The Question of Steve Bannon
Originally published on AH Tribune.
Steve Bannon. It is a name of elicits anger or praise depending on who one is talking to. Some praise his leadership of Brietbart.com, arguing that it is fights off against the liberal bias found in media. Others despise him, not only for his work at Breitbart, but his white nationalism, having been accused by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Cummings as being a white nationalist. Given this, many were overjoyed recently when President Trump fired Bannon from his role as White House chief strategist. While we are right to rejoice in his leaving, what should be explored is his influence in the foreign policy and economic sectors, something that the mainstream media has not really touched on.
On April 6, 2017, it was reported that President Trump had launched missiles on an airbase in Syria in response to allegations of the Syrian government engaging in a chemical weapons attack. While the media didn’t note the major, massive holes in this story, there also wasn’t much talk about Bannon’s push to avoid the strike.
Now, it should be noted, this wasn’t due to Bannon’s concern to avoid escalating the situation, finding out the truth of the matter, or anything like that, but it didn’t “advance Trump’s America First doctrine.” Chris Dixon of The Liberty Conservative noted that the strikes illustrated “the fall of the America First message within the Trump administration and the diminishing influence of nationalists such as Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.” So we can see that in these internal White House politics, there is a kind of mainstream, war-oriented, globalist clique in the form of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Jared Kushner, and their allies, with Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Julia Hahn, and the Freedom Caucus pushing somewhat of a more nationalist, domestic-oriented state of affairs. This was one of Bannon’s first major loses in the White House, as not only did the strikes occur, but even more importantly, it bought people together across party lines, no matter if they were a politician or regular American.
Economically, Bannon went against mainstream conservative thought by arguing for a forty percent tax increase on the wealthy. Currently, the President’s tax plan includes a decrease in the business tax, from 35% to 15%, and benefits people who make $500,000 to $1 million annually with a 6.4% decrease; over $1 million is a 9.3% decrease. Specifically, Bannon pushed for “tax reform to include a new 44 percent top marginal tax rate, hitting people who earn more than $5 million a year, with the revenue paying for tax cuts for the rest.” It fits in with Bannon’s (white) populist ideology in that helps to alleviate the tax burden of the working (white) man, however, it clashes with the view of mainstream Republicans, economic adviser Gary Cohn who came from Goldman Sachs (although Bannon himself has a history with Sachs as well), and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin who quickly trashed the idea, as did the President himself.
Bannon attempted again to steer the boat in a different direction by proposing that sites like Google and Facebook be regulated like utilities. What that means is that it would get rid of the monopoly power Facebook, Google and other companies currently have. During Obama’s second term, competition investigations in the online sector disappeared with the placement of “Google-friendly appointees [being] installed across a range of agencies that govern Google's business, from the DoJ to the Library of Congress to the FCC.” Yet, Bannon went and fought against this, arguing that the aforementioned websites have effectively become necessities in modern day life and thus, such companies shouldn’t enjoy the monopoly status they currently have and should be more regulated.
The tech business community has spent record amounts lobbying the feds, mainly in order to avoid this. However, the fight is far from over as “House Republicans are asking the chief executives of tech and telecom rivals — including Facebook, Google, AT&T and Comcast — to appear before the U.S. Congress in September and help settle the debate over net neutrality once and for all.” We will see how the situation plays out.
Finally, this most recent war of words regarding North Korea is speculated as the comment that cost Bannon his job. Bannon talked to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect. From the article:
Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote. Given that China is not likely to do much more on North Korea, and that the logic of mutually assured destruction was its own source of restraint, Bannon saw no reason not to proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.
Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” (emphasis added)
It was this that Kuttner has speculated got Bannon fired as he going up against the US Defense and State Departments.
The leaders of both departments recently pushed back against Bannon’s argument, with Tillerson saying “We are prepared. We’re prepared militarily, we’re prepared with our allies to respond if that is necessary.” Mattis noted that “there would be strong military consequences for the North Korean regime, echoing past statements that an attack on Guam or any other U.S. land would mean war.” Bannon’s view that there is no military solution to the Korea situation also puts him in the crosshairs of the defense industry, where stocks in the United States had gone to record highs and in South Korea saw a major upsurge with the talk of military action against North Korea. This is on top of new information coming out that North Korea is sitting upon somewhere in the realm of $6-$10 trillion in mineral resources.
Effectively what Bannon did when he said that was to tell the American people that they needed to reject the hysteria and hype surrounding the North Korea situation and that there are ways to solve problems that don’t involve war, that don’t involve brute force. His proposal of a non-military solution, though its plausibility be questionable, had the possibility of taking the wind out of the sails of the war hawks and their funders.
Overall, Bannon, while having disgusting and reprehensible views, was something of a fighter against the status quo. While we should ignore his racist ideas, we may want to at least pay attention to his foreign policy and economic thoughts. As the saying goes, a broken clock is right twice a day.
