No One Will Beat Trump Whose Only Offering Is That He's Not As Bad As Trump Is

Biden is such a effing mess, that his latest bullshit just moved me to call him Biden-- which I’ve been avoiding since he announced his desperate end of life candidacy-- instead of the preferred Status Quo Joe. Just as Democrats are making some headway in getting Moscow Mitch to consider calling some witnesses for Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, Biden had to go give him and Trump the ammo they were waiting for to back away. Can’t this asshole learn to keep him mouth shut while he’s still a candidate people are paying attention to? He told the Des Moines Register editorial board, on tape, that-- just like the Trump Regime criminals-- he will not comply with a subpoena issued by Congress. Isn't that one of the counts Trump is being charged with-- obstruction of Congress? Biden should quit the race today. “The reason I wouldn’t,” he said, stupidly, “is because it’s all designed to deal with Trump doing what he’s done his whole life: trying to take the focus off him. The issue is not what I did. This is all about a diversion. And we play his game all the time. He’s done it his whole career.”

It was like pulling teeth to get him to do it but he finally-- kicking and screaming the whole time-- released a list of the rich crooks who are bundling for him (i.e., hopeful future ambassadors). His corrupt campaign conveniently released the list Friday night at 9:30 PM, during the deadest week of the media calendar, between Christmas and New Years. The other 7 times Biden ran or tried to run for president, he was knocked out of the running within weeks. He’s lasting longer mostly because Trump is even more of a disgusting, repulsive hack than he is. Unfortunately, Status Quo Joe can’t win a general election, not even against Trump. He’s much worse than Hillary and he doesn’t have the idea of at least shattering a glass ceiling working for him. He’ll have nothing working for him at all outside of lockstep Democratic voters and shared hatred of Trump. So who’s the best bet to beat Trump? Well, Bernie-- And there’s a big bonus there. Not only will he beat Trump, he would be the only actually transformative and great president in almost all of our lifetimes (exception: people in their 80s and 90s).

Meagan Day and Matt Karp explained why Bernie is the most electable in a Jacobin essay about a week ago. “While every other general election matchup seems likely to descend into the bleak and muddled culture clash of 2016,” they wrote, “a contest between Sanders and Trump would present American voters with a stark choice: the populist who wants to win you health care and cancel your debt, or the rich prick who doesn’t care if you live or you die so long as your boss gets paid. Trump’s true electoral weakness is not his loutishness, his congenital lying, or even his personal corruption. It’s his function as a tool of the rich man’s Republican Party, and his blatant disinterest in making life better for the vast majority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Over the last forty years, no politician in America has focused as frankly or relentlessly on the unnecessary economic hardship faced by ordinary people as Bernie Sanders. This bread-and-butter emphasis is part of what has made Sanders the most popular presidential candidate in the field, especially among independent voters. And in a general election-- on a scale far larger than any primary contest-- no one is better prepared than Sanders to use that popular economic weapon to annihilate Donald Trump.”

For Democrats still scarred by the memory of November 2016, it is easy to imagine that Donald Trump is an electoral juggernaut, endowed with awesome and occult powers. But the truth is closer to the opposite: Trump is a historically unpopular leader who won a narrow electoral college victory over an equally unpopular rival.

Beyond a core of die-hard Republicans, most Americans don’t like Trump at all. Since his first few months in office, Trump’s overall approval rating has hovered between 38 and 42 percent, making him by far the most consistently disliked president in modern US history. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, the last two incumbents to lose an election, had much better numbers than Trump over their first three years in office.

Even in the key swing states where he defeated Hillary Clinton-- Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania-- Trump’s approval rating has been consistently underwater for over a year now.

Trump can be beaten, and the way to do it involves winning three key groups of voters in these Rust Belt battlegrounds: first, the Democrats and independents who backed Obama twice before turning to Trump; second, Obama voters who declined to vote in 2016; and third, the even larger group of Americans who do not typically vote at all.

There is reason to believe that on purely hard-headed electoral grounds, Sanders is the Democrat with the best chance to win back disaffected Obama supporters in the Rust Belt. Targeted polling of Obama-Trump voters shows Sanders and Joe Biden with a significant edge over Elizabeth Warren in Michigan and Wisconsin; while Biden still seems strongest in Pennsylvania, the differences are small.

But the real kicker is that in the 206 counties that went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then Trump in 2016, Sanders has out-fundraised all of his competitors-- by a long shot. By September 2019, he pulled in 81,841 individual donations from 33,185 donors in these flipped counties. That’s roughly three times as many as Biden, Warren, or Pete Buttigieg.

This high volume of individual small-dollar donations in Obama-Trump counties (and the “sticky support” it indicates) shows that Sanders has strong grassroots support in those places-- which makes sense, given that his political message is targeted to people whose lives get harder as elites grow richer. That captures the experience of many working-class people in the deindustrialized Rust Belt, abandoned by corporations in search of cheaper labor and higher profits elsewhere.

The most detailed study of these decisive swing voters comes from two Johns Hopkins political scientists who recently confirmed what other analysts have understood for a while: “economic anxiety” did, in fact, play a crucial role in the 2016 election. A close look at the American National Elections Survey data shows that Obama-Trump voters in 2016 were, on average, more worried about their “current financial situation” than either Romney-Trump or Obama-Clinton voters.

Obama-Trump voters were also far more likely than party-line Republicans (and just as likely as party-line Democrats) to believe that “rich people buy elections,” and to support higher taxes on the rich. And they were more likely than both Republicans or Democrats to oppose free-trade agreements that cost American jobs.

Trump wooed and won these Obama voters, the Johns Hopkins authors conclude, with a combination of “bandwagon bigotry” and “economic populism.” In 2020, Republicans will surely attempt to fire up the bigotry machine again. If Democrats cannot answer with a credible alternative economic agenda-- one that spells real change-- they are doomed to lose these voters all over again, and probably the election too.

Despite his residual popularity among Democrats stemming from the Obama years (now fading fast), Joe Biden cannot deliver this message.

He opposes strong measures to tax the ultra-rich; it is no coincidence he has more billionaire donors than any candidate in the race, Trump included. Worst of all, Biden has no credibility as an economic populist: he has devoted much of his political life to supporting free trade, including NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and permanent normal trade relations with China.

In a general election, Biden’s long record as a friend to banks and outsourcing businesses-- not to mention his son’s lucrative service on the board of a Ukrainian gas company-- will surely suffocate any Democratic attempt to battle Trump on economic grounds. Instead, a Biden-Trump contest stands every chance of offering a glassy-eyed sequel to the 2016 charade that put Trump in the White House. Of the two candidates polling competitively in the Rust Belt swing states, only Bernie Sanders can actually make the economic case Democrats need to win.

Just ask important as Obama-Trump voters are the millions of Obama voters who did not cast a ballot in 2016. Any good autopsy of the last presidential election will emphasize that turnout in key states was dismal. In Wisconsin, for example, turnout was down 3 percent from 2016, and in Ohio it was down 4 percent. In order to win, those margins need to be recovered or exceeded by Trump’s opponent in 2020.

Some commentators are quick to attribute low turnout in 2016 to restrictive voting laws, implying that nothing can be done to bring voters back to the polls. But then how to explain the fact that 1.7 million people cast incomplete ballots in these states and others, declining to vote for any presidential candidate-- far more than had been the case in 2012?

In Michigan, Donald Trump won by about ten thousand votes, while seventy-five thousand people cast ballots but declined to register a presidential preference. Meanwhile, nearly 3 million eligible voters didn’t even bother to go to the polls.

The Pew Research Center found that, nationwide, non-voters’ top reason for abstaining in 2016 was that they “did not like candidates or campaign issues.” Twenty-five percent of nonvoters cited distaste for both candidates as their rationale for staying home, compared to only 13 percent in 2012 and 8 percent in 2000.

The truth is that many people in swing states-- including many otherwise loyal Democratic voters-- were not sufficiently excited by Hillary Clinton, who they rightly associated with business-as-usual politics. And the very real “economic anxiety” that helped turn some white Obama voters toward Trump, as Malaika Jabali’s reporting has shown, helped dissuade many black Obama voters from casting a ballot in 2016, especially in battleground cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

The Obama voters who stayed home in 2016, one targeted survey has found, are focused overwhelmingly on bread-and-butter issues, with a larger share (64 percent) emphasizing the economy, health care, Medicare, and Social Security than registered voters as a whole (55 percent), or even the famously precarious Obama-Trump voters (58 percent).

If you think this suggests that these critical voters might be receptive to Bernie Sanders’s message of healthcare, education, and good jobs for all, you are right: Bernie’s favorability among this group (+38 percent) far surpasses Elizabeth Warren’s (+16 percent) and exceeds Joe Biden’s (+35 percent).

But perhaps the strongest argument for Bernie Sanders concerns a much larger group than any slice of disaffected Obama voters: the tens of millions of people, over 40 percent of the country, who typically do not vote in presidential elections.

American nonvoters, including nonvoters in the battleground states, are disproportionately young, non-white, and working-class. Bernie is distinctly popular with all of these groups, suggesting that he is by far our best shot to mobilize this vast slumbering army in a general election against Trump.

In the 2016 primaries, more people under thirty voted for Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined. Today, Sanders is the overwhelming favorite in the Democratic Party primary among young people. Trump’s approval rating among people under thirty is pathetic, but as we learned four years ago, that’s no guarantee that every young person who scorns Trump will show up to vote against him.

Democrats have a choice: either nominate a challenger who excites young people and can turn them out en masse, or hand the nomination to someone who doesn’t motivate them, greasing the wheels for a Trump victory.

Young black and Latino voters are especially enthusiastic about Bernie. Although he currently trails Joe Biden among older black primary voters, these voters are reliable Democrats and will likely come to the polls no matter the nominee. In Rust Belt and Sun Belt swing states alike, the crucial margin of victory may come down to the Democratic candidate’s ability to bring young people of color who are typically less inclined to vote to the polls. No politician in America is better suited to do that than Sanders.

And finally, an umbrella category: Sanders is the candidate of the working class, which encompasses most young and non-white people but also plenty of older white people too.

His supporters are the least likely of all the Democratic primary candidates to have a college degree. In the primary field, Sanders receives the lion’s share of individual donations from nurses, teachers, retail workers, servers, tech workers, truck drivers, and construction workers.

By contrast, Biden gets the most donations from company presidents, attorneys, real-estate developers, and investors.

People who work for a wage make up the majority of the US population, and low-wage workers make up the majority of people who don’t vote. Nearly three quarters of nonvoters in 2016 had a family income of less than $75,000.

If we want the sometimes-- or never-voters in swing states to turn out on election day, that candidate needs to have broad working-class appeal. That candidate needs to be Bernie Sanders.

Sanders has been crushing Trump in head-to-head polls for years now, and his lead is especially strong among lower-propensity voters. A recent SurveyUSA poll showed that in a matchup with Trump, Bernie actually runs a few points better than Biden (and much better than Warren) among voters making less than $80,000, and with voters who describe themselves as “poor” or “working class.” And those are just people who are already registered. Of the major Democratic candidates, Sanders clearly has the best chance to awaken the sleeping giant of young and working-class nonvoters and bring them into the electorate.

The United States has some of the lowest voter turnout in the world. Given the pervasive political alienation of the working class here, no single election is going to put us on par with nations like Belgium or Sweden, where over 80 percent of the voting age population casts ballots, compared to our paltry 55 percent in the 2016 presidential election. But precisely because the proportion of nonvoters is so large in the US, an uptick in turnout among people who don’t usually vote could be a decisive factor in 2020.

Bernie Sanders can draw people who don’t normally vote out of the woodwork. Nobody else can.

…You wouldn’t know it from mainstream media commentary, but Sanders has been relatively tender with his primary opponents so far. That’s because the rules of primary elections are different from those of general elections: primary candidates run the risk of alienating would-be supporters with harsh criticism of their opponents in a way that general election candidates typically don’t.

In a general election, we might expect Sanders to behave a bit more like he did during his first Senate race against Republican megamillionaire Rich Tarrant.

By 2006, Vermont was clearly trending Democratic, but just six years earlier, Republican Senator Jim Jeffords had won re-election by 40 points. Sensing an opportunity, Tarrant poured millions of his own money into the race, aiming to label Sanders-- still a socialist curiosity on the national stage-- as an out-of-touch Burlington radical.

But Bernie too took the gloves off against “Richie Rich,” activating his base of small donors and lambasting his opponent’s effort to buy the election as a symptom of the rigged economy. In the most expensive Senate campaign in Vermont history, Sanders won by 33 points.

If Sanders brought that kind of unbridled energy to a general election against Donald Trump, it would amount to perhaps the most high-profile spectacle of class conflict in the modern history of American electoral politics.

The campaign ad practically writes itself. In 1940s New York City, two boys were born only a few years and a few miles apart.

One, the son of a real-estate tycoon, grew up in a white-pillared mansion, literally doing his paper route from the back of his father’s limousine.

The other, the son of a penniless immigrant whose family was killed in the Holocaust, grew up in a cramped Brooklyn apartment, sleeping on a trundle bed in the living room.

One, educated in the best private schools money could buy, devoted his life to the pursuit of profit and power, abusing tenants, stiffing workers, and flaunting his wealth in New York’s highest society circles.

The other spent his life working in the trenches on behalf of the vast majority-- protesting segregation in Chicago, protecting poor tenants in Burlington, fighting for workers in Washington, and taking aim at the pampered elite who rule the economy from their penthouses.

This is a dynamic that we’ve never seen before in a presidential election. In fact, we’ve rarely seen anything like it in modern US history at all, so submerged has class politics been beneath the bipartisan pro-corporate consensus and its pablum about meritocracy and the marvels of capitalist free enterprise.

The self-seeking billionaire versus the lifelong crusader for the working class: it would be potent, resonant, and emblematic of the deep economic divide that people intuitively understand but don’t yet have the language for. It would be the kind of epic symbolic rivalry in which you can imagine people taking a side for the first time in their lives.

When people say that Sanders is a risk, they usually mean that his platform and his rhetoric are too far outside the Democratic political mainstream for comfort. But at this juncture in history, comfort itself is a risk. The Right has taken advantage of the public’s appetite for transformation in order to further enrich the masters of the universe. His opponents will have to take advantage of that same appetite to do the very opposite.

Sanders’s ambitious agenda represents a dramatic departure from the neoliberal Democratic consensus, and that’s exactly what we need to win. If we want to beat Trump and build a countervailing force capable of taking on the systems and institutions that produced him, we can’t afford not to nominate Bernie Sanders.

How "Both Sides" Forge U.S. Supremacy: The Nationalistic Hypocrisies of "Violence" and "Free Speech"

-by Sam Husseini

Many have focused on President Donald Trump's statements on Charlottesville condemning the "violence" from "both sides." Which is understandable, since the killing of Heather Heyer and overwhelming violence came from white supremacists. But virtually no one has scrutinized the first half of his remarks: Trump criticizing the "violence" of others.

How is it that Trump is designated to be in a position of judging the perpetrators of violence? The U.S. government is regularly bombing a number of countries. Just last week, Trump threatened North Korea with nuclear destruction in unusually blunt language-- "fire and fury" rather than the typical Obama administration veiled nuclear attack code lingo "all options are on the table."

On Monday, the same day Trump read a scripted condemnation of white supremacist violence, Airwars.org reported that in Syria: "Marwa, Mariam and Ahmad Mazen died with their mother and 19 other civilians in a likely Coalition strike at Raqqa."

You'd be hard pressed to find a "news" story about them. That's the concern with the effects of "violence" when it emanates from the U.S. government.

But the threats and use of violence are not new, nor is the hypocrisy. As he was ordering the ongoing bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, President Bill Clinton took time out of his schedule to address the shooting at Columbine High School: “We must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.”

Such outbreaks of domestic political violence are used not as openings for introspection about longstanding violence in U.S. society, but for rallying cries to uphold alleged virtues of the nation. The recent attacks are "repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans" Trump claims.

Since we live "under law and under the Constitution...responding to hate with love, division with unity, and violence with an unwavering resolve for justice. No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God."

The words Trump uttered seemed to echo Saint Augustine. Charles Avila in Ownership: Early Christian Teaching, outlines Augustine's beliefs: "The Creator, who alone is Absolute Owner, did not make us human beings so many 'islands,' without any relation to each other, but one human family, 'made from one mud' and sustained 'on one earth.'...We enjoy the same natural conditions: 'born under one law, living by one light, breathing one air and dying one death.'"

Thus, what seemingly originated as a universal theological admonition-- to attack the notion of private property no less-- has been perverted into a narrow nationalist one with universalist trappings. It simultaneously seems to condemn violence while actually facilitating it.

Nor is this new, either. during the presidency of Bill Clinton, he ordered up an "Initiative on Race". It's largely forgotten because its primary goal wasn't actually improving relations between different ethnic groups. Its goal was noted in its title: "One America in the 21st Century.” Not “Finally Overcoming Racism.” Not “Towards an America of Equality.”

National cohesion is the driving concern here. How can we make these differing ethnicities get along well enough to ensure that this stays one nation is a question elites must ask themselves. See my piece at the time: "'One America'-- To what Ends?"

There's a tightrope being walked here. There's a functionality to the "debate" between "both sides." The system requires a great deal of tension to keep people in their partisan boxes. The main thing that each political faction has going for it is the hatred towards the other.

But there's the threat that it could reach a threshold that tears at national unity, which is why you get Terry McAuliffe and other political figures making Trump-like brazen contradictory statements, pleading for unity one minute and denouncing white supremacists as being repugnant to American values the next, wholly unworthy of engagement.

The Democratic Party has to offer people something more than Russia-bashing, and that something seems to be opposition to a war that the party of Jefferson was on the losing side of.

Many were aghast at Trump's remarks about Washington and Jefferson: "So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"



If we do honest history, it doesn't stop. That's the point. It condemns most of the political class. And would do so to most of current political class. But that's not a conclusion many in the political class are interested in. A line can certainly be drawn from Washington to Lee, as Confederates frequently argued.

As historian Gerald Horne has argued, the U.S. Revolutionary War was largely a war to ensure the continuation of slavery. Part of the "genius" of the U.S. was the "unification" of many non-black and non-native people as "white," including southern and eastern Europeans and Arabs. So you have a large immigration pool to forge the nation.

Nor of course is slavery the only crime. It's perhaps focused on to at least some extent in our current political discourse because it's the main aspect of the imperial project that created, rather than destroyed, a major domestic constituency that was a victim of it. Native Americans are not a major domestic constituency because, unlike black folks in the U.S., their ancestors were not chained and brought to U.S. shores as slaves, but were driven out, killed en mass or made to die or be confined and marginalized.

And that project predated the formal creation of the United States. Kent A. MacDougall notes in "Empire-- American as Apple Pie" in Monthly Review that "George Washington called the nascent nation 'a rising empire.' John Adams said it was 'destined' to overspread all North America. And Thomas Jefferson viewed it as 'the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.'"

Of course, Trump isn't raising Washington and Jefferson to broaden the critique of the crimes of white supremacy, but to try to limit it. This is somewhat similar to when Bill O'Reilly said in an interview with Trump that Putin is "a killer"-- Trump replied: "There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?" Trump thus becomes the only honest person on the national stage, but largely not for the purpose of positive change. He's using what is mostly a left wing critique to entrench the establishment, which is similar to what "neocons" have done.

Trump's statements, understated as they were, about current U.S. government violence were roundly condemned by most of the political class. CNN's "chief national security correspondent" Jim Sciutto called them "relativistic"-- when they were they are the exact opposite. What's relativistic is condemning the actions of others while approving of similar actions by one's "own side." Of course, Trump is relativistic when he condemns the violence from "many sides" in Charlottesville.

So we have two relativistic dead ends: Trump "vs" the rest of the establishment. One victim for the time being is people's brain cells who have to endure and try to parse through the constant machinations.

Comments like those about U.S. violence or the history of Washington give Trump a legitimacy of sorts. The establishment media effectively keep the microphone away from anyone else who would note such defining facts, while giving reams of coverage to Trump. He effectively becomes the leading "dissident" while also being the head inquisitor. This discourse effectively immunizes the establishment from meaningful change or even dialogue.

Contrast Trump's realistic statement with what passes for dissent on Democracy Now, which recently reverentially interviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates of the once somewhat dignified journal The Atlantic. Coates stated: "The Civil War was the most lethal war in American history. The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars-- all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc."

"People."

Martin Luther King warned African Americans were "integrating into a burning house." Robert E. Lee said of blacks in the U.S.: "The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things." Many have seemingly accepted such instruction.

A path for "acceptance" by the establishment for African Americans, immigrants and others is to kiss the ring of U.S. supremacy.

This insular discussion of "both sides" in the U.S. context frequently renders the non-U.S. "other" even more expendable. As I wrote in 2015: "How #AllLivesMatter and #BlackLivesMatter Can Devalue Life":

Both sides limit who they mean by “lives.” They effectively exclude the victims of the U.S.’s highest officials. When most people use #BlackLivesMatter, they seem to be saying that all black U.S. lives matter when taken unlawfully by the government. And when most people who use #AllLivesMatter use it, they seem to be saying all U.S. lives matter when taken at the hands of police authorities-- not just black U.S. lives. But the formulation effectively excludes the lives of millions of people who U.S. officials have deemed expendable for reasons of state.

Coates also claimed: "What you have to understand is, Donald Trump’s very essence, his very identity, is the anti-Obama. ... I mean, there was a piece, I think, like just last week in BuzzFeed. It was talking about, you know, Trump’s foreign policy. And his basic deal is: 'Is Obama for it? Well, I’m against it.'"

This shows remarkable ignorance or deceit about the continuity of U.S. foreign policy in recent decades, which obviously extends to include Obama and Trump. This is especially the case for someone who lives outside the United States. Certainly, the branding and rhetoric is different, but it's supposed to be the job of "public intellectuals" to see beyond that, not calcify it.

There are many ramifications of the nationalistic blinders that are dutifully imposed by so many. Take the discussion of the ACLU's role in defending the white supremacists marching. The "both sides" here are: We should care so much about bigotry and violence that we should curtail the right of gun wielding white supremacists to march wherever they want. The other side is: Our devotion to free speech is so great that we should even allow this.

They both ring hollow to me. It is not at all clear that what is happening will root out structural racism; it has been at the level of symbols, which is where the establishment wants it to remain contained. Nor do I see a serious commitment to freedom of speech being displayed by the ACLU and others, as serious infringement of freedom of speech occur with hardly an objection. Partisan establishment apparatchiks dominate media at virtually every level, with government facilitation. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have effectively taken over much of the town square and are increasingly skewing what speech gets heard. Such is the nature of corporate power, backed by the state, right now.

The likely "collateral damage" of such "debates" will be critics of U.S. empire. Consider that as the national ACLU seemed to be backtracking from their position, the California ACLU put out a statement that read in part "First Amendment does not protect people who incite or engage in violence." Who is going to be the likely victim of this? White supremacists-- or someone who explains why Hezbollah might want to lob missiles at Israel? The line that the California ACLU seeks to draw would seemingly ironically lynch John Brown, whose actual execution was overseen by none other than Robert E. Lee in blue uniform.

Twitter suspended hundreds of thousands of accounts last year allegedly linked to ISIS, with hardly a word of protest.

Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel-- possibly the most anti-ISIS outlet going-- is banned in the U.S. without outcry; with barely a note.

The very discussion about "hate groups" is perverse. The entire political culture in the U.S. lives off of hate. The pro Hillary Clinton rhetoric is "Love Trumps Hate," but Clinton, like Trump, feeds off hate. There certainly are explicitly white supremacist groups. And there can be some distinction made between them and the merely implicitly structurally racist establishment. But the Democratic and Republican Parties would implode in a minute if it were not for the hatred of the other.

What's needed is that freedom of speech triumph and in today's world it's not clear if that is compatible with the nation state and corporate power in their current construct. In its present form and use, the internet is ceasing to be "world wide web"-- it is constricted in a myriad of ways by national boundaries and unaccountable corporate diktat that need to be questioned if not obliterated in our contemporary world.

The taking down of Confederate monuments poses a some opportunity-- a groundswell of democratic grassroots action could happen. But the tearing down needs to be built upon. In Baltimore, faced with the prospect of activists taking down Confederate statues, city officials abruptly arranged for their overnight disappearance. Local artists put a sculpture of an African American woman atop the pedestal in their place.

This hints at a greater solution to the immediate controversy over Confederate monuments. I recall the first time I saw, or at least comprehended, a Confederate memorial-- with Lee or some other general atop a horse, I think in New Orleans. I thought the solution would be not to remove them, but to build around them. A tree could hover above with strange fruit hanging down, for example.

This would diminish the "beauty" that Donald Trump sees in the Confederate statues while acknowledging the history, both in its illusion as to what it pretends to depict-- and the reality of the selective erection of such statues.

Indeed, perhaps we need more-- not fewer-- monuments to the Civil War, to all wars. If done right, they would actually be monuments for peace. Consider the nature of war, the consequences, the actual reality of mangled corpses beneath the "great men" atop their horses.

But there are perils at every turn. When the U.S. Treasury decided to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill last year, many welcomed it. But it seemed to me to be a subtle but real step to co-opting the legacy of the Underground Railroad to one that could be used to help justify "humanitarian interventionism"-- ie, U.S. militarism with some bogus moral pretext attached. That is, the language of the U.S. Civil War could be used to "free" people around the world as the State Department sees fit, as now with Venezuela. As Simon Bolivar said: “The United States seems destined by Providence to plague America with torments in the name of freedom.”

Ironically, some denouncing Trump's "fascist" proclivities have taken refuge in the actions of corporate bosses who have resigned from the American Manufacturing Council that Trump launched earlier this year. As Noam Chomsky [see video up top] and others have long noted, corporate structure is totalitarian. The saviors here are part of the threat. Perhaps doubly so since the Council was a corporate-government cooperative entity.

The pretexts and posturing run throughout public discourse in the U.S., as it's dominated by apparatchiks around Trump and around the Democratic Party. Only an ever vigilant parsing of the deceits and actions that are rooted in principles and a sense of the global commons will see us through.



Sam Husseini is founder of VotePact.org, which advocates principled left-right cooperation to break the duopoly. He's also the founder of CompassRoses.org, an art project to make apparent the one world we inhabit. Special thanks to Berkley Bragg.

  

How Many Republican Congressional Careers Can Trumpy The Clown Kill By November?

I don't expect we'll see many ads as blatantly anti-Trump from Republican incumbents as the one above from Mark Kirk's campaign. I suppose he's gambling that any Trump die-hards who are so outraged by it that they won't vote for him, will be more than made up for by Illinois' independents. I don't think Trump has responded yet. Maybe no one has mentioned it to him or even told him Mark Kirk is a Republican senator.

Trump knows Rubio, though. And it must infuriate him that Rubio is being negative about him again-- even if he's finally stopped making fun of Trump's deformed penis. Hillary is favored to win in Florida-- and win big [Quinnpiac found Hillary ahead 47-39%]-- and, instead of helping, Rubio says he won't campaign with Trump in his home state. He told CNN that he's not "looking to undermine him, but I think the differences between us on key issues are so significant that I just don't plan to campaign-- I've got to run my own race." Earlier he was encouraging Floridians to vote for him so he could stand up against either of the two unpalatable presidential candidates.



Dan Friedman speculated for Fortune readers that a big Trump loss in Florida could undo Rubio’s senate reelection bid. Rubio, he wrote, "may have briefly looked like the Republican frontrunner last winter, but today he is just one of several endangered Republican incumbents whose reelection chances will fall further as Trump’s numbers drop." Jennifer Duffy, a Senate specialist for the Cook Political Report that "if Trump gets blown out in Florida, it will be a whole lot harder for Rubio to win. And like his colleagues, he will be answering for everything Trump says and does."

Trump’s big win in Rubio’s home state of Florida in March forced the Republican senator out of the presidential contest. Now that Rubio has reversed his oft-repeated claim that he would not seek a second Senate term, a big Trump loss may undo Rubio’s second 2016 campaign.

The incumbent Republicans trying hardest to work out strategies that offend the least number of Trump backers while shielding themselves from Trump's toxicity are Ron Johnson in strongly anti-Trump Wisconsin, Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Rob Portman in Ohio, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, John McCain in Arizona, Richard Burr in North Carolina, Chuck Grassley in Iowa, even Arkansas' John Boozman and Missouri's Roy Blunt.

Democratic House candidates see the opportunity Trump presidents as well. Duwayne Gregory, the Long Island progressive head of the Suffolk County legislature is running for the South Shore seat held by Trump endorser Peter King and Gregory is making that support a key part of the election debate. Yesterday he sent out an e-mail asking Long Islanders to "Say “NO” to Donald Trump and any candidate who supports him!"

Peter King and Donald Trump sounded exactly the same last week in the wake of the tragedy in Orlando. They both made outrageous accusations, jumped to false conclusions, and continued spreading offensive rhetoric against minorities, especially Muslim-Americans. It’s clear why Peter King won’t stand up to Trump-- because he agrees with him!

We deserve a representative who shares our values and won’t shy away from denouncing Trump’s bigotry. Join me in taking the pledge: I will vote against Donald Trump and any candidate who supports him!

Donald Trump is the most outrageous and bigoted presidential candidate in decades, and it’s vital that Democrats hold strong against him and any Republicans that support him this year.

Last week, Trump repeated his calls for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. and even suggested Secretary Clinton and President Obama were involved with and responsible for the attack in Orlando. Republicans, including Peter King, fell in line and started echoing his baseless and offensive pronouncements.

Republicans who refuse to denounce Trump’s racism, sexism, xenophobia, and insulting behavior do not deserve to serve their community in elected office. And that includes Peter King.

State Senator Ruben Kihuen won a hard-fought primary and is now the official Democratic Party challenger to right-wing Republican Cresent Hardy in a huge Nevada district that leans Democratic. Policy-wise, he sees Hardy and Trump as two peas in a pod. Last night he told us that "Hardy can't run from Donald Trump because they agree on so many issues-- and perhaps the most shameful is their shared contempt for people with disabilities. Trump has viciously mocked a reporter for his disability, while Congressman Hardy thinks the disabled are "a drain on society." This is wildly out of step with the values of Nevadans." Help the good guys, like Duwayne and Ruben replace the bad guys... by clicking on the good guys thermometer below:

No, Jim Keady Won't Sit Down And Shut Up

by Tracy B Ann

Jim Keady is running for Congress in New Jersey's 3rd district and despite Chris Christie's "request" for him to sit down and shut up when he was protesting for Superstorm Sandy victims, Jim Keady just isn't that kind of guy. He doesn't sit down and shut up when people need help and aren't getting it.

Chris Christie wasn't home in New Jersey enough to realize what the victims of Sandy needed. If he cared he would have been there; Jim Keady was. I remember seeing this on the news; a woman whose house was destroyed was given $10,000 by FEMA. (80% of the Federal money given for victims has not been distributed by the State.)

At that time, I was wishing I could have a screened in back porch. How much could that cost? Very simple; some posts, a bit of decking, some screen and a door or two. The lowest price I got was $10,000 (I did not get a porch) and this woman was expected to rebuild her house for that amount?!?!

Plus, she and many others got letters from FEMA asking for half of the money back. Ok, not asking, demanding and threatening. Where was Chris Christie? Not in New Jersey, but Jim Keady was.

He told me he's running for Congress to represent the people in the 3rd district in New Jersey and the United States. "There are too many in DC who serve billionaires and big business and have no time for the everyday people in America," he says.  Which can sometimes sound cliché, and I admit that when he first started talking to me about that I inwardly rolled my eyes. He added:

"Every decision or vote a Congressperson makes not only affects their immediate district but every person in the US, which is why it's important to unite for progressive candidates and progressive values everywhere in the United States."

He had me with that. I may not live in New Jersey but as a member of Congress he can help improve my life even here in Tennessee, because we are the United States of America. If that wasn't enough, he went on to tell me that he shares the progressive message and commitment of Bernie Sanders. To "get informed and get engaged." He truly is a grassroots warrior for social justice.

"I don't need to be convinced of wage equality, gender equality, racial equality, labor rights, the important of environmental issues and climate change. It's part of my DNA."

I asked him about his connection to the band Rage Against the Machine. He's noted as one of their Freedom Fighters of the month on their website.

That all starts with his soccer career.

Jim played and coached soccer at the high school, college and professional level. He also taught high school religion for 5 years along with coaching soccer. He played for 3 seasons as a goalkeeper for the NJ Imperials.

He has a Masters Degree in Theology from St. John's University where he was also a soccer coach when they were the defending NCAA Division I National Champions.

In getting his degree in Theology he focused on social ethics and pastoral theology. It should be no surprise that when he was forced to wear Nike's as part of a more than 3 million dollar endorsement deal St. Johns signed with Nike, Jim Keady resigned rather than wear the Nike shoes.

During his studies for his degree he had learned that Nike pays their workers $1.25 cents a day, Even though studies were pointing out that this wasn't a living wage, even in Indonesia, Jim was having a hard time getting this point across.

Jim Keady was being featured on all the major network sports shows and speaking at the top colleges in the country but couldn't get past the "Those are great jobs for those people" mentality.

So he went to live in Indonesia and proceeded to see what it was like to survive on $1.25 a day. He came back being able to testify first hand that these are starvation wages.

This all got a lot of press and got Rage Against the Machine's attention, which is when they made him one of their Freedom Fighters of the month. Keady met Tom Morello, originally from Rage (most recently on tour with Bruce Springsteen), back then. They've been friends ever since.

Morello and Serj Tankian of System of a Down are the co-founders of Axis of Justice, a political group whose declared purpose is "to bring together musicians, fans of music, and grassroots political organizations to fight for social justice together." Jim Keady did consultant work for them for 2 years.

Keady also made a documentary about his experience in Indonesia called Behind the Swoosh.



NJ-03 is discombobulated swing district that takes in large parts of Ocean and Burlington counties including the vast, mostly empty Pine Barrens and stretches across the state from Tom's River to the suburbs northeast of Philly. Obama won the district twice, 51-48% against McCain and, 4 years later, 52-48% against Romney. The incumbent is Republican freshman and backbencher Tom MacArthur.

Before Keady faces off against MacArthur in November, he has to win a June 7th primary against Frederick LaVergne, who ran for this seat in 2012 with no party affiliation and got .02% of the vote. In 2014, as a third party candidate, what he called a "Democratic-Republican candidate."

Meanwhile, MacArthur is a notorious self-funder who wrote himself five 1 million dollar checks. Jim Keady is not a millionaire, he runs his family's Lighthouse Tavern in Waretown. He wants dark money out of elections so that the government can represent the majority of Americans, not the few.

When Keady was a city council member for Asbury Park, he wouldn't let anyone buy him a beer, not even people he'd known all of his life, and he still doesn't. He says you have to draw a line early and stick to it.

This is exactly what we need in Congress, in our political system today. This is what we need to counteract the recent Supreme Court arguments over former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's bribery charges. When Justice Stephen Breyer says "the government’s standard for criminal corruption is so vague that political figures don't know what conduct crosses the line" when referring to McDonnell accepting $20,000 shopping sprees and $5,000 engraved Rolex's, I just want to scream.

When I'm done screaming I'll go to donate to Jim Keady's campaign fund, because this guy knows where to draw the line and he draws it at one single beer.

You can contribute here or at the thermometer just above on the right. Keep in mind, Jim  Keady is also a supporter of 90for90 a voter advocacy movement. He doesn't have much info on his website (go to his Facebook page and Twitter feed for that) but what he does have front and center is voter registration information. If I wasn't already a huge fan, that would have done it right there.

Is Fascism Now Inevitable?

While most of the fascisticly-inclined morons who support Herr Trumpf say they would stick with him if he dumps the GOP and takes the independent route, more and more mainstream conservative Republicans are indicating that they won't even vote for Trumpf if he is the GOP nominee! In a contest between Trumpf and Bernie, who do you think McCain would vote for, at least in the privacy of a curtained voting booth?

"I respect Bernie Sanders. I will also say to anyone who will ask, Bernie Sanders is an honest man. He's an honest man and his word is good. Once we reached an agreement, that agreement stuck. And now he's brushing his hair, which is really a remarkable thing."

The last I read about McCain's (printable) thoughts on Trumpf didn't seem likely to lead to an endorsement. "It's just foolishness. It's been a long series of statements like this that have been just foolish." The other Republican senator from Arizona doesn't seem any more enthusiastic over Herr Trumpf than McCain does.

Bob Dole was funny, but he made the point that the other fascisticly-inclined GOP candidate this year, Ted Cruz, isn't any better than Trumpf... and also not worth voting for. When Andrea Mitchell asked Dole on her MSNBC show if he'd vote for Trumpf if he were the Republican Party nominee. He said he wouldn't. "Well, I mean, I've supported Democrats in the past. And not that I'm-- you know, hard rock Republican." When Mitchell asked him about the Texas fascist behind door #2, he said he'd probably oversleep on election day and not vote. "Because he used to make these speeches. 'Remember President Dole? Do you remember President McCain?' The inference was that we were all a bunch of liberals, and only he is a true conservative. And he uses the word 'conservative' in-- more than he ever uses the word 'Republican,' the party. So, it would be-- it would be difficult."

The fact of the matter is, however, the NRSC, the GOP committee charged with electing Republicans to the Senate, has been hawking Trump crap online. But, as Greg Sargent reported in the Washington Post yesterday, Cruz is rubbing his hands together expectantly as he waits for Trumpf to strangle on his own words.

In the interview [with Steve Instep at NPR], Cruz says he disagrees with Trump’s most incendiary proposal-- the plan to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States-- but he declines to criticize Trump over it. Cruz justifies this by claiming he has declined to attack other candidates, such as Marco Rubio. That’s questionable-- he has repeatedly attacked Rubio as soft on “amnesty.” And in any case, in calling for a Muslim ban, Trump has done something more worthy of criticism than Rubio has. But Cruz won’t criticize him over it. That’s apparently crucial to his effort to win over Trump voters later.

In the interview, Cruz also reiterates his call for restricting the entry into the U.S. of refugees from certain countries-- with an exception for those who are victims of genocide, which has been widely seen as an effort to exempt from the ban refugees who are Christian or non-Muslim. Pressed on this by Inskeep, Cruz doesn’t really deny that this might amount, in practical terms, to a “religious test.” Instead he defends his proposal on the grounds that the “religious persecution” those exceptions are suffering is legitimate grounds for exempting them. “What is happening to the Christians by ISIS is qualitatively different,” Cruz says. Even if one accepts that argument, by Cruz’s own implication this would amount in practical terms to a religion-based refugee admission policy, even if it isn’t put in stark Trumpian terms.

...But this idea-- that, no, of course we aren’t saying that Muslims are inherently evil and violent, but when Obama says this, he is hyping Islamophobia and apologizing for terrorism-- is crucial to the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game that is being played here. (Marco Rubio is also playing a version of this game.) The basic calculation driving this notion-- along with the refusal to directly fault Trump’s anti-Muslim demagoguery and the feints towards religious screening for refugees-- represent a bet on what is really driving Trump supporters and what will be necessary to capture them later. It’s a clever strategy. And it might work.

Edward Luttwak is a fascinating guy, especially if you're into military strategy-- and even more especially if you're into the military strategy of the late Roman Empire, one which he's written several books. He's also a U.S. Defense Department consultant. A Jew, he was born in Romania while his country was in the grips of Ion Antonescu's fascist dictatorship and an ally of Nazi Germany. Just over 10 years ago he wrote an article for the London Review of Books that I thought would be of interest to all the folks shocked by the Republican Party's recent turn towards fascism, Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future. From his very first paragraph, there is implicit a non-fascist Bernie solution to society's most pressing problem and, of course the fascist Trumpf/Cruz solution.

That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth is an old-hat truth now disputed only by a few cryogenically-preserved Gosplan enthusiasts and a fair number of poorly-paid Anglo-Saxon academics. That the capitalist engine achieves growth as well as it does because its relentless competition destroys old structures and methods, thus allowing more efficient structures and methods to rise in their place, is the most famous bit of Schumpeteriana, even better-known than the amorous escapades of the former University of Czernowitz professor. And, finally, that structural change can inflict more disruption on working lives, firms, entire industries and their localities than individuals can absorb, or the connective tissue of friendships, families, clans, elective groupings, neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities or even nations can withstand, is another old-hat truth more easily recognised than Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be spelled.

What is new-hat about the present situation is only a matter of degree, a mere acceleration in the pace of the structural changes that accompany economic growth, whatever its rate. But that, as it turns out, is quite enough to make all the difference in the world. Structural change, with all its personal upheavals and social disruptions, is now quite rapid even when there is zero growth, becoming that much faster when economies do grow. The engine turns, grinding lives and grinding down established human relationships, even when the car is stopped; and reaches Ferrari-like rpms at the most modest steamroller speeds.

One obvious cause of the increased destructiveness of the capitalist process is the worldwide retreat of public ownership, central planning, administrative direction and regulatory control, with all their rigidities inimical to innovation, structural change, economic growth, individual dislocation and social disruption alike. From Argentina to Zambia, with the entire Communist world in between, state ownership of economic enterprises was once accepted as the guarantor of the public interest: it is now seen as the guarantee of bureaucratic idleness, technical stagnation and outright thievery. Central planning, once honoured as the arithmetic highway to assured prosperity, is now known to be impossible simply because no group of mere humans can predetermine next year’s demand for every one of hundreds of different polymers, not to mention two to three million other items, from tower cranes to toothpicks. Administrative direction, once gloriously successful in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, at least helpful in France, a famous failure in George Brown’s Britain, and ineffective or corrupt, or ineffective and corrupt, almost everywhere else, is now being abandoned (slowly) even in Japan, having been abandoned long ago almost everywhere else.

As for regulatory controls, they do not cease to increase in number, because even if steam locomotives need no longer be prevented by speed limits from causing cows to abort, many rather more recent technical novelties entail regulation, and some positively demand it-- for example, to allocate frequencies. Other reasons for regulation are legion, but commercial (e.g. airline) as opposed to health and safety and environmental regulation has definitely retreated, and continues to do so. With that, efficiency increases, once-secure enterprises face the perils of the market, and employees once equally secure no longer are so.

Another partly related and equally obvious cause of accelerated structural change is the much-celebrated unification of the puddles, ponds, lakes and seas of village, provincial, regional and national economies into a single global economic ocean, and thus the increasing exposure of those same puddles, ponds, lakes and seas to the tidal waves of change in the global economic ocean, owing to the removal of import barriers, capital-export prohibitions, investment controls and licensing restrictions on the sale of transnational services; the advent and rapid geographic spread of reliable, cheap and instant telecommunications that ease the formation of new commercial relationships both materially and psychologically; the diminishing significance of transport costs due to the waning material content of commerce, as well as to the cheapening of transport with the improvement of air services, harbours and roads-- notably rural roads in Asia and Latin America if not Africa; the diffusion of up-to-date technologies for the production of export goods or components, even within otherwise backward local economies; and the hammering-down of once diverse consumer preferences into uniformity by transnational mass-media imagery and advertising.

The overall effect of ‘globalisation’ is that any production anywhere, can expand enormously, far beyond the limits of the domestic market, insofar as it is competitive-- and of course that any production anywhere, and the related employment, can be displaced at any time by cheaper production from someplace else in the world. Life in the global economy is full of exciting surprises-- and catastrophic downfalls.

Still another cause of disproportionately rapid structural change is the rather sudden arrival of the long-awaited, very long-delayed, big increases in administrative and clerical efficiency that machines for electronic computation, data storage, reproduction and internal communication were supposed to ensure long ago. Partly because with generational change even senior managers can now themselves work those machines if they want to, thereby allowing them to understand their uses, abuses and non-uses; partly because more junior managers are increasingly compelled to use those machines in place of clerical help and clerical companionship; and partly because computer networks allow managers at the next level up literally to oversee, right on their own screens, the work that their underlings are doing or not doing, thereby giving it the same transparency as assembly-line work, with the same immediate visibility of inefficient procedures, inefficient habits and inefficient employees-- for all these reasons the long-awaited, long-delayed increase in the efficiency of office-work has finally arrived, exposing hitherto more secure white-collar workers to the work-place dislocations, mass firings or at least diminishing employment prospects that have long been the lot of blue-collar industrial workers in mature economies.

At the present time, for example, even though the US economy is in full recovery, white-collar job reductions by the thousand are being announced by one famous corporation after another. They call it ‘restructuring’ or, more fancifully, ‘re-engineering the corporation’, and duly decorate the proceedings with the most recently fashionable management-consultant verbiage, those catchy, suggestive yet profoundly shallow slogans coined by the authors of the latest business-book bestsellers, who proclaim them expensively and with evangelical insistence on the corporate lecture circuit, with the result that they are then repeated with great solemnity to audiences of deferential, bewildered employees in corporate briefings, ‘workshops’ and ‘retreats’. But the real economies that Wall Street anticipates by bidding up the shares-- thereby hugely rewarding mass-firing top executives who have stock options-- come not from the background music of the management-consultant verbiage but rather from the displacement of telephone-answering secretaries by voice-mail systems, the displacement of letter-writing secretaries by computer word-processing and faxboards, the displacement of filing secretaries by electronic memories, and the consequent displacement of clerical supervisors; as well as from the displacement of junior administrators by automated paperflow processing and the consequent displacement of their administrative supervisors; as well as from the displacement of all the middle managers who are no longer needed to supervise the doings and undoings of both clerical and administrative employees. That is why corporations whose sales are increasing are nevertheless not adding white-collar positions; corporations whose sales are level are eliminating some white-collar positions; and corporations in decline are eliminating very many-- tens of thousands in the case of the sick giants IBM and GM.

Economists have long deplored the disappointing productivity gains of the administrative superstructure in advanced economies, in spite of the proliferation of office electronics. This was numerically irritating to the fraternity, because the goods-producing sector, whose productivity did keep increasing very nicely, has long been of diminishing significance, so that the productivity lag of administrative activities was lowering the numbers for the economy as a whole. Those particular economists need fret no longer: office-work productivity is finally increasing at a fast pace, allowing employers to rid themselves of employees just as fast.



There may be additional explanations for the acceleration of structural economic change. What counts, however, is the result: Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’-- the displacement of old skills, trades and entire industries with their dependent localities, by more efficient new skills, trades and entire industries – is now apt to span years, often very few years, rather than generations. And that is quite enough to make the colossal difference aforementioned. The same rate of structural change that favours global prosperity, that benefits many nations and regions, and that many other nations and regions can at least cope with, now brutally exceeds the adaptive limits of individuals, families and communities. When the sons and daughters of US steelworkers, British miners or German welders must become software-writers, teachers, lawyers or for that matter shop attendants, because the respective paternal industries offer less and less employment, few of them have reason to complain. But when the same mechanisms of change work so fast that steelworkers, coalminers or welders must themselves abandon lifetime proclivities, self-images and workplace companions to acquire demanding new skills-- on penalty of chronic unemployment or unskilled low-wage labour-- failure and frustration are the likely results. To be sure, nothing could be more old-hat than to worry about the travails of steelworkers, miners or welders, obsolete leftovers of the hopelessly passé white/male industrial working class. So the big news is the dislocation of white-collar employment as well.

I have no statistics that measure the decline in security of employment. But statistics do show very clearly the impact of a weakening demand for white-collar labour in the decline of white-collar earnings. Back in the early Eighties, when trade-union officials and incurable proletariophiliacs were bitterly complaining that American workers were being extruded from well-paid industrial employment into minimum-wage ‘hamburger-flipping’ jobs, the lusty defenders of the infallibility of free-market economics silenced them in Wall Street Journal editorials by pointing to the rapid increase in ‘money-flipping’ jobs in banking, insurance and financial services, as well as in then-booming real-estate offices. That is where the debate ended-- prematurely. By the end of 1992 more than 6.8 million Americans were duly employed in the financial sector (banking, insurance, finance and real-estate offices). One might assume, as the Wall Street Journal certainly presumed, that these people were a well-paid lot: but the average earnings of the 4.9 million non-supervisory employees among them were only $10.14 per hour, as compared to $10.98 for production workers in manufacturing. The 1.1 million clerks, tellers and other rank-and-file employees of banks earned much less than the sector’s average at $8.19 per hour, while 48,500 of their counterparts in stock and commodity brokerages-- at the very heart of ‘money-flipping’-- duly earned much more at $13.53 per hour. Still, if any disemployed industrial workers did equip themselves with the obligatory broad red suspenders to seek their fortunes on Wall Street, they would have found the rewards surprisingly modest.

At a time when it was forever being explained that it was silly to worry about the decline of manufacturing jobs in the age of ‘services’, the much larger story is that service employees throughout the US economy are actually paid much less than their counterparts still holding industrial jobs. Moreover the average hourly earnings of service employees have been going down for years in real dollars net of inflation. In the entire retail trade, for example, from department stores to street-corner news-stands, the 17.7 million ‘non-supervisory’ employees earned an average of $6.88 per hour in November 1990. In fact, their hourly average went down from a peak of $6.20 in 1978 to $5.04 in 1990 in constant 1982 dollars. To be sure, the retail trade is full of teenagers still in school who work only on weekends and holidays, and married women who work only part-time. That can he expected to depress earnings, and it does. Besides, many retail employees get commissions that are not reported to the collectors of labour statistics. But neither part-timers with modest demands nor commissions are to be found in transportation and public utilities (including railroads, local bus services, mass transit, trucking, courier services, river barges, airlines, telephone companies etc). Nevertheless, the 4.9 million non-supervisory employees in that entire sector had average hourly earnings of $13.07 in November 1990-- substantially more, $2.09 more as it happens, than their counterparts in manufacturing, but still substantially less than those same employees had earned in the Seventies in real money. In fact their earnings peaked in 1978 at $11.18 per hour in constant 1982 dollars-- as opposed to $9.58 at the end of 1990 in those same dollars.

...The median earnings of all males in the 45-54 age bracket with four years of higher education-- some two million Americans, all but 150,000 of them white-- actually peaked in 1972 at some $55,000 in 1992 dollars; they stagnated through three downward economic cycles until 1989, before sharply declining to $41,898 by 1992. From other evidence we know that those numbers average out two phenomena that are equally unprecedented in the American experience: in that same population, the combined total income of the top 1 per cent of all earners increased sensationally, and the combined total of the bottom 80 per cent declined sharply. Again, that implies in one way or another a more-than-proportionate quantum of dislocation. Needless to say, individual working lives cannot be dislocated without damaging families, elective affiliations and communities-- the entire moss of human relations which can only grow over the stones of economic stability. Finally, it is entirely certain that what has already happened in the United States is happening or will happen in every other advanced economy, because all of them are exposed to the same forces.

In this situation, what does the moderate Right-- mainstream US Republicans, British Tories and all their counterparts elsewhere-- have to offer? Only more free trade and globalisation, more deregulation and structural change, thus more dislocation of lives and social relations. It is only mildly amusing that nowadays the standard Republican/Tory after-dinner speech is a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one. Thus at the present time the core of Republican/Tory beliefs is a perfect non-sequitur. And what does the moderate Left have to offer? Only more redistribution, more public assistance, and particularist concern for particular groups that can claim victim status, from the sublime peak of elderly, handicapped, black lesbians down to the merely poor.

Thus neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the moderate Left is inclined to offer. Nor are they particularly envious of the rich, and they therefore tend to be uninterested in redistribution. Few of them are actually unemployed, and they are therefore unmoved by Republican/Tory promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: what they want is security in the jobs they already have-- i.e. precisely what unfettered markets threaten.

A vast political space is thus left vacant by the Republican/Tory non-sequitur, on the one hand, and moderate Left particularism and assistentialism, on the other. That was the space briefly occupied in the USA by the 1992 election-year caprices of Ross Perot, and which Zhirinovsky’s bizarre excesses are now occupying in the peculiar conditions of Russia, where personal economic insecurity is the only problem that counts for most people (former professors of Marxism-Leninism residing in Latvia who have simultaneously lost their jobs, professions and nationalities may he rare, but most Russians still working now face at least the imminent loss of their jobs). And that is the space that remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people. Such a party could even be as free of racism as Mussolini’s original was until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be corporativist restraints on corporate Darwinism, and delaying if not blocking barriers against globalisation. It is not necessary to know how to spell Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to recognise the Fascist predisposition engendered by today’s turbocharged capitalism.