Trump isn’t the problem, says new doc The Corporate Coup d’etat

(Note: Well, my prediction in the first line turned out to be wrong, although it didn’t matter either way: sitting here in October 2021, the only thing that impresses about the Biden presidency is how quickly it descended into open authoritarianism and naked corporatism, and how little the administration cares to conceal it. But obviously, given the review below — which was not, significantly, published in the print edition of the Straight or even edited for the web — I would have predicted that too. I wrote this piece because I worked in a liberal institution with friends and colleagues who didn’t share my cynicism about the opposition to Trump, which was no opposition at all, or my aversion to identity politics and all the other hollow gestures of the fake left — that same fake left that now, it must be said, and to my amazement and horror, is lending its full-throated support under COVID to the merger of State with Big Pharma and Big Tech. This is definitely not my grandmother’s socialism; it’s a kind of derangement, and it might be the Coup’s final and most insidious triumph.)

One way or another, there will probably be a Trump 2020. 

The explicit message of the documentary The Corporate Coup d'etat, presented with a necessary blue-in-the-face urgency, is that Cheeto Mussolini isn’t an aberration, but the continuation and inevitable result of a political system overcome by total corporate capture. 

It’s a notion repeated tirelessly and viewed from a variety of angles in Fred Peabody’s sharp film, which gets its SuperChannel premiere, rather poetically, on the day of David Koch’s death (August 23). 

In the company of Chris Hedges, the film visits “sacrifice zones” like Camden, New Jersey and Youngstown, Ohio, “Places that capitalism exploited and destroyed for profit, leaving behind misery, poverty, and environmental devastation.” 

It also finds Cornel West in typically fluid form, along with journalists Sarah Jaffe, Michelle Chen (The Nation), and Lee Fang (The Intercept). They join other clear-eyed observers of American empire, including Ralph Nader, and Canada’s Maude Barlow and John Ralston Saul, who wrote in 1995 that “Mussolini won the war”, and now confesses that he didn’t fully realize how right he was.

Illustrating that corporatism is imposed through force or conditioned through media, Matt Taibbi observes the “symbiotic relationship between Trump and his so-called adversaries in CNN and MSNBC,” concluding with wry understatement that “it’s kinda phoney. They’re making bank like never before, and Trump is the reason.”

Peabody takes the viewer back to the notorious “Powell Memorandum”, an ultra-conservative manifesto penned in 1971 by Lewis F. Powell Jr., just prior to his nomination by Nixon to the Supreme Court. It called for an intense commitment to the destruction of liberal institutions. 

This powerful declaration of class war occupies square one of what followed: from Black Monday in ’77 to Reaganomics to NAFTA, and on to Trump’s tax bill, which allowed corporations to buy back their own stock, inflate their value, defraud shareholders, and create astronomical compensation packages for CEOs. 

It’s by such relentlessly undemocratic means we arrive here with a global oligarchic class “looting and stealing as fast as they can while everything collapses.” (Hedges)

For most, this might be as glaringly obvious as a burning Amazon viewed from space. Perhaps more vitally, Peabody’s film unequivocally implicates America’s two-party system in pursuing the same goals.

Over images of the Clintons, Hedges thunders that "the faux Liberal class assiduously carried out an assault on the citizenry on behalf of corporate power.” Cornel West identifies Barack Obama as “the refined, smiling black face of the American empire.” Maude Barlow squarely blames Democrats for “setting the table for Donald Trump’s success.”

Most poignantly, Peabody’s doc takes the viewer to a bar in in decrepit Youngstown, Ohio, which is filled—black, white, man, and woman alike—with disillusioned Obama voters who turned to Trump, including the bar’s owner, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. (Seriously.) 

“With the two worst candidates of any election year, my vote defaulted to Donald Trump,” he says. 

How do we think these people—"deplorables" in Hillary Clinton's estimation—feel about the likes of Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, or Kamala Harris? 

Published August, 2019