Submitted by Pachamama

For months, if not years, we’ve been bombarded with claims that Russia interfered in the American ‘democracy’. Of course, this has been shocking to us because we were not aware that there was any tradition approaching ‘democracy’ within the USA.

We were not even aware that such a claim could be viably maintained, with a straight face, for any extended period of time. So they must be some seriousness there, or at least a determination to keep some elements of structural propaganda campaigns alive.

Of course, ‘democracy’ is best defined as having to do with equity in the distribution of resources. Sometimes is could be helpful if notions of ‘independence’ are liberally imbued. The best conditions for democracy cannot be said to exist when Trump himself represents the quintessential elements of oligarchy and domination, by less than one percent of one percenters.

Inside the United States such radical, rightist, racist, tendencies were well-established at Plymouth Rock. The Nobel Laureate, James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013) and a list of renowned academicians, largely from the Chicago School, since the 1960’s, laid the most recent foundations for today’s equivalent of White supremacy at its heyday, for cultural domination, at the strategic level, which Michele Alexander calls, ‘The New Jim Crow” as an internal phenomenon.

For Buchanan and his ilk, democracy and liberty could not mutually exist. For them, ‘liberty’ meant the unquestioned right of the few to own everything, including other human beings, as chattel. There were to be none of the so-called popular or meaningful ‘freedoms’ Americans and those so-socialized generally make grandiose claims about.

Buchanan and company made the affirmative argument that ‘democracy’ had to be ‘gagged’. They sought through stealth to establish this currently, dominant, American worldview. They contended that it was impossible for full ‘liberty’, meaning the ‘right’ of White men, mainly, to own ‘all’ the wealth in circumstances where ‘democracy’ was anything more than a mere platitude, a fiction, a cover for other more brutal political formations.

His work was international in scope, scale. Buchanan even more so than Milton Friedman and the other ‘Chicago Boys’ went into Chile and laid the foundations for a constitution aimed at foisting unpopular views on the majority of the population. Ideas hostile to ‘democracy’ within the Chilean constitution, in the hands of a military junta.

Buchanan was instrumental in arguing that ‘democracy’ had to be in chains for the America of Donald Trump to emerge. And yes, we have these ‘babes’ on TV, hour after hour, seeking to preserve the emptiness of a non-existent democracy which Buchanan and company have so stealthily bequeathed to us all.

The ‘money men’ who support these ideas have established networks of universities, think tanks and foundations to ensure their undemocratic traditions live forever. The Cato Institute, The Ford Foundation, The Koch Foundation. These institutions of oppression are even given pride of place within the wider culture. Such is the remarkable success of this ideology.

The America of Donald Trump sees every cabinet secretary appointed, as an agent of the moneyed interests, from the billionaire class. The far rightward, radical impulse now being given expression, exceeds the excesses of the Gilded Age. They aim is nothing less that the tearing down of the social welfare state and handing the savings to the billionaire class, themselves.

Trump’s cabinet secretaries are only the tip of the rightward lurch. Unlike most ‘pooraky’ countries, the USA has a relatively large number of wealthy citizens. Amongst these, the billionaire Koch brothers, have heavily funded the political-economy ideals of James Buchanan in ways that even Buchanan, himself, found objectionable, on his death bed.

These modern White supremacists maintain that even though 65% of the American people would favour a single-payer medical system and while the plans supported by the Republicans could, at best, gain 17% support amongst the electorate, Trumpism is determined to convince Americans that such a calculation is in their interests. These are the Buchanan ideals at work. The radical imposition of minority ideas on the vast majority using a popular party as the executing instrument of choice.

The Koch brothers and their acolytes have also funded voter suppression campaigns, promoted systems which imprison non-Whites disproportionately, funded the gerrymandering of constituencies, forcibly removed people of colour from places like the City of Chicago, Harlem; gutted budgets for public schools. These donor networks deploy their resources to exert extreme pressures on politicians, thanks to a supine supreme court, and have laid the foundations for the rise of Trumpism as the dominant governing system.
They have funded Republican and Democratic efforts internationally to interfere in the elections of governments they dislike. These ‘soft’ efforts to bring about coups have often been followed by direct or ‘hard’ attempts to overthrows other governments and put their lackeys in office. This has been going on for centuries.

That has been on the inside. On the outside. The decades old rise of Trumpism has manifested in the global organization, they say globalization, in which these far-rightist tendencies appear. It is the same side of the same political coin.

So while western central banks are not only bailing out commercial banks but more problematically subsidizing them, buying their bad debts and propping up the financial markets by trading in questionable bonds, countries like Barbados are to have no place in their world unless there are real assets to be taken.

Trump talks plainly about taking Iraqi oil. He is currently attempting to partition eastern Syria, this is already failing. He has already convinced the stupid Saudis to pay hundreds of billions for American protection of their medieval regime. This represents a level of gangsterism, crassness, unseen in recent times. American capitalism has reached the highest level of depravity imaginably. To the point where there is no difference between Trump, as president, and the presidency as an institution.

The events around 1776 and ‘victory’ in WW2 have led to scores of ‘independent’ countries over 70 years. Maybe it is time for the cautionary tale of Deng Xiaoping be put aside. Maybe it is not too soon to make the judgement that the rise of Americanism has not made the world a better place. A judgement that our world is no better than before or …. after.

Indeed, a close examination of the what is most likely to follow the age of Anglo-Americanism is likely to deliver a multi-polar world no less oligarchic than what we’ve had, as judged by elite Chinese and Russian behaviours in academia and commerce. The exception being their militaries, still fostering a completely different, distinctly anti-western orientation.