Thursday, November 17, 2016

Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio:Skytruth, WV citizens Action, Chemical Spill lawsuits on EPIC Nov 18

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Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Post: Skytruth, WV citizens Action, Chemical Spill lawsuits on EPIC Nov 18
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2016/11/paris-on-potomac-november-18-2016-our.html

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Thomas Piketty: We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail

We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail


Let it be said at once: Trump's victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this.

Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote.

Hillary won the popular vote by a whisker (60.1 million votes as against 59.8 million for Trump, out of a total adult population of 240 million), but the participation of the youngest and the lowest income groups was much too low to enable key states to be won.

The tragedy is that Trump's program will only strengthen the trend towards inequality. He intends to abolish the health insurance laboriously granted to low-paid workers under Obama and to set the country on a headlong course into fiscal dumping, with a reduction from 35% to 15% in the rate of federal tax on corporation profits, whereas to date the United States had resisted this trend, already witnessed in Europe.

In addition, the increasing role of ethnicity in American politics does not bode well for the future if new compromises are not found. In the United States, 60% of the white majority votes for one party while over 70% of the minorities vote for the other. In addition to this, the majority is on the verge of losing its numerical advantage (70% of the votes cast in 2016, as compared with 80% in 2000 and 50% forecast in 2040).

The main lesson for Europe and the world is clear: as a matter of urgency, globalization must be fundamentally re-oriented. The main challenges of our times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development.

Agreements of a new type can, if necessary, include measures aimed at facilitating these exchanges. But the question of liberalizing trade should no longer be the main focus. Trade must once again become a means in the service of higher ends. It never should have become anything other than that.

There should be no more signing of international agreements that reduce customs duties and other commercial barriers without including quantified and binding measures to combat fiscal and climate dumping in those same treaties. For example, there could be common minimum rates of corporation tax and targets for carbon emissions which can be verified and sanctioned. It is no longer possible to negotiate trade treaties for free trade with nothing in exchange.

From this point of view, Ceta, the EU-Canada free trade deal, should be rejected. It is a treaty which belongs to another age. This strictly commercial treaty contains absolutely no restrictive measures concerning fiscal or climate issues. It does, however, contain a considerable reference to the "protection of investors". This enables multinationals to sue states under private arbitration courts, bypassing the public tribunals available to one and all.

The legal supervision proposed is clearly inadequate, in particular concerning the key question of the remuneration of the arbitrators-cum-referees and will lead to all sorts of abuses. At the very time when American legal imperialism is gaining in strength and imposing its rules and its dues on our companies, this decline in public justice is an aberration. The priority, on the contrary, should be the construction of strong public authorities, with the creation of a prosecutor, including a European state prosecutor, capable of enforcing their decisions.

The Paris Accords had a purely theoretical aim of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. This would, for example, require the oil found in the tar sands in Alberta to be left in the ground. But Canada has just started mining there again. So what sense is there in signing this agreement and then, only a few months later, signing a highly restrictive commercial treaty without a single mention of this question?

A balanced treaty between Canada and Europe, aimed at promoting a partnership for fair and sustainable development, should begin by specifying the emission targets of each signatory and the practical commitments to achieve these.

In matters of fiscal dumping and minimum rates of taxation on corporation profits, this would obviously mean a complete paradigm change for Europe, which was constructed as a free trade area with no common fiscal policy. This change is essential. What sense is there in agreeing on a common fiscal policy (which is the one area in which Europe has achieved some progress for the moment) if each country can then fix a near-zero rate and attract all the major company headquarters?

It is time to change the political discourse on globalization: trade is a good thing, but fair and sustainable development also demands public services, infrastructure, health and education systems. In turn, these themselves demand fair taxation systems. If we fail to deliver these, Trumpism will prevail.

This piece was first published in Le Monde on 12 November 2016


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Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Re: [CCDS Members] [socialist-econ] Bill Fletcher: Notes from a Very Close Election

"Breadth is crucial, but that presupposes a dialectical (not class first) thread that connects different forms of oppression and diverse oppositional groupings in a broad, expanding, and diverse people's coalition to resist the first 100 days of the Trump agenda."
How does a "class first" outlook contradict a "dialectical thread" --a term that doesn't make sense anyway as dialectics is not a "thread" but a methodological approach that encompasses many different view points with the intent of synthesizing what is valuable in all of them in order to make advances in theoretical understanding and the application of practical politics. "Class first" is a socialist principle whereby the interests of the working people (long and short term) are of primary concern and should not be sacrificed or compromised for opportunistic short term seeming advantages but only if tactical considerations absolutely demand such an action for future strategic advantage. It is perfectly correct for CCDS and other socialist forces to put "class first" in seeking to work within a diverse people's coalition to resist Trump since it is the interest of the working class that is our primary concern and to further it by cooperation with others.

On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 12:10 PM, Samuel Webb <swebb1945@gmail.com> wrote:
A couple thoughts:

Breadth is crucial, but that presupposes a dialectical (not class first) thread that connects different forms of oppression and diverse oppositional groupings in a broad, expanding, and diverse people's coalition to resist the first 100 days of the Trump agenda. The labor movement as well as the Democratic Party and its leaders in my view must play a major role in this coalition. Besides Chuck Schumer and his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, we don't have many other levers at this moment to stop what looks like an onslaught from the right this winter and spring. And don't tell me a "general strike."

The left will have to stretch out its strategic and tactical thinking, if it hopes to play a positive role in these new conditions.

The march, initiated by some women's organization the day following the inauguration, could become a major national mobilization. Such a mobilization for a lot of reasons would be important now.


On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 9:42 AM, John Case <jcase4218@gmail.com> wrote:

With the exception of this sentence ("We don't know whether Bernie Sanders would have done any better, but we do know that his message is the one that needs to be articulated.") -- this article is mostly a list of EXCUSES for a Fascist force rising to power and dominating all three branches of the US government. THERE CAN BE NO EXCUSES FOR A RESULT THAT WILL COST, CONSERVATIVELY, MILLIONS OF LIVES.  Indeed, Bernie's own message needs to be amplified and expanded. Race and Gender issues will be at the cusp of the Fascist attacks soon to be unleashed in the first 100 days. However -- the class approach of Bernie's essential message must come FIRST FIRST FIRST -- if the anti fascist movement is to be broadened and given the muscle it needs. Brother Fletcher's list of movements to unify is insufficient -- all of them voted for Hillary anyway, except for the Left wing scabs. And he doesn't even mention labor


boo

A



Notes From a Very Close Election

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/trump-victory-close-election-lessons
Portside Date: 
November 13, 2016
Author: 
Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Date of Source: 
Friday, November 11, 2016
Dissent

Had it not been for the electoral college, at this moment we would be discussing the plans for the incoming Hillary Clinton administration. That's right. As of Friday morning, she has tallied nearly 400,000 more votes than Trump nationwide. Thus, once again, that institution created by the founding slaveowners has risen from the grave and prevented our exit from the cemetery.

I begin there to put the election into context and to suggest that commentary needs to be quite nuanced. No, I am not trying to make lemonade out of lemons. But I do think that it is important to recognize that the Trump victory was far from a slam dunk. The election was very close. One might not get that impression, however, when one looks at news headlines as well as electoral college maps.

What are some of the conclusions we can arrive at from this election?

The election was a referendum on globalization and demographics; it was not a referendum on neoliberalism. It is critical to appreciate that Trump's appeal to whites was around their fear of the multiple implications of globalization. This included trade agreements and migration. Trump focused on the symptoms inherent in neoliberal globalization, such as job loss, but his was not a critique of neoliberalism. He continues to advance deregulation, tax cuts, anti-unionism, and so on. He was making no systemic critique at all, but the examples that he pointed to of the wreckage resulting from economic and social dislocation resonated for many whites who felt, for various reasons, that their world was collapsing.

It was the connection between globalization and migration that struck a chord, just as it did in Britain with the Brexit vote. In both cases, there was tremendous fear of the changing complexion of both societies brought on by migration and economic dislocation (or the threat of economic dislocation). Protectionism plus firm borders were presented as answers in a world that has altered dramatically with the reconfiguration of global capitalism.

The election represented the consolidation of a misogynistic white united front. There are a few issues that need to be "unpacked" here. For all of the talk about the problems with Hillary Clinton-the-candidate and the failure to address matters of economics, too few commentators are addressing the fact that the alliance that Trump built was one that not only permitted but encouraged racism and misogyny. Trump voters were prepared to buy into various unsupported allegations against Clinton that would never have stuck had she not been a woman. Additionally, Trump's own baggage, including his multiple marriages and divorces and allegations of sexual assault, would never have been tolerated had the candidate been a woman (or, for that matter, of color). Trump was given a pass that would only be given to a white man in U.S. society. All one has to do is to think about the various allegations, charges, and history surrounding Donald Trump and then ask the question: had the candidate been a woman or of color, what would have happened? The answer is obvious.

Connected to this a recurring fact that, for all of the talk about economic fear, many people seem to wish to avoid. Just as with the Tea Party, the mean income of the Trump base is higher than the national mean (and was higher than the mean for Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters). We were not dealing with the poorest of the poor—far from it. Instead, this was a movement driven by those who are actually doing fairly well but are despairing because the American Dream that they embraced no longer seems to work for white people.

This is critical for us to understand because had the Trump phenomenon been mainly about a rejection of economic injustice, then this base would have been nearly interchangeable with that of Senator Sanders. Yet that was not the case. What we can argue, instead, is that this segment of the white population was looking in terror at the erosion of the American Dream, but they were looking at it through the prism of race.

Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate, but we should be careful in our analysis. Though Clinton had expected a coronation, the Sanders campaign pushed her to represent more than she expected. The platform of the Democratic Party was shifted to the left in many important respects. Yet Clinton could not be champion of an anti-corporate populist movement. Yes, she correctly argued for greater taxes on the 1 percent. Yes, she articulated many progressive demands. But in the eyes of too many people, including many of her supporters, she was compromised by her relationship with Wall Street.

That said, what also needs to be considered is that Trump had so many negatives against him. Yes, he was tsider, so to speak, and used that very skillfully to argue that he would bring another pair of eyes to the situation. Yet this is the same person who is in the upper echelons of the economy; refused to share his tax returns; has numerous allegations against him of bad business with partners and workers; and engages in the same offshoring of production as many of the companies he criticized. Yet none of that haunted him in the way that various criticisms haunted Clinton. Fundamentally this was a matter of sexism, though it is certainly true that Clinton's being perceived as an insider did not help.

We don't know whether Bernie Sanders would have done any better, but we do know that his message is the one that needs to be articulated. It is impossible to accurately predict whether Sanders would have done better in the final election. He certainly would have been subjected to an immense amount of redbaiting and suggestions of foreign policy softness. Yet his message did resonate among millions, especially younger voters. And it was younger voters who did not turn out in force to back Clinton.

In entering the Trump era it is the movement that Sanders was part of coalescing that becomes key in building a resistance with a positive vision. One of the weaknesses of the Sanders message was its failure to unify matters of class with race and gender. This is not an academic exercise. This is about telling the right story about what has been happening in the United States. It is also a matter of tapping into significant social movements—Occupy; immigrant rights; LGBT; environmental justice; the movement for Black Lives. These are movements that are focused on the future and a future that is progressive. This is where hope lies.

I have argued for some time that right-wing populism—with the Trump campaign exemplifying an aspect of this—is a revolt against the future. It is a movement that is always focused on a mythical past to which a particular country must return. In the case of the United States, right-wing populism seeks a return to the era of the "white republic," and it is this that the Trump campaign was so successful in articulating. It did so by disparaging Mexicans, invoking them as a source of crime while completely ignoring, for example, criminal syndicates that have historically arrived in the United States from Europe, or the cycle of violence that U.S. policy has helped fuel in Central America. It did so through demonizing Arabs and Muslims, invoking them as sources of terror while completely ignoring that the greatest sources of political terror in this country have been white-supremacist formations.

Right-wing populism has grown as a result of both the ravages brought on by neoliberal globalization as well as the demographic and political changes within the United States. It is the latter—demographic and political changes—that have unfolded over the decades as previously disenfranchised groups have asserted themselves and articulated, to paraphrase the poet Langston Hughes, we, too, sing America.

Yes, let us lick our wounds and reflect on the future. This election result was one that more of us should have anticipated as a real possibility. In either case, that the results were so close, even when we did not have the ideal candidate to represent the new majority emerging in the United States, remains for me a source of immense hope.

The struggle certainly continues.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a talk show host, writer, and activist. He can be found on Twitter, Facebook, and at www.billfletcherjr.com [1], where this article originally appeared.

This is part of an ongoing series of responses to the election results [2].


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Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Fwd: Why this Maine town pivoted from Obama to Trump

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Portside Labor" <labor-moderator@portside.org>
Date: Nov 15, 2016 1:03 AM
Subject: Why this Maine town pivoted from Obama to Trump
To: <PORTSIDELABOR@lists.portside.org>
Cc:

 

Portside Labor

    
 

 

Eric Russell
November 14, 2016
Portland Press Herald
 
Four years ago, when Obama won re-election, he carried this town by a 67-26 percent margin. This year, Trump won 50-42 percent over Hillary Clinton. They didn't care about Clinton's emails or where Trump likes to grab women. They cared about their jobs. They know Trump alone can't save the mill from closure, but they felt they knew what they'd be getting with Clinton: Four, or even eight, more years of the same.
  
 

Lisa Shardlow, who owns a barber shop in Mexico, cuts the hair of 2-year-old Corbin Laramee of Rumford. Mexico, a small town in Oxford County, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1, voted convincingly for Trump., Derek Davis/Staff Photographer,
 
 
MEXICO — Lisa Shardlow owns a barbershop in this quiet western Maine town whose fortunes are tied to the hulking paper mill across the river in Rumford.
 
Every day for the last several months, patrons have come in to get their hair cut or colored or styled. Many talk politics while they wait. She hears a lot.
 
"Everyone that came in here the last few weeks supported Trump. I mean everyone," said Shardlow, 54, a confident and well-spoken woman whose husband is a superintendent at a golf course in Turner. "People said they were tired of politics as usual. They wanted a shake-up."
 
That's the simple explanation of how a town like Mexico went from overwhelmingly supporting President Obama four years ago to favoring Donald Trump this time.
 
To understand how the New York billionaire could do so well in communities that also supported Obama is to understand the dynamics of communities like Mexico. It has much in common with the Rust Belt cities and towns that propelled Trump to unexpected Electoral College wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and, ultimately, to the White House. Mostly rural. Mostly white. Mostly frustrated non-college-educated blue-collar workers whose jobs have gone elsewhere.
 
Four years ago, when Obama won re-election, he carried Mexico by a 67-26 percent margin. This year, Trump won Mexico 50-42 percent over Democrat Hillary Clinton. According to an analysis of Election Day results in Maine, among 2nd Congressional District towns with more than 1,000 registered voters, Mexico was the town that saw the biggest shift away from supporting a Democratic presidential candidate and toward a Republican candidate from 2012 to 2016.
 
In conversations with voters here last week, most said they were willing to overlook Trump's unpolished way of speaking, his frequent caustic comments about women and minorities, and even his lack of specific ideas. They didn't care about Clinton's emails or where Trump likes to grab women. They cared about their jobs. The economy. Their safety in the world.
 
They know Trump alone can't save the mill from closure, if that is its fate, just as it has been the fate of so many of the state's paper mills in recent years. Bucksport. Millinocket. Madison. Jay.
 
But voters were willing to give the New York businessman a chance. So were all those other mill towns.
 
'WORLD HAS CHANGED … FOR THE WORSE'
 
In some ways, Trump's lack of specifics helped. Whatever he does, it's sure to be different. The townspeople felt they knew what they'd be getting with Clinton: Four, or even eight, more years of the same. And the last eight years haven't been good to Mexico, a town of about 2,700 residents, down from more than 5,000 in 1960.
 
People are moving away because there aren't enough jobs. The economic uncertainty has brought desperation and empty storefronts and opiates, too. More people seem to be on welfare or live in subsidized housing, and that frustrates those who stayed in town because it's familiar, and mostly quiet and pretty in autumn.
 
Dana Richardson, who was tending an empty bar, Tommy Guns Pit Stop, at lunchtime last week, said most people he talks to in town wanted change. It's an interesting argument because Obama won on a message of hope and change eight years ago. Whatever change happened, though, hasn't reached Mexico. Or maybe people just didn't like the change they saw.
 
"If the world has changed, I think people feel like it's changed for the worse," said Richardson, 58, who worked in construction for years before his body broke down. "It's more violent. It's less prosperous. There is more welfare."
 
Leo Grassette gave 41 years to the Rumford mill. He's 80 now and still works part time at the Mexico Trading Post. He doesn't have a career to worry about. If the mill closes and takes with it all the jobs, it won't affect him. His pension is safe. But Grassette and his wife of 57 years have children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.
 
In the 15 presidential elections held since he began voting, Grassette had never voted for a Republican. That changed last week.
 
Like many, he felt Clinton was dishonest but it was more than that. She talked more about why Trump was bad than about why she was good.
 
"Democrats used to be for the working class," Grassette said. "I don't feel that anymore."
 
JOBS AND THE ECONOMY
 
Mexico's identity has always been linked to Rumford. Like so many Maine communities, Rumford once thrived on the back of its paper mill, founded by Hugh Chisholm at the turn of the 20th century. Chisholm's family ran the mill for 66 years, employing a large share of working-age men in the region. It was the golden era of papermaking.
 
Since 1967, though, the mill has changed ownership five times and, following each transaction, provided fewer jobs. The mill still employs about 600 people, but there is widespread anxiety about how long those jobs will last. Nearly every paper mill across Maine has either shut down or is knocking on death's door. When Catalyst bought the Rumford mill in January 2015 for $62.5 million, there was a sliver of hope. By September of that year, one machine had been shut down and 50 people were laid off.
 
"I think people wonder often if Rumford will be the next mill to close," said Shardlow, the barbershop owner.
 
This is where Trump's support was fortified – in once-booming towns besieged by economic uncertainty. The mills closed, in many cases, because their owners found cheaper labor and fewer regulations overseas. Bad trade deals made it possible, Trump said. He vowed to undo those deals and bring jobs back.
 
The decline in Maine's paper industry is not necessarily tied to jobs being shipped overseas. It's tied more to demand for the product, which is shrinking in an increasingly paperless world. But again, that didn't matter to Mexico voters, either. Trump was speaking broadly about jobs and taxes. About bringing them back and lowering them, respectively. It didn't matter if he offered few specifics to back that promise other than "Make America Great Again."
 
It wasn't a Democratic or Republican thing. Registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans more than 2-to-1 in Mexico.
 
Other mill towns in Maine swung heavily toward Trump as well.
 
In addition to the massive shift in Mexico, Rumford also favored Trump by a 50-41 percent margin, after having supported Obama in 2012. Millinocket, which used to be a town with strong Democratic support, much of it tied to union workers, backed the Republican 53-41 percent, after strongly supporting Obama four years ago. The story was the same in Madison, Jay and Bucksport. All helped re-elect Obama four years ago. All went with Trump this time.
 
It's hard not to think jobs and the economy were driving that shift.
 
Shardlow knows that her success, like that of most businesses in town, is tied to the 115-year-old mill, now owned by the Canadian firm Catalyst, which she can see across the river from her parking lot. Gray-white smoke billows from its stacks. The smell of sulfur lingers.
 
While she and her husband are doing OK financially, Shardlow cares about the economy and jobs because they affect her business, too. But she also cares about health care. She didn't want to be forced to buy insurance, so she and her husband paid the tax penalty and rolled the dice. She worries about the flow of heroin into the U.S. from south of the border because her 23-year-old son is an addict. He's in jail now for breaking into a house and stealing guns. It was her house. She's the one who turned him in.
 
Shardlow is an independent-minded voter who has supported candidates of both parties in the past. This year, like so many of her patrons, she backed Trump.
 
"For me, I just couldn't trust Hillary," she said. "And I like that (Trump) isn't in anyone's pocket."
 
THE PENDULUM OF DEMOCRACY
 
Gary Morrison, 65, worked at the mill for many years before retiring in 2011. His wife died a year later from complications with diabetes.
 
Morrison didn't ride the wave toward Trump. The Republican candidate was simply too dangerous for him. Now, he looks around the town he's called home for the last 40 years and is surprised by what he sees.
 
"These people who are saying that they voted for change, a lot of them actually fear change," he said. "And that anger, that fear, he gave voice to all of it."
 
Morrison said uneducated voters seemed to help Trump most. The candidate famously said early in his campaign that he "loves the poorly educated."
 
"Honestly, I think a lot of them are too busy trying to survive to look at the candidates in any meaningful way," Morrison said.
 
The big swing from a president like Obama to someone like Trump, who is likely to be vastly different but remains a giant unknown, is part of the pendulum of democracy. It swings forward and if enough people think it's too far, they vote to correct.
 
It happened from the Reagan-George H.W. Bush era to Bill Clinton. Then it swung back with two terms of George W. Bush. Then Obama burst onto the scene as a fresh voice offering hope and change. He made history by becoming the country's first black president. But he also helped polarize the nation and, for better or worse, Hillary Clinton was tied to him. The pendulum swung back to Trump.
 
Welfare was a big source of frustration among Mexico voters, and it's a topic that Republicans have done better seizing upon. Many said the town, along with neighboring Rumford, has been too generous with benefits. For blue-collar workers, one of the hardest things to reconcile is the idea that someone may be getting something he or she didn't work for.
 
Grassette, the longtime Democrat, said it this way: "I'm not against helping people, but you've got to help yourself."
 
Dean Benson, a police officer in town, and his wife, Trish, who works at the Time Warner office in Rumford, split their vote. He voted for Trump. She knew she couldn't support Trump but she couldn't back Clinton, either.
 
So she went for Libertarian Gary Johnson.
 
Dean, 45, said he felt confident Trump would treat police and the military better, which was important to him. Trish, 35, said she's concerned about Trump's bullying ways and what message that will send to the world. She also worries that he doesn't care enough about education. One of her children has special needs and she's scared that those services could be among the first things cut.
 
Tiffany White, 28, lives in Mexico but works at a farm in Canton, three towns to the south. Her boyfriend, she said, was a big Trump supporter but she didn't like either candidate. When it came time, she stayed home.
 
"Why bother?" she said while waiting for her buffalo chicken tenders to arrive at Dick's Restaurant, a local eatery. "But the people I know who voted for Trump either were really for him or felt he was the lesser of two evils."
 
White was apathetic about voting, but other millennials in town were motivated. Town Clerk Penny Duguay said she registered 170 new voters prior to Election Day, most in their 20s.
 
Shardlow said social media was a big component of Trump's rise as far as she's concerned. She said people were tired of being told by the traditional media what to believe because, to her, they seemed to be favoring Clinton. The more the media warned about the dangers of Trump, the more people gravitated toward him.
 
But as much as the media failed to effectively understand the level of frustration in middle America, most people just didn't care about what the media was talking about.
 
They cared about jobs and taxes and welfare.
 
And more than that, they seemed to care about preserving the last remaining shards of their town, their state and their country.
 
"I used to walk the streets and I'd know everyone," Shardlow said.
 
  
 
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Re: [socialist-econ] Re: [CCDS Members] Left wing Scabs; IN these times

this is a time of unity. calling a long term magazine like In these Times or Jill Stein scabs is not helpful. 

On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 4:13 PM, Stewart Acuff <acuff.stewart@gmail.com> wrote:
John, you are so right!!!! When Dems don't give voters a reason to vote for them that improves their quality of life, they lose. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 12, 2016, at 1:38 PM, John Case <jcase4218@gmail.com> wrote:

I emphatically do NOT agree with this assessment. The loss to  Trump is INEXCUSABLE, on ANY grounds. From the beginning, Bernie's STRATEGY and LINE was the correct strategy. The Clinton strategy of focusing on Trump's unfitness, rather than the many positive vision, and pro worker positions on issues, points she shared with Sanders during the primary, was the PRIMARY MISTAKE. There are many others. I share some of them. But the bottom line is: Trump was beatable, and Hillary Clinton did NOT get it done.

On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 1:30 PM, Samuel Webb <swebb1945@gmail.com> wrote:
To hang the outcome last Tuesday on Hillary Clinton nearly exclusively, as many are, is very mistaken, and makes going forward more difficult. I'm writing a post for my blog that will address this.

But in the meantime, I just read Bernie Sanders' op ed in the NY Times. To write, as he does, that the vote across the Midwest was a "protest vote," and leave it at that, is shocking. And yet I'm not surprised. This is a blind spot in his "class politics."

When Trump threw particular sections of the working class and their communities under the bus, as he did in the campaign, no one, including Bernie should do anything now to dignify or give legitimacy the actions of white workers who helped elect him. And calling their vote a "protest vote" does exactly that. It would be fairer to characterize it as "scabbing," but that wouldn't be helpful either.

"Them versus Us" isn't class politics, especially in our country, if it doesn't have at its core an understanding of other forms of oppression experienced by particular sections of the working class and their communities and the necessity of unity of the multi-racial, male-female, native born and immigrant working class family.



On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 11:13 AM, John Case <jcase4218@gmail.com> wrote:
1. Every union engages in "business unionism" when it signs a contract granting management rights to the employer, as it is required to  do under everry labor law since the Wagner Act. Speaking as former UE member and organizer, I love "rank and file" unionism. However, that is not the cure for the crisis in the labor movement The UE did no better than the so-called "business unions" on either  contracts or organizing over the long run.

2. Clinton was far superior to Trump -- and the ONLY alternative to trump after the primary. The AFL-CIO decision to endorse Clinton was delayed several times in deference to the significant labor support for Bernie. But the AFL-CIO Executive council decision was, IMO, an essentially democratic one, reflecting the balance of support in affiliated unions.

3. The loss was due, first,  to Clinton errors (and others, including myself) in following through on Bernie's class politics, errors -- the biggest -- including NOT putting Bernie on the ticket, thee next biggest being focusing on Trump's unfitness, rather  than the demonstrated disaffection and alienation of  many workinig class voters who hav e not had a fucking raise in 40 years.

4. The left wing,Jill Stein, head up your ass, feet planted in mid-air Half-trump voters, are as close to scabs in the poliitical  arena as i can imagine. They are not the biggest reason for Trump's election, but they played a disgraceful, mostly white-privileged, role.,

Thats a short explanation.

On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Ellen Schwartz <ellen@nicetechnology.com> wrote:
John, please explain.  Is what we used to call "business unionism" not a real thing? Did organized labor play a positive role in the election?  Or is it that you feel Hillary was a positive candidate as compared with Bernie?

Ellen Schwartz
Sent from my iPad

On Nov 12, 2016, at 6:55 AM, John Case <jcase4218@gmail.com> wrote:

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/19621/labor_leaders_deserve_their_share_of_the_blame_for_donald_trumps_victory

More complete, asshat garbage from the scab left.

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Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio:OCCUPY West Virginia on EPIC Radio

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Post: OCCUPY West Virginia on EPIC Radio
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2016/11/occupy-west-virginia-on-epic-radio.html

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