As a gen­er­al rule, the smartest peo­ple in the room are the ones who don’t think every­one else in it is stu­pid, and the most cred­i­ble are those who have and con­sis­tent­ly hold prin­ci­ples. Recent events make it blind­ing­ly obvi­ous who falls short on both counts.

Top of the list are the so-called titans of finance, who were only too eager to praise and endorse Don­ald Trump and ignore his obvi­ous venal­i­ty, igno­rance of eco­nom­ics and pen­chant for syco­phan­tic loy­al­ty over abil­i­ty and experience,
In Jan­u­ary, JP Mor­gan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon urged we mere mor­tals to “get over” Trump’s tar­iff poli­cies, which were  “good for nation­al security.”
Now he says they’ll slow down growth as “input costs rise and demand increas­es on domes­tic products.”
Bil­lion­aire hedge fund investor Bill Ack­man, who offi­cial­ly endorsed Trump last sum­mer, bleat­ed this week that “the glob­al econ­o­my is being tak­en down because of bad math” which “is not what we vot­ed for.”
Oh dear. Now you’re less of a bil­lion­aire than you were last week.
But wait! There’s a 90 day hia­tus for every­one but China.
Accord­ing to Ack­man: “…this was bril­liant­ly exe­cut­ed by @realDonaldTrump. Text­book, Art of the Deal.”
(The book in ques­tion was actu­al­ly writ­ten by jour­nal­ist Tony Schwartz, who  has con­sis­tent­ly said he now regrets it.)
And with­in a day, Trump ramped up his trade war with Chi­na, “jeop­ar­diz­ing the fate of two super­pow­ers and threat­en­ing to drag down the world economy.”
 For­give us if we eschew set­ting up a GoFundMe for the bil­lion­aires in favour of wal­low­ing in schadenfreude.
Maybe when Trump told the Nation­al Repub­li­can Con­gres­sion­al Com­mit­tee Din­ner in Wash­ing­ton that coun­tries were  ”call­ing us up, kiss­ing my ass”, he was (as he so often seems to be) con­fused and meant CEOs.
Or am I being mean-spir­it­ed to won­der if your ini­tial paens may have been based on assess­ing him as your best “invest­ment” to make buck­ets of mon­ey and pay min­i­mal tax­es on it, con­se­quences for the greater good be damned?

                  A CREDIBILITY CHASM

In his first term, Trump called the three-way trade deal he nego­ti­at­ed with Cana­da and Mex­i­co, and has now sum­mar­i­ly torn up, “the fairest, most bal­anced, and ben­e­fi­cial trade agree­ment we have ever signed into law.”
If Trump can­not be trust­ed, nei­ther can the busi­ness inter­ests which embrace him. Or, as the 18^th cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Johann Goethe put it::“Tell me with whom you asso­ciate, and I will tell you who you are.”
To get around objec­tions from envi­ron­men­tal groups, The Met­als Com­pa­ny (which I am ashamed to say is Cana­di­an) plans to take advan­tage of  what’s been called “the Trump administration’s “seis­mic shift” of cut­backs in envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion poli­cies, by using a U.S. sub­sidiary to seek approval to  mine in inter­na­tion­al waters. 
A recent report by the non-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion Plan­et Track­er con­clud­ed that deep sea min­er­al min­ing could cause dam­ages to the world’s bio­di­ver­si­ty “up 25 times greater than land-based mining.”
The com­pa­ny CEO said he believes “we have suf­fi­cient knowl­edge to get start­ed and prove we can man­age envi­ron­men­tal risks.”
But the cred­i­bil­i­ty lev­el of the moral rec­ti­tude and accep­tance of respon­si­bil­i­ty for their actions on the part of com­pa­nies whose busi­ness poten­tial­ly puts the envi­ron­ment at risk, makes them fel­low trav­ellers with the mon­ey men.
Chevron was recent­ly fined $744.6‑billion for decades of refus­ing to repair dam­age caused by canal dredg­ing, well drilling and dump­ing  bil­lions of gal­lons of waste­water into marshlands.
Rather than take respon­si­bil­i­ty and pay up, Chevron plans to appeal the ver­dict of a tri­al that took ten years to reach.
Sad­ly, that style of cyn­i­cism and rapa­cious­ness is matched by great pow­er com­pe­ti­tion for min­er­als that may be hard­er to counter than Trump’s fan­tasies of tak­ing over those of  Cana­da, Green­land and Ukraine.
The Broad­way play “Good Night and Good Luck:” based on the movie of the same name, about the bat­tle against the evil of McCarthy­ism, is being con­sid­ered by many as more than rel­e­vant to today.
It there­fore seems fit­ting that the last word for the Trump enablers and  cor­po­rate high and mighty, who see their inter­ests, machi­na­tions and procla­ma­tions as some­thing the rest of us ought to accept at face val­ue as gospel, is the injunc­tion of the great CBS News cor­re­spon­dent Edward R. Mur­row, whose integri­ty, courage and sign-off the play revolves around:
“To be per­sua­sive we must be believ­able; to be believ­able we must be cred­i­ble; to be cred­i­ble we must be truth­ful. It is as sim­ple as that.”

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