Mumia Abu-Jamal remains in prison for life for the 1981 killing of a poliiceman, a trial filled with bias and distortions conviction that outraged people in the U.S. and the world and led conservative politicians prosecutors and judges to dig in their heels. After spending thirty years waiting for execution, Mumia's death sentence was finally changed to life in prisonment in 2011
But this is not about the case as such, although Mumia has now spent more than half of his life behind bars and at the moment there is no real possibility of a new trial that his supporters through the world have called for for decades.
In prison, Mumia's voice is still heard on prison radio and in articles like the one below. It is a serious voice, a powerful one, with serious class analysis and connections to ideological and institutional racism, not simply slogans and descriptive headlines like ruling class media
Below I have cut and pasted Mumia's comments on Donald Trump and the Republican presidential campaign. Note that Mumia connects what is happening today to Richard Hofstadter's classic portrayal of prejudice in U.S. politics in the 1950s, when Joe McCarthy was running wild in the nation.
You won't see any of this kind of analysis on ruling class media today, neither CNN or its righting colleague, FOX. And you won't see it on MSNBC either, which, appealing to the center-left and left market, will probably be poking fun at all of the Republicans, who will serve as free comedy writers for them.
Trump is on one level ridiculous and laughable along with his fellow candidates. But he and they are also sinister. The "paranoid style" Hofstadter wrote about others more concretely referred to as fascist ideology, which mobilized people around scapegoats for the "politics of resentment."
And,as many noted, German commentators laughed at Hitler and his crazy Nordic Aryan Master Race rantings in the 1920s, pointing to his own physical appearance and those of Goering, Goebbells, and other henchman as poor examples of "Nordic Aryians." But few recognized the danger until it was too late
Norman Markowitz
04 August 15
Trump & The Politics of Resentment :
hen New York billionaire and GOP presidential candidate, Donald Trump, launched into his anti-immigrant tirade against Mexicans crossing the border, he was using a long-term political technique of plugging into the live wire of American resentment for the "other".
Today it's Latinos, of course, more precisely, those from the southern borders: Mexicans, Salvadorians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and the like. But since the 19th century, politicians have used these currents of fear to fuel movements against those who came from abroad. In those days though, the targets of nativist ire, were those from Ireland, Jews from Russia, people from Italy and other Europeans sights.
These forces gave birth to the American Party, a fierce anti-immigrant group that became known popularly as the "Know Nothings". They formed a third-party during the 1850s and ran former US President Millard Fillmore as their unsuccessful candidate.
US historian Richard Hofstadter, in his classic work, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", argued that much of the energy of the anti-immigrant forces stem from what might be called "status anxiety", or the intense insecurities of people unsure of their place in US society, but who could point to others, immigrants, who hold weaker positions in society. Furthermore, these same anxiety-ridden groups often have mixed feelings of fear and admiration for social elites. And who is more elite in America than the super rich?
Witness the spectacle of Donald Trump, who without question is perhaps the richest man to ever run for president, and as a billionaire populist no less!
I wouldn't get too excited about his place in the polls right now. In 2012, the toast of both press and polls was a pizza exec named Herman Cain. We know how that worked out.
But most candidates, especially of the GOP, worship at the thrown of the wealthy. For they are the ones they serve.
The thousands and perhaps millions who rage at Latino immigrants also worship the rich. In Donald Trump, they have found their voice, and he has found the energies of resentment. An undeniable fuel for failure.
