Trump: What Are You Going to Do?

I saw the “State of the Union” message yesterday. It brought mendacity and braggadocio to new lows. I checked out some of the on-line responses today. The best ones were good reasoning; the worst had no reason but ridicule.

The Alliance for Retired Americans gave a measured response to the issues most important to retirees. ARA response: https://retiredamericans.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/2020-SOTU-Fact-Check-UPDATE.pdf?link_id=0&can_id=4323d125406e51f8a379e93227bf8d59&source=email-setting-president-trumps-record-straight&email_referrer=email_717673&email_subject=setting-president-trumps-record-straight. On every retiree issue, they point out, Mr Trump lied.

I also watched Bernie Sanders give his response to an audience of Caucasian supporters in New Hampshire. It was brilliant. Here are a couple of quotes, “We are now experiencing more income inequality than at any time in the last 100 years. Today 3 Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of America. 500,000 are homeless…. Billionaires now pay a lower effective tax rate than ordinary working people.”

Sanders took up Trump’s major points in order but, instead of looking at them from the billionaire point of view, he considered what they actually meant for working families. It was like reversing a telescope. Every result was a refutation of the “State of the Union” speech.

Sanders, to his immense credit, went much further. He marveled aloud that any president, in 2020, could make a long public speech without mentioning the climate catastrophe.

Anybody For Peace?

Mr Sanders did not talk about foreign policy. I was hoping he would oppose what Mr Trump had said when he bragged about trying to overthrow the government of Venezuela. But he didn’t.

And by the way, I noticed that Mrs Pelosi only clapped a few times during Mr Trump’s exposition, but she was certainly clapping when Trump said that the United States was heading a coalition to overthrow Venzuela! I would have liked to think that somebody on “our side” of the 2020 elections was against imperialism.

Ed Sills of the Texas AFL-CIO expressed outrage at Mr Trump’s obvious intention to privatize schools. He wrote, “Last night, President Trump made vouchers a centerpiece of his State of the Union address and slammed public schools as ‘failing government schools.’ The sight of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripping up her copy of Trump’s speech as he concluded is a great metaphor for how we feel about private school vouchers.”

Doing it Wrong

Should Pelosi have ripped up the speech? There are minor arguments about it today, but I want to point out a much more important issue because I also watched late-night comedian Stephen Coulbert’s report on the “State of the Union” speech.

Coulbert mimicked and ridiculed Mr Trump. His studio audience seemed to like it, but I didn’t. It is one thing to disagree with reactionary ideas and reactionary people, but it is another thing altogether to ridicule them. The crippling polarity in America today is largely because of fundamental disagreements and class interests, but there is no value in making it worse by ridiculing Trump and his millions of misguided working class supporters.

Whether we like it or not, we have to have them. We have to win them over no matter how hard it is nor how long it takes.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. They podcast them on knon.org. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site