Defying Donald
Trump’s Kleptocracy
By Chris Hedges
January 02,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Truth
Dig" -
The final
stages of capitalism, Karl Marx predicted, would be
marked by global capital being unable to expand and
generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would
begin to consume the government along with the physical
and social structures that sustained them. Democracy,
social welfare, electoral participation, the common good
and investment in public transportation, roads, bridges,
utilities, industry, education, ecosystem protection and
health care would be sacrificed to feed the mania for
short-term profit. These assaults would destroy the
host. This is the stage of late capitalism that Donald
Trump represents.
Trump plans to
oversee the last great campaign of corporate pillaging
of America. It will be as crass and brazen as the
fleecing of the desperate people, hoping for a miracle
in the face of dead-end jobs and ruinous personal debt,
who visited his casinos or shelled out thousands of
dollars for the sham of Trump University. He will
attempt to unleash a kleptocracy—the word comes from the
Greek klépto, meaning thieves, and kratos,
meaning rule, so it is literally “rule by thieves”—one
that will rival the kleptocracies carried out by Suharto
in Indonesia and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. It
is not that Trump and his family will use the influence
of government to increase their wealth, although this
will certainly take place on a massive scale; it is that
hundreds of billions of federal dollars will be diverted
into the hands of cronies, sleazy bankers, unethical
financial firms and scabrous hedge fund managers. The
pillars of the liberal state will be obliterated.
The only
possibility for halting the destruction being designed
by the Trump transition team is sustained resistance and
civil disobedience that will create popular pressure for
impeachment. This is why I will be at the
march in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21 and speak that
evening at a rally with
Kshama Sawant and
Jill Stein.
Trump is
impulsive, ignorant and inept. His corruption and greed
are so unfettered he may become a burden and
embarrassment to his party and the nation, as well as a
danger to himself. The longer he stumbles in the
unfamiliar corridors of governmental power the more
vulnerable he becomes. But if we are not in the streets
to hold the system accountable he may be able to cling
to power and inflict significant damage.
Laurence Tribe,
a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School,
has argued that Trump could be impeached under the
Constitution’s emoluments clause. This clause prohibits
a federal officeholder from receiving from a foreign
power anything of value that could compromise the
exclusive loyalty owed to the Constitution. Trump’s
global businesses make him vulnerable, Tribe argues, to
foreign pressure from countries where he has assets.
“Trump’s continued interest in the Trump Organization
and his steady stream of monetary and other benefits
from foreign powers put him on a collision course with
the emoluments clause,” Tribe
wrote in The Guardian.
If, however, we
suffer another catastrophic domestic terrorist attack or
launch a new war, the political space to examine and
prosecute Trump and remove him from office will
disappear. The rhetoric from the Oval Office will become
bloodcurdling. The security and surveillance state will
go into hyperdrive. Any dissent, including mere
criticism of the president, will be attacked as helping
our enemies. Trump and his kleptocrats, under the
familiar cover of national security and war, will
transform huge sums of government money into personal
assets.
The Trump
transition team is busy anointing its coterie of
kleptocrats. The appointment of Betsy DeVos (from a
family with a net worth in excess of $5 billion) to
become secretary of education means she will oversee the
more than $70 billion spent annually on the Department
of Education. DeVos—the sister of Eric Prince, who
founded the notorious private security firm
Blackwater Worldwide—has no direct experience as an
educator. She promoted a series of for-profit charter
schools in Michigan that make money but have had dismal
academic results. She sees vouchers as an effective tool
to funnel government money into schools run by the
Christian right. Her goal is to indoctrinate, not
educate. She calls education reform
a way to “advance God’s kingdom.” Trump has already
proposed using $20 billion of the department’s budget
for vouchers. The American system of public education,
already crippled by funding cuts, will be destroyed if
Trump and DeVos succeed.
The Veterans
Administration spends $152.7 billion a year on veterans’
benefits that include general health care and treatment
in VA hospitals. Last week Trump publicly
weighed allowing veterans to use the for-profit
health care system. Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove
(annual salary $2.3 million) is one of the front-runners
to head the VA.
“I’ve been
saying we have to take care of our vets,” Trump told
reporters Wednesday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm
Beach, Fla. “We are working on something to make it
great for our veterans because they are treated very,
very unfairly.”
“We think we
have to have kind of a public-private option, because
some vets love the VA,” he added. “Definitely an option
on the table to have a system where potentially vets can
choose either/or or all private.”
Rep. Tom Price,
a Georgia Republican (net worth $13 million), has been
selected by Trump to be secretary of health and human
services. He plans to abolish Obamacare. He said he
expects the House to push for Medicare privatization
“within the first six to eight months” of the Trump
administration.
Steve Mnuchin
(net worth $40 million), a former partner at Goldman
Sachs and the president-elect’s choice to lead the
Department of the Treasury, told Fox Business that
“getting
Fannie and Freddie out of government ownership” is
one of the Trump administration’s top 10 priorities.
This is also the stated goal of Trump’s choice for
budget director, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (net worth $3
million), a Republican from South Carolina.
The
privatization of the government-backed mortgages would
see financial institutions authorized to issue
mortgage-backed securities that carry a government
guarantee. If the mortgages failed under the
privatization scheme, the taxpayer would foot the bill.
If the mortgages succeeded, the banks would get the
profit. The privatization plan amounts to the
institutionalization of the 2008 government bailout for
big banks. It could cost the taxpayer billions.
The biggest pot
of gold is the $2.79 trillion contained in or owed to
the Social Security fund. The kleptocrats will work hard
under Trump to divert this money into the hands of
hucksters and crooks on Wall Street. Tom Leppert (net
worth $12 million), the former mayor of Dallas, whom
Trump is expected to name to head the Social Security
Administration, not surprisingly advocates the
privatization of Social Security and Medicare. The
infusion of this kind of liquidity into an overheated
stock market would probably bring on a crash that would
evaporate perhaps as much as 40 percent of the Social
Security fund, rendering it insolvent.
“I will never
shy away from any issue, even the so-called ‘third rail’
of entitlement reform,” Leppert wrote about privatizing
Social Security as he campaigned for the Texas Senate in
2012. “Talk to any young person today, and they will
tell you Social Security and Medicare won’t be there for
their generation. To preserve these vital programs, we
first and foremost must not change anything for those
ages 55 and older. These folks rely on their benefits
and we’ve made a promise to them. But for younger
workers, we need to provide Medicare subsidies for the
purchase of certified private plans, raise the
retirement age, encourage greater retirement savings,
and launch an initiative of Personal Retirement Accounts
to allow every American, not just the wealthy, to save
and invest toward their retirement. Make no mistake—if
we don’t act now, these programs will go bankrupt. The
simple fact in this debate is that people who oppose
reform are the ones who want to destroy our entitlement
system.”
He went on to
call for abolishing Medicare. “This would be gradually
phased-in over time and would not affect anyone
currently over the age of 55,” he wrote. “For younger
individuals, when they reach retirement, they will
receive a subsidy from the federal government that will
allow them to purchase certified coverage plans. Those
with the lowest incomes would receive more funds from
vouchers and would be eligible for additional Medicaid
coverage.”
Social services
and government programs under Trump will be continually
degraded. Profits for those who oversee privatized
educational, health and Social Security funds will
skyrocket. This orgy of predation—the dream of the 1
percent—will be accompanied by further austerity among
the citizenry, along with soaring personal costs for
health care, utilities and basic services and a
crippling debt peonage.
We will not
have a champion in the Democratic Party’s Senate
minority leadership, headed by the party’s slicked-up
version of Trump, Sen. Chuck Schumer (net worth
$700,000). Schumer sits on the Senate Finance Committee,
whose members are loyal and well-compensated allies of
the 1 percent, and he is a member of the Banking,
Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. His chief role in
the party has been to raise millions of dollars from
Wall Street for the party, himself and party candidates
including his friend and protégé, the
now disgraced Anthony Weiner, a former member of the
House.
Schumer’s
donors and allies include hedge fund moguls Steven Cohen
(net worth $13 billion), John Paulson (net worth $8.6
billion), Stanley Druckenmiller (net worth $4.4
billion), Paul Tudor Jones (net worth $4.3 billion),
Paul Singer (net worth $2.2 billion) and James Chanos
(net worth $1.5 billion) and Donald Trump (net worth
$3.7 billion).
Schumer is the
senator-of-choice for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and
Citigroup. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, before they
collapsed in 2008, lavishly funded his campaigns.
Schumer joined with Republicans in 1999 to repeal the
Glass-Steagall Act, which had created walls between
investment and commercial banks. This repeal set the
stage for the 2008 global financial crisis. Schumer
voted to bail out Wall Street in 2008. He sponsored an
amendment that barred the Securities and Exchange
Commission from overseeing credit rating agencies, such
as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service.
Schumer, like
Trump, is addicted to his own celebrity. He, like Trump,
believes that politics is fundamentally about public
relations. This is why he trots out Bernie Sanders, his
new “chair of outreach” for Senate Democrats, to stand
behind him like a store mannequin at press conferences.
America has
only one genuine political party. It is the corporate
party. Schumer and Trump are charter members. They will
work together—as Trump has predicted—as a well-oiled
wrecking crew.
Trump’s
illiteracy, lack of self-discipline and insatiable greed
are profound faults. He does not listen to others. He is
cursed with a self-destructive ego and unbridled
narcissism. He cares nothing for the law. And he usually
acts on impulse. But Trump will not be toppled unless we
rise up in sustained protests to defy his racism,
misogyny, religious bigotry and wanton plunder. If he is
impeached and convicted, it will slow, although not
halt, the corporate state’s disemboweling of America.
And that, for now, is probably our best hope for the new
year.
Chris Hedges,
spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in
Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the
Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and
has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National
Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York
Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15
years.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
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