Full-scale Democratic Devolution
Let’s get this straight. Mr. Trump, after manufacturing the looming crisis for the U.S. agricultural industry as well as other sectors of the economy via his ill-conceived executive actions imposing billions of dollars of tariffs on U.S. trading partners, is opting to offer assistance to farmers (how much of this would go to small family farms versus big corporate farms?) to the tune of $12 billion.
Mr. Trump made the comment on 7/24/18 that “Tariffs are the greatest!” to the Twitterverse. If tariffs are the greatest thing since spray tans, why are U.S. farmers needing to be bailed out? Why is Harley-Davidson packing up shop and moving some of its manufacturing elsewhere? Why is Maytag starting to sweat? These trade war skirmishes between the U.S. and, well, just about everyone else, do not bode well for a strong economic future for most of us.
Back to the $12 billion. I thought that we were so strapped that the GOP was hellbent on cuts to the social safety net in their neoliberal dystopian plan. Why, then, should farmers receive largesse from the government while so many others hurt by the economic mis-manipulations of the Trump Administration end up empty handed? Of course Mr. Trump is just trying to protect one portion of his base by buying their votes and support. We can’t afford to provide healthcare for this country’s vulnerable impoverished children, but we can cynically toss money at a solid voting bloc to keep them in the fold? We can’t afford to rebuild the roads and water systems (Flint’s water is STILL non-potable) that are crumbling? Puerto Rico can’t be tended to after nearly a year has gone by?
Mr. Trump spoke to a national veterans group in Kansas yesterday (7/24/18). Among his comments was this gem: "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." Mr. Trump is desperately attempting to keep control of the narrative, changing his positions and explanations and interpretations at breakneck speed in a convoluted game of Political Twister in which his position on just about everything is becoming more and more precarious. His latest broadside against the noncompliant press is further proof that he has no interest in Constitutional protections for anything contrary to what he perceives as his own good.
Not that I want Mr. Trump replaced by a theocratic Dominionist like Mr. Pence, because I don’t, but Mr. Trump is running roughshod over the laws, regulations, and general well-being of a large swath of people living in the U.S. He isn’t leading, like the U.S. President is supposed to do, he is ruling. I think that we made it very clear historically that we wanted to curb despotic rule here. Executive power has grown exponentially during the tenure of the past several administrations. Now that the Executive Branch is under the control of a person intent on further limiting the vestiges of rule by the people in lieu of rule by the elite, I think some people are waking up to the fact that Mr. Trump and the GOP are subverting the core principle of governmental checks and balances.
As long as acquiescence is given to Mr. Trump in his continuing mission to destroy a United States that theoretically recognizes that all people are fundamentally equal and to continually provide an avenue of increasing control to himself, the monied elite and their corporations, the more the people will suffer, and the more Mr. Trump will dissemble, divert, bumble and stumble in his attempt to build a new status quo. Until we demand a change, not just in the rhetoric and behavior of the current inept administration, but in the system as a whole, the people’s role will continue to devolve. Until we take responsibility to become educated, to think and talk and dream, we will be trapped in the muddled reality of Mr. Trump and his sycophants, disseminated by the corporate-owned and controlled media. Mr. Trump is counting on his adherents to let him tell them what is true. Remember, Mr. Trump loves the poorly educated. Let us deprive him of this love and become the best educated that we can be.
