Can Trump Deliver?
Paul Craig Roberts
My view of Trump is conditional and awaits evidence. I am encouraged by the One Percent’s opposition to Trump, or we have just experienced the greatest ruse in history. Indeed, a pointless ruse, as the Establishment had its candidate in Hillary.
Trump’s executive orders don’t support the argument that he is acting for the One Percent. Trump nixed the global corporations’ beloved TPP. He is trying to close down the mass immigration that the corporations use to suppress domestic wage rates. He is committed to normalizing relations with Russia, much to the discomfort of the neoconservatives and the military/security complex.
As for Mnuchin, he left Goldlman Sachs in 2002, the same year that Nomi Prins left Goldman Sachs. That was 14 years ago. We know for a fact that Nomi, a former managing director, is not an operative for Goldman Sachs, so my position is to wait and see what Mnuchin does before we declare him to be a Goldman Sachs agent. For a different view see Nomi Prins in the Guest section of this website.
Think about it this way: If Trump is sincere, and the Ruling Establishment seems to think that he is, about cleaning out a nest of outlaws, what better help could he have than one of the outlaws?
Change from the top requires tough mean people. Anyone else would be run over.
My position is to wait for the evidence. For years my readers have said that they need some hope. Trump’s attack on the Ruling Establishment gives them hope. Why take this hope away prematurely?
From the beginning my concern has been that Trump has no experience in the economic and foreign policy debates. He doesn’t know the issues or the players. But he knows two big things: the middle and working class are hurting, and conflict with Russia could result in thermo-nuclear war. My view is support him on these two most important of all issues.
My worry is that Trump has already gone off course on better relations with Russia. Trump had the sense to speak during his first week in office with Russia’s President Putin. Reports are that the one hour conversation went well. However, the report from the Trump administration is that the sanctions were not mentioned and that Trump is considering connecting the removal of the sanctions with a reduction in nuclear arms.
Clearly, Trump needs more astute advisors than he has. Confronted with 28 NATO countries, Russia, the population of which is dwarfed by this collection of countries and armaments, relies on its nuclear weapons to deal with the potential threat. During the Obama regime, the threat to Russia must have seemed to be very real, as the demonization of Russia and its President were based entirely on obvious lies and reached levels of provocation seldom seem in history without leading to war.
If I had been Trump’s advisor, I would have insisted that the first thing that Trump tell Putin is that “the sanctions are history and I apologize for the insult based on the fabricated lies of my predecessor.”
This is what was needed. Once trust is restored, then the matter of reduction in nuclear arms can be raised without making the Russian government concerned that the duplicitous Americans are setting them up for attack.
If you were a Russian, if you were a member of the Russian government, if you were president of Russia, if you had experienced an American coup that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine, a province that was part of Russia for 300 years, if you had experienced an American inspired attack on the Russian residents and Russian peace-keeping forces in South Ossetia, long a province of Russia, that caused the intervention of the Russian armed forces, an intervention blamed by the US government on “Russian aggression,” would you trust the United States? Only if you are a complete fool.
Trump needs advisors sufficiently knowledgable to tell him about the situation that he has committed himself to improve.
Who are these advisors?
Consider now the “Muslim ban.” Muslim refugees are a problem for the US and Europe because the US and its NATO puppets have bombed a large number of Muslim countries entirely on the basis of lies. One might have thought, that with all its experience of war, the Western countries would be aware that wars produce refugees. But apparently not.
The easiest and most certain way to deal with the problem of Muslim refugees is to stop the bombings that produce refugees.
Apparently, this solution is beyond the grasp of the Trump administration. According to news reports—and considering the presstitute status of news organizations one never knows—the new Trump administration authorized a SEAL team attack in Yemen that murdered an 8 year old girl along with a number of women and children on January 29. As far as I can ascertain, no women are marching in opposition to the Trump administration’s continuation of the policy of the Bush/Obama regime of murdering Muslims in the name of a hoax “war on terror.”
Trump’s Archilles’ heel is his belief in the “Muslim threat,” an orchestrated threat cooked up by the neoconservatives. If Trump wants to defeat ISIS, all he needs to do is to stop the US government and CIA from funding ISIS. ISIS is Washington’s creation, used to overthrow Libya and sent to Syria to overthrow Assad until the Russians intervened.
Someone needs to have enough geo-political knowledge to tell Trump that he cannot simultaneously mend relations with Russia and revive the conflict with Iran and threaten China.
As I feared, Trump has no idea who to appoint in order to achieve his agenda.
Now let’s turn to Trump’s critics: Identity Politics, that is, the explanation of Western history as the victimization of everyone by white heterosexual males. The attacks on Trump lack legitimacy, and everyone except those immersed in victim politics sees that. The same people who march against Trump and condemn his Muslim ban do not march against the wars that produce the Muslim refugees and immigrants. Trump’s opponents are in the illogical position of supporting the “war on terror” and the 9/11 story on which the war is based, but objecting to the ban on entry of “Muslim terrorists” into the US. If Muslims are terrorists as the Bush/Obama narative claims, it is totally irresponsible to admit into the US Muslims harmed by Washington’s attacks on their countries who might have thoughts of revenge.
The liberal/progressive/left long ago abandoned the working class. The consequence of their illegitimate complaints will be to lump all dissent into their illegitimate category. Thus truth-tellers along with fiction-tellers will be shut down. The public will not be able to differenate between the orchestrated attacks on Trump and those telling the truth.
My conclusion is that the stupidity of Identity Politics by discrediting dissent will empower the worst elements of the right-wing. If Goldman Sachs is also operating against us, as Nomi Prins believes, then the US is history.
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