Selling Out

Comes now another newspaper column:

Economic news is pretty darn good, and Trump deserves credit for maintaining the Obama recovery. By some measures, it’s gotten faster. To investors, this is pleasing. Inexplicable except as unbridled greed and indifference to average Americans, Trump’s reportedly looking into making high-income investors even richer. Super. Except for those from whose flesh another hundred-billion in tax cuts will be sliced. 

Despite such recklessness, the economy is humming, and that’s a good thing. So why can’t Trump ride the wave without lying about it? What in his hagridden brain drives him to make claims so easily debunked? To wit: He claimed he “turned the economy around.” Had he done so, to a robust economy growing steadily when he took over, he’d have tanked it, which, thankfully, he didn’t. 

So what’s the point of saying something like that? And then, because lie father, lie son, Don Jr. said there was never a quarter with such high GDP growth under Obama. There were several. Nor, as junior claimed, is it true that Obama never saw growth higher than two-percent. 

As with the difference between debt and deficit, many people misunderstand how quarterly growth rates differ from annual ones. But people at high levels of government surely know, so what they claimed aren’t mistakes, they’re lies. It’s what they do. Because it’s what their diehards want, I guess. I don’t get it, but the evidence is everywhere.  

One wonders who exactly is benefitting from the growth spurt. Can those who regularly inform me of their displeasure with my writing point to something specific that’s better for them? For sure, the very wealthy can. But regular folks? Continuing an eight-year trend, many have gotten jobs, more than have lost them because of tariffs and the increased pace of outsourcing. The poor, though, especially the working poor, are undeniably worse off, caught as they are in the backwash of money flowing upward at the expense of programs that were helping them. Likewise, people with pre-existing medical conditions and those on Medicaid. And auto workers.   

While still enjoying the record profits begun under Obama, affected businesses are passing the costs of Trump’s tariffs to consumers. Other than a couple of highly-touted but isolated, brief, and minimalist boni showily handed to employees, wages are stagnant as Trump’s upside-down tax breaks are being used for enormous CEO payouts, stock buy-backs, and investor profits.  

Yet this selective economic goodness is seen, by those whose lives aren’t and won’t be improved, as justifying their glorification of Trump. It’s like his lies: in the long run they harm everyone, but are loved by Trumpists for their own dark reasons. It’s a safe assumption that when the economy tanks, as economies are wont to do, especially under pressure from massive deficits, the cultists will love him even more. Call it the Shockhome Syndrome. 

Here’s another safe bet: after months of being assured there was “no collusion” with Russia, Trumpists will be unbothered by the sudden, hoofbeat-hearing switch to “It’s not a crime.” Or, “There was no meeting before the meeting, and the ‘president’ didn’t attend it.” Or, as we’ve already seen, tapes proving the “fake news” that Trump agreed to pay off yet another playmate wasn’t fake at all. For loyalists, brazen lying has become a non-issue.  

At some point, you’d think it’d sink in that what Trump calls “fake news” is true unless proven otherwise. Nope, not for the cultists, to whom the obvious dangers of a constantly lying “president” will never occur. For everyone else -- people, that is, who see the forest and the trees -- the inability to trust a leader on critical issues because he lies about everything, is a serious matter.  

No collusion. No interference. Fake news.  

We know Russians gained entry to some voting machines, and we’ve just witnessed how easy it is to obtain complete control. Seventy-seven-thousand votes out of 135 million, changed, deleted, or influenced by trolls, is all it would have taken. 

Sounding panicky, Trump just demanded Sessions immediately end Mueller’s “rigged” investigation, while, ironically, declaring Democrats would get rid of law enforcement. His latest rally, ominously including deranged Q-Anon believers, was the ugliest yet toward journalists. 

Too many people refuse to acknowledge the peril of Trump’s perfidious, hate-mongering demagoguery. Does good economic news justify ignoring it? Decide. We’re at a crossroads.  

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The Problem With Governing Humans

Comes now my next newspaper column:

Unprecedented stock market volatility. Poorer than expected jobs reports. Layoffs. Businesses still sending jobs out of country, working people still struggling to get by, an extra ten bucks a week notwithstanding. The only difference between Trump’s and Bush’s tax cuts, and the other Bush’s, and Reagan’s, is that its economic shortcomings are becoming evident sooner than usual. Maybe because the others figured on two terms.  

Readers seem to like calling me a communist when I point out the obvious about what’s needed to make capitalism work. In addition to showing how unaware they are of the meaning of the term, they refuse to provide examples of my alleged affinity. Which is understandable: there aren’t any. Capitalism has been good to me. In turn, unlike Trump, I’ve been good to capitalism: pay my taxes, follow the law, don’t cheat people or go bankrupt. Invest in good companies. Recycle. Minimize polluting. 

Communism and unfettered capitalism do have something in common, though: they both assume a level of goodness inherent in humankind that doesn’t exist. Self-designations to the contrary, there’s never been a communist country. Purely socialist, yes; and they’ve failed. Other than a few collective farms, the USSR was never communist. It wasn’t even in its name. Same with China. It’s an unworkable, borscht in the sky system.  

Over here, a few hippies and transcendentalists tried to live “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” (communism’s essential definition) but they dispersed after acrimonious collapse. As a whole, notwithstanding examples of individual selflessness, humanity simply isn't good enough to manage it.  

Since the point is philosophical rather than economical, this isn’t the place to discuss how upside-down and ill-timed Trump’s tax cuts were, other than to point out that with a humming economy after President Obama rescued it from Bush, with corporate profits at record highs, with crumbling infrastructure and escalating economic inequality, money extracted from revenues and handed to corporations and, therefore, to their investors but mostly no one else, while causing untenable increases in budget deficits and national debt, could have been much better spent to guarantee the survival of our system, by creating jobs and raising wages for real rather than a couple of impermanent boni. (There. I devoted only one sentence to it.)  

Communism doesn’t work because humans are inherently greedy and jealous. Pure socialism doesn’t work because most people need incentives to be excellent, and when the government controls all production, there aren’t any. (That, plus the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, not Reagan, is why the Soviet Union ultimately failed.) Capitalism works, but does so to the extent it’s mated with regulations providing reasonable restraint on the worst human tendencies. 

America has experienced unregulated capitalism. It led to abuse of workers (including children), disregard for the environment, the Great Depression, and, as is happening yet again, sequestration of too much money in the hands of too few. It’s the opposite of what drives successful capitalism: average people having the means to buy stuff, and rules mitigating corporate greed. And it’s where Trump and his invertebrate congress are taking us, yet again. 

For Trump’s part, maybe the wrongness of his tax cuts derives from his ingrained disinterest in educating himself. Republican Congressfolk had to have known though, from experience; they just don’t care. By action and inaction they’ve signaled their intent to take the money and run; and since they don’t see preserving our planet as remunerative, they figure they may as well take it with them, too. What they’ve done, while being decidedly pro particular donor capitalists, is demonstrably anti capitalism. Proof is everywhere. 

There’s one thriving system of governance that’s designed to improve the lot of its citizens, giving them a voice in the process while confronting the strengths and weaknesses of humanity: “democratic socialism,” a better name for which might be “democratic kinda socialistic capitalism.” Countries demonstrating it regularly top lists of health and happiness. Also, they invented telephone handsets, implantable pacemakers, medical ultrasound, three-point seatbelts, zippers, and dynamite.  

“Godless” liberals, foolishly counting on human decency, call for shared sacrifices to help all Americans, while the party claiming an inside track to Jesus Himself gives itself over to human nature’s darkest side, legislating every man for himself. (Woman, not so much.) Liberals get called communists by people who think Trump loves America. And Mick Mulvaney admits it’s all about bribery.

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