Few places in America loved Donald Trump on Nov. 8 as much as Upshur County, West Virginia, in the heart of Coal County. Just under 76 percent of Upshur County residents voted for the GOP candidate \u2014 and why wouldn\u2019t they, after Trump promised \u201cto put our miners back to work\u201d while Hillary Clinton and other liberals were looking instead to a future after coal?<\/p>\n
Less than a month after his election, Trump rewarded that vote of confidence by naming as his commerce secretary the billionaire former owner of Upshur County\u2019s Sago Mine, which collapsed in 2006 \u2014 killing 12 miners \u2014 after a mounting list of safety violations was ignored at what union leaders say was a dangerous, exploitative \u201cdoghole mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The billionaire, Wilbur Ross, did ultimately pay out $2 million to the families of the 12 men and a 13th survivor, but relatives say it was too little, too late. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to throw a couple million afterward instead of spending a few million ahead of time to save men\u2019s lives in the first place,\u201d Kevin Sharp, one of those family members, told ABC News.<\/p>\n
Ross, the so-called \u201cking of bankruptcy\u201d who looks for bargain-basement companies to strip and sell for a handsome profit, bought Sago\u2019s prior owner after a bankruptcy judge had agreed to squash its union benefits. Two years after the collapse, Ross\u2019s firm closed Sago and his International Coal Group eventually sold out, for a healthy profit, to new owners who\u2019ve laid off many of the remaining miners.<\/p>\n
Now, as commerce secretary, Ross will be President-elect Trump\u2019s point man for using his Midas touch to revitalize the economy and, allegedly, make America great again for coal miners, steelworkers and other struggling Rust Belt and rural blue-collar voters who formed the backbone of The Donald\u2019s winning coalition. I write \u201callegedly\u201d because there\u2019s no actual evidence that Ross or Trump\u2019s recent pick to run the Treasury Department \u2014 hedge-funder and former \u201cforeclosure machine\u201d chief Steve Mnuchin \u2014 know anything about actually creating stable, well-paying jobs with good benefits.<\/p>\n
What do these billionaires of Trump\u2019s swamp-definitely-not-drained Cabinet like Ross and Mnuchin know how to do? Squeeze millions from struggling industries and their workers. Stomp all over pension plans for aging workers. Move jobs overseas if there\u2019s an extra dollar or two to be made. Foreclose on mortgage holders at the drop of a hat, or on the basis of a dumb mistake \u2014 especially if the homeowner is black or Latino. Devastate unions that might fight for living wages or affordable health plans.<\/p>\n
Look, I know. Trump\u2019s voters in places like Upshur County didn\u2019t vote for their beloved strongman based on a detailed read of his economic policies. They wanted to send a message to the pointy-headed elites in Washington and New York and all the university towns, people who not only had no clue how to solve the problems of a place like West Virginia but who \u2014 far, far worse \u2014 looked down their collective nose at the people who live in such places.<\/p>\n
Message sent and received. Still, you have to think the people of America\u2019s Heartland expected to get some economic benefit out of Trump\u2019s election \u2014 except that his new straight-outta-Goldman (and George Soros, imagine that, friendly conservative readers) team only knows how to cut taxes for the wealthy and remove the restrictions on \u201ccasino capitalism\u201d intended to prevent another crash like the one in 2008 that walloped states like West Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no way to sugar-coat this: Trump\u2019s new Cabinet, when it comes to domestic policy, is made up of wealthy people who\u2019ve devoted their lives to perfecting ways to screw over Trump\u2019s voters. Shocking, isn\u2019t it? \u2014 that the man who gave the world Trump University, a boiler-room type operation in which the marks, also known as students, were pressured to max out their credit cards to pay for worthless courses on real estate taught by people who knew little or nothing about real estate, would pull a con job on the 46 percent of Americans who voted for him.<\/p>\n
The lack of concern that Trump\u2019s money men hold for the \u201cforgotten middle class\u201d is even worse than you\u2019d expect. Ross once whined that \u201cthe 1 percent is being picked on for political reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or maybe the 1 percent is getting picked on because of folks like Mnuchin (who really ought to use some of his vast wealth to buy a vowel), a Yale Skull and Bones man who made a fortune at Goldman Sachs (where his dad was also a legendary trader) and for that George Soros hedge fund, then bought a troubled mortgage company that foreclosed on 36,000 homeowners, often in the worst possible ways.<\/p>\n
Consider the case of Minneapolis resident Leslie Parks, who thought she was renegotiating her mortgage terms with Mnuchin\u2019s OneWest as the winter of 2009 was arriving, only to come home one afternoon during a raging blizzard to find her home had been padlocked shut. Like so many middle-class folks in the run-up to the crisis, Parks had run into trouble when her banker had steered her family into a much riskier adjustable-rate mortgage, right before the U.S. economy came crashing down.<\/p>\n
In a Long Island foreclosure case, a judge lashed out at Mnuchin\u2019s OneWest, calling the firm \u201cinequitable, unconscionable, vexatious, and opprobrious\u201d in its actions against homeowners. In addition, OneWest foreclosed on a disproportionate number of senior citizens. At one point, protesters camped out in front of Mnuchin\u2019s Bel Air mansion to protest \u2014 but it all seemingly fell on deaf ears. As Treasury Secretary, Mnuchin is expected to work to undo the Dodd-Frank reforms that were passed with the goal of preventing another crash like the one in 2008.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s much more that could be said about the awfulness of Trump\u2019s choices \u2014 about how Ross stripped North Carolina (which also went narrowly for Trump) of hundreds of textile jobs, or about the thin resume of yet another billionaire nominee, Chicago Cubs owner Todd Ricketts, but the bottom line is clear.<\/p>\n
At some point \u2014 maybe not next week or next month, but soon \u2014 the people who elected Trump to vent their frustrations will realize that the 45th president isn\u2019t actually working for their interests. And then what? The last embers from 2016\u2019s torches and pitchforks are still glowing.<\/p>\n
What kind of sparks will fly when they learn that America\u2019s new strongman isn\u2019t strong for the forgotten middle class?<\/p>\n
\u2022 Will Bunch is a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Few places in America loved Donald Trump on Nov. 8 as much as Upshur County, West Virginia, in the heart of Coal County. Just under 76 percent of Upshur County residents voted for the GOP candidate \u2014 and why wouldn\u2019t they, after Trump promised \u201cto put our miners back to work\u201d while Hillary Clinton and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-19070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19070"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=19070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}