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Tag: elitism
What Isn’t Donald Trump Hiding?

What Isn’t Donald Trump Hiding?

Given all that he’s hiding — including his tax returns, the reasoning behind his campaign’s contacts and possible coordination with Russia, the visitor logs for the White House, and his private lobbying theme park Mar-A-Lago as well as the details of nearly all his economic proposals — it’s amazing what Donald Trump isn’t hiding.

Let’s start with his impressive ignorance.

After years of insisting at every chance he got that China is ripping off the United States, Trump informed the Wall St. Journal that Xi Jinping, the president of the world’s most populous nation, had schooled him — on North Korea.

“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” Trump said. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea. … But it’s not what you would think.”

If by “you” he means “Donald Trump,” that’s true.

No one — except people who only learn about politics by watching themselves on Fox News — thought resolving our conflicts with North Korea would ever be simple, especially after it became a nuclear power during the George W. Bush administration. But this is still a remarkable admission — like Trump’s admission that he had no idea how complex health care reform would be.

It’s also the kind of revelation that illustrates the divide in American politics. To Trump voters, this might make him more relatable, while indicating he has the strength to be flexible. To the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for Trump, it might confirm their worst fears about electing a self-satisfied and self-obsessed doofus to become the most powerful person alive.

But even more remarkable than the admission that Trump had listened to someone else speak for ten minutes was for him to then shake off his campaign promise to label China a currency manipulator — a Trump fixation  that many experts believe is rooted in the past. And the president says he is doing this because China is helping us with North Korea.

Why he suddenly trusts a country he was sure was ripping us off is something he has not explained. But sometimes a con man is the easiest mark.

Then there’s his obsession with sucking up to the elite.

In a interview this month with the New York Times, Trump bragged about his tax reform plan by dropping a name that once represented, in his own rhetoric, the swampiest of the elite swamp zombies, slowly dining on our sweet America First brains.

“We have some very, very good people,” he said. “This man was the president of Goldman Sachs. I mean, he was, like, the president of Goldman Sachs.”

The investment bank is now basically Trump’s farm team, but during the campaign Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein served as his whipping boy, a personification of globalist — cough, Jewish, cough — bankers.  And Trump used the bank to tar Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton as corrupt.

Why would he brag about becoming the Goldman Sachs Bannon Trump Kushner administration?

Yes, Trump campaigned on draining a swamp full of elites. But we shouldn’t be so naive as to believe that he we speaking about all the elites. He meant just the elitists who want to help minorities at the expense of you — meaning, the good people who are sick of not being wished “Merry Christmas” by everyone you meet.

Trump’s right-wing version of populism, as The Nation‘s Jedediah Purdy explains, “often punches both up and down: It attacks those at the top of the economic and political ladder, but it also targets the disenfranchised, whether racial minorities, the poor, or immigrant groups.”

If Trump supporters assume the is using the power of the elites — co-opting them, as his supporters often say — to help you and not them, everything will be fine in Trumpland.

And Trump is giving his supporters plenty of reason to believe that he is still obsessed with going after them, even if it doesn’t help you economically.

There’s been wishful bleating, fed by that the blasts of war that cable news loves, insisting that Trump is somehow becoming more centrist, because he doesn’t want to immediately break up NATO and put tariffs on everything except the products he and his daughter import. But if reality is forcing him to drop some his more disruptive pledges, he is still pursuing sickening nativism while nurturing some of the most bigoted policies in recent American history.

Trump is learning, as The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent notes, that if he pleases the plutocrats with more predictable approaches to existing international alliances and trade agreements, he can keep feeding his followers super-sized nativism.

“The administration continues to defend the travel ban in court and remains fully committed to building the Mexican wall. On deportations, the reign of fear is kicking in,” Sargent wrote. “Parents are yanking kids from day care out of fear of removal; longtime residents with no other offenses are getting deported; the administration continues to try to strong-arm sanctuary cities into enforcing the federal immigration crackdown. As ABC News reports this morning: “The deportation force looks like it’s coming together – just more quietly than anticipated.”

Trump definitely isn’t hiding his Attorney General Jeff Sessions — who is doing his best to reverse nearly every effort the government makes to help minorities vote, settle in America, or stay out of prison.

This includes reviving the War on Drugs to its fullest, most destructive vaience, which means destroying lives of people — disproportionately black and brown people, if history is any guide — for smoking pot.

Trump feels no need to hide his comical ignorance and his even more comical admiration for the “globalist” elites. This could be because he and Jeff Sessions have a unique sense of what his voters want.

Perhaps that’s an America where only they feel welcome. It seems that antipathy for a nation that seeks to accommodate an increasingly diverse population is something they’re sick of hiding, too.

Trump Should Take On The Real ‘Global Elite’ — His Kids

Trump Should Take On The Real ‘Global Elite’ — His Kids

If you have a weak stomach, the GOP convention promises to be emetic.

Not only will Donald Trump, a certified thrice-married birther, be accepting the nomination of the party that gave us Abraham Lincoln and, much more recently, decades of braying about traditional marriage, but you’ll also have the abdomen-churning pleasure of watching his children and his third wife speak directly to the nation.

Meanwhile, both living former Republican presidents and the GOP’s last nominee for president will be spending the week trying to pretend that 2016 isn’t happening.

For anyone who cares about America, decency and tolerance, this convention will be an informercial for what’s gone wrong. But the inclusion of the Trump family suggests there could be useful message broadcast out of Cleveland — if only in the subtext of Trump and his older children’s speeches.

To understand why, lets look at some numbers.

Amidst the constant stream of grim news that has marked this fateful yar, we actually got some good news this week. The latest data from the IRS shows that the incomes of the bottom 99 percent of Americans grew 3.9 percent in 2014, which just happens to be the year Obamacare went into effect. It was the best yearly growth for working families since 1998.

In the same year, the top 1 percent saw their income grow at an even faster 7.7 percent.

America’s richest families have captured most of the real income growth since the recession ended in 2009, continuing a trend that began in 1980 of massive and luxurious gains for the few million people at the top while the 300 million or so other Americans enjoy almost no new wage increases from the most radical series of technological advances that have ever been crammed into four decades.

Privilege. It quickly become one of the most politicized words in the English language as we were told to “check it,” or were accused of envying it while getting rich on a few dollars a day in food stamps. But privilege is the beating heart of the twin crises of our time — climate change and inequality. Some billionaires just really resent being asked to not boil the planet or pay taxes, even if the inevitable alternative is famine, drought, and massive social unrest.

And foremost among these billionaires is the likely Republican nominee for president, who will be the first presidential nominee in almost fifty years not to release his tax returns, despite two dozen promises to do so.

Donald Trump has promised to make climate change worse by refusing to believe it’s actually a real problem. And his solution to economic inequality?

Cutting taxes for the rich and their corporations, slashing regulations that protect workers and the environment, and completely eliminating the inheritance tax.

Getting rid of any taxes on the giant inheritances that a tiny fraction of Americans who have won the lottery of birth and stand to gain millions from their relatives’ deaths has long been a Republican passion project. Congress, which tends to be far richer and far more likely to be the beneficiary or benefactors of great inheritances, has shockingly obliged.

The tax was nearly eliminated by conservatives until it was reinstated after President Obama’s re-election in 2012.

The right has done an amazing job of getting the public on their side in this issue, which is a tribute to their marketing abilities. Bloomberg‘s Barry Ritholtz explains:

In 2013, 2,596,993 Americans died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 5,000 of them paid a tax after that mortal event. To be more accurate, their estates paid whatever tax was owed. That means 2,591,993 Americans died that year without paying any tax.

In other words, just 0.19 percent of all deaths in 2013 resulted in a tax. When 99.81 percent of all deaths don’t create a taxable event, calling it a death tax is mathematically nonsensical.

What is the actual trigger for this taxable event? If your estate is worth less than $5.43 million dollars in 2015 (or $10.86 million dollars for a couple), you are exempt from the federal estate tax.

Republicans have made this perfectly sensible and necessary tax unpopular by branding it a “death tax.”

“Why would someone use the phrase ‘death tax’ when more than 99 percent of deaths don’t result in a tax?” Ritholtz asks. “Because he is either a) innumerate, b) ignorant or c) trying to deceive you. There are no other possibilities.”

Remember when Trump said he was taking on “global elites?” Apparently he’s doing it that by making sure that his kids’ kids’ kids’ never have to fly coach.

In exchange, we get around $320 billion added to our deficit, which is about 160 times the funding to fight Zika that President Obama has requested and that the GOP Congress has refused to fund without cuts and other important civic needs like flying the Confederate Flag. Or almost as much as we’ll “save” by passing costs on to seniors if we enact Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher plan.

Democrats need to fight the fire that’s burning up our economy with fire. They should start calling the inheritance tax a “global elite tax.” Mostly because it is one.

Some of these global elites will be functional and somewhat impressive people like Ivanka Trump. And some will have the dull stares of Trump’s two older sons, who some genius nicknamed “Uday and Qusay.”

The children of the wealthiest, who are sucking up most of the gains of the economy, will earn multiples of what most Americans will earn in a lifetime on the day their parents die. The least we can do is expect they’ll be taxed for it the same way you’re taxed for the money you sweat all week to earn.

Of course, the greatest commercial for a “global elite tax” on inheritances is Trump himself.

He likes to brag that he started off with “a small million dollar loan,” which was anything but small in the 1970s and was also matched exponentially by a $70-million loan guarantee from his father, who was still paying him a six-figure salary into the 1980s and was still bailing him out in the 1990s.

Denying that even this booster rocket filled with privilege aided his ascent gives Trump the fantasy that he’s self-made — that he some how overcome his childhood of attending schools and making connections that gave him access to wealth and power beyond the imagination of most Americans.

Opponents of affirmative action often talk about the stigma the beneficiaries of the program must carry knowing they got some assistance from a program designed to expand our economy’s gene pool. But those who benefit from the inbreeding of wealth suffer no stigma. Instead, they get to invent myths in which they’ve conquered all with the help of small loan, ignoring the millions of Americans who have to take on loans in hopes of earning the college degree and doing better than their parents.

Of course, Hillary Clinton’s descendants will benefit from the great machinery of wealth perpetuation conservatives have built, even if she wasn’t born into privilege as Trump was. And she, like most rich people, is structuring her wealth to avoid estate taxes.

But at least she’s not trying to destroy any hope that we can move beyond an economy that has been captured by the malefactors of great wealth.

While Trump cuts taxes for the richest, Clinton’s plan makes sure that millionaires pay at least the same tax rates as nurses and adds a surtax for those who earn over $5 million to fund services like universal pre-K. She would also raise the estate tax on her family.

Our winner-take-all economy has led to a winner-take-all political system in which birth increasingly determines success in life.

When the Trump kids speak, it’s our chance to see the global elite in their natural environment — on a platform built by their parents’ success. When you see them there, think about setting them free from the burden of dependency as we take on the feudalism of the global elite.

Why Was The Brexit Vote So Shocking to Global Elites?

Why Was The Brexit Vote So Shocking to Global Elites?

The most shocking thing about “Brexit” — the British people’s resounding vote to pull their country out of the European Union — is that it came as such a shock to the British establishment.

After all, say the flummoxed elites, everyone who is anyone in Great Britain was opposed to exiting. The prime minister, leaders of all the major political parties, nearly every banker and corporate chieftain and most media barons had sternly lectured common Brits that talk of withdrawal was irresponsible fiddle-faddle that could undermine the global economic order.

Indeed, Tony Blair, Britain’s former prime minister, has lashed out at British voters for having “a shared hostility to globalization,” referring to their June 23 decision to exit the Union. A decade ago PM, Blair had been a backer of schemes to expand EU’s authority over the citizens of Great Britain and 27 other European nations, so he took the Brits’ electorial rejection personally. In a New York Times op-ed, he rather prissily blamed the Brexit vote on populist demagogues who had caused “palpitations in the body politic.” Obviously befuddled, he asked: “How did this happen?”

Well, sir, one reason is that you and other peers of Britain’s privileged class have been adopting treaties, trade deals and other policies that have reduced the wealth and power of common wage earners while greatly increasing the wealth and power of corporate executives and rich investors. Your prized European Union itself has become a messy, bureaucratic, multinational government of, by and for corporate interests over the interests of the common people.

So, the more those upper-crusters said “no” to Brexit, the more the masses shouted, “Yes!” The private-club elites were so out of touch with the local-pub commoners that they had no clue that overturning the applecart of aloof, plutocratic globalizers is precisely what ordinary citizens were eager to do. The laboring class was first assaulted by Margaret Thatcher’s laissez-fairyland policies 30 years ago, and then came the global financial crash, along with the EU’s harsh austerity policies and poppycock promises of trickle-down benefits. The result is a working class that’s been left devastated and uncared for. Thus, when the governing party of the moneyed interests called a national vote on staying or exiting — arrogantly assuming they would easily win — the people welcomed it as a chance to jab a thumb in the establishment’s eye. And they did.

Now, the entire global establishment is rushing to assure itself that the Brexit movement is not a class revolt, but only a momentary spasm of voter ignorance and lower-class bigotry against Muslim immigrants. But they’re only fooling themselves. While the two-headed monster of raw racism and xenophobia was most certainly in play, that was not the majority of the pro-exit vote. At its core, this vote was a full-throated rebellion against out-of-control economic and political elites ruling from afar, enriching themselves by ransacking the workaday majority.

Located in faraway Brussels, EU officials make decisions that harm British working stiffs who never heard of the decision-makers and have no power to replace them or to alter the decisions. That is how and why the Brexit rejection of European government happened — it was a democratic shout of anger at the steady usurpation of the people’s sovereignty and well-being, fostered by you and your fellow architects of corporate plutocracy.

Of course, the obtuse, self-absorbed Tony Blairs of our world still don’t get it. Blair concluded his op-ed by pleading with establishment centrists to regain political control from the people and “find solutions that rise above populist anger.” Exactly wrong, sir. The obvious solution is to understand and work with the angry populace, rather than stoking their anger with more “solutions” from above.

Yes, some voters are outright bigots; others sometimes get bamboozled into looking down and blaming their problems on people even more desperate than they are; but most voters today — in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere — are finding the light of true, progressive populism, turning their eyes upward to see and rebel against the elite manipulators who’ve long been rigging the system against poor and middle class families.

 

Photo: The Union Jack (bottom) and the European Union flag are seen flying, at the border of Gibraltar with Spain, in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar, historically claimed by Spain, June 27, 2016, after Britain voted to leave the European Union in the EU Brexit referendum. REUTERS/Jon Nazca