Rodeo Clown

“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!