Thursday, January 12, 2017

James Kwak — The Perfectly Normal Ways Trump Can Enrich Himself as President

The president-elect's control over conventional economic policy could be worth more money than any conflict of interest.…
Along with the many unprecedented problems they create, Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest, as with so many other things, illustrate in striking fashion an existing flaw in American democracy. The problem is corruption: the potential for elected officials to take actions that benefit themselves, their family, their friends, or their business associates rather than the country as a whole.…
James Kwak's complaint is essentially that Donald Trump and his appointment of billionaires to his cabinet has eliminated the middleman in the graft that has enveloped US politics through campaign finance, lobbying and the revolving door.

Previously, the wealthy used elected representatives and unelected political appointees and officers of the court to promote elite interest. Now some of them have decided to eliminate the middleman, but the middleman still exists for the others to take advantage of.

What's the difference other than being more blatant? The result is the same. Time will tell about the scope and scale.

As far as I can tell, this much ado about nothing. Same old, same old with a different twist.

The Atlantic
James Kwak | Associate Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law

2 comments:

Penguin pop said...

Yes Trump makes all of this much more obvious to people who haven't been aware of these things or have never paid attention. He's a much easier target for people to point to these problems. Obummer could read a teleprompter better than Dubya so that also helped to not make this so blatant.

Andrew Anderson said...

There's a lot more to life than money - once one has enough.

Or has nearly everyone forgotten "What profit it a man to gain the whole world ..."