Donald Trump's Vampire Presidency

[Celerity]

How does the president’s brand of kleptocracy work? It turns out rentier politics is even more lucrative than rentier capitalism.

https://newrepublic.com/article/197670/trump-rentier-politics-crypto-kleptocracy

https://archive.ph/ORrjC



President Donald Trump is America’s first rentier president. A rentier is a sort of capitalist parasite who extracts wealth from the economy without contributing to economic productivity. He is the precise opposite of the entrepreneur who disrupts markets and creates jobs with innovative new products, new manufacturing methods, or new ways to market goods or services. Many commentators bemoan today’s rentier capitalism. Now we’re seeing the advent of rentier politics.

John Maynard Keynes, in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, predicted “the euthanasia of the rentier” as a growing supply of capital pushed interest rates down permanently, depriving the “functionless investor” of his livelihood. He was too optimistic. Today the rentier is alive and well—partly because he learned how to extract wealth when interest rates were low (rentiers are no strangers to debt); partly because more of the U.S. economy is financialized than Keynes could possibly imagine; and partly because tax and other policies at the federal and state level privilege capital over labor.

Trump was a textbook rentier well before he entered office, as both an heir to a family fortune (he inherited $413 million from his father, Fred Trump) and an investor in real estate. To derive wealth from the ownership of land is the original French meaning of rentier. A more modern rentier activity is to dodge taxes, and when House Democrats three years ago released Trump’s tax returns for 2015 through 2020, Trump was revealed to have paid $750 or less in three of those six years.

During his first term as president, Trump’s serial violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses to extract wealth from public office put previous White House financial scandals like Teapot Dome and the Whiskey Ring in the shade; neither of the latter two episodes implicated the president, whereas Trump was the sole offender. Trump netted at least $7.8 million in payments from at least 20 foreign countries. The Supreme Court, three of whose members were appointed by Trump, avoided passing judgment by putting off a ruling until after Trump left office and then declaring the question moot.

snip

[usonian]

1. Cure for vampires. Trump steak.

stake

[Jack Valentino]

2. Good stakes for sale, CHEAP!