When I write that billionaires should not exist, I’m not advocating that all billionaires be butchered and made into chum or even that they simply be guillotined. Please don’t get me wrong; I just want them taxed out of existence… starting with Elon Musk. Which brings me right to a damn tangent. That scumbag doesn’t just want to become richer; he wants to be the baddest robber baron who ever lived. The chum factory might too good for that one. He owns 13% of Tesla; he’s trying to force the board to give him 25%. “Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla,” he threatened. I suspect that tactic isn’t legal. I should ask an attorney. He’s also threatening the state of Texas, which was ever so happy to lure him there. His shitty rockets regularly fall out of the sky and destroy parts of Boca Chica State Park. He’s “offering” to trade some crappy, nearly worthless acreage he bought near the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge Bahia Grande Unit in return for the immensely more valuable Boca Chica.
OK, back to today’s villain: Jamie Dimon, a Rahm Emanuel kind of Democrap. Obama nearly made him Treasury Secretary, virtually the only reason people breathed a sigh of relief when he named NY Fed president Tim Geithner instead. When FDR talked about economic royalists in 1932, he could have been describing a Dimon antecedent: “The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service, new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.”
It’s easy to imagine the Senate Banking Committee’s Pecora Commission (1932) dragging Dimon in front of it to testify about the 1929 stock market crash. (Pecora’s exposure of criminal and abusive practices by the finance industry led to the passage of Glass-Steagall.) Testimony from Dimon’s predecessor, J.P Morgan, caused public outrage when he admitted that he and his partners didn’t pay income taxes. (I wasn’t in charge or J.P would have been turned into chum that afternoon— and perhaps Dimon would be better behaved today, although I doubt it… which is why billionaires cannot exist.) During Dimon’s time heading JPMorgan Chase, the bank was fined $38 billion by the government for legal and regulatory infractions, including a then-record $13 billion fine in 2013 for defrauding investors. What a guy!
Although he donates primarily to conservative Democrats, in 2012 he said he was “barely a Democrat,” whining about the party’s “anti-business behavior, the attacks on work ethic and successful people. This month, at Davos, he praised Trump and criticized Biden for being disrespectful of Trump’s supporters. He said “Take a step back, be honest. [Trump] was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China. He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues.” What planet was he on?
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich almost had a coronary. He responded with an opinion piece for The Guardian.
Kind of right about NATO? Trump wanted the US to withdraw from NATO— and may get his way if he becomes president again. This would open Europe further to Putin’s aggression.
Kind of right on immigration? Even the conservative Cato Institute found that Trump reduced legal immigration but not illegal immigration. Trump refused to grant legal status to children of immigrants born in the United States or who grew up in the US. He banned Muslims from the US, and when the Muslim ban was found to be unconstitutional, banned people from Muslim countries. He fueled the flames of nativism by describing poorer nations as “shitholes” and has used terms redolent of Nazism to describe foreigners as “poisoning the blood” of Americans.
Grew the economy quite well? In fact, under Trump the economy lost 2.9 million jobs. Even before the pandemic, job growth was slower than it has been under Biden. The unemployment rate increased by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3%. The international trade deficit that Trump promised to reduce went up. The US trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 40.5% from 2016. The number of Americans lacking health insurance rose by 3 million. The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4tn to $21.6 trillion.
Tax reform worked? Trump’s tax cut conferred most of its benefits on big corporations and the rich, while enlarging the budget deficit. Giant banks and financial services companies got huge gains based on the new, lower corporate rate (21%), as well as the more preferable tax treatment of pass-through companies.
If not for the Trump cuts— along with the Bush tax cuts and their extensions— federal revenues would keep pace with federal spending indefinitely, and the ratio of the debt to the national economy would be declining.
Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57% of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90% of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to Covid-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100% of the increase.
Right about China? As the Brookings Institution found, Trump’s China policy only made China less restrained in pursuit of its ambitions. Confrontation has intensified, areas of cooperation have vanished, and the capacity of both countries to solve problems or manage competing interests has atrophied.
Oh, and then there are the pesky matters of Trump’s seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, facing 91 criminal indictments, causing the US to be more divided than at any time since the Civil War, lying every time he opens his mouth, and planning to use the justice department for “vengeance” against his political enemies if elected again.
Why is Jamie Dimon— the most influential CEO in America— spouting these talking points in favor of Trump?
Because he thinks Trump has a good chance of becoming president, and Dimon wants to be in his good graces.
Asked which candidate would be better for his business, Dimon said: “I have to be prepared for both. I will be prepared for both. We will deal with both.”
Dimon knows that his support for Nikki Haley irked Trump.
“Highly overrated Globalist Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMORGAN, is quietly pushing another non-MAGA person, Nikki Haley, for President,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social in late November. “I’ve never been a big Jamie Dimon fan, but had to live with this guy when he came begging to the White House. I guess I don’t have to live with him anymore, and that’s a really good thing.”
So now, Dimon— like Republican lawmakers across the US, like too many other leaders of American institutions— feels it necessary to cave into the integrity-crushing intimidation of a Trump administration, and lick Trump’s backside.
And when Dimon does this, you can bet many other CEOs and financial leaders will now follow his example.
At a time in American history when the most influential leaders of the US need to stand up loudly and clearly for the rule of law, for democracy, for decency, and against Donald Trump, Dimon is leading the charge in the opposite direction.
This is how fascism takes root and spreads.
