Why the Republicans Are in a Panic Over the Rise of Trump

Republican spokesmen David Brooks & Peter Wehner, as well as mouthpieces The National Review  and Commentary have condemned Donald Trump in the strongest terms, while GOP politicians like Mitt Romney and Lindsay Graham are trying to take measures to insure that he is not the party’s nominee, but there is precious little explanation for their panic in terms of the real power structure in this country.

If we consider the relationship between Republicans and their financial support, their existential fear of Trump becomes clearer. But first, we have to acknowledge that real power in this country has increasingly become concentrated in the "deep state," the defense industry, the big corporations and the big banks and financial interests. These entities have supplied the greatest share of financing to both parties, but especially the Republicans, so that no law or reform, no matter how popular, has a chance of being implemented if it impairs the interests (read the bottom line) of these huge financial sources—think of single-payer health care and the conventional wisdom that it was “impossible” to put into effect, despite its overwhelming popularity.

This power structure has been in effect a long time—C. Wright Mills already described it in 1956—but it so overwhelming today, boosted by the Citizens United decision, that we can no longer consider the United States to be a popular democracy.

The white working class have been the biggest losers in the evolution of the US economy towards extreme inequality, runaway industries, and the financialization of essential social institutions, including education and health care. Yet the Republican party has until now been able to convince this large group that they best represent their interests by embracing the so-called “values” issues—male power (“right to life”), gun rights, anti-immigration, lower taxes for all, small government to encourage freedom and entrepreneurship—while actually advancing the interests of the “deep state,” which is the same as the superwealthy. This was always a deceptive confidence game, so it couldn’t last forever, and now Trump has exposed its fraudulence.

Trump is running supposedly without the financial support of the deep state actors, and he is attracting white working class support with his vague, throwaway promises and tough-guy trash talk against perceived threats, such as immigrants and Muslims. But Trump threatens the bond between the Republicans and their money sources: he doesn’t need them himself (so he says), and he removes popular support from Establishment Republicans, making them less useful to their heretofore patrons in the real deep state power structure.

So Trump could let the financial air out of the Republican party, exposing them as the party of the superrich, full stop, with nothing of substance for their historical base. They would then be incapable of winning elections, therefore useless to these interests.

So the Republicans see Trump as the author of the handwriting on the wall—they’ve come to the end of their power trip—and just when they’re at the apex of their governmental power, with a majority of governorships, statehouses, and both houses of Congress. They are manifesting the panic of the condemned, the drowning, those about to be left behind by “history.”

So the deep state actors, the 0.1 percent, the neo-liberals, the globalizers, privatizers, defense contractors, banksters and obscenely overpaid CEOs, would then logically transfer their support to the Democrats, a more effective conduit of popular legitimacy, and already pretty much in their pocket—certainly Hillary is! It’s the perfect time for the rise of third party, one that represents true democratic interests. Bernie is, of course, the closest thing we have to this right now—and he beats Trump by 15 percentage points to Hillary’s 10, according to today’s Times. This is the judgment of the independents, those who trust neither party.

Bernie vs. Hillary & the "Deep State"

My two wonderful daughters have had a spirited email debate over Bernie vs. Hillary. Forgive my paternal pride at reading their articulate analyses. But I felt compelled to give my root reasons why I support Bernie:

Dear Nora & Molly,

    Hillary was certainly there in the corridors of power when she was first lady. She’s gone on to acquire even more experience, and she is brilliant at it, a great communicator. And it’s also true that the special burden of her gender may have compelled her to triangulate more than a man might have had to. If Democrats have to prove how tough they are in wielding our hypertrophied Defense establishment against the threats, real and imagined, in the world, a woman has to be even more demonstrative about it. I almost forgive Hillary for voting for the Iraq war, along with all but 22 Senators (Senator Byrd’s “Honor Roll” in the movie about it).

    But also, being part of Bill Clinton’s “New” Democratic party shift to the corporate right, she ended up on the wrong side of many issues during the 90s. But the redefinition of our political parties during that time, essentially validating the Reagan “revolution”—namely the financialization of our society, the promotion of “market fundamentalism,” the erroneous idea that markets are self-regulating and that less government regulation is better (a fundamental Koch Brothers article of faith)—marked a terrible watershed in our economic and social history. She was part of this revolution, and she is deeply embedded in Establishment politics. This means that she is deeply indebted to the corporate forces that have been taking over American society, culture and the economy at increasing speed since Reagan’s presidency, forces that push for privatization (in education, infrastructure, prisons) with disastrous results, that set up the models for our humanistic institutions such as universities to emulate, with very harmful results as well.

    Bill Clinton’s move to the right was a way of getting in on the bonanza of corporate money, that was already flooding the political arena before Citizens United. So basically, the Republicans won; the “New” Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, went over to their side, but while winning the economic argument, they also lost ground politically, since they were no longer the only corporate party any more. So they had to become even more extreme in their ideas, while trying to subvert the day-to-day functioning of Congress (holding hearings and keeping the secret from Democratic members of committees—this is the 90s, as documented in The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank). Then they stole two elections for Bush (now well documented), got us into that horrendous, unnecessary and wasteful war—which profited Bush’s cronies in the Defense industry enormously.

    So we’re at a point now where due to the Republicans’ deliberate actions, the Congress has been rendered impotent. This is NOT the way the system is meant to function, Nora. It is designed for compromise and NOT gridlock. Gridlock is technique being used by Republicans to undermine Americans’ faith in their government in order (1) to get them to participate less and (2) to believe that private corporations should handle hitherto public functions—a recipe for disaster. This is cynical and even treasonous, certainly anti-Constitutional.

    We have, though, a situation in which the real power in this country resides primarily not with elected officials, but with the operatives of the “Deep State.” This is a loose group of defense contractors, corporate CEOs, military brass, big banks, and the Israel Lobby (AIPAC and Adelson), who determine policy by paying for it, that is, buying politicians, and who have taken over many state governments (through ALEC), and whose aim is simply to transfer money from the public purse, the Treasury, into their coffers. This is the naked function of war, of “quantitative easing” (money transfers to banks, given freely), of deregulation (no more fines for murderous pollution—see Koch brothers’ history), of the $3+billion/year support for Israel (which goes to buy US-made armaments and security systems). See The Deep State by Mike Lofgren, former Congressional aid to John Kasich, when he was a congressman from Ohio.

    And then there’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the one area where Obama and the Republicans are on the same side, and which is getting NO exposure in the US press. This would transfer sovereignty over matters such as wages, environmental regulation, and safety standards to global corporations, whose decisions would supersede those of our elected representatives. It’s a corporate giveaway of sovereignty; it’s scandalous; it’s frightening. Bernie talks about it. Does Hillary?

    So where are Hillary and Bernie in all this? Hillary takes laudably liberal positions on a host of issues, most of them social. Then she talks about living in the real world. To me this is code for living within the cramped ambit of power that’s left to our elected politicians by the purveyors of the Deep State. But if we do this, we’ll be bankrupt; we won’t have the resources to take care of our general needs. Unless these forces are reigned in, they’ll simply squeeze us dry with military adventures and sexy hardware, and bank giveaways. Bernie knows this, talks about it. Even if elected, he’d be up against huge odds to be able to get them under control and assert the Constitutional power of the People once again, a power which is now in serious remission. They might try to assassinate him, as they did JFK (a different configuration of Deep State, but some of the same players are involved—viz. military & CIA).

    Now I know that history doesn’t play out as neatly as our fantasies or fears would have it. If any Democrat is elected President, we’ll finally have a rational balance on the Supreme Court, which will correct the corporate tilt we’ve had to endure for several decades now. The Republicans are reaping their whirlwind—by cultivating their lunatic fringe they’ve created a monster who no longer needs them. I’m still astonised at the number of nominally rational people who are “ethnically” Republicans who still think they’re dealing with old-style Bob Dole-Nelson Rockefellar-Herald Tribune Republicans. They’re extinct. The GOP fears that if Trump is nominated the Deep State corporate moneybags may not need them any more, and then Hillary would be the ideal recipient of their largesse—and we’d still be in the situation we are now, with slightly different social-issue tuning.

    Could we survive a Hillary presidency? Probably. With her in office, other forces might be unleashed that would take on the Deep State, but they will not originate from her. She might join them belatedly.
   
    But if Bernie is elected, he’d lead the charge to return to Constitutional democracy, and this is desperately what we need.

    Love,

    Dad

Trump Is the Greatest Gift to the Democrats

Finally—finally!—those truant chickens are coming home to roost. After years of lies, betrayals, and outright criminality in election stealing, the Republican party is waking up to a revolt of its rank-and-file, who sense with their gut that they’ve been taken for patsies. As the good blue collar jobs have been shipped abroad for the greater glory and profit of ex-patriotic American corporations, the white working class, the Reagan Democrats who stayed red, realize they’ve been manipulated with anti-gay, misogynistic, and evangelical prejudices, while their economic situation has continually deteriorated, and the banks and CEOs who got bailouts, tax breaks, and slaps on the wrist for their destructive behavior, are doing just fine, thank you very much.

Donald Trump, with all his callow bluster, insults to Republican icons, and disregard of the traditional money sources on the right, is capturing the hearts and beer bellies of the good yeomanry of the heartland. The Republicans, even unto Charles Koch, are in a tizzy, according to the NY Times today (Feb. 28). They can see the disaster approaching: Trump is nominated; the party is rent in two in the next election. Other Republican candidates are forced to choose between his buffo popularity and the bad odor of party’s orthodoxy. The Democrats keep the White House, take back the Senate and possibly the House, install a rational and public-spirited Supreme Court Justice, investigate election theft, jail Karl Rove, and the Republicans go the way of the Whigs. The smart money (even the Kochs!) goes over to the Democrats—and possibly another party gains true national status.

Is the country saved? Not necessarily. The purveyors of the Dark State are still in the saddle: the defense contractors, big banks and corporations, the Israel lobby (AIPAC & Sheldon Adelson, who simply and crassly buy support for Likud’s oppressive and racist policies). They’ll see that the Republicans can no longer deliver, and they’ll switch to the Democrats, who’ve been courting them for some time. But they will no longer have the same degree of sway they once had, and there’s a prayer of siphoning off some of their power.

I don’t know what will happen next, but we may be at a pivotal point in our political history. We thought Obama’s election would be it, but we were wrong. That was just the shift away from overt criminality in the White House, but the powers that put Bush there and hugely profited from him were still in control.

But they’ve overreached themselves now, and Trump is the symptom of that. So let’s all enjoy the circus, while he’s still in the ring. I don’t believe he can possibly win. Thirty-six percent of Republican primary voters, who may make up 30% of the electorate, is only 12%. It may be difficult for him to break 25% of the vote in the general election. When faced by a candidate such as Hillary or Bernie, his only response will be more contemptuous bluster, which will not work in a national debate. It works in the Republican debates because it’s all theater anyway—virtually none of the issues they bring up or proposals they make have much basis in reality. When he explodes with insults against Bernie or Hillary, he will reveal himself as the no-nothing bully that he is. He’s incapable of mounting actual arguments.

We still need to expose the Deep State, and the best way to do that is to fight for Bernie. Hillary, unfortunately, is just one more compliant Democrat, hopefully not as complicit as her husband with these forces that are hollowing out the US middle class. Why, if the dollar no longer remains the exchange currency world wide of oil, the only products that countries would need dollars for are armaments. Virtually everything else we consume is made in China, Bangladesh or elsewhere in Asia. And just watch the collapse if the dollar standard for oil disappears.

The "I-can-work-with-the-opposition-to-get-things-done" myth

It seems this is one of the points that Hillary Clinton mentions that supposedly defines her as "practical" and "realistic."

But as Justice Louis Brandeis said, "An ounce of history is worth a pound of logic." Recent history has shown that Republicans have been determined to opposed the Democratic President in everything he does, not matter how conciliatory he tries to be. They simply haven't wanted to allow Obama to succeed at anything. (It's now known that at a secret right-wing pow-wow right after Obama was inaugurated, Congressional Republicans took an oath urged on them by then South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint—who had won his seat under very questionable circumstances—to oppose everything Obama did, regardless of its intrinsic value. Jane Mayer describes it in her new book Dark Money.)

Then when Obama finally caught on and started to used his executive powers to accomplish what he could (he was, after all, elected by a substantial majority), they accused him of operating an imperial presidency. Now that's chutzpah (remember: like the kid who kills both his parents then wants sympathy for being an orphan).

What no Democratic President has tried in recent times is full-throated, muscular opposition to the intransigent Republicans, calling them out on it, showing how they're hurting the country, and then going over their heads by vigorously appealing to the voters. I'll bet this motivates new minions of them to come out of the woodwork of their cynicism, to participate politically—to vote and organize—in numbers possibly sufficient to bury the Republicans once and for all, to expose them as  saboteurs of economic health, as childish authoritarians, as abject hirelings of the plutocracy, opposed to the general welfare, heedless of the common good or the future, not worthy of being a major political party any more. After all, they sold their soul long ago and have been running on the fumes of "less government," "low taxes" clichés, mantras from the phrasebook of the extreme market fundamentalist libertarians, like the Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, (arch-polluting free-marketeer) John M. Olin and others, who have paid billions to develop think-tanks and to corrupt universities to legitimize this tripe.

Every Democratic President from Carter to Obama has cowered before these GOP bullies and has tried to negotiate with them, to reason with them, to make concessions in exchange for limited support, while the Republicans have almost always abused this deference to block the President's initiatives. Facing pressure against any hint of compromise from Tea Party extremists, they've abandoned the traditional practices of political horse-trading, and would rather bring government operations to a halt—at least that way they preserve their bona fides to rabid no-nothings. In return, Democrats in Congress often worked with President Bush.

Bernie is the first Presidential candidate who indicates that he would fight them outright, rather than trying to win them over. Where has Hillary been for the last eight years, she who coined the phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy" when Bill was its target? What can she possibly mean by "practical" and "realistic"? The opposition is neither. They can only win in general elections by vote suppression and electronic vote stealing. But the passivity of the Democratic party and the general avoidance of these issues by the mainstream media have left too many voters frustrated, cynical and resigned to a political system that has ceased to respond to them.

This is why we need Bernie. If he's elected and maintains his current stance, though, he'll have to have a tough palace guard to stay alive.

The Economy of Empathy: Why Racism Seems to Be Increasing with Inequalty

Michelle Alexander's eye-opening book, The New Jim Crow (2013) and now Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.'s Democracy Is Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul reveal how deeply the nefarious tentacles of racism penetrate in American life today. Alexander's book shows, among other things, how draconian drug laws and their selective enforcement have created an incarcerated population that's analogous to an enslaved one (much as Nicolai Berdayaev [1874–1948] showed in Slavery and Freedom [1939] how Stalin's gulags recreated serfdom). Glaude's book shows how certain outward gains, such as overcoming overt racism in popular culture and electing black office holders, have led to complacency about the overall conditions of life for black Americans, leading to the "revelations" about racist attitudes and practices in law enforcement and the much greater devastation to black wealth and financial security from the Great Crash that was experienced by whites. The election of a black President only compounded that complacency in many circles.

But stepping back a bit, if one looks at not only the resistance of racism to diminish four decades after the Civil Rights Movement made its greatest gains, but also the increase in misery and poverty experienced by black people over the past 10 to 20 years, one must wonder about how this problem has been influenced by other changes happening to our economy and society.

I am always interrogating the ramifications of financialization, that people talked about in the first few years of this new century. The talk has mostly receded now, but I think that's more because the condition has been accepted as the new reality. It's shaped our attitudes and assumptions, so its immediate costs have been absorbed and transmuted into other problems that may seem unrelated.

But there is an economy to people's empathy, one which is subject to shifts in personal fortune, to the effort necessary to survive. The much-lauded generosity of spirit of most Americans, our willingness to help a needy neighbor or a "good cause," may not be as robust as it once was. Charities have more difficulty raising funds; each of us receives many more appeals for contributions than we used to, as government has become more parsimonious in its distribution of benefits. Right-wingers are even more resentful of "freeloaders" than they used to be, so it seems.

So as the economy and culture have become more financialized, that is, as financial values crowd out humanistic values in so many areas of our lives, people who are less successful financially appear to have less cultural weight. This is because, on one hand, the values have shifted, and on the other,  because more people are more desperate in their fight for survival themselves, so have less mental and spiritual energy left over for empathy or drive to correct inequality. So communities or tribes have become more closed, more insular, more self-protective, and more partitioned off from the perspectives of other groups. All of these factors disadvantage the already disadvantaged, preeminently African-Americans, but including many other groups.

In simple terms, this is how the greediness and meanness of those at the top spread throughtout society. It is one of the poisoned fruits of hypertrophied inequality. It also implies that attempts to reverse this trend with macro-economic, legislative, and legal/judicial remedies can ultimately benefit the disadvantaged by shifting or enlarging people’s spirits. We mustn’t let up on the day-to-day struggle, of course; just NOT discount someone like Bernie Sanders whose main emphasis is in redressing gross economic crimes. I hope the Black Lives Matter movement is listening.

Political Outrages Surfacing Today: Dark Money, False Flags, and Poisoned Drinking Water

On Democracy Now this morning (Jan. 20) Amy Goodman interviewed New Yorker writer Jane Mayer about her new book Dark Money about the Koch Brothers and other sources of unregulated political money. According to Mayer, these people constitute a secret third political party—oh those Supreme Court Boobs who imagined that opening the floodgates wouldn’t change much! (Or did they hope it would?!) 

But what really got me was her discovery that the Republicans had a powwow when Obama was elected, where they had to decide whether to support him on occasion as the opposition party, or to oppose systematically everything he proposed. The latter position was urged on them by then Senator Jim DeMint, a moral gnome who went on to other insidious work. And of course, they adopted it. This was really a Rubicon for those idiots, basically abandoning their oath of office of fealty to the Constitution in order to try to block everything Obama did. It really amounts to a form of soft treason, and certainly disqualifies them from holding public office.

The next program on WBAI, Guns and Butter, featured Richard Dolan talking about his book project about false flag operations. Having just finished reading Webster Tarpley’s 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, I was thoroughly primed. It’s so deeply nefarious, it’s (to borrow James W. Douglas’s word) unspeakable—the extent of the official subversion going on to turn us into an authoritarian state. Dolan described the various security agency's terms "white opps" (open, publicly announced operations), "grey opps" (where an operative poses as an independent journalist and issues a highly tendentious report), and "black opps" (where a criminal act is attributed to an enemy force but really choreographed by the agency–the false flag operation).

Dolan spoke of fascism—sugar-coated, pop-culture-coated. He didn’t mention the late Sheldon Wollin’s insightful term “inverted totalitarianism” from Wollin's book Democracy, Inc., which I find very useful—it’s the tacit agreement in the media and polite public discourse not to talk about or give credence to anything other than the official narrative about traumatic events, effectively covering up the government’s role in manipulating public opinion (from the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations on to 9/11 with many stops in between) and discrediting any exposure of false flag operations, even as they become more commonplace, as "conspiracy theories."

And in today’s Times we have the increasingly familiar spectacle of a politician apologizing for an egregious infraction once he’s discovered having caused or ignored it for an unconscionably long time. It shows again that the distance from contempt to contrition is as short as the one from the remote to the TV. It’s Rick Snyder, of course, Michigan Gov. “Just the Figures, Please,” apologizing for the brain damage that the lead in the Flint drinking water did to its swarthy children (whose parents didn’t vote for him anyway). The decision was made by an austerity commission that he had appointed, not responsible to the people, of course, until there is press attention to the resulting brain damage. Protesters are now demanding his resignation and prosecution, and he’s talking “humbly” about bucks stopping here—now. Just like Mayor Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago, after sitting on the video of the police shooting of teenager Laquan MacDonald by officer Jason Van Dyke for more than a year.

 So it takes black martyrs, who pay with their bodies, to expose these criminals in suits and uniforms.

Bernie Lies Outside the Times' Categories

In a front page article in today's Times (Jan. 17), the headline reads "Clinton Allies Have Regrets Over Strategy." In it Hillary supporters regret that they didn't take Bernie's campaign more seriously and attack him vigorously from the beginning. Now he appears to be surging in Iowa, and Hillary seems to be in the same situation she was with Obama in 2008.

What's amusing is the Times' writer Patrick Healy's characterization of Bernie's position as his "archliberal message," indicating that the journalist's thinking is confined to the archaic linear graph that extends from radical to liberal on the left to conservative and reactionary on the right, and that it's all a matter of policy. What he can't acknowledge, either because he's unaware of it or because the Times won't allow it, is that this is no longer a democratically run country, where power is in the hands of the People, as our Constitution stipulates. We are an oligarchy, run by by the superwealthy few, who control our politics, our financial institutions, and our military and try to control our economy.

Bernie is actually threatening (promising) to reign in this oligarchy and return power to the people. Threatening the oligarchy is extremely dangerous to one's health, as JFK found out. Obama maintains a healthy respect for them, which is why he never became the transformational President that Jesse Jackson and many others said we needed when he was first elected. He would have been much too easy a mark for them, too, since the racism that he evoked in the pathological sector of the electorate would have provided an abundance of willing patsies to do the deed—and then be conveniently disposed of (as Oswald was). Hopefully, Bernie, if elected (and that's now a distinct possibility) will be savvy about his own physical security and take appropriate precautions.

Incidentally, the Times reveals its political naiveté again today (January 17) in its story of Jeb Bush's good manners ("Manners Fit Jeb Bush, If Not an Uncouth Race" by Ashley Parker, p. 25). The implication is that he's too well-bred to descend to the level of Trump and start swinging, so we can lament the passing of the age of political decorum (??) and resign ourselves to Jeb not getting the nomination, denying the Grand Old Party access to the White House for yet another four years—since there just aren't enough crazies to vote Trump or Cruz into office. Incidentally, one power broker who successfully seduced the Times management with his good breeding and collegiality was Allen Dulles, the first CIA director, who led the agency from the early Eisenhower years through the beginning of Nixon's presidency. According to David Talbot's excellent new book on Dulles (The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and America's Secret Government), Dulles began his career by serving the power elite, working for the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, and continuing to serve them as CIA director, by subverting democratic leaders in Iran, Guatemala and the Congo, and by avoiding an honest investigation of JFK's assassination (in which he was most probably involved, if not directing). So much for decorum.

What the Times misses (again) is that the support for Trump and Cruz is the measure of the frustration with the GOP establishment who've used its resentful rank-and-file to vote in pro-corporate chumps (like W and the Republican majoritarians in Congress) who pass laws and instigate wars that siphon treasure out of the public purse and into the accounts of military suppliers, bank profits, and other giant corporations. We can complain about increasing inequality all we want, but the super-rich have already bought out those who make the rules, and who were elected by the folks now in revolt.

What these good yeomen don't realize is that a demagogue like the Donald is deeply susceptible to slavishly serving the wealthy once in office. This is the story of every fascist and extreme right-wing candidate who attains power.