By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for daily POR ESTO! of Mérida, México.
The surprising successes of Bernie Sanders on the left flank and Donald Trump on the right flank –in part, believed to owe something to the new positions of the “white working class” in the US– have sparked new interest within the political outlook of the nation.
So writes Zoltan Zigedy, a prominent American Marxist political commentator in his “ZZ” column.
The Wall Street Journal calls them the “forgotten Americans.” Others see them as racist and xenophobic. In 2008, then-aspiring-President Obama characterized them way: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.” Whether they are forgotten, dismissed, or demonized, the “white working class” has been discovered this election season.
Even a decade ago, it was widely believed that there was no working class in the US –only a vast middle class and the poor. Fostered by social scientists, mainstream politicians, and trade union functionaries, the fiction prevailed that, apart from the very rich, everyone was either middle class or poor.
Of course, this illusion began to shatter in the wake of the 2008 crash and the ensuing economic stagnation. Likewise, the rebellion against corporate, cookie-cutter candidates in the 2016 primary contests exposed a class division that fit poorly in the harmonious picture of one big class with insignificant extremes at either end.
Whatever else the 2016 electoral campaigns have revealed, they certainly have shattered the illusion that the US is largely a classless society. But US elites and their opinion-making toadies struggle to find the “white working class,” says Zigedy.
Just as the mass media has fostered caricatures of African-Americans, the media and cultural/entertainment corporations craft an unflattering image of white, working class citizens. Whereas Black people are saddled with images of violence, idleness, promiscuity, and criminality, white workers are portrayed as bigoted, socially, culturally and intellectually backward, superstitious, and conservative.
One would never know from the “hood” movies, talk radio hysteria, and the crime-obsessed news anchors, that most African-Americans are a significant part of the working class, maintain stable households, and work diligently for a better life. Similarly, most white workers are neither gun fanatics nor Bible-thumpers. Most white workers do not attack gays, abuse their spouses and children, torch mosques or lynch Black people.
According to Zigedy, the common perception dished out by the mass media is that white workers constitute the electoral base for Donald Trump, when the truth is that the median household income for his primary voters shows that Trump’s followers are more typical of the white petty-bourgeoisie than the white working class.
Certainly media elites, pundits, and politicians do not want to talk about the latent rebelliousness of the white working class. There is a large majority of white workers who believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction. This is an opinion that should not surprise anyone since the median household income in the US has declined by 7% since 2000.
The current crisis of political credibility shows that they, like most of the rest of the population, have yet to find a way out.
Social scientists have begun to acknowledge the toll that corporate pillage has taken on the working class, very dramatically of late in the case of the white working class.
Death rates, especially from alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide have risen sharply among white workers. The institutions that formerly traded a measure of privilege to white workers for their compliance and docility have now abandoned them.
According to Zigedy, the Democratic Party, for example, is so thoroughly corrupted by corporate money that when a benefit or privilege is wiped out linked to interracial prejudice, false friends and bombastic demagogues, enemies of the working class, take the opportunity and use it to mask the identity of the common enemy and thus weaken the unity in the ranks of U.S. workers.
August 13, 2016.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
By Manuel E. Yepe
Exclusive for daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Today increasingly-substantial financial resources are being invested in the creation of new technologies of war and weapons of mass destruction, though there isn’t the least defensive justification for it in the conditions of the post-Cold War world.
Europe, which benefited so much from the conquest and colonization of America, Africa and Asia, has been responsible for dragging the world into two global wars. The so-called old continent should have made a supreme effort to avoid catastrophes like those in the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, as well as the criminal extermination actions which for many years have been perpetrated by the Zionist forces against the martyred Palestinian people, to mention only the bloodiest.
Only 19 years elapsed between the first and second world wars. World War II ended 71 years ago. However, since then there have been conflicts and wars that have employed several times more explosives and chemical weapons than both world wars together.
The policy of allocating more massive budgets for war and lowering taxes for the more powerful contributors means less money for social expenditures. This does not affect the entire US population equally. Neo-liberal practices, together with globalization, ensure that the rich continue to increase their wealth while the poor continue to grow in number and become increasingly poorer.
In the United States, federal programs for education, community development, grants to agencies for environmental protection, financing for development, low-cost alternative energy, disease control, drug abuse treatment, health and occupational security management, as well as public safety are reduced or eliminated; this list includes only the most recently and hardest hit areas.
The United States presents the paradox of being the richest country in the world
and at the same time it has one of the highest indices of poverty among developed countries. The US currently has, proportionally, the largest number of poor people without health insurance, yet with insecurity and food deficiency among the rich countries.
These sad social realities for the people of the United States, caused by imperialist wars in terms of soldier casualties and injuries, cannot compare, however, with the enormous damage that these disproportionate wars have meant for the attacked peoples.
The farcical excuses presented by the United States, first, to justify the occupation and, then, to save face in view of the evidence of a lost war, have been grotesque.
This happens when Washington cannot find a way out of the attacked countries without obtaining substantial economic benefits for the transnational monopolies that were the real reason for the aggression in the first place.
The noble aspiration of mankind to make the twenty-first century the first in history without wars died early. Against the accumulation of hardships, atrocities, cruelties and sacrifices that characterize the reality of war, the struggle of humanity for peace becomes a vital necessity.
Humanity today has sufficient culture and experience to reject the notion that peace must be imposed by war. Peace can and must be a conscious objective of human intelligence and solidarity.
It has been said many times that the people of the United States are the only ones who can carry out the titanic feat of bringing down the most powerful and bloodthirsty empire ever known to humanity. Today, humanity anxiously waiting to see that people react to give it the solidarity it deserves!
These days, people around the world have been able to follow, sometimes with disgust, the process of elections that every four years takes place in the United States.
On this occasion, however, new and striking manifestations of the profound crisis that engulfs the political system of the only superpower of this era have become apparent.
The campaign of the Republican candidate Donald Trump has allowed everyone to see, in all its crudeness, the terrible fascist danger that looms over humanity. By contrast, the Democratic Party candidate, Bernard Sanders, had encouraging messages that had never before been heard from within the highest echelons of imperialist politics.
July 28, 2016.
By Manuel E. Yepe
Exclusive for daily POR ESTO! of Mérida, México.
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Nobody in the world doubts that a victory by Donald Trump in the US presidential election would mean a devastating blow to Americans who are struggling to save democracy and avoid a reversal and the country´s political shift to the right that would be even worse than the one caused by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The most politically-advanced sector of the citizenship of the United States fears, rightly, that the world’s only superpower is living through a crucial time when fascism is casting its ominous shadow.
Trump’s social base consists of an alliance between billionaires and snippets of the lower middle class, which already resulted in such other monstrosities as the Tea Party. Its greatest danger lies in his social base and will be there beyond the elections.
The class struggle opposing this alliance is concentrated, for now, in communities such as the immigrants, women and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and not in the working class, where it has a relatively low support.
But to slow the rise of the right and stop its xenophobic attacks, it is imperative that immigrants, the BLM movement, women and youth form an alliance to strengthen their ranks in the struggle against their oppression by US capitalism.
Trump has been called a megalomaniac, paranoid, a racist, xenophobic… But, in a speech on the third day of the Democratic National Convention, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg clearly questioned the sanity of the US Republican presidential candidate: “Does Donald Trump only say crazy things, or does he say crazy things because he actually is crazy?”
More importantly, the issue of Trump’s emotional stability has also been raised by a growing number of influential and highly-respected mental-health professionals. They have done so out of a sense of urgency, even in the face of a code of conduct promulgated by the American Psychiatric Association that cautions psychiatrists against making public statements about individuals whom they have not formally evaluated.
Political commentator William Blum, in his widely-read column published in progressive US media, warns that if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, he could well be the most profoundly-disturbed occupant of the Oval Office since Richard Nixon, “whose extreme paranoia brought us Watergate and precipitated the most far-reaching constitutional crisis of the late 20th century.”
“Ordinarily, as someone licensed to practice law rather than psychology,” wrote Blum, “I’d stay out of the debate, and remain in my comfort zone of traditional legal and political commentary, committed to exposing the policy shortcomings of both major-party candidates and their surrogates.”
“But Donald Trump has secured the GOP nod for president. He’s one election away from being the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation the planet has ever seen. As such, he, like Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, deserves heightened scrutiny, both as to policy and personality.”
“Some readers, particularly on the progressive left, who by orientation are predisposed to policy critiques, may not be comfortable with my approach. Some may even ask if it isn’t a waste of time to examine the psyche of a president or a presidential hopeful, noting that even a paranoid Nixon agreed to end the Vietnam War and opened the door to normalized relations with China,” said Blum.
A consensus has emerged that Trump suffers from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) described as a “condition in which people have traits that cause them to feel and behave in socially-distressing ways. This limits their ability to function in relationships and other areas of their lives, such as work or school.”
According to Blum, Trump embodies –in the US electoral scenario– a society brutally-conditioned to accept a dictator in the future.
Trump embodies the US conservative feeling that sees in him the recovery of world power, undermined by Russia and Syria and commercially by China. It is a reality riding on a character who seeks power based on racial superiority.
If Trump made it –as a fascist incarnation—to be a presidential candidate, it is as a result of the extreme right’s work and their well-developed media power.
The political pendulum in the US has swung to extremes since Obama’s election. Everything has been radicalized and, as Blum points out, even if Trump loses the election, the country will have become further polarized.
August 9, 2016.