Wall Street Declares Victory Against the American People: The Banking Elites are Now Waging War against One Another
On August 31st, the Republican political site Politico bannered “Wall Street Republicans’ Dark Secret: Hillary Clinton 2016,” and
Ben White and Maggie Haberman delivered a blockbuster report about the
big-money Republican donors they had talked to, who confided (not for
specific attribution, though) that they might finance Hillary Clinton to
become President, if Jeb Bush announces after November’s mid-terms that
he won’t run for the Republican Presidential nomination. Ms. Clinton is
so appealing to Republican aristocrats, many of them will back her if
Republicans won’t nominate Bush.
Of course, virtually all
Democratic aristocrats are already pouring money into the place-holding
fundraising campaign for Clinton’s expected entrance into the Democratic
Presidential contest.
This means that virtually the
entire aristocracy will be flooding Clinton’s Presidential war-chest,
unless Jeb Bush seeks the Republican nomination.
Where, then, does this leave the
public? Obviously (barring some unimagined scenario of a progressive
running against Hillary for the nomination and beating her), both of the
two people who will be the major-Party nominees are going to be running
in order to go farther than NAFTA, and farther than deregulating Wall
Street, and farther than re-invading Iraq, and farther than financing Ukraine’ s ethnic-cleansing operation
ousting the ethnic Russians out of that country’s southeastern region,
and farther than threatening to bomb Assad’s forces in Syria, and
farther than arm-twisting
the EU to weaken their anti-global-warming regulations so that the EU
can import the Koch brothers’ dirty oil from Alberta Canada’s tar sands — in other words: farther than Obama has gone, or is yet aiming to go.
Does it make much of a
difference, then, which of those two people, Clinton or Bush, will be
doing these things for America’s aristocrats? Not enough to make
Republican aristocrats back the other Republican contenders instead of
Hillary if Bush doesn’t enter the race. They’ll then be joining with the
Democratic aristocracy, who have already thrown in their lot behind
her. Aristocrats don’t much care whether its name is “Clinton,” or is
instead “Bush.” Either one would make an acceptable king (or queen) for
them during the following eight years.
Of course, the two candidates
will pander to their respective voting-bases: Hillary will pander to
women, etc.; and Bush will pander to ‘job-creators’ etc.; but that’s
basically just squabbling about how to decorate the aristocratic cake,
not about what the cake will consist of, from the aristocrats’
viewpoint. Either way, it’ll be a tasty dessert for them, custom-made
for their delectation.
On the other hand, White and
Haberman are also clear that there is now emerging a war between two
main portions of the Republican aristocracy, regarding which of these
two Republican factions will control the White House beyond 2016.
Haberman and White, perhaps being Republicans themselves, don’t mention
this internal conflict explicitly (since doing so would emphasize their
Party’s split), and they don’t even mention the word “Koch,” not even
once (even though the Kochs are the Party’s biggest fundraiser by far);
but these Politico journalists do indicate that the very same Republican
moneybags who are demanding that Bush become the nominee are
threatening to bolt to Clinton if Ted Cruz wins the Republican
nomination. Haberman and White don’t so much as mention, at all, that Cruz
is the invention of the Koch brothers’ wing of the aristocracy, and
that he had had his political career financed via the Kochs’ agent Jim
DeMint, who recruited Cruz into the Senate and who raised the money to
get him to knock off the Republican Establishment’s Kaye Bailey
Hutchison and become the new Republican U.S. Senator from Texas. (That
was a Rove-versus-Koch contest, and the Kochs won it in far-rightwing
Texas, whose far-rightwingism was a chief reason why the Kochs chose
that state to mount their big assault against their Party’s ‘moderate’
Establishment.) So: this is actually an intra-Republican war over which
faction of the Republican aristocracy will own (or else co-own) the next
White House. Bush or Cruz would then be leasing it – either (if Bush or
else Clinton) from the Rove (that is: the Bush or — if shared with the
Democratic aristocracy — Clinton) group; or else (if Cruz) from the Koch
group.
During the 2012 “election,” the
Kochs and their friends poured at least $400 million into Republican
coffers; and, so, even if the majority of the traditional Republican
aristocracy end up financing Hillary’s campaign, there will still be
plenty of money going into Cruz’s campaign, at least until he gets
beaten — if he gets beaten. (The Kochs are so extreme that
even Hillary isn’t acceptable to them. If Cruz looks like he’s going
down, then they’ll back a different ‘Tea Party’ favorite. They created the ‘Tea Party.’)
Also, the traditional wing of the Party told Haberman and White that
Rand Paul would be unacceptable to them if Hillary gets the Democratic
nod. Rand Paul hasn’t yet sold out enough to the Koch brothers, though
they are the big financial backers of “libertarianism,” the philosophy
to which Paul declares his allegiance. So, if Paul enters the race, then
his candidacy is currently expected to be much like that of his father,
Ron Paul: purely a “movement” phenomenon, not a part of serious U.S.
politics (which has come to be increasingly about transactions, and less
than ever about ideology).
However, if Paul does ultimately
sell out to the Kochs, and if Cruz fails to do well in the primaries,
then again, there might yet be a real battle for the Republican
nomination within the Republican Party. Already, Paul is making his pitch to the Koch crowd;
so, Cruz will probably have at least one serious competitor for Koch
money. (I’m expecting Cruz to fade in the primaries, and Paul to become
the Republican nominee, and President — but only after first selling out
to the Kochs.)
The general expectation is that
Clinton is going to take the Democratic nomination in a walk, so that
her gargantuan corporate-backed campaign war-chest — filled with cash
from both the Democratic and a large portion of the Republican
aristocracies — will be the heavy favorite to win the White House in
2016. The only things that might upset that expectation are:
1) Someone like Alan Grayson
enters the Democratic primaries from the progressive side and somehow
makes the nomination a real contest without selling out to the
aristocracy.
2) Bernie Sanders enters the
race as a progressive-movement independent after Hillary wins the
Democratic nomination and he draws off enough Democrats for the
Republican nominee to win.
3) The $30-billion Mike
Bloomberg, former Mayor of Wall Street, spends $3 billion on his own
independent Presidential campaign and draws off enough votes in the
general election so that for the first time there will be a “third
party” (actually no-party) winner of the White House. (He’s like Hillary
Clinton on almost all issues — if he was Wall Street’s Mayor, then she
was Wall Street’s Senator.)
4) Jeb Bush runs, and turns out
to be an even more-skillful politician than he has been cracked up to
be, so that he wins the Republican nomination and goes on to beat
Hillary Clinton.
5) Rand Paul wins the Republican
nomination and unites enough conservatives and libertarians to win the
White House (my expectation).
As for the Democratic aristocrats, they already love a candidate, Clinton, who is acceptable to most Republican aristocrats.
So (unless #1 on that list turns
out to be the case), the aristocracy, led by some faction of it, will
be partying with cake and champaign on Election Night 8 November 2016,
no matter which “side” wins: it’ll be themselves. They’ll have beaten us, yet again, in this ‘democracy,’ via these ‘elections.’
Not all that much different from
Ukraine, really; and we’re getting closer and closer to that all the
time. Let’s hope we’ll avoid the civil war part of it. That could turn
out to be even worse than our last one. Next time, it wouldn’t be over
slavery versus non-slavery; it would be over nazism versus fascism. Democracy, it seems, is already nearly dead here.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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