The US President, Donald Trump, speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Jan. 21, 2025, in Washington. (CFP Photo)
Again, Donald Trump is back in the Oval Office. In his inauguration speech on Monday, the 78-year-old man, having escaped a bullet by the skin of his teeth, delivered a speech, full of plain language and demagogic statements but with more specific actions outlined in his executive orders.
Perhaps not a large portion of people worldwide took the speech seriously on Jan. 20, 2017. However, what's past is prologue, as the speech soon triggered global attention eight years later.
Staying up until 2 AM to watch online, David Blair, vice president and senior economist at the Center for China and Globalization, told GDToday that the main focus of Donald Trump in his second term will be domestic issues, given his executive orders concerning federal workers and curtailing immigration, particularly to serve the interests of working and middle-class people within the US.
Authoritative data has unveiled that the top 10% of wealthy Americans control 60% of the nation's wealth, while the poorer half of the country holds only 6% currently.
Boeing workers wave picket signs to passing drivers as they strike after union members voted to reject a contract offer in Everett, Wash., on Sept. 15, 2024. (CFP Photo)
David Blair attributed the exacerbating economic inequality and the ensuing rise of populism throughout the country mainly to the neoliberal policies adopted since the 1990s, which imply "an extreme capitalism without much concern for workers or communities."
"Trump's major constituency is working-class people. They are the main target he's working for," noted Blair.
According to him, banks were previously constrained to operate within only a single state. The largest change in the financial system occurred during the Bill Clinton administration, which allowed big banks on Wall Street to operate nationwide.
"We had 30,000 small banks whose job was to fund local industry, farmers, and housing. Most of those were destroyed. You see a lot of destruction of working-class communities, especially in the Midwest of the US."
However, big banks were not concerned about that at all. In a discussion with one of the presidents of Bank of America previously, Blair told GDToday that big banks made money off loans to either highly risky firms for higher returns, such as Silicon Valley firms that might become monopolies, or subprime loans that they could end up charging 29% interest on.
The situation was aggravated by the second George Bush administration, which created Know Your Customer rules for banks. This move made it tough for small banks to survive, as they couldn't afford the technology or lawyers needed to comply.
In the early half of the 2010s, Silicon Valley had many firms and was a highly competitive place. Then the Barack Obama administration consolidated the firms down to five big oligopolies to make it easier to assert government control over them.
"That's how we got where we are, and it destroyed the American working class," Blair noted.
Dockworkers gather at the Bayport Container Terminal in Seabrook, Texas, on October 1, 2024. (CFP Photo)
Additionally, as Blair observes, median real wages of the American working class have been stagnant over the last three to four decades.
"If you look at median real wages, which represent half the people above and half below the wage earners, they are less now than they were in 1979. They were pretty much flat until the Biden administration."
Americans are very angry about wages. People die from depression, suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholism. The phenomenon was captured by 2015 Nobel economic laureate Angus Deaton and his wife Anne Case. Both of them are professors of Economics and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University.
They compiled a monograph titled "Deaths of Despair," explaining the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shedding light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class in the US.
"It's a very sad situation, much worse than when I was young," Blair said. "That's one reason Trump was elected and is seeking to reverse that."
"As Trump knows, these issues need to be addressed quickly, or many people will get rich off old policies, and they will resist every step of the way," he warned.
Reporter | Zhang Ruijun
Editor | Yuan Zixiang, James, Shen He