The Importance of Being Wrong

There's good news and bad news.  The good news is that my unblemished record of incorrectly predicting the winner of presidential elections is.......still unblemished.  That's 36 years and 10 presidential elections in a row, and I defy anyone to show me a record that approaches mine in consistency, steadfastness, and error.

The bad news?  The bad news is the "soul-searching" and the "self-examination" and the despair and the hope and all the other crap that will now pile on this outcome.  We've got the "Jesus Christ, not this."  We've got the "I told you sos."  We've got the "Economy has had the slowest, weakest recovery since XXXX."  We've got "It's a global phenomenon."   We've got the "Pushback against the elites."  We've got the "International alliance of sinister forces sabotaging..."

We'll get the "Don't mourn, Organize."

We're gonna get it all and more including the Muslime raus!  Latinos raus! Juden raus! (except for accountants and tax lawyers, because Trump wouldn't want to cut off their noses, as it might spite his own face).

But before we go down any of those roads, let's dispose of the supposed "lucid, direct" appeal to the "white working class" made by Trump.  And let's dispose of it like this.  Rural areas, smaller cities, and married white males provided the deep reservoirs of Trump's support. There is no questioning the devastation that has been wreaked upon those rural and small city areas since 1973, and more intensely, after 1979, with asset stripping, de-unionization, and  capital flight.  But.....but has the "white" working class suffered more than black workers?  Is the unemployment rate higher for white workers than black workers?  Is the unemployment rate, incarceration rate, death rate, higher for white rural youth than for black rural youth?  Are incomes for whites higher than incomes for blacks?  Are white workers generally employed in higher paying jobs than black workers?    No, no, yes, yes??  Well, just one fact for your consideration, since 1980, black and Hispanic hourly earnings have shown no progress in reducing the hourly wage differential that keeps those earnings at about 70 percent of the earnings of their white counterparts.  So.......?

So why didn't/doesn't the Trump appeal appeal to black and Hispanic workers?  Because the appeal is anything but lucid, and direct.  Because the appeal is precisely to prejudice, status, privilege, to class non-solidarity and class collaboration.  Because the appeal is to the aspiration to becoming a little bourgeois unto himself, and it's not unlike the appeal that kept the poor white Southerner in line for years  working for lower wages.  Because the appeal is designed to obscure class, and target color, race, gender, ethnicity.

It's the same appeal Trump made to flog enrollment in Trump "University." "You too can become a slaveholder" is now  "you too can be a real estate developer.  you too can become a (petty) bourgeois."  Trump appeal to ethnicity, not to class.  His was the identity politics writ large.

So when some Marxist tells you how "chattering classes" have stigmatized the white workers as dumb racists, let's point out that today the "chattering classes" are all talking about the "alienated, angry, neglected, white working class,"  so incensed over a worker from Honduras working at a job a white worker would never accept, for money that's below what the white worker accept... let's point out to those "Marxists" that in talking about the chattering class, they are talking about themselves.

The election was secured not only by and in the once working class strongholds of the Democratic Party-- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin-- but just as, importantly, by the impact of voter suppression actions throughout the country, particularly in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.  The fact that the chattering class Marxists have ignored this extensive and intensive policy of the bourgeoisie, have never even entered the field of opposition to this suppression by seeking to mobilize the population in direct action, and independent of the Democrats and NGOs, shows how effective the rollback, the erasing, of the entire experience of the civil rights struggle has been over the last 4 decades.  We can't ever remember how we even accomplished anything.

So here's a prediction.  The alt-right, new-right, Trump-Breitbart-Murdoch government will begin a campaign in or out of Congress to either repeal outright, or allow states to opt out of the 14th and 15th amendments.  Nothing portends the approach of the second civil war, like the repeal of the accomplishments of the first civil war.  The specter of Radical Reconstruction arising from the grave, threatening  the reconstitution of  the former slaveholders through and in Redemptionist governments will not be banished until those violations of "states' rights" are reversed.

On that, all the Republicans in this now current Redemptionist government can agree.  Take that Thaddeus Stevens!

The Marxists will have yet another opportunity to screw the pooch and leave the battle to the Democrats and the NGOs.

Moving on, let's smack ourselves in the forehead-- no, not you, just me, I smacked myself in the forehead, because......because for 45 years, I've been following the US oil industry major corporations, the movement of their profits and profitability, and I became somewhat adept at linking "policy" and "politics" to the conditions within that sector, which happens to be the most technically intensive sector of the economy.  

Where has the price of oil been for the past two years?  Where have profits been in the industry for the last two years?  And how could I, of all people, have forgotten what happens when the profitability of the oil industry tanks?  How could I have forgotten what happened in 2000 after the price of oil dropped in 1998 to $10 per barrel?  Or how could I have forgotten what happened in 2003 after the price of oil in 2002 dropped to $20 per barrel.

So two things, or relations, or moments of capital are returning:  1. a big-ass recession  2. a US war in the Mideast to get the price of oil up.  

Putin likes Trump?  No doubt.  The price of oil will begin to climb.  He might not like it so much when Trump starts threatening Iran with tactical nuclear weapons.  Like it or not, it's going to happen.

That's another prediction.


November  9, 2016