Unequal Spoils
By Phil Mattera for the Dirt Diggers Digest
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| For more cartoons by Ted Rall, CLICK HERE |
Calling themselves
Meliorists, people such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, Ted Turner and Bill
Gates Sr. use their wealth to bankroll creative efforts to undermine the
stranglehold of big business and promote an agenda of universal healthcare, a
living wage, sustainable energy, public financing of elections and other forms
of popular democracy.
It is unlikely that
Donald Trump has read the 733-page volume, but his emerging administration is
well on its way to becoming an ugly variation on Nader’s theme.
Rather than
enlightened billionaires promoting a progressive agenda, Trump is building a
government that will be run by wealthy proponents of reactionary policies.
After a presidential
campaign in which he railed against elites and suggested that he would shake up
the system, he is filling his cabinet and other top jobs with individuals who,
like himself, have exploited it to the hilt.
Trump’s pick for
Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, worked for 17 years at Goldman Sachs but
made his real money purchasing distressed IndyMac Bank amid the financial
crisis in 2009, and after engaging in controversial foreclosure practices
resold it at a hefty profit.
The proposed Commerce
Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose personal wealth is estimated by Forbes at $2.9
billion, has an even longer track record as a vulture investor who has turned
around failing businesses but often at a high cost to employees.
Betsy DeVos, Trump’s
choice for Education Secretary, is a school privatization zealot who comes from
a wealthy family and is married to an heir to the Amway fortune.
According to news
reports, Trump is likely to name even more members of the 0.1 Percent to his
administration. Plutocracy, once used as a rhetorical flourish, is increasingly
a literal description of where things are heading.
Even those members of
the Trump team who are not listed on the Forbes 400 are known for promoting policies
that benefit the billionaire class rather than the workers who voted for the
Republican ticket. Health and Human Services nominee.
Tom Price is a
pharma-friendly, anti-Obamacare fanatic who seems to want to create a system of
bare-bones coverage that is highly profitable to the insurance industry.
Seema Verma, named to
head the agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid, is a pro-privatization
consultant.
And then there are
the dozens of industry lobbyists installed on the
landing teams for individual federal agencies who are helping target a wide
range of regulations that protect consumers, workers and the general public.
Perhaps out of an
awareness that his supporters may be starting to look askance at this power
grab by corporate interests, Trump has taken pains to fulfill his campaign
promise to help workers at the Carrier Corporation plant in Indianapolis whose
jobs were being sent to Mexico.
The president-elect
has just announced a deal in which up some 800 of the 1,400 affected workers
will save their jobs. This is welcome news for those workers and their
families, who probably don’t care that Mike Pence used his soon-to-expire
powers as governor to grant the company the kind of special “incentives” that
Trump frequently denounced during the campaign.
For the rest of the
country, it difficult to avoid thinking that Trump and Pence are using the
Carrier situation mainly as a way to boost their popularity and distract people
from the overwhelmingly pro-business bent of the rest of the transition.
We are likely to see
more of this as the Trump Administration creates a new form of inequality: big
and lucrative policy gains for the powerful and smaller, mainly symbolic
benefits for the rest of the population.
The question is: will Trump’s working
class enthusiasts settle for crumbs while the powerful gorge themselves?
