Sham populism, shameless plutocracy - Kristina vanden Heuvel

[Bill USA]

..Whenever I hear GOP Toadies of M$M refer to ANY GOP candidate, who is particularly successful at conning working people to vote for him, as a "populist" it makes me want to throw up. So Kristina 'had' me with her title, but the entire article is great.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sham-populism-shameless-plutocracy/2016/12/20/dd52a8e4-c602-11e6-bf4b-2c064d32a4bf_story.html?utm_term=.0e4322384e7d

But as his administration takes shape, Trump is sending signals to the right that he is prepared to fulfill their wildest fantasies. [font color="red"]With his sham populism giving way to shameless plutocracy[/font], it appears increasingly likely that Trump will attempt to reverse more than the progress achieved over the past eight years under President Obama. The tremendous advances and reforms of the 20th century — from the New Deal to the Great Society — may be on the chopping block.

So far, Trump’s Cabinet picks offer perhaps the clearest evidence of how he intends to govern and how much is really at stake. In addition to surrounding himself with billionaires, bankers and crony capitalists, Trump has nominated several candidates to run federal agencies whose functions they fundamentally oppose on ideological grounds. As Jamelle Bouie writes of Trump’s Cabinet in Slate,[font size="+1"] “It’s less a team for governing the country than a mechanism for dismantling its key institutions.”[/font]

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[font size="+1"]Trump has also telegraphed his intention to smash organized labor and attack workers’ rights.[/font] His pick for labor secretary, fast-food executive Andy Puzder, is an outspoken enemy of minimum-wage increases with an appalling record of mistreating employees. The Labor Department has uncovered violations of labor laws in 60 percent of its investigations of Puzder’s restaurant chain locations. Indeed, as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recently said, Puzder’s career has been “defined by fighting against working people.”

[font size="+1"]Almost every legitimate function of the federal government could be subverted by Trump’s wrecking crew. [/font]Under billionaire Republican megadonor advocate Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education could be reoriented to gutting the nation’s public education system and redistributing its resources to for-profit charter schools. Led by attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — who once condemned the Voting Rights Act as “a piece of intrusive legislation” — the Justice Department can be expected to systematically undermine civil and voting rights, denying justice to millions of Americans in the process. And if longtime ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson is confirmed, even the State Department could fall prey to private-sector fetishization.

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[idahoblue]

1. Read it here.

https://www.thenation.com/article/sham-populism-shameless-plutocracy/