Letters to the Editor

Trump Victory

People wonder how Trump could have won the election and what the Democratic Party did wrong that made them lose it. The answers lie in economic history and our capitalist system.

One of the laws of Capitalism is to maximize profit. Businesses will always seek to lower their bottom line. The competition is fierce and if one business figures out some new technology or some new strategy, all the others must do the same or perish.

In the late 1960s, because of the civil rights movement integrating the South the workforce became racially integrated. This allowed a massive migration of jobs and businesses from the northern to the southern states. This also was enhanced by lower wages in the South and the fact that, unlike the northern states, unions in the South were weak or nonexistent. The northern and midwestern manufacturing jobs moved to the low wage South.

One of the benefits of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s was to integrate the workforce and allow businesses like textiles to move from the Northeast to the southern United States where there was a history of anti-unionism.

By the late 1970s telecommunications technology and computers enabled these same jobs to migrate to the least developed part of the world including Central America and Mexico. The biggest boon was China, a developing country with an enormous well educated workforce, which would work for very little money combined with a government bent on modernization.

The so-called rust belt of the US was deindustrialized. Thousands of jobs left those parts of the country, devastating places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio. To enable this process, the Democratic party was taken over by the Neocons. Neocons promoted free market Capitalism, Globalization and Intervention. It was Bill Clinton that passed laws like NAFTA which sped the de-industrialization process.

The Democrats turned their backs on the working class. Bernie Sanders, a traditional New Deal Democrat, appealed to working people and those who opposed intervention and war. Bernie was defeated and pushed aside. Trump populism filled the vacuum by addressing these issues as the fault of immigrants, minorities in general and the LGBT+ population. Aligning with the anti-abortion Christian fundamentalists and white supremacists was the icing on the cake.

The American people are sick of wars, the neglect of working people, the maligning of rural people and the lack of decent paying jobs. The economic basis for this discontent was the drive for higher profits and cheaper labor.

Can America be fixed? Definitely not under Trump and his reactionary rich supporters. He will betray his base. It is possible a grassroots movement can pick up the pieces and build a just and peaceful America. It’s going to a lot of hard work.

Marshall Blesofsky, PA-C, MPH, EdD