Trump’s America – Episode 90 – All You* Can Eat

By Arthur Piccolo

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Oct. 5, 2018: “I Donald J. Trump do solemnly swear …”

So, while members of the Democratic Party Elite, who serve in the U.S. Senate focus on profound questions such as if the current nominee for the Supreme Court vomited while he was in high school, as usual they ignore the REAL issues that face the future of our nation. All while they keep the Circus alive!!

First of all, the reason another Conservative Republican is headed to the Supreme Court is because the Queen of the Democratic Party Elites, Hillary Clinton, was nominated by the rest of the Democratic Party Elites to run against a “bad boy” member of the Republican Party Elite, Donald Trump.

That is the ONLY reason Donald Trump is President – with the POWER to name Supreme Court Judges. And all these Democratic Senators who sit on the Judiciary committee and the larger number in the entire U.S. Senate ALL vigorously supported Hillary Clinton to get the Democratic Party nomination.

SO BLAME YOURSELVES Ladies & Gentlemen of the U.S. Senate!

As for the asterisk in this week’s title ….

“ALL YOU* CAN EAT”…. the “you” are the 1% who control everything.

Define Elites please? The rich and/or powerful few who control America.

Let me get to the real issues in another profound episode of Trump’s America….

The issue while Obama was President. The issue while Trump is President. The issue for the 2020 Presidential election is – INEQUALITY in America. All kinds of inequality: wealth inequality, income inequality, power inequality, gender inequality, political inequality, social inequality, opportunity inequality, educational inequality, health care inequality, housing inequality, transportation inequality, police inequality, Internet inequality …

INEQUALITY, INEQUALITY, INEQUALITY – everywhere you turn.

There is ONE reason for all this INEQUALITY in America – and by the way everywhere else on Planet Earth – it is the unquenchable GREED of the rich and/or the powerful. They never ever have enough ….

It is a FATAL disease ….. their disease that is FATAL to all the rest of us.

Which brings me to a new book and my media partner for this episode –  Amand Giridharadas and his new book WINNERS TAKE ALL.

Amand gets it and so should you Dear Readers and everyone else.

The New York Times, my #1 media partner – by the way Amand is a former NYT reporter – published this week a very, very, very long investigation about one of those very GREEDY, very rich Americans …

Some call him President, many of us call him ridiculous and worse. He is the very GREEDY Donald J. Trump. But there are so, so many others, although they are just 1% of Americans. Jeff Bezos an anti-Trump, is another very well-known one. It does not matter – Republican or Democrat – GREED rules.

Of course, GREED in America goes far beyond the 1% but it is the 1% who have the POWER to screw the rest of us with their limitless GREED.

Why do the rich always want their taxes to be lower no matter how low they are or how many tax breaks they are provided and why President Trump lowered the taxes of the rich yet again? Because their GREED knows no bounds even though they know the nation and everyone else suffers as a result.

Do not forget this – destructive GREED does not just involve money – it is just as much about POWER and being greedy about it too. So, we have Elites with too much POWER who control the Democratic Party and gave us Hillary.

So, let me get to Amand Giridharadas, who puts all this between the covers of a book in 263 pages of very useful logic.

I am going to bring in a little-known media source, Citylab, and allow them to tell you about the book everyone must read: “WINNERS TAKE ALL”

Their recent article is titled: “Why Real Change Won’t Come From Billionaire Philanthropists” and sub-titled: “In his new book Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas argues that plutocrats have co-opted the language of social change while reinforcing their own power.”

Citylab begins …

“When wealthy elites embrace issues such as inequality, poverty, climate change, women’s empowerment, and LGBTQ rights, are they spurring change—or reinforcing the status quo? In his new book “Winners Take All”, the writer Anand Giridharadas says it’s the latter. Giridharadas persuasively argues that when they adopt pressing social and economic issues as causes, plutocrats simply reinforce their position atop the hierarchy.”

They then ask Anand Giridharadas a few questions and he replies …

QUESTION: How do we get to the point in our society when the elite take it upon themselves to be, and are seen as, the re-mediators of our social problems?

ANSWER: It’s a testament to just how unequal and angry and, in many ways, decadent the United States is. We have this situation where the extreme inequities of our time, on one hand, inspire elites to step up, do more, solve social problems. But at the same time, those same inequities have an equal and opposite consequence.

In a highly inequitable society, the price of not being on the top grows much higher. When the middle is not a nice place to be, you don’t want to fall from the top. That’s actually a very common culture in developing countries, where there’s this real clinging to privilege and there’s no middle, and either you’re rich or you’re poor. That has started to happen here. It’s that strange dualism of wanting to make a difference and wanting to cling to one’s privileges.

QUESTION: You point to elite gatherings such as Davos, Aspen, South by Southwest, the Clinton Global Initiative. What do you see as the problem?

ANSWER: What is particularly worrisome to me is that when elites get together in our time, they don’t just get together because they enjoy hanging out. This is a coming together of elites in a kind of gated way to discuss how to change the world. While that sounds great, it also means the priority-setting of how the world is changed—the discourse of world-changing itself, the theories of how to go about change—become hugely shaped by these confabs, by the people who attend them, and their network. What you end up having is rich people not just joining the effort to change the world, but conquering the effort to change the world.

IMPORTANT POINT … in the reply above Amand addresses the vital issue that the Elites are NOT just the super-rich but just as much those POWER Elites without all that wealth who are usually just very, very affluent but who have POWER they share with the super-rich those like Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio, Chuck Schumer just to name some of the Democratic Party Elite.

A dirty little secret here by the way although Amand has written an important book further warning us about the Elites having recently heard him speak at the NYU School of Journalism SURPRISE Amand may be among the Elite.

Anyway, back to this useful Q & A from Citylab …

QUESTION: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, George Soros, and Mike Bloomberg (who is allegedly considering running for president) position themselves as the antidote to Trump. But you see them and Trump more as flip sides of the same coin. Why is that?

ANSWER: One of the things that became very clear to me as I reported this is: It’s not about billionaires we like versus billionaires we don’t like. This is not about rich people who do the right thing versus rich people who do the wrong thing. This is a fundamental question of, why do rich people have so much power over public life in America?

Donald Trump is an easy villain, but people we are inclined to like, who share [socially liberal] views on women and immigration and fighting to help the DREAMers and who hate Trump, a lot of those people are complicit in why we are in this moment. We have to have an honest conversation about that.

Amand, we need a lot more than “an honest conversation about that.”

INEQUALITY in America must be the CORE issue of the Democratic Party Presidential “sweepstakes” to decide who challenges Trump in 2020. If the rest of us let the Elites make the choice for us again, well SURPRISE, SURPRISE, SURPRISE …. DONALD J. TRUMP WINS AGAIN!!!

Even more to the point, if INEQUALITY keeps increasing in every way as it did when Obama was President, and as it is with Trump as President and now getting worse, then all the rest of us are going to be DOOMED ….

to live in an America, we don’t want and that is NOT good for the rest of us.

Either the Greedy Elites keep wining all the time OR the rest of us WIN for the change we need right now and in 2020. Time to dream a better America.

Choose your side and then let’s rumble. The stakes are very, very high!

NEVER FORGET, When WINNERS TAKE ALL, all the rest of us LOSE.

(This entire series is dedicated in honor of the late Liu Xiaobo)

EDITOR’S NOTE: About The Writer: Arthur Piccolo is a professional writer and commentator and often writes about Latin America for New Americas.