October 23, 2018: We Now Live in a Plutocracy

 

10/23/18: The Trump administration moves to undo Obama-era regulations related to gender identification. A recent memo indicates Team Trump plans to reduce a complex issue to two categories. Individuals will be rated “male” or “female” based on genitalia at birth. 

Period. 

 

A winning policy designed to please the bigots. 

According to the Intersex Society of North America – which you have probably never heard of unless your family is affected – as many as 1 in 1,500 children born have serious questions involving sexual identity. Some have both male and female sex organs. Others have an extra X chromosome or catastrophic hormone imbalances, making identification nearly impossible. 

Now, even those who have undergone complicated sex-change surgeries will be re-classified as “male” or “female,” as per their certificates of birth. 

Apparently, this winning policy was designed to please the bigots in Trump’s base. These are the people who fear having to share bathrooms with transgender individuals like the rest of us might fear being sneezed on by someone with Ebola. These are the folks who insist you can look up all the answers in the Bible. It’s like when they say they’re against gay marriage. God didn’t plan for Adam and Steve to marry. But they can’t tell you why He would create babies with the genitalia of both sexes, so that those unlucky children wouldn’t know which they were, Adam or Eve, or whom they should marry, if that day ever came.

 

I happen to be a regulation male and a lifelong fan of the regulation female. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t wish transgender confusion on my worst enemy. My sympathy rests with the estimated 1.4 million Americans (including 2,000 or more currently serving in the United States military) who identify as “transgender” and I hate to think their problems in life might soon be exacerbated. 

(When I divide current U.S. population, 327.2 million, by 1,500, I get a figure of 218,333 Americans born with serious questions about sexual identification. So, the numbers are more or less estimates.)

 

*

PRESIDENT TRUMP is now promising a 10% middle class tax cut next week, right after the midterms. So, could you please just vote for all the nice Republicans? Reporters try to pin the president down on what his plan includes or how he’s going to pass it next week – since Congress isn’t in session. 

This exchange actually occurs: 

Reporter: You said “lower tax cuts.” You said that you wanted tax cuts by Nov. 1. Congress isn’t even in session. How is that possible?

 

Mr. Trump: No, we’re going to be passing – no, no. We’re putting in a resolution sometime in the next week, or week and a half, two weeks.

 

Reporter: A resolution where?

 

Mr. Trump: We’re going to put in – we’re giving a middle-income tax reduction of about 10 percent. We’re doing it now for middle-income people. This is not for business; this is for middle. That’s on top of the tax decrease that we’ve already given them.

 

Reporter: Are you signing an executive order for that?

 

Mr. Trump: No. No. No. I’m going through Congress.

 

Reporter: But Congress isn’t in session, though.

 

If Trump’s magical plan to pass the tax cut wasn’t silly enough, he promised again that these tax cuts would not increase the federal deficit. 

Just like the Bush tax cuts in 2003 wouldn’t, and the Trump tax cuts in 2017 wouldn’t, and it is totally “Fake News” if the Congressional Budget Office says the deficit grew by 17% last year. 

But, hey, Trump can still brag about the stock mark…. 

Oops. 

The market, when it was up, Trump said he did that all himself. Now that the market is stumbling, down from 26,828 on October 3, and up only slightly from 24,824 on January 2, Trump isn’t taking any blame. He says the Federal Reserve is at fault. Trump says Chairman Jerome Powell “almost looks like he’s happy raising interest rates.” Central bank policies, he grumbles, are the “biggest risk” to the U.S. economy. “Every time we do something great, he raises interest rates,” the president whines. “I’m very unhappy with the Fed because Obama had zero interest rates [emphasis added here and below].” 

The Fed is worried about inflation undercutting a healthy economy. That’s how fiscal policy works.

 

*

In 1900, a few giant companies monopolized American industry.

Government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. 

SINCE WE’RE talking fiscal policy, every American’s favorite topic for party discussion, let’s talk Paul Volcker! 

Yes! That Paul Volcker! The man who chaired the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987, when St. Ronald of Reagan led the GOP. If you’ve forgotten the good old days of President Jimmy Carter, you might not remember the crippling inflation rates of those years: 7% in 1977, 9% in 1978, 13% in 1979, 13% again in 1980 and 9% in 1981, with Reagan then in charge. 

(If you multiply it all out, groceries that cost $100 in 1976 would cost $162.33 five years later.) 

Volcker told The New York Times recently, that he was deeply concerned for the future of democracy. Washington D.C. is overrun with lobbyists and Republicans are chipping away at rules to reign in Wall Street.

 

Volcker says we’re being turned into a “plutocracy.” That is: government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. 

“There is no force on earth that can stand up effectively, year after year, against the thousands of individuals and hundreds of millions of dollars in the Washington swamp aimed at influencing the legislative and electoral process,” he writes in a new memoir soon to be released. 

Volcker believes the swamp exists. He faults policy makers for forgetting the American worker who saw his good factory job shipped overseas. He faults them for glib talk of “retraining” textile workers for a “new economy.” In fact, as a flaming liberal, I sympathize with Trump supporters when they complain that in recent years the deck seems increasingly stacked against them. 

However, I would like to point out that Trump and his ilk are the ones who did most of the stacking.

 

Conservatives might tell you Big Government is the danger. It was Big Business that started eliminating worker pensions. The government didn’t shift jobs to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and China (capitalism helping cut its own throat, in the latter case, by shifting work to a communist nation). Greedy corporations did. Government didn’t hire illegal immigrants to do jobs Americans would happily do – like building houses down in Texas. Greedy business types did. Government didn’t jack up prescription drug prices and insist opioid painkillers were safe. Big Pharma did. (See: 1/27/19.) 

The tax laws which allow the fattest cats to hide money in offshore tax havens? Those laws were written by legislators swimming in campaign donations provided by those fattest cats. The Citizens United case, decided on a 5-4 vote, with five conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices declaring that donating money to politicians was a form of “free speech,” opened the sluices. 

The four liberal members of the court were powerless to close them. 

If you feel like the democratic system isn’t working fairly, you’re right, whether you’re a Trump supporter or a liberal blogger. But you might want to consider who rigged the game. If Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, Charles and David, and President Trump and Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin run the show, don’t expect the “common man” to come out on top. 

At best, you’ll get a few crumbs, just enough to keep you hoping. 

When money dominates a government it’s no longer a true democracy or a republic. It’s a plutocracy, folks.