America: A Burning Ship
God Bless America! Today we are witnessing one of the most important elections in the country's history - but things are not going well for the American people. The system is rigged and while efforts to change that are faltering, false hopes are also being raised. The results in November are painful to imagine.
I base my views partly on the work of Thomas Frank digging into the guts of the Trump campaign and also on the obvious and well-documented lack of mainstream media coverage being devoted to the courageous efforts of Bernie Sanders and his campaign to take back America from the .1%, the Super-Pacs and the corporations.
To get quickly to the point, according Frank's analysis, published the other day in his new book, Listen, Liberal: Or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? and laid out very well in his CBC interview with Anna Maria Tremonti, the following are the big issues driving people to vote for Donald Trump in these primaries.
#1 Unpopular Trade Deals - NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) between Canada, the US and Mexico moved hundreds of factories and hundreds of thousands of well-paying working class jobs to Mexico. The new so-called "Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement" will do more of the same on a bigger scale with twelve countries involved. Trump and Sanders are against both these deals and for the return of corporations and jobs to the US, while Bill Clinton signed the first deal and Hillary Clinton participated in making the second.
These deals are unpopular among regular people in all three countries who bear the brunt of these deal and immensely popular with the economic and intellectual elites who either profit or feel no pain from them. Bear in mind that the next wave of unemployment (already started) is going to be from robotics. As automation makes more jobs redundant, the very rich are going to become even richer and the divide between the haves and have-nots bigger still.
#2 The Democratic Party is No Longer for the Working Classes - The Democratic Party leadership today gets its money and inspiration from the elites on Wall Street and in Big Pharma and the Silicon Valley and cares little for the lives of ordinary workers.
#3 Donald Trump Aligns Himself with the Working Poor and Middle Class - Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both speak to the great injustice these trade agreements have done to regular Americans. But Donald Trump gets the mainstream media attention, mostly for the wrong reasons, while Bernie Sanders does not.
If Elected, will Donald Trump really come through? Will he renegotiate or tear up these trade deals and return prosperity to the American people? Thomas Frank doesn't think so. Will Hillary Clinton do anything of the sort? Highly unlikely. The Democratic Party leadership is not interested.
Can Bernie Sanders still win the Democratic nomination? He could, but according to this analysis it would be difficult. Most polls show he would easily beat Donald Trump in an election with a wider margin than Clinton. But with the current media blackout, this is going to be hard and if more people come to grips with the real contrast between Clinton and Trump in terms of jobs and prosperity in America, in my view Trump might even win in a contest with her. (Just imagine the debates!) According to Frank, even Bill Clinton - who has won a few elections - believes the Hillary camp is in denial about the appeal of the Trump campaign.
Can anything be done? Other than prayer, my humble suggestion as a sympathetic neighbour is that voters make the Bernie Blackout a bigger campaign issue by picketing, boycotting, and otherwise bringing attention to how cable and network news and major print media are influencing this election campaign. And continue their vigorous support.
Now is the time.
God Bless America! Today we are witnessing one of the most important elections in the country's history - but things are not going well for the American people. The system is rigged and while efforts to change that are faltering, false hopes are also being raised. The results in November are painful to imagine.
I base my views partly on the work of Thomas Frank digging into the guts of the Trump campaign and also on the obvious and well-documented lack of mainstream media coverage being devoted to the courageous efforts of Bernie Sanders and his campaign to take back America from the .1%, the Super-Pacs and the corporations.
To get quickly to the point, according Frank's analysis, published the other day in his new book, Listen, Liberal: Or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? and laid out very well in his CBC interview with Anna Maria Tremonti, the following are the big issues driving people to vote for Donald Trump in these primaries.
#1 Unpopular Trade Deals - NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) between Canada, the US and Mexico moved hundreds of factories and hundreds of thousands of well-paying working class jobs to Mexico. The new so-called "Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement" will do more of the same on a bigger scale with twelve countries involved. Trump and Sanders are against both these deals and for the return of corporations and jobs to the US, while Bill Clinton signed the first deal and Hillary Clinton participated in making the second.
These deals are unpopular among regular people in all three countries who bear the brunt of these deal and immensely popular with the economic and intellectual elites who either profit or feel no pain from them. Bear in mind that the next wave of unemployment (already started) is going to be from robotics. As automation makes more jobs redundant, the very rich are going to become even richer and the divide between the haves and have-nots bigger still.
#2 The Democratic Party is No Longer for the Working Classes - The Democratic Party leadership today gets its money and inspiration from the elites on Wall Street and in Big Pharma and the Silicon Valley and cares little for the lives of ordinary workers.
#3 Donald Trump Aligns Himself with the Working Poor and Middle Class - Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both speak to the great injustice these trade agreements have done to regular Americans. But Donald Trump gets the mainstream media attention, mostly for the wrong reasons, while Bernie Sanders does not.
If Elected, will Donald Trump really come through? Will he renegotiate or tear up these trade deals and return prosperity to the American people? Thomas Frank doesn't think so. Will Hillary Clinton do anything of the sort? Highly unlikely. The Democratic Party leadership is not interested.
Can Bernie Sanders still win the Democratic nomination? He could, but according to this analysis it would be difficult. Most polls show he would easily beat Donald Trump in an election with a wider margin than Clinton. But with the current media blackout, this is going to be hard and if more people come to grips with the real contrast between Clinton and Trump in terms of jobs and prosperity in America, in my view Trump might even win in a contest with her. (Just imagine the debates!) According to Frank, even Bill Clinton - who has won a few elections - believes the Hillary camp is in denial about the appeal of the Trump campaign.
Can anything be done? Other than prayer, my humble suggestion as a sympathetic neighbour is that voters make the Bernie Blackout a bigger campaign issue by picketing, boycotting, and otherwise bringing attention to how cable and network news and major print media are influencing this election campaign. And continue their vigorous support.
Now is the time.
