Beware the attractive -looking infrastructure re-building promises of Donald Trump. I am writing to make some speculative predictions, because I believe Trump’s plans are likely to have ominous consequences.
As we all know, Trump has been promising to rebuild American infrastructure (roads, bridges, tunnels, railroads, airports, seaports, etc.) for a long time. This general idea has merit. However, the GOP has consistently nixed all such plans introduced under the Obama administration, citing budgetary constraints. Now, Congressional Democrats have recently submitted a trillion dollar infrastructure plan for government spending with the hope that they can collaborate with Trump, the GOP, industry and unions on this issue.
I have a two-part prediction: (1) I expect that at least part of the GOP will continue to argue that the cost of infrastructure improvement is too high, and that the U.S. budget cannot support it. (2) I suspect strongly that Trump has never had in mind spending very much (if any) government money on infrastructure construction anyway.
I predict that both Trump and the GOP will argue that we just can’t afford government spending on infrastructure. Instead, they will likely push hard to let private equity corporations (e.g. Bain Capital and the like) ride in on their white horses to save us by funding the construction themselves. They will tell us that this is much more efficient than letting the government do it, the venture capitalists will use “best management practices,” etc. They will say that this will save the taxpayers enormous amounts of money, and we will get higher quality results.
Of course, what they will NOT tell us is that the real goal is to privatize our infrastructure and make a handful of oligarchs enormously rich (including Trump, most likely). They will want to sell off our existing “crumbling” infrastructure to private corporations at pennies on the dollar, then let them fund the new construction so they can later make a huge profit in various ways. We will end up using toll roads, toll bridges, etc. at enormous cost to ordinary citizens. We will lose public ownership of our infrastructure and become captive to corporate executives and stockholders. This will drive us further toward being a fully corporate fascist state dominated entirely by oligarchs and plutocrats.
I believe that one big reason why Trump likes Russia’s Putin so much is that he admires the way Putin turned Russia into a giant kleptocracy and made himself the richest man in the world. www.msnbc.com/... Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin sold public assets, especially oil facilities, to a handful of special friends at pennies on the dollar. By various means, including selling these assets at enormous profits, these friends became multi-billionaire oligarchs and made Putin the richest man in the world. I suspect that Trump would love to do a similar thing with the United States.
I urge Congressional Democrats to be aware of possible Trump plans to enhance his kleptocracy, and work to stop any GOP efforts in this direction.