Global picture shows we didn’t suffer political chaos at all

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

At the end of February last year, when the dust had settled on the general election, we thought we had voted for chaos.

The largest party, Fine Gael, had less than a third of the votes – and the only way it could get anything through the House was to rely on the second largest party, its traditional old enemy, Fianna Fáil.

It was the closest we have come in this State to the long-cherished wish of left-wing parties; for the two centrist parties to merge and realign Irish politics along expected lines.

What we got may not have been neat – but it was like a mild aspirin compared to the political rat poison that’s been administered in the United Kingdom, in the Unites States and in what is now rapidly becoming the Dis-United European Union.

Donald Trump gives daily reminders of why he is a change president, a disrupter. He has continued his presidency as he conducted himself in the election.

They say that those who campaign in poetry govern in prose; but he campaigned with bile to govern with vile.

What’s so strange about it all is this guy was presented as the anti-establishment candidate. The image his campaign team pushed was a “blue collar billionaire”.

The oxymoron is so glaring, that it’s obvious that no such thing exists. Trump was born with a golden spoon in his mouth, the son of a billionaire.

The idea that he would take on the establishment is laughable. He has stuffed his Cabinet with millionaires and with Wall Street luminaries and the whole impetus of his presidency will be easing the path for big business and big finance, reducing the tax burden of the very wealth, squeezing welfare and health care, and denying climate change.

During the campaign he riffed on two themes that have given rise to right-wing populists everywhere – the sense that their countries were being over-run by grasping immigrants (untrue in all cases); and the promise that they could somehow return the countries to a glorious past.

In American, it would mean un-rusting the Rust Belt and bringing back factories to the Mid-West States where manufacturing is already gone elsewhere.

Others might quibble about his trade policies but it’s the most reasonable part of what he’s doing. He’s trying to revive blue collar jobs. And the way he wants to do that is by forcing companies to set up their factories in the US and not abroad.

He’s doing that by tearing up many of the multilateral trade deals and replacing them with bilateral trade deals, the aim of which is to get America’s huge deficits down.

If companies don’t cooperate he will slap huge tariffs on goods that are imported in the US. Expect other States to respond in kind.

What’s insidious is his travel ban, which is clearly directed at Muslims, despite his denials. If you looked at his tweets he talked about minority Christian believers being persecuted and murdered in some countries (which is, of course, true).

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.