Trump—triumph or tragedy? Pt. 1

Contrary to the contentions of those misguided (or deviously Machiavellian) Americans now agitating for a “Convention of the States” in order to amend the Constitution in some unpredictable fashion, the ridiculous and intolerable situation which confronts this country today is not the product of “the supreme Law of the Land”. No, indeed. It is the result of decades of disregard and even disdain for, and thoroughgoing disobedience to, the Constitution in both the District of Columbia and the States, by a totally dysfunctional, if not outright disloyal, professional “political class” and the vicious, predatory factions in the Establishment for which the “political class” works. But, obviously, in keeping with traditional methods of political reform, the stranglehold which the greasy fingers of this cabal press into Americans’ throats can be broken only upon the emergence of viable candidates for high public office whom the Establishment does not control. Increasing numbers of patriotic Americans, disgusted with the present noxious state of affairs, and desperate for change which is worth believing in and struggling for, are asking whether Donald Trump is such a candidate. Will his emergence on the political scene usher in a time of triumph, or the final act of an American tragedy?

To be sure, because there are no probabilities of unique events, the past never provides perfect parallels for the future. (As the expression coined by advertisers in the automotive trade has it, “your mileage may differ”.) Yet, just as the enjoyment of a deceptive prosperity in 1928 predictably collapsed into the anguish of a real depression in 1932, today’s data indicate to every perceptive observer that an economic, social, and political crisis of substantial magnitude cannot be averted in this country (and the rest of the world as well) during the foreseeable future. Indeed, in light of the unbearable burden of America’s public and private debt (most of which is not only entirely unfunded now, but also quite incapable of ever being funded); the incompetence, corruption, and criminality of the Federal Reserve’s banking-cartel and Wall Street’s financial casinos; the disappearance of high value-added jobs (as in manufacturing) through off-shoring and globalist “trade deals”; the impoverishment of the middle class and destitution of the poor; the utter unsoundness of this nation’s currency; and especially the Establishment’s perverse principle that the very worst criminals in the Axis of Financial Fraud which runs from New York City to the District of Columbia are both “too big to fail” and “too big to jail”—due to all of this, in comparison to the approaching national calamity the Great Depression of the 1930s will appear to have been a period of economic rationality, social tranquillity, and political stability. And, most ominously for Mr. Trump, in this benighted era in which the President is viewed by all too many as “the Decider” whose actions determine the course of events for better or worse in every sphere of human endeavor, whoever happens to be the President from 2017 through 2020 will be held economically, politically, and ideologically accountable for whatever transpires, be it good or especially be it ill. (One might discount these concerns by pointing out that, were Hillary Clinton elected President, she would face the same Hooverite danger of incumbency in the midst of an economic collapse. Unlike Mr. Trump, however, Mrs. Clinton would benefit from the inestimable advantage of having the big “mainstream media” as ardent propagandists indoctrinating Americans with the party line that only the fascistic, socialistic, or other policies of political racketeering which her Administration promoted could eventually restore prosperity.)

So, if Mr. Trump is not fully prepared—well before the fact—to tell Americans exactly how he plans to deal, expeditiously and effectively, with the hard times that are surely on their way, if he is elected his Administration will be blamed for the collapse, even more than Herbert Hoover was pilloried for the Great Depression. Not only that: Having run on a fundamentally anti-Establishment platform, Mr. Trump and all of his political and ideological supporters—be they constitutionalists, advocates of federalism and limited government, Tea Party-ites, or simply average Americans who hope that by electing an “outsider” they can finally escape from domination by the “two” major political parties and the string-pullers in the Establishment who control them from behind the screen—will find themselves decisively defeated, defamed, discouraged, and dumped into the dustbin of history. The Establishment will emerge triumphant, more puissant, irresponsible, rapacious, and vindictive than ever before.

So, what is to be done—by Mr. Trump certainly, and indeed by any candidate for “the Office of President” who aspires to be a true political “outsider” both in words and especially in deeds? For one thing, he must not make Herbert Hoover’s mistake of attempting to deal with an economic cataclysm by employing the very same discourse, analyses, tactics, policies, and types of persons as advisors which and who were responsible for the crisis. First and foremost, as the essence of his electoral campaign he must stop talking about evanescent “issues” concocted largely by his opponents and disseminated through “the mainstream media” as part of their incessant dissemination of disinformation, but instead must apprise Americans as to what the real score is at the opening of this, the fourth quarter; then set out his unique plan for the rest of the game.

A. First on Mr. Trump’s agenda must be to lay before this country a candid and accurate assessment, in detail, of the present situation—what it entails, how it came about, and why it will inexorably play out to this country’s destruction if the right steps are not taken in due course. He must be as unsparingly honest and coldly clinical as a physician who warns his patient that the patient suffers from a disease which will have fatal consequences unless radical treatments are employed as soon as possible. And, just as such a physician would do, he must explain that the necessity for these treatments derives from the source, nature, and inevitable effects of the disease. Of course, Mr. Trump would not be the first to describe the hard times now bearing down upon us, or to explain the origins of the danger. I, for one, have been writing about this subject since even long before my earliest commentaries for NewsWithViews, such as “‘Homeland Security’—For What and For Whom?” (8 March 2005) and “Are Monetary and Banking Crises Inevitable in the Near Future?” (17 March 2005). Other noteworthy prophets of the obvious include Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson on economics, John Whitehead on this country’s burgeoning para-military police state, and Frosty Wooldridge on the disastrous effects of unlimited immigration. Mr. Trump, though, enjoys the decided advantage that, as a candidate for the office of President with the savvy and financial wherewithal to generate his own mass publicity, he cannot be dismissed as a nonperson by “the mainstream media”. Although the big media may go all out for character assassination, they can neither impose anonymity on him nor consign what he says to the oblivion of Orwell’s “memory hole”.

From his self-made “bully pulpit”, Mr. Trump needs to emphasize that the present situation is not the product of disembodied “trends” or “historical forces” for which no one in particular, or for which everyone in general, is responsible. The situation confronting America today has resulted from specifically human actions. And (as everyone conversant with Austrian economics knows) all human actions are the products of some identifiable individuals’ purposeful behavior, or misbehavior. Therefore, Mr. Trump needs to expose and excoriate the actual culprits in the Establishment out of whose witches’ cauldron the contemporary septic mess has overflowed. Consequences must be connected with actions—actions must be associated with names—and to names must be assigned moral and political responsibility, if not outright criminal culpability, for past, present, and future events. I, for one, am not responsible for America’s plight; and I presume that vanishing few of my readers are, either. But some identifiable individuals are at fault here. And this country is entitled to know their names, what they have done, and why—and, most to the point in a political campaign for the highest office in the land, what the leading candidate intends to do about it all. Obviously, the rogues’ gallery must include at least the dominant figures and operatives of the “two” major political parties, as well as all of the factions and other special interests, both domestic and foreign, for which those “two” parties are partisans, fronts, transmission belts, stooges, and gaggles of useful idiots (if not outright co-conspirators). These individuals, after all, have exercised actual control over America’s political, economic, social, and cultural institutions for decades upon decades. If those institutions have gone to blazes, it is not illogical or unfair to conclude that the men and women in charge of them lit the matches.

Of course, exposure of this dirty linen will confront Americans with the hard reality that their country’s body politic, and the economic, social, and cultural institutions over which it presides, are riven with irreconcilable conflicts. Yet for America to come to grips with such divisions is not without historical precedent—although in the past that problem was usually recognized for what it was, not swept under the rug as it tends to be today. For the prime instance, when “the REPRESENTATIVES of the UNITED STATES” promulgated the Declaration of Independence, they did so “in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of the[ ] Colonies”. Not all of the people, but only “the good People”—because the Founders were well aware that Americans in their day were far from being united. Some were “good People” who favored independence; some were attentistes who sat on the political fence, abiding events; and some were Tories who supported King George III. From the Patriots’ point of view, whatever the Tories’ personal merits as individuals, as a group they were to be accounted “bad people”, with whom no political reconciliation or compromise was possible.

In the late 1700s, much more in the economic, social, and cultural realms united Patriots and Tories than divided them. The decisive fracture appeared along a political fault-line: namely, whether “the good People” were entitled to enjoy the plenitude of “the rights of Englishmen”, or were to be consigned to a second-class status at the mercy of the British Imperial Government. “[W]hy should we enumerate our injuries in detail?” asked the Continental Congress in 1775. “By one statute it is declared, that parliament can ‘of right make laws to bind us IN ALL CASES WHATSOEVER.’ What is to defend us against so enormous, so unlimited a power? * * * We saw the misery to which such despotism would reduce us.” A declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North America, now met in General Congress at Philadelphia, setting forth the causes and necessity of their taking up arms (Thursday, 6 July 1775), Journals of the Continental Congress, Volume 2, at 146-147.

Today, an arguably worse situation exists. For, with the advent of “multiculturalism” as the Establishment’s strategy of social control through engineered social dissolution, almost everything has become a source of divisions which the Establishment exploits for the purpose of accreting to itself powers even more “enormous” and “unlimited” than any to which the British Parliament aspired in Colonial times. Yet, in confirmation of the old axiom that le plus ça change le plus c’est la même chose, in contemporary America the primary division between “the good People” on the one hand, and “the bad people” among or allied with the Establishment on the other hand, appears in the same stark political terms. Just as in the late 1700s, “the good People” of the contemporary United States demand only that to which they are entitled: namely, “the rights of Americans”, which “the bad people” are bending every effort to strip from them.

In reliance upon the Declaration of Independence, “the good People” want to maintain “among the powers of the earth, the[ir] separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”—not to be swept up into some supra-national “new world order”. They want the public officials who administer the “Governments” this country’s Founders “instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” to exercise only “just powers”; at every turn of the political wheel to seek out and conform to, not to disregard and dispense with, “the consent of the governed”; to acknowledge “[t]hat whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”; and always to remember, in fear and trembling, that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce the[ People] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”. In short, “the good People” want to remain sovereigns in their own land, not subjects, serfs, or slaves of a global imperium run by and for the benefit of gigantic corporations devoid of souls, hearts, or consciences, that scorn “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and violate them with impunity.

As this country’s sovereigns, “the good People” want, deserve, and have an absolute legal right to enjoy the benefits of the Constitution their forefathers “ordain[ed] and establish[ed]” “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. In contrast—

• The Establishment intends to dissolve “a more perfect Union” in this country in order to absorb Americans within a global “new world order” in which their national identity disappears.
• The Establishment intends to “[dis]establish Justice” by creating a dichotomy of legal status between its members and minions, on the one hand, and average Americans, on the other. For the Establishment, one sort of “justice” will prevail, and quite another one for everyone else. Private special interests will be the beneficiaries, not only of “bail outs”, “bail ins”, and other subsidies under color of the excuse that they are “too big to fail”, but also of abusive “trade deals” that enable supra-national corporations to usurp the constitutional authority of Congress “[t]o regulate Commerce”, thereby permanently alienating Americans’ ability to control their own economic destiny. And those corporate interests, along with the rogue public officials who do their bidding, will be “too big to jail”—the worse their offenses, the more complete their immunities.

• The Establishment intends to undermine “domestic Tranquility” by sowing the dragons’ teeth of disharmony, dissension, discord, and division throughout society, in pursuit of its strategy of divide et impera. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the aid and comfort the Establishment extends to invasions of America by illegal aliens who refuse to assimilate but instead assert a right to impose divisive “multiculturalism” on everyone else, with the inevitable result that every thread of traditional Americanism will be ripped from this country’s social fabric.

• The Establishment intends to pervert “the Army and Navy of the United States”—after the Militia, the primary national instruments for “the common defence”—into hordes of witless myrmidons deployed for aggressive military adventures overseas, in violation of the constitutional principle that “the genius and character of our institutions are peaceful, and the power to declare war was not conferred upon Congress for the purposes of aggression or aggrandizement”. Fleming v. Page, 50 U.S. (9 Howard) 603, 614 (1850).

• The Establishment intends to supplant “the general Welfare” with “corporate welfare”, so that special interests among 1% of the population can amass unlimited wealth at the expense of the remaining 99%. And, worst of all,

• The Establishment intends to render utterly “[in]secure the Blessings of Liberty”, by empowering a para-militarized police state to oppress average Americans at every turn, in a manner far more egregious than anything King George III and his Ministers could ever have contemplated, let alone attempted.

Indeed, the Establishment is well on its way to accomplishing each and every one of these goals. For Part two click below.