A lesson to learn from trump not enough identified is: The danger as we move from democracy to corporatocracy.
How bad he is, is a reminder of how dangerous having huge concentrated power able to lord over the people — which is definitely the case — is. I don’t mean this in any libertarian sense. I mean it in the sense of how concentrated wealth and power are not only the enemy of democracy, but the superior force.
trump is an utter buffoon and worse — but the ongoing forces of the special interests are far more dangerous. Always present, always pursuing a selfish agenda at great cost to people — and not as often recognized as the menace to the public they are. Take your pick — the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, Wall Street, the tax-reducing-on-the-rich industry — these are normalized, ‘just part of our capitalist system’ forces that are extracting wealth from the people and creating dominance over our politics more and more all the time.
To where our elections at best are ‘100% corporatist’ against ‘not quite 100% corporatist’.
I’ve long recognized that government and institutions tend to get a machine-like single track that tends to be very powerful, without much consideration to whether it’s a good idea.
The military industry is the clearest example, along with state and CIA — you can’t have too much power.
Is the US the most powerful country? OK, good.
Do we have absolute hegemony? If we do, good. If not, get it.
And once we do — with as much military spending almost as all of our allies and adversaries combined — what we need is more military spending.
No country, no corporation, can have enough. If Wall Street — which has taken up to 40% of all the profits in the country — takes that much, all it’s thinking about it how to take more.
And presidents like Bill Clinton and Obama tend to normalize the situation. OK, we have some concerns, but they’ll moderate the harm, we hope.
No, trump is a canary, showing us ‘hey, what if all this massive accumulated institutional power gets into the wrong hands?’
It’s a reminder why ‘the people’ are supposed to rule — to make the massive resources of our society serve the public, not the few.
But that’s long since lost, really. We have the tail wagging the dog. The few now use mass media to tell the people what to do, rather than the other way around.
Not what it’s every really been different. But the theory of democracy, and at some times, it has worked as it’s supposed to. Such as when the environmental movement was formed.
As bad as we think having trump, an out of control maniacal narcissist submitting the national budget, running the country’s regulations, representing the people and with the nuclear codes and military is, it’s really an ongoing problem that powerful interests have moved our country so much toward plutocracy, oligarchy, corporatocracy if trump were not elected. It would be the situation with President Pence or President Ryan or President Romney or any of them. And let’s admit, much less but still too much with President Hillary.
A century ago, the people recognized things like the corrupt appointing of US Senators and organized to fix that and other things.
Today, we recognize things like the corruption of money in politics and the propaganda machine for the plutocrats corrupting our democracy — will we organize and fix any of those issues?
Trump is chirping, tweeting, canary that he is about the dangers how the people are not in charge.
trump will be gone, but the problem of corporatocracy will not.
Believe it or not, the way things are going, it’s possible trump could be looked back on as charmingly independent compared to the cold, ruthless industries having an iron fist.
He’s one canary. Another is to note that with 17 Republican presidential candidates, *not one* was anything BUT a plutocrat — a false choice which exposes the sham the ‘choice’ has become.