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Let me quote Ari Shapiro of NPR interviewing the New Yorkers David Kirkpatrick, who has been investigating just how much our president has been pocketing from his second term in office: Before Donald Trump became the president of the United States, he was a business tycoon. And in some ways, that never really stopped. At the beginning of his first term, Trump and his family said they wouldnt make any new deals abroad. He did not make any such promise before he took the oath of office for the second time, and the Trumps now have five major deals in the Persian Gulf alone.
No wonder he made no such promises! I mean, imagine this: On Mar-a-Lago alone, Shapiro said to Kirkpatrick, you calculate that Trump is making an extra $125 million by being president. And that, it turns out, is just a drop in the bucket. In fact, when asked how much Trump is actually exploiting the White House for his own personal gain, Kirkpatricks estimate is that the figure would be around $3.4 billion (yes, billion!) so far.
Of course, to give Trump credit, hes the first billionaire ever to become president, even if hes now living in an all-American world in which there are more than 800 billionaires. And if you don't mind being stunned a little, consider this bit of information from the remarkable Bernie Sanders: In this America, the three wealthiest men (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg) own more wealth than the bottom half of our society over 165 million people And it is not just these three men. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 90% and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider every day.
And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon consider a Trumpian world of ever-growing inequity that once might have seemed unimaginable and how little (Bernie and a few others aside) the Democrats have done and are now doing about it. Tom
Victims Without Victimizers
How Corporate Democrats Led to the Trump Era
The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn't the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?
Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone cant make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.
While income inequality is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.
We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth, Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.
Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country's 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich at the expense of people with scant resources.
This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trumps faux populism as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.
While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.
Opportunity as a Killer Ideology
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