Allan Nairn talking:
in a sense, the current governing group, the Republicans and Trump, in a sense, it’s a coalition between the racists and the rich, the most extreme elements of both. And what this does—and they’re a minority in the United States. The extreme rich are a fraction of 1 percent. And the most intense racists and anti-immigrant people are perhaps a majority of the American white population, but definitely a minority of the whole American population.
So how do you govern if you’re a minority in a national system that’s heavily based on elections, where lots of decisions—not all decisions, but lots of decisions—are made on the basis of elections? Well, you have to build in structural advantages. You have to have levers. The U.S. Constitution gives some of those levers, with things like the Senate, where small states like Montana and Idaho, etc., are able to send two senators, equal to that of California; things like the Electoral College; things like gerrymandering of House districts; of voter suppression aimed at groups like African Americans and also younger people, who might vote against the right.
And one thing that the tax bill does is it adds yet another layer of structural obstacles to the actual majority in the United States, the actual majority of people who oppose the program of Ryan and McConnell and Trump and the largest corporations. It adds yet another obstacle, because of that $1.5 trillion being transferred, perhaps the largest transfer of wealth in American history. A large chunk of it is going to wind up in the pockets of either the rightist individual oligarchs, like the Kochs, like the family controlling Walmart, like Mercer, who directly fund their own independent political operations that spearhead things like voter suppression operations. And on the other hand, another big chunk of it, through the corporate tax cut, will go to the largest corporations, like Wall Street and Apple and so on, who will have that much more money to spend on lobbyists. So, not only will it be an immediate money transfer, worsening inequality while, at the other end, 13 million people lose their healthcare and many thousands more will die as a result, but it also is a systematic increase in the political power of the radical right. So it’s yet another obstacle that’s been thrown up.
free expression and the chance for political dissent, a lot of which these days takes place through the internet, is in great danger, and it’s under attack now from both the Republicans and the mainstream Democrats—the Republicans with net neutrality, which essentially will give license to the companies that control the internet to start cutting traffic to sites, shutting down sites, if they want, and on the other side, from the Democrats, who have been using the Russia issue as an occasion to demand that Twitter, Facebook, Google and others start censoring their posts. There were hearings a couple months ago in Congress, first in the Senate and then in the House, where the Democrats were holding up placards of false information put out allegedly by Russia during the election. And they said—they had the Twitter people there and the Facebook and the Google people, saying, “Why didn’t you censor this? Why didn’t you stop this message before it could get posted on your site?”
demanding of these corporations, saying, “Why aren’t you doing political censorship? If you don’t—you, the corporation, don’t—start doing political censorship, we, the Congress, will start having to force you.” So you have the Republicans giving the corporations the means to do censorship, and you have the Democrats giving them a motive, a particular demand. And it’s extremely dangerous. I mean, they could—if they wanted to, they could start cutting the traffic to the Democracy Now! site. Already, AlterNet said, a few months ago, that their own traffic was hurt when Google changed their search algorithm in response to these kinds of these pressures.
net neutrality issue that gives the corporations the right to charge more for faster internet. So that means that people and sites with fewer resources can have less ability to reach the public.
the majority of people who voted actually voted against Trump, on the popular basis in the last election, are rejecting this attempt at rightist revolution. But they cannot succeed unless there’s a massive mobilization that’s persistent and doesn’t stop, because of all the structural obstacles that are built in. But in the November congressional election, if the Republicans can be swept out of control of the House and the Senate, and if people take to the streets, like they did in Honduras, they can win.
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Allan Nairn
award-winning investigative journalist.
— source democracynow.org