This act is nothing short of heresy in the corridors of the neoliberal priesthood of our modern age. The “economic foundation” upon which today’s globalized world are premised assert that nation states may not participate in the marketplace. No price controls, no protective tariffs, no bank regulation and certainly no national banks. Following this gospel, nations are permitted to do war and promote various forms of population control… but nothing that pollutes the purity of the supposedly “free market”.

Of course, simply utilizing national banking practices by themselves is not a full solution. A fascist regime can of course, use national banks for destructive ends just as a democratic republic can use them for positive ends, and as we have seen over the years, the financial oligarchy has no problem supporting fascist regimes such as Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy nor do they have any problem supporting “national Keynesian initiatives” so long as they are done under an anti-human Green New Deal frame work.

So what makes President Obrador’s current efforts different?

As Brown states in her paper:

“The new president has held to his campaign promises. In 2019, his first year in office, he did what Donald Trump pledged to do — “drain the swamp” — purging the government of technocrats and institutions he considered corrupt, profligate or impeding the transformation of Mexico after 36 years of failed market-focused neoliberal policies. Other accomplishments have included substantially increasing the minimum wage while cutting top government salaries and oversize pensions; making small loans and grants directly to farmers; guaranteeing crop prices for key agricultural crops; launching programs to benefit youth, the disabled and the elderly; and initiating a $44 billion infrastructure plan. López Obrador’s goal, he says, is to construct a “new paradigm” in economic policy that improves human welfare, not just increases gross domestic product.”

If you haven’t figured it out, the answer is MORALITY.

What gave the establishment of modern nation states their power and legitimacy in the wake of the Golden Renaissance, was the fact that they are premised upon the common good of the people against the interests of private oligarchs and elite families. Those feudal orders dominated by hereditary institutions during most of human history placed the “natural order” upside down, with the welfare of the talking cows (aka: peasants) granted to them by the fancy of the master class of land lords.

Under a true sovereign nation state, elected leaders derive their legitimacy and support of the people through their mandate to defend the inalienable rights of people though internal improvements which increase the socio-physical-spiritual well being of the people. This used to be recognised in past ages as an elementary idea of Natural Law (which saw the laws of morality as intertwined into the fabric of objective reality as the laws of gravity, and electricity).

Ben Franklin’s Electric Insight into Economics

It is here no coincidence that the leading proponent of national banking and productive credit in America was also the leading scientist who trumped all elite scientific minds of Europe when he discovered the principle of electricity in 1752. Benjamin Franklin and his vast network of leading collaborators across Europe and America never saw a distinction between “subjective moral sciences” and “objective a-moral physics”. The foundational documents and also the first national banking system of America (upon which other republics in South and Central America modelled themselves in the coming years) were based upon this idea of Natural Law. This insight was the basis for Franklin’s 1727 opus on the Necessity for a Paper Currency where Franklin argued that value was not located in gold, or silver, or land or even demand per se, but rather in the creative powers of a people!

The consolidation of America’s revolutionary war debt incurred by each of the 13 colonies into a unified federal credit transformed the unpayable debt “into a national blessing” as Ben Franklin’s protégé Alexander Hamilton (first Treasury Secretary) laid out in his famous Reports on a National Bank and On Manufactures in 1791. In opposition to the early free traders and monetarists who wished America would end its protective tariff, stay agrarian and allow Britain to maintain its global monopoly on industry, Hamilton and Franklin understood this would undo the entire revolutionary cause resulting in America’s eventual re-absorption back into the empire.

Although slandered by generations of anti-American propaganda as a “Rothschild tool”, Hamilton was in fact a great patriot who argued that once the new federal debt was consolidated, the BEHAVIOUR of the debt would be turned from a passive burden which held the nation under water into an ACTIVE fuel of investments into infrastructure and manufacturing. By doing this, the nation was able to TRANSFORM from an agricultural slave society of cash cropping into a full spectrum society capable of producing for itself and trading surplus finished goods to other nations. In its first 40 years, this program allowed America’s population to quadruple overcoming all Malthusian “limits to growth”.

Unfortunately, starting with the 1804 killing of Alexander Hamilton at the hands of Aaron Burr (the father of today’s Wall Street banking syndicates), much of America’s history has been contaminated by either slave-loving traitors who attacked national banking (such as Presidents van Buren, Andrew Jackson, and Polk), OR great statesmen who too often died in office before their efforts to revive the constitution could be consolidated. In this list we find Presidents Harrison (1840), Taylor (1851), Lincoln (1865), Garfield (1880), McKinley (1901), Harding (1923), FDR (1945), JFK (1963).

Mexico and America

By 1865, Lincoln’s use of national banking practices (the Greenback) was instrumental in saving the union from British-orchestrated Civil War- although his assassination hampered this momentum to full industrial reconstruction of the south. During this time, Britain, French and Spanish Hapsburg empires had initiated parallel wars to destroy the newly emerging Mexican republic then led by Lincoln-admiring president Benito Juarez, first with the 1858-1860 War of Reform and then 1862-1867 French Invasion. In spite of this existential challenge, Juarez succeeded in driving out the imperialists with political and military support from Lincoln patriots in America, while also imposing tariffs which encouraged the build-up of industry- liberating Mexico from its status as cash cropping exporter. Social and educational reforms elevating the health and welfare of the people grew enormously under Juarez’s leadership.

Although Lincoln republicans supported Mexico’s sovereign in opposition to foreign empires using a healthy interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, the death of McKinley in 1902 saw a grievous abuse of the Monroe Doctrine which too often became an imperial hammer to subdue banana republics as seen under the brutal leadership of Teddy Roosevelt.

Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to push back against the pro-empire Wall Street crowd since McKinley’s murder which he brought in with the Good Neighbor Policy stating:

“In the field of world policy, I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”

FDR broke from his puppet predecessors by supporting Mexico’s rights to control its own oil and resources (after President Cárdenas, expropriated foreign oil holdings) and also vastly expanded credit from the US Export-Import Bank to fund massive Mexican infrastructure projects with a focus on water, energy and transport. This served as one of the earliest international extensions of the New Deal which FDR intended would liberate all nations of the earth from colonialism.

Franklin Roosevelt Inspires Mexico’s AMLO

Upon his election in 2018, President Obrador announced the first phase of his New Deal with an “Every Young Person to Work” program inspired by FDR which he described saying:

“I have had this idea since I read how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pulled the United States out of the 1930s’ crisis. What did he do, in a tremendous economic crisis? He decided to put the whole U.S. people to work. And he decided to put young people to work, and he paid them a dollar a day, for every young person. But his idea was full employment. That is, a job for everyone. That idea stuck in my head, because Roosevelt lifted the United States out of the crisis, and for me, he was therefore, if not the best President, one of the best that the United States has had—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by that action, by that decision. Now we are going to do something similar: All young people to work.”

Under NAFTA, Mexico was kept down by acting as cheap labor market to do the work once done by high paid Americans and Canadians. This policy ultimately hurt Mexico since free trade’s obsession with low costs resulted in keeping quality of life and production dismally low. (The formula “Low prices= low paid workers= better slaves= weakened nations” is as true today as it was 250 years ago when the British Empire commissioned Adam Smith to write his 1776 Wealth of Nations).

Obrador’s efforts are moving in the right direction, however the 13 000 national bank branches which he intends to have built will have to go beyond merely sending money to the poor as the plan is currently constituted and he knows it. Responding to the monetarist priests howling at the sacrilege of national banking, Obrador stated:

“We’re going to speak with those from the Bank of México respecting the autonomy of the Bank of México. We have to educate them because for them this is an anachronism, even sacrilege, because they have other ideas. But we’ve arrived here [in government] after telling the people that the neoliberal economic policy was going to change.”

Thus, taking over responsibility from the usurious private banking network and Mexican Central Bank which have converted Mexico into an indebted colony of crime and despair since the overthrow of President Portillo in 1982 is a vital next step in the fight. Luckily China has made great strides in this direction which will likely be of a great assist to Mexico. To this point, Brown ended her report with the following astute analysis:

“Today, the best model for that approach is China, which funds infrastructure by borrowing from its own state-owned banks. Like all banks, they create loans as bank credit on their books, which is then repaid with the proceeds of the projects created with the loans. There is no need to tap up the central bank or rich investors or the tax base. Government banks can create money on their books just as central banks and private banks do.

For Mexico, however, using its public banks as China does would be something for the future, if at all. Meanwhile, AMLO has been a trailblazer in showing how a national public banking system can be initiated quickly and efficiently. The key, it seems, is just to have the political will — along with massive support from the public, the legislature, local business leaders and the military.”

The irony here is that the American system of National banking, productive credit and protective tariffs which were innovated by Alexander Hamilton and applied by every great leader from Harrison to Lincoln to McKinley to FDR both internally and across to international allies in Mexico is now most clearly embodied by the country which few people associate with America… the Peoples Republic of China!

While China uses its debt as an active asset to invest into great long term infrastructure projects which thus extinguish the original debt while increasing the productive powers of labor, America’s private central banking system under the Federal Reserve merely creates debt for speculation and turning poor Americans into slaves. Just look at the $14 trillion the treasury printed to bail out failing speculators in 2008-2010. Or look at the $9 trillion printed by the Fed to do the same. Nothing was invested in the real economy during this time.

What a different world we could have created had this money been invested into a new (non-Green) New Deal of the 21st century such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative has ushered in?

NAFTA’s long awaited death is a start, as are Obrador’s vital reforms… however a fight needs to still occur before a North American Belt and Road Initiative can finally break colonized nations (including the USA) out from the clutches of the financial oligarchy and their self-imploding deep state managers.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Page three of the US-UK Trade and Investment Working Group document that was released by Jeremy Corbyn says it all – and here it is:

“US talked UK through the SME Chapter of USMCA, highlighting that it was ‘TPP+’ with a clear cooperative focus and a commitment to SMEs from all sides in participating in regular Dialogues and information sharing. USMCA is the first US FTA to have a chapter on SMEs and is considered to be ‘state of the art’. The underlying sense, although not confirmed, is that we could expect this chapter to be a blueprint for a UK FTA. ”

Just to walk you through this. The USMCA is the United States – Mexico – Canada – Agreement. Broadly speaking it has these components:

• Country of origin rules: Automobiles must have 75 per cent of their components manufactured in Mexico, the US, or Canada to qualify for zero tariffs (up from 62.5 per cent under NAFTA).

• Labour provisions: 40 to 45 per cent of automobile parts must be made by workers who earn at least $16 an hour by 2023. Mexico passed new labour laws to give greater protections to workers. Democrats still want tougher enforcement, though.

• US farmers get more access to the Canadian dairy market: The US got Canada to open up its dairy market to US farmers, a big issue for Trump.

• Intellectual property and digital trade: The deal extends the terms of copyright to 70 years beyond the life of the author (up from 50). It also extends the period that a pharmaceutical drug can be protected from generic competition, and includes new provisions to deal with the digital economy, such as prohibiting duties on things like music and e-books, and protections for internet companies so they’re not liable for content their users produce.

• Sunset clause: The agreement adds a 16-year “sunset” clause — meaning the terms of the agreement expire, or “sunset” after 16 years. The deal is also subject to a review every six years, at which point the US, Mexico, and Canada can decide to extend the USMCA.

TruePublica wrote about this deal in August 2018. We said that a trade deal with America would simply be TPP Plus and guess what – it is being promoted in internal government documents as TPP+

Three things that should strike you immediately. First, this is a deal just like the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), a deal that was comprehensively rejected by the general public en-masse in the countries in which it was proposed. In Japan, for instance, Shinzo Abe the Prime Minister had to promise to drop TPP negotiations as it was clear he would not be elected again if he didn’t. In America, Donald Trump promised to drop TTP as part of the reason why he was elected as the general public were comprehensively against it. In its place is the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership which emerged only when the USA withdrew from TPP, the original partners suddenly signed up having dropped 20 clauses that benefitted America. Trade ministers under Liam Fox (at the time) expressed a wish to join this second group post-Brexit. So you can see where this is going – reduced standards to meet those in that agreement – countries such as Brunei, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Vietnam.

In the EU, their version of the US – EU trade deal was called TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). The biggest public survey ever undertaken in the bloc ended with 97 per cent of the public objecting to the TTIP deal binding the EU to US trade policy and standards. Eventually, after considerable protest, it failed on both sides of the Atlantic. The biggest proportion of objections in that survey came from the United Kingdom.

The second is that American agricultural products will have much greater access (as will the chemical industry) – meaning hormone growth products in meat, chlorine-washed poultry, GMO products and generally reduced standards of welfare and production across the board.

The third is exactly as the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has highlighted – a focus on protection for big pharma against cheaper generic drugs that the NHS currently benefits from. And all this is from the third page of a 450-page report.

As a footnote, on page 4 of this report, it should be noted the meeting was hosted by PayPal, that Google was in attendance and on page five the order of dialogue was about business and nothing else but included comments about ISDS – and ISDS is a huge matter that was quite possibly the single biggest reason why TTP and TTIP failed. ISDS caused a public outcry over a once-obscure element of international trade agreements and was, in the end, the cause of the downfall of the biggest trade deal in history worth an astonishing $34 trillion market stretching from Honolulu to Helsinki.

ISDS – gives multinational corporations a stranglehold over elected parliaments and national courts and tear apart public health and protection policies at the same time. A US-UK trade deal is hardly “taking back control.”

truepublica.org.uk

Consider his meeting, on February 13^th, with Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau:

Trump had come into office opposing the George Herbert Walker Bush created, and Bill Clinton passed-into-law, NAFTA treaty, with Canada and Mexico, because it reduced employment and wages in the United States, but he said nothing at all about its severe reduction of American sovereignty, NAFTA’s really toxic transference of America’s sovereign ability to increase its regulations of the environment, product safety, and workers’ rights — NAFTA’s transference of certain regulatory portions of America's sovereignty over to international corporations and their private three-person arbitration panels who would be making unappealable decisions to determine how many millions or billions of dollars America’s taxpayers would be required to pay to the owners of international corporations who oppose those new regulations and whose rights are, under NAFTA, protected above the rights of the mere citizens (such as taxpayers) of any nation.

The biggest issue between Canada and the United States now is something even worse than NAFTA: it’s CETA, a treaty between Canada and the European Union, which would not only drive wages down, but enable international corporations — including American ones — to sue taxpayers in both Canada and the EU, for even enforcing their existing laws regulating the environment, product-safety, and workers’ rights. 

Here is a description of how that works. In that particular instance, a Canadian international mining company is suing Romania for enforcing its antipollution laws. «The project’s majority owner Gabriel Resources is suing Romania at a World Bank-based international investment tribunal, seeking a reported US$ 4 billion in compensation for the alleged failure of the country to issue the necessary permits». «The mine would leave behind a waste lake of cyanide-contaminated water the size of 420 football fields», and so it would vastly violate Romania’s environmental laws; but, under the terms of a 1995 and of a 1997 treaty that Romania had signed, both of which had arbitration provisions just like CETA (and like Obama’s proposed TPP, TTIP, & TISA treaties) would have, the Romanian government must now choose between either authorizing the project, or else paying the stockholders of Gabriel Resources $4 billion for blocking it.

CETA would be an absolute boon to U.S.-based international corporations, because «Four out of five US-based corporations with EU operations (41,811) could use CETA to attack the EU and its member states if they structure their investment through Canadian subsidiaries». CETA wouldn’t allow international corporations to sue U.S. taxpayers, because the U.S. wouldn’t be a signatory to that particular treaty, but it would still be a huge new profit-center for America’s international corporations (basically like activating Obama’s moribund proposed TTIP treaty through a back door); and, if Trump represents the owners of American-based international corporations more than he represents the American public, he’ll be supporting Canada’s Prime Minister, who likewise represents the owners of international corporations and thus supports CETA.

Furthermore, the first public financial report of Gabriel Resources, which was in 2012, had noted that during the prior two years, the World Bank’s partner, the IMF, had imposed «austerity measures» upon Romania; and, «These austerity measures, influenced also by the wider economic crisis within the European Union, gradually eroded the public support for the activity of the Government and led to public protests in Romania in January, 2012». Then, «On February 6, 2012, the lack of public support led to Prime Minister Boc announcing his resignation together with that of his entire Cabinet. Shortly thereafter, President Basescu asked Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, the Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service and a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, to form a new Government», which lasted «only 11 weeks in power». 

So, the Romanian public were under the gun to approve this project. And, now, after mass demonstrations against it, and the government’s rejection of the project, the Romanian public are being sued by the international corporation, for denying permission for it. The thumbscrews of economic austerity had failed to work, and so now an arbitration panel in which all nations’ laws and courts were and are excluded and whose decision will be final no matter what Romania’s Constitution and laws say, will determine what, if anything, Romania’s taxpayers will pay to the corporation’s stockholders, for ‘violating their right to profit’ (from a mining operation that Romania says would violate Romanian laws, which the mining company says should just be ignored). This is ‘Western democracy’. It fits the description of what Mussolini (whom we supposedly defeated) sometimes called «fascism», and sometimes called «corporationism» (but this is an advanced, inter-national, version of it: an emerging fascist world government). 

The arbitral panel would adhere to the rules of something called ICSID, which is described in this article about Obama’s proposed TPP treaty.   

On 27 July 2016, George Monbiot headlined in Britain’s Guardian, «Sovereignty? This government will sell us to the highest bidder», and he reported that though UK’s voters had voted to leave the EU because of its corrupt international-corporate-controlled government, the UK’s own Prime Minister’s government was now supporting CETA because UK’s billionaires want to get in on this new booming business of suing taxpayers when countries enforce their consumer-protection, environmental-protection, and workers’-rights, laws. 

On February 13^th, another article in the Guardian reported that:

Ceta will eventually expose European regulations to more investor lawsuits from Canadian resource firms and the Canadian subsidiaries of US multinational corporations, ushering in, through the back door, a hated part of TTIP, the supposedly moribund EU-US free trade deal… the Canadian corporate sector is already pressing the Trudeau government to match the US president’s deregulatory moves in order to remain competitive in their most important market. Ceta’s regulatory cooperation mechanisms will provide an avenue for North American lobbyists to quietly deploy downward pressure against EU regulations. This is particularly true in sensitive areas such as genetically modified organisms and endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

The international aristocracy has fooled publics throughout the world to believe that government regulations are bad and so the fewer and weaker they are, the better they are. Donald Trump himself spouts this lie, but it contradicts his alleged loyalty to the American (or any other) public. His actual actions since he came into the White House suggest that what he’s serious about is stripping national sovereignty, not strengthening it.

And that’s his deepest fraud, if that’s what he’ll actually follow-through on. There still is time for him to avoid being as rotten as most other leaders in ‘the Western democracies’ are. But, soon, we’ll know which side he’s really on.

Without a doubt, the aristocracies of the U.S. and of all of its allied countries want this type of world government, even though it would hurt the publics everywhere.

This is the first time in quite a while there will be all-Republican Government in Washington DC with both the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as the White House under one party control. So, President Trump will have quite a lot of political capital to spend and a Congress willing to do most of his bidding. What will he do? It is difficult for the political observer, putting it mildly, to know where one stands with an incoming Trump administration since President-elect Trump has proven himself to be so erratic with his campaign pronouncements and positions out on the trail.

There is of course his policy on illegal immigration.

At the core of Donald Trump’s policy appeal to the voters who have sent him now to the White House was the specific issue of illegal immigration and the US system of immigration more broadly. Candidate Trump famously declared at the launch of his Presidential campaign at Trump Tower, New York City in June 2015 that when Mexico sends people to the United States: «They (Mexico) are not sending their best.» He then went on to say that Mexican immigrants where bringing: «crime… they are bringing drugs. They are rapists. And some I guess are good people». This controversial rhetoric has translated into the infamous Trump policy of building a wall along the United States southern border with Mexico, and somehow making Mexico pick up the tab of an estimated $10 billion. How precisely a Trump administration will force another sovereign country to pay for the construction of a project within the United States is unclear. But the question remains, will the Trump administration make good on its pledge of actually building such a wall along the US-Mexico border?

This could very well be an indicator within the first 100 days of a Trump Presidency of the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric and policy pledges. If a Trump administration failed to carry through on his pledge of building such a wall, it would be a huge disappointment to his followers and supporters and could paint him in the same light as the «do-nothing, all talk» political elites he railed against during the election. Then there are the even more radical immigration policies of detaining all undocumented, illegal immigrants currently resident in the USA (estimated to be at least 10 million people) and instigating mass deportations.

Again, this hardline pledge, which is reminiscent of Nazi Germany, was extremely popular with Trumps voters. If a Trump administration does implement such a domestic policy it will not only cause deep social tensions, perhaps even massive riots and other forms of civil disobedience, but it will also have a very damaging effect on the American economy as many, if not the majority of the illegal immigrants are actually working and paying taxes, contributing to economic growth. By ripping out about 10 million people from the economy will leave quite a void. There is also the issue of whether a Trump administration could whether the pressure internationally and the damage this activity would do to America’s image abroad.

Turning from immigration, the next big item on the domestic front for the incoming Trump administration will be Donald Trump’s stated aim of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. To be fair to President-elect Trump the Affordable Care Act has turned out to be anything but affordable. One of the factors that probably damaged Hillary Clinton at the polls but has not been cited a great deal is the fact throughout October many Americans saw their healthcare premiums under Obamacare soar to astronomical levels. Obamacare has been a disaster from the moment of its botched roll out when a White House website costing $300 million to build and operate failed spectacularly. It was also half-baked with no public option provided for. The Obama/Axelrod communications team never sold it properly to the American people and let the Tea Party and the Republicans on Capitol Hill make all the running on the presentation of it to the American people.

One simply cannot argue against the reality that Obamacare was designed in theory to make healthcare more affordable. Sadly, in reality and practice it has had the opposite effect and has not kept costs down, far from it. The Republican Party never liked the idea of the Federal Government mandating people to have health insurance coverage, believing this to be a Government infringement on the liberties of Americans. As President Trump has been moderating his position on Obamacare. In his first television interview after the election with CBS 60 Minutes he stated that he would like to keep certain provisions of Obamacare such as keeping it illegal for health insurance providers to deny anyone healthcare coverage because of pre-existing conditions and allowing young adults to be able to stay on their parent’s health insurance programme up to the age of 26. The Republican Party and Mr. Trump have not offered any concrete alternatives, but make no mistake, the GOP on Capitol Hill in the House of Representatives and Senate loath President Obama’s signature issue and his greatest domestic achievement. Obamacare in its present failing form will likely not survive a Republican Congressional mauling starting in January. Certain provisions may survive but the days of what was known as Obamacare are likely coming to an end.

On the issue of the broader US economy the Trump platform is a more conventional Republican/Reganite trickle down economic programme which has failed miserably contributing to the massive national debt that the United States has built up since the Reagan administration of the 1980s and the huge budget deficits of the Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. era. The Trump tax plan includes eliminating the inheritance or «death» tax as Republicans term it. Trumponomics includes cutting business taxes to a flat rate of 15% and simplifying the tax income brackets from 7 to 4 with rates at 0%, 10%, 20% and 25%. However, on trade policy, the Trump platform is very unconventional for a Republican.

One of the major contributing factors alongside immigration that propelled Trump to a win was his «American First» trade policy, ripping into NAFTA and TPP and vowing to do away with the former and block the latter. He is the most protectionist Republican to come into the White House perhaps ever. He has repeatedly, in colourful language, accused China of «raping» the United States with cheap imports while stealing manufacturing jobs. Trump has vowed to designate China as a «currency manipulator» and introduce a 15% tax on companies in the USA who outsource jobs abroad. He has pledged to boost economic growth by as much as 3.5% to 4% annually. 

On the environment Donald Trump is an avowed denier of Climate Change and will in all likelihood scrap the US participation of the UN Paris Climate Change Agreement from November 2015 which just recently came into force, just as his last Republican predecessor George W Bush once in office immediately rescinded the Kyoto climate change protocols. He has pledged to abolish or seriously neuter President Nixon’s Environmental protection Agency. With the Republicans enjoying their largest majority in the House of Representatives since the 1920s and con trolling the Senate many of the above policies stand a real chance of becoming law within the first 100 days or first year of a Trump administration. How those who did not vote for Trump, or voted for him without realising what exactly they were voting for, react to each of these policy scenarios from mass deportations to the building of a wall or trade wars with China, remains to be seen. We could very well be heading into a period of extreme civil chaos and strife much like the 1960s and 1970s in American history. 

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books

The U.S. is entering a dangerous political phase where a distant and cloistered political class threatens the use of state power to legitimize itself in the face of declining popular support and serial military calamities of its own making. In 2001 the George W. Bush administration used the opaque and as yet not fully explained events of 9/11 to claim legitimacy as faux protector of the American people as it launched catastrophic wars that destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan and unleashed ongoing chaos across the Middle East.

With uber-hawk and unindicted co-conspirator Hillary Clinton favored to win election under a cloud of suspicion for pay-to-play practices as Secretary of State and in widely declining economic circumstances an imperative to change the subject will assert itself the day after election day. Having demonstrated a propensity for wanton slaughter in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and the streets of major American cities (1994 ‘Crime’ bill), Mrs. Clinton is already busy stoking a new Cold War with Russia to cover her own activities.

The neo-con choice of Russia as menace-of-opportunity joins a long history of defining American politics through negation. In the original (‘classic?’) Cold War national identity served as an envelop-of-convenience for conciliatory economic policies within the U.S. and repressive and opportunistic policies abroad. Since the 1970s selective (class based) economic liberalization has cut labor and the poor adrift as a self-serving ruling class has gorged itself at the public trough through bailouts, privatizations and special privileges.

The Cold War was always largely a business enterprise— the communist boogeyman was used by the U.S. to overthrow democratically elected governments and install business-friendly regimes that would answer to U.S. (corporate) interests. Its resurrection is to reassert a national ‘envelop’ as cover for economic interests now ‘freed’ to treat a growing portion of the domestic population as imperial subjects. Growing resistance suggests a need for more convincing misdirection if the status quo is to be maintained.

Ongoing neo-con claims that Russia invaded Ukraine are to cover the U.S. role in facilitating a coup against the popularly elected government there and depend on American ignorance of the longstanding Russian naval base at Sevastopol for plausibility. Furthermore, against explicit promises not to do so, since the early 1990s the U.S. (through NATO) has built military bases in Eastern Europe surrounding Russia. This as the U.S. embarks on a multi-decade program to ‘upgrade’ its nuclear weapons arsenal.

Surrounding Russia with NATO (U.S.) military bases is generally analogous to the Russians building military bases on the Mexican and Canadian borders with the U.S., only without the historical precedent of sequential, devastating land invasions that the Russians have faced. What cloistered neo-cons in the U.S., led by Hillary Clinton, call military ‘strength’ is a perpetual upping of the ante where each step is ‘rational’ in some political-economistic sense while the broader enterprise risks collective suicide.

As strategy, doing so leaves either capitulation or full scale confrontation as likely responses. A ‘third-way’ was tried when American economists were sent to post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s to ‘help’ with privatization of the Russian economy. The result was a bifurcated economy where 99% of Russians were deeply immiserated while select ‘oligarchs,’ were made stupendously rich. Luckily for the economists, enough Russians died from privation during their ‘experiment’ to leave few witnesses to the fiasco.

For cynical Americans raised on Cold War propaganda, the idea of Western academics scamming gullible Russians with long-discredited capitalist ideology might be good for a laugh were these same people not the ‘brain trust’ behind the bi-partisan governing consensus in the U.S. in 2016. The economics used to loot Russia were absolutely conventional, the very same used by Bill Clinton to ‘liberate’ Wall Street from social accountability, to liberate the American working class from gainful employment and to ‘free’ the American poor from burdensome food and rent money.

The Russian reaction to being immiserated was to turn away from the American-style economic liberalization that remains the Democrats’ core economic program in the U.S. The seeming inability of the American political class to learn from its mistakes proceeds from the assumption that current outcomes are mistakes in any sense recognizable to it. Highly cloistered class divisions leave it impervious to the negative consequences of its economic policies much as it is to those of its foreign policies.

Following passage of NAFTA economic competition was used to explain the engineered immiseration of the American working class. But without commensurability of circumstances the idea of a global labor market makes little sense. The implausibility of displaced auto workers in Detroit packing up their families and possessions to live for $10 per day in southeastern China illustrates the conundrum. ‘Capital,’ connected capitalists with extensive social resources, can build factories abroad. But without a standing army to repatriate profits, that scheme has never worked very well.

Conversely, with the racial repression that followed the nominal end of slavery in the U.S., at what point did American Blacks receive the market wage that no longer suppressed wages more broadly? Notice the formulation: Blacks whose wages were held down through systematic racial repression (Black codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow and now mass incarceration) acted in a ‘market’ sense to lower the wages of wage-dependent Whites. This is the ‘market’ explanation of race relations in a market economy when the (liberal) premise of market-driven outcomes is applied.

It is this latter point — that rigged economic institutions produce rigged outcomes, that liberal Democrats try to explain away with identity politics. NAFTA, like the TPP that follows, is designed to shift economic power from labor to capital. It is also designed to exploit residual imperial relations to divide labor along engineered lines of division. In the U.S. the state created and enforced racial repression to serve economic interests. This is the residual of imperial relations that to which NAFTA was added.

By siding with existing economic power Western liberals chose the paradox that by destroying the institutions that make markets ‘free’ like labor unions and collective bargaining (see Adam Smith on manufacturer combines suppressing wages) economic outcomes can still be claimed to be ‘market’ based. In a general sense in the case of Russia, the Russian people wanted none of it once it became clear that American intentions were collaborative looting of the Russian economy.

Americans have a longer history of market mythology to wade through. If slaves produce goods that have economic value then demand for wage labor is reduced relative to the goods produced and the difference accrues to capitalists. If NAFTA ‘frees’ capitalists to produce goods in Mexico or China under neo-colonial conditions (see Foxxcon suicide nets) a similar process takes place. This sleight-of-hand works by tautologically defining all labor, including slave labor, as freely undertaken.

It is hardly accidental that Barack Obama, and soon most probably Hillary Clinton, frame corporate-power enhancing agreements like the TPP in terms of geopolitical competition. Much as Democrats use Republicans (and vice-versa) as foils, the U.S. powers-that-be need a Russian ‘strongman’ and Chinese economic ‘connivance’ to sell trade deals and foreign entanglements to an already hard-pressed American working class. Here the relation of economic interests to geopolitics re-enters.

Like her husband before her, Hillary Clinton has committed to the economically paradoxical position of increasing social spending and balancing the Federal budget. Bill Clinton addressed this paradox by reneging on his promise to increase social spending. In terms of factual possibility, balancing the budget has always been a canard used by Republicans (and national Democrats) to cut social spending. There is no fact-based reason why a balanced budget is either necessary or virtuous.

The political-economic position that this leaves Mrs. Clinton in is that her major benefactors on Wall Street and in executive suites want policies that weaken the position of labor and immiserate the bottom 90% or so of the population. And the pressure relief value of increased social spending will be ‘off-the-table’ much like it has been under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton so as to balance the budget. Even if neo-Keynesian pleaders get through to her the response will be ‘public-private partnerships,’ privatization and tax cuts that benefit the wealthy.

The political problem for the establishment is that the polity is in various stages of open revolt. In the long-held American tradition of dividing to conquer, Mrs. Clinton has drawn battle lines in a class war by dismissing the most economically put-upon half of the polity as ‘deplorables,’ as racist hicks who lack the vocabularies and table manners to properly earn their keep. That these same people had jobs until the Clintons sent them to Mexico and earned their keep until Wall Street cut their pay to nothing helps clarify precisely who it is that is deplorable.

Russia re-enters as the mythical boogeyman, a/k/a convenient foil, for the remote and calcified ruling class to pin its own misdeeds on. Julian Assange has now clarified that, Clinton ‘team’ assertions to the contrary, Russia is not the source of the Wikileaks revelations that will serve as fodder for ongoing investigations if Mrs. Clinton wins election. A crisis of legitimacy is all but guaranteed. If ‘things’ begin to unwind as circumstances suggest they might, expect the war drums to beat louder.

But Jeb is not only the brother of George W. and the son of George H. W. Bush.

Jeb Bush also had close personal ties to Raul Salinas de Gortiari, brother of Mexico’s former president Carlos Salinas de Gortiari. In the 1990s, Raul the “drug kingpin”, according to Switzerland’s  federal prosecutor Carla del Ponte, was one of the main figures of the Mexican Drug Cartel.  

Jeb Bush  – before becoming Governor of the Sunshine State– was a close friend of Raul Salinas de Gortiari (image right):

“There has also been a great deal of speculation in Mexico about the exact nature of Raul Salinas’ close friendship with former President George Bush’s son, Jeb. It is well known here that for many years the two families spent vacations together — the Salinases at Jeb Bush’s home in Miami, the Bushes at Raul’s ranch, Las Mendocinas, under the volcano in Puebla.

There are many in Mexico who believe that the relationship became a back channel for delicate and crucial negotiations between the two governments, leading up to President Bush’s sponsorship of NAFTA.” (Prominent intellectual and former foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge G. Castañeda, The Los Angeles Times. and Houston Chronicle, 9 March 1995, emphasis added)

The personal relationship between the Bush and Salinas families was a matter of public record. Former President George H. W. Bush — when he worked in the oil business in Texas in the 1970s– had developed close personal ties with Carlos Salinas and his father, Raul Salinas Lozano. (left)

Raul Salinas Lozano was the family patriarch, father of Carlos and Raul Junior. According to the former private secretary to Raul Salinas Lozano (in as statement to US authorities):

“…Mr. Salinas Lozano was a leading figure in narcotics dealings that also involved his son, Raul Salinas de Gortiari, his son-in-law, Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the No. 2 official in the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and other leading politicians, according to the documents. Mr. Ruiz Massieu was assassinated in 1994.” (Dallas Morning News, 26 February 1997, emphasis added).

Former president George H. W. Bush and Raul Salinas Lozano were “intimo amigos”. According to former DEA official Michael Levine, the Mexican drug Cartel was a “family affair”. Both Carlos and Raul were prominent members of the Cartel. And this was known to then US Attorney General Edward Meese in 1987 one year prior to Carlos Salinas’ inauguration as the country’s president.

When Carlos Salinas was inaugurated as President, the entire Mexican State apparatus became criminalised with key government positions occupied by members of the Cartel. The Minister of Commerce in charge of trade negotiations leading up to the signing of NAFTA was Raul Salinas Lozano, father of Raul Junior the Drug kingpin and of Carlos the president.

And it is precisely during this period that the Salinas government launched a sweeping privatisation program under advice from the IMF.

The privatisation program subsequently evolved into a multibillion dollar money laundering operation. Narco-dollars were channelled towards the acquisition of State property and public utilities.

Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies, testified to the US Congress (April 14, 1994) that

“billions of dollars in state assets have gone to supporters and cronies” (Dallas Morning News, 11 August 1994).

These included the sale of Telefonos de Mexico, valued at $ 3.9 billion and purchased by a Salinas crony for $ 400 million.(Ibid).

Raul Salinas was behind the privatisation programme. He was known as ”El Señor 10 por Ciento” [Mr. 10 Percent] “for the slice of bid money he allegedly demanded in exchange for helping acquaintances acquire companies, concessions and contracts [under the IMF sponsored privatisation program"(The News, InfoLatina, .Mexico, October 10, 1997).

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Raul Salinas de Gortiari is the brother of  former president Carlos Salinas de Gortiari, who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in December 1992 alongside US President George H. W. Bush and Canada's Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.(image left)

In a bitter irony, it was only after this historical event, that Carlos Salinas' family links to the drug trade through his brother Raul were revealed.

The George H. W. Bush Senior administration was fully aware of the links of the Salinas presidency to organized crime. Public opinion in the US and Canada was never informed so as not to jeopardize the signing of NAFTA:

"Other former officials say they were pressured to keep mum because Washington was obsessed with approving NAFTA".

"The intelligence on corruption, especially by drug traffickers, has always been there," said Phil Jordan, who headed DEA's Dallas office from 1984 to 1994. But "we were under instructions not to say anything negative about Mexico. It was a no-no since NAFTA was a hot political football." (Dallas Morning News, 26 February 1997)

In other words, at the time the NAFTA Agreement was signed, both Bush Senior and Mulroney were aware that one of the signatories of NAFTA, namely president Salinas de Gortiari  had links to the Mexican Drug Cartel.

In 1995 in the wake of the scandal and the arrest of his brother Raul for murder, Carlos Salinas left Mexico to take up residence in Dublin. His alleged links to the Drug Cartel did not prevent him from being appointed to the Board of the Dow Jones Company on Wall Street, a position which he held until 1997:

Salinas, who left Mexico in March 1995 after his brother, Raul, was charged with masterminding the murder of a political opponent, has served on the company's board for two years. He was questioned last year in Dublin by a Mexican prosecutor investigating the murder in March 1994 of Luis Donaldo Colosio, who wanted to succeed Salinas as president. A Dow Jones spokesman last week denied that Salinas had been forced out of an election for the new board, which will take place at the company's annual meeting on April 16… Salinas, who negotiated Mexico's entry into the free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, was appointed to the board because of his international experience. He was unavailable for comment at his Dublin home last week." (Sunday Times, London, 30 March 1997).

Washington has consistently denied Carlos Salinas involvement. "it was his brother Raul", Carlos Salinas "did not know", the American media continued to uphold Salinas as a model statesman, architect of free trade in the Americas and a friend of the Bush family.

In October 1998, The Swiss government confirmed that the brother of the former Mexican president had deposited some 100 million in drug money in Swiss banks:

"They [Swiss authorities] are confiscating the money, which they believe was part of a much larger amount paid to Raul Salinas for helping Mexican and Colombian drugs cartels during his brother’s six-year term ending in 1994. Mr Salinas’ lawyers have maintained he was legally heading an investment fund for Mexican businessmen but the Swiss federal prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, described Salinas’ business dealings as unsound, incomprehensible and contrary to customary business usage. (BBC Report)

 A few months later in January 1999, after a four-year trial, Raúl Salinas de Gortari (left) was convicted of ordering the murder of his brother-in-law, Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu:

“After [Carlos] Salinas left office in 1994, the Salinas family fell from grace in a swirl of drug-related corruption and crime scandals. Raúl was jailed and convicted on charges of money laundering and of masterminding the assassination of his brother-in-law; after spending 10 years in jail, Raúl was acquitted of both crimes.  …

With the scandal unraveling, Jeb’s friendship with Raúl did not go unnoticed. Jeb has never denied his friendship with Raúl, who [now] keeps a low profile in Mexico.

Kristy Campbell, spokesperson for Bush, did not respond a request for comment. The Salinas family’s demise caught the Bushes by surprise. “I have been very disappointed by the allegations about him and his family. I never had the slightest hint of information that President Salinas was anything but totally honest,” Bush senior  told me in the 1997 interview. (Dolia Estevez, Jeb Bush’s Mexican Connections, Forbes, April 7, 2015, emphasis added)

“The Salinas family’s demise caught the Bushes by surprise”? (Forbes, April 2015) The Bushes knew who they were all along.

Former DEA official Michael Levine confirmed that Carlos Salinas role in the Mexican drug cartel was known to US officials.

US President George H. W. Bush was  regularly briefed by officials from the Department of Justice, the CIA and the DEA.

Did Jeb Bush –who is now a candidate for the White House under a Republican ticket– know about Raul’s links to the Drug Cartel?.

Was the Bush family in any way complicit?

These are issues which must be addressed and debated by the American public across the land prior to the 2016 presidential primary elections.

According to Andres Openheimer writing in the Miami Herald (February 17 1997):

“witnesses say former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortiari, his imprisoned brother Raul and other members of country’s ruling elite met with drug lord Juan Garcia Abrego at a Salinas family ranch; Jeb Bush admits he met with Raul Salinas several times but has never done any business with him.”

US authorities waited until after Carlos Salinas finished his presidential term to arrest Mexican drug lord Juan Garcia Abrego, who was a close collaborator of the president’s brother Raul. In turn, Raul Salinas was an “intimo amigo” of Jeb Bush :

Juan Garcia Abrego, a fugitive on the FBI’s most-wanted list, was flown to Houston late Monday, following his arrest by Mexican police …  Garcia Abrego, the reputed head of Mexico’s second most powerful drug cartel, had eluded authorities on both sides of the border for years. His arrest is an enormous victory for the U.S. and Mexican governments.CNN, January 16, 2015

But there is more than meets the eye: while the Bushes and the Salinas have longstanding ties, Wall Street was also involved in the laundering of drug money:

A U.S. official said the Justice Department has made significant advances in its money-laundering investigation against Raul Salinas de Gortari and has identified several people who can testify that the former first brother received protection money from a major narcotics cartel.

If the U.S. were to indict Mr. Salinas, it could have implications for a Justice Department investigation into possible money laundering by Citibank, where Mr. Salinas had some of his accounts. Citibank, a unit of Citicorp, has denied wrongdoing. (WSW, April 23, 2015)

Raul Salinas de Gortiari was set free  in 2005. All charges were dropped.

The matter involving the Bushes and the Salinas has largely been forgotten.

Meanwhile, American political history has been rewritten…

Not to mention the 1992 “Free Trade” Agreement (NAFTA),  which was signed by a head of State with links to organized crime. Does that make it an illegal agreement? The legitimacy of NAFTA has so far not been the object of a legal procedure of judicial inquiry.

An “illegal NAFTA” sets the stage for the TPP and TTIP “agreements” negotiated behind closed doors.

All is well in the American Republic.

At least until the forthcoming 2016 presidential elections.