Donald Trump just pulled off the biggest bait-and-switch in American history.
Back when he was a presidential candidate, Trump said things about the big banks that made him sound like a Bernie Sanders Democrat.
In his final ad before Election Day, for example, he blasted the “global power structure” that he said was robbing the country blind and enriching the wealthy at the expense of working Americans.
That campaign ad — and really the entire Donald Trump campaign — will now go down in history as a con job of epic proportions.
All that populist talk about fighting the “draining the swamp”?
It was another one of those pesky little “Alternative Facts” Kellyanne Conway is always talking about.
It was a lie.
See more news and opinion from Thom Hartmann at Truthout here.
Instead of fighting the “global economic power structure,” Donald Trump is now hard at work making it even more powerful.
For example, he’s now asking the Labor Department to scrap the so-called fiduciary rule, which requires investors who manage retirement accounts to act in the best interest of their investors — not Wall Street.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Not for the banksters.
They hate the fiduciary rule because it prevents them from ripping people off – and they’ve spent millions lobbying against it over the past few years.
As Trump administration Economic Advisor and former Goldmans Sachs second-in-command Gary Cohn told the Wall Street Journal, “[the fiduciary rule] is like putting only healthy food on the menu, because unhealthy food tastes good but you still shouldn’t eat it because you might die younger.”
Scrapping the fiduciary rule is just the start of Trump’s big plan to help Wall Street.
Earlier today he signed an executive order calling on the government to “review” all regulations created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.
“Review,” of course, is just more Republican doublespeak for what’s actually going to happen.
And what’s actually going to happen is that Trump is going to gut the very minimal protections created by the Dodd-Frank law to help his super-rich bankster friends get even richer .
This is literally what Trump says he wants do.
Seriously, I’m not kidding.
We all know what’s going to happen next.
Anytime the government deregulates Wall Street, a financial crisis follows.
The deregulation of the big banks in the 1920s caused the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, Reagan’s deregulation of the S&L’s in the early 1980s caused the S&L crisis, and repealing Glass-Steagall back in the 2000s caused the crash of 2008.
These are just facts, and if Trump goes ahead with his push to gut Dodd-Frank, he next financial crisis is all but inevitable.
I guarantee it.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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