Witches

President Trump must be the least devious conniver in history. If he were a boxer, he’d put Western Union out of business by telegraphing every punch. If he were a poker player, he’d be all tell and no show. If he were a serial killer, he’d welcome the police to search his house, as long as they kept away from his prize rose bushes in the back yard.

His technique in dealing wth the manifold troubles of his seat-of-the-pants administration has been just as transparent. He brags he can molest women and then claims he never laid a finger on the women his lawyer has had to bribe to keep quiet. He claims he’s cutting taxes for the hard working men and women of America, not for people like him. Then he’s caught gloating to his Mar-A-Lago cronies that he has delivered a huge windfall to them.

He promises he’ll bring the best people to Washington, yet as fast as he hires them he dumps the best people. The second best he retains, and they may be the biggest gaggle of crooks since the Grant Administration, blatantly in bed with the industries they regulate, putting cronies and family on the payroll, helping themselves to expensive furniture, travel, praetorian guards, and other perks. Zinke, Pruitt, Price, Perry, Carson, Mulvaney.

He tweets incessantly that the Russian interference with the integrity of an American election that benefited him is “fake news,” that there was no collusion. Yet the number of people in his orbit who had connections to Russia, Putin’s inner circle, and shady oligarchs would populate a city the size of Magnitogorsk. Many have already been indicted and plenty more are in the on deck circle. Don, Jr. Ivanka, Kushner, Manafort and Gates, Carter Page, Papadopoulos, Erik Prince, Michael Flynn, et al.

Most hilarious is the fact that long before any of this stuff became an issue, Trump was warning investigators that his business dealings, his personal finances, the artful deals for which he deserved respect were off limits, as were the tax returns he promised to release as soon as a neverending audit was concluded.

In short, turning over rocks in regard to Trump Inc. was crossing a red line, unacceptable, beyond the pale, verboten. He might as well have written an engraved invitation to Robert Mueller’s forensic accountant, or gone around wearing a sign on his back. Instead of saying, “Kick Me,” it would say, in Day-Glo paint, “FOLLOW THE MONEY!” No wonder the raid to confiscate the records of Michael Cohen, his lawyer-fixer-bagman-bimbo wrangler fused all Trump’s circuits.

His reaction represented another flashing red sign, telling the hounds that they were on the right track. “Attorney-client privilege is dead,” he tweeted. Well, yes, if attorney and client are collaborating in an illegal scheme to obstruct justice, cover up sex scandals, or steal an election. The latter now seems less far-fetched, since it is now reported Cohen was in Prague, as the Steele dossier contended. Allegedly, he was serving as a liaison between the Putin trolls and the Trump campaign.

The raids are a “disgrace,” or at least may shed light on many disgraceful doings. They were “an attack on all we stand for.” True, if you stand for collusion, subversion, peculation, obstruction, lying, cheating, bribery. And of course, he repeatedly reiterated, “A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!”

It’s possible Mr. Trump doesn’t understand the meaning of the witch hunt metaphor or its origin. In Salem, wild-eyed Puritans put people to death because they thought the place was overrun with witches. But there were no witches. After the Russian Revolution, Attorney General Palmer launched raids to round up subversives. It soon became clear that, like a later day Mather, he was seeing imaginary Red witches under every bed. But he proved that playing on popular fears worked politically. McCarthy, Nixon and HUAC played the same game. If you could make the public believe there were witches, then any political foes who denied it must be witches too.

The problem with Trump’s employment of this hoary device is that there really are witches this time. Putin is one. His troll farm in St. Petersburg was real, and was using the internet to do digital witchcraft, influence opinion, target voters with misinformation, and steal and American election. Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Wikipedia, among others, colluded in the witchcraft, wittingly or as useful idiots.

Yes, Mueller is conducting a witch hunt, and every time he turns over a rock another connection to Putin conspiracy pops out. Erik Prince is in the Seychelles meeting a witch whisperer. Michael Cohen has a rendezvous with a witch in Prague, then lies about his whereabouts. The Trumps, Kushners and Manafort meet with Russians, are in debt to Russians, have real estate deals with Russians, sit down to talk with them during the campaign, but not about dirt on Hillary, about orphans. They change the Republican platform in ways favorable to Putin and resist sanctions on him, but that doesn’t mean they are under his spell.

And yet, the tells keep coming. We learn Trump dragged his feet about joining Britain and France in ejecting Russian diplomats following the poisoning of a Putin enemy in England. And Trump exploded in rage when he learned U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley had announced more sanctions on Russia that he had approved. Instead, he reversed his decision and blamed her for getting it wrong. Perhaps his aides thought he told them to kick Putin’s ass, when he actually told them to kiss it. Or perhaps he got orders from the covern to call in off, or else.

Trump may claim the Russia attack is a hoax and he did not collude and knows no one in Russia, but Mueller seems to believe the witches are real. And guess who else seems to think it? The CIA, NSA, FBI, MI6, a Fisa Court that allowed wiretaps, several judges, a grand jury issuing indictments, investigative reporters.

It looks a lot like, Ding Dong, the witches aren’t dead. They are alive and well and living in Moscow and possibly in the West Wing. And Mueller is after them with a pail of subpoenas. Is it only a matter of time until we arrive at Trump’s last tweet? “I’m melting! Ohhhhh… What a world, what a world! Who ever thought a little special prosector like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”

Parable of the Errant

Paul Ryan’s decision to retire from the House at 48 has produced a spate of elegies. Some concluded he was no longer in sync with the Republicans’ more radical drift, others that he was sullied by his devil’s bargain wth Trump — thinking he could manage him long enough to enact his wish list without being splashed by the fallout, still others that he has become so much a creature of the swamp that he was out of step with the economically-stressed constituents of his own district and might lose his seat in November.

They night all be true. I confess I never fell for Ryan’s boyish charm, another Midwestern paladin, a Reagan-Lite whose “aw shucks” manner failed to disguise the heartlessness of his ideology. I certainly never fell for the notion that he was the intellectual leader of the Republican Party. Or if he was, it wasn’t a crowded field.

In fact, he was an anti-government zealot whose Social Security Survivor benefits paid for his miseducation at Miami of Ohio where he read Hayek, Mises, and Friedman and learned to regard any federal program, including the New Deal, as the road to serfdom and the second coming of Stalin.

As far as we know, the only novels he ever read were “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” which taught him to believe that government is best that imposes the least restraint on the one percent — people like Paul Ryan’s libertarian donors. He might have been a bit more rounded intellectually if he’d ever bumped into “The Jungle,” “The Octopus,” or Ida Tarbell.

Like many anti-government crusaders lacking irony, he left college and chose not a capitalist path but a 25-year career in Washington. He quickly fell under the sway of Jack Kemp and Arthur Laffer, the foremost purveyors of the supply side Kool-Aid that fueled the Reagan Revolution. He was also present at the creation of some of the propaganda mills that now dominate Republican orthodoxy, like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity.

Ryan made it his mission in life to craft a government willing to spend lavishly on defense contracts, regulate nothing, cut taxes for the well-off, and finance the loss of revenues by deep cuts to safety-net programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare for the least among us. All this while claiming that the whole farrago would be self-financing and “end identity politics through higher wages and upward mobility for the poor and working classes,” due to an invigorated economy and the explosion of entrepreneurship.

Unfortunately for this plan, it repeatedly failed to work, racking up huge deficits. And many voters who hadn’t read “Atlas Shrugged” rather liked having a social safety net in case of trouble. If Ryan had read Fitzgerald rather than Ayn Rand he might have recognized that his enablers and the beneficiaries of his tax cutting plans — casino grifters Sheldon Adelson and Trump, the traders and lenders behind the Great Recession, and polluters like the Koch brothers — were less like Rand’s paragons of heroic capitalism, Howard Roark and John Galt, than like Tom and Daisy Buchanan; “They smashed up things…and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

But if Ryan’s program was not good for the average Joe in Janesvile, it was great for him. He became a pet of the oligarchs who showered him with millions in campaign contributions. With 
Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress, he finally got his chance to turn his donors five talents into ten when the tax billed passed.

By 2027, it is calculated Trump Tax will bestow 83% of its benefits on the top one percent of earners. It also contains special tax treatment for investments in real estate and oil and gas, which will certainly please the Koch, Kushner and Trump families, not to mention Ryan’s own wife who inherited several million dollars of investments in those sectors, a classic case of conflict of interest.

Shortly after the tax bill passed, Ryan addressed congratulatory words to the annual Koch-sponsored gathering of billionaire donors. “We would not be in this unique position if not for the hard work and devotion from everyone in the Koch network.”

And they promptly demonstrated their devotion to and appreciation of their good and faithful servant, Paul Ryan. The Kochs gave him $500,000 in campaign funds and five other donors gave Ryan $100,000 each. Unfortunately, the average American worker will get rather less of a windfall from a tax bill design to be of the plutocrats, by the plutocrats and for the plutocrats.

Predictably, the companion deficit-reducing cuts in government spending, especially entitlements, did not materialize. Giving away money is politically safe. Taking away benefits is suicidal. So, in fact trillions in new spending were approved to accompany $2 trillion less revenue.

Thus, Ryan leaves office having feathered the already plush nests of the oligarchs and has bequeathed to the country trillion dollar annual deficits as far as the eye can see. In order to cooperate with Trump to achieve this fiscally nightmarish outcome, the pure Knight had to turn a blind eye to a president practicing what he himself called “textbook” racism, and “playing to people’s divisions and exploiting frustrations.” He also had to stand up and praise Trump for his “exquisite presidential leadership.”

Luckily, Ryan is a relatively young man, so he should have thirty years or more to repent his sins against the gods he worships — St. Ayn, St. Milton, and St. Friedrich. I’m sure his excuse will be that his work made the deserving rich richer, even if he didn’t get to punish the people his donors call “the takers” for being poor.

Demagoguery By The Numbers

Is Donald Trump an aberration, an alien bacillus invading the body politic? Studies, such as “How Democracies Die,” say no. He has plenty of company. In fact, the populist demagogue is a garden variety pest to which troubled societies are prone.

Liberal democracies flourish when a large, prospering, cautious middle class has a vested interest in resisting extremism. They wither when stress causes large segments of the electorate to despair and fall for simple solutions and alluring promises. Our current situation was ripe for a Trump.

The groundwork was laid by decades of political malpractice in which the playing field was tilted to favor the few over the many — in tax policy, social policy and educational opportunity. By 2016, a substantial portion of the society no longer trusted either party to provide them with the American Dream of job, home, better life for their kids, secure retirement, social safety net in case of illness or other trouble.

Instead of a “United We Stand” attitude, demagogues exploit and amplify divisions along racial, religious, economic and cultural lines. By 2016, the fractures were plain to see. The top 10% of Americans owned 81% of financial assets, the next 10% controlled an additional 11% of assets, leaving the bottom 80% with just eight percent of financial assets.

The story of the net worth of Americans flows from this fact, since capital grows faster than wages or productivity, particularly in times of stagnation or recession. So while many lost jobs and homes, the top 20% of the electorate now possesses 85 percent of the country’s net worth. The bottom 40% have less than one percent.

These are people who have more credit card debt than savings, the 49% of families who say they’d have trouble coming up with $500 in an emergency, who live paycheck to paycheck, and are one illness or layoff away from economic ruin.

Those at the nadir are often blamed for their own situation, branded as lazy or welfare queens, criminals and addicts. But as the middle class has been hollowed out, the ills of the poor have begun to afflict those who once had well-paying jobs, but have seem the ground shift under them.

Some of these people were open to Trump’s appeal, but even more so were elements of the lower middle class who were increasingly squeezed and lived in dread of falling another rung or two down the socio-economic ladder. They felt the country was in decline, and Trump aimed his pitch squarely at them.

In a time of an evolving economy, a government of the people would be working to help the dislocated weather the transition. In an increasingly technical world, in which eduction and retraining will be essential to achieve a middle class life, we are underperforming our competitors, and failing to invest for the future.

Census figures show 12% of American don’t have a high school diploma, another 30% have completed only high school and a further 16% have only a two-year degree. When machines and foreign competitors now perform the kind of labor that once provided a living wage, many of these people are ill-equipped for the marketplace

Trump played expertly to their fears and dreams. His appeal was half scapegoating and half promises he wouldn’t be able to keep. He blamed their troubles not on a changing economy but on immigrants and unfair foreign competition. He did not promise to help the country adapt to changing times, but to bring back the good old days of coal and steel by building physical and tariff walls.

He also exploited cultural fears over race and religion. In the 1950s, when he alleges America was great, 80% of the electorate was comprised of people who were married, white and Christian. By the 2000s, only 40% of the electorate was married, white and Christians. So Trump courted evangelicals, promised a ban on Muslims, and cozied up to white nationalists.

He also promised huge tax breaks for the working class and no more free ride for Wall Street. Since he was rich he knew how the game was rigged and would fix it. And it all worked, as a look at the results of the 2016 vote demonstrates.

By huge margins he lost the minorities he demonized, the educated whose intelligence he insulted (losing voters with graduate degrees by 58-37), and got only 41% of those with income under $50,000 a year. They rightly feared he would shred the social safety net they might have to depend on.

He won whites 58-37, voters over 50 by a 53-44 margin, and males 53-41, (but lost women 54-42). and won those with income between 50K and 99K by 50-46. Most revealing of all, Trump broke even in the suburbs, lost cities by a lopsided 59-35 margin, but won towns smaller than 50,000 in population and rural counties by a whopping 62-34.

Unfortunately for those who trusted his spiel, Trump has not delivered. His followers have been had. The fat cats got the tax cuts. Coal and steel won’t be back. And isolating one’s country from a global economy is a losing strategy for workers. Investor dollars can go anywhere, but workers are marooned on an island. Instead of funding education, infrastructure and a social safety net to protect our citizens from capitalist vicissitudes and make them more productive, Trump seeks to cut such programs.

Instead, of a big break for the working class, Congress voted and Trump signed a bill that delivers 80% of tax breaks to globalist corporations and the already wealthy. CBO analysis calculates that the result of this Robin-Hood-in-reverse, tax and spend policy will to be an increase in the national debt from $19 trillion to $30 trillion.

Trump promised to make voters rich like him, but it isn’t going to happen unless he decides to adopt them. He got his start in life at private schools funded by a wealthy father who taught him the family business, gave him millions as seed money, and helped bail him out of his many foolish bankruptcies.

As Jim Hightower said of George H.W. Bush, Trump was born on third and thinks he hit a triple. His skill set includes neither retooling America for the 21st Century, nor turning back time to the good old days.