Voters Have Heavy Responsibility In November -- Paul Craig Roberts

Voters Have Heavy Responsibility In November

Paul Craig Roberts

It seems like a nightmare, but it is reality: The Democratic Party has chosen a criminal as its presidential candidate. And the liberals said that Reagan wore teflon!

Enough commentators have made the point that Hillary has been elevated above the law even before she is POTUS. The One Percent know how to protect its servants.

As Obama and Hillary demonstrate, the Democratic Party, formerly a defender of the common man, now competes with the Republican Party as an agent of the One Percent. Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat, and Ronald Reagan the last Republican, whose concerns encompassed ordinary folks.

Who represents the people today? Ironically, one of the One Percent—multi-billionaire Donald Trump. The incongruity of the people’s champion being a One Percenter has produced conspiracy theories that Trump’s assigned role is to alienate voters, thereby delivering the presidency to Hillary. Considering how deceptive American political life is, such a conspiracy cannot be dismissed out of hand. However, it seems to me that Trump is making too good of a fight out of it for his candidacy to be a conspiracy. The damage he is doing to Hillary does not fit the conspiracy theory. Trump can do himself in without having to take Hillary with him.

The presstitutes are assigned the task of laying Trump’s scalp at the feet of Hillary. Paradoxically, the standard of comparison for denigrating Trump’s political leadership is Ronald Reagan, who during his terms was consistently derided as a senile old fool who fell asleep during cabinet meetings, but nevertheless was responsible for Iran-Contra and everything else that resulted in media concerns. Even the neoconservatives, who Reagan fired and prosecuted, now hold up Reagan as the gold standard of presidential leadership.

As I do, Amb. Faith Whittlesey, who served Reagan during both terms, remembers it differently.
Moreover, she sees Trump as a proven leader, especially when compared to Hillary, a mere vassal of the One Percent. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ambassador-faith-whittlesey/never—they-said-that-of_b_10845880.html

In my opinion, Whittlesey’s emphasis on Reagan’s free market capitalism is overdone. Reagan was a union leader, and free market capitalists are opposed to unions. It was Bill Clinton, not Ronald Reagan, who deregulated the financial system in the mistaken belief that “markets are self-regulating.”

Reagan spoke up for private enterprise, because the deck had been stacked against it since the Great Depression. There had been two large expansions of government, Roosevelt’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. One more and private enterprise would have had to have been put on the endangered list. There needs to be a balance between governmentg and business, and Reagan was trying to keep a balance.

If Trump were to be elected, none of us knows whether he could escape the power of the One Percent and rule in behalf of broader interests than has been the case during the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. However, unlike Hillary, Trump is not a vassal. He is his own independent person.

This doesn’t mean that he knows what to do or whom to appoint to government office in order to save the sinking ship that is the United States of America.

What does seem clear is that if Hillary is elected, more war, including war with Russia, will be our future.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.