Lesley Gill – Norbert Ross : What’s Class Got to Do With It?

Raw free market capitalism has devastated white working class lives by sending their jobs abroad, but many of them cling on to the belief that an arch capitalist like Trump will turn their fortunes around. At present I think he might be better than Hilary because he wants to withdraw US military bases from the world and bring about peace with Putin. He also wants to establish industry back into the US which is the way to go.

Personally I would vote for Jill Stein and if enough Democrat voters were to do the same it would give the Democrats a good kick up the ***, while still helping Trump to get in.

I've got back into Veteren's Today recently. It's a crazy place full of gun loving, climate change deniers (or sometimes they used to be), but it seems to be more left than ever. They describe Trump as a professional gangster and I think they might be right, but Hilary is still worse.

What a choice? A two party duopoly with both parties as bad as each other.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/06/whats-class-got-to-do-with-it/

For William Galston, writing in Newsweek, working class whites vote for Trump because they “seek protection against all the forces that they perceive as hostile to their way of life—foreign people, foreign goods, foreign ideas.” Salon’s Michael Bourne locates white working class anger in “1960s-era legislation for promoting the interests of immigrants and minorities over their own, just as they blame free-trade policies of both parties for sending their jobs offshore.” According to Bourne, they are either the hapless “victims of American progress or a bunch of over privileged bigots.”

However, narratives that blame the individual prejudices of working class whites for the ascendance of Trump are too partial and convenient. Not only do they miss how thirty years of anything-goes, free-market capitalism re-established the power of corporations at the expense of diverse working people, and how so much upheaval created new and aggravated old racial, national and gender inequalities among working people. They also ignore how racism and hatred are present in the upper echelons of US society, where the well-to-do isolate themselves in gated communities, and decades of war on drugs and terror disproportionately target minorities, define them as threats, and militarize the policing of their communities.

Trump’s promise to register Muslims, build a wall along the Mexican border, and deport all undocumented immigrants, his demeaning treatment of women, a Mexican-American judge, and a disabled journalist, and his mocking of “political correctness,” speak to their collective sense of insecurity about the perceived collapse of “order” and the hierarchies that define it.

Trump’s anti-labor stance, his proposed tax policy, and his own business practices are hostile to working-class interests, yet his disdain for global trade agreements and his isolationist international policies do not favor those in the upper echelons of power, either.