In The Anthropocene, The GOP Are Nothing More Than Vultures At The Carcass, Like The CEOs They Serve
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Meanwhile, Wall Street’s largest banks reassured their clients this week that congressional Republicans will eventually acquiesce to another hefty stimulus package (as opposed to the “skinny” one that the party currently backs), with Morgan Stanley projecting a “a $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion package” by month’s end. At present, Mitch McConnell & Co. have refused to meet Nancy Pelosi’s caucus halfway on relief funding. This is in part because Republicans oppose significant fiscal aid for states and cities, a policy that enjoys the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Moody’s Analytics, which has argued that “every state needs additional federal aid” and that the “economic impacts” of states “not receiving it quickly are exceedingly high.”
These developments testify to an underappreciated fact about contemporary American politics: Contrary to popular conception, the GOP does not govern in the interests of U.S. business — or, at least, not in the long-term interests of U.S. business as a whole.
To be sure, Trump has done a great deal to benefit corporate America’s incumbent executives, especially those looking to maximize their own wealth in the run-up to retirement. Through his regressive-tax cuts and deregulatory measures, the president has saved major U.S. firms and their shareholders a bundle. The nation’s six largest banks alone have pocketed $32 billion as a consequence of Trump’s policies. And for America’s most socially irresponsible enterprises, this administration has been a true godsend. Since taking power, the Trump White House has, among other things, expanded the liberty of coal companies to dump mining waste in streams, pushed to preserve the rights of retirement advisers to gamble with their clients’ money, freed employers from the burden of logging all workplace injuries, and ended discrimination against serial labor-law violators in the bidding process for government contracts.
But the Republican Party is too corrupted by rentier and extractive industries — and too besotted with conservative economic orthodoxy — to advance the long-term best interests of American capital. This reality has made itself conspicuous at various points over the past two decades. During the 2008 crisis, George W. Bush’s efforts to stabilize the U.S. financial system encountered sustained opposition from his party’s House caucus, relying on strong Democratic support to make it into law. Over the ensuing years, the tea party’s debt-ceiling demagoguery repeatedly threatened to force the country into a needless debt default. Under Trump’s leadership, meanwhile, the GOP dismantled much of the pandemic management infrastructure that its Democratic predecessor had built up in response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Once COVID-19 arrived, the president proceeded to misleadingly downplay the threat of the virus; discourage his supporters from complying with recommended measures for containing its spread; refused to coordinate a comprehensive federal response, opting instead to let blue states bid against each other for limited supplies; convened potential super-spreader events in viral hot spots; publicly admitted that he hoped to suppress testing so as to make case counts look more favorable than they actually were; advised Americans that injecting disinfectant into their lungs might cure COVID; and blocked fiscal aid to states and cities amid a broader effort to coerce them into reopening their economies before the virus was contained.
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https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/cftc-report-climate-change-gop-pro-business-trump.html
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