William Cavanagh, professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University patiently explains to working people who voted for Trump: “You have been hoaxed!”
Billionaires are not populists.
“Dear blue-collar Trump voters,
“Surprise! Judging from Donald Trump’s cabinet choices, it turns out that a narcissistic billionaire who doesn’t pay taxes might not be the champion of the working class after all. Who could have predicted that?…
“I could go on. This administration is a robber baron’s dream come true. Some accuse Trump of betraying his populist message, but I don’t think that Trump is simply being a hypocrite. Trump doesn’t think of any of his cabinet choices as anti-worker, because he thinks being pro-business is the same as being pro-labor. The theory is that if you shower business with benefits, business will create jobs, and that’s good for workers.
“Sometimes it works that way. Certainly there are plenty of good businesspeople out there who care for the common good and for the earth, who listen to their workers and cooperate with them to create strong companies with happy and secure employees.
“But in Trump’s world, businesspeople are the heroes and should be running the country. Power needs to be taken from the government and from the workers and given to corporate executives, who know best. Worker safety, the right to unionize, overtime pay, workers’ compensation, banking regulations, the health of the environment—all these and more are nuisances from the point of view of Trump and friends. They believe that corporate executives will create lots of great jobs if they are unshackled from the fetters of regulators and unions.
“In truth, however, the interests of the owners, and the managers who work for them, will inevitably conflict with the workers’ interests. And when they do, whose side will Donald Trump and friends take? Trump is a wealthy businessman who has surrounded himself with wealthy corporate executives. When push comes to shove, do you seriously think they give a damn about you?”
This billionaire is no populist. He is a nativist, a white nationalist, a demagogue. But not a populist.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reminds me of Jon Stewart on Colbert after the Republican Convention:
film clip of Hannity interviewing Trump: I remember you described your father as a blue collar billionaire.
cut to Stewart: That’s not a thing.
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Thank you for this post, Diane. Listen to Diane. She’s right. Anyone who thinks the REPs represents us is well…UNINFORMED and may be living in “lala” land.
However, I must say that the DEMs still have no clue. The DEMs have become NEO-Literals.
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Well said.
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Great piece by Professor Cavanaugh. Trump reminds me of Elmer Gantry, just without the “religious” training. His nomination of Betsy Devos brings to mind this quote from Elmer Gantry about that novel’s namesake:
“He had learned how to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned that poverty was blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.”
I agree with Yvonne though – what a blown opportunity was the Obama administration to support and energize the working class and young voters.
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Trump duped lots of people to win the election. He is a con artist, not a populist. Trump didn’t campaign on carving up the social safety nets; yet the Republicans went right to work planning a way to defund Planned Parenthood and “modernize” Medicare and Social Security. I love the way Bernie went into Congress with Trump’s remarks in big letters on an easel to highlight the Republicans’ hypocrisy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inF18GdYtbw
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retired teacher: if I may riff off of your remarks…
Someone wittier than I noticed during the campaign that Trump’s attacks on Clinton re her husband were, properly understood, stupidly self-wounding: He was lambasting HER for having married a man like HIM!
😳
With the added proviso that Trump has numerous strong allegations of sexual assault lodged against him made by many women over a period of many years, while Clinton engaged in consensual sex outside of marriage. IMHO, the former is much more serious than the latter. *Do I really need to add that I approve of neither the one nor the other?
😒
So if you will humor me for a moment, Donald Trump ferociously attacked Hillary Clinton for fronting for the special interests of people like HIM.
🙄
Donald Trump. Five-Fingered Vulgarian. Grabber-in-Chief. And now, the Poster Child [has he really grown up from being the self-proclaimed immature 59-year-old he was in 2005?] for all those with a Shoe-Shaped Mouth.
The Marines are sometimes called leathernecks. Should we start referring to Donald Trump as Leathermouth?
😏
And thanks to everyone for a lively thread.
😎
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Those working class folks in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, etc. … they got played. They all got SO played.
To all those Trump-lovers who are those who are not surviving on minimum wage, or who are barely surviving on minimum wage, well your hero’s putting people in his cabinet whose openly stated and first goal is to … wait for it … ABOLISH THE MINIMUM WAGE!!! That’s right. While you were supporting him, and cheering him, and voting for him, he and his buddies thought that you minimum wage folks were overpaid slobs living the high life, undeserving of even the minimal salary you have bringing home.
To all those Trump-lovers whose families, prior to Obamacare, had never had health care coverage in your family’s history — hundreds of years of crossing your fingers and hoping you and/or your loved ones don’t get seriously sick or injured, and then going bankrupt if and when you did — well, your hero now says he’s going to take that away from you and cancel Obamacare (whatever its faults, it did insure tens of millions of previously uninsured folks.) … and he’s openly stated that he has nothing to replace it with, and instead, will go back to the old system that worked so well.
All those working class folks at those rallies cheered him on, thinking, “Yeah, man! He’s got our backs!” Oh, Trump’s got your backs alright, and now he’s about to stick knives in to all of them.
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True,
I would enjoy watching them suffer except many good people will be hurt with them.
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All areas of American life are suffering from our nation’s destructive case of “The Billionaires’ Disease.” Many billionaires are delusional: They have accumulated not only great wealth, but also sycophants who tell them they are geniuses. These sycophant-surrounded billionaires come to believe themselves not only to be geniuses, but that they alone are responsible for the wealth they have accumulated; they rationalize away the key and essential roles played by others in the success of their businesses. In their delusional minds they see their “genius” as being applicable to other areas, such as government and public education, notwithstanding the fact that they have no experience or expertise in these areas. So what we have today are billionaires with no governmental experience who think they know best who our elected officials should be, what government should and should not do, and billionaires who never taught a classroom full of children but who think they know exactly what “reforms” are needed in public education. And, of course, what’s needed in public schools is the charter school business model because the business model is the only thing the billionaires know even a bit about. And of course there are plenty of simpering sycophants to tell the billionaires how insightful they are about reforms and charter schools because these sycophants see an opportunity to cash in on unregulated charter schools to bleed tax money away from children and into their own pockets. If only there was a simple cure for The Billionaires’ Disease, then perhaps cured billionaires could turn their resources to combating the true root causes of problems not only in schools but throughout our nation: Poverty and racial discrimination.
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Indeed, Scisne, you are correct.
The billionaires have so many people telling them that the sun shines out of their @ss (or, as Mr. Zorba says, that their sh!t doesn’t stink), they believe that they are experts on absolutely everything.
Warren Buffett is certainly no saint, but he recognized years ago that he had won “The Ovarian Lottery.”
“I’ve had it so good in this world, you know. The odds were fifty-to-one against me being born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different.
Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, “One of you is going to be born in the United States, and one of you is going to be born in Bangladesh. And if you wind up in Bangladesh, you will pay no taxes. What percentage of your income would you bid to be the one that is born in the United States?” It says something about the fact that society has something to do with your fate and not just your innate qualities. The people who say, “I did it all myself,” and think of themselves as Horatio Alger – believe me, they’d bid more to be in the United States than in Bangladesh. That’s the Ovarian Lottery.”
http://blog.bradleygauthier.com/congratulations-youve-won-the-ovarian-lottery/
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Scisne
Lets take this a step further: The fact that they are billionaires is the cause of that poverty .
How would they get to be billionaires if the rigged system hadn’t diverted 92% of profits to share holders . vs 50% a few decades ago. With CEO’s being the small fish making 3-400 times the worker on the shop floor. By squeezing labor to the bone outsourcing labor while importing goods and services. Hallowing out companies in the search for ever increasing profits.
If rigged tax advantages didn’t allow them to become Vulture capitalists . Outsource-rs or Tax avoid-rs
If patent protection did not rig the system toward billionaires. Who like Bill Gates, we could argue either out right bought these patents, inventions or the underlying research. Where they had come up with an idea there were many others working on the same idea. 17 people were working on the light bulb at the same time.
When you hear about trade protecting intellectual property rights is high on the list. . Which protects who . Certainly not the working classes,the 90% . How is it beneficial for Americans to be paying an extra 350billion for drugs to be protect by patents. Or for that matter people India.
When would the fatal Blue screen have disappeared if Bill’s patent was 5 years instead of 95 years .
There are ways to conduct research that are far more efficient and would save trillions not millions or billions over the life of inventions.
32 billion a year is spent by Pharma on research a lot for copy cat drugs . 30 billion by NIH . Pharma could be relegated to Generic producers at a savings of 350 billion a year for Americans . The difference between the cost of generics and the cost of patent protected drugs. At the cost of another 32billion investment by NIH . Instead we will see public-ally funded research diminished. Nausea again.
“Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer”
A free online book available from Dean Baker.
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Joel, your first sentence basically sums up Thomas Piketty’s “Capital.”
And you are right about pharma and NIH (which is a little more than $32 billion of mostly well spent money). Whenever you see the word “innovation,” you can be sure pharma’s influence is behind it. Kind of like “disruption” in education.
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Joel, a lot of the initial research that Big Pharma depends upon comes from that NIH-funded research, which has been paid for by our tax dollars, and is freely available to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, saving them tons of money for research that they mostly would never have done in the first place, unless it promised to give them big returns in the very near future, which is not the way most basic research is done.
That, and the fact that our government made it illegal to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma. We are basically subsidizing the drug prices that most of the Western world (and even some “Second World”) counties pay for their drugs, which is much less than what we pay for them, because they negotiate. We cannot. We don’t because it might cause already obscenely wealthy Pharma-bros to make a little bit less that they otherwise would. 😦
If people only knew this, maybe they would start to wake the he!! up.
Although, who knows? People are so used to listening to Faux News, et al, and voting against their own self-interests, I despair.
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Zorba Greg
Agreed
And how much of that research is done by the mad scientist in the basement of Bayer vs being done at teaching hospitals and other institutions of higher learning that would not exist with out federal support from student loans and grants to research facilities that would not exist if not for federal support.
https://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=11588
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Diane, if you haven’t already read it, please read the Op-Ed piece “The wrong and right business lessons for schools” in the Sunday, January 8, 2017, edition of The Los Angeles Times. Really great points are made for the billionaires and their puppet politicians to heed.
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Scisne: not to worry.
Hours ago I sent her an email with the article and online comments included via copy-and-paste.
And I second your suggestion: a first-rate piece.
😎
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Posting Sam Abram’s great article tomorrow.
Meanwhile here’s my review of his book. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/08/when-public-goes-private-as-trump-wants-what-happens/
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The people on my email group lists must dislike Diane, because I clutter their in boxes with the links she provides . Thanks for another good article .
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But what we do have to understand , a large percentage of the Trump vote had not seen a factory floor in thirty years. Earned more than most Democrats no matter what type collar they wore or their education or race. However certainly enough were where they never should be and my favorite line was at the end.
“At least Trump noticed you exist, which is more than the Democrats—with the exception of Bernie Sanders—have done in recent decades. But Trump’s cure for what ails the working class is likely to be much worse than the Democrats’ benign neglect.”
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Hi Diane. I was so glad to find your blog mentioned on Utahans Acting for Change together (U-ACT) FB page. Your multiple posts per day help to relive my concern that my news post-election addiction is not out of the norm. I’m following you now and your name is mentioned in our house and community frequently as a result. I am so appreciative that you are informing people of issues that would normally be front page headlines but have found a place on the back page if at all. Feeling crazed by all the stupidity and ignorance and praying for any news out of Washington that reflects a better view of humanity.
Love to you and Mary.
Donna
P.S. Have you checked out VICE News on HBO? Appears to be a fresh attempt by the next generation to engage young viewers. A 19-year-old Air Force Academy student gave a nod to this recently. I watched 4 broadcasts on demand last night after checking it out. Somewhere between Walter Cronkite and a Sundance documentary. They should be interviewing you.
Sent from my iPhone
>
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Donna,
VICE news is wonderful. No bull. Young people reporting it from the scene
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In December Vice News did a story on how “choice” harmed the city of Detroit along with DeVos’ contribution to the chaos. They are not spewing the same old “reform” line from mainstream media. I started to cheer! https://news.vice.com/story/school-choice-detroit-betsy-devos
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Donna,
So good to hear from a Garden Place buddy.
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The Post dispatch in St. Louis has invited readers to write a letter, 200 words or less, to Donald Trump—just like we are talking to him. I doubt mine gets featured, but I feel good about having written it. I tried to mix in the idea that not all billionaires are geniuses, and offered Bill Gates as an example of one who was not:
joe prichard
I wondered what your reaction was when Bill Gates compared you to JFK. I was not much concerned about whether he had anything worthwhile to say, but more about just why he was saying it. The press seems to have missed noticing just how much damage he did to Obama’s presidency, with his demands on behalf of charters.
You should know that being a billionaire is a good thing, but it does not guarantee genius. Many talented people challenged the destruction Bill Gates has been doing to public education,
and many are worried that Betsy DeVos will be worse. I am not, because she will be challenged, instead of enjoying automatic acceptance. She will be easy to replace. Just be careful of offering Bill Gates a role to play in your administration. He is more like Ross Perot than you are like JFK. He is not really that smart.
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“This administration is a robber baron’s dream come true. ”
Yeah, some already tried, like Perot or Forbes, but they were too sensible.
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Yes it is robber barons dream of more for them self I do wonder what the few that voted for Trump what Are they feeling now .again Trump is not president Of the people did not vote for him Russia voted for him
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