What Trump Means

When all is said and done, some good may come out of this administration, but only as a by-product and only if we live long enough to learn the lessons, of course. It seems to me that there are two lessons here: one factual, and one moral.

The first one, pointed out by the great George Carlin, is economic : there is an “owner” class. If we look at the man himself, and his cabinet and some of Congress as well, you see no one who looks like you. The chairman of Trump, Inc has the chairman of Exxon Mobil as his Secretary of State, he has a billionaire real-estate developer as a son-in-law. He is friends with the CEO of Aetna, who made individually 46 million dollars while withdrawing his company (or threatening to, I can’t remember) from Obamacare. He has a Secretary of Education from an unimaginably wealth family, and a brother who made a “killing” literally and figuratively by founding Blackwater, the “defense contractor” (read ‘mercenary’). Tom Price has benefited from Big Pharma in some incredible amount.  Even Ben Carson, I bet, has made more money than most of us can imagine, but he’s probably the least wealthy among them. On the Russian side, there is Putin and his lot — Putin possibly being the “richest man in the world”, according to Rachael Maddow. On his staff are people — while supposedly making a government pension —  who own Chalets and yachts all over the world. The man from Aetna and the Putin staff are the same type of people: decrying the national debt and the failing economy while they make billions by causing that debt and bad economy. If the economy is doing well enough that you can make $46million, and your salary could pay for health insurance for more than 2000 families at $15,000 per year, the problem isn’t saving money and getting ahead, which most folks are told. It’s not even doctors or nurses asking for too much money which is the more “in-depth analysis” version of this. It’s that one man has 8,000 times the money he needs. In Russia, the economy suffers because there’s not enough money to build things for The People who are all supposed to be equal. Companies are taken over by the the government all the time, and yet, amazingly the government has no money. Two systems, same problem.

Remember when Mitt Romney believed it was fair that he paid no federal taxes because he was only taking what was legally allowed and “everybody should do that”? Remember during the Obama administration, when people noticed that most elected people were millionaires and/or lawyers, while they have free healthcare and pension for life for just serving one term? There’s a connection between all of this. The connection is that some people who make decisions for the rest of us also make make policies which benefit themselves financially — and they don’t believe in a limit to their wealth. Remember the old “Military-industrial complex”? Now it’s the military-financial-industrial complex — what Carlin called the “owner class. Their way of living and being, under Trump, is now public: out there for all to see. Now, the rules don’t apply to them because they’re in politics. Before, the rules didn’t apply to them because they had money. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, but now they’re doing it in the light of day. That’s the factual piece. 

The moral piece is this: there isn’t anything inherently bad about money. In the old days, there was a sense of “nobless obliege” which is the obligation of the rich to give back to society that they had taken from. No matter how rich you were, you were a part of society. You were connected morally to “the great unwashed” outside your door because of faith and/or The Rules of Good Society, the way Old Money largely still acts today. But now, the point of wealth is to not be connected to The Rules or each other. As long as money is used to untether you from society, there will be problems. 

The man who owns Chobani is taking the opposite tack. The more he makes, the more he shares. He has human connections to his community. Work satisfaction is high. The community does well and everybody does better as the company grows. At the same time, the company grows because everybody does better! There was a factory owner in Lynn, Massachusetts who paid his employees when the factory burned down, because of his wealth (he could) and because of his connection to his workers and his community (he wanted to). 

Owners with class have no interest in being in the Owner Class, because of their values. Ben and Jerry, media darlings that they are, and the owner of Starbucks are owners of a corporation, not owners of people. They are people first, at once constrained by their communities and welcomed in it. The type of people closest to Trump have always existed. Maybe now, for the first time ever, we get to see what they look like and how they operate.

Resisting with peace,
John