Yawn... I am pretty confident in predicting that Trump has no plans on going
after Rob Walton. As far as supporting a candidate because of their "attitude"?
Get real, positions make the candidate not their attitude. I care about
attitude about as much as I care about what color box shorts a candidate is
wearing; with much apologizes to Ms. Figuarina, but not to Ms. Clinton.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2016 12:20 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Thomas Frank: All Those Donald Trump Supporters?
They're Not Just Racist
Thomas Frank: All Those Donald Trump Supporters? They're Not Just Racist
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/thomas_frank_all_those_trump_sup
porters_theyre_not_just_racist_20160312/
Posted on Mar 12, 2016
Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0
When Republican front-runner Donald Trump isn't insulting his opponents, he's
hammering home a message about free trade that is intensely appealing to its
victims, writes Thomas Frank at The Guardian.
"I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a
racist," writes Frank, whose new book, "Listen Liberal, or Whatever Happened to
the Party of the People" will be available Tuesday from Metropolitan Books.
"But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his
support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even
better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery
that 30 years of Washington's free-market consensus have brought the rest of
America."
It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air
conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that
he's telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on
the march. Many of Trump's followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are
probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he
denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO
that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white,
working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might
say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their
place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a
political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white
working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and
January.
Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even
among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a
racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his "attitude",
the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned,
"immigration" placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind
their number one concern: "good jobs / the economy".
"People are much more frightened than they are bigoted," is how the findings
were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working
America. The survey "confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up,
people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids
don't have a future" and that "there still hasn't been a recovery from the
recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another."
Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council
in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class
Trump fans. "These people aren't racist, not any more than anybody else is," he
says of Trump supporters he knows. "When Trump talks about trade, we think
about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent
Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged
jobs."
"They look at that, and here's Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way,
but at least he's representing emotionally. We've had all the political
establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these
people, and then we've had to fight them to get them to represent us."
"Now, let us stop and smell the perversity," Frank continues. "Left parties the
world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left
party in America - one of our two monopoly parties - chose long ago to turn its
back on these people's concerns. . The working people that the party used to
care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous
Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them any
longer."
Read Frank's full article here.
-Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/ Thomas Frank: All Those ;
Donald Trump Supporters? They're Not Just Racist
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/thomas_frank_all_those_trump_sup
porters_theyre_not_just_racist_20160312/
Posted on Mar 12, 2016
Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0
When Republican front-runner Donald Trump isn't insulting his opponents, he's
hammering home a message about free trade that is intensely appealing to its
victims, writes Thomas Frank at The Guardian.
"I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a
racist," writes Frank, whose new book, "Listen Liberal, or Whatever Happened to
the Party of the People" will be available Tuesday from Metropolitan Books.
"But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his
support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even
better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery
that 30 years of Washington's free-market consensus have brought the rest of
America."
It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air
conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that
he's telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on
the march. Many of Trump's followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are
probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he
denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO
that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white,
working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might
say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their
place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a
political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white
working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and
January.
Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even
among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a
racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his "attitude",
the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned,
"immigration" placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind
their number one concern: "good jobs / the economy".
"People are much more frightened than they are bigoted," is how the findings
were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working
America. The survey "confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up,
people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids
don't have a future" and that "there still hasn't been a recovery from the
recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another."
Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council
in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class
Trump fans. "These people aren't racist, not any more than anybody else is," he
says of Trump supporters he knows. "When Trump talks about trade, we think
about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent
Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged
jobs."
"They look at that, and here's Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way,
but at least he's representing emotionally. We've had all the political
establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these
people, and then we've had to fight them to get them to represent us."
"Now, let us stop and smell the perversity," Frank continues. "Left parties the
world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left
party in America - one of our two monopoly parties - chose long ago to turn its
back on these people's concerns. . The working people that the party used to
care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous
Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them any
longer."
Read Frank's full article here.
-Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blowing_the_biggest_political_story_of_t
he_last_fifty_years_20160312/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blowing_the_biggest_political_story_of_t
he_last_fifty_years_20160312/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blowing_the_biggest_political_story_of_t
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cy_reagan_as_a_champion_20160312/
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/thomas_frank_all_those_trump_sup
porters_theyre_not_just_racist_20160312/
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/thomas_frank_all_those_trump_sup
porters_theyre_not_just_racist_20160312/
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porters_theyre_not_just_racist_20160312/
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e_slain_20160312/
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e_slain_20160312/
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