GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – News that has brightened my Day
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been arrested and charged with fraud over a fundraising campaign to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
Bannon was a key architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory. His right-wing anti-immigration ideology fuelled Trump’s “America First” campaign.
Bannon and three others are facing charges that they defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with the “We Build the Wall” campaign, which raised $US25m, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said.
The former investment banker was the driving force behind the right-wing Breitbart News website before serving in the Trump White House as chief strategist who was highly influential in many of Trump’s decisions such as the mid-2017 US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.
Bannon’s arrest comes at the very time when the extreme right with their hate filled agenda are at their most dangerous. He has also been an influential supporter of forming a right-wing supergroup of populist parties in Europe which , if it succeeded , would usher in a very dark period in World history.
We are an island nation but as Covid -19 has proved we are not immune to what happens in other parts of the world and to watch the politics of selfishness starting to crumble both internationally and at home gives me some hope that we may also yet see the demise of the economics of selfishness that is neoliberalism which, for the last 3 decades, has benefitted the self-centred, self- indulgent few at the expense of the many.
Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
“Darkness is good: Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, Satan. That’s power”
…an actual statement by Mr Bannon.
Bannon – who once claimed, “Darkness is good: Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, Satan. That’s power”
and who last week appeared on Fox News to argue “Democrats want death and destruction,”
proving how much he’s evolved –
was taken off the 151-foot yacht Lady May, anchored off the Connecticut coast, early Thursday morning.
The boat’s owner is a high-profile Chinese real-estate tycoon and possible felon who’s either an asylum-seeker or a spy; he’s also a member of Mar-a-Lago, which is why Trump reportedly stepped in to stop his deportation. More at this link: Abby Zimet, Common Dreams, 20th August 2020
That place is a powder keg.
Prediction:
– election close to call (similar to the Bush/Gore election), initially Democrats look to have won
– by around December 9th Republicans appear to have won
– whomever is inaugurated in Feb 2021 will not finish the term
– immediately after the election and into the beginning of 2021 there will be widespread social unrest similar to BLM protests
– as a result of all of the above NZ is in even higher demand as a place to live and our population rapidly expands
to watch the politics of selfishness starting to crumble both internationally and at home gives me some hope
Yes. Very much so.
It’s been a long, long, long time coming, but maybe we (much of the world) really are beginning to emerge from the darkness of greed, selfishness and of power for its own sake.
Bannon represents the corporatist/ financialist right’s attempts to reorganize and defend its retreat, as neoliberal orthodoxy collapsed in the wake of 2008. Neoliberalism as a political-economic project has been over for some time, and everything we’ve seen over the last few years is the power struggle over which faction of the middle class will replace the neoliberal elites as the new ruling class(es), and whether those elites will govern at global, national, or local levels.
Investment banker. Says it all. It could be a positive description of someone but would require a change to investing in people and giving them opportunity to advance themselves using their personal gifts.