The Real Reason for Trump Hatred

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

The Republicans will do anything to stop Donald Trump from winning their nomination.

On March 19 failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Trump “repulsive,” and added bigot, racist, and xenophobe for good measure. Let’s say all this is true. So how is it that this man has been on television, a popular figure in the news, and so forth, for decades? 

He was “The Donald,” a celebrity mogul and raconteur. Romney himself was pleased to get Trump’s endorsement in 2012.

Does it mean that Trump has become a completely different person since he began running for office? (Hitler, for instance, hadn’t been a run-of-the-mill celebrity before he “became” the Hitler who was a monster.) Or is this nothing but desperate attempts to destroy Trump by the establishment? 

And if it is the latter, the absolute frenzy is telling – they must be terrified of Trump because they obviously politically and economically have a lot to hide. After all, I don’t recall them being particularly worried about racism and xenophobia in the past.

The networks, which are owned by the same billionaires who hate Trump’s stands on securing the country’s borders, tightening the regulations on entry to the country, and putting an end to so-called globalization, which is destroying millions of American jobs, never have one good word to say about this man.

Such biased reporting is something unprecedented in television news; even Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, and Ted Cruz, a far-right intolerant bully, get ample positive coverage.

It is now asserted ad infinitum that the populist Trump is “a divider, not a uniter,” because of his stance on immigration. But when did it become illegitimate for a nation to control its borders and determine who can live within them? Why, otherwise, have a sovereign state at all? 

Of course the rich don’t mind having a continuing flow of undocumented workers to keep wages down. One little-known fact: Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower deported millions of illegal immigrants in order to give jobs to returning veterans after the Second World War and the Korean War.

And why have the country’s financiers and industrial barons come to feel it is entirely proper to move their enterprises to wherever in the world they can obtain the cheapest labour and obtain the greatest profits, while leaving behind the very people who worked to make those enterprises the successful companies they had become?

Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was particularly notorious, destroying jobs by hollowing out companies and leaving behind huge debts, while he and his partners got fabulously rich.

It involved borrowing huge sums of money from Wall Street venture capitalists to take over existing firms. However, once all that debt was added, the company would fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit.

In his new book Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, travel writer Paul Theroux visits ruined decaying towns with abandoned businesses. In these depopulated places, manufacturing has fled, outsourced to China, India and Vietnam.

He found the people still there “as hard-up and ignored and hopeless as any I had seen in the world.”

Trump is promising “fair trade,” using import rules, tariffs and taxes, to punish unfair competition by such rivals as China to keep manufacturing jobs in America. He also wants to tax the profits big corporations make overseas. 

As well, he has attacked hedge-fund managers, and wants to rein in the nation’s five biggest banks, whose assets have increased exponentially in the past quarter-century.

His supporters want a new approach to capitalism, in which foreign trade partners must pay living wages and heed global environmental norms.

It was once considered normal that a government’s first loyalty was to its citizens and the national interest. It was also understood in the past that the preservation of a country’s culture and civil institutions was a necessity.

Unlike Romney is 2012, Trump isn’t writing off the “47 per cent” of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.” 

The elites in the Republican Party can’t tell the electorate that the real reason they are terrified of Trump is because of their own selfish interests, and would prefer even Hillary Clinton to him.

Anti-Trump Propaganda

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

If you've been watching MSNBC, CNN and other cable networks covering Donald Trump’s rallies you will have seen how they are manufacturing anti-Trump propaganda in a manner worthy of Vladimir Putin. It’s so blatant it’s shocking. 

Their whole emphasis has been on the potential for violence, to create the impression that Trump is like the pre-war British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, using goons to attack protesters. It’s a three-step process: first, you warn viewers that there might be violence at his rallies; then there is violence; and finally, you blame Trump for the violence.

I guess the earlier smears trying to tie him to the Ku Klux Klan or painting him as a Hitler haven’t worked well enough so now we have this.

As surely as the Council of Guardians vets candidates in Iranian elections, the liberal media and political elites have declared Trump ideologically out of bounds and unacceptable. They have all been “piling on,” to use a football expression.

The protests are planned and organized by those who fear a Trump nomination. And of course those coming to support Trump get enraged; they are probably people who have been angry for years at what has happened to their jobs, their kids, their schools, their cities, their lives. 

They and their concerns are ignored as America becomes ever more a plutocracy, with its politicians bought and paid for. (Read, for example, a New Yorker article in the March 14 issue about “The Billionaires’ Loophole,” detailing how the super-rich – billionaires -- manage to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.)

I think the so-called establishment fears Trump because he might take on their entitlements and their destruction of the American economy over the past three decades. It’s why they preferred Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and, especially, Marco Rubio, who are beholden to them.

Last summer Trump tweeted, “I wish good luck to all the Republican candidates who traveled to California to beg for money, etc. from the Koch brothers. Puppets?”

Indeed, a mouthpiece for the anti-Trump Republicans, Ross Douthat, in a March 13 New York Times op-ed, “The Party Still Decides,” has suggested that Republicans should not nominate Trump at the Cleveland convention, even if he has won the most delegates in the primaries and caucuses.

The Republican National Committee’s rule makers will meet a week before the convention, and, if the delegates approve rule changes, they may try to make winning harder for Trump. Presumably this would make either Cruz or, more likely, Kasich, the nominee.

This would be a political “coup d’ état,” and would destroy the party’s chances this November and for many years to come. 

Despite all of this, Trump won four of the five primary elections on March 15. Rubio is out, Cruz and Kasich are hanging on, but neither will amass more delegates than Trump.

In the Democratic Party race, Bernie Sanders brings up many of the same issues that Trump does, though they are seen as ideologically at opposite ends of the spectrum. 

But Hillary Clinton will make sure Sanders doesn’t get the Democratic Party nomination, leaving the field for mobilizing the disaffected to Trump, should he prevail as the Republican nominee.

Trump is battling the “official” ideology that unites all the other Republicans, as well as the Democrats. They are united in declaring that he isn’t “presidential” – whatever that means. 

Perhaps in the past they’d have said he wasn’t a “gentleman,” the same term used against the “backwoodsman” Andrew Jackson, in the 1824 and 1828 elections. 

One thing is certain: just as the elites in 1932 labeled the patrician Franklin Delano Roosevelt “a traitor to his class,” today’s Republican establishment no doubt feels the same about Trump.

If neither Trump nor Sanders makes it onto the November ballot, the anger within the electorate will keep simmering long past this election. 

Expanding China's Economic Ties

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

In January, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as Iran. The central object was to promote the Belt and Road Initiative, which will revive the ancient Silk Road. 

“Since China and Saudi Arabia forged diplomatic ties 26 years ago, our relationship has developed by leaps and bounds, with mutual political trust deepening continuously and rich results in co-operation in various fields,” Xi said upon his arrival in Riyadh. 

“I believe that my visit will be a friendly trip with fruitful achievements, thus conducive to lifting our co-operation in various fields to a new level,” he added.

China is the world’s largest oil importer and gets more than half of its crude from the region. Saudi Arabia has been China’s biggest supplier, and bilateral trade reached $69.1billion in 2014.

Xi and King Salman inaugurated an energy research centre in Riyadh and opened the Yasref oil refinery, a joint venture between Saudi Aramco and China’s Sinopec.

The official Saudi Press Agency reported that the two companies signed a framework agreement for strategic co-operation and that the Saudi and Chinese governments had signed a memorandum of understanding to build a high-energy nuclear reactor.

In Egypt Xi, together with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, inspected the China-Egypt Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone, which is near the Suez Canal and 120 kilometers away from Cairo.

 The first phase, already completed, is an international industrial base which covers industrial projects, including processing and manufacturing, logistics, protective tariff, technological development, commerce and trade, and modern services. 

Xi said that 32 Chinese companies were now working in the economic zone, investing more than $400 million, and these figures would rise to 100 firms and $2.5 billion in the second phase of the project, creating about 40,000 jobs for Egyptians.

“China supports Egypt’s efforts to maintain stability, develop the economy and improve livelihoods,” Xi stated. 

Officials from the two countries signed 21 deals at a ceremony in Cairo, including a $1 billion financing agreement for Egypt’s central bank and a $700 million loan to the state-owned National Bank of Egypt for financing medium and small projects.

China and Egypt are also planning 15 projects in electricity, infrastructure and transport with investments that could total $15 billion, Xi added. 

Four months earlier, President Sisi had visited Beijing and emphasized just how seriously Egypt’s new government is about deepening ties with China. The China State Construction Engineering Corporation agreed to build and finance part of a new administrative capital that will be built to the east of Cairo. 

Sisi’s government expects the project to cost $45 billion over the next five to seven years. When finished, it will include government agencies and the president’s office as well as a new airport.

China is now Egypt’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade worth $11 billion. Like many of China’s trading partners, however, Egypt is concerned about just how imbalanced that trade is. 

Egyptian Trade and Industry Minister Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour told the Xinhua News Agency that Chinese exports to Egypt account of $10.5 billion out of that $11 billion. 

“We are working hard to increase our exports to China and urge for opening the Chinese markets for our industrial and agricultural exports,” Nour remarked, and also said that Egypt would seek to encourage more Chinese investment. 

In December 2014, during an earlier trip to China by Sisi, China and Egypt upgraded their relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” and a number of projects were announced, including the construction of a power plant in Suez Province and a new electric rail project to link Tenth of Ramadan City in Sharqia to Cairo.

To facilitate economic cooperation in the Middle East and elsewhere, in 2014 China founded the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as a counterweight to the U.S.-dominated World Bank. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are both founding members.

Iraq, Libya, and American Interventionism

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

Should the United States have helped bring down Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein? This is not ancient history and has a bearing on this year’s presidential election – it helped jettison Jeb Bush’s candidacy, in some respects thanks to his brother George W. Bush’s Iraq war.

Clearly, getting rid of the two were, by themselves, good things. Who could argue otherwise? They were bloodthirsty lunatics and killers. Their regimes were oppressive and dangerous.

But the next question is: did either George Bush in 2003, or Barack Obama, in 2011, actually think “regime change” would lead to some sort of democracy, or even just a better life, in those two countries? 

Were they really hoping to engage in the fantasy of “nation-building?” If so, they were foolish.

On the other hand, should they then have just left Iraq and Libya alone and allowed the tyrants to continue murdering their own people and stealing all their wealth, as well as interfering with their neighbours, as Saddam did in conquering Kuwait and going to war with Iran, and Gadhafi by supporting terrorism all over the world, and invading Chad? 

Given all that, Bush and Obama rolled the dice and hoped for the best. We now know the consequences.

The lesson I take from this is that countries like Iraq and Libya, which exist only on paper and are held together by a tyrant, will, after the removal of the dictator, almost certainly become anarchic entities run by, among others, armed militias, warlords, religious fanatics, and simple criminals. 

The Islamic State has taken over large swathes of Libya, which now comprises its largest base outside of Syria and Iraq.

Now we are in the realm of deep-seated political culture. After all, that’s what had already happened in Somalia after the demise of Siad Barre in 1991. Nor has Afghanistan become a “democracy” after the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. Maybe these were lessons that should have been learned.

In a sense, this has been a conflict between two schools of American foreign policy. One is political neoconservatism – oddly, a variant of Wilsonianian internationalism and the ideology of human rights – whose adherents believe that establishing democracy throughout the world is possible. They are willing to institute “regime change” to hasten the process.

The other strand is the “clash of civilisations” thesis propounded by the late Samuel Huntington. His followers are more often isolationists skeptical of intervening in places without the requisite political culture to support a liberal electoral order, at least for the foreseeable future.

The U.S. has seemed to oscillate between these two attitudes throughout its history.

These foreign policy options are not tied to specific parties. The modern neoconservative movement began in the Democratic Party in the 1970s, with people such as Senator Henry Jackson and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, while isolationists were more often found among Republicans.

Should either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio win the Republican nomination, most “hawks,” who backed George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, would prefer either of them to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, the latter in fact  a “dove.” Many of them, including Elliott Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Michael Chertoff, Michael Mukasey and Dan Senor, have supported Marco Rubio.

However, many neoconservatives have threatened to support Hillary Clinton were Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee – to some extent, because they consider Trump less willing to defend Israel. They view her as more “hawkish” than him. 

“I’d vote for Hillary Clinton rather than Trump or Cruz,” declared Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan administration veteran who was a Pentagon adviser during the Iraq War. Another leading neoconservative, Robert Kagan, said the same thing.

The battle lines remain fluid.

The American Presidential Election

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

Last week I remarked to friends that if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the respective nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties, Trump will win. On the other hand, she would beat both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

Bernie Sanders would actually beat any of the Republicans. But, ironically, since Clinton “owns” the Democratic Party — it speaks volumes that no one except Martin O’Malley and Sanders dared even run against her — he won’t get the nomination.

I made this prediction before the Michigan primaries of March 8. Their results — Trump and Sanders were the winners — confirms my hypothesis, as I will explain.

The Republican “establishment” (aka the donors and moneybags) doesn’t want someone they can’t control. They would prefer the feckless Marco Rubio, who looks like he’s a high school kid memorizing his lines, or even the theocratic fire-and-brimstone Ted Cruz, to Trump.

They have thrown everything but the kitchen sink against Trump, including, outlandishly, trying to link this fairly moderate New York businessman with, of all things, the remnants of the southern racist Ku Klux Klan! And now we’re told he’s another Hitler!

One may hate Trump but it’s absurd to make him a “Nazi.” Such hyperbole would make it harder for people to see what a real fascist is, should one eventually emerge in America. Who will Trump be compared to next? Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot?

He’s also been called a racist and a clown. Yet he keeps winning, as he did in Michigan, taking even a large share of evangelicals, Cruz’s supposed strength.

Clinton would beat either Cruz or Rubio, and rather easily. But the Democratic Michigan primary, as well as earlier ones in the South, demonstrated that, while she has a lock on the African American vote, Bernie is clearly the favorite of white working class people, especially males, and genuine left liberals. To the surprise of pollsters and pundits, he won.

The Michigan voters supported Sanders because he’s a bona fide leftist willing to shake up the system and try to challenge the American plutocracy. They know Clinton is tied to Wall Street and the big banks and, along with her husband, has made millions of dollars in bribes (aka “speeches”) from them.

They see her as part of the elites who have been running — and ruining — the economy of the country over the past three decades. After all, it has been 24 years since her husband Bill won the presidency.

These voters are populists and nationalists. If Clinton becomes the Democratic standard-bearer, a big enough percentage of them will switch over to Trump if he’s the Republican nominee, just as many of their political ancestors became the old “Reagan Democrats” 35 years ago, while they would never cast their ballots for Cruz or Rubio.

Trump is, after all, an “outsider” and oddly non-partisan — part of the reason the Republican right wing hates him. But that will be his strength amongst secular disaffected voters. And they will hand Trump the keys to the White House in November.

China Takes Advantage of Opportunities

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Though now in an economic downturn, China continues to flex its muscles on the world stage and is still increasing its economic reach across Africa, East Asia, South America, and the Middle East.

China has supplanted Japan and the United States as the leading trade partner of nearly all African and East Asian countries, and has become a crucial actor in South American and South Asian trade.

China’s demand for African commodities has fuelled the continent’s recent economic growth.

But the decline in African exports to China, down 38 per cent from 2014, reflects the recent slowdown in China’s economy.

So this past December, in a summit meeting in Johannesburg with most of Africa’s leaders, President Xi Jinping of China pledged $60 billion in development assistance to the continent and promised to support Africa “in achieving development and prosperity.”

Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president and the chairman of the African Union, praised China as a counterpoint to Western powers. Many delegates said China, unlike the West, treated Africans as equals.

China has invested heavily in Zimbabwe, despite European and World Bank sanctions. From 2000 to 2012, approximately 128 Chinese official development projects were identified in Zimbabwe. China is now Zimbabwe’s largest trading partner, and purchases 27.8 per cent of the country’s exports.

In fact, Zimbabwe has adopted the Chinese yuan as an official reserve currency. Zimbabwe’s finance minister Patrick Chinamasa maintains that use of the yuan “will be a function of trade between China and Zimbabwe and acceptability with customers in Zimbabwe.”

Some critics accuse China of “neo-colonialist” behavior as it acquires the raw materials that it needs to fuel its own economy.

Supporters, on the other hand, say that China’s initiatives to build and improve infrastructure such as roads, railways and telecom systems have been a boon to Africa’s manufacturing sector.

In January, Xi visited Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran. China has a big stake in the Middle East. It is the world’s largest oil importer and gets more than half of its crude from the region.

China views Iran as a vital link in its so-called Silk Route strategy, linking China and Europe, which would cross the Middle East.

“We are Iran’s biggest trading partner for six years in a row,” Xi wrote in an open letter to the Iranian people. “China has considerable strength in capital, technologies, equipment and other areas,” he said. “Iran has rich resources, ample labor force and huge market potential, and it is in the crucial stage of industrialization and modernization.”

In Tehran, the Chinese have been involved in the construction of a huge elevated expressway and the building of the Niayesh Tunnel, which will be one of the longest urban tunnels in the world. The city’s metro system was built with Chinese capital and Chinese engineers, and a Chinese-built steel mill recently went into operation.

Now that western sanctions have been lifted, Iran’s economy will undoubtedly expand. While Xi was in Tehran, both countries agreed to increase trade to $600 billion in the coming decade.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini told him that “Iranians had never trusted the West.” That was why Iran was seeking more cooperation with “independent countries.”

China has also been leading the effort of global non-western countries to create a new system to govern the world economy. In 2013 it helped set up the New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, to serve as a lending institution for infrastructure development projects. In 2014 China also founded the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

China is now in a position to co-author the rules of international commerce. Power will have to be shared.