crony cap 2 bak
4/18 redumbdent/ belated?
this is reserved for clear quid pro quo bribery/ correction of trump and vlad, but i'm losing distinction to cult corrupt
see steve mnuchin pred loANS = EXTRACTION
9/20 bak html amassing
{{---
msnbc maddow ripped him a new one, details long hist
pretend flowers pizza delivery
268% interest on harlem restaurant?fined for screwing military
poor ppl need cars b/c gop kills mass transit
===
it remains to be seen how successful Donald Trump will ultimately be in appealing Justice Arthur Engoron's sanctions in New York State Attorney General Letitia James' civil fraud case. But for now, he has a financial lifeline while making the appeal: the $175 million bond posted by billionaire Don Hankey, who chairs Knight Specialty Insurance Company.
Since the 80-year-old Hankey posted the bond, his history in the business world has drawn a great deal of scrutiny. The New Republic's Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, in a biting article published on April 3, stresses that Hankey — who has been called "the king of subprime loans" — has a history of "shady business practices."
The Daily Beast has reported that one of Hankey's companies, Westlake Services, was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) when Trump was president for illegally repossessing 70 cars. And Houghtaling points out that the Westlake debacle wasn't the first time he was "penalized by the feds."
READ MORE:**Trump lawyer threatens Alvin Bragg with 'serious' consequences if Michael Cohen testifies**
"That's all a part of the game to Hankey, who carved out his $7.4 billion fortune through those kinds of predatory practices, targeting low-income customers with high-interest auto loans," Houghtaling explains. "Hankey's Knight Specialty Insurance Company is the group that underwrote Trump's bond for his civil fraud trial, but it’s not Hankey's only investment in Trump's financial situation.
Hankey is also believed to be the largest shareholder in Axos Financial, according to MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin — a financial institution that, in 2022, refinanced more than $50 million of Trump's loans on Trump Tower and Trump National Doral Miami, according to documents filed with the Office of Government Ethics."
Houghtaling points out that Hankey discussed Trump with Forbes during an early April interview.
The billionaire told Forbes, "I'd never met Donald Trump. I'd never talked to him on the phone. I heard that he needed a loan or a bond, and this is what we do. So, we reached out, and he responded."
READ MORE:[Here's what federal law says about Trump 'threatening a sitting president': ex-federal prosecutor
*Read The New Republic's full article at this link.
===}}
https://www.alternet.org/**2022/05**/trump-administration-meat-industry-covid/
former President Donald Trump's administration colluded with top-level meatpacking industry executives to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic in order to drive up prices and downplay the severity of the emergency, according to an exhaustive investigation released on Thursday by the United States House Select Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.
Representative Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), the House Majority Whip and chairman of the Subcommittee, said in a statement that "the shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated."
The probe began last year and uncovered a spider web of corruption and flagrant disregard for human life involving American corporate titans and individuals in the highest ranks of the federal government.
Officials at the Department of Agriculture – including Secretary Sonny Purdue and Under Secretary for Food Safety Mindy Brashears – "collaborated" with corporate bigwigs to prioritize profits and production over the safety of employees and the public despite being fully aware of the hazards.
"Infections and deaths among workers for five of the largest meatpacking companies—Tyson Foods, Inc. (Tyson), JBS USA Holdings, Inc. (JBS), Smithfield Foods (Smithfield), Cargill, Inc. (Cargill), and National Beef Packing Company LLC (National Beef)—were significantly higher than previously estimated, with over 59,000 workers for these companies being infected with the coronavirus andat least 269 dying," the report states.
The powerful cadre also "engaged in a concerted effort with Trump Administration political officials to insulate themselves from coronavirus-related oversight," it explains.
In one instance, the chief executive officers of the conglomerates told Purdue on a phone call that their workers “should not be entitled to unemployment benefitsif they are otherwise able to work through the pandemic” and cautioned against “creat[ing] an incentive, much less a path, for food industry workers to choose unemployment overproducing food.”
In that same conversation, they "implicitly acknowledged how dangerous plants were, asking for liability protection against lawsuits if workers were infected on the job."
There was also an aggressive campaign to skirt "pesky" local, state, and federal regulations that would have kept workers and their products safe and healthy.
"Companies lobbied the White House to make clear that—despite concerns by state and local health departments—meatpacking companies should not have to address coronavirus risks if it would impact productivity," the investigation revealed.
Alarmingly, the CEOs managed to successfully lobby Trump to draft and sign an executive order in April of 2020 that "would insulate meatpacking companies from oversight by state and local health departments and provide legal protection against lawsuits for worker illnesses and deaths."
The edict led to Trump "invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure meatpacking plants 'continue operations.'"
Shortly thereafter, records handed over to the Subcommittee show that "meatpacking industry representatives and companies—Smithfield and Tyson in particular—engaged in constant communications with Trump appointees at USDA, the National Economic Council, and the White House, including calls between Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; a joint call with Sullivan, Meadows, and Tyson CEO Noel White;a call between White and Vice President Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short; and a call from Meadows to White asking if White would be willing to meet with President Trump."
Trump subsequently "held a call with officers of the meatpacking companies who had lobbied for it on the morning the order was issued."
After Trump granted their wish, an effort was undertaken between the administration and the industry to "coordinate closely on messaging concerning the order and its effects, apparently hoping to generate positive press coverage" for the ex-commander in chief.
Worker fatalities, meanwhile, were swept under the rug.
In a particularly egregious example, an outbreak at Foster Farms in Livingston,California that infected "at least" 392 workers and killed eight in August of 2020 prompted the company to "intimidate" the Merced County Department of Public Health from shutting down the plant.
"Foster Farms attempts to obfuscate the death count by labeling fatalities as 'resolutions,'" investigators learned. "MCPH officials told the Select Subcommittee that an unidentified person on the call from either Foster Farms or USDA said these cases could be considered 'toe tag resolutions,' referring to the toe tag that is often put on a corpse at the morgue. MCPH said that Brashears asked this individual to 'stop' and said they would 'talk about this separately.'"
Operations at Foster Farms in Livingston were eventually temporarily suspended on August 31st.
covid $ steered to consult pvt firms with pol connections esp in states that defunded public health 821
https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/scathing-editorial-by-wisconsin-newspaper-slams-ron-johnson-as-a-con-artist-whose-grifting-made-his-cronies-even-richer/
an
can they just not help themselves to helping themseselves to whatver they can grab?
invisible company owned by Rudy Giuliani got taxpayer-backed PPP money — but lists no employees. Was it fraud?
Roger Sollenberger / Salon September 17, 2020
A payroll company owned by Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, took between $150,000 and $350,000 in taxpayer-backed emergency small business loans this spring. It’s unclear what Giuliani did with the money. The loan reveals…
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aha: trump is just apotheosis: invis hand me vs we short vs long term: $ = winner, vs losers who deserve poverty, corruption/crony capitalism is natural inevitable outcome
wa mo
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-and-his-cronies-must-be-brought-to-justice-but-more-will-be-required/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/usps-has-paid-trumps-postmaster-general-286-million-since-2013-report/
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/complete-bombshell-former-top-usps-official-reveals-disturbing-new-details-of-dejoy-selection-and-mnuchin-sabotage-of-mail-service
no lnx vid twt
"Complete bombshell’: Former top USPS official reveals ‘disturbing’ new details of DeJoy selection and Mnuchin sabotage of mail service
Written by Common Dreams August 21, 2020
In his first public remarks since resigning from the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors in protest at the end of April, David Williams on Thursday offered a number of alarming new details surrounding the selection of Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy as postmaster general and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s efforts to exert influence over mail operations and finances.
Williams, the former vice chairman of the USPS Board of Governors with decades of federal government experience, testified to the Congressional Progressive Caucus that what he witnessed in his final months at the Postal Service was unprecedented, detailing how Mnuchin required members of the supposedly independent board to “come to his office to kiss the ring and receive his blessing before confirmation” and made “illegal” demands of officials.
“Corruption, plain and simple. Not only is Louis DeJoy a Trump crony and clearly unqualified to be Postmaster General but he also has significant financial conflicts of interest that make him eager to destroy the USPS altogether. We won’t let him.”
—Rep. Pramila Jayapal
“The Secretary has called over board members to provide instructions and requests and express his displeasure, which is really striking. I’m not sure I’ve run into that before, where one department is trying to run another department,” said Williams, who previously served as USPS inspector general. “Normally you would simply reject the effort and report it to Congress.”
Williams told lawmakers that the removal of USPS mailboxes in several states was specifically advocated by Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive who was reportedly involved in the recruitment of DeJoy for the postmaster general position.
“The blue boxes were maybe the most interesting of all,” said Williams, a Democrat who was appointed to the Board of Governors by President Donald Trump. “Those were not part of ongoing plans. To my knowledge, as a matter of fact… Secretary Mnuchin wanted that done. His study of the Postal Service asked that it be done.”
In response to Williams’ account of Mnuchin’s interference at the independent agency, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said the treasury secretary should be called—and, if necessary, subpoenaed—to testify before Congress.
“This hearing is a complete bombshell,” tweeted David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, which first reported that Williams resigned from the Board of Governors in protest.
Williams also offered an inside look at the process that led to the Board of Governors’ selection and May appointment of DeJoy, a former logistics executive with zero experience working for the Postal Service.
Asked whether the board interviewed other qualified candidates for the postmaster general role, Williams answered in the affirmative and characterized DeJoy as uniquely unfit for the job, recounting that he had to be coached through his interviews. Williams said DeJoy’s appointment was pushed by John Barger, a board member and Republican donor who—according to Williams—helped DeJoy “finish a number of sentences where he got stuck” and “explained to the board what Mr. DeJoy meant during the presentation.”
Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) called Williams’ description of the selection process “very, very disturbing.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Williams’ testimony was “stunning.”
Williams’ revelations came just hours before DeJoy is set to appear before the Republican-controlled Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where he is expected to face questions about his sweeping policy changes that caused massive mail backlogs across the nation.
A day after DeJoy vowed to suspend the operational changes until after the November election, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement that the postmaster general “frankly admitted” to her that he has “no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes, and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed and that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works.”
In a letter to the USPS Board of Governors on Wednesday, 90 House Democrats demanded the immediate removal of DeJoy for using his brief tenure as postmaster general “to sabotage the United States Postal Service.”
“Despite recent claims by Mr. DeJoy that implementation of certain changes may be delayed,” the lawmakers wrote, “he has already done considerable damage to the institution and we believe his conflicts of interest are insurmountable.”
COI dejoy
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-postmaster-general-caught-making-cash-off-of-post-office-contracts-report/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/lawmakers-demand-removal-of-postmaster-general-dejoy-over-nefarious-efforts-to-destroy-the-postal-service
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/friday-night-massacre-at-us-postal-service-as-postmaster-general-a-major-trump-donor-ousts-top-officials
==
==
golf tourney trump club
nfl trump inaug slush fund
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trump-donor-woody-johnson-has-turned-americas-uk-embassy-into-chaos-report/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/here-are-some-of-trumps-friends-and-family-who-were-cleared-for-millions-in-small-business-bailout-fund
Businesses tied to President Donald Trump’s family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in government loans designed to shore up payroll expenses for companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal data released Monday.
A hydroponic lettuce farm backed by Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., applied for at least $150,000 in Small Business Administration funding. Albert Hazzouri, a dentist frequently spotted at Mar-a-Lago, asked for a similar amount. A hospital run by Maria Ryan, a close associate of Trump lawyer and former mayor Rudy Giuliani, requested more than $5 million. Several companies connected to the president’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, could get upward of $6 million.
There’s no ban on businesses connected to Trump’s orbit receiving money. Democrats added a provision to the CARES Act excluding government officials and their family members from receiving some bailout funds, but not those from the PPP.
The firms sought funding under the Paycheck Protection Program, one of the Trump administration’s sweeping pandemic relief efforts. Created in late March by the CARES Act, it allowed small businesses — generally, those with fewer than 500 employees — to apply for loans of up to $10 million. The loans can be forgiven if used to cover payroll, rent, mortgage interest or utilities.
The program paid out $521 billion to almost 4.9 million companies in an effort to provide relief for small businesses and their workers amid the sudden economic shock brought on by the pandemic. As applications slowed after the initial rush, $132 billion remained unspent, and Congress voted to extend the program.
After resisting releasing the names, the government bowed to pressure from critics and watchdog groups. On Monday, the administration disclosed only those entities that were approved by banks for loans over $150,000. A consortium of news organizations, including ProPublica, has sued the administration under the Freedom of Information Act to release the full list of recipients and loan details.
The program has been criticized for including some loan recipients, particularly large, publicly traded companies, and for favoring wealthier businesses that had existing relationships with banks. In some cases customers could essentially skip the line. Overall, however, many economists praise the PPP for having gotten billions to companies relatively quickly.
The New York Observer, the news website that Kushner ran before entering the White House and is still owned by his brother-in-law’s investment firm, was approved for between $350,000 and $1 million, data shows. A company called Princeton Forrestal LLC that is at least 40 percent owned by Kushner family members, according to a 2018 securities filing, was approved for $1 million to $2 million. Esplanade Livingston LLC, whose address is the same as that of the Kushner Companies real estate development business, was approved for $350,000 to $1 million. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The loans to Kushner-related companies were first reported by The Daily Beast.
In addition, up to $2 million was approved for the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy, a nonprofit religious school in Livingston, N.J., that’s named for Jared Kushner’s grandfather and supported by the family.
....
==
history
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-15-2020/
https://www.risingupwithsonali.com/2019/07/17/swindlers-all-a-brief-history-of-government-business-frauds-from-alexander-hamilton-to-aig/
MICHAEL POWELSON – Presidents throughout American history have enabled corporate excess even at the expense of public welfare. And yet they promise to uphold the Constitution and the rights of all Americans. Making the case that our economic and political system are inherently geared toward corruption, my next guest has written a history book about it.
Dr. Michael Powelson, teaches at LA Valley College and Cal State University Channel Islands. His new book is Swindlers All, a Brief History of Government Business Frauds from Alexander Hamilton to AIG.
could have bought GM for 3 bill$, instead gave 149b, cost us 11b never get back, Geitner; GS and AIG will never pay back
==
520 an
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/another-private-jet-company-owned-by-a-trump-donor-got-a-bailout-this-one-for-20-million/
another private jet company owned by a Trump donor got a bailout — this one for $20 million
==
==
guk --> desmog 5/20
...fossil fuel companies have taken at least $50 million in taxpayer money they probably won’t have to pay back,according to a review of coronavirus aid meant for struggling small businesses by the investigative research group Documented and the Guardian.
A total of $28 million is going to three coal mining companies, all with ties to Trump officials, bolstering a dying American industry and a fuel that scientists insist world leaders must shift away from to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.
The other $22 million is being paid out to oil and gas services and equipment providers and other firms that work with drillers and coal miners.
Melinda Pierce, the legislative director for the Sierra Club, said: “The federal money Congress appropriated should be going to help small businesses and frontline workers struggling as a result of the pandemic, not the corporate polluters whose struggles are a result of failing business practices and existed long before COVID-19 entered the public lexicon.”
More than 40 Democratic lawmakers have argued that fossil fuel companies should not get any assistance under the coronavirus aid package.
Some Democrats have also warned the forgivable loans being made under Congress’ Paycheck Protection Program could be a transparency disaster.
Banks and lending institutions are distributing the money, so the government says it cannot track recipients in real time. The loans revealed have been made public only through news reports and securities filings by publicly traded companies, although the Federal Reserve has committed to issuing monthly reports.
So far, it’s clear the program is not working as intended. The funds are aimed at helping small businesses to keep paying their employees and covering other recurring expenses during the economic downturn. But they have been exploited by large companies forced to return the money amid a public outcry, including the Los Angeles Lakers, Shake Shack, and Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
The industry aid comes as the Trump administration is reportedly considering a broader bailout for oil and gas corporations, which were already under pressure before the coronavirus and have watched oil prices nosedive because of a global price war and low demand for gasoline. The U.S. government could make loans to oil and gas companies, essentially making taxpayers investors in the industry.
The Federal Reserve on Thursday also announced changes to its lending rules that could help indebted petroleum firms.
“The idea that oil workers are getting a paycheck is great,” said Jamie Henn, a spokesman for the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign who co-founded the environment group 350.org. “The worry is that the money’s going to the top and not going to filter down.”
The $50 million already paid to fossil fuel companies is a small fraction of the the $2.1 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the Cares Act. But the total assistance to the industry is likely much larger than can currently be tallied and will continue to grow.
Environmental advocates and oversight experts tracking the funds say it’s impossible to count how much of the money will assist fossil fuels, including because some firms provide services across multiple industries.
“All of this is voluntary disclosures by the companies,” said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher with Documented. “No matter what, it’s going to be an incomplete picture of what’s going on.”
Coleman said in many cases the fossil fuel companies getting aid have made bad investments and “now they’re going to come crawling hat in hand and say: look at what the coronavirus did to us.”
Among the coronavirus aid recipients is Hallador Coal, an Indiana-based coal mining company that hired Donald Trump’s former environment chief Scott Pruitt as a lobbyist. The company’s former government relations director now works at the energy department. Hallador is taking $10 million to fund two months of payroll and other expenses.
Coal mining company Rhino Resources, which was formerly run by Trump’s Mine Safety and Health Administration head, David Zatezalo, is receiving $10 million.
Coal firm Ramaco Resources, whose CEO, Randy Atkins, is on the energy department’s National Coal Council, is getting $8.4 million.
The U.S. coal industry has been in steep decline, driven out of the market by cheap natural gas and environmental concerns. Trump campaigned on putting coal miners back to work, and his agencies have unsuccessfully explored ways to bail out coal companies, which are seeing their lowest employment levels in modern history. The Trump administration has also rescinded nearly all of the environment and climate protections the fossil fuel industry has opposed.
Fossil fuel companies can also take advantage of tax benefits under the coronavirus legislation, including deferring payment of social security and medicare taxes.
The Missouri-based Peabody Energy coal company has said it will speed up collecting an alternative minimum tax refund of $24 million to 2020 and defer $18 million of owed taxes.
U.S. taxpayers already subsidize the fossil fuel industry at roughly $20 billion a year, according to conservative estimates.
The Center for International Environmental Law has accused the oil, gas, and plastics industries of “exploiting the crisis by aggressively lobbying for massive bailouts and special privileges in a desperate attempt to revive an oil and gas industry already in decline.”
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis argues that federal lending to the oil and gas sector would be “a complete waste of money,” because it wouldn’t fix the industry’s underlying financial problems.
Oil industry lobbyists have pushed for changes at the Federal Reserve to let companies with large amounts of debt use its Main Street Lending Program and borrow to pay off existing loans.
In an April 15 letter to the Federal Reserve, the oil trade group the Independent Petroleum Association of America asked for the new provisions, saying “oil and natural gas producers are not looking for a government handout; they are seeking a bridge to help survive this economic disruption.”
Environmental advocates say the move would disproportionately benefit small and mid-sized oil and gas companies, such as Occidental Petroleum, which has nearly $80 billion in liabilities on its balance sheet.
Graham Steele, who directs the corporations and society initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business, called the situation the “classic disaster scenario where an opportunistic administration and industry is taking advantage of a crisis.”
“And by the way, these are industries driving climate change. It’s both a bad financial proposition of the Fed and for taxpayers and a bad situation for the planet.”
==
c de v an 120
...Is Mar-a-Lago a nexus for Trump’s apparent influence peddling and corruption?
Anywhere Trump shows up is a nexus for his influence peddling and corruption. It could be his golf courses or Mar-a-Lago or somewhere else. Gift-giving is a form of currency, influence-buying. Certainly Trump knows that he can buy loyalty from people. And what’s a better way to buy loyalty than if you’re president of United States and you know you’re going to assassinate the No. 2 guy in Iran and that it’s going to move markets.
On Jan. 2, the markets were up big. Soleimani was assassinated at one in the morning, Baghdad time, after the markets here had closed. There was some night trading, which was obviously going to make the markets go down the next day. Killing Gen. Soleimani was going to make the Middle East much more unstable. And what better way to reward your buddies — who were already your buddies, because they’re at Mar-a-Lago, to begin with, on New Year’s Eve — than with this little gift? It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on.
How would one send those signals? How does insider trading work?
Who are the people who know what is going to happen? Who knows about the trade docs? Steve Mnuchin, Robert Lighthizer, Wilbur Ross. Larry Kudlow, Donald Trump, Trump’s kids, Trump’s son-in-law. These people who do have knowledge of certain events are either giving gifts to friends or trying to continue to buy loyalty. What I think is more likely is that there are surrogate traders who are making these trades with inside information. They make the money and then stash it in some sort of account to be gotten back to after they leave office. But again, I don’t know. The people who would know are not cooperating. The head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange said that my article in October should have been written in crayon because it was so childlike.
To reiterate: The people who were supposed to be watching and regulating are somehow complicit, looking away, indifferent, etc.?..
==
pension plan / crony capitaLISM
Rick Perry Rejoins Pipeline Company Energy Transfer’s Board of Directors
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-trumps-trade-war-is-making-lobbyists-rich-and-devastating-small-businesses
no lnx
How Trump’s trade war is making lobbyists rich — and devastating small businesses
Written by Lydia DePillis / Pro Publica January 6, 2020
Mike Elrod voted for Donald Trump in 2016, hoping for a break from tight government oversight that his business had endured for years, which he often found unreasonable.
“There was a time when every day I dreaded opening the mail,” said Elrod, who founded a small firm in South Carolina called Eccotemp that makes energy-efficient, tankless water heaters. “The Department of Energy would put in an arbitrary rule and then come back the next day and say, ‘You’re not in compliance.’ We had no input into what was changing and when the change was taking place.”
Elrod also thought that big businesses had long been able to buy their way out of problems, either by spending lots of money on compliance or on lobbyists to look for loopholes and apply political pressure. Trump, of course, had promised to address that — to “drain the swamp.”
Elrod is in his mid-60s, tall with a white beard and deliberative drawl. He trusted the president even as Trump started a trade war with China, where Elrod manufactures his heaters. The administration said U.S. companies that could prove they had no other source for their imports and whose business would be gravely injured could be spared the punishing tariffs that Trump was imposing. They would simply have to file for an exemption.
“I had every reason to believe they were talking about us,” Elrod said. Eccotemp had spent 15 years developing different models of tankless heaters with manufacturers in China. Simply finding new factories in other countries seemed impossible.
So in the summer of 2018, Elrod settled in at his desk, strewn with brass valves, a pressure tester and a smiling jade Buddha from a Chinese supplier, and began typing. He and his dozen U.S. employees — designers, engineers, salespeople and customer service representatives — operate out of a squat cinder block building in a woodsy suburb of Charleston that used to be a film studio and now doubles as a distribution warehouse.
In letters to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Elrod asked that gas-powered water heaters be exempted from the administration’s 25% tariffs, writing that the cost would be “devastating” for the company’s balance sheet. “We had all the boxes checked,” Elrod said. “Or so I thought.”
The process didn’t go as he expected. It’s the stuff that libertarians like Elrod dread: Low-level staffers with limited industry knowledge issuing seemingly arbitrary decisions that can save or smash a company’s bottom line.
Every few weeks, a list comes out with a new batch of lucky winners, and losers. “Non-electrical wall candelabras, of wood, each with 3 wrought iron candle holders” received a pass, for example, but none with one or two candles.
There is no mechanism for appeals.
Overall, Trump’s tariffs have not had the effect that the self-described “Tariff Man” promised. Companies have moved manufacturing out of China — and it has mostly gone to Vietnam, Taiwan and Mexico. Tariffs are chiefly behind a months-long decline in domestic manufacturing, Federal Reserve researchers have found. The total loss of jobs across the economy may be as high as 300,000.
But constantly up-in-the-air trade agreements and the byzantine, opaque exclusion process has been a blessing for one set of players: Washington’s influence industry, including the firms of former Trump officials and allies like inauguration committee chief Brian Ballard, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebusand Trump fundraiser Marc Lampkin.
Ballard was once Trump’s lobbyist in Florida. He’s since been dubbed “the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington.” A cancer therapy firm, Varian Medical Systems, paid Ballard and a colleague $540,000 to lobby the White House, the trade office and Vice President Mike Pence on trade issues, filings show. The outreach included a meeting with Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, Peter Navarro.
Since then, four of Varian’s five exclusion requests have been approved — which, the company said in an SEC filing, boosted revenues by $23 million. (Navarro said he doesn’t intervene in the exclusion process.)
Priebus’ firm, Michael Best Strategies, was hired by a Wisconsin company, Primex, to handle exemptions for its timekeeping and temperature measurement devices. “You’re not gonna do it on your own,” Primex CEO Paul Shekoski said in an interview. “It’s suicide actually.”
Shekoski said he wanted help understanding the process and making sure all the requests were filed correctly. With Michael Best’s guidance, he personally wrote letters to and met with his representatives in Washington.
The collective effort may have made it all the way to the Oval Office. Shekoski said in an email last fall that he heard from his lobbyist at Michael Best, Denise Bode, that Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. cited Primex as an example of a Wisconsin company suffering from tariffs when the senator took the issue to the president. “He not only called USTR, he was able to bring our specific case up to Trump directly,” Shekoski said. Bode did not respond to a request for comment, and a Johnson spokesman did not respond to questions about the Trump contact, saying only that Johnson had advocated for many Wisconsin companies.
FORECLOSURE:
kpfa aaron glanz homewreckers
fundraiser
https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-december-12-2019/
1119
invert yield curve;homewreckers book8 mil foreclosures; big % llc shell corps; // CDO; R wolff says banks can't deal with hit 1/2 of Gt Recession , get loans to cover loans; mnuchin etc wilbur recalled gov't baillout after S&L; mnu sez put 1.x billion but pain nothing for indybank and then got subsidies to foreclose?! // get car for free, put some bucks in then pocket total profit 11/8/19
==
==
new
steve mnu paid 0 for indy bank, and gov't guar lose no money, sold to buddy in same blg (bunch of pluto-crats ) soros, paulsen, wilbur, thomas barack trump pal
extensive interview: https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-23-2019/
https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-october-21-2019/
aaron glantz homewreckers
==
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/12/03/business/ap-us-border-wall-fox-news-pitch.html
contractor
pvtization of foreign policy?!
aha: expert // to norms (eg civ servent amb marie yovanovich masha
trump /bannon calls himself a disruptor (like the clint e rogue cop who does not play by rulebook and gets his own brand of justice);
some talk early on that we need to codify into law;
in part djt prolly broke them b/c he simply was to dumb or inexperienced to know they exist, or to understand they exist for a legit reason; another possibility is that they do not fit (we have never had a full on bizman prez before?)
--
aha: djt/bannon present as disruptor, but basically used elim or norms, experts and SOP for self-ish graft/power grab
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-rudy-giuliani-how-americas-mayor-became-trumps-grifter/
no lnx
The rise and fall of Rudy Giuliani: How ‘America’s mayor’ became Trump’s grifter
Written by The Washington Monthly November 18, 2019
Rudy Giuliani was a shoo-in for attorney general or secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in a nascent Trump administration. Not only was Giuliani “America’s Mayor” following his command of the situation on 9/11, he was a former federal prosecutor, presidential candidate, and an early validator—if late endorser—of Donald J. Trump.
Life looked pretty rosy for the ambitious pol, with a clear path to power and privilege, given his expertise.
He didn’t want the jobs proffered, however. He wanted something bigger.
Whether he was done with the law or just wanted something that approximated the power and prestige of the presidency, he postured and heavily lobbied to be Trump’s secretary of state. As the former mayor of America’s most important city, he was regularly in the company of foreign dignitaries and, of course, 9/11 gave him a global stage from which to show off his leadership skills.
But translating international experience and foreign hobnobbing into policy focused on America’s global role required diplomatic skill not often associated with New York moxie. It would have been a hard sell—even to a pliant Republican-dominated U.S. Senate. After all, John McCain—and even Lindsey Graham 1.0—were actively looking out for America’s national security interests back then.
Giuliani’s jones-ing to become America’s lead diplomat seemed to have more to do with a desire for his own publicly financed jet and private traveling press corps than any real interest or ability to negotiate long, hard hours toward solutions that required uncomfortable trade-offs. He wanted the position’s perks and platform more than the work—or the extraordinarily demanding work schedule that comes with the job.
Fast forward to 2019, and the Giuliani scorned by Jared Kushner has become the roiling Rudy who plays Donald Trump’s personal attorney on TV. Giuliani has never met a Sunday news show he doesn’t like. Trump has turned to this anti-matinee idol and put personal business and state policy in the hands of a freewheeling, out-of-control—and sometimes crazed—Giuliani. His uncanny ability to stay simultaneously both on message and off—yet claim to be reliably consistent and coherent—has allowed him to play rough in all positions of Trump’s political defense and remain untouched.
Until now.
Now he’s all lawyered up, as investigators in the U.S. House release State Department officials’ closed-door testimony implicating Giuliani in Trump’s move to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless it agreed to investigate Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Giuliani so desperately needed to play the globetrotting role of secretary of State that he got to become Trump’s “Shadow Secretary.” In that role, he used presidential proximity to guide America’s foreign activities, fire its diplomats, bully its allies, and bank on the nation’s sheer power to leverage lethal aid into forced foreign state-sponsored oppo research on 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
Biden became the target of the externally run, illicitly operated Giuliani Shadow State Department, doing the Trump-Kushner-Pompeo trio’s dirty work while operating with Oval Office assurances that his free hand and opaque operation was guarded by attorney-client privilege. This questionable privilege was also supposed to protect Michael Cohen, Trump’s previous personal attorney. Cohen is now serving a prison sentence for doing Trump’s shadowy business.
A one-man, oversight-free, power-drenched Shadow State Department is a heady thing. Giuliani recognized that he no longer had to play by the same rules as a government agency. He could operate the way Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, did with his paramilitary organization, Blackwater. Renamed Xe, Blackwater was a private entity conducting a contracted war, freed from the constraints of treaty obligations, multilateral engagement, long-standing bilateral relations, protocol, congressional oversight, budgetary limits, press access, or full transparency.
Giuliani was as free to disregard established foreign policy and practice as Prince’s locked-and-loaded organization was to end-run military rules of engagement.Bonus points: Giuliani also was able to profit as a free agent. Who was going to question his private authority when the imperial presidency, with its seemingly unchecked privilege, had his back and could dangle a potential blanket pardon?...
no lnx
nyt
Opinion
The Revenge of the Bureaucrats
Honesty is the best foreign policy.
By Elizabeth Drew
Ms. Drew is a journalist based in Washington who covered Watergate.
Nov. 16, 2019, 2:30 p.m. ET
The opening hearings on the Ukraine scandal demonstrated that mundane government processes and seemingly colorless bureaucrats are what keep our country going. It was these sorts of unknown public servants who maintained the executive branch functioning during Watergate — and are doing so now while our distracted president and his acolytes try to circumvent the rules.
The witnesses in the first week of open hearings were three lifelong career diplomats — on Wednesday, William Taylor, currently the chargé d’affaires in Ukraine, and George Kent, the senior State Department official on Ukraine; and on Friday, Marie Yovanovitch, the career diplomat whom President Trump fired as ambassador to Ukraine because she got in the way of his private schemes.
While the three witnesses came across as unusually admirable, they’re not atypical of their breed. They will endure only so much abuse or see only so much scandal around them before rising up in some way. All three testified in defiance of the president.
Mr. Trump cannot fathom such people, because they’re not interested in big money or fame. The “bureaucracy” may seem sluggish, stubborn and unimaginative at times, but it also can stand as a bulwark against assaults on the laws and the Constitution by the passers-through who inhabit the administration of the moment. Mr. Trump made a big mistake by demeaning civil servants from the outset (his awkward, self-reverential speech to the C.I.A. on his first full day in office was an embarrassment and also an omen) and then setting about trying to make them irrelevant.
The problem for presidents who, in their frustration over the limits on their power, empower extragovernmental groups to carry out their extragovernmental policies, is that it usually comes a cropper. If Richard Nixon’s “plumbers” hadn’t been such stumblebums, botching every wayward project they took on, the Nixon presidency just might have survived its attempts to determine the opposition party’s candidate for the next election.
In the case of the current scandal, the “three amigos” — Kurt Volker, a foreign policy expert who signed on as a special envoy to Ukraine; Rick Perry, the departing energy secretary who has close ties to the energy industry; and Gordon Sondland, a hotel magnate whose donations to the Trump inaugural committee helped him secure his job as ambassador to the European Union — usurped Ukraine policy from normal State Department channels, setting Mr. Trump’s private whims against the stated policies of his government. Mr. Sondland appears to have known even less about Ukraine than he did about Europe before taking that job.
The three men seem to have reported to Rudolph Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a freelance provocateur. Mr. Giuliani, now under federal investigation in New York, has had his own business interests in Ukraine’s natural gas industry. Under arrest are a couple of his sidekicks, Soviet-born Americans known by their first names, Lev and Igor, with substantial Ukraine interests.
Mr. Giuliani and the three amigos were reportedly part of the president’s scheme to hold up $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine in order to wring from the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, a public announcement that he would order an investigation of Joe Biden and Mr. Biden’s surviving son, Hunter, who took an ill-advised membership on the board of one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies while his father was managing Ukraine policy for the Obama administration. (Numerous press investigations have turned up no actual misbehavior on the Bidens’ part.) The fragile Hunter, who lost his brother, to whom he was very close, to brain cancer and has struggled with addiction, remains a Republican political target.
Mr. Sondland inadvertently provided the only real news on the first day of the hearings, when Mr. Taylor testified that a member of his staff overheard the president talking to Mr. Sondland when the latter called him on his cellphone from a restaurant in Kiev. Mr. Trump volubly asked how things were going in getting President Zelensky to announce an investigation of the Bidens. This linked Mr. Trump directly to the pressure on Ukraine. Later, it was learned that a second person also overheard the call. Mr. Trump’s allies have also pushed Mr. Zelensky to look into the fantasy that the foreign interference in the 2016 election involved Ukraine, and not Russia.
But the hearings are less about big disclosures than about building the case, brick by brick, of why the president should be impeached. The Democrats have suggested various terms on which to charge him, and they’re not yet united on that. Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested on Thursday that the charge should be bribery, since that’s a constitutionally stated reason for impeachment, and it's a crime that people can understand. But this is a disheartening choice, because a more significant ground for impeachment is abuse of power, which isn’t in the statute books, and it would apply to Mr. Trump’s holding up the arms aid, among other offenses in this instance.
Yet, just a few days ago, Ms. Pelosi and others were talking abuses of power. A House Democrat advised me not to take too seriously the flurry of competing rationales: The Democrats haven’t actually met to decide on a unified position, he said; that may wait until the Judiciary Committee draws up the actual articles of impeachment.
The Republican strategy of the moment is apparently to seal off Mr. Trump from Mr. Giuliani and the amigos’ activities. Their attempts to engage in their specialty of disrupting hearings was swiftly shut down by the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who was firm but fair, leaving them little to dispute. They’ve found it awkward to defend Mr. Trump since they know that squeezing the Ukrainians for desperately needed military aid in their war against Russia for his own political purpose is indefensible. Moreover, Mr. Trump has complained about their focus on process issues, continuing to insist, ridiculously, that his infamous July 25 phone call to Mr. Zelensky was “perfect.” Regrettably, he may actually think it was.....
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payday loans buy access to rnc
am priorities conf:
PIC geo crony capitalism [CA fines? forced labor, Am King fdn charity? 5x ways to give $ to djt?! ,
---
https://www.citizen.org/article/detained-for-profit-spending-surges-under-u-s-immigration-crackdown/
https://boingboing.net/2019/08/21/leaked-emails-suggest-this-tru.html
no lnx guk
US interior secretary David Bernhardt is pushing a fossil fuel project that the lobbying firm he used to work for is getting paid from, these e-mails in a Guardian report today suggest.
Bernhardt worked at the Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck before he quit to join the Trump administration in August 2017.
At the lobbying firm, Bernhardt represented oil companies.
Here's an excerpt from one of the leaked emails.
Excerpt:
Experts say Bernhardt is probably violating ethics guidelines issued by the Trump administration with the stated goal of “draining the swamp”. Based on these rules, Bernhardt should be recused from specific issues involving a former client for at least two years.
The Jordan Cove Energy Project was proposed by the Canadian energy giant Pembina to transport fracked natural gas through Oregon to the international port at Coos Bay in the state. It would include a new 232-mile pipeline that passes through several dozen miles of interior department land.
Several county commissioners from Colorado, where much of the gas is fracked, met with Bernhardt in Washington DC to boost the project in March. They included Mike Samson, Bernhardt’s former high school teacher.
“Awesome time in DC he is totally behind the project and has people working on it towards completion,” Samson wrote concerning Bernhardt in a 7 March email to Ray Bucheger, a Jordan Cove lobbyist with the firm FBB Federal Relations. “He recognizes that time is of the essence and that meaningful progress needs to [be] made this year.”
Revealed: emails raise ethical questions over Trump official's role in gas project [the Guardian, photo of David Bernhardt: Shutterstock]
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trump epa fail
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-total-disgrace-outrage-as-trump-epa-says-it-wont-ban-pesticide-linked-to-brain-damage-in-children
no lnx
' A total disgrace’: Outrage as Trump EPA says it won’t ban pesticide linked to brain damage in children
Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams July 19, 2019
In a move environmentalists denounced as yet another case of the Trump administration putting industry profits over public health, the Environmental Protection Agency announced on Thursday that it will not ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to brain damage in children.
“By allowing chlorpyrifos to stay in our fruits and vegetables, Trump’s EPA is breaking the law and neglecting the overwhelming scientific evidence that this pesticide harms children’s brains,” Patti Goldman, attorney with Earthjustice said in a statement. “It is a tragedy that this administration sides with corporations instead of children’s health.”
EPA chief Andrew Wheeler’s decision to reject a petition by environmental groups calling for a ban on the neurotoxic chemical ignores the assessments of his agency’s own scientists, said Tiffany Finck-Haynes, pesticides and pollinators program manager for Friends of the Earth.
“The EPA’s refusal to ban chlorpyrifos ignores decades of science showing that this pesticide has irrevocable effects on human health and the environment,” said Finck-Haynes. “The EPA is endangering the lives of children to protect pesticide industry profits.”
Friends of the Earth
@foe_us
Today Trump's @EPA announced that it will not #BanChlorpyrifos — a brain-damaging pesticide that EPA's own scientists have deemed unsafe at any level.
"The EPA is endangering the lives of children to protect pesticide industry profits."https://foe.org/news/trumps-epa-continues-delay-federal-ban-brain-damaging-pesticide-chlorpyrifos-leaving-states-take-action/ …
Trump’s EPA continues to delay federal ban on the brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos, leaving...
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it will not ban the neurotoxic, brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos. Last summer, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals...
foe.org
Chlorpyrifos has been banned for household use since 2000, but the pesticide is still used by farmers on “more than 50 fruit, nut, cereal, and vegetable crops,” according to the New York Times.
“In 2016,” the Times reported, “more than 640,000 acres were treated with chlorpyrifos in California alone.”
The Obama administration in 2015 proposed banning use of the pesticide on food crops, but former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt authorized its continued use in 2017.
“This is a total disgrace,” Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) tweeted in response to the EPA’s decision on Thursday.
Finck-Haynes ofFriends of the Earthsaid that as the federal government continues to work on behalf of chemical interests, states must take immediate action to protect the public and the environment.
“While the federal government refuses to act, we urge states to step in, ban chlorpyrifos, and demonstrate that they will safeguard public health and the environment,” said Finck-Haynes. “We call on [New York] Governor [Andrew] Cuomo to sign the chlorpyrifos ban bill sitting on his desk and protect New Yorkers from this toxic pesticide.”
In a statement on Thursday, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) highlighted the Trump administration’s ties to Dow Chemical, the largest producer of chlorpyrifos in the United States.
“The relationship between President Trump and Dow Chemical… has been called into question,” the group said. “Among other things, the chemical manufacturing giant reportedly donated $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, and its CEO previously played a chief advisory role to the president, heading up his now defunct American Manufacturing Council.”
Erik Olson, senior director of health and food at NRDC,said the effort to achieve a ban on chlorpyrifos will continue.
“Until EPA gets this stuff out of our fields and off our food,” said Olson, “this fight is not over.”
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But Energy Transfer did announce on October 22 that it is exploring the prospect of boosting throughput capacity for Dakota Access from 500,000 barrels to 570,000 barrels per day. Oil which flows into Dakota Access comes primarily via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)in North Dakota's Bakken Shale basin.
One of the companies which has oil flowing through that pipeline,Continental Resources, was founded by its CEO Harold Hamm, a major donor to President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and to his 2020 campaign via the America First Action Super-PACand a maximum allowable individual contribution. Hamm has also given tens of thousands of dollars to Republican Party congressional candidates for the 2018 midterm elections.
Kelcy Warren, the CEO and founder of Energy Transfer, also donated to Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and has given tens of thousands of dollars to GOP congressional candidates for the 2018 midterm cycle. Energy Transfer, too, has donated tens of thousands to Republican Party candidates for the 2018 election cycle.
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aha 519: is it a criminal enterprise? activ suppress, honduras?
see suncor , tar sands,
see kelcy warren CRONY CAPITALISM
5/17 etp tag then saw redumbdent b/c xl tag
seetigerswan
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See the Series: https://www.propublica.org/series/trump-inc
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/here-are-4-ways-unrestrained-crony-capitalism-is-making-americans-lives-miserable/
Here are some ways in which unrestrained crony capitalism is making Americans’ lives miserable.
1. Health care
Of all the major industrialized developed countries, the United States is the most dysfunctional when it comes to health care. Americans pay more for health care than their counterparts in Europe, Australia, Japan or New Zealand, yet get much worse results. And Americans are dying younger: life expectancy, according to CIA World Factbook data, was only 79 in the U.S. in 2015 compared to 84 in Japan, 82 in Switzerland, Italy and Australia or 81 in the Netherlands and Sweden.
The Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, was an improvement over the horrible health insurance system the U.S. had before that, but insurance companies still have way too much power and can discourage Americans from seeking preventative care. Democrats have different views on how to achieve universal health care: Sanders favors a Medicare-for-all system, while the centrist Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (another presidential candidate) favors an aggressive expansion of Obamacare combined with a possible public health option.
Democrats can have a robust debate on what universal health care should ultimately look like in the U.S., but whatever their views, there is no question that insurance companies and their abusive practices exemplify crony capitalism at its absolute worst.
2. Banking abuses
Sanders, contrary to what the far right claims, is not promoting a “government takeover of banking,” but he does favor using anti-trust laws to break up large megabanks into much smaller banks and forcing them to compete with one another. Ironically, a self-described “democratic socialist” — unlike his Republican opponents in the Senate — is the one promoting a fundamental element of free-market capitalism: competition. And when megabanks are allowed to merge with other megabanks and competition is reduced, consumers inevitably suffer. Banks have a long history of charging outrageous fees for everything from writing checks to using debit cards to having checking account balances under $1500, and the more the too-big-to-fail model is encouraged, the more abusive they are inclined to be. ...Warren is absolute right when she asserts that the U.S. is suffering from “a severe lack of affordable housing.” The problem is especially harsh in large cities, where millions of Americans are rent-stressed yet cannot afford to purchase a home. Developers, as Warren has noted, “can usually turn bigger profits by building fancier new units targeted at higher-income families rather than units targeted at lower-income families.” To tackle the crisis, Warren has proposed legislation to encourage “federal investments to increase” the United States’ “housing supply.”
4. Unfair tax policies
The GOP-sponsored Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which lowered the corporate tax rate in the U.S. from 35% to 21%, is classic trickle-down economics. While giant corporations have prospered, the Republican overhaul of the U.S. tax code offered precious little tax relief for the American middle class. And in fact, some of the tax deductions that the law eliminated or reduced resulted in higher tax bills for middle class Americans.
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619
basically earmarks revival trms
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/full-fledged-banana-republic-ethics-experts-sound-the-alarm-after-transportation-secretary-chao-secures-millions-for-projects-in-mcconnells-state/
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William Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s…
no lnx
IRS abruptly stopped criminal investigation of Mar-a-Lago member accused of massive tax fraud months after Trump took office
IRS abruptly stopped criminal investigation of Mar-a-Lago member accused of massive tax fraud months after Trump took office
written by David Cay Johnson June 6, 2019
William Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he is a member. The only one of the four billionaire Koch brothers to support Trump, Bill Koch…
David Cay Johnston
William Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he is a member. The only one of the four billionaire Koch brothers to support Trump, Bill Koch even hosted a Trump campaign fundraiser at his Cape Cod vacation home in August 2016. Co-chairs were asked to donate or raise $100,000 for the event; simply attending cost $2,700.
Atop the invitation to Koch’s home? Trump Finance Chairman Steven T. Mnuchin, now Treasury Secretary of the United States, whose duties include overseeing the Internal Revenue Service.
In part one of the Koch Papers, we revealed that Bill Koch has enjoyed hundreds of millions of dollars of untaxed profits from his carbon-based businesses, having shifted profits earned in the United States to a subsidiary in the Bahamas. A 2016 whistleblower complaint prompted an IRS criminal investigation, but the IRS halted all communication with the whistleblower’s attorneys shortly after Trump became president.
In part two, we’ll explore how Koch’s businesses withheld critical documents, stymying IRS auditors. We’ll also publish the contents of the June 2017 email that signaled the IRS had stopped pursuing the complaint against Koch’s businesses, five months after Trump took office.
These documents are among nearly a thousand pages obtained by DCReport@RawStory, which we refer to as the Koch Papers.
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aha 619
fossil fuel heart of trump pals: murray, arsenic and hvy metals coal ash threat to his own midwest base? andy szasz on protect unborn?!
hamm, icahn, etp pipelines
craft (wife ambassador UN?!)
duke coal
omfg
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html
some lnx below
Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science
May 27, 2019
WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.
Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.
In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.
And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.
[Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.]
Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.
As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.
The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey,James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.
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President Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of holding public debates on the validity of climate science.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times]
Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.
The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.
Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.
“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”
In an email, James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.
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“The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Mr. Hewitt said.
However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.
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The Beaufort Sea in the Arctic, a region that is warming rapidly. The United States recently declined to sign a communiqué on protecting the Arctic unless it omitted references to climate change.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times]
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“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.
Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.
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Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer,the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.
Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.
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Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.
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“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”
But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.
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William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council, is pushing to create a climate review panel that would question scientific consensus.CreditPool photo by Albin Lohr-Jones]
The concept is not new. Mr. Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of a series of military-style exercises, known as “red team, blue team” debates, on the validity of climate science first promoted by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator who was forced to resign last year amid multiple scandals.
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At the time, the idea was shot down by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. But since Mr. Kelly’s departure, Mr. Trump has talked about using Mr. Happer’s proposed panel as a forum for it.
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For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.
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His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.
ImageThe Daily Poster
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The White House Plan to Change Climate Science]
...
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contractor direct line to trump brain // whitaker:
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/24/how-one-company-used-fox-centric-pr-strategy-try-get-trump-give-it-lucrative-federal-contract/223793
omg
Fox News has unprecedented influence over President Donald Trump’s decision-making. Trump’s worldview is shaped by the hours of propagandistic and sycophantic programming he often watches in a day, as well as his private consultations with many of the network’s stars on a wide variety of topics. As a result, Fox’s commentators have at times dictated the president’s policy agenda and political strategy, harnessed the news cycle by directing his attention to their particular obsessions, provided staffers for his administration, and hand-picked the recipients of his pardons.
And now, the network is emerging as a platform that can determine who could receive hefty federal contracts.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Trump has “alarmed” military commanders and Department of Homeland Security officials by aggressively lobbying them to grant a border wall contract to Fisher Industries, a North Dakota-based construction company whose CEO, Tommy Fisher, has regularly appeared on Fox and other conservative outlets to promote his company’s bid.
Fisher claims that his company can build a border wall both faster and cheaper than his competitors thanks to a patent-pending installation system, but the Army Corps of Engineers determined that Fisher’s design “did not meet its requirements and lacked regulatory approvals” and that the firm’s previous work on a barrier project “came in late and over budget,” the Postreported. Rejected through the procurement process, Fisher is trying to go around it through the right-wing media, a method that has allowed him to reach the president. Trump is now trying to sidestep the contracting process because, as Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) explained to the Post, he “had seen [Fisher] on television” -- specifically on Fox -- “advocating for his version of the barrier.”
Fisher has used a Fox-centric PR strategy to directly pitch the president in hopes of obtaining a federal contract, making at least 10 appearances on Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, since January 2018, according to a Media Matters review. Programs the president regularly watches, including Fox & Friends and The Ingraham Angle, have repeatedly granted Fisher an uncritical platform to shill for his company.
Fisher’s strategy mimics that of K Street lobbyists who pay off TV pundits to promote their messages during on-air appearances and lawyers who put their clients and their relatives on Fox to ask the president for pardons.
[https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/03/10/how-lobbying-has-changed-donald-trump-washington/
By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Roger Dow realized he had a problem. Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, is the tourism industry’s top lobbyist in Washington. Over the previous two years, he’d grown increasingly troubled by some unfavorable trend lines: From 2015 to 2017, the United States was one of just two leading global tourism destinations that had experienced declines in incoming international travelers. Throughout the world, the market for overseas travel was expanding, and if America could simply have retained its share of visitors, domestic businesses would have gained, according to the association’s estimates, $31 billion in revenue and added 96,000 jobs. Instead, tourists were heading to Canada or the United Kingdom. (The only other destination to decline, Turkey, had been destabilized by a failed military coup.)
The development, Dow explains, was rooted in several forces, including a stronger US dollar, economic weakness in Latin America, and dirt-cheap airfare in Europe. But there was another factor, Dow says: “the Trump effect.” The 2017 executive order blocking entry to citizens from six majority-Muslim countries, and the President’s hostile proclamations about immigration, had signaled to foreigners they weren’t welcome here, even if they only wanted to spend money in Times Square and go home.
Dow put together a plan to reverse the decline. He assembled a collection of similarly affected Washington trade groups into what became known as the Visit U.S. Coalition, and its leaders identified specific policy fixes that they believed would ease the way for foreign tourists. More important, though, Dow and his allies were hoping for a stylistic change to accompany the policy tweaks: They wanted Trump to tamp down his language so as not to scare people away. Talking tough on national security was fine, Dow says, but it had to be coupled with the message that America still welcomed visitors from abroad. “The rhetoric,” he says, “is not balanced.”
Given all of Trump’s talk about expanding the economy, Dow was convinced that the President would embrace the industry’s recommendations—if only they could reach him. And therein lay the problem. In another administration, policy and rhetoric alike might have been worked up in a bureaucracy whose officials might be in a smart lobbyist’s Rolodex. In Trump’s government, though, the rhetoric came from the President’s own gut. Sharing policy insight with an agency functionary wasn’t going to help. They had to plant their talking points in front of POTUS himself. But how?
The coalition hired S-3 Public Affairs, one of the many DC lobbying-and-media-consulting firms scrambling to adjust to the city’s new power structure. In prior years, says S-3 partner Amos Snead, the firm might have designed an “outside-in” approach—collect letters or petitions from industry backers around the country, bring them to Washington, and use the testimonials to influence lawmakers, agency officials, and other thought leaders. Trump’s Washington, Snead believed, required a different approach. He sensed there might be a more direct path into the President’s head, via one of his favorite mediums: Twitter.
Snead used a technique known as geofencing to send digital ads via Twitter, as well as Facebook and You-Tube, touting the benefits of foreign tourism. Instead of targeting the entire capital, they were aimed at the coordinates of a vanishingly small audience: the President and his top aides, wherever they happened to be. The consultants tracked Team Trump’s movements inside the Beltway and beyond. When the commander in chief was in Washington, they sent their ads to IP addresses that covered the White House and the Trump hotel. If Trump headed to his golf club in New Jersey, they beamed the ads to IP addresses there. When he went to Mar-a-Lago, they sent them to his club in Florida.
As Snead puts it, “We’re following [Trump] where he goes.”
This tactic is part of what’s known, in the parlance of the industry, as the “audience of one” strategy—and tourism boosters aren’t the only people using it. In fact, it’s become a staple of the business of Washington under the 45th President.
...
Trump marched into Washington promising to “drain the swamp,” but his administration has been great for K Street. Total spending on lobbying reached $3.4 billion in 2018—the most in eight years.
Yet just because the influence industry is swimming in cash doesn’t mean its world hasn’t been rocked. Trump’s arrival in the White House has had a profound impact on the way K Street operates, according to interviews with more than 30 lobbyists, consultants, former administration officials, and others. In prior years, lobbyists and consultants felt compelled to work officials in all corners of the federal bureaucracy when trying to shape policy. But now, with decision-making consolidated inside the Oval Office, they’ve had to rewrite their playbook.
“It’s two different worlds,” says Eric Bovim, a managing director of Signal Group, a public-affairs agency in Washington. “Under President Obama, the government was a finely tuned instrument, all the parts working together to produce a single note. You needed to work with everybody to calibrate the sound. Today, for the most part, it’s a one-man band, the President in a never-ending guitar solo on the White House lawn, overpowering all the other instruments.”
From the beginning, pressing a case with Trump was difficult for a run-of-the-mill lobbyist: Veteran GOP influencers—the Establishment—didn’t have many friends in Trump’s inner circle. With the administration struggling to fill agency positions, even many well-connected consultants and lobbyists didn’t have a lot of other corners of the government to go to for help. Instead, the focus was on Trump.
HOW DO YOU GET TRUMP TO PAY ATTENTION TO POLICY? MAKE HIM THE STAR OF A COMMERCIAL.
In the early days, influence peddlers ran ads designed to appeal to him in New York newspapers—the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post—which they believed he was still reading. They also used the peculiar way that other articles got to him.
One key discovery was the story folder. During at least the first seven months of the new administration, staffers in the White House communications department compiled flattering news stories about Trump into packets, which they delivered to the President twice a day. According to a former White House aide, as the packet made its way to the Oval Office, additional officials inserted other news articles they wanted the President to read. “It would typically be, like, Stephen Miller putting his latest race-baiting story in there,” the former White House aide says.
When consultants and lobbyists learned about the folder, they saw a fresh opportunity. One Republican consultant told me he was able to plant stories favorable to his corporate clients in Breitbart News—the far-right outlet once run by Trump’s former strategist, Steve Bannon—and then pass those stories to a friend in the White House, who in turn slipped them into the daily packet destined for the Oval. “If you have a friend in there who can get something on the Resolute desk,” the consultant says, “it doesn’t really matter what the source [of the information] is anymore.”
Others try to influence the thinking of the White House officials Trump listens to. One consultant told me he has geofenced the Kalorama home of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump with digital ads in an effort to shape their views on an issue. Beyond the White House and Trump’s hotel, S-3’s influencers also targeted power restaurants such as Central Michel Richard in case a top aide popped in for lunch.
Special interests have begun targeting Trump’s “outfluencers” as well—people like Oklahoma billionaire Harold Hamm and ex–UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who don’t work in the White House but are believed to have the President’s ear. One consultant went so far as to geofence the school of the child of a particular outfluencer with ads specifically designed to appeal to younger viewers. “If [the family is] sitting around the dinner table talking and the issue comes up,” the consultant told me, “I want that kid to be able to say, ‘Hey, I saw something about that.’ ”
The cornerstone of the audience-of-one strategy, though, is Trump’s love affair with television. After the election, consultants began buying commercial time during Fox & Friends, the conservative morning show that the President is known to watch religiously. But how do you get a 72-year-old man with no interest in policy to watch a commercial on ethanol subsidies? Well, the influencers decided, you find old footage of Trump discussing the issue on the campaign and make him the star of the commercial.
“The President’s favorite topic is himself,” says a Republican consultant. “What better way to get him interested in a message than by providing him with the thing that he’s most obsessed with?”
Snead used the tactic during his work for the Visit U.S. Coalition. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in early 2018, Trump declared to the roomful of elites that “America is open for business.” There it was—Snead’s money shot. He and his team immediately created a commercial that featured Trump saying the line. They then beamed the ad to the IP address they were using to geofence the President in Switzerland. “As soon as those words came out of his mouth,” Snead says, “we’re turning those into ads.”
..
]
The CEO has honed his pitch to appeal to the president in particular, as demonstrated by his March 5 appearance on Fox & Friends, during which co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked him to explain “why should the president, or why should his administration, choose your company?"
[vid]
Fisher first appealed to the president as a businessman, saying Trump should know that his company would do the work for less money than other companies, get it completed faster, and throw in access roads and other additions.
He went on to describe his company as “the first responder” of the industry, appealing to Trump’s well-known obsession with police officers and firefighters.
And he also tried to link the bid to one of Trump’s notable construction successes, the renovation of the Wollman Rink in Central Park in the 1980s. “I think he’ll understand,” Fisher argued, “just like the Central Park deal with the ice skating rink, if you need it done now, nothing against government bureaucracy, but it takes time, so you need an expert to come in there and do it now and do it right.”
Earhardt ended the interview by giving Trump another reason to prefer Fisher: “You might be able to build it just in time for that election, too.”
And Fox’s promotion of Fisher’s bid has not been limited to the network’s supposed “opinion” shows. On April 19, the network’s flagship “news” broadcast, Special Report, ran a packaged report that essentially served as an infomercial for Fisher’s proposal. Introduced by anchor Bret Baier and reported by national correspondent William La Jeunesse, the segment featured an interview with Fisher and credulously repeated his claims that he could construct the wall “faster, better, and cheaper."
[vid]
All of this laudatory coverage has had Fisher’s desired effect, with the president reportedly promoting the company’s bid in meetings with senior military and DHS officials and forcing them to explain “that the president could not just pick a company” to get the contract in defiance of the federal procurement process.
Fisher harnessed the incredible power of Fox’s hold on the president to get much closer than he should have to taxpayer dollars. He won’t be the last to try to do so.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/trump-privately-asked-mcconnell-to-prioritize-confirmation-of-irs-counsel-over-attorney-general-and-now-we-know-why/
The New York Times is out with another bombshell report, this time describing how – and why – **President Donald Trump** privately asked **Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell** to make his top priority the confirmation of a new IRS Chief Counsel, even over confirming a new Attorney General.
It was February, one month after the new Democratic-majority House of Representatives had been sworn in. This is a very aggressive goal-oriented group of progressive lawmakers, and they had promised to get a copy of Trump’s tax returns.The Times’ Maggie Haberman and Nicholas Fandos report that “the request by Mr. Trump, made to Mr. McConnell on Feb. 5,” to prioritize the confirmation of the IRS Chief Counsel, “raised questions about whether the president had other motivations,” for pushing to get his nominee confirmed.
“For months, the president has seethed over vows by congressional Democrats that they would move to obtain his tax returns from the I.R.S. And this week, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, formally asked the I.R.S. for six years of the returns, using an obscure provision in the tax code to do so.”The Times also notes that “Mr. Trump and his team have been warily anticipating the probing demands of House investigators since Democrats won control in November. The message to Mr. McConnell came around the time that Mr. Trump, eyeing a torrent of new House investigations led by Democrats, told reporters that he was unfairly under fire.The IRS Chief Counsel presumably would be able to provide the Secretary of the Treasury with “reasons” to not allow Congress to obtain Trump’s tax returns.Also of great concern is that the Senate did, in fact, confirm Michael Desmond, a tax lawyer from Santa Barbara, California, as IRS Chief Counsel, despite, as the Times notes, Desmond “had briefly advised the Trump Organization on tax issues before Mr. Trump took office.”
There’s more.
“In private practice, Mr. Desmond worked for a time alongside William Nelson and Sheri Dillon, who currently serve as tax counsels to the Trump Organization.”
It’s almost as if President Trump installed William Barr at the DOJ to protect him from the Mueller investigation and installed Michael Desmond at the IRS to protect him from Democrats trying to obtain his tax returns.
==
Two coal companies just became even more influential over the Trump administration.
A new report reveals that Murray Energy andAlliance Resource Partners successfully lobbied to have a conservative nominee to the government’s energy regulator thrown out — simply because he opposed a plan to force taxpayers to bail out money-losing coal plants.
As Politico reported, the two coal companies — owned by two major Republican donors and Trump allies, Bob Murray and Joe Craft — teamed up with Energy Secretary Rick Perry to pressure the White House to drop the nomination of David Hill to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Hill had served as the Energy Department’s general counsel under President George W. Bush.
What was Hill’s undoing? He had previously said that Perry’s costly plan to raise consumer energy bills in order to subsidize uneconomic coal plants was “absolutely not the solution."
Last January, FERC unanimously rejected the coal bailout proposal.
Rick Perry’s plan to make taxpayers bail out coal and nuclear rejected by federal agency
Since then, Perry and Big Coal have been working overtime to stack FERC, which oversees the U.S. grid and regulates interstate electricity transmission, with cronies who will force Americans to buy costly coal and nuclear power. This vision would amount to a multi-billion dollar taxpayer bailout at the expense of cheaper renewable sources and natural gas.
The revelation also serves to further cement the relationship between the coal industry and the Trump administration. Not only has President Donald Trump tapped Craft’s wife as the next U.N. ambassador but under former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt, Craft often met with the agency and he even gave Pruitt basketball tickets. Pruitt is reportedly now consulting for Craft’s coal company.
Meanwhile, Murray is well-known for his wish list of policy demands delivered during Trump’s first year in office; current EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler also used to lobby on behalf of Murray Energy.
All of this is to say that we now have the staggering hypocrisy of a Republican administration seeking to force American ratepayers to pay billions of dollars a year more in energy bills to prop up dirty energy — even as Trump and GOP leaders have been characterizing Democratic efforts to speed up clean energy deployment to save a livable climate as “socialism.”
Wyoming’s coal plants are so unprofitable Republicans turned to a ‘socialist program’ to save them
Indeed, when FERC killed Perry’s plan last year, they explained it would be unduly discriminatory against cheaper renewable energy sources. As Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur explained at the time in a concurring opinion, subsidizing the electricity dinosaurs was not FERC’s job: “I believe the Commission should continue to focus its efforts not on slowing the transition from the past but on easing the transition to the future.”
But in the past year, Big Coal has already succeeded in replacing one anti-bailout FERC commissioner, Robert Powelson, with a pro-coal crony, Bernard McNamee.
Former FERC Chairman Kevin McIntyre’s untimely death in January means Perry and the coal industry will have a second pro-bailout commissioner if they can keep thwarting candidates who are more supportive of the cheap, clean energy of the future rather than the costly, dirty energy sources of the past. Those in favor of forcing taxpayers to prop up the coal industry would need only one more vote on FERC to pass Perry’s plan.
So it still remains possible that the Trump administration will be able to achieve its dream of a centrally-planned economy where consumers are forced to pay billions to keep coal plants running and spewing their toxic and climate-destroying pollution.
OMFG
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/meet-the-new-un-ambassador-nominee-a-billionaire-gop-donor-and-science-denier-who-gave-trump-millions/
prez **Donald Trump** promised he’d always hire the “best people” during his presidential campaign, but not only has that turned out to be false, he’s had more turnover than any president in modern history, if not ever.
The president is fond of playing “whack-a-mole” with his personnel problems, by shuffling the players around instead of actually looking for, as he put it, the “best people.”For example, Mick Mulvaney joined the Trump administration after serving as a U.S Republican Congressman. He served as Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, then added to his resume the title of Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney then became Trump’s Acting White House Chief of Staff, replacing embattled and disgraced John Kelly – while giving up his CFPB job but still retaining the role of Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Fast forward to Friday evening.
President Trump has just announced his latest nominee to become Ambassador to the United Nations, after his earlier nominee, who would have replaced Nikki Haley, was forced to withdraw her nomination after illegally hiring as a nanny an immigrant unauthorized to work in the U.S.
“I am pleased to announce that Kelly Knight Craft, our current Ambassador to Canada, is being nominated to be United States Ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump announced via tweet. No formal White House announcement has been made yet. “Kelly has done an outstanding job representing our Nation and I have no doubt that, under her leadership, our Country will be represented at the highest level. Congratulations to Kelly and her entire family!”
Trump neglected to mention that Knight Craft is Trump’s current Ambassador to Canada, so he’s just shuffling the players around again.
Knight Craft is perhaps best known for her science-denying remarks, saying she believes in “both sides” of climate change. (There are not two sides.
[vid]
Meanwhile, the President also neglected to mention Knight Craft, along with her billionaire coal baron husband, donated millions of dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign.
Ambassador to the United Nations is not the same as Ambassador to Canada. There are few national security issues America’s Ambassador to Canada would be relied upon to keep Americans safe.
But the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations holds a key national security role. They sit on the UN Security Council and represent the U.S. to the rest of the world.
There is no indication Knight Craft is qualified for the role.
Knight Craft does hail from Kentucky, where she has also been a major GOP donor, or, as one Canadian news publication described it, “Knight Craft is well known among Republicans, to whom she has donated piles of money.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, also of Kentucky, reportedly recommended her for the role of UN Ambassador.
McConnell is not the only member of his family greasing the wheels. This week Trump Transportation SecretaryElaine Chao, who happens to be married to the Senate Majority Leader, was embroiled in scandal.
Secretary Chao “has met at least 10 times with Kentucky business leaders or politicians after email requests made by her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY),” The Daily Beast reports.
“A cache of more than 800 emails—obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the watchdog group American Oversight—shows that some of those meetings led toMcConnell’s associates being granted their wishes by the powerful Transportation Secretary—from infrastructure grants to highway project funding. In at least one example, the lobbyist had donated to McConnell’s re-election campaign.”
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https://www.propublica.org/series/the-new-power-brokers
series: THE NEW POWER BROKERS
West Virginia’s Natural Gas Industry
Coal, long West Virginia’s most dominant industry, is ailing. Natural gas is taking over, as a powerful economic and political force. Is the state making the same mistakes again with a different fossil fuel?
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/emails-reveal-melania-friend-who-planned-trump-inauguration-ripped-officials-over-sketchy-money-practices/
friend of Melania Trump’s who planned the president’s inauguration flagged multiple financial and conflict of interest issues when working on the events — and was ignored.
Vanity Fair‘s Emily Jane Fox reported Thursday that Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former Vogue staffer and New York City event planner, was brought on to plan Donald Trump’s inauguration just days after he was elected president. She had no idea what was in store for her. According to people familiar with recordings made by former Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen, Wolkoff can be heard telling the president’s longtime attorney during conversations last summer that she had many concerns with the process that unfolded.
Those recordings, Cohen told the event planner, were later seized by the FBI — and led in part to the SDNY’s investigation into the inauguration that Wolkoff is now involved in.
Wolkoff, the report noted, eventually raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest that could stem from the Trump family businesses’ involvement in the planning — as well as those surrounding deputy inauguration chairman Rick Gates and Tom Barrack, the longtime Trump friend who served as the inaugural chair.
Gates, Fox wrote, “approached a couple individuals working on the inauguration and asked if they would be willing to be paid directly for their work by a donor, rather than by the inaugural committee.”
“They had received more donations than they’d initially anticipated, Gates told these people,” the report noted. “Skirting the usual payment route could allow the inaugural committee to avoid reporting the full amount raised from donors.”
Wolkoff reportedly raised concerns about the deputy chair with the First Lady, expressing her view that “he exacerbated a situation already fraught with potential conflicts of interest.”
She also questioned Gates and Barrack directly about budget issues, people familiar with the conversations told Vanity Fair — and found she was being left out of meetings soon after.
“Because part of her responsibilities included reviewing all budgets from her vendors and presenting them to other members of the inaugural committee, she studied the line items in order to be able to explain them,” Fox wrote. “At points, she could not justify the numbers coming in. After circulation of a quote from one of their largest event-production vendors, Hargrove LLC, Wolkoff was shocked that no one in the organization appeared willing to question the figures.”
In an email to Barrack and her staff on December 31, 2016, Wolkoff made her displeasure known.
“I am DISGUSTED by [Hargrove’s] lack of transparency and entitlement to [the Presidential Inaugural Committee’s] funding,” she wrote. “I can not approve any budget line items because I do not have a clue what these numbers represent!!”
She was particularly concerned about Barrack’s “chairman’s dinner,” which took up ample attention and money, the report noted. Along with Cohen, former RNC finance chairman Elliott Broidy and disgraced Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, invitees included seven “foreign ministers” for Saudi Arabia, one from Qatar and one from the United Arab Emirates.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-house-brain-damaging-pesticides-2613568873.html
Trump White House Pushes to Let Minors Spray Brain-Damaging Pesticides on Farms
The White House's just-released list of planned environmental and public health rollbacks includes letting high-school-age kids spray brain-damaging pesticides on commercial farms.
The plan would drop the age of workers permitted to spray restricted-use pesticides on crops from 18 to 16. Minors would be allowed to apply dangerous chemicals such as chlorpyrifos, which U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists say can cause brain damage in children even in small doses.
The move, which would take effect next September, was first announced last year by Scott Pruitt, the former head of the EPA, who was forced in July to resign after a string of ethical scandals.In one of the first acts of the Trump administration, Pruitt aborted a scheduled ban of chlorpyrifos just weeks after meeting with the CEO of Dow, chlorpyrifos's manufacturer.
Pruitt's reversal of the ban was recently overturned by a federal appeals court. Under acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, the EPA is fighting the court's order to ban the pesticide.
The minimum age rules were enacted by the Obama administration to protect minors who work on farms. Many of these teenagers are migrant workers who speak little English, making it harder to understand directions on how to apply pesticides safely. The rules were championed by physicians and farmworker-rights advocates, who led a multi-year effort to improve protections for farmworkers.
"Letting younger teenagers handle dangerous pesticides fits perfectly with the Trump administration's war on children's health protection," said EWG President Ken Cook. "There are other farm jobs they could do that don't involve strapping containers of dangerous chemicals on their backs that they will inhale and ingest. But this administration will let unscrupulous farm bosses risk these kids' health."
"Maybe the president should pick up a spray nozzle for a day and see what it's like walking through a plume of pesticide fumes," said Cook. "But the closest he gets to a farm is flying over them on the way to his golf resorts and MAGA rallies."
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
- Hawaii Bans Use of Toxic Pesticide Chlorpyrifos ›
- Trump Administration Asks Court to Re-Hear Case That Banned ... ›
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might not meet quid test, but written by lobbyists:
https://www.alternet.org/buried-fine-print-trump-rule-would-give-25-billion-tax-cut-big-bank-fat-cats
Wall Street banks continue to enjoy record profits thanks to President Donald Trump's $1.5 trillion tax scam, Trump's Treasury Department—headed by former Goldman Sachs executive Steve Mnuchin—quietly moved to hand big banks yet another major gift on Wednesday by hiding a $2.5 billion tax cut in the fine print of an "esoteric" new rule proposal (pdf).
At first glance, the Trump administration's rule appeared to be little more than a mundane set of regulations aimed at providing owners of so-called pass-through businesses everything they "need to comply with the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act," as Reuters put it.
But Capital & Main journalist David Sirota decided to take the radical step of actually reading the proposal in its entirety, and he found that the White House's rule alsoseeks to exclude banking from the "financial services" category—a move that would allow thousands of large banks to take advantage of the controversial tax cut for pass-through income included in Trump's tax bill. As they were hashing out the details of their tax bill behind closed doors, Sirota notes, Republican lawmakers included a provision that prohibited businesses in the "financial services" sector from qualifying for the tax cut in an effort to counter "assertions that the bill could enrich big banks."
But, at the direction of bank lobbyists, the Trump administration's new rule asserts that "'financial services' don't include banking," thus allowing "hundreds of banks operating as S corporations—as well as their owners—[to] claim the tax cut," Sirota writes.
In addition to taking the side of bank lobbyists with its new rule, the Trump administration also explicitly "echoed their views" in the fine print of its proposal, Sirota points out.
"Banking industry lobbyists pushed for the interpretation—acknowledging that the bill generally blocked pass-through tax cuts for businesses in financial services, but arguing that 'financial services are, however, clearly something other than banking,'" Sirota writes. "The Trump Treasury Department not only sided with the lobbyists, but in the fine print of its new rule, which is now subject to a public comment period before it goes into force, echoed their views."
According Daniel Hemel, a tax law professor at the University of Chicago, the Trump administration's rule change would reward "roughly 2,000 banks around the country that qualify as S corporations."
"It's a safe bet that most of the S corporation shareholders benefited by today's decision will fall into the upper reaches of the top one percent—not many middle-class folks own a bank," Hemel told Capital & Main. "If you assume a return on assets of around one percent and S corporation bank assets in the range of $400 billion, then the move reduces the total tax liability of S corporation bank shareholders by $300 million per year for 2018 through 2025. We're talking about something like $2.5 billion total."
In response to the Trump White House's latest attempt to reward the wealthy—which comes as wages for most workers are declining—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote, "It's never been more clear who the Trump administration is really working for."
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/tariffs-feed-swamp-wall-street-journal-issues-scathing-editorial-against-trumps
...
NEWS & POLITICS
'Tariffs Feed the Swamp': Wall Street Journal Issues Scathing Editorial Against Trump's Latest Recipe for 'Crony Capitalism and Corruption'
Trump has somehow given the Wall Street Journal editorial board and Paul Krugman something to agree about.
By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet August 6, 2018, 3:49 PM GMT
President Donald Trump's tariff policy continues to infuriate the usually GOP-friendly writers on the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the way the scheme is playing out had the board spitting fire Monday in a scathing new denunciation of the administration.
"Tariffs are taxes, which distort investment and limit growth," the editorial said in the piece. "And like taxes, when tariffs are high they create a political incentive for exemptions and favoritism. Behold the Commerce Department’s new and tortuous process for reviewing exemptions to steel and aluminum tariffs. This is everything Republicans typically claim to hate."
The new review process allows for companies to file for exemptions to the tariffs — which many experts believe is an even worse outcome applying blanket tariffs.
"This is the worst thing about Trump trade policy I've read yet," tweeted liberal economist Paul Krugman, in rare agreement with the Journal's editorial board. "Tariffs are one thing; tariffs that are enforced selectively, at the discretion of political appointees, are much worse -- an open invitation to corruption."
In the editorial, the board details the onerous process companies must undergo to qualify for exemptions. The applications include mountains of paperwork and require extreme levels of detail. They also include statement sections where companies can make blatantly political — rather than economic — appeals on their own behalf.
And of course, the result is that tens of thousands of applications have been filed with the Commerce Department, to be reviewed by non-experts in the relevant fields. And while the applications are supposed to be settled within three months, companies have already seen that deadline come and go with no response.
"This Commerce mess illustrates that in addition to the harm tariffs do economically, they alsocreate new opportunities for crony capitalism and corruption. Far from draining the swamp, tariffs feed the swamp," the board writes.
==
LAT
In the early days of President Trump's administration, Trump had a friend in AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Randall Stephenson.
The telecom executive described himself as one of Trump's "biggest defenders on public policy." He met with the president-elect at Trump Tower and talked about all the jobs that the largest U.S. phone company would create. Stephenson also praised Trump to investors, saying the president would usher in a new era of corporate tax relief and fewer regulations.
And as it turned out, AT&T's relationship with the fledgling administration went deeper. The carrier acknowledged Tuesday that it hired a firm founded by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, seeking "insights" on how the unorthodox president would govern. It also wanted guidance on how Trump would respond to its plan to acquire Time Warner Inc., according to a person briefed on the matter.
AT&T said it cut ties with Cohen's firm in December, shortly after receiving word that the administration would try to block its Time Warner deal — a move that Stephenson described at the time as "a big curve ball."
The question now is whether AT&T's payments were an attempt to influence Trump's views on the Time Warner deal or just research on a new and idiosyncratic administration. In addition to seeking guidance on the Time Warner transaction, the carrier also asked for information on tax reform and net neutrality policies, said the person familiar with the situation, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations were private.
Stormy Daniels
The relationship came to light Tuesday, when AT&T was cited by attorney Michael Avenatti as one of the parties that made payments to Cohen's firm. Avenatti is representing Stephanie Clifford, the porn actress known as Stormy Daniels, who was paid $130,000 by Cohen just before the 2016 presidential election not to discuss an alleged tryst with Trump.
Larry Solomon, a spokesman for AT&T, confirmed the relationship Tuesday.
It "was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration," he said in an email. "They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017."
It isn't clear why AT&T would use Cohen, considering that he was a personal lawyer to Trump and not in the administration.
Russia allegations
The acknowledgment pulls AT&T into a rapidly unfolding legal saga involving the president, his lawyer and alleged ties to Russia. Avenatti also alleged that a company connected to a Russian oligarch sent $500,000 last year to Cohen's business.
Essential Consultants is a Delaware limited-liability company started by Cohen, and it has been identified as the source of the hush payment to Daniels.
Cohen wouldn't have had to register as a lobbyist unless he spent 20% of the time he devoted to AT&T on efforts to influence the federal government while having at least two contacts with one or more high-ranking government officials, including members of Congress, their staff or administration officials.
AT&T’s payments
AT&T, based in Dallas, made four payments of $50,000 apiece around the end of last year, according to Avenatti. But the company's statement that the consulting arrangement started in early 2017 suggests there may have been other payments.
The carrier announced just before the election that it would acquire Time Warner, embarking on a "vertical merger" that would bind entertainment and news content with AT&T's network infrastructure. There were reasons for concern about the deal: Trump regularly criticized Time Warner's CNN unit on the campaign trail and threatened to derail any merger.
But AT&T and Time Warner weren't competitors, so Stephenson assumed the deal wouldn't be opposed on antitrust grounds.
"We were obviously surprised when the government decided to try and block the merger," he said during a conference call in January. "It is a classic vertical merger between two companies that don't even compete with one another. With 50 years of legal precedent, it's the type of business combination that the government has consistently approved with appropriate conditions."
Courtroom battle
The Justice Department's fight against the merger ultimately proved fierce. The two sides are just now wrapping up a six-week courtroom battle over it.
The companies and the government have filed hundreds of pages of post-trial documents, and U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington is weighing whether to bless the $85-billion deal or block it. He plans to announce his decision June 12.
Critics have spent years accusing Hillary Clinton of making policy decisions during her time as secretary of State based on the interests of corporate and foreign government donors to the Clinton Foundation, especially to the Clinton Global Initiative.
Trump and other Republicans alleged during the 2016 campaign that Clinton's decisions as president would be swayed by donors who had spent years cultivating influence through the foundation — and by paying her to speak during the two years between her departure from the Obama administration and the start of her campaign.
Clinton and her team insisted that efforts to avoid conflicts of interest were made at the State Department and that further steps would be taken if she was elected.
Other companies
Meanwhile, other firms have also transferred funds to Cohen's firm, according to Avenatti's summary. They include Novartis Investments SARL, a subsidiary of pharmaceutical maker Novartis AG, which made four payments totaling $399,920 in the same four-month span as AT&T.
A Novartis spokesman said that he was looking into the issue but added that any agreements with Essential were entered into before the arrival of the company's current CEO in February and have expired.
There also was a $150,000 payment in November 2017 from Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd., a manufacturer of aircraft, including jets, helicopters and unmanned vehicles, according to the summary.
Korea Aerospace, which is seeking to sell its planes in the United States, hired Cohen's entity for advice on local accounting standards and sent a single payment of $150,000 when the work was completed, a spokesman said Wednesday, adding that the contract was legal.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/26/gop-tax-law-bails-out-fracking-companies-debt-eog-hamm
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Thanks to the new tax law, Continental took home an extra $700 million because its effective tax rate for 2017 was negative 406 percent.
...Continental needed that money (although Hamm certainly doesn’t). In 2007 Continental had $165 million in debt and paid $13 million a year in interest on that debt. In 2016 its debt had ballooned to $6.5 billion and the annual interest payments rose to $321 million. The GOP tax law essentially pays off two years of Continental’s interest payments, allowing this failing business model to continue because Continental has not been generating enough income to pay even the annual interest on its debt.
While the company he leads is drowning in $6.5 billion of debt, Harold Hamm is personally worth twice that amount. He'll be fine. He was easily able to afford one of the most expensive divorce settlementsever.
These are just two examples of shale companies receiving an immediate financial lifeline from the GOP tax bill. These companies also will benefit from lowered tax rates in future years. However, this one-time handout simply masks the reality that the shale revolution looks a lot like a Ponzi scheme enriching CEOs and Wall Street financiers by producing oil and gas with borrowed money that is unlikely to be paid back in the future.
And Hamm and the Wall Street financiers have no incentive to do anything differently. Sure bankrupt energy companies destroy worker pensions, wipe out investors equity, layoff thousands of workers — but if we use the coal industry as an example — CEOs will still get bonuses after driving their companies into bankruptcy.
Tax Bill Especially Beneficial to Oil Companies
The benefits of the new tax bill are certainly not unique to oil and gas companies. Utility companies did even better and the big Wall Street banks who are financing the cash-burning shale industry also are awash in new profits thanks to the GOPtax overhaul.
However, due to the nature of how oil and gas companies book profits and losses — and the epic money-losing streak the shale industry created over the past few years — these companies benefited more than most.
To be clear — this bill which was signed at the end of 2017 was applied to the deferred tax liabilities that were already on the books — thus erasing a large chunk of the liabilities for these companies that had built up while the industry kept borrowing to drill more and ultimately lose more money. Simply a bailout of reckless financial behavior by any other name.
And it wasn’t just the companies primarily working in shale that benefited. ExxonMobil raked in a $6 billion benefit from the new tax law, which even CNN Money referred to as a “gift.”
Industry Will Use Bailout to Borrow and Drill More
In discussing the trade deficit President Trump recently tweeted the following:[twit]
Coming from a man whose career includes multiple bankruptcies, this shouldn’t be surprising. The shale oil industry definitely has a kindred spirit in the White House.
What happens when you give free money to gamblers on an epic losing streak? In the shale industry, they double down.
ExxonMobil has promised to use the billions it gained from the tax bill to … drill and frack more shale oil. Which is likely to result in further discounts of Permian Shale oil, which will lower the price of oil and put more pressure on the heavily leveraged shale companies.
While the mainstream media is pushing the industry message that shale companies now are focused on profits instead of just production volume, record U.S. oil production and predictions for even greater increases would appear to reveal the lie in that promise. Just as most sharks must swim to stay alive, shale companies must drill to preserve CEO bonuses, which are often tied to oil production, not profits. So, they drill. Even when that means losing money on nearly every barrel of oil they pump.
A graphic from the Wall Street Journal reveals just how much money the shale industry has been losing compared to traditional oil — all while CEOs such as Harold Hamm were amassing billions in personal wealth. The shale oil industry generated free cash flow pumping oil for one brief period in the last seven years. Hamm has done a bit better personally during that time frame.
Shortly after President Trump signed the new tax bill, he took another vacation to Mar-a-Lago where he reportedly toldthose in attendance: “You all just got a lot richer.”
A rare moment of honesty from the President. And while he wasn’t speaking specifically to shale oil CEOs — it's safe to say they got the message loud and clear.