By Rob Williams
I read with interest The Valley Reporter's editorial of last week re: the 2016 presidential election, Trump's narrow victory and the "pendulum" swinging from left to right re: the electorate and presidential politics. Respectfully, this makes no sense. What we witnessed under Barack Obama from 2008 to 2016 was the continuation of the Bush-Cheney regime on steroids and Trump's election already is promising more of the same.
To wit: When so-called liberal Democrat Barack Obama won his 2008 presidential victory on a carefully crafted "Hope and Change" marketing campaign, Vermont and the U.S. rejoiced and then promptly went to sleep for eight years.
While Vermonters were sleeping, President Obama "deep sixed" his grassroots citizen database of supporters and then presided over a dramatic expansion of U.S. neoliberal imperial policies begun by "New Democrat" Bill Clinton in the 1990s and amplified by the Bush-Cheney Republicans, including Wall Street bailouts of "too big to fail" banks, six more wars begun overseas, the largest weapons/arms deals ever seen, more drone bombing and whistleblower prosecution than witnessed under Bush-Cheney and unequivocal support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) at the economic expense of the dispossessed American workers who just elected Trump to high office.
Even "Obamacare," his signature domestic policy achievement, turned over our health care system to the for-profit insurance industry who actually wrote the legislation adopted by Obama's White House.
Over the next two months, President-elect Trump (whose success owes so much to big media networks like CBS, ABC, NBC and FOX who made tons of cash delivering the salacious spectacle of the Trump campaign nightly into American living rooms) will be encircled in a giant, friendly bear hug by the true unelected U.S. masters of empire: Wall Street financiers, the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA and the big energy and big pharma industries, who are already helping him hand-pick his cabinet with the eager help of newly overjoyed reactionary and neoconservative Republicans.
They are all sitting "The Donald" down and explaining to him how the U.S. empire really works and the dark forces of misogyny, racism and anti-immigrant sentiment Trump's campaign has unleashed will only grow stronger when Trump's voting base soon realizes he will not be able to deliver on his economic promises to “make America great again,” at least for them.
Fascism is what happens when corporate capitalism feels threatened. Trump's grotesque personal qualities, married to the U.S.'s three-decade imperial neoliberal globalization model, are a recipe for fascist disaster. Our best alternative, as Vermonters, is twofold. We must (1) decentralize and make more resilient our Green Mountain communities - finance, fuel, food and beyond – and (2) elect political leaders of courage and conscience who are prepared to use Vermont's constitutional power as a state to push back on ever-expanding U.S. imperial power.
We've written about all of this at www.vermontindependent.org, and we have launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce a full-length documentary film called Plan V about how Vermont can do this.
Above all, we all must wake up and recognize that the United States is now a bipartisan empire uninterested in solving the problems of ordinary citizens, regardless of their politics. We Vermonters must organize for our own 21st-century future. "Freedom and Unity," and free Vermont!
Williams lives in Waitsfield.
