Tag: President Corrupt

  • Is not normal

    Oh god. We’re just not even going to be able to keep up. Teams of reporters and activists will be on each item and still they won’t be able to keep up. There’s just so much…

    Joshua Foust points out the obvious truth that This is not normal. He explains that for a few paragraphs and I nod along with him.

    “Normal,” as a concept, matters. The old adage that it is just the setting on a dryer is not just wrong but misleading. When something is abnormal it is important to understand why. If a person is not normal they could be brilliant or they could be sick, and knowing the difference is the distance between life and death. In politics, too, there is normal and there is abnormal. An insurgent candidate swinging a party or the country right or left is normal — Marco Rubio winning the GOP nomination and the general election would have been normal, for example. But Donald Trump is not normal. In fact, the things he represents, the decisions he has made and is continuing to make, and the entourage he has surrounded himself with, are not normal. They are so abnormal that they look like the opening stages of authoritarianism — something those of us steeped in the study of authoritarian countries recognize like a flashing light at a railroad crossing.

    Yep yep yep, I thought. But then he starts enumerating, with a list, with at least one link in each item, and each item is a horror…So how can we possibly even keep up?

    Just some of that list:

    They want you to think it is normal when the President is openly selling your interests out to a foreign power, or when he is using the levers of government to materially enrich and empower his family. The presumption of normality during abnormal times is one of the most powerful weapons the authoritarian has, and that is why it is so important to recognize how profoundly abnormal Donald J. Trump will be as president. So I assembled a list.

    • Using your Presidential transition website to promote your own business propertiesis not normal.
    • Calling for millions of federal employees to sign nondisclosure agreements apart from standard government forms is not normal.
    • Blasting journalists with product placements for the labels your child, who is on your transition team, is wearing is not normal.
    • Having a wide range of senior figures in your own political party distance themselves from your transition team, citing the profound irregularity of it and worrying about future ugliness, is not normal.
    • Placing your children in charge of your business empire, then placing them on your transition team, then seeking top secret security clearances for them, is not normal. The conflicts of interest that this represents are almost too many to count, but at a basic level: you do not give someone with a financial interest to work against U.S. policy access to sensitive information — at all, ever.
    • Putting one’s children into senior positions of a government is the behavior of a banana republic, not a constitutional democracy with strong institutions. This is not normal.
    • For a president who ran on his business acumen to refuse to disclose his taxes to the public, which in turn denies anyone the ability to see if financial conflicts of interest are driving his policy decisions, is not normal.
    • Asking if he can decline the President’s salary, so as to avoid paying taxes, is not normal.
    • Owing hundreds of millions of dollars in business debt to a foreign bank and refusing to fully divest yourself from those finances is not normal.
    • Ascending to the White House while your eldest son, who is also on your transition team, and for whom you also seek a top-secret clearance, seeks out seven-digit business deals in Russia, is not normal. When Russia then names the President elect an “honorary Cossack,” it is not normal.

    You see what I mean. And that’s not even all.

  • Exemptions

    I was thinking President Plutocrat has to obey rules against conflicts of interest…but he doesn’t. The Times spelled it out a couple of days ago:

    A theme of Mr. Trump’s presidency is likely to be the clash of his duties running the country with the remnants of his decades as a hard-charging businessman. But federal rules and precedent make a couple of things clear.

    Mr. Trump will have no immunity from lawsuits involving his corporate ventures, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling involving Paula Jones, one of President Bill Clinton’s accusers. And nothing will stop Mr. Trump’s family from continuing to run its vast international web of businesses. Federal ethics laws and conflict-of-interest statutes that apply to other federal employees and cabinet members do not apply to the president.

    So that’s bad news. President Corrupt is who he is, so he will avail himself of that immunity to go right ahead and use the office to his personal advantage and profit. Of course he will. He didn’t get where he is by passing up opportunities to be a greedy corrupt piece of shit.

    “It is unprecedented in modern history to have the level of complexity of global substantial business relationships that the president-elect has, and the litigation that inevitably follows any complex global business venture,” said Norman L. Eisen, a former special counsel for ethics and government reform under President Obama, who supported Mr. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. “It will be complicated, but not insurmountable.”

    And either way there won’t be anything we can do about it.

    Mr. Trump faces potential conflicts on multiple fronts. He has income streams that could be affected by taxation policies he may try to get through Congress. His companies have hundreds of millions of dollars of debt from banks regulated by the federal government. In one case, Mr. Trump is a part owner of an office building in Manhattan that carries a $950 million loan from lenders that include the Bank of China.

    A key source of his revenue is the licensing of the Trump name, both domestically and abroad, and the value of that brand could be helped, or harmed, by actions he takes or does not take.

    The Trump Organization said it had begun the process of “vetting various structures,” with a goal of quickly transferring the businesses to three of Mr. Trump’s children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — along with executives. “This is a top priority at the Organization and the structure that is ultimately selected will comply with all applicable rules and regulations,” Amanda Miller, a marketing executive for the company, wrote in an email.

    During a debate in January, Mr. Trump said he would put his holdings in a blind trust, an arrangement in which a public official lets a financial manager control his wealth and does not know exactly how the money is invested. But in the next breath, he acknowledged the problem with that strategy: “Well, I don’t know if it’s a blind trust if Ivanka, Don and Eric run it.”

    Yeah it’s not. But that’s ok because it turns out a blind trust isn’t obligatory, because nobody thought someone as corrupt as Trump could get elected president.

    Under federal laws, executive branch employees must comply with conflict-of-interest rules that guard against being influenced by personal investments, and they must curb payments from sources outside the government. As a result, employees may have to recuse themselves from working on matters where they may have conflicts, holding certain properties or accepting money. For example, when Henry Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs executive, became Treasury secretary in 2006, he pledged to sell about $470 million in company stock to comply with conflict-of-interest rules.

    But the president and vice president were exempted from such laws, on the theory that they needed to be able to carry out their constitutional duties without restraint. So President Trump will be able to take actions pertaining to another country even if he has business interests there.

    And we can be very sure he won’t even try to bracket his business interests while taking those actions. Don’t be silly – he’s not going to waste this golden opportunity, is he. Making himself richer is all he knows.

    Mr. Trump will be required next year to file an updated personal financial disclosure listing his holdings, similar to the forms he has filed the past couple of years as a candidate. But Mr. Trump will not be required to make public his income tax returns, which he declined to do during the campaign, citing a continuing audit by the Internal Revenue Service, an agency he will now control. If he did release them, the tax returns could provide transparency into his international business dealings and other potential conflicts that may arise.

    But he won’t release them, because why would he. He gets away with it, so he’ll go on doing that.

    Mr. Trump has been engaged in a lengthy dispute with Palm Beach County over jetliners flying over his Mar-a-Lago resort on the way to and from the nearby airport. In a lawsuit, he claimed that the noise, vibrations and emissions from the aircraft are disruptive to guests and damaging the property, including the Dorian stone and antique Cuban roof tiles.

    And in Washington, Mr. Trump has sued two celebrity chefs, Geoffrey Zakarian and José Andrés, after they backed out of restaurant deals at his new hotel development at the Old Post Office Pavilion after he made incendiary comments last year about Mexican immigrants.

    The Old Post Office project itself is a potential conflict. The Trump Organization signed a 60-year deal with the federal government to redevelop and manage the building as a hotel — meaning that he will be, in a sense, his own landlord.

    The squalor rises every hour.

  • Trump’s children must keep their jobs

    Again there’s that unprecedented issue that Trump has binders full of business interests that present unmistakable and undeniable conflicts of interest – and the fact that he wants to keep it that way. I guess nobody told him this was an issue during this entire campaign? That was sloppy. Is sloppy the word I mean? Do I mean reckless? Do I mean corrupt? Gosh it’s hard to choose.

    The Washington Post reports that Giuliani – lawyer Giuliani, former prosecutor Giuliani – says it’s cool for Trump’s family to run his businesses and also help Daddy run the government.

    Appearing on televised interviews on Sunday, Giuliani initially said Trump should set up some kind of “blind trust.” When pressed, Giuliani told CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump has an unusual situation and that creating a traditional blind trust would “basically put his children out of work.”

    He says they then would have to “start a whole new business and that would set up … new problems.”

    Giuliani said Trump’s three children — Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric — who are involved in his businesses would not advise Trump once he becomes president in January. All three children are, however, are on the executive committee of Trump’s transition team.

    And these people had the gall to call Clinton corrupt. Clinton was much too cozy with bankers and CEOs, yes, but this is a whole different level, one we can’t even see from where we are.

    Also it’s interesting to see that Giuliani’s concern is what would be good for Trump’s children, and their employment, and the family’s business interests. It’s not for…you know…the country, and its people.

    And then there’s the fraud division.

    Donald Trump’s attorneys have filed a motion to delay until after the presidential inauguration a class-action fraud lawsuit involving the president-elect and his now-defunct Trump University.

    In the motion filed Saturday in San Diego federal court, Trump’s lawyer Daniel Petrocelli argues that the extra months would give both sides time to possibly reach a settlement.

    The San Diego Union-Tribune reports Petrocelli wants to postpone the trial until sometime soon after the Jan. 20 inauguration to allow Trump to focus on the transition to the White House.

    Right, because once that’s over he’ll be able to kick back and relax. He’s not going to have anything to do after he’s inaugurated, naturally.

    And then there’s the bullying and threatening.

    The war of words between Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and President-elect Donald Trump is escalating, this time through their top aides.

    Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, on Sunday said Reid should be careful in a “legal sense” about characterizing Trump as a sexual predator. When asked whether Trump was threatening to sue Reid, Conway said no. Also on Sunday, Trump took to Twitter to taunt The New York Times.

    So Conway first threatened and then lied. Good start.

    Those tweets –

  • Question authority

    Who is Myron Ebell? He’s a climate change denialist who directs environmental and energy policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

    (What’s the Competitive Enterprise Institute? Let’s ask SourceWatch:

    The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a advocacy group based in Washington DC with long ties to tobacco disinformation campaigns and more recently to climate change denial. It calls itself “a non-profit, non-partisan research and advocacy institute dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.”[1] The Competitive Enterprise Institute is an “associate” member of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing “think tanks” in every state across the country.[2])

    Why do we need to know who Myron Ebell is? I bet you can guess.

    In looking for someone to follow through on his campaign vow to dismantle one of the Obama administration’s signature climate change policies, President-elect Donald J. Trump probably could not have found a better candidate for the job than Mr. Ebell.

    Mr. Ebell, who revels in taking on the scientific consensus on global warming, will be Mr. Trump’s lead agent in choosing personnel and setting the direction of the federal agencies that address climate change and environmental policy more broadly.

    Mr. Ebell, whose organization is financed in part by the coal industry, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the linchpin of that policy, the Clean Power Plan. Developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the plan is a far-reaching set of regulations that, by seeking to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation, could result in the closing of many coal-burning power plants, among other effects.

    So…sorry kids and grandkids. Sorry everybody who won’t be dying in the next two or three decades. Donald Trump and Myron Edell would rather protect the immediate profits of the coal industry and other carbon-emitting industries than worry about your late-to-the-party asses.

    Mr. Ebell, who did not respond to a request for an interview, grew up on a ranch in Oregon. He got his undergraduate degree at Colorado College and master’s at the London School of Economics, where he studied under the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. He has described himself as “sort of a contrarian by nature and upbringing,” and has said he was very strongly influenced by the “question authority” ethos of 1960s and ’70s counterculture.

    “I really think that people should be suspicious of authority,” he told an interviewer last year. “The more you’re told that you have to believe something, the more you should question it.”

    Right, and the coal industry is the epitome of that “question authority” ethos of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture. All the critical thinkers work for the coal industry, and the mindless authoritarian dogmatists are found only among climate scientists.

    This is Trump draining the swamp again.

  • Reward

    Good god. He’s managed to surprise me.

    Remember that Florida AG who dropped a possible investigation into Trump “University”?

    Yes?

    Well guess who is on the transition team!

    Orlando Weekly:

    Dropping that investigation into Trump University is apparently really paying off for Florida’s Attorney General Pam Bondi because she was just named onto President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.

    The Tampa Bay Times reports Bondi joins Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, New Gingrich, Gen. Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon and several of Trump’s children in the transition team.

    Such fun! And when that’s over maybe she’ll be appointed Secretary of Integrity.

    Earlier this year, Bondi was engulfed in controversy over a $25,000 donation Trump made to her political committee while she was considering whether Florida should investigate complaints that Trump University had defrauded consumers. Ultimately, she decided not to pursue the allegations and has adamantly denied a connection between the contribution and her office’s handling of the issue.

    The political donation from Trump to Bondi ultimately cost him a $2,500 penalty to the IRS this year after it was discovered the donation was an illegal political contribution from the businessman’s charitable foundation, which can’t make political donations.

    Swamp: drained!