The World Is A Business, Liberal
Liberals, you are old; you think in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, yen, renminbi, rubles, pounds and euros.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.
And the current presidency is no exception. But you, liberals, committed to an international capitalist system as being ultimately humane long ago, so you cannot acknowledge this current failure for what it is. Instead, you focus on some Russian influence as a man behind the curtain pulling the switches. But the few facts which make up your theories are much more easily explained by the reality that the world is governed by profit and that this governance, full of contradictions, is the greatest threat against humanity today.
The conservatives and the Republican Party, though they lack basic human compassion, are at the very least aware of how power works:
Sure, Trump is a particularly foolish and ghoulish example of modern power, but his characteristics are not extraordinary among the people who actually run the world. The patriarchal sexual violence, with little to no real accountability, is not unusual. The familial ties to fascism and current ties to white nationalism are not unusual. Relentlessly attacking any media that questions them is not unusual. Profiting off of death, disease, and other health miseries is not unusual. Facilitating racial hatred and violence is not unusual. Advocating for “tough on crime” stances to facilitate the creation of a mostly Black and Latinx underclass is not unusual.
But many of you, liberals, are not really focused on such things. Russia is the problem, and particularly you look to a clumsy “follow the money” approach where each business deal or transaction constitutes the latest evidence of a grand orchestration that explains how the orange goon is now our president.
Liberals: what do you think it is that your heroes like former president Barack Obama or failed candidate Hillary Clinton did in their meetings? Read from the Constitution and reflected on what the ideals of equality and freedom mean? Of course not. They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, mini-max solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like the business interests they serve (and in the case of the Democrats that is mostly finance, insurance, and real estate).
Russia is a large and important country in the world, particularly for its natural resources, and that is where a good amount of the conspiracy theories arise from. But the truth in globalized capitalism is that it is difficult for those at the highest echelons of power to completely escape having done any transactions in a country like Russia. That is true for the Clintons. It is true for “tough-on-Russia” former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who was COO of Citigroup when it earned the title of “Best Consumer Bank in Russia.” And it is true for former SEC Chair Mary Jo White and her firm Debevoise & Plimpton’s intimate involvement in Russian cybersecurity.
And of course none of those links are conclusive of anything and that’s the point. Money connections to Russia, liberals, are not a sign that Russia has power over everything: they are a sign that capitalism, more than any national interest, is the ties that bind all things. And it is capitalism that produced Donald J. Trump: only in this system (or an even more barbaric one like feudalism) can such a person have accumulated so much wealth and, consequently, so much power.
He is such a glaring rebuttal to the claim of capitalist meritocracy that you, liberals, are obsessed with proving that he is not really as wealthy as he claims. That he is a “bad” businessman. That he is on the fringe of the business world (and oh how that has changed after his inauguration).
You are so wedded to the idea of the ethical capitalist that when capitalism’s most raw form is laid bare you must find an explanation other than that a grossly incompetent, sexually vicious, explicitly racist, spoiled man-child could be exactly what your precious free market wants. That they want a world of famine, oppression, and brutality. All necessities privatized. All anxieties commodified. All dissent subdued.
