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Sunday, July 23rd, 2017

A New Deal for Wall Street: Trump’s Plans for Mass Privatization Are a Colossal Giveaway to the 1%

Author:     Rebecca Burns
Source:     Reader Supported News
Publication Date:     21 July 17
 Link: A New Deal for Wall Street: Trump’s Plans for Mass Privatization Are a Colossal Giveaway to the 1%
Stephan:   If the Republicans continue to control American government we will continue to become a nation of three classes, a tiny uber-rich class, a small middle class, and a majority class of economic peasants. The economic structure of that society will be, as it was in Medieval times, a vast milking operation transferring wealth paid by nickels and dimes to the uber-rich, in a process managed by the middle class. Exactly what the Founders did not want.

Building Trades Union members protest Trump’s presence at their annual conference in April.
Credit: Oliver Douliery

Nostalgia for the New Deal is not typically the provenance of the Right, but in a November interview with the Hollywood Reporter, right-wing news exec-turned-Trump strategist Steve Bannon suggested the new president’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan would recreate the heady days of the Works Progress Administration:

“With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

One might be tempted to dismiss this bizarre pitch as, say, the product of a late-night game of ideological Mad Libs. But Trump and Bannon’s apparent rejection of neoliberal orthodoxies, including fiscal austerity and free trade, inspired hope that progressives might actually be able to negotiate with Trump on a small number of economic issues—if they could avoid collaborating in an otherwise racist, reactionary agenda. Infrastructure, in […]

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