(3) The appearance of plutocracy. There are people on both the left and the right who say that our democracy is a sham because our country is really run by the big corporations. Trump’s packing his cabinet with billionaires, Wall Street tycoons, and corporation CEOs plays right into that.Trump hammered Hillary Clinton for giving speeches to Goldman-Sachs. But he has appointed three Goldman-Sachs executives to his administration. He owes his election to blue-collar workers the Democrats have ignored, but where is an advocate for that demographic in his administration?Maybe the Trump phenomenon is just the return of the old pre-Reagan country club Republicans. After all, Trump builds country clubs. The Rockefeller Republicans were the party of big business, throwing in some socially liberal noblesse oblige. I had greater hopes than this. Somebody, please, convince me that I’m wrong to worry.
In his new role at the State Department, Trump said Tillerson would “promote regional stability and focus on the core national security interests of the United States. Rex knows how to manage a global enterprise, which is crucial to running a successful State Department, and his relationships with leaders all over the world are second to none.”. . .
The Senate must still confirm Tillerson, and some members of the Republican majority have raised the Russia question.
Tillerson’s ExxonMobil duties involved working on major oil projects with Russia, including a partnership with the Russian oil giant Rosneft.
In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded Tillerson the Order of Friendship, one of the highest honors the nation bestows on foreign citizens.
Photo of Rex Tillerman and Vladimir Putin, from the archives of the Russian government: http://archive.premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/18700/ (the site includes an interesting transcript of their remarks). Licensed by Creative Commons, 3.0. No changes were made.
