ProvokoLoko's Commentary of “America's Great Divide: Robert Reich Interview” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bgkBrFoOOo
This interview is so informative and reflects ProvokoLoko’s ire and energy for many of our illustrations. The financial crisis of 2008 illuminated much for Americans. It revealed the great unfairness in the United States.
1) Bankers got bailed out
2) No executives went to jail.
3) Homeowners didn’t get help.
4) Millions of people lost their savings and their jobs.
It was a wakeup call, as if a curtain was opened and everybody could see the true landscape of America. Most people were not getting anywhere. A small group at the top was basically raking in more and more power and wealth.
The government was now too cozy and in bed with corporations and the wealthy, and not the middle class. The events of 2008 define this division in America.
A HISTORY
This unfairness has been happening for many years. The median wage hadn’t increased since 1979. An entire generation of people expected that they would do better and better and better. But from 1979, 1980 onward, the middle class shrunk. Women entered the workforce and everybody worked longer hours. They used their homes as collateral.
People persuaded themselves that this reality of stagnation was not really something that hurt them. They had found ways of coping with stagnant incomes and with a game that looked to them increasingly like it was rigged for the benefit of the wealthy. But as long as they could maintain their own incomes, by refinancing their homes and getting deeper into debt, they could basically persuade themselves that everything was fine.
The groundwork was laid for a great sense that the bailout in 2008 was fundamentally unfair. The sense of unfairness expressed itself on the right in the Tea Party movement, on the left, briefly, the Occupy Movement. Both movements expressed outrage. In 2016 with Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. Bernie Sanders was the direct lineal descendant of the Occupy Movement. Donald Trump was the direct lineal descendant of the Tea Party Movement. Both sides believed this unfairness is that the government had betrayed the people by getting too close to corporations, big banks, and big business. It was essentially the same message. People wanted a shakeup of the current system. Both Bernie and Trump understood this. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump became the oracles of this deep-seated sense of betrayal.
The Tea Party were Republican, right-wing operatives. They wanted to pull the Republican Party even further to the right. At the time, the establishment part of the Republican Party didn’t understand that by allying themselves with the Tea Party,
they would be ultimately undermining their principles and their infrastructure. They were writing their own death certificate that would lead to the takeover to the Republican Party by somebody like Donald Trump.
Here is an important point. The populist Democrat/progressives and the populist Republicans/Tea Party Republicans, had a lot in common. They felt that the establishment had shafted them and most Americans. Both sides should have united to get big money out of politics and laws, condemning corporate welfare. UNITED: both slides should have reformed the system to benefit average Americans instead of big business. BIPARTISAN ACTION UNTIED IN COMMON CAUSE.
US VERSUS THEM CULTURE WARS
Instead of unifying the country in a common cause (Provokoloko’s conspiracy theory), corporations encouraged influential personalities to divide the country into a combative spirit: agree with our thinking or you are an enemy. The biggest division in America is not right versus left. It’s not Democrats versus Republicans. The deepest division is between the vast number of people who are going nowhere and the small number of people at the top who are getting richer and more powerful every year. It is in the interest of those people at the top to keep everybody else angry at each other.
Economic frustrations can easily be channeled into racism and xenophobia. This is one of the oldest tricks in the demagogue’s playbook. Demagogues have taken economic frustrations and actually pointed to what are essentially scapegoats: the other, people who look different, foreigners, people who have different skin pigments, people who have different religions.
[1] People like [Jeff] Sessions and [Steve] Bannon and [Stephen] Miller were able to turn people’s economic frustration into anger within the GOP base. It worked. The Republican Party by the 2000s was looking for every opportunity to divide the country with issues of immigration, guns, national health care, and quasi-socialism. By the time of the Obama administration, the entire structure of bipartisanship had been wrecked.
WHO WE ARE (GOP.COM)
Initially united in 1854 by the promise to abolish slavery, the Republican Party has always stood for freedom, prosperity, and opportunity. Today, as those principles come under attack from the far-left, we are engaged in a national effort to fight for our proven agenda, take our message to every American, grow the party, promote election integrity, and elect Republicans up and down the ballot. The principles of the Republican Party recognize the God-given liberties while promoting opportunity for every American.
[1] The GOP welcomed Trump’s famous speech about immigrants, build a wall, and telling the Proud Boys to standby. Donald Trump knew intuitively the key to his success was to demonize the others: immigrants, blacks, people who looked and acted differently, even women on occasion. When he announced his candidacy for president, he used Mexicans; he called them rapists and murderers. He built a base, utilizing this frustration and anger, a sense of being left behind, a sense of unfairness. And Trump’s genius was how to fan the flame of rage, utilizing that emotional chord of a deep sense of betrayal. He elevated it, exploited it, and made it work politically. He called his base, the “forgotten.”
[2] Insider - Harrington (11/16)
Trump’s message continues to resonate with his base. But he also utilized a saying “Drain the swamp.” Drain the swamp originally was used to deal with mosquitos and malaria in the US and Europe. It was first used in politics by a Democrat. Winfield Gaylors wrote in 1903, “Socialists are not satisfied with killing a few of the mosquitoes which come from the capitalist swamp. They want to drain the swamp.” Reagan used it in 1980 when he said, “drain the swamp” of bureaucracy in Washington. Trump used the term for sweeping ethics reform that “make our government honest once again.”
[1] Instead, Trump stacked his White House transition team with Washington lobbyists and GOP veterans, prompting doubt if he really intended to “drain the swamp” and cleanse Washington of political insiders who are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Donald Trump has done basically nothing for the forgotten Americans (the bottom 60%). The big tax cut went mostly to the big corporations and the wealthy. Donald Trump’s regulatory rollbacks have hurt many people because regulations are actually protections in terms of health, safety, and the environment. The big winners are the big corporations and the very wealthy
It is Provokolo’s belief that Trump never intended to benefit America with his presidency. He intended to benefit Trump with the power enabled by the most powerful job in the world. He utilized the Autocrat playbook to divide the country with culture wars to keep us divided and not unified. Trump is part of the money-making machine which has taken over Washington.
Yet, even after his presidency ended, the passions of his base continue to be misguided. The extremes of his base have taken control and continue to fan the flames of “the Other”, the xenophobia. And the United States is unable to move forward as a result of the GOP using nationalism as a vehicle for conducting divisive hate. Demagogues have often used nationalism, confused it with patriotism, and appealed to the worst instincts in people instead of the best.
THE FORGOTTEN ARE REAL
The next president must realize that as manipulated and deceived as Trump supporters are, the underlying frustration is real and accurate. Setting aside the ideotic conspiracy theories and xenophobia, their anger has good reason to exist. The forgotten Americans are real. [1] The median wage has gone almost nowhere since the late ’70s, early 1980s. Most Americans have not seen any gain in their own economic lives, even though the national economy is two to three times bigger than it was. CEOs who in the 1960s took home 20 times what the typical worker was taking home are now taking home 300 times what the typical worker is taking home. Wages are going nowhere, people are working harder than ever, they are losing job security, 80% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and they don’t have any faith that anybody is looking after them. People aren’t stupid. The game is rigged. Washington is awash in money, and that money is coming from big corporations and wealthy people. Unions are no longer a major force in politics because they have been busted or made irrelevant or companies have moved to non-union states. So the forgotten people are basically most Americans. Both Democrats and Republicans and Independents are the forgotten.
How did the first black president lead to the first white supremacist president? [1] The question is not are they bad or good? They are decent, hardworking people. The question is, what’s being done for them? What’s being done to them? Are the major parties speaking to them? One of the problems the Democrats have had, and I think one of the problems—biggest problem Hillary Clinton had, she didn’t have a clear and forceful explanation for what happened to the working middle class.
Barack Obama did some very important and good things. He made sure that the economy—the economy didn’t succumb to the great crash of 2008. He created the beginnings of a national health care system that nobody thought was possible. However, Obama did not respond to the core grievance of America. Obama focused on preventing another depression, making sure that the financial crisis did not lead to the kind of apocalyptic economic consequences. But he ignored the larger political fallout, the sociological fallout, the sense of fundamental betrayal. Most were not getting ahead and drowning in debt because the system is rigged; big money is taking over politics. It’s all corporations and Wall Street and the wealthy, and that has to end. Barack Obama had Wall Streeters in his office all the time. He hired people from Wall Street. People from Wall Street left the administration, went back to Wall Street. Barack Obama didn’t understand the degree of anger in the population. Hillary Clinton did not understand the degree of anger in the population. Donald Trump intuitively understood, but he used it for his own purposes, and he twisted it into racism, misogyny, and xenophobia.
TRUTH NO LONGER MATTERS
[1] Extremist party leaders do what demagogues have done throughout history. Trump communicates directly, and he accuses the press of being “enemies of the people” and The New York Times of being “treasonous.” His followers believe, “Isn’t it great that we can circumvent all of the intermediaries, the media and talk truthfully?” The word “media” comes from “intermediary”. Trump’s supporters do not register his lies. Instead, they hear somebody who is giving them the unvarnished truth. He’s not spinning. He doesn’t sound like a politician. In fact, he sounds like the opposite of a politician. He uses words that politicians don’t use. He says things politicians don’t say. To their ears, he sounds honest, despite that their situation is not getting any better. They are so willing to suspend disbelief in terms of their own situation not getting any better. They’re willing to believe him because they want to shake up politics and the establishment that are rotten to the core.
https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal-government/
Eight of the ten states most dependent on the federal government were Republican-voting, with the average red state receiving $1.35 per dollar spent.
Nine states sent more to the federal government than they received — seven of these were Democrat-voting and had higher per capita GDPs than many of the red states that received the most.
HEAL AMERICA - REALLOCATE POWER WHEN VOTING
[1] The only way out is to respond to not the racism, xenophobia, and the misogyny. The leaders must respond to the genuine frustrations that people have about a rigged game, about a political system that is no longer working for average people. The important point to understand is that minus the racism and xenophobia, the core of the populist Republican Party has much in common with the core of the populist progressive Democratic Party.
We now have a society divided between the bottom 60 or 70% of people who are going nowhere, or many of whom are on a downward escalator, and people at the very top who are taking home most of the goodies.This is not your father’s or mother’s politics.
Left, right and center mean nothing in this world. The real issue is who’s going to look out for and who’s going to respond to the bottom 60%?
Trump is embarrassing for the GOP. They don’t like the racism, they don’t like all of this divisiveness, but as long as the stock market continues to do well and they get the tax cuts and they get the regulatory rollbacks, they are not going to make a fuss. Business-friendly big tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks,, the money flowing into big corporations and into the stock market and into the hands of wealthy investors. But at the same time, you’ve got this cartoon going on with Trump telling his base that their enemies are immigrants; he’s sounding racist alarms; he is getting people riled up. In other words, he’s conducting this symphony of ugliness and anger while the Republican establishment is laughing all the way to the bank.
Change the allocation of power in society and the middle class becomes strong again. Nobody in the elites, both establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats, want to talk about power. Most people feel that they have no power; they have no agency; they have no control over their fates. And they are accurate. Those with power don’t give a damn about the lower 60 percent as long as they can keep their power. It’s time to vote for politicians who run on a platform that empowers most Americans politically and economically. Voters must ignore the culture war and hate tomfoolery. Reallocation of POWER should be the platform of the next president.
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