Americans have long been subjected to political and corporate sleight-of-hand, the creation of a narrative that says it is doing one thing while behind the scenes doing another.
America’s corporate tyrants work with our elected officials to claim they are keeping us safe and secure in our continental cocoon of North America as they spend $1 trillion a year preparing for and engaging in war across the globe.
This false narrative is part of the long-standing military-industrial complex narrative. It propagates fear so that Americans open their national treasury and allow it to be drained of hard-earned tax dollars to purchase weapon systems that do not work, empty inventories of ammunition on unarmed populations and create endless wars when diplomacy would have resolved the issue.
Let us not create a moral equivalency between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party or between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but rather let us highlight to Americans that they now have another narrative containing some truth, some falsehoods and some hysteria, all being aimed their way so they will not object to or attempt to prevent corporate theft abroad or here at home.
The point is not to obsess about Trump but rather to obsess about the entire American political system. Outrage at Trump must be channeled to the broader system that allows Trump and other elected officials, Democrat and Republican, to commit war crimes, gut our national treasury and benefit their corporate donors, all while pointing the finger at the malevolent character on the other side of the political aisle, or the evil foreigner on the other side of the globe.
It is time to reject these narratives. The truth of corporate tyranny is outrageous enough. Let us stay focused on that. Brad Wolf is director of Peace Action Network and co-coördinates the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.
