By Robert Reich
As
we’ve seen this bizarre political year, the biggest force welling up is rage
against insider elites in both parties, and against the American establishment
as a whole – including the denizens of Wall Street, large corporations, and the
mainstream media.
Now,
with Bernie Sanders essentially out of the race, Donald Trump wants Americans
to believe he’s the remaining anti-establishment candidate.
It’s
smart politics but it’s a hoax.
Trump
is even more of an establishment figure than Hillary Clinton – inheriting a
fortune from his father, spending years bribing politicians to subsidize his
hotels and casinos, and repeatedly using bankruptcy to shield his money while
leaving creditors and workers holding the bag.
“Bernie
Sanders and I are in complete accord [on] trade,“ Trump said last week in Ohio.
”[Sanders] said we’re being ripped off and I say with being ripped off. I’ve
been saying it for years he’s been saying it for years. I think I am saying it
even louder …. Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to
politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing
but poverty and heartache.”
By
putting opposition to trade at the center of his economic agenda, Trump gets a
twofer – landing blows against big American corporations and Wall Street, and
also against the Clintons (he traces America’s economic problems to the North
American Free Trade Agreement that Bill Clinton signed in 1993, and the entry
of China into the World Trade Organization, which Bill Clinton supported, and
says Hillary “voted for virtually every trade agreement.”)
It’s
pure demagoguery. Trade isn’t to blame for the declining wages and job security
of most Americans.
The
real problem has been the unwillingness of the biggest beneficiaries of trade
(and also of job-displacing technologies) to share the gains with the rest of
America – through larger wage subsidies, stronger safety nets, better schools,
and easier access to higher education. Trump’s Republican Party has been the
main culprit.
Trump
vows to cancel the pending Trans Pacific Partnership – “another disaster done
and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country” – which Hillary
Clinton praised in 2012 as “set[ting] the gold standard in trade agreements,”
and then reversed herself after Sanders came out strongly against it.
Too
bad Clinton delegates on the Democratic Party’s platform committee muddied the
waters last week by voting down a proposal by Sanders delegates to put the
party on record as opposing the TPP, noting instead that “there are a diversity
of views in the party” on this matter.
The
central problem with the TPP is it would penalize member nations for raising
health, safety, environmental, and labor standards. But this aspect of the TPP
doesn’t trouble Trump, who calls America “overregulated.”
Trump’s
faux populism extends to “powerful corporations, media elites, and powerful
dynasties,” who, he said last week in Pennsylvania, again echoing Sanders, have
“rigged the system for their benefit will do anything and say anything to keep
things exactly as they are.“
Unwittingly,
the GOP establishment seems intent on proving Trump’s point. Mitt Romney
condemns him, conservative media pundit George Will is deserting the Republican
Party because of him, big business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and
the National Association of Manufacturers blast him, Republican mega-donors
like Paul Singer rebuke him, and Wall Street Republicans like former Goldman
Sachs CEO and Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (who initiated the Wall
Street bailout) announce they’re voting for Hillary Clinton.
"It’s
almost – in some ways, like, I’m running against two parties,” Trump crowed
recently. “The people who rigged the system are supporting Hillary Clinton.”
It’s
all an act. The real Donald Trump thinks U.S. wages are too high, and has
fought against the unionization of his hotel employees.
His
businesses outsource abroad like mad. Most of the suits, ties and cuff links he
peddles are made in China; his luxury line of furniture comes from Turkey; the
crystal for his Trump Home line is produced in Slovenia.
And
the real Trump is on the side of the super wealthy. He proposes to cut taxes on
the rich from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, and reduce taxes on all business
income to 15 percent (thereby slashing the top tax rate of hedge fund and
private-equity managers from the current 23.8 percent to 15 percent).
The
real Trump isn’t a populist. He’s a plutocrat. Above all, he’s a con man. And
the people being conned are average working Americans who are buying Trump’s
ruse of being a man of the people.
ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at
the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center
for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective
cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books,
including the best sellers “Aftershock, “The Work of Nations," and "Beyond
Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also
a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause,
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the
award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.