US Election Aftermath 8/1/21

All the commentators are saying that Trump has no case and that the US election was properly run and the result is correct.  No doubt they are right as far as they go.

But we might ask why people are so upset that they will storm the Capitol and make the US look like a tin pot third world rabble, where police line up to stop raging demonstrators and shoot a few.

Many years as a young child I went to the first version of ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ with my mother.   There is scene in that with a huge rally with banners, shouting, festivities and people squirting each other with hoses.  I asked my Mom, ‘What are they doing?’.  She replied, ‘They are having an election, son’.  I said, ‘That is not how you have elections’.  She said. ‘It’s how they do it over there’.

It has always stuck on my mind.  She regarded the US as not actually a civilised country.  At that time we watched Westerns where they had shoot outs and wars with the baddies a.k.a Indians.  Later she explained that they carried guns and had no health system for poor people.  When my parents retired they went on a trip to the USA and were held up at gunpoint at their motel in Los Angeles by men who needed money for drugs, which tended to prove her point.

This morning on  Radio National singer/songwriter Tori Amos told of how as an aspiring artist she played in bars and heard how the powers behind the throne arranged judicial appointments such that there was a court decision to allow unlimited money into political donations without the source of it being clear. 

Looking at the choices of president facing the US electors last time, there was Trump, the anti-Establishment TV reality host v. Hillary Clinton, an existing Establishment figure. The progressive voice of Bernie Sanders had been eliminated. This time there was Trump with his failed rhetoric and COVID non-policies against Biden, an existing Establishment figure.  Sanders had again been side-lined.  So, yes the count was correct, but how much use is this to the common person, whose job is no longer secure and whose income has not risen for decades? 

Inequality has been rising apace. Everyone may be aware of this, but some are more aware than others, some are much more affected than others, and some want to do much much more about it than others.

The vote count and procedures may be correct, but the system is not delivering a fair outcome.  Taking jobs from US workers to ones in China or elsewhere allows importers to make supernormal profits, and this process, which amounts to the undoing of colonialism where the raw materials came  from overseas and were processed in the First World will not be complete until all the world’s workers are equal.  In the meantime, the poor in the First World get a lot poorer and the rich, initially in the First World, but now elite as much by class as  by nationality, get richer (as Marx had predicted).

The Trump demonstrators are wrong about the election, but not so wrong if you talk about the system and their place in it.  Sanders may have had a solution, Trump never did.  The US elite have avoided confronting the issue so far, but it is still there, and will be ongoing.

Here is Bob Carr, ex-NSW Premier and ex- US Foreign Minister writing about how the problem will not go away.  He is less specific on why.

www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/capitol-chaos-is-just-the-first-act-the-republican-party-is-shattered-and-civility-is-not-coming-back-20210107-p56sdw.html