AI
Wednesday, November 06, 2024 6:39:26 PM
Why did voters abandon Kamala Harris? Because they feel trapped – and Trump offered a way out
---------------
------
Teflon populism See the article below. Firstly, lengthy excerpts
from an article more relevant today than it was six years ago
"Trump to Dictators: Have a Nice Day
[...]
Teflon populism
"Any one of these revelations would have ended the career of a politician in any previous Polish government. But since PiS came to power in 2015, not a single government minister has resigned as a result of a scandal. On the contrary, scandals seem to have shored up the party’s base. Although polls show that 84% of Poles support establishing a lay commission to investigate paedophilia in the church, a significant share of the electorate still supports PiS. Most Poles believe that scandals are real, but that didn’t stop PiS from securing a substantial victory in the European Parliament, with 45.5% of the vote. If anything, the party has gained even more leeway to engage in malign and corrupt behaviour.
The PiS government is immune to scandal for two reasons. The first is the strong economy, which has allowed it to pursue successive social programs aimed at marginalised voters. For example, just before the European Parliament election, the government disbursed an extra month’s worth of retirement benefits and issued payments to rural residents. Both groups voted overwhelmingly for PiS.
[As so many past Republican presidents Trump will inherit a strong
economy, look for him to indulge in some social giveaways.]
The second factor is propaganda. Because PiS constantly levies spurious, defamatory charges against the opposition and groups such as doctors, judges and striking teachers, real scandals no longer seem all that shocking or compromising. This debasement of public discourse is no accident. Kaczynski has made a conscious effort to create a media environment in which anything goes. That is why he frequently accuses European Council President Donald Tusk of conspiring with the Russians to orchestrate the plane crash that killed his brother in 2010. It is also why he traffics in conspiracy theories about German Chancellor Angela Merkel being installed by the Stasi (communist East Germany’s notorious secret police) and about refugees carrying infectious diseases.
For a politician like Kaczynski, a public sphere with no standards of truth or rules of decorum is ideal. The media and opposition can expose whatever they want; it won’t change anything. While investigative journalists compile fact after fact and receipt after receipt, and publish rigorous year-long investigations, PiS is busy poisoning public discourse through the state-run media outlets it oversees.
Owing to its unscrupulous use of targeted cash transfers and propaganda, PiS is not only immune to scandals but benefits from them. Where everyone else sees the disclosure of ugly facts, PiS supporters see a frontal assault on their own interests. Revelations of malfeasance by the ruling party merely strengthen many working-class Poles’ resolve to defend a government that has assisted them through social-welfare transfers.
The situation might be different if PiS politicians faced the risk of criminal investigation or prosecution. But the prosecutor’s office has been fully co-opted and will not seriously investigate the ruling party. You can hear a recording of Kaczynski bribing a businessman, but you can’t interrogate him (the same also seems to apply to US presidents suspected of obstructing justice). And if you are an investigative reporter who uncovers facts that are inconvenient for the government, you can expect to come under pressure to reveal your sources.
And so, Poland—and Europe—is left with a government that is utterly impervious to scandal and charges of nepotism. The PiS administration is beyond reproach, not because it is a moral authority, but precisely because it is so shamelessly immoral. It may be pillaging the country, but it is sharing enough of the spoils not to have to look over its shoulder."
------
Related:
Obviously most Americans disagree with my thinking Trump as not an ideologue. Course i never have understood...
[...]
So by the standard of national politics in 2014, Trump is unquestionably more ideological than Republicans overall. We might not have used “conservative” to describe his politics at the time, since “conservative” was a signifier for Republican spending and social positions. Now it’s a signifier for Trump’s far-right mix of populism, isolationism and xenophobia. And by the standard of the new Trump “conservatism,” Trump is in fact not extreme at all. The water got warmer.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175257451
The Road From Mitt Romney to MAGA
Opinion Paul Krugman
Sept. 18, 2023
[...]But eventually the forces that economic conservatives were trying to use ended up using them. This wasn’t something that suddenly happened with the Trump nomination; people who think that the G.O.P. suddenly changed forget how prevalent crazy conspiracy theories and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Democratic electoral victories already were in the 1990s. The current dominance of MAGA represents a culmination of a process that has been going on for decades.
P - And for the most part, Republican politicians who probably weren’t extremists themselves went along. For a while this may have been because MAGA was still delivering the right-wing economic goods. Bear in mind that despite all the talk of “populism,” Trump’s main policy achievement was a big cut in corporate taxes. But non-extremist Republicans also, and increasingly, gave in out of fear — for their careers and perhaps even their safety.
P - It’s to Romney’s credit that he finally reached his limit. But he did so very late in the game — a game that people like him basically started.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175049084&txt2find=populism
----------------
Aditya Chakrabortty
His resounding victory will be blamed on ‘populism’, but that’s lazy thinking. He addressed the key concerns far better than the Democrats did
Thu 7 Nov 2024 05.28 AEDT
Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images
All links and image
Since we’ll hear a lot, again, about “populism”, let’s remember, again, that 19th-century US populism had a healthy strain of leftwing politics. Defending workers, riling up bankers, decrying the “cross of gold” and economic conservatism: look past his Bible-bashing, and William Jennings Bryan was a precursor to Franklin Roosevelt. Yet for much of this election year, the populists’ modern-day successors in the Democrats have served up an anti-populism: telling voters they were wrong.
Americans were told they were wrong to see the corrosion of Joe Biden’s abilities, and wrong to think that his replacement should not be decided in a giant backroom stitch-up. They were wrong not to enjoy the US economic miracle, and wrong not to worry about the future of democracy. Black and brown people and students were wrong to expect the party to oppose the bloodbath in Gaza. Latinos were ungrateful to desert the party of racial equality, while Black men were boneheaded not to back a Black woman. Everyone was wrong not to lap up the rallies opened by Beyoncé and Usher, the skits on Saturday Night Live and that clip of Barack Obama rapping. Why couldn’t they just feel the joy?
For reasons I’ll explain in a moment, I’m no fan of explanations that begin and end with the bogeyman of “populism”. They almost always wind up with well-lunched commentators ventriloquising the opinions of people they’ve never talked to and in whose worlds they’ve never set foot. Look at the exit polls and you see a materialist explanation for what’s just happened: two out of three US voters report their economy is bad. And they have an excellent point. As I wrote last month, look at the data over the long run and two big trends stand out.
First, for the vast majority of US employees – whether middle class or working class, teacher or shop assistant – wages have flatlined. Not for four or even 20 years – but for most of the past half century. Strip out inflation, and average hourly earnings for seven out of 10 employees have barely risen since Richard Nixon was in the White House.
[ Insert: Except lately real wages have increased under Biden:
[...]By all the three measures we’ve evaluated, Biden and Yellen are correct.
Real average hourly earnings (calculated by adjusting nominal average hourly earnings for inflation using the CPI-U) increased by 1.20% between February 2020 and May 2024, while disposable per-capita real personal income increased by 6.06% between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2024. Finally, real median weekly wages increased by 0.83% between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2024. These findings support Biden’s claim that the average consumer possesses more purchasing power today than before the pandemic.
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/06/competing-narratives-on-real-wages-incomes-under-biden/ ]
I can’t think of a more flammable political economy than a country with a few very rich people where most workers only get by because of low gas and food prices. Then what happens? A second blow. Covid peters out, the world comes out of lockdown and low-wage America is doused in that most combustible of economic substances: inflation. The entire system goes up – and Donald Trump spots his chance.
IMAGE - Real terms pay for blue-collar workers has barely increased since the 1970s
Average hourly wage for US blue-collar workers, adjusted for inflation
Faced with the flames, what would be a left-populist response? It wouldn’t be to resort to pedantry, to correct angry voters by showing them the aggregate figures – but that’s what many Democrat supporters did. Nor would it be to roll back all the benefits extended over the pandemic: the improved child tax credit, Medicaid and unemployment insurance. But that’s what Joe Biden did, even as he shovelled billions into infrastructure. The electoral result was that working- and middle-class voters peeled away from the Democrats. Kamala Harris won the most affluent voters, while Trump took those earning between $50,000 (£39,000) and $100,000 (£77,000). The two tied for those on $50,000 and below. So much for Harris being part of the most pro-worker government since the 1960s.
Just as the electorate professed fury with the entire political and economic system, she and the Democrats made themselves the system’s defenders. They weren’t change but more of the same. They worried about the future of “democracy”; they warned about disrupting free trade. Harris’s slogan of “we’re not going back” said it all: a campaign defined by being anti-Trump rather than for anything. A strategy intended to woo “moderates” left nearly everyone cold.
Harris started her campaign differently, by promising to hunt down price-gouging corporates. That policy was popular, but there was little else. She went policy-lite, so as to present Trump with less of a target. Among the supporters she wheeled out this autumn was the billionaire Mark Cuban. In a country where the richest 0.1% own nearly 20% of all wealth .. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-zucmanBPEAoct19.pdf – almost as much as 90% of Americans put together – this is almost the definition of anti-populist politics.
The shocking US election result will create a new world order – and launch a fresh wave of Trump wannabes
Martin Kettle
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/06/us-election-donald-trump-new-world-order
We probably won’t hear much about billionaires over the next few days. If the commentariat’s form from 2016 is anything to go by, the sketch will be of angry left-behinds and rednecks rallying to a strongman. Never mind that last night’s exit polls showed Trump as personally less popular than Harris, or that more than half of voters judge his views to be “too extreme”. Not to mention that Trump is easily the richest man ever to serve in the White House, with a personal net worth of about $5.5bn (£4.3bn). A marketing man, skilled at targeting discontent, Trump does not follow his crowds. Rather, he is led by the money men around him: the fossil fuel executives, the shadow bankers, the crypto bros and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Mitt Romney and George W Bush could always rely on some stuffed shirts from the Fortune 500 to hand over a few tens of thousands. But Trump’s donor class is very different. They include men like Stephen Schwarzman, head of the world’s largest private equity firm, Blackstone, billionaire investor Nelson Peltz and Silicon Valley’s David Sacks.
-------
[No need for random thoughts about how Vance got there: Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph ]
[...]
In contrast to Trump ... Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging
leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
P - Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/16/buffalo-massacre-great-replacement-theory-republicans .. voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”
[...]
Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
P - Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.
P - That’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.
----------
[Insert: So there you have it, Vance is young, the tech moguls have long-term plans. NOTE: No Libertarian party has ever won an election to lead any country of the world, so one decades in the making solution of these tech oligarchs appears to be to not only eliminate elections, but also to eliminate countries.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175293248
-------
They’re not company men building relationships but, as Trump styles himself, dealmakers. This lot have shelled out a lot more to get in Trump (Musk alone has spent an estimated $100m), and expect their money’s worth. “They’re less concerned about the photo op and a visit to the White House,” as one former bagman for Trump told the New Yorker. “They want to essentially get their issues in the White House.”
Trump has reportedly lined up Musk to become his “secretary of cost cutting”, while in April, the US’s next president demanded oil executives give him $1bn to beat the Democrats. In return, he said, he’d let them do a lot more drilling. Slashed regulations and lower taxes are Trump’s way of keeping donors on side. Last time he was in the White House, he brought in $1.5tn of tax cuts that meant the richest 400 families in the US paid a lower tax rate than their secretaries, nannies, cleaners and anyone else in the working class.
You can expect a lot more like it over the next four years. Trump will almost certainly plunder from the budgets for social security and Medicaid. The tech bros will suckle on government subsidies, while the suits from private equity get to set government policy.
However this politics dresses itself, it’s not populism. Try: theft – taking from the poor to give to the rich.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/06/kamala-harris-us-elections-donald-trump-victory
---------------
------
Teflon populism See the article below. Firstly, lengthy excerpts
from an article more relevant today than it was six years ago
"Trump to Dictators: Have a Nice Day
[...]
Teflon populism
"Any one of these revelations would have ended the career of a politician in any previous Polish government. But since PiS came to power in 2015, not a single government minister has resigned as a result of a scandal. On the contrary, scandals seem to have shored up the party’s base. Although polls show that 84% of Poles support establishing a lay commission to investigate paedophilia in the church, a significant share of the electorate still supports PiS. Most Poles believe that scandals are real, but that didn’t stop PiS from securing a substantial victory in the European Parliament, with 45.5% of the vote. If anything, the party has gained even more leeway to engage in malign and corrupt behaviour.
The PiS government is immune to scandal for two reasons. The first is the strong economy, which has allowed it to pursue successive social programs aimed at marginalised voters. For example, just before the European Parliament election, the government disbursed an extra month’s worth of retirement benefits and issued payments to rural residents. Both groups voted overwhelmingly for PiS.
[As so many past Republican presidents Trump will inherit a strong
economy, look for him to indulge in some social giveaways.]
The second factor is propaganda. Because PiS constantly levies spurious, defamatory charges against the opposition and groups such as doctors, judges and striking teachers, real scandals no longer seem all that shocking or compromising. This debasement of public discourse is no accident. Kaczynski has made a conscious effort to create a media environment in which anything goes. That is why he frequently accuses European Council President Donald Tusk of conspiring with the Russians to orchestrate the plane crash that killed his brother in 2010. It is also why he traffics in conspiracy theories about German Chancellor Angela Merkel being installed by the Stasi (communist East Germany’s notorious secret police) and about refugees carrying infectious diseases.
For a politician like Kaczynski, a public sphere with no standards of truth or rules of decorum is ideal. The media and opposition can expose whatever they want; it won’t change anything. While investigative journalists compile fact after fact and receipt after receipt, and publish rigorous year-long investigations, PiS is busy poisoning public discourse through the state-run media outlets it oversees.
Owing to its unscrupulous use of targeted cash transfers and propaganda, PiS is not only immune to scandals but benefits from them. Where everyone else sees the disclosure of ugly facts, PiS supporters see a frontal assault on their own interests. Revelations of malfeasance by the ruling party merely strengthen many working-class Poles’ resolve to defend a government that has assisted them through social-welfare transfers.
The situation might be different if PiS politicians faced the risk of criminal investigation or prosecution. But the prosecutor’s office has been fully co-opted and will not seriously investigate the ruling party. You can hear a recording of Kaczynski bribing a businessman, but you can’t interrogate him (the same also seems to apply to US presidents suspected of obstructing justice). And if you are an investigative reporter who uncovers facts that are inconvenient for the government, you can expect to come under pressure to reveal your sources.
And so, Poland—and Europe—is left with a government that is utterly impervious to scandal and charges of nepotism. The PiS administration is beyond reproach, not because it is a moral authority, but precisely because it is so shamelessly immoral. It may be pillaging the country, but it is sharing enough of the spoils not to have to look over its shoulder."
------
Related:
Obviously most Americans disagree with my thinking Trump as not an ideologue. Course i never have understood...
[...]
So by the standard of national politics in 2014, Trump is unquestionably more ideological than Republicans overall. We might not have used “conservative” to describe his politics at the time, since “conservative” was a signifier for Republican spending and social positions. Now it’s a signifier for Trump’s far-right mix of populism, isolationism and xenophobia. And by the standard of the new Trump “conservatism,” Trump is in fact not extreme at all. The water got warmer.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175257451
The Road From Mitt Romney to MAGA
Opinion Paul Krugman
Sept. 18, 2023
[...]But eventually the forces that economic conservatives were trying to use ended up using them. This wasn’t something that suddenly happened with the Trump nomination; people who think that the G.O.P. suddenly changed forget how prevalent crazy conspiracy theories and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Democratic electoral victories already were in the 1990s. The current dominance of MAGA represents a culmination of a process that has been going on for decades.
P - And for the most part, Republican politicians who probably weren’t extremists themselves went along. For a while this may have been because MAGA was still delivering the right-wing economic goods. Bear in mind that despite all the talk of “populism,” Trump’s main policy achievement was a big cut in corporate taxes. But non-extremist Republicans also, and increasingly, gave in out of fear — for their careers and perhaps even their safety.
P - It’s to Romney’s credit that he finally reached his limit. But he did so very late in the game — a game that people like him basically started.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175049084&txt2find=populism
----------------
Aditya Chakrabortty
His resounding victory will be blamed on ‘populism’, but that’s lazy thinking. He addressed the key concerns far better than the Democrats did
Thu 7 Nov 2024 05.28 AEDT
Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images
All links and image
Since we’ll hear a lot, again, about “populism”, let’s remember, again, that 19th-century US populism had a healthy strain of leftwing politics. Defending workers, riling up bankers, decrying the “cross of gold” and economic conservatism: look past his Bible-bashing, and William Jennings Bryan was a precursor to Franklin Roosevelt. Yet for much of this election year, the populists’ modern-day successors in the Democrats have served up an anti-populism: telling voters they were wrong.
Americans were told they were wrong to see the corrosion of Joe Biden’s abilities, and wrong to think that his replacement should not be decided in a giant backroom stitch-up. They were wrong not to enjoy the US economic miracle, and wrong not to worry about the future of democracy. Black and brown people and students were wrong to expect the party to oppose the bloodbath in Gaza. Latinos were ungrateful to desert the party of racial equality, while Black men were boneheaded not to back a Black woman. Everyone was wrong not to lap up the rallies opened by Beyoncé and Usher, the skits on Saturday Night Live and that clip of Barack Obama rapping. Why couldn’t they just feel the joy?
For reasons I’ll explain in a moment, I’m no fan of explanations that begin and end with the bogeyman of “populism”. They almost always wind up with well-lunched commentators ventriloquising the opinions of people they’ve never talked to and in whose worlds they’ve never set foot. Look at the exit polls and you see a materialist explanation for what’s just happened: two out of three US voters report their economy is bad. And they have an excellent point. As I wrote last month, look at the data over the long run and two big trends stand out.
First, for the vast majority of US employees – whether middle class or working class, teacher or shop assistant – wages have flatlined. Not for four or even 20 years – but for most of the past half century. Strip out inflation, and average hourly earnings for seven out of 10 employees have barely risen since Richard Nixon was in the White House.
[ Insert: Except lately real wages have increased under Biden:
[...]By all the three measures we’ve evaluated, Biden and Yellen are correct.
Real average hourly earnings (calculated by adjusting nominal average hourly earnings for inflation using the CPI-U) increased by 1.20% between February 2020 and May 2024, while disposable per-capita real personal income increased by 6.06% between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2024. Finally, real median weekly wages increased by 0.83% between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2024. These findings support Biden’s claim that the average consumer possesses more purchasing power today than before the pandemic.
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/06/competing-narratives-on-real-wages-incomes-under-biden/ ]
I can’t think of a more flammable political economy than a country with a few very rich people where most workers only get by because of low gas and food prices. Then what happens? A second blow. Covid peters out, the world comes out of lockdown and low-wage America is doused in that most combustible of economic substances: inflation. The entire system goes up – and Donald Trump spots his chance.
IMAGE - Real terms pay for blue-collar workers has barely increased since the 1970s
Average hourly wage for US blue-collar workers, adjusted for inflation
Faced with the flames, what would be a left-populist response? It wouldn’t be to resort to pedantry, to correct angry voters by showing them the aggregate figures – but that’s what many Democrat supporters did. Nor would it be to roll back all the benefits extended over the pandemic: the improved child tax credit, Medicaid and unemployment insurance. But that’s what Joe Biden did, even as he shovelled billions into infrastructure. The electoral result was that working- and middle-class voters peeled away from the Democrats. Kamala Harris won the most affluent voters, while Trump took those earning between $50,000 (£39,000) and $100,000 (£77,000). The two tied for those on $50,000 and below. So much for Harris being part of the most pro-worker government since the 1960s.
Just as the electorate professed fury with the entire political and economic system, she and the Democrats made themselves the system’s defenders. They weren’t change but more of the same. They worried about the future of “democracy”; they warned about disrupting free trade. Harris’s slogan of “we’re not going back” said it all: a campaign defined by being anti-Trump rather than for anything. A strategy intended to woo “moderates” left nearly everyone cold.
Harris started her campaign differently, by promising to hunt down price-gouging corporates. That policy was popular, but there was little else. She went policy-lite, so as to present Trump with less of a target. Among the supporters she wheeled out this autumn was the billionaire Mark Cuban. In a country where the richest 0.1% own nearly 20% of all wealth .. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-zucmanBPEAoct19.pdf – almost as much as 90% of Americans put together – this is almost the definition of anti-populist politics.
The shocking US election result will create a new world order – and launch a fresh wave of Trump wannabes
Martin Kettle
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/06/us-election-donald-trump-new-world-order
We probably won’t hear much about billionaires over the next few days. If the commentariat’s form from 2016 is anything to go by, the sketch will be of angry left-behinds and rednecks rallying to a strongman. Never mind that last night’s exit polls showed Trump as personally less popular than Harris, or that more than half of voters judge his views to be “too extreme”. Not to mention that Trump is easily the richest man ever to serve in the White House, with a personal net worth of about $5.5bn (£4.3bn). A marketing man, skilled at targeting discontent, Trump does not follow his crowds. Rather, he is led by the money men around him: the fossil fuel executives, the shadow bankers, the crypto bros and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Mitt Romney and George W Bush could always rely on some stuffed shirts from the Fortune 500 to hand over a few tens of thousands. But Trump’s donor class is very different. They include men like Stephen Schwarzman, head of the world’s largest private equity firm, Blackstone, billionaire investor Nelson Peltz and Silicon Valley’s David Sacks.
-------
[No need for random thoughts about how Vance got there: Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph ]
[...]
In contrast to Trump ... Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging
leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
P - Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/16/buffalo-massacre-great-replacement-theory-republicans .. voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”
[...]
Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
P - Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.
P - That’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.
----------
[Insert: So there you have it, Vance is young, the tech moguls have long-term plans. NOTE: No Libertarian party has ever won an election to lead any country of the world, so one decades in the making solution of these tech oligarchs appears to be to not only eliminate elections, but also to eliminate countries.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175293248
-------
They’re not company men building relationships but, as Trump styles himself, dealmakers. This lot have shelled out a lot more to get in Trump (Musk alone has spent an estimated $100m), and expect their money’s worth. “They’re less concerned about the photo op and a visit to the White House,” as one former bagman for Trump told the New Yorker. “They want to essentially get their issues in the White House.”
Trump has reportedly lined up Musk to become his “secretary of cost cutting”, while in April, the US’s next president demanded oil executives give him $1bn to beat the Democrats. In return, he said, he’d let them do a lot more drilling. Slashed regulations and lower taxes are Trump’s way of keeping donors on side. Last time he was in the White House, he brought in $1.5tn of tax cuts that meant the richest 400 families in the US paid a lower tax rate than their secretaries, nannies, cleaners and anyone else in the working class.
You can expect a lot more like it over the next four years. Trump will almost certainly plunder from the budgets for social security and Medicaid. The tech bros will suckle on government subsidies, while the suits from private equity get to set government policy.
However this politics dresses itself, it’s not populism. Try: theft – taking from the poor to give to the rich.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/06/kamala-harris-us-elections-donald-trump-victory
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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