WNU Editor: I watched the U.S. morning news shows dissecting the U.S. election .... and they still do not get it. Democrat politicians still went on and called President-elect Trump the usual .... racist/misogynist/anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim/anti-poor/etc. .... ignoring what happened on Tuesday. And the pundits and main stream media news commentators are still debating if President-elect Trump has a mandate .... while at the same time saying that he must reach across the aisle to find accommodation. Their disappointment and anger from the Tuesday election result may have dissipated .... but their views, biases, prejudices, and their altitudes have remained unchanged.
11 comments:
Those who seem to represent the punditry are told they do not get it. Ok. But then, dismiss them, and what are you left with? Now those who think, write, discuss, etc are the "elite," while those who voted for Trump are the "salt of the earth"?
we used to have "working class" and who are they? Formerly called blue collar workers. But if industry has largely moved out of the nation, who then is the working class?
And the "elite"? anyone with college degree? or lots of money? or jobs not using hands but brains?
my point: we are redefining things.
the very poor=those having their coffee in McDonalds
the working class=coffee at Dunkin Donuts
the elites=Starbucks
the 1% coffee in university clubs, ie, Harvard, Princetom clubs
Fred. The point that I am trying to make is that when change happens .... the media and political elite .... in order to grow and prosper .... must change also. But watching what I say this morning .... the impression I had is that they are not going to change .... and if so, it is easy for me to predict that they will become irrelevant in the years to come, especially as other media platforms (like social media) become more important in spreading one's message out there.
I ahve seen this before. This reminds me of the Soviet Union/Russia after the fall of Communism. The news media and pundit class were still entrenched in Communist and Soviet dogma and thinking .... and not surprising their viewership and power were gone with a short period of time .... their audience walked away. Ditto to what I saw this morning .... if the U.S. mainstream media do not change, these people will be gone or irrelevant by the next Presidential election or two.
The Media in Canada and the US are and have been out of touch for a very long time. The promotion of Globalism which is a code for Income Redistribution and it's not the Income of the wealthy it's the income of the working and middle class of the west. Equalization of wages, bring the wages of the third world up and the wages of the first world down, this is the crux of Globalization, working people in the west have not had real wage increases since 1979, with trade deals and immigration they have broken the unions and the working and middle class. The term is used all the time "Immigrants do the jobs Canadians wont do", but the reality is if you cheap bastards would pay a decent wages we would do those jobs. In Nova Scotia they closed down almost all the fish plants, and instead have factory ships off shore with Asian workers processing the fish for slave wages, that is one example. Most of Canada's clothing was produced here until Mulroney got rid of the Duty on Clothes and over night the rag trade died in Canada, and I remember at the time, I compared a shirt I knew how much I paid for it when it was made in Canada and a year later it was made in Bangladesh, the retail price was the same, that was the last time I went to Sears 1989. People are pissed with this, no jobs and every thing made overseas so there will never be jobs and no future. If Trump doesn't change things America will tear it's self apart, the clock is ticking for them and because of Canada's proximity for us as well.
In 1971 in an econ class the concept of production going to the cheapest producer was mentioned by the teacher. If this idea came true, I realized America would experience "The Great Homogenization". Exactly what has happened though somewhat differently than I imagined being but 25 at the time.
As TWN has written the shirt costs the same. Someone collects the $$$ difference. It has never been shown to me what that item would cost if produced in America nor have we been given much of a chance to make the choice. I do know first hand that imported products are often inferior and thus should cost much less and avoided when possible. I also know that the various taxes workers and their employers in this country pay are a situation akin to a millstone around our production neck that the competition doesn't have to add to their costs of production.
This is a delicate situation for Trump; punitive actions are a two way street, look at the 1930's depression era trade legislation.
I vividly recall stories my grandparents and others now gone told me of the days before trade unions. Some were hard to imagine being a baby boomer and thus growing up when this country was rebuilding a great deal of the civilized world after WWII with the resulting "good times" for us. I never carried a lard sandwich for lunch at school or saw newspaper secured to the wall boards to keep out Oklahoma winds. As my late neighbor said, "We didn't know anything different. Everyone was like this".
I haven't much of a solution for this globalization phenomenon but I don't see that a country that has a growing number of people whose job title is "spender" and what they are spending is given to them because they aren't employed, is a financially healthy country and it worries me greatly.
Roger
I think the truth may be that their ratings no longer are that high. So if a tree falls in the woods and no is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I think the truth may be that their ratings no longer are that high. So if a tree falls in the woods and no is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
If every American company paid workers nothing but the minimum wage, they could still not compete with the same stuff made in Asia. If industry comes back, prices go way up. And the wage gap continues to grow.
To blame the Liberals and the pundists etc and say they do not get it is also to ignore the fact that Hillary won the popular vote. Small margin, true, but more people wanted her than Trump. And so one can understand anger.
What we are seeing is the proletarianization of wide swathes of people. The liberal and consevative establishment are desperate to keep them at each other over issues of gender, "race", religion etc. as little by little more and more are waking up to the issue of class conflict.
Soon enough, the Trump anti-establishment front will be exposed for what it is; an Obama in whiteface "hope and change" snake oil scam to reify and legitimate a bankrupt system and the privileged pet pigs it keeps. Look at Trump's "team" and what they stand for and tell me they are so extremely different from Obama-Clinton's where it counts. A neocon free trader for VP, a neocon candidate for Defense Secretary, a JP Morgan CEO approached for Treasury Secretary.
If anything, the settler garrison tuned into the Jim Crow redux code words figuring they were part of a bargain to restore lost privileges such as tenured factory jobs offering generational employment, women and "coloreds" in their places etc.. They are deceived. Just as the liberal set was before they really felt the Bern.
Canada with it's Prime Minister Tulip and "fiscally responsible" reform/alliance/heritage front Conservatives is little better.
Just like the Fauxit in the UK, this is a fraud.
And the kids won't buy it for much longer.
And Mark Twain was no fan of Capitalism.
Neither was the author of the very relevant qoute below:
In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich - that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty" - supposedly petty - details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., - we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.
V.I. Lenin
The State and Revolution
Chpt. 5: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State
45% of eligible voters didn't bother.
The spin doctors on "both" sides can catcall all they want. The jig is on its way to being up.
And Mark Twain was no fan of Capitalism.
Neither was the author of the very relevant qoute below:
In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich - that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty" - supposedly petty - details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., - we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.
V.I. Lenin
The State and Revolution
Chpt. 5: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State
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