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Breathe and push: Sikh-American civil rights advocate Valarie Kaur‘s plea to her country in the times of Donald J. Trump.
Raising a Brown Boy in Today's America
Breathe and push: Sikh-American civil rights advocate Valarie Kaur's plea to her country in the times of Donald J. Trump.
Posted by Scroll on Saturday, February 25, 2017
BOOM! Jack Ma, a Chinese Business legend, was asked to respond to comments put forth by our Idiot-in-Chief about the global financial system, and his response is EPIC!
Shared by Occupy Democrats; like our page for more!
Chinese Businessman SLAUGHTERS Trump's Misunderstanding of Fin…
BOOM! Jack Ma, a Chinese Business legend, was asked to respond to comments put forth by our Idiot-in-Chief about the global financial system, and his response is EPIC! Shared by Occupy Democrats; like our page for more!
Posted by Occupy Democrats on Friday, November 10, 2017
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By Jack Holmes December 27, 2017
While you were celebrating the holidays—and the fact you can say “Merry Christmas” again—President Trump and his allies launched an all-out attack on the people and institutions leading investigations into him. Because this is how we live now, the day after Christmas saw the president tweet about an ongoing Justice Department investigation, an action that in the past would have kicked off a major White House scandal.
Dec 26th trump tweet: WOW, “Dossier is bogus. Clinton Campaign, DNC funded Dossier. FBI CANNOT (after all of this time) VERIFY CLAIMS IN DOSSIER OF RUSSIA/TRUMP COLLUSION. FBI TAINTED.” And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!
This followed up on Trump’s Christmas Eve tweets about his victory in the War on Christmas—as well as this Freudian masterpiece:
trump tweet: The Fake News refuses to talk about how Big and how Strong our BASE is. They show Fake Polls just like they report Fake News. Despite only negative reporting, we are doing well – nobody is going to beat us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
But back to all the noise about The Dossier and WOW, FBI TAINTED. First of all, it’s never a good idea to get your national security news (or legal advice) from Fox & Friends, but that is unfortunately where the President of the United States gets a great deal of information. The Friends bounced off a report from the conservative Washington Times claiming FBI and Justice Department sources have told congressional investigators they’ve been unable to verify claims of Russian collusion in The Dossier, which is the extensive catalogue of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia compiled by a former British intelligence agent. This could well be true, although the BBC reported way back in March that other details of The Dossier had already been verified. But ultimately, it’s a sideshow anyway.
As former FBI and CIA officer Phillip Mudd reminded us on CNN last night, The Dossier is just one part—and not a particularly large one—of the Russia probe.
What does this dossier have to actually do with the investigation? Robert Mueller we know has acquired financial records, email records, phone records, interviews. That combination of information has led to four indictments and two guilty pleas. In none of those four indictments has the dossier cropped up. Those guilty pleas included people who said, admittedly, in front of a court, that they lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So the president’s trying to mix apples and oranges. He’s trying to get us to focus on the dossier. The indictments so far don’t have anything to do with that.
Jim Sciutto, the host, echoed that notion by adding that The Dossier is also a very small part of the separate House and Senate investigations. Put simply, there is so much more to the Russian question than this one document, even if it once was making the biggest news.
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That hasn’t stopped Trump’s authoritarian lackeys from going entirely off the rails on this. They have seized on The Dossier (which was compiled by a firm initially hired by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, and which later received funding from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign) and used it as a cudgel to attack the FBI, Robert Mueller, and the Russia probe in general. Freedom Caucus loon Jim Jordan got in early with a salvo on December 20. The president himself tweeted an attack on Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe on Christmas Eve:
Dec 24th trump retweet from fox news: -FBI’s Andrew McCabe, “in addition to his wife getting all of this money from M (Clinton Puppet), he was using, allegedly, his FBI Official Email Account to promote her campaign. You obviously cannot do this. These were the people who were investigating Hillary Clinton.”
Tuesday, the similarly unhinged Louie Gohmert suggested Mueller had a personal vendetta against the president and would “love to get Trump’s scalp.” Congressman Francis Rooney went for the gold medal, calling for the FBI to be purged of top leadership, whom he said are part of the “Deep State”:
Dec 26th MSNBC tweet: WATCH: GOP Rep. Francis Rooney calls for ‘purge’ of FBI, accuses some in the agency of being a part of the ‘deep state’
Trump, of course, got his post-Christmas ammunition from Fox News. MSNBC ran the segment in question, and it’s a study in propaganda:
Both The Washington Post and Politico have published reports indicating this is all part of a comprehensive strategy on the part of Trump and his allies to undermine the investigation’s credibility by making it a partisan issue. If they can throw enough accusations around about bias in Mueller’s team or the FBI, Trump’s base will rally behind him on the basis that this is all “Fake News” or part of a “Deep State” campaign against him. (The idea the FBI harbors left-wing anti-Trump radicals will be news to the left-wing groups the FBI has relentlessly hounded since at least the 1960’s.) This would give Trump the political cover to start pardoning his associates on the basis they were victims of a biased investigation—a “Witch Hunt”—an explicit part of the plan, according to Politico, that would prevent them providing incriminating testimony.
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All of this depends on the public being unable to parse the details of the probe. It also depends on Trump’s quest to erase the line between truth and falsehood, a staple of authoritarianism that undermines the rule of law, the free press, and any other checks on the power of the executive. If nothing is true, anything can be true. Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier suggested Trump’s FBI attacks are “the conduct of someone who could become a tyrant.” Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in an op-ed last week that our republic is at an “inflection point,” where we must decide what kind of society we are. They’re not wrong.
The president and his allies’ opinions about the FBI or Robert Mueller are not relevant to the investigation they are conducting. The law is the law. If the president or his associates broke it, they must face the consequences. If they are not accountable to the press, and they are not accountable to the law, then to whom or what are they accountable?
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By Jack Holmes December 19, 2017
Sally Yates did not mention Donald Trump’s name once, but she didn’t have to. The former Acting Attorney General wrote an op-ed for USA Today this morning that serves as a call-to-arms for a nation on the precipice. Yates referred to our current era as one of many “inflection points” in the history of the American republic, when we are forced to decide who we are as a nation and what we value. There’s no confusion over who brought us here. The president, aided and abetted by a Republican Party that has lost both its mind and its spine, has overseen a dangerous erosion of our democratic norms and institutions. We are sliding closer to authoritarianism than at perhaps any other time in our history.
As Yates (whom Trump fired for refusing to defend his Definitely Not a Muslim Ban in court) explained, the founding values of this country—of which we have always fallen short, but always strived in the general direction of—were laid out in the Preamble to the Constitution.
“We the people of the United States” (we are a democratic republic, not a dictatorship) “in order to form a more perfect union” (we are a work in progress dedicated to a noble pursuit) “establish justice” (we revere justice as the cornerstone of our democracy) “insure domestic tranquility” (we prize unity and peace, not divisiveness and discord), “provide for the common defense” (we should never give any foreign adversary reason to question our solidarity) “promote the general welfare” (we care about one another; compassion and decency matter) “and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” (we have a responsibility to protect not just our own generation, but future ones as well).
How many of these values are in good health at the moment? Trump has waged war on the free press, declaring any and all adversarial coverage to be “fake news” and threatening to shut down news outlets. He has sought division on ethnic, racial, and ideological lines at every opportunity, and broken down the value for compassion and decency in our discourse—culminating with his response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and his grotesque support for Roy Moore. He has, as Yates spelled out, waged a relentless campaign against the rule of law:
Our shared values include another essential principle, and that’s the rule of law — the promise that the law applies equally to everyone, that no person is above it, and that all are entitled to its protection. This concept of equal protection recognizes that our country’s strength comes from honoring, not weaponizing, the diversity that springs from being a nation of Native Americans and immigrants of different races, religions and nationalities.
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The rule of law depends not only on things that are written down, but also on important traditions and norms, such as apolitical law enforcement. That’s why Democratic and Republican administrations alike, at least since Watergate, have honored that the rule of law requires a strict separation between the Justice Department and the White House on criminal cases and investigations. This wall of separation is what ensures the public can have confidence that the criminal process is not being used as a sword to go after one’s political enemies or as a shield to protect those in power. It’s what separates us from an autocracy.
Just this morning, Politico published a report detailing a plan by Trump and his authoritarian lackeys to undermine Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election. Rather than fire Mueller directly, which even Trump’s allies see as a step too far, this crew is trying to throw enough accusations around about bias in Mueller’s team to make the investigation just another partisan issue. That way, Trump’s base will rally around him, even if he is found to have colluded with a foreign power—and even if he starts pardoning his associates to prevent them from testifying, which is apparently an explicit part of the plan.
RELATED STORY
Trump’s Allies Are Trying to Get Mueller Fired
All this is undergirded by the essential anti-democratic Trump initiative: The War on Truth. Trump does not believe in the concept of objective truth in the public discourse, and he and his aides—looking at you, Kellyanne Conway—have worked tirelessly to undermine it in the eyes of the public as well. If there is no truth, only different opinions about what happened or what’s happening, we can’t determine right from wrong, or hold politicians accountable for their promises and claims, or agree that the president and his associates broke the law or violated our democratic process. A lack of truth aids the spread of propaganda about minority populations and foreigners and political opponents, which supporters will believe even when the evidence to the contrary is insurmountable. A truthless world spawns a kind of lawlessness, where demagoguery and brute power are likely to win out. It brings to mind a quote from Hannah Arendt, the German-American political theorist:
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists.”
We are living in a seismic moment for the American republic, when its very existence, as we know it, lies in doubt. The Enlightenment value for the truth and the scientific method we use to find it are under severe attack from perhaps the worst elements ever to hold so much power in our society. The ruling party of today serves only the tiniest sliver of Americans, the big-dollar donor class: That’s why 80 percent of the Republican tax bill’s benefits will go to the top 1 percent. The ruling figure, Donald Trump, serves only himself.
The only way to stop this is a unified effort by citizens who still believe in the concept of truth, and in the democratic norms—especially the free press and the rule of law—which depend on it.
It’s worth reading Yates’ editorial in its entirety.
By Stacy Malkan, AlterNet December 27, 2017
Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey/Flickr CC
At a recent soiree at Union Station, the D.C. power elite gathered in an anti-public health confab dressed up as a celebration of women that should concern anyone who cares about the health and rights of women and children.
The Independent Women’s Forum drew an impressive array of Republican politicians to its annual gala sponsored by, among others, the American Chemistry Council, the tobacco company Philip Morris, the cosmetics industry trade group, Google and the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council.
Speakers included House Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, who won the IWF Valor Award for being a “passionate advocate for limited government” who does not embrace “the idea that being a woman is a handicap.” Conway is also an IWF board member.
So what is the Independent Women’s Forum? IWF got its start 25 years ago as an effort to defend now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as he faced sexual harassment charges. The group has since raised millions from the secretive foundations of the Koch brothers and other right-wing billionaires to carry out its mission of “increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty.”
In the world of the IWF—a group Joan Walsh described in The Nation as “the ‘feminists’ doing the Koch’s dirty work”—that means defending the freedom of corporations to sell toxic products and pollute the environment, while trying to frame that agenda as good for women and children.
E-cigarettes should be approved because of the unique biological needs of women, for example, and climate science education is too scary for students. (The e-cig letter is “standard Philip Morris PR,” says tobacco industry expert Stan Glanz, and Greenpeace classifies IWF as a “Koch Industries climate denial front group.”)
Women can also benefit by ignoring “alarmist” concerns about toxic chemicals, according to an IWF lecture series sponsored by Monsanto.
To give you a sense of the messaging on chemicals: Moms who insist on organic food are arrogant, snobby “helicopter parents” who “need to be in control of everything when it comes to their kids, even the way food is grown and treated,” according to Julie Gunlock, director of IWF’s “Culture of Alarmism” project, as quoted in an article titled “The tyranny of the organic mommy mafia” that was written by an IWF fellow.
At the IWF gala, Gunlock posed for a photo op with Monsanto staffer Aimee Hood and Julie Kelly, who writes articles casting doubt on climate science and pesticide risk, and once even called climate hero Bill McKibben “a piece of shit.”
Gunlock and Kelly are “rock stars,” Hood tweeted.
“I’m framing this,” Monsanto employee Cami Ryan tweeted in return.
Put a frame around the whole shindig and behold the absurdity of corporate-captured politics in America, where policy leaders openly embrace an anti-women “women’s group” that equates “freedom” with eating toxic pesticides, at an event sponsored by the chemical industry, a tobacco company, an extremist group that wants to do away with a voter-elected Senate and the world’s most influential news source.
Meanwhile in the rational world
Recent science suggests that if you want to get pregnant and raise healthy children, you should reject the propaganda that groups like the Independent Women’s Forum are trying to sell.
In just the past few weeks, the Journals of the American Medical Association published a Harvard study implicating pesticide-treated foods in fertility problems, a UC San Diego study documenting huge increases in human exposure to a common pesticide, and a physician’s commentary urging people to eat organic food.
I wrote about those studies in more detail here, “Trying to get pregnant? Science suggests: eat organic and regulate the pesticide industry”.
Mainstream groups have been giving similar advice for years.
In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended reducing children’s exposure to pesticides due to a growing body of literature that links pesticides to chronic health problems in children, including behavioral problems, birth defects, asthma and cancer.
In 2009, the bipartisan President’s Cancer Panel reported: “the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.”
The panel urged then-President George W. Bush “most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”
Unfortunately for our nation, acting on that advice has not been possible in a political system indentured to corporate interests.
Corporate capture of health and science
For decades, pesticide corporations have manipulated science and U.S. regulatory agencies to keep the truth hidden about the health dangers of their chemicals.
The details are being revealed by hundreds of thousands of pages of industry documents turned loose from legal discovery, whistleblowers and FOIA requeststhat have been examined in government hearings and by many media outlets.
For a synopsis of Monsanto’s “long-running secretive campaign to manipulate the scientific record, to sway public opinion, and to influence regulatory assessments” on its herbicide glyphosate, see this essay by my colleague Carey Gillam in Undark magazine.
As one example of government/corporate collusion: in 2015, on the Obama administration’s watch, the EPA official in charge of evaluating the cancer risk of glyphosate allegedly bragged to a Monsanto executive about helping to “kill” another agency’s cancer study, as Bloomberg reported.
Suppressing science has been a bipartisan, decades-long project. Since 1973, Monsanto has presented dubious science to claim the safety of glyphosate while EPA largely looked the other way, as Valerie Brown and Elizabeth Grossman documented for In These Times.
Brown and Grossman spent two years examining the publicly available archive of EPA documents on glyphosate, and reported:
“Glyphosate is a clear case of ‘regulatory capture’ by a corporation acting in its own financial interest while serious questions about public health remain in limbo. The record suggests that in 44 years—through eight presidential administrations—EPA management has never attempted to correct the problem. Indeed, the pesticide industry touts its forward-looking, modern technologies as it strives to keep its own research in the closet, and relies on questionable assumptions and outdated methods in regulatory toxicology.”
The only way to establish a scientific basis for evaluating glyphosate’s safety, they wrote, would be to “force some daylight between regulators and the regulated.”
Limited government means freedomtoharm
In Trump’s Washington, there is no daylight at all between the corporations selling harmful products and the agencies that are supposed to regulate them.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is pushing scientists off advisory boards and stacking the EPA with political appointees connected to the oil, coal and chemical industries, many of whom are connected to climate science deniers.
As one of his first official actions, Pruitt tossed aside the recommendation of EPA’s scientists and allowed Dow Chemical to keep selling a pesticide developed as a nerve gas that is linked to brain damage in children.
“Kids are told to eat fruits and vegetables, but EPA scientists found levels of this pesticide on such foods at up to 140 times the limits deemed safe,” Nicholas Kristof wrote in a scathing NYT op-ed. “Trump’s most enduring legacy may be cancer, infertility and diminished I.Q.s for decades to come.”
Pruitt has gone so far as to put a chemical industry lobbyist in charge of a sweeping new toxics law that was supposed to regulate the chemical industry.
It’s all so outrageous – but then, it has been for a very long time.
That sweeping new toxics law, which passed last year in a hailstorm of bipartisan glory, was opposed by many environmental groups but lauded by—and reportedly written by—the American Chemistry Council.
“The $800 billion chemical industry lavishes money on politicians and lobbies its way out of effective regulation. This has always been a problem, but now the Trump administration has gone so far as to choose chemical industry lobbyists to oversee environmental protections,” as Kristof described it.
“The American Academy of Pediatrics protested the administration’s decision on the nerve gas pesticide, but officials sided with industry over doctors. The swamp won. The chemical industry lobby, the American Chemistry Council, is today’s version of Big Tobacco…”
“Someday we will look back and wonder: What were we thinking?!”
The character of our country
A decade ago, the Independent Women’s Forum presented its Valor Award to Nancy Brinker, founder of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the nation’s largest breast cancer organization – a group that has also drawn criticism for taking money from polluting corporations and promoting unhealthy food and toxic products.
At the 2007 IWF gala, in an acceptance speech she called “The Character of our Country,” Brinker warned that millions of lives will be lost unless America acts to avert the coming “cancer tsunami.”
But then, she said: “My friends, this is not a problem of politics. When it comes to cancer, there are no Republicans or Democrats, no liberals or conservatives.”
Rather, she said, invoking vagueness as she stood before a group that tells women not to worry about pesticides, at an event awash in corporate cash, beating cancer is a matter of summoning the will to make cancer a “national and global priority!”
But that is exactly a problem of politics. It’s about Republicans and Democrats, both of whom have let Americans down by failing to confront the chemical industry. It’s about summoning the political will to get chemicals linked to cancer, infertility and brain damage off the market and out of our food.
In the meantime, we can take the advice of science: eat organic and vote for politicians who are willing to stand up to the pesticide industry.
This article first appeared in Huffington Post.
Stacy Malkan is co-director of U.S. Right to Know, a food industry research group that voluntarily discloses its funding. She is the author of Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry and also co-founded the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. Follow her on Twitter @stacymalkan.
Natasha Geiling December 4, 2017
(CREDIT: AP PHOTO/RICK BOWMER, FILE)
Speaking outside of the Utah State Capitol on Monday, President Donald Trump announced the largest-ever reduction of a national monument in the nation’s history, shrinking Bears Ears National Monument by some 1.1 million acres, or nearly 85 percent.
“I know all of you feel blessed to be living among some of the most glorious natural wonders anywhere in the world,” Trump said. “Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. Guess what? They are wrong. The families and communities of Utah know and love this land the best, and you know the best how to take care of your land. You know how to protect it, and you know how best to conserve this land for many generations to come.”
Trump also announced that he would be reducing Grand Staircase-Escalante, another national monument in Utah, to nearly half its original size. He called the move “a very historic action” and criticized previous administrations for abusing the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to designate areas of federal land as national monuments in order to protect natural, cultural, or scientific features. In total, Trump’s actions on Tuesday will result in the loss of some 2 million acres of national monuments designation.
“Our precious natural treasures must be protected, and they, from now on, will be protected,” Trump said. “Under my administration we will advance that protection through a truly representative process, one that listens to the local communities that know the land the best and cherishes [sic] the land the most.”
The public comment period for Trump’s monument review has ended, and the response was overwhelming.
The two reductions come after a Department of Interior review, initiated in April, which looked at all national monuments created since 1996. Trump, at the time, said that the review would put an end to “egregious abuse of federal power” that has resulted in a “massive federal land grab.” During the signing ceremony, Trump singled out Bears Ears National Monument as an example of the federal government using its authority to undermine local control over public lands, saying that the monument was designated “over the profound objections of the citizens of Utah.”
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said that the purpose of the review was to ensure that all stakeholders had a chance to participate in the creation of a national monument. But the review was dogged by accusations of industry-favoritism and a lack of transparency, leading one Nevada representative to describe the process as a “sham” in an interview with ThinkProgress.
In August, Zinke released his recommendations following the review, which suggested that the administration should reduce or change the boundaries of six national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Bears Ears was designated by President Barack Obama in December of 2016, as one of his final major designations as president. Environmentalists and indigenous groups have fought for years to protect Bears Ears, arguing that the area holds numerous sites of historical, cultural, and ecological significance.
Interior Department given narrow time frame to complete review of monuments.
But Bears Ears is also rich in uranium, and home to the nation’s last operating uranium mill. In his final designation, President Obama chose to leave much of the area’s uranium deposits outside of the monument’s boundaries, but banned new mining operations within the monument. Still, Utah lawmakers wrote to Secretary Zinke in June, arguing that the national monument could hinder the mill’s business and “permanently” eliminate the state’s uranium mining industry.
On Monday, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) thanked Trump for “giving a voice to the people of Utah who for too long have been overlooked in the debate about public lands.” Polling shows that Utah residents are almost evenly split on the issue, though Bears Ears tends to be more controversial than Grand Staircase-Escalate. An October poll commissioned by commissioned by The Salt Lake Tribune and the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics found that 51 percent of Utahans polled in October favored shrinking Bears Ears, but 53 percent opposed breaking up Grand Staircase-Escalante.
During the public comment period for the Interior’s monuments review elicited more than 2.5 million responses, of which 98 percent were supportive of maintaining or expanding current protections for national monuments, according to a Center for Western Priorities analysis. Before Trump’s announcement on Monday, thousands of protesters gathered in Salt Lake City to oppose reducing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Trump’s decision was immediately met with harsh criticism from environmental and conservation groups, which painted the move as an assault on necessary protections for America’s most sensitive lands.
“The gutting of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante is a violent act, an assault on America’s public lands,” Terry Tempest Williams, a Center for Biological Diversity board member and Utah native, said in a press statement. “With Senator Orrin Hatch by his side, Trump’s is an act of conscious aggression waged against the health and protection of our communities, both human and wild. In a word: criminal.”
The decision will now head to the courts, which will have to decide whether the Antiquities Act gives the president authority to reduce — as well as designate — national monuments. The Navajo Nation has already said that it will challenge Trump’s directive, as have a handful of Democratic attorneys general. Presidents have, in the past, reduced the size of national monuments, though those changes have never been challenged in court.
“President Trump’s attempt to dismember two of America’s most remarkable National Monuments is a blatant attack on the integrity of one of our nation’s oldest and most important conservation laws,” David J. Hayes, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law and former Interior deputy secretary during both the Obama and Clinton administrations, said in a press statement. “Progressive state attorneys general are on record: the President does not have the authority under the Antiquities Act to override previous Presidents’ decisions to protect special public lands for the benefit of future generations through national monument designations. Only the Congress can do that.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created and passed by the Democratic controlled congress and the Obama Administration, to protect consumers, after the 2007/2008 financial collapse and Great Recession. It was part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The agency was originally proposed in 2007 by then Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren. The proposed CFPB was actively supported by Americans for Financial Reform, a newly created umbrella organization of some 250 consumer, labor, civil rights and other activist organizations.
The Republi-cons have been trying to cripple the CFPB since the day it was created. trump and the republi-cons in congress have their marching orders from the powers that own them; defang the CFPB. But when trump and the republi-con’s in congress vote against the bureau, they vote against our Veterans and America’s middle-class, who they claim to support. Families who have a Veteran deployed are especially susceptible to predatory lenders. They are often under financial and emotional distress and are at the mercy of unscrupulous lenders, payday lenders and debt collectors. Thanks to true veteran advocates, like the Obama’s, the Bidens and Sen. Warren, The CFPB went a long way to protecting Veterans and their families. But this president, his administration and the Republi-con controlled congress couldn’t care less about our Veterans, only their campaign donors.
John Hanno
U.S. Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., speaks at the Freedom Summit, Saturday, May 9, 2015, in Greenville, S.C. Photo by Rainier Ehrhardt/AP
By Steve Benen December 26, 2017
The point of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is pretty easy to figure out: the agency’s name offers a pretty big hint. The CFPB was created to protect consumers’ interests against unfair financial industry practices.
At least, that was its intended purpose. As Slate noted the other day, the bureau’s mission statement has received a Trumpian makeover:
The latest is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the crisis-era creation of Sen. Elizabeth Warren charged with investigating the deceptive practices of lenders, wire services, auto dealers, credit card companies, and so on. The banking watchdog’s mission statement now lists its first order of business as hunting down “outdated, unnecessary, or unduly burdensome regulations.”
Slate has reached out to the CFPB for comment, but the change can likely be traced to the arrival of Acting Director Mick Mulvaney, who took over the CFPB on Nov. 27. The South Carolina Republican is also the director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and as the Intercept’s Dave Dayen reports, has quickly moved to fill the ranks of the CFPB with Trump loyalists.
Mulvaney, as regular readers know, has repeatedly and publicly condemned the existence of the CFPB, which the president asked him to lead, and which he’s dramatically changing the direction of.
This is, of course, an important piece to a larger puzzle: when given opportunities to champion the interests of consumers and working families, Trump always seems to do the opposite.
The New York Times had a good piece along these lines two weeks ago, before the CFPB changed its mission statement in a more bank-friendly way:
[T]his week, the president hopes to sign with great fanfare a tax bill that would deliver its largest benefits, not only in dollar terms but also as a percentage increase in income, to corporations and the wealthiest Americans. […]
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission, led by Mr. Trump’s pick as chairman, Ajit Pai, reversed the Obama-era policy known as net neutrality, over the objections of consumer groups and owners of small internet businesses. […]
In the coming weeks, the Education Department plans to roll back protections for college graduates saddled with student debt from sham for-profit universities. And in the opening months of his presidency, Mr. Trump signed congressional resolutions permanently reversing rules that would have required companies seeking significant federal contracts to disclose violations of labor standards, and would have required oil, gas and mining companies to disclose payments made to foreign governments in exchange for access to drilling or mining rights.
By reversing one rule, the administration impeded states from establishing retirement programs for private-sector workers whose employers do not offer a retirement plan. Another rule that was eliminated would have required retirement planners to agree that financial advice had the client’s best interest at heart, not the investment company’s.
We’ve seen this play out in ways large and small. Note, for example, that shortly before the holidays, Trump scrapped an Obama-era rule on airline transparency on baggage fees, with the Republican administration once again siding against consumers.
I’m trying to think of a single example from 2017 in which Trump, the self-proclaimed champion of the “forgotten” working class, sided with consumers’ interests above businesses’ interests. Nothing comes to mind.
Explore: The MaddowBlog and CFPB
U.S. Bank building in downtown Bismark, North Dakota. Randy Hoffman / Flicker
By Sharon Kelly December 21, 2027
At a shareholder meeting this past spring, U.S. Bank announced it would be the first large American bank to completely stop issuing loans for oil and gas pipeline construction projects.
Environmental groups, indigenous activists and divestment advocates hailed U.S. Bank’s announcement as a triumph.
Yet that triumph—and the bank’s commitment—seems less sure with the news that U.S. Bank has entered into a new $4 billion loan deal with the company behind the contentious Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL).
Divestment Success?
For months, the bank had been under fire for financing the Dakota Access pipeline by providing over a quarter billion dollars worth of funding to its builder, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP). Environmentalists famously dropped a banner calling on U.S. Bank to divest from DAPL at the New Years 2017 Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears football game.
The language of the bank’s new policy seemed blunt.
“The company does not provide project financing for the construction of oil or natural gas pipelines,” U.S. Bancorp, parent company of U.S. Bank, wrote in its April 2017 Environmental Responsibility Policy.
Divestment advocates cheered. “We applaud this progressive decision from U.S. Bank,” an Honor the Earth representative said in a statement, as the bank’s new policy made headlines.
Some advocates remained skeptical, however, pointing out that the line of credit extended to Energy Transfer Partners wouldn’t be covered by that language, because it could be considered a loan for the company as a whole, not the more specific “project financing.” And U.S. Bank’s CEO told shareholders that his bank wouldn’t end its existing Energy Transfer Partners deal, saying that instead it would “fulfill that contract and commitment.”
“We know there are always loopholes through which banks will try to pass off responsibility,” Rachel Heaton of Mazaska Talks and a Muckleshoot Tribe member told Yes Magazine, “but we will continue to resist until these banks completely divest from all pipeline and fossil fuel corporations and incorporate the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of Indigenous peoples into their corporate lending structures.”
Even if that specific contract wasn’t going to be torn up, environmental groups hoped that in the future, the bank would limit its funding of fossil fuel projects.
CEO Andy Cecere “strongly implied that the bank would pull back from pipelines and ETP in particular—aside from its obligations under its ‘contract with ETP’ (i.e. its existing credit facility),” Brant Olson, Program Director at ClimateTruth.org, told DeSmog.
U.S. Bank’s new environmental policy added that any new deals the bank did with companies in the oil and gas pipeline industry would have to undergo additional scrutiny, including a look at their environmental record.
“We want to confirm that a firm’s policies and processes are sound and effective as they relate to the environment and the community in which it operates,” the policy adds. “In accordance with our environmental responsibility commitment, we prohibit relationships with customers who participate in any illegal activities.”
Transferring More Money to Energy Transfer Partners
That’s why it was so striking when Energy Transfer Partners quietly announced in a Dec. 1 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that U.S. Bank was part of ETP’s new $4 billion credit deal.
ETP’s projects include numerous controversial fossil fuel pipelines nationwide, including not only Dakota Access, but also Mariner East 2, Rover, Bayou Bridge, and the Energy Transfer Crude Oil pipeline.
Asked whether Energy Transfer Partners had passed muster during the additional due diligence in U.S. Bank’s much-lauded environmental review policy, U.S. Bank’s spokesperson Cheryl Leamon declined to comment. “As a matter of policy, we do not discuss customer relationships,” she told DeSmog in an email.
Environmentalists hoped that this was a chance for U.S. Bank to end its dealings with ETP. StopETP.org, a coalition of national and local environmental and indigenous rights groups, wrote a letter to the bank in November, urging it to use the chance to cut ties with ETP, which was seeking to renew its $4 billion credit line in a deal involving numerous major banks.
But U.S. Bank has apparently refused, said Food and Water Watch senior researcher Dr. Hugh MacMillan, “after having scored praise back in May for its new pipeline finance policy.”
U.S. Bank did not respond when asked about the types of law-breaking that might cross the line and cause a borrower to fail the bank’s new due diligence requirements.
Illegal Activities
The bank’s professed wariness of fossil fuel companies had drawn an angry response from the Energy Equipment and Infrastructure Alliance, which had fired off a letter to U.S. Bank protesting the new policy. “This creates the presumption that firms and people involved in these areas, including those providing construction, equipment, materials, services or other support to these operations, are more likely than all others to be ‘bad actors’,” the trade group wrote, “thus requiring a higher level of scrutiny.”
That additional environmental record review was widely expected to be particularly bad news for Energy Transfer Partners, which has an environmental record that includes more than 300 pipeline incidents in the past decade, causing over $67 million dollars in property damage, according to data from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
“From January 2010 through June 2017, ETP spilled hazardous liquids near water crossings more than twice as frequently as any other pipeline company in the United States this decade [and w]as responsible for almost 20 percent of all hazardous liquid spills near water crossings,” a recently published report by the Waterkeeper Alliance noted.
In November, one of Energy Transfer Partners’ pipeline projects was was sued by Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency over 13 violations of the state’s environmental laws, including spewing millions of gallons of drilling fluid into the state’s wetlands.
“Among other things, ETP has caused seven industrial spills during the construction of the $4.2 billion natural gas pipeline through Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Michigan,” Reps. Frank Pallone, Jr. and Maria Cantwell, ranking members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and Energy and Natural Resources, respectively, wrote in a July 27, 2017 letter to federal regulators decrying ETP’s track record on complying with environmental laws.
The company’s spill record has even drawn concern from investors, with The Street reporting, “‘Energy Transfer seems to have an approach where they stick to the minimum requirements instead of exceeding them,’ Genscape natural gas analyst Colette Breshears said.”
Sunoco Logistics, which merged into ETP last year, had the worst oil spill record of any company in the industry, a 2016 Reuters investigative report found.
Photographer: Brent Lewin/
By Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen December 26, 2017
From mobile phones to furniture, Vietnam’s export boom shows no signs of losing steam, defying a gloomy outlook at the beginning of the year when U.S. President Donald Trump persisted with his trade threats.
Furniture maker Xuan Hoa Viet Nam Co. is planning for a 20 percent increase in export orders next year by investing $3 million on equipment to expand production, General Director Le Duy Anh said in an interview. The company, based near Hanoi, makes office tables and cabinets for clients including Ikea.
“I’m quite optimistic about our sales next year,” Anh said. “We have new customers in Europe while our regular clients also sent more orders than last year.”
When Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in January, it was seen as a blow to Vietnam, which exports about a fifth of its goods to the world’s largest economy. Instead, a global trade recovery and Vietnam’s young and low-cost workforce have been magnets for international investors like Nestle SA, which have opened factories in the country this year. That’s helping underpin its economy, which economists predict expanded 6.75 percent this year ahead of data due Wednesday, among the fastest in the world.
“We’ve seen Vietnam’s coming of age this decade with its rapid transformation to a manufacturing powerhouse,” said Eugenia Victorino, an economist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group in Singapore. “The diversification of products and markets provides a tailwind to exports. We are very bullish on growth, though we remain cautious of structural issues of legacy bad debts.”
US, EU gain as Japan, Asean loses
The strength of the U.S. economy bodes well for Vietnam, which was the top exporter of goods last year among Southeast Asian nations.
Nguyen Sy Hoe, deputy general director of Phu Tai Corp., which makes home furniture for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. outlets in the U.S., forecasts a 30 percent increase in exports next year. Phu Tai, based in a central province of Vietnam, relies on the U.S. for 40 percent of its sales.
Vietnam’s exports surged to a record $177 billion last year, with U.S. customers accounting for about 22 percent of sales. Mobile phones and parts make up the biggest segment at about a fifth. Shipments abroad accounted for 90 percent of GDP in 2015, compared with 64 percent a decade ago, according to the World Bank.
Xuan Hoa is buying three machines that make wooden furniture parts and equipment to make steel cabinets, Anh said. The company is also boosting its workforce by 20 percent with the hiring of 100 more laborers.
“We’ve increased production and are now preparing for the first shipment next quarter,” Anh said. “We’re very prepared.”
Vietnam’s government is counting on those shipments to bolster growth to as much as 6.7 percent in 2018, the same goal for this year.
“There are some potential risks for next year that we need to be mindful of,” said economist Vu Minh Khuong, Associate Professor at National University of Singapore, who is also a member of the newly-formed economic advisory team to Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. “Downside factors may come from the U.S. and some other international markets. But for now, the economy is resilient with good indicators.”
— With assistance by John Boudreau
Paul Ryan and the new Republi-cons want to tear all this down
