The US is the greatest purveyor of violence in human history (cf. MLK) and ignores and represses its guilt from the senseless, immoral, illegal wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Gaza, and Ukraine. Russia, China, and Cuba are demonized; enemies are needed to justify its excessive military spending.
The Trump-Musk Clown Show and Prophetic Criticism, 2/5/2025
by Marc Batko (marc1seed [at] yahoo.com; freetranslations,foundation)
Late finance capitalist reality is marked by contradictions, cognitive dissonance and the implosion of the American empire. Since the end of World War Two, the US has been the unrivaled hegemon of the world. While Europe was in ruins, the US as the only unscathed power could dominate economically, politically and militarily. Now in 2025 the US is challenged and eclipsed by the People’s Republic of China. With 1.4 billion people, China has had an economic growth of 7-9% for decades while US growth is only 2% and German growth is currently at 0%. India has a similarly enormous population and is also very developed technologically.
China became the workbench of the world, developed high-speed levitation trains (150-200 mph) reaching all parts of the gigantic country with metro stations resembling palaces. This can be seen and verified in many You Tube videos.
In 2015, Donald Trump, the celebrity host of “The Apprentice” and hotel and casino owner began his meteoric rise. He is the product of his father Fred Trump, a racist property owner in NYC whose motto was “Kill, Kill, Kill.” Roy Cohn. the chief advisor to the Red Scare demagogue Sen. Joe McCarthy, told the young Donald never to admit a mistake but to shift all blame to the weaker ones. As a digital demagogue, Trump dominated Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube as the top story seven out of eight days from 2015 to 2025!
Trump won the 2016 election and amassed more debts than all US presidents combined, according to MSNBC. In his two 2017 tax heists, he gave $8 trillion to corporations and households with over a million dollars! There were no hearings for the tax bills; the doors were locked and lobbyists took over.
The digital demagogue filed bankruptcy six times but pretended to be a successful businessman and political outsider. In 2024, he carried out a defamation campaign constantly condemning “Crooked Joe,” “Crooked Kamala,” Obama judges, the media as “the enemy of the people,” fake news, and witch-hunt journalism. After winning a close election over Kamala Harris (with a 1.4% advantage), he vowed to take revenge on his political enemies. His speeches have been vile, vicious, and vulgar, full of lies, threats, exaggerations and rambling incoherence He repeatedly calls the left “vermin” and demonizes Mexicans as “rapists and murderers.”
Turning reality upside down and ignoring the systemic, structural crises of exploding inequality, poverty, homelessness, tax avoidance, tax havens, and the enrichment of financial speculators, he repeats the same lies again and again “we’re treated badly and are ripped off by every country.” In truth, the US has profited massively with the dollar as the global currency. For decades, countries were often forced to grow tulips and strawberries for Miami instead of rice and beans for their own people. The Investor-State-Dispute Settlement tribunals enabled corporations to sue states for lost future profits. As one example in the 2000 Metalclad case, an incinerator company (that never operated an incinerator) won a decision for $15 million when the Mexican community worried about cancer and air pollution blocked the construction. In the 2006 film “Maquiladoras,” the dreadful conditions of sweatshops in Tijuana are shown. When the company left for Vietnam, they didn’t even leave sewage facilities since profit maximization was their only goal!
People become cynical when the major issues of war and peace, environmental protection, active or punishing state, financial markets and the real economy, tax reform and immigration reform are decided in secret by lobbyists or elites. To the Confucian Chinese, existence means co-existence. China has 85% of the world’s rare earth (lithium, nickel, uranium), an experienced manufacturing workforce, and a reliable supply chain. Their capabilities in manufacturing computers, TVs, electric cars, solar panels, airports, and metro stations are overwhelming. It would take the US years or decades to come close to their superiority. Because of Trump’s crushing tariffs and America First protectionism, China is now aiming to diversify its supply chains. Rising consumer costs have a domino effect. US-China ties are unraveling. The loss of Chinese demand for soybeans and other agricultural products isolates the US. With the additions of Indonesia, Nigeria, Cuba, and possibly Japan, the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and 23 other countries) is a formidable rival with 55% of the world’s population (compared to 10% for the G7 and 4.4% for the US). The multi-polar world is the new reality superseding the uni-polar world of the Washington Consensus (privatization, deregulation, and liberalized markets (casino economy)!
Heterodox, alternative theory formation, is unavoidable simply because today’s monetary policy cannot explain the lack of inflation in the face of massive excess liquidity (cf. Bremen economist and professor Rudolf Hickel). The financial markets have long been in intensive care and are only kept alive by the Fed’s infusion of trillions of dollars. Finance made itself independent and has taken important investments and resources from the real economy. The extraction economy gave way to the service economy and car-free zones like Gastown in Vancouver B.C. However, the global economy of interdependence is blocked by the extreme right-wing,
economic nationalists and market fundamentalists.
Each and every heart is bounded by a world of dreams. Each and every rising sun is greeted by a lonely one. Make a promise and take a vow. Understand the voice within and feel the change already beginning. (The Moody Blues). The future must be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the present (theologian Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope). The fog is lifted! The language of proclamation runs crossway to the language of time. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics and Cost of Discipleship).
When I think of the rise of fascism, I think primarily of Karl Polanyi’s explanation, with the root cause the naive faith in the obsolete market mentality. The second explanation is more social than economy and comes from the German psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm. Human beings are social beings. Humans crave to be with the majority and seek the protection of the strong man.
We are divine and earthly, said Soren Kierkegaard in the 1840s. Truth must well up within us and cannot be forced with a cudgel or club. Faith is a leap across seventy-thousand fathoms of water! The ego must die for the self to be born. Trust in the infinite selfless God who created all things out of nothing is central. Lilies are more glorious than Solomon and sparrows don’t store in barns and are sustained by the Almighty! The universal needs the particular to be concrete and relevant. The particular needs the universal as the goal, vision, utopia, or Telos. Without humility, there is no sense of wonder, he warned.
We live on the shoulders of the spiritual greats and the contemporaneous Christ! Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian and martyr of the underground Confessing Church, emphasized the church exists in the world and for the other, the poor. the persecuted, reviled and discriminated. Only those who say a word for the Jews can sing the Gregorian chant! One act of obedience can be more important than a hundred sermons! Life is inevitably a fragment. God is with us and beyond us!
Martin Luther King was certainly a spiritual giant, a sparkling creative preacher who called everyone to the universal God of transcendent love and reconciliation. There is good in every person. Nonviolence is stronger than violence. Racism, materialism, and militarism are the three destroyers. The human race should have priority over the arms race!
Jurgen Moltmann, professor of theology and prolific writer, proclaims that hope sets us apart from all other creatures so we can go beyond everything past and present in the power of the coming. Christianity is an historical faith, not a tribal or feel-good religion. God is encountered in this world as present and future; the afterlife is for the angels. God is before us and not only above us.
Western civilization is dominated by science and technology. Other world-views and interpretations live only a marginal existence in our hyper-materialistic and hyper-individualist society. The one-dimensional society, Herbert Marcuse warned, is a society of fear. Now Donald Trump and Elon Musk threaten to turn our fragile democracy into elite rule and fascism. Worlds separate the constitutional state from the security or emergency state. Beware the beginnings of fascism when an enabling law turns active citizens into passive victims of an all-knowing state! Revenge, tantrums, lies, and defamation are the tools of the scaremongers!
Can you tell a green field from a course derailed? Did they get you to trade your heroes for gold? (Pink Floyd)
Elite democracy is democracy for the elite and the rich. Censorship rules on the quiet in the US. Five or six corporations command 90% of the revenues in publishing and broadcasting. The media discredited itself when it trivialized or ignored the right-wing fanatic Netanyahu’s genocide of 40,000 in Gaza and when it supported the massive escalation in Ukraine. Progress comes through the values of empathy and compassion, not only through technology and celebrity glamor!
The donor class is the deciding class, not the elected.
Bob Dylan’s song “Idiot Wind” (1976) describes the paralysis and helplessness of America after Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025:
“Idiot wind, from the Grand Coolie Dam to the Capitol, from the Grand Coolie Dam to the Mardi Gras. They’re planting stories in the press… Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted facts. It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe. He won the war after losing every battle. Cover up the truth with lies. Destiny drove us apart. Everything is a little upside down. What’s bad is good. What’s good is bad. You’ll find out when you reach the top you’re on the bottom. It’s a wonder you can even feed yourself.”
God is an active transcendent God of the exodus who made the Red Sea into a dry land and is the strength of the poor, the outcast and the debased. “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled. Whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” “What you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.” Jesus proves himself the long-awaited Messiah by uniting past, present, and future and being present by the Spirit as the contemporaneous Christ! Musk only fills outer space with debris and and mocks the US Constitution and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Trump is a bungle and bandito whose only experience is in banking and insurance fraud, upgrading and downgrading his properties to make himself great!
The US is the greatest debtor country in history. In 2024, it paid $1 trillion in interest on its $35 trillion debt. Its imports are twice its exports. Its economy of indebtedness and enrichment is also an economy of wastefulness and corruption. Beware of false teachers and false Christs who wear long robes, take the front seats in the synagogues, see the speck in their brother’s eye but not the log in their own eye. They clean the outside of the cup and leave the inside filthy.
The US is the greatest purveyor of violence in human history (cf. MLK) and ignores and represses its guilt from the senseless, immoral, illegal wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Gaza, and Ukraine. Russia, China, and Cuba are demonized; enemies are needed to justify its excessive military spending.