The Trump pick for Treasury secretary, the billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, complements Lutnick nicely. Bessent sees cryptocurrencies as “integral to economic freedom” and may soon be moving to invest our tax dollars in speculative crypto schemes that enrich the richest among us.
For Department of Energy secretary, Trump has selected the CEO of the Denver-based fracking company Liberty Energy, Chris Wright, a drill-baby-drill character who last year claimed “there is no climate crisis.” The billionaire oilman Harold Hamm, Trump’s go-to energy adviser, is getting the credit for putting Wright on Trump’s radar screen.
Trump’s pick for Education secretary, the billionaire Linda McMahon, once claimed she has a bachelor’s degree in education. She doesn’t. McMahon does, on the other hand, have more than a passing acquaintance with civics. She spent nearly $100 million from her own fortune on two self-funded and unsuccessful races to become a US senator from Connecticut.
For the corner office at the Department of the Interior, the Trump team has selected the holder of still another fortune of at least 10 digits, the former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, net worth $1.1 billion. Burgum jumped onto Trump’s shortlist once he threw in the towel early on his candidacy for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Two other billionaires – Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and Vivek Ramaswamy, another friendly Trump rival in the 2024 presidential campaign – have exceedingly visible quasi-official roles in the new administration. They’re running the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” an off-the-books entity that will be identifying federal government programs “deserving” of defunding.
Musk, meanwhile, has plenty of deep-pocketed pals he feels deserve high government office. One of them, the billionaire Jared Isaacman – a big-time customer of Musk’s SpaceX – now has Trump’s nod to run the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Another Musk pal, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks, will become the Trump administration’s “czar” for crypto and artificial intelligence. His naming to this new White House slot, notes a New York Times analysis, “cements the expectation” that Trump “intends to take a lighter hand” on regulating crypto, an area where “Trump personally has a business interest.”
Other Musk-friendly tech CEOs and venture capitalists are performing their patriotic duty by interviewing candidates for top positions in the second Trump administration.
Marc Andreessen, for instance, has been quizzing candidates for “senior roles” at departments ranging from State to Health and Human Services. Shaun Maguire, an investor at Sequoia Capital, is concentrating on candidates for top Defense Department slots.
By early December, according to a Guardian analysis, Trump had named to key federal executive slots at least 11 affluents who were either living life large in billionaire households or grinning “within touching distance” of billionaire status.
Excerpted: ‘Of the Plutocrats, By the Plutocrats, For the Plutocrats’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org
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