THE RISE OF DONALD TRUMP IS NO MYSTERY

THE RISE OF HATE-FILLED DONALD TRUMP IS NO MYSTERY --From the Hampton Institute. "As has been shown in research

studies, in the social sciences, economic, political,

and social exclusion predisposes many persons to

adopting racist, neo-Nazi, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic,

or other hate-based ideologies. Economic inequality is

the main driver of many of the most salient forms of

economic, social, and political exclusion. By

contributing to the rise of inequality neo-liberal

economic policies help to facilitate the hardship and

privation that drive many to take up hate-based

ideologies. Since the 1970s neo-liberal ideas have

become the dominant ideology in economic circles

both in the academy and among policy-makers. In the

main, this is an ideology which favors upward

redistribution of wealth, through low taxation of the rich and corporations. This supply-side bias diverts

resources away from the working poor, and toward the

already obscenely wealthy."

Neo-liberal economic policies thus only further exacerbate natural tendencies within capitalist economies toward inequality and thus get a hearing and support for the hate-filled racist rants of the clever clown, Donald Trump, which provide a racist scapegoat for Trump's downtrodden White male supporters which provide his political base.

My own view is that there is plenty of work for the poor to do if we would save the crumbling American infrastructure. If we would get the American corporations and upper 1% to pay their fair share of taxes, and and stop extraordinary expenditures for the American war machine, which takes up 60% of the national budget, we could pay for this and much more. This would include stopping the view that America is the "exceptional nation" that should impose its values on the rest of the world and a withdrawal from the Middle East, which is nothing but an extension of George W. Bush's illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq which created ISIS. We must end the American Empire with its 700 military bases abroad and return to an American Republic with liberty, justice, economic equality, and freedom for all.