Whichever candidate wins, US will be corrupt military state: Activist

Early results from the US presidential election 2016 are in, and Donald Trump has won more than the required 270 Electoral Votes to become the 45th US president. The campaigning for the race was extremely polarizing and divisive. Press TV has spoken to David Swanson, American activist and author, as well as Lawrence J. Korb, former US assistant secretary of defense, to get their projections on the direction in which the US would be headed after the election.

Swanson believes that the United States is going to be "a corporatized, corrupted military state, seeking empire” regardless of whoever wins and becomes president.

“I do not actually know whether it is better for the world to recognize that in the face of Donald Trump or to be somewhat fooled in the [President Barack] Obama-like manner of Hillary Clinton,” he said.

He also asserted that most Americans were in fact trying to “defeat” one of the two candidates whom they were told were acceptable and had a chance of winning, rather than supporting the other.

However, he said, in many cases this mentality quickly begins to slide in the direction of actually liking the candidate that they started out describing as “a lesser evil.”

“So after the Election Day, you have a crowd of people who actually like the president and a crowd of people who despise the president. And then the rest of us, this little minority that wants to now get active and demand better policies and impose better policies on those in power,” he stated.

The activist further argued that Americans need to have the strength, unity and principled policy to stand up as a people and resist the unpopular issues such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTIP), the war supplemental spending bill, as well as the effort to undo the right to sue Saudi Arabia.

He also noted that if Hillary Clinton became president, people in the United States and around the world would see her as somehow a candidate of “liberalism, peace and humanitarianism” in contrast to the “buffoonish, racist” alternative in Donald Trump and stick with that mindset for the next eight years or at least four.

Swanson further dismissed President Obama’s disastrous policies, adding that the powers he was handing off to either Clinton or Trump would far exceed the powers that the previous presidents had.

“Here we have Barack Obama as president having created a new form of warfare, having proliferated wars and bases and enlarged the military spending and invested in new nuclear weapons and created a new Cold War with Russia. We have got 7, 8 countries bombed, at least 5 wars up and running, ready to be handed off to the next president and people around the world, not just in the United States, are thinking of this man as a peaceful president,” he said.

“When Obama just funnels more arms and training and troops into Syria, which the US public was even more against, and exacerbates the problem and figures out a different PR angle to get into the war on both sides the next year, that is not a restraint peaceful policy,” he added.  

Swanson also criticized the election campaign for dealing with all sorts of “nonsense issues” instead of addressing the defense spending budget that either of the candidates has considered.

Meanwhile, the other panelist on Press TV’s program, Lawrence J. Korb noted that Obama has had “a great legacy,” adding that his popularity ratings are higher than any president at the end of his office.

“He [Obama] came in, we had a horrible recession, almost a depression. He has gotten us out of that. Unemployment rate is below five percent. Yes, we are involved in wars in the Middle East but not to the extent that we were when he came in. And it is not just us. We have a coalition of other nations that are dealing with it,” he said.

He also opined that Hillary Clinton is going to follow along Obama’s restraint policies whereas Donald Trump would undo a lot of his accomplishments - namely the nuclear deal with Iran.

The analyst further denounced the personal attacks by both US presidential candidates, adding that they should have talked more about the defense spending budget in their campaign. 

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