POST-ELECTION HANGOVER (continued)

POST-ELECTION HANGOVER (continued)

A lot of commentary trivializing the announcement that Trump’s intervention supposedly saved 1000 (mostly union) jobs misses the point of such a gesture, just as they underestimated Trump’s appeal to workers in Rust-belt states which apparently gave him the electoral college margin that allowed him to win.  Trump tells a story --  Trump threatens ‘consequences’ for U.S. firms that relocate offshore --

about saving good-paying US jobs and bashing the elites who have shown little empathy for displaced workers. Liberals or Democrats saying “these jobs are not coming back” may be accurate in general, but it is not a message which offers any hope to displaced workers.  And even if it is true that the Carrier jobs are a drop in the bucket of declining manufacturing employment – or that the tax subsidies offered to Carrier are a public giveaway -- 1000 Indiana union families can now look forward to keeping decent-paying jobs.  And they -- along with the many more who learn about this from the news -- will enthusiastically thank Donald Trump.  Democrats need to give more than lip-service to Labor and actively support organizing – while unions should demand more in return for support.  A decimated labor movement means losing the best organized base for opposing reaction nd supporting the fight against Trumpism.

WILL TRUMP’S PR TRIUMPH AT CARRIER MEAN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S DEMISE?

Post-election pundits are propagating the false equation that “industrial workers” equals “white working class,” and that Clinton’s crushing defeat in the Rust Belt was the result of a white worker revolt against political correctness ― i.e., they’re racists! But America’s industrial workforce reflects the future, not the past. The 1,400 person Carrier workforce in Indianapolis, for example, is fifty percent African-American. Women make up half of the workers on its assembly lines, and ten percent of the employees are Burmese immigrants… Trump's effort to save these jobs contrasts starkly with the failure of the established Democratic Party to do anything at all about such devastating plant closures. President Obama has never used his bully pulpit to mention even one of the thousands of facilities that shifted abroad under his watch. Similarly, Hillary Clinton remained silent about Carrier during her entire campaign, thereby allowing Trump to morph into the champion of the working class… Virtually every article on Carrier opines that Trump's quick fix cannot alter the technological march that surely will displace these blue collar workers. What they are really saying is the corporations have the right and obligation to move wherever and whenever they wish in order to boost profits and "shareholder value." Mainstream economists then assure us that, overall, society is better off due lower-cost imported goods and higher value-added domestic jobs, even if a few workers are sacrificed along the way. But a "few workers" have turned into millions of family members and members of devastated communities who have seen their lives deteriorate. They are heading Trump's way.   More

ROBERT REICH: The Democratic Party Lost Its Soul. It’s Time to Win It Back

You might think this overwhelming drubbing would cause the Democratic party to reorganize itself into a very different party from the one it’s become – which is essentially a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests that make up the bulk of its funding. Don’t bet on it. For one thing, many vested interests don’t want the Democratic party to change. Most of the money it raises ends up in the pockets of political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers, advertising consultants and advertisers themselves, many of whom have become rich off the current arrangement. They naturally want to keep it. For another, the Democratic party apparatus is ingrown and entrenched. Like any old bureaucracy, it only knows how to do what it has done for years.   More

TRUMP PRESIDENCY COULD KILL LABOR UNIONS

As Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin—states that once were the stronghold of the nation’s industrial union movement—dropped into Donald Trump’s column on election night, one longtime union staff member told me that Trump’s victory was “an extinction-level event for American labor.”  He may be right.  A half-century ago, more than a third of those Rust Belt workers were unionized, and their unions had the clout to win them a decent wage, benefits, and pensions. Their unions also had the power to turn out the vote. They did—for Democrats. White workers who belonged to unions voted Democratic at a rate 20 percent higher than their non-union counterparts, and there were enough such workers to make a difference on Election Day…  The most devastating blow to unions may come from the Supreme Court, once a Trump-appointed conservative wins confirmation to the seat that the late Justice Antonin Scalia occupied. It was only Scalia’s death that kept the court from ruling in the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association  case that public employee unions no longer have the right to collect partial dues payments from the nonmembers they represent in disputes with employers and for whom they bargain contracts.   More

Was 11/8 a New 9/11? 
The Election That Changed Everything and Could Prove History’s Deal-Breaker

37 years after the first Afghan intervention and 15 years after the second one, in the wake of an American election, blowback from the war on terror -- its generals, its mindset, its manias, its urge to militarize everything -- has come home in a significant way. In fact, we just held what may someday be seen as our first 9/11-style election…  As with 9/11, a long, blowback-ridden history preceded 11/8 and Donald Trump’s triumph… Think of Donald Trump’s election, then, as the victory of the suicide bomber the white working class dispatched to the Oval Office to, as people now say politely, “shake things up.” … Whatever Americans may have ushered in with the events of 11/8, one thing is increasingly certain about the country that Donald Trump will govern.  Forget Vladimir Putin and his rickety petro-state: the most dangerous nation on the planet will now be ours… It’s not a pretty picture.  And yet it’s just a lead-in to what, undoubtedly, should be considered the ultimate question in Donald Trump’s America: With both the CIA’s coup-making and the military’s regime-change traditions in mind, could the United States also overthrow a planet?  More

The System IS Rigged!—The Electoral College and the 2016 Election

Donald Trump was right: the system is rigged! But it is rigged for the Republicans, not the Democrats, for conservatives, not progressives. And the result is the election of an extreme racist, misogynist authoritarian who may change the course of U.S. and even world history.

Belatedly we learn that Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump by more than two million votes, yet Trump still won the Electoral College. The public burst into an uproar in 2000 when Gore beat Bush by 550,000 votes but lost the Electoral vote. This time the public, the Clinton campaign and the press are quiet… In fact the Electoral College system was created by slaveholders, and remains undemocratic and racist, and biased to the Republicans. Obama showed that the system can be overcome and even turned to our advantage, but the Clinton and Gore losses show it is an uphill climb… The pro-Republican bias of the Electoral College derives from two main dynamics: it overweights the impact of mostly conservative voters in small population states and it negates entirely the mostly progressive votes of nearly half of African American voters, more than half of Native American voters and a major swath of Latino voters.   More

How the electoral college gerrymanders the presidential vote

The principle of “one person, one vote” doesn't really apply to electoral politics. The winner-take-all system means that votes in some states are quite literally more valuable to presidential candidates than votes in other states. This is why the candidates tend to spend all of their time in a small handful of battlegrounds. The electoral map, in other words, is something of an organic gerrymander — the results it produces owe a lot to the way the boundaries are drawn. The difference between this electoral “gerrymander” and a true gerrymander comes down to intent: the border between Illinois and Wisconsin was not created in 1818 with the intent of electing Donald Trump 200 years later, for instance. But as Hayes frames it, electoral college results are highly sensitive, or “unstable,” to small shifts in state and county boundaries. Contrast this to an election by national popular vote: In that case, you could move boundaries around all you want without changing the outcome.  More