Oligarchy R Us
by digby
Ron Brownstein notes that the Chamber of Commerce and other big business types have been unusually quiet about Trump’s attacks on Amazon:
[T]he Chamber issued a statement late Tuesday afternoon in the name of Neil Bradley, its executive vice president and chief policy officer. “It’s inappropriate for government officials to use their position to attack an American company,” Bradley said. “The U.S. economy is the world’s most powerful because it embraces the free enterprise system and the rule of law, whereby policy matters are handled through recognized policy making processes.”
It’s not hard to imagine that the response from the Chamber and other business groups would have been far faster and far more furious if a Democratic president had mounted such a sustained attack on a single U.S. company. The cautious reaction to Trump’s offensive against Amazon—like the limp response to his earlier onslaughts on enterprises, from Merck & Co. to Nordstrom to the NFL—reflects the complex bargain that Trump has struck with the nation’s corporate leadership. And it’s a deal the president is using to try to bend business to his will.
On the one hand, Trump is giving the business community virtually everything it wants on many of its key policy priorities. His tax bill slashed corporate taxes. Federal agencies are systematically rolling back financial, consumer-protection, and environmental regulations. While Trump is pursuing some policies that many businesses oppose—particularly the moves to restrict immigration and raise trade barriers that are central to his insular nationalism—generally he has aligned with corporate preferences as unreservedly as any president since at least Ronald Reagan (if not Calvin Coolidge).
For business, though, the price for those wins is accepting a president committed to publicly stoning companies and individual corporate leaders who cross him. Trump’s message seems to be that businesses that play ball will be rewarded and those that don’t will be punished. That’s a political logic familiar in strong-man governments that run the spectrum from old urban machines like Richard Daley’s Chicago on one end to autocracies like Vladimir Putin’s Russia on the other.
Let’s just say they won’t be crossing Trump any time soon. And no, it’s not just because they love him so much for all the goodies he’s given them. It’s because businesses prefer to avoid controversy and nobody gets one going like Trump. So they’ll let him do whatever he wants. Being who he is, much of it will likely benefit them. But they’ll stay quiet even when it doesn’t. Who wants to be seen as being responsible for stock market losses because Trump decided to tweet some trash talk? Nobody. In fact, they’ll cozy up to him as much as possible to avoid that.
It’s true that they are all mostly shills for tax cuts and deregulation so maybe it doesn’t matter if business and industry toe Trump’s line. They would probably do it anyway. But it does get a little bit dicey when it comes to media companies. CEOs and corporate boards will have learned it’s best not to cross him and in ways subtle and not so subtle the word will go forth.
It’s not as if we haven’t seen that before. In the run up to the Iraq war they all rallied around George W. Bush and squelched dissent within their ranks. So far it hasn’t happened with Trump. But never say it can’t. It has. And then think about the agenda they will be enabling.
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