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The Trump-Media Circus and Continuity of Agenda

Ulson Gunnar, January 27

5434234234As the US media expertly divides the American public into pro and anti-Trump camps over cartoonish, unfounded personal accusations aimed at President-elect Donald Trump, Trump’s nominee for US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson confirmed before the US Congress that hostilities and agitation toward both Moscow and Beijing will only expand over the next 4-8 years.

The Business Insider in an article titled, “CNN distances itself from BuzzFeed, says Trump is using the website ‘to deflect from CNN’s reporting’,” outlined the recent rash of accusations and the political fallout in their wake, stating:

CNN distanced itself from BuzzFeed on Wednesday after the digital news outlet published a document that contained unverified claims about President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign conduct and personal life.

CNN’s decision is based on the fact that nothing it or BuzzFeed reported is actually substantiated with fact, with the Business Insider admitting:

“We [CNN] made it clear that we were not publishing any of the details of the 35-page document because we have not corroborated the report’s allegations,” the statement continued.

The fallout following the oafish, elementary lies spread by BuzzFeed, CNN, and others, represents rhetorical bait irresistible not only to Trump supporters, but to anyone with a conscience who opposes the systemic abuse that persists across the Western media. However, bait this irresistible is laid out for a purpose.

As the Public Squabbles, Continuity of Agenda Marches On

Were headlines not consumed by the crass allegations pushed across the Western media aimed at Trump, and the rhetorical backlash that predictably followed, the American public might be consumed instead by the fact that Trump’s nominee for US Secretary of State just confirmed that quite literally nothing is going to change as Trump takes office in regards to US foreign policy

Reuters, in an article titled, “Trump secretary of state nominee: China should be denied access to South China Sea islands,” reports that:

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state set a course for a potentially serious confrontation with Beijing on Wednesday, saying China should be denied access to islands it has built in the contested South China Sea. 

In comments expected to enrage Beijing, Rex Tillerson told his confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee that China’s building of islands and putting military assets on those islands was “akin to Russia’s taking Crimea” from Ukraine.

In Tillerson’s comments, it’s revealed that not only will the United States continue meddling across Asia and provoking conflict with China, just as was done under US President Barack Obama’s 8-year administration, but that, in Tillerson’s view, Russia was unjustified in its intervention in Crimea in the wake of a US-NATO backed Neo-Nazi-led coup in Kiev, Ukraine.

Tillerson would explicitly claim:

We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.

Nothing, short of war, will backup Tillerson’s statements about a sea literally an ocean away from US shores. His statements also absolutely contradict the non-interventionism many Trump supporters believed would unfold upon his taking office.

How the US Presidency Really Works 

Imagine the United States is a corporation. It thus has a board of directors (Wall Street). It has a CEO (the US President). The candidates for CEO and the CEO are all chosen by the board of directors merely under the guise of “democratic elections.” The CEO then implements the desires of the unelected board of directors, serving also as a spokesperson for the board and a representative of the board’s overarching agenda.

This explains how, over the past 16 years from US President George Bush Jr. to now President-elect Donald Trump, singular agendas, including unending war in Iraq and Afghanistan, still rage and expanding confrontations with Russia, China, and Iran continue unabated regardless of who is president, and regardless of the alleged principles, political ideals, and campaign promises they respectively represented.

Rhetorically and ideologically, Presidents Bush Jr. and Obama could not have been any more diametrically opposed, yet the continuity of agenda from one 8-year administration to the other was almost seamless. Upon closer examination of the actual corporate-financier interests underpinning both presidencies’ policies, we find the same profiteering special interests and their agendas at play; from big-defense and big-auto to big-oil and mega-finance. From big-pharma to big-ag, and all of these industries sponsoring the same circle of “policy experts” within the halls of corporate-financier funded “think tanks.”

The presidency of Donald Trump will be no different. There is nothing about either Trump or those he has surrounded himself with that makes him any more “independent” from the defacto “board of directors” that runs corporate America than the administrations of Bush or Obama.

To distract the American public from this fact, and to lump at least some of the public behind President-elect Trump, they have orchestrated a media campaign so crass and despicable, few can resist (even just on principle alone) from responding to and thus becoming consumed and distracted by this expanding media circus.

On the other side of this circus, however, is an America even more deeply and dangerously involved in provoking global conflict and the instability and human tragedy that will predictably unfold in its wake.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.