HP Source: ‘Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains’

‘So understand me when I say, there’s no love for this U.S.A.

 This world is doomed with its own segregation,

Just another nazi test..’

 

Last week we considered the direction that the stimuluses provided by central banks should take.

As a fellow commentator said, as global stock markets continue to grind higher, the outlook for growth and jobs continues to deteriorate.

Investors seem unmoved to the forthcoming crisis in unemployment, zero or even negative growth, and the huge inequality that the ‘apparent’ market recovery is hiding. Lest we forget the pandemic still is far from over, and the US is aflame with injustice.

‘as global stock markets continue to grind higher, the outlook for growth and jobs continues to deteriorate’

As far as markets are concerned their biggest fear is a return to the ‘normal’, liquidity/QE stopped and interest rates rising.

At some point this must happen, and it has the potential to go horribly wrong.

This time around, unlike 2008, if we don’t see a ‘genuine’, i.e. one that benefits everyone, then the riots we are currently seeing in the US could be the tip of the iceberg.

We need to see the support guided by the government in the same was that happened after WW2.

This doesn’t mean that governments effectively run or dictate aspects of the economy, instead they need to nurture and encourage the private sector to take an active invest role alongside them.

There is still the pandemic to contend with, and the possibility of a ‘second wave’, and, in the UK we can add:

 

• Can we negotiate a meaningful trade deal with Europe, or will it be hard-Brexit?
• Who wins in November’s US election will have a major effect on a post–Brexit UK

 

It is to the US that will focus on for this rest of this article. For anyone who supports Trump and/or his actions this week you aren’t going to enjoy this!

‘When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,’ ⁽¹⁾

At breakfast on Tuesday morning I sat down to the frankly horrible pictures of Donald Trump, with four US flags behind him, threatening to send in the military against the American people, then crossing the road to pose for a photo outside a historic church while clutching an upside-down Bible.

He was only able to get there after heavily armed police and horse-mounted national guardsmen fired teargas and rubber bullets to chase away peaceful protesters and journalists.

Comparing him with other to dictators has fallen out of favour in recent years, but that is returning:

 

• Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator for Oregon, tweeted: ‘The fascist speech Donald Trump just delivered verged on a declaration of war against American citizens. I fear for our country tonight and will not stop defending America against Trump’s assault.’
• Kamala Harris, a Democratic senator for California, told the MSNBC network: ‘These are not the words of a president. They are the words of a dictator.’

 

To bring in the military would require him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, therefore this may just be a ruse to force the hand of state governors to call up more troops from the national guard.

He had already told the governors to get tough; ‘You have to dominate or you’ll look like a bunch of jerks.’ Adding, ‘you have to arrest and try people,’ as he referred to protesters as ‘terrorists’.

‘people are feeling real pain out there and we’ve got to have national leadership in calling for calm’

One of the Democratic governor-jerks decided to draw the line at Trump’s rhetoric. ‘I need to say that people are feeling real pain out there and we’ve got to have national leadership in calling for calm and making sure that we’re addressing the concerns of the legitimate peaceful protesters,’ said JB Pritzker of Illinois, during a conference call between the president and state governors. ‘That will help us to bring order.’

To which Trump responded, ‘OK well thank you very much, JB, I don’t like your rhetoric much either because I watched it with respect to the coronavirus, and I don’t like your rhetoric much either. I think you could’ve done a much better job, frankly.’

The choreography of his remarks in the White House Rose Garden and protesters being roughed up just outside was a made-for-television moment around the time of the evening news.

‘The darkness of his tone was also true to his instincts’

The darkness of his tone was also true to his instincts demonstrating his apparent love of conflict. The address was not unlike his populist rallies, berating the media and threatening to ‘lock up’ political opponents. The thugs in police uniform are being mandated by a thug in the Oval Office.

Earlier in his presidency, Trump was surrounded by military figures, including chief of staff John Kelly and national security adviser HR McMaster, who might have found ways to thwart his strongman posture. They are long gone, replaced by supplicants pandering to the president.

Chris Whipple, author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, said: ‘This is someone who has never empowered anyone to tell him what he does not want to hear and the result is a complete failure of leadership. It’s clear that he no longer has a functioning White House chief of staff.’

‘There is no one who can walk into the Oval Office, close the door and tell him hard truths … . He has the presidency he’s always wanted, which is a presidency of enablers and sycophants and people who will not dare to tell him what he needs to hear, and so we’re seeing the results,’ Whipple said.

‘a presidency of enablers and sycophants and people who will not dare to tell him what he needs to hear’

Writing from a Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr famously told his anxious fellow clergymen that his non-violent protests would force those in power to negotiate for racial justice. ‘The time is always ripe to do right,’ he wrote.

Last evening, two generations later, Donald Trump walked out of the White House, where he’d been hiding in a bunker. Military police had just fired teargas and flash grenades at peaceful protesters to clear his path, so that he could wave a bible in front of a boarded church. This isn’t ‘doing right’ it’s adding fuel to the fire

Since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, Trump has watched and tweeted, whilst after decades of supposedly legal police beatings and murders protests swept across America.

Whereas previous presidents understood that their basic duty was to calm the violence and protect the people, Trump is using his office to incite violence.

 

• This is the man who, during his 2016 campaign, encouraged his supporters to assault protesters. ‘Knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK,’ he said on the day of the Iowa caucuses. ‘I promise you I will pay for the legal fees.’
• Later in Las Vegas, he said the security guards were too gentle with another protester. ‘I’d like to punch him in the face,’ he said.

 

Sure enough, a protester was sucker-punched on his way out of a rally the following month.

This is a president who was sued for incitement to riot by three protesters after they were assaulted leaving one of his rallies in Kentucky.

The case ultimately failed, but only after a judge ruled that Trump recklessly incited violence against an African-American woman by a crowd that included known members of hate groups.

This is a president who told a crowd of police officers to be violent with arrested citizens; ‘When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see ’em thrown in, rough, I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’

‘I have to tell you, you know, the laws are so horrendously stacked against us, because for years and years, they’ve been made to protect the criminal,’ he added. ‘Totally made to protect the criminal. Not the officers. You do something wrong, you’re in more jeopardy than they are.’

As we have seen over the years many of the US police force need little encouragement to resort to unnecessary violence.

 

‘A young nigga got it bad ’cause I’m brown

And not the other color so police think

They have the authority to kill a minority..’

 

Trump’s comments and behaviour shows that he can no more end the violence than he can manage a pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 Americans, or create the jobs that will rescue more than 40 million unemployed.

His comments are incendiary; ‘I am your president of law and order,’ he said in the Rose Garden, as thousands of Americans protested against the nation’s agents of law and order.

Trump said he would mobilise ‘all available federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting’ to protect ‘your Second Amendment rights’.

‘a call to arms for every vigilante to escalate the violence’

This is no more than a call to arms for every vigilante to escalate the violence. A call that was gleefully taken up by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas who tweeted that the protesters – he prefers to call them terrorists – should face combat troops on American streets. ‘Let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division’.

Trumps tactic, if you can call it that, is to confuse his faithful followers, framing the aggressor as a peace-loving victim, and the victim as a hateful aggressor.

Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary, tweeted on Monday night: ‘I lived through MLK and Bobby being assassinated, our cities burning, Watergate, 9/11 and other national tragedies. I’ve never been so frightened for our country as I am tonight. Trump has to go now.’

The sheer scale of the protests suggests that this death may prove a turning point. Trumps attempts to dismiss those participating as merely lawless rioters, or out-of-state ‘anarchists’, shows that he hasn’t understood the mass expression of revulsion and fury that has been forthcoming.

‘he hasn’t understood the mass expression of revulsion and fury’

He leads, supposedly, a country that has already suffered a Covid-19 death toll of more than 100,000, a disproportionate number of these came from the less well-off, killing African Americans at almost three times the rate of white Americans.

The economic devastation caused by the disease has pushed the unemployment rate close to 20%, on a par with the Great Depression. Again, the fallout has disproportionately affected African Americans.

 

‘But with the rate of inflation you should eat your check

So you try to make a hustle, to get ahead

But the only thing you manage is to stay in the red..’

 

Trumps rhetoric in the last week shows he is unfit to hold such office; his words were as stupid and incendiary as those of a notorious Miami police chief during racial unrest in 1967 ⁽²⁾.

From his defence of far-right marchers in Charlottesville to the abuse of black football players who refuse to stand for the national anthem, Trump has exacerbated and exploited racial divisions to shore up his white voter base.

Between now and November, there is a danger the president will attempt to act on the authoritarian undertones of his inauguration speech in 2017, when he talked of stamping out ‘American carnage’ in the country’s inner cities.

The Atlanta rapper Killer Mike has urged those marching across the US to take on prosecutors, mayoral offices, police chiefs and deputy chiefs in the voting booth, and to challenge those local structures of judicial and civic power, where systemic racism still thrives.

A new generation of politicians, informed by the culture and insights of movements such as Black Lives Matter, will be required to follow through successfully on such a strategy.

They may find allies in police officers such as those in New Jersey who have marched with protesters, or the police chief in Atlanta who condemned the use of Tasers by her officers and went out into the street to listen to demonstrators.

We must all hope this is enough, 4-more years of Trump would set the world backwards. Not just domestically, but internationally, as the US will become more insular and self-obsessed, and more copy-cat populist leaders seek to follow in his footsteps.

 

‘The symbols of our heritage

Lit up proudly in the night

Somehow fits to see the homeless people

Passed out on the lawn..’

 

Notes:

1. _{The source of this quote appears uncertain with names such James Waterman Wise, and Sinclair Lewis suggested}
2. _{Trump tweeted on Friday, calling the protesters in Minneapolis ‘thugs’ and said: ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ The phrase was used prominently by Walter E. Headley, Miami’s former police chief, in 1967 as he pledged a no-holds-barred response to a Christmas-season outbreak of violent crime in black neighbourhoods that had left three people dead in attempted robberies. Headley suggested that his department’s tough tactics had kept Miami calm that year, even as race riots were convulsing dozens of other cities and leaving scores dead. ‘We haven’t had any serious problems with civil uprising and looting because I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ he said. ‘We don’t mind being accused of police brutality. They haven’t seen anything yet.’}

 

A powerful commentary from Philip this week, and a reminder that the inequality he has documented in the UK is every bit as acute in the US, and manifesting itself in the protests that have swept the country since the murder of George Floyd.

With a mountain to climb in terms of rebuilding the economy, Philip is cogniscent that as the sands run out on our opportunity to Brexit with a trade deal, the likelihood is that a no-deal scenario will force us into ever closer alignment with the US; he pulls no punches in sharing his feelings about that happening if Mr Trump prevails in November.

His choice of tracks is powerful as befits the situation – there is fury, there is outrage; the fact that some of the tracks are 30 years old, proves only to him that ‘nothing changes in the US’. Although, just maybe..

Not a sniff of a point for me, and to be honest, given the degree of difficulty just 3 pts for both artist and title, seems a bit mingy; please note that this week’s tracks do come with a PG rating – they’re pretty gamey.

Electronic entries only please, and cap well and truly doffed to you if you got to ‘frantic hardcore at its best allied to powerful lyrics’ – Bad Brains with ‘Big Take Over’. Wow. Then ‘a seminal rap album which includes NWA with ‘F**k the Police’.

‘A more dance orientated form of rap, but still powerful lyrics’ – Run DMC with ‘You’re Blind’; last but not least the ‘original hardcore US punks, angry and still relevant’ Dead Kennedys with ‘Stars and Stripes of Corruption’.

I’m not sure these tracks were ever designed to be ‘enjoyed’ but its an interesting trip down an unfamiliar avenue; stay safe.

 

 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

 

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