politics for the 99%

… why Establishment Voices Stigmatize the “White Working Class” as Racist and Xenophobic – Published on Global Research.ca, by Prof. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, Oct 6, 2016.

… The powerful establishment interests vested in the continuation of the status quo and, therefore, the election of Hillary Clinton, have created a campaign narrative that tends to stereotype and stigmatize the white working class as racist, sexist and xenophobic.

This was most colorfully expressed recently by Clinton herself when in an unguarded moment before her wealthy donors in Manhattan she stated that half of all Trump supporters consisted of a “basket of deplorables.” Those backing Trump, she continued, were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it” … //

… Are Trump’s Supporters Driven by Racism and Xenophobia? … //
… Why Are the Establishment Elites so Eager to Reject Economic/Class Explanations? … //

… Concluding Remarks:

Capitalism has always employed the age-old tactic of divide-and-rule to pit various strata of the working class against each other in order to keep them docile. This tactic has especially been used more effectively in the United States because as a country of immigrants it has always benefitted from the flow of successive waves of migrant workers who, due to the vulnerability of their circumstances, could easily be exploited more compared to the workers who had arrived before them.

Not only has U.S. capitalism handsomely benefitted from this perennial competition between successive generations of migrant workers, between the old and new migrants, but also elite politicians have often taken advantage of this competition for their own nefarious political and economic purposes. “Slave owners did this by getting laws passed that required white indentured servants and black slaves to be treated differently. Richard Nixon did it by employing the cynical ‘Southern strategy.’ Now Trump is following in this long tradition by pitting struggling white people against immigrants and Muslims” [12].

Hillary Clinton has employed a different tack in pitting the working people against each other: while Trump is guilty of peddling racism and xenophobia, she is guilty of touting moralities, identity politics and wedge issues. Feigning an artificial moral high ground, she (and other elites of the establishment) argues that the worsening of the economic conditions of the white working Americans is mainly the result of their own personal and/or moral failures: laziness, racism, sexism and xenophobia.

While often misplaced or misdirected, the white working Americans’ economic grievances are real. Hillary Clinton and the powerful by-partisan supporters of her campaign tend to dismiss this reality because acknowledging it would be tantamount to acknowledging their own guilt: the fact that their economic policies of the past four decades have been disastrous for working Americans.

Blaming white American workers (as Clinton does) or migrant workers (as Trump does) for the sins of neoliberal austerity economic policies of the past forty years or so represent a blatant effort on the part of the two presidential candidates to scapegoat the working class in order to sanitize the capitalist class. Despicable as these attempts at deflection and deception are, however, one cannot really blame Clinton or Trump for pursuing such self-serving policies of diversion and obfuscation in the service of their class, the reach and powerful … //

… (full long text).

(Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University). He is the author of Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014), The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave–Macmillan 2007), and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989). He is also a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion).

Links:

Getting Ready for the Tory Storm in Manitoba (Canada), on The Bullet, Socialist Project’s E-Bulletin no. 1312, by David Camfield, Oct 7, 2016; (se also: Manitoba general election, 2016, on en.wikipedia);

Economic Update: Capital for Worker Coops, 55.32 min, uploaded by Democracy At Work, Oct 6, 2016 … Updates on US workers’ productivity rising while wages flat since 2009, US corps evading taxes, Gallup Poll on poor US job picture, wealth of billionaires enough, if redistributed, to change global economic conditions, rising corp debt problem. Major discussions of (1) ways and means of providing capital to worker coops, and (2) why technical “progress” excites capitalists and worries workers: the problem is capitalism;

Nahed’s “Crime”… and Punishment, on Dissident Voice, by Ahmad Barqawi, Oct 6, 2016;
He was a Jordanian Journalist, a Leftist, a self-proclaimed “anti-Imperialist”. He was a pro-Syria activist and a fierce supporter of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s Government against the West’s war of aggression for regime change in that country. And now he is the victim of Jordan’s first ever political assassination …;

Droning Julian Assange and Wikileaks, the Clinton Formula, on Global Research.ca, by Dr. Binoy Kampmark, Oct 5, 2016; … for one, it shows that Hillary Clinton will not be averse to muddying the waters of international law she is so happy to proclaim against Russia, China and other contesting bug bears. For another, it does not suggest that a Clinton administration is going to go soft on whistleblowers, or the secrecy complex. The latter is richly ironic given the Secretary’s own slap dash attitude to secrecy protocols when heading the State Department …;

New Report: Building Decent Jobs from the Ground Up, on Worker’s Action Centre.org, Sept 28, 2016; download the report, 84 pages;

Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, by Google Scholar-search;
example: [BOOK] Global capital, human needs and social policies, by Ian Gough, 2016; … also on amazon;

… and this:

• Kokoda Trail, Papau New Guinea, on Google Images-search.