 90% will be screwed either way. But I will settle down in the evening, have a cuppa, and
hope that TV will provide me with some schadenfreude.
I apologize if these concluding thoughts on an exhausting electoral season, by Chris Hedges,
have already been posted:
"We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political
theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules.
Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state….
The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence.
[This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed.
Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective
strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment
of the system's downfall.
Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience."
Sounds too much like the Demos fighting for the people but never winning. Also a bit narcissistic.
And is Hedges a foe of, say, the government insurance of privately created deposits – a fascist
invention if ever there was?
Thanks for Correcting the Record! Glad that we can lump anyone who questions your narrative into four neat categories. There's
no possible way someone could have an original thought.
You only need to buy a plane etc. to hand out as favors, buy 4 or 5 dozen media personalities
at mainstream outlets (a network is a must), get your sycophants in elections offices all over
the country to purge your rival's voters and raise a billion dollars. Easy peasy.
Your assuming we don't get about a dozen Florida Hanging-chad scandals. If Trump wins the wrong
states – this will land in court, and all end in tears.
That Reed column, "Vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger; it's important, has always struck
me badly. His point that those who voted for a Democrat for President since '92 have done as badly
or worse than they would in voting for Clinton is just false. No one in my memory has so slavishly
supported finance capital and foreign wars. No one has made going to war with China, Russia or
Iran a central plank in their candidacy.
I, personally, can't get over that. Republicans will do what they will do, it is not my job
to support someone who makes for a better Republican than they can come up with themselves.
I will never again vote for the 'lesser of two evils'. Did it once for Obama (against Sarah
Palin).
Never again. It just encourages more crapification.
I've read exactly
one compelling
argument for voting Hillary, by Jim Kunstler, who thinks it best if the crew responsible for
the mess is still holding the bag when things really go south.
I'd be more inclined to value that possibility if it wasn't clear that the Executive Branch
can now launch wars of choice at will. I have a draft age daughter.
It's not a reference to Doing your Bit turning in family/friends/neighbors/coworkers who you
"know" to be abusing the system, and thus Causing the Problem??
First violence is not the answer. Still that does make one want to find a way to march the
people who came up with that along with the top management of Cigna to the stocks for some quality
communing time with their customers. That there should also be a huge pile of rotten produce near
the stocks would be merely coincidence.
LOL and tomorrow a majority of Americans will vote back in the crowd that brought this down
upon them. Wait til you see what they are gearing up to do to SocSec.
Maybe it's a deep-seated Calvinist/Protestant self-loathing? Catholic self-flaggelation? Stockholm
Syndrome?
Joe Bageant wrote about the curious phenomenon of the Republican base voting year in and year
out for candidates who acted in direct opposition to their own economic interests…maybe that's
both "sides" of politics now?
Ha! Nope. Bought a house in 2009 and thought it was appropriate, and have been using it on
finance / political forums ever since. Worked out OK for us, though.
" But lots of other states use electronic machines in some capacity" [Wired]. "
Much depends on exactly how. For an example, Oregon uses paper ballots marked by the voter,
but, at least in my county, electronic counters. But the paper ballots are audited and stored
for years, so it's easy to check up. Everything happens at the courthouse, so there's no transmission
from precincts, and transmission to the SOS is probably in person by phone, followed up by email.
I'm confident in this system, not least because Oregon is a "clean" state. One county official
has been caught cheating by filling in unvoted lines for Republicans, but went to jail. I can
think of other ways for insiders to cheat, but it would be dangerous and pretty easy to catch.
I'm not concerned about the electronic counters as long as they aren't connected to the internet
– no reason for them to be – and the results are properly audited, the biggest if. I wonder a
bit about very small rural counties, where everybody knows everybody else's business and there
isn't much money for safeguards.
In any case, from a national point of view Oregon's results are not in doubt. Now I have to
do some campaign work for our Ranked Choice Voting initiative, and I look forward to finding out
how it did in Maine.
Trump had big mo, maybe until yesterday…
Today's Ibd puts T ahead by 2, best for some time… Plus generally favorable LATimes…
And blacks not turning out nearly as 08/12.
And Brexit and MI primary polls were far off because ungrateful deplorables.
Regardless, FL is must win for T. If he gets that, then the following swings might fall into place:
OH, NV, NC, IA, NM, (270), and maybe NH bonus.
If he misses FL he would need PA plus CO, likely hopeless.
I guess we deserve what we've got here… Vastly corrupt warmonger running for Obomber's third
term vs loose racist/sexist cannon, albeit apparently the latter likes Putin and avoidsWWIII.
Does seem harsh.
Of course, if Hillary wins the bubble wins. Everyone with a 401k thinks they hit a triple,
but they were walked to third. They won't make it to "home" (comfy retirement).
Meanwhile, Trump is of the 80s heyday of corporate raids…letting it fall and buying up cheap.
Wall St knows.
Hillary wins – ride the bubble and pray you know when to dump (and you can't trust the MSM
info – otherwise suckers would have seen 2008 coming).
The election will continue until the correct result is obtained.
That could happen tomorrow; it could just as well drag into January if the EC is tied or, say,
the "Russians" interfere and we have to have a cyberwar or something. Wouldn't it be interesting
if the House of Rs had to pick the prez? Maybe if the Supremes hadn't lawlessly intervened in
the 2000 election, we wouldn't be in this pickle now. But they did. And we are.
The "correct result" one assumes is Hillary; one has assumed so since this morbid campaign
began. As appealing as Bernie could be at times, there was no chance he would be allowed to stand
as the Democratic nominee. And if the indications of chicanery are correct, he was actively prevented
from becoming the nominee regardless of the "vote."
At no time did those who rule us ever consider Trump for the Big Chair. He's just too open
and uncouth, don'tchaknow. Can't have that. Might give the game away. But he's a sop to the so-called
populists, and man does he run a masterful con. All the slick and perfumed members of his class
only wish they had his skill at suckering the rubes. Whoa. Dude.
Meanwhile, it's good to learn that there can be no corruption unless its name is Clinton (er,
correction: "Clintoon") or can be linked somehow, if only tangentially, to the Clintoon Crime
Syndicate, or it arises politically from the Democratic (er, correction: "Democrat") Party which
is the ultimate source of all corruption, even that of the Clintoons.
Nothing the Democrat Party or the Clintoons do is defensible; defenses for Trump, on the other
hand, well. "It's just business." Or my favorite: "At least he hasn't killed anybody (sotto voce:
yet… that we know of ") So let's give him a chance!
Our Rulers are close to panicking because no matter who is ultimately selected, they fear there
will be blood in the streets, and the unrest might get close to their compounds, lead to unpleasantness
in their high-rises, interfere, perhaps, with some of their looting and destruction for pleasure.
This election has, for once, discommoded the comfortable.
I voted for Stein, the completely incorrect candidate, though I toyed with leaving the topline
blank. Many people I know did that. But no, some of us feel the need to show solidarity with our
leftish comrades. So few though, in the end.
Also, if people are writing in a candidate to make a statement or as an act of personal conscience,
that's their choice, but if they want the vote counted the rules vary by state. In most states,
including Maine, the candidate has to file paperwork.
What's your prediction of how many votes Stein will get nationwide? The Wiki god of knowledge
says she got 470K in 2012. I'm going to say 3M in 2016 or about 2.5%.
One need only track the past month's series of outrages, each quickly receding into the
distance, to recall that he has done not one but almost innumerable things that in any previous
election would have been, quaint word, "disqualifying."
I don't know if it would ever occur to Gopnik, but perhaps people are tired of idiotic gaffes
and meaningless scandals sinking candidates. Maybe, for a sizable portion of the country,
the sex scandal has been overused as some kind of indicator for someone's ability to govern, or,
even though Gopnik doesn't understand this, it isn't a reflection on their ability to speak about
policies that mean something to them.
Talking with Trump supporters I know, they are all very much influenced by: 1) his embracing
of nationalism, 2) rejection of trade deals, 3) ideas about reforming government finance. Of course,
their distrust for Hillary is just as strong.
I haven't met any trump supporters saying, "Gee, I really think his misogyny lets me free my
own inherent sexism." But then again, when identity politics is what you rely on to make your
vote, anyone opposed to your candidate is part of a vast linked chain of ignorant brains and invisible
connections that only they can see or appreciate.
Also loved his closing line:
For, as Shakespeare would have grasped at once, there is no explaining Trump.
Isn't that your job, Adam? Put your keyboard down if you're unable to do it and spare us the
columns.
The slightest bit of self-discipline on Trump's part, and Clinton is suddenly in the race
of her life. Shows her extreme weakness as a candidate, and the decadence of the Democrat nomenklatura
that forced her nomination through, not to mention the decadence of the political class…
If Clinton wins by any margin that doesn't keep her up all night, will not be surprised if
she and Team Blue will act as if this is the most awesome-est triumph ever because they are the
most awesome-est ever. First women first couple both being Presidents etc etc. They don't seem
to have any sense of just how weak and disliked she/they are, and why. They will arrogantly proceed
to govern as if they received a powerful mandate and not give an inch anywhere on policy, confident
that the methods they used to get elected will work again in 4 years. It will be their way or
the highway.
A cynic might also view another first in this election: the first time that a "charitable"
foundation has been elected to the office! But perhaps I am being somewhat unfair in questioning
the esteemed institution's charity, as it has indeed been charitable towards some.
Taxable Donations to the Clinton Foundation could pay off the national debt – says Charles
Ortel, should a Trump administration request a grand jury to assess the many many deficiencies
and out and out crimes of that sham charity.
That is the spit and glue that binds the never Trump coalition. There are billions and billions
at stake. Wall St, foreign governments, world leaders and the Gates Foundation, Bezos, Slim, Geithner,
Paulson - all the big boys. Ortel does a splendid job on you tube explaining how strict the rules
are for charitable foundations.
The FBI has the goods on the Clinton's and their phony baloney "foundation".
All they need is a courageous and honest Atty General – state or federal – willing to literally
risk life, limb, children, dogs, cats and extended family members should they file charges on
the Royals and fail.
"The onus is on the charity" – says Ortel, to prove their innocence, once charges are filed.
And the Clinton Foundation has never EVER filed the proper paper work to do ANY of their activities.
AGAIN, the rules state you may not raise money for AIDS, unless your charter was filed to do so.
the Clintons have never filed the necessary paperwork. There is a 19 page expose on their failure
to file or provide the necessary forms.
Hundreds of billions in taxable penalties and interest will be due, should Trump prevail and
ask for a grand jury. He doesn't have to threaten them. THEY KNOW
When you see George Will, LInsay Graham, Bill Kristol and the Bush crime family pulling out
all the stops to end this revolution – it's because of EXPOSURE.
The Clinton Foundation is the GOLD MINE. Watch and listen.
Hillary Clinton's planned celebratory election night fireworks display over the Hudson River
has been canceled, it was revealed Monday.
"They do have a permit for fireworks, but at this point we believe the fireworks is canceled,"
NYPD chief of intelligence Tommy Galati said at a city press conference on Election Day security
with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O'Neill.
When asked by a reporter why the fireworks were canceled, Galati responded, "I cannot tell
you that."
Clinton was planning aerial detonations for her potential victory that would last for two
minutes starting as early at 9:30 p.m. - a half-hour after the polls close in New York.
Since Latino Turnout has been up and AA down Trumps best shot is hoping that the Philly transit
strike and Rain in Detroit and most of PA on tuesday suppress less enthusiastic Clinton voters.
Both have low early voting. Then he has to cross his fingers for NC and NH. http://www.270towin.com/maps/EXyOo
crud. Well maybe the rainstorm will blow in a little sooner then it is predicted, even then
it will only hit Pittsburgh though. But it will hit Detroit all day.
Gallup US Consumer Spending Measure, October 2016: " In October, Americans' daily self-reports
of spending averaged $93, similar to September's $91 average. However, it is among the highest
for the month of October in the survey's nine-year trend" [Econoday] - Was it too much to
hope for an economists-trying-to-sound-smart subtitle along the lines of "Economists cite effect
of Halloween falling in October this year" on this?
(And I wonder how that yuuge $2 rise compares to the error bars on the survey. Also whether
any portion can be attributed to all those new improved health insurance rates showering their
blessings on the country.)
What about the idea that if we elect Trump, Americans' anger will be diffused and most people
will be happy?
If Clinton gets it, everyone, except her financiers will be unhappy, sooner or later.
Four years of Hillary, continuing economic stagnation and more wars may usher in and elect
a candidate in 2020 who will make Trump look like a meek-mannered gentleman.
Will it really be worth it to the elite to elect Hillary and end up having to live behind locked
gates and only venture out in public with a cadre of bodyguards? Will the wealthy see their Teslas
and luxury cars stoned and trashed when they park them in public?
Or, should they just live with Trump and like it? If I were an elite, I'd vote for Trump for
that very reason.
Electing Trump will not defuse the anger–it will just mean that for a little while at least
the half of the population who owns most of the guns will be happier. That will give us a year
or so until they realize that he was never serious about helping them, and lacks the political
skills or even attention span to do so. By 2018, we'd be right back to the starting point–just
in time to start the whole stupid cycle all over again.
No, a lot of things would change. Clinton winning would be seen as validation of the status
quo. Trump winning would be destabilizing. To pretend that the two outcomes are the same is wrongheaded.
Trump winning would break the hold of the Clintons on the Democratic party, and since they've
made the party overly concerned with the Presidency, at the expense of building a bench or capturing
down-ticket races (all down the list, Congress, governorships, important state level posts), the
damage to the party would be profound. They were already expected to lose the Senate in 2018 even
if they recover it tomorrow.
Trump winning would also throw a wrench into the Republicans, although not to quite as profound
a degree, since him getting this far has already put them in disarray. It would put the orthodox
corporate types and many of the evangelicals in a tizzy. The lineup that Trump wants to bring
in as his team are either outsiders or not well like by the mainstream of the party. So you can
expect Trump to have to fight with much of his own party, as well as the Dems keen to re-establish
themselves in the face of their loss.
If nothing else, Trump can do a lot on the trade front without Congress, based on the analyses
I've seen so far. How far he would get in trying to wind down our over-involvement in the Middle
East is questionable, but it does appear that he would at least stop further escalation with Russia.
He also appears to have the ability to get INS rules enforced more strictly (Obama has deported
more people than is widely acknowledged).
In other words, the President has a fair bit of power to act unilaterally. That does not require
"political skills" since you don't need to get Congress to go along. I agree Trump would have
little success with Congress, based on the precedent of Jimmy Carter, who had been a governor
and had a House and Senate that were both solidly Democratic, and thus in theory should have gotten
some cooperation, but brought in a team of outsiders and acted as if being post-Watergate meant
he could do things differently.
I'm probably voting for Trump only because of TPP. Thanks to the trade traitors, fast track
passage made it much easier to pass TPP with a simple majority during the lame duck session. Clinton
will let it ride, but Trump will probably kill it, or at least try to.
If DARPA's robotics program will only come up with some cool enough robots we might send a
bot or two to closes down the flow of gated sewer lines or stop the flow of gated water - or add
a little something.
I never never even made these suggestions - a Russian spy working for PUTIN took over my keyboard.
I have absolutely no evidence that there's any manipulating of the polling data going on, or
how that would work if it were, but it seems to me that this down to the wire close and flip-flopping
polling data is hugely in the media's $$ interest. Gazillion$$ are being dumped into late media
buys especially for senate races. I can't see how they could manipulate it but if the media could
it's certainly in their $$ interest to do so.
I raised this yesterday as a comment, but would like to re-phrase as a question. Bearing in
mind that the Clinton 'team' had possession of all of her e-mails for 2 years prior to the original
request for the records re the Benghazi investigation, and that the Admin was kind enough to allow
Clinton's lawyers to be the ones who determined which e-mails were 'work-related' and which 'personal',
and further bearing in mind that the focus has been on whether or not any of the 'personal' e-mails
were classified or not, I'd like to ask everyone this:
Did the FBI audit all of the e-mails that Clinton lawyers put in the 'work-related' basket?
Given State is full of Clinton 'friendlies' would it not be possible that incriminating 'personal'
e-mails were improperly slotted as 'work-related' to hide them with State until it all blows over?
Alternately, was the FBI granted access to all Clinton's State Department '.gov' account messages,
and those on the systems often referenced by Clinton and others that was used for all important,
classified, secret stuff? Further, did FBI have access to all Clinton's (or others') communications
using State Department (or other Government) systems that may have been sent to the Foundation,
or to any of her usual suspects (Podesta, Mills, Abedin, Clinton lawyers, etc.)?
Two years is a long time for someone to think about what to do with a pile of incriminating
stuff – something a bit more selective than Podesta's 'dump it'.
Truly terrible NPR coverage of the start of the Dylann Roof trial in Charlestown on
both the
morning and
evening shows.
No mention of the fact that a charismatic black state senator, Clementa Pinckney, was assassinated.
Pinckney is referred to, and not by name, only as the pastor of the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church.
No breathless speculations or leaks from anonymous LE sources about how Roof was radicalized
or who else might have been involved in the plot.
No use of the phrase `domestic terrorism', which apparently is off limits in such cases.
Hillary Loses the Left
| 06 Nov 2016 | While Donald Trump has been
consolidating his base of support, the opposite appears to be happening for Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton, who seems to be hemorrhaging supporters from her progressive
base...[I]n the closing days of the 2016 campaign, the rift has been laid bare through a
combination of WikiLeaks revelations, a series of high-profile endorsements for Green
Party presidential nominee Jill Stein from progressives like Marc Lamont Hill, Cornel
West, and Susan Sarandon, as well as polling data that suggests Trump's broad populist
messaging is resonating with Democrat-leaning voters. v Contrary to the narrative
perpetuated by corporate media, many prominent liberals are now expressing their belief
that installing Hillary Clinton, a "
corporatist
hawk
," in the White House is "
the
true danger
" and would be "
more
dangerous
" for progressive values, the well-being of the nation, and the stability
of the world than would four years of a Donald Trump presidency.
"... The outcome of the election remains in doubt despite one candidate's collapsing support. There are a number here who have been making similar arguments about the inefficacy of left-right labels. ..."
"... The prospect of a gutting of the Democratic party seems far more likely to me, if Brent Baier is to be believed, and that is a big 'if,' I concede. We should see the donor class candidate triumph as we normally do. ..."
"... The constituency that supports Trump is utterly indifferent to the Frums of the world, and even the Limbaughs. They are pissed-off, non-ideological, and highly-motivated. ..."
"... electoral politics in this country has come to such a pass but the Left (or what passes for it in the US) is as much to blame as the Right in that they haven't offered real substantive alternatives to the NeoLib/NeoCon orthodoxy that seems to dominate US policymaking. ..."
Corey does deserve credit for all the reasons jh notes. The outcome of the election
remains in doubt despite one candidate's collapsing support. There are a number here who have
been making similar arguments about the inefficacy of left-right labels.
... ... ...
The prospect of a gutting of the Democratic party seems far more likely to me, if Brent
Baier is to be believed, and that is a big 'if,' I concede. We should see the donor class
candidate triumph as we normally do. My basic read has not changed, however. The
constituency that supports Trump is utterly indifferent to the Frums of the world, and even
the Limbaughs. They are pissed-off, non-ideological, and highly-motivated.
Frum still hasn't figured out that he's just as likely to find himself the target of their
hostility as any Dem. And right now Trump supporters outnumber the Frums of the world by far
from inconsequential numbers.
I still say Trump edges it.
DMC 11.03.16 at 7:27 pm
There's just too many people in this country for whom "more of the same and harder" is a
deal breaker. They'll go with the guy who tells them "one more throw of the dice" and who
apparently scares the snot out of the Establishment types.
The ruder he is, the more they like it. The more the "grown-ups" say this is going to be
bad for the country, the better it sounds to people picking up cans off the road to make ends
meet. Its utterly hateful that electoral politics in this country has come to such a pass
but the Left (or what passes for it in the US) is as much to blame as the Right in that they
haven't offered real substantive alternatives to the NeoLib/NeoCon orthodoxy that seems to
dominate US policymaking.
"... Holding on to the White House in 2016 is extremely important. We can't afford to let party elites jeopardize that by ignoring the will of the voters. Join me and DFA in telling superdelegates to pledge to support the popularly-elected winner of the nomination now. ..."
"... If Trump wins, all the Democratic party elites should be given their pink slips and never allowed to run the DNC again ..."
Recall this warning to the Democratic Party after Bernie Sander's landslide win in New Hampshire?
Shockingly, all the superdelegates went over to Hillary Clinton:
Holding on to the White House in 2016 is extremely important. We can't afford to let party
elites jeopardize that by ignoring the will of the voters. Join me and DFA in telling superdelegates
to pledge to support the popularly-elected winner of the nomination now.
If Trump wins, all the Democratic party elites should be given their pink slips and never allowed
to run the DNC again.
...they felt that mainstream America had left them and had gone by, didn't see
them, didn't recognize who they were and neither political party spoke to their
feelings and interests. In this sense, they felt like strangers in their own
land.
I'll give you an example of that.
One woman I spoke to said, "I'm
really glad you've come to interview us, because we are the fly-over-state and
people think of the South that we're ignorant, backward, that we have
old-fashioned attitudes, that we're pro-family, pro-life and that many people
think we're racist when we're not, and so they write us off, they call us
rednecks, so thanks for coming to see who we really are."
You've said that, "The conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or
liberal today" in the US. Can you elaborate on this move to the right in
American politics?
In 1968, Barry Goldwater was the first really
radical anti-government national candidate for the Republican presidency. His
wife was a founder of Planned Parenthood. Today, Republicans and the Tea Party
want to defund Planned Parenthood, which offers contraception, abortion, cancer
screening and other very important things.
Again, former Republican President Richard Nixon brought us the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act,
and now Republicans are calling for the end of the EPA.
Yet again, former Republican President Eisenhower called for a minimum
wage; now Republicans oppose this. Eisenhower called for investments in public
infrastructure, now it's opposed. Today, the Republicans of the '50s, '60s,
'70s and '80s look liberal. That's how far right we've become.
Trump mirrors resentment with the current political culture. Unfortunately very few readers in this
forum understand that the emergence of Trump as a viable candidate in the current race, the candidate
who withstand 24x7 air bombarment by corrupt neoliberabl MSM (like Guardian ;-) signify deep crisis
of neoliberalsm and neoliberal globalization.
Notable quotes:
"... "What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate an entire nation, regardless of its size." ..."
"... That's it – finance and sophisticated lobbying. And you can add to that mass brainwashing at election campaigns by means of choice language and orchestration as advised by cognitive scientists who are expressly recruited for this purpose. Voters remain largely unaware of the mind control they are undergoing. And of course the essential prerequisite for all of this is financial power. ..."
"... Now read again in this light Gore Vidal's famous pronouncement… "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so." ..."
"... Worse still, the political spectrum runs from right to right. To all intents and purposes, one single party, the US Neoliberal party, with 2 factions catering for power and privilege. Anything to the left of that is simply not an available choice for voters. ..."
"... Americans have wakened up to the fact that they badly need a government which caters for the needs of the average citizen. In their desperation some will still vote for Trump warts and all. This for the same sorts of reasons that Italians voted for Berlusconi, whose winning slogan was basically 'I am not a politician'. ..."
"... The right choice was Bernie Sanders. Sadly, not powerful enough. So Americans missed the boat there. But at least there was a boat to miss this time around. You can be sure that similar future boats will be sunk well in advance. Corporate power has learnt its lesson and the art of election rigging has now become an exact science. ..."
"... Donald Trump, Brexit and Le Pen are all in their separate ways rejections of the dogma of liberalism, social and economic, that has dominated the West for the past three decades. ..."
"... In 2010, Chomsky wrote : ..."
"... The United States is extremely lucky.....if somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. ..."
"... Dangerous times. The beauty of democracy is we get what we deserve ..."
"... The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he's the man in the mirror. ..."
"... He is the distillation of all that we have been induced to desire and admire. ..."
"... I thought that he is the mirror image, the reverse, of the current liberal consensus. A consensus driven by worthy ideals but driven too far, gradually losing acceptance and with no self correcting awareness. ..."
"... Trump is awful - but by speaking freely he challenges the excesses of those who would limit free speech. Trump is awful - but by demonising minorities he challenges those who would excuse minorities of all responsibility. Trump is awful - but by flaunting his wealth he challenges those who keep their connections and wealth hidden for the sake of appearances. ..."
"... Trump is awful because the system is out of balance. He is a consequence, not a cause. ..."
"... Voting for Trump is voting for peace. Voting for Clinton is voting for WW3. ..."
"... It's quite clearly because Hillary as President is an utterly terrifying prospect. When half the population would rather have Trump than her, it must be conceded that she has some serious reputational issues. ..."
"... Personally, I'd take Trump over Hillary if I was a US citizen. He may be a buffoon but she is profoundly dangerous, probably a genuine psychopath and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the Presidency. Sanders is the man America needs now, though, barring one of Hillary's many crimes finally toppling her, it's not going to happen... ..."
"... The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal ..."
"... And the shame is we seem to be becoming desensitized to scandal. We cannot be said to live in democracies when our political class are so obviously bought by the vastly rich. ..."
"... One of the things it says is that people are so sick of Identity Politics from the Left and believe the Left are not very true to the ideals of what should be the Left. ..."
"... When the people who are supposed to care about the poor and working joes and janes prefer to care about the minorities whose vote they can rely on, the poor and the working joes and janes will show their frustration by supporting someone who will come along and tell it as it is, even if he is part of how it got that way. ..."
"... People throughout the world have awoken to the Left being Right Light but with a more nauseating moral superiority complex. ..."
"... he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics ..."
"... 'Encouraged by the corporate media, the Republicans have been waging a full-spectrum assault on empathy, altruism and the decencies we owe to other people. Their gleeful stoving in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic norms, their stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have turned the party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.' ..."
"... Many years ago in the British Military, those with the right connections and enough money could buy an officer's commission and rise up the system to be an incompetent General. As a result, many battles were mismanaged and many lives wasted due to the incompetent (wealthy privileged few) buying their way to the top. American politics today works on exactly the same system of wealthy patronage and privilege for the incompetent, read Clinton and Trump. Until the best candidates are able to rise up through the political system without buying their way there then the whole corrupt farce will continue and we will be no different to the all the other tin pot republics of the world. ..."
"... There's the "culture wars" aspect. Many people don't like being told they are "deplorable" for opposing illegal (or even legal) immigration. They don't like being called "racist" for disagreeing with an ideology. ..."
"... I like the phrase Monbiot ends with - "He is our system, stripped of its pretences" - it reminds me of a phrase in the Communist Manifesto - but I don't think it's true. "Our" system is more than capitalism, it's culture. And Clinton is a far more "perfect representation" of the increasingly censorious, narrow [neo]liberal culture which dominates the Western world. ..."
"... Finally, Monbiot misses the chance to contrast Clinton's and Trump's apparent differences with regard to confronting nuclear-armed Russia over the skies of Syria. It could be like 1964 all over again - except in this election, the Democrat is the nearest thing to Barry Goldwater. ..."
"... As a life-long despiser of all things Trump, I cannot believe that I am saying this: Trump is good for world peace. ..."
"... I fully agree with Monbiot, American democracy is a sham - the lobby system has embedded corruption right in the heart of its body politic. Lets be clear here though, whatever is the problem with American democracy can in theory at least be fixed, but Trump simply can not and moreover he is not the answer ..."
"... His opponent, war child and Wall Street darling can count her lucky stars that the media leaves her alone (with husband Bill, hands firmly in his pockets, nodding approvingly) and concentrates on their feeding frenzy attacking Trump on sexual allegations of abusing women, giving Hillery, Yes, likely to tell lies, ( mendacious, remember when she claimed to be under enemy fire in Bosnia? remember how evasive she was on the Benghazi attack on the embassy) Yes Trump is a dangerous man running against an also extremely dangerous woman. ..."
"... Extremely interesting reference to the Madison paper, but the issue is less about the size of the electorate, and more about the power that the election provides to the victor. ..."
"... Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy. You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt? ..."
"... When you look at speeches and conversations and debates with the so-called bogeyman, Putin, he is not at all in a league as low and vile as portrayed and says many more sensible things than anybody cares to listen to, because we're all brainwashed. We are complicit in wars (now in Syria) and cannot see why we have to connive with terrorists, tens of thousands of them, and they get supported by the war machine and friends like Saudis and Turkey which traded for years with ISIS. ..."
"... Clinton the war hawk, and shows us we are only capable of seeing one side and project all nastiness outward while we can feel good about ourselves by hating the other. ..."
"... It fits the Decline of an Empire image as it did in other Falls of Civilizations. ..."
"... Trump spoke to the executives at Ford like no one before ever has. He told them if they moved production to Mexico (as they plan to do) that he would slap huge tariffs on their cars in America and no one would buy them. ..."
"... What happens in Syria could be important to us all. Clinton doesn't hide her ambition to drive Assad from power and give Russia a kicking. It's actually very unpopular although the media doesn't like to say so; it prefers to lambast Spain for re-fueling Russian war ships off to fight the crazed Jihadists as if we supported the religious fanatics that want to slaughter all Infidels! There is an enormous gulf between what ordinary people want and the power crazy Generals in the Pentagon and NATO. ..."
"... USA has got itself in an unholy mess . It's politicians no longer work for the people . Their paymasters care not if life in Idaho resembles Dantes inferno . Trump has many faults but being "not Hilary" is not one of them. The very fact he is disliked by all the vested interests should make you take another look. And remember , the American constitution has many checks and balances , a President has a lot less power than most people imagine. ..."
"... Like many on the right, the left have unthinkingly accepted a narrative of an organized, conspiratorial system run by an elite of politicians and plutocrats. The problem with this narrative is it suggests politics and politicians are inherently nefarious, in turn suggesting there are no political solutions to be sought to problems, or anything people can do to challenge a global system of power. As Monbiot asks: "You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt?" Well, what indeed? ..."
"... I don't think you need to believe in an organised conspiracy and I don't see any real evidence that George Monbiot does. The trouble is that the corporate and political interests align in a way that absorbs any attempt to challenge them and the narrative has been written that of course politics is all about economics and of course we need mighty corporations to sustain us. ..."
"... Not long after the start of the presidential campaign I began to reflect that in Trump we are seeing materializing before us the logical result of the neoliberal project ..."
"... The Republican party essentially offered their base nothing – that was the problem. ..."
"... They couldn't offer all the things that ordinary Americans want – better and wider Medicaid, better and wider social security, tax increases on the rich, an end to pointless foreign wars and the American empire. ..."
"... The Democrats have largely the same funding base, but they at least deliver crumbs – at least a nod to the needs of ordinary people through half-hearted social programmes. ..."
"... Trump is imperfect because he wants normal relations rather than war with Russia. No, Hillary Clinton is the ultimate representation of the system that is abusing us. What will occur when Goldman Sachs and the military-industrial complex coalition get their, what is it, 5th term in office would be a great subject of many Guardian opinion pieces, actually. But that will have to wait till after November 8. ..."
"... And, of course, we also have Hillary's Wall Street speeches -- thanks to Wikileaks we have the complete transcripts, in case Guardian readers are unaware. They expose the real thinking and 'private positions' of the central character in the next episode of 'Rule by Plutocracy'. ..."
"... The democrats is the party practicing hypocrisy, pretending that they somehow representing the interest of the working class. They are the ones spreading lies and hypocrisy and manipulating the working class everyday through their power over the media. Their function is to appease the working class. The real obstacle for improving conditions for the working class historically has always been the Democratic party, not the Republican party. ..."
"... In what concerns foreign politics, Trump some times seems more reasonable than Clinton and the establishment. Clinton is the best coached politician of all times. She doesn't know that she's coached. She just followed the most radical groups and isn't able to question anything at all. The only thing that the coaches didn't fix until now is her laughing which is considered even by her coaches as a sign of weirdness. ..."
"... Western economies are now so beholden to the patronage of the essentially stateless multinational, it has become a political imperative to appease their interests - it's difficult to see a future in which an administration might resist this force, because at its whim, national economies face ruination. In light of such helplessness our political representatives face an easier path in simply accepting their lot as mere administrators who will tinker at the margins [and potentially reap the rewards of a good servant], rather than hold to principle and resist an overwhelming force. ..."
"... "Trump personifies the traits promoted by the media and corporate worlds he affects to revile; the worlds that created him. He is the fetishisation of wealth, power and image in a nation where extrinsic values are championed throughout public discourse. His conspicuous consumption, self-amplification and towering (if fragile) ego are in tune with the dominant narratives of our age." ..."
"... Yes, they don't care any more if we see the full extent of their corruption as we've given up our power to do anything about it. ..."
"... It was once very common to see Democratic politicians as neighbors attending every community event. They were Teamsters, pipe fitters, and electricians. And they were coaches and ushers and pallbearers. Now they are academics and lawyers and NGO employees and managers who pop up during campaigns. The typical income of the elected Democrats outside their government check is north of $100,000. They don't live in, or even wander through, the poorer neighborhoods. So they are essentially clueless that government services like busses are run to suit government and not actual customers. ..."
"... Yea, 15 years of constant wars of empire with no end in sight has pretty much ran this country in the ground. ..."
"... We all talk about how much money is wasted by the federal government on unimportant endeavors like human services and education, but don't even bat an eye about the sieve of money that is the Pentagon. ..."
"... Half a trillion dollars for aircraft carriers we don't need and are already obsolete. China is on the verge of developing wickedly effective anti-ship missiles designed specifically to target these Gerald R. Ford-class vessels. You might as well paint a huge bull's-eye on these ships' 4-1/2 acre flight deck. ..."
"... There are plenty more examples of this crap and this doesn't even include the nearly TWO trillion dollars we've spent this past decade-and-a-half on stomping flat the Middle East and large swaths of the Indian subcontinent. ..."
"... And all this time, our nation's infrastructure is crumbling literally right out from underneath us and millions upon millions of children and their families experience a daily struggle just to eat. Eat?! In the "greatest," wealthiest nation on earth and we prefer to kill people at weddings with drones than feed our own children. ..."
"... I'd like to read an unbiased piece about why the media narrative doesn't match the reality of the Trump phenomenon. He is getting enormous crowds attend his rallies but hardly any coverage of that in the filtered news outlets. Hillary, is struggling to get anyone turn up without paying them. There is no real enthusiasm. ..."
"... The buzzwords and tired old catch phrases and cliches used by the left to suppress any alternative discussion, and divert from their own misdemeanors are fooling no one but themselves. Trump supporters simply don't care any more how Hillary supporters explain that she lied about dodging sniper fire. Or the numerous other times she and her cohorts have been caught out telling fibs. ..."
"... Very true. Throughout history the rich, the powerful, the landed, ennobled interest and their friends in the Law and money changing houses have sought to control governments and have usually succeeded. ..."
"... In the Media today the rich are fawned over by sycophantic journalists and programme makers. These are the people who make the political weather and create the prevailing narratives. ..."
"... Working class people fancied themselves to above the common herd and thought themselves part of some elite. ..."
"... It's quite disturbing the lengths this paper will go to in order to slur and discredit Trump, labelling him dangerous and alluding to the sexual assault allegations. This even goes so far to a very lengthy article regarding Trumps lack of knowledge on the Rumbelows Cup 25 years ago. ..."
"... Whereas very little examination is made into Hillary Clinton's background which includes serious allegation of fraud and involvement in assisting in covering up her husband's alleged series of rapes. There are also issues in the wikileaks emails that merit analysis as well as undercover tapes of seioau issues with her campaign team. ..."
"... One of the most important characteristics of the so-called neoliberalism is its negative selection. While mostly successfully camouflaged, that negative selection is more than obvious this time, in two US presidential candidates. It's hard to imagine lower than those two. ..."
"... Well, OK George. Tell me: if Trump's such an establishment candidate, then why does the whole of the establishment unanimously reject him? Is it normal for Republicans (such as the Bushes and the neocons) to endorse Democrats? Why does even the Speaker of the House (a Republican) and even, on occasion, Trump's own Vice-Presidential nominee seem to be trying to undermine his campaign? If Trump is really just more of the same as all that came before, why is he being treated different by the MSM and the political establishment? ..."
"... Obviously, there's something flawed about your assumption. ..."
"... Trump has exposed the corruption of the political system and the media and has promised to put a stop to it. By contrast, Clinton is financed by the very banks, corporates and financial elites who are responsible for the corruption. This Trump speech is explicit on what we all suspected is going on. Everybody should watch it, irrespective of whether they support him or not! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tab5vvo0TJw ..."
"... "I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don't necessarily agree with him. They're not racist or redneck, they're actually pretty decent people and so after talking to a number of them I wanted to write this. ..."
"... Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said "if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them." It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - the "Brexit" states. ..."
"... Mrs Clinton is also the product of our political culture. A feminist who owes everything to her husband and men in the Democratic Party. A Democrat who started her political career as a Republican; a civil right activist who worked for Gerry Goldwater, one of last openly racist/segregationist politicians. A Secretary of State who has no clue about, or training in, foreign policy, and who received her position as compensation for losing the election. A pacifist, who has never had a gun in her hands, but supported every war in the last twenty years. A humanist who rejoiced over Qaddafi's death ("we came, we won, he is dead!") like a sadist. ..."
"... One thing that far right politics offers the ordinary white disaffected voter is 'pay back', it is a promised revenge-fest, putting up walls, getting rid of foreigners, punishing employers of foreigners, etc., etc. All the stuff that far right groups have wet dreams about. ..."
"... Because neoliberal politics has left a hell of a lot of people feeling pissed off, the far right capitalizes on this, whilst belonging to the same neoliberal dystopia so ultimately not being able to make good on their promises. Their promises address a lot of people's anger, which of course isn't really about foreigners at all, that is simply the decoy, but cutting through all the crap to make that clear is no easy task, not really sure how it can be done, certainly no political leader in the western hemisphere has the ability to do so. ..."
"... Wrong as always. Trump *is* an outsider. He's an unabashed nationalist who's set him up against the *actual* caste that governs our politics: Neo-liberal internationalists with socially trendy left-liberal politics (but not so left that they don't hire good tax lawyers to avoid paying a fraction of what they are legally obliged to). ..."
"... Best represented in the Goldman Sachs executives who are donating millions to Hillary Clinton because they are worried about Trump's opposition to free trade, and they know she will give them *everything* they want. ..."
"... Trumps the closest thing we're gotten to a genuine threat to the system in a long, long time, so of course George Monbiot and the rest of the Guardian writers has set themselves against him, because if you're gonna be wrong about the EU, wrong about New Labour, wrong about social liberalism, wrong about immigration, why change the habit of a lifetime? ..."
"... Lies: Emails, policy changes based on polls showing a complete lack of conviction, corporate collusion, Bosnia, Clinton Foundation, war mongering, etc. Racist stereotypes: Super predators. Misogyny: Aside from her laughing away her pedophile case and allegedly threatening the women who came out against Bill, you've also got this sexist gem "Women are the primary victims of war". ..."
"... Alleged gropings: Well she's killed people by texting. So unless your moral compass is so out of whack that somehow a man JOKING about his player status in private is worse than Clinton's actions throughout her political career, then I guess you could make the case that Clinton at least doesn't have this skeleton in her closet. ..."
"... Refusal to accept democratic outcomes: No. He's speaking out against the media's collusion with the democratic party favoring Clinton over every other nominee, including Bernie Sanders. He's talking about what was revealed in the DNC leaks and the O'Keefe tapes that show how dirty the tactics have been in order to legally persuade the voting public into electing one person or the other. ..."
"... When do the conspiracy theories about the criminality of his opponent no longer count as conspiracies? When we have a plethora of emails confirming there is indeed fire next to that smoke, corruption fire, collusion fire, fire of contempt for the electorate. When we have emails confirming the Saudi Arabians are actually funding terrorist schools across the globe, emails where Hilary herself admits it, but will not say anything publicly about terrorism and Saudi Arabia, what's conspiracy and what's reality? ..."
"... Is it because Saudi Arabia funded her foundation with $23 million, or because it doesn't fit with her great 'internationalists' global agenda? ..."
"... Yep trump is a buffoon, but the failure of all media to deliver serious debate means the US is about to elect someone probably more dangerous than trump, how the hell can that be ..."
"... Nothing wrong with a liberal internationalist utopia, it sounds rather good and worth striving for. It's just that what they've been pushing is actually a neoliberal globalist nirvana for the 1 per cent ..."
"... The problem is the left this paper represents were bought off with the small change by neoliberalism, and they expect the rest of us to suck it up so the elites from both sides can continue the game ..."
"... we near the end of the neoliberal model. That the USA has a choice between two 'demopublicans' is no choice at all. ..."
"... This is the culmination of living in a post-truth political world. Lies and smears, ably supported by the corporate media and Murdoch in particular means that the average person who doesn't closely follow politics is being misinformed. ..."
"... The complete failure of right wing economic 'theories' means they only have lies, smears and the old 'divide and conquer' left in their arsenal. 'Free speech' is their attempt to get lies and smears equal billing with the truth. All truth on the other hand must be suppressed. All experts and scientists who don't regurgitate the meaningless slogans of the right will be ignored, traduced, defunded, disbanded or silenced by law. ..."
"... Not so much an article about Trump as much as a rant. George Monbiot writes with the utter conviction of one who mistakenly believes that his readers share his bigotry. When he talks about the 'alleged gropings' or the 'alleged refusal to accept democratic outcomes', that is exactly what they are 'alleged'. ..."
"... The Democratic Party has been dredging up porn-stars and wannabe models who now make claims that Trump tried to 'kiss them without asking'. ..."
"... The press also ignored the tapes of the DNC paying thugs to cause violence at Trump rallies, the bribes paid to the Clintons for political favours and the stealing of the election from Bernie Sanders. Trump is quite right to think the 'democratic outcome' is being fixed. Not only were the votes for Sanders manipulated, but Al Gore's votes were also altered and manipulated to ensure a win for Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The same interests who engineered the 2000 election have switched from supporting the Republican Party to supporting Clinton. ..."
"... Great article. The neoliberals have been able to control the narrative and in doing so have managed to scapegoat all manner of minority groups, building anger among those disaffected with modern politics. Easy targets - minorities, immigrants, the poor, the disadvantaged and the low-paid workers. ..."
"... The real enemy here are those sitting atop the corporate tree, but with the media controlled by them, the truth is never revealed. ..."
America's fourth president, James Madison, envisaged the United States constitution as representation
tempered by competition between factions. In the 10th federalist paper, written in 1787, he argued
that large republics were better insulated from corruption than small, or "pure" democracies, as
the greater number of citizens would make it "more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise
with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried". A large electorate would
protect the system against oppressive interest groups. Politics practised on a grand scale would
be more likely to select people of "enlightened views and virtuous sentiments".
Instead, the US – in common with many other nations – now suffers the worst of both worlds: a
large electorate dominated by a tiny faction. Instead of republics being governed, as Madison feared,
by "the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority", they are beholden to the not-so-secret
wishes of an unjust and interested minority. What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent
to which unconstrained campaign finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate
an entire nation, regardless of its size.
For every representative, Republican or Democrat, who retains a trace element of independence,
there are three sitting in the breast pocket of corporate capital. Since the supreme court decided
that there should be no effective limits on campaign finance, and, to a lesser extent, long before,
candidates have been reduced to tongue-tied automata, incapable of responding to those in need of
help, incapable of regulating those in need of restraint, for fear of upsetting their funders.
Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy. You
can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics
is corrupt? Turn to the demagogue who rages into this political vacuum, denouncing the forces he
exemplifies. The problem is not, as Trump claims, that the election will be stolen by ballot rigging.
It is that the entire electoral process is stolen from the American people before they get anywhere
near casting their votes. When Trump claims that the little guy is being screwed by the system, he's
right. The only problem is that he is the system.
The political constitution of the United States is not, as Madison envisaged, representation tempered
by competition between factions. The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal. In other
words, all that impedes the absolute power of money is the occasional exposure of the excesses of
the wealthy.
greatapedescendant 26 Oct 2016 4:11
A good read thanks. Nothing I really disagree with there. Just a few things to add and restate.
"What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign
finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate an entire nation, regardless
of its size."
That's it – finance and sophisticated lobbying. And you can add to that mass brainwashing
at election campaigns by means of choice language and orchestration as advised by cognitive scientists
who are expressly recruited for this purpose. Voters remain largely unaware of the mind control
they are undergoing. And of course the essential prerequisite for all of this is financial power.
Now read again in this light Gore Vidal's famous pronouncement… "Any American who is prepared
to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so."
Which recalls Madison over 200 years before… "The truth is that all men having power ought
to be mistrusted."
What the US has is in effect is not a democracy but a plutocracy run by a polyarchy. Which
conserves some democratic elements. To which the US president is largely an obedient and subservient
puppet. And which openly fails to consider the needs of the average US citizen.
Worse still, the political spectrum runs from right to right. To all intents and purposes,
one single party, the US Neoliberal party, with 2 factions catering for power and privilege. Anything
to the left of that is simply not an available choice for voters.
Americans have wakened up to the fact that they badly need a government which caters for
the needs of the average citizen. In their desperation some will still vote for Trump warts and
all. This for the same sorts of reasons that Italians voted for Berlusconi, whose winning slogan
was basically 'I am not a politician'. Though that didn't work out too well. No longer able
to stomach more of the same, voters reach the stage of being willing to back anyone who might
bring about a break with the status quo. Even Trump.
The right choice was Bernie Sanders. Sadly, not powerful enough. So Americans missed the
boat there. But at least there was a boat to miss this time around. You can be sure that similar
future boats will be sunk well in advance. Corporate power has learnt its lesson and the art of
election rigging has now become an exact science.
UltraLightBeam 26 Oct 2016 4:11
Donald Trump, Brexit and Le Pen are all in their separate ways rejections of the dogma
of liberalism, social and economic, that has dominated the West for the past three decades.
The Guardian, among others, laments the loss of 'tolerance' and 'openness' as defining qualities
of our societies. But what's always left unsaid is: tolerance of what? Openness to what? Anything?
Everything?
Is it beyond the pale to critically assess some of the values brought by immigration, and to
reject them? Will only limitless, unthinking 'tolerance' and 'openness' do?
Once self-described 'progressives' engage with this topic, then maybe we'll see a reversal
in the momentum that Trump and the rest of the right wing demagogues have built up.
The United States is extremely lucky.....if somebody comes along who is charismatic
and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the
justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.
Dangerous times. The beauty of democracy is we get what we deserve.
DiscoveredJoys -> morelightlessheat 26 Oct 2016 6:11
The most telling part for me was:
The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he's the man in the mirror.
Except that instead of
He is the distillation of all that we have been induced to desire and admire.
I thought that he is the mirror image, the reverse, of the current liberal consensus. A consensus
driven by worthy ideals but driven too far, gradually losing acceptance and with no self correcting
awareness.
Trump is awful - but by speaking freely he challenges the excesses of those who would limit
free speech. Trump is awful - but by demonising minorities he challenges those who would excuse
minorities of all responsibility. Trump is awful - but by flaunting his wealth he challenges those
who keep their connections and wealth hidden for the sake of appearances.
Trump is awful because the system is out of balance. He is a consequence, not a cause.
Gman13 26 Oct 2016 4:25
Voting for Trump is voting for peace. Voting for Clinton is voting for WW3.
These events will unfold if Hillary wins:
1. No fly zone imposed in Syria to help "moderate opposition" on pretence of protecting civilians.
2. Syrian government nonetheless continues defending their country as terrorists shell Western
Aleppo.
3. Hillary's planes attack Syrian government planes and the Russians.
4. Russia and Syria respond as the war escalates. America intensifies arming of "moderate opposition"
and Saudis.
5. America arms "rebels" in various Russian regions who "fight for democracy" but this struggle
is somehow hijacked by terrorists, only they are not called terrorists but "opposition"
6. Ukranian government is encouraged to restart the war.
7. Iran enters the war openly against Saudi Arabia
8. Israel bombs Iran
9. Cornered Russia targets mainland US with nuclear weapons
10. Etc.
snakebrain -> Andthenandthen 26 Oct 2016 6:54
It's quite clearly because Hillary as President is an utterly terrifying prospect. When
half the population would rather have Trump than her, it must be conceded that she has some serious
reputational issues.
If Hillary and the DNC hadn't fixed the primaries, we'd now be looking at a Sanders-Trump race,
and a certain Democrat victory. As it is, it's on a knife edge as to whether we get Trump or Hillary.
Personally, I'd take Trump over Hillary if I was a US citizen. He may be a buffoon but
she is profoundly dangerous, probably a genuine psychopath and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near
the Presidency. Sanders is the man America needs now, though, barring one of Hillary's many crimes
finally toppling her, it's not going to happen...
jessthecrip 26 Oct 2016 4:29
Well said George.
The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal
And the shame is we seem to be becoming desensitized to scandal. We cannot be said to live
in democracies when our political class are so obviously bought by the vastly rich.
Remko1 -> UnevenSurface 26 Oct 2016 7:43
You're mixing up your powers. legislative, executive and judicial are the powers of law. Money
and business are some of the keys to stay in command of a country. (there's also military, electorate,
bureaucracy etc.)
And if money is not on your side, it's against you, which gets quite nasty if your main tv-stations
are not state-run.
For example if the EU would (theoretically of course) set rules that make corruption more difficult
you would see that commercial media all over the EU and notoriously corrupted politicians would
start making propaganda to leave the EU. ;)
yamialwaysright chilledoutbeardie 26 Oct 2016 4:38
One of the things it says is that people are so sick of Identity Politics from the Left
and believe the Left are not very true to the ideals of what should be the Left.
When the people who are supposed to care about the poor and working joes and janes prefer
to care about the minorities whose vote they can rely on, the poor and the working joes and janes
will show their frustration by supporting someone who will come along and tell it as it is, even
if he is part of how it got that way.
People throughout the world have awoken to the Left being Right Light but with a more nauseating
moral superiority complex.
Danny Sheahan -> chilledoutbeardie 26 Oct 2016 5:25
That many people are so desperate for change that even being a billionaire but someone outside
the political elite is going to appeal to them.
Tom1Wright 26 Oct 2016 4:32
I find this line of thinking unjust and repulsive: the implication that Trump is a product
of the political establishment, and not an outsider, is to tar the entire Republican party and
its supporters with a great big flag marked 'racist'. That is a gross over simplification and
a total distortion.
UnevenSurface -> Tom1Wright 26 Oct 2016 5:05
But that's not what the article said at all: I quote:
he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs
the global economy and governs our politics
No mention of the GOP.
Tom1Wright -> UnevenSurface 26 Oct 2016 5:14
and I quote
'Encouraged by the corporate media, the Republicans have been waging a full-spectrum
assault on empathy, altruism and the decencies we owe to other people. Their gleeful stoving
in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic norms, their
stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have turned the
party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.'
HindsightMe 26 Oct 2016 4:33
the truth is there is an anti establishment movement and trump just got caught up in the ride.
He didnt start the movement but latched on to it. While we are still fixated on character flaws
the undercurrent of dissatisfaction by the public is still there. Hillary is going to have a tough
time in trying to bring together a divided nation
leadale 26 Oct 2016 4:37
Many years ago in the British Military, those with the right connections and enough money
could buy an officer's commission and rise up the system to be an incompetent General. As a result,
many battles were mismanaged and many lives wasted due to the incompetent (wealthy privileged
few) buying their way to the top. American politics today works on exactly the same system of
wealthy patronage and privilege for the incompetent, read Clinton and Trump. Until the best candidates
are able to rise up through the political system without buying their way there then the whole
corrupt farce will continue and we will be no different to the all the other tin pot republics
of the world.
arkley leadale 26 Oct 2016 5:48
As Wellington once said on reading the list of officers being sent out to him,
"My hope is that when the enemy reads these names he trembles as I do"
Some would argue however that the British system of bought commissions actually made the army
more effective in part because many competent officers had to stay in the field roles of platoon
and company commanders rather than get staff jobs and through the fact that promotion on merit
did exist for non-commissioned officers but there was a block on rising above sergeant.
Some would argue that the British class system ensured that during the Industrial Revolution
charge hands and foremen were appointed from the best workers but there was no way forward from
that, the result being that the best practices were applied through having the best practitioners
in charge at the sharp end.
rodmclaughlin 26 Oct 2016 4:37
"he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global
economy and governs our politics."
Obviously, Donald Trump is not an "outsider" in the economic
sense. Trump definitely belongs to the ruling "caste", or rather, "class". But he is by no means
the perfect representative of it. "The global economy", or rather, "capitalism", thrives better
with the free movement of (cheap) labour than without it. Economically, poor Americans would be
better off with more immigration control.
And there's more too it than economics. There's the "culture wars" aspect. Many people
don't like being told they are "deplorable" for opposing illegal (or even legal) immigration.
They don't like being called "racist" for disagreeing with an ideology.
I like the phrase Monbiot ends with - "He is our system, stripped of its pretences" - it
reminds me of a phrase in the Communist Manifesto - but I don't think it's true. "Our" system
is more than capitalism, it's culture. And Clinton is a far more "perfect representation" of the
increasingly censorious, narrow [neo]liberal culture which dominates the Western world.
Finally, Monbiot misses the chance to contrast Clinton's and Trump's apparent differences
with regard to confronting nuclear-armed Russia over the skies of Syria. It could be like 1964
all over again - except in this election, the Democrat is the nearest thing to Barry Goldwater.
nishville 26 Oct 2016 4:40
As a life-long despiser of all things Trump, I cannot believe that I am saying this: Trump
is good for world peace. He might be crap for everything else but I for one will sleep much
better if he is elected POTUS.
dylan37 26 Oct 2016 4:40
Agree, for once, with a piece by George. Trump is nothing new - we've seen his kind of faux-outsider
thing before, but he's amplifying it with the skills of a carnival barker and the "what me?" shrug
of the everyman - when we all know he's not. The election result can't be rigged because the game
is fixed from the start. A potential president needs millions of dollars behind them to even think
about running, and then needs to repay those bought favours once in office. Trump may just win
this one though - despite the polls, poor human qualities and negative press - simply because
he's possibly tapped into a rich seam of anti-politics and a growing desire for anything different,
even if it's distasteful and deplorable. It's that difference that might make the difference,
even when it's actually just more of the same. It's all in the packaging.
greenwichite 26 Oct 2016 4:41
Donald Trump is a clumsy, nasty opportunist who has got one thing right - people don't want globalisation.
What people want, is clean, high-tech industries in their own countries, that automate the
processes we are currently offshoring. They would rather their clothes were made by robots in
Rochdale than a sweat-shop in India.
Same goes for energy imports: we want clean, local renewables.
What people don't want is large, unpleasant multinational corporations negotiating themselves
tax cuts and "free trade" with corrupt politicians like Hillary Clinton.
Just my opinion, of course...
TheSandbag -> greenwichite 26 Oct 2016 4:50
Your right about globalisation, but I think wrong about the automation bit. People want Jobs because
its the only way to survive currently and they see them being shipped to the country with the
easiest to exploit workforce. I don't think many of them realize that those jobs are never coming
back. The socioeconomic system we exist in doesn't work for 90% of the population who are surplus
to requirements for sustaining the other 10%.
Shadenfraude 26 Oct 2016 4:43
I fully agree with Monbiot, American democracy is a sham - the lobby system has embedded corruption
right in the heart of its body politic. Lets be clear here though, whatever is the problem with
American democracy can in theory at least be fixed, but Trump simply can not and moreover he is
not the answer.
... ... ...
oddballs 26 Oct 2016 5:24
Trump threatened Ford that if they closed down US car plants and moved them to Mexico he would
put huge import tariffs on their products making them to expensive.
Export of jobs to low wage countries, how do you think Americans feel when they buy 'sports
wear, sweater, t-shirts shoes that cost say 3 $ to import into the US and then get sold for20
or 50 times as much, by the same US companies that moved production out of the country.
The anger many Americans feel how their lively-hoods have been outsourced, is the lake of discontent
Trump is fishing for votes.
His opponent, war child and Wall Street darling can count her lucky stars that the media
leaves her alone (with husband Bill, hands firmly in his pockets, nodding approvingly) and concentrates
on their feeding frenzy attacking Trump on sexual allegations of abusing women, giving Hillery,
Yes, likely to tell lies, ( mendacious, remember when she claimed to be under enemy fire in Bosnia?
remember how evasive she was on the Benghazi attack on the embassy)
Yes Trump is a dangerous man running against an also extremely dangerous woman.
onepieceman 26 Oct 2016 5:31
Extremely interesting reference to the Madison paper, but the issue is less about the size
of the electorate, and more about the power that the election provides to the victor.
One positive outcome that I hope will come of all of this is that people might think a little
more carefully about how much power an incoming president (or any politician) should be given.
The complacent assumption about a permanently benign government is overdue for a shakeup.
peccadillo -> Dean Alexander 26 Oct 2016 5:43
Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy.
You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure
of politics is corrupt?
Having missed that bit, I wonder if you actually read the article.
tater 26 Oct 2016 5:46
The sad thing is that the victims of the corrupt economic and political processes are the small
town folk who try to see Trump as their saviour. The globalisation that the US promoted to expand
its hegemony had no safeguards to protect local economies from mega retail and finance corporations
that were left at liberty to strip wealth from localities. The Federal transfer payments that
might have helped compensate have been too small and were either corrupted pork barrel payments
or shameful social security payments. For a culture that prides itself on independent initiative
and self sufficiency this was always painful and that has made it all the easier for the lobbyists
to argue against increased transfer payments and the federal taxes they require. So more money
for the Trumps of this world.
And to the future. The US is facing the serious risk of a military take over. Already its foreign
policy emanates from the military and the corruption brings it ever closer to the corporations.
If the people don't demand better the coup will come.
MrMopp 26 Oct 2016 6:12
There's a reason turnout for presidential elections is barely above 50%.
Wised up, fed up Americans have long known their only choice is between a Coke or Pepsi President.
Well, this time they've got a Dr. Pepper candidate but they still know their democracy is just
a commodity to be bought and sold, traded and paraded; their elections an almost perpetual presidential
circus.
That a grotesque like Trump can emerge and still be within touching distance of the Whitehouse
isn't entirely down to the Democrats disastrous decision to market New Clinton Coke. Although
that's helped.
The unpalatable truth is, like Brexit, many Americans simply want to shake things up and shake
them up bigly, even if it means a very messy, sticky outcome.
Anyone with Netflix can watch the classic film, "Network" at the moment. And it is a film of
the moment.
"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression.
Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks
are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street
and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the
air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local
newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if
that's the way it's supposed to be.
We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is
going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living
in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms.
Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave
us alone.'
Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don't want you to protest. I
don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn't know
what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and
the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. [shouting]
You've got to say: 'I'm a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!'
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to
get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I'M AS MAD
AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out
and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!' Things have got to change.
But first, you've gotta get mad!...You've got to say, I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO
TAKE THIS ANYMORE! Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and
the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and
yell, and say it: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
And that was in 1976. A whole lot of shit has happened since then but essentially, Coke is
still Coke and Pepsi is still Pepsi.
Forty years later, millions are going to get out of their chairs. They are going to vote. For
millions of Americans of every stripe, Trump is the "I'M AS MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE
THIS ANYMORE", candidate.
And he's in with a shout.
André De Koning 26 Oct 2016 6:13
Trump is indeed the embodiment of our collective Shadow (As Jung called this unconscious side
of our Self). It does reflect the degeneration of the culture we live in where politics has turned
into a travesty; where all projections of this side are on the Other, the usual other who we can
collectively dislike. All the wars initiated by the US have started with a huge propaganda programme
to hate and project our own Shadow on to this other. Often these were first friends, whether in
Iran or Iraq, Libya: as soon as the oil was not for ""us" , they were depicted as monsters who
needed action: regime change through direct invasion and enormous numbers of war crimes or through
CIA programmed regime change, it all went according to shady plans and manipulation and lies lapped
up by the masses.
When you look at speeches and conversations and debates with the so-called bogeyman, Putin,
he is not at all in a league as low and vile as portrayed and says many more sensible things than
anybody cares to listen to, because we're all brainwashed. We are complicit in wars (now in Syria)
and cannot see why we have to connive with terrorists, tens of thousands of them, and they get
supported by the war machine and friends like Saudis and Turkey which traded for years with ISIS.
The Western culture has become more vile than we could have imagined and slowly, like the frog
in increasingly hot water, we have become used to neglecting most of the population of Syria and
focusing on the rebel held areas, totally unaware of what has happened to the many thousands who
have lived under the occupation by terrorists who come from abroad ad fight the proxy war for
the US (and Saudi and the EU). Trump dares to embody all this, as does Clinton the war hawk,
and shows us we are only capable of seeing one side and project all nastiness outward while we
can feel good about ourselves by hating the other.
It fits the Decline of an Empire image as it did in other Falls of Civilizations.
tashe222 26 Oct 2016 6:28
Lots of virtue signalling from Mr. M.
Trump spoke to the executives at Ford like no one before ever has. He told them if they
moved production to Mexico (as they plan to do) that he would slap huge tariffs on their cars
in America and no one would buy them.
Trump has said many stupid things in this campaign, but he has some independence and is not
totally beholden to vested interests, and so there is at least a 'glimmer' of hope for the future
with him as Potus.
Yes, when the Archdruid first posted that it helped me understand some of the forces that were
driving Trump's successes. I disagree with the idea that voting for Trump is a good idea because
it will bring change to a moribund system. Change is not a panacea and the type of change he is
likely to bring is not going to be pleasant.
Hanwell123 -> ArseButter 26 Oct 2016 6:59
What happens in Syria could be important to us all. Clinton doesn't hide her ambition to
drive Assad from power and give Russia a kicking. It's actually very unpopular although the media
doesn't like to say so; it prefers to lambast Spain for re-fueling Russian war ships off to fight
the crazed Jihadists as if we supported the religious fanatics that want to slaughter all Infidels!
There is an enormous gulf between what ordinary people want and the power crazy Generals in the
Pentagon and NATO.
unsubscriber 26 Oct 2016 6:43
George always writes so beautifully and so tellingly. My favourite sentence from this column is:
Their gleeful stoving in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic
norms, their stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have
turned the party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.
Cadmium 26 Oct 2016 6:51
Trump is not a misogynist, look the word up. He may be crude but that's not the same thing. He
also represents a lot more people than a tiny faction. He is also advocating coming down on lobbying,
which is good. He may be a climate change denier but that's because a lot of his supporters are,
he'd probably change if they did. The way to deal with it is with rational argument, character
assassination is counterproductive even if he himself does it. Although he seems to do it as a
reaction rather than as an attack. He probably has a lot higher chance of winning than most people
think since a lot of people outside the polls will feel represented by him and a lot of those
included in the polls may not vote for Hilary.
ID4755061 26 Oct 2016 6:52
George Monbiot is right. Trump is a conduit for primal stuff that has always been there and never
gone away. All the work that has been done to try to change values and attitudes, to make societies
more tolerant and accepting and sharing, to get rid of xenophobia and racism and the rest, has
merely supressed all these things. Also, while times were good (that hasn't been so for a long
time) most of this subterranean stuff got glossed over most of the time by some kind of feel good
factor and hope for a better future.
But once the protections have gone, if there is nothing to feel good about or there is little
hope left, the primitive fear of other and strange and different kicks back in. It's a basic survival
instinct from a time when everything around the human species was a threat and it is a fundamental
part of us and Trump and Palin at al before him have got this, even if they don't articulate it
this way, and it works and it will always work. It's a pure emotional response to threat that
we can't avoid, the only way out of it, whihc many of use use, is to use our intellects to challenge
the kick of emotion and see it for what it is and to understand the consequences of giving it
free reign. It's this last bit that Trump, Palin, Farage and their ilk just don't get and never
will, we aill always be fighting this fight.
PotholeKid 26 Oct 2016 6:56
Political culture includes the Clintons and Bushes, the Democratic party and Republican party.
exploring that culture using the DNC and Podesta leaks as reference, paints a much better picture
of the depth of depravity this culture represents..Trump is a symptom and no matter how much the
press focuses on maligning his character. The Clintons share a huge responsibility for the corruption
of the system. Mr. Monbiot would serve us well by looking at solutions for cleaning up the mess,
what Trumps likes to call "Draining the swamp"
lonelysoul72 26 Oct 2016 6:59
Trump for me , he is horrendous but Clinton is worse.
nooriginalthought 26 Oct 2016 7:06
"Democracy in the U.S. is so corrupted by money it is no longer recognisable as democracy."
Sounds like a quote from Frank Underwood. To catch a thief sometimes you need the services of
a thief. With a fair degree of certainty we can be sure a Clinton administration will offer us
continuity .
If that is what you think the world needs fine.
If you believe globalization to be of benefit only to the few .
If you believe Russia has no rights to a sphere of influence on its boarders.
If you believe America's self appointed role as world policemen a disaster.
If you believe trade agreements a backdoor to corporate control.
If your just pissed off with politicians .
Your probably going to vote Trump. Looking forward to a long list of articles here in November
prophecies of Armageddon a la brexit. You liberal lefties , you'll never learn. If you want to
know what people are thinking , you got to get out of the echochamber.
nooriginalthought -> aurlius 26 Oct 2016 7:45
Sorry , hate having to explain myself to the dim witted.
USA has got itself in an unholy mess . It's politicians no longer work for the people .
Their paymasters care not if life in Idaho resembles Dantes inferno .
Trump has many faults but being "not Hilary" is not one of them. The very fact he is disliked
by all the vested interests should make you take another look.
And remember , the American constitution has many checks and balances , a President has a lot
less power than most people imagine.
Pinkie123 26 Oct 2016 7:21
While it is impossible to credibly disagree with the general thrust of this, some of Monbiot's
assumptions exemplify problems with left-wing thinking at the moment.
But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his
caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped
of its pretences.
Like many on the right, the left have unthinkingly accepted a narrative of an organized,
conspiratorial system run by an elite of politicians and plutocrats. The problem with this narrative
is it suggests politics and politicians are inherently nefarious, in turn suggesting there are
no political solutions to be sought to problems, or anything people can do to challenge a global
system of power. As Monbiot asks: "You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what
do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt?" Well, what indeed?
I think Monbiot a principled, intelligent left-wing commentator, but at the same time he epitomises
a left-wing retreat into pessimism in the face of a putatively global network of power and inevitable
environmental catastrophe. In reality, while there is no shortage of perfidious, corrupt corporate
interests dominating global economies, there is no organized system or shadowy establishment -
only a chaotic mess rooted in complex political problems. Once you accept that reality, then it
becomes possible to imagine political solutions to the quandaries confronting us. Rather than
just railing against realities, you can envision a new world to replace them. And a new kind of
world is something you very rarely get from the left these days. Unlike the utopian socialists
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is little optimism or imagination - just anger,
pessimism and online echo chambers of 'clictivists'.
Like the documentarian Adam Curtis says, once you conclude that all politics is corrupt then
all you can do is sit there impotently and say: 'Oh dear'.
deltajones -> Pinkie123 26 Oct 2016 8:12
I don't think you need to believe in an organised conspiracy and I don't see any real evidence
that George Monbiot does. The trouble is that the corporate and political interests align in a
way that absorbs any attempt to challenge them and the narrative has been written that of course
politics is all about economics and of course we need mighty corporations to sustain us.
Even the left has largely taken on that narrative and it's seen as common sense. Challenging
this belief system is the toughest job that there is and we see that in the howling indignation
hurled at Jeremy Corbyn if he makes the slightest suggestion of nationalisation of the railways,
for instance.
ianfraser3 26 Oct 2016 7:29
Not long after the start of the presidential campaign I began to reflect that in Trump
we are seeing materializing before us the logical result of the neoliberal project, the ultimate
shopping spree, buy an election.
furiouspurpose -> IllusionOfFairness 26 Oct 2016 8:08
The Republican party essentially offered their base nothing – that was the problem.
They couldn't offer all the things that ordinary Americans want – better and wider Medicaid,
better and wider social security, tax increases on the rich, an end to pointless foreign wars
and the American empire. None of these things were acceptable to their funders so that only
left emotional issues – anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-god, pro-gun. And all of the emotional issues
are on the wrong side of history as the US naturally grows more politically progressive. So the
Republican party couldn't even deliver on the emotionally driven agenda. I think their base realised
that they were being offered nothing – and that's why they turned to Trump. Perhaps a fascist
blowhard could bulldoze the system to deliver on the emotional side of the offer. That's why Trump
broke through
The Democrats have largely the same funding base, but they at least deliver crumbs – at
least a nod to the needs of ordinary people through half-hearted social programmes. In the
end the African Americans decided that Hillary could be relied upon to deliver some crumbs – so
they settled for that. That's why Sanders couldn't break through.
fairleft 26 Oct 2016 7:55
Trump is imperfect because he wants normal relations rather than war with Russia. No, Hillary
Clinton is the ultimate representation of the system that is abusing us. What will occur when
Goldman Sachs and the military-industrial complex coalition get their, what is it, 5th term in
office would be a great subject of many Guardian opinion pieces, actually. But that will have
to wait till after November 8.
Such commentary would be greatly aided the Podesta emails, which enlighten us as to the mind
and 'zeitgeist' of the HIllary team. And, of course, we also have Hillary's Wall Street speeches
-- thanks to Wikileaks we have the complete transcripts, in case Guardian readers are unaware.
They expose the real thinking and 'private positions' of the central character in the next episode
of 'Rule by Plutocracy'.
But, of course, opinion columns and think pieces on the Real Hillary and the Podesta emails
will have to wait ... forever.
toffee1 26 Oct 2016 7:58
Trump shows the true face of the ruling class with no hypocrisy. He is telling us the truth.
If we have a democracy, we should have a party representing the interests of the business class,
why not. The democrats is the party practicing hypocrisy, pretending that they somehow representing
the interest of the working class. They are the ones spreading lies and hypocrisy and manipulating
the working class everyday through their power over the media. Their function is to appease the
working class. The real obstacle for improving conditions for the working class historically has
always been the Democratic party, not the Republican party.
Kikinaskald Cadmium 26 Oct 2016 8:39
In fact presidents don't usually have much affect, they're prey to their advisors. Generally true.
But Obama was able to show that he was able to distance himself up to a certain point from what
was around him. He was aware of the power of the establishment and of their bias. So, when the
wave against Iran was as strong as never before, he made a deal with Iran. He also didn't want
to intervene more actively in Syria and even in what concerns Russia, he seems to have moderate
positions.
In what concerns foreign politics, Trump some times seems more reasonable than Clinton
and the establishment. Clinton is the best coached politician of all times. She doesn't know that
she's coached. She just followed the most radical groups and isn't able to question anything at
all. The only thing that the coaches didn't fix until now is her laughing which is considered
even by her coaches as a sign of weirdness.
Kikinaskald -> J.K. Stevens 26 Oct 2016 9:09
She is considered to be highly aggressive, she pushed for the bombing of a few countries and
intervening everywhere..
Unfortunately all politics in the west is based on a similar model with our own domestic landscape
perhaps most closely resembling that in the US. We've always been peddled convenient lies of course,
but perhaps as society itself becomes more polarised [in terms of distribution of wealth and the
social consequences of that], the dissonance with the manufactured version of reality becomes
ever sharper. It is deeply problematic because traditional popular media is dominated by the wealthy
elite and the reality it depicts is as much a reflection of the consensual outlook of that elite
as it is deliberate, organised mendacity [although there's plenty of that too].
Western economies are now so beholden to the patronage of the essentially stateless multinational,
it has become a political imperative to appease their interests - it's difficult to see a future
in which an administration might resist this force, because at its whim, national economies face
ruination. In light of such helplessness our political representatives face an easier path in
simply accepting their lot as mere administrators who will tinker at the margins [and potentially
reap the rewards of a good servant], rather than hold to principle and resist an overwhelming
force.
Meanwhile the electorate is become increasingly disaffected by this mainstream of politics
who they [rightly] sense is no longer truly representative of their interests in any substantive
way. To this backdrop the media has made notable blunders in securing the status quo. It has revealed
the corruption and self-seeking of many in politics and promoted the widespread distrust of mainstream
politicians for a variety of reasons. While the corruption is real and endemic, howls of protest
against political 'outsiders' from this same press is met with with the view that the political
establishment cannot be trusted engendered by the same sources.
The narrative for Brexit is somewhat similar. For many years the EU was the whipping boy for
all our ills and the idea that it is fundamentally undemocratic in contrast to our own system,
so unchallenged that it is taken for fact, even by the reasonably educated. Whilst I'm personally
deflated and not a little worried by our exit, it comes as little surprise that a distorted perspective
on the EU has led to a revolt against it.
There are of course now very many alternative narratives to those which are the preserve of
monied media magnates, but they're disparate, fractured and unfocused.
Only the malaise has any sort of consistency about it and it is bitterly ironic that figures
like Trump and Farage can so effectively plug into that in the guise of outsiders, to offer spurious
alternatives to that which is so desperately needed. It's gloomy stuff.
Western economies are now so beholden to the patronage of the essentially stateless
multinational, it has become a political imperative to appease their interests - it's difficult
to see a future in which an administration might resist this force, because at its whim, national
economies face ruination. In light of such helplessness our political representatives face
an easier path in simply accepting their lot as mere administrators who will tinker at the
margins [and potentially reap the rewards of a good servant], rather than hold to principle
and resist an overwhelming force.
I have been an advocate of this point for a long time.There is a saying in politics in America
that'' the only difference between a Democrat and a Republican is the speed at which they drop
to their knees when big business walks into the room''.
How it is going to be stopped or indeed if there is the will to do so,I do not know. The proponents
and those who have most to lose have been incredibly successful in propagating the myth that 'you
to can have what I have'and have convinced a sizeable minority that there is no alternative.
Until that changes and is exposed for the illusion that it is ,we are I fear heading for something
far worse than we have now.
"Trump personifies the traits promoted by the media and corporate worlds he affects
to revile; the worlds that created him. He is the fetishisation of wealth, power and image
in a nation where extrinsic values are championed throughout public discourse. His conspicuous
consumption, self-amplification and towering (if fragile) ego are in tune with the dominant
narratives of our age."
Because this is who we are and this is how we role. We got on rickety ships and braved the
cowardly waters to reach these shores, with tremendous realworld uncertainty and absolute religious
zeal. We are the manly men and womanly women who manifested our destiny, endured the cruel nature
naturing, and civilized the wild wild west, at the same time preserving our own wildness and rugged
individualism. Why should we go all soft and namby-pamby with this social safety nonsense? Let
the roadkills expire with dignified indignity on the margins of the social order. We will bequeath
a glorious legacy to the Randian ubermenschen who will inherit this land from us. They will live
in Thielian compounds wearing the trendiest Lululemons. They will regularly admonish their worses
with chants of: "Do you want to live? Pay, pal". If we go soft, if we falter, how will we ever
be able to look in the eye the ghosts of John Wayne, Marion Morrison, Curtis LeMay, Chuck Heston,
Chuck Norris, and the Great Great Ronnie Himself? Gut-check time folks, suck it up and get on
with the program.
"The political constitution of the United States is not, as Madison envisaged, representation
tempered by competition between factions. The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal."
The Founders had a wicked sense of humor. They set up the structure of various branches so
as to allow for the possibility of a future take-over by the Funders. That leaves room for the
exorbitant influence of corporations and wealthy individuals and the rise of the Trumps, leading
to the eventual fall into a Mad Max world.
"Yes, [Trump] is a shallow, mendacious, boorish and extremely dangerous man. But those traits
ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that
runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped of its pretences."
It is irrelevant if everyone sees the emperor/system has no clothes, it quite enjoys walking
around naked now that it has absolute power.
'It is irrelevant if everyone sees the emperor/system has no clothes, it quite enjoys
walking around naked now that it has absolute power.'
Yes, they don't care any more if we see the full extent of their corruption as we've given
up our power to do anything about it.
chiefwiley -> Luftwaffe 26 Oct 2016 9:31
It was once very common to see Democratic politicians as neighbors attending every community
event. They were Teamsters, pipe fitters, and electricians. And they were coaches and ushers and
pallbearers. Now they are academics and lawyers and NGO employees and managers who pop up during
campaigns.
The typical income of the elected Democrats outside their government check is north of $100,000.
They don't live in, or even wander through, the poorer neighborhoods. So they are essentially
clueless that government services like busses are run to suit government and not actual customers.
It's sort of nice to have somebody looking after our interests in theory, but it would
be at least polite if they deemed to ask us what we think our best interests are. Notice the nasty
names and attributes being hurled at political "dissidents," especially around here, and there
should be little wonder why many think the benevolent and somewhat single minded and authoritarian
left is at least part of their problems.
ghstwrtrx7 -> allblues 26 Oct 2016 14:02
Yea, 15 years of constant wars of empire with no end in sight has pretty much ran this
country in the ground.
We all talk about how much money is wasted by the federal government on unimportant endeavors
like human services and education, but don't even bat an eye about the sieve of money that is
the Pentagon.
Half a trillion dollars for aircraft carriers we don't need and are already obsolete. China
is on the verge of developing wickedly effective anti-ship missiles designed specifically to target
these Gerald R. Ford-class vessels. You might as well paint a huge bull's-eye on these ships'
4-1/2 acre flight deck.
And then there there's the most egregious waste of money our historically over-bloated defense
budget has ever seen: The Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter. Quite a mouthful,
isn't? When you hear how much this boondoggle costs the American taxpayer, you'll choke: $1.5
Trillion, with a t. What's even more retching is that aside from already being obsolete, it doesn't
even work.
There are plenty more examples of this crap and this doesn't even include the nearly TWO
trillion dollars we've spent this past decade-and-a-half on stomping flat the Middle East and
large swaths of the Indian subcontinent.
And all this time, our nation's infrastructure is crumbling literally right out from underneath
us and millions upon millions of children and their families experience a daily struggle just
to eat. Eat?! In the "greatest," wealthiest nation on earth and we prefer to kill people at weddings
with drones than feed our own children.
I can't speak for anyone else other than myself, but that, boys and girls, has a decided miasma
of evil about it.
transplendent 26 Oct 2016 9:49
I'd like to read an unbiased piece about why the media narrative doesn't match the reality
of the Trump phenomenon. He is getting enormous crowds attend his rallies but hardly any coverage
of that in the filtered news outlets. Hillary, is struggling to get anyone turn up without paying
them. There is no real enthusiasm.
If Hillary doesn't win by a major landslide (and I mean BIGLY) as the MSM would lead us to
believe she is going to, it could be curtains for the media, as what little credibility that is
not already swirling around the plughole will disappear down it once and for all.
The buzzwords and tired old catch phrases and cliches used by the left to suppress any
alternative discussion, and divert from their own misdemeanors are fooling no one but themselves.
Trump supporters simply don't care any more how Hillary supporters explain that she lied about
dodging sniper fire. Or the numerous other times she and her cohorts have been caught out telling
fibs.
leftofstalin 26 Oct 2016 10:06
Sorry George YOU and the chattering classes you represent are the reason for the rise of the
far right blinded by the false promises of new labour and it's ilk the working classes have been
demonized as striking troublemakers benefit frauds racists uneducated bigots etc etc and going
by the comments on these threads from remainders you STILL don't understand the psyche of the
working class
Gary Ruddock 26 Oct 2016 10:07
When Obama humiliated Trump at that dinner back in 2011 he may have set a course for his own
destruction. Lately, Obama does not appear anywhere near as confident as he once did.
Perhaps Trump has seen the light, seen the error of his ways, maybe he realizes if he doesn't
stand up against the system, then no one will.
transplendent 26 Oct 2016 10:38
Trump's only crime, is he buys into the idea of national identity and statehood (along with
every other nation state in the world mind you), and Hillary wants to kick down the doors and
hand over the US to Saudi Arabia and any international vested interest who can drop a few dollars
into the foundation coffers. I can't see Saudi Arabia throwing open the doors any day soon, unless
it is onto a one way street.
N.B. The Russians are not behind it.
gjjwatson 26 Oct 2016 11:10
Very true. Throughout history the rich, the powerful, the landed, ennobled interest and
their friends in the Law and money changing houses have sought to control governments and have
usually succeeded.
In the Media today the rich are fawned over by sycophantic journalists and programme makers.
These are the people who make the political weather and create the prevailing narratives.
I remember when President Reagan railed against government whilst he was in office, he said
the worst words a citizen could hear were "I`m from the government, I`m here to help you".
Working class people fancied themselves to above the common herd and thought themselves
part of some elite.
All of this chimes of course with American history and it`s constitution written by slave owning
colonists who proclaimed that "all men are created equal".
bonhiver 26 Oct 2016 12:10
It's quite disturbing the lengths this paper will go to in order to slur and discredit
Trump, labelling him dangerous and alluding to the sexual assault allegations. This even goes
so far to a very lengthy article regarding Trumps lack of knowledge on the Rumbelows Cup 25 years
ago.
Whereas very little examination is made into Hillary Clinton's background which includes
serious allegation of fraud and involvement in assisting in covering up her husband's alleged
series of rapes. There are also issues in the wikileaks emails that merit analysis as well as
undercover tapes of seioau issues with her campaign team.
Whereas it is fair to criticise Trump for a lot of stuff it does appear that there is no attempt
at balance as Clinton's faults appear to get covered up om this paper.
Whereas I can not vote in the US elections and therefore the partisan reporting has no substantive
effect on how I may vote or act it is troubling that a UK newspaper does not provide the reader
with an objective as possible reporting on the presidential race.
It suggests biased reporting elsewhere.
thevisitor2015 26 Oct 2016 12:46
One of the most important characteristics of the so-called neoliberalism is its negative
selection. While mostly successfully camouflaged, that negative selection is more than obvious
this time, in two US presidential candidates. It's hard to imagine lower than those two.
seamuspadraig 26 Oct 2016 13:37
Well, OK George. Tell me: if Trump's such an establishment candidate, then why does the
whole of the establishment unanimously reject him? Is it normal for Republicans (such as the Bushes
and the neocons) to endorse Democrats? Why does even the Speaker of the House (a Republican) and
even, on occasion, Trump's own Vice-Presidential nominee seem to be trying to undermine his campaign?
If Trump is really just more of the same as all that came before, why is he being treated different
by the MSM and the political establishment?
Obviously, there's something flawed about your assumption.
CharlesPDXOr -> seamuspadraig 26 Oct 2016 13:58
I think the answer to your question is in the article: because Trump has brought the truth
of the monied class into the open. He is a perfect example of all that class is and tries to pretend
it is not. And when the commoners see this in front of them, a whole lot of them are disgusted
by it. That doesn't sit well back in the country club and the boardroom, where they work so hard
to keep all of that behind closed doors. They hate him because he is one of them and is spilling
the beans on all of them.
bill9651 26 Oct 2016 13:01
Trump has exposed the corruption of the political system and the media and has promised to
put a stop to it. By contrast, Clinton is financed by the very banks, corporates and financial
elites who are responsible for the corruption. This Trump speech is explicit on what we all suspected
is going on. Everybody should watch it, irrespective of whether they support him or not!
Michael Moore explaining why a lot of people like him
"I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don't necessarily
agree with him. They're not racist or redneck, they're actually pretty decent people and so after
talking to a number of them I wanted to write this.
Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives
and said "if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico,
I'm going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy
them." It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything
like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - the "Brexit" states.
You live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is kind
of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting, and that's why every beaten-down,
nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves
Trump. He is the human Molotov Cocktail that they've been waiting for; the human hand grande that
they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. And on November 8, although
they lost their jobs, although they've been foreclose on by the bank, next came the divorce and
now the wife and kids are gone, the car's been repoed, they haven't had a real vacation in years,
they're stuck with the shitty Obamacare bronze plan where you can't even get a fucking percocet,
they've essentially lost everything they had except one thing - the one thing that doesn't cost
them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American constitution: the right to vote.
They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be fucked over and fucked up it doesn't
matter, because it's equalized on that day - a millionaire has the same number of votes as the
person without a job: one. And there's more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire
class. So on November 8 the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot,
close the curtain, and take that lever or felt pen or touchscreen and put a big fucking X in the
box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined
their lives: Donald J Trump.
They see that the elite who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall
Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump, after they loved
him and created him, and now hate. Thank you media: the enemy of my enemy is who I'm voting for
on November 8.
Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go
and blow up the whole goddamn system because it's your right. Trump's election is going to be
the biggest fuck you ever recorded in human history and it will feel good."
Michael Moore
Debreceni 26 Oct 2016 14:15
Mrs Clinton is also the product of our political culture. A feminist who owes everything
to her husband and men in the Democratic Party. A Democrat who started her political career as
a Republican; a civil right activist who worked for Gerry Goldwater, one of last openly racist/segregationist
politicians. A Secretary of State who has no clue about, or training in, foreign policy, and who
received her position as compensation for losing the election. A pacifist, who has never had a
gun in her hands, but supported every war in the last twenty years. A humanist who rejoiced over
Qaddafi's death ("we came, we won, he is dead!") like a sadist.
Both candidates have serious weaknesses. Yet Trump is very much an American character, his
vices and weaknesses are either overlooked, or widely shared, secretively respected and even admired
(even by those who vote against him). Clinton's arrogance, elitism and hypocrisy, coupled with
her lack of talent, charisma and personality, make her an aberration in American politics.
BabylonianSheDevil03 26 Oct 2016 15:26
One thing that far right politics offers the ordinary white disaffected voter is 'pay back',
it is a promised revenge-fest, putting up walls, getting rid of foreigners, punishing employers
of foreigners, etc., etc. All the stuff that far right groups have wet dreams about.
Farage used the same tactics in the UK. Le Pen is the same.
Because neoliberal politics has left a hell of a lot of people feeling pissed off, the
far right capitalizes on this, whilst belonging to the same neoliberal dystopia so ultimately
not being able to make good on their promises. Their promises address a lot of people's anger,
which of course isn't really about foreigners at all, that is simply the decoy, but cutting through
all the crap to make that clear is no easy task, not really sure how it can be done, certainly
no political leader in the western hemisphere has the ability to do so.
ProseBeforeHos 26 Oct 2016 15:45
"But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste,
the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics."
Wrong as always. Trump *is* an outsider. He's an unabashed nationalist who's set him up
against the *actual* caste that governs our politics: Neo-liberal internationalists with socially
trendy left-liberal politics (but not so left that they don't hire good tax lawyers to avoid paying
a fraction of what they are legally obliged to).
Best represented in the Goldman Sachs executives who are donating millions to Hillary Clinton
because they are worried about Trump's opposition to free trade, and they know she will give them
*everything* they want.
Trumps the closest thing we're gotten to a genuine threat to the system in a long, long
time, so of course George Monbiot and the rest of the Guardian writers has set themselves against
him, because if you're gonna be wrong about the EU, wrong about New Labour, wrong about social
liberalism, wrong about immigration, why change the habit of a lifetime?
aofeia1224 26 Oct 2016 16:09
"What is the worst thing about Donald Trump? The lies? The racist stereotypes? The misogyny?
The alleged gropings? The apparent refusal to accept democratic outcomes?"
Lies: Emails, policy changes based on polls showing a complete lack of conviction, corporate
collusion, Bosnia, Clinton Foundation, war mongering, etc.
Racist stereotypes: Super predators. Misogyny: Aside from her laughing away her pedophile case
and allegedly threatening the women who came out against Bill, you've also got this sexist gem
"Women are the primary victims of war".
Alleged gropings: Well she's killed people by texting. So unless your moral compass is
so out of whack that somehow a man JOKING about his player status in private is worse than Clinton's
actions throughout her political career, then I guess you could make the case that Clinton at
least doesn't have this skeleton in her closet.
Refusal to accept democratic outcomes: No. He's speaking out against the media's collusion
with the democratic party favoring Clinton over every other nominee, including Bernie Sanders.
He's talking about what was revealed in the DNC leaks and the O'Keefe tapes that show how dirty
the tactics have been in order to legally persuade the voting public into electing one person
or the other.
Besides that, who cares about his "refusal" to accept the outcome? The American people protested
when Bush won in 2000 saying it was rigged. Same goes with Obama saying the same "anti democratic"
shit back in 2008 in regards to the Bush Administration.
Pot call kettle black
caravanserai 26 Oct 2016 16:16
Republicans are crazy and their policies make little sense. Neo-conservatism? Trickle down
economics? Getting the poor to pay for the mess created by the bankers in 2008? Trump knows what
sells to his party's base. He throws them red meat. However, the Democrats are not much better.
They started to sell out when Bill Clinton was president. They pretend to still be the party of
the New Deal, but they don't want to offend Wall Street. US democracy is in trouble.
rooolf 26 Oct 2016 16:24
When do the conspiracy theories about the criminality of his opponent no longer count as
conspiracies? When we have a plethora of emails confirming there is indeed fire next to that smoke,
corruption fire, collusion fire, fire of contempt for the electorate. When we have emails confirming
the Saudi Arabians are actually funding terrorist schools across the globe, emails where Hilary
herself admits it, but will not say anything publicly about terrorism and Saudi Arabia, what's
conspiracy and what's reality?
Is it because Saudi Arabia funded her foundation with $23 million, or because it doesn't
fit with her great 'internationalists' global agenda?
Either way there seems to be some conspiring of some sort
When is it no longer theory? And where does the guardian fit into this corrupted corporate
media idea?
Yep trump is a buffoon, but the failure of all media to deliver serious debate means the
US is about to elect someone probably more dangerous than trump, how the hell can that be
What the author overlooks is the media's own complicity in allowing this to develop
Unfortunately the corruption of the system is so entrenched it takes an abnormality like trump
to challenge it
Hard to believe, but trump is a once in a lifetime opportunity to shake shit up, not a pleasant
one, in fact a damn ugly opportunity, but the media shut him down, got all caught up in self preservation
and missed the opportunity
it what comes next that is scary
BScHons -> rooolf 26 Oct 2016 17:09
Nothing wrong with a liberal internationalist utopia, it sounds rather good and worth striving
for. It's just that what they've been pushing is actually a neoliberal globalist nirvana for the
1 per cent
rooolf BScHons 26 Oct 2016 17:17
Totally agree
The problem is the left this paper represents were bought off with the small change by
neoliberalism, and they expect the rest of us to suck it up so the elites from both sides can
continue the game
Talking about the environment and diversity doesn't cut it
mrjonno 26 Oct 2016 17:02
Well said as ever George. Humanity is in a total mess as we near the end of the neoliberal
model. That the USA has a choice between two 'demopublicans' is no choice at all.
I would go further in your analysis - media controlled by these sociopaths has ensured that our
society shares the same values - we are a bankrupt species as is.
As long as you are here to provide sensible analysis, along with Peter Joseph, I have hope
that we can pull out of the nosedive that we are currently on a trajectory for.
Thank you for your sane input into an otherwise insane world. Thank you Mr Monbiot.
annedemontmorency 26 Oct 2016 19:08
We'll ignore the part about the inability to accept democratic outcomes since that afflicts
so many people and organisations - Brexit , anyone?
More to the point is how the summit of US politics produces candidates like Trump and Clinton.
Clinton is suffering the same damage the LibDems received during their coalition with the Tories
.Proximity to power exposed their inadequacies and hypocrisy in both cases.
Trump - unbelievably - remains a viable candidate but only because Hillary Clinton reeks of
graft and self interest.
The obvious media campaign against Trump could also backfire - voters know a hatchet job when
they see one - they watch House of Cards.
But politics is odd around the whole world.
The Guardian is running a piece about the Pirate party in Iceland.
Why go so far? - the most remarkable coup in recent politics was UKIP forcing a vote on the
EU which it not only won it did so in spite of only ever having ONE MP out of 630.
Trump may be America's UKIP - he resembles them in so many ways.
ID6209069 26 Oct 2016 20:35
It's possible that something like this was inevitable, in a nation which is populated by "consumers"
rather than as citizens. There are "valuable demographics" versus those that aren't worthy of
the attention of the constant bombardment of advertising. I jokingly said last year that as I
was turning 55 last year, I am no longer in the 'coveted 29-54 demo'. My worth as a consumer has
been changed merely by reaching a certain age, so I now see fewer ads about cars and electronics
and more about prescription medicines. The product of our media is eyeballs, not programs or articles.
The advertising is the money maker, the content merely a means of luring people in for a sales
pitch, not to educate or inform. If that structure sells us a hideous caricature of a successful
person and gives him political power, as long as the ad dollars keep rolling in.
GreyBags 26 Oct 2016 21:19
This is the culmination of living in a post-truth political world. Lies and smears, ably
supported by the corporate media and Murdoch in particular means that the average person who doesn't
closely follow politics is being misinformed.
The complete failure of right wing economic 'theories' means they only have lies, smears
and the old 'divide and conquer' left in their arsenal. 'Free speech' is their attempt to get
lies and smears equal billing with the truth. All truth on the other hand must be suppressed.
All experts and scientists who don't regurgitate the meaningless slogans of the right will be
ignored, traduced, defunded, disbanded or silenced by law.
We see the same corrupted philosophy in Australia as well.
JamesCameron 7d ago
Yet Trump, the "misogynist, racist and bigot"' has more women in executive and managerial positions
than any comparable company, pays these women the same or more than their male counterparts and
fought the West Palm Beach City Council to be allowed to open his newly purchased club to blacks
and Jews who had been banned until then. I suspect his views do chime with Americans fed up with
political correctness gone mad as well as the venality of the administration of Barak Obama, a
machine politician with dodgy bagmen from Chicago – the historically corrupt city in Illinois,
the most corrupt state in the Union. Finally, unlike The Hilary, he has actually held down a job,
worked hard and achieved success and perhaps they are more offended by what she does than what
he says.
aucourant 7d ago
Not so much an article about Trump as much as a rant. George Monbiot writes with the utter
conviction of one who mistakenly believes that his readers share his bigotry. When he talks about
the 'alleged gropings' or the 'alleged refusal to accept democratic outcomes', that is exactly
what they are 'alleged'.
The Democratic Party has been dredging up porn-stars and wannabe models who now make claims
that Trump tried to 'kiss them without asking'. This has become the nightly fare of the mainstream
media in the USA. At the same time the media ignores the destruction of Clinton's emails, the
bribing of top FBI officials who are investigating the destroyed tapes and the giving of immunity
to all those who aided Clinton in hiding and destroying subpoenaed evidence.
The press also ignored the tapes of the DNC paying thugs to cause violence at Trump rallies,
the bribes paid to the Clintons for political favours and the stealing of the election from Bernie
Sanders. Trump is quite right to think the 'democratic outcome' is being fixed. Not only were
the votes for Sanders manipulated, but Al Gore's votes were also altered and manipulated to ensure
a win for Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The same interests who engineered the 2000 election
have switched from supporting the Republican Party to supporting Clinton.
Anomander64 6d ago
Great article. The neoliberals have been able to control the narrative and in doing so
have managed to scapegoat all manner of minority groups, building anger among those disaffected
with modern politics. Easy targets - minorities, immigrants, the poor, the disadvantaged and the
low-paid workers.
The real enemy here are those sitting atop the corporate tree, but with the media controlled
by them, the truth is never revealed.
mochilero7687 5d ago
Perhaps next week George will write in detail about all the scandals Hildabeast has caused
and been involved in over the past 40 years - which have cost the US govt tens of millions of
dollars and millions of man hours - but I won't be holding my breath.
Trump shows the true face of the ruling class with no hypocrisy. He is telling us the
truth. If we have a democracy, we should have a party representing the interests of the
business class, why not.
The democrats is the party practicing hypocrisy, pretending that
they somehow representing the interest of the working class. They are the ones spreading lies
and hypocrisy and manipulating the working class everyday through their power over the media.
Their function is to appease the working class. The real obstacle for improving conditions for
the working class historically has always been the Democratic party, not the Republican party.
Jill Stein to win over the hearts of some progressives and jump start her far-left "
people-powered
" movement.
"This is Jill Stein's moment," said longtime Democratic pollster and Fox News contributor Pat
Caddell.
"There are many Clinton voters who would rather vote their conscience than vote for a major party.
According to the latest Breitbart/Gravis poll, when given the choice of whether you should vote for
a major party candidate or vote your conscience, 44% of Clinton voters said you should vote your
conscience," Caddell explained.
Even before the FBI director's dramatic announcement on Friday, the ABC News/Washington Post
tracking poll
indicated that "loosely affiliated or reluctant Clinton supporters"- which includes white women
and young voters under the age of 30- seem to be floating off and "look less likely to vote."
Caddell explained that the polling data suggests "there are many people who are ambivalent
about Clinton who don't want to vote for Trump. Given these new revelations from WikiLeaks and the
re-intensity of the concern regarding the corruption of her emails, these ambivalent voters need
a place to go and Jill Stein-being not only a progressive woman, but an honest progressive woman-is
the obvious choice for so many of these voters, particularly for those who supported Bernie Sanders."
Indeed, nearly 60 percent of voters- including 43 percent of Democrats- believe America needs
a third major political party,
according to a Gallup poll released late last month.
As one former Bernie Sanders supporter told Breitbart News, "It's come to this: voting for
Hillary Clinton is voting for the lesser of two evils. But voting for the lesser of two evils is
still voting for evil, and I'm tired of voting for evil. That's why I'm voting for Jill Stein.
"
This sentiment has been echoed by Stein herself who has argued, "it's time to reject the lesser
of two evils and stand up for the greater good."
Stein seems ready to capitalize on the FBI's announcement as well as the steady stream of WikiLeaks
revelations that have exposed, what Stein has characterized as, the Clinton camp's "hostility" to
progressives.
"The FBI has re-opened the Clinton investigation. Will the American people rise up and vote for
honest change?" Stein asked on Friday, via Twitter.
... ... ...
Clinton's strained relationship with progressives has been well documented and could
present Stein– who has demonstrated a remarkable ability to articulately prosecute the progressive
case against Clinton– with an opening, especially as polling reveals a significant chunk of Clinton
voters believe voting their conscience ought to trump voting for a major political party.
As Politico reported in a piece
titled "WikiLeaks poisons Hillary's relationship with left" :
Some of the left's most influential voices and groups are taking offense at the way they
and their causes were discussed behind their backs by Clinton and some of her closest advisers
in the emails, which swipe liberal heroes and causes as "puritanical," "pompous", "naive", "radical"
and "dumb," calling some "freaks," who need to "get a life." […] among progressive operatives,
goodwill for Clinton - and confidence in key advisers featured in the emails including John Podesta,
Neera Tanden and Jake Sullivan - is eroding…
Even before the FBI's announcement, many noted that it was becoming increasingly difficult
to view a vote for Clinton as anything other than a vote to continue the worst aspects of political
corruption.
As columnist Kim Strassel recently
wrote , the
one thing in this election of which one can be certain is that "a Hillary Clinton presidency will
be built, from the ground up, on self-dealing, crony favors, and an utter disregard for the law."
As such, "anyone who pulls the lever for Mrs. Clinton takes responsibility for setting up the
nation for all the blatant corruption that will follow," Strassel
concludes
. "She just doesn't have a whole lot of integrity,"
said far-left progressive Cornel West.
West
endorsed Stein over Clinton explaining Stein is "the only progressive woman in the race."
"The Clinton train- [of] Wall Street, security surveillance, militaristic- is not going in
the same direction I'm going," West
told Bill Maher earlier this year.
She's a neoliberal… [I] believe neoliberalism is a disaster when it comes to poor people
and when it comes to people in other parts of the world dealing with U.S. foreign policy and militarism.
Oh, absolutely. Ask the people in Libya about that. Ask the people in the West Bank about that.
West has separately
explained that Clinton's "militarism makes the world a less safe place" and that her globalist
agenda created the "right-wing populism" that has fueled Trump's rise.
Clinton policies of the 1990s generated inequality, mass incarceration, privatization of schools
and Wall Street domination. There is also a sense that the Clinton policies helped produce the
right-wing populism that we're seeing now in the country. And we think she's going to come to
the rescue? That's not going to happen.
"It's too easy to view him [Trump] as an isolated individual and bash him," West
told Maher. "He's speaking to the pain in the country because white, working class brothers have
been overlooked by globalization, by these trade deals"– trade deals which Stein also opposes.
Stein has railed against the passage of TPP, which she and her party have described as "NAFTA
on steroids" that would "enrich wealthy corporations by exporting jobs and pushing down wages." They
have argued that the deal essentially amounts to a "global corporate coup" that "would give corporations
more power than nations" by letting them "challenge our laws".
Stein is
against the "massive expanding wars," "the meltdown of the climate," "the massive Wall Street
bailouts," and "the offshoring of our jobs."
Pointing to Clinton's "dangerous and immoral" militarism, Stein has
warned that "a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war" and has explained how under a Clinton
presidency, "we could very quickly slide into nuclear war" or could start an air-war with Russia.
"No matter how her staff tries to rebrand her" Clinton is "not a progressive," Stein has
said -rather Clinton is a "corporatist hawk" that "
surrounds
herself with people who are hostile progressives" such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz "after she sabotaged
Bernie [Sanders]." Stein has warned progressives that the role of corporate Democrats like Clinton
is to "prevent progressives from defying corporate rule."
Stein has made a point to
highlight the fact that "we're now seeing many Republican leaders join Hillary Clinton in a neoliberal
uni-party that will fuel right-wing extremism," by continuing to push its "neoliberal agenda [of]
globalization, privatization, deregulation, [and] austerity for the rest of us."
In contrast to Clinton's corporatist "uni-party", Stein and her party have explained that their
campaign represents a "people's party with a populist progressive agenda" that-unlike Democrats and
Republicans- is not "funded by big corporate interests including Wall St. Banks, fossil fuel giants,
& war profiteer."
Stein is a Harvard Medical School graduate, a mother to two sons, and a practicing physician,
who became an environmental-health activist and organizer in the late 1990s. As the Green Party's
2012 presidential candidate, Stein already holds the record for the most votes ever received by a
female candidate for president in a general election.
In Jill Stein, her party writes, "progressives have a peace candidate not beholden to the billionaire
class."
"... I would agree that Trump is horrible candidate. The candidate who (like Hillary) suggests complete degeneration of the US neoliberal elite. ..."
"... But the problem is that Hillary is even worse. Much worse and more dangerous because in addition to being a closet Republican she is also a warmonger. In foreign policy area she is John McCain in pantsuit. And if you believe that after one hour in White House she does not abandon all her election promises and start behaving like a far-right republican in foreign policy and a moderate republican in domestic policy, it's you who drunk too much Cool Aid. ..."
"... In other words, the USA [workers and middle class] now is in the political position that in chess is called Zugzwang: we face a choice between the compulsive liar, unrepentant, extremely dangerous and unstable warmonger with failing health vs. a bombastic, completely unprepared to governance of such a huge country crook. ..."
The key problems with Democratic Party and Hillary is that they lost working class and middle
class voters, becoming another party of highly paid professionals and Wall Street speculators
(let's say top 10%, not just 1%), the party of neoliberal elite.
It will be interesting to see if yet another attempt to "bait and switch" working class and
lower middle class works this time. I think it will not. Even upper middle class is very resentful
of Democrats and Hillary. So many votes will be not "for" but "against". This is the scenario
Democratic strategists fear the most, but they can do nothing about it.
She overplayed "identity politics" card. Her "identity politics" and her fake feminism are
completely insincere. She is completely numb to human suffering and interests of females and minorities.
Looks like she has a total lack of empathy for other people.
"What scares me is my knowledge of her career-long investment in trying to convince the
generals and the admirals that she is a 'tough bitch', ala Margaret Thatcher, who will not
hesitate to pull the trigger. An illuminating article in the NY Times (
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html ) revealed
that she always advocates the most muscular and reckless dispositions of U.S. military forces
whenever her opinion is solicited. "
Usually people are resentful about Party which betrayed them so many times. It would be interesting
to see how this will play this time.
Beverly Mann October 23, 2016 12:00 pm
It will be interesting to see if yet another attempt to "bait and switch" working class and
lower middle class works this time?
Yup. The Republicans definitely have the interests of the working class and lower middle class
at heart when they give, and propose, ever deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, the repeal of the
estate tax that by now applies only to estates of more than $5 million, complete deregulation
of the finance industry, industry capture of every federal regulatory agency and cabinet department
and commission or board, from the SEC, to the EPA, to the Interior Dept. (in order to hand over
to the oil, gas and timber industries vast parts of federal lands), the FDA, the FTC, the FCC,
the NLRB, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Justice Dept. (including the Antitrust
Division)-to name only some.
And OF COURSE it's to serve the interests of the working class and lower middle class that
they concertedly appoint Supreme Court justices and lower federal court judges that are unabashed
proxies of big business.
And then there's the incessant push to privatize Social Security and Medicare. It ain't the
Dems that are pushing that.
You're drinking wayyy too much Kool Aid, likbez. Or maybe just reading too much Ayn Rand, at
Paul Ryan's recommendation.
beene October 23, 2016 10:31 am
I would suggest despite most of the elite in both parties supporting Hillary, and saying
she has the election in the bag is premature. In my opinion the fact that Trump rallies still
has large attendance; where Hillary's rallies would have trouble filling up a large room is a
better indication that Trump will win.
Even democrats are not voting democratic this time to be ignored till election again.
likbez October 23, 2016 12:56 pm
Beverly,
=== quote ===
Yup. The Republicans definitely have the interests of the working class and lower middle class
at heart when they give, and propose, ever deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, the repeal of the
estate tax that by now applies only to estates of more than $5 million, complete deregulation
of the finance industry, industry capture of every federal regulatory agency and cabinet department
and commission or board, from the SEC, to the EPA, to the Interior Dept. (in order to hand
over to the oil, gas and timber industries vast parts of federal lands), the FDA, the FTC,
the FCC, the NLRB, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Justice Dept. (including
the Antitrust Division) -- to name only some.
And OF COURSE it's to serve the interests of the working class and lower middle class that
they concertedly appoint Supreme Court justices and lower federal court judges that are unabashed
proxies of big business.
=== end of quote ===
This is all true. But Trump essentially running not as a Republican but as an independent on
(mostly) populist platform (with elements of nativism). That's why a large part of Republican
brass explicitly abandoned him. That does not exclude that he easily will be co-opted after the
election, if he wins.
And I would not be surprised one bit if Dick Cheney, Victoria Nuland, Paul Wolfowitz and Perle
vote for Hillary. Robert Kagan and papa Bush already declared such an intention. She is a neocon.
A wolf in sheep clothing, if we are talking about real anti-war democrats, not the USA brand of
DemoRats. She is crazy warmonger, no question about it, trying to compensate a complete lack of
diplomatic skills with jingoism and saber rattling.
The problem here might be that you implicitly idealize Hillary and demonize Trump.
I would agree that Trump is horrible candidate. The candidate who (like Hillary) suggests
complete degeneration of the US neoliberal elite.
But the problem is that Hillary is even worse. Much worse and more dangerous because in
addition to being a closet Republican she is also a warmonger. In foreign policy area she is John
McCain in pantsuit. And if you believe that after one hour in White House she does not abandon
all her election promises and start behaving like a far-right republican in foreign policy and
a moderate republican in domestic policy, it's you who drunk too much Cool Aid.
That's what classic neoliberal DemoRats "bait and switch" maneuver (previously executed
by Obama two times) means. And that's why working class now abandoned Democratic Party. Even unions
members of unions which endorses Clinton are expected to vote 3:1 against her. Serial betrayal
of interests of working class (and lower middle class) after 25 years gets on nerve. Not that
their choice is wise, but they made a choice. This is "What's the matter with Kansas" all over
again.
It reminds me the situation when Stalin was asked whether right revisionism of Marxism (social
democrats) or left (Trotskyites with their dream of World revolution) is better. He answered "both
are worse" :-).
In other words, the USA [workers and middle class] now is in the political position that
in chess is called Zugzwang: we face a choice between the compulsive liar, unrepentant, extremely
dangerous and unstable warmonger with failing health vs. a bombastic, completely unprepared to
governance of such a huge country crook.
Of course, we need also remember about existence of "deep state" which make each of
them mostly a figurehead, but still the power of "deep state" is not absolute and this is a very
sad situation.
Beverly Mann, October 23, 2016 1:57 pm
Good grace.
Two points: First, you apparently are unaware of Trump's proposed tax plan, written by Heritage
Foundation economists and political-think-tank types. It's literally more regressively extreme
evn than Paul Ryan's. It gives tax cuts to the wealthy that are exponentially more generous percentage-wise
than G.W. Bush's two tax cuts together were, it eliminates the estate tax, and it gives massive
tax cuts to corporations, including yuge ones.
Two billionaire Hamptons-based hedge funders, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, have
been funding a super PAC for Trump and since late spring have met with Trump and handed him policy
proposals and suggestions for administrative agency heads and judicial appointments. Other yuge
funders are members of the Ricketts family, including Thomas Ricketts, CEO of TD Ameritrade and
a son of its founder.
Two other billionaires funding Trump: Forrest Lucas, founder of Lucas Oil and reportedly Trump's
choice for Interior Secretary if you and the working class and lower middle class folks whose
interests Trump has at heart get their way.
And then there's Texas oil billionaire Harold Hamm, Trump's very first billionaire mega-donor.
One of my recurring pet peeves about Clinton and her campaign is her failure to tell the public
that these billionaires are contributing mega-bucks to help fund Trump's campaign, and to tell
the public who exactly they are. As well as her failure to make a concerted effort to educate
the public about the the specifics of Trump's fiscal and deregulatory agenda as he has published
it.
As for your belief that I idealize Clinton, you obviously are very new to Angry Bear. I was
a virulent Sanders supporter throughout the primaries, to the very end. In 2008 I originally supported
John Edwards during the primaries and then, when it became clear that it was a two-candidate race,
supported Obama. My reason? I really, really, REALLY did not want to see another triangulation
Democratic administration. That's largely what we got during Obama's first term, though, and I
was not happy about it.
Bottom line: I'm not the gullible one here. You are.
likbez, October 23, 2016 2:37 pm
You demonstrate complete inability to weight the gravity of two dismal, but unequal in their
gravity options.
All your arguments about Supreme Court justices, taxes, inheritance and other similar things
make sense if and only if the country continues to exist.
Which is not given due to the craziness and the level of degeneration of neoliberal elite and
specifically Hillary ("no fly zone in Syria" is one example of her craziness). Playing chickens
with a nuclear power for the sake of proving imperial dominance in Middle East is a crazy policy.
Neocons rule the roost in both parties, which essentially became a single War Party with two
wings. Trump looks like the only chance somewhat to limit their influence and reach some détente
with Russia.
Looks like you organically unable to understand that your choice in this particular case is
between the decimation of the last remnants of the New Deal and a real chance of WWIII.
This is not "pick your poison" situation. Those are two events of completely difference magnitude:
one is reversible (and please note that Trump is bound by very controversial obligations to his
electorate and faces hostile Congress), the other is not.
We all should do our best to prevent the unleashing WWIII even if that means temporary decimation
of the remnants of New Deal.
Neoliberalism after 2008 entered zombie state, so while it is still strong, aggressive and
bloodthirsty it might not last for long. And in such case the defeat of democratic forces on domestic
front is temporary.
"... Instead of the investigative process being focused on achieving justice, Kucinich says it was "a very political process" that had "everything to do with the 2016 presidential election" in which Clinton is the Democratic nominee. Kucinich elaborates that "the executive branch of government made an early determination that no matter what came up that there was no way that Hillary Clinton was going to have to be accountable under law for anything dealing with the mishandling of classified information." ..."
Speaking Monday on Fox News with host Neil Cavuto, former Democratic presidential candidate
and United States House of Representatives Member from Ohio Dennis Kucinich opined that, from
early on, the US government's investigation of Hillary Clinton for mishandling confidential
information while she was Secretary of State was fixed in her favor.
Instead of the investigative process being focused on achieving justice, Kucinich says it
was "a very political process" that had "everything to do with the 2016 presidential election" in
which Clinton is the Democratic nominee. Kucinich elaborates that "the executive branch of
government made an early determination that no matter what came up that there was no way that
Hillary Clinton was going to have to be accountable under law for anything dealing with the
mishandling of classified information."
"... Point being that not only would The Clintons have the Democratic Party machine to rely on for potential vote rigging in this stage of the process (distinguishing vs. primaries simply for rhetorical focus), ..."
"... but with the clear reality of the Republican Party elite also backing her, she can rely on at least some of the Republican Party machine also being available for potential vote rigging, and who have their experience in Florida, Ohio, etc to bring to the table. ..."
"... The longer term issue is the Imperial Oligarchy has now taken off the mask, they have abandoned the pretense of 2 party competition to unite behind the defender of status quo interests, with WikiLeaks detailing the gory bits of their corruption and malfeasance. And everybody in the system is tainted by that, both parties, media, etc. It has overtly collapsed to the reality of a single Party of Power (per the term Oligarch media like to use re: Russia for example). ..."
"... the Clinton faction is 100% "bi-partisan" and about confluence of both Oligarchic parties. ..."
"... I would say the Democratic primary was even a mirror of this, I would guess that Clinton had hoped to win more easily vs Sanders without rigging etc... essentially between Sanders and Trump turning anything but "radical status quo" into boogymen. ..."
"... That just reveals how close to the line the Imperial Oligarchy feels compelled to play... and, I suppose, how confident they are in the full spectrum of tools at their disposal to manipulate democracy. ..."
"... But that is also shown merely by the situation we are in, with the collapse of the two party system in order to maintain the strength of Imperial Oligarchy. ..."
Point being that not only would The Clintons have the Democratic Party machine to rely on
for potential vote rigging in this stage of the process (distinguishing vs. primaries simply for
rhetorical focus),
but with the clear reality of the Republican Party elite also backing her, she can rely
on at least some of the Republican Party machine also being available for potential vote rigging,
and who have their experience in Florida, Ohio, etc to bring to the table.
The longer term issue is the Imperial Oligarchy has now taken off the mask, they have abandoned
the pretense of 2 party competition to unite behind the defender of status quo interests, with
WikiLeaks detailing the gory bits of their corruption and malfeasance. And everybody in the system
is tainted by that, both parties, media, etc. It has overtly collapsed to the reality of a single
Party of Power (per the term Oligarch media like to use re: Russia for example).
And the craziest thing of course is not that this all happened by accident because some "scary
clown" appeared, but that this was nearly exactly planned BY The Clinton faction themselves (promoting
Trump in order to win vs. "scary clown"). Most notably, not simply as a seizure of power by Democratic
Party "against" Republicans... They are very clear the Clinton faction is 100% "bi-partisan"
and about confluence of both Oligarchic parties.
I would say the Democratic primary was even a mirror of this, I would guess that Clinton
had hoped to win more easily vs Sanders without rigging etc... essentially between Sanders and
Trump turning anything but "radical status quo" into boogymen. Only surprise was how well
Sanders did, necessitating fraud etc, with polls in fact showing Sanders was BETTER placed to
defeat Trump than Clinton.
That just reveals how close to the line the Imperial Oligarchy feels compelled to play...
and, I suppose, how confident they are in the full spectrum of tools at their disposal to manipulate
democracy.
But that is also shown merely by the situation we are in, with the collapse of the two
party system in order to maintain the strength of Imperial Oligarchy.
"... The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is a registered political party established in the United Kingdom in 1983 by the musician David Sutch, better known as "Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow" or simply "Screaming Lord Sutch". It is notable for its deliberately bizarre policies and it effectively exists to satirise British politics, and to offer itself as an poignant alternative for protest voters, especially in constituencies where the party holding the seat is unlikely to lose it and everyone else's vote would be quietly wasted. ..."
I watched that yesterday. Funny and a complete take down of Jill Stein. How come a British comedian
knows more about our issues than one of our candidates for the White House? Oh wait - even Jill
Stein knows more than Donald Trump. If it were not for that Constitutional matter, I'd say Oliver
for President.
Fred C. Dobbs -> pgl... , -1
All politics is 'wacky',
the third-party kind is
the wackiest of all.
Maybe the UK does it best.
The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is a registered political party established in
the United Kingdom in 1983 by the musician David Sutch, better known as "Screaming Lord Sutch,
3rd Earl of Harrow" or simply "Screaming Lord Sutch". It is notable for its deliberately bizarre
policies and it effectively exists to satirise British politics, and to offer itself as an poignant
alternative for protest voters, especially in constituencies where the party holding the seat
is unlikely to lose it and everyone else's vote would be quietly wasted.
(Wikipedia)
"... As I have tirelessly explained, the U.S. economy is not just neoliberal (the code word for
maximizing private gain by any means available, including theft, fraud, embezzlement, political fixing,
price-fixing, and so on)--it is neofeudal , meaning that it is structurally an updated version of Medieval
feudalism in which a top layer of financial-political nobility owns the engines of wealth and governs
the marginalized debt-serfs who toil to pay student loans, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages and taxes--all
of which benefit the financiers and political grifters. ..."
"... The media is in a self-referential frenzy to convince us the decision of the century is between
unrivaled political grifter Hillary Clinton and financier-cowboy Donald Trump. Both belong to the privileged
ruling Elite: both have access to cheap credit, insider information ( information asymmetry ) and political
influence. ..."
"... If you exit the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. at a cushy managerial rank with a fat pension and
lifetime benefits and are hired at a fat salary the next day by a private "defense" contractor--the
famous revolving door between a bloated state and a bloated defense industry--the system works great.
..."
Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe
they have lost the consent of the governed.
Every ruling Elite needs the consent of the governed: even autocracies, dictatorships and corporatocracies
ultimately rule with the consent, however grudging, of the governed.
The American ruling Elite has lost the consent of the governed. This reality is being masked by
the mainstream media, mouthpiece of the ruling class, which is ceaselessly promoting two false narratives:
The "great divide" in American politics is between left and right, Democrat/Republican
The ruling Elite has delivered "prosperity" not just to the privileged few but to the unprivileged
many they govern.
Both of these assertions are false. The Great Divide in America is between the ruling Elite and
the governed that the Elite has stripmined. The ruling Elite is privileged and protected, the governed
are unprivileged and unprotected. That's the divide that counts and the divide that is finally becoming
visible to the marginalized, unprivileged class of debt-serfs.
The "prosperity" of the 21st century has flowed solely to the ruling Elite and its army of technocrat
toadies, factotums, flunkies, apparatchiks and apologists. The Elite's army of technocrats and its
media apologists have engineered and promoted an endless spew of ginned-up phony statistics (the
super-low unemployment rate, etc.) to create the illusion of "growth" and "prosperity" that benefit
everyone rather than just the top 5%. The media is 100% committed to promoting these two false narratives
because the jig is up once the bottom 95% wake up to the reality that the ruling Elite has been stripmining
them for decades.
As I have tirelessly explained, the U.S. economy is not just neoliberal (the code word
for maximizing private gain by any means available, including theft, fraud, embezzlement, political
fixing, price-fixing, and so on)--it is neofeudal , meaning that it is structurally an updated
version of Medieval feudalism in which a top layer of financial-political nobility owns the engines
of wealth and governs the marginalized debt-serfs who toil to pay student loans, auto loans, credit
cards, mortgages and taxes--all of which benefit the financiers and political grifters.
The media is in a self-referential frenzy to convince us the decision of the century is between
unrivaled political grifter Hillary Clinton and financier-cowboy Donald Trump. Both belong to the
privileged ruling Elite: both have access to cheap credit, insider information ( information asymmetry
) and political influence.
The cold truth is the ruling Elite has shredded the social contract by skimming the income/wealth
of the unprivileged. The fake-"progressive" pandering apologists of the ruling Elite--Robert Reich,
Paul Krugman and the rest of the Keynesian Cargo Cultists--turn a blind eye to the suppression of
dissent and the looting the bottom 95% because they have cushy, protected positions as tenured faculty
(or equivalent). They cheerlead for more state-funded bread and circuses for the marginalized
rather than demand an end to exploitive privileges of the sort they themselves enjoy.
Consider just three of the unsustainably costly broken systems that enrich the privileged Elite
by stripmining the unprivileged:
healthcare (a.k.a. sickcare because sickness is profitable, prevention is unprofitable),
higher education
Imperial over-reach (the National Security State and its partner the privately owned Military-Industrial
Complex).
While the unprivileged and unprotected watch their healthcare premiums and co-pays soar year after
year, the CEOs of various sickcare cartels skim off tens of millions of dollars annually in pay and
stock options. The system works great if you get a $20 million paycheck. If you get a 30% increase
in monthly premiums for fewer actual healthcare services--the system is broken.
If you're skimming $250,000 as under-assistant dean to the provost for student services (or equivalent)
plus gold-plated benefits, higher education is working great. If you're a student burdened with tens
of thousands of dollars in student loan debt who is receiving a low-quality, essentially worthless
"education" from poorly paid graduate students ("adjuncts") and a handful of online courses that
you could get for free or for a low cost outside the university cartel--the system is broken.
If you exit the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. at a cushy managerial rank with a fat pension and
lifetime benefits and are hired at a fat salary the next day by a private "defense" contractor--the
famous revolving door between a bloated state and a bloated defense industry--the system works great.
If you joined the Armed Forces to escape rural poverty and served at the point of the spear somewhere
in the Imperial Project--your perspective may well be considerably different.
Unfortunately for the ruling Elite and their army of engorged enablers and apologists, they have
already lost the consent of the governed.
They have bamboozled, conned and misled the bottom 95% for decades, but their phony facade of
political legitimacy and "the rising tide raises all boats" has cracked wide open, and the machinery
of oppression, looting and propaganda is now visible to everyone who isn't being paid to cover their
eyes. Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe
they have lost the consent of the governed. The disillusioned governed have not fully absorbed this
epochal shift of the tides yet, either. They are aware of their own disillusionment and their own
declining financial security, but they have yet to grasp that they have, beneath the surface of everyday
life, already withdrawn their consent from a self-serving, predatory, parasitic, greedy and ultimately
self-destructive ruling Elite.
WOW! Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is on fire! After previously blasting Hillary
Clinton, accusing her of basically being a scary psychopath who "would start World War 3 with
Russia", Jill is now warning liberal progressives not to throw away their vote by supporting
corporatist Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton because she is a "two faced public and private
position, corporatist who takes Wall Street special interest big donor money, traitor who would
betray you, a crook who controls the media, a monster and your votes would be wasted on her" in
what is basically a summary of what Jill Stein said.
"Don't waste your vote on corporate Democrats. #InvestYourVote," Stein wrote on Twitter on
Wednesday:
"If Trump's campaign is flailing, does a "spoiler" vote even exist anymore? Don't waste your vote
on corporate Democrats."
Stein then retweeted a statement from the Green Party's official Twitter account which read,
"It's time to #InvestYourVote in building a people's party – not waste your vote on corporate
party candidates that continue to betray you."
"Unlike the Democrats and Republicans, we don't cuddle up to Wall Street and special interests
with our 'public' and 'private' positions," Stein added in a separate tweet, referring to the
recent WikiLeaks revelation that Hillary Clinton said that politicians need to have "both a
public and private position" on every issue:
"Unlike the Democrats and Republicans, we don't cuddle up to Wall Street and special interests
with our "public" and "private" positions."
she's right the Republicans are in the same boat! People like Paul Ryan, John McCain, there's
no doubt about it, they are just as corrupt as the Democrats. Its only Donald Trump himself who
is not bound to any Wall Street special interests and who doesn't accept donations from big
banks, but other Republicans are just as corrupt as your average Democrats. That's why GOP elites
are not endorsing Trump. Trump himself is also at war with the GOP establishment.
Stein observed that "corporations were originally chartered to serve the public good, but they've
become monsters that dominate our government."
Stein has previously explained that the liberal progressive agenda–on health care, crime, climate
change, trade, etc.– cannot be accomplished under a corporatist like Hillary Clinton. Stein
argued that a Clinton presidency will simply be the continuation of the policies supported by
Washington's "uniparty," which is controlled by special interest donors–and will not in any way
advance the goals of liberal progressives.
Seeming to borrow Trump's moniker for Clinton, Stein also attacked DNC chair Donna Brazile for
her "crooked" behavior– providing Clinton's campaign with a question in advance for a town hall
as Clinton was trying to defeat Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary:
"Invest your vote in a movement party, not in more crooked behavior from the Democrats!
PodestaEmails4 http://thehill.com/media/300427-emails-donna-brazile-gave-town-hall-questions-to-clinton-camp-in-advance
"
Stein is a Harvard Medical School graduate, a mother to two sons, and a practicing physician, who
became an environmental-health activist and organizer in the late 1990s. As the Green Party's
2012 presidential candidate, Stein holds the record for the most votes ever received by a female
candidate for president in a general election.
While third party Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson has received quite a bit of media attention
throughout this election, Stein said that she has experienced a virtual media blackout. Stein
urged supporters to help her "#BreakTheBlackout from corporate media."
Stein suggested that the reason for the media blackout stems is because she is an effective
messenger against Washington's "uniparty."
"I debated @MittRomney in 2002 and was declared the winner by viewers. After that they locked me
out of the debates," Stein tweeted. "The Democratic and Republican candidates + @GovGaryJohnson
refuse to debate me because they're scared. #OccupyTheDebate":
"Help us #BreakTheBlackout from corporate media – go to http://Jill2016.com and sign up to join
our team! #GreenTownHall"
WOW! Her anti-Hillary rants have been really strong lately! Its nice to finally see someone else
take on the crooked Democrats with such anger. Seeing Trump doing all the ranting all by himself
is really nice but now its even better. Perhaps the two should meet and discuss some sort of
alliance. Jill Stein could be an effective messenger to the Bernie voters. Perhaps Trump could
make her the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency or something, since she's
Green.
In exchange Jill should of course drop out and ask her 2% voter base to vote Trump. She should
also keep bashing the Democrats and target Bernie Sanders's people to vote Trump. Wouldn't be
such a bad idea, wouldn't it??
Donald Trump's solid core of support comes from white working-class America. As the
blue-collar voter has become central to the political conversation, a clear picture of who we're
talking about has emerged: He's likely male and disillusioned with the economy and loss of
industry. He's a coal miner that's been
laid off in Hazard, Kentucky, and is scraping by off his wife's income; a machinists' union
member in a Pennsylvania steel town who
says "a guy like Donald Trump, he's pushing for change." Through the campaign, we've seen
endless portraits of Trump support in the heart of
Appalachian coal country, and a recent spate of books documents
white working-class alienation and the history of the
white underclass in America. Trump's iron grip on the support of blue-collar white Americans
has been one of the most striking threads of his unprecedented campaign.
... ... ...
...Thomas Frank, who recently published
Listen, Liberal, about the Democratic Party's abandonment of the working class and
Robert Reich, public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley and former
secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. They
both have outlined a
series of Democratic moves to elevate free trade and an inability to defend unions as proof that
Democrats created a platform that left no room for the white working class.
Marginalized for years without working-class candidates or elected officials, "the white
working class found their voice in Trump," says Justin Gest, assistant professor of public policy
at George Mason University and author of The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an
Age of Immigration and Inequality. "He speaks directly to conspiracy, frustration and a sense
of powerlessness, and they're grateful he speaks to them." Trump, too, has worked hard to burnish
his working-class cred,
telling a crowd in Pennsylvania on Tuesday that he considers himself "in a certain way to be
a blue-collar worker."
...In terms of the economy, white working-class women also differ from their male
counterparts. While manufacturing concerns and the white working class may be linked in our
cultural narrative (especially in Trump's campaign), the women were focused on different economic
concerns-in particular, the cost of higher education and preschooling.
.... Single women tend to lean to the left,and in recent years white working-class
marriage rates have fallen more sharply than those of their more educated and affluent
counterparts, who are more likely to delay marriage than not get married at all, according to
FiveThirtyEight's
analysis of
Census data. (Roughly 45 percent of white working-class women are unmarried, according to
GQRR's Nancy Zdunkewicz). In a June/July national survey by GQRR, white working-class womenput Trump 23 points ahead of Clinton in a three-way ballot, but when you looked at only
unmarried white non-college-educated women, that gap was only 11 percent-a preview, if current
trends continue, of a gap likely to grow in the future.
..For Democrats hoping to capitalize on this group, it's not obvious they can just
swoop in and grab alienated women. For one thing, white working-class women don't necessarily
trust Hillary Clinton any more than men do.
,,,For now, though, if Democrats continue bleeding white working-class men and women, the
party's white base will be mostly highly educated and white collar, a perhaps uncomfortable shift
for the so-called party of the people
Julia Sonenshein is California-born writer and editor living in New York City. Her work
focuses on social-political issues like reproductive rights, American gun culture and
intersectional feminism.
"... A new ad released by Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC is targeting supporters of Bernie Sanders in the wake of the WikiLeaks DNC email scandal. The anti-secrecy group released some 20,000 hacked emails exposing an anti-Sanders bias and "mainstream" media corruption that led to the ouster of Democratic National Committee(DNC) chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. ..."
"... Incredibly, Donna Brazile, a longtime ally of the Clintons, was made the new interim chair of the DNC. The WikiLeaks emails also showed Brazile was in the tank for Clinton, showed her bias against Bernie Sanders and even called him "stupid" threatening to curse him out. ..."
"... While Sen. Sanders, himself, fell on his sword, suspended the roll call vote and moved to nominate Mrs. Clinton by acclamation at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, a very significant number of his supporters remain unpersuadable. Recent polls show upwards of 25% still say they will vote for Donald Trump and roughly half will not vote for Mrs. Clinton, either way. ..."
"... The DNC revoked the convention credentials for scores of Sanders supporters and delegates for the remaining two days of the convention after both he and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., darlings of the left, were booed in their speeches when mentioning the Democratic nominee's name. Prior to former President Bill Clinton's speech on Tuesday, Sanders supporters staged a mass walk-out. ..."
A new ad released by Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC is targeting supporters of
Bernie Sanders in the wake of the WikiLeaks DNC email scandal. The anti-secrecy
group released some 20,000 hacked emails exposing an anti-Sanders bias and "mainstream"
media corruption that led to the ouster of Democratic National Committee(DNC)
chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
"Bernie never had a chance," it says. The ad, with aa $300-$400K budget, will run in 8 swing states and reiterates
that Mrs. Clinton rewarded Wasserman Schultz with a cushy new job on her campaign.
Wasserman Schultz was given the role of DNC chair in exchange for Mrs. Clinton's
enthusiastic excitement for then-Sen. Barack Obama after a 2008 bruising primary.
Incredibly, Donna Brazile, a longtime ally of the Clintons, was made the
new interim chair of the DNC. The WikiLeaks emails also showed Brazile was in
the tank for Clinton, showed her bias against Bernie Sanders and even called
him "stupid" threatening to curse him out.
"Hillary just doesn't get it," the narrator says.
While Sen. Sanders, himself, fell on his sword, suspended the roll call vote
and moved to nominate Mrs. Clinton by acclamation at the Democratic National
Convention in Philadelphia, a very significant number of his supporters remain
unpersuadable. Recent polls show upwards of 25% still say they will vote for
Donald Trump and roughly half will not vote for Mrs. Clinton, either way.
The DNC revoked the convention credentials for scores of Sanders supporters
and delegates for the remaining two days of the convention after both he and
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., darlings of the left, were booed in their speeches
when mentioning the Democratic nominee's name. Prior to former President Bill
Clinton's speech on Tuesday, Sanders supporters staged a mass walk-out.
Mr. Trump has now retaken the lead on the PPD average of national polls.
Thus far, there has been little to no movement in Mrs. Clinton's direction during
interviews conducted during the first three days of the Democratic National
Convention.
"... The incomprehensibly privileged treatment of Hillary and her impossibly possible run for President is not my last stand. I give up. ..."
"... I have defected from the Democrats. I will stay registered to them because the system is designed to keep you adhered to one party or the other, particularly in my home state New York ..."
"... The Democrat issues are not mine, they have no core beliefs or ideology, instead it is a tangle of fiscal recklessness, big government, hierarchies of victimization, contributor solicitations coupled with some implicit threat, catchy jingles and nifty focus group tested slogans. ..."
"... The system is broken. The legal and ethical exceptions that the FBI, the DoJ and the Democratic party establishment and it's too loyal voters have bestowed to Hillary is frightening. There is a really big hole in the dam and now there will be many more. ..."
I was a partisan. Now I am not. I am a Democrat at the exit. DemExit
The incomprehensibly privileged treatment of Hillary and her impossibly possible run for
President is not my last stand. I give up.
I have defected from the Democrats. I will stay registered to them because the system is designed
to keep you adhered to one party or the other, particularly in my home state New York. Here an
independent is a sub voter, reduced to a spectator as the primary candidates thrash around. But
now I am emotionally detached from the Democratic party comradery. That nucleus is broken and
instead I'll pick at its smallest bits, mixing and matching the candidates like a sports team,
drafting this one, trading that one.
The Democrat issues are not mine, they have no core beliefs or ideology, instead it is a tangle
of fiscal recklessness, big government, hierarchies of victimization, contributor solicitations
coupled with some implicit threat, catchy jingles and nifty focus group tested slogans.
The Democratic party is a mess and it won't get cleaned up soon, this is a generational problem.
The Democrats still have too many overly practiced, memo circulated, talking points to be
recited. They are not yet hoarse and exhausted from singing 'we shall overcome' in the protected,
comfortable caverns of Congress while between courses of catered buffets.
The system is broken. The legal and ethical exceptions that the FBI, the DoJ and the Democratic
party establishment and it's too loyal voters have bestowed to Hillary is frightening. There is a
really big hole in the dam and now there will be many more.
In view of the recent events the old question arise again: Was Hillary Clinton already on warafin when she suffered her latest fall?
Notable quotes:
"... Secretary Clinton was started on Coumadin, also known as warfarin. This medication significantly reduces - though it does not eliminate - the chance of a future blood clot. ..."
"... This extends to other facets of life; a simple fall that would be shook off by anyone else can give a patient on blood thinners a lethal brain bleed. The risks and benefits of anticoagulation must be weighed against the risk of a stroke if one does not use blood thinners; and is a choice for every patient to make with their physician. ..."
"... This does not include the possibility of an intracranial bleed, which could cause major cognitive disabilities without being lethal. ..."
"... There is a non-trivial possibility that Secretary Clinton will suffer a major bleed of some kind. ..."
"... Vamsi Aribindi is a medical student who blogs at the Medical Intellectual . ..."
Her
medical history includes two deep vein thromboses (DVTs) in 1998 and 2009,
as well as a cerebral venous sinus thrombosis in 2012. A thromboses is a clot;
basically, the formation of a solid plug inside a vein, a misfire of the body's
ability to plug holes and stop bleeding. While I could not find news articles
discussing the 2009 incident in further detail, the
1998 incident was a proximal DVT - one that had ascended into the popliteal
vein - an especially dangerous form of DVT that is most likely to cause a condition
called pulmonary embolus which can be fatal. A cerebral venous sinus thrombosis
is also a deadly condition, with a mortality of
approximately
10 percent and negative cognitive effects, though survivors make a good
recovery.
When anyone has multiple unprovoked clots, meaning there was no obvious reason
for the body to misfire it's clot formation system such as surgery or active
cancer, and especially when someone has a clot in an unusual location such as
the brain, an extensive workup is indicated to look for causes. Some such causes
include previously undetected cancers, inherited or random genetic disorders,
and autoimmune disorders. That workup was negative in Secretary Clinton's case,
per her doctor's letter. This is not unusual; there are many disorders that
we have not yet discovered, and in all likelihood Secretary Clinton's particular
clotting disorder happens to be one that has not yet been discovered.
When someone has such a clotting disorder, as a precaution patients are often
started on a medication to prevent the formation of clots. These medications
are known as anticoagulants or blood thinners. Secretary Clinton was started
on Coumadin, also known as warfarin. This medication significantly reduces -
though it does not eliminate - the chance of a future blood clot.
What is the side effect of blood thinners? A greater chance of bleeding and
greater difficulty stopping a bleed once it happens. An elderly patient on blood
thinners who is subsequently injured in a car crash is a nightmare for a trauma
team. This extends to other facets of life; a simple fall that would be
shook off by anyone else can give a patient on blood thinners a lethal brain
bleed. The risks and benefits of anticoagulation must be weighed against the
risk of a stroke if one does not use blood thinners; and is a choice for every
patient to make with their physician.
In Secretary Clinton's case, what is her risk of bleeding? Secretary Clinton
is over 65, and she has had multiple falls (in
2005, 2009, and 2011, and 2012); the 2009 fall resulting in a broken elbow
and the last one resulting in a concussion. According to
guidelines
put out by the American College of Chest Physicians, two risk factors puts her
in the category of high-risk patients, meaning her risk of bleeding while on
long-term anticoagulation is 6.5 percent per year. The mortality from a major
bleed is
approximately
10 percent. This does not include the possibility of an intracranial
bleed, which could cause major cognitive disabilities without being lethal.
What is Secretary Clinton's precise risk? It is difficult to say. She does
receive excellent medical care, and presumably has her dose of warfarin closely
monitored by many professionals. In addition, she may soon switch to newer anticoagulants
which are easier to take and dose than warfarin, though it is unclear if they
are truly any safer.
Ultimately, all that can be said is this: There is a non-trivial possibility
that Secretary Clinton will suffer a major bleed of some kind. The worst
possible scenario? Trump and Clinton are nominated, and Clinton suddenly suffers
a devastating bleed in the middle of the campaign, leaving a likely underqualified
vice presidential pick to try and fight Donald Trump. However, the risk of this
is likely small; and it is not as if 74-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders is free
of health risks either. Patients and doctors both hate uncertainty, and yet
we deal with it every day. I don't believe Secretary Clinton's increased risks
are anything that should disqualify her from the presidency, but they are certainly
something to ponder.
"... I believe that the symbolism of a black President shielded Obama from the evaluation, discussion, transparency and criticism that citizens must demand of their leader. ..."
"... TPP is the most urgent example of a President aligned with lobbyists to install the most transformational and anti Democratic bill in American history ..."
"... ObamaCare Was a transfer of taxpayer wealth to insurance companies. It was cloaked in excessive language to hide its deceptions according to its own architect . ..."
"... Trump has direction. Precision can be acquired ..."
"... "On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy, the jobs, incomes and security of the American worker will always be my first priority." - Trump doctrine ..."
"... Trump is the peace candidate. For decades we have been led by self-aggrandizing neocon war hawks who desired war and regime change and then reversed engineered their way into those conflicts. The neocons hate Trump and instead they aligned with the vicious war mongerer Hillary. They wrote this inverse ..."
"... We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them - Albert Einstein ..."
"... Free speech is a safety valve . Reducing our language of any possible offensive character is being engineered not to salve, but to createturmoil. Big state (your tax dollars) is manufacturing chaos and then big state (your tax dollars) is coming into legislate and police. Big state is setting the fire and then calls the fire department and becomes a hero. ..."
"... Is Trump Racist, Islamophobic, Misogynistic, Homophobic? Answer: No ..."
"... "The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends and when old friends become allies, that's what we want. We want them to be our allies. We want the world to be - we want to bring peace to the world. Too much destruction out there, too many destructive weapons." ..."
My thoughts below are scattered, brief and incomplete.
Obama
I voted for Obama two times.
I believe that the symbolism of a black President shielded Obama
from the evaluation, discussion, transparency and criticism that citizens
must demand of their leader.
TPP is the most urgent example of a President aligned with lobbyists
to install the most transformational and anti Democratic bill in American
history.
"On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy, the jobs, incomes and
security of the American worker will always be my first priority." - Trump
doctrine
Trump is anti (endless) war
Trump is the peace candidate. For decades we have been led by self-aggrandizing
neocon war hawks who desired war and regime change and then reversed engineered
their way into those conflicts. The neocons hate Trump and instead they
aligned with the vicious war mongerer Hillary. They wrote this inverse
letter of support for her.
Economic outlook
Our economy is not as elastic or resilient as it once was. We are burdened
with both the 'known' debt and the high probability of crippling 'known
unknown' debt, such as from bank failure, pension fund bailouts and municipal
bond defaults.
There has been almost a decade of bipartisan contempt for a federal budget
and balancing the taxpayer checkbook.
Tax receipts are at a record, yet we are trillion dollars more in debt
this year. This is a government personality disorder.
Despite trillions of dollars forced into the economy, wealth inequality
has widened along racial, ethnic lines during Obama's presidency:
read this from the Pew research Center .
I am bullish on startups, venture capital, private equity. Requirements
for financial reporting, mechanisms for liquidity, analyst coverage and
distribution will greatly improve.
Government
Professional politicians have installed a system of big, excessive government
as both a business operating system and as a social issues arbiter.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we
created them - Albert Einstein
Can political correctness kill? Why has political correctness so aggressively
being injected into legislative and judiciary and Executive agendas?
Free speech is a safety valve . Reducing our language of any possible
offensive character is being engineered not to salve, but to createturmoil.
Big state (your tax dollars) is manufacturing chaos and then big state (your
tax dollars) is coming into legislate and police. Big state is setting the fire
and then calls the fire department and becomes a hero.
Is #FightingForYou also #VictimizingYou
Is Trump Racist, Islamophobic, Misogynistic, Homophobic? Answer: No
People are being pounded into a mass media induced frenzy.
Reactions to Trump are visceral. That has been manufactured.
People need to talk and be compassionate to each other. People are not,
yet, homogeneous twitter bots.
An uncomfortable discussion that knocks on the walls of a safe space can
be frightening to some people. But, that person cowering in their safe space
can also be a bully.
Transgender: Being the odd people person that I am, I asked atransgender
person their thoughts on the subject and its periphery matters. She thinks
it is a state issue. She is voting for Trump.
Islamophobia: The Obama administration has forcibly removed 'Islamic
Terrorism' and 'Radical Islam' from our vernacular. We have lost very important
qualitative and quantitative measures that can distinguish the 'good' from
the 'bad'. Without this evaluation how can we win a war on terror? Or, maybe
that's the point? Trump calling for a temporary ban on entry for Muslim
immigration was an opening bid to a discussion. I know many Muslims very
enthusiastically voting for Trump.
Refugee crisis and economic (illegal) immigration
Trump didn't create the wars in South America or provoke American intervention
in those countries. He didn't draft, advocate or sign NAFTA, CAFTA which caused
massive economic disruption. He is unmolested by the legacy of those issues.
This gives him, and us, a chance to sincerely discuss very real issues.
Refugee settlement requires a coherent and articulated American strategy,
not
Bono financial exploitation.
Both parties use this contrivance to lure straying voters and attach them
to a cause. I don't see any certainty that one side, left-wing or right, will
produce a different outcome than any other. We are fortunate to have a very
durable foundation.
From the applause the Democrats gave themselves a person might think
that Dodd Frank was useful legislation, it wasn't. It didn't solve any problems
and managed to create new ones.
Banks have to be 'broken up' and Trump is the only candidate who can
take away their candy. David Stockman, cofounder of Blackstone, wrote this
great piece, pls read:
The Case For A Super Glass-Steagall
Trump foreign policy
"The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies,
that we are always happy when old enemies become friends and when old friends
become allies, that's what we want. We want them to be our allies. We want
the world to be - we want to bring peace to the world. Too much destruction
out there, too many destructive weapons."
Trump vs ______
The 'job' of the
pundit, expert and intellectual is to preserve the status quo thru 'any
means necessary'. This includes ridicule, marginalization, outright lies.
It is an exchange, the Government and/or its apparatus and American apparatchiks
will give a person privilege, in exchange they must legitimize whatever
absurdity is implicitly demanded of them.
Politic is a consumer item and 'buyers', the voters are deliberately
being bombarded with crazy attacks on Trump. The intention is not to create
an accurate, rational, narrative of Trump. The purpose is to continually
'shock' the voter. It is a tactic that George Soros has discussed as an
economic theory.
Soros: General Theory of Reflexivity
Miscellany incomplete thoughts
The mechanics of propaganda are bombarding every channel of distribution
with an untrue and anachronistic view of our remarkable history, our people
and the achievement of our Constitution. There has never been anything like
it and it is being eroded, purposefully, by both sides. Each take turns
pushing its envelope and each uses the Supreme Court to legitimize the Federal
overreach.
If someone is interested in reading some well informed and wonderfully
constructed examination of our political system, I would suggest starting
with this brief read (pdf), the
Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard . From this starting point work
your way backwards or forwards in time, from Thucydides in ancient Greece
to contemporary history.
Free college is a lie, because…College as a 4 year program is a lie.
College is the cable TV bundle, why do I need to pay for all the channels
if I only want ESPN?
'White privilege' is a political tactic manufactured and promulgated
to create conflict and increase violence. Politics is always about directing
rage, the true culprit is not 'white privilege' but rather those who are
the masters of the system, who are white. So 'White privilege' is meant
to cast a too wide net, its target should be narrowed to the '1% privilege',
some of whom are white. Y'all dig? Please read this 1970's radical treatise
'
Prairie Fire ' by Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground. It is the
architecture of much of the deliberate civil discord we are experiencing
now.
President Trump
America needs a true leader, not just someone swathed in American iconography
and reciting focus group certified slogans. We are an emotionally frail country.
A generation of Americans have never known a country not at war, not in debt,
not printing money. We have to get out of the state of wardom, spend our money
on us and save for our future.
I believe Trump's business failures and successes are precisely what
makes him qualified.
The solution to creating more and better jobs is not more government,
itsless.
As an employer, Trump understands how onerous the government and its
compliance and regulatory structures have become. Washington has led an
assault on business .
They lost... Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was re-elected.
Notable quotes:
"... Tad Devine, Mark Longabaugh, and Julian Mulvey, who helped lead Sanders' campaign and drove his highly acclaimed media presence, will help Democrat Tim Canova's campaign in the closing days of his race against Wasserman Schultz in South Florida, where congressional primaries will be held Aug. 30. ..."
"... While Wasserman Schultz is still the favorite in her race, people aligned with Sanders have seized on Canova's candidacy as a proxy for their disapproval of Wasserman Schultz's stewardship of the DNC, pouring money into his effort. The addition of DML signals an increasing professionalization of the anti-Wasserman Schultz effort. ..."
The consulting firm that made Bernie Sanders' ads in the 2016 presidential race
is going to work for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's primary challenger.
Tad Devine, Mark Longabaugh, and Julian Mulvey, who helped lead Sanders'
campaign and drove his highly acclaimed media presence, will help Democrat Tim
Canova's campaign in the closing days of his race against Wasserman Schultz
in South Florida, where congressional primaries will be held Aug. 30.
It's the latest move from Sanders supporters to go after Wasserman Schultz,
after their outrage stemming from leaked emails drove her to resign as chairman
of the Democratic National Committee this week.
The move is a concrete step forward in Sanders' attempt to spread his "political
revolution" after the end of his presidential campaign and another boost to
Canova, a previously little-known law professor who has raised millions of dollars
for his run against Wasserman Schultz. It's also the first tangible sign of
heavier involvement from his political circles in down-ballot races between
now and November. Sanders had previously endorsed Canova and raised money online
for him and a selection of other congressional candidates.
While Wasserman Schultz is still the favorite in her race, people aligned
with Sanders have seized on Canova's candidacy as a proxy for their disapproval
of Wasserman Schultz's stewardship of the DNC, pouring money into his effort.
The addition of DML signals an increasing professionalization of the anti-Wasserman
Schultz effort.
The consultants' firm, Devine Mulvey Longabaugh, was behind spots like the
famous "America" ad that helped define Sanders' campaign as he rose to prominence
against Hillary Clinton, and it has worked for a wide range of down-ballot campaigns
this cycle. Canova's campaign was already working with Revolution Messaging,
Sanders' digital firm, as well.
It's hard to overstate the amount of caution we should all display with this story, but it's too newsworthy to ignore.
It starts
with this interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange where he brings up
murdered DNC staffer,
Seth Rich, unprompted.
Here's the juicy part:
ASSANGE: Our whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There's a 27 year
old that works for the DNC, he was shot in the back. Murdered, uh just a few weeks ago, uh, for unknown reasons as he was walking
down the street in Washington. So...
INTERVIEWER: That was, that was just a robbery I believe. Wasn't it?
ASSANGE: No. There's no finding. So...
INTERVIEWER: What are you suggesting? What are you suggesting?
ASSANGE: I'm suggesting our sources take risks and they uh, become concerned, uh to see things occurring, like that.
INTERVIEWER: Was he one of your sources then? I mean...
ASSANGE: We don't comment on who our sources are.
INTERVIEWER: Then why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?
ASSANGE: Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States. And our sources are ... you know... our
sources face serious risks. That's why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity.
Then comes the news that Wikileaks is offering a $25,000 reward for any information leading to the capture of Rich's murderer.
Dr. Holland also gets the endocrinology wrong (hope she's got it right in
her book) when she refers to estrogen a "stress hormone that helps a woman be
resilient during her fertile years."
Stress hormones are part of the "flight or fight" response, and the major
stress hormones include
cortisol and epinephrine. Stress hormones can be released rapidly by the
body in response to a threat of some kind (running the gamut from a broken toe
to reading an article on how hormones make or break a woman's ability to be
president). This is not estrogen. Estrogen thickens the lining of the uterus,
affects breast tissue, and of course (like most hormones) has a multitude of
effects everywhere in the body. It is not, however, a stress hormone. It may
be able to counteract oxidative stress in some tissues, but that doesn't make
it a stress hormone).
The major source of estrogen before menopause is the developing egg and how
far the egg is in the cycle is what governs the release of estrogen, not stress.
The female endocrine system is just not built to churn out large amounts of
estrogen in response to stress. Also, girls don't have estrogen before puberty
so it would be a pretty poor evolutionary design for a stress hormones to only
kick in at puberty. Bad luck if you get chased by a saber-toothed tiger at the
age of eight!
... ... ...
Postmenopausal women are not biologically primed to handle stress any more
or less than premenopausal women. Hillary Clinton's hormones have nothing to
do with her qualifications, and I find any connection between the two, whether
well-intentioned or simply a book plug, an insult.
To say a woman's hormones are in some way related to her fitness to be president
then also means at some time you think she is less fit to be president. You
can't have it both ways.
There is no wisdom in menopause. There is wisdom, and then there is menopause.
All I care about is Ms. Clinton's wisdom, and that's all you should care about
too.
Jennifer Gunter is an obstetrician-gynecologist and author of
The Preemie Primer. She blogs at her self-titled site,
Dr. Jen Gunter.
Hillary Clinton reportedly has chronic health issues that may interfere with
the presidency, according to one political insider. The 68-year-old presumptive
Democratic nominee has never been too open about her medical history, but the
coughing fits alone may be enough to indicate that Clinton has some
serious health problems. Radar Online issued a report on Wednesday
that has an insider close to Hillary Clinton saying the presidential hopeful
is facing "mounting health issues."
Several coughing fits have been caught on camera as Hillary Clinton has campaigned
across the nation for the 2016 primary elections and caucuses. The Washington
Post reported in April that Clinton had
two public coughing fits in one week, leaving Democratic constituents wondering
if she's even healthy enough to become president. Actress Susan Sarandon even
said in May during an interview with Larry King that she won't endorse Hillary
Clinton as a presidential candidate because "she may have health issues."
... ... ...
In April, an article published on
KevinMD.com outlined some concerns about Hillary Clinton's health records,
but said that Clinton's health risks aren't anything that should disqualify
her from being president. However, "they are certainly something to ponder."
Hillary is a warmonger and is very dangerous in any high position in government (look how much damage
she managed to do while being the Secretary of State), to say nothing about being POTUS. Among other
things Hillary and just too old and too sick to be a President.
Notable quotes:
"... A vote for Stein is a vote against empire. It's a vote against the neocons and their plans to bring the entire world under our rule. ..."
"... Look who Hillary picked as her VP! Look who she hired in her campaign. She doesn't give a damn. Instead of demanding the progressive vote to avoid disaster, have her change course and deserve that vote. People have had enough already. ..."
"... Bernie Sanders sold out. Time to forget him and forget his advice, as the worst vote would be a vote for a neocon and the wars she would bring us. ..."
"... I mean if this was a contest between Hitler and Stalin there would still be people asking others to vote for Stalin so that Hitler wasn't elected and arguing that voting for another candidate is wasting your vote. If you want to vote tactically, vote tactically, and if you want to vote for what you believe, vote for what you believe, but understand what you are saying and don't act as if there was any kind of moral obligation to vote for Clinton, because there isn't. ..."
"... Independent studies and reports have proven that the primaries were rigged beyond any doubt. ..."
"... Hillary's biggest supporters spend most of their time on Wall St, in oil companies, or in corrupt foreign governments. ..."
"... There simply isn't any logic to this OMG Trump will be the worst thing ever. So one must then assume that the argument is created and perpetuated simply to manipulate and mislead. ..."
"... Trump, a detestable person, would get very little of his extreme views passed. Clinton, a detestable person, would get very much of her extreme views passed. ..."
"... Because Clinton is to the right of Obama (accurate provided you aren't a rabid partisan) she is far more likely to get every awful military action she wants. Since she's apparently the "pragmatic" one, how quickly do any of these policy proposals get watered down or gutted entirely in the name of compromise and political realities and "politics being the art of the possible"? ..."
"... True. It ends here. A vote for Hillary is a vote that supports and condones the corruption of the DNC and Clinton 's campaign. Clearly, they had handicapped Sanders from the start. Starting with an 'insurmountable 400+ superdelegates before Bernie entered the race which the MSM, who, in collusion with the DNC, pushed as "an impossible lead to overcome" skewed the primaries results in favor of Clinton. ..."
"... I won't vote for someone who has to nuance her answers when it comes to the way in which she's conducted herself during her tenure at the Department of State. This from a former Clinton supporter in 2008. ..."
"... Glad to know that they would rather have a Trump presidency instead of banding together with the Dems. ..."
"... Please see what you will be doing if Trump becomes president. He doesn't stand for ANYTHING that Bernie stands for. ..."
"... Not this election. Certainly not the next election. Or the one after that. At least Hilly is Dem. Best laugh of the day. ..."
"But I am concerned that the DNC elected Hillary in the first place. Because they [Trump and Clinton]
are either tied or she's even losing in some polls. Whereas Bernie consistently beat Trump by double
digits [in hypothetical match-up polls]. We could win the House and the Senate back with those kind
of numbers."
... ... ...
"I've read hundreds of the DNC leaked emails. I feel that our votes were stolen. I don't think
she won the primary fair and square. And if she had to cheat to do it, maybe she shouldn't become
the first woman president."
"I think by me voting for the third-party candidate, along with millions of other Bernie supporters,
it will maybe show that the third party is possible in the future." JCDavis Tom J. Davis
What has Jill Stein ever done that qualifies her to lead a large nation with international
obligations and not just those to it's own citizens?
A vote for Stein is a vote against empire. It's a vote against the neocons and their plans
to bring the entire world under our rule.
pdehaan -> Tom J. Davis
It's quite something for democrats to demand the progressive votes for Hillary and trying to
induce a guilt trip in order to avoid Trump from being elected.
Why don't you demand Hillary Clinton to earn that vote?? For example, by having her guarantee
in no uncertain means that she'll oppose TPP and associated trade deals in any form or fashion
(instead of in it's current form)? Why don't you demand Hillary Clinton to be less hawkish and
dangerous wrt foreign policy instead? Why don't you demand her to work towards a $15 minimum wage,
income equality and social protection instead? It's very easy to demand one's vote just because
the other side is even worse. This issue comes up every election and it's just maintaining the
status quo.
Look who Hillary picked as her VP! Look who she hired in her campaign. She doesn't give
a damn. Instead of demanding the progressive vote to avoid disaster, have her change course and
deserve that vote. People have had enough already.
JCDavis -> palindrom
Bernie Sanders sold out. Time to forget him and forget his advice, as the worst vote would
be a vote for a neocon and the wars she would bring us.
JCDavis -> davshev
Think of it this way--Trump may be a clown, but Hillary is a warmonger who will bring us war
with Russia. and a war with Russia will be a disaster for everyone. So if your vote for Stein
gives us Trump, that is not as bad as it could be.
cynictomato
Oh Please! If you want to vote for Clinton just vote for her but let the rest do whatever they
want. The idea that if you vote for another candidate besides the two main ones you are wasting
your vote is what has turned the USA in a two party democracy and is detrimental for the citizens
because the main parties only have to worry about presenting a better option than their rival,
not about presenting a good candidate.
I mean if this was a contest between Hitler and Stalin there would still be people asking
others to vote for Stalin so that Hitler wasn't elected and arguing that voting for another candidate
is wasting your vote. If you want to vote tactically, vote tactically, and if you want to vote
for what you believe, vote for what you believe, but understand what you are saying and don't
act as if there was any kind of moral obligation to vote for Clinton, because there isn't.
The idea that the Democratic National Committee, and the Clinton campaign, "rigged" the Democratic
primary is fairly widespread
It's not an IDEA it's a FACT.
Independent studies and reports have proven that the primaries were rigged beyond any doubt.
(Guardian please study these reports and write an in depth article on the rigged primaries)
On foreign policy, Clinton is certainly not "the much lesser threat to their ideology". She
has made it clear that aggressive stance on Syria/Ukraine will be taken, increasing the odds of
an uncontained global conflict.
NoOneYouKnowNow -> kevdflb
Hillary's biggest supporters spend most of their time on Wall St, in oil companies, or
in corrupt foreign governments.
mrmetrowest -> Iskierka
Are Nader voters more responsible for Bush than the hundreds of thousands of Democrats that
voted for him? Are they more responsible than the millions who stayed home? The 'Nader cost Gore
the election' canard is one of the least logical pieces of conventional wisdom ever.
Mrs Clinton is on record as supporting a no-fly zone in Syria - an act that will further embroil
us in the Middle East and might get us into a blow-up with Russia. If this happens, are Clinton
supporters willing to be responsible for her actions?
Vote Green, if that's what your conscience says. The anti-Trump voters' moral position is less
pure than they think; in four years they'll be voting against someone else. This goes on forever.
mrmetrowest -> Rolf Erikson
In 1964, voters were presented with a choice between LBJ and Goldwater. Goldwater was considered
to hold extreme political views which caused many to vote for LBJ, who won a landslide victory.
LBJ did great things domestically, however he massively escalated the war in Vietnam, leading
to the deaths on tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese. To what extent are
those who voted for LBJ responsible for those deaths? Likewise, if Mrs Clinton gets us into a
war in Syria, or Iran, will you accept responsibility for helping put her in office?
Cue the trolls insisting that you must, must vote for their preferred candidate. If people vote
Green, that is their democratic choice and right. It is also because the Democratic Party saw fit
to foist a terrible candidate on the people.
Bernie has #DemExit and is returning to his roots as an Independent and said he will run in
2018 for the Senate as an Independent! Follow Bernie's lead and exit the corrupt, neoLiberal Democratic
Party! Do you want 4 more War Years? Peace NOW or nothing later!
Vote for peace and prosperity - Dr Jill Stein and the Green Economy!
Sawant is a complete pile-driver of a debater, a devastatingly accurate verbal machine gun,
and she utterly crushed...but, to me, Traister still won. The 'vote your heart' constituency diagnose
the situation near perfectly, and push for political action that isn't beholden to election cycles
but they then just fall short; they then turn on a dime and act like the electoral system isn't
broken, like a General Election is an 'end game' and is meaningful. Whereas L.E.V. adherents don't
close their eyes to what's on offer and it's they, not 'vote your heart' people, who see a General
Election for what it is: a broken democracy offering a "choice" between two types of terrible
but one type of terrible is always going to be less terrible. Underneath Traister's tiresome,
wilfully blind, if well written, Hillary hagiographies, I think that she knows this too.
Of course, the Hillary supporters and media cheerleaders will spin around from beseeching for
a vote against Miller/Barron/Drumpf/von Clownstick to then, if Hillary gets a solid victory, claiming
a great win, after all -"look at the votes *for* Hillary Clinton!" - when she would only win because
of votes *against* the short-fingered hysteric. They'll steal votes cast against Drumpf and disingenuously
claim them as votes *for* Hillary. So what? 'Cynical, dishonest narcissists in cynical, dishonest
narcissism' shock! "Let the baby have its bottle", as they say, and let them stew in their own
juice after progressives perhaps bolt to the formation of a new party or a re-structured Green
party after election day.
Think outside of election cycles and it's precisely *because* one should do so, and treat General
Elections as unimportant towards the big scheme of things, that one should vote for better of
two historically disliked candidates because other days will offer less sickening choices and
huge swathes of the country will gain/be better off even if you don't. It would ironically be
Clintonian to punish Clinton and the DNC for not having a sufficiently collectivist outlook by
personally selling out others and allowing the short-fingered vulgarian to snake oil his tiny-handed
way in. Women seeking to retain the right to choose
http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/07/mike-pence-says-roe-v-wade-will-be-overturned.html Mexican
people, Muslim people, immigrants in general will be just some of those who'll be in your spiritual
debt if you're a swing state voter who'll bite the bullet. You don't have to support someone in
order to give them your vote.
The idea that the Democratic National Committee, and the Clinton campaign, "rigged" the
Democratic primary is fairly widespread among Sanders supporters
This is something that really annoys me. You're implying that this is not an undeniable fact clearly
backed by written evidence fact by calling it an ''idea''.
The thing about Hilary is that she is not by any stretch of imagination a good candidate. She
is deeply unpopular because of who she is as a politician. You cannot expect people to ignore
this. When the DNC willingly and knowingly rigged the election in favour of a bad candidate it
was done based on the partly flawed calculation that the fear of any Republican winning over a
Democrat would suffice to back their candidate no matter what.
And I say partly true, because a lot of the people who would vote for Democrats anyways will
do so even if they backed Bernie.
However Bernie (and to a far smaller extent Trump) energised and brought in people who might
not normally vote at all because they're fed up with the establishment. Once they found their
voice in Bernie and got fired up, they will vote but on for the thing they despise the most (aka
the establishment like Clinton). Nor should they. It was up to the Democratic Party to recognise
the candidate that would have taken advantage of this and they willingly failed in doing so. Even
when picking a VP for Clinton they failed to make even the smallest gesture to these people. So,
no there is no reason good enough for them to switch and vote for someone they despise and know
for sure represents the things they hate.
Now there is also the irony that they're attacking Trump for his fear mongering, while they
themselves are also creating fear mongering amongst voters about what a monster Trump would be.
It's all about fear even when they pretend it's not and that is sickening.
There simply isn't any logic to this OMG Trump will be the worst thing ever. So one must then
assume that the argument is created and perpetuated simply to manipulate and mislead.
Trump, a detestable person, would get very little of his extreme views passed. Clinton,
a detestable person, would get very much of her extreme views passed.
Because Clinton is to the right of Obama (accurate provided you aren't a rabid partisan)
she is far more likely to get every awful military action she wants. Since she's apparently the
"pragmatic" one, how quickly do any of these policy proposals get watered down or gutted entirely
in the name of compromise and political realities and "politics being the art of the possible"?
And of course, the useless, vapid, Democrat partisans will, for the most part, say nothing.
See: 8-years of Obama as Bush 2.0.
Get your facts straight. Those have been labeled FALSE!
However the corruption and neoLiberal war supporter that is hung on Clinton has been proven
by her actions with "regime change" in Libya and coup support in Honduras. And then there is the
corruption of weapons for charitable contributions for the Clinton Foundation!
Do we want peace and prosperity that only ill Stein can bring with her Green Economy or do
we want 4 more years of war and job loss? Simple choice.
Obama was very different to bush on almost every issue, the differences might not be massive but
they have a real impact on people. For example on climate change obama successfully pushed for
polices that will help reduce emissions while bush did literally nothing. It will be the same
for clinton.
You are correct that Obama was different from Bush, you're just wrong about the direction.
Drones/Illegal Wars: Expanded
Wall St/Corporate Corruption: Went unpunished & expanded
Domestic Spying: Expanded
Constitutional Violations: Expanded
War or Whistleblowers: Created
He has done nothing but act like climate change is important. He has not done anything meaningful
except offer more hopeful rhetoric, the only thing the Democratic candidates seem to be good at
lately.
You're being ridiculous. If Trump wins, the republicans win the Senate and the House and he will
sign dozens of Republican bills that will set the progressive movement back a decade or more.
He will also nominate a right wing judge to replace Scalia Anna the SCOTUS will be in conservative
hands for another generation.
If you don't see that, you have a severe case of denial.
You are aware that you can vote for candidates for other positions that are not in the same as
the party as the president you vote for, yes? You can not vote Clinton but still vote Team D everywhere
else.
As an institution, SCOTUS has held back progress almost as often as it has helped it. So no,
i'm not one of those easily swayed by the terrible "but think of the appointments!" argument.
Perhaps it becoming even clearer that it is an anti-democratic institution is the best way to
achieve real justice.
The old worse of two evils logic that guarantees an eternity of bad candidates.
Cliff Olney
True. It ends here. A vote for Hillary is a vote that supports and condones the corruption
of the DNC and Clinton 's campaign. Clearly, they had handicapped Sanders from the start. Starting
with an 'insurmountable 400+ superdelegates before Bernie entered the race which the MSM, who,
in collusion with the DNC, pushed as "an impossible lead to overcome" skewed the primaries results
in favor of Clinton.
What a hollow victory it must be for Hillary, but then, one must have a conscience to feel
such things, and as we can see from her support for the coup in Honduras, she lacks this empathy.
"Give them a good attorney before we deport the children back to Honduras", resonates with those
of us that have a conscience.
Not going to happen.
Sanders was honest. So is Stein. I won't vote for someone who has to nuance her answers
when it comes to the way in which she's conducted herself during her tenure at the Department
of State. This from a former Clinton supporter in 2008.
Clinton or Trump? The duopoly's choice for president is a dry heave.
BradStorch -> Mardak
How will you push Clinton to the left? What leverage will you have after you gave her a pass
on Iraq, Libya, Wall Street etc.? If she runs against Ted Cruz in 2020 you'll vote for her whether
or not she started any wars or did anything from Bernie's platform, right?
brooks303
Glad to know that they would rather have a Trump presidency instead of banding together with
the Dems. I understand the need for a three, or even four party system. We should work toward
that at the ballot box.
But not with this election. Please see what you will be doing if Trump
becomes president. He doesn't stand for ANYTHING that Bernie stands for. At least Hillary is a
Democrat.
Indie60 -> brooks303
Not this election. Certainly not the next election. Or the one after that. At least Hilly
is Dem. Best laugh of the day.
christinaak -> brooks303
We would have to amend the Constitution to have an effective multiparty system, because of
the current requirement of 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency. Under the current system
it would be all but impossible for one candidate to obtain 270 electoral votes in a truly competitive
multiparty system. If one candidate does not obtain the required number then the House of Representatives
gets
(CNSNews.com) -- Given the testimony of FBI Director James Comey and statements
made under oath by Hillary Clinton about her use of a personal email server as Secretary of State,
two chairmen in the House of Representatives have sent a letter to the U.S. attorney for the District
of Columbia requesting that he investigate whether Clinton "committed perjury and made false statements
when testifying under oath before Congress."
In the July 11 letter, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz
(R-Utah) and House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) write to the Honorable Channing D. Phillips:
"We write to request an investigation to determine whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
committed perjury and made false statements during her testimony under oath before congressional
committees."
"While testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 7, 2016,
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey stated the truthfulness of Secretary Clinton's
testimony before Congress was not within the scope of the FBI's investigation," write the chairmen.
"Nor had the FBI even considered any of Secretary Clinton's testimony."
"Director Comey further testified the Department of Justice requires a criminal referral from
Congress to initiate an investigation of Secretary Clinton's congressional testimony," said Chaffetz
and Goodlatte. "We are writing for that purpose."
"The evidence collected by the FBI during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal
email system appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony," said the chairmen.
"In light of those contradictions, the Department should investigate and determine whether to prosecute
Secretary Clinton for violating statutes that prohibit perjury and false statements to Congress,
or any other relevant statutes."
In a press release, Chaffetz and Goodlatte further note that they have requested FBI Director
Comey to turn over "the FBI's full investigative file from its review of former Secretary Clinton's
use of an authorized private email server."
In addition, Chariman Goodlatte has asked Director Comey, in a letter signed by more than 200
members of Congress, "demanding answers" regarding "the many questions surrounding his announcement
that he does not recommend federal prosecution against former Secretary Hillary Clinton for mishandling
classified information through private email servers."
However, there are a significant number of voters who supported Sen. Bernie
Sanders during the Democratic primary who now say they will either vote for
Dr. Stein, Mr. Trump, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson or not at all–in that
order.
Below is an interactive chart based on more than 400 responses conducted
last night (7/30/2016) via our Internet panel and live interviews. It provides
cross tab data to determine the presidential preference for primary voters based
on the candidate they voted for in the primaries. While these results are particularly
strong for Dr. Stein–there were also an unusually high number of 18 to 29 year-old
samples–the total results include the 7-day rolling average, are weighted based
on demographics from the U.S. Census Current Population Survey and show Mr.
Trump ahead 46.8% to 42.2%.
The sub-sample shown in the chart paints pretty much the same picture as
the overall result. The polling data indicate Mr. Trump did a better job winning
over those Republicans who did not vote for him in the Republican presidential
primary (88%), as well as maintain those who did (97.8%). Mrs. Clinton is maintaining
94.4% of Democratic voters who cast their primary ballot for her, but less than
half (47.7%) of those who voted for Sen. Sanders say they are certain they will
be on board.
Now to Dr. Stein's bump. Again, we do not believe Mrs. Clinton will only
end up with half of Sen. Sanders' voters. Last night was an unusual response.
But we are saying many, many voters are very, very angry.
Nearly 16% of Sanders supporters say they will vote for Mr. Trump, but more
than a quarter are at least giving Dr. Stein a serious look. Sanders' voters
also have a largely favorable view of Dr. Stein (56%), compared to only 33%
who say the same for Mrs. Clinton. Not surprisingly, these voters are markedly
more likely to say they don't believe the federal government acts in the interest
of the people. Another 5.6% of her support comes from the small pool of voters
who supported another candidate in the Democratic presidential primary.
Whether Dr. Stein can maintain that level of support is uncertain and worth
debating as we collect and digest more polling data in the upcoming days and
weeks. But what isn't up for debate is the fact that a significant number of
Sen. Sanders' voters have extremely negative views of Mrs. Clinton and are not
quite ready to just suck it up and move on.
"... Similar to the styling of the British vote to leave the European Union, they're calling the movement #DemExit. ..."
"... After the Democratic National Convention brought some Sanders supporters into the fold, others are refusing to settle viewing the leaked emails, indicating the DNC's preference for Hillary Clinton over Sanders as the final straw. ..."
There's a push to make green the new blue. As some Bernie Sanders supporters
are jumping ship from the democratic party, opting instead to vote for green
party candidate Jill Stein.
Similar to the styling of the British vote to
leave the European Union, they're calling the movement #DemExit.
Some Sanders supporters see the choice between the Democratic and Republican
presidential nominees as simple: "Whether we get Hillary or we get Trump, we
get just as dangerous on either side just-in different ways," Sanders supporter
Erik Rydberg said.
After the Democratic National Convention brought some Sanders supporters
into the fold, others are refusing to settle viewing the leaked emails, indicating
the DNC's preference for Hillary Clinton over Sanders as the final straw.
Progressives who are fed up with the Democratic leadership's adherence to the status quo are
calling for a major #DemExit on July 29. However, progressive groups, such as Black Men for
Bernie, are urging voters to stay in the party until they have a chance to vote in their states'
primaries, especially if they live in closed or semi-closed primary states.
Abstaining from #DemExit until after state and local primaries is especially important for Florida,
which has a closed primary. On August 30, Professor and legal expert Tim Canova has a chance to unseat
Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, whose tenure as the head of the Democratic
Party has been fraught with controversy and more recently, allegations of election fraud and rigging.
A mass exodus, therefore, could sabotage progressives' own agenda to elect officials who are challenging
incumbents and establishment candidates. As of now, 23 states and territories have local and state
primaries up until September 13, so it is imperative for current members of the Democratic party
to stay until they've voted and then commit to #DemExit.
"... Let's compare donations from people who work at Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton, has received $495,503.60 from people who work on Wall Street Bernie Sanders, has received only $17,107.72. Hillary Clinton may have Wall Street, ..."
"... The false promise of meritocracy was most disappointing. It basically said that meritocracy is hard to do, but never evaluates whether it is the right thing to do. Hint - it isn't enough. We need to worry about (relative) equality of outcome not just (relative) equality of opportunity. An equal chance to starve is still an equal chance. ..."
"... Making economies games is how you continued rigged distribution apparatus. Question all "rules"! ..."
When it comes to Wall Street buying our democracy, you just need to follow the money. Let's
compare donations from people who work at Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Wells
Fargo, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton, has
received $495,503.60 from people who work on Wall Street Bernie Sanders, has received only $17,107.72.
Hillary Clinton may have Wall Street, But Bernie has YOU! Bernie has received more than 1.5
million contributions from folks like you, at an average of $30 each.
To be fair, don't you think we should count donations for this election cycle for Clinton?
Y'know,
she was the Senator from New York.
pgl -> EMichael,
Some people think anyone from New York is in bed with Wall Street. Trust me on this one - not
everyone here in Brooklyn is in Jamie Dimon's hip pocket. Of course those alleged liberals JohnH
uses as his sources (e.g. William Cohan) are in Jamie Dimon's hip pocket.
EMichael -> pgl,
I hate things like this. No honesty whatsoever. This cycle.
The total for Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Bank of America
is $326,000.
That leaves Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs to contribute $169,000.
EMichael -> RGC,
I stand corrected, somewhat.
Let me know how much comes from those organizations PACs.
reason said,
The false promise of meritocracy was most disappointing. It basically said that meritocracy
is hard to do, but never evaluates whether it is the right thing to do. Hint - it isn't enough.
We need to worry about (relative) equality of outcome not just (relative) equality of opportunity.
An equal chance to starve is still an equal chance.
ilsm -> reason,
Making economies games is how you continued rigged distribution apparatus. Question all
"rules"!
"... Clinton served as secretary of state from Jan. 2009 to Feb. 2013. The emails she sent with the "[email protected]" were sent in 2011 and 2012, according to the documents released by the Times. ..."
Emails
published by the New York Times Monday indicate that Hillary Clinton used more than
one private email address during her time as secretary of state, contradicting previous claims
from the Democratic presidential contender's office.
Multiple emails show Clinton used account "[email protected]" while serving in the Obama
administration as secretary of state.
... ... ...
Clinton served as secretary of state from Jan. 2009 to Feb. 2013. The emails she sent with
the "[email protected]" were sent in 2011 and 2012, according to the documents released by
the Times.
... ... ...
Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted Monday evening that the news proved
Clinton "misled public about the use of only one secret email address."
Earlier this year,
it was reported Clinton may have violated federal rules by exclusively using a personal email
address to conduct all official government business while serving as secretary of state.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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