Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

(Leonard Cohen, Democracy is coming to the USA, 1993)

President Donald J. Trump became the 47^th U.S. President on Monday, January 20^th at Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Building. President Trump then invoked the memory of the 25^th U.S. President, William McKinley, by signing an executive order restoring the name of Alaska’s Mount McKinley, and removing the Indigenous name Denali. 

Trump also executively renamed the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.”

McKinley was a Republican who believed strongly in the effectiveness of tariffs by supporting the Tariff Act of 1890 while he was a Representative and before he became President. Tariffs were raised on imports up to 50% as a protection for American manufacturing interests. 

These manipulations were part of the colonization and expansion of territory beyond the legal boundaries of the United States during the “Manifest Destiny” era of mid-19^th Century continental aggression. It’s curious that the journalist John L. O’Sullivan, who became a future Confederate propagandist, was the first to use the phrase in 1845, arguing for the annexation of both Texas and Oregon.

Clearly President Trump admires this Republican President almost as much as he celebrates the concept of international trade being conducted like war, through the imposition of taxes designed to damage imports in a competitive marketplace. He also seems to be willfully unaware of how negative tariffs can be on the price of goods and the American voters who elected him. 

Trump sees the Gay Nineties, when the major banking and industrial families of Cleveland and New York could do almost anything they wanted with virtually no governmental interference, as a gilded age of wealth. At that time, the robber barons owned more than fifty percent of the nation’s property in this pre-income tax era.

The term “one percenter” has become synonymous with the extremely wealthy members of our society at the top of the global food chain. These would be your typical dictators, oil company executives, bank presidents, venture capitalists, and Tech Sector entrepreneurs plus politicians like the Trump and the Bush families. 

The rest of us are the “ninety-nine percenters” who work and pay taxes to support the wealthy. The official term for these 21^st century kleptomaniacs is “ultra-high net-worth individuals,” and they are defined as having a financial portfolio of at least 30 million US dollars. 

An independent study by lead author James S. Henry, a former McKinsey & Co. Chief Economist, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited, estimates that the super wealthy, who only represent .0001% of the world population, have tucked away a tidy tax-free retirement package in numbered bank accounts.

Using data from the BIS, IMF, World Bank, and world governments, Henry reports that the global 1% have deposited somewhere between $21 trillion to $32 trillion in tax havens to evade taxes. The 1% hide more than the total annual economic output of the US and Japan combined.

The “trickle-down theory” much touted during the Reagan-Bush Presidencies seems to be working backwards. It’s actually “Robin Hood in Reverse.” 

Aside:  Strangely the term “one percenter” was originally applied by the American Motorcycle Club in the 1960s to differentiate its riders from the “outlaw” motorcycle gang members who were becoming notorious for drunken brawls and public intimidation of U.S. citizens. Sunny Barger, president of the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels, took this designation as a badge of honour (literally). If you look carefully at an Angels’ “colours” you will usually find a 1% symbol on the shoulder patch, proudly proclaiming membership in this exclusive club. To date, the corporate executives and global elite have not followed the Angels in updating their wardrobe.

It seems unreal that Donald Trump is the President of the United States for a second time. During both election campaigns he appeared to be channeling the actor Peter Finch playing Howard Beale, the “Mad Prophet” in the 1976 feature Network with his line "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" 

Clearly the electorate responded to his siren call and elected him to the most powerful office on the planet and once again quoting Beale: “And woe is us! We're in a lot of trouble!!”

The very idea that a manipulative, hard-nosed businessman would have any interest in returning unemployed factory workers or coal miners to their jobs is absurd. Trump is a slick salesman in the tradition of marketing guru Elmer Wheeler who in 1938 came up with the sales slogan “sell the sizzle, not the steak.” 

H. L. Mencken in a Chicago Tribune column summarized the reality of what happens when the chickens vote for Colonel Sanders:

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” 

What is remarkable in retrospect is that the “alt-right” has been with us all along, hiding in plain sight, on the road to this delusional fantasyland. In the past, politicians were embarrassed to publicly state their sexist and racist views. 

The misguided electorate have now given a mandate that Trump and his billionaire cabinet members have already started to put into action, reshaping America into a new “workers’ paradise” in the next four years. 

We forget that Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the same coin, just as Trump and Putin may become in our own time. I’ll close with another H. L. Mencken quote from Notes on Democracy which seems very accurate in the current situation:

“There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called…the demaslave. . .The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself.”