Weve Reached Peak Political Absurdity
President Donald Trump holds a roundtable discussion on border security this
month. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)
American telescreens broadcast an endless theater of the politically absurd.
Take, for example, the ongoing saga over the government shutdown and
President Donald Trumps border wall that has been playing out on screens
across the nation for weeks.
Recently, news channels showed Trump telling reporters he can empathize with
800,000 federal workers struggling to pay their bills thanks to the
government shutdown he ordered on the pretext of a national security
crisis on the United States southern border.
I can relate, Trump said. And Im sure that the people that are toward
the receiving end will make adjustments. They always do.
People understand
exactly whats going on.
According to CNN, the government even gave unpaid workers sample letters
explaining the situation to creditors.
The closure could go on for years, claimed the president, adding that
given federal government workers support the move, it was better to call his
payment stoppage a strike.
The telescreens showed Trump threatening to declare a national emergency
over a national crisis of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexican
boundary. We saw Trump and his press secretary claim that U.S. authorities
had recently interdicted many terrorists (including Islamic ones) from
crossing the border.
We learned that the president threatened via tweet to end birthright
citizenshipthe national citizenship granted to all persons born in the
U.S. under the Constitutions 14th Amendmentthrough an executive order.
When the corporate media granted Trump prime telescreen time to promote his
wall, he dedicated much of his talk to grisly stories about Latino
immigrants who raped and murdered U.S. citizens.
The following weekend, Trump made another appearance to offer Democrats a
deal he claimed would end the shutdown and the humanitarian crisis at the
border. His proposal (a non-starter before it aired) combined billions
for the border wall with some short-term and partial protections for the
Dreamers (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival [DACA] recipients who
were born to parents without legal status). Calling opponents of his wall
open-border extremists who would render the country defenseless in the
face of a criminal invasion of drugs, gangs and violence, he also attributed
the nations widespread drug crisis to our open border policy.
The radical Left, Trump bizarrely intoned during his speech, can never
control our borders. I will never let it happen. Walls are not immoral. In
fact, they are the opposite of immoral.
His entire proposal was absurdity in its purest form for a number of
reasons. To begin with, contrary to what the president would have Americans
believe, border crossings have been dropping for years and are now at
historic lows. There is also no evidence of anything remotely akin to a
terrorist (Islamic or otherwise) influx at the U.S.-Mexico border. Its
actually Trumps draconian policies, replete with the vicious
mass-internment of asylum-seeking families and children from Central
America, which are the main causes of humanitarian horror unfolding at the
border.
Moreover, drugs enter the U.S. primarily via air, water and legal points of
entry. They will not be stopped by physical boundaries along the southern
U.S. border.
When it comes to illegal immigrants, most of the people labeled as such
are those who overstayed their visas, not people who crossed the southern
border. Mexican and Central American immigrants, both documented and
undocumented, are also less, not more, prone than naturalized U.S. citizens
to commit violent crimes in the U.S. The young people known as Dreamers do
not need or want another maddening deferral of the resolution of their
situation.
And as far as revoking birthright citizenship goes, a president cannot undo
a Constitutional amendment with an executive order (or a tweet).
There is naturally no evidence of significant federal worker support for the
presidents preposterous decision that they should go without paychecks.
Its worth remembering that a strike occurs when workers collectively
withhold their labor to try to compel their employer to make changes in pay
and/or working conditions. To describe federal workers involuntary loss of
payment at the command of their boss as a strike is ludicrous to a degree
that would make George Orwell blush.
While hes at it, Trump might as well send out a tweet claiming to resolve
the problem of essential federal workers unpaid status with an executive
order abolishing the 13th Amendment and designating them as slaves.
The presidents claim that the radical left is a threat to control our
borders is just as bizarre, not to mention a prime example of red-baiting
Equally ridiculous is any assumption that federal workers can forego pay for
an extended period. Like their working- and middle-class counterparts around
the nation, many government employees live from paycheck to paycheck with
slight savings. You cant buy gas or groceries with a letter from your
dysfunctional employer, even if he is the president of the United States.
And profit-hungry financial institutions arent going to tolerate long-term
non-payment because people have a deadbeat boss.
Can Trump relate to the workers whose paychecks and benefits hes
suspended, as he claims? The presidents net worth is $3.1 billion. Though
he continually claims he didnt inherit his wealth, a detailed New York
Times investigation last fall showed that he got his start and otherwise
benefited significantly from his fathers real estate fortune. By age 3,
the Times reported, Trump was earning $200,000 a year in todays dollars
from his fathers empire. He was a millionaire by age 8. In his 40s and 50s,
he was receiving more than $5 million a year.
The millionaires ability to relate is evidently so strong that he
couldnt say anything about the plight of 800,000 unpaid federal workers
during his speech to the nation last Saturday afternoonnot one word.
A president of the United States proudly proclaiming his readiness to
cripple essential national services like air-traffic control, coastal
protection, food safety inspectors and much more is nearly as outrageous as
the U.S. Coast Guard telling its workers to take dog-walking and babysitting
jobs and have garage sales to pay their bills. Or expecting air-traffic
controllers to focus properly on their stressful and momentous duties while
worrying about making their next rent or mortgage payment.
But Trump and his party do not have a monopoly on the political absurdity
that stalks the cable news.
Top Democrats claim to find Trumps wall immoral is a case in point.
Their partys leaders have long championed expensive and draconian border
security measures, including fencing. Wall-building at the border increased
dramatically under Bill Clinton, who feared an influx of Mexican farmers
displaced by his arch-neoliberal North American Free Trade Agreement. Fence
construction also continued under the record-setting deporter-in-chief
Barack Obama.
One recent morning, I tuned into liberal MSNBC, the cable news
headquarters of progressive neoliberalism, that curious mixture of
corporate-financial allegiance and metropolitan identity politics that holds
sway atop the Democratic Party. There I beheld morning MSNBC host Stephanie
Ruhle speak passionately against the human costs of Trumps ridiculous
shutdown. Ruhle mocked the presidents pretense of empathy with unpaid
federal workers. Then, right before a swath of drug commercials, she said
that her next segment would turn to Wall Street, my favorite place.
Thats right, the same Wall Street that has been screwing over working-class
people of all kinds (federal workers included) in service to the nations
unelected dictatorship of capital for as long as it has existed.
MSNBC talking heads can cry all they want about the plight of working people
and the poor. Their network, most of its hosts and the top Democrats they
support are every bit as allegiant (if not more so) to that dictatorship as
Fox News and the Republicans.
Ruhle wasnt kidding about the worlds leading financial district being her
happy place. Before entering the corporate media universe via Bloomberg
Television, the MSNBC host spent six years in global hedge fund sales. Ruhle
was vice president of Credit Suisse First Boston, where she became the
highest producing credit derivatives salesperson in the United States.
In 2003, her Wikipedia page boasts, Ruhle joined Deutsche Bank as a
credit salesperson covering hedge funds. She ended her eight-year career
there as a managing director in Global Markets Senior Relationship
Management.
With a fortune built on financial weapons of mass destruction that helped
ruin working-class lives, Stephanie Ruhle enjoys a net worth of $5 million
and receives $1 million a year from MSNBC. Evidently she feels for working
people while inhabiting a lavish $7.5 million townhouse on Manhattans Upper
East Side.
Now that shes lost her Senate seat, the right-wing corporate Democrat
Claire McCaskill should fit into her new position as a regular commentator
at MSNBC, where neoliberal centrism privileges the servicing of corporate
sponsors over social justice and even over the winning of elections by
Democrats.
Along the way, MSDNC talking heads join not-so-progressive neoliberal
brethren at CNN (where liberal hosts regularly invite and applaud anti-Trump
commentary from former top national spymasters and generals) in doing their
best to manufacture consent to the American Empire. As Glenn Greenwald
notes, MSNBC has become reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping
President Donald Trump, and [is] now the prime propaganda instrument of the
War Machines promotion of militarism and imperialism. Thanks to what
Greenwald calls NBC/MSNBCs all-consuming militarism:
An entire generation of Democrats paying attention to politics for the first
time is being instilled with formerly right-wing Cold Warrior values of
jingoism, über-patriotism, reverence for security state agencies and
prosecutors, a reckless use of the traitor accusation to smear ones
enemies, and a belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and
foreign policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing. These
toxins will endure far beyond Trump, particularly given the now full-scale
unity between the Democratic establishment and neocons.
How ridiculous: A cable news network commonly said and thought to represent
the positions of the Left functions as perhaps the leading propaganda
organ of the War Party, opposing Trump on the grounds thats hes bad for
the supposedly noble U.S. global empire.
Sadly, as Greenwald observes, Democrats are now more globally
interventionist and imperial than Republicans. MSNBC and CNNs relentless
promotion of the national security state and the military-industrial-complex
in the name of #Resistance played no small part in the partys
transformation.
An MSNBC roundtable last Sunday morning ended with a Democratic strategist
offering curious commentary on whats happened to the right- and
nationalist-leaning U.S. and Europe over the last two years. Things were
going great, the strategist said, under the leadership of Barack Obama, who
embodied the best of enlightened Western civilization. Then Vladimir Putin
came along and single-handedly ruined it all by passing Brexit, electing
Donald Trump and fueling populism across Europe.
The suggestion begs a darkly interesting question regarding the nations
reigning corporate-managed democracy, as Alex Carey calls it. Whos more
absurd: those who blame corporate-ruled Americas continuing systemic
decline on a mythical invasion of Mexican and Central American rapists or
those who point the finger at the supposedly all-powerful president of
Russia?
Paul Street
Contributor
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban
League. Street is also the author of numerous