You’re Getting Punked. But What’s So Bad About It Is You’re Complicit In Your Own Punking.

By Dr. Davis Davidson-Methot, As published in The Union

Freshly out from his conviction for business fraud, Mr Trump made his way to Phoenix for a political rally on June 6th. This was reported in the Union (6/7) and some of the attendees were quoted. One man noted that “the Democrats can’t campaign on the border, they can’t campaign on the economy” so they have to attack Mr Trump. Both of those statements are demonstrably false. It was Mr Trump who ordered congressional Republicans to dump the bipartisan Border Bill, and the economy since the pandemic has rebounded strongly — including statistics just released of another record number of jobs created, and most importantly for working folks, strong — slightly over 4% — growth in wages (Marketplace, PBS, 7 June 24).

What so many Republicans who talk about the border apparently fail to realize is that it is in large part due to a strong immigrant workforce that the United States has fared better than most other developed countries in the post-Covid recovery period. I wonder how many older Republicans who are collecting Social Security are aware that if they succeed in their stated goal of “closing” or “securing” the border Social Security will go bankrupt all the sooner? With the falling birth rate among Americans — and most developed nations — it is only through strong immigration that we can supply the workers needed to pay into the system to support the growing number of “Baby Boomers” (like myself) who are collecting Social Security. You “close the border” at your own economic peril. It is a foolish and terribly short-sighted proposition. Reform our immigration system, yes; close the border, no.

But this is part of a larger pattern for Republicans since Nixon and especially Reagan — remember so-called “trickle-down economics”? Well, the ever increasing income gap between median wage workers and CEO’s over the past 40 years shows that not very much corporate wealth has “trickled” very far down the ladder. Forty to fifty years ago the average ratio of CEO to median worker pay was 40:1. Today in the US it is roughly 351:1 (as of 2020, Romeo, 2023). But Republicans can’t be honest about that, so they have successfully used so called “culture war” issues to rally their “base,” giving them the political power to lavish tax cuts on their wealthy benefactors — as the Reagan, Bush and Trump tax cuts so effectively did, and with corresponding ballooning of the national debt. Witness reports that last April Mr Trump hosted a group of oil company executives at Mar-a-Lago and promised, “For the low cost of $1 billion dollars, he would ‘reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted’.” (Dawsey & Joselow, cited in Shephard) Those are his true friends, the ones with money. He’s just using the working class as pawns in a much larger game. As former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele so aptly put it back in 2020, if you’re working class and voting for Republicans, “You’re getting punked. But what’s so bad about it is you’re complicit in your own punking.” (quoted by Capehart, J., Washington Post, 24 August ’20)

But as I already noted, this isn’t new or unique with Mr Trump. It has been Republican strategy for half a century- ever since the whole-hearted embrace of Milton Friedman’s “laissez faire economics” — or free market capitalism. You hear this articulated by Republicans all the time — government regulations are bad, letting the free market manage itself through market forces is good. The problem with the theory, as Naomi Klein has demonstrated in her book “The Shock Doctrine” (also a documentary available on YouTube) is that consistently since the ‘70’s when these principles have been applied in different countries around the world the results have been remarkably consistent — the shrinking of the middle class, weakening of unions, and concentration of wealth in a few — in other countries such as Russia we refer to them as “oligarchs,” which has taken on a pejorative connotation, while here in the US we simply call

them “billionaires”. Seems so much more innocent, while revealing the very same economic reality — concentration of wealth, and therefore power, in a few, at the expense of the many, again, by getting you to be “complicit in your own punking.” It is as masterful as it is devious. Kudos to them for getting away with it for so long, but shame on you if you keep letting them get away with it. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

References:

Capehart, J. (24 August ’20) The Washington Post. Michael Steele to the Trump cult: ‘You’re complicit in your own punking’

Dawsey, J. & Joselow, M. (9 May ’24) The Washington Post. What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign.

Klein, N. (2008) The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Picador: NY.

Romeo, N. (2023) The Alternative: How to build a just economy. Public Affairs/Hachette Books Group: NY.

Shephard, A. (2024) The New Republic. The Billionaires have captured Donald Trump.

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