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 are 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 labour 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
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