It’s Not Going to Be So Different

The advent of the second Trump regime will not significantly change America. In fact, it might even improve certain things.

Having competent people acting as “guard rails” within the executive branch of government has not exactly produced a great society.

The amount of legally sanctioned corruption in our economy has already passed its “fail-safe” point. Even with dedicated, intelligent administrators working in government agencies, we could not catch up with the staggering amount of money that the federal government transfers each year to the rich.

The problem has always been that we’ve built an economic system run in the name of profit. Those who bring profits to their company or personal bottom lines are rewarded with lifestyles unimagined even by monarchs of earlier times.

The most salient fact about this corruption is how deeply ingrained it has become in our system. When people know that they can cheat and get away with it to make extra money, that’s exactly what they do. How else can we explain countless thousands of $250 fire extinguishers being sold for $8,000 to our military for four years without any repercussions?

The answer is a vast majority of expenditures are never correctly audited, The Pentagon, for example, had a $380 billion budget last year. We’ve no clear idea what they spent that money on. The people who are supposed to look at it have, for the last four years, given them a yearly extension so they don’t have to show or justify their expenditures.

Things are even worse in the transportation sector. Those officials who oversee America’s mobility expenditures are not only beholden to “Big Car” lobbyists but also know that after a few years in the government, they’ll be rewarded with plush, six-figure jobs working for those same lobbyists. They then meet with the person who’s replaced them in government and negotiate the next deal for “Big Car,” of course, letting the government employee know that a job such as theirs awaits them.

This is not unique to the Department of Transportation. “Big Agriculture,” “Big Pharmacy,” “Big Military,” “Big” everything plays by the same rules.

Investigative reporting has disappeared, and it’s very seldom that Corporate Greed is ever even noticed until some major catastrophe occurs. Even then very few are punished.

Trump’s appointees, with their almost total lack of expertise in the sectors they’ll be running, will be even easier for the “Bigs” to deal with.

Our only hope is that, like President Warren Harding and his corrupt and inept administrators, there will be such a groundswell of revulsion when we finally find out what happened that the system will finally have to change.