 I mentioned in covering the best analyses of the election that the white working class was a real issue and to me one of the biggest issues that the Democrats eaten by neoliberalism basically ignored the white working class. And this is clearly a touchy issue in particular if we contrast this with what's becoming called identity politics and there's a lot of interesting analysis being done on this. But I want to dive deeper into what the white working class has to look forward to and this applies I think to people who've lost their jobs as well as people with jobs who've got moderate to reasonable incomes but they kind of see this tsunami coming. And I think I'm trying to describe here the thing they see coming that nobody seems to be working to fix. So they see pretty bleak prospects. They see that their kids are going to do worse than they did and they're accustomed to each generation doing better than the generation before. Jobs are gone and jobs were gone because corporations were highly motivated to outsource through globalization and Wall Street pressure. But also jobs have gone through automation and I have to say I see automation as a flesh eating bacterium. Basically software as soon as it's replicated a task as well as a human does it. When the quality is as good the cost is clearly a lot lower. So why not ship the job over to the piece of software. So people see that but and nobody is particularly designing software to augment rather than replace humans. So the question really is when are you going to be wiped out. Corporations in the meantime are busy eliminating full time employees. They want to have as few people on the payroll who need benefits who are who need an office as is humanly possible. As a result we have a lot of underemployment the juicy jobs are basically gone. We're sitting in the middle of a jobless recovery which is a big topic and sort of beyond the scope of what I can do here probably beyond the scope of what I understand. But it's really easy to blame this on immigrants and figure things out. Now if you look a little deeper there's some really interesting research into what the white working class has been feeling and one of the things they feel for example about government is that the funds never make it back here. We get taxed by government but nothing ever shows up to help us over here. In general I think government support systems are cruel in particularly the United States. In other countries in the northern European social democracies the government support systems really are quite humanistic and there's a whole ideological battle being fought between those systems which is basically what Bernie Sanders was proposing and the American systems which truly are cruel they cut away support. There seems to be the underpinning in America that unless the threat of imminent hunger and death are upon you you won't try really hard to find a job. And what they don't understand is that poverty is a dismal trap that the rags to riches stories apply to some small number who win the lotto do the right thing at the right time but that in general poor people have no access to capital in fact their capital costs a lot. Once they spiral downward they just get trapped and keep spiraling downward. This is really a horrible setup in the U.S. with very few people willing to really pull people up. In fact that has fallen on religious institutions and other third parties nonprofits who are busy trying to help a completely broken system. So government support systems are also very mechanistic antiquated and in many cases not dignified the people who are on support are played down as much much inferior to other people in the popular narrative. So the white working class sees that all these things are broken politics is broken community is broken money is broken. There used to be things called bluechip stocks they used to be places where if you saved some money you could put it somewhere now it just seems we're losing ground everywhere unless you're really big and if you're really big you're going to your money is going to make money but right now there's there's no safe harbor which particular category of asset do you know is actually going to be there when you retire and they're getting priced out of housing so even if they lived somewhere near their job they can't afford that place anymore rents are going up etc and they see that the 2008 global financial crisis almost wiped out a lot of things in fact it may have wiped out their retirement account if it wasn't already expropriated basically by takeover artists in the 1990s or the 2000s then big box stores brought them cheap stuff and in many cases that was nice because now you could actually buy jeans and sneakers for your kids at Christmas but in so doing it killed off the local small businesses and then I think this is more dramatic than we realize then the big box stores closed because as people didn't have jobs in rural towns across the country they couldn't afford to buy things even in the big box stores so traffic went away and the walmarts and others moved other moved elsewhere then as a result we have a lot of ghost towns in the middle of the country this is something that is mirrored in many places around the world most notably maybe Japan where many many villages across Japan have seen all the young people move away there's an increasingly aging population but you'll go into a village and you know 20% of the of the houses will actually be occupied it's a little crazy so what's the answer to all this what do Democrats suggest retrain go to school not now retrain as what exactly most of the schools are not really up to date the degrees and the certifications and other things you can get don't really catch up with what's happening in the world today as they say when you go into school most of the things that are available as majors are not things that will be needed in the economy once you graduate never mind automation right tuition is expensive it is next to health care and in fact above health care the fastest rising expense there and because of the bankruptcy abuse prevention and consumer protection act passed under W it is debt you cannot shake the financial sector made sure that you couldn't bankrupt yourself from school tuition so you can throw Pell grants at this you can really try to move us toward community colleges but I don't think that education works but then automation makes this whole thing almost almost a joke because there is a lag effect mismatch meaning the time it takes you to certify for something to apply to school get accepted go take two years three years four years to get a degree come back into the workforce and get a job is very likely longer than the time it takes to automate some of the tasks of that thing you were about to try to become whether it's an x-ray tech or a dental tech or an auto mechanic or an aircraft make whatever that thing was that you thought you're going to train for it may be gone and it's very hard to figure which one will be there and which one won't so that system is supposed to work and there's sort of nothing else nobody's in the neighborhood trying to help you figure this thing out so that was all describing the situation for the working white class the white working class whether employed or not employed but just a typical situation and hopefully not too stereotypical for people of color it's a bit different because they have all of that except they have a load on top which is there are random stoppings that occasionally result in deaths and well there's been violence against people of color forever in the US we can go back to Jim Crow and well before but now many people are carrying high definition video cameras so we're seeing more of these things and we're seeing just how random and stupid some of these things are so you could be pulled over for a traffic citation and end up dead on the ground with nine bullets in your back there's also the culture of mass incarceration which is the subject of a recent documentary called 13th about the 13th amendment and how the plantation system was replaced by the incarceration system that's still in force and unless we drop the drug the war on drugs and do other sorts of things that'll still keep going then there's many more subtle things like implicit bias when people are interviewed for jobs when people are looked at as they come down the street there's a whole series of biases that kick in all of which add up to fewer opportunities for people of color part of the problem is we haven't dealt with the ghosts of our past and I talked about this at some length in my first video the the precursor video and I talked about the ghosts being things like slavery things like how we treated our first nations things like misogyny and and these things really are still bubbling hot beneath the surface and every time we try to deal with them all hell breaks loose as we can sort of see then women of color have an even worse situation so factor on top of that the misogyny and whatever else and it's it's just not a pretty picture so everything I've just described bleak as these prospects are is before Trump's win before all of this everything I just named was happening before Trump's win now factor in a considerable amount of shame now the 29% of the country seems to have voted for him or something like that and didn't include me but I'm I'm actually ashamed that Donald Trump is going to represent our country to other countries and the kinds of things that he's going to do and has done are now represented as okay for our leadership but also Trump basically in hacking everybody and hijacking everybody he as a campaign strategy he really let loose the hounds of hell he has normalized and made at least visible certainly not appropriate the kinds of actions that were formally seen as purely fringe and that were edited out or were just left on the fringe and these things are now sort of everyday occurrences there are violations of human civil women's rights all sorts of things happening and there may well be more of it so abuse and fear has been normalized and in fact fueled and fanned Godwin's law is that any online discourse off will tend to degrade into mentions of Hitler and the Nazis here it's like like Godwin's law has has become the administration for the country so it's it's a little very strange then facts are broken we're now in this world of post-truth which it was probably perking under the surface but now has really become a way to deal with not having to face uncomfortable truths including facts that you have spoken just a month earlier or a couple hours earlier it's really quite amazing so the anti-intellectualism that the GOP did a very good job of bringing has now been amplified doubts about science the inclusion of lobbyists in the government there could well be major problems with climate change in the next couple of years because even the measures we had agreed to take the Tokyo product Kyoto protocols and other things they're not enough and there's no guarantee whatsoever that those kinds of things would have helped now we're going to take our foot off the break and in fact throw this thing into fifth gear and see what that does in the middle of this of all this the Supreme Court is going to keep going but then politically you wonder whether brexit now trump whether there is a just a sharp swing to the right globally a global lurch to the right i'm calling in here with Marine Le Pen who might win a win power in France golden dawn le ganard the german AFD in the philippines duterte is the the prime minister uh poland hungry turkey austria all have swung to the right in the last couple of years through elections through democratic process but there's nationalism in fact authoritarian nationalism that is uh sort of all over the place and uh putin in russia is sort of happy to watch this and may well have ambitions of creating the greater russia um trump himself is likely a very good recruiting poster for the clash of civilizations which some of us were thinking we might actually be avoiding and maybe we're heading toward now who knows there there could easily be on the table the potential for opening up world war three or at least triggering regional or local nuclear wars so this is all not that exciting however however and this is it's hard to talk about the howevers but i'm looking for these places where one could do something positive change really was needed the reason all these things are happening the reason for all this nationalism is that we've been treated as mere consumers not as human beings we've been we've torn the fabric of society we've decided to offload to government the support for people and then we cut back the government um we've been running this whole machine country by country on obsolete if not backward models of how things ought to work on just these these concepts these wars of memes and ideologies that really haven't worked out um again for me voting for hillary meant putting on hold the kind of change that i saw could happen and it was in fact already happening at a different kind of fringe that a fringe like open source software at a fringe like the sharing economy uh where people were learning how to trust one another again in cities and neighborhoods so trump has catalyzed a moment of dramatic change he also in the process left himself a lot of leeway it's a little strange but by backtracking on everything and denying everything he said before he's kind of set a pattern where he can backtrack and uh who knows where this all goes so i found a small piece of humor on the on the web trump says hey let's get that muslim band going band we thought you said band no way that's harsh also how's the mexican mall coming if only reality were like that so i'm not trying to normalize or praise trump uh in fact his first appointments are so off the charts abysmal that it's hard for me to complete these recordings but i still want to keep the door open because i'm trying to find positive opportunities and these opportunities are worthwhile uh in upcoming videos here they're worthwhile whether or not trump changes there's a lot to be done if we don't do any of these things this whole situation is really likely to end badly and i mean quite badly so i'm highly motivated from that to put these ideas out and see what we can do together my name is jerry mckalski this is one of a series of videos linked together around that trump won and now what we what should we do i am not an historian or a political theorist and the rest of these bullets are explained in the lead video the introductory video to this series please subscribe and come back there's more here thanks for watching