For all the shock in some quarters, Trump’s arrival on the scene, let us never forget, made possible and facilitated by the innumerable betrayals and corruption of the Democrats, is a logical development. Historically and easily for at least over a century, the US government, standing for the rule of the plutocracy, has employed lies (and public relations techniques) constantly and consistently. The lies are inevitable because the nation honors the myth of being a democracy, but most laws enacted are designed to benefit an extravagantly puny minority that clearly contradicts the majority’s will, while hurting its interests. The rejection by Obama and previous administrations of the single-payer solution to the outrageous condition of the healthcare system in the US is but one case in point. For its part, the corporate mainstream media and other sectors of the mass communications machinery (including the so-called public channels, PBS, NPR, etc.) as integral parts of the same plutocracy, have also indulged in and continue to employ constant lies, omissions, and distortion in much of their output. As we all know—or should know—pieties aside, their role has never been primarily to entertain or inform but to serve as ideological guardians of the status quo. The latter function, performed with ruthlessness, has dissolved any possibility of real democracy in the United States.
Trump, however, perhaps unwittingly, has detonated a new phenomenon, a deep fissure between the presidency and the stenographic media, which usually, in all IMPORTANT matters of war and peace and relations between the employers and the working class, work hand in glove to advance and preserve the power of the 0.000001%. As we write these lines, Trump represents a probably momentary breakdown in the rudder of the plutocratic ship of state. Truthwise, this rift has not created salutary dividends for the public as neither the Trump side nor his opponents have halted their habitual stream of well-packaged deception. It is in this extremely confusing and polluted mindscape, with no real heroes to root for, and compounded by the longstanding ignorance, petty partisanships and indifference of much of the American public, that we print these reports concerning Trump and what is obviously a very ugly and dangerous political situation. The need for truth and a rational understanding of what humanity faces has never been so urgent.—PG
The Obama-Clinton (and Democratic Party newsmedia) war against Donald Trump — a war to delegitimize him as the U.S. President, and to soften the country up for installing instead a President as rabidly hostile toward Russia as Hillary Clinton would have been — continues on every front.
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Graphic by the New York Times, a leading organ in the anti-Trump campaign, accusing Trump of having possibly treasonous ties to Russia.
The libertarian-liberal ACLU is financed mainly by Democratic Party aristocrats such as the hedge-fund gambler (euphemistically called ‘investor’) David Gelbaum ($19 million donated annually to ACLU until George W. Bush’s economic crash hit him hard in 2009 and forced him to stop), David Trone ($15 million in 2015), and George Soros (now in the fourth year of a $50 million total donation). Also, some Republican families such as the Kochs and the Waltons were mentioned, although that poorly written Washington Post article merely suggested, but failed to make clear whether, those families had donated anything to ACLU. Furthermore, the libertarian neoconservative (otherwise known as neoliberal neoconservative, or as imperialistic libertarian, or, more simply, as “war-mongering”) Democrat Soros’s Center for Media & Democracy has exposed the fact that almost all of the libertarian Republican Kochs’ donations on criminal justice are actually to weaken laws against CEO and other white-collar crimes — so as to benefit the aristocracy, at the public’s expense.
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Furthermore, one of the much-pumped Koch ‘charitable’ involvements that helps poor ex-convicts, had actually received from the Kochs only a donation “in the six figures” — pocket-change, cheap lipstick on their enormous financial pig. Soros himself, moreover, does far more to stir war against Russia than to ‘do good’ inside America or anywhere else; and so, for all aristocrats, ‘non-profits’ (such as ACLU) are likelier propaganda-vehicles to put a kindly face upon their unlimited greed (and partisan political campaigns), than they are actual agencies for the public’s good. Of course, the millions of small donors (who don’t own any ‘charities’) take no tax-deductions for their far more sincerely intended sacrifices of their personal donations; and all tax-deductions for ‘charitable donations’ are less of an actual generosity than they are a political scam on the rest of society, by the wealthiest Americans, to receive both good PR and lowered taxes, while the lower 90% become yet poorer than they were before, with no tax-deduction for their authentic generosity, and so those non-rich individuals end up being the people who pay the tab for it all, in taxes, low wages, and crumbling infrastructure. It’s a vast societal scam worldwide, by the top 0.1% actually, against the bottom 99.9%, in order that (for example) “Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world”, and yet it somehow won’t be considered to be unearned wealth, theft (however subtly) by the richest few, from the less-fortunate half of the population. (No? Eight men are as worthy as are the 3.75 billion who constitute the world’s poorer half? Those eight earned as much as those 3.75 billion? Or do they simply take as much?) (What actually stands behind, and sustains, any such enormous concentration of wealth, is power, which is composed of deceit and violence — deceit if a ‘democracy’, violence if a dictatorship. It’s theft, either way. That’s just a fact. But, of course, myths, from the aristocracy, constantly deny it.)
Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff presents the Distinguished Public Service Award to David Gelbaum at the Pentagon Nov. 18, 2010. Why on earth is the top brass presenting awards to civilians? (DoD photo)
So: who are Gelbaum and Trone? David Gelbaum ‘earned’ his fortune in high-frequency trading, using algorithms to identify moment-to-moment stock trends, at Princeton Newport Partners. David Trone is a strong believer in the fascist principle that money is speech, so that billionaires have thousands of times more ‘free speech’ ‘rights’ than normal people do, and this favoritism for the super-rich fits the Republican Supreme Court’s rulings that political campaigns should be one-dollar-one-vote instead of one-person-one-vote — or that no one’s political spending should be limited, a principle the ACLU has backed strongly. Trone’s own personal political contest, to become the Democratic candidate to replace the retiring Democrat Chris van Hollen in the U.S. House, spent more money, $393 per vote, than anyone in U.S. history had spent, and it was all his own money — and yet he was so lousy that he didn’t win the nomination anyway. Like most mega-donors, these ‘philanthropists’ join with others of like mind, to control their government (both political Parties), for their collective class benefits, the super-rich class against everybody else — but not against their ‘philanthropies’, their own tax-advantaged PR organizations. And yet some of them can’t win a Congressional nomination even paying $393 per vote; so, all that remains to them for swaying the government, is to use the propaganda-cover of “ACLU,” or some other ‘idealistic’ ‘charity’, to front their ‘philanthropy’.
Trump is offering, to his fellow-aristocrats, a deal, and we’ll soon know whether enough of them accept it, for him to be allowed to serve out his term: generous opportunities to scam the American public, in some ways even more than Obama and Bush did. So far, it seems that America’s aristocrats simply will not accept anything less than the precise type of scam that GHW Bush instituted and laid the groundwork for: rule of, by, and for, America’s military-industrial complex (themselves), focused specifically upon conquering Russia (mainly because that’s not only the most resource-rich target, but also because it’s the only ‘enemy’ that to ‘compete’ against with new weaponry would keep their own mega-arms firms soaring)…now comes the moment when the answer — whether Trump rules his aristocracy, or his aristocracy rules Trump — will likely soon become clear.
This essay is crossposted at strategic-culture.org
MAIN IMAGE: Anti-Trump cartoon capitalizing on his well-established image as a blowhard.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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