Political trade secrets
Perhaps you're aware of this story from a decade ago, but probably not because everybody involved made a concerted effort to keep it quiet: Rogue employees at the Coca-Cola Company were turned in by the executives at PepsiCo after attempting to sell the rival company vital secrets about the operations at Coke. The authors at Freakonomics (linked above) suggested a few days after that event that Pepsi might be as interested in keeping the super secret recipe for Coke out of the hands of the public as Coke is...
That would be a lot like what happens to prescription drugs when they go off patent and generic drug companies come in. The impact would be that the price of real Coke would fall a lot (probably not all the way to the price of the generic Coke knockoffs). This would clearly be terrible for Coke. It would probably also be bad for Pepsi. With Coke now much cheaper, people would switch from Pepsi to Coke. Pepsi profits would likely fall.
Since Ralph Nader, in his 2004 book "The Good Fight," famously linked the consumer choice between Democrats and Republicans to the one between Coke and Pepsi, it stirred me to ponder how this year's presence of Donald Trump in the presidential race is like that example of corporate espionage among soda makers ten years ago. What bothers the establishment, in this case, about Trump is his manners. It's not his politics, or even his rhetoric. Those are right in line with those of the Republicans that oppose him...
Ben Carson didn't say we needed to build a wall to keep Mexicans out. No, instead he suggested we use drones to bomb the areas of the Southwestern desert where migrants are known to cross without sanction. (Maybe his political mistake was in failing to call on the Mexican government to pay for the drone strikes.) Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio also support the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, even against the criticism of the plan by Pope Francis.
Rubio and Cruz don't support a stoppage of immigration to the U.S. for all Muslims, as Trump does. What Rubio favors instead is a halt to immigration "from that part of the world." Ted Cruz has suggested that President Obama's defense of Muslims in general is a defense of terrorism. They spend the first two hours of each televised debate talking about how immigration is ruining the country. Then, in each of their closing remarks, always mention how their parents came to the country years ago, without understanding English, and wound up making a magical life here for themselves and their children.
Trump says there's nothing wrong with torture, indeed, he says we don't do enough of it. But the establishment candidates, Rubio and Cruz, also refuse to rule out traditional torture techniques as part of their campaign's proposed policies on national security. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have implemented torture. In 2009, Gen. Barry McCaffrey admitted that our intelligence services have tortured Muslims to the point of murdering dozens of them. We're still waiting for the public release of the videos that show the worst offenses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. There are pictures still under federal protection that show American soldiers raping children.
Trump caused major angst by saying we need to go after the family members of terrorists. Obama actually does that. When the sixteen-year-old son of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike two weeks after the same thing happened to his father, in Yemen in 2011, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the boy should have "had a more responsible father."
See what I'm getting at? Washington's beef with Trump is only that his bluntness is bad for the brand. The torture and bombing topics are shit they talk about only in secret, or within the protective cocoon of a White House press briefing, yet here he is out in Sioux City and Macon blabbing it in front of the church folk. Does the establishment media and political apparatus not think we know about any of this stuff? Do they really wonder why Trump's speeches, while poisonous and repellent to many, don't cause blanching on behalf of the portion of the electorate that's scared to the point of bowel discharge by the threat of terrorism?
It was absolutely comical to see a group of 90 Washington careerists, calling themselves "members of the Republican national security community," come out with guns blazing against Trump this past week, releasing a statement of condemnation against the Republican front-runner. In this paper, we have the bizarre spectacle of seeing them criticize the "embrace of the expansive use of torture"? Signee Robert Blackwill, former National Security Adviser, said of torture in 2005, "I would never say never." Signee Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security, signed another paper once, one that authorized waterboarding.
Trump is a "corporate espionage-style" threat to these guys. He's repeatedly bashed their former boss, George W. Bush, on the campaign stump, routinely calling him an awful president. On stage in February, he even brought up the third-rail issue of the 9/11 Commission, referring subtly to the 28 redacted pages of the commission's report. "Elect me," he promised, "and we'll find out who really knocked down the towers. You may find it's the Saudis."
Protecting a brand means protecting secrets. Coke and Pepsi know this. Democrats and Republicans know it. Donald Trump seems to understand it intuitively. It's more than okay for a Republican administration to implement illegal, immoral, and anti-American policies. It's definitely okay for a Democratic administration to then immunize those Republicans from accountability with bipartisan political support for the same, and an offer of legal protection from prosecution. But for Christ's sake, don't talk about it. And stop shouting it.
posted by CM @ 11:55 AM
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