First, I told you not to underestimate Trump (well, I’ve told you repeatedly), now I’m going to tell you not to underestimate Bannon, his chief strategist, rewarded for supporting him through everything from Breitbart.
“The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get fucked over. If we deliver we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”
Pretty much. Now, it was not necessary to gut the American working class to create a middle class in Asia, there were win/win ways to alleviate poverty outside the developed world without fucking working class Europeans, Americans, and anyone else over. But those methods were not possible under neoliberalism.
That point is important, but irrelevant to what Bannon is saying. The way the world economy was run completely fucked a lot of people in America, the EU, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere and Bannon is right that if the Trump White House can deliver for enough people, they will get to rule DC and America for 50 years, like the Dems did from 1932 to 1980 (yeah, there were Republicans, but they governed as Democrats).
Bannon’s problem is simple enough: Trump doesn’t really believe. Oh, he doesn’t not believe either, Trump doesn’t have firm beliefs of most any sort, except that Trump is the best and that he wants people to adore and cheer him. Trump’s picks for the cabinet are the same old, same old–Goldman Sachs for Treasury, etc., and his tax cut program, whether Bannon understands it or not, will undercut any long-term prosperity for the working and middle class. If his health secretary gets to end Medicare, that will also be a disaster.
Doing that stuff will deny Bannon his 50 years.
But it won’t deny Trump his eight years, because all that’s really required in the US (or Europe) for what feels sort of like prosperity for a while, is to simply stop insane austerity policies and for the muscle in both areas to insist on jobs. You can cut worker’s rights at the same time, and it’ll work for a while. Hitler wasn’t an economic genius, and he gutted workers rights. But he did end idiot austerity and most workers were better off for a time. It’s a wasting strategy (Hitler needed war for his economy), but it works for a time.
In more immediate terms, Bannon, for all he is decried as a racist, is the person you want to win most of the Trump White House fights, at least if you care about ordinary people, because he’s the guy who wants ordinary Americans to do well, and he knows he needs Hispanics and Blacks to get jobs too. Contrary to what mainstream economists (over 90 percent of whom, I remind you, did not notice the housing bubble) say, Trump can use tariffs to bring a lot of jobs back. The manufacturer of iPhones (FoxConn) has already said, sure, they’re willing to build them in the US. They aren’t going to kiss a market like that goodbye.
But Trump’s tax cutting instincts work against this. Cutting taxes for corporations isn’t as effective as tariffs, because corporations already pay very low taxes, and multinationals pay damn near none, since they play various jurisdictions off against each other.
Bannon will also need easy money from the Fed, and need to direct that money to where he wants. Trump will get to replace most Fed governors, fairly soon, so he can certainly have a compliant Federal Reserve. Bear in mind that the Fed gave away trillions of dollars, and was giving away tens of billions a month for years. That money is an available slush fund for anyone smart enough to use it to do more than bail out bankers.
Bannon, I suspect, is smart enough. 80 billion a month can buy a lot of jobs if you use it effectively, which Obama’s Fed never did.
So Bannon is a key man in the White House. If you’re a partisan Democrat first and don’t give a fuck about the working class and middle class, especially in flyover country, then Bannon needs to lose his fights, because if he wins them, Trump gets elected again (though, as I note, I don’t think Bannon gets his 50 years, unless he’s far more clever even than he’s so far indicated (not impossible)).
This is going to be a very interesting White House and administration, simply because Trump does not have definitive views on many issues. Who wins these internal fights will determine the entire course of Trump’s presidency, and may well determine America’s (and the world’s) future for decades.
Place your bets and don’t underestimate these people.
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