USA - Trump: a president for the elites - by Wendy Kaminer

Trump Followers : The Porsche Turbo Elies

Of all the mistaken or cynically disingenuous characterizations of Donald Trump (and there are many from which to choose) ‘anti-elitist’ is perhaps the most obviously untrue.

Put aside his unusually wealthy cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires. Put aside his appointment of Goldman Sachs veterans to high-ranking posts, including treasury secretary, after promising to ‘drain the swamp’ of corporatists, like Hillary Clinton and her Goldman connections. You can even put aside, for the moment, his own personal and familial profiteering from the global business he continues to own. Focus simply on his policies.

First consider Trump’s opposition to consumer-friendly financial regulations enacted after the 2008 crash, particularly his effort to revoke an Obama administration rule requiring brokers to act in the best interests of their customers. Trump apparently wants financial advisers to have the freedom to serve their own interests, even at the expense of unsophisticated clients.

Then, consider his proposed budget. ‘If you’re a poor person in America, President Trump’s budget proposal is not for you’, the Washington Post correctly observes. His budget would not just cut deeply into a wide range of social-welfare programmes. It would also deny lower-income people access to justice by eliminating the Legal Services Corporation, which provides lawyers for poor people in civil cases, enabling them to vindicate their rights. Adding insult to industry, the Trump budget would ‘fall hardest on the rural and small-town communities that Trump won’, the Post reports. It ‘would slash or abolish programmes that have provided low-income Americans with help on virtually all fronts, including affordable housing, banking, weatherising homes, job training, paying home heating oil bills, (as well as) obtaining legal counsel in civil matters’.

?It’s only fair to note that this budget would hurt affluent as well as lower-income Americans. It’s a threat to anyone who expects to become sick or disabled – in other words, everyone who expects to age. The National Institute of Health, which funds research into diseases that no one wants to suffer but many or most will, is slated to lose a fifth of its funding. Remember Trump’s inaugural promise to ‘free the Earth from the miseries of disease’? He, it seems, does not.

At least relatively wealthy people will be able to afford medical treatment. The unemployed and working poor are likely to lose health insurance and access to care if the House Republican plan to ‘repeal and replace’ Obamacare is passed without major revisions. As the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office determined, some 14million people would lose health insurance under this plan by 2018 and 24million would lose it by 2026, while wealthy people enjoyed a substantial tax cut. (Multimillionaires and billionaires – America’s elites – would also enjoy substantial cuts under Trump’s proposed tax plan.)

Like the Trump budget, Trumpcare would hurt his base of lower-income voters, as he belatedly acknowledged on Fox News. The president briefly distanced himself from the plan he’d initially approved (apparently seeking to pass the buck to House speaker Paul Ryan). But then he began lobbying hard for it, warning congressional Republicans they risked losing their seats if they failed to pass it. So far, members of the hard right House Freedom Caucus are demanding additional cuts to insurance coverage that would be required by law, complicating efforts by the White House and Speaker Ryan to secure the votes of Republican moderates. As I write this, on the evening of 23 March, Republicans are still negotiating, having postponed a scheduled vote on the bill. If the House eventually approves some version of Trumpcare, it will then confront the Senate, where Republicans are similarly divided and Senate rules limit the scope of legislation that can be enacted by a simple majority, without facing a filibuster.

Trump had promised his supporters he’d replace Obamacare with ‘something terrific’, but that was before he learned healthcare was ‘complicated’. Who knew? ‘Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated’, Trump explained last month, universalising his ignorance.

The politics of healthcare are also complicated, with Democrats expected to oppose efforts to repeal Obamacare, instead of mending it, and Republicans divided into factions that consider the current plan too generous to lower-income Americans and factions that consider it not generous enough. Meanwhile, the public seems increasingly wary, with polls showing majority opposition to the Republican plan. Prospects for it are most uncertain. So are prospects for the Trump budget, which some Republicans, as well as most if not all Democrats, will oppose. Trump and congressional Republicans are now grappling with the difference between posing as an anti-elitist and governing as one.

Reasd more: Trump: a president for the elites | US Election 2016 | USA | spiked

Eurozone Report Card 2013 - by John Weeks

Three and one-half years ago the infamous Troika (IMF, European Commission and the European Central Bank, with the German government in close attendance) began its unsuccessful attempt to contain the crisis of the Eurozone, with a draconian austerity program for Greece. Subsequently, the Troika would add Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain to its list for the austerity medicine. At the end of 2013, what has austerity achieved?

The table in the report shows the preliminary results for 2013 for the two largest Euro countries, plus the five whose governments applied Troika austerity programs during and after 2010. Judging the fiscal balance and debt results as a success implies extremely low expectations. Only two of the seven countries meet the Maastricht deficit criterion of three percent of GDP, Germany and Italy. In the case of Italy the improvement, if that is the appropriate word, since 2010 was barely over one percentage point in GDP. For public debts the levels are so far above the Maastricht rule of sixty percent that achieving that criterion through growth-suppressing austerity is impossible. With the exception of Germany with no change, the debt-GDP ratio increased in every country compared to 2010.

In contrast to this meager harvest of fiscal improvements, the social cost of austerity defies belief. Looking at those same seven countries, only in Germany has per capita income risen, and there by barely four percent compared to 2007 (see first chart). For every other country, the contractions resulting from the global financial crisis persisted under the austerity programs. In 2012 per capita incomes in Italy were nine percent below the pre-crisis level, eleven percent for Ireland and twenty-one percent for Greece. The Irish statistic considerably understates the welfare loss of the population. Because of Ireland’s enormous trade surplus, required to service its external debts, domestic income per head has fallen as much as in Greece. Of the fifteen countries that were members of the Eurozone at the beginning of 2008, only one other than Germany had a 2012 per capita income greater than in 2007 (Austria, by one percentage point).

A government justifies its EU membership to its population on the grounds that by staying within the Union problems are more easily solved. When this is not the case, the Union becomes dysfunctional. The argument that Greece, for example, exiting the Euro would be far more costly and painful than the burden of the current austerity programs is completely disingenuous. This argument says, in effect, once a country is in, it is trapped – no matter how much its population suffers, it would suffer more if it tried to escape.
The argument is also misconceived, because the relevant comparison is the counterfactual – would Greece, Cyprus, Spain, etc. be better able to manage their economies now if they had never joined? To me it is obvious that the answer is not a resounding and unambiguous “no”. If I am correct, that at best the balance of cost and benefits of membership in the Eurozone (and perhaps the Union itself) is unclear, this does not require country-by-country “reforms”.  It requires fundamental changes in the governance and goals of the European Union.
The changes should not consist of giving the Commission greater powers to enforce fiscal austerity. On the contrary, the changes should facilitate national level economic adjustments that bring relief and benefits, not welfare-depressing austerity. First among these changes should be a move away from austerity to employment generation as the EU-wide policy focus.
In 1999 Jorge Huffschmidt wrote,

…[T]he convergence criteria of Maastricht was totally biased and counterproductive. Today it seems not to be very realistic, but nothing contradicts similar intensive efforts of the EU – not only the countries of the monetary union – for the abolishing of unemployment to achieve progress and successes as well – for example the reduction of unemployment within the next 3 years.

Now, fourteen years later, that judgment is even more urgent that it was then. To escape the despair of economic decline and unemployment, we need an EU-wide commitment to full employment, similar to that stated in the US Full Employment Act of 1946, a commitment “to promote maximum employment, production and purchasing power.”

For the complete transcript : A Eurozone Report Card 2013 - Social Europe Journal