The Elon Musk/Donald Trump Alliance appears to be holding for now. Both are serving the other’s needs, such as they are. Elon dreams of colonizing Mars and being a messenger of the salvation of humankind, while Donald, oblivious to the suffering loss of Palestinian lives and homes, envisions a Trump Hotel and golf course rising from the rubble of the Gaza Strip. Both of these egocentric sociopaths, hungry for power and certain of their brilliance, are off the charts of psychiatric normalcy. Both have severely damaged psyches enthralled with wielding power. Thus far, they are working in tandem to lay a broad axe to the structures of American government, an act no less globally unsettling than that of the Trotsky/Lenin overthrow of the Russian Tsars. Some speculate that a Clash of the Titans is inevitable, perhaps an Alien Versus Predator scenario raging through the halls of the White House and Congress. Someone has to emerge as number one. In the meantime, confusion and anxiety over the ramifications of Trump 2.0 hang over everyone’s future.
Tag Archives: Capitalism
Racing apace
Everything everywhere all at once. The breakneck speed and urgency of Donald Trump’s first days of imposing his will on government and the American people is dizzying to anyone trying to analyze and comprehend what is emerging. Confusion is enervating and Trump is the master of manipulation, adept at bending anger and mass hysteria in his favor, and tweeting doublethink for and against nearly every issue. All the while, Congressional members are trembling in their suits in fear of stirring his anger. Welcome to 1984. George Orwell was eerily prescient in showing the overwhelming power of Doublespeak in propaganda messaging when it is omnipresent and unquestioned. With the rise of social media and data mining, personal privacy no longer exists, and Big Brother, aka Donald Trump, is ever watchful and demanding.
RP
Wave Boarding
Leaders of nations around the world, autocratic and/or elected, are all riding varying waves of political and cultural history and momentum. The United States is no exception, but what Donald Trump has ingeniously done is change the American ethos from one of being an amalgam “Melting Pot” of diverse peoples and cultures to the earlier one of “Manifest Destiny”, the belief that the bounty of New World was God’s gift to enterprising, primarily white immigrants claiming ownership of land and utilizing the newly arriving labor to create personal wealth and build a nation of winners and losers based on capitalist exploitation. Black slavery was eventually abolished, but “people of color” and women have long belonged to a distinctly lesser class to be put to use. In Donald Trump’s view, America has always been a white man’s world.
For those who thought and hoped his semi-coherent rambling was merely political bluster and posturing are today waking up to the realization that America has elected an ego maniac who fully intends to do everything he said he would do in leading the free world into the 21st Century. Those less zealous riding his coattails into the future should be questioning just what exactly they have signed up on.
When the unelected million/billionaire Tech titans are seated in the front row with the incoming Cabinet members behind them at the inauguration, it is clear who Trump sees as the best Americans to be rewarded, those making the most money. His pardon of the Capital rioters indicates his concept of law-and-order is that criminals supporting him are heroes, not criminals, and he intends to “weaponize the Justice Department” against his perceived enemies. The talk radio spin and doublethink on all this is mind boggling, but having January 6th made a national holiday looms as an actual possibility. Further, on the subject of mania and beyond, Elon Musk, the Buck Rogers dreamer of space travel and the colonization of Mars and self appointed Czar of government efficiency is not the first genius mind in history to go off the rails. His dalliance and embrace of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany is more than sadly disturbing. It is dangerous in our next four year journey into the future.
RP
Destiny in Question
Donald Trump, his MAGA acolytes, and his millionaire/billionaire supporters are simply a continuation of America’s “Manifest Destiny”, the belief that this New World continent was God’s gift to White men. That the birth of the United States included the genocide of the America’s First People, slavery, women regarded as second class citizens, and the exploitation of the Earth and human labor is not important to these “true” American patriots. Everything was for the taking, a concept that has not left the country. With its belief that racial and cultural diversity leads to the undoing of American values, the Trump phenomenon has deep roots in our history and heritage, and can be seen as an heirloom fruit of the Founding Fathers. Countering that embedded cultural momentum and its resulting concentration of wealth and power, and addressing human-caused global warming will require a monumental shift of national and human ingenuity and identity. It is not just us, the entire world faces a daunting future. There will be no easy sailing for whoever is the next President.
The Future of Trumpism
The MAGA rioters who stormed the Capitol and the Neo-Nazi Fascist Klansmen marching at a Trump rally in Charlottesville regarded themselves as patriotic revolutionaries acting under a romantic illusion that brute force was a realistic means to keep Donald Trump in the White House. The real insurrectionists today are the authors and proponents of Project 2025 who recognize that the true power in capitalist America is money, even more so since the Conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that it had unlimited “free speech” power. Project 2025 is structured around a Libertarian ethos of freedom from regulation, maximum profit, and concentrated wealth that will radically alter the historical arc of American democracy. It has deep pocket corporate and individual backers. Donald Trump aspires to personal autocratic power, able to hire and fire as he sees fit, but at the forefront of Project 2025, he is largely a storefront manikin and incoherent entry level drug to an authoritarian rule of wealth. J D Vance has had a few opening glitches, but with his manly White embrace of religious and family values, his roots in the Midwest, and time spent in the tech world of Silicon Valley, he stands as a reliably malleable successor to lead the Project 2025 revolution. In this election, America stands at a crossroads of its self-definition.
RP
On and on
Cultural momentum, be Chinese and Russian authoritarian imperialism or Euro-American colonial white supremacy, remain primal driving forces in world political history. The same must be said of the religious institutions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, each claiming being the favorite of God, and equally so of the global consumption of the life and riches of the Earth for survival and power. War and violence, profit and larceny, have been part and parcel of human history from its onset. As for American democracy being “a shining city on a hill”, armaments and munitions sales are soaring, fossil fuel drilling and consumption are booming, Andrew Jackson, father of the Trail of Tears, remains the face of the $20 bill, and Donald Trump aspires to an autocratic Presidency and has an avid following. The trajectory of mankind, increasingly technologically accelerated, seems ever more virally spiraling out of control, trending toward an uncertain end. The meek may well be destined to inherit the Earth or at least what is left of it. A basic law of physics states that a body in motion remains in motion until meeting a countering force. The heart of humankind is divided, at best bipolar, in imagining the future. Where we eventually land is narrowing precipitously.
RP
Disorder
Regarded honestly, our American (and now global) psycho-social political economic configuration and underpinnings have no capacity nor inclination to realistically address global warming, the concentration of wealth, economic and climate migration, drug addiction, homelessness, misogyny, gun violence, unending (and profitable) warfare, nor universal healthcare, yet capitalist enterprise continues to be held up as the human ideal and inevitable “way of the world”. The world of finance thrives in an ethos built on the use of all available resources, human and natural. This ecology, our relationship with the world around us, is uniquely adversarial, exploitive, and destructive. “The Market” is worshipped as an all-powerful god. Those benefiting from this state of affairs, corporate and individual, have no qualms about using all their privilege, power, and wealth to maintain the status quo. Maximum profit is the “Golden Rule” of modern corporate business. Throughout history, those drawn to the allure and trappings of power and wealth have dominated the distribution of community well-being. “Overlord” is an antique term, but it is the most accurate description of today’s sociopolitical economy. Whether this is human nature or a carefully crafted manipulation to enrich a small elite class is the question of the Ages.
-RP
Trickle Down
To the Editor:
Let’s call it Trickle Me Once, Trickle Me Twice. The Trumpublican tax “reform” is a simple reaffirmation of Ronald Reagan’s supply-side, trickle down economic platform that has resulted in the wealth and income disparity we have today. It is purely magical thinking to believe that the corporate world will share its tax windfall with the average working American whose own tax “relief”, unlike that for corporations, is set to expire. Company bonuses are nice but, unlike pay raises, they are only temporary. In other words, future deficits will fall squarely upon public rather than corporate income and Conservatives can amplify their disparagement of federal public well-being and safety net programs such as Medicare and Social Security. The goal seems to be to continue the transformation of America into a Banana Republic ruled by a wealthy, oligarchical elite. All “isms” have positive and negative aspects, but coupled with the deregulation of banking and the fossil fuel extraction industries, this is Capitalism at its worst.
Robert Porath
Education
To the Editor:
Up until Ronald Reagan was elected Governor, public education through college was free for any citizen of California. One could call it socialist education, an entitlement program that benefited anyone wishing to become better educated. As the “Question Authority” and Free Speech movements and the anti-Viet Nam war protests grew on college campuses, the Conservative sentiment became “education is not for the masses” and must be relegated to a select few, easily manageable and fully buying into the status quo and America’s self-image, and the push has been to render higher education increasingly more expensive and privatized. What better way to ensure compliant behavior is there than to have everyone indebted to the financial industries? There is a lot of braggadocio about the “freedoms” inherent in capitalism, but being constantly indentured, be it to a bank or, for that matter, to “must-have” telecommunication services, does not seem much like true freedom. The great irony is that the emphasis on the monetary value of education, in reality, only cheapens its true value, both to an individual and to society at large. Call it socialism, if you must, but like healthcare and retirement planning, education should not be placed so heavily under the thumb of for-profit institutions.
– RP
Original Intent
To the Editor:
Reduced to their basic elements, politics is concerned with the creation and distribution of power within a society, while economics delineates the creation and distribution of its wealth. Democracy and capitalism are not automatically, or even necessarily, synonymous. Socialist democracies exist, as do capitalist autocracies. At the time of the writing of the U.S. Constitution, the idea of a democracy, of a government by the people of a nation rather than by an aristocratic elite, was an untried and unproven proposal. If there was genius in the creation of this ground-breaking document, it was that, through argument and discussion and compromise, the Founding Fathers came upon an extensive system of checks and balances designed to prevent the abuse of power by any one sector of the many voices that make up the wide spectrum of interests that is “We the People”. This balancing of powers is crucial to the survival of democracy. No form of government will always be correct in its actions and America’s democracy is no exception, but it has had the capability and flexibility to correct its mistakes along the way.
Of equal importance to the maintenance of a democracy is a balance of wealth. This does not mean an equality of wealth, but rather a balanced distribution. In human nature there will always be some who pursue wealth relentlessly while others may care little about its accumulation. However, since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, wealth has become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands to the point that today we have 400 billionaires with more wealth than that held by nearly the entire rest of the population. While some may wish to say this outcome is simply a result of “Social Darwinism”, that this is a natural process in capitalism, it has actually come to fruition through the halls of government, through a legislated tax structure that favors disproportionately the interests of the wealthy over those of the common citizen. The influence of money in politics acts as both the carrot and the stick in driving the legislative process.
Further, the five conservative Justices on the Supreme Court have consistently ruled that the interests of corporations supercede those of the individual and, in the Citizens United decision, have legitimatized money as integral to the right of free speech first granted in the Magna Carta in 1215. In today’s world of commercial advertising on radio and television, a world the Founders, even in their wildest dreams, could never have imagined, money in political campaigning has immense power. In these rulings, five men have radically tipped the scales of government in favor of the influence of wealth in the political system. In the coming presidential election it is projected that the combined campaigns alone may spend nearly a billion dollars and unprecedented amounts are pouring into Congressional races as well. To what end are the super rich funneling millions into Republican campaigns if not for the continuation of a favorable tax code and a lasting bias in the Supreme Court.
How the Conservative Justices find “original intent” in any of this requires a leap of logic that is hard enough to fathom without recalling that this was the same group that decided that an accurate accounting of the votes in Florida was inconvenient and unnecessary and installed George Bush as President over Al Gore in 2000 and realizing just how much power the Court has assumed for itself over the years. It is impossible to imagine the writers of the Constitution not being shocked at the shambles their checks and balances are in today and that their dream of democracy is being supplanted by a wealthy ruling class.
RP
Notes from the Provinces 