The view from Pete

Conservatives are really good at portraying themselves as the voice of the little guy when they’re not in power; they have this identity politics sewn up like pro’s. But working class voters, who’s grievances and anxieties are real, keep being sold a bill of goods that are at times opposite to what was advertised.

To be sure, the Liberals are an elitist party. They also say the right things and their strength is their appeal to emotions and the generic progressiveness of an overwhelming majority of Canadian voters. But its all a ploy. Say the things that they know will force a reaction – out of fear or anger, and you’ll have voters drinking up whatever swill you’re offering.

But here’s the spoiler: Conservatives are an elitist party too.

They both draw their economic philosophy from neoliberalism. That is to say, the least amount of government regulation and presence and the maximum amount of corporate influence and tax cuts, and the rest is just noise.

We’re seeing in live time what this political bait and switch looks like.

In America, Trump cultivated a following among certain working class demographics, harnessing their anger and grievances and won a narrow election victory because of it. He tapped into their frustrations over inflation and ever growing wealth gap. But his approach was to rail against immigrants and the trade deficit. Both misguided, but it sounded good to those needing a scapegoat.

So what has he delivered? Very dangerous things.

Setting aside the legality and constitutionality of such deportations, what was to unfold would shake the American economy to its core.

To be certain, there are large communities of undocumented immigrants who live in the USA. They are not citizens, cannot vote, cannot obtain many taxpayer supported benefits, ineligible for medicaid or social security, but they pay taxes and participate in the larger economy. Interestingly, its their participation in the economy, now being undone, which is doing some extreme damage.

Its no secret that many of your farm workers are undocumented immigrants; picking fruits and veggies, handling livestock, etc. Why? Because their labour costs were substantially cheaper than what a citizen with right could demand.

The result is produce rotting in the fields and the vines of farms that relied on this undocumented labour. To hire “legal” employees and citizens to do the same work (who have proper and enforceable labour rights), would cost said farmers exponentially more…if they can find those hard done by Americans displaced by illegals. Well, guess what: nobody wants those jobs.

And it’s not just agriculture; its construction too. Undocumented immigration has filled gaps in the economy to such an extent that by withdrawing them – it could fundamentally cripple it in their absence. These are not the only sectors where the blatant racism behind the mass-deportation agenda is going to cause some devastating and unintended consequences.

The fact that the undocumented send some of their earnings “home” to support their families elsewhere is the fundamental underpinning of the American Dream is it not? Work hard, save some cash, build a life and success. Who opposes this?

The next target in Trump’s rage, a pillar in his election strategy, was to demonize the trade deficit as a measure of his manhood, or by extension – the strength of the US economy. Nothing further could be the truth. In fact, blanket, kneejerk tariff rate increases have done nothing but damage the US economy. Its well documented that the tariffs launched in and around the great depression era – while not the instigating factor of the depression, assured that it would cut deep.

Every nation has a right to impose tariffs, and many do – for various reasons. But make no mistake – a tariff imposed by a country is forcing its own citizens to pay the premium. Its a tax, its always been a tax. The Trump administration is crowing about how many billions of dollars their tariffs are collecting in revenue; but its directly from American businesses and consumers…and its adding to the costs of said imports causing expanded inflation where it at all but died down.

Trump campaigned on cleaning up corruption and waste in government. To that end, he launched Elon Musk in his “DOGE’ campaign to discover where waste and fraud was hiding in the federal government and eliminate it. What did America get? Cuts to essential public services, gutting of medicaid and veterans services. Whole departments closed, oversight scrapped. Suddenly, the people voting for Trump to clean up waste ended up losing disability benefits.

What’s the point of this? Its illustrative to the extent of the betrayal of populist right wing governments when given power to do what they want. What do they want? To enrich their elite friends, insiders and top dollar donors – and themselves at the expense of the taxpayer and the forced sacrifice of the working class whom gave them the support to do so.

But why?

For the same reason that Liberals do it. Their version is just as repugnant though. They appeal to the emotional heart strings of moderates and liberals with often vague pledges around human rights and other performative matters; that they’re the antidote to the harshness of hard-line conservatism. While that might be true for social issues, they are indistinguishable from conservatives on economics. They’re both neoliberals.

Neoliberals. The modern way of marketing ‘trickle-down’ economics.

The essentials are; cutting social service spending and the public workforce, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation for heavy industry, and austerity for the rest of us.

But neither will campaign on this; they campaign against each other on things that either scare you or anger you. What should anger you most is that they both answer to the same elitists and make you suffer even more.

Look around you.

In every major crisis requiring government intervention, the massive taxpayer bailout benefits the 1% and not you. Big companies, big financial institutions, heavy industry, big tech, big pharma, automakers, oil companies, etc – they end up with the cash, you get the layoffs.

But the moment some real solutions come by that actually address the wealth and prosperity gap between rich and poor; its treated as a biohazard.

Its because once the centrist Liberals and hard line conservatives discovered that its very profitable to pander to the neoliberal elite, they had no use for working class people any longer. But they had to play the game with the same old rhetoric to grab votes when it seemed possible they’d win.

The answers are on the left. That’s always been the case. We ran western civilization with a largely free enterprise economy under Keynesian economic theory, which is positively leftist compared to what’s going on lately. We had a strong social safety net that cared for the destitute, we had strong unions that created the blue collar middle class, we had governments that cared for the arts and culture, seniors and planned for long term sustainable growth.

We don’t have that any longer. We have a system that rewards greed and corruption. and everyone can see it.

Now its time to do something about it.

My2bits