Newsweek    Politics

Trump is Leading the Most Corrupt Administration in U.S. History, One of First-Class Kleptocrats

Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek      November 2, 2017

He’d promised to build the wall. To make America great again. To lock her up. Now, in the last weeks of his campaign for president, Donald J. Trump needed one more stirring slogan. And since he was badly trailing Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, it would have to be a marketing marvel worthy of Mad Men’s Don Draper, one that encapsulated the vague yet compelling promise of his candidacy—its worship of American ideals and its total break from them.

On October 17, 2016, the Trump-Pence campaign released a five-point plan for ethics reform that featured lobbying restrictions that would insulate Trump and his administration from corporate and interests. The plan was called “drain the swamp.”

Trump tried out the phrase that day at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He used it the next day at a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “We’re going to end the government corruption,” Trump vowed, “and we’re going to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.” He then recited a litany of accusations regarding Clinton and her use of a private email server, calling her “the most corrupt person to ever run for the presidency.”

“Build the wall” had been the raw opening cry of the Trump campaign. “Make America great again” was its chorus. “Drain the swamp” was its closing number. But while talk of a border wall plainly thrilled Trump, he was apparently never too worked up about the festering bog that was the nation’s capital. He said as much in an October 26 rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, in one of his unsettling bouts of honesty: “I said that about a week ago, and I didn’t like it that much, didn’t sound that great. And the whole world picked it up.… Funny how things like that happen.… So ‘drain the swamp,’ I didn’t like it. Now, I love it, right?”

“Drain the swamp” fit perfectly with Trump’s constant complaints about the “rigged system,” thereby excusing what some said was going to be a historic defeat. As the campaign concluded, Trump turned himself into a martyr for the cause of American democracy, waging a principled but doomed campaign.

Donald J. Trump @ realDonaldTrump     I will make our government honest again–believe me. #DrainTheSwamp in D.C.    Twitter

But a funny thing happened on the way to a third Obama term. Winning endowed the things Trump said during the campaign with an import they’d previously lacked. He was, back then, a hopeless renegade, troubling but not threatening. Then, the returns from Florida and Wisconsin came in on the evening of November 8. And while many understood that his “rigged system” was just an excuse, “drain the swamp” sure sounded like a promise.

So as the presidential inauguration approached, anticipation bubbled through the sulfurous nexus of Capitol Hill politicians, special interest groups and their K Street lobbyists, the media, the establishment and just about everyone else who had dismissed Trump and his slogans as a publicity stunt. There was now a question, rather urgently in need of an answer: Was he serious about all that “swamp” stuff?

Not really, revealed former House Speaker and loyal Trump supporter Newt Gingrich, admitting to NPR on December 21 that “drain the swamp” was never a genuine promise. “I’m told he now just disclaims that,” Gingrich said a month before Trump was to assume the Oval Office. “He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore.”

Someone from Trump Tower must have placed an angry call, because the former speaker soon tweeted that he’d overstated the case. But that didn’t kill the story. That same day, Politico wondered if “drain the swamp” would be Trump’s “first broken promise.” It cited the access-peddling lobbying firm of Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey R. Lewandowski, as well as the consulting firm with troubling foreign ties run by his incoming national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. “Trump and his allies have engaged in some of the same practices they accused Hillary Clinton of exploiting and vowed to change,” Politico wrote.

Now, a year after the election—and more than a year after Trump first made that pledge to the American people—many observers believe the swamp has grown into a sinkhole that threatens to swallow the entire Trump administration. The number of White House officials currently facing questions, lawsuits or investigation is astonishing: Trump, being sued for violating the “emoluments clause” of the U.S. Constitution by running his Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Paul J. Manafort, the second Trump campaign manager, indicted on money laundering charges in late October; Flynn, for undisclosed lobbying work done on behalf of the Turkish government; son-in-law and consigliere Jared Kushner, for failing to disclose $1 billion in loans tied to his real-estate company; and at least six Cabinet heads being investigated for or asked about exorbitant travel expenses, security details or business dealings.

An allegation of corruption is, of course, not proof that corruption took place, but when has the American body politic ever awaited certitude before passing judgment? “The most corrupt presidency and administration we’ve ever had,” says Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor who authored a book titled Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.

To supporters of the president, charges of corruption are being leveled with undue zeal by anti-Trump forces that will say or do anything to thwart the president’s agenda and lead to his removal from office. “President Trump came to Washington to drain the swamp and is following through on his promises,” White House deputy press secretary Raj S. Shah told me, citing Trump’s executive order on ethics, the elevation to deputy status of ethics lawyers in the White House counsel’s office and “unprecedented steps to rein in waste of taxpayer funds.”

Trump friend Christopher Ruddy, the publisher of conservative outlet Newsmax, laughed off the suggestion that Trump would enter public service to enrich himself, as critics have suggested. At the same time, he added, “I don’t think it’s like they wake up in the morning and say, ‘How can we drain the swamp today?'”

Ruddy thinks Trump can only do so much to fulfill his promise on ethics. “At the end of the day, the swamp rules,” he told me, referencing the enormous class of unelected technocrats that will outlast Trump’s presidency, as well as all the ones that come after.

But according to the presidential historian Robert Dallek, no American leader has acted with more unadulterated self-interest as Trump. Dallek says that in terms of outright corruption, Trump is worse than both Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, presidents who oversaw the most flagrant instances of graft in American political history. Grant’s stellar reputation as a Civil War general is tarnished in part by the Whiskey Ring scandal, in which Treasury Department officials stole taxes from alcohol distillers; members of Harding’s administration plundered oil reserves in Teapot Dome, a rock outcropping in Wyoming that has lent its name to the most notorious example of government corruption in American political history. In both cases, the fault of the president was in his lack of oversight. As far as Dallek is concerned, something more nefarious is at work in the White House of Donald Trump.

“What makes this different,” Dallek says, “is that the president can’t seem to speak the truth about a host of things.” Trump isn’t just allowing corruption, in Dallek’s view, but encouraging it. “The fish rots from the head,” he reminds.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, puts the matter even more bluntly: “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump addresses a campaign rally at the Deltaplex Arena October 31, 2016 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. With just eight days until the election, polls show a slight tightening in the race. Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Disgusting Displays of Wealth

On June 29, Secretary of Veterans Affairs David J. Shulkin sent a memorandum to top managers in his department. In the memo, “Essential Employee Travel,” Shulkin outlined a new process by which travel would be approved and documented. “I expect this will result in decreased employee travel and generate savings,” he wrote.

Two weeks later, Shulkin and his wife, Merle Bari, got on a plane and flew from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Copenhagen. With them were three VA staffers and one staffer’s husband. There was also a six-person security detail. “The 10-day trip was not entirely a vacation,” reported The Washington Post. But it wasn’t a three-day conference in Tulsa, either. Shulkin planned the trip so that it began with meetings in Denmark and ended about a week later with meetings in London. In between, there was watching tennis at Wimbledon, visiting medieval castles, touring and shopping. A tourist from Madison, Wisconsin, told the Post she spotted Shulkin and company “whisked to the front of the line” at an attraction in Copenhagen. One of Shulkin’s taxpayer-funded security guards, she said, was hauling a “large number of shopping bags.”

The Post noted that American taxpayers reimbursed Bari for her expenses during the trip, which may have been as high as $3,600 per day. Although some of the other members of the party paid for their travel, taxpayers nevertheless incurred significant costs associated with flights and security. Perhaps it is naïve to expect a Cabinet head to Skype into international gatherings, but the previous VA head, Robert McDonald, had not needed to take a single trip abroad to do his work.

Secretary of Veteran Affairs David J. Shulkin Paul Morigi/Getty

Shulkin is one of six Trump Cabinet members being investigated for (or at the very least, being asked uncomfortable questions about) travel or security expenses:

The inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency is investigating its administrator, Scott Pruitt, for what The Washington Post says are “at least four noncommercial and military flights” in the past eight months, these having cost the government more than $58,000. Pruitt has also built himself a $25,000 soundproof booth in his office, for reasons that remain unclear. Pruitt’s personal security detail includes high-ranking EPA investigators who are supposed to be tracking environmental violations.

Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt Mark Reinstein/Corbis/Getty

Steven T. Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs banker who now runs the Treasury Department, is being investigated for commandeering a government jet so that he and his wife, Scottish actress Louise Linton, could see the Great American Eclipse in Lexington, Kentucky. That trip came to light after Linton engaged in a social media spat with an Oregon woman who was disgusted by the couple’s displays of wealth. That same month, Mnuchin took a U.S. Air Force C-37 jet from New York to Washington. The trip cost taxpayers $25,000, and while use of military planes by government officials is common, there are dozens of commercial flights daily that cover the same route. Timothy F. Geithner, who was President Barack Obama’s secretary of the treasury, frequently flew coach when he made that trip.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty

Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, is being investigated for travel expenses that include a $12,375 chartered flight to Montana from Las Vegas, where he had attended an event for a hockey team owned by one of his benefactors. Zinke is being investigated for two other chartered flights as well.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke Mark Wilson/Getty

Elaine L. Chao, who heads the Transportation Department, has used government planes on at least seven occasions, according to The Washington Post. She is also facing questions about her ownership of stock in Vulcan Materials, a building company that would likely benefit from a $1 trillion infrastructure plan Trump has touted.

Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty

Rick Perry, the energy secretary, took a private plane to visit “a uranium facility in Piketon, Ohio,” in late September, according to Reuters. He once also, the same outlet reported, flew into “a private airport in Kansas that was within a 45-minute drive of Kansas City International Airport.”

Energy Secretary Rick Perry Alex Wong/Getty

Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, pays for her private flights (she is a billionaire), but she uses security from the U.S. Marshals Service, a highly unusual move that will cost the American taxpayer about $1 million per month. She is the first education secretary to have such extensive protection in recent history.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Win McNamee/Getty

Chiding chatter about the Trump administration’s high-flying ways began when Politico reporters Dan Diamond and Rachana Pradhan got a tip that Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was using private planes to jet around the globe, infuriating already-demoralized HHS employees back home with grating dispatches from Switzerland, Liberia and elsewhere. As Diamond and Pradhan wrote, the “notoriously secretive Cabinet secretary” had not been forthcoming about his travel records, in keeping with the Trump administration’s broader aversion to releasing records unless forced to. Their shoe-leather reporting included waiting at the charter terminal at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, hoping to see Price entering or leaving a private jet.

Diamond and Pradhan published their initial story on Price’s private-jet travel on September 19, their details dredged from the very swamp Trump promised to drain: costly chartered flights to Philadelphia, when Amtrak would have sufficed, as well as a trip to the Aspen Ideas Festival, a potent symbol of the elitism Trump had denounced during the campaign.

Trump was furious, and Price resigned at the end of the month, after offering to pay back $52,000 of his travel costs. The total cost of his taxpayer-funded jaunts is estimated to be $1 million.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price Zach Gibson/Getty

This behavior is outrageous—but also puzzling, since Trump’s Cabinet has been estimated to be worth at least $4 billion, making this White House the wealthiest in American history. These were people, we’d been told, who were sacrificing lucrative private-sector posts to work in the service of the American people. Now, those very same “forgotten Americans” were paying for Mnuchin, worth as much as $500 million, because he apparently didn’t want to go through airport security. In his Cabinet are many people who went to Ivy League universities, worked for Fortune 500 corporations. They had to know better. And if they didn’t, how can we trust them?

“Power and stupidity are close companions,” said Teachout when I asked her to explain how so many Cabinet members could make the same mistake, and make it so frequently. “They are actually living in a world in which they can’t see the ways in which they are being corrupted,” she speculated. “You’re so powerful that you don’t even understand that a chartered flight isn’t a right.”

A senior White House noted that it had not been the White House’s job to micromanage Cabinet-level travel plans in prior administrations. Now, those plans need approval from Chief of Staff John F. Kelly. David J. Apol, who heads the Office of Government Ethics, recently wrote a memorandum that had him “deeply concerned that the actions of some in Government leadership have harmed perceptions about the importance of ethics.” (OGE would not make Apol available for an interview with Newsweek.)

But Apol’s dismay, however welcome, is not enough for all those who believe the Trump administration is unwilling to face up to its ethical shortcomings. “You don’t see any shame here,” says E.J. Dionne Jr., the Washington Post columnist and co-author of the new book One Nation After Trump.

“And that’s really disturbing.”

The Great Enabler

On the morning of November 9, Teachout was dealing with a personal political loss: The night before, she had lost to Republican John J. Faso for a House of Representatives seat in the Hudson River Valley, north of New York City. Teachout had run an anti-corruption campaign, while Faso was a fairly conventional Northeastern Republican who never resolved his apparent unease about Trump. Voters apparently did not mind.

Sometime that day, she spoke to a Clinton critic who may have voted for Trump (he only revealed that he hadn’t voted for Clinton). “I just want to put a stick in the stream,” he told her. The vote a small act of defiance, since New York State was safely Democratic. But even a small vote can be telling. By possibly casting a ballot for Trump, the man indicated his profound exasperation with the political system, as well as his conviction that only a wholesale reimagination of what government did—and how—could make Americans believe in government again. Even if it wasn’t clear what Trump meant by “drain the swamp,” the image powerfully evoked a righteous cleansing, a renewal of the tired, infertile land.

“The language of corruption is incredibly powerful,” Teachout says, and Trump’s campaign harnessed that power to great effect. But the transition to governing presented new challenges, foremost among them questions about the inscrutable, transnational Trump Organization, which has included everything from a line of steaks to a new hotel in the heart of D.C., in a building leased from the very federal apparatus he now controls.

On January 11, just days before the presidential inauguration, Trump held a press conference at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to address ethics issues surrounding his administration. “I could actually run my business and run the government at the same time,” he boasted. His tax lawyer, Sheri A. Dillon, described a vague arrangement in which Trump would not manage his businesses, but also not disassociate from them. On a table next to Trump were stacks of papers, presumably relating to his finances. A reporter’s photograph suggested the papers were blank, just for show.

“The tone was set by the president when he decided not to divest,” says Walter M. Shaub Jr., who’d been appointed by Trump’s predecessor, Obama, as the head of OGE, and who remained in that post during the transition and first five and a half months of Trump’s tenure. He says this administration “came in unprepared for the rigors” of working within the federal government, “unaware of the fact that there are many requirements and a culture of accountability to the public.”

Shaub blames a lot of the ethical lapses on White House counsel Donald McGahn II, whom he charges with fostering an anything-goes atmosphere by interpreting rules and laws in ways that allowed Trump to skirt them. “He has been the great enabler. And he has been an amplifier of the message that ethics doesn’t matter.” McGahn did not respond to a Newsweek request for comment.

Don McGahn, then general counsel for the Trump transition team, in the lobby at Manhattan’s Trump Tower on November 15, 2016. Now, as White House counsel, McGahn represents the Office of the Presidency, which comprises the chief executive and also the White House staff and the institution as a whole. Drew Angerer/Getty

A senior White House official who was only authorized to speak on background disputed the assertion that the Trump administration has not made ethics a priority. He says the lawyers working on ethics issues in the White House are “not shrinking violets” and points to the elevation of their office to deputy status, presumably giving those lawyers greater sway. The office is headed by Stefan C. Passantino, deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel to the president, who, upon his appointment, was praised by Howard Dean, a former Democratic primary candidate for the presidency and governor of Vermont. “I have a lot of confidence that he will be clear about what the ethical and legal boundaries are in his advice to the White House,” Dean said at the time.

One individual who worked with Passantino in the early days of the Trump administration described him as courteous and eager about toiling in the federal government’s employ, a welcome contrast to the surly attitudes of some other high-ranking Trump officials. At the same time, this individual says Passantino was diligently figuring out how to dismantle regulations. He notes that among Passantino’s previous legal clients is Gingrich, who was sanctioned by the House of Representatives over ethical violations.

A telling episode took place on February 9, when senior administration counselor Kellyanne Conway went on Fox & Friends to defend Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and one of his most trusted advisers. Ivanka also runs a fashion business, but Nordstrom’s had recently dropped her line after protests by liberal activists who sought to have the department store sever all affiliations with the Trump family. Conway defended Ivanka, speaking on live television from the White House: “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff is what I would tell you.… I’m going to give a free commercial here. Go buy it today, everybody.”

This seemed a flagrant violation of ethics rules, which prohibit elected officials from endorsing a commercial enterprise. Shaub sent a letter to Passantino, informing him that “there is strong reason to believe that Ms. Conway has violated the Standards of Conduct and that disciplinary action is warranted.” Passantino wrote back that Conway “made the statement in question in a light, off-hand manner while attempting to stand up for a person she believed had been unfairly treated and did so without nefarious motive or intent to benefit personally.” In a footnote, Passantino interpreted federal rules to conclude that Shaub’s office, OGE, did not have oversight over the executive office of the president, meaning that he could not sanction Conway over the endorsement.

Shaub was stunned. “The assertion is incorrect, and the letter cites no legal basis for it,” he wrote Passantino. To him, this was evidence that the Trump administration sought not only to disregard ethics rules, but to actively dismantle them. He quit OGE on July 6 and deemed the administration he was leaving behind “pretty close to a laughingstock.” He has been making similarly withering critiques on social media and CNN, which he joined as a contributor in September.

Shaub’s migration to cable news has annoyed supporters of President Trump. Another CNN regular is Richard W. Painter, who was the chief ethics lawyer for George W. Bush and is vice chair of the group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, suing Trump over the emoluments clause. Another CREW member, its chair and sometime CNN commentator, is Norman L. Eisen, who occupied the same position in the White House of President Obama. The White House senior official I spoke to expressed dismay at this “machinery” of outrage, calibrated perfectly to a liberal viewing audience.

When I raised these concerns to Shaub, he laughed them off as “deeply cynical.” He knew that the White House thought of him. He wasn’t bothered by it.

It’s a Swamp Thing; You Wouldn’t Understand

The most significant action by Trump to drain the swamp was taken a week into his presidency. On January 28, he signed Executive Order 13770, titled “Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Appointees.” All such appointees had to pledge that they would not lobby the agency to which they were appointed for five years after leaving it; they would abide by restrictions regarding contact with agency officials; would not lobby foreign governments after working for the administration; would not accept gifts from lobbyists; and would follow other regulations.

Shah calls it “the most sweeping Executive Order in U.S. history to end the revolving door” between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the lobbying firms of K Street, singling out the injunction against foreign lobbying in particular. In some ways, the order is not dissimilar from what was in place during the Obama administration.

US President Donald Trump signs an executive order on ethics commitments by the executive branch appointees in the Oval Office of the White House on January 28, 2017, in Washington, DC MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty

But Eisen thinks the widespread granting of ethics waivers by the administration—that is, permits to violate the new rules—completely undermine the executive order. “They’ve made a mockery of the executive order and of ethics in general,” he cried out when I called him, claiming that the Trump administration has “virtually no standard” on how such waivers are granted. Fourteen such waivers had been granted as of May 31.

While Trump officials have described the executive order as being not much different from the one that guided the Obama administration, Eisen finds that assertion preposterous: “It’s an ethics calamity of a kind we have never seen in modern presidential history.” In June, a liberal super PAC called American Bridge 21st Century found 74 lobbyists working in the administration, 49 of them in agencies they once lobbied on behalf of clients. The new deputy administrator of the EPA, for example, is former coal lobbyist Andrew R. Wheeler.

“This will not take away one vote,” says Sam Nunberg, a longtime Trump associate who was fired from the presidential campaign in 2015.

That may be the case. It may also be shortsighted. Painter, the former Bush lawyer, is a Republican “Never Trumper” who endorsed Clinton in the general election. He thinks Trump isn’t just eviscerating ethics laws but destroying the conservative movement that, for decades, preached moral responsibility and fiscal prudence. “This,” he laments, “could be the end of the Republican Party.”

Cummings, the Democrat from Maryland, has begun to investigate the travel habits of Trump administration cabinet members. Yet he believes that Republicans will ultimately protect the president himself. “They’ve come to basically accept his conduct,” Cummings told me.”The things he is doing, he could not do without the Republicans in Congress aiding and abetting.” It is not clear what they will get in return. If Painter is right, it won’t be much.

As for the “drain the swamp” plan, with its vision of purified Washington? I managed to find the link to the original press release and, feeding it into my browser, was transported to those late October days when pundits mused about whether Clinton would take Arizona and whether Trump would start a television network of his own.

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.

More from Newsweek

• Drain the Swamp, One Year Later: Is Trump Draining or Drowning?
• Private Jets Scandal: So Much for Draining the Swamp
• House Investigator Asks Kellyanne Conway for Information About Her Taking Private Flights With Tom Price

The Guardian

We need new fairy stories and folk tales to guide us out of today’s dark woods

Andrew Simms            November 1, 2017

In these perilous times, progressives must create narratives that shine a light on crises such as climate change and the plight of refugee

Illustration from a Brothers Grimm Snow White fairy-tale, circa 1900 ‘Our daily lives seems to have become as dark and disturbing as anything dreamed up by the brothers Grimm.’ Photograph: INTERFOTO / Alamy/Alamy

With natural forces running amok and wolves prowling in the shady woods of our workplaces, reality seems stranger than a folk tale or fairy story. Our daily lives seem to have become as dark and disturbing as anything dreamed up by the brothers Grimm, or written down by Charles Perrault, the great 17th-century chronicler of folk and fairytales.

Folk tales emerge in times of upheaval, and from societies’ grimmest moments. They enable us to process and assimilate extreme experience, and deal with our fears. They also, typically, communicate powerful and uncompromising moral narratives. It’s not hard to draw a map of current major global problems with reference to them.

The most powerful kingdom in the world, for example, falls into the hands of a ruler who is equal parts the insatiable, comfortless greed of Midas, and the vanity of Narcissus, who disdains those who love him, and the self-delusions of the naked emperor. Remind you of anyone?

And just as it may be the season of flamboyant, escapist horror, it can be frightening when we discover that places we thought, or trusted to be safe, turn out to be concealing predators. Almost daily at the moment, another male impresario or figure with other power is revealed as the wolf that befriends with an ulterior motive the young and vulnerable, or perhaps the charming vampire seeking to satisfy its lust.

This, of course, is one of the other functions of folk tales – they are cautionary and teach us to identify risks. Across cultures you will find stories designed to keep us away from danger, with many applicable to a warming world.

The kelpies of Scottish folklore carried children to watery graves, while the Inuit told tales of the Qallupilluit, who lived beneath the ice and would steal children through its melting cracks.

One of our greatest contemporary threats is our wholesale abuse of the natural world. Seas are polluted with plastic and acidifying, the atmosphere loaded with more carbon dioxide than human civilization has ever experienced, and a mass extinction event underway, visible recently in the large-scale die-off of insect life. Folk tales are a guide to the consequences of such short-sighted self-centeredness.

King Canute was the monarch who vainly tried to command the seas not to rise. In fact Canute was demonstrating the opposite to his courtiers, the ultimate limits of kingly power and humankind’s attempts to command nature.

And the story of killing the goose that lays the golden egg in order to extract its riches, and finding nothing, stands as a parable for how we over-exploit the environment everywhere from our seas, to our forests, farms, fossil fuel extraction and more.

Folk tales and myths are especially strong on hubris, with the tale of Icarus and Daedalus sharply dividing Icarus, who fails to accept the limits of the material world, overreaches and crashes, from the wiser Daedalus, who still manages to fly, but not too near the sun. Icarus strikes a Richard Branson-like figure, or the head of an oil company still exploring for oil we cannot afford to burn. Daedalus is the smart entrepreneur switching to wind and solar power.

So much accumulated wisdom in tales mocks our multiple current follies. But that is partly because, in campaigning for change, the art of storytelling has been too often replaced with reliance on a deluge of facts and polices.

Progressives have learned the hard way in an age of Brexit and Trump that it is messages that resonate with mythologies – such as “making America great again” tapping the former frontier optimism of nation-builders, or “taking back control” for the brave, resilient island – are impervious to fact and rational argument. In both you might also glimpse the village whipped up by the charismatic trickster who appears in its midst, into a fury of self-destructive suspicion and isolation. If you want change to happen, you have to change deeply embedded cultural narratives.

Progressive politics needs better stories as much as it needs facts and policies. Without them it will flail and flounder. That’s why a group of leading scientists, economists and ecologists recently put facts momentarily to one side, and wrote modern folk tales for troubling times in an experiment to communicate issues of concern more compellingly.

In Knock Twice, the resulting collection, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate and geo-hazards, Bill McGuire, weaves a story of refugees from rising sea levels slipping through immigration controls. Jayati Ghosh, one of India’s leading economists, who has written about women’s extreme inequality in the labor market, spins a tale about a young woman, Chitrangada, who rejects the role assigned for her. Bluebeard & Partners by Anthea Lawson, a leading authority on corporate corruption, exposes a world of tax avoiding shell companies. They are joined by the former head of a cabinet office inquiry into public services, with an unusual re-reading of Puss-in-Boots, and the head of a UN inquiry into designing a sustainable financial system imagining an all-powerful phone app.

Most tales, at some level, present a rite of passage through difficulty to maturity, awareness or resolution. Now, more than ever, it feels like we need new tales to lead us through our troubling times.

Andrew Simms is the editor of Knock Twice: 25 Modern Folk Tales for Troubling Times.

Sierra

The National magazine of the Sierra Club

Our National Parks Might Become a Gated Community

Secretary Zinke’s proposal to increase entry fees could make parks an exclusive playground

Photo by kellyvandellen/iStock

By Jason Mark        October 26 2017

The mission of America’s national parks seems pretty clear. Legislation establishing the National Park Service, passed just over a century ago, said the parks and monuments should “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life” of parks and monuments “by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Such places should be widely open to visitors. The Park Service is supposed to ensure that nothing “interfere[s] with free access . . . by the public.”

But somehow the people who now oversee the national parks didn’t get the memo. They’re hoping to jack up entry fees at some of the most iconic parks by such enormous percentages that those places will no doubt become less accessible to many.

TAKE ACTION    $70 to Enter a National Park? Say NO!  

Instead of keeping our parks accessible to all, the Trump administration wants to increase park fees by more than double, while making it easier and cheaper for the fossil fuel industry to drill. Say no way!

Earlier this week, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced a proposal to more than double entry fees at 17 of the most popular parks during the summer months. Vehicle fees will go from $30 to $70. Motorcycle visitors will see their entry fees spike from $25 (and as low as $12 in some parks) to $50. Per-person rates—for those who arrive on bicycle, foot, or horse—will go from $15 a head to $30.

America’s public lands, rightly celebrated as an inspiring example of the country’s democratic aspirations, are at risk of becoming a gated community.

Here are the names of the parks facing skyrocketing fee increases (on the chance that one of the places is beloved by you): Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Denali, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Olympic, Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Zion National Parks.

You might be asking, What’s this all about?

Zinke claims the fee increases are needed to address the Park Service’s reported $12 billion backlog of maintenance projects. “The infrastructure of our national parks is aging and in need of renovation and restoration,” Zinke said in a statement calling for “targeted fee increases at some of our most-visited parks.”

I have a hard time believing Zinke’s concern about the infrastructure backlog when, at the same time, he and President Trump are proposing a budget that would cut spending on the Park Service by 13 percent and reduce staff by up to 1,200 employees. Zinke’s deferred maintenance anxiety feels a bit disingenuous—enough crocodile tears to match Yosemite Falls.

And while it’s true that some park facilities are badly in need of repair, the whole maintenance issue is a bit of a red herring. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, about $400 million of the backlog should actually be paid for by the concessionaires like Aramark and Xanterra that are making a killing on selling hot dogs at the visitor centers. Nearly half of the Park Service’s list of needs, close to $6 billion, is just for four roads in a handful of parks.

Maybe the proposed entry fee hike is some gesture to show the administration is serious about fiscal probity—you know, help balance the budget by doubling the price for a family wanting to spend a summer vacation in Arches or Yellowstone. That doesn’t pass the sniff test either, not when Zinke is also giving oil and gas companies a nearly 30 percent discount on their shallow water leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

I suppose the plan, with its focus on the summer months, might be a way to reduce what has become the unbearable overcrowding at some parks at peak season, a challenge that park officials acknowledge is making it difficult to leave their stewarded areas “unimpaired.” But if you really want to improve visitor experience, you don’t ratchet up prices to keep people away; instead, you build new and better infrastructure, with more buses in and out of parks being the obvious solution.

There’s something more going on here. Zinke’s whole proposal—the government is going to make it vastly more expensive for you to visit the lands you already own—seems a perfect expression of the Trump administration’s id. In Trump and company’s narrow world view, there are no common goods or shared assets, no civic solidarity. Public lands? What are those? One must pay to play.

Zinke has insisted again and again that he is “absolutely against” the sale of public lands. Yet that’s exactly what he’s doing with this proposed skyrocketing of national park fees. No, I suppose there won’t be any transfer of title. But every summer our common grounds will be rented to the highest bidders. National parks will become more like the exclusive enclaves and private planes the Trump folks love so dearly.

The national parks are supposed to be open-aired temples of democracy. If Trump and Zinke get their way, the affluent will have the places all to themselves.

More stories about: national parks

Jason Mark is the editor of Sierra and the author of Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man.

HuffPost

Scott Pruitt’s Professor Regrets ‘Unleashing’ EPA Chief On ‘Unsuspecting Public’

The teacher blasts his former law school student in an Op-Ed.

By Alexander C. Kaufman          November 1, 2017

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is nothing if not lawyerly.

As Oklahoma’s attorney general, he waged war against Obama-era environmental rules by arguing on technicalities. He billed himself as a “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

Since taking over the agency he sued more than a dozen times, he has defended the Trump Administration’s deregulatory campaign in complex legalese, arguing that the issue is not how best to protect the environment and public health, but how to adhere to his narrow interpretation of the EPA’s mandate under the law. He even thanked a Time Magazine reporter for calling him “lawyerly” in an interview last month.

For that, Rex J. Zedalis, who taught Pruitt at the University of Tulsa’s law school in the early 1990s, said he has “tossed and turned” for “countless nights.”

“I confess regret for whatever small role I played in unleashing Administrator Pruitt on the unsuspecting public,” Zedalis wrote in an Op-Ed published Monday in The Santa Fe New Mexican. “Surely I’m at least partially to blame for failing to nurture in him a deep regard for seeing law as an instrument for addressing real facts on the ground, not simply implementing a political ideology, regardless the facts.

Bloomberg via Getty Images. Scott Pruitt’s actions since becoming head of the Environmental Protection Agency have chagrined one of his former law professors.

He pointed to Pruitt’s proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the sweeping set of Obama-era regulations meant to curb planet-warming emissions from the utility sector. While still at his Oklahoma post, Pruitt persuaded the Supreme Court to issue a stay on the plan last year, so it never went into effect. Since becoming EPA’s chief under President Donald Trump, Pruitt submitted a policy to eliminate the Clean Power Plan without replacing it, a move critics said demonstrated his intention to cripple efforts to curb climate change rather than refine the legal framework through which that action is taken.

“I understand why Obama’s environmental measures seem objectionable to Administrator Pruitt,” Zedalis wrote. “What I fail to comprehend, though, is his utter disregard for tailoring EPA regulatory actions so they address the environment as facts demonstrate we find it, not as we imagine it.”

I confess regret for whatever small role I played in unleashing Administrator Pruitt on the unsuspecting public. Rex J. Zedalis, University of Tulsa College of Law

He said Pruitt’s attempts to unravel climate regulations are rooted in a refusal to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that climate change is dangerous, human-caused and addressable. Ninety-seven percent of peer-reviewed research agrees with the conclusion that factors including the burning fossil fuels are warming the planet with greenhouse gases. And a research review published last November found significant flaws in the methodologies, assumptions or analyses used by the 3 percent of scientists who found otherwise.

“What affords all of us, including Administrator Pruitt, the chance to blithely live regret-free is the fact we never live long enough to witness the full effect of many of our decisions,” Zedalis wrote. “As discomforting as it might be to accept consensus decisions of the scientific community on particular matters, the alternative raises the specter of regression to the Dark Ages’ reliance on the shaman and the soothsayer.”

The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Pruitt.

Mashable, Science

Scott Pruitt just destroyed one of the EPA’s core safeguards, and we may never get it back

Protesters gather outside a meeting where a climate change report was to be released.

Image: AP/REX/Shutterstock

By Andrew Freedman           October 31, 2017

In an unprecedented move, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt just issued a directive that would prohibit individuals from serving on the agency’s independent scientific advisory boards if they also receive research grants from the agency.

The far-reaching directive will boot many mainstream environmental scientists from the congressionally-mandated panels that work to ensure the EPA administrator receives the best available scientific advice. It also opens the door for experts who do not typically obtain EPA grants, specifically industry representatives and state regulators, to be brought in to replace them.

The directive Pruitt signed on Tuesday also sends the message that industry researchers can steer rules to benefit their sectors while somehow being more objective than scientists with federal funding.

SEE ALSO: Earth is seeing an unprecedented surge in carbon dioxide levels, with disturbing implications

That is a radical notion (some would call it flat-out bonkers) that could have serious consequences for the agency even after Pruitt leaves office, since committee members often serve for more than one administration.

The panels influence the agency’s rule making on issues ranging from chemicals regulation to air pollution and climate change, serving as a check on the science the agency relies on for its decisions.

“Those very committees are giving us the bedrock of science to ensure that we’re making informed decisions,” Pruitt said during a signing ceremony at EPA headquarters in Washington.

The three panels include the Science Advisory Board, or SAB, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, or CASAC, and the Board of Scientific Counselors, or BASC. Administrator Pruitt announced new chairs for each of these panels on Tuesday. The new directive may also apply to other agency advisory committees as well.

For the Science Advisory Board, Pruitt selected Michael Honeycutt, who heads the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s toxicology division. He is well known to environmental activists and mainstream researchers for questioning the scientific evidence tying health risks to smog.

At a 2003 hearing on proposed federal air quality rules, Honeycutt said no standards should be implemented that could force people to drive less, or make other changes in their daily lives.

“Programs that require lifestyle changes are unacceptable to the public,” he said, according to The New York Times.

Pruitt said the EPA will release more names of committee members later this week, although a list leaked to the press shows representatives of the American Chemistry Council, and the oil companies Phillips 66, Southern Company, Total, and Exxon as possible additions.

In justifying the changes, which will allow the EPA to add scientists who hold views outside the scientific mainstream, Pruitt cited the need for scientific independence.

“When we have members of those committees that have received tens of millions of dollars in grants at the same time that they’re advising this agency, that is not good and that’s not right,” Pruitt said, without mentioning that the EPA is the largest source of grants for studying particular environmental health issues, and that advisory board members have to comply with agency conflict of interest policies in order to be able to serve.

“They are no longer going to be receiving grants from this agency,” Pruitt said regarding advisory board members. “They will have to choose, either the grant, or service, but not both.”

Hijacking science

Many scientists and activists see the directive, and legislation resembling it that passed the House last year but went nowhere in the Senate, as a way to purge the panels of expert researchers who Pruitt and his allies don’t agree with.

Pruitt has denied the fact that greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming, and has worked to roll back numerous EPA regulations enacted under the Obama administration. Many of these rollbacks have since been blocked in the courts.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.  Image: MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA/REX/Shutterstock

Pruitt is unlike any of his predecessors at the agency since its creation in 1970. He rarely consults agency staff before making decisions, holds most of his meetings with industry groups, and is infamous for cutting the agency’s budget while spending millions to beef up his personal security detail.

Rush Holt, who heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), came out strongly against the advisory board changes.

“The American Association for the Advancement of Science denounces the EPA administrator’s decision to disallow qualified scientific experts from providing evidence-based information as members of its science adviser boards,” Holt, the chief executive officer of the AAAS and a former congressman, said.

“This EPA decision is motivated by politics, not the desire for quality scientific information. Federal agencies should recognize and enable input of scientific and technical information that represents the best available evidence,” Holt, a physicist by training, added in the statement.

“The government must ensure that its science advisers possess the requisite scientific, medical and technical expertise to inform agency policies. At the same time, the government must facilitate transparency and protect against conflict of interest. Federal agencies from NIH [National Institutes of Health] to EPA have policies on scientific integrity and financial conflict of interest, allowing agencies to balance transparency and access to expertise.”

According to Delaware Democratic Senator Chris Coons, Pruitt’s directive shows that he mistakenly thinks scientists personally profit from research grants, and that he is mainly looking out for the oil, gas, and chemicals industries.

“These changes fundamentally upend the role that science should play in policy at the EPA and suggest a profound misunderstanding of how scientific grants are awarded and how science is conducted,” Coons said in a statement.

“To suggest that academic scientists personally profit from grants they receive to conduct research while representatives of regulated industries do not benefit from how regulations are implemented is extremely disingenuous.”

Chris McEntee, executive director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest organization of Earth scientists, disagreed with the EPA’s move as well.

“Science has one agenda: to advance the body of scientific knowledge. The principles and practices that protect the integrity of science are well defined through the scientific method and the peer-review process,” she said in a statement.

“EPA’s decisions have real implications for the health and well-being of Americans and in some cases people worldwide. By curtailing the input of some of the most respected minds in science, Pruitt’s decision robs the agency, and by extension Americans, of a critically important resource.”

The AAAS’ Holt even questioned whether the EPA can continue to fulfill its basic mission given this and other changes pushed through under Pruitt’s leadership.

“Given its desire to limit expert perspectives and the role of scientific information, we question whether the EPA can continue to pursue its core mission to protect human health and the environment,” Holt said.

Interestingly, this change could come back to haunt Pruitt and his successors if it makes agency rules harder to defend in court. By potentially skewing the science justifying EPA’s regulations, it could make it easier for opponents to halt or overturn them.

WATCH: These edible wrappers could help keep plastic out of the ocean

USA Today

As globe warms, Trump doubles down on fossil fuels

The Editorial Board, USA TODAY      October 29, 2017  

First the Paris climate accord. Now the Clean Power Plan: Our view

(Photo: George Frey, Getty Images)

As if any more evidence were needed that climate change is making extreme heat more likely, take a look at what happened in Southern California last week. On Tuesday at Dodger Stadium, the first-pitch temperature for the opening game of the World Series was a record-shattering 103 degrees. The same day, two other locations hit 108, matching the hottest weather the nation has seen so late in the year.

And how is the Trump administration responding to these flashing-red warning signs of global warming on the West Coast and elsewhere around the world? By systematically dismantling the Obama administration’s environmental initiatives.

Just five months ago, President Trump broke with nearly 200 other countries in taking the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, a stunning move given that the accord regulated nothing, relying only on peer pressure and transparency to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Nicaragua recently joined the Paris pact, leaving the United States and war-ravaged Syria as the odd nations out.

Now the Trump administration is turning its attention to gutting the Clean Power Plan, the 2015 Obama initiative aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from energy plants. This latest effort to kill the Clean Power Plan demonstrates sheer contempt for laws governing clean air and the benefits of environmental regulation.

Power plants generate about a third of the 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide America pumps into the atmosphere each year. The Clean Power Plan offered a reasonable pathway to reducing these emissions by a third by 2030, giving each state flexibility to reach that goal. The plan was the next best idea to a market-based carbon tax that would be rebated to consumers.

Yes, it would undoubtedly result in less burning of coal, the dirtiest fuel. But coal was already in decline — with or without new environmental regulations — as utilities embraced cleaner-burning natural gas and alternatives such as wind and solar.

U.S. coal mining jobs have fallen to fewer than 77,000, while those in renewable energy have hit 800,000 and keep increasing. Some of the nation’s largest power companies this month shrugged off Trump’s regulatory rollback, arguing that clean energy has proved to be good business and vowing to keep reducing emissions.

The Supreme Court narrowly voted last year to temporarily block implementation of the plan amid challenges that it represented regulatory overreach. An appellate panel can still reach a decision and should do so.

Regardless, the Environmental Protection Agency remains compelled by law to significantly reduce carbon dioxide. A 2007 Supreme Court ruling established the gas as a pollutant and subject to reduction if EPA found it a danger to public health. The EPA made such a finding two years later, courtesy of a mountain of scientific evidence.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s proposal for dismantling the Clean Power Plan mentions drafting a new method for reducing carbon dioxide. We’ll believe that when we see it.

If there’s any good news, it’s that the Clean Power Plan — or some similar action to significantly reduce greenhouse gases gushing from the nation’s electricity sector — is likely to survive this effort at sabotage. But that might take years of bureaucratic and legal wrangling, consuming precious time as the planet grows warmer.

USA TODAY’s editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature. To respond to this editorial, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

VOX

This one quote shows what angry white guys mean when they talk about government overreach

Updated by David Roberts       October 29, 2017

(YouTube)

Before Donald Trump, GOP elites — policymakers, intellectuals, DC operators — were in the grips of a comforting illusion: that their party was united around the principles of limited government and free markets. The family values and national security stuff rounded out the picture, of course, but small-government economics was the core.

That is how the elite — with help from a compliant media — interpreted the Tea Party uprising that followed Obama’s election. Here were patriots devoted to reducing burdensome regulations and defending economic freedom.

Post-Trump, this illusion has become untenable. Trump never paid lip service to conservative economic ideology. He doesn’t even possess the vocabulary, the catechisms that virtually every Republican candidate can recite by heart. He bypassed small-government ideology almost entirely in favor of white resentment. And Republicans, at least a plurality of them, embraced him for it.

“We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism,” said conservative intellectual Avik Roy in an interview with Zack Beauchamp. “In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

The story of how the language of small government became a handmaiden to ethnonationalism has been told on Vox several times, in excellent pieces by Andrew Prokop, Rich Yeselson, and Lee Drutman, among others. My contribution today is that I found a funny quote.

Rolling coal, just as the Founding Fathers intended

It comes about halfway through a New York Times story from 2016 on “rolling coal.” You’ve probably heard about rolling coal, the practice of modifying a truck’s diesel engine so that it spews thick, toxic black smoke in order to … well, to be obnoxious. There were several trend pieces about it a few years back.

Apparently it is still a thing, to the point that some states, like New Jersey (and possibly Illinois, though not Colorado), are passing laws against it.

Entire dissertations could be written about rolling coal. Even more than Trump’s ascension, it seems to perfectly capture a moment in time, an inarticulate yawp of protest from angry white men. They feel disdained and overlooked and they will blow thick black smoke in your face until you pay attention.

There’s no faux nostalgia involved. Unlike with, say, hunting, there’s no tale of rugged rural self-sufficiency to draw on. This is not some sturdy heartland tradition with which meddlesome elites want to interfere.

Rolling coal is new; it just caught on a few years ago. It does not improve the performance of a truck. It has no practical application or pragmatic purpose of any kind. It is purely aggressive, a raw expression of defiance: I can pollute your air, for no reason, and no one can stop me.

It is what it is. And now lawmakers are cracking down on it.

Which brings us to our quote.

But to diesel owners like Corey Blue of Roanoke, Ill., the very efforts to ban coal rolling represent the worst of government overreach and environmental activism. “Your bill will not stop us!” Mr. Blue wrote to Will Guzzardi, a state representative who has proposed a $5,000 fine on anyone who removes or alters emissions equipment.

“Why don’t you go live in Sweden and get the heck out of our country,” Mr. Blue wrote. “I will continue to roll coal anytime I feel like and fog your stupid eco-cars.”

Sweden, where one lives if one wants to avoid coal rolling.(Shutterstock)

My apologies to Mr. Blue for using him as a synecdoche here, but … this really captures something.

The core of the ethnonationalist perspective is that a country’s constituent groups and demographics are locked in a zero-sum struggle for resources. Any government intervention that favors one group disfavors the others. Government and other institutions are either with you or against you.

What FOX and talk radio have been teaching the right for decades is that native-born, working- and middle-class whites are locked in a zero-sum struggle with rising Others — minorities, immigrants, gays, coastal elitists, hippie environmentalists, etc. — and that the major institutions of the country have been co-opted and are working on behalf of the Others.

Here’s my favorite Rush Limbaugh quote, from back in 2009:

“We really live, folks, in two worlds. There are two worlds. We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap. …

The Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.”

That is the right-wing media’s message, delivered with relentless consistency: Government has become an agent of the Others. That’s what ethnonationalists mean when they talk about big government — not that government is exceeding some libertarian theorist’s notion of constitutional limits, but that government is on the wrong side, backing the wrong team.

From an ethnonationalist perspective, government overreach is when government tells people like me what to do. The proper role of government is to defend my rights and privileges against people like them.

After all, even the strictest libertarian acknowledges that the government has a policing role, to protect citizens from direct harm. What could be more direct harm than having unfiltered diesel smoke blown in your face?

But to Corey Blue of Roanoke, Illinois, the government is not protecting anybody — it’s targeting people like him, punishing him on behalf of the liberals, dope smokers, and heathens who prefer “eco-cars.”

Blowing toxic black smoke into the air “anytime I feel like” is his way of showing that it’s still his America, that he can still do what he wants and doesn’t have to follow a bunch of namby-pamby rules imposed by liberal bureaucrats. He and other coal rollers may dress this sentiment up in the language of small government, but what they’re expressing is a long, long way from conservative economic philosophy.