Providing Some Context in the Age of Trump

Providing Some Context in the Age of Trump

In the wake of the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States of America, one of the first executive memorandums to don the signature of The Don was the one that gave express support to the previously stalled Dakota Access and Keystone XL (TransCanada) pipelines.  In any other context, any foreign power which threatened to poison the water supply of millions of people would be labeled a terrorist organization and rightly so.  And even in the case of the Dallas, Texas headquartered Energy Transfer Partners, one has to ask, what power could be more foreign to working and oppressed people than the power of transnational capital?

Terrorism, indeed, goes by another name in this country—business.

Today, many of us stand strongly united in our opposition to the president, but let us not so quickly forget the crimes of the old.  When water protectors from all over this country rose up in North Dakota, it was Obama who held that office.  He watched and sat silent for weeks on end while police and private security forces brutalized native people and their allies in what, at times, mimicked the suppression of black activists fighting for civil rights in the south.  When finally the pressure had risen to a boiling point, he did just enough to assuage the immediate concerns of those on the ground; just enough to make thousands of people believe they could break from their resistance;  just enough to buy the time required for Energy Transfer Partners and the state of North Dakota to fortify their offensive.

It is time we recognize that “just enough” is no longer enough.

The system of global capital and its requisite political institutions have fallen into near complete decay.  While it has always been a system of profit over planet, profit over peace, and profit over people, neither the people, nor the planet, nor the relative peace in which we live can continue to bear the weight of it.  The human race is on a collision course with its own self-extermination and global capital has the wheel.

However much Trump may seek to accelerate us along that path, the tracks were laid at the very founding of this nation.  We are a nation birthed in genocide and slavery.  The dominance of our country on the international stage arose not from the cooperative and ingenious nature of its population, but in the crucibles of two great imperialist wars.  Today, that dominance is sustained through never ending war and a political system which convinces millions of people that their only choices are between the party of wall street and the party of big oil.

These problems are not the product of the last 70 days. The last 70 days is the product of these problems.  We have a system so failed and so rapidly decaying that in order for working people to feel like they were no longer handing their money to conmen, they thought they’d give the mob boss a try.  It is for these reasons that although many of us stand united in opposition against Trump, we must go further.  Insofar as people continue to accept that we must vote for the lesser of two evils, not only will we always get evil, but there will always be an incentive for the lesser evil to fan the flames from which the greater evil is born.

Featured Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/25977579392