The Grand Betrayal is under way:
1.) During the campaign, Donald Trump promised to halt the rise of drug prices that is helping to make health care so expensive. Initially, he talked of allowing cheaper drugs to be imported from overseas; later, he pledged to use the enormous buying power of the federal government to negotiate lower prices.
“When it comes time to negotiate the cost of drugs, we are going to negotiate like crazy,” Trump promised a crowd in New Hampshire. “The drug companies probably have the second or third most powerful lobby in this country. They get the politicians, and every single one of them is getting money from them.”
In practice, “negotiate like crazy” means do nothing, because those proposals have suddenly been dropped from Trump’s agenda, sending pharmaceutical stocks soaring. Business Insider reports that Paulson & Co., a hedge fund headed by Trump adviser John Paulson, made $463 million last Wednesday alone, largely due to its pharmaceutical investments. Sweet.
2.) Trump also railed against “the insiders … the professional political class. It’s the powerful protecting the powerful. Insiders fighting for insiders. I am fighting for you.”
Today, those very same insiders are running the Trump transition team, and they’re not “fighting for you.” Trump has named energy lobbyists to handpick appointees who will regulate energy. Banking lobbyists are handpicking the men — and they are almost exclusively men — who would regulate banking. Telecom lobbyists are setting telecom policy and also handpicking regulators of their own. It’s a huge corporate power grab.
“He is going to need some people to help guide him through the swamp — how do you get in and how you get out?” explains former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, now one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington. “We are prepared to help do that.” Out of the goodness of their hearts, no doubt.
3.) When condemned by Hillary Clinton for paying no federal income taxes despite being a billionaire, Trump blamed the insiders who wrote the tax code and promised voters that he would fix that inequity.
"A lot of my write-off was depreciation and other things that Hillary, as a senator, allowed," he said in their second debate. "And she'll always allow it because the people that give her all this money, they want it. That's why. See, I understand the tax code better than anybody that's ever run for president."
Now that he’s president-elect, Trump and the Republican Congress are rushing to “fix” the tax code not by closing loopholes for the wealthy, but by blowing the whole thing wide open. They are eyeing tax cuts three times as large as the massive Bush tax cuts, with benefits going mainly to multi-millionaires and billionaires like himself. According to the Tax Policy Center, a middle-income taxpayer would see $20 a week more in take-home pay, an increase of 1.8 percent. The top 0.1 percent — those with incomes of more than $3.7 million — would get an average tax cut of more than $1 million, a 14 percent increase in after-tax income.
The American people got conned, and every passing day brings fresh evidence of just how deep the betrayal runs.
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