Nov.
17, 2017:
The Economic Implications of Trump’s
Trade & Tax Policies
Sept.
8, 2017:
The American military empire: Is Trump
its would-be emperor?
June
23, 2017:
A Thought for the Fourth of July: Can
the U.S. Constitution Accommodate a Rogue President?
April
7, 2017:
From the Trump Administration, Expect an
Erratic Flip-Flop Foreign Policy, a Return to Gunboat Diplomacy and more
Illegal Wars of Aggression
Feb.
17, 2017:
The Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump:
a Threat to American Democracy and an Agent of Chaos in the World?
Jan.
20, 2017:
What to Expect from the Trump
Administration: A Protectionist and Pro-Corporate America Government
Friday, November
17, 2017
The
Economic Implications of Trump’s Trade & Tax Policies
By Dr. Rodrigue
Tremblay
(Author of the
books “The
Code for Global Ethics”, and “The
New American Empire”)
“As the leader of the West and as
a country that has become great and rich because of economic freedom, America
must be an unrelenting advocate of free trade.”
President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), in
an address before a Joint Session of the
Congress on the State of the Union, January 25, 1983.
“We should be trying to foster the
growth of two-way trade, not trying to put up roadblocks, to open foreign
markets, not close our own.”
President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), in
a radio address to the Nation on free
and fair trade and the budget deficit, May 16, 1987.
“Genuine free traders look at free markets and trade, domestic or
international, from the point of view of the consumer (that is, all of us), the
mercantilist, of the 16th century or [of] today, looks at trade from the point
of view of the power elite, big business in league with the government.”
Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), American economist, (in a 1983 article, ‘The NAFTA Myth’, Mises
Daily, Nov. 30, 2013)
“…I do think
we’re much safer and I hope that [another financial crisis] will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t
believe it will be.”
Janet Yellen (1946- ),
U.S. Federal Reserve Chair, (statement made on Tuesday, June 27, 2017, in
London U.K.)
Sudden
changes in trade and tax policies, the likes of those considered by the Trump
administration, could be very disruptive to macroeconomic equilibrium,
especially if they result in a sudden burst of inflation and in rapid interest
rate hikes. Indeed, raising taxes on imports, repatriating large corporate
profits parked overseas and increasing the fiscal deficit, when the economy is running
at close to full capacity, can result in both demand-led and supply-led
inflation. This could come much faster than most people expect, if all these
measures are implemented in the coming years.
After 35 years of
declining inflation and declining nominal and real interest rates since 1982,
the tide is about to turn, partly as a consequence of the populist and
protectionist policies of the Trump administration. With widely unexpected
higher inflation rates and higher interest rates just around the corner,
protectionist trade policies and higher fiscal deficits just as the Fed embarks
upon a series of interest rates increases could have recessionary consequences.
Moreover, since the end of the 2008-09 recession in June 2009, the influence of
the 9.2 years economic cycle cannot be underestimated.
Let us see why.
1. Trump’s trade policies will be inflationary
For President
Donald Trump and his advisors, international trade is some sort of a zero-sum
game. It is, in their eyes, a win/lose proposition. When countries enter into
multilateral international trade and investment agreements, some countries are
said to “win” and some other countries are said to “lose”. Over time, such a
trade theory has been completely discredited. Indeed, nothing can be further from
the truth, because in most cases, international trade is a win/win proposition, in which workers, investors and consumers win on both
sides.
International trade is what makes economies prosper, and all countries
benefit from international trade, to various degrees. Most economists agree
that, in the current state of economic development of most industrial
countries, trade protectionism is a dead
end, which can be dangerous for the U.S. economy and its
trading partners, such as Canada.
However, what
Donald Trump seems to believe in—judging by his pronouncements at least—is
‘managed international trade’ and government planning, preferably in a
bilateral way, not in one particular economic sector for social and economic
reasons, but for all sectors of the economy. Such a system was tried in the old
Soviet
Union, and that economic system collapsed in 1991. In fact, Donald
Trump professes to want to repudiate sixty years of increased multilateral
economic cooperation between countries, based on economic laws and
macroeconomic accounting. His goal is to adopt a mercantilist
and protectionist approach to international economic relations, i.e.
develop a positive trade balance with other countries. Such an approach would
be a throwback to a theory that was prevalent in the 17th and 18th centuries in
Europe. In other words, this has been tried many times before.
If the Trump
administration were to get his protectionist way and were allowed by the U.S.
Congress to play the apprentice sorcerer with international trade and
international investment, the latter will contract, labor productivity will
fall and costs of production will rise, jobs will be lost, real incomes will
decline even though some money wages would increase, inflation will rise and
the same for nominal interest rates. It would only be a matter of time before
there would be a return to a 1970-style stagflation.
2. Trade
facts regarding the United States.
In 2016, total U.S. trade deficit in goods and services was $502 billion.
Indeed, during that year, the U.S. imported for $2.711 trillion of goods and services while exporting
$2.209 trillion.
In the same year, the U.S. registered a deficit in goods only totaling $750 billion, while realizing a trade surplus
of $248 billion in service trade (financial, insurance and banking
services, royalties and license fees, transport and business services, etc.).
This is an indication that the U.S. service industry is very competitive in the
global market and this has created a lot of jobs in the United States. This
services trade surplus helps offset the deficit in goods.
3.
Adjustments in the overall U.S. balance of payments
Of course, this
is not the end of the story. The reason the U.S. economy can buy more
goods than it makes, in a given year, is due to the fact that it borrows
capital (savings) from other countries, on a net basis. Such net borrowings
from foreign lenders helped cover its current account deficit and kept American
consumption spending high. This also helped to finance part of the huge fiscal
deficits registered year after year by the U.S. government. In 2016, for
example, the U.S. government domestic fiscal deficit was $552 billion.
Thus, the main
reason why the United States, as a country, has a trade deficit is because it
overspends and does not save enough, especially its government with its
multiple costly
wars abroad (US$5.6 trillion spent on
wars, directly and indirectly, since 2001).
The United States
as a whole is spending more money than it makes. This results in a chronic
domestic fiscal deficit, and this means also that the United States, as a
country, must borrow from foreign lenders to finance its external deficit. In
other words, the United States lives beyond its means. However, American
politicians want to lower
taxes by a whooping $1.5 trillion US, over the next ten years, and
increase the central government’s fiscal deficit. They do not seem to see the
link between their public dissaving and their external indebtedness and
external trade deficit.
President Donald
Trump professes to want to correct U.S. trade deficits in goods and services by
unilaterally reducing American imports and by increasing exports. But
international trade is a two-way street: countries pay for their imports with
their exports. Such a beggar-thy-neighbor approach could easily lead to trade wars, and
the result could be catastrophic. If this were to happen, indeed, the entire
international trade system would contract and this would bring about a
worldwide economic downturn from which no country would escape.
The Trump
administration should avoid making rash decisions regarding the North
American Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which took years to be negotiated and
implemented. The very idea of killing
a successful and functioning trade agreement in the hope of starting from
scratch is a most hazardous proposition. It could have dire economic and
political consequences. Such a rash decision would carry a lot of risks and
would not be a wise move.
Basically, if a
particular country really wants to reduce its trade deficit with other
countries, it would need to borrow less and save more. Tinkering with border
excise taxes and other protectionist policies would not change the basic
underlying cause of the foreign deficit.
4. The U.S. dollar role as an international currency
could be in jeopardy
Part of the
U.S.’s annual trade deficit with the rest of the world results from the fact
that a big chunk of multilateral international trade is financed in U.S. dollars and that the U.S. dollar
is used as a reserve currency by many countries. Other countries pay the United States for using banking services
in U.S. dollars. Such external revenues are called seigniorage.
This allows the United States to import more goods than it exports and to borrow
funds from abroad at a subsidized rate.
Indeed, the United States, because of the size of its
money and capital markets, is the owner of a global reserve currency, the
American dollar. This ensures a strong demand for U.S. dollars and for U.S.
debt instruments. Imagine what the cost of imported goods in the U.S. would be
if there was a drop in the demand for the U.S. dollar?
Some countries
have attempted recently to use other currencies to finance their international
trade. For instance, China has pressed Saudi Arabia to
accept its currency, the yuan, as a mode
of payment for its oil imports. In addition, the International Monetary Fund
presently recognizes the Chinese currency as an international reserve currency.
If the U.S. were to withdraw from its policy of international economic
cooperation, its economic and financial influence would decline and some other
country could likely pick up the relay.
5. Tax policies
can be inflationary if they over-stimulate an economy already running at full
capacity
The Trump
administration and its allies in Congress would like to substantially reduce
personal and corporate taxes and seem willing to accept a substantial rise in
the yearly fiscal deficit and in the U.S. public debt. Ironically, if this
fiscal policy were to lead to more U.S. foreign borrowings, it would partly
contradict the objectives pursued with the trade policy. Indeed, such increased
borrowing abroad would strengthen the foreign exchange value of the U.S.
dollar, and would encourage imports while hurting exports. A larger fiscal
deficit would also put pressures on interest rates. Financial markets (bonds
and stocks) would suffer and this would have a recessionary effect on the
economy.
All this would
happen, when income and wealth inequalities in the U.S. are the
highest in a century and when the huge speculative
bubble in the financial markets could burst at any moment.
Conclusion
I would recommend
that the Trump administration coordinate its trade and tax policies. It should
be careful not to upset the economic apple cart when it deals with the existing
system of international trade and investment, and it should be careful not to
overheat an economy running at close to full capacity. Otherwise, it may be
sowing the seeds of the next
economic recession.
______________________________
Friday, September
8, 2017
The American military empire: Is Trump
its would-be emperor?
By Dr. Rodrigue
Tremblay
(Author of the
books “The
Code for Global Ethics”, and “The
New American Empire”)
“Fascism
may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation
with community decline, humiliation or victimhood, … in which a massed-based
party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective
collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and
pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals
of internal cleansing and external expansion.” Robert Paxton (1932- ), American
historian, (in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004)
“When and if fascism comes to America, it will not be labeled ‘made in
Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called
fascism; it will be called, of course, “Americanism.” Halford Edward Luccock (1885–1961), American
Methodist minister and professor, (in Keeping Life out of Confusion, 1938)
“Before mass
leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is
marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact
depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.” Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German-born,
Jewish-American political theorist, (in The Origins of Totalitarianism,
1951)
By
now, most observers have finally realized who President Donald Trump really is.
After close to eight months in the White House, Trump has clearly demonstrated
that he has serious character defects in his public role as an American “showman” president. His behavior, so far,
has been more than bizarre. It has been clearly aberrant and frightening.
For example,
people are accustomed to be lied to by politicians, but Donald Trump seems to
have elevated the art
of lying to new heights.
He speaks and acts as if he were living in some sort of permanent fantasyland,
and his first natural instinct is to invent lies. This goes hand in hand with
another art that Trump has cultivated and developed to the utmost, and it is
the art
of bullying to get his way, with anybody, members of Congress, foreign
leaders, even his own staff and subordinates, from whom he enjoys extracting
public praise regarding his
own persona.
What may be the
most frightening realization of all, for an American president with such
responsibilities, in charge of nuclear weapons, is the fact that Donald Trump
seems to be a person who adopts the views of the last person he talks to, be it
somebody from his immediate family who has been appointed to an official rank
in his administration, or one of the generals whom he has appointed close to
himself. — He seems not to have any firm political
ideas of his own. — It all depends on whether or not
he’s reading from a
teleprompter.
On the last
point, Trump may have reached a Summum
of irresponsibility, for a
democratic leader, when he
transferred basic military policy on important foreign policy decisions to the
military brass. I suspect that is a ploy to shed responsibility for future
failures, for which he could conveniently blame the military.
This points to
the fact that President Trump will be the puppet of his military junta in the coming months, as the besieged president
retreats into his cocoon. He will be happy to let generals run the show in near
complete secrecy,
and with hardly any input from Congress, as the representatives of the people.
The pretext this time around: “America’s enemies must never know our plans”, says Trump. Indeed,
an empire cannot be democratic
and open. It must be run in secrecy, with no, or hardly any, democratic debate.
As for now, the
Pentagon has divided the world into six separate geographic so-called Unified
Combatant Commands to oversee and impose by force a global “Pax
Americana”. For instance, Canada is assigned to the USNORTHCOM, and
countries such as Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and France are assigned to the USEUCOM, Japan and China are assigned to the USPACOM, as well
as tiny Vanuatu, etc. According to Pew Research and government statistics, the
U.S. still has 73,206 troops in Asia, 62,635 troops in Europe, and 25,124
troops in the Middle East and North Africa.
Of course, such a
global military development requires a lot of resources, which have to be
diverted from other domestic uses. This creates the type of “military-industrial
complex”, which establishes a symbiosis between U.S. military
industries and the Pentagon. That is precisely what President Dwight D.
Eisenhower warned the American
people against, in his farewell speech of January 17, 1961.
The
transformation has been long in the making. But with Trump as a would-be
autocratic emperor, it is a fait accompli,
notwithstanding what the U.S. Constitution says or calls for, in terms of
checks and balances and the division of powers, and notwithstanding the basic
wishes of the American people.
The conclusion is
inescapable. Americans must recognize that the United States has become a de facto military empire, even if not
yet a de jure empire, and Donald
Trump is its current megalomaniac figurehead, a near neo-fascist
would-be emperor. Where that will lead is anybody’s guess, but this is most
unprecedented and most ominous.
Empires are very costly to maintain
However, as with
any empire in quest of global hegemony, the ultimate danger is overextension.
Military empires are very
costly to maintain and they are subject to the law of diminishing
returns, i.e. military investments result in lower and lower net economic
returns, as negative reactions increase and the cost-benefit ratio rises. The
collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 can serve as a reminder of such a scenario.
Sooner or later, indeed, the same cause and effect equation is bound to
confront the current neocon-inspired American adventure as a world
empire.
Considering the
above, it is not surprising that little leeway is left in the U.S. fiscal
budget for social programs on the domestic front. In the short run, this may
hardly matter, since Donald Trump does not seem to be talking to anybody in
Congress, after having insulted most of its leaders and having created a vacuum
around himself and his office. In the long run, however, this could be a
harbinger of social troubles ahead.
Currently, Donald
Trump is bound to accomplish very little as far as domestic policies are
concerned. Trying to bully the Senate with ludicrous threats to shut
down the U.S.
government if the former does not vote his way in appropriating $1.6 billion in
border wall money, may insulate
Trump even more, even if such irresponsible talk pleases his electoral base.
Indeed, if the President were to carry out his threat of “closing down our government” by vetoing any spending bill that
does not include funding for his pet project of building a wall on the
U.S.-Mexican border, this would represent some dangerous brinkmanship rarely
seen in politics.
Also, with the
ominous threat of a possibly devastating report from U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller, sometime late in the fall or in
early 2018, a president-under-siege’s main political way out may be to coach his generals
into launching or expanding overseas wars. Indeed, this could be in the Middle East and/or
in Asia, or even against Venezuela — it doesn’t much matter — while hoping that
his unsophisticated political base, establishment journalists and the U.S. media
in general will appreciate the
show, and that the public’s attention can be somewhat diverted from his
ineptitude.
Conclusion
All this is to say that with Donald Trump in the White
House, the United States is marching more or less blindly toward a series of
major crises, politically, economically and militarily. Which one will come
first and how serious it will be is hard to predict. In any case, you can
expect that it will be most disruptive.
______________________________________
______________________________________
Friday, June 23,
2017
A Thought
for the Fourth of July: Can the U.S. Constitution Accommodate a Rogue
President?
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
"I have described him [Donald
Trump] as an impostor and a con man and a
would-be dictator. But he's only a would-be dictator because I'm confident that
the [U.S.] Constitution and the
institutions of the United States are strong enough. ... He would be a dictator
if he could get away with it, but he won't be able to." George Soros (1930- ),
Hungarian-American billionaire, (in an interview, Thurs. Jan. 19, 2017)
“He [FBI Director James Comey] was
fired because he was investigating the White House… This is the kind of thing
that goes on in non-democracies.” Jeffrey Toobin (1960- ), legal analyst and former U.S. federal prosecutor, on CNN, Tues., May 9, 2017
“I’m trying to avoid the
conclusion that we’ve become Nicaragua.” General Michael Hayden
(1945- ), former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National
Security Agency, Wed., May 10, 2017
“War is too serious a thing to be entrusted to military
men.” Georges
Clemenceau (1841-1929), French Prime minister, 1906-1909 and 1917-1920, in 1932
On
Monday, June 12 2017, in his first public cabinet meeting, Trump is seen accepting a North-Korean-style pledge
from his sycophant Cabinet members, on live television, after he had praised himself
profusely. This was eerie: Watching all these secretaries humiliating
themselves in lavishly praising the self-appointed ‘Great One’. They all echoed
Trump’s Chief of Staff Reince Priebus who said: "We thank you for the opportunity and blessing to serve your agenda."
This was quite a totalitarian show, rarely seen in a democracy, but common in a dictatorship.
These secretaries (billionaires, CEOs, generals, etc.)
were not saying that they were serving the people of the United States and its
Constitution, to the best of their capabilities. No, instead, in a junta-like
style, they said that they were serving the person of Donald Trump, above all,
not unlike the Cabinet appointees in North Korea are serving dictator Kim Jong-un. And, what is
even worse, maybe, none of them thought of resigning, after being asked to shred
any sense of self-respect in public, in the most servile manner.
This marked the
day when the most skeptical among political observers had to realize that
president Donald Trump is officially a would-be dictator in the making. As the
popular saying goes, “if it looks like a
duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then
it probably is a duck”.
Very soon after his inauguration, Donald Trump began governing in authoritative
way, issuing decree after decree, while attacking the press and the courts that
stood in his way. Now, he seems to want the entire U.S. government to be at his
personal service.
On February 17, I
wrote a piece entitled “The Imperial Presidency of Donald
Trump: a Threat to American Democracy and an Agent of Chaos in the World?” — Indeed, scandal after scandal, outrageous statements upon outrageous
statements, insults after insults, falsehoods after falsehoods, and self-serving
idiosyncrasies after self-serving idiosyncrasies, Trump has confirmed the
apprehensions of many, and he has clearly become “a threat to American democracy and an agent of chaos in the world”.
One has to be blind or fanatically partisan not to see that.
A Possible
Challenge to the U.S. Constitution
The U.S. Constitution was adopted
officially on September 17, 1787, 230 years ago, and came into force in 1789.
That makes American democracy one of the oldest in the world. Its
constitution’s main idea is the separation of powers and the rule
of law, with checks and balances, a political
doctrine originating in the writings of 18th century French social and political
philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755). More precisely, the U.S.
Constitution states that the president, for example, can be removed for
treason, bribery, or “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” under the authority
of the U.S. Congress.
However, the
ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (c. 469/470
BCE–399 BCE) was reported to have said to Plato (428-348 B.C.): “Tyranny
naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and
slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty”.
What Socrates
meant by these words, of course, is that democracy, notwithstanding its
merits, is not a permanent form of government, but it is always threatened in
its existence by the advent of tyranny, by autocratic or
authoritative rule by a single person, a would-be dictator, by an oligarchy,
which is the tyranny of a minority, or by the tyranny of a majority against
minorities, when there are no legal protections
for the individual or for groups, and it thus requires a constant
vigilance on the part of citizens.
American Father
of the Constitution George Mason (1725-1792) was also worried about democracy “when the same man,
or set of men, holds the sword and the purse.” He feared that
this could mean “an end to Liberty”.
Nevertheless,
the writer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), was more optimistic. He was confident that the U.S. Constitution
was strong enough to prevent a would-be dictator or an oligarchy to usurp
absolute power when he wrote, in 1798: “in questions of power, then, let no
more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the
chains of the Constitution”.
Was Thomas
Jefferson too optimistic regarding the constraints a constitution imposes on
people in power when the latter control money and the means of propaganda? Did
he underestimate the possibility that political partisan interests, when a
president is of the same political party that controls Congress, could, in
fact, grant a sitting president, in advance, a statutory authority to violate
the constitution at will, to govern by decree, or to wage wars of aggression
abroad, at his discretion, without congressional due process?
Indeed, a
constitution is a living document, which, as political history indicates, can
be amended, circumvented or changed to fit the needs of power hungry men, when
the circumstances are favorable to them. The U.S. Supreme Court, which is the
final arbiter of constitutional changes, can also be subverted, or filled with
persons hostile to the very principles they are sworn to uphold.
In other
words, a constitution is as good as the people in power who believe in its
principles. If people in power no longer believe in its principles, they will
find a way to change it or circumvent it. This is major lesson of the history
of democracy: Democracies do die and they can be replaced by tyrannies.
During
troubled political times or dire economic times, indeed, it can be feared that
charlatans, demagogues, impostors, and would-be dictators could have a field
day promising the people in distress easy and quick fixes for the lingering
social and economic problems, in exchange for relinquishing their freedom.
Italian
newspaper editor Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) ruled Italy as Prime Minister and de facto dictator for more than twenty
years (1922-1943). He was elected to the Italian Parliament on May 15, 1921,
and his party, thanks to an alliance with rightist parties, gained thirty-five
seats. From then on, Mussolini used violent and intimidating tactics to gain
power. His Fascist blackshirt-followers launched a campaign to unseat the
Italian government and they organized a “march
to Rome”. On October
28, 1922, the then King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, turned down the existing government’s request to
declare martial law to prevent a fascist revolution. This led to the
resignation of the elected government.
Then, in a most
controversial decision, the King asked Mussolini to form a new right-wing
coalition government, with the support of the military, and of the wealthy
industrial and agrarian Italian establishments. Mussolini's political objective
was to eventually establish a totalitarian state, with himself as “Supreme
leader”. Mussolini legally became dictator through a law passed on December 24,
1925, which declared him “head of the government, Prime minister and State
Secretary”, with no responsibility to Parliament, but only to the King. Armed
with absolute powers, Mussolini then proceeded to progressively dismantle all
constitutional and conventional restraints on his power. The rest is history.
Let us also
consider the case of Germany, some 85 years ago, a European democracy and the
most advanced economy at the time. On January 30, 1933, in a Germany still mired in an economic depression, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was named
German Chancellor and head of a coalition government, even though his political
party, the National Socialist
German Workers Party (the Nazi Party) had not won
a majority during the 1932 elections.
Nevertheless, he had profited politically from the general dissatisfaction of
voters with the way things were in Germany, politically and economically, and
had promised an ‘effective’ government, besides promising to stimulate the
economy by rearming Germany and by establishing new alliances.
Hitler became
a de facto legal
dictator on March 23, 1933, when the German Parliament (the Reichstag) adopted
a law (the Enabling Act), giving Hitler's cabinet the power to enact ‘executive
orders’ without the consent of the Reichstag for four years. —In effect, Hitler
could govern by decree. —He became a true dictator on August 19, 1934, when a
German plebiscite approved the merger of the presidency with the
chancellorship, thus making Hitler Head of State and Supreme Commander of the
armed forces in that country. Hitler could then freely prepare the German
economy for war.
A 1934 article published in the Green Bay Press-Gazette in the U.S.
explained the political rise of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) in these terms: “Adolf Hitler…
tооk advantage of the groans. Hе told people that he would make Germany ‘great’
again. Hе blamed Jews, Socialists, Communists, and others for the troubles of
the land. Hіѕ blazing speeches gained followers for his ‘cause’.”
Since the
inauguration on January 20, 2017, incumbent President Donald Trump has shown a
clear bent toward autocratic rule and has indicated his goal of boosting the
U.S. military-industrial complex. For
example, he declared on Thursday Feb 23, 2017, that he wants to build up the
U.S. nuclear arsenal to ensure it is at the “top of the pack,” claiming that
the United States has fallen behind in its atomic weapons capacity.
In my book, The New American Empire, I wrote, “The same simplistic populism, the same
anti-intellectualism, the same aggressive isolationism, the same xenophobia,
the same militarism, and the same scorn of international laws and institutions
are found in some U.S. Republican leaders today. The United States is perhaps
in greater danger than many think.” (p. 224).
I believe
that these words could appropriately apply to the current Trump administration. In the coming
months, the United States may face its most important democratic test ever.
An ominous
danger: Leaving important war and peace decisions to the military
A most
reckless decision by Donald Trump was to grant American military chiefs overall control of U.S. military policy in Syria,
thus leaving the U.S. military to operate in a political vacuum. Such a
decision has greatly increased the risk of a military confrontation between the
two main nuclear powers, the United States and Russia. A good example is the shooting down of a Syrian Air Force jet in Syria’s airspace, on Sunday June
18, 2017. This was presumably done to prevent the Syrian Army from getting
directly involved in the liberation of Isis’s improvised capital Raqqa. The Syrian
government is winning against the terrorist organization Isis, and that does
not please the Trump administration at all.
Whatever the
objective, besides the obvious hypocrisy, such an act of military aggression was clearly a
violation of Syria’s sovereignty and a flagrant violation of not only international
law, but also of U.S. law. It was, in fact, a premeditated act of war against a
sovereign nation, with no involvement by the U.N. Security Council or by the
U.S. Congress, as both international law and U.S. law require. And this was after
Trump bombed, also illegally, a Syrian government air base, on Friday,
April 7, 2017, on a false flag pretext. If this does not remind you of Hitler bombing Poland’s air fields on
September 1st 1939, what does? Indeed, would-be dictators do not
like the rule of law, domestic or international. They always look for pretexts
to launch wars of aggression to fit their agenda.
The truth is
that Syria does not represent a threat to the USA—just as Poland did not
represent a threat to Germany in 1939—and it has not attacked the United
States, just as Poland had not attacked Germany. If this conflict were to
degenerate into something even more serious, Donald Trump would have to take
full personal responsibility for the chaos and the human disasters to follow.
Is it necessary
to point out that Russia is legally in Syria, a member of the United Nations,
having been officially invited by the legitimate Syrian government to defend
itself against external aggression, while the U.S. has no legal basis
whatsoever to be in Syria, has no legal right to conduct military operations in
that country, and, therefore, is in clear violation of Syria's sovereignty. Why
is Donald Trump anxious
to escalate the civil war conflict in Syria, with the help of al Qaeda terrorists, a conflict that
could evolve into WWIII? Do ordinary Americans really approve of such
incoherence, knowing that al Qaeda was behind 9/11 and 3,000 American deaths?
This is another
example of Donald Trump’s brinkmanship and irresponsibility in international relations.
This is also a far cry from the U.S. Constitution, which vests war decisions in
Congress. It is true that, since WWII, the power of the U.S. President to wage war on his own has
grown appreciably. —This is no progress. But Donald Trump, who has brought
numerous generals into his administration (Marine general James
Mattis, Marine general Joseph F. Dunford, Marine
general, John
F. Kelly), is now transferring basic war decisions to military
commanders. Notwithstanding the fact that the latter are clearly in a conflict
of interests on this score, because the more wars they start, the more
promotions they receive.
That coterie of
generals now forms a sort of parallel government in the Trump administration.
Donald Trump may want to hide behind them to shift the
political conversation from his domestic predicaments in Washington D.C. And, a
war abroad is often a convenient rallying point for an American politician who
is low in the polls. In other words, an escalating war in Syria could be in
Trump’s short-term personal political interest.
Moreover,
after a presidential campaign during which he promised to help disadvantaged voters and improve
social programs for the poorest Americans, once in power, Donald Trump did
pretty much the reverse of what he promised. Indeed, his nominations and his
policies have mostly been designed to enrich large corporations, the
Military-Industrial complex and, through planned tax cuts, the super rich among Americans, while
depriving average and poorer Americans of health care, education and other essential social services.
In fact,
states and counties where candidate Trump
received the largest backing from voters are precisely the ones set up to loose
the most from the Trump administration’s proposed cuts in welfare programs. On this regard, it
can be said that politician Trump could be considered an impostor, defined as “a person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others.”
The newly
elected president has also shown a serious lack of transparency and openness. He has tolerated that his immediate
family’s wealth-seeking activities received favorable treatment from foreign
governments, anxious to draw favors from the new administration. Similarly, he
has not severed himself from obvious personal conflicts of interests, and he has not
even released his tax returns as previous American presidents have done.
As a
consequence of all of this, if the Democrats were to gain control of the House
of Representatives in 2018, it is a virtual certainty that President Trump
would be subjected to an impeachment procedure. Whether it will
succeed is another matter. What is certain is that this will be most
destabilizing for the economy.
Conclusion
Therefore,
yes, a would-be dictator can be elected, most often, as history shows, with a
minority of the votes. And no democratic constitution in the history of the
world is totally protected against violations of its principles, if an oligarchy
in power tolerates or welcomes them and when a substantial part of the
population approves of them. That is why it would presumptuous for Americans to
believe otherwise.
________________________________
________________________
Friday, April 7,
2017
From the
Trump Administration, Expect an Erratic Flip-Flop Foreign Policy, a Return to
Gunboat Diplomacy and more Illegal Wars of Aggression
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“Fool me once,
shame on you; but fool me twice, shame on me.” Ancient proverb, (sometimes attributed to an Italian, Russian or
Chinese proverb)
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more
complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to
move in the opposite direction.” Ernst F. Schumacher (1911-1977) (in
‘Small is Beautiful’,
an essay, in The Radical Humanist, Aug. 1973, p. 22)
“The powers-that-be understand that to create
the appropriate atmosphere for war, it’s necessary to create within the general
populace a hatred, fear or mistrust of others regardless of whether those
others belong to a certain group of people or to a religion or a nation.” James Morcan (1978- ) (in ‘The
Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy’,
2014).
“Almost all wars begin with false flag operations.” Larry Chin, (in ‘False Flagging the World towards War. The CIA Weaponizes Hollywood’, Global Research, Dec. 27, 2014)
Another
terrible war crime against Syrian civilians has taken place in Syria, on top of
multiple war crimes committed in that country torn apart by six years of a civil
war marked by foreign interventions. On Tuesday, April 4, 2017, a chemical
attack killed more than 70 people, including women and children. No neutral official investigation has yet taken place,
but two versions of events have surfaced.
- The first version,
advanced by the American Trump administration and other Western governments,
and seemingly the only version retained by most Western media, points to a
bombing by the Syrian government at Khan Cheikhoun, in the Idlib
province, as the culprit.
The fact that a Syrian plane was seemingly involved would support this version.
However, what benefit would the Assad regime gain from such a crime is less
than obvious.
- The second
version, advanced by the Russian Putin government and by other analysts
is that a bomb launched by a Syrian plane would have accidently hit a depot of
chemical weapons in the rebel-held territory and caused the carnage. Islamist
rebels would have exploited the accident to stage a very effective mediated
coup against the Assad regime. In the absence of conclusive physical evidence,
the ‘Cui Bono’ argument (‘who
benefits’) could be used to support that version.
It is good to
recall that a similar war crime, among many others, took place at Ghouta, in
the Damascus suburb, on August 31, 2013. In that case, it was strongly
suspected that the horrific chemical attacks, which killed hundreds of people,
including many children, was likely a criminal
‘false flag operation’,
staged by Al Qaeda rebels anxious to provoke U.S. President Barack Obama to
intervene militarily on their side in the Syrian conflict. A ‘false flag
operation’ is defined as “a horrific, staged event, — blamed on a political
enemy — and used as pretext to start a war or to enact draconian laws in the
name of national security.”
International law is being more and more discarded in
favor of international anarchy
It is a sad fact
that in totalitarian states, but also in our so-called democracies, it seems
that wars of aggression are now based and sold with official lies and
fraudulent fabrications in order to fool the people. Warmongers in government
know that people do not like wars, especially illegal wars of aggression,
against countries that have not attacked them. That is why their first choice
is to attempt to drag the people along with lies and false
pretexts for war, and by dehumanizing any potential enemy through crude
propaganda.
Historically,
there have been numerous instances when a ‘false flag operation’ was used to
justify a “humanitarian” military intervention against a country or a regime.
(Let us also remember that under the United Nations Charter,
which is the foundation of international law, no country has a right to attack
another one, no matter the pretext used, except in self-defense.)
Suffice here to
recall two famous cases.
Case No. 1
Indeed, there are
many historical precedents. Of course, the most recent one is George W. Bush
administration’s use of a pretext to launch a so-called “pre-emptive” war of
aggression against Iraq, pretending that there were chemical “weapons of mass
destruction” in that country. It asserted that such WMDs posed a threat to
neighboring countries and to the U.S. — It turned out that not only this act of
international military aggression was illegal,
but also that it was a lie, a pure fabrication, since no such weapons were
discovered after the U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq.
Case No. 2
On February 15,
1898, the battleship
USS Maine, on a friendly visit to Cuba, caught fire and sank in the Havana
Harbor, seemingly because of an internal explosion of one of its torpedoes
aboard. A purely American-run investigation concluded, however, that the
explosion was not a terrible internal accident,
but was caused externally by a naval mine in the harbor.
Republican
President William McKinley (1843-1901), pushed by influent New York newspapers,
(the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers), accused the colonial government of Spain, in Cuba, of
being responsible for the explosion and used that pretext to issue an ultimatum
to Spain. The U.S Congress declared war against Spain on April 20, 1898. — That
was the beginning of the Spanish-American
War, which ended up with the U.S. occupying Cuba, Porto Rico, the
Island of Guam and the Philippines.
Donald Trump’s new conversion to war
Politicians in
disfavor can also find in foreign wars a way to improve their domestic
political status. Indeed, if circumstances permit, what does an ambitious
politician do, when facing a falling popularity at home? Chances are that he may
be tempted to find a pretext to start a war, any war, and without any regard to
international law.
It might seem
bizarre that President Donald Trump has completely reversed his position
regarding U.S. involvement in the Syrian conflict. But he is languishing in the
polls,
and even the Republican-controlled Congress is distancing
itself from the White House. What better way, especially in the United
States where wars abroad are a rallying point, to move the attention from
domestic affairs to foreign affairs?
Whatever the
motive behind the move, President Trump’s hasty decision to resort to an act of
war in bombing the country of Syria, on Friday morning, April 7, has been met
with hurrahs by many members of Congress. The American people may
be more divided on the issue, but it can reasonably be expected that in the
coming weeks Trump’s popularity, presently around 35 percent, will rise under
the general approval that he will surely receive from the concentrated
American media. He also is likely to receive a more positive collaboration from
Congress for his more controversial domestic agenda.
It may be sad to
say, but in the United States, the quickest road to popularity for a politician
in difficulty, at least initially, is to launch a war abroad. For example,
President George W. Bush’s
popularity went from around
50 percent to more than 90 percent when he initiated his war against Iraq in
2002-2003. At the end of his second term, however, his approval rating had
fallen below 30 percent. [For a description of the period, see my book The
New American Empire,
2004.]
Conclusion
The unfolding of
events in the Middle East would seem to reinforce my personal assessment of
last February that an unpredictable President Donald Trump risks becoming “a
threat to American Democracy and an agent of chaos in the world”, and even more so now that Congressional Democrats
seem ready to jump on his war bandwagon (as they did with President George W.
Bush).
________________________
Friday, February
17, 2017
The Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump:
a Threat to American Democracy and an Agent of Chaos in the World?
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“In order to obtain and hold power a man must
love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness,
but with the opposite qualities of pride, craft and cruelty. Without exalting self and
abasing others, without hypocrisy, lying, prisons, fortresses, penalties,
killing, no power can arise or hold its own.” Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), (in 'The Kingdom of God is
Within You’ 1894.)
“The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by
the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be
feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the
great men of history.” Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), (in The Conquest of Happiness, ch. 1, 1930.)
“Nearly all men can stand
adversity, but if you want to
test a man's character, give him power. ” Abraham
Lincoln (1809-1865),
16th President of the United States, 1861-65; (N. B.: Originally found
and attributed to Lincoln in a biography entitled “Abraham
Lincoln, the Backwoods Boy” by Horatio Alger Jr., pub. in 1883.)
“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of
liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or
pretended from abroad.” James
Madison (1751-1836), Father of the US Constitution, 4th American President, (in a letter to
Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798.)
“When
fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the
cross.” Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), (It Can't Happen Here, 1935, a novel
about the election of a fascist to the American presidency.)
When
46.1% of Americans who voted,
in November 2016, to elect a
real estate magnate in the person of Donald Trump as U.S. President, they did
not know precisely what they were buying, because, as the quote above says, we
really know how a politician will behave only once he or she assumes power.
Americans surely did not expect that the promised “change” the Republican presidential candidate envisioned and
promised was going to be, in fact, “chaos”
and “turmoil” in the U.S. government.
President Donald
Trump (1946- ) has surrounded himself with three politically
inexperienced Rasputin-like advisers, i.e. his young pro-Israel Jewish
son-in-law Jared
Kushner (1981- ), advising on foreign policy and acting as a speech
writer, and his far right media executive and chief political strategist Steve
Bannon (1953- ) with an apocalyptic worldview, who is, moreover, a
voting permanent member of the National Security Council (NSC). Stephen
Miller (1985- ), 31, also a young inexperienced senior
White House adviser, completes the trio. He is working with Jared Kushner for
domestic affairs and is also a Trump speechwriter.
Three weeks after
his inauguration, President Trump has turned out to be a much more erratic
politician than could have been expected, even after all the inanities he
uttered during the U.S. Presidential campaign. I, for one, thought that once
elected president and installed in the White House, he would abandon his
tweeting eccentricities. —I was wrong.
In fact, for a
few weeks after inauguration day, on January 20, 2017, before the nominated
secretaries of various government departments were confirmed by the Senate, and
anxious to "get the show going", the Trump White House behaved like an imperial junta,
issuing a string of executive
orders and memos. The objective, seemingly, was to force the hands of
the responsible departments and of the elected Congress, and to bend the entire
U.S. bureaucracy to its agenda. It may have gone too far.
Indeed, when the
heads of important departments like the Department of Defense (James Mattis) and the State Department (Rex Tillerson) were confirmed and assumed their functions,
President Trump changed his mind on many policies about Israel,
China,
the Iran
Deal …etc.
U.S.
courts have also thrown
a monkey wrench in the blanket executive order closing the U.S. borders without
recourse to the citizens of seven Muslim countries (Iraq,
Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen), for spurious “security
reasons”.
Let us recall how
the inexperienced Trump White House has created chaos during the first weeks
following inauguration day.
• President Donald Trump has shown a propensity to
govern by decree with a minimum input from government departments and from the
elected Congress
A dangerous and
potentially disastrous approach to government, in a democracy, occurs when a
leader adopts the practice of governing
by decree, without constitutional constraints, thus forcing the hands of responsible departments, of the elected
Congress and submitting the entire U.S. bureaucracy to his will by governing as
an autocrat. If it were to continue on that road, the Trump administration
could turn out to be more like a would-be imperial
presidency than a responsible democratic government.
This term was
first coined by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in his 1973 book The Imperial
Presidency, in response to President Richard Nixon’s attempt to extend the power
of the U.S. president, declaring “when
the president does it, that means it is not illegal”. In my own 2003 book The New American
Empire, I dealt with the issue of American presidents having usurped over time
the power to adopt a policy of global intervention, and the power to launch
wars of aggression at will, with a minimum input from Congress.
President Trump
seems to want to outdo President Nixon in considering the White House as the
primary center of political power within the American government, contrary to
what the U.S.
Constitution says about the separation of powers.
To be sure, other
American presidents have issued executive orders and presidential memos early
in their administration, but this was mainly to re-establish procedures that a
previous administration had abandoned. They usually did not deal with
fundamental and complex policies without debate, although many did.
In the case of
President Trump, his executive orders and presidential memos have not only been
multiple, they also have dealt with fundamental policies, without consulting
and requesting the professional input of the Secretary and of the department
responsible, be it on healthcare, abortion, international trade, immigration,
oil exploration, justice, etc., and without producing policy papers to explain
the rationale behind the policy changes and without outlining the objectives
being pursued.
When such a
development of governing by decree has occurred in other countries, democracy
was the loser, and the consequences for the leader and his country turned out
to be disastrous.
• President Donald Trump seems to be anxious to find
pretexts to pick fights with other countries: For him, it seems to be the U.S.
against the world
In a March 2007 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, the future presidential candidate Donald Trump said
that President George W. Bush had been a disaster in foreign relations and that
he was “the worst American president in
the history of the United States”, adding that he “should have been impeached” because he lied his way into a war of
aggression against Iraq and sent thousands of people to their death. This is an
assessment that he has repeated on numerous
occasions.
However,
ironically, President Donald Trump seems to be on the same track as George W.
Bush regarding the country of Iran, using lies
and false
claims to pick a fight with that country, and in so doing, echoing the hysterical rhetoric of Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin
Netanyahu. He has also
recklessly insulted the heads of a half dozen countries,
even going so far as to threaten the President of Mexico to invade
his country. As to his criticism of President George W. Bush, it seems that
really, “it takes one to know one”!
President Trump
should be reminded of what he promised
as a presidential candidate. In a foreign policy speech delivered on
Wednesday April 27, 2016, he declared “Unlike
other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first
instinct. You cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower
understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength. Although
not in government service, I was totally against the war in Iraq, very proudly,
saying for many years that it would destabilize the Middle East.”
• President Donald Trump has been less than candid
regarding the influence of the Wall Street lobby on politicians, including
himself
During the 2016
Presidential political campaign, candidate Donald Trump was very critical of
politicians who do the heavy lifting for Wall Street firms in Washington D.C.
On many occasions, Mr. Trump said that Wall Street is a symbol of a corrupt
establishment that has been robbing America's working class and enriching
the elite. He also tweeted point blank, on July 28, 2016, that Secretary
Hillary Clinton was “owned
by Wall Street” and that Wall Street banks had “total,
total control” over his
rivals Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, implying
that they were unfit for the Office of the President. On October 19, 2016, Mr.
Trump tweeted that “crooked Hillary is
nothing more than a Wall Street Puppet”, thus presenting himself as the
populist defender of the working class against the financial elite.
But guess what? One of Mr. Trump’s first moves as President was to order
the undoing of the banking regulations known as the Dodd-Frank legislation,
which was adopted in 2010, after the 2008 subprime financial crisis. President
Trump thus quickly answered the main request made by the very Wall Street mega
banks that he had accused previously of corrupting Washington politicians. He
went even further when he named a former Goldman Sachs banker, Steven
Mnuchin, as his Treasury Secretary.
Also, Mr. Trump has reached to the mega-bank Goldman Sachs for help and
support. He name Mr. Gary Cohn (1960- ), president
of Goldman
Sachs, head of the President’s National Economic
Council, thus making sure that Wall Street bankers will have a big say in his
administration’s economic and financial policies.
Was his lambasting of his opponents as Wall Street banks’ puppets simply
campaign rhetoric without substance? That is certainly a question worth asking.
• President Donald Trump’s continuous attacks against
the free press and against independent judges who rule against his policies is
an authoritarian approach to government and is a violation of the separation of
powers
On Monday
February 6, President Trump launched a barrage of off-the-cuff
intimidating insults at
the American news media, accusing them of “refusing to report on terrorist attacks”, without
providing any evidence to back up such serious accusations. He has also
attempted to intimidate
judges who have to rule on the constitutionality of some of
his decrees and threatened their judiciary
independence.
Such behavior is a violation of, and contempt for the separation
of powers clause in the U.S. Constitution and is a frontal attack
against the free
press.
This is not a
trivial matter, because when an authoritarian regime wants to establish itself
and avoid accountability, it usually attacks the legislative and the judiciary
branches of government to pressure them to toe the line of the executive
branch, and it tries to silence the very institutions that can put the false
statements of politicians to the test.
• President Donald Trump has a mercantilist view of
international trade, which is rejected by nearly all economists
President Donald
Trump seems to think that his country should have trade surpluses on goods and
services vis-à-vis other countries, the latter being saddled with trade
deficits, whatever the overall balance of payments
of the United States, especially its capital account, and whatever the
domestic and foreign economic circumstances. This is economically false. That
is not the way adjustments in the balance of payments of a country work, in a
multilateral world.
When Donald Trump places all the emphasis on only one
part of the balance of payments, the trade balance, he misses the point. For
example, if a country lives beyond its means and borrows money from abroad,
such foreign borrowing appears as an inflow of foreign capital in the country.
Such an inflow of foreign capital causes an excess of domestic spending over
its production, and that helps finance an excess of imports over exports of
goods and services with the rest of the world. The capital account of the
country shows a surplus, while the trade balance (more precisely the current
account) indicates a deficit, thus balancing more or less each other.
The main reason
why the United States is registering trade deficits is because it borrows too
much from abroad.
This is partly
due to the fact that the U.S. government runs huge
fiscal deficits, spending more than its tax revenues, and borrowing
money both from the private sector and from foreigners, thus increasing the
public debt. Such deficits often are the result of tax reductions and of
increased military expenditures. The fact that the world economy uses the
U.S. dollar as a reserve
currency represents an interest-free loan that the rest of the world
makes to the United States, which allows the USA to have a chronic trade
deficit. Mr. Trump and his advisers would be wise to understand these truths of
international finance.
If his
administration wants to reduce the annual U.S. trade deficit with the rest of
the world, the U.S. government should balance its books and reduce its foreign
borrowings. Trade wars will not
improve the U.S. trade balance if the country keeps over-spending and keeps
borrowing from abroad. They would only make matters worse.
For many decades
now, the U.S. government has piled up debt upon debt
while running continuous fiscal
deficits, mainly due to the fact that it has been waging costly wars
abroad, while financing such interventions with foreign money. This is a
problem that American politicians must understand if they don’t want their
country to go bankrupt. This has happened in the past to other overextended
empires, and there is no reason why it should not happen today when a
country continuously spends more than it produces. And wars do not produce
anything, except death and destruction.
• Hopes of putting an end to the Middle East chaos
have greatly diminished
One of the
positive results of the Trump election was the promise to end the deadly chaos
in the Middle East. During the presidential campaign and once in power, Mr.
Trump threw some cold water on that promise.
Firstly, in his
March 21, 2016 speech to
AIPAC, he flattered his rich Zionist donors by announcing his intention
to break with the half-century policy of most western nations that considers
the city of Jerusalem a United Nations protected zone and an international city
occupied by Arabs, Christians and Jews. He declared “we will move the American embassy [from Tel Aviv] to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.”
Secondly, on Thursday December 15, 2016, to make sure that everybody
understands that he is one-sided in the more than half a century old
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, President-elect Trump announced his choice of a
hardliner pro-Israeli settlements on privately-owned Palestinian lands for U.S.
ambassador to Israel
(in fact, David
Friedman, his former bankruptcy lawyer). The new ambassador didn’t
waste any time in professing that he was looking forward to doing
his job “from the U.S. embassy in
Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”
And, thirdly, seemingly forgetting that he had criticized Secretary
Clinton for proposing a similar dangerously reckless policy, President Trump
announced, on January 25, that he “will absolutely do safe
zones in Syria”, seemingly without
considering if it was legal to do so without the consent of the Syrian
government, and without consulting with the three principal countries (Russia,
Turkey and Iran), which had just concluded a peace plan for Syria. He opted
instead to talk to leaders of Saudi Arabia and of the United Arab Emirates— two countries
known to be sponsoring terrorism in Syria.
• The world is afraid of President Donald Trump: Doomsday Clock scientists have concluded that
humanity is just two-and-a-half minutes from
the apocalypse
Late in January,
the scientists in charge of the Doomsday
Clock set the clock at just two-and-a-half minutes from
the apocalypse, allegedly because of Donald Trump. They said that the
businessman turned politician, with his disturbing
and ill-considered pronouncements and policies, has the potential to drive the Planet to
oblivion. This means that they consider that the
Earth is now closer
to oblivion than it has ever been since 1953, at the height of the
nuclear confrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union. The existential
threats facing the Earth now come from the loose talk about using nuclear
weapons and the proliferation of such weapons, as well as the observed
acceleration of climate change.
• Conclusion
All considered,
the turn of events since the election of Donald Trump has raised a number of
fears that a lot of things could go wrong in the coming years. Many of the
policies advanced by the Trump administration are the wrong remedies for the
problems facing the United States and the world. In fact, many of these
ill-conceived policies are more likely to make matters worse, possibly much
worse, than to improve them.
Things seem to
have begun to change somewhat with the arrival of newly confirmed secretaries
in the decision-making process and new advisers. Let us hope that cooler heads
will bring experience, knowledge and competence to a Trump administration that
cruelly needs it.
___________________________________
Friday, January
20, 2017
What to Expect from the Trump
Administration: A Protectionist and Pro-Corporate America Government
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“Fascism should more appropriately be called
Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945),
Italian politician,
journalist, and leader of the National Fascist Party. (As quoted in
Mats Erik Olshammar’s book Dragon Flame, 2008, p. 253)
“The dangerous American fascist is
the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what
[Adolf] Hitler did in Germany in a
Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method
is to poison the channels of public information. — With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to
the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the
fascist and his group more money or more power.”
Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965), American politician, 33rd Vice President
of the United States, 1941-1945, (in ‘The Danger of American Fascism’, The New
York Times, April 9, 1944, and in ‘Democracy Reborn’, 1944, p. 259)
"Demagogue: one who
preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."
“With all that
Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the
Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it may be, their number one act and
priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far
greater importance! »
Donald Trump (1946- ), on January 3, 2017,
after House
Republicans voted 119-74 to place the
independent Office of Congressional
Ethics under the control of the House of Representatives. (N.B.: They
reversed their position after Mr. Trump’s criticism)
Presidential
candidate Donald Trump raised the hopes of many Americans when he
criticized his political opponents for their close ties to Wall Street and, above all, when he promised to 'drain
the swamp' in Washington D.C. He may still fulfill that last
promise, but as the quote above indicates, he may have to fight House
Republicans on that central issue. Candidate Trump also raised the
hopes of many when he promised to end costly wars abroad and to concentrate
rather on preventing jobs from moving offshore, on creating more middle-class
jobs at home and on preventing the American middle class from shrinking any
further.
No doubt the cabinet
he has assembled is filled with well-intentioned and capable persons. And, it
is only normal that a new president surrounds himself with loyal supporters and
people with whom he feels comfortable ideologically and personally. And, let us
be fair. Not many progressives or academics supported Donald Trump during the
November 2016 election. However, on paper at least, it can be said that Trump’s
cabinet looks to be more to the right than himself.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration will probably
be the most pro-business administration and the wealthiest
in American history. This is somewhat ironical
because, during the November 2016 presidential election, Mr. Trump prevailed in
poor,
economically challenged cities, while Ms. Clinton drew her support in more
affluent cities and counties.
The overall image that emerges, indeed, is a U.S.
government fit for an inward-looking industrial-financial-military
complex, made up, to a large extent, of billionaires and of Wall Street financiers (Ross,
Mnuchin, Cohn,
Clayton, etc.), of known warmongers (Mattis,
Flynn, etc.), and of known
Zionists (Bolton, Friedman, Greenblatt, etc.). However, this is a corporate
government that is hostile to large American international corporations (GM,
Coca-Cola, etc.), hostile to economic regulations and to economic globalization
in general.
There is a clear possibility, considering its
composition, that the pro-domestic-business Trump administration could herald a new Robber
Baron era of laissez faire capitalism within the United
States, somewhat similar to the one that led, in reaction, to the passage of the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act in 1890. If so,
history could repeat itself. Only time will tell.
A genuine desire for radical change
There is no doubt
that the 2016 U.S presidential election revealed a desire for radical change on
the part of a large segment of the U.S. electorate, discontent and dissatisfied with the way things are
these days with the political gridlock in Washington D.C. and with the
relatively stalled U.S. economy.
The economic
policies espoused by the U.S. establishment over the last quarter century have
resulted in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, with the
result also that economic
and social mobility
for average American families has declined and is now much lower than in other
advanced economies. This has been an important cause for disillusion and anger
among many Americans who feel that the economic system is rigged against them
and in favor of the very rich.
Can President
Trump succeed in bringing about fundamental, even revolutionary change,
especially in reducing political corruption and in bringing more economic and
social justice for American workers, or will he be engulfed in the morass of
politics as usual in Washington D.C.? Here again, only time will tell.
On the other
hand, President Trump can hardly pretend to have received an overwhelming
political mandate for change from the electorate, considering that he got 2,865,000
fewer votes than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The
last time that this happened was in 2000 when Republican presidential candidate
George W. Bush received about 540,000
fewer votes than his adversary Al Gore, but he was nevertheless elected
president by the U.S. Electoral College.
Moreover, by
professing to want to cumulate his responsibilities as U.S. President and those
as a de facto head of his own
international real-estate company, and by refusing to park his private business
interests in a blind trust, thus creating a permanent conflict of interests,
President Donald Trump is sending the wrong signal. And transferring the daily
executive responsibilities to his sons does not pass the smell test.
During the 2016 campaign,
candidate Trump clearly said that “[I]f I
become president, I couldn’t care less about my company. It’s peanuts… I
wouldn’t ever be involved because I wouldn’t care about anything but our
country, anything.” Public interest, indeed, is not the same as private
personal interests, and it is difficult to believe that Mr. Trump has had a
change of mind on such an important issue. People should expect their
politicians not to use their positions, directly or indirectly, to enrich
themselves. Period.
Let us consider
how a strong pro-business Trump administration could have some beneficial
results in the short run, but could also be very disruptive in the long run,
both for the United States and for the world.
1. Donald Trump’s authoritarian approach may endanger
American democracy
American
democracy may be seriously
tested in the coming months and years, as a President Donald Trump
administration begins implementing a fundamental shift in American domestic and
foreign policies. This could be either for better or for worse.
That is because
the new U.S. president, Donald J. Trump (1946- ), is a businessman, in fact, an
international real-estate mogul who owns hotels, golf courses and casinos in many countries,
who has no government experience of his own and who has run his family business
with total control. Moreover, businessman Donald Trump has tended to trust his
business instincts more than his head in making important decisions, and he is
also inclined to act in a self-serving manner. He is a person who, temperamentally
and on occasion, does not hesitate to denigrate, humiliate and bully people around to get his way. Indeed, his modus
operandi in his dealings with people seems
to rely on intimidation and on bluffing in order to exact concessions on their
part and to obtain some benefits for himself.
Some fifteen
years ago, another businessman was elected to the American presidency, i.e.
Texan oilman George
W. Bush (1946- ), who also boasted that he made decisions with his
guts. That did not turned out too well for the United States, as Bush II ended
up being one of the worse presidents the U.S. ever had. Presidential candidate
Trump even said publicly that George W. Bush was “the worst President in history”, and
said he should have been impeached because he lied about the presence of
weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq with the clear intention of tricking
the American public into supporting a war against that country.
It’s true that
George W. Bush did not hide his intentions of governing in an authoritarian way
when he declared, "I'm the commander in chief, see, I don't need to explain, I do not
need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting part about being
president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I
don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation", as this was documented in Bob Woodward's book 'Bush at War', 2002. Will President
Trump take such a statement as a precedent, or will he be more open to outside
ideas to improve things?
2. Fears of trade wars and disruptive protectionism
looming ahead
President Donald
Trump has made no qualms about being a trade
protectionist. His spokespersons have repeatedly said that the new
administration is a protectionist one. It is one thing to adopt ad hoc protectionist measures; it is another matter to adopt an
overall protectionist policy that could lead to widespread economic
disintegration, and trigger costly economic dislocations, uncertainty and,
possibly, risk a worldwide economic depression.
This could also mean bringing forward destructive laws, similar to the
protectionist 1930
Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which imposed high tariffs and
other barriers to the importation of foreign-produced goods.
There are, however, international
trade laws that prevent one country from singling out another country for punitive
tariffs or trade impediments without cause. If the Trump administration were to
violate those laws, other national governments could be expected to retaliate,
and this could wreak havoc with international trade and world prosperity. In
the 1930s, protectionist “beggar-thy-neighbor
policies" raised unemployment and intensified the Great
Depression. Nobody can be absolutely sure that this would not be repeated if similar
policies were pursued today.
In fact, it is
far from certain that increasing duties on imports would be beneficial to the
U.S. economy. Such impediments to trade would push up the prices of goods in
the United States, thus making it harder for workers on low salaries to buy
them. American exports could also suffer when other countries retaliate and
raise tariffs on goods produced in the U.S. and shipped from the U.S., creating
unemployment in many American exporting industries, notably in the agricultural
sector.
With American
protectionist policies raising prices, the Fed could then be expected to raise
interest rates faster, thus slowing down interest-rate sensitive industries
such as the construction industry, while higher U.S. interest rates could
appreciate the U.S. dollar vis-à-vis other currencies, resulting in a further
decline of U.S. exports abroad and negating the expected objective of
protectionism.
Indeed, President
Trump and his advisers could learn some lessons in economics in 2017-2018, when
they see an extraordinary strong U.S. dollar, boosted by their expected
protectionist policies, destroying American exports and possibly also tanking
the stock market. Large American
international companies could be expected to suffer the most, and those
who work for them or own stocks in them would also suffer, both from the
artificially strong dollar and from retaliations from other countries.
Therefore, it is
far from a sure thing that the jobs created in American import-substituting
industries would not be counterbalanced by the loss of jobs in American export
industries. The result could be net negative for the U.S. economy as a whole.
Protectionist policies could also lower American overall productivity, in the
long run, because of a reduction in economies of
scale caused by a contraction of U.S. export industries and in their
investments.
3. The North American economy could be disturbed and
political relations could possibly turn sour
The United States
needs allies and friends in the world, and there is no better friend of the
United States than neighboring Canada. In 1988, the Reagan administration
reached a free
trade agreement (FTA) with Canada, a country with a similar free market
economy and standard of living, which has benefited both countries. In 1994,
the Clinton administration enlarged the Canada-US free trade Agreement to
include Mexico, the latter country having a standard of living that is less
than one third the American standard of living. That was NAFTA.
The Trump
administration intends not only to cancel the already signed trade agreement
(TPP) with Asiatic countries and to end negotiations for establishing a
transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP), but President Trump
would also like to reopen and renegotiate the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). Such isolationist moves are bound to create unnecessary
economic and political frictions besides creating a lot of uncertainty. For
neighboring Canada and Mexico, this has the potential of disrupting their
economies. Let us hope that cooler heads will prevail and that the baby of
economic cooperation won’t be thrown out with the bathwater of trade irritants.
Mr. Trump and his
advisers should know that trade is a two-way street and that a country pays for
its imports with its exports. They must know, therefore, that Canada is the
U.S.’s number one trading partner and that there are 35 U.S. states (New York,
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, New Hampshire,
Wisconsin, Alaska, etc.)
for whom the number one export country for their goods and services is Canada.
In 2015, for the
record, the United States exported
goods and services to Canada for a total value of $337.3 billion, and imported from Canada goods and services
valued at $325.4 billion, for a net U.S. surplus equal to $11.9 billion. In
2015, Canada was the United States' number-one goods export market. Moreover, American companies had direct investments
worth $386.1 billion in Canada, in 2014, while Canadian
companies had direct investments in the United States worth $261.2 billion in
the same year.
The
Trump administration should know that, in 2015, nearly 9
million American jobs
depended on U.S. trade and investment with Canada. Therefore, Canada is not a country posing a trade problem to the
United States and Mr. Trump and other U.S. politicians should know it. The
Canadian and American economies are well integrated and are complementary to
each other.
The motto should be: If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
4. Drastic U.S domestic policy changes may hurt the
poor and enrich the already super rich, thus exasperating inequality, if they
are not replaced by better policies
Presidential
candidate Trump promised to lower U.S. corporate tax on corporate profits from
35% to 15%. Even though the real
corporate tax rate paid by most American corporations is much lower
than the posted rate, being closer to 12%, such a drastic drop in the official
corporate taxation rate is bound to make the rich richer. In fact, the
post-November-8 stock market rally is largely a reflection of that promise to
lower the corporate tax rate.
Similarly,
candidate Donald Trump has promised to deregulate U.S. mega banks, which were
at the center of the 2008
subprime loan financial crisis, and especially end the Dodd-Frank
rules, which require
banks to hold more capital as an insurance against catastrophic failures. Here
we go again: politicians pandering to those who can give them money, while
risking the stability of the entire financial system and the jobs of millions
of Americans. If this comes to pass, the next financial crisis may be called
the ‘Trump financial crisis’.
On the social
side, Trump’s promise to dismantle the Obamacare program, without advancing a
credible replacement, may end up hurting the poorest Americans. Indeed, what would happen to the some 20
million Americans who previously had been left out of secured access to
health services through employer-sponsored insurance? In politics, it is usually easier to dismantle
something than to build something of value.
5. U.S. economic and political clashes with China may
be very disruptive to world peace
The Chinese
government is a communist and authoritarian government, even though it has moved, since 1978,
under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997), to a more decentralized market-oriented socialist economy. The biggest economic step for China came on
December 11, 2001, when it officially abandoned protectionism as a policy and
joined the World Trade
Organization (WTO),
thus integrating the world economy.
It is true that
the U.S. has a trade deficit with China. In 2015, for example, American exports
to China amounted to $116.1 billion while the U.S. imported goods from China
valued at $483.2 billion, leaving a trade deficit equal to $367.1 billion. That
is party due to the fact that many U.S. companies have invested in China, and
they imported goods from China. This is partly due to the fact that the U.S.
government has a large fiscal deficit, and some of it translates into an
external trade deficit. Of course, it is true that China is also a large
low-wage country, and its products are very price-competitive.
An important
point of contention between the U.S. and China has been the value of the latter
country’s currency, the Yuan. Critics have argued that the Chinese currency has
been kept artificially
undervalued, thus reducing the price of Chinese goods on international
markets and stimulating its exports. The Chinese government has argued that the
Yuan exchange rate reflects its own economic conditions, i.e. low labor costs,
and that the value of the Yuan, in fact, has been appreciating over the last
twenty years and that the country runs trade deficits with other countries.
Such an issue
should be settled by a panel of international monetary experts, and should not
be a pretext for a trade war.
6. The Trump administration, by siding even more
openly with Israel than previous American administrations, may make matters
worse in the Middle East
During the
electoral campaign, candidate Trump said, on many occasions, that he wanted to
reduce congressional term limits, fight political corruption and stop the influence of
the tens of thousands of lobbies in Washington D.C.
Ironically, on
Monday evening, March 21, 2016, Mr. Trump appeared in front of the most
powerful foreign policy lobby in the U.S., the pro-Israel American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an umbrella lobbying organization that boasts of
having access to a vast pool of political donors. He then delivered the most demagogic and the most
pandering speech that a
politician can make to get votes and money from a lobbying organization. So
much so that, the next day, AIPAC president Lillian Pinkus had to apologize
for some of Mr. Trump’s remarks.
During his
speech, Mr. Trump went on to please his listeners by declaring that he was prepared to turn a
blind eye to the issue of illegal Israeli settlements that the Israeli
government has allowed on the occupied lands Palestinians want for their future
state. He went even further and said that he would veto “100
percent”, as U.S. President, any attempt by the United Nations to impose a
Palestinian state on Israel, provoking cheers and applause. Mr. Trump went on
promising to “move the
American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem”, a
shift of policy that would be denounced by most other countries, even if this
was met with cheers and applause by the AIPAC delegates.
Soon after his
AIPAC speech, not surprisingly, prominent American billionaires, such as
casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, casino owner Phil Ruffin, activist investor
Carl Icahn, etc. became prominent donors
to the Trump campaign. So much for draining the swamp!
7. President Trump has made incendiary and false
statements about Iran
Candidate Trump,
in his pandering speech to AIPAC, promised to “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran”. He even repeated the lie that the U.S. government “gave” $150
billion to Iran. In fact, that sum was Iran’s own funds that had been frozen in
American financial institutions because of unilateral sanctions. This was not a
“gift”. It was restitution.
It was said of
the George W. Bush administration that it made “its
own reality”. Would the Donald Trump administration be on the same
track in creating “its
own facts”?
It was an
agreement reached by six countries (France, Germany, the U.K., Russia,
China, and the United States), which removed the possibility that Iran develop
nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future. Would President Trump insult all
these countries and opt to go to war with Iran to please his rich donors? I
hope not. That would be crazy. I doubt very much that this is the type of
“change” that American voters want, i.e. more neocon-inspired wars of
aggression abroad.
8. The Trump administration is expected to show little
respect for the environment
Scott Pruitt, the
new Head of the Environmental Protection Agency (APA) is openly a denier of climate science and of clean air
legislation. As Attorney General of the state of Oklahoma, he opposed the Environmental Protection Agency (APA) over its Clean Power Plan.
He can be expected to encourage highly polluting coal burning.
Indeed, it is one thing to be a climate change skeptic, and another to
be pro- air pollution. There are economic activities that generate pollution
costs to the entire population and cause diseases. Such social external costs
are not included in the market prices of private goods. They should be.
People have only
to look at some Chinese cities, like Beijing, to see how destructive air
pollution can be, when people have to wear masks when going outside their
homes. In particular, burning coal on a large scale creates smog
and is a recipe to generate deadly air pollution. That is what China is
learning the hard way, as this results in thousands of premature deaths.
Numerous members
of the Trump administration are climate change deniers and are opposed to
climate scientists’ recommendations. For one, Rick Perry, the former Republican Governor of Texas and
President Trump’s choice for Energy Secretary, denies that climate change is
happening or that it is caused by greenhouse gas emissions. It is undeniable,
for example, that the year 2016
was the warmest ever and that the trend toward a warming climate will continue
as CO2 emissions keep increasing.
On the
environment, therefore, the Trump administration can be expected to be anti-intellectualism
and anti-science.
9. After statements made to that effect, the Trump
administration is expected to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with far-right judges
Presidential
candidate Donald Trump is on record as willing to pack the U.S. Supreme Court
with far right pro-life judges. Mr. Trump is known to have been, for most of his life, pro-choice, although he has expressed a personal dislike for
abortion, except for three exceptions, i.e. when the health
of a woman is in danger, in case of rape, and in case of incest. In 1999, for example, he told NBC ‘Meet The Press, “I'm very pro-choice.”
However, during the last presidential campaign, on August 1, 2016, Mr. Trump went further and said that “I will pick great Supreme Court Justices”, …similar in philosophy to
the late Justice Antonin
Scalia (1936-2016), one of the most far right judges ever to have sat on the
U.S. Supreme Court.
The most contentious proposals of the Trump administration will
undoubtedly be the type of judges it nominates for confirmation by the U.S.
Senate.
10. On the positive side, the Trump administration is
bound to end the Washington Neocons’ New Cold War with Russia
In international
affairs, the main positive contribution that the Trump administration could
bring to the world would be to put an end to the artificially created New
Cold War with Russia that Washington Neocons have initiated from
scratch in recent years, within the Obama administration. Indeed, President
Donald Trump has been most clear in expressing his desire to adopt a more peaceful
approach to Russia and President Vladimir Putin. In many areas, he even
considers Russia to be an ally of the U.S., not the dangerous adversary that
the Neocon establishment in Washington D.C. has tried to portray it to be in
recent years. If this New Détente with Russia can be achieved, it would be a
major accomplishment for world peace and for American prosperity.
Conclusion
One of the weak
characteristics of democracy is that, in practice, it pushes politicians to
pander to special interests for votes and money, at the expense of public
interest and the common good.
From what we know
so far, the Trump administration is geared to be the most pro-domestic-business,
the most economically isolationist and protectionist, and the most pro-special
interests American administration, ever. This could spell trouble for the
United States and for the world if it truly acts in that direction.
As an economist,
indeed, I fear that an inexperienced Trump administration would go too far, too
fast in dislocating American international corporations and in raising domestic
tariffs on imports. The end-result could be some disastrous trade wars that
would create stagflation
and that would hurt both the American and foreign national economies.
This is an
administration that should heed a few words of caution, and it should refrain
from being an extremist administration.
Stay tuned.