- Tsunami Alert!
- Robert Reich on Donald Trump’s cabinet of sycophants and charlatans;
- Threats against those who defy the “Gospel of Trump”;
- Heather Cox Richardson look back on the history of business vs the government;
- How the right perceives the murder of the UnitedHealthCare CEO.
Today around 10.30 am my phone went off with a shriek and displayed a *tsunami* alert! First, I hadn’t realized such alerts were sent out; and second, I realized immediately that there must have been some large earthquake relatively nearby to have a caused such an alert in our area. Details filtered in, and eventually the tsunami alert was cancelled. In any event, we live way up in the hills and are in more danger from fires than floods.
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We’re still watching the spectacle of Donald Trump assembling his set of sycophants and charlatans. The only requirement is that they’re loyal.
Robert Reich, 5 Dec 2024: The difference between loyalty and subservience, subtitled “Trump’s picks are submissive hacks whose cringe-worthy subservience to him will bring down his administration — and possibly America”
Friends,
The media has it all wrong about Trump’s picks for his administration. The conventional view is they’re “Trump loyalists” whom Trump “recruited.”
Rubbish.
First, they’re not loyalists; they’re subservient hacks.
There’s a crucial difference.
All politicians want their underlings to be loyal, but Trump wants them to be more loyal to him than to the nation, and he demands total subservience without regard to right or wrong.
He goes down the list. Kash Patel; Pam Bondi. Then makes this point:
Moreover, Trump didn’t recruit these people or anybody else. They recruited him.
Every one of his nominees campaigned for these jobs by engaging in conspicuous displays of submission and flattery directed toward Trump.
Going on with Elise Stefanik, Kristi Noem (who created a replica of Mt. Rushmore with Trump’s face added), Mike Waltz, and on and on. This is why many describe Trump, his followers and fans, as a cult. But Reich’s point here is that perhaps it’s not so much about people who by nature gravitate to a strongman to lead them… as if it is about unprincipled, ruthlessly ambitious people seeking out Trump for their own ends. There are always such people.
To be a member of this unique group, one needs to be both colossally ambitious and profoundly insecure, willing to demean oneself to gain Trump’s favor.
Trump didn’t find these people; these people found Trump. And to get in his good graces, they saw to it that he noticed their servile deference, fawning adulation, and total submission.
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These are the kind of people who live in cartoon worlds of absolute good and evil, and who believe all the conspiracy theories.
AlterNet, Alex Henderson, 5 Dec 2024: How MAGA Republicans have declared war on ‘heretics’ who ‘refute the Gospel of Trump’
Quoting Kash Patel:
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
As for RFK Jr:
“Like Patel, RFK Jr. has promised to clean house when approved for his new position as secretary of health and human services. He’s said he’d likely fire around 600 employees at the National Institutes of Health who don’t see his vision.” … “He’s also promised to fire, on Day One, ‘every nutritional scientist at (the Food and Drug Administration) because all of them are corrupt — all of them are complicit in the poisoning of our children.”
These people are paranoid morons and perhaps the only bright side in this is that the slow-moving bureaucracy of the “deep state” that they so despise will make it difficult for them to carry out their plans, at least right away.
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Heather Cox Richardson today takes a long but fascinating view of the history of government vs. business in the US. I read her book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, but have not yet written it up here. But from that book, one of her key takes is that, following World War I and the Depression, there was a consensus about the balance between business and government that she calls the “liberal consensus,” which only lasted until 1980, until Reagan.
Heather Cox Richardson, December 4, 2024
In this piece she reaches back to 1883 and the contrast between rich industrialists and the poor factory workers who worked “12 hours a day, seven days a week.”
In contrast to those who believed government should stay out of economic affairs so individuals can amass as much wealth as they can, others looked at the growing extremes of wealth, with so-called robber barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt II building a 70-room summer “cottage” while children went to work in mines and factories, and concluded that the government must try to hold the economic playing field level to give everyone equal chance to rise to prosperity.
Prevailing opinion in the U.S. has seesawed between these two ideologies ever since.
Republicans always resent government regulations. And yet,
From 1933 to 1981, Americans of both parties came to agree that the government must regulate the economy and provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. They believed such intervention would stabilize society and prevent future economic disasters by protecting the rights of all individuals to have equal access to economic prosperity.
Then in 1981, the country began to back away from that idea. Incoming president Ronald Reagan echoed William Graham Sumner when he insisted that this system took tax dollars from hardworking white men and redistributed them to the undeserving. In a time of sluggish economic growth, he assured Americans that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and that tax cuts and deregulation were the way to make the economy boom.
For the next forty years, lawmakers pushed deregulation and tax cuts, privatization of infrastructure, and cuts to the bureaucracy that protected civil rights. Those forty years, from 1981 to 2021, hollowed out the middle class as about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
And her point then is that Joe Biden tried to reverse this trend, having had some amount of success, until American voters have brought Donald Trump back into office. With potentially dire consequences. More ways to help the rich get richer.
What is the big picture? It depends on whether you see the nation as one big family, even including all the immigrants (as our ancestors once were), in which we’re all better off when we take care of each other, or whether you are invested in the tribal mentality that only your family, or community, matters, and is somehow in competition with all the others, and for you to prevail, others must fail.
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The major scandalous news today was how the CEO of UnitedHealthCare was gunned down on a street in New York City yesterday morning. Much commentary is about the policies of the major health care organizations and how many claims they reject. UnitedHealthCare, in one graph I saw, had the highest rate of rejections. So you can understand how a bitter man suffering some such rejection might have felt the need for retribution.
But right-wing media blames the people they already hate.
