Trump for the working class..

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How did Trump happen and why his diagnosis and solution will really not benefit the working class, here is Joseph Stiglitz:

But several underlying factors also appear to have contributed to the closeness of the race. For starters, many Americans are economically worse off than they were a quarter-century ago. The median income of full-time male employees is lower than it was 42 years ago, and it is increasingly difficult for those with limited education to get a full-time job that pays decent wages.

Indeed, real (inflation-adjusted) wages at the bottom of the income distribution are roughly where they were 60 years ago. So it is no surprise that Trump finds a large, receptive audience when he says the state of the economy is rotten. But Trump is wrong both about the diagnosis and the prescription. The US economy as a whole has done well for the last six decades: GDP has increased nearly six-fold. But the fruits of that growth have gone to a relatively few at the top – people like Trump, owing partly to massive tax cuts that he would extend and deepen.

At the same time, reforms that political leaders promised would ensure prosperity for all – such as trade and financial liberalization – have not delivered. Far from it. And those whose standard of living has stagnated or declined have reached a simple conclusion: America’s political leaders either didn’t know what they were talking about or were lying (or both).

Trump wants to blame all of America’s problems on trade and immigration. He’s wrong. The US would have faced deindustrialization even without freer trade: global employment in manufacturing has been declining, with productivity gains exceeding demand growth.

Where the trade agreements failed, it was not because the US was outsmarted by its trading partners; it was because the US trade agenda was shaped by corporate interests. America’s companies have done well, and it is the Republicans who have blocked efforts to ensure that Americans made worse off by trade agreements would share the benefits.

How Trump Happened by Joseph E. Stiglitz - Project Syndicate

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Yea, Trump for the working class!

Workers' rights advocates say President-elect Donald Trump's likely appointment of Andrew Puzder to lead the Department of Labor could be a major setback in the fight for higher wages and greater protections for the nation's most vulnerable workers.  "It’s hard to think of anyone less suited for the job of lifting up America’s forgotten workers — as Trump had campaigned on — than Puzder," Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, said in a statement.

Trump's pick for labor secretary is controversial - Business Insider

On Thursday, Trump revealed that he had nominated Andrew Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants, to be Labor Secretary. CKE Restaurants is the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., two fast food companies that have been targeted by Fight for 15. Puzder himself is on record as an opponent of raising the minimum wage, and has said that he would like to try automating service more service jobs in response to wage hikes.

Unsurprisingly, the fast food lobby was delighted with Trump’s decision to elevate Puzder. International Franchise Association President and CEO Robert Cresanti called Puzder “an exceptional choice to lead the Labor Department” in a statement responding to the news. Cresanti also offered up a wishlist for Puzder’s early days in office. The Obama Labor Department issue a rule (currently held up in federal court) that would dramatically expand the number of workers eligible for overtime pay. The department has also fought to expand joint-employer liability, meaning that multinational corporations such as McDonald’s may be held legally accountable for labor law violations committed at their franchised locations.

Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary is a big ‘screw you’ to the Fight for $15

Great rollback of worker rights that started in the 1980s and together with the elevation of shareholder value led to this:

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Hard right policies, masked by publicity stunts to pull wool over many of his supporters who are about to lose their healthcare, their overtime pay, their clean environment, etc.

President-elect Donald Trump has a problem. He’s remarkably unpopular for a new president, so he needs to win over more voters in order to be reelected. At the same time, he needs to keep a conservative coalition that wants to enact sweeping and controversial policy changes united behind him. In recent days, we’ve started to get a sense of how he may try to pull off both.

First, Trump will use the bully pulpit — through Twitter, through the media, and through his own staged events — to preserve his brand. He’ll market himself as a defender of American jobs (with showy stunts like the Carrier deal and his dubious claim to have saved Ford jobs). And he’ll make clear that he’s still not one of the political elites, because he’ll keep flouting their rules of decorum and “telling it like it is” (by getting into feuds with media outlets, coastal elites, the cast of Hamilton, and so on).

But secondly, Trump has also been handing out key domestic policymaking jobs to staunch conservatives, effectively empowering them to carry out a hard-right agenda in a way that keeps the GOP base satisfied — but with a layer of removal from Trump personally..

Trump's governing strategy is taking shape — and it could be a political winner - Vox

[Admin]

In the last few weeks, Donald Trump has engaged in seemingly contradictory behavior. On the one hand, the president-elect is using the bully pulpit to champion workers and challenge big business. He has threatened to punish companies that offshore jobs, accused Boeingof gouging taxpayers with its contract with the U.S. Air Force, and criticized the pharmaceutical industry for high drug prices. On the other hand, Trump has proposed a cabinet made up of conservative plutocrats, many of them multimillionaires or billionaires, who are committed to the very policies that Trump is railing against.

Trump’s expected pick for labor secretary, Andy Puzder, is a perfect example of the latter. The CEO of fast-food conglomerate CKE Restaurants, which owns Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, Puzder is a fan of paying workers as little as possible, opposes the minimum wage, and says that immigrants are superior to native workersbecause they are more grateful. He’s also a fan of automation, telling Business Insider that machines are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”

Trump’s Populism Is a Sham | New Republic

[Admin]

Keep your eyes on the ball folks. From The New Republic:


Popular government programs like Social Security and Medicare are called the third rail of American politics for good reason. Unilateral efforts to cut or devolve them generate significant public backlash—indeed, the most effective, early political attack on the Affordable Care Act was based on its provisions that cut Medicare spending. But our sense of these issues’ political explosiveness is shaped in a huge way by the fact that conservatives have never accepted the social compacts of the New Deal and Great Society, and have tried to undermine them aggressively for decades.

The canonical example of third rail politics is the GOP’s doomed 2005 push to privatize Social Security. After a reelection campaign of jingoism and fear mongering, George W. Bush claimed he’d won political capital and set about spending it on an unrelated plan that would’ve diverted significant payroll tax revenue into private investment accounts. Had he succeeded, many retirees would have become vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the market, and the guaranteed-benefit pension aspect of Social Security likely would have disappeared.

Liberals take great solace in the fact that Bush failed, and will reprise their strategy of unwavering opposition and refusing to negotiate when Republicans introduce plans next year to repeal the Affordable Care Act and phase out Medicare. Their resistance may well succeed.

But before they embark upon it, they should consider the possibility that, like everything in the Trump era, things probably won’t go precisely according to plan. Past GOP attacks on entitlement programs have been fairly frontal. Trump and his agenda-setters on Capitol Hill are going to do their best to keep this one off of the front pages.

...

Donald Trump, by contrast, is currently barnstorming the country congratulating himself on his victory. He campaigned against privatizing Medicare, and promised to replace Obamacare with “something terrific” that covered everyone. “You cannot let people die on the street, OK?” he famously said. It is unlikely, in other words, that he will make a big Medicare privatization sales pitch that commands daily media attention. Instead he will do things like this:

On a daily basis, Trump has proven able to divert media attention away from the plutocratic government he is assembling and on to a variety of shiny objects. His meetings with Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio received far more coverage, for instance, than the fact that his designated Environmental Protection Agency director worked hand in glove with polluters as Oklahoma’s attorney general. He has not tweeted about Obamacare or turning Medicare over to private insurers, but he did appoint one of the most fiercely dedicated foes of both programs to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2005, when Democrats wanted the GOP’s plan to privatize Social Security to drive news coverage, Bush played into their hands. In a way, he did so consistent with the best liberal traditions of public debate. Likewise, when President Barack Obama asked Congress to pass health care reform, Congress undertook a major public legislating process, while Obama quarterbacked. He gave a prime-time health care reform address to a joint session of Congress, and participated in a televised negotiation with congressional Republicans at the Blair House—a final gesture for cross-over support—before Democrats passed it on their own.

In all likelihood, Trump isn’t going to do any of this.
And in a very intentional way, he won’t really have to. House Speaker Paul Ryan has been priming Republicans in Congress to streamline Obamacare repeal and Medicare privatization for years. Unifying control of government so Congress can set the agenda, and the president can sit back and sign bills, has been the party’s long-game for years. The difference is that instead of keeping drama at bay, the GOP president will be creating routine distractions from the hard work of crafting unpopular legislation.

For the press, the temptation will be hard to resist. Covering major legislation is grueling, complicated work that doesn’t generate a return-to-clicks in the way a Trump rally or a Trump tweet does. Many dedicated, hardworking reporters will work insane hours covering the GOP’s decision-making and legislative maneuvers, but much of that hard work will end up below the fold, where much of the public won’t see it. This will insulate the party from blowback while the process is underway, which is precisely when blowback is most needed.

Democrats can do their best to focus the public mind. They can send their most popular figures (like senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) on to the stump or have them host regular press conferences. They can organize rallies and protests. Barack Obama himself might even participate.
But it is eerily possible to imagine Republicans pulling off the most regressive social reforms in modern history under a cloak of darkness. And the scariest thing of all for supporters of these programs is that nobody knows for sure how to reverse the dynamic, so that the third rail goes live again.

[Admin]

How to Expose Trump’s Dastardly Bait-and-Switch

Trump is not an economic populist, he’s just playing one on TV.

By Robert L. Borosage
DECEMBER 7, 2016


Donald Trump is a masterful con man, and his presidency will be a bait-and-switch of epic proportions. He will, on one hand, appeal to the populist temper of the time—as he did this week with his “thank you tour”—and with stunts, as he did with the Carrier deal or his series of tweets purporting to hold Boeing to account for overcharging the Air Force.

The switch comes in Washington, with what David Axelrod dubbed a “Monster’s Ball” of Wall Street and right-wing ideologues in the cabinet. Republican majorities in Congress will work to further rig the economy for the wealthy few.

Trump’s opening speech of his “thank you tour” in Ohio laid out the bait. While putting forth his “action plan to make America great,” Trump dished out nationalist and populist themes with a characteristic mix of racist signaling. Trump promised to put America first: “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag. From now on it is going to be: America First,” Trump said. “Never anyone again will any other interests come before the interest of the American people. It is not going to happen again.”

Trump echoed Bernie Sanders with his focus on the “forgotten” American worker. Trump felt their pain, and indicted trade deficits and flight of manufacturing jobs. He promised good jobs. He will renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and take on China. He bragged about the Carrier deal, and pledged a 35 percent tariff on companies that offshore jobs and try to ship products back into the United States.

Like Sanders, Trump proposed a major plan to rebuild America, including “our inner cities.” His plan will have “two simple rules”: “Buy America” and “Hire America,” phrases that too many Democrats would choke on.

The conservative core of his program—corporate tax cuts, deregulation, reviving coal and oil, repealing Obamacare—is wrapped in this populist gauze.

The switch, of course, will take place in the suites of Washington where, instead of draining the swamp, he’s populating it with predators. Trump’s CEO council, which will advise him on taxes and regulation, is a classic gang of thieves. Steve Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, and impassioned defender of the carried-interest tax-break scam, is the chairman of Trump’s group. (He famously compared the effort to roll back this obscene tax rip-off with Hitler’s invading Poland). It also includes Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase, the bank with one of longest rap sheets coming out of the financial debacle. His bank paid over $38 billion in fines for various fraudulent schemes from 2008 to 2015, and still counting.

Add Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, bailed out by the Obama administration, which managed to pay no federal taxes despite $7.7 billion in world earnings in 2015.

And there’s Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, America’s largest and viciously anti-union employer, infamous for paying its workers so little that they are forced to depend on billions in taxpayer subsidies in everything from food stamps to low-wage housing assistance, while the six heirs of the founder have wealth equaling the combined fortunes of 40 percent of Americans.

After scorning Goldman Sachs on the campaign trail, Trump wants to hand the Treasury Department to a second-generation Goldman Sachs alum, Steven Mnuchin, whom Senator Elizabeth Warren dubbed the “Forest Gump of the financial crisis” because he seemed to be everywhere. Mnuchin profited at Goldman trading the collateralized mortgage-backed securities and debt swaps that helped blow up the economy, and then cleaned up after the crash by purchasing IndyBank and running one of the most fraudulent foreclosure mills in the country.

In interviews held simultaneous to Trump’s “thank you” tour, Mnuchin laid out the real agenda. “Our number-one priority is tax reform, the largest tax change since Reagan.”

The administration will push to lower corporate taxes to 15 percent, and give the companies that evaded taxes by stashing the money abroad a massive tax break. The rich will clean up with “middle-class tax reforms” that feature lower-top-end taxes and an end to the estate tax. Mnuchin suggested that closing loopholes would keep the rich from benefiting from top-end personal tax cuts, a preposterous falsehood.

The second priority will be rolling back the “complications” of Dodd-Frank financial reform. Trump is brandishing the threat of 35 percent tariffs on companies who ship jobs abroad, but his nominee for Commerce Secretary, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, noted “tariffs are the last thing…part of the negotiation. The real thing is going to be to increase American exports,” echoing every American president since Clinton.

Representative Tom Price, the anti-abortion zealot nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services, will work with House Speaker Paul Ryan to repeal Obamacare. The plan now is repeal and delay—repealing the reform on a date certain three or so years from now, while working out the “replacement” in the meantime. With Trump and the Republican Congress intent on slashing taxes and raising military spending, the resulting deficits will be used justify an attack on Medicaid and Medicare as part of “reform.” In control of the Congress and the White House, Republicans will push to roll back and privatize basic pieces of the safety net.

Progressives will necessarily find themselves embattled on many fronts. Deportations will ramp up. Anti-Muslim rhetoric will fuel increased surveillance and restriction. Law-and-order rhetoric and brutal stop-and-frisk policies will unleash harsh reprisal against Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Voter-suppression efforts will find a home in the Department of Justice. Unions—particularly public-employee unions—will be assailed from the start.

Solidarity will be vital for activists who are targeted, communities threatened, families torn apart by deportations or worse.

To expose the bait-and-switch on the economy, it will be vital to follow the money, and expose the corruptions and the lies. Challenging Trump’s appointments will provide the first opportunity to pierce the veil.

Fierce opposition is needed, not simply defense. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi claimed, “I don’t think people want a new direction.” That is wrong. The question is: What side are you on? Who will fight for changes that make this economy work for working people? More of the same is not an answer.

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

Defending Barack Obama’s trade policy against Trump’s “protectionism” won’t get the job done. Criticizing Trump for running up deficits, in contrast to Obama’s austerity, is a sucker’s game. Progressives can’t defer to cautious leaders calling for least-common-denominator unity. They have to put forth bold reform ideas to contrast with Trump’s depredations. Bernie Sanders offered a decent example, calling Trump out on outsourcing, while putting forth a bill that would punish companies for moving jobs abroad, not allowing them to extort subsidies for staying here.

But ultimately this debate won’t be decided in Washington but across the country among mobilized citizens.

For example, Fight for $15 can drive reform at the state and local level. People will swarm congressional meetings to protect Social Security or Medicare. They must do the same to stop another round of tax giveaways to corporations and the rich that drain the public purse and add to inequality.

Trump can fool many of the people for some of time. He inherits an economy with low unemployment and wages beginning to stir. If he manages to get a major infrastructure program out of this Congress, the jobs created could help tighten labor markets enough to begin to lift wages. He can stoke his base with race-baiting politics and by taunting the establishment’s delicacies (such as taking the call from the prime minister of Taiwan).

But his show will get stale over time, particularly if the rip-offs are exposed, the divisive racial and gender politics are confronted, and working families learn that the crony capitalists on the inside are cleaning up while they are getting stiffed. Trump is a wily and experienced confidence man, but selling his remedy won’t be easy once people realize it’s the same old failed brew.

[Admin]

Really good article..

Donald Trump is a masterful con man, and his presidency will be a bait-and-switch of epic proportions. He will, on one hand, appeal to the populist temper of the time—as he did this week with his “thank you tour”—and with stunts, as he did with the Carrier deal or his series of tweets purporting to hold Boeing to account for overcharging the Air Force. The switch comes in Washington, with what David Axelrod dubbed a “Monster’s Ball” of Wall Street and right-wing ideologues in the cabinet. Republican majorities in Congress will work to further rig the economy for the wealthy few.

How to Expose Trump’s Dastardly Bait-and-Switch | The Nation

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And another bait and switch..

During his post-election victory speech, Donald Trump promised to rebuild America’s infrastructure and make it “second to none.” Unfortunately, his plan fails to address the country’s critical infrastructure needs while delivering a windfall for Wall Street at the expense of middle-class families.

The beating heart of the Trump plan is a combination of new tax credits for investors, and tolls and other user fees for Americans. That means huge profits for wealthy Wall Street investors and less money in the pockets of working families. Unsurprisingly, Wall Street is aggressively supporting Trump’s plan ..

In exchange for making equity investments in infrastructure projects, private investors would be given the authority to raise tolls on drivers and charges on households for services like drinking water and sewage removal. This would allow investors to earn annual returns of 10% to 15%.

Additionally, investors would receive tax credits under Trump’s plan that would lower their federal tax bill — effectively a double benefit of high returns and lower taxes. By comparison, interest charges on traditional municipal debt used to finance big projects are around 3%. In effect, the Trump plan would push governments away from cheap debt to far more expensive source of project finance.

All of this amounts to a massive and unavoidable tax hike on middle-class Americans since infrastructure acts more like a monopoly than a competitive market. After all, only one pipe delivers water to your house, and most commuters have only one or two efficient routes to work. That means workers and families would be stuck paying the tolls and fees no matter what the rate.

Beyond enriching Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, the plan has another major flaw. It fails to address the country’s needs.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the United States needs to invest trillions of dollars in critical infrastructure maintenance and expansion projects. Yet, the vast majority of the facilities that need repair or expansion either do not generate much revenue or are simply too small to attract investment. This includes projects like expanding congested highway interchanges, repairing broken water mains and replacing aging city buses.

Under the Trump plan, projects like these would be left out. For this same reason, Trump’s plan leaves behind rural communities and smaller cities facing economic hardship.

Trump’s infrastructure plan leaves U.S. behind, enriches Wall Street - MarketWatch

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Both his pick as budget director and his choice to head Health and Human Services want to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and privatize Medicare. His choice as labor secretary is a fast-food tycoon who has been a vociferous opponent both of Obamacare and of minimum wage hikes.

And House Republicans have already submitted plans for drastic cuts in Social Security, including a sharp rise in the retirement age. ... In other words..., European populism is at least partly real, while Trumpist populism is turning out to be entirely fake, a scam sold to working-class voters who are in for a rude awakening. Will the new regime pay a political price?

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: Populism, Real and Phony

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Looking back to the campaign trail, it’s not hard to see what Trump was doing. Whether it was taking care of vets or respecting cops or reopening coal mines or getting Americans jobs in steel mills, wherever there was a stereotypically male occupational category, Trump was there to rhetorically elevate its social status.

He did not actually have a specific criticism of the veterans’ health care status quo or a specific plan to improve it, and I think Americans in the relevant parts of the country will soon find that he doesn’t have a plan to bring back coal mining or labor-intensive forms of domestic steel production either. In many cases, that reality probably won’t cost Trump votes. Voting for the guy who praises steel and coal and cops and veterans rather than the woman talking about reducing student debt is at least as much a matter of identity politics as it is a matter of policy.

Donald Trump confirmed yesterday that his veterans’ health “plan” is a joke - Vox