Incompetence Blowing Up the US Democracy
An Open Letter to Donald Trump
by Marc Batko (marc1seed@yahoo.com; freetranslations.foundation)
Donald, do us a favor and return to your beloved private sector! Deception, trickery, lies, exaggeration and enrichment are the accepted unwritten laws of private enterprise. Buyer beware, regulations are evil, money is a private matter, trickle-down prosperity, and the self-healing market have been emphasized since Reagan.
The public sector and public service should be ruled by selflessness and altruism. People should be served and respected as the true sovereign in a constitutional democracy, not demeaned as a cash cow to be exploited by private interests. The state should protect people from being trampled by the wheels of profit maximization.
Elon Musk is surely one of the biggest welfare queens in history. He has successfully commandeered hundreds of billions in subsidies for Tesla and SpaceX. He is financially supporting the anti-immigrant party in Germany (AfD) and hopes to whittle down Medicare and Social Security in the US. Never mind the seven recent failures of SpaceX or that millions survive on these two most popular programs!
The Washington Consensus of privatization, deregulation, and liberalized markets (the casino economy) has discredited itself by decimating the Global South and stealing resources. The Investor-State-Dispute tribunal system enables corporations to sue state for lost future profits. In the Metalclad case, an incinerator company won a decision against Mexico after the citizens raised protests over the cancerous polluted air. They won the decision even though they never operated an incinerator before!
Is the government reduced to a wrecking ball or a punishing state? Has the Trump regime become a cesspool of insults, threats, lies, scapegoating, mud-throwing, and name-calling? Are compromise, negotiation, principle, and due process replaced by tantrum, arrogance, ignorance, propaganda, and intimidation?
On the quiet, the social state or welfare state was dismantled. Anti-trust investigation and prosecution as intended by the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act has apparently fallen by the wayside. Polarized and paralyzed, the state ignores the obvious necessities of taxing the rich and crafting a more just immigration law. The state steals away from feeding and housing its people while corporations steal away from paying their fair taxes!
Taxes is the price we pay for living in a constitutional republic, said Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes around the turn of the century a hundred years ago. Education, health care, libraries, hospitals, road repair, sewage systems, postal service, and fire and police protection are vital public services to which citizens are entitled. Suspending all federal expenditures and urging all 2.3 million federal workers to accept illegal buyout offers seem reckless, cruel, and juvenile!
Countries are legitimate and trustworthy when they acknowledge a higher authority, the United Nations. Otherwise they are rogue or failed states ruled only by the law of the stronger or the law of the jungle.
God, the infinite Creator of all things out of nothing, is the invisible Sovereign from the guttermost to the uttermost. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies in the Psalms, Micah, and Isaiah as the long-awaited Messiah, more than a teacher or a prophet. From a liberation theology perspective, Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was to be the end of human sacrifice. Interpreted spiritually, Jesus himself was the fulfillment of the land promise to Israel.
Israel was to be the light in which all the nations were to see themselves. The universal had to become particular to be concrete and relevant. The particular needs the universal as a goal, vision, or utopia. Humans are divine and earthly, Soren Kierkegaard proclaimed in the 1840s.
Trump’s first 11 days were filled with lawlessness, contempt for all vulnerable persons, mockery of international law, erratic, unpredictable, illegal bailout offers to 2.3 million federal workers, suspension of all federal expenditures (cancelled 48 hours later), firing 17 Inspector Generals including the FAA General Counsel and acting chair, forcing out Senior FBI officials and January 6 prosecutors, and blacking out federal websites like CDC (Center for Disease Control). What a clown show of arrogance, megalomania, and contempt for human dignity and the rule of law!