The Ongoing War Against Trump

Sunday, 22 January 2017

The Ongoing War Against Trump

ERIC ZUESSE | 22.01.2017 | WORLD

The Ongoing War Against Trump

The Obama-Clinton (and Democratic Party newsmedia) war against Donald Trump — a war to delegitimize him as the U.S. President, and to soften the country up for installing instead a President as rabidly hostile toward Russia as Hillary Clinton would have been — continues on every front.

The New York Times headlined on Inauguration Day, Friday the 20th of January, «Donald Trump’s Inauguration Becomes a Time to Protest and Plan». That news-report said:

The American Civil Liberties Union announced on Thursday that it had filed its first legal action against Mr. Trump, a Freedom of Information Act request for documents about his potential conflicts of interest, and it released a seven-point plan to challenge every aspect of the incoming president’s agenda.

«It’s a first shot across the bow to underscore the fact that no one, not even the president, is above the law, and that there are serious concerns about the president’s disregard for existing laws and statutes,» said Anthony Romero, the executive director of the organization, which is adding 100 staff members — a 10 percent increase — in anticipation of taking legal action against Mr. Trump. »We need to go on offense from the very beginning, and we will litigate everything that we possibly can, we will try to deny them momentum, we’ll try to rob them of time and bandwidth».

The libertarian-liberal ACLU is financed mainly by Democratic Party aristocrats such as the hedge-fund gambler (euphemistically called ‘investor’) David Gelbaum ($19 million donated annually to ACLU until George W. Bush’s economic crash hit him hard in 2009 and forced him to stop), David Trone ($15 million in 2015), and George Soros (now in the fourth year of a $50 million total donation). Also, some Republican families such as the Kochs and the Waltons were mentioned, although that poorly written Washington Post article merely suggested, but failed to make clear whether, those families had donated anything to ACLU. Furthermore, the libertarian neoconservative (otherwise known as neoliberal neoconservative, or as imperialistic libertarian, or, more simply, as «war-mongering») Democrat Soros’s Center for Media & Democracy has exposed the fact that almost all of the libertarian Republican Kochs’ donations on criminal justice are actually to weaken laws against CEO and other white-collar crimes — so as to benefit the aristocracy, at the public’s expense. Furthermore, one of the much-pumped Koch ‘charitable’ involvements that helps poor ex-convicts, had actually received from the Kochs only a donation «in the six figures» — pocket-change, cheap lipstick on their enormous financial pig.

Soros himself, moreover, does far more to stir war against Russia than to ‘do good’ inside America or anywhere else; and so, for all aristocrats, ‘non-profits’ (such as ACLU) are likelier propaganda-vehicles to put a kindly face upon their unlimited greed (and partisan political campaigns), than they are actual agencies for the public’s good. Of course, the millions of small donors (who don’t own any ‘charities’) take no tax-deductions for their far more sincerely intended sacrifices of their personal donations; and all tax-deductions for ‘charitable donations’ are less of an actual generosity than they are a political scam on the rest of society, by the wealthiest Americans, to receive both good PR and lowered taxes, while the lower 90% become yet poorer than they were before, with no tax-deduction for their authentic generosity, and so those non-rich individuals end up being the people who pay the tab for it all, in taxes, low wages, and crumbling infrastructure. It’s a vast societal scam worldwide, by the top 0.1% actually, against the bottom 99.9%, in order that (for example) «Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world», and yet it somehow won’t be considered to be unearned wealth, theft (however subtly) by the richest few, from the less-fortunate half of the population. (No? Eight men are as worthy as are the 3.75 billion who constitute the world’s poorer half? Those eight earned as much as those 3.75 billion? Or do they simply take as much?) (What actually stands behind, and sustains, any such enormous concentration of wealth, is power, which is composed of deceit and violence — deceit if a ‘democracy’, violence if a dictatorship. It’s theft, either way. That’s just a fact. But, of course, myths, from the aristocracy, constantly deny it.)

So: who are Gelbaum and Trone? David Gelbaum ‘earned’ his fortune in high-frequency trading, using algorithms to identify moment-to-moment stock trends, at Princeton Newport Partners. David Trone is a strong believer in the fascist principle that money is speech, so that billionaires have thousands of times more ‘free speech’ ‘rights’ than normal people do, and this favoritism for the super-rich fits the Republican Supreme Court’s rulings that political campaigns should be one-dollar-one-vote instead of one-person-one-vote — or that no one’s political spending should be limited, a principle the ACLU has backed strongly. Trone’s own personal political contest, to become the Democratic candidate to replace the retiring Democrat Chris van Hollen in the U.S. House, spent more money, $393 per vote, than anyone in U.S. history had spent, and it was all his own money — and yet he was so lousy that he didn’t win the nomination anyway. Like most mega-donors, these ‘philanthropists’ join with others of like mind, to control their government (both political Parties), for their collective class benefits, the super-rich class against everybody else — but not against their ‘philanthropies’, their own tax-advantaged PR organizations. And yet some of them can’t win a Congressional nomination even paying $393 per vote; so, all that remains to them for swaying the government, is to use the propaganda-cover of «ACLU,» or some other ‘idealistic’ ‘charity’, to front their ‘philanthropy’.

America’s aristocracy just don’t like Trump, and they overwhelmingly — even Republican ones — preferred Hillary Clinton to become President. In the final tally for the 2016 Presidential election, Trump’s campaign spent $340 million for 62.98 million votes, and Hillary’s campaign spent $581 million for 65.84 million votes. Trump spent $5.39 per vote, while Hillary spent $8.82 per vote (much of Hillary’s being wasted in states like California where she clobbered Trump by 60% or more, whereas Trump focused only on the states that were toss-ups, which latter states decided the contest). (In America’s Electoral College, winning a given state by 1 vote is the same as winning it by 100% — it’s «winner take all».) (Yes, like throughout Hillary’s entire career, she was plain stupid, notwithstanding that she was articulate.) (Of course, both of the candidates were liars, but neither of them was nearly as skillful at that craft, as was Barack Obama, a supreme master of deceit.) Excluding $66 million which Trump himself had paid for his campaign (Hillary spent nothing on hers), his campaign received a mere $274 million from donors — less than half of the $581 million that Hillary’s donors gave to hers. (As regards the average size of the donations that any candidate has received, the American system is set up so that no such figure can be calculated, and the only sources on the matter come from the campaigns themselves and cannot be verified from any reliable source.) In any case: Clinton was overwhelmingly (by more than two-to-one) favored above Trump by America’s aristocracy.

Consequently, whereas the U.S. aristocracy were willing to finance George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and (in 2016) Hillary Clinton, into the White House, they provided far fewer funds to their fellow-aristocrat Donald Trump, who wants to end the Cold War on the U.S. side now — 25 years after George Herbert Walker Bush and all of his successor-Presidents until Trump had consistently refused to end the Cold War, even though it ended on the Soviet side in 1991, when the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance all ended, even while America’s anti-Russia NATO military alliance continues to this day. Ending that war by the U.S. side would mean steep declines in some of the aristocracy’s major investments: they therefore resist it implacably.

Trump is offering, to his fellow-aristocrats, a deal, and we’ll soon know whether enough of them accept it, for him to be allowed to serve out his term: generous opportunities to scam the American public, in some ways even more than Obama and Bush did. So far, it seems that America’s aristocrats simply will not accept anything less than the precise type of scam that GHW Bush instituted and laid the groundwork for: rule of, by, and for, America’s military-industrial complex (themselves), focused specifically upon conquering Russia (mainly because that’s not only the most resource-rich target, but also because it’s the only ‘enemy’ that to ‘compete’ against with new weaponry would keep their own mega-arms firms soaring).

Trump has given these people a national-security team that is rabid to conquer Iran; but, apparently, even this aggressive intent is not sufficient to win their support. Nothing but conquering Russia will suffice, for them; so, they are now pressing forward with their scheme to portray Trump as being ‘Putin’s puppet’.

They have thus thrown down the gauntlet, and they stand a reasonably good likelihood of being able soon to replace him with his current Vice President, Mike Pence, who has no such rebellious tendency. Perhaps the Republican establishment would have gone all-in for Hillary Clinton (and Trump wouldn’t even have gotten that $274 million) unless Trump offered them a Vice Presidential candidate, a back-up, whom they approved of (such as Pence); but Trump’s having made this concession to them could end up as his un-doing. What more concessions could he offer them than he has already done by his rabidly anti-Iranian Cabinet-appointments? Only time will tell, and it could tell soon.

So, now comes the moment when the answer — whether Trump rules his aristocracy, or his aristocracy rules Trump — will likely soon become clear.