Satire/Rosie Sorenson

The Art of the Steal

Trump’s attempt at ye olde soybean shell game has hit a snag. First, he hurts farmers with his “I’m-Too-Big-To-Fail” tariffs. Then he dips into the national piggy bank (yours, mine and ours) to bail them out to the tune of $12 billion so that these farmers will continue to debase themselves on his behalf. I thought Republicans despised the redistribution of wealth. Guess I was wrong.

Too clever by half is our Trump; this time his scheme doesn’t seem to be working. Some farmers have said they would rather have access to free markets than a government bail-out. Others have said that $12 billion isn’t nearly enough, but, oh by the way, we’ll accept it in addition to our other bailouts. But don’t you dare call it “farmer welfare.” Or worse, a “bail-out.”

When ABC’s Kristen Welker asked Treasury Secretary Mnuchin for a comment about the bailout, he turned away and said, “We’re not bailing out any farmers … That’s a ridiculous comment. It’s not a bailout.” (CSpan, July 26, 2018).

Well, la-di-da. This is the same Mnuchin who asked to use a $25,000-per-hour United States military jet for his 2017 honeymoon to France, Italy and Scotland. But, no siree, that was no bail-out, no handout, no welfare, no freebie, no scam, no rescue, no entitlement, no misappropriation. When Republicans do it, it’s called sound business. When you or I rip off the government for millions, it’s called twenty-to-life.

It’s unclear who it was in the government that had the cajones or the ovaries to turn down his request, but we should all give thanks to that member of the deep state for his or her willingness to stand up to Mnuchin whose estimated worth is about $300 million. (Vanity Fair, September 14, 2017)

A fitting punishment for Mnuchin’s greedy chutzpah would be for him to be force-fed several gallons of water from the Flint River every day for a year. And speaking of Flint, how about we give its residents a $12 billion bail-out for all the pain and suffering they’ve endured at the hands of Michigan Republicans. These brainiacs decided to switch water sources from Lake Huron to the polluted Flint River to save money. Lead? What lead? Who cares about the health of these mostly poor and mostly minority residents, left behind when the auto industry bailed out years ago?

If there is any bright side to the obscene mismanagement of Flint’s water system it’s that the Michigan Attorney General’s Office has charged several state officials with involuntary manslaughter because 12 people died from Legionnaires’ disease during the Flint water catastrophe (CNN Library, April 8, 2018).

In the meantime, Mnuchin is now casting his greedy gaze upon another scheme. At Trump’s urging, he wants to find a way to perpetrate another “no bailout” bailout for the richest of the rich, which would add to the pile of huge tax breaks they’ve already received.

When is enough ever enough for these people? Oh, right, never.

The scheme is simple. Change the formulation for capital gains taxes. It would result in a huge windfall for those who don’t need another tax cut and who didn’t even deserve the first one they received from this administration.

Trump and Mnuchin believe that they alone can enact this theft by means of an executive order, bypassing that annoying Congress altogether. One teensy little problem. There’s this pesky thing called the “Constitution” which charges Congress and not the executive branch with managing our country’s purse strings. Neener-neener.

But when has a flimsy law gotten in Trump’s way? Mnuchin is trying to pull off a shell game here by shuffling around some of the definitions set forth by regulation to make it possible for the Treasury Secretary, i.e. him, to enact this ripoff. We don’t need no stinkin’ Congress.

This would, of course, blow up the deficit by who knows how many more billions or trillions. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Steal all the marbles so that there’s nothing left for Social Security and Medicare, let alone many of our other needs such as health care, infrastructure and oh, yes, election security. The GOP’s outrageous tax cuts on the wealthy have long been one of their favored weapons of mass destruction.

But when the economy blows up under the weight of our debt, and the social safety nets have been shredded, with millions upon millions of Americans descending into poverty, what are the odds that the top 10% will rush in to bail them out?

It’s not too farfetched to think that all of this deliberate siphoning of our coffers upwards to the very rich could come back to bite Republicans in the butt. Millions of fed-up, hungry Americans could rage into Washington with their 3-D printed guns, locked and loaded, and storm the White House, à la the Bastille, screaming:

Que voulons-nous? (What do we want?)

Mise en accusation! (Impeachment!)

Quand est-ce que nous le voulons? (When do we want it?)

Maintenant (Now!)

Could happen.

Rosie Sorenson is a humor writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Email RosieSorenson29@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2018

Populist.com