So, I think we need to understand that Trump is not playing by the rules of politics. He’s playing by the rules of branding. And, you know, there have been presidential conflicts of interest before. There have been presidents with business interests before. But there has never been a fully commercialized global brand as a sitting U.S. president. That is unprecedented.
And the reason that’s unprecedented is because this is a relatively new business model. It is—the business model that has been adopted by the Trump Organization is really not one that existed before the 1990s. It is what I called in my first book, No Logo, the hollow brand model, right? And the model comes out of the fact that in the—so, the original history of branding is you have a product—you know, maybe it was rice, maybe it was beans, maybe it was shoes—you’re a manufacturer first, but you want people to buy your product, so you brand it. You put a logo on it. You identify it with, you know, some sort of iconic image, like Uncle Ben’s or whatever it is, right? You give it a kind of personality.
.. an advertising executive who said, “Consumers are like roaches. You spray them and spray them, and they become immune after a while.” It’s just lovely insight from a marketer, yeah, about how they see customers. So, marketing started to get more ambitious, and then you started to see these companies that position themselves as lifestyle brands. And they said, “No, we’re not product-based companies. We are in the business of selling ideas and identity.” Nike was the ultimate example of this. Nike CEO Phil Knight stepped forward and said, “We are not a sneaker company. We are not a shoe company. We are about the idea of transcendence through sports,”
.. Starbucks wasn’t a coffee company; it was about the idea of community and the third place. And, you know, Disney was family.
.. So, Trump was more of a traditional business in the 1980s. And Trump was just sort of like a guy who built buildings, but—built buildings and had a flair for marketing. But the game changer for him was The Apprentice. That’s when he got to—he realized he could enter the stratosphere of the superbrands.
.. And his business model changed. It no longer became about building the building or buying the building. That was for other people to do. He was about building up the Trump name and then selling it and leasing it in as many different ways as possible. So you’ve got the Trump water and Trump Steaks and Trump’s very so-called dodgy university.
.. Trump’s big idea, the idea at the center of his brand, is the power that comes with wealth. And so, the more powerful he is—and, of course, he happens somehow to have got himself the most powerful job in the world—that fact alone is massively increasing the value of his brand, which his sons are cashing in on busily on every front by selling that name for inflated prices.
.. this idea that we’re going to somehow catch him out, damage him by proving that he is corrupt, you know, that he treats people awfully, that’s his brand.
His brand is that he’s the boss, and he gets to do whatever he wants.
.. The Apprentice, as you so aptly describe, was really based on selling a cutthroat brand of capitalism to the American people as the way that people should be.
.. Yeah, it’s televised class war. I mean, it opens up with an image of a homeless man sleeping rough on the streets of New York, and then cuts to Trump in his limousine. And it’s basically like “Who do you want to be? The homeless guy or Trump?” Right? And so, you know, this happens. You know, the show launches at a time when people understand that this—that neoliberalism is not lifting all boats. It is this cutthroat world of winners and losers. And which one do you want to be?
.. I didn’t know that in later seasons they deported half of their contestants into tents in the backyard. They called it Trump’s trailer park. And, you know, they would overlay the sound of like howling dogs at night. And it was this idea of creating drama out of the massive inequalities of our economic system. The people who were sleeping in the backyard, who had been deported into Trump’s trailer park, would peek over the hedges to look at the people living in the mansion, you know, drinking champagne and floating around in the swimming pool, right?
.. if you play by my rules, you end up in the mansion. And it will be even sweeter because people are sleeping outside, right? Because you won.
Have We Lost A Constitutional Right In The Fine Print?
The right to require arbitration was ratified in a series of battles in the Supreme Court, which, Silver-Greenberg says, was engineered by a Wall Street coalition of credit card companies and retailers.
.. Arbitration was designed – in its ideal form, it was designed to really be a system where companies of equal bargaining power went to work out their disputes.
.. What we have in the consumer context and the employment context is far different.
.. It is binding. So one of the tricky things about arbitration – one of the things that came up a lot in our reporting – was that, regardless of how the process has gone, the decisions in arbitration – the decisions of the arbitrators – are virtually impossible to appeal. So judges have said when plaintiffs have gone in and asked them to overturn a decision they say is unfair by an arbitrator, they have said their hands are tied. And even in instances where an arbitrator’s decision resulted in substantial injustice, they would still – a court said they would still be unable to overturn or revoke the arbitrator’s decision.
.. Class action lawsuits, because they enable large groups of people that might be similarly affected to pool their resources, are really the only way that an individual can afford to go up against a deep-pocketed company with vast resources. It allows people to join together to prove their case. And these are cases that require often a lot of expert testimony, a lot of evidence, and so they would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to bring.
.. The lawsuits are also really important when you were dealing with systemic issues, like wage theft, that affects many people in the same way. So we’re not just talking about disputed fees or a checking account problem. We’re also talking about discrimination that impacts, you know, hundreds of thousands of people and is a practice that can be changed because of a successful class action.
.. So these were a group of class action lawsuits that were brought around 2009 against more than a dozen banks for allegations of reordering transactions. So what that looked like was – say I made two purchases. I bought a $500 stereo system and a $2 cup of coffee. The banks were accused of processing the most expensive – the largest transaction – that stereo system – first, even if I bought it after I bought the cup of coffee, and then withdrawing money to cover the cup of coffee.
.. And so the banks were accused of reordering all these transactions to maximize the amount of fees that they could get from overdraft.
.. And the class actions resulted in, I think, more than a billion dollars in relief for customers. And so those are, I think, a particularly poignant example because if I have a $35 overdraft fee, I’m probably not going to take the time to file a lawsuit about it.
.. it wasn’t just about the money they got back. It was about changing the practices.
.. And in the – and if those disputes are instead confined to arbitration, all of the parties who might be affected by the practice, whether it’s an employment practice or consumer practice – they don’t even know because the arbitration is limited to a single individual.
.. So for years, what would happen was companies that tried to put arbitration clauses with class-action bans in them – in the fine print of their contracts – were told by judges that that just was not going to fly. So judges refused to routinely uphold these clauses because they said that they amounted to – one judge in California put it very starkly – a get out of jail free card. And the reason they said that was because…
.. And the reason they said that is because realistically, you need a class action in order to mount a legal challenge as an individual against a deep-pocketed company. So when these companies were putting in their arbitration clauses, hey, you guys can’t file a class, you know, you can’t join together as a group, judges said that that was the equivalent of saying, you can’t bring a lawsuit at all.
.. And for that group, their victory, their real kind of coup, came in 2010
.. One of the lawyers apparently involved in this was John Roberts, the current Chief Justice of the Court. But he was involved in this effort, you say, as an attorney. What was his role?
.. Yes, so he was working for Discover Bank in a case that Discover was trying to get the Supreme Court involved in. So what the cases was is Discover Bank was accused of charging unfair fees.
.. They said that Discover was trying to grant itself – and the quote is – “a license to push the boundaries of good business practices to their furthest limits,”
.. And he said that allowing consumers to bring a case as a class would violate the core purpose of this Federal Arbitration Act.
.. They win because the Supreme Court in 2010 – so now, you know, John Roberts is now Chief Justice – and they take up this case that involves AT&T.
.. And the California courts in this case involving AT&T that the Supreme Court is hearing had said class-action bans are unfair. They’re unconscionable. And the Supreme Court in their decision basically said the Federal Arbitration Act, it beats out state law.
So all the state court judges that were using state contract law to invalidate these arbitration clauses with class-action waivers, they suddenly lost that power. They lost the ability to use state law to do that because the Supreme Court said, no, the federal law wins out.
DAVIES: And a big difference was the Supreme Court had changed by then, right?
SILVER-GREENBERG: Yes. Yes, I mean, that’s a huge difference in that John Roberts, when he was petitioning the court as a private lawyer in 2002, he was not there yet, right? He was not the Chief Justice. Then fast-forward to 2010 when they take on this AT&T case and he is. So that did change things.
.. Tell us how the arbitrators themselves are chosen, and are they genuinely impartial?
SILVER-GREENBERG: So when I began an arbitration there’s a firm, an arbitration firm, that kind of oversees the whole thing. And they provide to both sides a list of potential arbitrators. And they are made up of retired judges and many, many, many, many, many corporate lawyers. And so each side gets a list of say five people and they can go through and cross out the people that they would object to hearing their cases. So that creates an incentive, a kind of skewed incentive as described by the arbitrators, where if they want to be picked to hear future cases, if they want to continue having business they say and said in interviews that they feel they need to be friendlier towards the companies because the companies are the ones that can offer them future cases, whereas the plaintiffs can’t. The plaintiffs are going to be there probably once in their lives. Whereas the companies offer a repeat stream of cases. And they talk about arbitrators who had very plaintiff-friendly rulings. And the nightmare scenario, in one they said, was an arbitrator who ruled in favor of an employee and forced the employer to pay more than a million dollars in damages. And that arbitrator, the story goes, was never given another case again.
.. And the arbitrator said to Debbie and the other students he said – he chastised them for not being savvier shoppers. He basically said you exercised about as much discretion as if – I think his quote was buying a Snickers bar at the local market. And he ruled against them, and because of the hardship that he said they inflicted on the school he forced them – he ruled that they would have to pay the school’s attorney’s fees. So that was the, you know, $300,000 – a little over that, that they had to pay – that they were ordered to pay to cover the school’s attorneys.
.. one case in your story where customers with televisions that had fuzzy pictures were part of a class-action lawsuit. They ended up getting coupons for $25 or $50 apiece for the merchant and the lawyers in the question got $22 million for the effort. Do these folks have a point?
.. So any plaintiffs lawyers fees have to be – they don’t happen in a vacuum. They have to be approved by a judge.
.. conservative legal scholars, including one who clerked for Justice Scalia, and what he said, this one professor, he said that attacking class actions for yielding small individual amounts is beside the point because class actions help lots of people get back a little bit of money. But they serve another function as well, which is they help address practices. So they help get rid of and change business practices that would otherwise go unchecked.
.. I think people are surprised. I mean, I think there’s been a lot of surprise that they signed away this right and people are signing away a constitutional right when they sign these clauses.
This Isn’t Tax Policy; It’s a Trump-Led Heist
This isn’t about “jobs,” as the White House claims. If it were, it might cut employment taxes, which genuinely do discourage hiring. Rather, it’s about huge payouts to the wealthiest Americans — and deficits be damned!
.. If Republicans embrace this “plan” after all their hand-wringing about deficits and debt, we should build a Grand Monument to Hypocrisy in their honor.
Trump’s tax “plan” is a betrayal of his voters. He talks of helping ordinary Americans even as he enriches tycoons like himself.
.. fewer than 10 percent of low-income households with children would get anything at all
.. families earning between $10,000 and $30,000 a year would receive an average child care benefit of just $10.
.. In fairness, Trump’s proposal does include some sensible elements. Raising the standard deduction is smart and would simplify everything, reducing cheating and the need for record-keeping because millions of filers would no longer itemize deductions.
How the System Is ‘Rigged’
In what sense is the system rigged?
Consider Big Media—the elite columnists and commentators, the dominant national press, and the national and cable networks, save FOX. Not in this writer’s lifetime has there been such blanket hatred and hostility of a presidential candidate of a major party.
.. There are more than 11 million illegal immigrants here, with millions more coming. Yet the government consistently refuses to enforce the immigration laws of the United States.
Why should those Americans whose ancestors created, fought, bled and died to preserve America not believe they and their children are being dispossessed of a country that was their patrimony—and without their consent?
.. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Congressional majority voted to end discrimination against black folks.
When did we vote to institute pervasive discrimination against white folks, especially white males, with affirmative action, quotas and racial set-asides? Even in blue states like California, affirmative action is routinely rejected in statewide ballots.
.. We now know, thanks to leaked emails, that not only the superdelegates and the Obama White House but a collaborationist press and the DNC were colluding to deny Sanders any chance at the nomination.
The fix was in. Ask Sanders if he thinks the system is rigged.
.. If there is an issue upon which Americans agree, it is that they want secure borders and an end to trade policies that have shipped abroad the jobs, and arrested the wages, of working Americans.
Yet in a private speech that netted her $225,000 from Brazilian bankers, Hillary Clinton confided that she dreams of a “common market, with open trade and open borders” from Nome, Alaska, to Patagonia.
.. That would mean the end of the USA as a unique, sovereign and independent nation. But the American press, whose survival depends upon the big ad dollars of transnational corporations, is more interested in old tapes of the Donald on The Howard Stern Show.
.. And if they do, Middle America—those who cling to their bibles, bigotries and guns in Barack Obama’s depiction, those “deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic,” who are “not America” and are “irredeemable” in Hillary Clinton’s depiction—will have to accept the new regime.