Trump 2016: The Latest and Maybe Final Battle of the American Civil War

America, our nation is at a crossroads. This is not normal “politics” and partisanship that we might have all seen as the Clinton’s and Bush’s came and went in Washington DC. We are all about to lose the final battle of the American Civil War.

From 1861 to 1864 we fought the bloodiest war in American history and over 600,000 Americans perished. This was a war as all wars are based in economics. It was a war over control of resources and wealth. In this case the cotton industry powered by slavery. It was a war where very wealthy plantation owners the industrialists of their day controlling the poorest often most poorly educated rural Americans through patriotic jingoism and lies convinced those men to march barefoot into the hot lead of musket and canon fire.

After Union general Sherman made his brutal destructive march to the Sea where he burned Southern plantations, melted down and tied up their railroad rails, and shelled their towns, the end was near.

This war took lives and many limbs from families and it also took their world view of white supremacy and cultural identity and crushed it into heaps of smoldering ash. Many people lost everything they had, family, wealth, and a sense of control of how the world worked and their place in it.

The scars were so deep that they last to this day as in many former Confederate Southern states the mere mention of the word “union” stirs negative emotions and contempt. I think perhaps this is one reason the labor union movement has faced the greatest difficulties in this region.

The Southern states were ravaged by war and the loss of economic power. The people had their lives upended and those who saw battle were as many in such circumstances deeply emotionally and mentally scarred.

Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877 was supposed to mend these scars and help rebuild the Southern states of our newly stitched together Union but instead was prematurely ended and extremely poorly conducted. So much so that some including this writer concludes there was essentially no real reconstruction of the Union and consequently no healing for our nation.

Since then from the days of Jim Crow laws essentially an extension of slavery, to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960’s and on to the advent of the ACA “ObamaCare” by our nation’s first black President, the decedents of the Southern plantation owning class have been seeking a return to their economic dominance.

They still use the poor rural often partially educated working class folks pitting them against the descendants of slaves to incite a war against the Federals for economic control of resources. They still use jingoism like “states rights” and “make America great again” to control these people into fighting for right to enjoy their billionaire lifestyles and pass their aristocracy to their children, something we created the inheritance tax to try to prevent.

Recently former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke at an event and said that the plan for the new Trump administration is to essentially end the Federal Government as we know it undoing the New Deal social safety network put in place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This is why President Elect Trump as announced his intention to nominate as heads of departments of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, State Department, Housing and Urban Development, and Interior Department people who have publically spoken out as seeking the actual elimination or evisceration of these Federal agencies. Because this is a hostile takeover of the United States Federal government by the billionaire class that was crushed in the U.S. Civil War and later pushed by by the Roosevelt New Deal in the ending of the so-called Gilded Age. This is their revenge.

Ironically at least in my view this latest perhaps last battle of our Civil War was war was won because once again we failed at reconstruction. This time we failed to rebuild what some call the “Rust Belt” otherwise known as the American industrial Midwest. This area if you drive through many towns looks as if it was torn apart by war with buildings that had steel mills and textile mills the former centers of economic prosperity and security now either empty shells or replaced by vacant lots.

Each day as citizens of these towns drive by these empty lots and factory buildings where they, their parents and neighbors used to have reliable decent paying jobs, instead of seeing those new “good tech jobs” which were often promised they see evidence of their abandonment by their own government.

Sadly it’s not the government that abandoned them so much as the CEO’s of multinational corporations and the billionaire hedge-fund managers and others who manipulated and infiltrated the government for decades as they shifted their money to cheap labor countries and tax havens.

Our government living in a DC bubble surrounded by Wall Street people using the revolving door to come and go from boardrooms to government backrooms, became out of touch with the real and deep economic pain of the people in many of our previously prosperous industrial centers of our nation.

The working families living in our urban centers and rural towns where our industrial economy gave our lives meaning and main streets life, have been hurting for a long time in this nation.

So when a leader comes along like Bill Clinton looks you in the eyes and says “I feel your pain” or Barack Obama and says “Yes we can” or Donald Trump and says “Make America great again” many of our people cling to that hope for change and cast their ballot accordingly just as they did recently.

Tragically the people who just seized power in the Federal government have no real interest in helping rebuild the industrial Midwest. Those coal jobs are never coming back. The factory jobs like the ones I myself worked at in my youth have been replaced by automation and to a lesser degree by corporate written trade deals. I keep remembering the late Steve Jobs of Apple reportedly told President Obama about the tech jobs he sent to China when he said those jobs are never coming back.

Donald Trump is not here to make America great again. He is here to fulfill the vengeance of the old money Southern plantation Aristocracy. This is the latest, perhaps final battle of the United States Civil War and as in every war the poor will pay the price and the wealthy will reap the profits. Just like in every war the people will suffer, be stolen from and many will die.

This is not hyperbole or even exaggeration. Cutting off Medicaid expansion is killing poor people today and what they’re about to do to Medicare, Medicaid the ACA (Obamacare) and Social Security will result in thousands of deaths each and every year. These deaths have been projected and studied by Harvard studies and others.

So-called “austerity” conservative policies have been directly linked to higher suicide rates. We see an epidemic of overdoses from pain killers here in the U.S. with suicides also on the increase especially among white middle aged men with partial college education many of whom experienced economic displacement from the American workplace.

Poverty kills. We are still at war America and we are still dying so the aristocracy the wealthy elites can maintain their plantation lifestyles and pass their wealth and power to their children. Don’t be surprised when Chelsea Clinton runs for political office and when Donald Trump Jr or Ivanka do the same. They say the past doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.

I sincerely hope that this time after the war is settled we do better at reconstruction and healing the deep scars that are sure to come.

What do you think? Leave your comment below and if you appreciate this piece I wrote please click the heart/like and share it. Thanks!

Joseph Segal

Founder of BetterWorld.store
Creating tools to broadcast messages of love!