A new gang is in power in Washington. No one quite knows how or why, but the old gang is fighting back with all of its might. A charlatan heads the new gang; he says he opposes everything the old boss did. He says he will set it all right at home and in the global neighborhood, yet his cabinet of consiglieri is stacked with muscular Pentagon Telamon Ajaxes, avaricious bankers and Wall Street vultures, and the mother of all archaic fossil-fuel planetary polluters—Exxon Mobil.
A clutch of customary villains, no less villainous than the ones before. His boss of Labor opposes raising the minimum wage. His boss of Treasury is a former partner of Goldman Sachs, international economic polluters, big time.
In January 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved up its “Doomsday Clock” by thirty seconds to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the closest to Armageddon since 1953. The causes, they wrote, were “nuclear volatility” and climate change. The signs that Trump might reverse the course of doom are unpromising. Rex Tillerson’s appointment means that Exxon-Mobil will function as the virtual Secretary of State. The war state rules: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Trump said to Mika Brzesinki in a phone call in December, if we can trust the report by the co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Meanwhile, during and after the electoral process, the circulatory apparatus of two-gang democracy has shown…