 |
| President Trump speaks to world leaders at the 72nd United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York on Sept. 19, 2017. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) |
This post originally appeared at Tom Dispatch.
This interview has been
excerpted from Global
Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy,
the new book by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian to be published this December.
Take your eyes off Trump
and you'll see the most savage fringe of the Republican Party is carefully
advancing policies designed to enrich their true constituency.
David Barsamian: You have spoken about the difference between
Trump’s buffoonery, which gets endlessly covered by the media, and the actual
policies he is striving to enact, which receive less attention. Do you think he
has any coherent economic, political or international policy goals? What has Trump
actually managed to accomplish in his first months in office?
Noam Chomsky: There is a diversionary process under way, perhaps just a
natural result of the propensities of the figure at center stage and
those doing the work behind the curtains.
At one level, Trump’s antics ensure that attention is focused on
him, and it makes little difference how. Who even remembers the charge that millions of illegal immigrants voted
for Clinton, depriving the pathetic little man of his grand victory? Or the
accusation that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower?
The claims themselves don’t really matter. It’s enough that attention is
diverted from what is happening in the background. There, out of the spotlight,
the most savage fringe of the Republican Party is carefully advancing policies
designed to enrich their true constituency: the constituency of private power
and wealth, “the masters of mankind,” to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase.
These policies will harm the irrelevant general population and devastate
future generations, but that’s of little concern to the Republicans. They’ve
been trying to push through similarly destructive legislation for years. Paul
Ryan, for example, has long been advertising his ideal of virtually eliminating
the federal government, apart from service to the constituency — though in the
past he’s wrapped his proposals in spreadsheets so they would look wonkish to
commentators. Now, while attention is focused on Trump’s latest mad doings, the
Ryan gang and the executive branch are ramming through legislation and orders
that undermine workers’ rights, cripple consumer protections and severely harm
rural communities. They seek to devastate health programs, revoking the taxes
that pay for them in order to further enrich their constituency, and to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank Act,
which imposed some much-needed constraints on the predatory financial system that
grew during the neoliberal period.
That’s just a sample of how the wrecking ball is being wielded by the newly
empowered Republican Party. Indeed, it is no longer a political party in the traditional
sense. Conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have
described it more accurately as a “radical
insurgency,” one that has abandoned normal parliamentary politics.
Much of this is being carried out stealthily, in closed
sessions, with as little public notice as possible. Other Republican policies
are more open, such as pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, thereby
isolating the US as a pariah state that refuses to participate in international
efforts to confront looming environmental disaster. Even worse, they are intent
on maximizing the use of fossil fuels, including the most dangerous; dismantling
regulations; and sharply cutting back on research and development of
alternative energy sources, which will soon be necessary for decent survival.
The reasons behind the policies are a mix. Some are simply
service to the constituency. Others are of little concern to the “masters of
mankind” but are designed to hold on to segments of the voting bloc that the
Republicans have cobbled together, since Republican policies have shifted so
far to the right that their actual proposals would not attract voters. For
example, terminating support for family planning is not service to the
constituency. Indeed, that group may mostly support family planning. But
terminating that support appeals to the evangelical Christian base — voters who
close their eyes to the fact that they are effectively advocating more unwanted
pregnancies and, therefore, increasing the frequency of resort to abortion,
under harmful and even lethal conditions.
Not all of the damage can be blamed on the con man who is
nominally in charge, on his outlandish appointments, or on the congressional
forces he has unleashed. Some of the most dangerous developments under Trump
trace back to Obama initiatives — initiatives passed, to be sure, under
pressure from the Republican Congress.
Please
continue this interview here: http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-presidency-imperils-world/
No comments:
Post a Comment