I mentioned last week in this blog post - The dislocation between the PMC and…
Both main candidates were unelectable but one was more in tune with the nation than the other
So from January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will inherit the on-going genocide that the US government has been party to in the Middle East. He will then have no cover and will be judged accordingly. What follows are a few thoughts that I had when I watched the unfolding disaster for the Democrats and the amazing victory that Trump has recorded. It was obviously a Hobson’s Choice facing the US voters (from an outside perspective), which also tells us something about the way the US society has evolved. Both candidates were in my view unelectable. But the voters didn’t agree with me. And, one candidate was much smarter that the other and better understood the plight the American voters are in after several decades of neoliberalism. Spare the thought.
I am on the public record as saying that if I was an American voter I would have voted for Jill Stein because, despite some misgivings I have about her narratives (particularly about macroeconomics), she has been consistently green and consistently against the way the Israelis have treated the Palestinians.
Those two issues are of utmost importance in my World View.
I noted that many claimed a vote for her would effectively be a vote for Trump.
Which implies that some people should not have agency to express their voting preference, which I would find offensive if I was an American.
The Democrats who tried to vilify Jill Stein on that basis were really saying that voters should not have a choice and should just vote for Harris no matter what they thought.
That was the line that Bernie Sanders took telling people in his last Op Ed that Kamala might be bad on Gaza but Trump would be worse.
Well, Trump hasn’t been president or vice-president while the US government has been sending massive quantities of lethal weapons and support to Israel, which has enabled the genocide to proceed.
Only one Party has done that so far in this current period.
So no matter what Sanders said, he couldn’t justify what his own party and the candidate he wanted people to vote for, had been up to.
Which has been a disgusting and disgraceful abuse of human rights in the most extreme form.
The US government could have brought Israel to heal if it had withdrawn all financial and political support for the Israeli government.
A US boycott of Israel would have forced the Israeli’s to negotiate a security solution rather than the path they have taken to obliterate a whole population of people they don’t want to exist.
The latter course of action was exactly the path the Nazis took in the 1940s in Europe.
History is repeating itself in that respect.
I don’t think the Gaza issue was all that important in the overall voting in the Presidential election but it seems that in some electoral districts it was instrumental in Trump’s victory.
I read that in the “two cities, which have the highest percentage of Arab Americans among all cities in the United States”, Trump either won or made huge gains relative to Harris (Source).
The article reported that:
In Dearborn, where 55% of the residents are of Middle Eastern descent, Trump won with 42.48% of the vote over Vice President Kamala Harris, who received 36.26%, according to results, with 100% of precincts counted, provided to the Free Press from City Clerk George Darany. Jill Stein received 18.37% of the vote …
Trump also won in Dearborn Heights, where 39% of the residents are of Middle Eastern descent, defeating Harris 44% to 38.3%, with Stein at 15.1%.
So not only did Jill Stein poll unusually high – which I estimate was due to Democrats rejecting the Harris position on Gaza but not wanting to vote for Trump, but Trump himself energised the voters.
In the 2020 election, Trump had only gained 29.9 per cent of the vote.
So a massive gain for him as well as the Stein vote.
It was obvious – why would these people vote for Harris when her government was supporting and facilitating the slaughter of some of their family members or friends in Gaza or Lebanon?
The border issue was obviously important.
In their report (July 22, 2024) – What we know about unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. – Pew Research estimated that:
The unauthorized immigrant population in the United States grew to 11.0 million in 2022 … The increase from 10.5 million in 2021 reversed a long-term downward trend from 2007 to 2019. This is the first sustained increase in the unauthorized immigrant population since the period from 2005 to 2007.
They also noted that since that data was published “The U.S. unauthorized immigrant population has likely grown over the past two years”.
They noted that other sources revealed that there were record border “encounters … throughout 2022-23” and “the number of applicants waiting for decisions on asylum claims increased by about 1 million by the end of 2023”.
In 2022, this cohort “represented 3.3% of the total U.S. population and 23% of the foreign-born population”.
The Democrats could not escape responsibility for the increases in the last few years.
Trump obviously knew that it was a political issue and played it for all it was worth.
Of course I disagree with the way he constructs the problem – all the talk of criminals and people eating dogs etc – was deeply offensive and disgraceful.
But it was an issue and it is clear that nations have to have population policies in place that allow them to manage the growth of that population.
Demographers developed the – Push and pull factors in migration – framework in order to understand migration flows between nations.
The push factors promote incentives for people to leave their current place and seek residence elsewhere, while pull factors are the attractors that make one country more favourable for migration than another.
Examples are:
Push: not enough job opportunities, natural disasters, authoritarian regimes, poor housing, war, etc
Pull: job opportunities, better welfare security, kinder political regime, better housing and health care, etc
Rich nations, especially those with porous borders will always provide ‘pull’ incentives to citizens in poorer nations where the ‘push’ factors are strong.
There are two options then.
First, recognise the strength of the ‘pull’ factors and encourage migration with orderly administrative processes in place.
The fact that Biden Administration appeared to ‘lose’ control of the border in the last few years does not suggest those administrative processes were working effectively.
Second, recognise the strength of the ‘push’ factors in countries where people are likely to be migrating from and use foreign aid outlays to help reduce them.
For example, help poorer nations improve education and health care systems.
Help create good quality employment and improve wages growth.
Help the nation build adequate housing and public infrastructure.
What has the US been doing in terms of foreign aid?
In 1970, all the advanced nations signed up to the UN commitment to spend at least 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid – see this – The 0.7% ODA/GNI target – a history – for more details.
A Brookings Institute study (September 12, 2024) – What is US foreign assistance?reveals that:
The average for all wealthy nations is around 0.3%, with the U.S. ranking at the bottom.
The US spends around 0.3 per cent of GDP on foreign aid and that proportion or less has been stable since the mid-1980s.
Here is a graph from the Congressional Research Service (via Brookings) which tells that story.
Rather than waste resources building a – Trump wall – along the Southern border of the USA, it would have been much more humane and probably much more effective to invest heavily in the nations that are pushing their citizens to leave.
But that would require the US authorities to understand the capacity of their currency and to spend that currency on useful things rather than financing the destructive IDF assault on Palestinian humanity.
Further, the US dominates the IMF and the World Bank and both institutions have screwed the poorer nations with their pernicious structural adjustment packages over the last several decades.
The damage that these multilateral institutions have caused in the poorer nations, driven by the US oversight, have amplified the ‘push’ factors.
And might I add the ‘push’ factors must be pretty bad for anyone to want to go to the US anyway (laugh).
Then we come to the ‘cost-of-living’ issues, which appear to have played quite a part in the Democratic defeat.
I find this aspect really amusing as it represents how to be too smart for your own good.
At the beginning of each of his campaign speeches Donald Trump asked the audience (both in person and via the electronic media) whether they were better off now relative to what the state they were in 4 years ago.
It was a loaded question of course, given the mismatch between presidential terms and shifting economic outcomes and the special events that may arise within a term of office (like a GFC, or pandemic).
The Democrats wanted to claim that the economy is strong and people have never been better off and that the Biden Administration, and by implication, Kamala Harris, had brought the cost-of-living spike down fairly quickly.
The problem with their rhetoric on the inflation episode was that it was contradictory and inherently self-defeating.
For years they have been telling the public that the Federal Reserve Bank is independent of the Government and that its primary remit is to maintain price stability.
They told the people – aided and abetted by mainstream New Keynesian economists – that monetary policy should prioritise keeping inflation under check and fiscal policy should not undermine that quest by working against the direction of the central bank’s policy stance.
They also kept telling the public that this was the most responsible and effective way to deal with inflation and maintain prosperity.
So when the inflationary spike hit in the wash up to the first bad years of the pandemic and the Federal Reserve Bank started hiking interest rates, people (voters) had been conditioned (brain washed) to believe that the higher interest rates would bring down inflation.
Just as they had been told over and over again by the neocons in the Democratic Party.
And sure enough the inflationary spike has effectively dissipated (and the central bank is cutting rates) which led people to believe that it was the central bank that had reduced their cost-of-living nightmare rather than anything Biden or Harris had done via the Treasury.
After all – they had been conditioned to believe that the central bank was independent.
It didn’t matter that the reality of the situation is that the Federal Reserve Bank’s action had little to do with the fall in the inflation rate.
The inflation rate rose and fell again because supply constraints were created by the response to the pandemic and then Russia invaded the Ukraine.
But the public has been so conditioned by economists and the politicians that hide behind the economists that it was the central bank’s doing that they couldn’t disentangle cause and effect in this situation.
Which then meant, ironically, that Biden or then Harris could not take credit for the declining inflation rate.
Mission accomplished – lie and deceive and then pay the price.
Finally, and I will have more to say about this data in due course, the Democrats have forgotten who votes governments and Presidents in.
By wheeling out the celebrities, who probably arrived to the rallies in chauffeur-driven cars, etc after going to the hairdresser and outfitter for a coiffure and some fashion styling, the Democrats revealed how out of touch they are with the voters that delivered Trump his victory.
Sure enough the characters that adorned Trump’s stages were pretty boorish and awful – to wit, the Hulk guy who is ageing and struggled to complete his signature rip the tee-shirt open.
But they resonate with the mainstream voters it seems, which tells one something useful about the state of sophistication of American society.
The Democrats (remember Clinton) consider them deplorable, but guess what, they vote and this time they voted in large numbers with one aim in mind to eliminate what they see as woke.
The Democrat campaign was seemingly oblivious to all that.
Moreover, the data trends are not attractive for the Democrats.
Here is a graph I compiled from the large US census databases, which shows mean real income in 2023 dollars (indexed to 100 at 1967) for the quintiles plus the top 5 per cent from 1967 to 2023.
The shaded areas are those that coincide with a Democratic President (LBJ, Carter, Clinton, Obama, Biden).
What do you see?
It appears that the relativities were stable but started to diverge in the mid-1980s as neoliberalism emerged.
But the real divergence – when the top quintile and especially the top 5 per cent part of that quintile left the pack – occurred under the Clinton Presidency.
The next major acceleration in the divergence came under the Obama Presidency.
It is clear that these trends are part of the hollowing out of the middle class that has occurred in the US and the Democrats have overseen much of the process.
That means that the Democrat candidate demonstrated an error of judgement when she said she would not have done anything different.
It was hubris because down in the streets, the citizens who make up the vast majority of voters have felt the pain of trends in income distribution, where the top-end-of-town has captured a disproportionate amount of the GDP ‘income growth’.
In terms of shares of total income, the lowest quintile households accounted for 4 per cent of total income received in 1967 and ratio was relatively stable up until the early 1990s.
It has been steadily declining since and now stands are 3.1 (2023).
The top quintile went from to 43.6 per cent (1967) to 51.9 per cent (2023).
The top 5 per cent went from to 17.2 per cent (1967) to 23 per cent (2023).
There was also a hollowing out of the middle quintile – the ‘middle class’.
Conclusion
There is a lot more to it than what I have written about today.
But those are just a few thoughts that I had when I watched the unfolding disaster for the Democrats and the amazing victory that Trump has recorded.
I know it was a Hobson’s Choice, which also tells us something about the way the US society has evolved.
Both candidates were in my view unelectable.
But one was much smarter that the other and better understood the plight the American voters are in after several decades of neoliberalism.
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2024 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
Bernie Sanders would have done a better job and being more honest with the average person, worker citizen in the USA.
I think the border thing is very much exaggerated by media, including the liberal ones. The worse part is the Democrats, instead of saying migrants have always been a part of the country and contribute to the economy, they embraced building the wall, something which Harris was against just 4 years ago.
And while I disagree with Bernie Sanders endorsing Biden and then Harris, his statement after the loss was excellent
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1854271157135941698
«What has the US been doing in terms of foreign aid?»
Exploitation, sanctions, propaganda NGOs, coups, and bombings cost a lot of money, you know. That they force displacement is a bonus to the capitalists relying on cheap serfs who can’t complain. Maybe they’ll increase prison slave labor, even the “radical” liberal state is fine with it.
“And sure enough the inflationary spike has effectively dissipated”
Did it? Yes, it went down, but, as far as I’m aware, the non-CPI-measured prices of food and energy are still an issue. Americans might not care about foreign policy, even when trotting out the most inane speeches of former presidents and the support of America’s greatest murderers, but they do care about the effects on their basket of goods and treats.
And since their owned votes didn’t show up, despite being given no reason to do so – how do they lose votes in every single minority? – , the only lesson learned is to throw even more people under the bus and ride further right in search of the mythical undecideds. It’ll work next time
Infighting couldn’t happen to a more deserving country.
New Keynesians consider supply to be exogenous.
So what we think of as “suppliers” (say, mining companies) are demanders in New Keynesian models. If prices are rising then even firms we consider to be “suppliers” (e.g., natural resource companies) are *demanding* too much.
When New Keynesians refer to demand, they’re referring to the economy as a whole (including those we would call mid-stream or up stream “suppliers”), not just end users.
Is it really a meaningful thing to say ‘Trump wasn’t i office when the government send arms aid to Israel’? On what basis could anyone say that had he been in office he wouldn’t have sent arms to prop up Israel? The usual line is that the war there wouldn’t have started at all. As if somehow HAMAS was waiting for Trump to leave office and….the neoliberal Dems who support Israel to take office?? Illogical.
Trump is recorded as saying to Netanyahu on his last U.S. visit: “Get your victory, then end the war.’
This entire four years has been a balancing act. Can you imagine how popular it would have been if the Biden administration had ‘started heavily investing in countries’ from where people usually try to come over the border? That would have put a fine picture in the heads of the voters via all the MAGA mouthpieces: ‘he’s aiding Honduras and Columbia..but our ‘gas’ and food at home is really expensive..damn Biden!’ Since we’re not just talking about practical, sensible economics in this, it’s framing and political PR.
With the fact of the deviant economics of the Democrats I can’t argue, but the incoming guy is working from the same crib sheet and a bit more, such as: ‘let’s eliminate income tax’.
The thing about making models around inflation is that inflation is a rate of change of prices. Mathematicians might write it as d$/dt .
So when inflation is zero,m prices stay the same.
When inflation goes up from zero (positive) prices go up.
When inflation goes up then returns to zero, prices go up and stay up.
Inflation has to go negative (not merely down, but below zero) before prices come down.
It’s still perfectly true that a high price is a high price, and perhaps too high, regardless of what pattern of inflation made it high.
America is very confusing to outsiders, and probably to many Americans. When leaders there enthuse about freedom and democracy what they are really articulating is the freedom for capitalists to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of others, both at home and abroad, while condemning nations with different values, like China, who are helping smaller countries to develop and trade so that all can benefit.
While the farcical presidential election captures world attention, behind the facade the State Department neo-cons, the barely accountable CIA and military planners, with the support of their major beneficiaries, the arms manufacturers, continue on with their endless war strategy scarcely impacted by the political processes.
The Labor Party in Australia would do well to heed the electoral experience of its so-called progressive counterpart in th US. Like the Democrats Labor has become a party that puts big business before the welfare of ordinary people.
Labor politicians have abandoned their party’s historic determination to provide finance independent of privare banking for the good of the nation and are now subservient to the Bank for Independent Settlements.
They will probably not be punished for putting Australia at the service of the US/UK military, or for supporting the Israeli-US extermination of Palestinians thanks to blanket mainstream media propaganda, but their slavish adherence to neo-liberalismand mainstream economic thinking and the resultant wealth transfer and resultant pain that they have enabled may make them unelectable.
Sadly, at present the alternative party here would be unlikely to offer anything better than Trump and Co in the US. The only option would appear to be more activism and engagement in politics by ordinary people, and a wider understanding of how the economy really works.
I meant to refer above to the Bank for International Settlements.
“Independent” from government oversight is what the BIS wants all central banks to be, so that commercial banks are able to profit from higher than desirable interest rates and by lending where the biggest and easiest profits can be made, rather than in areas where the country would benefit most.
Bernie Sanders is absolutely right about Trump and the Palestinians. Trump’s first term was when he moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem against long standing US policy of the city’s territory being disputed. He also largely pursued deals to normalize relations between Israel and the Gulf states, but again did nothing to resolve the status of of the occupied Palestinian Territories — he doesn’t care about them — and lately unloaded Middle East policy to his Jewish son-in-law, and the money and weapons were flowing to Israel under him as well.
Your protests that you promote green ring thoroughly hollow as there will be huge differences between the Trump administration and what a Harris administration would have done, and what the Biden administration did. The Trump administration will be disastrous for the climate and will be focused on promoting more development of green house producing gases, and stymie any progress on climate change — something the Biden administration has invested in, and would have continued under a Harris administration. Those who actually work in climate science are very worried about what will happen under the new administration.
To imply that there is no difference between the two, on the things you care about demonstrated at best a naïveté about where the two parties are. I get you are disgusted with the center left political parties, and they have a lot to explain for, but you do not seem to have a feel or understanding of what may or may not be politically possible. Voting for Jill Stein will always be a wasted vote. If that’s what someone wants to do, fine, but it’s not malevolent or wrong for other people to point that out, and ask people to make their votes count.
Trump is a very talented politician and knows how to read the public mood and play to it — and his comments weren’t just ‘disgraceful’ but horribly racist and used the sort of language that came out of Nazi Germany. Yes, he won and we will have to deal with it, and pay a high price.
But your response, which is basically botherism, is one the reasons people despise the ‘mainstream’ media.
I don’t think people ‘get’ it either which is why Trump won against Harris in both vote percentage and EC unlike Trump in 2016. Keep in mind Harris lost by votes than what Stein got.
And it was Biden admin under which Israel was allowed kill at least 40k people in Gaza. Biden could’ve ended it day one by threatening an arms embargo, Harris could’ve ran on the same. But noting happened, U.S. allowed Israel to continue. The Dems even refused to allow a Palestinian-American to speak at the DNC.
“The Trump administration will be disastrous for the climate and will be focused on promoting more development of green house producing gases, and stymie any progress on climate change — something the Biden administration has invested in”
Harris ran on a pro-fracking message when she claimed she was against the same 4 years ago. Another one of her several contradictions.
It’s exclusively her and the party’s fault for doing nothing to earn the votes, not the voters themselves. No one is obliged to vote for Democrats. It doesn’t help that there is no consistent way to vote in the U.S. either, no central Electoral Commission; just ‘states rights’ nonsense.
It was the same Dems who sent King Neoliberal Epstein’s friend Bill Clinton to talk to Palestinians in Michigan on how their family members deserve to be killed by Israel.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/31/bill-clinton-criticised-for-saying-israel-forced-to-kill-gaza-civilians
Keith Wresch:
I’m fed up with the so-called educated ‘Left’, who are not at all educated in the underlying causes of our problems and the solutions to them. I’m also fed up with people believing that when we elect Left or Centre-Left parties, the world is on track to solve its problems, and we can live happily and equitably in the meantime. If you have a look at what has happened over the past fifty years to GHG emissions and the Ecological Footprint (EF) of nations, and at the global level, you will see that they have continued to rise regardless of who is in government. You will see that the Gini coefficient of income inequality has risen in most countries regardless of who is in government. You will see that a policy of full employment has been abandoned and that unemployment rates are much the same, notwithstanding changing economic circumstances, regardless of who is in government. In other words, you will see that the Left and Centre-Left governments have failed to deliver on all the things they say they believe in yet point their finger at the ‘Right’ for all our problems.
The failure of the ‘Left’ has meant that the world’s problems magnify over time, the most vulnerable people suffer most and get angry (not the educated ‘Left’), and our capacity to solve our problems becomes ever more difficult. I’m sure half of the world’s educated Left heard the news of Trump’s victory while holidaying in Greece, hiking in Nepal, or sipping chardonnay at their coastal retreat house on a Wednesday afternoon because they’ve either retired relatively young on an excessive retirement income made possible by a generous superannuation scheme (one of the greatest institutional rorts) or because they’ve taken some mid-week work leave that is not an option for vulnerable people. And whilst they were fuming about the election result, they probably calmed themselves down by surfing the internet in case an affordable investment property had just come onto the market.
We simply will not solve our environmental problems unless we do something about population growth and until rich nations make the transition to a steady-state (non-growing) economy now (already too late), and poor nations do likewise in the near future. And we will not be able to make this transition in a just way unless currency-issuing central governments use their fiscal capacities to achieve and maintain full employment (i.e., ensure an equitable share of a non-growing and possibly shrinking national stock of real wealth by imposing a maximum income limit and by distributing income through work, not through a UBI), and increase the share of real wealth made up of high quality public goods (which means a decreasing share of useless junk).
But all I hear from the so-called educated Left is stuff about ‘green growth’, a ‘circular economy’, ‘decoupling GDP from natural resource use’, ‘fiscal sustainability’, the ‘demographic transition’, and ‘aspirationalism’. If you believe in any of these things, you are exactly the sort of person I’m referring to. Garbage, garbage. Myth, myth. Destruction, destruction. End result? A Donald Trump victory and more of his type to follow.
If people on the Left believe that growth can continue on a finite planet, don’t argue with me. Go and argue with those who reside in the physical sciences of our universities who will tell you otherwise – the people who justifiably make jokes of economists and the social sciences generally. The term ‘social science’ is an oxymoron because there is so little science to be found. Of course, the physical scientists aren’t perfect. They don’t understand modern money and what I am now calling ‘modern markets’ (modern markets emerged post-Industrial Revolution following the rise of oligopolies/oligopsonies – privately-owned nodes of central planning – that can only be effectively linked by modern markets, albeit modern markets can only bring about oikonomic outcomes as opposed to chrematistic outcomes if appropriately regulated by governments). Nor do most economists! Nor do most people belonging to the educated Left!
Meanwhile, things get worse (see above); introducing genuine policy solutions becomes more difficult and politically more unpalatable (because there are still too many people unnecessarily in poverty and there are too many of the educated Left whose comfortable way of life depends on rising GDP, rising stock market values, and rising property prices); and the election of Trump-like characters becomes ever more likely.
Humankind had it chances fifty years ago. We had a lot of the necessary physical and institutional structures in place to make a smooth, painless, and equitable transition to an ecologically sustainable and qualitatively-improving steady-state economy, which would have ended the period of using fossil fuels (and other non-renewable resources) to make the transition from a renewable resource-based agrarian economy to a renewable resource-based post-industrial society. But it chose not to and the Left, by succumbing to neoliberalism (e.g., Hawke-Keating Labor(?) governments), played its part and has helped make such a transition almost impossible now. There is so much institutional rebuilding necessary to get back to where we were fifty years ago that the planet will be stuffed by then. There will be more than twice the number of mouths to feed and we will be further locked into ecologically-destructive technologies and a growth-dependent economy.
It’s time to stop voting for Left and Centre-Left parties if they do not offer genuine solutions to our genuine, and in many cases existential, problems. As an Australian, where it is compulsory to have your name ticked off at a booth to collect a ballot paper, I’ll almost certainly be voting ‘informal’ at the next election (handing in a blank sheet) simply because I’m almost certain none of the candidates will represent my interests and the interests of the planet, vulnerable people, and future generations. Only when they start doing this will they deserve my vote.
I’d endorse almost all of that comment., especially the critique of the “educated left”. but the left never has shown much environmental awareness, let alone commitment, possibly excepting Gorz and Bookchin, who cancelled each other out.
I’ve evolved to the view that even steady state is no longer a sustainable medium term position and degrowth is essential.
Possibly, a staged transition would allow stage 1 to be green growth, as its a very tricky transition without adopting intermediate goals, given the nightmares of inertia in corporate capitalism and consumerism.
Stage 2 would then be steady state, and degrowth progressively from there
Incidentally, the circular economy is an essential element of all phases of change. We have to have a repair and reuse mindset anyway, and reclaim as many resources as possible, however entropy occurs.
Given where we are, and the state of global geopolitics, plus embedded corporate and financial power, any hope for a moderated transition to a sustainable society looks pretty thin, and a triumph of hope over experience.
I’m not quite as pessimistic as the full collapse clique, but any optimism is certainly misplaced.
Yes, we might just have been able to achieve a sensible planned transition 50 years ago, but it is going to be very painful, with the poorest suffering the most.
It is not just centre and vaguely left parties which are clueless on sustainability – many green parties too are nowhere near a full commitment to genuine sustainability, for example, the Green New Deal of Labour and Greens initiated in 2007/8 in the UK falls well short, with several of its leading lights holding some odd and contradictory positions – including Murphy and Pettifor.
British Labour is a hopeless case as far as even basic environmental policy is concerned, though more centre right.
What we have witnessed here in both elections that he won and in the interregnum of Mr Biden; what we have seen is a massive Revolt by the American employee class against 40 Years of neoliberal globalization. In those 40 years roughly following the opening up of China by Kissinger and Nixon we have seen a massive hollowing out of American manufacturing and allied industries of all kinds.
Go where the wages are low and the market is growing the place over the last 40 years where the wages were low and the market was growing the most was the People’s Republic of China. American corporations cashed in on the profit wave of the future at the expense of traditional centres of manufacturing.
Cities collapsed, the states that relied on them collapsed, they had to cut back on their social services in the bizarre way that capitalism works you can’t do public services at the time the people need the most.
The working class has had its revenge it has looked at the political parties, Republican and Democrat and by here I mean the Republican Party of the likes of George Bush and the Democratic party the likes of Clinton Obama and now Biden and they have said to them here let me show you my middle finger because what you have done to me I am now going to do to your political Representatives.
They voted them out is that because they liked Trump
Not at all
But they are lashing out because you have taken their economic security from them and their children away.
Trump has said he is the protector of working people to get up on a white horse. He is a wall of Steel against the invading migrants and a wall of tariffs against the invading Chinese!
That will not work either but economic illiteracy lives in the United States for a reason it gave the neoliberals a free reign!
The Democrats created an environment where they even embrace Trump’s bullsh^t.
great analysis,
but what didn’t get mentioned n dispatches was race and gender,
two women have contested against trump in recent history almost the same outcome on the electoral map. both were strong women in their own way and the long run slippage in the latino male chauvinistic vote continued, despite the dems making meaningful policy decisions on their behalf,
harris had a double whammy, in that not only was she a women, she was part indian , and we can have all the exit polls we like indicating voters made a choice over their wallets rather than character, but know one in those polls is going to admit they are racist.
same would have happened had polls been taken on the landstrabe’s in pre war berlin
The US needs a good walloping of neoliberalism, because they just voted for it with Trump to implement cuts in so called public waste, which i bet excludes treasury bonds for corporate welfare and alike.
Its a pity the public discourse on macroeconomics is poisoned by the myths lies and fairytales from government narratives. Or voters imho would be wiser.