March
18, 2024
Joe
Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look
set to make it possible again.
If
Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter
suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and
racists.
It
will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of
Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished
inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt
and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves
of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with
its job instability and suppressed wages.
Biden
and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust
enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to
cannibalize the nation.
They
backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through
massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that
resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade deals, including
the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working
class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing.
They
were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S.
prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to
turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars.
The
Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them,
including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the
Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and
extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating
reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power.
They
fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan
writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the
thing from inside until it sinks.”
Authoritarianism
is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in
Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The
Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we
will pay.
A
Second Trump Term
A
second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance.
Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump — the press, the courts,
the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the
federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.
Our
imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly
into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial
branches. The plan to snuff out our
anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the
Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for Leadership.”
The
Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists
and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos
that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep
State” for undermining his first administration.
Our
industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the
flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and
“traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class,
abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal
agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections
they have left.
War
and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will
remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state,
especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and
protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.
Unfettered
and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything
into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits,
until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi
writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle,
Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only
options left are tyranny or revolution.
The
Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why.
Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes:
“[C]ontrary to many pundits’
assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro
working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t
care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought
Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and
daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing
on social issues.”
But
the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them
in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and
fear.
The
Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs
while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these
layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express
concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of
dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to
sustain the genocide.
Les
Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive
polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the
engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.
He
writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with
530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they
refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the
plant.
Biden
then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the
2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in
the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.
Mingo
County, West Virginia, in the early 20th
century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and
the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective
Agency.
The
gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and
shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke
the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt
administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized.
“Mingo
County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes.
“As late as 1996, with more than 3,200
coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7
percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats
declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received
only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once
saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”
The
3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss
of coal jobs in any county in the country.
The
lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women
than any of the lies spewed by Trump.
Mass
Layoffs
There
have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor
Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The
reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized
workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers
to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that
enforces labor rights.
Elon
Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB –
already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate
compliance — after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking
the law by blocking union organizing.
The
NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk.
SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts
to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from
hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.
Fear
— fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the
Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where
college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are
busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.
The
Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political
cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system
built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual
failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating
the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.
Fear
has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands
of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid
crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and
profound despair.
They
want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?
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