Progressives (Liberals)

You know that's a fair point but still and all they could do a lot better.

Plus I'm sure most of these late night shows would have them on as guests if they thought they'd get some fight out of them.

Where's the passion, the anger, that the rest of us feel.

Establishment Dems are like reruns of Wagon Train. Familiar old tales you know how they will end as they are starting. Move along folks. Not much to see here. We get our comforting preachments from people who have comfortable niches and are not about to rock any boats on either side of the aisle.

On Thursday, at the initiative of the Boston Globe, hundreds of newspapers purported to stand up for a free press against the destructive rhetoric of Donald Trump. It was also the one-month anniversary of my arrest at the July 16 Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, in which I was dragged out of the news conference and locked up until the middle of the night.

As laid in my cell, I chuckled at the thought of the city’s billboards proclaiming Finland the “land of free press.” Let’s say I’ve grown an especially high sensitivity to both goonish behavior toward journalists simply doing their jobs and to glorified marketers masquerading as defenders of media freedoms.

As some have noted, the editorials in question will likely help Trump whip up support among his base against a monolithic press. Just as clearly, the establishment media can draw attention away from their own failures, corruptions and falsehoods, simply by focusing on Trump’s.

Big media outlets need not report news that actually affect your life and point to serious solutions for social ills. They can simply bad-mouth Trump. And Trump need not deliver on campaign promises that tapped into populist anger that has grown in reaction to years of elite rule. He need only deride the major media.


Together, the two are frenemies, engaged in an elaborate game of logrolling. The major media built up Trump; Trump’s attacks effectively elevate a select few media celebrities.

My case is a small but telling one. From the start, major media outlets were more likely to misinform about the manhandling I received in my attempt to ask about U.S., Russian and Israeli nuclear threats to humanity than to crusade against it. (I’ll soon give a detailed rebuttal to the torrent of falsehoods, some of which I’ve already noted on social media). But examples are too numerous to count.

None of the newspaper editorials I’ve seen published, for instance, mention the likely prosecution of Wikileaks. If there were solidarity among media, the prospect of Julian Assange being imprisoned for publishing U.S. government documents should be front and center.

Neither have I seen much mention of RT or, as of this week, Al Jazeera, being compelled to register as foreign agents. State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert has openly refused to take questions from reporters working for Russian outlets. This virtual silence is born, in part, of the media’s depiction of Russia as the great enemy, which lets U.S. government policy around the world off the hook. Unlike the rhetoric that demands so much of today’s news coverage, all of these are concrete actions the Trump administration has taken against the media.

Then there’s the threat of social media.

In my day job, I work for the Institute for Public Accuracy. Yesterday [Aug. 15], I put out a news release titled “Following Assassination Attempt, Facebook Pulled Venezuela Content.” Tech giants can decide—possibly in coordination with the U.S. government—to pull the plug on content at a time and manner of their choosing. You would think newspapers might be keen to highlight the threat that such massive corporations pose, not least of all because they have eaten up their ad revenue.

The sad truth is that this is what much of the media have been doing for decades. Contrary to the lofty rhetoric of this week’s editorials, the promise of an independent and truth-seeking press has frequently been subservient to propaganda that pushes for war or advocates on behalf of a narrow set of economic interests.

Another major story of the week—one quite related to this—is that of Trump pulling former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance. NPR has called it an attempt to “silence” political dissent. But Brennan had an op-ed in Thursday’s New York Times and frequently appears on major media. If anything, the president’s actions have only elevated the former Obama official’s major media status.

The ones who have truly been silenced in the “Trump era” are those who are critical of the seemingly perpetual U.S. government war machine since the invasion of Iraq.

Trump’s attacks on establishment media—like many media attacks on him—are frequently devoid of substance. But in one of his more revealing tweets, he recently argued that the press “cause wars.” (I would say “push for war,” but that’s quibbling.)

Trump is technically right on that point, but he’s hardly one to talk, as one of the primary beneficiaries of the very compulsion he claims to deride. When he exalted U.S. bombing strikes in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere, CNN infamously called him “presidential.”

Many consider “Russiagate” to be the president’s achilles heel, and yet the two reporters called on at the the Helsinki news conference focused on precisely that, which in turn led to Brennan and others attacking Trump as “treasonous”. Meanwhile, established collusion between the U.S. and Israel has been ignored as the two governments attempt to violently reorder the Middle East.

The need for genuinely free sources of information is greater than ever. It remains unclear if traditional newspapers can be part of the solution. More likely, the institutions desperately needed to carry out that critical mission are yet to be born.

This article first appeared on Sam Husseini’s blog, Posthaven.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/what-those-joint-editorials-denouncing-trump-conveniently-left-out/

I think it's important for you to know that most of the country is not angry and certainly is not passionate about politics. We can't even get more than half the country to vote.

The U.S. is not unique there. But we'll see in the mid-terms.



Says you.

Yemen

Do you have some data or anything to show otherwise?

There are 330 million people in the USA. What percentage of them would you say are angry?

That doesn’t mean they’re not passionate; a lot of people are disgusted by the process and think votes are rigged anyway.

People will come out of the cold when they are given a good reason.

They aren’t cowards; they’re earning their money from corporate bigwigs and billionaire influencers. They’re doing quite well for themselves.

If Bernie ******* Sanders had one, he’d break TV.

Many mainstream Democrats are so brutally stupid about this they are guaranteed to suppress needed votes.

some interesting numbers to look at

http://www.people-press.org/2018/08/16/as-midterms-near-democrats-are-more-politically-active-than-republicans/

The Winner - Osama Bin Laden

Their dreams couldn’t have been more ambitious. As they launched the invasion of Afghanistan, they were already looking past the triumph to come to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the glories that would follow once his regime had been “decapitated,” once U.S. forces, the most technologically advanced ever, were stationed for an eternity in the heart of the oil heartlands of the Greater Middle East. Not that anyone remembers anymore, but Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and the rest of that crew of geopolitical dreamers wanted it all.

What they got was no less unique in history: a great power at the seeming height of its strength and glory, with destructive capabilities beyond imagining and a military unmatched on the planet, unable to score a single decisive victory across an increasingly large swath of the planet or impose its will, however brutally, on seemingly far weaker, less well-armed opponents. They could not conquer, subdue, control, pacify, or win the hearts and minds or anything else of enemies who often fought their trillion-dollar foe using weaponry valued at the price of a pizza. Talk about bleeding wounds!

A War of Abysmal Repetition

Thought of another way, the U.S. military is now heading into record territory in Afghanistan. In the mid-1970s, the rare American who had heard of that country knew it only as a stop on the hippie trail. If you had then told anyone here that, by 2018, the U.S. would have been at war there for 27 years (1979-1989 and 2001-2018), he or she would have laughed in your face. And yet here we are, approaching the mark for one of Europe’s longest, most brutal struggles, the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. Imagine that.

And just in case you’re paying no attention at all to the news from Afghanistan these days, rest assured that you don’t have to. You already know it!

To offer just a few examples, the New York Times recently revealed a new Trump administration plan to get U.S.-backed Afghan troops to withdraw from parts of the countryside, ceding yet more territory to the Taliban, to better guard the nation’s cities. Here was the headline used: “Newest U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan Mirrors Past Plans for Retreat.” (“The withdrawal resembles strategies embraced by both the Bush and Obama administrations that have started and stuttered over the nearly 17-year war.”) And that generally is about as new as it gets when it comes to Afghan news in 2018.

Consider, for instance, a report from early July that began, “An American service member was killed and two others were wounded in southern Afghanistan on Saturday in what officials described as an ‘apparent insider attack’”; that is, he was killed by an armed Afghan government soldier, an ally, not an enemy. As it happened, I was writing about just such “insider” or “green-on-blue” violence back in July 2012 (when it was rampant) under the headline “Death by Ally” (“a message written in blood that no one wants to hear”). And despite many steps taken to protect U.S. advisers and other personnel from such attacks since, they’re still happening six years later.

Or consider the report, “Counternarcotics: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” issued this June by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR). Its focus: 15 years of American efforts to suppress opium growing and the heroin trade in that country (at historic lows, by the way, when the U.S. invaded in 2001). More than eight and a half billion American dollars later, SIGAR found, opium remains the country’s largest cash crop, supporting “590,000 full-time jobs — which is more people than are employed by Afghanistan’s military and security forces.” Oh, wait, historian Alfred McCoy was writing about just that at TomDispatch back in 2010 under the headline “Can Anyone Pacify the World’s Number One Narco-State?” (“In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.”)

Recently, SIGAR issued another report, this one on the rampant corruption inside just about every part of the Afghan government and its security forces, which are famously filled with scads of “ghost soldiers.” How timely, given that Ann Jones was focused on that very subject, endemic corruption in Afghanistan, at TomDispatch back in… hmmm, 2006, when she wrote, “During the last five years, the U.S. and many other donor nations pledged billions of dollars to Afghanistan, yet Afghans keep asking: ‘Where did the money go?’ American taxpayers should be asking the same question. The official answer is that donor funds are lost to Afghan corruption. But shady Afghans, accustomed to two-bit bribes, are learning how big-bucks corruption really works from the masters of the world.”

I could, of course, go on to discuss “surges” — the latest being the Trump administration’s mini-one to bring U.S. troop levels there to 15,000 — such surges having been a dime-a-dozen phenomena in these many years. Or the recent ramping up of the air war there (essentially reported with the same headlines you could have found over articles in… well… 2010) or the amount of territory the Taliban now controls (at record levels 17 years after that crew was pushed out of the last Afghan city they controlled), but why go on? You get the point.

Almost 17 years and, coincidentally enough, 17 U.S. commanders later, think of it as a war of abysmal repetition. Just about everything in the U.S. manual of military tactics has evidently been tried (including dropping “the mother of all bombs,” the largest non-nuclear munition in that military’s arsenal), often time and again, and nothing has even faintly done the trick — to which the Pentagon’s response is invariably a version of the classic misquoted movie line, “Play it again, Sam.”

And yet, amid all that repetition, people are still dying; Afghans and others are being uprooted and displaced across Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and deep into Africa; wars and terror outfits are spreading. And here’s a simple enough fact that’s worth repeating: the endless, painfully ignored failure of the U.S. military (and civilian) effort in Afghanistan is where it all began and where it seems never to end.

A Victory for Whom?

Every now and then, there’s the odd bit of news that reminds you we don’t have to be in a world of repetition. Every now and then, you see something and wonder whether it might not represent a new development, one that possibly could lead out of (or far deeper into) the graveyard of empires.

As a start, though it’s been easy to forget in these years, other countries are affected by the ongoing disaster of a war in Afghanistan. Think, for instance, of Pakistan (with a newly elected, somewhat Trumpian president who has been a critic of America’s Afghan War and of U.S. drone strikes in his country), Iran, China, and Russia. So here’s something I can’t remember seeing in the news before: the military intelligence chiefs of those four countries all met recently in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, officially to discuss the growth of Islamic State-branded insurgents in Afghanistan. But who knows what was really being discussed? And the same applies to the visit of Iran’s armed forces chief of staff to Pakistan in July and the return visit of that country’s chief of staff to Iran in early August. I can’t tell you what’s going on, only that these are not the typically repetitive stories of the last 17 years.

And hard as it might be to believe, even when it comes to U.S. policy, there’s been the odd headline that might pass for new. Take the recent private, direct talks with the Taliban in Qatar’s capital, Doha, initiated by the Trump administration and seemingly ongoing. They might — or might not — represent something new, as might President Trump himself, who, as far as anyone can tell, doesn’t think that Afghanistan is “the right war.” He has, from time to time, even indicated that he might be in favor of ending the American role, of “getting the hell out of there,” as he reportedly told Senator Rand Paul, and that’s unique in itself (though he and his advisers seem to be raring to go when it comes to what could be the next Afghanistan: Iran).

But should the man who would never want to be known as the president who lost the longest war in American history try to follow through on a withdrawal plan, he’s likely to have a few problems on his hands. Above all, the Pentagon and the country’s field commanders seem to be hooked on America’s “infinite” wars. They exhibit not the slightest urge to stop them. The Afghan War and the others that have flowed from it represent both their raison d’être and their meal ticket. They represent the only thing the U.S. military knows how to do in this century. And one thing is guaranteed: if they don’t agree with the president on a withdrawal strategy, they have the power and ability to make a man who would do anything to avoid marring his own image as a winnner look worse than you could possibly imagine. Despite that military’s supposedly apolitical role in this country’s affairs, its leaders are uniquely capable of blocking any attempt to end the Afghan War.

And with that in mind, almost 17 years later, don’t think that victory is out of the question either. Every day that the U.S. military stays in Afghanistan is indeed a victory for… well, not George W. Bush, or Barack Obama, and certainly not Donald Trump, but the now long-dead Osama bin Laden. The calculation couldn’t be simpler. Thanks to his “precision” weaponry — those 19 suicidal hijackers in commercial jets — the nearly 17 years of wars he’s sparked across much of the Muslim world cost a man from one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families a mere $400,000 to $500,000. They’ve cost American taxpayers, minimally, $5.6 trillion dollars with no end in sight. And every day the Afghan War and the others that have followed from it continue is but another triumphant day for him and his followers.

A sad footnote to this history of extreme repetition: I wish this essay, as its title suggests, were indeed the war piece to end all war pieces. Unfortunately, it’s a reasonable bet that, in August 2019, or August 2020, not to speak of August 2021, I’ll be repeating all of this yet again.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-to-fight-a-war-of-ultimate-repetitiousness/

Corporate Democrats Have a Vested Interest in Not Listening to Workers – RAI with Thomas Frank

I think the WikiLeaks emails were way down the list of factors that swung the election. I think that the election can be entirely explained by all the sort of usual things that we go to to explain American elections, these broad longterm shifts, and things that the candidates said and promises that were made, and after two terms of a Democratic presidency, there’s a million things that you can point to.

In terms of blunders, if you talk about unforeseen blunders, wait, remember, first back up. The main impact that the WikiLeaks emails had, and they were covered in the American press, was Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs. You remember, that was I believe almost the only item from those emails that made it into the press, and it was far overshadowed by Trump’s extremely vulgar comments. Remember, when he was on the Access Hollywood tape which came out at almost exactly the same time. So in terms of blunders, I mean, Trump’s blunders were so much bigger than Hillary’s, and just in terms of, as long as we’re just talking about mistakes that might’ve cost the Democrats the election, there’s so many other things that you have to mention other than that. I mean, the James Comey stuff where he appeared to reinstate the investigation against Hillary Clinton, which was so shocking.

But also, you think of Barack Obama trying to get, remember this? Trying to get the Transpacific Partnership passed all the way through the election? That’s an incredible blunder while Hillary’s trying to distance herself from it, remember? And Trump is hitting her, hitting the Democrats for this every day, and here’s Obama saying, “No, we’re going to get it done. We’re going to get it done through Congress.” That really hurt, and another one, raising Obamacare premiums two weeks before election day. What were they thinking? Just ask yourself, I mean, you and I are old enough to remember Lyndon Johnson. Would Lyndon Johnson ever have made a move like that? No, it’s just like these are beginner’s mistakes. Or not beginner’s, it’s because they had such contempt for Trump. They didn’t think he had a chance, so Obama could take what was the most explosive issue in the election, trade deals, Trump was hitting the Democrats for trade deals at every speech all the time, and Obama could just disregard that. It’s not a threat, it’s not a problem.

And here’s poor Hillary, remember, trying to backpedal backpedal backpedal, get out of this, saying “Oh, I’ve changed my mind about the Transpacific Partnership, I used to say it was the gold standard but now I know different,” and Obama just subverting her. It was a terrible blunder.

Paul Jay: And if-

Thomas Frank: But they don’t want to talk about any of that by the way, you know that right, of course, these are …

Paul Jay: If it was the emails and if it was Comey, then it doesn’t just affect the swing states.

Thomas Frank: Well there’s-

Paul Jay: Then she doesn’t win the popular vote.

Thomas Frank: Yeah, right, but there’s also, there’s a million things that … I think the Comey emails were a big factor.

Paul Jay: But they should’ve been a big factor everywhere.

Thomas Frank: Yeah, of course, but-

Paul Jay: But she still wins the popular vote.

Thomas Frank: But wait, as long as, it’s a silly, it’s a kind of rainy day way to talk about it. I don’t want to say it’s silly, but it’s a rainy day way to talk about politics. Because if you get to take away Hillary’s blunders or the terrible things, the accidents that happen to her, you get to take away Trump’s blunders too, and this man, oh my God. Just go down, remember all the mistakes this man made on the campaign trail in 2016? Attacking this group, insulting that group, going after the judge remember? Going after the beauty contest winner, oh my lord. On and on and on.

Paul Jay: I certainly didn’t predict Trump would win, and the morning of the election if you’d asked me, I would’ve said Clinton would win. But the first time I said to myself in a serious way, “Oh, she could lose this,” was the night before the election. They were in Philly and Obama’s onstage with her bragging about all the achievements of the administration. So little sense of the anguish so many people were feeling about their conditions, and all he’s doing is bragging about the economic achievements.

Thomas Frank: Yeah, and that’s the larger, the sort of motif of the Clinton campaign was complacency. This was a resume campaign, there was no … What was she offering to, I mean, the great swing electorate of this country, white working class voters, what is she offering these guys? And by the way everybody was saying, everyone knew what was coming. If Trump had a chance, that was the group that he was going to, that’s where his chances lay was with [crosstalk]

Paul Jay: And the swing states.

Thomas Frank: So what do you do about that? What do you do, what do you offer these guys? Well, there’s all sorts of things you could offer them. Hillary doesn’t bother. Instead, it’s about her qualifications. How she is the most qualified presidential candidate of all time, she’s running as a resume candidate. And the sort of unofficial slogan of the Democrats in this last go round was ‘America is already great.’ That’s just unbelievable.

Paul Jay: Well, that’s the whole point is that she ran in defense of the, and the continuer of the Obama legacy, but the Obama legacy saw one of the greatest increases in wealth inequality-

Thomas Frank: Inequality, yeah, inequality is totally rampant, totally out of control. By the way, I was at the Democratic convention. I went to both party conventions last year, and at the Democratic convention you had speakers who tried to make something of that, the growth in inequality. Elizabeth Warren talked about it, Bernie Sanders talked about it, the problem is they’re at the Democratic convention, and half of the speakers are from the administration, from the Obama administration. You can’t really blame this on … They were in a terrible spot, because that’s sort of what Democrats are very comfortable talking about, inequality, but they can’t do it when they’ve been sitting in the White House for eight years.

Paul Jay: I think one of the things you say in your book, and we talked off camera ahead of time, it’s not just they made mistakes and it’s not just they don’t learn and observe but they have a vested interest, and they represent a section of the elite, and maybe they should be better liars but they’re a little closer to what they really think-

Thomas Frank: But they really and truly don’t care. Yeah, I think that’s about … I don’t want to be too, I don’t want to apply that with too broad a brush, because you and I both know there’s plenty of Democrats who do care and there’s a lot of good Democrats out there, and I hope that we’ll see some shift in the Democratic party. By the way, a lot of Democrats historically that I’m fond of, I like Franklin Roosevelt, I like Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, these are good … I mean, these people with terrible flaws but these are guys who would’ve known what to do about the current economic situation.

Paul Jay: We are going to talk a little bit about this later, because each one of these presidents you just mentioned have some pretty horrible things on their record.

Thomas Frank: Of course. Vietnam War, of course, but wait-

Paul Jay: And dropping nuclear bombs on people.

Thomas Frank: Yeah, but the current, the faction that is currently in charge of the Democratic party, this is by and large a very contented group of people. So the thesis of ‘Listen, Liberal,’ what I write about in ‘Listen, Liberal’ is how the Democratic party changed from being a party that really cared about blue collar workers, working class people, to being a party that cares about a very different group.

Paul Jay: Did it actually care when, even Roosevelt, when he originally ran he certainly wasn’t running on a stimulus plan, he wasn’t running on a big jobs program.

Thomas Frank: Did they genuinely care?

Paul Jay: Let me just add one point to it. Are they simply more farsighted when it comes to systemic solutions? Like, Roosevelt knew that if you want to keep any form of modern Democratic capitalism-

Thomas Frank: Yeah, it has to be reformed, yes.

Paul Jay: -you need to have a jobs program and such or you’re going to be dealing with some kind of fascism in the United States.

Thomas Frank: Yeah, that’s right, no, that’s exactly right. But towards the sort of end of the New Deal era, like in the 1960s, labor unions were very powerful within the Democratic party, members of Congress often came from a blue collar background, came up through organized labor, that sort of thing was fairly common in those days. This is not to say that they were ever a perfect party or anything like that, but there was, there has been a real shift. Not a cosmetic shift, but a real shift on-

Paul Jay: Doesn’t that actually begin with Truman?

Thomas Frank: With Truman?

Paul Jay: Yeah, like Vice President Wallace, Roosevelt’s vice president-

Thomas Frank: Yeah no, you’re right. There’s been fights-

Paul Jay: A real progressive, and then you had kind of a coup against Wallace, the unions want Wallace to become the vice presidential nominee, and in ’45 that’s kind of a coup within the party and they dump Wallace and bring in Truman.

Thomas Frank: And bring in Truman, I know. But that’s, I consider that that stuff was too far outside of the focus of ‘Listen, Liberal,’ I start in the late 1960s, which is, there was an enormous change in the Democratic party. A lot of it for the better, this is in the aftermath of the Vietnam war when the Democratic party decided to sit down and reform itself, and they basically decided to remove organized labor from its structural position within the Democratic party. This is the famous McGovern Commission in the early 1970s. Now, some of the things they did were very good and very healthy, and in their defense … By the way, once they do this, once a party of the left, which is unfortunately what the Democrats are in our system, once a party of the left decides that it’s no longer going to be a voice of working class people and instead is going to be a voice of a different group, namely affluent white collar professionals which is what they deliberately chose in the early 1970s. They chose to make this transition.

When that happens, things like the inequality, the situation that we’re in today are inevitable. When the left party in your system has decided that they don’t really care about the fate of working class people, what we have seen come to pass is inevitable. Now, in their defense, no one in 1971 would’ve seen that coming. I mean, America was probably at its most equal state ever, like the high water mark of social equality. Or I should say economic equality, in this country where you had, very famously back in those days, blue collar people living next door to white collar people, both live in ranch houses in the suburbs or whatever, and the difference would mainly be a matter of taste. Commentators, like sociological commentators used to write about this all the time. Like, “This guy drinks Budweiser, this guy drinks martinis, this guy drives a Chevy, this guy drives a Buick,” but they earned the same amount. And that’s who we were in this country, not all-

Paul Jay: The higher paid, the higher stratums of mostly unionized workers were making similar money to some professionals.

Thomas Frank: White collar, exactly. Yeah. And that was-

Paul Jay: And to a large extent, because they were getting kind of bought off with the-

Thomas Frank: Well they were paid really well-

Paul Jay: Well yeah, but they were getting that set share of the plunder of the world, because they-

Thomas Frank: Oh of course, oh no, those were. You were talking about the very large picture, yes, absolutely. And they have a lot to answer for, too. But all I’m getting at here is that this was the case in this country and that has completely disappeared. And in fact, I’m in my fifties now, but I grew up in that world where, I’m from Kansas City. If you have a parade in Kansas City, organized labor had a float in the parade. If you had a blue ribbon commission to decide some issue, organized labor had a seat at the table.

It was just that’s who were as a society that working class people were represented, and that’s gone. And I describe this to younger people, and they can’t imagine that America was like this, but it was not just that America was like this. This was the cliché of you were who, you know?

Paul Jay: And isn’t part of what happened in the Democratic party is that the leadership of many, not all but many, of the big unions, because they’re having such a comfortable life and the leaders of the unions are not living and getting paid like professionals, they’re getting paid like CEOs. They’re getting, you know.

Thomas Frank: That’s right. CEOs in the ’70s, it’s a very different world now.

Paul Jay: Yeah, but big salaries and $40 steaks at lunch and so on, that they ceded. They said okay to the elites, they said okay to Wall Street. “You can run the Democratic party, you just make sure that us big unions kind of get what we need in a very narrow way.”

Thomas Frank: Oh that’s right, I think that might be the case. I mean, some unions were always better than others. United Auto Workers for example, but they were very angry when this happened to them in the ’70s, when they basically lost their Democratic party, they were very upset about it.

Paul Jay: Part of the critique of, including the auto workers, is that they had this wonderful healthcare plan for themselves but they did next to nothing to lobby for a universal healthcare plan for the country. Later, they get screwed.

Thomas Frank: Yes. Look, all of these are, these are all true and correct objections, but the larger picture thing is they get removed from their position of strength in the Democratic party, the Democratic party then becomes through the 1970s and the ’80s, becomes a very different beast and becomes a vehicle for the interests of affluent white collar professionals. And as we all know, labor by and large still endorses Democratic candidates, funds Democratic candidates, and the Democrats have lots of other groups who are part of the coalition as well. We all know that. Minorities, women, the young, on and on and on. Many many many groups that vote that are reliably Democratic. But the group that comes first, and the group whose interests always prevail in Democratic circles, is professionals.

And by the way, this is not a secret, this is not something that I made up, this is not something we have to read between the lines. They’re open about this. They talk about this all the time, the Democratic party. You read their-

Paul Jay: And in your book you call this class the meritocracy.

Thomas Frank: Yeah, this is … Well, that’s their philosophy, and that’s the philosophy that the Democratic party has by and large embraced, and you see it in the Hillary Clinton campaign in a sort of staggering way. Well, you see it in Hillary Clinton’s career where Hillary Clinton, and by the way, and I don’t hold this against her, I admire Hillary Clinton in all sorts of ways, but she’s like her husband and like Barack Obama, she comes from a humble background and is plucked out of it by a fancy education, by a fancy school. In her case, Wellesley College. In her husband’s case, Georgetown. Barack Obama was at Harvard. Was it Harvard? It was Columbia and then Harvard for grad school.

Paul Jay: Yeah, and he heads up the Harvard Law Review, yeah.

Thomas Frank: Yes, right, right. But there’s, it’s always the same trajectory with these people where their success in life comes through education, and comes through the opportunities that education affords them. And so Hillary goes to Yale law school, Hillary becomes this super lawyer sort of back in Little Rock, and they used to call her whatever it was, the best lawyer west of whatever river Little Rock is west of. I don’t even remember, it might be the Mississippi, I forget. But that’s her career, is defined by her academic excellence and her achievement as a professional. And that’s really who she cares about, and that’s who the Democratic party cares about.

And you can see this, and what I do in ‘Listen, Liberal’ is I point out all the ways that this manifests itself, that this meritocratic worldview that a guy like Barack Obama really embraces at his core, that really is who he is, you know. He really believes that the talented should rule and that the talented can figure out, and-

Paul Jay: And then these guys say to the section of billionaires willing to listen to them, and they say to them, “We will manage the system for you, and it’ll be good for you and it’ll be good for us, and we know how to talk to the working class so we’ll make sure that they don’t become a problem.”

Thomas Frank: Yes, and it’s … So what you see in America basically in the last 20 or 30 years is both parties speak to different segments of the wealthy. The Republicans have the 1%, the people with inherited wealth, the people who are really way up there. Koch brothers, Walton family, that kind of thing. The Democrats speak to the top 10%. Your affluent suburban professionals, people with advanced degrees, people who live in the nice suburbs. And these are people that I live among, I am one of these people.

Paul Jay: Well they get some of the 1%ers, they get some of them. They get some of the hedge fund guys and they get Silicon Valley.

Thomas Frank: But you have this situation now where it’s gone so far that … Did you know that Hillary out-raised Donald Trump two to one in this last go round? And you look at the really affluent, like the affluent college towns, the affluent suburbs, Hillary won them. Hillary won Orange County. Am I right about that, or did I imagine that in a dream or something? It just …

Paul Jay: I’m not sure.

Thomas Frank: But where Hillary Clinton was beating Donald Trump in all of these sort of corners of American wealth. Donald Trump, the billionaire.

Paul Jay: And my understanding is Trump had very little billionaire money behind him other than Sheldon Adelson.

Thomas Frank: A handful of the usual suspects.

Paul Jay: It wasn’t till, well, in the primaries he had only Sheldon Adelson and then after the primaries he gets Robert Mercer, who you should watch our documentary about Robert Mercer, The Bizarre Right Wing Billionaire That Backed Bannon and Trump, because he played a key role in this, but he didn’t have the normal billionaires, including the Koch brothers.

Thomas Frank: They were not excited about Trump. So Hillary out-raised and outspent Trump two to one. I remember I went to Florida the week before and actually went to Palm Beach right down the street from Trump’s house, and I was in Palm Beach … You know Florida, the ultimate swing state, the week before the election. I was writing a story that I assume we’ll talk about later, a story for the Guardian about … Well, we’ll come to this later. But I was watching TV of course, watching the news, and it was wall to wall Hillary commercials. Hillary TV commercials constantly, no Trump commercials. I didn’t see any Trump TV commercials, but then you get in the car and drive out into the countryside and there’s Trump billboards everywhere you go.

It was a really interesting moment where Trump basically, in all sorts of ways, kind of flipped the equation on the Democrats, and did so well in all of these blue collar counties, and with a lot of these blue collar voters who really, as I’ve always said, have no business voting for a guy like that and are spectacularly ill-served by Republican economic policy.

Paul Jay: Okay, in the next segment of our interview, we’re going to continue our discussion and dig a little further into what sections of the working class voted for Trump and why. Thomas has written quite a bit about this, including his book, what is it again, ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?’ Well, what’s the matter with the American working class? We’re going to talk about that in the next segment of Reality Asserts Itself with Thomas Frank on The Real News Network.

https://therealnews.com/stories/tfrank0901rai

Why Are Millions Of Democratic Voters Missing From The Rolls?

Despite all the voter drives in the United States, despite kids marching after the Parkland shooting and the subsequent drive to register young voters, despite the massive influx of refugees from Puerto Rico into Florida, for example, you see the total number of registered Democratic voters plummeting. Two million voters altogether have been wiped off the voter rolls since the 2016 election — net — which would be impossible without the mass purges coordinated by Kris Kobach.

Learn more about Kris Kobach and how he helped Trump steal the White House in 2016. Watch The Best Democracy Money Can Buy — FREE on Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Democracy-Money-…/…/B078SHBQLB/…

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