Money

 Hartmann Report -  As the wealth of the American 1% hits a record $44 trillion, Republican billionaires are saluting Trump. The main effect of neoliberalism, aka Reaganism, is to transfer wealth and political power from the working class into the money bins of the morbidly rich, while replacing a landscape of small and medium sized businesses with monopolistic behemoths. And it’s sure working that way: in the past 3 years, the wealth of the top 0.1 percent has almost doubled. In its early days, this outcome was pitched as a good thing: Reagan said that giving trillion dollar tax cuts to billionaires would “trickle down the prosperity” to working people (it didn’t), and Clinton said white collar tech jobs would replace the estimated 20 million manufacturing jobs America gave up to China, Vietnam, and Mexico (they didn’t). But nobody’s believing any of that anymore; the last president to pitch a neoliberal agenda was Trump, with his $2 trillion gift to his fellow billionaires, while Joe Biden has explicitly repudiated it. And those billionaires now fully intend to return Trump’s favor. While many condemned Trump after his January 6th attempt to overthrown American democracy, now they’re reconsidering, particularly as President Biden promises to raise their taxes if he gets a Democratic congress. Wealthy people putting their own interests above the good of the nation is nothing new: back in 1934, Marine General Smedley Butler blew the whistle on an attempt by a cabal of America’s richest men to kidnap or kill President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace him with a fascist like Charles Lindbergh. The same thing happened in Germany in the 1930s, when the morbidly rich industrialists and bankers (along with Prescott Bush) lined up to support Hitler (who then turned on them, forcing Fritz Thyssen to flee Germany and later write an apologetic autobiography titled I Paid Hitler). Will America’s rightwing billionaires someday confront a similar “come to Jesus” moment when Trump turns the forces of government against them? Not if we can keep him out of office by voting in overwhelming numbers this fall…