Trump could not have become
America’s President if he had not won the “vote” of his nation’s second-largest
political donor in 2016, casinos-owner Sheldon Adelson.
In publicly
recorded donations, as of 25 December 2018, Adelson and his wife donated $82,522,800 to
Republican candidates in 2016, and this amount doesn’t include any of the
secret money. Of that sum, it’s virtually impossible to find out how much went
specifically to Trump’s campaign for President, but, as of 9 May 2017, the
Adelsons were publicly recorded as having donated $20.4 million to Trump’s
campaign. Their impact on the Presidential contest was actually much
bigger than that, however, because even the Adelsons’ non-Trump-campaign
donations went to the Republican Party, and the rest went to Republican
pro-Trump candidates, and the rest went to Republican PACS — and, so, a large
percentage (if not all) of that approximately $60 million non-Trump-campaign
political expenditure by the Adelsons was boosting Trump’s Presidential vote.
The
second-largest Republican donor in 2016 was the hedge fund manager Paul Singer,
at $26,114,653. It was less
than a third, 31.6%, as large as the Adelsons’ contribution. Singer is
the libertarian who proudly invests in
weak entities that have been sucked dry by the aristocracy and who almost
always extracts thereby, in the courts, far larger returns-on-investment than
do other investors, who have simply settled to take a haircut on their failing
high-interest-rate loans to that given weak entity. Singer hires the rest of
his family to run his asset-stripping firm, which is named after his own middle
name, “Elliott Advisors,” and he despises any wealthy person who won’t (like he
does) fight tooth-and-nail to extract, from any weak entity, everything that
can possibly be stripped from it. His Elliott Advisors is called a “vulture
fund,” but that’s an insult to vultures, who instead eat corpses. They don’t
actually attack and rip apart vulnerable struggling animals, like Singer’s
operation does.
So, that’s the
top two, on the Republican Party side.
On the
Democratic Party side, the largest 2016 donor was the largest of all political
donors in 2016, the hedge fund manager Thomas Steyer, $91,069,795. The
second-largest was hedge fund manager Donald S. Sussman, $41,841,000. Both of
them supported Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders, and then against Donald
Trump.
As of 23
January 2019, the record shows that Trump received $46,873,083 in donations
larger than $200, and $86,749,927 in donations smaller than $200. Plus, he got
$144,764 in PAC contributions. Hillary Clinton received $300,111,643 in
over-$200 donations, and $105,552,584 in under-$200 donations. Plus, she got
$1,785,190 in PAC donations. She received 6.4 times as much in $200+ donations
as Trump did. She received 1.2 times as much in under-$200 donations as he did.
Clearly, billionaires strongly preferred Hillary. So, it’s understandable why
not only America’s Democratic Party billionaires but also many of America’s
Republican Party billionaires want President Trump to become replaced ASAP by
his V.P., President Pence, who has a solid record of doing only whatever his
big donors want him to do. For them, the wet dream would be a 2020 contest
between Mike Pence or a clone, versus Hillary Clinton or a clone (such as Joe
Biden or Beto O’Rourke). That would be their standard fixed game, America’s
heads-I-win-tails-you-lose ‘democracy’.
On 18 January
2018 was reported that,
“Trump pulled in $107 million in individual contributions,
nearly doubling President Barack Obama’s 2009 record of $53 million.” However,
in both of those cases, the figures which were being compared were actually
donations to fund the inaugural festivities, not the actual campaigns. But Adelson
led there, too: “Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was [the] most generous
[donor], giving $5 million to the inaugural committee.” The second-biggest
donor to that was Hushang Ansary of Stewart & Stevenson, at $2 million. He
had previously been the CEO of the
National Iranian Oil Company until the CIA-appointed dictator, the brutal and
widely hated Shah, was overthrown in 1979 and replaced by
Iran’s now theocratically overseen limited democracy. The US aristocracy, whose
CIA had overthrown Iran's popular and democratically elected Prime Minister in
1953, installed the Shah to replace that elected head-of-state, and they then
denationalized and privatized Iran’s oil company, so as to cut America’s
aristocrats in on Iran’s oil. Basically, America’s aristocracy stole Iran in
1953, and Iranians grabbed their country back in 1979, and USbillionaires have
been trying to get it back ever since. Ansary’s net worth is estimated at
“over $2 billion,” and, “By the 1970s, the CIA considered Ansary to
be one of seventeen members of ‘the Shah’s Inner Circle’ and he was one of the
Shah’s top two choices to succeed Amir Abbas Hoveyda as Prime Minister.” But,
that just happened to be the time when the Shah became replaced in an authentic
revolution against America’s dictatorship. Iran’s revolution produced the country’s
current partially democratic Government. So, this would-be US stooge Ansary
fled to America, which had been Iran’s master during 1953-79, and he was
welcomed with open arms by Amerca’s and allied aristocracies.
Other than the
Adelsons, the chief proponents of regime-change in Iran since 1979 are the
US-billionaires-controlled CIA, and ‘news’-media, and Government, and the
Shah’s family, and the Saud family, and Israel’s apartheid regime headed by the
Adelsons’ protégé in Israel, Netanyahu. America’s billionaires want Iran back,
and the CIA represents them (the Deep State) — not the American
public — precisely as it did in 1953, when the CIA seized Iran for America’s
billionaires.
In the current
election-cycle, 2018, the Adelsons have thus far invested $123,208,200, all in
Republicans, and this tops the entire field. The second-largest political
investor, for this cycle, is the former Republican Mayor of NYC, Michael
Bloomberg, at $90,282,515, all to
Democrats. Is he a Republican, or is he a Democrat? Does it actually make any
difference? He is consistently a promoter of Wall Street. The third-largest
donor now is Tom Steyer, at $70,743,864, all to Democrats.
The fourth-largest is a Wisconsin libertarian-conservative billionaire, Richard Uihlein,
at $39,756,996. Back on 19
March 2018, Politico reported that
“Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth, are currently the biggest Republican donors
of the 2018 midterm elections, having given $21 million to candidates for
federal office and super PACs that will support them. And that doesn’t include
their funding of state candidates.” On 1 October 2016, International Business Times had
listed the top ten donors to each of the two Parties, and the Uihleins at that
time were #4 on the Republican side, at $21.5 million.
Of course, all
of the top donors are among the 585 US billionaires, and
therefore they can afford to spend lots on the Republican and/or Democratic
nominees. Open Secrets reported on 31 March 2017 that
“Of the world’s 100 richest billionaires, 36 are US citizens and thus eligible
to donate to candidates and other political committees here. OpenSecrets Blog
found that 30 of those [36] [or five sixths of the total 36 wealthiest
Americans] actually did so, contributing a total of $184.4 million — with 58
percent [of their money] going to Republican efforts.” Democratic Party
nominees thus got 42%; and, though it’s not as much as Republican ones get,
it’s usually enough so that if a Democrat becomes elected, that person too will
be controlled by billionaires.
For example, in
the West Virginia Democratic Presidential primary in 2016, Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties
in the state but that state’s delegation to the Democratic
National Convention handed 19 of the state’s 37 votes at the Convention to
his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who got more money from billionaires
than all other US Presidential candidates combined. The millions of Democrats
who voted for Hillary Clinton were voting for the billionaires’ favorite, and
she and her DNC stole the
Party’s nomination from Sanders, who was the nation’s most-preferred
Presidential candidate in 2016; and, yet, most of those voters still
happily voted, yet again, for her, in the general election — as if she hadn’t
practically destroyed the Party by prostituting it to its billionaires even
more than Obama had already done. Of course, she ran against Trump, and, for
once, the billionaires were shocked to find that their enormous investment in a
candidate had been for naught. That’s how incompetent she was. But they still
kept control over both of the political Parties, and the Sanders choice to head
the DNC (the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party itself) lost
out to the Obama-Clinton choice, so that today’s Democratic Party is still the
same: winning is less important to them
than serving their top donors is.
This means that
America’s winners of federal elections represent almost entirely America’s 585
billionaires, and not the 328,335,647Americans (as
of noon on 23 January 2019). Of course, there is a slight crossover of
interests between those two economic classes, since 0.000002 of those
328,335,647, or 0.0002% of them, are billionaires. However, if 0.0002% of
federal office-holders represent the public, and the remaining 99.9998%
represent the billionaires, then is that actually a bipartisan Government? If
instead 99.9998% represented 328,335,062 Americans, and 0.0002% represented the
585 billionaires; then, that, too, wouldn’t be bipartisan, but would it be a
democratic (small “d”) government? So, America is not a democracy (regardless
of whether it’s bipartisan); it is instead an aristocracy, just like ancient
France was, and the British empire, etc. The rest of America's population (the
328,335,062 other Americans) are mere subjects, though we are officially called
‘citizens’, of this actual aristocracy.
The same is
true in Israel, the land that the Adelsons (the individuals who largely control
America) are so especially devoted to. On 8 November 2016, Israel’s
pro-Hillary-Clinton and anti-Netanyahu Ha’aretz newspaper headlined "The Collapsing Political
Triangle Linking Adelson, Netanyahu and Trump”, and reported
that Ha’aretz’s bane and top competitor was the freely distributed daily
Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom, and:
Israel Hayom was founded
by Adelson nine years ago, in order to give Netanyahu – who has been rather
harshly treated by the Israeli media throughout his political career – a
friendly newspaper. Under Israeli law, the total sum an individual can donate
to a politician or party is very limited, and corporate donations are not
allowed. Israel Hayom has been a convenient loophole, allowing Adelson to
invest the sort of money he normally gives American politicians on Netanyahu’s
behalf. It has no business model and carries far fewer ads than most daily
newspapers. While the privately owned company does not publish financial
reports, industry insiders estimate that Adelson must spend around $50 million
annually on the large team of journalists and the printing and distribution
operations.
Distributed for free, in hundreds of thousands of copies the
length and breadth of the country, Israel Hayom … clings slavishly to the line
from Netanyahu’s office – praising him and his family to the heavens while
smearing his political rivals, both on the left and the right.
A billionaire
can afford to use his or her ‘news’-media in lieu of political campaign
donations. Lots of billionaires do that. They don’t need to make direct
political donations. And ‘making money’ by owning a ‘news’-medium can even be
irrelevant, for them. Instead, owning an important ’news’-medium can be, for
them, just another way, or sometimes their only way, to buy control over the
government. It certainly works. It’s very effective in Israel.
Adelson is #14
on the 2018 Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans,
all having net worths of $2.1 billion or more, his being $38.4 billion, just
one-third as large as that of Jeff Bezos. Bezos is the owner of around 15% of
Amazon Corporation, whose profits are derived almost entirely from the Amazon
Web Services that are supplied to the US Pentagon, NSA, and CIA. So, he’s
basically a ‘defense’ contractor. Bezos’s directly owned Washington Post is
one of America’s leading neoconservative and neoliberal, or pro-invasion and
pro-Democratic Party, media; and, so, his personal ownership of that newspaper
is much like his owning a one-person national political PAC to promote whatever
national policies will increase his fortune. The more that goes to the military
and the less that goes to everything else, the wealthier he will become. His
newspaper pumps the ‘national security threats’ to America.
Adelson
controls Israel’s Government. Whereas he might be a major force in America’s
Government, that’s actually much more controlled by the world’s wealthiest person, the
only trillionaire, the King of Saudi Arabia. He has enough wealth so
that he can buy almost anybody he wants — and he does, through his numerous
agents. But, of course, both Israel’s Government and Saudi Arabia’s Government
hate Iran’s Government at least as much as America’s Government does. In fact,
if Russia’s Government weren’t likely to defend Iran’s Government from an
invasion, then probably Iran would already have been invaded. Supporters of
America’s Government are supporters of a world government by America’s
billionaires, because that’s what the US Government, in all of its
international functions (military, diplomatic, etc.) actually represents: it’s
America’s global dictatorship. They throw crumbs to America’s poor so as to
make it a ‘two-party’ and not merely a ‘one-party’ government and so that one
of the Parties can call itself ‘the Democratic Party’, but America’s is
actually a one-party government, and it represents only the very
wealthiest, in both Parties. The aristocracy’s two separate
party-organizations compete against each other. But their real audience is the aristocracy’s dollars, not the
public’s voters. This “two-Party” dictatorship (by the aristocracy)
is a different governing model than in China and some other countries.
The great
investigative journalist Wayne Madsen headlined on January 24th “Trump Recognition of Rival
Venezuelan Government Will Set Off a Diplomatic Avalanche” and
he reported the possibility of a war developing between the US and Russia over
America’s aggression against Venezuela.
US media even have pretended that
the US Government isn’t the one that customarily perpetrates coups in Latin
America, and pretended that Russia’s and Cuba’s Governments are simply blocking
‘democracy’ from blossoming in Venezuela. On January 24th, Middle East Eye reported that
Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman had just told the World Economic Forum, in
Davos, that the torture-murder of Saudi Crown Prince Salman’s critic
and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was “unacceptable,”
“But what do you do? What part do you play in the process of economic and
social change?” and the report continued: “Gorman said he did not judge any
country’s attempts to root out corruption,” and Gorman and a French tycoon
joined in throwing their “weight behind Riyadh’s economic and social direction,
by saying, ‘it is quite difficult and brave what the kingdom is doing’,” by its
‘reforms’. It was all being done to ‘root out corruption, and to spread
democracy’. Sure. There’s “a sucker born every minute,” except now it’s every
second. That seems to be the main way to win votes.
On January 26th, Trump appointed the fascist Elliott Abrams to
lead this ‘democratization of Venezuela’, by overthrowing and replacing the
elected President by the second-in-line-of succession (comparable in Venezuela
to removing Trump and skipping over the Vice President and appointing Nancy Pelosi
as America’s President, and also violating the Venezuelan Constitution's
requirement that the Supreme Judicial Trbunal must first approve before there
can be ANY change of the President without an election by the voters).
It’s clearly another US coup that is being attempted here. Trump, by
international dictat, says that this Venezuelan traitor whom the US claims to
be installing is now officially recognized by the US Government
to be the President of Venezuela. Bloomberg News reported that
Abrams would join Trump’s neocon Secretary of State on January 26that the UN to lobby there
for the UN to authorize Trump’s intended Venezuelan coup. The EU seemed strongly inclined to follow America’s lead.
On the decisive UN body, the Permanent Security Council, of China, France,
Russia, UK, and US, the US position was backed by three: US, France, and UK.
Russia and China were opposed. In the EU, only France,
Germany, Spain, and UK, came out immediately backing the US position. On January
25th, Russia’s Tass news agency was the first to report on the
delicate strategic situation inside Venezuela. It sounded like the
buildup to Obama’s successful coup in Ukraine
in February 2014, but in Venezuela and under Trump. In fact, at
least two commentaors other than I have noted the apparent similarities:
Whitney Webb at “Washington Follows Ukraine, Syria
Roadmap in Push for Venezuela Regime Change” and RT at “‘Venezuela gets its Maidan’:
Ukrainian minister makes connection between regime change ops”.
Abrams’s career
has been devoted to “regime-change,” and is as unapologetic about it as is John
Bolton. Also like Bolton, he’s an impassioned supporter of Jewish apartheid. He
wrote in his 1997 book Faith or Fear,
that “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to
the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in
which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in
Israel — from the rest of the population.” Israel is, in this and the view of
many billionaires, the whole world’s ghetto, and ‘real’ Jews don’t belong anywhere
else than there. And, according to that, nobody else does belong there, except
people who accept being ruled by Jewish Law — the Torah. So, on 25 June 2001,
George W. Bush, as the main representative of America’s billionaires, made
Abrams the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for
Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations at the National Security
Council. Of course, Abrams was gung-ho for Americans to conquer Iraq, because
Iraqis didn’t like Israel. And the current US President hires that same agent of
Israel, Abrams, now to sell internationally America’s current coup to grab
Venezuela for America’s billionaires. Abrams, for years, had been courting
Trump’s favor by having declined to include himself among
the many Republican neoconservatives, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who endorsed
Hillary Clinton for President. He thereby has now won his new job, on the
real-world sequel to The Apprentice, which is
known as President Trump’s Administration. Another such winner, of course, is
John Bolton, who likewise had
declined to endorse Hillary.
Perhaps the US
regime thinks that testing the resolve of Russia’s Government, regarding
Venezuela, would be less dangerous than testing it over the issue of Iran. But
Big Brother says that this imposition of America’s corruption is instead merely
a part of rooting out corruption and spreading democracy and human rights,
throughout the world.
The US has
managed to get Venezuela in play, to control again. Some American billionaires
think it’s a big prize, which must be retaken. The largest oil-and-gas
producers — and with the highest reserves of oil-and-gas in the ground — right
now, happen to be Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Russia, Venezuela, and US So, for
example, Venezuela is a much bigger prize than Brazil.
All of those
countries have an interest in denying the existence of human-produced global
warming, and in selling as much of their product as quickly as possible before
the world turns away from fossil fuels altogether. High-tech doesn’t drive
today’s big-power competition nearly so much as does the fossil-fuels
competition — to sell as much of it as they can, as fast as they can. The
result of this competition could turn out to be a nuclear winter that produces
a lifeless planet and thus prevents the planet from becoming lifeless more
slowly from global burnout — the alternative outcome, which would be produced
by the burnt fossil fuels themselves. Either way, the future looks bleak, no
matter what high-tech produces (unless high-tech produces quickly a total
replacement of fossil fuels, and, in the process, bankrupts many of the
billionaires who are so active in the current desperate and psychopathic global
competition).
This is what
happens when wealth worldwide is so unequally distributed that the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67
Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%”. According to economic
theory (which has always been written by agents for the aristocracy), the
distribution of wealth is irrelevant. This belief was formalized by a key
founder of today’s mathematized economic theory, Vilfredo Pareto, who, for example,
in his main work, the 1912 Trattato di Sociologia Generale,
wrote (# 2135), that, though
“the lover of equality will assign a high coefficient to the utility of the
lower classes and get a point of equilibrium very close to the equalitarian
condition, there is no criterion save sentiment for choosing between the one
[such equality of wealth] and the other [a single person — whom he called “superman” — owning
everything].” The article on Pareto in the CIA’s Wikipedia doesn’t
even so much as mention this central feature of Pareto’s thinking, the feature
that’s foundational in all of the theory of “welfare” in economics. Pareto was
also the main theoretician of fascism, and the teacher of Mussolini. This
belief is at the foundation of capitalism as we know it, and as it has been in
economic theory ever since, actually, the 1760s. Pareto didn’t invent it; he
merely mathematized it.
So, we’ve long
been in 1984, or at least building toward it. But US-allied billionaires
wrote this particular
version of it; George Orwell didn’t. And it’s not a
novel. It’s the real thing. And it is now becoming increasingly desperate.
If, in
recognizing this, you feel like a hog on a factory-farm, then you’ve got the
general idea of this reality. It’s the problem that the public faces. But the
publics in the US and its allied regimes are far less miserable than the
publics in the countries that the US and its allied regimes are trying to take
over — the targeted countries (such as Syria). To describe any realistic
solution to this systematic global exploitation would require an entire book,
at the very least — no mere article, such as here. The aristocracy anywhere
wouldn’t publish such a book. Nobody would likely derive any significant income
from writing it. That’s part of the reality, which such a book would be
describing.
However, a key
part of this reality is that for the billionaires — the people who control
international corporations or corporations that even are aspiring to grow
beyond their national market — their nation’s international policies are even
more important to them than its domestic affairs (such as the toxic water in
Flint, Michigan; or single-payer health insurance — matters that are relatively
unimportant to billionaires), and, therefore, the most-censored and
least-honestly reported realities on the part of the aristocracy’s ‘news’-media
are the international ones. And, so, this is the field where there is the most
lying, such as about “Saddam’s WMD,” and about all foreign countries. However,
when a person is in an aristocracy’s military, deception of that person is even
more essential, especially in the lower ranks, the troops, because killing and
dying for one’s aristocracy is far less attractive than killing or dying in
order honestly to serve and protect an authentic democracy. Propagandizing for
the myth that the nation is a democracy is therefore extremely important in any
aristocracy. Perhaps this is the reason why, in the United States, the military
is consistently the institution that leads above all others in the public’s
respect. It’s especially necessary to do that, in the nation that
President Barack Obama repeatedly said is “the one indispensable nation”.
This, of course, means that every other nation is “dispensable.” Any
imperial nation, at least since ancient Rome, claimed the same thing, and
invaded more nations than any other in the world when it was the leading
imperial nation, because this is what it means to be an empire, or even to
aspire to being one: imposing that given nation’s will upon other nations —
colonies, vassal states, or whatever they are called. When soldiers know that
they are the invaders, not the actual defenders, their motivation to kill and
die is enormously reduced. This is the main reason why the ‘news’-media in an
imperial nation need to lie constantly to their public. If a news-reporting
organization doesn’t do that, no aristocrat will even buy it. And virtually
none will advertise in it or otherwise donate to it. It will be doomed to remain
very small and unprofitable in every way (because the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67
Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%”). Billionaires donate to
‘news’-organizations that might report accurately about domestic US problems,
but not to ones that report accurately about international affairs,
especially about important international affairs. Even liberal ‘news’-media are
neoconservative, or favorable toward American invasions and coups. In order to
be a significant player in the ‘news’-business in the United States, one has to
be.
So: this is how America’s dictatorship works. This
is not America’s exceptionalism: it is America’s ordinariness. America’s
Founders had wanted to produce something not just exceptional but unique in its
time: a democratic republic. But what now exists here is instead a dictatorial
global empire, and it constitutes the biggest threat to the very existence of
the United Nations ever since that body’s founding in 1945. If that body
accepts as constituting the leader of Venezuela the person that America’s
President declares to be Venezuela’s leader, then the UN is effectively dead.
This would be an immense breakthrough for all of the US regime’s billionaires,
both domestically and throughout its allied countries (such as in France,
Germany, Spain, and UK). It would be historic, if they win. It would be
extremely grim, and then the UN would immediately need to be replaced. The US
and its allies would refuse to join the replacement organization. That
organization would then authorize economic sanctions against the US and its
allies. These will be reciprocated. The world would break clearly into two
trading-blocs. In a sense, the UN’s capitulation to the US on this matter would
create another world war, WW III. It would be even worse than when Neville
Chamberlain accepted Hitler’s offer regarding the Sudetenland. We’d be back to
the start of WW II, with no lessons learned since then. And with nuclear
weapons.
