Democrats, Donald Trump, and the Dark Underbelly of Economic Growth
by Brian Czech
Democrats are stunned by Donald Trump’s lack of culpability for racist rhetoric, Twitter tantrums, and international insults. They shouldn’t be. They’re the party of “It’s the Economy Stupid.” They should know that if a president inspires a bull market, creates a few jobs, and grows the GDP, he can “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters.
(photo credits: theduran.com)
Elected Dems can’t hold Trump accountable because they can’t break their own addiction to growth. They’re defenseless against a growth-mongering president. They want the credit for economic momentum from the Obama era, yet they just know that stock market boom is all about Trump.
Hearkening back to Obama’s economic performance makes the Democratic Party look like a Super Bowl loser taking credit for the half-time show. They’re in the process of being long-forgotten. Trump owns the Department of Commerce, the fiscal policy pen, and the printing presses for reports on growth. Not to mention the Twitter Feed from Hell.
There is a solution for Democrats, if they dare take it. It’s a simple solution but a real paradigm shifter: It’s a new outlook on growth. Ironically, Trump’s going to help them more than anyone in their own party. By the end of his term, economic growth will never look the same. Consider three ugly lessons:
- Trump proves it doesn’t take a stable genius to grow the economy. Any old dummy can do it by trashing the planet. All you have to do is dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, dispose of public lands, and generally run roughshod over the hard-won environmental institutions of earlier administrations and congresses. Don’t worry about offshore oil spills, the Arctic, or endangered species. Just drill baby drill, and grow the economy!
- Trump doesn’t want his Americana – especially his American economy – saddled with poor and huddled masses from the “shithole countries.” He’d rather have the entrepreneurs, industrialists, and inheritors who bring instant big money to his hotels, golf resorts, and casinos. His personal financial obsession melds into a brutal economic philosophy: Keep the little money out, bring the big money in. That’s the quickest way to excite Wall Street, grow the GDP, and take credit for both!
- Trump doesn’t view the international community as a precious outcome of creation, evolution, or civilization. To him it’s a collection of potential customers or, at best, business partners to skunk. Trump pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accords. He’s threatened multilateral obligations from NAFTA to NATO. He’s an insult to the United Nations. Rather than pursing goodwill among nations, Trump pursues the terms of trade most likely to bolster American GDP, regardless of what it does to the hopes and dreams of less advantaged nations who once revered the USA for its generosity and its democratic approach to capitalism. The United States is losing respect like never before; a doubly dangerous trend in an age of international instability.
Trump gets away with it all by hiding behind the goal of GDP growth. His minions at the White House collude. How many times have we heard them tell us that Trump does more for blacks than Obama ever did, because he’s growing the economy faster and providing jobs for all? And how is he providing these jobs? By “taking historic steps to lift the restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion and to cancel job killing regulations,” as Trump’s EPA Administrator puts it. Meanwhile he justifies his international bullying with, “When the United States grows, so does the world.”
Right now, due to the bipartisan obsession with economic growth, Democrats look like losers at the GDP racetrack, racist sentiments are fair game again, and the rapacious pursuit of growth is liquidating the environment. Democrats, racial minorities, and environmentalists can pine independently, “Woe is me.” Or, they can unify and announce to the president and Republicans, “It’s not just GDP, stupid.”
As a bonus, they might get the Green Party vote, and we all know how that can change history.
Welcome back Brian! I have missed CASSE and the Daly news. I rack my brains for language to frame the debate preserving an ecologically based distinction between economic development and economic growth. The ‘growth is good’ axiom is so pervasive that anything I can think of can be interpreted to support it. HELP!
It’s also a function of the fracking bubble.
Conventional oil peaked in the USA in 1970 Fracking gave it a stay of execution but that has probably peaked now.
Conventional “natural” gas peaked in the USA in 1973. It has declined by more than half since then, mostly since 2000. Fracking for shale gas hid this from public awareness.
Fracking delayed rationing.
http://www.peakchoice.org/peak-frack.html
What the frack? Scraping the bottom of the barrel is not good to the last drop
On Jan 31, 2018, at 8:24 AM Jan 31, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy wrote:
“As a bonus, they might get the Green Party vote, and we all know how that can change history.”
Bush the Lesser did not win in 2000 or 2004. Faith based voting machines run by Republicans and voter suppression flipped key swing states (not only Florida and Ohio). Most Democrats were afraid to even hint at this and ratified the theft of the election when Congress made Bush President during the certification of the electors from the many states.
Trump got lots of votes but rigged Republican voting machines and voter suppression were needed to flip the outcome away from the Democrats. This was also done in the Senate races in Wisconsin (a great loss for democracy), Missouri (a so-so Democrat) and Pennsylvania (a really terrible Democrat but her win was stolen from her).
Bottom line: the “election” at the national level is theater of the absurd, often decided long before election day.
I got to ask Jill Stein about limits to growth and the military industrial complex when she was running, that was not a topic she wanted to highlight. None of the above was an honorable choice.
http://www.jfkmoon.org/jim-garrison.html
interview of Jim Garrison, District Attorney of New Orleans (portrayed in Oliver Stone’s film JFK)
it wasn’t corporations who removed the Kennedys and King from politics
October 1967 interview
PLAYBOY: Many of the professional critics of the Warren Commission appear to be prompted by political motives: Those on the left are anxious to prove Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy within the establishment; and those on the right are eager to prove the assassination was an act of “the international Communist conspiracy.” Where would you place yourself on the political spectrum — right, left of center?
GARRISON: That’s a question I’ve asked myself frequently, especially since this investigation started and I found myself in an incongruous and disillusioning battle with agencies of my own Government. I can’t just sit down and add up my political beliefs like a mathematical sum, but I think, in balance, I’d turn up somewhere around the middle. Over the years, I guess I’ve developed a somewhat conservative attitude — in the traditional libertarian sense of conservatism, as opposed to the thumbscrew-and-rack conservatism of the paramilitary right — particularly in regard to the importance of the individual as opposed to the state and the individual’s own responsibilities to humanity. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to formulate this into a coherent political philosophy, but at the root of my concern is the conviction that a human being is not a digit; he’s not a digit in regard to the state and he’s not a digit in the sense that he can ignore his fellow men and his obligations to society. I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau; I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there has haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I’ve always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets at a time when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers. I’m concerned about all of this because it isn’t a German phenomenon; it’s a human phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man. What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it’s based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we’ve built since 1945, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we’ve seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution. In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn’t the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same. I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I’ve always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government’s basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I’ve come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
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http://www.oilempire.us/trump.html
Trumped-up Democracy
Donald Trump and Peak Blame
Exit polls for Clinton, voting machines for Trump
Obama’s gift to Trump: a supersized NSA
anagram: alternative facts = an evil statecraft
“Make America Grateful Again!”
(not Trump’s slogan)