Just as the Republican
convention demonized Hillary (“Lock Her Up”), so the Democrats are demonizing
Donald Trump. They refuse to support any policy that he backs, even when he
says something progressive.
One might think that at least
Bernie’s supporters would applaud Trump’s left-wing transformation of the old
conservative, pro-corporate neocon Cheney-Bush core of the Republican Party.
But nobody had a single good word to say about Trump’s assertions that he would
wind down confrontation with Russia, reduce military spending on the grounds
that NATO is obsolete, and oppose the TPP and TTIP as well as rewrite NAFTA’s
terms.
The Democrats are misrepresenting
this election’s rivalry with the Republicans by attacking Trump’s anti-neocon
positions. This leaves Hillary as the neocon choice.
She also has become the choice
of the Koch Brothers and the Chamber of Commerce, who are shocked by Trump’s
critique of the corporatist TPP and other trade agreements.
So where on earth should
reasonable people stand? Writing in “The Nation” (August 1/8) Francis Fox Piven
wrote that: “left movements gain influence when the regime in power depends on
them for support. Clinton is unlikely to win without significant support from
Sanders’s core voters.”
I think that’s crap. Choosing
the right-wing Kaine as VP candidate (Hillary finally found someone even to the
right of her own neoliberal stance) shows that the Democrats don’t care about
Sanders’ people at all. I think that the left would LOSE influence if they fall
for the “lesser evil” choice, always voting Democrat in a knee-jerk reaction
even when the Republican nominee opposes Cold War escalation and opposes
anti-labor trade agreements. — Michael Hudson
[Below is a transcript of
Michael Hudson’s interview with Sharmini Peries on the Real News Network.]
SHARMINI PERIES: On Friday,
just after the Republican National Congress wrapped up with its presidential
candidate, Donald Trump, Paul Krugman of the New York Times penned an article
titled “Donald Trump: The Siberian Candidate.” He said in it, if elected, would
Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House? Krugman himself is
worried as ludicrous and outrageous as the question sounds, the Trump
campaign’s recent behavior has quite a few foreign policy experts wondering, he
says, just what kind of hold Mr. Putin has over the Republican nominee, and
whether that influence will continue if he wins.
Well, let’s unravel that
statement with Michael Hudson. He’s joining us from New York. Michael is a
distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri
Kansas City. His latest book is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and
Debt Bondage Destroyed the Global Economy. So let’s take a look at this article
by Paul Krugman. Where is he going with this analysis about the Siberian
candidate?
HUDSON: Well, Krugman has
joined the ranks of the neocons, as well as the neoliberals, and they’re
terrified that they’re losing control of the Republican Party. For the last
half-century the Republican Party has been pro-Cold War, corporatist. And Trump
has actually, is reversing that. Reversing the whole traditional platform. And
that really worries the neocons.
Until his speech, the whole
Republican Convention, every speaker had avoided dealing with economic policy issues.
No one referred to the party platform, which isn’t very good. And it was mostly
an attack on Hillary. Chants of “lock her up.” And Trump children, aimed to try
to humanize him and make him look like a loving man.
But finally came Trump’s
speech, and this was for the first time, policy was there. And he’s making a
left run around Hillary. He appealed twice to Bernie Sanders supporters, and
the two major policies that he outlined in the speech broke radically from the
Republican traditional right-wing stance. And that is called destroying the
party by the right wing, and Trump said he’s not destroying the party, he’s
building it up and appealing to labor, and appealing to the rational interest
that otherwise had been backing Bernie Sanders.
So in terms of national
security, he wanted to roll back NATO spending. And he made it clear, roll back
military spending. We can spend it on infrastructure, we can spend it on
employing American labor. And in the speech, he said, look, we don’t need
foreign military bases and foreign spending to defend our allies. We can defend
them from the United States, because in today’s world, the only kind of war
we’re going to have is atomic war. Nobody’s going to invade another country.
We’re not going to send American troops to invade Russia, if it were to attack.
So nobody’s even talking about that. So let’s be realistic.
Well, being realistic has
driven other people crazy. Not only did Krugman say that Trump would, quote,
actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy at the expense of America’s allies,
and he’s referring to the Ukraine, basically, and it’s at–he’s become a
lobbyist for the military-industrial complex. But also, at the Washington Post
you had Anne Applebaum call him explicitly the Manchurian candidate, referring
to the 1962 movie, and rejecting the neocon craziness. This has just driven
them nutty because they’re worried of losing the Republican Party under Trump.
In economic policy, Trump also
opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the TTIP trade and corporate power
grab [inaud.] with Europe to block public regulation. And this was also a major
plank of Bernie Sanders’ campaign against Hillary, which Trump knows. The
corporatist wings of both the Republican and the Democratic Parties fear that
Trump’s opposition to NAFTA and TPP will lead the Republicans not to push
through in the lame duck session after November. The whole plan has been that
once the election’s over, Obama will then get all the Republicans together and
will pass the Republican platform that he’s been pushing for the last eight
years. The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement with Europe, and the other
neoliberal policies.
And now that Trump is trying
to rebuild the Republican Party, all of that is threatened. And so on the
Republican side of the New York Times page you had David Brooks writing “The
death of the Republican Party.” So what Trump calls the rebirth of the
Republican Party, it means the death of the reactionary, conservative,
corporatist, anti-labor Republican Party.
And when he wrote this, quote,
Trump is decimating the things Republicans stood for: NATO, entitlement reform,
in other words winding back Social Security, and support of the corporatist
Trans-Pacific Partnership. So it’s almost hilarious to see what happens. And Trump
also has reversed the traditional Republican fiscal responsibility austerity
policy, that not a word about balanced budgets anymore. And he said he was
going to run at policy to employ American labor and put it back to work on
infrastructure. Again, he’s made a left runaround Hillary. He says he wants to
reinstate Glass-Steagall, whereas the Clintons were the people that got rid of
it.
And this may be for show,
simply to brand Hillary as Wall Street’s candidate. But it also seems to
actually be an attack on Wall Street. And Trump’s genius was to turn around all
the attacks on him as being a shady businessman. He said, look, nobody knows
the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. Now, what that
means, basically, as a businessman, he knows the fine print by which they’ve
been screwing the people. So only someone like him knows how to fight against
Wall Street. After all, he’s been screwing the Wall Street banks for years
[inaud.]. And he can now fight for the population fighting against Wall Street,
just as he’s been able to stiff the banks.
So it’s sort of hilarious. On
the one hand, leading up to him you had Republicans saying throw Hillary in
jail. And Hillary saying throw Trump in the [inaud.]. And so you have the whole
election coming up with—.
PERIES: Maybe we should take
the lead and lock them all up. Michael, what is becoming very clear is that
there’s a great deal of inconsistencies on the part of the Republican Party.
Various people are talking different things, like if you hear Mike Pence, the
vice presidential candidate, speak, and then you heard Donald Trump, and then
you heard Ivanka Trump speak yesterday, they’re all saying different things.
It’s like different strokes for different folks. And I guess in marketing and
marketeering, which Trump is the master of, that makes perfect sense. Just tap
on everybody’s shoulder so they feel like they’re the ones being represented as
spoken about, and they’re going to have their issues addressed in some way.
When it comes–he also in that
sense appealed to, as you said, the Bernie Sanders people when he talked about
the trade deals. You know, he’s been talking about NAFTA, TTIP, TTP, and these
are areas that really is traditionally been the left of the left issues. And
now there’s this, that he’s anti-these trade deals, and he’s going to bring
jobs home. What does that mean?
HUDSON: Well, you’re right
when you say there’s a policy confusion within the Republican Party. And I
guess if this were marketing, it’s the idea that everybody hears what they want
to hear. And if they can hear right-wing gay bashing from the Indiana governor,
and they can hear Trump talking about hte LGBTQ, everybody will sort of be on
the side.
But I listened to what Governor
Pence said about defending Trump’s views on NATO. And he’s so smooth. So slick,
that he translated what Trump said in a way that no Republican conservative
could really disagree with it. I think he was a very good pick for vice
president, because he can, obviously he’s agreed to follow what Trump’s saying,
and he’s so smooth, being a lawyer, that he can make it all appear much more
reasonable than it would.
I think that the most, the
biggest contradiction, was you can look at how the convention began with
Governor Christie. Accusing Hillary of being pro-Russian when she’s actually
threatening war, and criticizing her for not helping the Ukrainians when it was
she who brought Victorian Nuland in to push the coup d’etat with the neo-nazis,
and gave them $5 billion. And Trump reversed the whole thing and said no, no,
no. I’m not anti-Russian, I’m pro-Russian. I’m not going to defend Ukrainians.
Just the opposite.
And it’s obvious that the
Republicans have fallen into line behind them. And no wonder the Democrats want
them to lose. All of that–you’ve had the Koch brothers say we’re not going to
give money to Trump, the Republicans, now. We’re backing Hillary. You’ve got
the Chamber of Commerce saying because Trump isn’t for the corporate takeover
of foreign trade, we’re now supporting the Democrats, not the Reepublicans.
So this is really the class
war. And it’s the class war of Wall Street and the corporate sector of the
Democratic side against Trump on the populist side. And who knows whether he
really means what he says when he says he’s for the workers and he wants to
rebuild the cities, put labor back to work. And when he says he’s for the
blacks and Hispanics have to get jobs just like white people, maybe he’s
telling the truth, because that certainly is the way that the country can be
rebuilt in a positive way.
And the interesting thing is
that all he gets from the Democrats is denunciations. So I can’t wait to see
how Bernie Sanders is going to handle all this at the Democratic Convention
next week.
[Michael Hudson is a
former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University
of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books,
including Super
Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto
Press, 2002). His new book is: Killing
the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy (a
CounterPunch digital edition). Sharmini Peries is executive producer of
The Real News Network.]
