PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS-Donald Trump seems to have found a political sweet spot and an early tentative lead in the Republican Party Presidential primary race by melding two frustrated rather large constituencies that never thought they would find a standard bearer.
One of these constituencies consists of paranoid people incapable of sequencing enough ideas on any subject to be able to meaningfully question Trump's glib platform that seems to magically float in space without anything supporting it. The other part of his constituency is people who have become justifiably frustrated by a political system where nothing seems to change no matter who is implementing the agenda of the corporate oligarchy that runs this country.
What unites these people is the audacity -- rational or not -- of Donald Trump whose feigned irreverence for a system his own class runs seems like a breath of fresh air.
People who either have been losers their whole life or who think they will continue to be treated like losers (as long as Washington remains controlled by special interests,) sense that they will never have the power necessary to challenge the status quo. They mistakenly believe that Trump, who, with his glitzy tabloid persona, acts like a defector from his ruling class, will look after them. Nothing could be further than the truth.
What Trump offers them is Latino scapegoats whom he proposes to exclude with his version of the Berlin Wall. As for the North American Free Trade Treaty (NAFTA), it has put American agribusinesses in cut-throat competition with Mexican farmers and made the cultivation of corn in Mexico no longer profitable. NAFTA has served as a major motivation for displaced campesinos to head north just to survive.
But Trump never quite gets around to addressing this issue and other American decisions that have been unilaterally imposed on Latin America and that have led to a greater influx of the undocumented that Trump thinks can only be stopped with a wall. He scrupulously avoids any discussion of the undocumented migrant laborer's willingness to do the jobs that Americans do not want to do. He fails to mention how American borders were opened to braceros to pick our crops the last time undocumented hysteria surfaced not so many years ago.
Trump denounces the Trans-Pacific Partnership and talks about how China, Japan, and Mexico are "killing us economically," but he never gets down to describing how his class has emasculated government regulation, while creating the current climate that favors foreign production. Corporate America pledges allegiance to which ever country gives it the best deal, irrespective of the negative effects this has on the American worker and consumer.
One example of his magical thinking is Trump’s criticism of the success of Japanese imported cars. But he never mentions that in the late 60s American car manufacturers chose to use their political clout to get waivers from meeting the new legal emission control standards. Japanese car manufacturers, however, had no difficulty in meeting these new clean air standards.
By saying that Obamacare should be "replaced with something much better for everybody...and much less expensive," what The Donald fails to mention is that every other industrialize country in the world has single-payer government regulated healthcare. These countries pay less than what Americans pay, yet receive objectively better healthcare. America is twenty-seventh in the world in its infant mortality rate. In Canada, the administrative cost of running their healthcare system is three percent. Here, one third of every healthcare dollar is paid to an insurance company. Is the single payer system perfect? Hell no, but it's head and shoulders above what we have or what Trump proposes.
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Trump does some good old fashioned American saber rattling when he talks about how he would deal with the Islamic State militant group known as ISIS. But he never gets around to discussing the West’s non-stop exploitation of the Middle East for oil and other geopolitical considerations. And of course, our blind support for whatever Israel continues to do to its Palestinian population engenders only silence from The Donald.
Trump would also like to see us invest in updating our nuclear weapons. But he doesn’t seem to understand how difficult it has been up until now to reduce the American and Russian stockpiles of these mutually assured destruction devices – not to mention trying to stop others from getting their hands on them. Just witness how heated and complex the fight has been between the Republicans and the Obama administration during the Iranian nuclear non-proliferation talks.
Trump does not seem to have any historic awareness that nuclear powers have spent generations since the beginning of the arms race trying to control the spread of nuclear weapons.
The recent spate of gun violence in schools and theaters has shown us many acts causing horrendous yet still limited damage. I can't help but wonder what might happen if someone with an enormous ego -- and the power to literally bring human history to an end – got his finger on the button. Talk about the ultimate ego trip.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 90
Pub: Nov 6, 2015
