“Trump is Corporate
America's rodeo clown. His job is to keep the raging American bull from
stomping the corporate CEOs riding on our back. While we watch Trump pimp his
brand and spin his personal wheel of fortune from the Oval Office, Corporate
America is in the shadows stealing our future. “
A comment to Paul Krugman's NY
Times column of May 22
I like this rodeoesque take on
things. Krugman in his column that day
was complaining about the abuse of the word 'freedom' by the GOP as they try to
eviscerate Obamacare. The Repubs like to yack about “freedom' while effectively
taking away freedom: freedom from being bankrupted and pauperized by health
problems, freedom from going to school hungry, freedom from seeing our
environment raped and consumed for profit.
The only "freedom” the current crop of so-called 'conservatives' care
about is the freedom to allow a small number of greed-heads to amass ever more
obscene piles of wealth. This while their beloved ”free market” mode
of production is actually undermined as
the US middle class is slowly decimated. After all it is middle class that keeps
aggregate demand, the engine of
capitalism, up and running. Discord in the lower tiers of the middle class as they plummet into hardscrabble poverty (effectively ignored
by the corporate-Demos) is the key reason why we are stuck with Donald
J. Trump - not Russian hackers.
But aside from the GOP
oligopolistic class war driven economic policies, simply from a capitalism-friendly point of view, their mindless
attachment to discredited supply side voodoo economics (lower taxes on the rich
= economic growth = jobs) doesn’t fucking work! The already super rich don't invest if demand for goods and service is weak which it terminally is, they just
speculate with their 'savings' putting it in high risk hedge funds, etc, It’s’ ‘fun-money’
like the ordinary Joe sets aside for a trip to Vegas. Of course its more complicated than that. There is a whole industry for managing wealth and avoiding taxes. When anyone invests in a business they want it to be one that is making money and/or its stock value is ascending. But more importantly when CEOs of major corporations choose to expand production, they go where labor costs are lowest and environmental regulations are weakest - and it's not going to be western Pennsylvania or Saginaw Michigan.
But it is Trump's absurd position (and the GOP’s criminally
misbegotten party line) on climate change that is even a more serious form of blind
stupidity. It is dangerously foolish in the deepest way. Time is not on our side. Obama should
have done more. The projections made at the Paris climate accords, even if all 195
nations rich and poor, kept their pledges, indicate the planet will still overheat (it already has). The Paris accords optimistic assumption was
that as technology improved all nations would re-calibrate their
projections. Trump and his science-adverse reactionaries now in EPA and the Dept of Energy and are now pulling out the
plug on all of that. We are the second largest contributor of green house gases. As we go so goes the world.
The establishment is trying to shake this Trumpian creature off its back like a huge beast would try to wriggle free of a blood sucking parasite. Virtually the entire intelligentsia left, center and right regards him as a bad joke at best and a proto-fascist at worst. Nightly the cable news obsesses with Trumpian misdeeds large and small. So called 'public intellectuals' across the
board can’t stop themselves from producing daily
anti-trumpian rants. Even ordinarily politically aloof sectors like the
scientific community are aghast and have resorted to marching
in the streets. The
entire staff of the mainstay of educated centrist opinion, the Gray Lady, the venerable NY Times to a person abhor the
Orange One and everything he stands for. This includes all their regulars: Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristof, Charles Blow, ,Tom Friedman, (Queen of Snark re: HRC) Maureen Dowd along with in-house conservatives David Brooks and Ross Douthou. Also the entire Washington Post' stable of pundits - even
their right wingers who I once hated to read like Jennifer Rubin, George
Will and even the loathsome Charles Krauthammer all are up in arms against DJT
and his gang that can't shoot straight.
Glenn Beck of all people
has even turned against the Orange One. The
only influential media personality who remains to publicly and tirelessly defend DJT's
plunging presidency is Fox's Sean Hannity (now that serial lecher
Bill O'Reilly has gotten the bums rush). And of course most recently Republican stalwart and CSNBC 'Morning Joe' Scarborough and his co-host Mika Brzezinski have elicited such crude and tasteless Twitters from the The Donald that even has most Repubs in Congress upset.
Can this Trumpian/GOP
Nightmare get much worse? Of course it
can - and it will. And it will transpire with or without Donald J Trump.
Even if Trump were jettisoned and we avoided the ugly conglomerate of ill-conceived
Trumpian idiocy: The Wall, Muslim travel
bans and trade wars, the GOP boiler plate Ayne Rand inspired brutalist
agenda is still before us. They are on a blood thirsty path of revocation of
everything socially positive going back 100 years including the Teddy Roosevelt
and the Progressive Era, FDR and the New Deal of 1930s (which essentially
resuscitated capitalism), as well as LBJ’s Medicare/Medicaid health care for
the old and the very poor, and finally their final coup de grace – blowing away
all 1970s Nixon Era environmental protections just a Climate Change starts to
kick in for real.
For now have to endure Trump's
(when non scripted) trite superlative infused, lie infested, inarticulate
babble. Just as George W. Bush made Reagan look almost Jeffersonian,
now the Orange One makes the inarticulate, verbally challenged 'W' sound almost
Lincolnesqes. We are in the realm of an unfinished plot of bad Hollywood
dystopian comedy written by a bitter, cynical, misogynist hack.
Seeing Trump with his florid
face, his stupid vain strange hairdo, flabby wide angle figure, business suit
attired and (when talking to his brain-dead pack of acolytes) his stupid red
cap, is always is painful. How come
other countries get reasonable appearing and competently speaking leaders and
we get this piece of feces? It's not
fair! It's embarrassing in fact. God
knows what he's saying to these heads of state (like his ‘bros’ the Saudis)
behind closed doors. What we know about is bad enough. The Russkies must have
some hilarious tales to tell each other back in Moscow or St Petersburg as they
knock back their chilled vodkas.
These are dark days indeed!