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The Not-Hillary President
It is impossible to know what the Not-Hillary inauguration will bring. Not-Hillary because putting up Hillary as candidate was the most stupid thing the Democratic party and it paymasters could do. She had extremely high negative ratings and stood for everything that one could dislike with the party's policies. Many who ended up not voting or voted for Trump could have been easily won by a different Democratic candidate even with much of the same general policies (see: Obama, Barack).
Hillary would surely have lost against any middle-of-the-road Republican candidate. History will note that she was an arrogant but incompetent Democratic candidate who lost against a rather bad Republican candidate, one who lacked support even from his own party. Trump won barely, but she lost completely.
Seen from the perspective of power centers Clinton once had all the support she needed. But she then lost a decisive group due to her uncompromising neo-conned foreign policy. Here is an interesting take based on a theory from the 1950s:
[T]he power elite can be best described as a “triangle of power,” linking the corporate, executive government, and military factions: “There is a political economy numerously linked with military order and decision. This triangle of power is now a structural fact, and it is the key to any understanding of the higher circles in America today.”
The 2016 US election, like all other US elections, featured a gallery of pre-selected candidates that represented the three factions and their interests within the power elite. The 2016 US election, however, was vastly different from previous elections. As the election dragged on the power elite became bitterly divided, with the majority supporting Hilary Clinton, the candidate pre-selected by the political and corporate factions, while the military faction rallied around their choice of Donald Trump.
That is only a rough take. The corporate factions are divided within. The oil industry does not like it when wars disturb its long term businesses (see Russia and Libya). Boeing wants to sell planes to Iran. Other corporate parts don't mind such wars as long as they create new markets or easy access to cheap labor. The media love war as it creates ever thrilling content around which they can sell advertisements.
The decisive political point in this election round was the fight between neo-conservatives/liberal-interventionists and foreign policy realists. One side is represented exemplary by the CIA with the U.S. military on the other:
A schism developed between the Defense Department and the highly politicized CIA. This schism, which can be attributed to the corporate-deep-state’s covert foreign policy, traces back to the CIA orchestrated “color revolutions” that had swept the Middle East and North Africa.
The CIA created bloodthirsty future enemies the military will later have to defeat. Fascists in Ukraine and Takfiris all over the Middle East are used by the CIA to further neocon aims but then require relative cheap military intervention at high human costs. The Generals do not like that. (The precedence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was enough for them.) Neither does the military industry. Fighting Takfiris does not require big ticket items. Ratcheting up the rhetoric against peer competitors (without ever fighting a real war) is the best justification for a two million strong military and huge military contracts.
It is still astonishing that the military Trump faction of the power triangle could win the fight. Trump made that possible when he used a hostile media for his gain. The corporate media stood strongly behind Clinton but that was not enough to hide her negative sides. Trump's salesmen bluster proved too fascinating to not be reported. In the end the media that hated him ended up making the very best advertisement for him. For weeks the neoconned Washington Post editorial page ran five or six anti-Trump pieces per day. That alone was for some reason enough to vote for Trump.
Trump will now have to win over other parts of the power triangle. The corporate part is the easy one. He will lower its taxes. He will also, in one form or another, reinstate tariffs along the U.S. borders. His confrontational position against main exporting countries, China, Germany, Mexico etc, will also transfer into higher U.S. corporate profits. It may even create some additional jobs in the U.S. which would help him to get reelected.
The military will demand its due beyond the three generals now in Trump's cabinet. But soldiers do not like to go to war. That means that Trump will increase conflict rhetoric against some foreign countries but also that he will not start any serious war. Expect the announcement of some super nifty, new but useless military wonder weapon for which Trump will promise trillions (Reagan's star wars redux).
The most difficult faction to win over to his view is the political/executive/secret services side including many people within his own party. Neoliberalism has inflicted those on all levels. Trump will have to neutralize or fire people in their upper ranks early and often. If he fails to do that all his plans will be challenged and stymied in their early implementation.
Trump is a highly gifted salesman, one of the best I have ever seen. His general business skills are more average. He is full of bluster before going into negotiations. His current rhetoric in relations to other countries should be seen as opening shots. Such threats and offers alike are to him just parts of a negotiation process. His main aim with those will be to get some manufacturing back into the United States. He needs some success in this, in creating jobs, jobs, jobs and raising wages, to secure his reelection.
Economically Trump will lower taxes and increase spending (after some minor for-show cuts.) U.S. national debt will rise significantly. Interest rates will rise in conflict with his aim to lower the dollar value in exchange markets. His U.S. centric protectionism will allow other countries to also take steps in such a direction. At one point Trump will have to take up a fight with speculative Wall Street banking. It is an impediment for all his other aims. This will be his most difficult fight and the one he will probably lose.
Over all I do not expect anything exceptional from Trump. His time in the White House will probably turn out to be minor remake of Reagan's.
It is time for everyone to move on. In the end when we discuss issues in here we are talking about power, or more correctly control. Just as the the 20th century corporatist types through their sales divisions came to understand that it is impossible to control any one individual but easy to get large masses to behave as they wish, anyone who is concerned about the welfare of all humans has to quit trying to persuade people one by one to support some type of centralised benevolence and instead set about ensuring all humans have the opportunity to express their own interests.
Laura’s post at #7 sums up the current problems that have led to the ‘de-powering’ of humanity. Until mechanisation of manufacturing industries really took hold most humans depended on manufacturing workers to exercise their ability to withdraw labour as a tactic for an end run around the bribing of the inevitably corrupt political class.
When manufacturing folded the less esteemed professional workers in health and education (essentially teachers and nurses) took up as much of the mantle as their positions would allow. Withdrawing labour from hospitals and schools isn’t merely controversial, it just doesn’t cause the same panic in boardrooms that production lines sitting idle used to do.
So that meant the leverage exerted by those workers had to go through another step a transmission system like a gearbox, that system was political and subject to the same flaws caused by character deficiencies as the political system it meshed with.
Most of us are familiar with the old bourgeois ploy of ‘pulling the ladder up after yourself’, epitomized by the education fees and oppressive ‘loans’ system which boomers imposed upon the generation coming after them once they had extracted all that they needed from tertiary education.
Well Trump will do the same with the political system and the worst of that is the very forces of neoliberalism that loathe trump so much will be the agents of change dedicated to ensuring no ‘populist’ unwanted and resented by the political elite can ever rise again.
Whether it be by way of censorship of alleged ‘fake news’ on FB, or hands on control of net routing, presenting opposing points of view is about to become much more difficult, as will working through the internal machinations of an established political organisation.
The Russia thing is but one tentative move by the dem party elite to set about preventing “Bernie” or anyone like him getting so close ever again. The same will happen in the UK if and when Mr Corbyn is deposed. Make no mistake about it, these fat assed fork tongues play for keeps when it gets down to us or them.
Yet even if the elites do secure everything they want before the employment based economy is totally extinct and they imagine they won’t need to generate wealth to survive, they will find they cannot stop, simply because the insanity within them will not be able to find an outlet unless they continue to exploit the rest of us in some form or another. Sure they can play golf or poker or fucking Diablo against each other but that is akin to giving a junkie a capsule of paracetamol – it may ease the pain, but it doesn’t ease the pain.
The assholes need us, even if it is just to validate their superiority and the sanctity of their lives, they will continue to market shit to us. Most nations with amerika as a possible exception, will be forced to adopt some sort of negative tax system, so that everyone gets enough of a pittance to buy the shit the elites sell.
The alternative is simply not tenable as we have seen before in all the failures of fascism, if the masses are pushed far enough, they will push back, and do so inventively, remorselessly and totally, until the old elite is replaced by a new one most usually comprised of leaders of the ‘resistance’.
So elites in most societies which have the means to, will construct a safety valve in the form of something along the lines of a negative tax, in order to white ant opposition to their domination.
But that is the end point and while we are considering the destruction of employment as the goal for the navigators employed by elites we aren’t there yet. In the interim there are measures to institute which will not prevent the ultimate automation of all jobs, but will ensure that we the shit-kickers do retain enough power to prevent our oppression.
If you grabbed one of the ‘adorable deplorables’ or any of the other drongos who have been convinced Trump is a cure not just another symptom, and asked them what it is that motivates their passion for trump, the odds are good you will get some personal story about an incorrect invoice, a faulty product or a really unjust medical or financial decision. Same goes for all the shit-kickers protesting his inauguration. In the end it is the personal indignities which we have all endured over the last two decades that underpins the upswell of anger across the population.
The citizen attempted to right the wrong but quickly discovered that life has been reduced to a series of one way valves. Every entity from your energy utility to your hospital has many channels open brimming with ways to access the goods or services the entity ‘markets’ but absolutely no method of providing meaningful feedback when things are to say the least, unsatisfactory.
It comes back to my initial statement about controlling masses but not individuals. The entitites don’t care, there is nothing anyone can do as even when someone manages to be heard above the cacophony of competiting claims and counter claims, all that is required a large dose of ‘feeding the chooks’ as a particularly bent Australian politician used to describe his interactions with media, and all is forgotten/ forgiven.
The corporates have jumped aboard the advantanges granted by available tech and stymie us all with no public contact in the name of security, emails to ‘support’ that provoke irrelevant form responses, and circular ‘voicemail’ systems where even if you do get to talk to a human at the end the odds are high that a/ the human will be on the other side of the world, and b/ he or she won’t be an employee of the entity that has wronged you anyhow.
At the moment we, meaning the 99% of us who just want to live our lives, are letting the pricks do this, shrugging our shoulders and feeling more embittered, resentful and less empowered every day.
It amazes me that there hasn’t yet been an effective pushback against this by using the same tools as the entities use to oppress us.
True it would take leadership and smarts, but imagine for a moment a group in say amerika, was to put out a phone app where people could enter the detail of their corporate relationships (before the cries of privacy and paranoia begin we also need to believe that the app uses effective end to end encryption and secures it’s database if even that is where data is stored and not just with the end user).
A particularly egregious act by one of the entities whose consumers are well subscribed to the app comes to light. A crime of greed so bad that any normal decent human when notified of it by their app and asked “do you support this crime or do you want to show you’re appalled by it?” selects b I’m appalled and want to tell the assholes that. Clicking the button then notifies the app holder’s financial authority that all payments to the greedy entity must cease immediately.
How many corporations can manage the immediate loss of their cash flow? SFA that is how many.
This is a simplified explanation of a complex system which doesn’t detail arcane mechanics, but I have no doubt that if political power in the sense we understand it, that is getting elected bodies to express our will to corporate power, is destroyed, as I believe is inevitable under Trump, and standard issue republican/democrat pols, the solution sits before us.
We simply go around them and create our own mechanism to do the things that the legislature corrupted by corporations, will not do.
Posted by: Debsisdead | Jan 21 2017 1:59 utc | 88
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