ROOSEVELT HOUSE INSTITUTE—Roosevelt House hosts a special evening featuring Nancy Isenberg, author of the groundbreaking bestseller White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, in conversation with Frank Rich, Writer-at-Large for New York Magazine, and Bill Goldstein, Public Programming Curator for Roosevelt House. Isenberg, the T. Harry Williams Professor of history at Louisiana State University, has updated the paperback of White Trash to include updated reflections on the 2016 presidential election. As Isenberg and Rich will discuss, the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, from the earliest British colonial settlement to today’s hillbillies. Isenberg’s White Trash upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society – where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility.
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ERIC ZUESSE—“Chavismo” (named after Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chavez) which Maduro represents, and which had been Venezuela’s Marxist (communist) independent Venezuela, will become past history, when President González will start his (six-year) term on 10 January 2025.
The reason why a vast majority of Venezuelans will be voting for González is that this will be the only way they can get the U.S. Government’s virtual blockade of sanctions against their country lifted so that maybe the enormous mass poverty that those sanctions imposed upon them will likewise end. However, that favorable outcome for the poor of Venezuela won’t happen, and here is why:
González is secretly committed to privatizing Venezuela’s gas, oil, and other resources, as well as a “broad program of privatization of companies and public assets,” including the currently entirely free-to-the-public educational system and pension system, all of the Government’s assets to be auctioned off to investors from throughout the world so as to produce profits from the poor to increase the wealth of investors throughout the world, and, so to increase yet further the economic-inequality indexes throughout the world.
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AMARYNTH—There is very little new here. The RoW faces a repeat of the previous Trump administration, because Trump is not able to understand that many of the ‘international crises’ were of his doing. I don’t see, intuit or sense a change. I don’t find an understanding that the problems are US Policy and not so much what he did, or what Biden or anyone else did. It is systemic and long term.
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JOHN VAROLI—At that time, however, the U.S. government couldn’t exert the full potential of imperial might and total social control that the ruling class today in Washington wields. Thanks to the rise of the modern digital society, the dictator’s dream of total surveillance and concentration of power are a few clicks away. The U.S. ruling class literally has at its disposal all the levers needed to manipulate and control.
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ERIC ZUESSE—The first fact that they hide is that though elections are a NECESSARY part of any democracy, elections throughout the U.S. empire are only for PR purposes, to fool the deceived public to think that an election is a SUFFICIENT condition in order to BE a democracy. That ridiculous lie is universal throughout the U.S. empire — despite its ludicrousness. For example: Did you know that each of the two political Parties in America, the DNC and the RNC, is a closed self-appointing private club, which has no obligation to its voters — much less to the entire public — and so it can and sometimes does ignore vote-counts in its primary ’elections’, whenever it wants to?
