ROBBER BARONS
The term robber baron is originally German. It was used to describe feudal lords who charged nominally illegal tolls (unauthorized by the Holy Roman Emperor) on the primitive roads crossing their lands or larger tolls along the Rhine river. The American Robber Barons were titanic monopolists who crushed competitors, rigged markets, and corrupted government.
In their greed and lust for power, they held sway over a helpless democracy. Author & history professor Hal Bridges said that the term represented the idea that "business leaders in the United States from about 1865 to 1900 were, on the whole, a set of avaricious rascals who habitually cheated and robbed investors and consumers, corrupted government, fought ruthlessly among themselves, and in general carried on predatory activities comparable to those of the robber barons of medieval Europe." The term combines the pejorative senses of criminal ("robber") and aristocrat ("barons" having no legitimate role in a republic). One thing is for certain. These types of people are harmful to democracy. They are it's foes...not it's friends... and are always at odds with the very nature of fairness, justice, and all other democratic principles. Self interest drives business, even small benign business...and this is not conducive to public service.
Most U.S. presidents have had some experience in private enterprises before entering the Oval Office, a few of them quite substantial. Herbert Hoover made millions as a mining consultant; Jimmy Carter managed a successful peanut farm; and George W. Bush ran an oil company. However, no president before Trump has ever spent his entire adult life immersed in the hustle and huckstering of business or, to use Trump’s preferred nomenclature, deal-making. That activity deserves a special scrutiny in light of the refusal to release his tax returns. Conflicts of interests come in many forms, but few are as worrisome as the leader of the free world keeping one eye on his portfolio whenever he contemplates some national or international policy decision. The founders were clear about emoluments and of course it turns out the majority in power these days are not inclined to follow the constitution on this. They say Trump is a special case and allow him to continue profiting from his office; a clear constitutional violation. In fact, Donald Trump is the 10th highest paid "athlete" in the world based on the money he rakes in everytime he bilks the government for his golf trips.
No, we don't need a "businessman" to run the country. This is a common but idiotic notion that stems from the misguided belief that the president is essentially the nation’s CEO, a common misconception that warps one’s understanding of how exactly the federal government works constitutionally.
Instead of an obvious and (as far as the Founders were concerned) highly desirable consequence of the division of powers and divided government providing checks and balances,
Washington’s inability to “get things done” is seen as unmistakable evidence of gross deficits in the character and competency of its leaders.
If the president, in particular, were simply more technically gifted, managerially adroit, and decisive in his decision-making—in other words, if he had the skills we often associate with successful CEOs—Washington would at last “work,” a remarkable conclusion that assumes for one thing that Americans are unanimous about the “work” that they would like to see done.
The truth is far from this.
The head honcho of a Fortune 500 company may assume their orders will be dispatched faithfully by subordinates, but when dealing with members of Congress, a president’s power is by and large confined to the power of persuasion. Yes, the president does have a limited battery of carrots and sticks—the promise of a political appointment, for example, or the threat of withholding support in the case of a primary—but for the most part, when one can neither freely promote nor fire the individuals one must work with in order to get anything substantial accomplished, they are power centers unto themselves rather than pawns to be moved at will as in businesses.
Ironically we have a casino magnate with six bankruptcies under his belt
who is playing high-stakes poker.
Domestically, he's playing with house money.
Overseas, he gambles with blood...not his own.
The question is " how did we get to this low station?"
THIS LOW STATION
After the rise of the Robber Barons in the gilded age, Trust Busting Teddy Roosevelt accomplished a great deal towards diminishing the oligarchic practices of big business. FDR made further strides. And things were going well generally in terms of general democratic practices in the US.
But sadly, in 1980, Ronald Reagan won the White House by arguing that the New Deal, the laws that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure, were destroying American liberty. In his inaugural address, Reagan claimed “Government is not the solution to our problem;” “government is the problem.”And the sheep believed him.
but rather to individuals who claimed to be outside that sphere of expertise
- The business men...men of the people.
As the sheep celebrated those “self-made” individualists
the Congress cut taxes and regulation to free them to run their businesses however they saw fit.
We had a Republican house speaker who got into politics because he had been in the exterminator business and was angry about the government telling him he couldn't just dump his poisonous chemicals down the sink.
After 1981, wealth began to move upward at a startling pace , and yet the Republican party continued to howl about socialism and insisted that we would not have true freedom until all regulations, all taxes, and government programs that did not enrich the already wealthy were destroyed. When Reagan came into office in January of 1981, the top tax rate was 70%, but when he left office in 1989 the top tax rate was down to only 28%.
As Reagan gave the breaks to all his rich friends, the lack of revenue coming into the federal government caused huge deficits. The national debt, when Reagan came into office
was $900 billion, by the time he left the national debt had tripled to $2.8 trillion.
In order to bring money back into the government, Reagan was forced to raise taxes eleven times always hitting the working class and poor the hardest.
The american labor unions were neutered under this presidency.
In their place we would have businessmen who had proven their worth by creating successful businesses. They would run our country in the best way for all of us. The claim that this system worked well or worked at all for any but the very few directly profiting from it is fiction. . Republican leaders stayed in power not because a majority of voters agreed with their ideology, but because as their policies moved wealth upward into the few and hurt most everyone else. The wealthy blamed economic hardships of the workers and middle class on women, minorities, immigrants and “special interests” who were demanding hardworking white men pay more taxes than they should. They also increasingly buggared the political system to make sure they stayed in power. They disenfranchised Democratic voters and carved up districts so that in 2012, for example, Democrats won a majority of 1.4 million votes for candidates to the House of Representatives, and yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority. Trump lost the popular vote by OVER 3 Million votes but because of the arcane way states send electors to the electoral college...well you know the result. We place blame on the electoral college, but 47 of the 50 states choose to use a "winner takes all" regarding electoral votes. If they did not do this, if they submitted their electors in a way that actually reflected the votes in their state; the electoral votes would be similar to the popular vote count. While changing the constitution to get rid of the electoral college is a formidable task unlikely to happen, getting states to agree to delegate their electors based on the actual votes in their state is reasonable and practical.
Why do we not pursue this? (That's a question for a different posting I imagine.)
The election of Donald Trump
is the apex of this erroneous political mentality.
He was seen as an outsider who posed as a successful businessman, disdainful of politics, who promised to gut government (the swamp) and put into office only the best people, people known for their business or their family connections to other business sybarites. Expertise and loyalty to the American government was frowned upon.What mattered was the ability to make money and be loyal to the president. Trump, like his predecessors slashed regulations, gave away national resources to businessmen, and passed a huge tax cut for the wealthy, a tax cut which was supposed to stimulate investment in the economy and promote economic growth. In the midst of the myriad of growing administration scandals, Trump banked on the fact that Wall St. profits would keep him in office for a second term and insisted that those opposing his administration, regardless of party, were hostile Democrats who wanted big government “socialism.”
Now, a virus from China is exposing the hollowness of a generation of relying on businessmen to manage our government instead of experts. The whole anti science mantra is exposed for the absurd charlatanism that it is. The administration’s response to the coronavirus has been disturbingly poor.
In 2018, it got rid of the government leadership for handling a pandemic, so we have no one in charge who is trained to handle such a crisis. Then, when the virus broke out, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own test, rather than using the guidelines established by the World Health Organization. Their test didn’t work, making health officials unable to test people in danger before they got sick. Then, over the advice of the CDC, administration officials decided to evacuate 14 infected patients who had been stranded on a cruise ship in Japan along with healthy travelers. We learned from a whistleblower that, once landed in the U.S., workers came and went from the facility that housed the patients with no precautions. Now, we have our first case of the coronavirus that appears to have appeared here on its own, and it happened in the same place where these workers came and went (although it is too early to say if there is definitely a connection,,,it would surely appear likely).
(instead of people with expertise or science -medical backgrounds),
insisted on television that the virus is “contained.”
The problem of handling a public health crisis of this magnitude when you are merely equipped to promote business is demonstrated by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alexander Azar, a former drug company executive and pharmaceutical lobbyist, telling Congress that when scientists manage to make a vaccine for the coronavirus (12 to 18 months out, by all accounts), not everyone will be able to afford it. “We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can’t control that price" This is the modern Republican Party laid bare. Profits before lives, because only businessmen, not government policy, can manage the country. This moment makes it really clear what happens when the Republicans’ ideology comes up against reality. While GOP leaders over the years, and Trump of late, have managed to silence opponents by calling them socialists or making sure they cannot vote, this virus is not going to stop simply by changing the narrative on twitter or Fox News. Investors know this, and the dropping stock market shows their realization that you cannot shut down entire countries and keep supply chains and consumer goods moving. The stock market has fallen 11.13% in the past four days, erasing a third of the gains it has made since Trump was elected. We are facing an economic downturn, one that will strain an economy that was excellent indeed for those at the very top, but not good for those who now will be vital to keep consumption levels up because but those very people will struggle to come up with extra income in an economic downturn.
The markets are acknowledging the biggest drops since the 2008 crisis. This is a crisis that demands expertise and coordinated government health programs, but we no longer have those things. Instead, Trump and his surrogates on the Fox News Channel are falling back on the old arguments that have worked so well for GOP leaders in the past: "Democrats are hyping the coronavirus and spooking the markets to hurt the president."
Trump, and Americans in general, are about to discover that there comes a point when hokum and product image can no longer override reality. We are in the spiral of that chaos now. But on the other side of it, we have the potential to rebuild a government that operates in reality, and that works for all of us.
While Americans need to reject this notion that business men will fix democracy.
We must also understand that Trump is the symptom of an infection much deeper.
The corrupting effect money has on governance.
Imagine if you can a world where public servants spent their time serving the public instead of endlessly fund raising and campaigning or sucking up to corporate donors & oligarchs. Imagine policy makers who did not owe favors to the wealthy. An electorate not bombarded with ridiculous negative advertising from shadow organizations. None of this is good for democracy. None of this is good for anyone but the very few directly benefiting from such corruption.
We need to eliminate private money from the election process. Plain and simple.
Replacing an ignorant illiterate billionaire oligarch with a literate one is no answer.
It's like taking an Advil to ward off cancer. It just won't work.
Whoever is nominated to be the alternative to Trump's lies
has an awful big workload ahead of them
but not much else will matter if the importance of
private money in public policy making is not removed.
Public financing only.
And campaigning should be limited to 2 months before an election.
Attempting to influence elections or politicians through bribery
should be a serious criminal offense...not an institution.
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