On
the face of it, Trump is Reagan on steroids. His towering size, his nativist US
supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show confidence make him ideal
for the role of bullying and big lies from the oval office.
He
is America come to meet itself in larger-than-life image to rejuvenate it as
its pride slips away in third-world conditions and a multi-polar
world.
While
Trump’s narrative is that the American Dream seeks recovery again,
the dominant media and political elite relentlessly denounce him as an implicit
fascist and disastrous fake.
Something
deeper is afoot. An untapped historic resentment is boiling up from underneath
which has long been unspeakable on the political stage. Trump has mined it and
proposed a concrete solution always denied of his candidacy. From his promise
to halve the Pentagon’s budget to getting the Congress off corporate-donation
payrolls, the public money that the big corporate lobbies stand to lose from a
Trump presidency are off the charts. But his attackers dare not recognize
these explosive issues because they are all part of the problem.
The public money stakes may be
bigger than the US corporate stakes behind the foreign wars the US state has
initiated since 1991. The takeaway promised by Trump’s policies threaten almost
every big lobby now in control of US government purse strings. It grounds in
the military-industrial complex spending close to $2,000,000,000 a day for its
endless new untested weapons and foreign wars both of which Trump opposes. But
the cut-off of hundreds of billions of public giveaways to the Big Corps do not
end here. They hit almost every wide-mouthed transnational corporate siphon
into the US Treasury, taxpayers’ pockets and the working majority of America.
Masses of American citizens increasingly without living wages and benefits and in increasing public squalor and
insecurity are paying attention to what the political establishment and
corporate media have long buried and continue to silence.
Trump has raised the great
dispossession from impotence into the establishment’s face, and this is
why he is a contagion on the American political scene. He is pervasively
mocked, accused and slandered in non-stop public fireworks of ad hominem hits,
but the counter-attacks never engage what Trump has set his sights on – the
long stripping of America by corporate globalization selecting for the
limitless enrichment of the very rich living off an ever-growing take from
public coffers and the impoverishment of America’s working people. A primal
rage unites the political establishment across party lines, but they can’t say
why. No defaming scorn and abuse is off limits, but Trump’s underlying betrayal
of the ruling game remains unspeakable on the stage.
The electoral dynamite of all the
Americans who have lost all their good blue-collar jobs,
social benefits and public infrastructures is recognized only in
class condescension. But the facts cannot be denied of a
corporate globalization effectively stripping the lower middle classes and the
public realm itself with no-one in Washington establishment saying a word
against the greatest transfer of wealth to the 1% in history.
Trump may deserve back as bad he
gives. But this understanding keeps our eyes on the ego-contest which is the
standard spectacle to avoid the real issues. The personal attacks
only tells us how deep the rupture has become between Trump’s campaign and the
establishment on the issues kept out of sight. This is why the corporate
politicians and media are almost as wound into one-way demonization of Trump as
they are when they beat the drums of war against a designated Enemy abroad.
In the end, it may get to him – as
when he tries to find angry millions again from onside with an evangelical
trumpet of abortion-is-murder just before the primary in Wisconsin.
Trump is a shameless opportunist, no
doubt. Yet we continue to revolve within an ad hominem circle until we go
deeper than the establishment morality tale of the evil of the stigma object –
the oldest propaganda trick in the
book. The major money interests that are really at stake in the conflict
between Trump and the political-economic establishment remain unconnected and
blocked out. “Who will stop Trump’ is not only now asked across America, but
the world’s media in China too. But nothing is less talked about than the
globally powerful interests he has promised to rein back from the public
troughs bleeding the country’s capacities to build for and to employ its
people. On this topic, there is only silence or abusive distortion frothing from
the mouth.
Joining
the Dots of the Great Silence
Eventually people may ask why the
establishment unanimously abhors Trump across party divisions which are
otherwise unbridgeable. Even if he is a caricature of American privilege and
self-promotion, who else could fight the corrupt corporate-state and media
establishment? Who else could ever get public support from dispossessed masses
and from inside the Republican Party base itself? Who else could take on the supra-dominant
corporate interests of the war state, drug monopoly, health insurance racket,
lobby-run foreign policy, off-shore tax evasion, and global trade with only
corporate rights to profit taking jobs in the tens of millions from home
workers, and still hold a large and right-wing voter base onside?
Conversely, what else than Trump’s
threat to the corporate-state establishment can explain the unity of voice and
venom against an American paragon of wealth and chupzpah? What else could
motivate a cross-party and corporate media hate campaign where there is nothing
else in common across the condemning voices?
Only those citizens depending on the
deep system corruptions he promises to reverse are really
threatened by Trump’s candidacy. But how do these huge private interests go on
getting away with a corporate-lobby state transferring every more public wealth
and control to them at the expense of the American majority and their common
interest when most people already dislike and systemically exploited by them? They get away with it by no-one
being able to do anything about it.
Trump represents a threat to these
gargantuan public-trough interests that even the super-clean and
informed Ralph Nader candidacy for president never did. The corporate media and
party machines just shut him down on the electoral stage so few even knew he
was a presidential candidate. You can’t do that with Trump. That is the very
big problem for the otherwise seamless political and media establishment who
are all in on the fabulous payoffs of this corporate state game.
Trump’s entire strategy is based on
getting public attention, and he is a master at it, unbuyably rich, and the
most watched person in America across the country and the world. He can’t
be shut up. Personal stigmatization and attack without let-up are the only way
to gag his policies and turn the tide against him at the same time.
Maybe it will work in the end.
It’s how disastrous and bankrupting foreign aggressions and wars have been sold
whatever the ruinous costs to the public paying for them.
Until Wisconsin
When you join the dots to Trump also
preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable corporate jaws feeding on
trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the meaning becomes clear. But that connected meaning is
blacked out. In its place, the corporate media and politicians present an
egomaniac blowhard bordering on fascism who preaches hate, racism and sexism.
But the silenced policies he
advocates are more like jumping into a crocodile pit. He
is on record saying he will cut the Pentagon’s budget “by 50%”. No winning
politician has ever dared to take on the military-industrial complex, with even
Eisenhower only naming it in his parting speech. Trump also says that the US
“must be neutral, an honest broker” on the Israeli-Palestine conflict – as
unspeakable as it gets in US politics. Big Pharma is also called out with “$400
billion to be saved by government negotiation of prices”. The even more
powerful HMO’s are confronted by the possibility of a “one-payer system”, the
devil incarnate in America’s corporate-welfare state.
Trump even challenges “the Enemy”
cornerstone of US ideology when he says “wouldn’t it be nice to get along with
Russia and China for a change?” Not very fascist of him. He was also open to
nationalizing the Wall Street banks after 2008. None of this sees the light of
day in the hate-Trump culture that been effectively mounted across even
left-right divisions.
Most of all, Trump rejects the whole
misnamed “free trade” global system because it has “hollowed out the lives of
American workers” with rights to corporations to move anywhere to get cheaper
labor and import back into the US tariff-free. But again the connected meaning
is repressed. That Trump also wants to get the US out of foreign wars at
the same time, the other great pillar of corporate globalization, is the real
danger to the transnational corporate state he has set in motion.
All these policies threaten only the
ruling money interests of America that depend on the superpower public purse to
extend their transnational monopolies and multiply their wealth. This is
the real establishment interest that has so far evaded the glare of publicity
and critique of the Donald Trump phenomenon, bigger now with Bernie Sanders
than any political challenge to the US system since the 1960’s.
Trump is certainly not a
working-class hero. He is a pure capitalist, with all the furies of private interest
and greed that capitalism selects for. But at this time he is a capitalist who
is not rich from looting the public purse as the biggest annual cash flow, nor
from exporting the costs of labor and taxes to foreign jurisdictions with
subhuman standards that come back to the US as “necessary to compete”.
Trump has initiated a long overdue recognition of parasite capitalism eating
out the life capacities of the US itself.
Prof. John McMurtry is author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism:
From Crisis to Cure (Pluto) The
original source of this article is Global Research Copyright
© Prof. John
McMurtry,
Global Research, 2016 Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by
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