Reality Host Donald Trump is in his glory. As he tweets and twitters
and makes a mockery out of the Presidency, his little band of stoolies
are busily rubbing democracy from the American Way of Life.
The amazing thing is not how quickly the social services and public
safeguards are being dismantled, but it's the fact that we made any
gains in the face of an Oligarchy that refuses to accept the Working
Class as true Citizens. One day the American Working Class will
realize that to the Ruling Class, we are no different in their eyes
than the Dairy herd. Instead of milk, we Workers produce all of the
products which allow our Masters to live in Grand Style. And, like
the Dairy Cow, as long as we are of value to our Masters, we receive a
measure of consideration. But if we step out of line or no longer
produce, we are quickly disposed of.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/2/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
America the Failed State
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
TORONTO—Our “corporate coup d’état in slow motion,” as the writer John
Ralston Saul calls it, has opened a Pandora’s box of evils that is
transforming America into a failed state. The “unholy trinity of
corruption,
impunity and violence,” he said, can no longer be checked. The ruling
elites
abjectly serve corporate power to exploit and impoverish the citizenry.
Democratic institutions, including the courts, are mechanisms of corporate
repression. Financial fraud and corporate crime are carried out with
impunity. The decay is exacerbated by the state’s indiscriminate use of
violence abroad and at home, where rogue law enforcement agencies harass
and
arrest citizens and the undocumented and often kill the unarmed. A
depressed
and enraged population, trapped by chronic unemployment and
underemployment,
is overdosing on opioids and beset by rising suicide rates. It engages in
acts of nihilistic violence, including mass shootings. Hate groups
proliferate. The savagery, mayhem and grotesque distortions familiar to
those on the outer reaches of empire increasingly characterize American
existence. And presiding over it all is the American version of Ubu Roi,
playwright Alfred Jarry’s gluttonous, idiotic, vulgar, narcissistic and
infantile king, who turned politics into burlesque.
“Congress works through corruption,” Saul, the author of books such as
“Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” and “The
Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World,” said when we spoke
in Toronto. “I look at Congress and I see the British Parliament in the
late
18th century, the rotten boroughs. Did they have elections? Yes. Were the
elections exciting? Yes. They were extremely exciting.”
Rotten boroughs were the 19th-century version of gerrymandering. The
British
oligarchs created electoral maps through which depopulated boroughs—50 of
them had fewer than 50 voters—were easily dominated by the rich to maintain
control of the House of Commons. In the United States, our ruling class has
done much the same, creating districts where incumbents, who often run
unchallenged, return to Congress election after election. Only about 40 of
the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are actually contested. And
given the composition of the Supreme Court, especially with Donald Trump
poised to install another justice, it will get worse.
The corruption of the British system was amended in what Saul called “a
wave
upwards.” The 1832 Reform Act abolished a practice in which oligarchs, such
as Charles Howard, the 11th Duke of Norfolk, controlled the election
results
in 11 boroughs. The opening up of the British parliamentary system took
nearly a century. In the United States, Saul said, the destruction of
democracy is part of “a wave downwards.”
The two political parties are one party—the corporate party. They do not
debate substantive issues. They each support the expansion of imperial
wars,
the bloated military budget, the dictates of global capitalism, the bailing
out of Wall Street, punishing austerity measures, assaulting basic civil
liberties through wholesale government surveillance and the abolition of
due
process, and an electoral process that has cemented into place a system of
legalized bribery. They battle over cultural tropes such as abortion, gay
rights and prayer in schools. We elect politicians based on how we are made
to feel about them by the public relations industry. Politics is
anti-politics.
The Republican Party built its political base in these culture wars around
Christian fascists, nativists and white supremacists. The Democratic Party
built its base around those who supported workers’ rights,
multiculturalism,
diversity and gender equality. The base of each party was used and
manipulated by elites. The Republican Party elites had no intention of
banning abortion or turning America into a “Christian nation.” The
Democratic Party elites had no intention of protecting workers from
predatory corporatism. Everyone was sold out. The ascendancy of a populist
right, dominated by racists and bigots, is the inevitable product of the
corporate coup d’état, Saul said. He warned we should not be complacent
because of President Trump’s imbecility. Trump is immensely dangerous. “The
insipid,” Thomas Mann wrote in “The Magic Mountain,” “is not synonymous
with
the harmless.”
“How could a civilization devoted to structure, expertise and answers
evolve
into other than a coalition of professional groups?” Saul asked in
“Voltaire’s Bastards.” “How, then, could the individual citizen not be seen
as a serious impediment to getting on with business? This has been obscured
by the proposition of painfully simplified abstract notions which are
divorced from any social reality and presented as values.”
“The rational elites, obsessed by structure, have become increasingly
authoritarian in a modern, administrative way,” he wrote in another section
of the book. “The citizens feel insulted and isolated. They look for
someone
to throw stones on their behalf. Any old stone will do. The cruder the
better to crush the self-assurance of the obscure men and their obscure
methods. The New Right, with its parody of democratic values, has been a
crude but devastating stone with which to punish the modern elites.”
All despotic regimes, Saul said, carry out their final battle for control
by
contending against public officials and government bureaucrats, the
so-called deep state, which views the rise to power of demagogues and their
sleazy enablers with alarm. These traditional courtiers, often cynical,
ambitious, amoral and subservient to corporate power, nevertheless engage
in
the decorum and language of democracy. A few with a conscience win minor
skirmishes to slow the rise of tyranny. Despots see these courtiers and
democratic institutions, no matter how anemic, as a threat. This explains
the assaults on the State Department, the Justice Department, the
Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the
courts.
Despots use their appointees to undermine and destroy these institutions,
mocking their existence and questioning the loyalty of the professionals
who
staff them. The reviled and neutered public employee surrenders or walks
away in despair. Last year, the entire senior level of management officials
resigned at the State Department. Resignations continue to bleed the
diplomatic core, as they do at other agencies and departments, and last
week
included James D. Melville Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Estonia, and Susan
Thornton, the nominee to be assistant secretary for East Asian affairs.
“For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the
United
States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not
only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go,” Melville said
in the post that announced his resignation.
Once a process of deconstruction is complete, the system calcifies into
tyranny. There remain no internal mechanisms, even in name, to carry out
reform. This corrosive process is being played out daily in Trump’s Twitter
rages, lies, smears and the barrage of insults he levels against public
servants, including some of his own appointees, such as Attorney General
Jeff Sessions, as well as institutions such as the FBI.
Witnessing this, Saul berates the American press too, which he said
willingly plays its part in the charade for ratings and advertising
dollars.
“Trump gives these astonishingly Mussolini-ish press conferences,” he said.
“He says to the press, ‘Shut up. Stop!’ The press screams at him like a
mob,
a bunch of cattle. How can they be taken seriously? It is like the end of
the Roman Republic. Important political leaders from the Senate, along with
their rivals, would move around Rome with 50 people to protect them.
Scenes,
exactly like Trump’s interactions with the press, defined the end of the
Roman Republic. Nobody knew what was going on. There was no dignity. You
can’t have a democracy without a level of respect and dignity. You only
have
chaos. This chaos eventually leads to a call for autocratic order. Trump
benefits from the confusion, even though he resembles a cartoonish figure
out of a funny novel, a character from Jean Genet’s ‘The Balcony,’ although
without the self-awareness.”
Trump’s decision to launch a trade war—Canada will impose punitive measures
on $12.63 billion worth of imported American goods in response—is an
example
of the damage a despot who has little understanding of the economy,
politics, international relations or law can do. These self-inflicted
wounds, Saul warned, see despots intensify attacks on the demonized and the
vulnerable, such as Muslims and the undocumented. Despots frantically
scapegoat others for their mess, often inciting violence among their
supporters to placate an inchoate rage.
“I’ve always opposed trade deals not because I oppose trade,” Saul said,
“or
because I thought they were about getting a fair balance in the trade, but
because the trade deals were about something else. They were about
deregulation. They were about handing power to corporations and banks. They
weren’t about trade. Trump has again and again attacked the Canadian dairy
system. Nobody has stopped to ask him, ‘Why are you opposing this instead
of
adopting it for yourself?’ A lot of American dairy farmers would like to
have the Canadian system.”
“The free market approach to agriculture produces a surplus that drives
prices down and destroys the income of farmers,” Saul said. “There are two
ways of responding to this. One of them is subsidizing. Europe, following
the old social democratic approach, subsidizes their agricultural sector.
This drives down the income of farmers, so [the governments] subsidize
[agriculture] more. They have enormous surpluses. Periodically, they’re
throwing millions of tomatoes on the streets.”
“The United States claims it embraces the free market, but it does the same
thing as the Europeans,” Saul said. “It too heavily subsidizes the
agricultural industry. This leads to American dairy farmers producing too
much milk. This economic argument says the way to win is to mass-produce
cheap goods. This is the Walmart argument. You’re not selling your milk or
cheese for enough to make a living. The end result is, even though you
subsidize them, the farmers go bankrupt. They commit suicide. You have
terrible unhappiness in the [U.S.] dairy community.”
“We have a very efficient management system in Canada that keeps the prices
up, not so high that working-class people can’t buy milk and cheese, but it
keeps the prices up high enough that farmers can make a proper living,”
Saul
said. “Because farmers can make a proper living they’re not committing
suicide. What Trump is saying to Canadians is that they should give up a
system that works so Canadian farmers can commit suicide with American
farmers.”
“The problem with the Western world is surplus production,” Saul said.
“We’re in surplus production in almost every area. But there is a terrible
distribution system where people around the globe suffer and die from
starvation. This is a distribution problem, not a production problem.”
Saul said the imposition of tariffs and the crude insults Trump uses
against
American allies—he called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “dishonest
and weak”—are rapidly destroying America’s clout and standing in the global
hierarchy. This behavior is having very negative political, economic and
social consequences for the United States.
“The whole world, the Western world in particular, invested enormously in
the idea that the United States is the leader,” Saul said. “The idea that
the United States is to be admired. What’s sad about it is Americans take
it
for granted that the world loves them. They’ve never analyzed the
responsibilities that come with being the leader. It’s what you expect from
a good parent. You act in a certain way. People want to identify with the
United States. It’s been that way since the Second World War. All this is
being thrown away. Like or dislike Obama, he rebuilt a great part of the
world’s admiration for the United States. I know what his failures were.
But
I also know his strengths. He was a president who was capable of acting and
talking like the intelligent, civilized American that everyone wants to
admire.”
“But there’s always a shadow to the bright tower,” Saul went on. “Trump’s
feeding that shadow. ‘Americans are stupid. Americans are corrupt.
Americans
are not educated. Americans can’t be trusted.’ The whole list. The longer
the chaos goes on, the worse it gets.”
The collapse of the legislative and executive branches of government has
now
been accompanied by the collapse of the judiciary. The loss of an
independent judiciary, Saul warned, is especially ominous.
“The biggest problem in the United States is a very powerful and deeply
corrupted Supreme Court,” Saul said. “This will set patterns for decades.
It
will be hard to undo the evil being put into place.”
Saul despaired, at the same time, over the Trump administration’s attack on
public education, which he called “the most fundamental service of
government when it comes to a democracy.”
“What holds democracy up?” Saul asked. “What makes democracy work? Public
education is number one. A well-educated citizen. [Secretary of Education]
Betsy DeVos is undoing that. There is a special place for her in hell.”
U.S. trading partners and allies such as Canada and European states will,
he
said, reduce their dependence on the American market. The traditional
strategic and political ties to Washington will be steadily weakened. And
when the next financial crash comes, and Saul expects one to come, the
United States will be bereft of partners when it needs them most.
“If you treat your closest allies as a threat, who is going to stand with
you?” he asked.
Chris Hedges
