Source: http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/04/14/what-us-aristocracy-demanding.html
By: Eric Zuesse
Originally Published on April 14, 2017
By: Eric Zuesse
Originally Published on April 14, 2017
Donald
Trump has reversed his national-security policies 180 degrees, and is now
focusing it around conquering Russia, instead of around reducing the threat
from jihadists. The reason for this drastic change is in order for him to be
able to win the support of the U.S. aristocracy, who had overwhelmingly
favored Hillary Clinton during the Presidential contest, and who (and whose
‘news’media) have been trying to portray Trump as «Putin’s fool» or even as
«Putin’s Manchurian candidate» and thus as an illegitimate President or even
traitor who is beholden to 'America’s enemy’ (which to them is Russia) for
Trump’s having won the U.S. Presidency — which they had tried to block from happening.
Actually, even
Republican billionaires generally preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump —
and almost all of them hate Putin, who insists upon Russia’s independence,
which the U.S. aristocracy call by all sorts of bad names, so that any American
who even so much as merely questions the characterization of Russia as being an
‘enemy’ nation, is considered to be ‘unAmerican’, like in the days of communism
and Joseph R. McCarthy, as if communism and the U.S.S.R. and its Warsaw Pact
that mirrored America’s NATO military alliance, even existed today, which they
obviously don’t. So: the U.S. Establishment’s portrayal of current international
reality is so bizarre, it can be believed only by fools, but enough such fools
exist so as to enable that Establishment to do horrific things, such as the
2003 invasion of Iraq, and the 2011 invasion of Libya, just to name two
examples, which got rid of two national leaders who were friendly toward
Russia.)
After
Trump ditched his National Security Advisor Mike Flynn (whom Obama had fired
for not being sufficiently anti-Russian, but Trump then hired) and replaced him
with the rabidly anti-Russian H.R. McMaster (whom the aristocracy’s people were
recommending to Trump), Trump was expecting to be relieved from the
aristocracy’s intensifying campaign to impeach him or otherwise replace him and
make the President his clearly pro-aristocratic Vice President Mike Pence, but
the overthrow-Trump campaign continued even after McMaster became installed
replacing Flynn. Then, perhaps because the replacement of Flynn by McMaster
failed to satisfy the aristocracy, Trump additionally ousted Stephen Bannon and
simultaneously bombed Syrian government forces, and now the campaign to
overthrow Trump seems finally to have subsided, at least a bit, at least for
now.
Trump’s
domestic enemies have been variously called «neoconservatives», «Zionists»,
«Democrats», «liberals», «Republicans», and other such misleading categories,
all of which ‘sides’ are now actually controlled by, and representing, only one
side, the world’s roughly 2,000 billionaires (and
this Forbes list doesn’t even include royalty, who are the topmost of
all, such as the King of Saudi Arabia, whose net worth is in the trillions).
These are the individuals who control all of the ‘news’ media that have
significantly large audiences, and who also control Wall Street, and who also
control the giant oil companies, and who also control the top 100 U.S.
government contracting firms, the top 25 of which are shown, in the ranking of
the «Top 100 Contractors of the U.S. federal government», as being: 1:
Lockheed Martin. 2: Boeing. 3: General Dynamics. 4: Raytheon. 5: Northrop
Grumman. 6: McKesson. 7: United Technologies. 8: L-3. 9: Bechtel. 10: BAE. 11:
Huntington Ingalls. 12: Humana. 13: SAIC. 14: Booz Allen Hamilton. 15:
Healthnet. 16: Computer Sciences. 17: UnitedHealth. 18: Aecom. 19: Leidos. 20:
Harris. 21: General Atomics. 22: Hewlett-Packard. 23: Battelle. 24: United
Launch Alliance. 25 Los Alamos National Lab.
Those
25 firms are about 35% of the total, but they’re almost 100% ‘Defense’
Department suppliers, and so they show the extreme extent to which the
extraordinary entity that President Dwight Eisenhower had called (only when he
was leaving office — he had been too scared to say it while still in
the White House) «the military-industrial complex», has come to be the
aristocracy that’s now joined-at-the-head to the behind-the-scenes U.S. government,
and that uses, and is used by, that government (its politicians), in order to
protect and increase their personal wealth.
They
thrive on war, because war is the ultimate government-expense.
(Aristocrats have, over the centuries, benefited from government expenses,
because those expenses are extracted from the public, and become income to the
aristocracy.) And, then, after a war is over, the entity who own the debt that
the taxpayers will need to pay back, for all of those government-purchases, from
all of those government contractors (basically the manufacturers of the
machines for mass-killing) is whom? The megabanks had been lending to those
weapons-makers, of course, so as to enable these manufacturers to ramp-up
production. The money that was lent to make those weapons, comes back to these
megabanks, with interest, charged to those weapons-makers, who profited from
these weapons-sales. Thus, it’s not just those weapons-manufacturing firms but
also the megabanks, that grow from wars.
In
addition, the government has issued bonds to pay to the weapons-makers to
purchase those weapons. Those enormous debts, which had been paid to the
weapons-makers, are now owed by taxpayers to the government to pay to the
owners of those government bonds, which often are investment-firms, either the
megabanks themselves, or clients of the megabanks. Ultimately, these debts
often become assets on the mega-banks’ balance-sheets — and the same
aristocratic families can (and often do) own or control both government contractors
and megabanks, and sometimes also the investment-firms. This is the safe way,
the low-risk way, for billionaires to become multi-billionaires. Virtually all
of the risks of wars are borne by the general public, but all of the profits
from wars go to the aristocrats. It’s a certain type of game, in which the
billionaires are the players, and the public are the toys, which are played
with; and, from which, multiple extractions are made, as the game is played.
It’s like raising «game» (in the animal-sense) in order to shoot, and eat it.
Even
the world’s biggest bookstore-owner, Jeff Bezos, became a major contractor to
the ‘Defense’ Department, by providing cloud-based computing services to
the war-machine, and then he arranged to purchase the world’s top
neoconservative ‘news’paper, the Washington Post, to boost and to suppress
the careers of whichever federal politicians have proven to be the most and the
least cooperative with regard to expanding the budget for the only U.S. Cabinet
Department that’s so corrupt it can’t even be audited: the ‘Defense’
Department. A mere retailer, such as Bezos, doesn’t generally have much clout,
unless he either owns a ‘news’ medium (such as the Washington Post) or
hires effective lobbyists. At that high a level, things are very interconnected,
and a player needs to have agents in each crucial part of the power-machine.
So, Bezos does. But, so, too, do other high-tech leaders, such as the
billionaires at Alphabet Inc., formerly called «Google». They were heavily
involved in 2011 helping Hillary Clinton’s State Department draw up the
plans to overthrow two heads-of-state that allied with Russia: Yanukovych in
Ukraine, and Assad in Syria.
Of
course, ownership of almost all large corporations is usually hidden by layers
of ownership, and sometimes only one class of stock actually controls the
company, while other classes of stock are purely passive investors in the given
firm and they have no real control over it. But, regardless, anyone who is
paying serious attention to textbook versions of economic theory (‘economic
competition’) is thinking about a mere fantasy world, a fantasy-game, not the
real-world game; not the real world, at all — and the aristocracy also gets to
decide who writes those textbooks (the rules of the fantasy-game), to
make sure they distract the public from what’s happening in the real
world.
So,
within that tiny society at the top of this planet’s power-pyramid, are being
made the person-to-person deals that determine peace or war, life or death, for
the general population, at any given time. These are the few people who will
take their cut, no matter what. But, they need this cycle, of war, debt, and
politics, to continue going ’round and ’round, in order to achieve
what, for them, is «progress», and to keep it going — ’round and ’round,
like in centuries past, for themselves, and for their heirs. It’s a way of
life; it is a tiny sub-culture, at the very top; and it remains remarkably
constant, from decade to decade, and even from century to century. The illusion
that the players care about the toys, is needed, in order to keep the game
going, so that extractions can continue to be made from the toys, forever, and
the aristocracy can thus become evermore bloated («successful»), from this
‘progress’.
Here,
at the following links, is a brief history of how this game has been
proceeding, during recent decades, starting from current times, and going
backward through the decades:
So:
Trump has decided to do what he thinks he must do, in order to be able to stay
in power. In order to stay in power, he must be a type of President that,
in some crucial respects, is more like what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were,
than what he had promised his voters he would be. And the reason that this is
so, is that this is what America’s aristocracy demands, in today’s American ‘democracy’.
