I don’t usually write abut politics, but today I will in response to many of my friends wondering how anyone, let alone a majority of Americans, could vote for such a deplorable person. My answer is to take a little trip down memory lane.
I was thirty-one when my hero Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, another deplorable person. Jimmy, in his one term as President, launched the solar power revolution and might very well have ushered in the age of high-speed rail and other environmental-helping policies had he been re-elected. Jimmy was the only President we’ve ever had who really cared about the environment and made our government care about it, too. He spoke the truth about the need to live within our environmental means and was ousted by the corporate oligarchs who made sure we’d never see the likes of Jimmy as President again.
One of the ways the corporate oligarchs (the so-called 1%) have maintained control of our government since the ouster of Jimmy is to elect Democrats who are Republicans in every way save by party affiliation. The prime example of this in my lifetime is Bill Clinton.
Bill shoved NAFTA through Congress after his Republican predecessor and good friend George Bush Sr. failed repeatedly to do so. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade agreement, virtually overnight wiped out the American automobile industry and hundreds of other manufacturing mainstays of the economy, and this wipe-out finished off the American steel industry. These collapses directly created the Rust Belt (can you say Swing States?) where tens of millions of manufacturing jobs were lost because of NAFTA.
But Clinton was just getting his Republican agenda underway with NAFTA. He then abruptly and cruelly ended Welfare, throwing millions of people into even deeper poverty and fueling the homeless crisis while doing nothing to mitigate the suffering.
As for the environment, when Clinton came into office, the American fleet (all our cars) had a collective MPG (miles per gallon) well over 20 mpg. Clinton then gave massive tax breaks to people buying SUVs, and when he and Al Gore, the famous self-proclaimed environmentalist, left office eight years later the nation’s mpg was less than ten. That’s right. Less than ten miles per gallon. (Can you say huge profits for fossil fuel producers and a vast acceleration in global warming?)
Then for his most egregious act, Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act restricting affiliations between commercial and investment banks, which launched the era of Ponzi Scheme Economics run by the big banks and Goldman Sachs to create the stock market and real estate bubbles that enriched the 1% further. And less than a decade later America and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Crash of 2008 that caused over TEN MILLION American families to lose their homes.
And did the great Republican, I mean Democrat, Barack Obama help those ten million American families, roughly 40 million Americans who lost their homes? No. He bailed out the corrupt banks and Goldman Sachs and left those tens of millions in deep trouble. If you think I’m wrongly castigating Obama, remember he KEPT Bush’s Treasury Secretary Timmy Geithner as his Treasury Secretary to oversee the bailing out of the crooks and the abandonment of the American people.
So if you’re still wondering why so many people voted for Trump, please remember it was the Democrats who pushed through NAFTA, ended Welfare, replaced it with nothing, and launched Ponzi Scheme economics, all of which resulted in destroying huge sectors of our economy along with the lives of tens of millions of Americans, many of whom had been union members and loyal Democrats.
I certainly didn’t want Trump to win. If his election wakes people up to what’s really going on in our country that will be great. However, I don’t think it will wake many up because the truth is we the people elected these deplorable people instead of electing Bernie Sanders who would have trounced Trump in 2016, given us Single Payer Healthcare, and birthed a national renaissance as did FDR before him. Instead we ran Clinton 2.0 and roused the ire of all those who Clinton and Obama and the Democrats so terribly wronged and abandoned. And Trump tapped the anger of those who suffered under Clinton and Obama, and tapped their children’s inherited anger, too.
And that, I think, is a big part of why so many people could have voted for such a deplorable person.
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