Thursday, December 1, 2016

Trump does not have Jackson’s clear populist hate for Wall Street that elected him

Andrew Jackson is the original anti-establishment populist who slayed the Adams dynasty just as surely as Donald Trump slayed the Bush dynasty and Clinton family rule.  And as with The Donald, Jackson’s frontier populism rode roughshod over a minority, native Americans which in comparison make Trump’s threats against Mexicans and Muslims tame.  Nevertheless Jackson is considered an important President.  It was his argument to Henry Clay against breaking the union that Lincoln called for to review before taking the oath of President and as the South was seceding, yet so reviled by Washington elites that they called him a jackass, ergo the donkey symbolising modern day Democrats.  Less known is Jackson’s populist hatred of banks, specifically the 2nd Bank of the United States purposely lead by Nicholas Biddle to take the debts of Congressmen and Senators as a means of influence and power outside of the Constitution and the executive branch.  Trump on the other hand is showing a rare political disconnect with his rural supporters by calling on Goldman Sachs to fill out the Treasury despite it being the same bank that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama called upon. The very name voters believed got the bonuses while they got the shaft.  Curiously the assessment of Messrs. Simon Johnson and James Kwak in their book 13 Bankers  was that Jackson’s veto of the re-authorization of Hamilton’s central bank opened up the U.S. economy during the later half of the eighteen hundreds in beneficial ways, especially in comparison to Mexico and Brazil’s closed elite central banking structures of the time.  The point being that if Trump is going to be hard on an interest group he could do worse than take a few scalps on Wall Street to placate his supporters and do the country some good.

No comments:

Post a Comment