Paul Craig Roberts,
one of the most reliable progressive Anglophone journalists wrote "the day
after" under the heading "The Working Class Won the Election? What Kind of Trump
Administration? "
The
US presidential election is historic, because the American people
were able to defeat the oligarchs. Hillary Clinton, an agent for the
Oligarchy, was defeated despite the vicious media campaign against
Donald Trump. This shows that the media and the political
establishments of the political parties no longer have credibility
with the American people.
The fundamentally most
important thing in this conflictual situation where we are now, is six short
words: We do not need an empire. The
world has suffered during this unilateral regime for many decades, on an ever
increasing level since 9/11. We have had enough of all these conflicts.
Now for the details. First a warning about how little we really know about
Trump today, in November 2016. We know much more about Hillary Clinton since
she has shown all her cards during her tenure as foreign minister (Secretary of
State). What is needed now is united and strong pressure from the American
people to make Donald Trump listen and understand. We do not want any more
oligarchs who totally turn their backs on the American people and just go on
enriching the 1% – the multinational corporations and their executives. This has
now been the norm virtually since the 1980s with the Reagan era, and Bill
Clinton who followed in Reagan's footsteps – with gusto. This kind of politics
has had a catastrophic effect on the lives of the working class and eventually
even on the middle class, which is also a working class. The only ones who are
not working are the "Big Money Men" who live on the work done by
others, on stock market speculation and more or less shady money transactions.
Those people have seen their capital increase to shameless multibillions.
The people have more clearly than ever before showed that an oligarchic regime
does not carry water. Trump must remain a question mark until further notice,
even if he claims that he intends to create jobs and reduce the horrendous economic
inequality in the United States. He is of course a stalwart capitalist, but he
also seems to be a realist who sees where the shoe pinches. And pinch it does,
in the most disastrous way. He seems to be one of the very rare super-rich men
who clearly recognize that the status quo would lead directly to Götterdämmerung.
Middle America sees Trump as a populist. His victory in 'the swing states' -
Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Iowa clearly shows that the
working class sees in Trump a man who is on their side. The cry for more jobs
became a sesame to stunning victories for the Republican candidate.
Now we'll soon see if he really is for the people. It was never very
likely that he would surround himself with progressive and socially conscious
advisers and men and women of his future government, but it might have been
enough if they had been realists. It has rarely been as clear as it is now that
a US-type of oligarchy, a super-rich class that lives exclusively on other
people’s work – on workers who have no safety net or job security – can never
work in the long run.
In the world's
richest country, a large majority does not have access to the higher education
they ought to have a right to. And this just for economic reasons. The
wide-spread poverty in this rich country is a shameful reality. Good health
care is inaccessible to the lower income holders or to the unemployed. The most
basic human rights that European countries have taken more or less for granted
since the Great Depression of 1929 are non-existent in the United States.
A society simply can not work in the long run under these conditions.
What we do know with some certainty is what can now hopefully be avoided with
the defeat of Hillary Clinton. The hostility and the massive propaganda against
Russia and Putin which reached hysterical and vulgar decibels in the Western
media will probably become more low-toned, at least after the initial
anti-Trump hysteria has died down. These media now stand there with egg on
their face and they quite clearly feel embarrassed by their total lack of
foresight.
The result of this US
election in 2016 will definitely go down in history as a total fiasco for all
the media and the oligarchs who own these media, the neoliberal neoconservative
establishment, which Hillary Clinton was the tool for – with great conviction.
It has become clear that the elections were rigged by both sides, and that the
‘Deep State’ was (and is) divided between the two candidates. It has also been
proven by Greg Palast that millions of people didn’t get their votes counted,
mainly people of one minority or another.
Now, if Trump indeed gets any of his promises realized, we can first of all
expect a rapprochement between Russia and the U.S. and the threatening cloud of
a looming World War III may now dissolve. That I consider to be a
sufficient reason to feel great relief that Hillary Clinton seems to be
history. We can expect an end to the war in Syria, which is not a civil war but
a war that was created and supported from beginning to end by the U.S. together
with Israel, Saudi Arabia and some Gulf states. If all goes well, we must be
able to hope for some sort of solution even to the chaos in Iraq, in
Afghanistan, which is an even more complicated problem, and of course the
incredibly shameful destruction of Yemen.
Reuters estimates
that the war in Iraq by itself has cost U.S. citizens over $2 trillion. Nobel
prize-winning economist, Joseph Stieglitz, sets the sum higher. He wrote a book
titled ‘The $3 trillion War’.
It is uncertain
whether the sanctions against Russia, which will run out on January 31, 2017
according to the latest renewal by EU, will or will not cease.
The
Financial Times
wrote on November 10 –
“EU
foreign ministers have been called to a special dinner on Sunday to discuss the
consequences of Mr Trump’s unexpected victory, which has cast doubt on core
strands of Europe’s foreign policy alignment with Washington.”
What has Russia been
guilty of? A normal protection of their own people, the Russians, who were the
vast majority in Crimea, a peninsula that had belonged to Russia from the
seventeen-hundreds until 1954, when Khrushchev gave the peninsula to his native
Ukraine. Crimea's population is for the large majority Russians and I have
dealt with this subject in detail previously.
We are in a desperate need of a global détente. The world can not go on living
under the constant threat of annihilation. Expansionism and aggression with the
overriding struggle for oil and fossil gas must give way to people's need for a
decent life where constant fear of tomorrow won't have to be part of our
lives, where we can live in security and enjoy the basic human needs for food, high-quality
education and proper housing.
For the rich
countries in the West these rights ought to be self-evident, but they ought to
be standard in third-world countries as well. We can obviously not expect this
to change with Trump as the future president. He himself is after all part of
the 0.01% elite that runs the world. However, if he is honest in his promise to
end the wars and the stand-off situation towards Russia, that would indeed be a
first step to get the world out of the insane situation it is in at this point.
However, the all
over-reaching issue today is obviously the fight against global warming and the
gradual destruction of our planet. Here Trump must, above all other concerns,
be taught by wiser men and women than he himself that there is no putting off
till tomorrow of this pressing issue. It must be faced and proper measures
taken NOW.
Donald Trump should
surround himself with advisers who are not hawks, who are not oligarchs, unless
there are oligarchs who can change their skin when they see how the cookie
crumbles. The big question now is “Can a leopard change its spots?”
Unfortunately, Trump has chosen people for key positions in his upcoming
cabinet and top political positions who are precisely what we do not need. The
question now on the table is whether Trump has a realistic view of what it will
take to save the world from wars and destruction. At best, it might be possible
for people with common sense to make it clear to him that the people he has
chosen at this time for top-level positions are not what we need at this point.
At worst, those people were chosen by the neocon super-hawks and bigots who
make up the shadow government. If that’s the case, the only way to save the
world would be that the Empire self-destroys. It is already on its way by
crucially over-reaching in their ceaseless expansionist policies.
Americans right now express their disgust for the sleazy Donald Trump, but they
have quite forgotten, or simply never realized, how incredibly scary Hillary's
political platform was. Those who are strongly opposed to a future with Trump
as America's next president should first of all realize what a future with
Hillary would have been like. Feminist or not feminist (all thinking women, and
men, are probably 'feminists', for women's equal rights). What should be
of crucial importance to all of us is the fact that our planet will not survive
yet more of an onslaught of destruction by wars and by unnatural biotech seeds
and pesticides that will play hell with existing ecosystems.
Mrs. Clinton's criminal background through the Clinton Foundation should be
decisive for our choice. But even without that, we would have to mention her
war policies – her psychopathic and happily laughing scene caught on video
after the unbelievably cruel torture and
killing of Gaddafi, and the entire destruction of Libya. That war can be
written to Hillary's account, even if she was helped by the then French
president, Nicolas Sarkozy and NATO in general. Barack Obama was against the
war, but he was pushed by Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, to go along
with her war plans.
What was Hillary Clinton’s real platform? Subversion of all Latin-American
countries – Venezuela (well on the way), Brazil (virtually finished case by the
United States-supported opposition) – Paraguay (coup in 2012) and Argentina
(coup in 2015) are already 'completed', the next country scheduled for a coup
is Bolivia, which is already on the US list of "evil states". Iran is
of course in turn to be obliterated, as Hillary promised.
First of all, we must
consider how African and Asian countries must regain their true sovereignty and
their independence of big multinational corporations, a sovereignty which they
finally got back from the colonizing Europeans after World War II, in many
cases after shameless wars and great loss of lives. They must have the means to
give their people decent livelihoods, instead of getting their natural
resources expropriated by large multinational corporations. And this
scandalous takeover of poor nations’ livelihoods by the oil and mining
industries is only one part of the scandals brought on by neo-colonialism.
Multinational agribusiness is another.
On the other hand Europe
has also come eerily close to total submission under the US Empire.
If all goes well
after this transition period in the U.S., Europe and Russia will soon be able
to resume their peaceful mutual trade relations for the benefit of all – relations
that were suddenly broken by the sanctions installed on Washington's orders
after the Crimean crisis. These sanctions have met with resistance from several
EU countries, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, just to mention
one.
Washington will not be able to strangle Russia economically.
Europe has suffered more from these sanctions than Russia, since it simply
turned to the east for their trade, primarily natural gas
US cooperation with ISIS in Syria (which is also supported by Saudi Arabia,
Israel, Qatar, etc.) is one more stain on Washington's list of dirty
interventions in sovereign nations.
Under Trump, it looks pretty certain that EU will lose its present role as a
virtual US colony and that NATO will lose most of its importance or it will be
dissolved. This organization has no more raison d'être since Russia is an
entirely peaceful country without expansionist ambitions – and is all set to
cooperate with Europe.
The Kiev coup and the following Crimea uprising, the latest false-flag attempts
by Washington to make Russia appear to be the aggressor, ended up as a total
fiasco. Ukraine, at this time, is a 'lost state' and the world knows that
Washington was the agent in this coup.
Trump promises cooperation with Putin instead of aggression, and this must be a
compelling reason to vote for him for the sake of the world and to say good
riddance to Hillary Clinton. The Western world has suffered for decades under
Washington’s terrorism, which has always been strongly supported by the
corporate mass media.
The world has had enough!
" German
Foreign Minister Steinmeier says extending Russia sanctions more difficult –
An agreement on renewing sanctions against Russia when
they run out on July 31 has become more difficult with growing opposition from
some EU countries, Germany's foreign minister said on Thursday.
European Union
economic sanctions against Russia were introduced for one year in July 2014 in
response to its actions in Ukraine and twice extended in 2015.
"We are aware
that resistance in the EU to extending the sanctions toward Russia has
increased," Frank-Walter Steinmeier was quoted by Lithuania's BNS news
agency saying in an interview.”
Russia’s Remarkable Renaissance
The New Media Monopoly shows that
only 5 huge corporations – Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation,
Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom formerly CBS) – now control most of the
media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth. – Media Reform Information Center
*****
Siv O'Neall is an
Axis of Logic columnist, based in France. Her insightful essays are
republished and read worldwide. She can be reached at
siv@axisoflogic.com.
© Copyright 2016 by AxisofLogic.com
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