No is not enough

When Donald Trump was elected as the president, only close to 63 million people who voted for him were happy. This is 19.5% of the 323 million population of the United States in 2016. The other 80% were either indifferent, or shocked, or angry; or they were not old enough to vote or care. We don’t know what percent leaned which way. But those who were indifferent, either did not care about the politics, or knew his presidency would be the natural progression of the political condition in this country.

It is a general knowledge that the founding fathers of the United States were slaveholders. Ben Franklin was a dealmaker, who was able to guarantee independence of the United States from the British during the ‎revolution. His son William, however, led an army in favor of the Royalists and against the revolutionaries. He was imprisoned after the success of the revolution, until daddy released him and sent him to England to live there for the rest of his life. The most famous presidents of the United States are George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. However, it may not be a common knowledge that Washington became a slave owner at the age of eleven, Wilson was a racist to the core, and Roosevelt’s New Deal was a part of a series of demands by socialists, in which he had to accept or face a revolution. Any of the other presidents’ attitudes towards the majority of people, from Lincoln to Kennedy, to Carter, to Obama, requires a study to realize that their presidency summed up in benefiting a very small minority group, the wealthy. We may grade each president in that respect, however the ‎tendency has been accelerating by each president, with a sharp spike during Reagan’s presidency, when Neoliberalism was adopted. This tendency ended up with the presidency of the multi-billionaire himself.

‎”No is Not Enough” is a book by Naomi Klein that investigates this epidemic condition. She started with discussing money in politics: “It’s a naked corporate takeover, one many decades in the making. It seems that the economic interests that have long since paid off both major parties to do their bidding have decided they’re tired of playing the game. Apparently, all that wining and dining of elected officials, all that cajoling and legalized bribery, insulted their sense of divine entitlement. So now they’re cutting out the middlemen- those needy politicians who are supposed to protect the public interest- and doing what all top dogs do when they want something done right: they are doing it themselves,” (P.4) The progression of becoming candidate of the rich with their financial support, and serving as their president was pointed out above.‎Klein delves into this subject in more detail.

Was it Hillary’s lack of decency or Trump’s unintellectual and base character that appealed to those who voted for him? Or, was there another reason: “In the face of his total lack of government experience, Trump sold himself to voters with a somewhat novel two-pronged pitch. First: I’m so rich that i don’t need to be bought off. And second: You can trust me to fix this corrupt system because I know it from the inside...Within hours of taking office, Trump called for a massive tax cut, which would see corporations pay just 15 percent (down from 35 percent), and pledged to slash regulations by 75 percent...According to an analysis by Public Citizen, Trump met with at least 190 corporate executives in less than three months in office- before announcing that visitor logs would no longer be made public,” (P. 21).

Neoliberalism has been on the first page of the directives of every president since Reagan. It has been an ideology progressed throughout years by politicians and economists, and created the wealth division we are witnessing today. Milton Freedman, the famous economist who single handedly destroyed economies of Chile and several other countries, was 20th century advocate of Neoliberalism. This theory had a U-turn in the 21st century, which Naomi Klein believes that was one of the reasons for Trump’s winning hand: “In 2016, Credit Suisse estimated that there is roughly $256 billion in total global wealth – with a staggeringly unequal distribution: ‘While the bottom half collectively own less than 1 percent of all global assets.’ Which is why there just aren’t many serious people left who are willing to argue, with a straight face, that giving more to the wealthy is the best way to help the poor. Trump’s pitch has always been different. From the start, it was: I will turn you into a winner- and together we can crush the losers,” (P.49).

One of the major crises in the world today is fear of annihilation of all human kind, due to global warming. Every four years, a person is elected (selected) from each of the two parties in the US. Unfortunately, both parties are in support of fossil fuel industry, and in denial of the global warming. There is a glimmer of hope in 2020 however, that people such as Sanders and Warren are running through one of these parties. Hence, whether they will force the party to nominate them, and then if they get elected, and finally whether they are allowed to do anything to relieve us of the danger, is uncertain: “During the Democratic primaries, I was really struck by the moment when a young woman confronted Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail and asked her if – given the scale of the global warming crisis- she would pledge not to take any more money from the fossil fuel interest that are supercharging it. Up to that point, Clinton’s campaign had received large sums of money from employees and registered lobbyists of fossil fuel companies- about 1.7 million, according to Greenpeace’s research. Clinton looked disgusted and snapped at the young woman, saying she was ‘so sick’ of this issue coming up. A few days later, in an interview, Clinton said young people should ‘do their own research.’ The woman who had asked the question, Eva Resnick-Day, worked as a campaigner for Greenpeace. She had done her research, she insisted, ‘and that is why we are so terrified for the future... What happens in the next four or eight years could determine the future of our planet and the human species’...There are many plots and intrigues swirling around Washington, most notoriously claims about the Trump team conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election...Trump’s collusion with the fossil fuel sector is the conspiracy hiding in plain sight,” (P.71).

One should remember famous Bill Clinton’s campaign slogan “it is the economy stupid” which made such an impact on the voters, and made the inventor of this short statement a lifetime political commentator. In addition to such strong slogans in Trump’s campaign, there was something else working there: “Trump speaks directly to that economic panic, and, simultaneously, to the resentment felt by a large segment of white America about the changing force of their country, about positions of power and privilege increasingly being held by people who do not look like them. The intensity and irrationality of the rage Trump and his strongest supporters reserved for Barack Obama, the years of feverish desire to strip him of his Americanness by ‘proving’ he was Kenyan, thereby rendering him ‘other’, cannot be explained by anything but race hatred. This is the ‘whitelash’ that CNN commentator Van Jones named on election night, and there is no doubt that for a considerable segment of Trump’s voters it is a ferocious force,” (P.85).

It has been said before that American expansionist culture and its acceptance by citizens stem from a long scientific and successful propaganda by the system: “This is a good time to remember that manufacturing false hierarchies based on race and gender to enforce a brutal class system is a very long story. Our modern capitalist economy was born thanks to two very large subsidies: stolen Indigenous land and stolen African people. Both required the creation of intellectual theories that ranked the relative value of human lives and labor, placing white men at the top. These church and state-sanctioned theories of white (and Christian) supremacy are what allowed Indigenous civilization to be actively ‘unseen’ by European explorers- visually perceived and yet not acknowledged to have preexisting rights to the land- and entire richly populated continents to be legally classified as unoccupied and therefore fair game on an absurd ‘finders keepers’ basis,” (P.94).

Naomi Klein talks about the vacuum created by 9/11. It seems like the political vertigo across the Western World stems from the economic condition enforced by those governments in the past half century, namely Neo-liberalism. Naomi Klein discussed this subject in detail in the past in her famous book “The Shock Doctrine”. No matter how many times it is explained and discussed, shock and awe always works to distract people and pursue an unpopular policy. 9/11 was another Pearl Harbor, to start a new war and keep United States in perpetual conflict. However, she sums it up with a short and interesting statement about political vacuum: “Politics hates vacuum; if it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear,” (P.113).

Neoliberalism created such a staggering divide between the rich and the poor that it is unavoidable to be mentioned in any real political writing. The presentation of rich people in Davos is discussed next: “... for multitudes around the world, the whole Davos class came to symbolize the idea that success was a party to which they were not invited, and they knew in their hearts that this rising wealth and power was somehow connected to their growing debts and powerlessness, and the increasing precariousness of their children’s futures. The fact that politicians who promised to protect working people’s interests were so entangled with the Davos class only increased the rage. The debate over Barack Obama accepting $400,000 for a speech to a Wall Street audience needs to be understood in this context,” (P.118). “The divide between the Davos class and everyone else has been widening since 1980s. but for a lot of people, the breaking point came with the 2008 financial crisis... All of a sudden it turned out that governments can do all kinds of things to interfere in the market, and have seemingly unlimited resources with which to help you out if only you are rich enough. At that moment, everyone on earth saw that they had been lied to,” (P.119).

Trump is in the business of real estates and casinos. His business surges during the peacetime, therefore, if he pledges to terminate all the non-ending wars created by previous administrations in the Middle East and Africa, it is not because of his sense of humanity, but in order for him to continue a more lucrative business. As almost all Republicans are war-mongering hawks, whoever he puts in charge of any department, that person pursues the politics of his or her predecessors, that has been continues war in the most volatile regions of the world, mentioned earlier. That is one of the reasons for Trump’s high personnel turnover: “Take a group of people who directly profit from ongoing war and then put those same people at the heart of the government. Who’s going to make the case for peace? Indeed, the idea that a war could ever definitely end seems a quaint relic of what during the Bush years was dismissed as ‘pre-September 11 thinking’,” (P.149).

‎One of the Trump’s biggest problems is his lack of education in general, and specifically in politics. Before presidency, he was not groomed by professionals as George W. was. Therefore, he speaks his heart in a common language without considering the politics of his statements. When he lies, he changes his words unabashedly. His racism, xenophobia, sexism, and other traits of the sort are un-apologizing and open for public consumption. When he was only a rich person, media liked his candid trash and everyone would endure it since he was wealthy. In this new position, a polished deep state is watching him, and before the end of his term, they will try to remove him from the office: “Trump has openly called for a new nuclear ‘arms race’- a call we have not heard since the 1980s. He has reportedly asked his foreign policy advisors repeatedly why the United States can’t just use nuclear weapons, seemingly not grasping the principle of retaliation. And one of Trump’s biggest financial backers, Sheldon Adelson, has talked about needing to threaten Iran with a nuclear strike in the ‘middle of the desert that doesn’t hurt a soul... maybe a couple of rattlesnakes... Then you say, See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business.’ Adelson donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, the largest donation of its kind ever,” (P.170).

In almost all large cities in America, one could find at least one private gated residential area. Considering that anyone entering the community should know some residents, person living in such neighborhood feels safe and secure. Therefore, living in a gated area gives the resident a false sense of security. Of course, it is more costly to live in a gated community, and those living in such communities are wealthier than those living outside of the gates. One may think that if the resident of a gated community was not as rich, and his wealth was distributed more equally, no one had to live in a gated neighborhood. Expanding this thought to a larger community, such as a country, we realize why Trump wants to build a wall to keep those who have escaped brutal governments installed by the very same United States, out. Naomi Klein expands this idea worldwide. “This is the way our world is being carved up at an alarming rate. Europe, Australia, and North America are erecting increasingly elaborate (and privatized) border fortresses to seal themselves off from people fleeing for their lives. Fleeing quite often, as a direct result of forces unleashed primarily by those fortressed continents, whether predatory trade, wars, or ecological disasters intensified by climate change,” (P.181).

“A crisis of imagination”. That is what this chapter is titled. It is about Abrahamic religions’ philosophies and their doomsday machines. Of course, there are mad men in power who can create those scenarios, copied from some movies: “Searching for a word to describe the huge discrepancies in privileges and safety between those in Iraq’s Green and Red zones, journalists often landed on ‘sci-fi.’ And of course, it was. The walled city where the wealthy few live in relative luxury while the masses outside war with one another for survival is pretty much the default premise of every dystopian sci-fi movie that gets made these days, from The Hunger Games, with the decadent Capitol versus the desperate colonies, to Elysium, with its spa-like elite space station hovering above a sprawling and lethal favela. It’s a vision deeply enmeshed with the dominant Western religions, with their grand narratives of great floods washing the world clean, with only a chosen few selected to begin again. It’s the story of the great fires that sweep in, burning up the unbelievers and taking the righteous to a gated city in the sky. We have collectively imagined this extreme winners-and-losers ending for our species so many times that one of our most pressing tasks is learning to imagine other possible ends to the human story, ones in which we come together in crisis rather than split apart, take down borders rather than erect more of them,” (P.184, 185).

History can teach us everything. A society with a continuum in its politics, from its origin and when it was established to present day, studying history of that society can disclose its future relationship with other societies: “The United States was founded in domestic state terror, from the genocide of Indigenous people to slavery through to lynching and mass incarceration; trauma has been ever-present right up to this day. Moreover, very frequently, shocks and crises have been handmaidens to the worst abuses. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the promise of land redistribution as economic reparation to freed slaves was promptly betrayed. The financial crisis of 1873, known as the Great Panic, further entrenched the excuse that the economy was too ravaged and the country too divided- and instead of reparations came a reign of terror against freed slaves in the South. During the Great Depression, amidst economic panic, as many as two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were expelled. After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, approximately 20,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of whom had been born in the United States) were incarcerated in internment camps; just as in Canada almost the entire Japanese-Canadian citizenry was rounded up and forcibly interned,” (P. 195,196).

A short statement describes why the United States is the largest military in the world, and a global bully: “If the goal is to move from a society based on endless taking and depletion to one based on caretaking and renewal, then all of our relationships have to be grounded in those same principles of reciprocity and care- because our relationships with one another are our most valuable resource of all. And that’s the antithesis of bullying one another into submission,” (P.247).

Creating shock and awe is the oldest political ploy to keep public busy, and to allow those running the state keep masses in dark, and pillage. Impeach hearing is one of those schemes. In order to comply with the hidden state, there are certain policies that a president or any political office holder should avoid. Number one is stopping wars and cutting military budget, and that was Trump’s crucial error. Considering many Trump’s deficiencies, it is not really hard for the hidden government, with the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, to go after him: “We have no idea what’s going on. But in so many ways explored in these pages, Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination- the logical end point- of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the natural world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the one percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or community held is sinister and not worth protecting. That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own. That there is no alternative to any of this,” (P.257). Fortunately, this book and those coming out against such hypocrisy (in any form or fashion), are the alternatives. Next step is mobilize to replace current administration with Warren or Sanders or the like. In fact, next election year could be a ground breaking. Of course, after the election, they may turn out to be another Obama, or Biden gets selected by Democratic party, or to make it worse, the same president gets reelected. But, one should not give up.