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I speak here for no one but myself. No complicity.
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Just because Trump isn't looking for war with Russia or any other nation (at this time) and wants to 'bring jobs back to America' doesn't mean that his intentions are anything remotely benevolent. He just doesn't want to die in a nuclear war and his brand of capitalist authoritarianism requires that people have jobs. Trump may well be the man who finally shows you just how depraved capitalism really is.
I know a very rich man who enthusiastically supported and voted for Trump. This man is a medical doctor and he once told me that he thinks there should be no medical facilities for prisoners in American prisons. He said it is a waste of time and money and is morally wrong. He said that people held in prisons don't deserve medical treatment and he has no problem with them just being left to die. No, I am not making this up. He really said it and meant it. And if you met him he would probably seem to you to be a very ordinary man who happens to have lots of money.
I asked him once what we should do about certain super-rich people who financially exploit, cheat, and sometimes ruin the lives of other people. He said he didn't have any idea what we should do about it and didn't care because "that's life." He said he thinks Trump is perhaps the man to make it possible for America to finally realize its true potential. I didn't ask him what he meant by that, but knowing that he equates 'morality' with making money, I had a pretty good idea.
Trump represents a certain type of maverick venal power-decadence that the USA has always been fascinated with and that can look like anyone from Cornelius Vanderbilt to Al Capone. It is in part the fantasy fascination of the ordinary frightened little clockwork conformist with the seemingly fearless daring of the opportunist who just takes what he wants with a perpetually grinning absence of compunction. A fascinating cavalier 'freedom'. And the USA has always had a rather immature and undeveloped idea of freedom. It's a stunted freedom that is always held by the chains of some form of venality. 'Americans' are profoundly vulnerable to this. Is the rise of Trump a sign of entrance into a new age of secretly idolized super-robber barons and super-gangsters who have government complicity? The Age of American Capitalist Feudalism. It's a very real possibility.
I see many people gazing on the alienating spectacle of President Trump and angrily longing for the days when it seemed that Bernie Sanders was bringing a genuinely moral 'revolution'. Let me address this issue of Sanders one more time and be done with it.
Sanders claimed in his primary run to be standing up against the oligarchs who are closely connected with a man such as Trump because they are connected with anything that has to do with big money. Sanders laid out his stance in terms of insurance companies, bankers, college tuition, and other domestic issues and called out the oligarchs on the unfairness of their practices in these areas. Now it can easily be demonstrated that the real essence of the oligarch agenda lies in its global-hegemony project. All of the oligarch domestic practices and policies in the USA are just the consequence of this larger agenda. So the place to shoot for the kill in the attack on oligarchs is here in the heart of oligarch agenda: foreign policy. Take out the oligarch foreign policy and the domestic policy will necessarily dissolve. But if you try to take out the domestic policy without addressing the foreign policy then you will get hopelessly tangled up in bureaucratic bull sh-t so deep that you'll be lucky to escape with any sanity because that's all the domestic domain is in the oligarchic system: bottomless bureaucratic bull sh-t. That is its design.
If Sanders had attacked the oligarchy in its heart of foreign policy everything else would have followed like falling dominoes. Take out the oligarch foreign policy and it becomes easy to address the domestic-policy issues. So why didn't Sanders do this? Why didn't he repeatedly and passionately raise the issue of the oligarch foreign policy that was turning domestic USA into an economic nightmare as well as threatening the rest of the world? Why? Because he wasn't against that foreign policy. He never once challenged that foreign policy in general. There were details in that foreign policy that he questioned, but more than 95 percent of the time he supported that foreign policy. And he never explained to anyone the rationale of opposing the oligarchs in domestic policy and supporting them in foreign policy because no one openly challenged Sanders on this blatant contradiction in his campaign message. So he got away with it.
Sanders was never really standing against the oligarchy in any essential way. He was merely 'demanding' that the oligarchy be somehow more 'compassionate' in the domestic consequences of its larger agenda, which he never even considered challenging. Sanders was like a 'soft-hearted' mid-level Mafia flunky who feels sorry for the ordinary people in the neighborhood who are subject to the Mafia tyranny. So he 'demands' that the goons be more gentle when they go to collect. But he never addresses the larger Mafia policies because he knows if he does he will soon be on the bottom of the East River sporting a new pair of cement shoes. And when the goons finally take soft-hearted Bernie into the back room and ask, "You gotta problem, Bernie? Don Giordano wants to know if you gotta problem. You gotta problem?" Bernie says, "Who me? Hey, Don Giordano knows I'm a true patriot. Look how long I been holdin' up that F-35! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha..." And Bruno says, "Hey, Bernie we're real glad to hear that, Bernie Little Buddy. You can go back home now, Gumba. And tell your wife, Hello, personal from Don Giordano."
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