A furtherance of “Donald Trump: The Perfect President of The Perfect Capitalist State”

trump

In response to Robert Delaney’s 12/11 column in The South China Morning Post

Robert Delaney, wrote an article today in his column in entitled “In the Huawei, Patrick Ho and Chinese spy cases, Trump sees only bargaining chips for his trade war” It is a column which both states the obvious and bemoans it; the obvious being that, as I wrote yesterday in my piece “Donald Trump: The Perfect President for the Perfect Capitalist State”, Donald Trump, to use my favorite phrase, doesn’t give “a rat’s ass” about the peripheral details of any situation. As his critics have noted, he doesn’t read and, as a person who might suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder might, disregards details because they irritate him. They irritate him because they draw his mind’s instinctual primary focus – increasing profits and power for his nation as for himself.

Delaney cites three individuals who were recently “arrested” by the United States, ostensibly for violating rules of decency, integrity and morality. The first person is Xu Yanjun who was charged with spying for the Chinese Ministry of State Security. He was extradited to the US where he is awaiting his pretrial hearings in a jail in Cleveland, Ohio, a city deep in America’s heartland. The second is Patrick Ho Chi-ping, who was arrested at JFK airport in New York. He is now in a place where no one wants to be, “The Tombs”, a notorious Manhattan jail, where he has been charged with fraud for trying to bribe African officials. The third and most famous individual is Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, CFO of Huawei, who I referred to in the article I wrote yesterday.

Delaney bemoans the fact that Trump will use the arrest of several individuals as poker chips in his negotiations. He then contrasts, in a very undialectical way I might add, the Justice Department, which Trump has nothing but contempt for, over and against Trump himself. He does this as if the Justice Department and the President did not share a common goal and purpose, that being the advancement of America’s political and economic supremacy in the world – a noble cause to be sure.

Mr. Delaney writes as if there were not an intimate internal relatedness between the actions of the Justice Department and President Trump. As if, the Justice Department were not the hunters who find and kidnap individuals whom President Trump then uses to extract ransom in the form of concessions to U.S. economic and political interests.

I am amazed to the point where my mouth hangs open when I read Mr. Delany’s statement: “Many in Washington see the Justice Department’s orders and convictions as part of a sincere effort to rid the world of corruption, uphold fair business practices, and check the influence of authoritarian governments.” As if the practice of paying bribes were not common practice, as if Halliburton had not paid millions of dollars in bribes in 2009; as if BAE systems had not in the past paid two billion in bribes to Saudi Arabian ambassador Bandar bin Sultan in a multi-billion-dollar arms deal; as if Johnson and Johnson, had not bribed government-paid doctors and health officials to promote sales of medical devices in Greece, Poland and Romania in 2011. Moreover, I am always quite fond of saying that in America, when money is given to a politician to help him get elected it is not called a “bribe” but a campaign contribution, and that not all campaign contributions are equal. Moreover, here is an article on corruption in the financial arena: https://www.businessinsider.com/11-examples-of-recent-corruption-on-wall-street-2010-4. Lest anyone have any doubts, wherever there is money to be made, wherever profits come first and people second, wherever there is need and wherever there is greed, there heart of corruption beats.

Of course, this does not make it right, but it does put things in perspective – China is not some maverick state that engages in spying…. all nations spy; it is not some deviant system whose companies, national and private, pay bribes; many companies have done so. Nor can we not say that “deals” which grant political and economic concessions to one nation from another are not themselves a kind of bribe. I am talking here about the kind of deals that Donald Trump is so good at making.

Delaney continues “But others will call the department’s collective actions a racist, imperialist crusade to arrest the decline of American influence.” Yep, that would be me. I would not use the word racist, I would balk at the term “imperialist crusade” and substitute “hegemony”, but no question, I do see the recent focus on Chinese individuals as part and parcel of an attempt “to arrest the decline of American influence.” Yep.

Every organ and every dimension of the Capitalist state functions in the interests of the capitalist class. To paraphrase Marx, the government is but the “executive committee” of that class, and the president of the United States of America, is the chairman of that committee. The chairman of that committee today is Donald Trump, a man who is used to being chairman of one capitalist organization or another; a man who is very good at his job.

Mary Metzger is a 72 year old retired teacher who has lived in Moscow for the past ten years. She studied Women’s Studies under Barbara Eherenreich and Deidre English at S.U.N.Y. Old Westerbury. She did her graduate work at New York University under Bertell Ollman where she studied Marx, Hegel and the Dialectic. She went on to teach at Kean University, Rutgers University, N.Y.U., and most recenly, at The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology where she taught the Philosophy of Science. Her particular area of interest is the dialectic of nature, and she is currently working on a history of the dialectic. She is the mother of three, the gradmother of five, and the great grandmother of 2.

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