Commentary by Black Kos editor JoanMar
CNN’s Brianna Keilar was moderating one of those all-too-common panel discussions that media houses are fond of offering their audiences — those superficial chatter with pundits working overtime to paraphrase and repackage what they’ve been hearing and repeating for days on end. The type of discussions which more than anything else shows that the media is woefully, almost criminally unprepared to meet the moment. Said Ms. Keilar in her most authoritative voice, “I mean, they voted for him because of the economy, right? It was an economic message. They were telling him that they are concerned about the price of milk and eggs, right?” Eh? Only white people eat eggs? I mean, over 80% of Black folks must not be concerned about the cost of eggs. Every 3 weeks or so I do buy a carton of some brown oval thingies that they tell me come from chickens. I eat them scrambled, I boil them, sometimes I use them to make delicious sardine omelettes (yes, sardines! And don’t think I can’t hear that eewwww over there!). I thought those were eggs, no?
But CNN’s journalists are not alone in providing cover for racists and their mendacious propaganda. They weren’t the only ones framing the election results in a way most favorable to one of the most morally bankrupt figures in recent history. A day after the elections, Senator Bernie Sanders looked at the results and issued his considered opinion:
“Here is the reality, the working class of this country is angry, and they have reason to be angry,” he said. “We are living in an economy today where people on top are doing phenomenally well while 60 percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck…
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them...”
Good ol’ Bernie forgetting about all the melanated folks again. I for one thought that the overwhelmingly majority of Black folks were considered working class. What am I missing? But even if for one moment I was to buy into this economic argument, why should the working class be angry at the Democrats? How has the Democratic Party abandoned the working class? As I recall, it was the Democratic Party that gave us Obamacare, the American Rescue Plan, the Child’s Tax Credit, Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and would have done so much more had the Republicans been even half way decent. If I have a quarrel with the Harris campaign is that they ceded the economic debate to the felon. Obama is the only one I heard on the campaign trail to repeatedly point out that the sicko inherited his [Obama’s] economy and quickly ran it aground. The orange menace did not build the economy he constantly bragged about. I expected the Harris campaign to have a wealth of charts available, clearly illustrating that the convict was engaged in an act of theft when he claimed all of Obama’s hard work as his own.
Trump inherited a strong economy that got stronger
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Unemployment: Under Obama, unemployment was cut from a recession-peak of 10 percent to only 4.7 percent. It has continued to drop and now is extremely low at 3.6 percent.5
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Job growth: By the end of the Obama administration, the economy had experienced 76 consecutive months of job growth. Since Trump became president, the streak has been extended to 109 consecutive months.
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Average monthly job growth: During the last 33 months of the Obama administration, non- farm job growth averaged 224,000 per month. During the first 33 months of the Trump administration, the average was 34,000 jobs per month less.
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GDP growth: Average real GDP growth was roughly the same (2.6 percent) for the first 11 quarters under President Trump (ending Sept. 2019) and for the last 11 quarters of the Obama administration.
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Income: During the last two years of the Obama administration, annual median household income increased $4,800. This is three times more than the $1,400 increase during the first two years of the Trump administration.
But back to Brianna and Bernie for a minute: it’s either that Black people are not considered part of the “working class,” or something very scary and as American as apple pie is at play. I am no fan of Professor Eddie Glaude, but I find his on-air, in real time rebuttal of Stephanie Ruhle — who’s been masquerading as some sorta economic guru — and her claim that white Americans voted for the convict due to the economic concerns and their discomfort with “identity politics” to be spot on. His delivery was also pretty darn impressive.
You’re telling me, Stephanie, that all of these people who believe that their lives are – that bread is too high and eggs are too high – that they voted for a convicted felon, a guy who said we can grab the P? … I do not believe that. I cannot believe that. And the reason I think you believe it is because you don’t want to believe that that’s what’s really motivating them. They voted for a crook, a person who they know is doing everything to undermine the so-called country that they love. And then they’re telling us the BS, that it’s economics. We know that’s not true. We know it’s not true. And we’ve got to raise our kids in this sh*t.”
*my bold.
Yeah, it was brutal. And so well deserved. This “economic anxiety” nonsense is used as a fig leaf to hide the naked truth. And the truth is it was all about race. And we all know it. So now white people have voted in a despicable conman from Queens who’s hell-bent on rebranding this country in his own image. Racists will reap what they sow. Sadly, as with the criminal mismanagement of COVID, millions of innocent people here and abroad will also be suffering right along with them, and through no fault of their own.
bsky.app/...
Update: His health guy doesn't believe in medical science. His law guy is a sex trafficker. His intelligence gal is a Russian asset.
You're all caught up.
— Jack E. Smith (@jack-e-smith.bsky.social) November 15, 2024 at 8:52 AM
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promise to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education is being criticized as a potential whitewashing of America’s education system and a challenge to Title I and Title VI that could defund special education, school lunch programs, and possible cancellation of summer schools,
Arne Duncan, former U.S. education secretary under the Obama administration, spoke exclusively to theGrio, saying, “It is our time to have courage and fight for kids.” When Duncan was specifically asked about the impact of Trump’s proposed education cuts on Black and brown kids, the ex-Obama official exclaimed there was a “chance to have an extraordinarily damaging and detrimental effect.”
Duncan’s concerns are about “our history being whitewashed,” adding, “We have to be concerned about defunding vulnerable populations. Title I money for poor children – money for special needs children, or school lunches — all that might be taken away.”
He continued, “A focus on after-school and summer school programs might be taken away. Access to higher education — that might be cut.”
Duncan, also a Howard University Board of Trustee, expressed concern over funding for HBCUs during a second Trump administration. During Trump’s first term, his advisor Steve Bannon argued that a commitment to increase funding for their institutions following a White House meeting with Trump would be unconstitutional, based on concerns that doing so discriminated against other races and ethnicities.
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In the days since Donald Trump’s victory became official, one of the great debates about Trumpism has come roaring back: To what extent can his rise to power be seen as a product of America’s divisions over race?
A closer look at the data suggests that both takes are wrong — or, at least, require more nuance. Trump’s victory was and wasn’t about race, as his winning coalition included many different groups with many different motivations. Understanding which kind of voter mattered, and in what ways, is crucial to getting the racial politics of 2024 right.
We can safely say it’s difficult to explain the shifts in the electorate between 2020 and 2024 by claiming that voters were motivated by Trump’s incendiary racial rhetoric.
It’s not just that Trump gained with minorities; it’s that he gained with nearly everyone, winning new votes in places with all sorts of different kinds of voters. To explain such a consistent national shift to the right, you need to look to factors that unite the population rather than divide it. This is why the best post-election analyses have given pride of place to inflation and anti-incumbent sentiment, two factors that appear to be present across many different groups in the American electorate.
At the same time, we can also say that race played an essential role in Trump being atop the Republican ticket in the first place.
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GARRY CONILLE lasted 166 days as Haiti’s prime minister. It was a miserable term. In June, one month after he took office, a UN-authorised security force of some 400 Kenyan police officers arrived. For a moment, some Haitians may have hoped that years of violence, impunity and suspended democracy might be coming to an end. No such luck. The undermanned Kenyan force has made little difference. Deaths from gang violence have increased since they arrived (see chart). The gangs that run Haiti remain in control.
On top of this intractable security crisis, 12m Haitians now find themselves thrust even deeper into a constitutional morass. Haiti has not had a president since 2021, when Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. Subsequent appointed leaders have failed to hold elections, in large part because gang control over much of Haiti makes fair elections impossible.
Mr Conille was fired after a vote on November 8th by Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, a nine-person body appointed in April by Haiti’s cabinet (none of them elected politicians) to carry out presidential duties. In normal times only parliament could remove a prime minister, but every seat in Haiti’s parliament has been vacant since January 2023. Mr Conille’s job, and the council’s, was to secure the country and prepare for elections in 2025.
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Maribel Hidalgo fled her native Venezuela a year ago with a 1-year-old son, trudging for days through Panama’s Darien Gap, then riding the rails across Mexico to the United States.
They were living in the U.S. when the Biden administration announced Venezuelans would be offered Temporary Protected Status, which allows people already in the United States to stay and work legally if their homelands are deemed unsafe. People from 17 countries, including Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan and recently Lebanon, are currently receiving such relief.
But President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have promised mass deportations and suggested they would scale back the use of TPS that covers more than 1 million immigrants. They have highlighted unfounded claims that Haitians who live and work legally in Springfield, Ohio, as TPS holders were eating their neighbors’ pets. Trump also amplified disputed claims made by the mayor of Aurora, Colorado, about Venezuelan gangs taking over an apartment complex.
“What Donald Trump has proposed doing is we’re going to stop doing mass parole,” Vance said at an Arizona rally in October, mentioning a separate immigration status called humanitarian parole that is also at risk. “We’re going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status.”
Hidalgo wept as she discussed her plight with a reporter as her son, now 2, slept in a stroller outside the New York migrant hotel where they live. At least 7.7 million people have fled political violence and economic turmoil in Venezuela in one of the biggest displacements worldwide.
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