Prior to Trump the rich and the big corporations got their way by paying the election expenses of the Congressmen or hiring expensive lobbyists. Now a new age has dawned – they don’t have to pretend any longer. Only in America, new stats show, could packing an incoming administration with gazillionaires be so easy.
People holding personal fortunes worth over $5 million this year make up less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the world’s adult population. People worth over $5 million may also this year make up nearly 100 percent of the picks Donald Trump chooses for his cabinet and inner circle.
President-elect Trump’s choices for top slots so far include at least two billionaires, two former Wall Street executives at Goldman Sachs, and assorted other mega-millionaire heirs and corporate honchos. Donald Trump, notes the Washington Post, “is assembling the richest administration in modern American history.”
The Trump choice for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, has ten times more personal wealth than the entire cabinet George W Bush appointed back in 2001.
This assemblage of awesomely affluent may not reflect the America most Americans experience in their everyday lives. But these Trump deep-pocket picks absolutely do reflect the core reality of our contemporary worldwide distribution of income and wealth: The United States currently hosts more really rich people than any other nation on Earth. No other nation comes close.
The United States, new 2016 Credit Suisse numbers show, has 582 billionaires who currently call the United States home, more billionaires than Japan, the UK, Germany, France, China, Italy, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, and South Korea combined. (adapted from an article on Inequality.org)
So what can we do about it? There is Bernie’s continuing revolution, bless him, and may he prosper. But as a start could we finally stop calling the United States a “democracy”. It is all too silly. Epicureans believe in moderation. There appears to be not a smidgeon of moderation in the Trump picks. They will be busy unpicking all the pesky regulations that protect our individual rights, the health of the environment, and indeed, the health of the poor who voted for Trump in the first place.
You recently had a post on ‘post truth’ politics. I think this is the epitome of it. The idea that a billionaire, surrounded by a cabinet of other billionaires and millionaires, can have the interests of the working man at hard is totally absurd. If the white working class continue to back Trump after this, it only goes to show that identity politics has come to prominence at the expense of rational class interests- a very sad prospect indeed.