Will we have opportunities under President-elect Trump?

Dear Editor,

I have just finished re-reading Peter C. Mancall’s Valley of Opportunity-Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700-1800. Mancall documents the early years of the exploitation of the Indians and the demise of the peltry trade due to the collapse of local beaver populations.

During the revolutionary war, the Indians were split with some joining the British and others joining the rebels. Up to this point in history the Indians were more or less accepted as neighbors. After the war the settlers were suspicious and made it difficult for any local Indian. As a result some Indians left for Oklahoma, others for Canada and a few went south. The few that remained often denied their Indian identity.

Both before the Revolution as well as after, large landowners or patrons solicited settlers to occupy their extensive holdings. English, Irish, and Germans were encouraged to clear the land, farm hunt and trade with their landlords for any other type of necessity they may have had a need for. For example, William Cooper, the founder of Cooperstown had 137 tenants living on his land. Developers or patrons that were not successful in populating their holding often went bankrupt. The prevailing philosophy was that the public good was best served by development. 

More land was cleared, cattle and other livestock roamed free, lumbering took off with large scale harvesting and floating of lumber rafts down the Susquehanna. What was left behind was a denuded landscape with increased flooding and more impoverished soils. Mancall states, “The disparity between rich and poor in America, still one of our most pressing social problems, [will be] evident everywhere by the end of the eighteenth century, if not earlier.”

Tench Coxe a premier economic essayist and constitutional delegate to the new Republic from Pennsylvania suggested that the entrepreneurial mind should have free play and access to the culture of economic development at all costs. An economy that would make the United States non-reliant of any European goods, Coxe believed that resources were to be harvested and one should create an infrastructure to bring those resources to those who demanded them. Coxe ignored the potential social, economic or environmental costs of his proposed venture.

President-elect Trump is our entrepreneurial leader who strongly appears to favor development. He has nominated mostly millionaires and billionaires whom he claims have high IQs to serve in his Cabinet.

President-elect Trump has nominated, as Secretary of State, someone who has moved to exploit the world’s oil reserves in Chad, Iraq and Russia, even when advised that he and Exxon would not be serving the best interests of the United States of America.

The President-elect has nominated for the Department of Labor someone who does not believe in the minimum wage; the Department of Energy someone who believes the Department should not exist; the Department of Health and Human Services someone who does not support Medicare and Medicaid; the EPA someone who doesn’t believe in climate change; the Department of Education someone who does not support PUBLIC EDUCATION; the Department of Interior someone who believes in exploiting our National Heritage.

I have to ask myself, is President-elect Trump my patron as well as the rest of us ordinary American citizens and are we here to further expand his holdings?

Sincerely,

Marty Borko

Waverly, N.Y.