Chomsky on Trump

[ahinton]

Working in the construction industry I would have to say that we need more immigration and not less such is the skills shortage. Things are so bad that the industry is looking very seriously at modular forms of design which can be prefabricated in a factory and thus obviate the need for skilled labour on site.

It is hugely depressing to see Trump as president but no real surprise. The papers like the Express will frequently make comments about the drive to rebuild broken Britain but the US has never been a country that has functioned properly. It is something of a dysfunctional construct. We should never let ourselves be deceived that America has ever been a democracy and, in it's way, it has always pursued a course whereby Socialism is considered wholly undesirable. This differs radically from Western Europe where there has been a far more democratic march towards Socialist ideals which even the likes of Cameron and May are accepting as necessary. European history has gradually evolved from feudalism and ultimately arrived at parliamentary democracies with monarchies, where they remain, being purely constitutional and of very little relevance. The Royal families of Europe will all be gone within the next 100 years, including the UK. This is just the natural evolution of things.

The problem with politics at the moment has been the advancement of "liberalism" which ultimately led the way to New Labour. I think that Trump's supporters and those in this country who have voted for UKIP appreciate that these ideas no longer square with the idea of a "working class" to exploit this fact. The fault for the Brexit vote directly stems from the failure of the New Labour project which de-franchised the core Working Class vote and made the principle left wing party in the Uk a plaything of the liberal middle classes. Ultimately, UKIP have exploited this and goaded parts of the population in to voting for something which, if explained logically no right minded person would have chosen. In the States the Democrats must take the same blame for the rise of Trump although I have never been comfortable with their politics at least on the international state as they are still something of a pariah state. Ask anyone living in the rural parts of Pakistan what they think of America Liberalism!

The most disappointing issue over the last 12 months has been Labour's failure to recognise that it remains' within the Left's gift to influence the direction of the EU and this can only be done from within. If Corbyn had been a more enthusiastic supporter of the EU and had offered to join hands with the likes of the Greeks, it would have been possible to envisage a more acceptable WU which served the people and not business. For me, this has been a massive missed opportunity and I would have liked to have seen an effort to redefine Europe along fairer lines . I have been reading a bit labour Trotsky of late and his idea of Internationalism. Whilst the book I read cast a very sunny and non-critical opinion of his merits, I think that the idea of countries working together for the people would have been awe-inspiring and a salutary lesson to the US.

The other thing that I would like to say is that I ultimately think that Trump will eventually result in the greatest fillip the Left will have had since the Second War War. It is fascinating that Theresa May has been presented with a massive dilemma insofar that an olive branch if being offered by Trump for a post-Brexit UK and that she has also gone on record as finding Trump unacceptable. Getting close to Trump will ultimately prove more catastrophic that the Bush / Blair relationship and if we start cosying up to America I can see our stock overseas taking a massive downturn. I strongly believe that Trump will be an unmitigated disaster for the Right and if May accepts his overtures she runs the risk of being labelled in the same bracket as the likes of Le Pen, etc. It is a poisoned chalice and one I cannot see the Conservative's surviving. A Trump administration will put British voters off UKIP and I think politics will eventually swing back to a form of normalcy.

I find it incredible that we now found ourselves ostracised from the EU which, despite it's eccentricities, was something admirable and find ourselves potentially aligned with a politician whose values we do not share and whose grasp of democracy is tenuous at best. It is regrettable that we look like now aligning ourselves with "The Great Satan" whereas we could have made a massive contribution in to making Europe a better and more equitable place.

The "swing" - or better "swings" - to which you allude will, I suspect, continue to occur with ever increasing rapidity between revolutionary socialism, market driven capitalism and anything and everything else in between, wherever any of us might be; we know at least something of all of these phenomena from past experience and I suspect that such experiences will catch up with themselves and with those who have had them in our internet superconnected age to ensure that such as state of flux will increase exponentially in speed, a rolling process that may well prove to be utterly unstoppable.

[aeolium]

That ignores the point I made. No, the average voters won't be influenced by these conclusions because they'll never hear them. They will hear the version peddled by the Daily Telegraph or the Express that migrants decrease their wages - and they'll put two and two together. EU=migrants=less in my wage packet. Therefore I'll vote to Leave the EU.

But what possible difference would it have made had those voters heard those conclusions, which did not incidentally dispute that there might well be an impact though small on the wages of the low-paid? They were in insecure, low-paid work - and work in which real term wages have remained essentially flat or declining for the best part of a decade. The economy which they are told benefits from unrestricted migration - always a rather weak argument in my view in that you could also say the economy would benefit from a large amount of cheap labour (as it does in China) - does not principally benefit them but others who disproportionately enjoy its wealth. Free EU movement is useless to them, for what jobs could they get in a Europe riven by high unemployment in the west and afflicted by much lower wages in the east? It benefits the transnational professional and business classes, and the wealthy retired who can move to Spain or have a second home in Tuscany, but these are highly unlikely to form any part of the Brexit vote. And the point about the immigration concern is that it has never solely been about economics but as much about identity and community, as this Demos report from 2014 showed. The report suggests that it was the much higher pace of net migration to the UK from 1997 onwards that changed immigration from being a minor issue to the top concern in both the European elections of 2014 and, clearly, the Brexit vote (IIRC only about 4% thought it was the most important issue facing the country in the early 1990s).

Edit: incidentally, re your question in post 193, the Demos report mentions that one reason that a fairly large segment of former Labour voters abandoned the party in 2010 was because they blamed Labour for the high level of net migration particularly post-2004. By 2015 many of these may well have voted UKIP.

[french frank]

But what possible difference would it have made had those voters heard those conclusions, which did not incidentally dispute that there might well be an impact though small on the wages of the low-paid?

If you start back at #182, teamsaint said, "I think it is pretty clear that a lot of those who voted leave think that the changes they ( think they) voted for will benefit them, and that the existing arrangements hurt them economically, through immigration reducing pay rates,."

I was intending to offer a 'correction' to any suggestion that immigration did noticeably reduce pay rates. The question was why people in the UK automatically blamed the hardship they were suffering on the EU. Not 'If only they had read these conclusions that would have influenced these voters'.

On the other hand, I do think any literature they received asserting that they had low and stagnant wages because of immigrants would have an influence.

But in any case, the areas that voted most strongly to leave the EU 'because of immigration' tended to be the areas where there was low immigration anyway, whereas areas of high immigration, like London, voted to Remain. Somewhere there was a disconnect between the reality of their experience, and their perception of that reality.

[Serial_Apologist]

To work out why working class people have come to vote for right wing parties and policies, one only has to look at how those at the top of society, the rich, the law, the media and "news" disseminators, have treated them.

Up until about WW2 in this and other European countries, the purpose of the working class was to work to create the goods and services then largely consumed by the upper and middle classes, and the value then to be translated into profits for the most competitive, as well as in auxiliary occupations, the police and armed forces. The arbitrary consequences in terms of unequal wealth distribution and periodic overproduction leading to mass unemployment and immiseration mattered not one jot to those at the top so long as they could be kept at bay, because it was only in basic necessities that the overwhelmingly renting class's purchasing power was to be appealed to.

The problem however was that the contradictions in laisser faire free enterprise liberalism, massive upswings pursued by slumps, had created levels of class conflict and resulting political radicalism only resolvable by state repression, scapegoating within the working class and ultimately fascism and war. The capitalist class realised that to save the system that kept it in power necessitated two things: greater state intervention, not as a step towards their own abolition and a classless society but to provide private industry with infrastructural support and minimal safety nets to maintain a healthy productive workforce, and one that was trained up in times of recession to meet the coming upswings while still able to spend, albeit at reduced levels.

After WW2 western governments, helped by the size and power in numbers of the post war baby boomers entering adulthood and benefitting from the above Keynsian macroeconomc policies of full employument, took their hint from how America's New Deal had led its working class to buy into the middle class "American Dream" of a consumerist home-owning democracy, and the advertising machine swung into re-gearing product appeal beyond its previous middle class target to secure the working class faustian pact with the consumer ideal that all was gold that glistered. At the same time de-colonialisation meant previous sources of cheap resources and labour were no longer the dependable means to ensuring working class loyalty at home, as competitor nations re-equipped with more productive technologies outbid Britain's outdated manufacturing processes and Europe pooled itself into what would become the EU. The house would eventually come tumbling down; the working class were the easiest target for blame for capitalism entering its so far most intractable situation - what was called "greed" being the expression of its long history of collective insecurity through making hay while the sun shone, and "pricing itself out of jobs" protecting selfsame jobs when the alternative was the dole and loss of the communitarian sense of working class solidarity provided by the workplace.

And where had Labour been all this time? - bettering bit by bit the conditions and safety nets, backed up by protective laws whenever electoral opportunities afforded, but siding with the employing class and logic of private ownership, control and competitive profitability being the logic and barometer to be upheld in the end at all costs. When under threat of mass redundancy grass roots proposals started to be adumbrated for worker's plans of socially necessary environmentally sustainable products planned across otherwise competing sectors, a compliant trade union bureaucracy refused support on grounds that militancy be restricted to wages and conditions ("management are paid to manage" etc). Meanwhile the Left fragmented into "identity politics", failing to discuss let alone address serious ideological weaknesses that had divided the novement for a century, leaving "the membership" at the mercy of sensationalised tabloid misinformation and in the future hands of those banks and money sharks to whom they would be indebted.

Capitalism's present state is a globally generalised variant on how things were when Thatcher's asset strippers de-industrialised the country in the unrealisable belief that British capitalism could start afresh from small businesses, freed of red tape and trade union mischief-making - the results of which are still there to see in the ex-mining communities of Yorks, Lancs and S Wales, where jobs with pay commensurate with those that had gone before and afforded that home never came. Meanwhile the only radical leftist alternative to Marxism, which at least offered the explanations for wealth creation, crisis and inequality, if not the insights needed into what it is that makes modern consumerist man and woman tick, has been that of the Greens.

[teamsaint]

I haven't suggested on this thread that immigration " did noticeably reduce pay rates", ( and was careful not to do so) although during the referendum, I never saw any evidence other than that widespread immigration does in fact reduce pay rates, and that this disproportionately affects the lower paid, who of course get hit very hard by small reductions in pay rate, and who in general have suffered stagnant pay rates for way too long.
but that of course, is all part of a much wider picture.

.

[Pianorak]

. . . But in any case, the areas that voted most strongly to leave the EU 'because of immigration' tended to be the areas where there was low immigration anyway, whereas areas of high immigration, like London, voted to Remain. Somewhere there was a disconnect between the reality of their experience, and their perception of that reality.

New statistics contained in a study recently conducted by Ipsos MORI suggest that the British population is ill educated on facts surrounding British society, particularly immigration issues.

http://iasservices.org.uk/British-Public-Ignorant-About-Immigration

The same source: The North East has the lowest immigration numbers in the UK.

[Serial_Apologist]

I haven't suggested on this thread that immigration " did noticeably reduce pay rates", ( and was careful not to do so) although during the referendum, I never saw any evidence other than that widespread immigration does in fact reduce pay rates, and that this disproportionately affects the lower paid, who of course get hit very hard by small reductions in pay rate, and who in general have suffered stagnant pay rates for way too long.
but that of course, is all part of a much wider picture.

.

A situation which Labour, under Corbyn, pledges to remedy by maintaining EU-promulgated workers' rights, and minimal/living wage rates - not that it's had much in the way of publicity, as the media concentrate on promoting those opposed to Corbyn's leadership who have been responsible in the first place for Labour's steady decline in electoral support among those who should ber its most "natural" supporters.

[Serial_Apologist]

New statistics contained in a study recently conducted by Ipsos MORI suggest that the British population is ill educated on facts surrounding British society, particularly immigration issues.

http://iasservices.org.uk/British-Public-Ignorant-About-Immigration

The same source: The North East has the lowest immigration numbers in the UK.

I think this phenomenon can in part be ascribed to hearsay - the feeling of negative anticipation, of "we hear what's happening in places like Peterborough and Boston, Lincs., and we don't want that happening here" - stirred up by the right wing press and not helped by being given prominence by TV reports.

[teamsaint]

New statistics contained in a study recently conducted by Ipsos MORI suggest that the British population is ill educated on facts surrounding British society, particularly immigration issues.

http://iasservices.org.uk/British-Public-Ignorant-About-Immigration

The same source: The North East has the lowest immigration numbers in the UK.

there is of course always the option of looking at what the survey actually says, which is that levels of ignorance in this country are actually below similar levels for Italy , France .Belgium and Poland, and only fractionally ( margin of error stuff) above Germany.

Which of course is nothing to be very proud of.....

Actually a very depressing piece in at least two ways.

[aeolium]

But in any case, the areas that voted most strongly to leave the EU 'because of immigration' tended to be the areas where there was low immigration anyway, whereas areas of high immigration, like London, voted to Remain. Somewhere there was a disconnect between the reality of their experience, and their perception of that reality.

Not entirely, because they certainly experienced the low wages and the reality of those wages having remained flat for nearly a decade, as well as poor levels of public investment compared with London and the south-east (the North-east for instance enjoying an average of £5 per head of public transport investment compared to London's £275 per head), and severe pressure on public services including the NHS. London may have experienced significantly higher immigration levels but to areas already highly diverse and thus (as the Demos report showed) much better prepared to accept it. There is no doubt that a high majority of the British population, as polled in 2014 around the European elections, felt that immigration was too high and ought to be reduced - the Demos report put the majority as high as 80%, and it is unquestionably true that the annual rate of net migration had been much higher in the previous decade than in the two decades before that. Even if the public perception about immigration was misguided, as Pianorak's link shows, surely the fact of that perception, and the fact of UKIP's coming first in the 2014 European elections, should have been a warning to the British and European establishment that some change was seriously needed.

[Lat-Literal]

I can see that people may very well not care about 'the economy' doing well if they don't feel they are (or even if they don't feel they're doing as well as other people). But why blame the EU rather than government policies? And I mean: Why? in a serious sense. Why does that happen? Why did they put the Conservatives back in power if they felt they were financially suffering?

Many people are a private-public partnership which is to say that they are both home owners or part home owners and in need of state support - health, pensions etc. Setting UKIP, the Greens, LDs and Nationalists aside for a moment, they have to weigh up whether it is the party of property or the party of the welfare state that is most likely to protect both these things more. Those who are getting on a bit may or may not have race issues but most of them see immigrants - black, white and anything else - by definition as having been in the country less long. Consequently, they do not consider the contributions they have made to the welfare state are equal to theirs. So - whereas in earlier days the poor and poorer well-off people would have signed up to the welfare state 100%, they are now selective about its application. They favour a harder line as long as it doesn't affect them.

Then there is the growing realisation among many that, whatever happens, the welfare state seems to be struggling. There is an assumption among some that the NHS will not be maintained because it can't be maintained in their opinion and that pensions will not be paid in the future in a meaningful way, ie to people of most living ages. Some of those rightly or wrongly view property as their future pension and their health support in a situation where the state cannot be relied on. The very old are blase about welfare because major change won't affect them. Of the rest, it tips more to the Tories on balance and a Labour Party that takes a dim view of property ownership will only accentuate that trend.

[french frank]

Not entirely, because they certainly experienced the low wages and the reality of those wages having remained flat for nearly a decade, as well as poor levels of public investment compared with London and the south-east (the North-east for instance enjoying an average of £5 per head of public transport investment compared to London's £275 per head),

I'm not disputing the reality of their perception/experience of their low/stagnant pay, but the 'reality' of their perception of it as being due to immigrants.

and severe pressure on public services including the NHS.

But, migrants tend to be younger, in work and put far less pressure on, certainly, the underfunded NHS than the permanent (older) residents. Working migrants are supporting the NHS both with their taxes and by staffing.

London may have experienced significantly higher immigration levels but to areas already highly diverse and thus (as the Demos report showed) much better prepared to accept it.

Not sure I understand that point. Doesn't it mean that as populations experience the presence of migrants, they accept it; and those unused to it (or even simply reading about it in the Daily Express but not experiencing it significantly) are more hostile? Which I think is what I'm saying.

There is no doubt that a high majority of the British population, as polled in 2014 around the European elections, felt that immigration was too high and ought to be reduced - the Demos report put the majority as high as 80%, and it is unquestionably true that the annual rate of net migration had been much higher in the previous decade than in the two decades before that. Even if the public perception about immigration was misguided, as Pianorak's link shows, surely the fact of that perception, and the fact of UKIP's coming first in the 2014 European elections, should have been a warning to the British and European establishment that some change was seriously needed.

You mean like educating people better as to the benefits? Or cutting down on migration?

[Dave2002]

Michael Moore on Trump:

https://www.channel4.com/news/michael-moore-on-trump

Amusing to note that Moore claims that Hillary won - based on popular vote, and that Trump only became President by a flawed electoral system, whereas Brexit, which some don't like, really was based on the popular vote. So in one sense the two events/outcomes are very different.

[french frank]

Amusing to note that Moore claims that Hillary won - based on popular vote

On which this article is interesting, published in 2012:

"Problem No. 1

It creates the possibility for the loser of the popular vote to win the electoral vote. This is more than a theoretical possibility.[] It has happened at least four times out of the 56 presidential elections, or more than 7 percent of the time, which is not such a small percentage, and it created a hideous mess every time. The most recent occurrence was 2000."

In the EU referendum, the question of franchise was the subject of objections, on at least three different counts, before the vote took place - not to mention the constitutional status of the referendum - on which the government has again lost on one count.

[Beef Oven!]

But, migrants tend to be younger, in work and put far less pressure on, certainly, the underfunded NHS than the permanent (older) residents. Working migrants are supporting the NHS both with their taxes and by staffing.

I’m not sure anyone knows what is exactly going on with all this. It could equally be said that migrants, being younger have younger larger families and thereby put far more pressure on schools and the education budget. Whereas older permanent residents put no pressure on this £85 billion area of the public purse. Migrants are also generally in lower income jobs and will not pay enough tax to cover their costs in education and the NHS usage, if they have children of school age - apparently a £30 salary is the threshold

I say this not because I want to contradict you or because I care very much about what I’ve just written.

I say it as a reminder that it is a very complex subject, and honest people need to navigate their way through so much subjective stuff being said to get to the truth.