What is most interesting, is hearing a number of people on the far left, whose
opinions I respect, give different takes on the same issue, or slightly
different takes, or sometimes, totally different takes, and then to listen to
people on what the mainstream calls, "the left", give absolutely different
versions. It certainly gives one pause when people talk about, "facts", or,
"reality".
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, October 28, 2019 11:07 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Will the GOP Become the Party of Blue-Collar
Conservatism?
No insults taken. We're just giving our personal, off the cuff opinions here.
That makes me think of an email I've received several times asking for my top
three candidates for president. This request has been popping up for over a
month now. It's a year until we're into the election season. Already the
pollsters are gearing up for the big Popularity Contest. Now if they want to
really challenge folks, how about asking for the top three issues facing
America this coming election. Or, name your preferred candidate along with the
top three issues you want them to take on.
We've allowed the Media to turn the serious business of Government into a pop
contest. No wonder we get the sorts of pretenders we get in the top slots.
We need to demand responsible reporting on the part of our news media During
the Second World War, I recall how folks simply could not understand how the
German People could believe the propaganda being spewed out by the Nazi
Masters. And all the while Americans were buying into our own brand of Brain
Washing.
The first step in effective brain washing is to convince the people that they
are not being brain washed. Based on just that one point, our Brain Washing
Machine is a huge success. Another critical point in an effective Mind Control
Plan is to convince the people that the opponents are all so stupid that we
have to be the ones to tell them that they are being suckered.
There was a time back in my foolish youth, not to be confused with my current
foolish age, when I eagerly sought out confirmation for my positions. Since my
positions were the correct ones, why bother hearing the foolishness spewed by
others?
Today I approach the "news" with an open mind. I attempt to be as critical of
the news with which I agree, as I am with the news I disagree with.
I do avoid the "evening television news" because it is full of non news. Also,
I seldom listen to the Right Wing talk shows since they do not teach or inform,
and since the broader media actually leans far enough to the Right that it
takes some effort to draw out actual information. And, as an equal opportunity
non listener, I mostly avoid the Far Left shows, too. Same reasons, even if I
am inclined to want to agree.
Actually, listening to the news, or reading the news, is hard work if we want
to be informed.
The other thing is to not become wed to our current beliefs. When we do so, we
tend to spend our time and efforts in defending positions that will be ancient
history next week.
Carl Jarvis, Futilely seeking knowledge in a Pop Culture.
On 10/27/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sorry, I wasn't insulting your intelligence. I was just wondering if
you had evidence of his attitude or were just making an assumption
based on what you believe that wealthier people think about less wealthier
people.
And I guess that you have a particular way of using words. You're
talking about all of us without a lot of money or power and you are
giving us a label, "working class". But I think about your life, your
work and your home and compare you to, for example, someone who works
in an Amazon warehouse and that person's home and life and education,
and it just seems to me that the working class label does not apply to
both of you equally. But then, you describe your thoughts about
religion and you insist that you're an agnostic, but to me, what
you're describing sounds like atheism. So my problem is certainly not
with what you say, it's with the particular labels you're choosing.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, October 27, 2019 3:08 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Will the GOP Become the Party of
Blue-Collar Conservatism?
Miriam and All,
I'd better turn in my rehab teacher membership if I am so unobservant
that I can't pick up on someone with that "Holier than Thou" attitude.
It's the same whether we call it that, or whether we call it, "I'm
better than you!" We certainly don't have to see in order to sense
the many Human attitudes. Although some folks are better at hiding
their real feelings, than are others.
As far as your thoughts on who is in the Ruling Class and who is in
the Working Class, I sense that I am going back and forth on the same
track, hoping that if I say it just one more time it will make sense.
I'm missing some key connection and so I will just toss in the towel,
rather than boring everyone with the same repetitious babble.
But all I know for certain is that so long as we folks in the broader
working class form our little specialty groups and bicker among
ourselves, we have lost the struggle.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/25/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, you're not home to answer but I wonder how you know that your
cousin thinks he's better than you. Maybe he just thinks that he's
wealthier than you and, therefore, more financially secure than you.
And he isn't just serving the ruling class, is he? Doesn't he treat
people who are at the same financial level or slightly higher or
lower than he is? The ruling class is Harvey Weissman and Hillary
Clinton and Robert mercer, etc.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2019 11:25 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Will the GOP Become the Party of
Blue-Collar Conservatism?
Tomorrow(Friday)we head out around 5:00 A.M. to attend the Washington
Council of the Blind annual convention. It's about a two hour drive
to the Double Tree at Seatac. It looks like another year of more
than 250 in attendance.
Every year rates go up and additional charges are added, like a ten
dollar per day for parking. That adds an extra $30 to the tab.
I don't suppose it matters what I define as "Working Class". What
matters is how each of us defines ourselves, and what values we hold
near and dear.
My suggestion that there is really no Middle Class, and that we are
divided into only two Classes...the Working Class and the Ruling
Class, is not meant to reflect how Americans see themselves. I do it
to make clear...although I think I'm failing at that, to make clear
that all who support the Ruling Class are part of the Working Class,
in the sense that nothing in the nature of actual work comes from the
controlling few on top. They are totally dependent on the rest of us
to sustain them. The problem is with the Rest of Us. My cousin who
is a surgeon specializing in matters of the heart, thinks he is
better than the rest of the family because he earns at least triple
what any of the rest of us make. In his mind, he is closing in on
becoming a member of the Ruling Class. That's how he sees it. But I
tell him that he will always be a member of the Working Class so long
as he is performing a service to the Ruling Class and those others
who can afford his skills. But he wants to believe that he is better
than me because he vastly out earns me. His values are set upon the
Gold Standard. Mine are based upon the Human Standard. I will never
convince him that my values are just as good for me as his values are
good for him. The trouble is that as long as he seeks to validate
himself based on earnings and his technical skills, he will do all he
can to ensure that his position on the Pyramid of Life is secure.
And he will kick me to the curb if necessary. But as bad as we've
become, in how we treat one another, I believe that it is learned
behavior, and it can be altered.
Anyway, i do plan to get up at 4:00 A.M., so I'd better brush my
teeth, wash my face and clamber into my PJ's and turn on a good TBBL
mystery.
I'll even let Cathy listen...if she's really, really good.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/20/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
People, individuals whom you consider to be members of the working
class, want material success. They want what people who have more
money than they, have. They will live in constant debt to have the
things that have been sold to them: I phones, big flat screen TV's,
fashionable clothing, new cars.
That's what a successful life is to them. They don't care all that
much about how the government works, so long as their lives are
comfortable.
Today, I was involved in a discussion about nail salons. When I was
young and concerned about such things, women went to beauty parlors
to get their hair done each week if they could afford it. If they
did, they might also have their nails done while their hair was
drying. I actually opted out of that along time ago, but many women
didn't. Some women did their own nails at home, if they couldn't
afford the beauty parlor. Now, everyone has their nails done at nail
salons, fingers and toes. It's apparently, a luxury experience. You
sit back in the comfortable chair and even get a foot massage along
with the pedicure.
Now, if one reads a lot of books like I do, one knows that those
nail salons employ low paid immigrant labor. Some of the women are
actually trafficked unpaid labor. But, as my daughter keeps telling
me, "times have changed". Most women, a very large number of whom
you would identify as working class, those who live here on Long
Island, go to those nail salons every week, and they don't care
about the conditions of the women who do their nails. So when you
talk about the working class, if you're going to be realistic, it's
important to define just whom you mean, and to look at what people
are actually doing and what really motivates them, rather than
talking about theory and romanticizing the people.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, October 20, 2019 1:13 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Will the GOP Become the Party of
Blue-Collar Conservatism?
The United States government is now owned by the descendants of our
Founding Fathers. It's not that the Working Class is easily
manipulated, the fact is that the Working Class has been lied to for
over
230 years.
My opinion is that the Working Class will continue to be misled
until such a time as the Working Class quits trying to participate
in the Establishment's Government.
The owners of the governmenment do not want to share that which they
believe belongs to them. We need to get it through our heads.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/19/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The truth is that the working class has no money or power and is
easily manipulated. It may be the backbone of the nation, but it's
controlled by the power elites. And those folks in power are, to
say the least, short sighted.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2019 3:25 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Will the GOP Become the Party of
Blue-Collar Conservatism?
While the Democrats talked the talk for years, the top leadership
of the Party had turned its back on the working class long before
FDR provided some relief. Maybe at the local, county and state
level the Democratic Party still backed the issues affecting the
working class, but name one president prior to FDR who supported
Labor over Wall Street. Wilson? Cleveland? And following FDR the
Democrats had the likes of Truman, Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and
Obama. Only LBJ took on the establishment in his fight to bring
about social reform.
The truth is that none of the nation's political parties favor the
working class.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/19/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Will the GOP Become the Party of Blue-Collar Conservatism?
Will the GOP Become the Party of Blue-Collar Conservatism?
Washington State Dept of Transportation / Flickr
From the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt onward through to the
1990s, the Democrats had long been considered the party of the
working class. That perception lingered long after the fact that
by the 1990s, they had more accurately become the party of Wall
Street and Silicon Valley, often embracing policies at variance
with their traditional blue-collar supporters. As Thomas Ferguson,
Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen outline in a paper sponsored by the
Institute for New Economic
Thinking: "Within the Democratic Party, the desires of party
leaders who continue to depend on big money from Wall Street,
Silicon Valley, health insurers, and other power centers collides
[sic] head on with the needs of average Americans these leaders
claim to defend." So the Democratic Party, a historically
center-left political grouping, has increasingly embraced a
neoliberal market fundamentalist framework over the past 40 years,
and thereby facilitated the growth of financialization (whereby
the influence and power of a country's financial sector become
vast relative to the overall economy).
Donald Trump exploited that shift during his 2016 campaign: Not
only did he proclaim his love for "the poorly educated," but he
also campaigned as an old Rust Belt Democrat-not only by attacking
illegal immigration and offshoring, but also coming out against
globalization, free trade, Wall Street, and especially Goldman Sachs.
As president, of course, Trump has proven incapable of "walking
the walk,"
even as he continued to speak about "draining the swamp" and
eliminating business as usual in Washington. But there is
increasing evidence suggesting that some of the more ambitious and
opportunistic politicians in the GOP are seeking to exploit the
material abandonment of working-class voters by the Democrats.
Both Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio are trying to move the
party in a more pro-worker direction, championing a new kind of
blue-collar conservatism that is supportive of unions and policies
that emphasizes the "dignity of work." Likewise, Senator Tom
Cotton of Arkansas has recently introduced a tax rebate for
lower-income Americans to offset the tariffs President Trump has
proposed on Chinese goods-essentially an annual payment from the
federal government to citizens to offset any increased cost in
consumer goods that might arise from Trump's proposed tariffs,
thus neutralizing the economic impact, and countering the
political argument that the president's trade war on Chinese goods
ultimately represents a tax on American consumers. As Henry Olsen
notes in the Washington Post:
"Cotton's approach addresses both the economic and political
challenges arising from Trump's tariffs. Economically, giving the
revenue back to average Americans offsets the expected rise in
prices they will face as a result of the tariffs. Consumer
spending, which was feared would decline in response to the price
hikes, would now likely stay high: Why cut back in spending when
you're not losing any money? That would keep the economy strong."
In other words, it's a tax-time Universal Basic Income.
Cotton's proposals would augment a little-discussed feature
emerging now in the U.S. labor market, as CNBC's Jeff Cox writes:
for the first time in this cycle (which started in 2009), "the
bottom half of earners are benefiting more than the top half-in
fact, about twice as much, according to calculations by Goldman
Sachs," using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More
recently, Derek Thompson of the Atlantic cites additional work by
labor economist Nick Bunker, who makes the case that "wage growth
is currently strongest for workers in low-wage industries, such as
clothing stores, supermarkets, amusement parks, and casinos. And
earnings are growing most slowly in higher-wage industries, such
as medical labs, law firms, and broadcasting and telecom companies."
Absent a significant growth slowdown, these workers might
increasingly identify their economic self-interest with
Republicans, not Democrats, particularly given the increasingly
restrictionist stance the GOP is adopting on immigration, which
will further tighten the labor market structurally and enhance the
relative bargaining position of American blue-collar workers.
The one lingering question is whether or not this trend will yet
supersede the power and influence of the GOP's historic corporate
constituencies, notably oil, mining and chemical companies, Big
Pharma, tobacco, the arms industry, and civil aviation. On the
face of it, this could well prove to be a tall order. But it is
conceivable if trade policy is ultimately rendered subordinate to
national security concerns, as increasingly appears to be the case
today. In the words of Michael Lind, all it would take is a
national developmental industrial strategy predicated on
sustaining U.S.
military
supremacy: "to identify and promote not specific companies but key
'dual-use' industries important in both defense and civilian
commerce."
That
would seem to be a more likely scenario for the GOP, one that
would build on Trump's steady inroads into the Democratic Party's
traditional blue-collar constituencies, while simultaneously
catering to the party's strong links to national defense interests.
Although a military-industrial strategy might run counter to some
of the interests of the party's traditional corporate backers
(such as Charles Koch), it would likely prove hugely beneficial to
America's manufacturing heartland, particularly the country's
disaffected blue-collar workers.
Historically, these workers have been Democrats, but their
livelihoods have been decimated by decades of trade liberalization
and other neoliberal policies. As Lind points out, a national
industrial policy based on the model of Alexander Hamilton but
married to "Cold War 2.0"
could, therefore, consolidate the GOP's efforts to become more of
a party of the working class. And such a policy is not
historically
anomalous: during the original Cold War, free trade and
globalization were always subject to the constraints of containing
the expansion of Soviet-led communism. A large chunk of the world
under the enemy sphere of influence was off-limits to American
trade and capital.
Today, even with the overriding influence of the Koch brothers,
and the Mercer family, a number of Republicans are geopolitical
hawks first, and economic libertarians second. They increasingly
see that it makes no sense to go to war against wage earners while
claiming to protect the same wage earners from Chinese
competition, especially if Beijing becomes the new locus of an
emerging Cold War 2.0.
Furthermore, if they are in safe, rock-solid GOP districts, they
are less vulnerable to a primary attack from corporate interests
antithetical to those positions. As geo-economics is increasingly
remarried to geopolitics (as it was during the original Cold War),
"blue-collar conservativism" will likely gain increasing policy
traction in certain conservative circles, even though Republicans
still have a ways to go before they can fully shift their party's
agenda toward a modern-day equivalent of "Bull Moose" progressivism.
Donald Trump is, first and foremost, a wrecker, as opposed to a
builder.
Arguably, that is one of the things that got him elected in the
first place.
But he has set the stage for a further political realignment,
especially as more educated whites and elites migrate to the
Democratic Party, and traditional Southern populists reside in the
GOP. There are very few Fritz Hollings types left in the party,
whose views on trade, immigration and manufacturing are closer to
the Democrats' historic New Deal constituencies.
This theory, though, is not watertight, and new coalitions are
still very much in flux. But as things stand today, ironically,
the Democrats now have trade and open borders policies that are
closer to those of the old Reagan/Bush Republicans and
libertarians such as the Koch brothers, while the GOP policy under
Trump is gravitating toward the old positions of the AFL/CIO on
both trade and immigration, a policy combination that makes the
embrace of a kind of blue-collar conservatism even more credible for the
GOP.
Furthermore, as trade issues (especially in regard to China) are
increasingly conflated with national security concerns, the GOP
may ultimately decide to build on Trump's attempts to re-domicile
key supply chains back to the U.S.
From the national security hawk perspective, this will ensure that
strategic industries necessary to sustain American military power
remain on home shores, even if this conflicts with the principles
of free trade, limited non-interventionist government. Sustaining
permanent production on U.S. soil, not just innovation in America
and production elsewhere, would be profoundly favorable to
blue-collar workers (hitherto among the biggest casualties of
globalization) and likely consolidate the GOP's efforts to become
the future party of the American working class, unless of course
the Democrats suddenly and unexpectedly reclaim their New Deal legacy.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the
Independent Media Institute.
Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.
Marshall Auerback /
