Concentrate on the system, not Trump

The US president’s job is to run the American system. It is variously called ‘Capitalism’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Free market enterprises’ and others (the label used dependents upon the crowd being addressed and the theme of the talk). Its sole aim is the generation of maximum monetary profits for those in the driver’s seat, no matter the cost to the environment or to humanity.

His employers are not the American people but rather a largely unknown elite under which the giant banks and corporates, the political parties, quasi-public institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce, industry, many so-called NGOs, think-tanks, bodies such as the powerful American Legislative Exchange Council [1], the rating agencies and so on, reside.

A review of the bottom line of recent history reveals there is no difference between Democrat and Republican. The same super elite and its upper tier corporacy regulate both. Trump is doing his job well, just as 44 presidents did before him.

War

The ‘Democrat’ drug and sex addict JFK, who nearly wiped out the world playing cowboys over Cuba,[2] allowed Patrice Lumumba to be murdered in 1961 and the Congo has been in flames since. The Congo has valuable minerals and metals the competing corporates and end user phone sellers [3] need (because the consuming public needs its phones and computers more than the Congolese need life, it seems). The same CIA that served JFK promoted Obama’s display of ethics through his assassination list.[4]

Republican Eisenhower took over from the French in Vietnam. JFK, a Democrat, faked the war’s start, more Democrats pushed it to new heights and only when business started saying ‘too much, too many Westerners are annoyed’ did a Republican surrender militarily, but win financially.

Afghanistan’s latest tale of slaughter was a similar story. Started by a Democrat senator[5] using fiddled funds the corporates (Raytheon supplied Stingers to the Taliban[6]) have made incalculable profits. Although the war was one of Obama’s pre-election promises to stop (in his first month, circa 2007), it is still going on - the money is simply too good.

The cream on the bottom line profits of thousands of US companies comes from killing. Investigative author Nick Turse takes his readers through a list that makes up most of the companies benefitting, supporting and enabling the military in his book, ‘The Complex’.

Talk is that the Iraq shakedown and Afghanistan minerals [7], opium[8] and strategic positioning control exercise cost the US taxpayer a trillion dollars. It is a sum that boggles the mind (the height of a stack of 1,000,000,000,000 one dollar bills measures 67,866 miles).[9] Because it so boggles folk tend to forget in non-war time that it is private companies, those that make everything from the infantryman’s undies to the mega bombs, that see war as profit. In this sense it is wrong to see Iraq as an oil stealing exercise. It was and is a total military-industrial-commercial project.

It is common knowledge Cheney made many-many millions, but where’d the rest of the say USD trillion at 40% profit go?

The US is committed to staying in the Middle East because China has friendly intentions to link Asia with a Middle (Near) East highway-fibre-pipeline-railway[10] through the various Stans (including the mineral and drug rich colony of Afghanistan) with Europe and Russia.[11] The trouble is: a) it will not have any high profit military component, b) Saudi Arabia and other really backward America allies will be excluded and c) and the US and its USD will not be at the money earning centre.

The current (manufactured) problems with Iran can be traced back to the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh by Eisenhower in 1953.[12] Mosaddegh wanted to use some of the oil profits to build the people. The same happened all over South America and even tiny Zimbabwe felt the whip with enforced structural adjustment programmes in the mid-1990s.[13]

Banks

While the transformation of the banks into entities that are too big to fall (and more important than the earth itself) began with the conception of the Federal Reserve under the racist Teddy Roosevelt some 100 years ago, they got their first modern big boost with Nixon. He bullied the world into accepting the dollar as the reserve currency, replacing gold. Reagan added with his partial de-regulation of business rules and Democrat Clinton, in the mid-90s, cut the last of the red tape that kept banking separate from investment/gambling, allowing the banks to do to the public whatever they wanted.

What they wanted the drunk[14] Bush agreed to with Enron. The master-minds of the massive bankruptcy (and the public guardians, the so-called rating agencies and so-called Big 5 auditors) got off near enough scot-free while thousands lost their jobs and more thousands lost their pensions. And the bail-in following the ‘housing’ debacle saw the same result. In fact, come Obama’s time those banking economic criminals paid themselves huge bonuses. One year after Goldman Sachs broke records with a $16.7bn bonus pot,[15] and a few months later JP Morgan did even better.

Debt

Ultimatley, America’s global dominance forces countries and regions to do business with it, and America doesn’t pay cash. On January 20, 2009, when Obama was sworn in, their debt was $10.626 trillion. On January 20, 2017, it was $19.947 trillion.’[16] Ignoring the additional cost of climate change to their wars, they owe foreign countries over $6 trillion (the rest of the total debt is intra-US).[17] That debt has been building up over the last 30 years or so, since Jimmy Carter. It was in September 1977 that the New York Times ran the story ‘Sounding Alarms On Foreign Debt’.  

To keep the country and its elitist structures afloat amidst that debt, the US has adopted the policy of ‘quantitative easing’. It is nothing more than the ad-hoc printing of money[18] by central banks to support the liquidity crisis nearly all major banks are in.

Once again the chief Bully Boy America leads the way. The public are required to believe the money printed will get to them in the form of loans or by way of new jobs created by bigger enterprises borrowing and building factories, but reality is if it goes anywhere near the public it is into the stock markets – the ‘work’ place of the already wealthy. And more important and dangerous, into the ‘hedge funds’, ‘investment’ houses and ‘investment’ banks – i.e. gamblers, made legal and underwritten by successive presidents. All that is needed is for one unexpected event to happen and the whole nasty edifice will collapse.

To put that hotdog in perspective, as at the third  quarter of 2016 global GDP was hovering around $78 trillion. The 25 major US banks had assets of $14.5 trillion. That piddly amount they’ve used as security to ‘issue’ ‘money-chips’ to gamble on futures/options/short selling and with ‘derivatives with a paper value of $243 trillion.’[19]

Imagine every American (say 300 million) asks the roulette table manager to lend them $800,000 to bet on a turn of the wheel. If it was only America involved that’s fine, but the whole tape worm is enmeshed with banks in other countries. When it crashes, the ordinary depositors and cheque issuing public will be hung out to dry first.[20] Not only are the general public from Middle Middle Class down too small to save, they work harder when bankrupt. 

Banks are not there for the good of the people, and the presidents support them. Trump declared he’d drain the swamp. Like Obama he lied and he has engaged some of Wall Street’s best men to work on behalf of his administration. Hillary Clinton has to be over the moon.

Banks are simply debt creating machines. U.S. households owe trillions[21] and most of the debt is expense relating to equipping people with education, keeping them healthy, locating themselves in a convenient position and getting  to work for the production of the mega-profits[22] that are made by the corporates and banks that choose the presidents.

The destructive IMF which has served Greed Capitalism so well by plunging so many less equipped nations into unpayable debt[23] as Corporate America and Europe stripped away finite assets[24] is a Roosevelt product. The NSA admirably advanced by Obama into the world of high-tech covert spy on all operations is the shoe salesman Truman’s gift to the world[25].

Dollar

The dollar is all important. As the world’s reserve currency is priced in USD, all conversions ‘go through’ New York banks who therefore get a cut of every transaction. If the US loses its reserve currency positioning the American economy will collapse because other than having the world’s biggest and most brutal ever military machine at its side, it has no backing.

That’s why Gaddafi was taken out and Libya looted under Ms Clinton as Secretary of State – he proposed a single African currency and pipeline to re-irrigate vast dry lands (and he was running the world’s foremost social-welfare state). That is why Obama had no option but to square up to Russia and China. They were ignoring the dollar – sacrilege!  Now Trump has no option either. To let them be is to allow the System to fail.

Firing General Flynn had naught to do with being in the pocket of Russia. The nearly impeached Bill Clinton ‘received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin’[26] - 15 times more than the general got for his talk. It is about Trump’s stated goal of ‘normalising’ ties with Russia and after Obama spent many millions destabilising the Ukraine, that’s simply not good corporate-banking business.

The public hear little about the big S with the double line through it. It’s taboo to discuss the role of the dollar in keeping the US afloat – a little like how the likelihood of Jesus’ homosexuality is never discussed – it’s just too close to the bone.

Climate change

Pulling back on climate change is not good corporate business either. The profit possibilities from damage wrought and alternate opportunities created (new diseases for the Big Pharma, Lymes disease for example[27]) by manmade climate change are enormous.

The earth has had climate change before but never this quick. We’re managing to do in 100s of years what happened over millions before.

The System, basically Capitalism gone rogue, thrives on chaos. Chaos means profit is made as things are broken and profit is made when they are put together. Millions of tobacco smokers are therefore as important to the ultimate money churn as are millions of smokers seeking respiratory medication, treatment and so on. The problem is climate change, like Trump’s Christian god, is omnipresent and the System owners need to wake up, realise hiding behind bodyguards and in unassailable, well provisioned and air-conditioned tower blocks won’t save them. And nor will gated communities save the Middle Class.

Imagine standing on your toes on a brick stretching your hamstrings by forcing your ankles ever lower. As you get fitter the position of your ankle vis-à-vis the sole of your foot will get lower and lower. Flexibility improves dramatically. Then to enhance the experience, you start to lean forward, more and more. Overdo it and you will topple.

When the ‘standard of living’ in the West reached what the West takes for granted last year, the earth reached tipping point. There is no solid ground to jump forward on to. The earth is a tiny speck all on its own in a gigantic and expanding universe. Prof McPherson says humans have 10 years left before we crash,[28] and that New Zealanders will be the last humans. Rubbish we cry! But the less controversial scientists don’t give us much longer than that before life virtually ceases to exist. Stephen Hawking and microbiologist Frank Fenner[29] gave humans 100 years more. Their primary reason for our extinction? Climate change and inequality. Astrophysicist Neil Tyson is quick to console the earth will survive, it is just that we’ll be gone.[30]

The System owners will be gone too but alive and looking down. Few will be able to afford to live on giant space stations but it will happen – a sort of gated community looking down on the rest as they fight for water.[31] Some entrepreneurs are saying these holiday-homes beyond the blue will be reality within 10 years.

Trump

In the actions of all the American presidents that have been, it’s clear that no challenge to Capitalism can be allowed to bear fruit. People must work to live. Profits don’t go to people – profits like spawning salmon swim upwards to be deposited in the accounts of the already rich in secret places.

Thousands of Americans were sterilised because they were losers,[32] but hundreds of millions throughout the world have been economically sterilised by successive presidents’ adoption of Milton Friedman’s free market forces. It is a legalised and moralised way of destroying prospects for a world based on co-operation through the System’s demand for maximum profit no matter the cost.[33] It now comes under the guise of globalisation.

The hate generated against the US means Trump and those who follow him will have forever to increase the anti-terror budget even down to the tiniest of activities. But the irony is the US and its Western associates are the world’s most dangerous terrorists.[34] The nukes that were there for Truman are available to Trump – they’re just 3000 times more dangerous per war-head. The IMF and WB and majors like JP Morgan and Barclays were there for Roosevelt, but now they are collectively bigger than most countries. Climate change was a worry under Clinton, now it is catastrophe happening and Trump is promising to make it worse by more deregulation.

In his inheritance there is nothing that Trump started or created or even seeded. Not even the famous Trump Wall is his personal call. In 1954 over a million Mexicans were physically hurled home.[35]

Trump inherited a world on the brink of nuclear war with those who resist the Capitalist maximum profit argument. He has been given an already moulded, baked and sliced monetary and banking process that is about to collapse, while the combination Military-Banking-Industrial-Commercial complex has positioned the world on the very edge of an abyss that is genteelly called ‘climate change’. 

Trump is only capable of copying and following on what truly horrible (for the world but nice for parties) presidents before have themselves followed and enlarged. And like them, all he seems to be determined to do is to take over the mantle of ‘the worst president ever’. Obama surpassed Baby Bush, Bush beat Clinton. Each ‘worst ever for the world’ has achieve that notoriety in their own unique way.[36]

Now Trump is going to do it his way.

* A former soldier and district commissioner in then Rhodesia, Douglas Schorr is today a committed critic of capitalism and colonial legacies, citing them as the source of poverty in Africa. His first book, The Myth of Smith, is available for sale on Amazon Kindle as are the short stories Mr Boomslang & 7 Other Rhodesian Fireside Tales. Schorr blogs at www.douglasschorr.com. Follow him on Facebook for regular updates.

End notes

[1] ‘ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through the secretive meetings of the American Legislative Exchange Council, corporate lobbyists and state legislators vote as equals on ‘model bills’ to change our rights that often benefit the corporations’ bottom line at public expense. ALEC is a pay-to-play operation where corporations buy a seat and a vote on ‘task forces’ to advance their legislative wish lists and can get a tax break for donations, effectively passing these lobbying costs on to taxpayers.’ … http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/What_is_ALEC%3F

[2] Oliver Stone @ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1494191/

[3] http://www.monbiot.com/2013/03/11/smart-phones-dumb-companies/

[4] https://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/5/kill_list_exposed_leaked_obama_me…

[5] http://www.globalresearch.ca/hollywoods-dangerous-afghan-illusion-charl…

[6] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ and see http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/02/charlie_wilson_texas_con…

[7] It is all about ‘the United States to control Afghanistan’s Rare Earth Elements (REEs) such as lithium, worth trillions …’ See http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/10/14/376774/

[8] http://www.globalresearch.ca/afghanistan-garden-of-empire-americas-mult…

[9] www.ehd.org/science_technology_largenumbers.php

[10] www.bbc.com/news/business-38654176 ... Jan 18, 2017

[11] China’s Great Game: Road to a new empire https://www.ft.com/content/6e098274-587a-11e5-a28b-50226830d644

[12] It is now known that France had a lot to do with the Ayatollah’s pre-coup ‘education’ and ‘Documents seen by BBC suggest Carter administration paved way for Khomeini to return to Iran by holding the army back from launching a military coup’ … https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/10/ayatollah-khomeini-jimmy-…

[13] http://www.douglasschorr.com/2015/12/mugabe-is-fool-but-for-not-for-rea…

[14] https://dillsnapcogitation.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/george-bushs-g8-mee…

[15] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/oct/15/goldman-sachs-record-b…

[16] https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-under-obama-3306293

[17] Five Charts @ http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/10/news/economy/us-debt-ownership/

[18] https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-quantitative-easing-definition-and-e…

[19] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/prem-sikka/authoritarian-populism-of_b_…

[20] See Web-of-debt articles

[21] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_united_states_of_debt/2016/0…

[22] ‘35 Percent Of All Americans Have Debt That Is At Least 180 Days Past Due. 69 percent of all Americans have less than $1,000 in savings today …’ http://www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/finance-news/the-world-largest-b…

[23] The Globalization of Poverty by M Chossudovsky

[24] How rich countries got rich and why poor countries stay poor by Erik Reinert

[25] www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/17/culture/.../a-brief-history-of-t…

[26] The New York Times reported in 2015 says https://consortiumnews.com/2017/03/20/the-missing-logic-of-russia-gate/

[27] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-lyme-d… and see ‘Lyme disease is now 4 times more common than AIDS’ @ http://www.lorigeurin.com/lyme-disease-is-spreading-faster/

[28] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqIt93dDG1M

[29] Professor Fenner (1914 -2010) once of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at The Australian National University. And see http://jcsmr.anu.edu.au/about-us/honour-roll/frank-fenner.

[30] Methane is 20 times more powerful molecule to molecule than the CO2 constantly quoted. Perhaps the ultimate in greenhouse gas it is stored in vast quantities the sea - http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/ocean-chemistry/climate-change-and… and see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/aug/05/7-fac… in which the Guardian presents the different arguments. And    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmeTCw5Xk1I

[31] 250 million years ago the Siberian volcano initiated the action, methane completed it.It is fine frozen solid as methane hydrate but heated it becomes unstable, our oceans are warming and there is an estimated 30 trillion tons of this stuff. The last time it happened 95% of all life on our earth was wiped out. The difference was, the scientists postulate, it took 500 thousand years to reach the tipping point we are in a headlong race to emulate. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmeTCw5Xk1I

[32] The irony is this methane could be very useful to humans but we’ve a process that negates that possibility almost entirely – the 4 yearly US elections, the top job going to the one who promises the most immediate and best profit return.

[33] http://www.space.com/35978-private-moon-refueling-station-by-2020.html

[34] https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/united-states-once-sterili…

[35] http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

[36] Noam Chomsky: US is world's biggest terrorist - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbnPA3fd5U

[37] https://theconversation.com/largest-deportation-campaign-in-us-history-…

[38] Example: as a presidential candidate he said … but went immediately he received the Peace Prize he sent more troops to kill peasants in Afghanistan.