Tom Engelhardt's Top Five trimpvelations
The 0.1% Economy
First of all it’s NOT really the "One Percent” who are calling the shots and letting prospects for any actual US democracy get washed away. It’s the 0.1% economy based on what Tom accurately calls "Casino Capitalism".
It's interesting to note that the architects of the Bretton Woods (NH) post WWII world economic order did what they could to corral “finance capital” as opposed to “productive” capital. But many such prudent safeguards including much of the New Deal have been steadily eroded, repealed, replaced or ignored by the Monied Masters of Mankind who, to their credit, share our disdain for the Dummkopf of Mal-A-Guano.
The chipping away at the foundations for decent living standards for the masses started well before the mushrooms over Nagasaki could begin to dissipate. Now the malign fallout of greed and unaccountable concentrated wealth is raining grief on all of us.
The National Security State and the Permanent War Economy
Publicly available national security planning documents make it clear that “world empire” was an expected outcome of the Second World War during which US planners were actively preparing for the actualities of (imperial) diplomacy, propaganda, and intervention under the “Pax” Americana.
World War II conclusively demonstrated that Keynesian economics worked wonderfully well in the real world. The anemic economic stimuli provided by the New Deal did mitigate the ravages of the Great Depression, but the massive war deficits actually eradicated unemployment faster and more effectively that what the Salk vaccine did to polio.
World War II also proved that, even during the most dire of national emergencies, there could be no peace between predatory capitalism and organized workers. Workers, lulled by postwar prosperity and the passing of generations, forgot this. Institutionalized greed did not.
The war economy was rationalized and sold to the US public by ginning up fears of the soul crushing world communist serfdom represented by the “Red Menace” of Soviet Russia and the “Yellow Peril” of Maoist China. US planning documents, including the Pentagon Papers, establish that US official clearly knew their real foe was the economic nationalism of peoples who dared dream of controlling “our” resources that just happened to be located within the borders of their quaint homelands. But that’s “communism” too, and as Strummer and Jones later noted, “Castro is a color that is redder than red. Castro is a color that will earn you a spray of lead.” But the Indian fighters of the US Calvary and the US commander in Vietnam put it even more cogently with their Almarican dictum which, as every American schoolboy knows, translates as “Kill ‘em all. Let God sort ‘em out”.
Interestingly, the war economy did much more than simply provide what passed for full employment. Much of the Pentagon funded research of the 50s and 60s was only tangentially related to national security needs. But they did supply the necessary research, development, and market building for the high tech economy.
The National Security Act of 1947 laid the legal basis for the National Security Surveillance State. The Church and Pike Committees and other investigations such as the one that looked into the Ronald Reagan/Oliver North Iran Contra travesty were little more than speed bumps in the accelerating development of the Secret Government. September 11. 2001 may still turn out to be the death knell for democracy as we dreamed existed in the US, but time will tell.
The One Party State
Principled leftist commentators have long said that US politics is dominated by one Business Party (with two flapping wings). Recent Supreme Court decisions and the increasing monopolization of our society’s collective resources by a predatory idiot (0.1%) elite mean that big money is likely to continue to dominate both parties and constrain public discourse (and campaign rhetoric) so as to protect the interests of these “Masters of Mankind”.
Although pundits and chatterers have long loves detecting signs that one or the other party is coming into certain dominance, elections in the US are amazingly close with ever fewer citizens able to give a clear description of the difference between Democrats and Republicans. If any party is likely to fracture, history and logic indicate that it will probably be the GOP. But in that event a new right wing party that aggressively pursues the agenda of the business will emerge from it’s wreckage just as the National Republicans replaced the Federalists, the Whigs replaced the National Republicans, and the GOP replaced the Whigs.
The New Media Landscape
Newspapers and network news appear to have lost some (or much) of their dominance. Social media enables the spread of all kinds of actual news that’s generally surpassed or ignored by the mainstream media. But social media (dubiously) is also blamed for siloing opinions and world views as well as for encouraging the dissemination of all kinds of fake news
Some “social media vectored “fake news” is designed and funded to have an ideological effect. Other times it is merely a way to generate clicks for ad revenue. Either way there is worry that such fake news is part our nation’s political polarization and governmental gridlock while also helping to maximize “information entropy”, a form of generalized anomie where no information or information source is credible or actionable except to occasional heavily armed nutjobs who open fire in oddly named pizzerias or take over remote woodland federal installations so they can take turns patrolling the perimeter while the rest stay inside watching the internet and roasting marshmallows.
Social media also offers new modes of political organization (and monitoring of such) while certainly allowing leaders to bypass typical media conduits.
All of this was partially instrumental in our upcoming trimpification.
Anomie, Exhaustion, Dereliction, Division, and Desperation
Though the US leads in destructive firepower and diabolical military technology, it is becoming ever more clear that our healthcare, educational, transportation, and energy infrastructure are falling apart while falling behind what is available in other advanced economies. It is now a commonplace that American children can no longer expect to do better materially than their parents. Incomes for 80% of the population have been stagnant since the 1970s.
We’re told that people are reflexively (because of so much media prompting) blaming “gubmint” for these ills. Seniors are portrayed as protesting, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” and the New York Times recently quoted a mom who condemned ObamaCare for forcing her son off her insurance when he turned 26.
It does seem to be the case that many of us are blaming immigrants or, at least, the “illegals”. In the meantime we being told that “white” people (a concept invented in colonial Virginia) are no longer the majority of those now under 5 years of age - although these reports usually don’t break down how many of these “brown” toddlers are the children and grandchildren of those of us who have been taught to identify as “white”.
As Tom Englehardt points out, this is the America that will, before the end of this month, fall into the short, stubby fingers of a delusional buffoon.
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