IN the June issue of Culture Wars magazine, E. Michael Jones, author of Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Labor and Usury, to mention just one of his many outstanding books, writes about the Trump Phenomenon, as seen from his hometown of South Bend, Indiana.

It’s an essentially positive view of Trump’s economic nationalism. On Trump’s casino bankruptcies, for example, Jones states:

If Donald Trump had crammed down Goldman Sachs the way he crammed down the claims of the creditors to [Atlantic City’s] failed casinos, the world would be a better place, and the United States of America would have $4 trillion dollars to spend on something other than usury payments to the wealthy.

Later, he writes:

… [The] point which Trump is now making in his inchoate, broken clock way, is that there is an intimate connection between the economy and the nation. Both entities are created by closure. The purpose of the national economy is the well-being and prosperity of all of its citizens. Any talk of an international economy is merely oligarch subterfuge for exploiting labor differentials throughout the world.

In Indiana, in May of 2016, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders paid homage to these truths by framing the issues in essentially the same way. According to the South Bend Tribune:

Sanders delivered his standard stump speech Sunday, attacking Wall Street and the “big banks” and promising campaign finance reform, free public college tuition, Medicare for all, and an end to “bad” trade policies that cost “millions” of American jobs.

Like Trump, Sanders denounced the Carrier air conditioning corporation, which “recently announced plans to move 2,100 jobs from Indianapolis to Mexi-co, where he said, workers earn ‘$3 an hour.’”20 Sand-ers denounced Carrier’s parent company United Tech-nologies as “a company that made a profit of $7 bil-lion last year. It is a company that could afford to pay its CEO over $14 in total compensation. . . . . United Technologies gave its outgoing CEO in 2014 a (sever-ance package) worth over $172 million. . . .”21

Sanders attack on Carrier drew loud boos from the audience. With the Hoosiers firmly on his side, Sanders proceeded to ruin his own message by dragging in all the sexual issues which are de rigueur for Democrats but anathema to Hoosier voters, who invariably hand the state over to the Republicans because of their aversion to them: “Everyone here understands,” Bernie said, haranguing the crowd, “what they (the Republicans) mean by family values is no woman . . has a right to control her own body. We disagree. What they mean by family values is our gay brothers and sisters do not have the right to be married. We disagree.”22

If Bernie ruined his chances of carrying Indiana in a general election by bringing up the sexual issues, Trump ruined his message by arguing for building up America’s military. And what explains the similarities? Is it simply that great minds run in the same circles? No, it’s the 5,000 people on the other side of the room. It is Demos in Indiana. Demos is anti-free trade, pro-manufacturing, pro-high wages, anti-abortion, and anti-homosexual marriage, and there is currently no party which represents their views. Nor is it clear that Hoosiers are in a position to articulate what is going on when the CEO from Sales Force parachutes into Indianapolis and demands that the state legislature change its laws to meet the specifications of the homosexual/CEO cabal that is the avant garde of oligiarch proxy warfare in our day.

One day later, Demos had spoken. Trump crushed Cruz in a lopsided 60 to 30 percent victory, guaranteeing his lock on the nomination in Cleveland in July. Cruz surprised everyone by dropping out, thereby denying himself the nomination as the oligarch’s candidate at a brokered convention. His departure coincided with the appearance of a story in the National Enquirer linking his father to Lee Harvey Oswald and the murder of John F. Kennedy. When Trump mentioned the story, he was roundly denounced as a conspiracy theorist, but the story of Cruz’s father and his link to Kennedy’s death still remains the most plausi-ble explanation of why Cruz would pass on a brokered convention.

In spite of the elite’s loathing for them, Demos came out of the Indiana primary as the clear winner, because he chose both the Republican and Democratic protest candidates as the winners of that state’s primary election. Demos had become the spokesman for a Zeitgeist, which had remarkable similarities to the time when Logos entered the human vocabulary. Then as now, the occasion was the struggle between Demos and the financial oligarchy which had enslaved him through usury:

We are living today in a transition period much like that of Athens c. 330 BC when Aristotle wrote his Politics. Seeing inequality widen as his city-state became an em-pire, he described how wealthy families tend to emerge within democracies to become a financial oligarchy. But an oligarchy emerged once again, to be followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on in Aristotle’s eternal polit-ical triangle. Destruction of democracy by the creditors and property owners who make up the One Percent thus is not a new phenomenon. The leading Roman historians blamed the destruction of Republican liberty on the ris-ing power of creditors overpowering democracies. Using violence to block the reforms proposed by the Gracchi brothers in 133 BC, Senate leaders initiated a century of social war that ended in debt deflation and, in due course, serfdom. From Greece and Rome to today’s world, the driving force in the transition from democracy to oligar-chy has been the fight by creditors against debtors. From the United States to Europe, creditors are taking over government agencies to control public policy and the tax sys-tem to undermine debt rights, privatize public property in their own hands, and impose the modern equivalent of debt serfdom.23

“Looks to me like South Bend is ready for a political revolution,’ the Vermont senator said to thunderous applause and chants of “Bernie! Bernie!”24 Pace, Bernie. The real test of the American political system is not whether it will follow one more Jewish revolutionary into the abyss; it is whether it can accommodate itself peacefully to the wishes of the majority of its citizens. Change is going to take place no matter what. The Republicans can either become the new populist party and win in November, or, led by the oligarchs and their pundits, it can sail into the iceberg and go down with all hands. There is no turning back now. Pressure is growing on the Republican leaders to back the rank-and-file’s choice. The pundits will continue to misconstrue the choice, but now even they recognize that something is afoot that is too important to ignore …

— Comments —

Eric writes:

Donald Trump is succeeding because his positions and his rhetoric imply that he is aware of the existence of an entity which, for lack of an appropriate English word, we can call the Volk.

His position on immigration recognizes that a people want to collectively determine who they admit as part of their national family.

His position on tariffs and trade recognizes that it is a duty of government to defend the collective economic interests of the Volk.

His position on exclusion of Muslims acknowledges that the defense of the safety of the Volk is a duty of government, even at the expense of other peoples.

His refusal to truckle or kiss the rings of the racial activists and [femino]-Americans indicates that he will not slander his people, and will defend their dignity, or at least not attack it.

Trump is a flawed man, and a flawed candidate. The support he is receiving in spite of his flaws, and in the face of unremitting hostility from the establishment, speaks to a tremendous hunger on the part of the American Volk.

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