Cabinet Confirmations (Jan 31, 2025)

By Amy West

This week’s post will be a short one. The House Republicans spent the first part of the week in a retreat and held no votes in the rest of the week. The Senate has held a number of hearings on cabinet nominees and begun to vote on them. The AP has a handy tracker that includes a little information about each nominee / confirmed cabinet member.

Confirmed Cabinet Positions

• Bessent – Treasury Secretary – 68-29

• Hegseth – Secretary of Defense – 51-50

• Duffy – Secretary of Transportation – 77-22

• Burgum – Secretary of the Interior – 79-18

• Rubio – Secretary of State – 99-0

• Ratcliffe – Director of the Central Intelligence Agency – 74-25

• Zeldin – Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency – 56-42

• Noem – Secretary of Homeland Security – 59-34

It has often been said that “People are policy.” It remains to be seen how loyal to the Trump/MAGA Agenda the personalities above will prove to be, because the 45th/47th President of the United States (POTUS) himself has said that he didn’t understand the working of Washington D.C. as well in 2017 as he does now in 2025. In the transition from 2016-2017, Trump made some picks in hindsight he was not happy with. For what it’s worth (FWIW), many in the right-leaning pundit class seem to believe he has done a much better job of picking people loyal to the MAGA/America First Agenda, as well as picking personalities who are often younger and will thus be a position to carry forward the movement that Trump says he is leading. Time will, of course, tell.

That said, it is absurd that one of the three most powerful nations military and economically on the planet – U.S., Communist China, former communist Russia (noting that Russia lags well behind the U.S. and China economically, there are stronger economies than Russia in Japan, Germany, Britian, India, Italy, etc.) can’t figure out what’s gone wrong in its lack of affordable housing?!? Clearly, there is a desire to obscure reality, to divide the population on a range of issues, in the apparent hope for keeping their respective gravy train going. More on that in Part III.

Part III – Joel Kotkin via Unherd ‘The Return of American Class Politics’ Plus More Information with a Focused Analysis and Commentary

Per his bio-in brief on UnHerd: “Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.” In a post dated 2.1.2025, the former Washington Post reporter and self-declared former Democrat Joel Kotkin said the following. Per left-leaning Bing’s AI powered Copilot, Kotkin “has expressed that he was once aligned with the Democratic Party but has since become critical of its current direction.”

In his farewell address, mere days before leaving the White House, Joe Biden made a dramatic intervention. Warning about how an oligarchy of “extreme wealth, power and influence” risked the basic rights of every citizen, he even suggested it could threaten American democracy itself. Given how late Biden’s intervention came, to say nothing of his typically stumbling delivery, it’s tempting to dismiss his comments as the rantings of a tired old man.

In truth, though, I think the speech matters. For in its populist appeal to Main Street over Wall Street, it reflects the revival of something we haven’t seen in years: class politics. Rather than appealing to racial subgroups, or sex or gender identity, Biden instead spoke, however fleetingly, to those many millions of Americans who care more about their paychecks than the colour of their skin.

Nor, of course, is the 46th president alone. Increasingly, both main parties realise that to win at the ballot box, they must appeal to the middle- and working classes, as proven by Trump’s roughly 10-point lead among those two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. Yet, if that speaks vividly to radical shifts across US socioeconomic makeup, it remains unclear if politicians on either side of the aisle are truly willing to back blue-collar workers — especially when the oligarchs continue to have such a grip over them all.

For all Biden’s warnings about oligarchy, the elite did very well during his tenure. Consider the numbers, with the wealthiest Americans increasing their collective net worth by a remarkable one trillion dollars over his time in office. The monopolists, for their part, have been generous in their turn. In 2020, to give one example, Biden received 25 times as much funding from tech companies than Trump, and over three times as much from Wall Street. Among electronics manufacturing firms, many of whom build their products outside the country, the margin was a remarkable $68 million to $4 million.

All the while, American business continued to consolidate, just as it has for a generation. The Review of Finance notes that three quarters of industry has become more concentrated since the late Nineties. This has been most notable across finance, where big banks have doubled their market share since 2000. The same is true elsewhere: a coterie of tech firms now account for a record 35% of market cap. No wonder only 22% of Americans were optimistic about the economy by the end of Biden’s term, even as confidence in his economic leadership had fallen to just 40%.

Taken together, then, Biden’s fall stemmed from an enormous miscalculation. Elected as a moderate, he ignored polls that suggested most Americans were more concerned with their economic prospects than issues like climate change and foreign affairs, let alone social justice manias around trans rights. Nonetheless, the Democrats followed the lead of their oligarchic funders, many of whose biggest contributions have been focused on exactly these side issues.

When the election came, no wonder so many blue collar Americans tried their luck with Trump: including a remarkable number of minority voters. Once again, the statistics here are clear, with 40% of Asians voting for him, well above the 30% in 2020, even as some African Americans headed to the GOP as well. Blue-collar Latinos went heavily for Trump too. The point is that this realignment largely happened on economic grounds, with minorities ignoring Trump’s past litany of racist comments because he offered them a more expansive economy, particularly in blue collar professions. All the while, they saw little promise in the tsunami of promises offered by Harris and her bozo vice-presidential partner Tim Walz. Knowing a winner when they see one, America’s billionaires duly came out for the Republicans too. That included Elon Musk, of course, but also prominent investment bankers like Bill Ackman.

Taken together, what does this revolution show? That class and economics now play a greater role in American politics than skin colour or national origin. If you want to secure minority voters, the new President clearly understands, you appeal to them not as identity groups but as individual people, and families, looking out for their own self-interest. Nor is this really revelatory. America’s working-class remains more aspirational than those in other Western countries. That’s equally true of non-white voters, many of whom appreciate that the politics of race is an impediment to the American Dream. Most of the middle-income people who lately lost their homes to fire, in the minority LA suburb of Altadena, hardly benefited from a city government more obsessed with race and gender than protecting property. No less telling, Democratic policies on water and climate have created what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls a “green Jim Crow” — where working-class minorities face increasing headwinds in terms of jobs and housing.

This matters: and not just morally. Minorities, after all, encompass over 40% of working class Americans, and will constitute the majority by 2032. To win back the White House, then, Democrats will need to ditch all their woke baggage and focus on addressing the everyday concerns of working-class people, especially the non-white variety. In practice, that’ll involve focusing on bread-and-butter issues. When it comes to education, for instance, this could include expanding charter schools, or else developing skill academies for well-paid blue-collar jobs. When it comes to crime, meanwhile, just enforcing the law would help. That’s clearly a novel idea for some progressives, but would have a real impact on the security of inner cities.

Rhetorically speaking, the Democrats also have that new pro-Trump oligarchy to fall back on, with progressives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez increasingly railing against a corrupt cabal of kleptocrats goose-stepping America towards fascism. Never mind that Democrats didn’t seem concerned when the tech elite marched in lockstep with Biden four years ago. (Probably the more egregious hypocrite here is Chuck Schumer, who tried to reposition himself as an anti-oligarch radical despite serving as an unofficial consigliere for varied Wall Street ghouls).

See the rest at this link here. Kotkin takes shots, merited or not, at both major parties and President Donald J. Trump. He drew towards his conclusion with the following.

One thing is certain: most oligarchs are not social democrats. Rather than a competitive economy, they represent what Aldous Huxley called “a scientific caste system” where the highly credentialed and technologically dominant have almost total reign. Artificial intelligence, the crack cocaine of the digital age, will accelerate this process, eliminating both high- and low-paid jobs, as power gravitates to those who control the algorithms. This new aristocracy, whatever its current political affiliation, already regards itself as intrinsically more deserving of their wealth and power than the old managerial elites, let alone grubby corporate speculators. Coming from the ADD tech world, they tend, if anything, to be more followers of Ayn Rand than any populist theoretician.

Starting in 2023, MHProNews periodically reported on the rise among traditional Democrats of leaders like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (a.k.a.: RFK Jr, Bobby Kennedy Jr, etc.) who called out the Democratic Party’s leadership for having sold out to billionaires, corporate interests, and self-serving kleptocrats.  Kotkin previously referred to a rising ‘new feudalism’ in the U.S. a phrase Kennedy also used to describe his stated goal to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power threatening a “new feudalism” in the U.S.A. When Kennedy said that Democratic Party insiders rigged the nomination process in favor of Joe Biden, he bolted the party and ran as an independent. Following the Republican Party nomination of Donald J. Trump as that party’s nominee, he eventually tossed his hat in with Team Trump using the MAHA pitch – Make America Healthy Again – which for Kennedy was part of his longstanding advocacy for healthier children and adults.