THE CASE FOR DONALD TRUMP
John Chuckman
Anyone who knows my writing and background knows I am not a
conservative and certainly have little use for the right wing anywhere.
But they will also know that I despise war and that I
believe America’s establishment has brought moral degradation to the country’s
international affairs. It has also brought degradation to America’s own people,
completely ignoring their welfare for decades, regarding them only as a herd from
which to solicit votes with television advertising and from whom to collect
taxes.
America’s establishment – as, for example, represented by
the Senate, its most powerful and anti-democratic tool in government – is
almost indistinguishable from members of the old Politburo in the heyday of the
USSR. Crinkly faces, heavy-set bodies, more money than they can spend, dripping
with special privileges, enjoying limitless terms of office, but enjoying no
ability to say anything fresh or interesting or helpful, ever.
So, too, the arrogant, almost unchecked power of America’s
massive security and military establishments. Almost the only sounds coming
from them, including even retired members looking for fifteen minutes of media fame,
are ugly threats about Russia or Syria or Iran or a number of other places in
this world. They function like a powerful Mafia with arms and assistance to
mercenary trash and fanatics as well as to the privileged trash of absolute
monarchies in a dozen different places. And they function as a Murder
Incorporated with their organized extrajudicial executions and bombings in many
lands.
America’s establishment, either directly using “the boyz” or
with proxies, has likely killed two million people in the last fifteen years or
so of the Neocon Wars. It has virtually destroyed several states and societies,
and it has sent millions running for their lives as refugees, effectively
de-stabilizing the foundations of Europe.
There are two major impacts of this dirty work, if you
choose to ignore the sheer mass killing and destruction. First, what we call
‘international terror” is in fact the illegitimate child of these efforts. It
is a result of many young men with limited means trying to protect, as young
men tend to do everywhere and always, their own kind from the horrors being
visited upon them. It has nothing to do with the nature of Islam. After all,
Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were all brought up in Christian churches, and
millions of Christian young men have gone to fight in bloody, unholy causes in
countless places over the centuries.
International terror was also fostered by the government’s
own use of such groups in the Neocon Wars. The Northern Alliance in
Afghanistan, some of whose members were every bit as bloody and extreme as the
Taleban, was used to fight the Taleban, minimizing American casualties. That
success gave a model to repeat. America again used and supplied cutthroats in
Libya to get rid of a decent and reasonable ruler it did not like. It did the
same in the aftermath of the colossal horror its own troops made in the
original invasion of Iraq. And it does so today in the beautiful land of Syria.
The arrogance, ruthlessness, and immorality of these acts are breathtaking.
Second, these wars have produced the greatest refugee crisis
of our time. Waves and waves of desperate people running for their lives have
smashed through organized border control in many places. There have been an
estimated six million refugees from Syria alone. About three million sit in
camps in Turkey, and they could be released gradually by a Turkish government
angry over an American-engineered coup if Europe doesn’t pay for their support
as promised by Germany’s Mrs. Merkel. About a million and a half are in poor little
Lebanon. Europe has close to de-stabilized itself politically by accepting a
million or more. This is completely the doing of America’s vicious policy in
Syria, and no European leaders or others have had the courage to speak up about
it. It could all have been prevented, but any European speaking out would only have
received serious economic or other threats behind the scenes.
The Neocon Wars have been the greatest moral and ethical
disaster of the modern era, and they have achieved nothing worth achieving.
Months ago, when Trump started his run for the nomination, a
sudden rumbling noise of opposition became apparent. The most vociferous voices
and most extreme words suddenly came from the Neocon crowd. People like William
Kristol became extremely active. Some other, lesser known figures, in
unprecedented and vitriolic language, actually used the word “assassination.”
Now, none of these people are known for deep humanitarianism or concern over
social issues, as with migration issues, so their intense opposition became a
bit of a mystery. It became clear, in view of Trump statements around war, the
mess made of the Middle East, Syria, and relations with Russia, that Trump was
hated for his views on war by the nation’s most powerful and entrenched war
lobby. That fact made me listen to Trump more carefully.
Meanwhile, the people of the United States have been lied to
through the entire Neocon War effort, and they have been subjected to many deliberate
scares and non-stop press promotion to keep them on edge for what the
establishment has been doing. They also have had their privacy secretly destroyed
by an arrogant government which never explains anything.
The government doing these things, at the same time, has
completely ignored the economic lives of Americans. Real incomes have dropped
for decades, cities have rotted into vast slums in some cases, corporate jobs
have been transferred offshore on a massive scale, many schools are in poor
shape across the nation, and their own government cannot provide a rational
healthcare system for them, Obamacare being a poorly designed creation which is
already failing. The middle class is in decline by every measure, median family
income has fallen steadily, the hopelessly poor are on the increase with an
explosion in food stamps, home ownership levels are in decline, student debt
has exploded, and labor force participation has only declined.
Lack of adequate government regulation and oversight
literally created the 2008 financial disaster – much in the fashion of the
hideous George Bush’s response to hurricane Katrina – and this leaves a
gigantic threat overhanging the lives of hundreds of millions. Obama has made
no effort at repairing the structural and regulatory mess responsible, and all
he has done to keep things somewhat steady is to print money – a la Weimar Germany
– for eight years, creating yet another threat overhanging the future.
Obama has not only kept the Neocon Wars going, he has
expanded them and introduced an entire new establishment for extrajudicial
killing, differing in no way other than in its technology from the filthy work
of the Argentine military junta of the 1980s. The Pentagon and CIA today
receive and consume unholy amounts of resources so that they can kill, plot
coups, and de-stabilize others while millions of Americans are not provided
with decent schools or the most basic public services such as clean drinking
water.
No one can solve all these problems, and I certainly think
it would be foolish to expect that Trump can, but I am confident that he can
make an important contribution. America’s priorities need re-ordering, and it
needs to extricate itself from the bloody lunatic adventures of the Neocon
Wars.
And, while I at first expected nothing special from Trump on
the domestic front, his recent speech in Michigan ranks as a great one. As a
child of the Midwest, I can tell you everything he said to black people was deadly
accurate. And courageous. Professional politicians are afraid to speak the
truth. If you want to see what he was talking about, look for images of the
South Side of Chicago or Detroit, Michigan, or Gary, Indiana, on the Internet.
Many Americans never see such places in their own country. There are sights as
appalling as one sees from war zones in the news, and no one in government
lifts a finger to help. Any effort here would be a blessing, and if Trump could
carry it off to any degree, he might well be proved right in his speech’s claim,
that in future, he’ll get 95% of black votes and “What in the hell do you have
to lose?”
As an old saying goes, you must pick your battles, and
nowhere is this truer than in politics. Candidates, in the language of economics,
always represent a bundle of goods, not all of which will be attractive to any
voter. When you choose a candidate, you always get goods you don’t want along
with those you do. It much resembles what happens when you buy an album of
music to get certain songs.
Politics, being quite rightly described by Bismarck as “the
art of the possible,” is an institution you must not look to solve or correct
everything, but if you can get a few important things right, you are doing
well. The politicians, supported by manipulative media flacks, try to endear
themselves to many kinds of voters with cheap sound bites or suggestive
statements, none of which are in any way specific. They are trying to assemble
a virtual bundle of goods that will be bought by a majority. If elected, they
go on to do as other powerful forces would have them do, never having to
deliver on what were mere, fleeting suggestive statements.
It will take a mighty tough and determined leader to achieve
any progress with America’s miserable problems. We all see how the man who
looked decent and intelligent and caring eight years ago has been totally
flattened by the establishment. He resembles Rachel Corrie after being backed
over by an Israeli bulldozer. We may just have been deceived by his manner in
2008, not realizing the smile was the smile of a charming psychopath, but I am
inclined to think he was simply overwhelmed by the rooms full of arrogant, be-tinseled
generals, intelligence executives, fat with privilege and resources, and extremely
powerful and arrogant special interests.
Trump has the merit of being a very tough-minded man who has
dealt for decades with powerful people to get what he wants, and he has made
billions doing it. He is no mere respecter of title or position, but a man who
judges by what you actually can do. By comparison, Obama appears a weak figure
next to such people, and so he has proved. He leaves office having achieved the
status of a smiling mass killer. He has done not a single worthwhile thing for
his own people.
And that is the so-called legacy Hillary Clinton is there to
preserve and extend. This is a woman who has done little besides take huge
amounts of money from many powerful people for years, special interests and
ugly foreign governments. It is all packed into a foundation, treated but not
functioning as a charity. It happens to function as a giant political slush
fund, a money-laundering scheme for questionable funds, and a source of employment
for relatives and friends. She starts on day one, as it were, as a completely
bought-and-sold figure many times over.
I think no story better sums up these personal qualities of
Hillary’s than one found in her recently released tax records. She apparently made
“charitable” donations last year of about $1,0040,000, which at first glance
sounds vaguely impressive. Then you read that $1,000,000 of that was in
donations to her own the Clinton Foundation. It just doesn’t come more corrupt
than that.
This also is the woman who, as Secretary of State, ran
America’s filthy operation out of Benghazi that collected weapons from prostrated
Libya – prostrated by American bombs and American-paid terrorists - plus
boatloads of maniac fanatics to send to Turkey for transshipment into Syria. The
American ambassador killed at Benghazi was an instance of “blowback” in a
covert operation when some of the maniacs decided he made a better target than
anything to be found in Syria.
Our last great investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, has
just told us for the first time that the sarin nerve gas, actually used in
Syria a few years ago a few times, was transshipped from Libya under her
auspices. Hundreds of civilians were hideously killed by America’s proxy
fanatics in the clearest of war crimes. It was an effort to create a
crossing-a-red-line stunt with which to blame Syria’s beleaguered, elected government
so that Obama could send in the jets and bomb the crap out of yet another
country. Only Putin’s deft statesmanship prevented that disaster.
The moral and ethical characters of the American leaders
involved here – Obama and Hillary plus the generation or two before them –
surely rank with some of history’s most hateful figures, and it is time to put
a stop to their handiwork. As well, it is time for a government that actually
works for the interests of its own people, a simple idea but one which is
entirely foreign to contemporary Washington.
I think of the great Franklin Roosevelt, and people who have
no history do not realize how intensely hated he was by a major part of the
establishment. Apart from constant attacks in the press, his life was
threatened. I think also of Abraham Lincoln, and again, people with no history
do not realize how hated the man was at first. He was called “an obscene ape”
in the newspapers, and he felt the need to travel to Washington for his
inauguration in disguise.
I am not comparing Trump, but I am reminding readers of some
of the unpleasant details that never appear on the plaques of monuments to such
great figures. I do very much believe, despite the sometimes loose and careless
words of an inexperienced politician, that there is great promise in this man. He
is a doer, not a talker, but his Michigan speech especially had intimations of
greatness in it. Just as he said, addressing America’s more than thirty-million
black population, “What the hell do you have to lose?”
And just look at the alternative. My God, none are so blind
as those who will not see, and anyone who can be enthusiastic for a woman of
her bloody and corrupt achievements is indeed willfully and dangerously blind.
Many commentators still miss the most essential truth of this
election, and I owe the profound observation to Robert Reich. This election is
not about Left versus Right. It is not about Democrat versus Republican. It is
about pro- versus anti-establishment, a very bloody, corrupt, and dishonest
establishment.
