[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/313884001″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]
Blog
-
Are you or a loved one having trouble staying afloat? You’re truly not alone.
Originally published at Counterpunch on March 23, 2017
While the media reports low unemployment and a rising stock market, the reality is that almost 20 percent of the country lives in “Underwater Nation,” with zero or even negative net worth. And more still have almost no cash reverses to get them through hard times.
This is a source of enormous stress for many low and middle-income families.
Savings and wealth are vital life preservers for people faced with job loss, illness, divorce, or even car trouble. Yet an estimated 15 to 20 percent of families have no savings at all, or owe more than they own.
They’re disproportionately rural, female, renters, and people without a college degree. But the underwater ranks also include a large number of people who appear to be in the stable middle class. Health challenges are a major cause of savings depletion for these people, both in medical bills and lost wages.
Plenty more Americans could be vulnerable.
A financial planallynner will advise you to put aside three months of living expenses in financial reserves, just in case. So if your living expenses are $2,000 a month, you should try to have $6,000 in “liquidity” — money you can easily get to in an emergency.
But 44 percent of households don’t have enough funds to tide themselves over for three months, even if they lived at the poverty level, according to the Assets and Opportunity Scorecard.
Even having a positive net worth doesn’t mean you can always tap these funds, especially if wealth takes the form of home equity or owning a car.
A Bankrate survey found that 63 percent of U.S. households lack the cash or savings to meet a $1,000 emergency expense. They’d have to borrow from a friend or family, or put costs on a credit card.
Seven percent of U.S. homeowners are underwater homeowners, with mortgage debt higher than the value of their homes. And more and more people have taken on credit card debt to pay the bills. Meanwhile, student debt is rising rapidly and is projected to become one of the biggest factors in negative wealth.
Conservative scolds will blame individuals for “living beyond their means” and being financially irresponsible. And individual behavior is important. But the financial stresses facing millions of families are more likely the result of four decades of stagnant incomes.
Half the workers in this country haven’t shared in the economic gains that have mostly gone to the rich. Their real wages have stayed flat while health care, housing, and other expenses continue to rise.
So not everyone is on the edge at this time of dizzying inequality, after all. The 400 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have as much wealth together as the bottom 62 percent of the population.
This is only possible because of the expanding ranks of drowning Americans.
Some politicians will scapegoat immigrants or other vulnerable people for this suffering. When this happens, hold on tight to your purse or wallet. They’re trying to distract you from the rich and powerful elites who are rigging the rules to get more wealth and power.
They want to deflect your attention away from the reality that your economic pain is the result of deliberate government rules that give more tax cuts to the super-rich and global corporations, keep wages down, push up tuition costs, and let corporations nickel and dime you for all you’re worth.
Congress and the Trump administration are proposing to cut health care, pass more tax cuts for the rich, and give global corporations even more power over you. They promise benefits will “trickle down.”
Unless we speak up, the only trickle will be the expansion of Underwater Nation.
Distributed by OtherWords.
More articles by:Chuck Collins
-
The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin
by Greg Palast
Originally published at TruthOut.org on December 17, 2016
Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state’s count by 10,704 votes. But hold on — a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.
The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.
According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really?
This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, “You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it’s probably not that surprising.”
Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles.
Bubbles?
Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don’t fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn’t vote for president.
Photo of Michigan ballot with bubble. (Image courtesy of Palast Investigative Fund, 2016)Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, “I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren’t originally counted, because those don’t scan into the machine.” (I can only use her first name because she’s terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.)
Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates.
How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white ‘burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist?
No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated.
I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed.
Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, “Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones.” It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots.
This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn’t fill in the bubble — my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:
How did Detroit end up with the crap machines?
Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by “emergency” overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city’s pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines.
“We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget,” Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. “No money was appropriated by the state.”
Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city’s water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race.
The Human Eye Count
There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters’ intent: the human eye.
That’s why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a “recount,” its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place.
Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump’s victory could vanish.
Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name — popular were “Bernie Sanders” and “Mickey Mouse” — but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton.
However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as “over-votes” (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake.
But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein’s human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match — exactly the places where you’d want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken — in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent).
I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this overt sabotage of the recount. “It’s shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the outcome of the election,” she said.
This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called “spoiled” or “invalidated” ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result.
Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted
Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. “Whether it’s because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there’s all kinds of mix-ups,” she said. “So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck.”
Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election.
An eye-popping 499,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost approximately 50,000 of the state’s voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.)
The Michigan Secretary of State’s spokesman Woodhams told me the purpose of the mass purge was, “to clean our voter lists and ensure that there’s no vulnerability for fraud. We’ve been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud.”
While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for double-voting in Michigan, the “aggression” in purging the lists was clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was confidential. The “double voters” are found by simply matching first and last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown.
Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list with care, more or less. He said, “I’m sure that there are some false positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we’re not just canceling people.”
As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list?
The GOP spokesman replied, “I’ve known a lot of white Browns.”
Jill Stein didn’t buy it. Responding to both Michigan’s and Trump’s claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent double voters, Stein said, “It’s the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump.”
Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well.
“It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed,” Stein concluded. “It’s not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy.”
-
Guilty of Grand Theft Overtime
reports on a ruling that denies overtime protection to millions of workers.
A TEXAS judge just denied more than 12 million workers a raise with the stroke of a pen.
U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant issued an injunction to block a new rule from the Department of Labor that would have enabled millions of workers currently ineligible for overtime protections–for example, getting paid time-and-a-half when you work more than 40 hours in a single week–to become eligible.
Specifically, the Obama administration regulation would have reduced the so-called “white-collar exemption,” which allows employers to avoid paying overtime for salaried administrative or professional workers who make more than about $23,660 a year–the equivalent of around $12 an hour for full-time work, and even less for workers pressured to work more than 40 hours a week.
The new rule would have basically doubled the threshold where companies can stop paying overtime–but that was too much for Judge Mazzant. Because of his ruling, millions of dollars in income that would have gone to workers will instead remain in the pockets of employers.
When the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was passed in 1938, overtime protections were intended to apply to all workers. Only managers and supervisors with the power to make schedules were supposed to be exempt.
Since the 1930s, however, a smaller and smaller percentage of workers have been covered by overtime protections. The rule change would have reversed that trend by expanding the number of workers eligible for overtime.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, millions of workers stood to benefit from the Obama administration’s rule change, including:
- 6.4 million women, who represent half of all workers would directly benefit;
- 4.2 million parents and 7.3 million children under age 18;
- 1.5 million Black workers (who are 8.9 percent of the salaried workforce but 12 . percent of those who would directly benefit from the rules change), and 2 million Latinxs (11.8 percent of the salaried workforce and 16 percent of directly benefiting workers);
- 4.5 million millennials, defined as workers aged 16 to 34; and
- 3.2 million workers with a high school degree, but not more education.
WHY DID Judge Mazzant issue the injunction and why is he so keen on denying raises to millions of workers? Ross Eisenbrey at the Economic Policy Institute has an excellent critical breakdown of the legal details. But this isn’t at root a legal issue–it’s a thoroughly political one that has to do with the balance of power between workers and employers.
An important starting point for understanding Mazzant’s move is the election of Donald Trump. The injunction will be one of many challenges to existing protections for workers in the next four years. But there is more than contemporary politics at play.
Where did the FLSA come from in the first place? It is part of a web of bureaucratic machinery enacted during the New Deal era in the 1930s to regulate industrial conflict between workers and capitalists. All these laws were forged in the midst of the greatest working-class revolt in U.S. history so far.
In 1934, there were three general strikes–one in Minneapolis, one in Toledo and another in San Francisco. These were mass strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers that shut down entire cities and sparked a huge wave of organizing activity all over the country.
These strikes resulted in a number of advances, including the successful unionization of the “Big Three” in auto manufacturing–a feat, like the unionization of Walmart today, that many at the time thought impossible. By the early 1940s, millions of workers had joined newly organized unions, more than doubling the size of the labor movement in the span of half a decade.
This working-class upsurge didn’t go unnoticed by the ruling class, of course, but there were debates about how the wealthy and the state should respond to it.
Some sections of the capitalist class wanted to try to maintain a status quo in which unions were basically illegal. Others associated with the millionaire Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt were reluctantly pushed to the conclusion that a carrot-and-stick approach was needed to quell the revolt and preserve the existing order.
Roosevelt’s approach carried the day. This is the background for the passage of various labor reforms, such as the overtime protections included in the FLSA, as well as Social Security, unemployment benefits, legal rights to collective bargaining and so on.
The positive aspects of these reforms were not given out for free–they were only won after hard-fought, militant struggles of millions of ordinary workers against their employers, the state and, in some cases, against their union leadership.
Fast forward to 2016. A billionaire who is staunchly anti-union is now set to control the executive branch of the federal government alongside a hoard of anti-union Republicans who will control Congress.
Mazzant’s attack on overtime is likely to be a mere opening salvo in a battle involving more brutal and ambitious attacks on workers, such as a national right-to-work law, the overturning of the Friedrichs decision affirming public employees’ right to collective bargaining, more legal restrictions on the right to strike, and on and on.
What right-wing Gov. Scott Walker did to labor in Wisconsin, Congressional Republicans and Trump may seek to do to workers all over the nation.
HOW SHOULD workers respond? The history of the 1930s presents some answers: Militant action in their workplaces, organizing the unorganized, and building the kind of broad-based unity and organizational strength in the labor movement that neither capitalists nor politicians can afford to ignore.
This was what won the meager labor protections we have in the first place. The strides that labor made in the public sector during the 1960s and ’70s were also won through militant, ambitious organizing efforts–many of them inspired and buoyed by social movements of the era, above all the Black freedom struggle.
These lessons from history are at odds with the common sense of contemporary liberals, however. For them, the reforms of the 1930s and 1960s were won by electing reform-minded Democrats with the foresight and resolve to do what was right.
In contemporary terms, this approach translates into a strategy that emphasizes looking ahead to the 2018 and 2020 elections with an eye to “take back” the White House and the Congress by campaigning for Democratic candidates.
Far from being a realistic solution, however, this failed approach is a prime cause of our present malaise. For decades, most of the labor movement has done little more than manage its own decline. It has brokered concessionary deals with employers and partnered with Democratic politicians in the hopes that the worst outcomes could be avoided through patient negotiation and cautious conservatism.
You can only effectively negotiate from a position of strength. So long as strikes remain at historic lows and union density continues to drop year after year, the power of workers to stop attacks, like the injunction against expanding overtime protection, will continue to decline as well. To the extent that the union movement allows itself to be divided, all unions will be vulnerable to being conquered by Trump and employers.
A renewed, militant labor movement based on class solidarity and rank-and-file democracy is the only way to turn the tide and stop the coming barrage of attacks from Trump and his ilk.
Trump is actually vulnerable on a number of fronts–the most obvious being that he has no mandate for his reactionary agenda. He lost the popular vote in the presidential election by a margin of more than 2.6 million votes and “won” the election by garnering the support of little more than 25 percent of the eligible electorate.
Trump is the most widely disliked president-elect ever since statistics were kept. The labor movement and the left should exploit this weakness to the fullest extent possible in order to thwart his anti-worker agenda.
That is a task best accomplished through independent political action, protest and, most importantly, a wave of new organizing that leverages the widespread anti-Trump mood in the country to build a bigger labor movement and a bigger left.
-
Voting as if a Just Peace Matters
The 2016 Presidential race again offers us a choice among corporate financed candidates and parties who have demonstrated by word, action and policy their antagonism to Islamic aspirations that we struggle for peace with justice for an ummah which embraces all of Creation. One of them would build a wall to exclude your families from re-uniting here. The other has built a political career on the bodies of innocents murdered in this nation’s illegal, immoral and imperial wars of aggression, conquest and occupation.
The Green Party offers a welcoming political home to our immigrant neighbors, and immigrant or not, as well to our Muslim neighbors too often vilified by our nation’s racism and Islamophobia. Please check us out.
-
Leaked Deutsche Bank Speech Shows Clinton Asking Wall Street To Police Itself, Supporting US Pivot To Asia
Originally published at Mint Press News, November 4, 2016Clinton’s October 2014 speech to Deutsche Bank was leaked as part of WikiLeaks’ archive of John Podesta’s Gmail account, revealing more of the nominee’s agenda for the financial sector and global affairs.
MINNEAPOLIS — With just days to go before the election, a two-year-old speech to a prominent global bank provides new insight into Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s possible agenda if she takes control of the White House.
Clinton delivered the speech on Oct. 7, 2014 to Deutsche Bank in New York, but the content of that speech and an ensuing Q&A session wasn’t made public until WikiLeaks released it as part of the organization’s ongoing publication of emails and files taken from the private Gmail account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair.
Clinton has faced pressure to release her speeches to banking executives throughout her presidential campaign, and particularly while vying for the Democratic nomination against Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who made campaign finance reform a central plank in his presidential platform.
In her speech, Clinton acknowledged the pressures facing Wall Street in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. She referenced the legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt in calling for moderate economic reforms:
“Remember what Teddy Roosevelt did. Yes, he took on what he saw as the excesses in the economy, but he also stood against the excesses in politics. He didn’t want to unleash a lot of nationalist, populistic reaction. He wanted to try to figure out how to get back into that balance that has served America so well over our entire nationhood.”
Roosevelt was known as a “trust buster” who was responsible for breaking up massive corporations, and he was outspoken about his wariness of big banks and wealthy business executives.
Clinton also acknowledged “that many Americans feel frustrated, some even angry,” about the economic downturn, adding: “And a lot of that anger has been directed at the financial industry.”
While recognizing the need for reforms, Clinton also seemed to suggest that the financial sector might be allowed to police itself:
“Today, there’s more that can and should be done that really has to come from the industry itself, and how we can strengthen our economy, create more jobs at a time where that’s increasingly challenging, to get back to Teddy Roosevelt’s square deal. And I really believe that our country and all of you are up to that job.”
According to one analysis of the speech and related emails, this attempt to acknowledge critics of the banking industry could have been intended as a way to placate Clinton’s critics in the event of the eventual release of the speeches.
“In an email on November 20, 2015 Clinton speechwriter Dan Schwerin explicitly noted how he left an ‘easter egg’ in the DB speech precisely in case the world came knocking and asking for Hillary’s speeches,” wrote an anonymous contributor at Zero Hedge using the name “Tyler Durden,” a shared pseudonym adopted by many writers at the site, in an analysis of the speech published on Wednesday.
In the 2015 email, Schwerin wrote:
“I wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats. It’s definitely not as tough or pointed as we would write it now, but it’s much more than most people would assume she was saying in paid speeches. … Perhaps at some point there will be value in sharing this with a reporter and getting a story written.”
Ultimately, “Tyler Durden” noted, the Clinton campaign opted not to release the speeches.
Elsewhere in the Deutsche Bank speech, Clinton acknowledged the crucial role big banks will play in Washington’s strategic pivot to Asia. She said:
“Will we have the discipline and dexterity to follow through on our pivot to Asia where so much of the history of the 21st century will be written, while managing new and old crises in the Middle East and Europe?
Can we get our relationship with China right, navigating between the twin shoals of excessive accommodation and the potential for dangerous conflict?
Will our traditional allies in Europe and East Asia step up and share the responsibilities of upholding a global order under pressure from so many fronts?”
The focus on Asia, started under the Obama administration and likely to continue under Clinton, if her speech is any indication, involves encircling China with economic and military allies as a way to undercut China’s growing global influence. However, some historic allies like the Philippines have begun to push back against U.S. influence in the region.
Many analysts see the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial trade deal, as a key element to the U.S. pivot to Asia. While initially supportive of the deal, Clinton now promises to oppose the TPP as president after facing intense pressure from Sanders and activists opposed to the deal.
-
‘Anti-Establishment’ Trump Plans to Appoint Goldman Sachs and George Soros Insiders
“I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.”
By @Subversive_Pen | published at Mint Press News, November 4, 2016
Contrary to his anti-establishment stance — which supporters readily boast as a viable alternative to Hillary Clinton — Donald Trump’s establishment roots run so deep, the billionaire real estate mogul plans to appoint a former Goldman Sachs partner and George Soros Fund manager as Secretary of the Treasury should he win the election.
Steve Mnuchin came on board Trump’s campaign as finance chair in May, raising eyebrows of many who felt his 17-year history with Sachs — and affiliation with liberal globalist George Soros as an Investment Professional of Soros Fund Management — conflicted directly with the then-presumptive nominee’s conservative stance and criticisms of establishment politicians.
“It is difficult to see how a second-generation Goldman Sachs partner would secure such a prominent position in an administration delivered by a populist wind,” Compass Point analyst Isaac Boltansky toldPolitico of Trump’s curious choice for Treasury Secretary.
According to Fox Business Network, Trump’s confidence in winning the White House has fomented enough to begin picking Cabinet members, and besides the anomalous choice of Mnuchin for the Treasury, sources said he’s considering New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for Attorney General and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for Homeland Security Secretary.
Trump has, of course, expended great efforts in criticizing opponent Hillary Clinton’s deep ties to the banking and Wall Street elite; and prior to garnering the Republican nomination, extended that critique to competitor Ted Cruz, saying in one debate:
“I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.”
Zero Hedge noted when Trump hired the left-leaning hedge fund manager and financier as finance chair that Mnuchin had previously donated multiple times to various Democrats, including Barack Obama and none other than Hillary Clinton.
Further substantiating his establishing banking insider status — the precise profile Trump claims publicly to loathe — Mnuchin worked at Goldman Sachs for 17 years, headed OneWest Bank prior to its purchase by CIT Group in 2015, and now sits on CIT’s board while also serving as chairman and chief executive of Dune Capital Management, a private investment firm with a focus on financing big-time Hollywood movies, like “Avatar.”
If Mnuchin’s Wall Street ties don’t trouble Trump’s supporters enough, the hedge fund manager’s links to George Soros — an ardent Clinton fan — certainly will.
In fact, in terms of opposition, Soros has spent billions influencing global politics by inserting his brand of leftism wherever possible — and earlier this year even pledged, with others, some $15 million specifically to mobilize Latinos and immigrants to defeat Donald Trump.
“Steven is a professional at the highest level with an extensive and very successful financial background,”Trump said upon bringing Mnuchin into his campaign. “He brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican Party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton.”
Indeed, Trump’s campaign, quoted by the Daily Caller, said Mnuchin “has previously worked with Mr. Trump in a business capacity and brings his expertise in finance to what will be an extremely successful fundraising operation for the Republican Party.”
While business dealings certainly bring ordinarily clashing personalities into contact on occasion, these details about the relationship between Trump and Mnuchin evidence the former’s links to the left.
Despite the nominee’s many diatribes excoriating Hillary Clinton as out-of-touch with the American populace, Trump’s own status as a billionaire belies both their decades-old friendship and striking similarities — particularly as darlings of the establishment.
Should you choose to vote on the 8th, it would be prudent to keep in mind blustery campaign rhetoric — from any politician — only constitutes so much hot air.
This article originally appeared on The Free Thought Project.
-
Fighting Ghost Fascists While Aiding Real Ones
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
An architect of regime-change, coups, no-fly zones, rule of the rich and mass incarceration is about to become Commander-in-Chief, yet the bulk of what passes for the Left is “engaged in a 1930s-style ‘united front’ against a ‘fascism’ that was never a threat in 21st century America.” Donald Trump, the orange menace, didn’t have a chance of becoming president. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a 21st century fascist and threat to life on Earth.
Fighting Ghost Fascists While Aiding Real Ones
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Originally published at Black Agenda Report on October 26, 2016
“Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent.”
Hillary Clinton’s impending — and totally predictable — landslide victory on November 8 will prove only that there never was any danger of a “fascist” white nationalist takeover of the U.S. executive branch of government in 2016. That was always a red (or “orange”) herring, a phony “barbarians at the gate” threat that — as Wikileaks documents confirmed — John Podesta and Hillary’s other handlers fervently hoped would convey “lesser evil” status to their manifestly unpopular candidate.
There was nothing particularly devious or out of the ordinary in the Hillary camp’s favoring Donald Trump or, alternatively, Ted Cruz. It is standard Democratic Party practice to position themselves just to the left of the Republicans. In a duopoly electoral system, victory lies in where the cake is cut. By hugging close to the GOP’s flanks, national Democratic candidates can lay claim to a “center-left” spectrum of political space that encompasses a clear majority of U.S. public opinion on most issues. By this calculus, Democrats are supposed to win, unless they are tripped up on the closely related issues of race (failure to “stand up” to the Blacks) and foreign policy (failure to “stand up” to whoever is the designated foreign enemy).
Race is the trickiest part of the equation, since white supremacy is embedded in the American political conversation, hiding just beneath the surface of most discourse on social and economic policy.
“His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites.”
Trump thought he could win by combining an overt white racist appeal with an anti-corporate message that laid the blame on Wall Street for (white) American job losses and falling living standards. He also calculated — correctly, it turns out — that in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown, many white Americans were more upset about their own economic and social status than they were angry at Russians; that they wanted regime change at home more than abroad.
Both of Trump’s central policies backfired, dooming his campaign. His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites, who have given majorities to national Republicans since 1968 but whose self-image is that they are not, as individuals, racist. (Certainly, white women found further reason to reject his candidacy.) Much more spectacularly, Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent.
At the national level, the duopoly system, as we had known it, virtually ceased to exist – a fact dramatically driven home by the near-universal corporate media rejection of Donald Trump, the candidacy they had done so much to create. The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election, a potential historic opening to a far wider space of progressive political struggle, including on the moribund electoral level. With the ruling class gathered in one Big Tent, and the overt racists occupying the imploded shell of the GOP, the system itself was in disarray. What was once two vibrant parties of the ruling class, with a virtual monopoly on the totality of the electorate, had become one ruling class party plus a hollowed-out husk, at least temporarily occupied by white nationalists under the leadership of a narcissistic and incoherent billionaire, yet without enough funds to mount a competitive general election campaign.
“The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election.”
In these pages, we had been saying since last year that Donald Trump could not win; that Bernie Sanders’ fate would be sealed in the southern primaries; and that, although ruling class money would insure Clinton an election by landslide, it could not buy her legitimacy among a significant section of the Democratic “base,” who would now be pushed to the latrine area of her Big Tent. As we wrote on May 18 of this year:
“Outsized fear of Trump is hysteria. These days, the ‘brown shirts’ wear blue. Hillary is the candidate of Wall Street, War and Austerity – not Trump, the racist America Firster. And, he can’t win, anyway – not with tens of millions of ‘moderate’ Republicans and most of the party’s funders rushing into Hillary’s welcoming embrace.”
But sadly, hysteria does reign in most of the “left” precincts of America. Those who did not hesitate to kick Hillary when she appeared to be “down” — in those heady days when they imagined it was possible she could lose to Sanders — are terrified to kick her when she is “up” and primed to take the helm of the hyper-power. They are engaged in a 1930s-style “united front” against a “fascism” that was never a threat in 21st century America, where a different kind of dictatorship of the rich (but also a fascism) has made brown-shirts (and Klansmen) utterly superfluous. These trembling leftists refuse to oppose the modern manifestation of fascism, which is now firmly entrenched in power with Hillary as its champion, in favor of a crusade against an “orange” menace that did not have a ghost of a chance of seizing national power. They have made themselves perfectly irrelevant and useless — except, of course, to the fascists-in-charge.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.