Nobody yet can tell whether Donald Trump is an
agent of change with a specific policy in mind, or merely a catalyst
heralding an as yet undetermined turning point. His first month in the
White House saw him melting into the Republican mélange of corporate
lobbyists. Having promised to create jobs, his “America First” policy
looks more like “Wall Street First.”
His cabinet of billionaires promoting corporate tax cuts,
deregulation and dismantling Dodd-Frank bank reform repeats the Junk
Economics promise that giving more tax breaks to the richest One Percent
may lead them to use their windfall to invest in creating more jobs.
What they usually do, of course, is simply buy more property and assets
already in place.
One of the first reactions to Trump’s election victory was for stocks
of the most crooked financial institutions to soar, hoping for a
deregulatory scythe taken to the public sector. Navient, the Department
of Education’s knee-breaker on student loan collections accused by the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) of massive fraud and
overcharging, rose from $13 to $18 now that it seemed likely that the
incoming Republicans would disable the CFPB and shine a green light for
financial fraud.
Foreclosure king Stephen Mnuchin of IndyMac/OneWest (and formerly of
Goldman Sachs for 17 years; later a George Soros partner) is now
Treasury Secretary – and Trump is pledged to abolish the CFPB, on the
specious logic that letting fraudsters manage pension savings and other
investments will give consumers and savers “broader choice,” e.g., for
the financial equivalent of junk food.
Secretary of Education Betsy
DeVos hopes to privatize public education into for-profit (and
de-unionized) charter schools, breaking the teachers’ unions. This may
position Trump to become the Transformational President that neoliberals
have been waiting for.
Nobody yet can tell whether Donald Trump is an agent of change with a
specific policy in mind, or merely a catalyst heralding an as yet
undetermined turning point. His first month in the White House saw him
melting into the Republican mélange of corporate lobbyists. Having
promised to create jobs, his “America First” policy looks more like
“Wall Street First.” His cabinet of billionaires promoting corporate tax
cuts, deregulation and dismantling Dodd-Frank bank reform repeats the
Junk Economics promise that giving more tax breaks to the richest One
Percent may lead them to use their windfall to invest in creating more
jobs. What they usually do, of course, is simply buy more property and
assets already in place.
One of the first reactions to Trump’s election victory was for stocks
of the most crooked financial institutions to soar, hoping for a
deregulatory scythe taken to the public sector. Navient, the Department
of Education’s knee-breaker on student loan collections accused by the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) of massive fraud and
overcharging, rose from $13 to $18 now that it seemed likely that the
incoming Republicans would disable the CFPB and shine a green light for
financial fraud.
Foreclosure king
Stephen Mnuchin of IndyMac/OneWest
(and formerly of Goldman Sachs for 17 years; later a George Soros
partner) is now Treasury Secretary – and Trump is pledged to abolish the
CFPB, on the specious logic that letting fraudsters manage pension
savings and other investments will give consumers and savers “broader
choice,” e.g., for the financial equivalent of junk food.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos
hopes to privatize public education into for-profit (and de-unionized)
charter schools, breaking the teachers’ unions. This may position Trump
to become the Transformational President that neoliberals have been
waiting for.
But not the neocons. His election rhetoric promised to reverse
traditional U.S. interventionist policy abroad. Making an anti-war left
run around the Democrats, he promised to stop backing ISIS/Al Nusra
(President Obama’s “moderate” terrorists supplied with the arms and
money that Hillary looted from Libya), and to reverse the Obama-Clinton
administration’s New Cold War with Russia. But the neocon coterie at the
CIA and State Department are undercutting his proposed rapprochement
with Russia by forcing out General Flynn for starters. It seems doubtful
that Trump will clean them out.
Trump has called NATO obsolete, but insists that its members up their
spending to the stipulated 2% of GDP — producing a windfall worth tens
of billions of dollars for U.S. arms exporters. That is to be the price
Europe must pay if it wants to endorse Germany’s and the Baltics’
confrontation with Russia.
Trump is sufficiently intuitive to proclaim the euro a disaster, and
he recommends that Greece leave it. He supports the rising nationalist
parties in Britain, France, Italy, Greece and the Netherlands, all of
which urge withdrawal from the eurozone – and reconciliation with Russia
instead of sanctions. In place of the ill-fated TPP and TTIP, Trump
advocates country-by-country trade deals favoring the United States.
Toward this end, his designated ambassador to the European Union, Ted
Malloch, urges the EU’s breakup. The EU is refusing to accept him as
ambassador.
Will Trump’s victory break up the Democratic Party?
At the time this volume is going to press, there is no way of knowing
how successful these international reversals will be. What is more
clear is what Trump’s political impact will have at home. His victory –
or more accurately, Hillary’s resounding loss and the
way she
lost – has encouraged enormous pressure for a realignment of both
parties. Regardless of what President Trump may achieve vis-Ã -vis
Europe, his actions as celebrity chaos agent may break up U.S. politics
across the political spectrum.
The Democratic Party has lost its ability to pose as the party of
labor and the middle class. Firmly controlled by Wall Street and
California billionaires, the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
strategy of identity politics encourages any identity
except that
of wage earners. The candidates backed by the Donor Class have been
Blue Dogs pledged to promote Wall Street and neocons urging a New Cold
War with Russia.
They preferred to lose with
Hillary than to win behind
Bernie Sanders.
So Trump’s electoral victory is their legacy as well as Obama’s.
Instead of Trump’s victory dispelling that strategy, the Democrats are
doubling down. It is as if identity politics is all they have.
Trying to ride on Barack Obama’s coattails didn’t work. Promising
“hope and change,” he won by posing as a transformational president,
leading the Democrats to control of the White House, Senate and Congress
in 2008. Swept into office by a national reaction against the George
Bush’s Oil War in Iraq and the junk-mortgage crisis that left the
economy debt-ridden, they had free rein to pass whatever new laws they
chose – even a Public Option in health care if they had wanted, or make
Wall Street banks absorb the losses from their bad and often fraudulent
loans.
But it turned out that Obama’s role was to
prevent the
changes that voters hoped to see, and indeed that the economy needed to
recover: financial reform, debt writedowns to bring junk mortgages in
line with fair market prices, and throwing crooked bankers in jail.
Obama rescued the banks, not the economy, and turned over the Justice
Department and regulatory agencies to his Wall Street campaign
contributors. He did not even pull back from war in the Near East, but
extended it to Libya and Syria, blundering into the Ukrainian coup as
well.
Having dashed the hopes of his followers, Obama then praised his
chosen successor Hillary Clinton as his “Third Term.” Enjoying this kiss
of death, Hillary promised to keep up Obama’s policies.
The straw that pushed voters over the edge was when she asked voters,
“Aren’t you better off today than you were eight years ago?” Who were
they going to believe: their eyes, or Hillary? National income
statistics showed that only the top 5 percent of the population were
better off. All the growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during
Obama’s tenure went to them – the Donor Class that had gained control of
the Democratic Party leadership. Real incomes have fallen for the
remaining 95 percent, whose household budgets have been further eroded
by soaring charges for health insurance. (The Democratic leadership in
Congress fought tooth and nail to block
Dennis Kucinich from introducing his Single Payer proposal.)
No wonder most of the geographic United States voted for change –
except for where the top 5 percent, is concentrated: in New York (Wall
Street) and California (Silicon Valley and the military-industrial
complex). Making fun of the Obama Administration’s slogan of “hope and
change,” Trump characterized Hillary’s policy of continuing the
economy’s shrinkage for the 95% as “no hope and no change.”
Identity Politics as anti-labor politics
A new term was introduced to the English language: Identity Politics.
Its aim is for voters to think of themselves as separatist minorities –
women, LGBTQ, Blacks and Hispanics. The Democrats thought they could
beat Trump by organizing Women for Wall Street (and a New Cold War),
LGBTQ for Wall Street (and a New Cold War), and Blacks and Hispanics for
Wall Street (and a New Cold War).
Each identity cohort was headed by a
billionaire or hedge fund donor.
The identity that is conspicuously excluded is the working class.
Identity politics strips away thinking of one’s interest in terms of
having to work for a living. It excludes voter protests against having
their monthly paycheck stripped to pay more for health insurance,
housing and mortgage charges or education, or better working conditions
or consumer protection – not to speak of protecting debtors.
Identity politics used to be about three major categories: workers
and unionization, anti-war protests and civil rights marches against
racist Jim Crow laws. These were the three objectives of the many
nationwide demonstrations. That ended when these movements got co-opted
into the Democratic Party. Their reappearance in Bernie Sanders’
campaign in fact threatens to tear the Democratic coalition apart. As
soon as the primaries were over (duly stacked against Sanders), his
followers were made to feel unwelcome. Hillary sought Republican support
by denouncing Sanders as being as radical as Putin’s Republican
leadership.
In contrast to Sanders’ attempt to convince diverse groups that they
had a common denominator in needing jobs with decent pay – and, to
achieve that, in opposing Wall Street’s replacing the government as
central planner – the Democrats depict every identity constituency as
being victimized by every other, setting themselves at each other’s
heels. Clinton strategist
John Podesta, for instance,
encouraged Blacks to accuse Sanders supporters of distracting attention
from racism. Pushing a common economic interest between whites, Blacks,
Hispanics and LGBTQ always has been the neoliberals’ nightmare. No
wonder they tried so hard to stop Bernie Sanders, and are maneuvering to
keep his supporters from gaining influence in their party.
When Trump was inaugurated on Friday, January 20, there was no
pro-jobs or anti-war demonstration. That presumably would have attracted
pro-Trump supporters in an ecumenical show of force. Instead, the
Women’s March on Saturday led even the pro-Democrat
New York Times to
write a front-page article reporting that white women were complaining
that they did not feel welcome in the demonstration. The message to
anti-war advocates, students and Bernie supporters was that their
economic cause was a distraction.
The march was typically Democratic in that its ideology did not threaten the Donor Class. As
Yves Smith wrote on
Naked Capitalism:
“the track record of non-issue-oriented marches, no
matter how large scale, is poor, and the status of this march as
officially sanctioned (blanket media coverage when other marches of
hundreds of thousands of people have been minimized, police not tricked
out in their usual riot gear) also indicates that the officialdom does
not see it as a threat to the status quo.”[1]
Hillary’s loss was not blamed on her neoliberal support for TPP or
her pro-war neocon stance, but on the revelations of the e-mails by her
operative Podesta discussing his dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders
(claimed to be given to Wikileaks by Russian hackers, not a domestic DNC
leaker as Wikileaks claimed) and the FBI investigation of her e-mail
abuses at the State Department. Backing her supporters’ attempt to
brazen it out, the Democratic Party has doubled down on its identity
politics, despite the fact that an estimated 52 percent of white women
voted for Trump. After all, women do work for wages. And that also is
what Blacks and Hispanics want – in addition to banking that serves
their needs, not those of Wall Street, and health care that serves
their needs, not those of the health-insurance and pharmaceuticals monopolies.
Bernie did not choose to run on a third-party ticket. Evidently he
feared being accused of throwing the election to Trump. The question is
now whether he can remake the Democratic Party as a democratic socialist
party, or create a new party if the Donor Class retains its neoliberal
control. It seems that he will not make a break until he concludes that a
Socialist Party can leave the Democrats as far back in the dust as the
Republicans left the Whigs after 1854. He may have underestimated his
chance in 2016.
Trump’s effect on U.S. political party realignment
During Trump’s rise to the 2016 Republican nomination it seemed that
he was more likely to break up the Republican Party. Its leading
candidates and gurus warned that his populist victory in the primaries
would tear the party apart. The polls in May and June showed him
defeating Hillary Clinton easily (but losing to Bernie Sanders). But
Republican leaders worried that he would not support what they believed
in: namely, whatever corporate lobbyists put in their hands to enact and
privatize.
The May/June polls showed Trump and Clinton were the country’s two
most unpopular presidential candidates. But whereas the Democrats
maneuvered Bernie out of the way, the Republican Clown Car was unable to
do the same to Trump. In the end they chose to win behind him,
expecting to control him. As for the DNC, its Wall Street donors
preferred to lose with Hillary than to win with Bernie. They wanted to
keep control of their party and continue the bargain they had made with
the Republicans: The latter would move further and further to the right,
leaving room for Democratic neoliberals and neocons to follow them
closely, yet still pose as the “lesser evil.” That “centrism” is the
essence of the Clintons’ “triangulation” strategy. It actually has been
going on for a half-century.
“As Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere
quipped in the 1960s, when he was accused by the US of running a
one-party state, ‘The United States is also a one-party state but, with
typical American extravagance, they have two of them’.”[2]
By 2017, voters had caught on to this two-step game. But Hillary’s
team paid pollsters over $1 billion to tell her (“Mirror, mirror on the
wall …”) that she was the most popular of all. It was hubris to imagine
that she could convince the 95 Percent of the people who were worse off
under Obama to love her as much as her East-West Coast donors did. It
was politically unrealistic – and a reflection of her cynicism – to
imagine that raising enough money to buy television ads would convince
working-class Republicans to vote for her, succumbing to a Stockholm
Syndrome by thinking of themselves as part of the 5 Percent who had
benefited from Obama’s pro-Wall Street policies.
Hillary’s election strategy was to make a right-wing run around
Trump. While characterizing the working class as white racist
“deplorables,” allegedly intolerant of LBGTQ or assertive women, she
resurrected the ghost of
Joe McCarthy and accused Trump of being “Putin’s poodle” for proposing peace with Russia. Among the most liberal Democrats,
Paul Krugman still leads a biweekly charge at
The New York Times that
President Trump is following Moscow’s orders. Saturday Night Live, Bill
Maher and MSNBC produce weekly skits that Trump and
General Flynn
are Russian puppets. A large proportion of Democrats have bought into
the fairy tale that Trump didn’t really win the election, but that
Russian hackers manipulated the voting machines. No wonder George
Orwell’s
1984 soared to the top of America’s best-seller lists in February 2017 as Donald Trump was taking his oath of office.
This propaganda paid off on February 13, when neocon public relations
succeeded in forcing the resignation of General Flynn, whom Trump had
appointed to clean out the neocons at the NSA and CIA. His foreign
policy initiative based on rapprochement with Russia and hopes to create
a common front against ISIS/Al Nusra seemed to be collapsing.
Tabula Rasa Celebrity Politics
U.S. presidential elections no longer are much about policy. Like Obama before him, Trump campaigned as a
rasa tabla,
a vehicle for everyone to project their hopes and fancies. What has all
but disappeared is the past century’s idea of politics as a struggle
between labor and capital, democracy vs. oligarchy.
Who would have expected even half a century ago that American
politics would become so post-modern that the idea of class conflict has
all but disappeared. Classical economic discourse has been drowned out
by their junk economics.
There is a covert economic program, to be sure, and it is bipartisan.
It is to make elections about just which celebrities will introduce
neoliberal economic policies with the most convincing patter talk. That
is the essence of
rasa tabla politics.
Can the Democrats lose again in 2020?
Trump’s November victory showed that voters found
him to be
the Lesser Evil, but all that voters really could express was “throw out
the bums” and get a new set of lobbyists for the FIRE sector and
corporate monopolists. Both candidates represented Goldman Sachs and
Wall Street. No wonder voter turnout has continued to plunge.
Although the Democrats’ Lesser Evil argument lost to the Republicans
in 2016, the neoliberals in control of the DNC found the absence of a
progressive economic program to less threatening to their interests than
the critique of Wall Street and neocon interventionism coming from the
Sanders camp. So the Democrat will continue to pose as the Lesser Evil
party not really in terms of policy, but simply
ad hominum. They will merely repeat Hillary’s campaign stance: They are
not Trump. Their parades and street demonstrations since his inauguration have not come out for any economic policy.
On Friday, February 10, the party’s Democratic Policy group held a
retreat for its members in Baltimore. Third Way “centrists” (Republicans
running as Democrats) dominated, with Hillary operatives in charge. The
conclusion was that no party policy was needed at all.
“President Trump is a better recruitment tool for us than a central campaign issue,’ said Washington Rep. Denny Heck, who is leading recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).”[3]
But what does their party leadership have to offer women, Blacks and
Hispanics in the way of employment, more affordable health care, housing
or education and better pay? Where are the New Deal pro-labor,
pro-regulatory roots of bygone days? The party leadership is unwilling
to admit that Trump’s message about protecting jobs and opposing the TPP
played a role in his election. Hillary was suspected of supporting it
as “the gold standard” of trade deals, and Obama had made the
Trans-Pacific Partnership the centerpiece of his presidency – the
free-trade TPP and TTIP that would have taken economic regulatory policy
out of the hands of government and given it to corporations.
Instead of accepting even Sanders’ centrist-left stance, the
Democrats’ strategy was to tar Trump as pro-Russian, insist that his
aides had committed impeachable offenses, and mount one parade after
another. “
Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio told reporters she
was wary of focusing solely on an “economic message” aimed at voters
whom Trump won over in 2016, because, in her view, Trump did not win on
an economic message.
“What Donald Trump did was address them at a very
different level — an emotional level, a racial level, a fear level,” she
said. “If all we talk about is the economic message, we’re not going to
win.”[4]
This stance led Sanders supporters to walk out of a meeting organized
by the “centrist” Third Way think tank on Wednesday, February 8.
By now this is an old story. Fifty years ago, socialists such as
Michael Harrington
asked why union members and progressives still imagined that they had
to work through the Democratic Party. It has taken the rest of the
country half a century to see that Democrats are not the party of the
working class, unions, middle class, farmers or debtors. They are the
party of Wall Street privatizers, bank deregulators, neocons and the
military-industrial complex. Obama showed his hand – and that of his
party – in his passionate attempt to ram through the corporatist TPP
treaty that would have enabled corporations to sue governments for any
costs imposed by public consumer protection, environmental protection or
other protection of the population against financialized corporate
monopolies.
Against this backdrop, Trump’s promises and indeed his worldview seem
quixotic. The picture of America’s future he has painted seems
unattainable within the foreseeable future. It is too late to bring
manufacturing back to the United States, because corporations already
have shifted their supply nodes abroad, and too much U.S. infrastructure
has been dismantled.
There can’t be a high-speed railroad, because it would take more than
four years to get the right-of-way and create a route without crossing
gates or sharp curves. In any case, the role of railroads and other
transportation has been to increase real estate prices along the routes.
But in this case, real estate would be torn down – and having a
high-speed rail does not increase land values.
The stock market has soared to new heights, anticipating lower taxes
on corporate profits and a deregulation of consumer, labor and
environmental protection. Trump may end up as America’s
Boris Yeltsin,
protecting U.S. oligarchs (not that Hillary would have been different,
merely cloaked in a more colorful identity rainbow). The U.S. economy is
in for Shock Therapy. Voters should look to Greece to get a taste of
the future in this scenario.
Without a coherent response to neoliberalism, Trump’s billionaire
cabinet may do to the United States what neoliberals in the Clinton
administration did to Russia after 1991: tear out all the checks and
balances, and turn public wealth over to insiders and oligarchs. So
Trump’s his best chance to be transformative is simply to be America’s
Yeltsin for his party’s oligarchic backers, putting the class war back
in business.
What a truly transformative president would do/would have done
No administration can create a sound U.S. recovery without dealing
with the problem that caused the 2008 crisis in the first place:
over-indebtedness. The only one way to restore growth, raise living
standards and make the economy competitive again is a debt writedown.
But that is not yet on the political horizon. Obama’s doublecross of his
voters in 2009 prevented the needed policy from occurring. Having
missed this chance in the last financial crisis, a progressive policy
must await yet another crisis. But so far, no political party is
preparing a program to juxtapose to Republican-Democratic austerity and
scale-back of Social Security, Medicare and social spending programs in
general.
Also no longer on the horizon is a more progressive income tax, or a
public option for health care – or for banking, or consumer protection
against financial fraud, or for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, or for a
revived protection of labor’s right to unionize, or environmental
regulations.
It seems that only a new party can achieve these aims. At the time
these essays are going to press, Sanders has committed himself to
working within the Democratic Party. But that stance is based on his
assumption that somehow he can recruit enough activists to take over the
party from Its Donor Class.
I suspect he will fail. In any case, it is easier to begin afresh
than to try to re-design a party (or any institution) dominated by
resistance to change, and whose idea of economic growth is a pastiche of
tax cuts and deregulation. Both U.S. parties are committed to this
neoliberal program – and seek to blame foreign enemies for the fact that
its effect is to continue squeezing living standards and bloating the
financial sector.
If this slow but inexorable crash does lead to a political crisis, it
looks like the Republicans may succeed in convening a new
Constitutional Convention (many states already have approved this) to
lock the United States into a corporatist neoliberal world. Its slogan
will be that of Margaret Thatcher: TINA – There Is No Alternative.
And who is to disagree? As
Trotsky said, fascism is the result of the failure of the left to provide an alternative.
>>http://www.globalresearch.ca/wall-street-first-trump-is-obamas-legacy-will-this-break-up-the-democratic-party/5581684<<
Notes.
[4] Ibid.
