![]() Low taxes, light-touch regulation, weak unions, and unlimited campaign donations are certainly in the best interest of the plutocrats. Other blots on his record, including accusations of domestic violence, had made him unpalatable. ![]() Rex Tillerson at State and Steven Mnuchin at Treasury are worth about $300 million each, says Forbes.įast food tycoon Andy Puzder, the labour secretary-designate, withdrew after pressure from Republicans in Congress, but not because he had publicly opposed increased minimum wages for America's poorest. The same with Elaine Chao, transportation secretary, who Forbes says comes from a family in the Top 40 or so of the richest in the country. Todd Ricketts, designated as commerce secretary, though not a billionaire himself, comes from a billionaire family. Like Trump, billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos inherited her wealth, part of the Amway products fortune. "Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich," the FT wryly quotes Trump as saying.Įstimates of the total wealth of Trump's rich appointees vary depending on how big a circle you draw around the administration but there are several billionaires, and most cabinet members are multimillionaires. "Trump … has never shied away from his wealth and often pointed to rich friends as 'winners' better suited to running a government than career politicians," reported the Financial Times. The Forbes magazine rich list recently put his wealth at $3.7 billion US, though he insists that is an underestimate. Trump, who inherited his property tycoon father's fortune, is so far the wealthiest of the group. Since being confirmed as the president's chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, a former boss at investment bank Goldman Sachs, has called for loosening the rules on banks.īut Cohn is by no means the richest of the rich rulers. Before the year was over, the Roaring Twenties would end and the Great Depression would begin. President Herbert Hoover's inaugural ball in March 1929 his government was stacked with plutocrats. The picture she paints In Plutocrats of an extravagantly wealthy elite taking over the reins of government and ruling in their own interest is eerily similar to what may be happening in the United States under Trump. is moving in the direction of what Chrystia Freeland, Canada's minister of foreign affairs, once decried as " crony capitalism."įreeland wrote her award-winning book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else in 2012, long before anyone serious imagined a President Donald Trump.īack then, Freeland was not a politician but a business journalist who among other things had become a specialist in the rise of the Russian oligarchs, the clique that used political clout to transfer the industrial and mineral wealth of the former Communist state into the hands of a small group of multibillionaires. In fact there are signs that instead, the U.S. Can one of the richest cabinets in White House history since the late-19th-century Gilded Age make the United States equal again? “The president of China, at least, says he’s looking forward to a harmonious relationship over time. “It sounds terrible but I respond more favorably to what the president of China is saying than the president of the United States,’” Volcker said. And they don’t like government and they don’t like to pay taxes.” (New York Times interview, 2018) ON PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S TRADE POLICIES We’ve got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they’re rich because they’re smart and constructive. “The central issue is we’re developing into a plutocracy. And there’s quite a lot of evidence, contrary to some earlier thinking, that it hits poorer people more than richer people, who have more maneuverability, more way to protect themselves - who own their houses, for instance.” (PBS interview) ON RISING DISTRUST OF GOVERNMENT “Inflation is thought of as a cruel, and maybe the cruelest, tax because it hits in a many-sectored way, in an unplanned way, and it hits the people on a fixed income hardest.
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