This is an excellent, well articulated, and deeply important article. - Molly
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Rajan Menon
Donald Trump’s supporters believe that his
election will end business as usual in Washington. The self-glorifying Trump
agrees and indeed his has, so far, been the most unorthodox presidency of our
era, if not any era. It’s a chaotic and tweet-driven administration that makes
headlines daily thanks to scandals, acts of stunning incompetence, rants,
accusations, wild claims, and conspiracy theories. On one crucial issue,
however, Trump has been a complete conformist. Despite the headline-grabbing
uproar over Muslim bans and the like, his stance on national security couldn’t
be more recognizable. His list of major threats -- terrorism, Iran, North
Korea, and China -- features the usual suspects that Republicans, Democrats,
and the foreign policy establishment have long deemed dangerous.
Trump’s conception of security
not only doesn’t break the mold of recent administrations, it’s a remarkably
fine fit for it. That’s because his focus is on protecting Americans from
foreign groups or governments that could threaten us or destroy physical
objects (buildings, bridges, and the like) in the homeland. In doing so,
he, like his predecessors, steers clear of a definition of “security” that
would include the workaday difficulties that actually make Americans insecure.
These include poverty, joblessness or underemployment, wages too meager
to enable even full-time workers to make ends meet, and a wealth-based public
school system that hampers the economic and professional prospects, as well as
futures, of startling numbers of American children. To this list must be added
the radical dangers climate change poses to the health and safety of future
citizens.
Trump may present himself as a
maverick, but on security he never wavers from an all-too-familiar externally
focused and militarized narrative.
Conjurer-in-Chief
Barack Obama wrote a
bestselling book titled The Audacity of Hope.
Perhaps Donald Trump should write one titled The Audacity
of Wealth. During the presidential campaign of 2016 he
morphed unashamedly from plutocrat to populist, assuring millions of people
struggling with unemployment, debt, and inadequate incomes that he would solve
their problems. The shtick worked. Many Americans believed him. Fifty-two percent of voters who did not have a
college degree chose him. Among whites with that same educational
profile, he did even better, winning 67% of their votes.
Unemployment, underemployment,
stagnant wages, and the outsourcing of production (and so jobs) have hit those
who lack a college degree especially hard. Yet many of them were
convinced by Trump’s populist message. It made no difference that he
belonged to the wealthiest 0.00004% of Americans, if his net worth is the
widely reported $3.5
billion, and the top 0.00002% if, as he claims, it’s actually $10
billion.
Former Louisiana Governor Huey
Long, perhaps the country’s best-known populist historically speaking, was born
and raised in Winn Parish, a poor part of Louisiana. In the 1930s, his
origins and his far-reaching ideas for redistributing wealth gave him
credibility. By contrast, Trump wasn't cut from humble cloth; nor in his
present reincarnation has he even claimed to stand for the reallocation of
wealth (except possibly to his wealthy compatriots). His father, Fred
Trump, was a multimillionaire who, at the time of his death in 1999, had a net
worth of $250
million, which was divided among his four surviving
children. The proportional allocations are not publicly known, though
it’s safe to assume that Donald did well. He also got his start in
business -- and it wasn’t even an impressive one -- thanks to lavish
help from Fred to the
tune of millions of dollars. When he subsequently hit rough patches,
Dad’s connections and loan guarantees helped set things right.
A man who himself benefited
handsomely from globalization,
outsourcing, and a designed-for-the-wealthy tax code nonetheless
managed to convince coal miners in West Virginia and workers in Ohio that all
of these were terrible things that enriched a "financial
elite" that had made itself wealthy at the expense of American
workers and that electing him would end the swindle.
He also persuaded millions of
voters that foreign enemies were the biggest threat to their security and that
he’d crush them by “rebuilding” America’s military machine. Worried about
ISIS? Don’t be. Trump would “bomb the shit out of them.” Concerned
about the nuclear arms race? Not to worry. “We’ll outmatch them at every pass and outlast them
all.”
Yet few if any Americans lie
awake at night fearing invasion by another country or the outbreak of nuclear
war. Fifteen years after 9/11, terrorism still ranks high on the American list
of concerns (especially, the polls tell us, among Republicans). But that
danger is not nearly as dire as Trump and the U.S. national security state
insist it is. A litany of statistics shows that deaths from car crashes leave
death-by-terrorist in the dust, while since 2002 even bee, hornet, and wasp
stings have killed more Americans annually in the United States than “Islamic
terrorists.”
Since 9/11, only 95 Americans -- 95 too many, let it be
said -- have been killed in terrorist attacks in the U.S. Not one of the perpetrators was a tourist or
someone on another type of temporary visa, and several were non-Muslims.
Nor were any of them refugees, or connected to any of the countries in Trump's
two Muslim bans. Indeed, as the journalist Nick
Gillespie notes, since
the adoption of the 1980 Refugee Act no refugee has been involved in a
terrorist attack that killed Americans.
Still, Trump’s hyperbole has
persuaded many in this country that terrorism poses a major, imminent threat to
them and that measures like a 90-day ban on travel to the United States by the
citizens of certain Muslim countries will protect them. (A recent poll
shows that 54% of the public supports this policy.)
As for terrorist plots, successful or not, by white far-right extremists, the president
simply hasn’t felt the urge to say much about them.
In other words, President
Trump, like candidate Trump, embraces the standard take on national
security. He, too, is focused on war and terrorism. Here, on the
other hand, are some threats -- a suggestive, not inclusive, list -- that genuinely
make, or threaten to make, millions of Americans insecure and vulnerable.
Poverty: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2015, 43 million Americans, 13.5% of
the population, lived below the poverty line ($11,700
for an individual and $20,090 for a three-person household) -- an increase of
1% since 2007, the year before the Great Recession. For children under
18, the 2015 poverty rate was 19.7%. While that was an improvement on the
21.1% of 2014, it still meant that nearly a fifth of American children were
poor.
The
working poor: Yes, you can have a
job and still be poor if your wages are low or stagnant or have fallen. The
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses a conservative definition for
these individuals: “People who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force
during the year -- either working or looking for work -- but whose incomes were
below the poverty level.” Though some studies use a more expansive definition,
even by the BLS’s criteria, there were 9.5 million working
poor in 2014.
Even if
you work and bring in wages above the poverty line, you may still barely be
getting by. Oxfam reports that 58 million American
workers make less than $15 an hour and 44 million make less than $12 an hour.
Congress last raised the minimum hourly wage to $7.25 in 2007 (and even
then included exceptions that applied to several types of
workers). That sum has since lost nearly 10% of its purchasing power thanks to
inflation.
Wage stagnation and
economic inequality: These two
conditions explain a large part of the working-but-barely-making-it phenomenon.
Let’s start with those stagnant wages. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), for about three decades after
World War II, hourly wage increases for workers in non-supervisory roles kept
pace with productivity increases: at 91.3% and 96.7%, respectively. Then
things changed dramatically. Between 1973 and 2013, productivity
increased by 74.4% and wages by only 9.2%. In other words, with wages
adjusted for inflation, the average American worker made no more in 2013 than
in 1973.
As for economic inequality, the
EPI reports that from 1980 to 2013 the income of the top 1% of wage earners
increased by 138% compared to 15% for the bottom 90%. For those at the
lowest end of the wage scale it was even worse. In those years, their hourly
pay actually dropped by 5%.
When was the last time you heard
Donald Trump talk about stagnant wages or growing economic inequality, both of
which make his most fervent supporters insecure? In reality, the defunding of federal programs that provide
energy subsidies, employment assistance, and legal services to people with low
incomes will only hurt many Trump voters who are already struggling
economically.
Climate change: There is a scientific consensus on
this problem, which already contributes to droughts and floods that reduce food production, damages
property, and threatens lives, not to speak of increasing the range of forest fires and lengthening the global fire
season, as well as helping spread diseases like cholera, malaria, and dengue
fever. Trump once infamously described climate change as a
Chinese-fabricated “hoax” meant to reduce
the competitiveness of American companies. No matter that, in recent
years, the Chinese government has taken serious steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, President Trump is gearing
up to take the U.S. out of the climate change sweepstakes entirely. For
instance, he remains determined to withdraw the country from the 2015 Paris Agreement (signed by 197 countries and so far
ratified by 134 of them) aimed at limiting the increase in global temperature
to a maximum of two degrees Celsius during this century. Scott Pruitt,
his appointee to run the Environmental Protection Agency, denies that climate change is significantly
connected to “human activity” and is stocking his agency with climate change deniers
of like mind. Needless to say Pruitt didn’t balk at Trump’s decision to cut the
EPA’s budget by 31%.
Nor do Trump and his team favor
promoting alternative sources of energy or reducing carbon emissions, even
though the United States is second only to China in total emissions and among the globe’s largest emitters
on a per-capita basis. Trump seems poised to scale back President Obama’s plan to increase the
Corporate Annual Fuel Efficiency Standard -- created by the government to
reduce average automobile gas consumption -- from the present 35.5 miles per
gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, end the 2015 freeze on leases for coal mining on federal land, and ease power plant emission limits. Worse yet, Trump’s America First Energy Plan calls for producing more oil and gas
but contains nary a word about climate change or a green energy strategy. If
you want a failsafe formula for future environment-related insecurity, this, of
course, is it.
Please continue this article here: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176260/tomgram%3A_rajan_menon%2C_making_america_insecure_again/#more
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