So now it’s clear from media that Clinton won the popular vote & Trump won the Electoral College. So if voters were preempted by the electors, why did they put us through two years of living hell?
Loath am I to be conspiratorial, but was Trump the choice of the US oligarchs? Did they engineer his Electoral College win? Because we have never had an election for whoever those electors are, don’t even know who the hell they are, & don’t feel comfortable letting them preempt democracy.
Wonder if Trump will stay orange & keep bleaching his comb-over? With a clown nose, Putin won’t know if it’s the POTUS or if the circus has come to town.
Those articles elaborating the demographics of the vote ought to explain to us how they know what they claim? The final popular vote is not yet tallied & within less than 12 hours the pollsters have calibrated data from across the country?
They know for sure, using scientific measure, that ‘more white women voted for Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton’ & that it was low-paid white workers who got Trump elected? Was it the same scientific measure they used to forecast that Clinton would win?
Proven so off the mark in this election, pollsters now call themselves communication experts & try to distance themselves from their analyses. That’s good because then we can justly interrogate the unsubstantiated claim that uneducated white workers are the base of Trump support.
It’s beyond dispute that his base is racist whites but it’s more likely to be middle-class, well-heeled whites & the better off strata of workers–meaning high-paid, unionized male factory workers or tradesmen. They are privileged workers who until affirmative action in the 1970s were unaccustomed to being around Blacks or Latinos or working with women.
Just because you don’t have a college degree doesn’t mean you’re a political idiot. But privilege & isolation from Black & Latino co-workers can make you stupid & believe me, from working in that environment for over 25 years, I can assure you that it makes you stupid all the way to the bone.
When I began working in a GE factory in the 1970s as a result of affirmative action court orders, the women & Black workers hired at that time went through years of hell because of the hostility & resentment of white male workers. Not all the white guys, but those who were aggressive, threatening, & often dangerous. We survived relying on each other & on white guys who detested unfair treatment.
I never faced such problems when I was a low-paid office worker before GE or after I got laid off & worked minimum wage jobs. Bonding among co-workers of whatever nationality against the indignities of such work was the norm. I was in my 50s & had the hauteur of a union worker when I got laid off. I will never forget the kindnesses of young Black, Latino, & Asian co-workers who saw what a struggle I was having in such repressive, miserable conditions doing day work & would counsel me how to survive.
Let me do the clairvoyant thing & say it’s far more likely those whites have bucks & privilege & are not the dispossessed.
In my FB memories from November 9th, 2012 was a photo album from the Atlantic dated October 4th, 2012 titled “Destruction Comes to Aleppo.”
At that time, an estimated 30,000 Syrians had already been killed in the 18 months of the civil war generated when Assad began using troops & bombers to crush the democratic uprising against his dictatorship. By the end of 2012, the UN reported that at least 700,000 Syrians had fled as refugees.
This little girl is 6-year-old Fatima Qassim being treated by medics at an Aleppo hospital after Assad forces fired on her family’s car on September 11, 2012. Would Assad supporters claim she or someone in her family is one of the terrorists Assad is hunting down with bombs in Aleppo?
The bottom photo is Aleppo after Assad bombing attacks on October 3, 2012. Imagine how it looks now after four more years of bombing.
Keep these images in mind when Assad supporters not only refuse to condemn Syrian & Russian bombing of east Aleppo (where an estimated 250,000 civilians live) but enthusiastically endorse it as a struggle against “throat-cutting jihadists.”
The only principled antiwar position is to demand the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing & to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces operating in Syria.
(Top photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP’ bottom photo by SANA/AP)
So the news is reporting that Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. That isn’t what the numbers showed last night. What’s up with that?
The vogue word on news these days is “conversation.” Americans are supposed to have a conversation about racism; a general suggests Trump have a conversation with military leaders about Putin. Is it like a talking to, a scolding, a polite way of dealing with irreconcilable differences, or just a bullshit session?
To update Marx: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, & human beings are at last compelled to face with sober senses our real conditions of life & our relations with our kind.”
What has not changed overnight is the barbarism of war, occupation, & genocide in several countries nor the responsibility of men & women of good will around the world to unite & oppose them whatever military force conducts them.
This is Mosul, Iraq, a killing field of US militarism since 1990, now being fought under the rubric of fighting ISIS. This child, one of thousands displaced by the war, lives in Khazer refugee camp near Mosul.
Progressives around the world need to get over electoral idiocies & disappointments to forge unity against the unfolding of Armageddon in the Middle East.
US out of Iraq & Afghanistan! Stop Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians in Syria! US, Russia, Iran, & all foreign military forces out of Syria.
(Photo by Alaa Al-Marjani/Reuters)
Having trouble getting your tongue around the phrase “President Trump”? Having nightmares about those awful Trump kids dining at state dinners & traveling on Air Force One on our dime–or rather off our Social Security & food stamp checks?
Now we can all see Russia from our back porch. Sarah Palin comes home to roost.
Fox News began what will become a resounding rebuke from Clinton supporters: third party candidates stole the election & assured the Trump win. That’s called thinking within the box.
In a democracy, people have a right to run for political office. They have a right to reject an undemocratic electoral system offering only two conservative choices. They have a right to think otherwise than within the two-party death trap run by millionaires.
If you want limited choices, there are one-party countries called dictatorships where you can move. They’ll tell you what to think. Or else. But if you live in a democracy, you have to accept that not everyone sees things your way or just the two authorized ways.
If you want to blame third party candidates for the 2016 election returns, it’s only because you’re a sore loser. Get over it. Think of what it’s like for the majority of Americans who find both candidates & the third party candidates intolerable. Either you believe in democracy or you don’t. If you don’t, find a dictator & cry your heart out to him/her. We don’t want to hear it.