Marshall Auerback, Counerpunch:
a large chunk [of women] still voted for him, and larger numbers of Hispanics voted for Trump than Romney. Doesn’t that suggest that identity politics has reached some sort of limit?
The establishment, especially the Democratic Party establishment, keeps enforcing what divides people rather than what unites people by embracing identity politics and ignoring class....
Obama is personally likeable, but did he really give us anything as great and durable as FDR did in the 1930s? The Affordable Care Act was effectively RomneyCare (with the comparable problem that there remains no means of controlling private health insurance costs, a fact that was cruelly revealed days before the election when 25% hikes in health insurance premiums were announced), much as Dodd-Frank was a joke in terms of achieving genuine financial reform, especially when one compares it to the legislation that emerged out of the Great Depression (which lasted unchanged for over 40 years). The Pecora Commission (established in the GD’s aftermath) was given relatively free rein to investigate the causes of the crisis and to go after the fraud. Widespread defaults and bankruptcies wiped out a lot of the private sector’s debt. The financial sector was downsized and rendered relatively unimportant for several decades.If Obama had offered up a serious version of the New Deal, especially since he had control of Congress in the first 2 years -- but also remember the massive economic downturn and the hysteria -- yet bold vision might have captured something - yet the bailout led to the tea party.
I don't agree with everything in this piece. Definitely worth reading.
November 14, 2016
It’s Class, Stupid, Not Race
http://www.counterpunch.org/
