Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Betraying Workers


Donald Trump came to power claiming he would be the working people's president. Paul Krugman writes:

By now, it’s almost a commonplace to say that Trump has systematically betrayed the white working class voters who put him over the top. He ran as a populist; he’s governed as an orthodox Republican, with the only difference being the way he replaced racial dog-whistles with raw, upfront racism.
Many people have made this point with respect to the Trump tax cut, which is so useless to ordinary workers that Republican candidates are trying to avoid talking about it. The same can be said about health care, where Democrats are making Trump’s assault on the Affordable Care Act a major issue while Republicans try to change the subject.

But, if you really want to know Trump's opinion of the working man, you should examine the opinions of  the man he has nominated to fill Justice Anthony Kennedy's seat on the Supreme Court:

The most spectacular example is his opinion that Sea World owed no liability for a killer whale attack that killed one of its workers, because she should have known the risks. He has declared the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps control the financial fraud against working families that played a major role in the 2008 crisis, unconstitutional. He’s taken an extremely expansive view of the rights of business to suppress union organizing.

It's true that globalization and technology have hit the working man hard. However,

there’s growing evidence that wage stagnation in America – the very stagnation that angers Trump voters — isn’t being driven by impersonal forces like technological change; to an important extent it’s the result of political changes that have weakened workers’ bargaining power. If Trump manages to install Kavanaugh, he’ll help institutionalize these anti-worker policies for decades to come.

Trump claimed he was the working stiff's saviour -- while dedicating himself to his or her annihilation.

But you knew that. Didn't you?

Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images





9 comments:

Anonymous said...

White workers could be reduced to living under bridges and roasting pigeons on coathangers for supper and they would still support Trump as long as he banned the black or Latino family next to them from eating pigeons.

Cap

Owen Gray said...

As long as they're better off than those at the very bottom of the ladder, they're happier than pigs in their own waste, Cap.

Owen Gray said...

Point well taken, Moira. Sometime I forget how much the world has changed.

The Mound of Sound said...


Trump has simply channeled Lyndon Johnson and then weaponized it against the Gullibillies (and ever other working-class American).

"If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” -Lyndon B. Johnson

True enough, they do. Trump's idea of an abject moral failure is to leave a convenient pocket un-picked, a sucker unscrewed.

Owen Gray said...

"Never give a sucker an even break, " said W.C. Fields. Fields' incompetence was a joke, Mound. Trump's isn't.

Deacon Jester said...

And yet somehow we are able to believe that something we call 'good' will win out in the end if we just struggle along.

We believe that because for hundreds of years fat vicars, sotted professors and sleek lairds have drummed into us that life is sacred because something else they call 'god' has said so.

What they really meant was that their lives are sacred.

Ours are to be spent in the service of whichever whim or folly takes their fancy.

We like it this way.

Owen Gray said...

Enslavement works best, Deacon, when the slaves see their condition as divinely ordained.

Tal Hartsfeld said...

"...Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Isn't this already a long-established practice of advertisers and corporations?
I mean, look at the automotive industry ...

Owen Gray said...

Quite true, Tal. It's not hard to spot the race taking place in competing driveways.