July 7, 2017
by Rob Urie
In significant ways popular
condemnation of Donald Trump and the corporate titans and billionaires he
brought with him to ‘public’ office is cluttered beyond what makes analytical
sense. Mr. Trump is the quintessential plutocrat— a self-interested man of
inherited means and limited life experience who stumbled upward through
political economy engineered to benefit his class. It is this very public
nature of his ‘success’ that attaches class culpability to his actions.
If the problem is plutocracy,
this is the one that must be addressed. Otherwise, who are these wise and
caring plutocrats who are preferred to Mr. Trump? When Hillary Clinton was
giving speeches to Wall Street ($21
million in speaking fees in two years), was she speaking to the
intelligent, competent and socially ‘woke’ plutocrats who will someday soon
save the environment and end U.S. militarism? When Barack Obama was bailing out
Wall Street, was he bailing out the good and just plutocrats who really care
about the rest of us?
Graph: The economic
circumstances of people who have to work— middle-aged breadwinners, has been
declining since the onset of the neo-capitalist coup in the mid-1970s. The
Clinton ‘boom’ was weak relative to earlier history and the (George W.) Bush
and (Barack) Obama booms (a/k/a economic calamities) were weaker still.
Bi-partisan political actions have supported the ‘right’ of capitalists to
crush labor and that is what they have done. How surprising then are the
consequences? Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
The conceptual challenge of
the moment is reconciling the form and function of late-capitalist political
economy with its product(s). Even if Mr. Trump were a ‘rogue’ plutocrat, he
brought enough of his class-mates into his administration to provide ballast to
the ‘ship of state’ were they collectively interested in doing so. The most
public political tension now playing out is between those who prefer the veil
of ‘system’ against the venal vulgarity of that system’s product now visible
for all to see. What Mr. Trump’s political opponents appear to be demanding is
a better veil.
The howls of outrage coming
from displaced Democrats would be hilarious if they weren’t so pathetic.
Quickly, who wrote Barack Obama’s ‘signature’ legislation, the ACA (Affordable
Care Act)? A health insurance industry lobbyist named Liz
Fowler wrote it. Who are the intended beneficiaries from the ISDS
(Investor-State Dispute Settlement) provisions of the TPP (Trans-Pacific
Partnership) ‘free’ trade agreement that Mr. Obama so vigorously supported? Wall
Street, hedge funds and multi-national corporations at the expense of
national, state and local governments and their citizens.
Furthermore, some fair measure
of what is so vile about Donald Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants is that the
American government, at the behest of the plutocrats who control it, created
serial refugee crises through economic policies and military adventurism.
Barack Obama was the ‘deporter in chief’ of economic refugees from Mexico
displaced by Bill
Clinton’s passage of NAFTA. Mr. Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary
Clinton, supported a right-wing coup in Honduras and then argued that the
orphaned child-refugees fleeing the resulting violence should be forcibly
returned there.
The charge here isn’t that
‘both parties do it,’ but rather that they— Democrats and Republicans, are
partners on the side of reigning plutocrats in a class war against a
broadly-defined global working class. Democrats have spent decades cynically
overwriting / overriding demands for meaningful employment, food, health care
and pension security with identity politics that reduce to the right of people
who can afford rights to receive them. Another name for this is class warfare.
Graph: relative labor force participation
by race is a function of institutional racism and economic cycles, not a ‘will
to work.’ From slavery to convict leasing and Jim Crow, American Blacks have
been systematically separated from the product of their labor. White privilege
promotes the illusion of absolute working class division where degrees of
exploitation define factual outcomes. Graph is: [(white labor force
participation – black labor force participation) / white labor force
participation]. The division is to (mathematically) normalize the difference to
account for economic cycles. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
To state what was occasionally
obvious to earlier generations, the way to support civil ‘rights’ is through
inclusive political economy. (Martin Luther King was murdered about the time he
started arguing this point). The political problem with Donald Trump isn’t that
he’s a boorish bigot. It’s that he has the social power to force his boorish
bigotry on the rest of us— power that he inherited as part of his (socially
given) ‘fortune.’ And the power to refuse boorish bigots comes from employment,
housing, health care and pension security that is independent of the good
graces of boorish bigots. Another term for this power is economic democracy.
Here Democrats have long
partnered with Republicans to do their masters’ bidding. The imperialist roots
of capitalism are found in the neo-colonialist mantra that economic insecurity
motivates labor to work harder and demand less in return. From the end of WWII
through the early 1970s regularly recurring recessions engineered by the
Federal Reserve kept labor scrambling. From the 1970s forward ‘offshoring’ and
institutional racism (reserve army of the unemployed) have served this purpose.
It is hardly accidental that
the more successful proponents of the ‘free trade’ agreements that have
facilitated offshoring have been liberal Democrats. In pushing policies to
benefit connected capitalists the language of the Left — against welfare
dependence (jobs, not welfare) and economic nativism, were used by cynical
liberals to recover pre-New Deal capitalism with entirely predictable
consequences. Economic mobility has declined in precise proportion to the
concentration of wealth as plutocrats have used their newfound political power
to close off economic competition.
In more locally visceral
terms, it was only a few short years ago that Barack Obama’s Secretary of the
Treasury, Timothy Geithner, worried about ‘moral
hazard’ when it was proposed that ill-sold home mortgages be forgiven while
he shoveled untold billions in public funds to connected bankers and their families
and friends. The language used was similar but the facts weren’t— the
bankers and their families and friends got the money while those with ill-sold
mortgages didn’t.
Hillary Clinton’s much decried
declaration against ‘deplorables’ was telling in that it conflated the dim
social-pornographic sentiments of the marginally connected and partially and
wholly dispossessed with the dismal factual outcomes her major campaign contributors
bring into being on a daily basis. Institutional racism (graph above) has waxed
and waned with economic ‘cycles’ and not with the moral sentiments of bourgeois
hate-mongers and the righteously pissed dispossessed.
To take one dimension of the Democrats’
cynical bullshit at face value: who is to be held to account for institutional
racism— the type we can collectively do something about, and who is going to do
the accounting? Well, let’s see— Democrats have held (national) power about as
often as Republicans over the last half-century and the answer so far is no one
and nobody. Any look at initial economic distribution finds the ‘heavy hand’ of
government handing out corporate welfare to people and organizations who have
the capacity to end institutional racism in labor markets if they were made to—
the levers to force the issue exist. But they haven’t been used.
More to the point, when
Democrats actually held power (1) the Clintons slashed social spending,
demonized immigrants and Black children, militarized the police, built out mass
incarceration, pushed racist drug laws and demonized the poor while (2) Barack
Obama gave voice to economic austerity while bailing out Wall Street, had a
lobbyist for the health insurance industry redesign the health care payments
system; ended due process to murder citizens without evidence at will and
pushed the power of corporate lawyers to override civil legislation through
so-called ‘free’ trade agreements.
This is what plutocracy looks
like. In this regard, Donald Trump is archetypal, quintessential. Resisting Mr.
Trump while supporting the political economy that gives him social power is
paradoxical, and as such, doomed. Bernie Sanders sold his soul to the Democrat
party decades ago. If the national Democrats had two functioning brain cells
they would support Mr. Sanders up to his election as president and then
undermine him to ‘prove’ that socialism doesn’t work. Proof that they don’t
have two functioning brain cells is that they didn’t do this in 2016.
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