Not Everything Nor Everyone Is A Commodity

The problem with our illegitimate president is not that he is imbecilic and inept—it is that he has surrendered total power to the oligarchs.
They get what they want.
They do what they want.

Although the president is a one-man wrecking crew aimed at democracy and institutions, and he has turned the United States into a laughingstock around the globe, our national crisis is embodied not in Trump but the corporate state’s now unfettered pillage.

Trump, who has no inclination or ability to govern, has handed the machinery of government over to the bankers, corporate executives, right-wing think tanks, CEOs and generals. They are eradicating the few regulations and laws that inhibited a naked kleptocracy. They are dynamiting the institutions, including the State Department, that served interests other than corporate profit and are stacking the courts with far right-wing, corporate-controlled ideologues. Trump provides the daily entertainment; the elites handle the business of looting, exploiting and destroying.

Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, a process begun before the election of Trump, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become a farce. This is the road we are paving friends. It is a road that leads to collapse and tyranny, and we are well into this journey.

The oligarch's moral and intellectual vacuum produced Trump.
They too are con artists. They are far slicker than he at selling lies and more adept at disguising their greed through absurd ideologies such as neoliberalism and globalization, but they belong to the same criminal class and share most of the pathologies that characterize Trump.

Trump, backed by the worst retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, including Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Sheldon Adelson and Carl Icahn, is the fool who prances at the front of our civilization's death march.
As natural resources become scarce and the wealth of the empire evaporates, a shackled population has been forced to work harder for less.
State revenues have been squandered in narcissistic projects and futile oil wars.

  The decision to slash corporate tax rates for the rich while increasing an already bloated military budget by $54 billion is typical of decayed civilizations.
Empires expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves and then go bankrupt funneling all their wealth into military industry. The Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires all imploded in a similar fashion.  The USSR went bankrupt trying to keep up in the arms race.
The lessons of history are clear.

But the illiterate charlatans who seize power in the dying days of empire know nothing of history. They are driven by a primal lust for wealth, one that is never satisfied no matter how many billions they possess.
 In dying cultures everything is turned into a commodity.
Human beings are commodities.
The natural world is a commodity.
Government and democratic institutions are commodities.
All are mined and wrecked for profit.
Nothing has an intrinsic value.
Nothing is valued.
The relentless and suicidal drive to accumulate greater and greater wealth by destroying the systems that sustain life is idolatry.
It ignores the biblical injunction that idols always begin by demanding human sacrifice and end by demanding self-sacrifice. The oligarchs are not only building our funeral pyre, they are building their own.

Lacking a vision beyond satiating their own greed, the modern oligarchs like their predecessors, revel in the intoxicating power to destroy.
They confuse destruction with creation.
They are agents of what Sigmund Freud calls the death instinct.
They find in acts of national self-immolation a godlike power.
They denigrate empathy, intellectual curiosity, artistic expression and the common good, virtues that sustain life.
They celebrate celebrity, wealth, hedonism, manipulation and the ability to dominate others. They know nothing of the past. They do not think about the future. Those around them are temporarily useful to their aims and must be flattered and rewarded but in the end are ruthlessly cast aside.
There is no human connection. 

 A commodity is a product manufactured for sale.
The ecosystem, labor and money, therefore, are not commodities.
Once these fictitious commodities are treated as real ones for exploitation and manipulation, human society devours itself. Workers become dehumanized cogs. Currency and trade are manipulated by speculators, wreaking havoc with economies and leading to financial collapse. The natural world is turned into a toxic wasteland.

The Oligarchs, as the society breaks down, retreat into protected enclaves where they have access to security and services denied to the wider population. They last longer than those outside their gates, but the tsunami of destruction they orchestrate does not spare them.

As long as Trump serves the interests of the Oligarchs he will remain president. If, for some reason, he is unable to serve these interests he will disappear. 

The Russia investigation—launched when Robert Mueller became special counsel in May reveals money laundering, fraud and shady business practices, things that have always characterized Trump’s financial empire. But it is unlikely to unseat the president. He will not be impeached for mental incompetence, over the emoluments clause or for obstruction of justice, although he is guilty on all these counts.
He is useful to those who hold real power in the corporate state, so he will stay.

Trump’s bizarre ramblings and behavior also serve a useful purpose. They are a colorful diversion from the razing of democratic institutions. As cable news networks feed us stories of his trysts with a porn actress and outlandish tweets, the real work of the oligarchs is being carried out largely away from public view. The courts are stacked with Federalist Society judges, the fossil fuel industry is plundering public lands and the coastlines and ripping up regulations that protected us from its poisons, and the Pentagon, given carte blanche, is engaged in an orgy of militarism with a trillion-dollar-a-year budget and about 800 military bases in scores of countries around the world.

Trump, is clueless about what he has unleashed.
He is uninterested in and bored by the complexities of governance and policy.
This suits the desires of those who manage the corporate state.
For the president there is only one real concern, the tumultuous Trump White House reality show and how it plays out on television. Nothing else matters.

The inability of the political establishment and the press to moderate Trump’s egregious behavior is rooted in their loss of credibility. The press, along with political and intellectual elites, spent decades championing economic and political policies that solidified corporate power and betrayed and impoverished American workers.
The hypocrisy and mendacity of the Oligarchs & their political minions left them despised and distrusted by the victims of deindustrialization and austerity programs.

The attempt to restore civility to public discourse and competency to political office is, therefore, fruitless. Liberal and establishment institutions, including the leadership of the two main political parties, academia and the press, squandered their moral authority. And the refusal to address the engine of discontent—social inequality—ensures that they will remain ineffectual. The blatant buffoonery of Trump and the coming tyranny go hand in hand laying the asphalt on the road to ruin.