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Friday, August 19, 2016

Could Trump Pull Off a Post-Party Coalition? - By Pepe Escobar

Hillary Clinton, Queen of Chaos, Queen of War, Golden Goldman Girl, for all practical purposes, is now the official bipartisan candidate of US neocons and neoliberalcons alike.
Certified add-ons include Wall Street; selected hedge funds; TPP cheerleaders; CFR(Council on Foreign Relations) interventionists; media barons; multinational corporate hustlers; in fact virtually the whole exceptionalist US establishment, duly underwritten by the bipartisan, mega-wealthy 0.0001%.
That does leave Donald J. Trump in the astonishing position of egomaniac billionaire outsider who somehow dreams he can game the whole system on his own, moved by his inexhaustible chutzpah.
It’s under this dynamic that Trump has been demonized with medieval fervor by US corporate media. His non-stop motormouth – and motortweet – certainly does not help, conveying the impression he’s in the business of antagonizing multitudes non-stop. For the establishment, his billions mean nothing; he’s treated like a bum. He may be impervious to empathy; on the other hand that kind of treatment keeps earning him widespread sympathy among the angry, semi-destitute, non-college educated white masses.
A US industrial renaissance?
Underneath all this sound and fury, something else is (quietly) going on. Powerful business interests discreetly supporting Trump – and away from the media circus — are convinced he’s got the road map to victory. The question is whether he may be able to tame his erratic behavior to seal the deal.
His key message, according to these backers, must revolve around the destruction of US industries by rigged currencies, and the “destruction of the wages of American workers by importing illegal cheap labor from dollar-a-day wage nations.” 
And that comes with an all-important military angle as a surefire selling point. As Trump’s backers outline it, “the Pacific Ocean cannot be used for transporting the vital and essential components of our military industrial complex, for in the event of war with Russia or China their advanced silent submarines equipped with advanced anti-ship weapons will block all of our ocean transport, collapsing our military industrial production in any war with catastrophic consequences. These component factories for Intel and others must be repatriated at once through currency adjustments or tariffs.”
So Trump should hammer the message that all new bank credit must be tied to rebuilding destroyed US industries, “either by ending currency rigging or applying tariffs.” Bank credit, Trump backers argue, “should not be used for currency manipulation, or for cash settlement market rigging. There should be no bank credit for speculation and absolutely none of hedge funds. Let’s wipe these speculative vehicles out by huge taxes on short-term trading profits, ending tax concessions on borrowing, and ending all bank credit for speculation. Let these people go to do real work.”
That, in a nutshell, explains Wall Street’s visceral aversion to Trump – from the Bloombergs to the Lloyd Blankfeins. Anyone familiar with Wall Street knows every market, commodity and indexes are rigged by cash settlement manipulations. As a New York-based Trump backer puts it, “This alone is sufficient reason to support Donald J. Trump. We should make the Carl Icahans and George Soroses do real work by taxing away their speculative profits. We need Henry Fords in this nation who create and build industries, and not Wall Street looters, where they rig everything as in 2008 then used their political power overbought politicians for bailouts, after throwing tens of millions of American out of their homes.”
According to this roadmap, which is already on Trump’s desk – but no one knows whether he read it in full, or will implement it – fighting illegal immigration and rigged currencies side by side would create nothing less than an industrial renaissance in the US to rebuild the devastated Detroit. Essentially, the road map calls for replacing millions of illegal immigrants with millions of unemployed US citizens; Trump’s backers consider the real unemployment rate to be a whopping 23% today, based on the 1955 Bureau of Labor Statistical Methodology, “and not the rigged statistics of today.”
The bottom line is this road map calls for Trump if elected, to create a cross-party, or trans-party coalition – as once happened in the House and Senate when Jesse Helms on one side and John Conyers and Chuck Schumer on the other side actually did real business.
This all implies Trump should become well versed in the national economy ideas of Friedrich List – whose tariff-protected Zollverein League was essentially the founding method of Prussia to build the German nation.
Some of the above has already filtered out in Trump’s announced economic agenda. Now comes the hard part for a man with an exceedingly short attention span who gets into the groove by tweets and sound bites; to coherently sell the plan without picking up unnecessary fights along the way.
But Vlad has already won it anyway
Polls at the moment seem to be pointing to a Hillary landslide. Trump’s backers tough “would not rely on the polls. Everything is rigged.”
And then there’s the all-enveloping “Russian aggression” hysteria. Hillary went as far as equating President Putin to Hitler. Trump insists he’s ready to do business with Moscow – starting with a joint operation to end ISIS/ISIL/Daesh for good.
Why bother? The Stupidity-o-Meter as applied to US mainstream media has gone on interstellar overdrive anyway – as the presidential election winner has already been christened: it’s – who else? – the omniscient Vladimir Putin.
A business source familiar with the designs of the real Masters of the Universe cuts seriously to the chase: “As far as Russia is concerned, the issue is decided from above, and that is where the battle has been. The decision is above Hillary and Donald, and Hillary will be ordered to create a rapprochement if she is elected if that is what is decided. If Trump wins, it is easy; and if he doesn’t, then the fact he brought it up will be used as a catalyst for policy changes toward Russia. The fight is behind the scenes now.”
As much as currency rigging “will be ended, as we already saw Jack Lew give out the orders to Germany and Japan”, a new geoeconomic  map – possibly under Trump — would swing towards the end of the oil price war as well. As a Trump backer puts it, “this is a national objective of the United States, as a higher price will make the United States energy independent. This is part of the significance of the Trump revolution.”
According to a source close to the House of Saud, Saudis and Russians are already involved in tortuous pre-negotiations on the possibility of engineering an oil price around $100.00 a barrel; “There should be enough mutuality of interest between the Saudis betrayed by the US under the neocons, and to be destroyed by the neocons eventually, and the Russians who can prevent that.”
An end to the oil price war may be something the Pentagon won’t be able to argue about. As a Trump backer notes, “it is in the vital interest of the military-industrial complex to achieve complete energy independence, and repatriate all its military industries to the shores of the United States.”
Compared to the current, 24/7 mud-wrestling match, all this may seem straight from Alice in Wonderland. There’s no evidence such an ambitious – and contentious – agenda can be sold to movers and shakers from JP Morgan to the Koch brothers. Trump creating a cross-party, trans-party or even post-party movement will only succeed if substantial players in the Power Elite are behind it, and there are no signs of this happening.
What proceeds relentlessly is a massive disinformation campaign – a ghastly remix of those good ol’ Cold War anti-USSR avalanches. The Clinton Media Machine is even vilifying Michael Flynn, former head of the DIA, who supports Trump. Trump was conceptually right when he said Obama and Hillary were the founder and co-founder of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. That’s exactly what Flynn admitted in that notorious interview when he stressed that the expansion of the phony Caliphate was a “willful decision” taken in Washington.
The bottom line, as it stands, is that Trump is not raising enough cash to offset the formidable Clinton cash machine. Now comes the time when he must really take no prisoners to gain maximum exposure – while trying to sell the road map outlined above, one tweet at a time.
And of course there will be a surprise – October and otherwise. Nothing has been decided – yet. Disraeli’s Coningsby was never more appropriate; “So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.