The elephant in the room
Since it’s Christmas morning (as I write this) I think an appropriate quote from Dickens is in order for these vexatious times. But not from “A Christmas Carol.” Trump and his den of thieves are beyond redemption from a whole stadium full of well-meaning spirits. This quote is from “Hard Times,” and demonstrates that the smug indifference of some of the tone-deaf rich to the suffering of others is nothing new: “This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat.”
And so it goes. To this day the very rich have exactly the same contempt for the poor they had in Dickens’ time. These so-called self-made millionaires and billionaires often forget to acknowledge the unfair advantages they had coming up, such as being born to wealth, or having connections, or having a first class education, or being born white, male and over six feet tall.
It’s also quintessentially Dickensian that the white, male and over six feet tall Afrikaans-American asshole Elon Musk congratulated Congress for delivering a budget stripped of cancer research for children. But what do you expect from a man whose idol, Donald Trump, also stole money from a children’s cancer charity? This is a villainy of comic book dimensions. It’s beyond belief that something so wicked should go minimally reported in the Vichy legacy press, and largely absent the outrage it ought to inspire.
The Musk fanboys and fangirls are quick to point out that the money for children’s cancer got allocated in the Senate anyway. But Musk didn’t know that. And the reason that money was packed into the budget in the House was because it’s much easier to pass that way, since it often takes up valuable floor time in the Senate to pass such a bill, and it must pass by unanimous consent. Thanks to the one holdout, the “Christian medical doctor,” Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, it almost didn’t.
This is a small sample of what we can expect of an America that is rapidly turning into an oligarchy modelled on Russia. Smug, cynical, heartless indifference to the needs of the working classes, kleptocracy on an industrial scale, glorification of the new self righteous robber barons will be the order of the day under Trump. And the MAGA fools who are incapable of understanding how much contempt Trump has for them will continue to cheer him on.
Bernie Sanders was right. When you put millionaires and billionaires in charge you cede power to the worst and least qualified among us to run the country. We are in this mess because of the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about, the fact that politics today isn’t about policy, or doing the right thing for the American people, it’s about money. Most politicians on both sides of the aisle don’t want to admit this or talk about this. They look for solutions elsewhere, when they look for solutions at all, when the best, most fundamental solution of all is to get money the hell out of politics.
The biggest threat to our corporate overlords, the entities that control much of what we see and hear, is the independent media such as Meidas Touch Network, Brian Tyler Cohen, David Pakman and, of course, The Palmer Report. Americans who are sick of Trump are turning away from traditional news outlets and turning to us by the millions. Corporations like Comcast, owners of NBC and MSNBC, AT&T, owners of CNN, Disney, owners of ABC, are scared to death of us and are hoping that Trump can find a way to silence us.
Not only do these companies control our news, they also control our politicians. Both Democrats and Republicans depend on money from these corporations to fund their campaigns. So they are understandably, even inevitably, reluctant to criticise them. It’s why politicians never get asked by the mainstream media about income inequality or healthcare or the concentration of wealth in America. Those topics are taboo.
How can this be solved? We must get money completely out of politics. It must become illegal to spend a dime on getting elected. If you want to be president of the United States then you should have to submit, say, ten thousand signatures gathered by you and volunteers and a $100 filing fee. That’s it. Then you should be given free TV time to state your case. No billion dollar donations, no super PACs, no lobbyists, no bullshit.
A tough order to fill, you say? Damn right. But the alternative is too awful to contemplate. We have no choice. Once money is gone from the political landscape, watch the smug, self righteous, “Christian” politicians abandon ship. They will be replaced by men and women who truly want to serve the nation. That is how you make America great again. Or maybe it never really was great, and it’s high time that it was.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.