In the weeks leading up to Sunday night’s debate, millennials have been some of the most talked about voters but among the groups least talked to. A recent study found that some 39 percent of millennials (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/05/a-new-poll-has-donald-trump-in-fourth-place-behind-hillary-clinton-gary-johnson-and-jill-stein-with-young-people/) were planning to vote for either the Green Party’s Jill Stein or Libertarian Gary Johnson in November. The demographic group that came out most strongly for Bernie Sanders, it seems, isn’t as enthusiastic about supporting Hillary Clinton.
If there’s one thing millennials can agree on, though, it’s a deep disgust with Donald Trump, the now-scandal-racked GOP candidate. Sixty-one percent hold a “strongly unfavorable” opinion of him, and it’s hard to imagine Friday’s revelations—of Trump feeling entitled to “grab (women) by the pussy”—will win him many favors among the coveted 18-34 demographic, now accounting for just under a third of the electorate.
For Sunday’s debate, I decided to spend time with some bona fide millennials. #AllofUs, profiled here (http://inthesetimes.com/article/19482/millennials-arrested-at-paul-ryans-office-demanding-he-denouce-trump), is a millennial-led group looking to ramp up pressure on Trump and the GOP in the few weeks remaining before November 8. Its leadership is culled from the so-called millennial movements, spanning from Occupy Wall Street to the climate fight to the movement for black lives and immigrant justice. This coming week, it will host an action in Washington, D.C., of millennial women and femmes in response to what it calls Trump's and the GOP’s “politics of hate.”
“Trump is despicable,” the group writes. “But we know where he came from. The GOP has pushed a 50-year politics of hate towards black people, immigrants, Muslims, women and LGBTQ people.”
I spent Sunday night with #AllofUs2016 at a watch party in Brooklyn.
“I’m expecting Donald Trump to continue his disgusting sexist racist campaign and I’m really disappointed to see that none of the issues that our generation cares about will likely be debated this debate: skyrocketing tuition, racial inequality and climate change,” Waleed Shahid, 26, an #AllofUs2016 organizer, said as the debate got started. “Unfortunately, the debate is going to be about the media circus.”
“Their party only cares about the billionaire donors trying to dig our country into the ground. If Donald Trump and the GOP love America so much,” he asked, “then why do they hate so many Americans?”
Most of the Brooklyn room was silent for the first half hour of the debate, as Trump threatened to throw Clinton in jail. One of the biggest cheers of the night was when Clinton mentioned that Obamacare has helped extend health care coverage to minors under 26 covered by their parents.
One thing that did come up early in the debate was immigration, when moderators Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz asked Trump to clarify his earlier statements to ban Muslims from immigrating to the United States “until we can figure out what the hell is going on.”
“Whatever happens November 8th, Trump has spent his campaign tying immigration to terrorism and crime, and that's going to outlast this election,” said Thaís Marques of the immigrant rights group Movimiento Cosecha.
An overtime question on energy policy saw Trump repeat a few points he’s previously made about how the Environmental Protection Agency and the administration of Barack Obama are "killing our energy business in this country” and the benefits of (non-existent) “clean coal." Clinton, while committing again to turn the United States into a “clean energy superpower,” also praised natural gas as a "bridge fuel,” in moving off of coal.
“I don’t think Hillary’s that great on climate, and Trump denies that it exists so I’m not surprised,” says Varshini Prakash, 23, of the Divestment Student Network, a group supporting fossil fuel divestment campaigns on campuses around the country. “It makes me sad and scared when two people running for president of the United States aren’t clear about what their positions are and how they’re going to solve this crisis.”
The night ended without any discussion of mass incarceration or criminal justice reform, among other important issues.
Asked what was missing from the debate, David Shor, 25—who worked on Sanders’ primary campaign—said, “excitement, and an appeal to rational young people.
“The things that we care so much about are not the first priority for the conversations that are being had at the highest levels. We need to keep on forcing ourselves into those conversations,” Shor said.


More... (http://inthesetimes.com/article/19525/what-millennials-think-of-the-2nd-trump-clinton-debate/)

OCTOBER 10, 2016
As it Was Always Scripted; Trump’s October Surprise
by JOHN STEPPLING

The Trump tapes, or Pussygate, can hardly come as much of a surprise. The most relevant aspect to this is the timing. Now I, and others, certainly, suspected Trump would take larger and larger missteps as the election grew near. Almost as if he wanted to lose. You think? The problem has been nothing he does dissuades his base. And this brings up former governor Schwarzenegger. of California. One who had similar allegations directed at him back in the early 2000s.

If Trump resembles Berlusconi (and he does now more than ever), he also resembles the former governor, and a host of other rich and powerful men in the public spotlight. For this kind of casual abusive misogyny is part of the performance for a certain class of men. Why else have money they will tell you? Great restaurants? (meh) Nice cars (yeah, thats probably second place) or travel (nope). Its access to beautiful younger women. The trophy wife side bar phenomenon. The frat boy rape culture that is the default setting for privileged young white males.

I’ve seen it over the years and I remember that former governor in fact, back when he spent his days in gyms. (and it should be noted, I’ve seen an inverse phenomenon with professional athletes who actually often have to have body guards remove the groupie contingent from the hotel when they are trying to get to their rooms. And pop musicians. For this is the culture of total sexual objectification. Sex is currency). I remember that sense of entitlement.

Wealth, obviously, breeds privilege. The more money you have the more privilege you have. But wealth and celebrity creates a sort of hyper privilege. Why is there even a first class section on airplanes? I ask this seriously. Why? So the rich can keep themselves from being dirtied by the masses? Why can’t people carry their own luggage up to their room at hotels? When some complain that if they did bell hops would be out of a job, the answer is that I’d be be happy to work as a bell hop my fair share of the time. Just as Don Trump should. And Hillary would be fine helping in the laundry room. I had an argument once with a rich person who said he knew the maids loved him and that he tipped well and so waiters loved him, too. All one can say to that is that firstly, it’s not true (they hate you) and second, if that is how, even casually, informally, one defines love, then we have a problem.

Now, Trump is a generally abusive person. One of his sons remembered fondly going with his grandfather to collect rents from the slum tenements the elder Trump owned. A Norman Rockwell image if ever there was one. On the other side, Chelsea Clinton (married to an Israeli/American hedge fund manager) waxes dreamily how she doesn’t really care about money. Only the rich say such things. Trump is the logical endgame for financial capital. Hillary the end game for a political class that first came to prominence in the cold war. But this was always in the cards. I am hardly the only one to have predicted a major problem that would force Trump to step down. And now every hideous war criminal and reactionary (Condi Rice, Jeb Bush, et al) are crawling over each other in degrees of moral outrage denouncing Trump. This is the electoral spectacle on steroids (apologies to the former governor).

But back to the Donald. Like the former Dianabol governor, Trump is mostly a freak show. A carny small tent act. But then, remember Reagan was governor on the heels of his disastrous term as president of the Screen Actors Guild. He was a celebrity. A pitchman for 20 Mule Team Borax. A B movie actor. . He never pretended otherwise. Reagan was, however, ideological. He was a rabid anti communist but he also pandered to wealth. He loved rich people. So did the human growth hormone governor.

But Berlusconi and Trump ARE wealth — maybe not Koch Brothers level wealth or the Sultan of Brunei— but close enough I think. And in Trump’s case, it is the fact that he signifies wealth more than his actual wealth. I mean John Kerry married the Heinz ketchup heiress. Just you know, speaking of wealth. Most national level politicians are wealthy. Who is the last senator or governor you can remember who is now living in an Airstream in someone’s driveway? Or in a tract home in Palmdale or Pensacola?

Anyway, Trump is not ideological. He is a businessman who made his money the old fashioned way, he inherited it. And I really find it odd that ANYONE can feign shock at Trump’s *pussy* remarks. Or that he is a boorish groper. For this goes back to the culture overall. A culture of marketing and images of allurement. Of 12 year old girls sexy posing in haute couture magazines (which is OK, but its a scandal to wear a hijab on the beach). It is the culture of military rape (watch Kirby Dick’s documentary The Invisible War). It is the culture of Catholic priest abuse going unreported and mostly unpunished.

Meanwhile a growing American gulag exists made up of 99% poor people, disproportionately black. Many serving decades for minor non violent offenses.In jail for doing far less, really, than Trump admits to. And yet, in Hollywood today it is impossible to find a film or TV show that does not idolize the military and police. It is the culture of runaway anti depressant use. Something like 1 in 4 Americans take anti depressants. Think on the current President and his assisting of Monsanto and GMO food, and the de-regulatory trade agreements he has pushed through. And most of all the billions spent on a military that is literally destroying the planet.

No, the public worries about distractions. Meanwhile people are beheaded in Saudi Arabia, our ally — but then that stuff is far away… and Israel is meanwhile slowly carrying out an ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Also far away. Thirty eight BILLION dollars is ticketed for Israel in the coming years. To better enforce their apartheid state. Inequality. And the US is encircling the globe with military bases and training various death squads (they once trained Yemen’s secret police for example). And the U.S. continues its draconian destruction of the middle east. And the re-colonizing of Africa. And assaults anywhere on disobedient states.

The U.S. public is being prepared for war with a virulent anti Russian propaganda campaign the likes of which I’ve never before seen (helped out by corporate owned media and PR firms like PURPOSE and AVAAZ). And the insane war loving ghouls in the Pentagon, and Hillary Clinton herself, want nothing so much as more war. Soros wants war. Western capital wants war. War makes money.

But back to the Donald. Trump was never going to be President. If a professional were handling his campaign and wanted to win this election, then trust me, this info would never have seen the light of day. No, this is just fine in terms of brand *Trump*. His cologne *Empire* (or if you prefer, his other fragrance *Success*) will probably increase in sales. His future media empire is barely affected by this scandal. If that’s what it is.

The abuse of women by rich powerful men goes on all the time. Its happened to Presidents. Its happened to governors and senators and DA’s and CEOs. Rich men consider it a part of their incentive package to treat women however they want. And given how extensive the groupie phenomenon is, the abuse has to be found in places outside the sexual because sex is always available for these men. Its about power and humiliation and degradation. And it’s a constant for the rich. Look at the University rape culture in the U.S. It occurs at very expensive and supposedly selective schools. It is part of learning to be Don Trump, or Bill Clinton. Abuse happens at major sports programs, too. Remember Joe Paterno? (or read the old volume by Gary Shaw on the old Daryl Royal football program at U of Texas). There are a thousand examples. It’s all related.

Treating people as things is what reification means. As Russell Jacoby said; treat your friends like appliances and your appliances like friends. Privilege is a staple of Capitalism. It creates inequality. And poverty. And inequality brings with it a kind of desperation. Those women looking for career advancement were scared of saying anything. Understandably. I watched at that gym those many years ago as the celebrity governor humiliated the husbands and boyfriends of women who he had noticed. That was part of it — the Alpha dog pissing contests. The women were incidental. And frankly it wasn’t about them for their husbands, usually, either. Capitalist patriarchy. Property.

Slip the maitre’d a c-note for a good table. It is a show of power. Its having *fuck you* money. I remember a visit to NYC years ago with a well known producer of bad films. And I remember his sense of entitlement with limo drivers and doormen. With anyone paid to serve him. I was embarrassed. I also felt powerless to do anything. And I regret that, in a way, although I still don’t quite know what I’d do.

All wealthy people do this to the help in one way or another. Some are less obvious is all. The expectation is that you get what you want if you are rich. Shirts with the right amount of starch. Vets to stay open late so you can get Poofy, your cat, when the merger meeting went longer than expected. You get to avoid waiting in lines. The bank manager escorts you into his office. Oh, and you get to grope and touch women you don’t know. Power… over their lives, often, and in general. The scandals of Gary Condit (Chandra Levy), or Eliot Spitzer (whose tab for call girls was extensive) or David Vitter and the *DC Madam* affair, or Moshe Katsav (Israel) or Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, or Edward Heath and Operation Midland. Google them all. Or, hey, Bill Clinton and…well….. pick a name. (funny how so few liberals were outraged about any of that.) Political scandal is always about someone with power and someone without power.

The point here is that such things are built into a racist capitalist patriarchal and hierarchical social order. The abuse of those with limited power or no power is an inextricable element in the fabric of capitalism. One of the reasons socialism is important, as an ideal, is that it is based on equality. So degraded is this concept today, across all the sub sets of abuse, that many laugh at the very notion.

People want to believe in some way or other that it is merit that gets you into the White House or boardroom. But it’s not. It is access and birth and money. Class and race. A kid born in that crumbling duplex in Cairo, Illinois, or Grant’s Pass, Oregon, or a thousand other dead end towns — that kid isn’t likely to ever do more than entry level service sector work. Increasingly those are the only jobs available in the U.S.

I knew a women who majored in *hospitality management* at college. How does such a course exist? Service. What does that mean? I’m not sure, but it has nothing to do with equality. It is a course in how to cater to the privileged. The sole remaining growth industries are prison construction and specialist service training for the 1%. This is why revolutions are violent and bloody.

Look at the entertainment industry. It is as crass and moronic as Trump. Prestige art is as elitist and class biased as Clinton. You want a play to get produced? Write about wealth. You want a novel picked up? Write about wealth. The lives of the rich and famous. They are building servants quarters in new houses for the first time since the Gilded Age.

Don Trump can return to the golf course now. Mike Pence can lose clumsily as it was always scripted. The most Imperialist and hawkish president in history will soon be sworn in.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/10/as-it-was-always-scripted-trumps-october-surprise/

Good piece by Steppling.


This is why revolutions are violent and bloody.

Yes, indeed, also because they cannot be any other way.

Clinton October Surprise buries Wikileaks October Surprise

By Brian BeckerOct 09, 2016

Clinton October Surprise buries Wikileaks October Surprise

https://www.liberationnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Screen-Shot-2016-10-09-at-8.52.12-PM.png
Trump and Clinton debate 0ct. 9, 2016

Nearly all sectors and centers of ruling class power are now mobilized to defeat or eliminate the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. This is a truly bi-partisan effort. The handful of establishment holdouts who hadn’t yet abandoned him have now joined the dump Trump effort following the release on October 7 of a 2005 hot mic audio recording of Trump talking about women in the most dehumanizing and abusive manner. This audio confirms something that is well known: that he is a pig, a vile male chauvinist and misogynist. But naturally the release of the 11-year old audio tape of Trump completely dominated all news coverage. His initial defense that Bill Clinton talked “worse” about women when they played golf together is probably true but it hardly helps him.

The timing of the release of the Trump audio tape also totally overwhelmed news coverage of another sensational story – the long awaited “October Surprise” release by Wikileaks of hacked emails revealing for the first time what Hillary Clinton said behind closed doors to Wall Street’s biggest banks. These emails are also damning in many other ways that could have doomed or deeply damaged the Clinton campaign. But with the Trump audio tape release, the emails about what Clinton said became a small side story.

Even in the second televised debate that took place October 9, the Wikileaks email release, which could have helped unravel the Clinton campaign, became just a footnote. In the three minutes minute devoted to the subject, Clinton cited the words she spoke to the bankers to compare herself to Abraham Lincoln and then blamed Russia and Putin for releasing the emails, hoping to change the subject from what the documents showed about what she actually said in the private speeches.

Obama administration and Clinton’s counter-measures against Wikileaks

The Clinton team and the Obama administration knew that the Wikileaks “October Surprise” release was coming. Assange had been announcing they were coming all week. The Obama administration and the Clinton campaign were preparing for it and looking for ways to discredit the damaging information or inoculate public opinion about the revelations which came from the hacked emails of John Podesta, the chairperson of the Clinton campaign. Early in the morning of October 7 the White House made the announcement that U.S. intelligence agencies had confirmed, without providing any hard facts or evidence, that the Russian government was responsible for the hacks of Democratic Party email servers and that “Russia was trying to influence the U.S. elections.” The timing of this remarkable and unsubstantiated announcement could not be coincidental coming just hours before the Wikileaks release.

The assertions that the hack of various Democratic Party email servers over the past months was the work of Russia provided the Clinton camp a way of turning attention away from the content of the emails. It also further activated the surveillance state, the FBI, CIA and NSA to go into high gear against Wikileaks now that they had been characterized as a proxy for Russian espionage. The surveillance state and the Military-Industrial Complex, not to mention the neo-conservatives from the George W. Bush era, are working together to elect Clinton.

The Wikileaks release of the hacked emails was finally set for October 7 in the late afternoon.

The Washington Post version of how the Trump audio tape story broke is that they received a call at 10 am on the Friday morning from a source who had access to the tape. The Post says that they know who the source is but they won’t reveal the name. If the intelligence services did not facilitate the leak of the Trump audio they certainly know the identity of the source. Regardless, there are many other revelations to come from Trump’s rotten portfolio that will be used against him in the coming weeks if he abides by his promise to stay in the race.

The Post story at 4 pm thus coincided almost exactly with the long awaited release from Wikileaks of hacked emails. These showed that what Hillary Clinton said to the biggest bankers in private, when they paid her and Bill Clinton tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees, completely contradicted her campaign speeches. The sensational emails confirmed the main charge made by Bernie Sanders and his supporters: that the release of the transcripts of these speeches would prove that Clinton was a double dealing politician who said one thing in public but was really a servant of the biggest Wall Street bankers whose greed and criminal conduct destroyed the lives of millions of working class families.

What John Podesta’s emails show

The hacked emails from John Podesta reveal that Clinton was telling Wall Street behind closed doors that they needn’t be concerned about what she said about or against them in public. In an April 2013 speech Clinton explained that politicians “need both a public and a private position. If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least.”

None of this matters now in the election. The capitalist ruling class in America does not want Donald Trump to be their president, the CEO of the state that looks after their vast interests, here and abroad. He is a narrow, unpredictable megalomaniac who only looks after himself. They don’t trust him to manage their common affairs. A Trump presidency would strip the U.S. state of any remaining legitimacy in a world that already resents the bullying and domination projected by U.S. imperialist power.

Patriarchy, misogyny and chauvinism are the norm in capitalist political circles

Trump’s disgusting comments about women are typical from the privileged and powerful men of the upper classes. Trump is like Bill Clinton and JFK in this regard. And while rich and famous men “can do anything” to women as Trump states in the audio tape, the reality is that the objectification, harassment and abuse of women is epidemic in bourgeois society–one in four women workers in fast food experience sexual assault or harassment–and involves men in all classes. This is known. In the military the issue is especially pronounced. In 2012, the Pentagon issued a report on the 20th anniversary of the Tailhook scandal during which 87 women were the subjected to violence and abuse at a Las Vegas hotel that was the site of a convention of air force admirals and other officers. The 2012 report stated that at least 26,000 military personnel, mostly women, were the victims of sexual abuse in just the past year which was undoubtedly an underestimate.

How many of these sanctimonious politicians who are now denouncing Trump also talk and act like him toward women or enable other men to do so? Joe Biden denounced Trump’s language as a form of sexual abuse but it was Biden who shielded Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings from law Professor Anita Hill as she tried to document the torment and abuse Thomas inflicted on her. Misogyny, degradation and violence against women are commonplace in capitalist America but these same politicians from both parties who are announcing their “shock, outrage and indignation” over Trump’s vile comments don’t give a damn or say anything every other day of the year. That goes for the Clintons too.

As a New York Times article of October 2 reports, Bill and Hillary Clinton and their aides used private investigators, media smear campaigns and many of the most aggressive attack tactics against multiple women who claimed that they were having affairs with Bill Clinton or had been the target of unwanted sexual advances and sexual assaults by him while he was Governor of Arkansas or while running for President.

“ … privately, she [Hillary Clinton] embraced the Clinton campaign’s aggressive strategy of counterattack: Women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Mr. Clinton would become targets of digging and discrediting — tactics that women’s rights advocates frequently denounce.

“The campaign hired a private investigator with a bare-knuckles reputation who embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s ‘character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.'” (NY Times Oct. 2, 2016)

That Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the candidates of the two dominant political parties is evidence of the profound lack of leadership from within the capitalist establishment. Both are deeply unpopular. Both are correctly viewed as rank opportunists. Both are reactionaries and imperialists.

For the last 18 months the attention of the country has been glued to the election process and the election outcome. It has gone on and on. More than $2 billion will be spent by the competitors by the end. Third party candidates have been excluded from the mainstream media and as a consequence there is no genuine representation from within the political process for working class people. There are no workers in Congress. The great U.S. labor movement has been reduced to a lobby and donor for the capitalist politicians. The real political power in society resides with the generals, admirals and intelligence services.This is a brand of democracy that is so twisted, so stifled and so unreal that it calls out for radical and revolutionary change. For the socialist movement a new day has begun and it will represent a major break from both of the political parties whose grip on society is gradually ending. It will find its voice in the streets.

https://www.liberationnews.org/clintons-october-surprise-buries-wikileaks-october-surprise/

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans
Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict – and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e326318febbcbcb916f05cc035a810e5d10d5357/0_0_3000_1500/master/3000.jpg?w=1300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&
One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. Illustration: Justin Francavilla
Sarah Smarsh
Thursday 13 October 2016 07.00 EDT Last modified on Thursday 13 October 2016 20.30 EDT

Last March, my 71-year-old grandmother, Betty, waited in line for three hours to caucus for Bernie Sanders. The wait to be able to cast her first-ever vote in a primary election was punishing, but nothing could have deterred her. Betty – a white woman who left school after ninth grade, had her first child at age 16 and spent much of her life in severe poverty – wanted to vote.

So she waited with busted knees that once stood on factory lines. She waited with smoking-induced emphysema and the false teeth she’s had since her late 20s – both markers of our class. She waited with a womb that in the 1960s, before Roe v Wade, she paid a stranger to thrust a wire hanger inside after she discovered she was pregnant by a man she’d fled after he broke her jaw.

Betty worked for many years as a probation officer for the state judicial system in Wichita, Kansas, keeping tabs on men who had murdered and raped. As a result, it’s hard to faze her, but she has pronounced Republican candidate Donald Trump a sociopath “whose mouth overloads his ass”.


No one loathes Trump – who suggested women should be punished for having abortions, who said hateful things about groups of people she has loved and worked alongside since childhood, whose pomp and indecency offends her modest, midwestern sensibility – more than she.

Yet, it is white working-class people like Betty who have become a particular fixation among the chattering class during this election: what is this angry beast, and why does it support Trump?

Not so poor: Trump voters are middle class
Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 – higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education, gender, age or race –predicted Trump support.

These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told
But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

The faces journalists do train the cameras on – hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags – must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well. That the media industry ignored my home for so long left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.

Part of the current glimpse is JD Vance, author of the bestselling new memoir Hillbilly Elegy. A successful attorney who had a precariously middle-class upbringing in an Ohio steel town, Vance wrote of the chaos that can haunt a family with generational memory of deep poverty. A conservative who says he won’t vote for Trump, Vance speculates about why working-class whites will: cultural anxiety that arises when opioid overdose kills your friends and the political establishment has proven it will throw you under the bus. While his theories may hold up in some corners, in interviews coastal media members have repeatedly asked Vance to speak for the entire white working class.

His interviewers and reviewers often seem relieved to find someone with ownership on the topic whose ideas in large part confirm their own. The New York Times election podcast The Run-Up said Vance’s memoir “doubles as a cultural anthropology of the white underclass that has flocked to the Republican presidential nominee’s candidacy”. (The Times teased its review of the book with the tweet: “Want to know more about the people who fueled the rise of Donald Trump?”)

While Vance happens to have roots in Kentucky mining country, most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia. That sometimes seems the only concept of them that the American consciousness can contain: tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a coal-dust-covered ghost, as though white poverty isn’t always right in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.

One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. The last time I saw my native class receive substantial focus, before now, was over 20 years ago – not in the news but on the television show Roseanne, the fictional storylines of which remain more accurate than the musings of comfortable commentators in New York studios.

Countless images of working-class progressives, including women such as Betty, are thus rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll.

This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America – “red” v “blue”– in which the 42% of Kansans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are meaningless.

This year, more Kansans caucused for Bernie Sanders than for Donald Trump – a newsworthy point I never saw noted in national press, who perhaps couldn’t fathom that “flyover country” might contain millions of Americans more progressive than their Clinton strongholds.

In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.

Poor whiteness and poor character

The two-fold myth about the white working class – that they are to blame for Trump’s rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons exemplify the rest – takes flight on the wings of moral superiority affluent Americans often pin upon themselves.

I have never seen them flap so insistently as in today’s election commentary, where notions of poor whiteness and poor character are routinely conflated.

In an election piece last March in the National Review, writer Kevin Williamson’s assessment of poor white voters – among whom mortality rates have sharply risen in recent decades – expressed what many conservatives and liberals alike may well believe when he observed that communities ravaged by oxycodone use “deserve to die”.

“The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles,” Williamson wrote. “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.”

For confirmation that this point is lost on most reporters, not just conservative provocateurs, look no further than a recent Washington Post series that explored spiking death rates among rural white women by fixating on their smoking habits and graphically detailing the “haggard face” and embalming processes of their corpses. Imagine wealthy white woman examined thusly after their deaths. The outrage among family and friends with the education, time, and agency to write letters to the editor would have been deafening.

A sentiment that I care for even less than contempt or degradation is their tender cousin: pity.

In a recent op-ed headlined Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class, David Brooks told of a laid-off Kentucky metal worker he met. On his last day, the man left to rows of cheering coworkers – a moment I read as triumphant, but that Brooks declared pitiable. How hard the man worked for so little, how great his skills and how dwindling their value, Brooks pointed out, for people he said radiate “the residual sadness of the lonely heart”.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.

One such journalist, Alexander Zaitchik, spent several months on the road in six states getting to know white working-class people who do support Trump. His goal for the resulting new book, The Gilded Rage, was to convey the human complexity that daily news misses. Zaitchik wrote that his mission arose from frustration with “‘hot takes’ written by people living several time zones and income brackets away from their subjects”.

Zaitchik wisely described those he met as a “blue-collar middle class”– mostly white people who have worked hard and lost a lot, whether in the market crash of 2008 or the manufacturing layoffs of recent decades. He found that their motivations overwhelmingly “started with economics and ended with economics”. The anger he observed was “pointed up, not down” at those who forgot them when global trade deals were negotiated, not at minority groups.

Meanwhile, the racism and nationalism that surely exist among them also exist among Democrats and higher socioeconomic strata. A poll conducted last spring by Reuters found that a third of questioned Democrats supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. In another, by YouGov, 45% of polled Democrats reported holding an unfavorable view of Islam, with almost no fluctuation based on household income. Those who won’t vote for Trump are not necessarily paragons of virtue, while the rest are easily scapegoated as the country’s moral scourge.

When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables”, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language “could be read as another way of saying ‘white-trash bin’.” Clinton quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained compassion for many Trump voters. But making such generalizations at a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television political satire Veep in which powerful Washington figures discuss “normals” with distaste behind closed doors.

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/debc21966234342f2a0bad89ca20f9386628f7bd/0_0_2000_1488/master/2000.jpg?w=620&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&
The DeBruce Grain elevator. Federal safety inspectors had not visited it for 16 years when an explosion ripped through the half-mile long structure, killing seven workers. Photograph: Cliff Schiappa/AP

When we talked, Zaitchik mentioned HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who he pointed out “basically makes eugenics-level arguments about anyone who votes for Donald Trump having congenital defects. You would never get away with talking that way about any other group of people and still have a TV show.”

Maher is, perhaps, the pinnacle of classist smugness. In the summer of 1998, when I was 17 and just out of high school, I worked at a grain elevator during the wheat harvest. An elevator 50 miles east in Haysville, Kansas, exploded (grain dust is highly combustible), killing seven workers. The accident rattled my community and reminded us about the physical dangers my family and I often faced as farmers.

I kept going to work like everyone else and, after a long day weighing wheat trucks and hauling heavy sacks of feed in and out of the mill, liked to watch Politically Incorrect, the ABC show Maher hosted then. With the search for one of the killed workers’ bodies still under way, Maher joked, as I recall, that the people should check their loaves of Wonder Bread.

That moment was perhaps my first reckoning with the hard truth that, throughout my life, I would politically identify with the same people who often insult the place I am from.

Such derision is so pervasive that it’s often imperceptible to the economically privileged. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions sometimes offend with obliviousness.

Many people recommended to me the bestselling new history book White Trash, for instance, without registering that its title is a slur that refers to me and the people I love as garbage. My happy relief that someone set out to tell this ignored thread of our shared past was squashed by my wincing every time I saw it on my shelf, so much so that I finally took the book jacket off. Incredibly, promotional copy for the book commits precisely the elitist shaming Isenberg is out to expose: “(the book) takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing – if occasionally entertaining –poor white trash.”

The book itself is more sensitively wrought and imparts facts that one hopes would dismantle popular use of its titular term. But even Isenberg can’t escape our classist frameworks.

When On the Media host Brooke Gladstone asked Isenberg, earlier this year, to address long-held perceptions of poor whites as bigots, the author described a conundrum:“They do subscribe to certain views that are undoubtedly racist, and you can’t mask it and pretend that it’s not there. It is very much a part of their thinking.”

Entertain a parallel broad statement about any other disenfranchised group, and you might begin to see how rudimentary class discussion is for this relatively young country that long believed itself to be free of castes. Isenberg has sniffed out the hypocrisy in play, though.

“The other problem is when people want to blame poor whites for being the only racist in the room,” she told Gladstone. “… as if they’re more racist than everyone else.”

That problem is rooted in the notion that higher class means higher integrity. As journalist Lorraine Berry wrote last month, “The story remains that only the ignorant would be racist. Racism disappears with education we’re told.” As the first from my family to hold degrees, I assure you that none of us had to go to college to learn basic human decency.

Berry points out that Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the alt-right. Indeed, it was not poor whites – not even white Republicans – who passed legislation bent on preserving segregation, or who watched the Confederate flag raised outside state capitols for decades to come.

It wasn’t poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the “war on drugs”.

Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black “welfare queen”.

These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in different forms and with more terrible power.

Among reporters and commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trump’s campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.

Mainstream media is set up to fail the ordinary American
Based on Trump’s campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough but who think of themselves as victims.

One thing the media misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.

Barack Obama, a black man formed by the black experience, often cites his maternal lineage in the white working class. “A lot of what’s shaped me came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas,” he wrote this month to mark a White House forum on rural issues.

Last year, talking with author Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books, Obama lamented common misconceptions of small-town middle America, for which he has a sort of reverence. “There’s this huge gap between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about our common life and our political life,” he said, naming one cause as “the filters that stand between ordinary people” who are busy getting by and complicated policy debates.

“I’m very encouraged when I meet people in their environments,” Obama told Robinson. “Somehow it gets distilled at the national political level in ways that aren’t always as encouraging.”

To be sure, one discouraging distillation – the caricature of the hate-spewing white male Trump voter with grease on his jeans – is a real person of sorts. There were one or two in my town: the good ol’ boy who menaces those with less power than himself – running people of color out of town with the threat of violence, denigrating women, shooting BB guns at stray cats for fun. They are who Trump would be if he’d been born where I was.

We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told
Media fascination with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion, that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly, financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as cash-strapped people of color – who face the threat of his racism and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available measures – can attest. However, one imagines that elite white liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their community that was decimated.

Affluent analysts who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when examining social woes but viewing their place on the political continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in “red” America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.

Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are “voting against their own best interests,” undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isn’t mentally fit to cast a ballot.

Whoever remains on Trump’s side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions. Let’s be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who “they” are.

Journalist? Then the chances are you’re not blue collar
A recent print-edition New York Times cutline described a Kentucky man:

“Mitch Hedges, who farms cattle and welds coal-mining equipment. He expects to lose his job in six months, but does not support Mr Trump, who he says is ‘an idiot.’”

This made me cheer for the rare spotlight on a member of the white working class who doesn’t support Trump. It also made me laugh – one can’t “farm cattle”. One farms crops, and one raises livestock. It’s sometimes hard for a journalist who has done both to take the New York Times seriously.

The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks. Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books. So few, in fact, that this former laborer has found cause to shift her entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a wealth-privileged industry, much as journalists of color find themselves talking about race in a whiteness-privileged one.

This isn’t to say that one must reside among a given group or place to do it justice, of course, as good muckrakers and commentators have shown for the past century and beyond. See On the Media’s fine new series on poverty, the second episode of which includes Gladstone’s reflection that “the poor are no more monolithic than the rest of us.”

I know journalists to be hard-working people who want to get the story right, and I’m resistant to rote condemnations of “the media”. The classism of cable-news hosts merely reflects the classism of privileged America in general. It’s everywhere, from tweets describing Trump voters as inbred hillbillies to a Democratic campaign platform that didn’t bother with a specific anti-poverty platform until a month out from the general election.

The economic trench between reporter and reported on has never been more hazardous than at this moment of historic wealth disparity, though, when stories focus more often on the stock market than on people who own no stocks. American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades – surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trump’s venom now fills. That the term “populism” has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy it’s supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call bullshit when they see it.

One such person was my late grandfather, Arnie. Men like Trump sometimes drove expensive vehicles up the gravel driveway of our Kansas farmhouse looking to do some sort of business. Grandpa would recognize them as liars and thieves, treat them kindly, and send them packing. If you shook their hands, after they left Grandpa would laugh and say, “Better count your fingers.”

In a world in which the Bettys and Arnies of the world have little voice, those who enjoy a platform from which to speak might examine their hearts and minds before stepping onto the soap box.

If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself – say, the ones who mopped a McDonald’s bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy – then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/13/liberal-media-bias-working-class-americans

She sure don't need no help but I thought of a great campaign slogan for Hilary, sing it!


http://youtu.be/29Mg6Gfh9Co

http://blackagendareport.com/sites/all/modules/service_links/images/forward.png Forward (http://blackagendareport.com/forward?path=node/5393) http://blackagendareport.com/sites/all/modules/service_links/images/print.png Print HTML (http://blackagendareport.com/print/trump-makes-it-safe-2-vote-green) http://blackagendareport.com/sites/all/modules/service_links/images/reddit.png Reddit (http://reddit.com/submit?url=http%3A//blackagendareport.com/node/5393&title=Trump%E2%80%99s%20Disintegration%20Means%20It%E2%80%99s%20Not%20Just%20Safe%20to%20Vote%20Green%2C%20It%E2%80%99s%20Mandatory) http://blackagendareport.com/sites/all/modules/service_links/images/viadeo.png Viadeo (http://www.viadeo.com/shareit/share/?url=http%3A//blackagendareport.com/node/5393&title=Trump%E2%80%99s%20Disintegration%20Means%20It%E2%80%99s%20Not%20Just%20Safe%20to%20Vote%20Green%2C%20It%E2%80%99s%20Mandatory) Google Plus One (http://blackagendareport.com/node/5393) Linkedin Share Button (http://blackagendareport.com/node/5393) Share on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php) Tweet Widget (http://twitter.com/share?url=http%3A//blackagendareport.com/node/5393&count=horizontal&via=blkagendareport&text=Trump%E2%80%99s%20Disintegration%20Means%20It%E2%80%99s%20Not%20Just%20Safe%20to%20Vote%20Green%2C%20It%E2%80%99s%20Mandatory&counturl=http%3A//blackagendareport.com/node/5393)
http://blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-400x300/public/hillary_n_donald03.jpg?itok=Nv-07ShD (http://www.thebellforum.com/trump-makes-it-safe-2-vote-green)

A BAR radio commentary by Bruce A. DixonHillary’s most potent argument among most people isn’t her own record, positions or abilities. It’s the proclaimed need to keep her opponent Donald Trump out of the White House. It’s only this need to prevent a disastrous President Trump that keeps many leftists and progressives in Hillary’s big stinking tent. But the self destruction of the Trump campaign frees them from worry that they might throw the election to the Donald, and opens up the possibility that millions can finally vote their hopes, not their fears.
Trump’s Disintegration Means It’s Not Just Safe to Vote Green, It’s MandatoryA BAR radio commentary by Bruce A. DixonThe election is more than two weeks away but the outcome isn’t the least bit in doubt. Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. It’s high time for leftists, so-called progressives and generally sensible people to reconcile themselves to this fact.
The Trump candidacy has shot itself in both feet again and again. Scores of high profile Republican officeholders have deserted their party’s nominee. Donald Trump has failed to rally the section of America’s ruling elite that traditionally backs Republicans seeking high office. Millions in donations one that percenters usually invest in a Republican presidential candidate are finding their way to Hillary, who has opened up a double digit lead in the polls. So many Republican voters are staying home or casting their ballots for Hillary that Democrats may carry some states like Georgia which are normally well out of their reach, and Democrats expect to gain control of the US Senate.
The Donald is certainly a racist demagogue, a thief, liar, a hyper-entitled sexual predator and a loathsome buffoon. But he’ll never be president. Since Trump will in fact never be president, speculations on what kind of neanderthals the imaginary President Trump might appoint to the EPA or the Supreme Court, nightmares about how many millions he’d deport, how high a wall the pretend president might build, or who the imaginary President Trump would jail, drone or nuke after a 3AM Twitter fit are not frightening possibilities we need to take urgent action to avoid. They are bogeyman stories, make-believe, bad science fiction without the science.
If there was ever a need to unite to prevent a President Trump that need is over because the make-believe President Trump has prevented himself. Trump’s definitive meltdown and the temporary or permanent near destruction of the Republican party locks down a runaway victory for Hillary Clinton. It’s a new day, an historic opportunity which opens the way for even the most cautious among us to vote our hopes, not our fears.
Now the Henry Giroux’s of the world who claim voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka, the only peace, jobs and justice candidates will lead straight to President Trump and “concentration camps” can stop hyperventilating. The Angela Davis types can reconsider whether those who don’t share their fears of the imaginary President Trump are “narcissists,” and the Hillary shills who claim voting for third parties is “white privilege” can just go away.
Since Hillary Clinton has a double digit lead in the polls, she doesn’t need the votes of so-called left and progressive activists. But those activists have their own needs. They need to build their own political home, their own political party. Right now Stein and Baraka are running at four and five percent in nationwide polls, even though restrictive ballot access laws banned Green candidates from the ballot in four states, and forced them to run as “independents” with no party affiliation in seven or eight more.
If Stein and Baraka get five percent of the vote in November, ballot access for Greens will be a done deal in most states, and the possibility of additional federal campaign funds in presidential years opens as well. So the only ways for left and progressive activists to waste their votes is to stay home, or to give them to Hillary. The only place where your vote matters this year is with the Green Party.
For Black Agenda Report, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com (http://www.blackagendareport.com/).Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Agenda Report and a co-chair of the GA Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

This is way too enthusiastic, a protest vote is one thing, intimating that a petty booj party will accomplish anything congenial to socialism is sophism. Likewise to suggest that we got any dog in bourgeois electoral politics is misdirection. For us bourgeios electoral politics are but a simple gauge of strength, an absurdity at this point.