Czar Nick Tweed talks about the devastating result in the Copeland by-election with our new Vice Czar for Labour Party Relations Al, and they speculate about the future of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party. They discuss the political atmosphere in the UK as Theresa May attempts to navigate her government through their exit from the European Union.
Part one of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 40:20
Listen here!
Monday 27 February 2017
Saturday 25 February 2017
Ep. 1.0(g): The French Presidential Election (Pt2of2) with Colombia Recap
Czar Nick Tweed and Vice Czar for Intercontinental Affairs Hashemite share their predictions for the upcoming French presidential election before turning to politics in Colombia. They discuss the aftermath of the razor-tight failure of the peace referendum in October 2016.
Part two of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 21:56
Listen here!
Part two of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 21:56
Listen here!
Monday 20 February 2017
Ep. 1.0(f): The French Presidential Election (Pt1of2)
Czar Nick Tweed interviews our Vice Czar for Intercontinental Affairs Hashemite about the upcoming French Presidential election as they examine the success of Marine Le Pen's National Front and what has contributed to a political atmosphere that bodes poorly for the left in France.
Part one of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 28:49
Listen here!
Part one of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 28:49
Listen here!
Sunday 19 February 2017
Ep. 1.0(e): Ireland Reckons with Brexit (Pt2of2)
Czar Nick Tweed and Vice Czar for Republic of Ireland Affairs Gully Foyle continue their conversation about the repercussions of Brexit. They explore the limits of free speech and the implications of so-called political correctness.
Part two of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 28:36
Listen here!
Part two of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 28:36
Listen here!
Thursday 16 February 2017
Ep. 1.0(d): Ireland Reckons with Brexit (Pt1of2)
Czar Nick Tweed and Vice Czar for Republic of Ireland Affairs Gully Foyle talk about the latest political developments in the Donald Trump administration before moving on to discuss the implications for Ireland of a "hard" Brexit.
Part one of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 33:24
Listen here!
Part one of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 33:24
Listen here!
Monday 13 February 2017
Ep. 1.0(c): Minnesota Politics with BRTD
Czar Nick Tweed interviews Minnesota Political Expert BRTD ("Better Red Than Dead") to get insight into the historical development of the parties there and a sense of why the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party has been so successful in the state.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 16:48
Listen here!
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 16:48
Listen here!
Sunday 12 February 2017
Ep. 1.0(b): Inside White Nationalism with Francis Marion McNamara IV (Pt 2)
Czar Nicholas Tweed continues his interview with our Undercover Vice Czar for Trump Cultist Watch, Francis Marion McNamara IV, from within the heart of Dixie, as they explore the white nationalist subculture that propelled Trump to victory, as well as the impact of homeschooling on children in this sort of environment.
This piece is highly edited/redacted to protect Mr. McNamara IV's Undercover status.
Part two of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 21:17
Listen here!
This piece is highly edited/redacted to protect Mr. McNamara IV's Undercover status.
Part two of a two-part interview.
Producer(s): Czar Dan Bickers
Length: 21:17
Listen here!
Thursday 2 February 2017
Donald Trump’s Administration: Ransacking America
Ryan Beale, Atlas Free Radio Correspondent for Corruption & the Environment
The definition of ransacking is ‘to go through a place stealing things and causing damage’. With Donald Trump now sitting in the Oval Office, it is has become increasingly clear that his Administration has every intent to pillage America for the benefit of its friends and allies.
While attention has been paid to Trump’s many wide ranging conflicts of interest, relatively little scrutiny has been paid to the disturbing policy agenda that is being set out by Trump’s allies and appointees. When coupled with the various ethical conflicts that the President and some of these appointees bring, it paints a far deeper and more dangerous underlying picture of the new government than most anticipated.
Commerce Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross stands with Donald Trump.
During the course of the campaign, Trump ran as the outsider to the establishment and railed against ‘Crooked’ Hillary Clinton for her Wall Street links and her supposed corruption. Why the Democratic Party let a tax avoiding, union busting billionaire from Manhattan get away without any real equivalent scrutiny will be a mystery that stands the test of time, but it helped contribute to his victory.
Trump’s platform was always heavy on rhetoric and light on detail. Nonetheless the details that have become available, as well as the nominations Trump has made during the transition, all indicate that the Trump presidency will be a massive coup for big business, particularly fossil fuels energy, Trump’s allies and potentially Trump himself. This is not in of itself a surprise, but the extent to which these forces now directly control the government was largely not anticipated and is potentially unprecedented.
Many of the policies proposed by Trump during the campaign are significantly different in detail to what was promoted, and/or are directly and solely beneficial to industries and people close to and involved in the new administration.
Much emphasis has been placed on Trump’s highly talked up trillion-dollar plan to restore America’s crumbling infrastructure. Democratic leaders have signaled a willingness to work with Trump on this issue. Indeed, it has been speculated that President Trump would find congressional Republicans more difficult to work with on this particular policy area. But there has been very little actual scrutiny of what the actual details of his plan might be, which is especially concerning since what has been uncovered is alarming.
In October Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, both now Trump appointees, published a paper detailing how Trump’s infrastructure proposal would work. The plan is radically different to what many envisaged it would be. In fact, it’s largely bunkum.
“The Trump infrastructure plan features a major private sector, revenue neutral option to help finance a significant share of the nation’s infrastructure needs. For infrastructure construction to be financeable privately, it needs a revenue stream from which to pay operating costs, the interest and the principal on the debt and the dividends on the equity.
To encourage investors to commit such large amounts and to reduce the cost of the financing, government would provide a tax credit equal to 82% of the equity amount. This would lower the cost of financing the project by 18 to 20%.
These tax credits offered by the government would be repaid from the incremental tax revenues that result project construction in a design that results in revenue neutrality. Two identifiable revenue streams for repayment are critical here. (1) the tax revenues from additional wage income, and (2) the tax revenues from additional contractor profits”
At heart, this is all bullshit. What is essentially being put forward is a massive tax credit for any private entity that invests in any sort of loosely defined ‘infrastructure’ work. Public-private partnerships in infrastructure development are an established concept in some nations, however the fundamental incentive of the private investment is the profitable rate of return, which is why these projects tend to be limited to public transportation, toll roads or other like-facilities which can be operated at a price to the consumer. If there isn’t a long term return on an investment, it’s simply not going to happen.
And this is where the Ross-Navarro plan is exposed. Not a single bridge will be restored, street paved or water pipe repaired under this proposal, because private capital is not going to find a way to make a return on funding that.
What this plan does do is make construction costs potentially significantly cheaper for the very people who designed it- for example an energy company could get a tax break on building an oil or gas pipeline. Who’s the kind of person who would stand to benefit from something like that? Wilbur Ross is one, as an investor in a number of energy companies.
The details of Trump’s policies on energy and the environment are better publicized, yet still poorly defined. He has consistently pledged to support fossil fuels and to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. The removal of any mention of climate change from the White House website is a potential sign of things to come. This rhetoric, from an environmental perspective, is deeply concerning in of itself. But what is truly terrifying is the extent to which Trump appears intent on dismantling the existing framework of environmental protections and climate regulations. The President has surrounded himself with climate deniers and people who would otherwise benefit from a lack of environmental regulation.
The man who oversaw his EPA transition, Myron Ebell, was not someone from any environmental background but was a climate skeptic who worked at a libertarian think tank funded by energy companies. News out of that period relating to environmental matters was concerning, with transition officials ominously asked the Energy Department for a list of employees who had worked on climate change issues, as well as reports that EPA scientists were desperately copying climate data in anticipation of its disappearance.
Given everything, it was no surprise then that Trump’s choice of Administrator of the EPA was not only a climate skeptic but also a fossil fuels goon. As Attorney-General of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt was one of the most stringent opponents of the Obama Administration’s environmental policies, suing the EPA in his capacity as Attorney-General 14 times. Nearly half of all donations to his Super PACs came from the energy industry, which is not necessarily surprising considering Oklahoma is a state reliant on oil and gas exploration. However, the relationship between Pruitt and the energy industry does not end there.
In 2014, the New York Times reported that Pruitt had helped form a secretive alliance between energy firms and Republican attorneys-general to oppose environmental regulations introduced by President Obama.
“But the attorneys general are also working collectively…never before have attorneys general joined on this scale with corporate interests to challenge Washington and file lawsuits in federal court.
Out of public view, corporate representatives and attorneys general are coordinating legal strategy and other efforts to fight federal regulations, according to a review of thousands of emails and court documents and dozens of interviews.”
Pruitt sent letters drafted by energy lobbyists to the EPA, Interior Department and other agencies and joined energy companies as plaintiffs in suits against the federal government. He essentially used the position of Attorney-General to become the courtroom lawyer of the energy industry, a true merging of corporate and political interests in the state of Oklahoma. Now with Trump appointing Pruitt as head of the body he for years fought against, the policy implications are as awful as might be suspected.
Trump’s plans to destroy environmental protections directly benefit the fossil fuels industry and in turn harm pretty much everyone else. During his confirmation hearing, Pruitt confirmed his intentions with regards to key policies. The Clean Power Plan, Obama’s initiative to limit carbon emissions will almost certainly be scrapped (Pruitt sued the federal government over this). Although directly contrary to statements made by Trump on the campaign trail, clean water regulations are also now expected to be rolled back. The so-called “Waters of the United States” rule introduced by the EPA in 2015 extended the application of the Clean Water Act 1977 to include streams that flow into navigable rivers and wetlands near said streams and rivers. Pruitt opposed the introduction of this rule at the time, as did a number of anti-environment activists, including Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who wrote that the rule was an “unprecedented power grab” and “twists the plain language of the Clean Water Act”. The Competitive Enterprise Institute was the same think tank that Myron Ebell worked at before joining Trump’s EPA transition.
Indeed, Scott Pruitt has a history of opposing federal clean water enforcement. After large amounts of chicken manure from corporate poultry farms began polluting the Illinois River, Pruitt’s main priority was adding Oklahoma to a lawsuit by several corporate agriculture lobby groups against the EPA over their enforcement of regulations against this.
Reducing clean water protections has no positive outcomes for residents, users of waterways or for the environment. It does benefit corporate farms, heavy industry, mining and oil and gas exploration. As does abolishing the Clean Power Plan and withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, further removing regulation on the ability of companies to pollute and damage the environment.
And the extent to which energy companies will be able to damage the environment will not only be aided by lax regulations, it will be accelerated by the policies of the Trump Administration. Trump proudly signaled his pro-fossil fuels exploration policies, establishing them as a key plank in his Make America Great Again platform. His policies vary in their amount of detail- the only substance to his vague promises to bring back coal is ending a moratorium on leasing federal coal reserves, a measure that might give a temporary reprieve to what is and what will remain a dying industry.
It is the oil and gas industries that will see the biggest boost under the new administration. Trump has already approved the construction of the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines. Presumably other such projects will be readily approved down the track, without serious regard for environmental safety or the safety of residents. He has promised to oversee an expansion of fracking (the kind of practice that would particularly benefit from weakened clean water rules).
Montana congressman Ryan Zinke, the President’s Secretary of the Interior nominee, has indicated his opposition to handing federal lands in the American West to the states, a stance Trump at one point agreed with on the campaign trail. However, Zinke has expressed full support for expansion of energy exploration activity in federal lands. Nonetheless, many congressional Republicans remain committed to the idea of handing off these lands and if Trump were to in the future see that such a move was in the best interests of his friends in fossil fuels, there’s no reason to necessarily believe he wouldn’t support it.
A huge amount of federal land- 90% according to one analysis by the Wilderness Society, is at least technically open to oil and gas leasing. The ways that the Trump Administration could attempt to expand exploration include smaller measures such as speeding up permit procedures and reducing regulations (and presumably reducing environmental protection in the process), or could involve opening up land that was previously not available for leasing.
One proposal in that vein was to privatize Indian reservations, opening them up to oil and gas exploration. One analysis suggests as much as a fifth of the United States’ oil and gas reserves could sit under reservations. This proposal, which has not been adopted as policy, would cause huge controversy among Native Americans, who would be rightfully concerned about its implications for sovereignty over their land. On the whole, Trump’s plans for energy are far from concrete. What is clear is that none of this will create a significant amount of jobs; energy is a high skilled industry that in reality employs relatively few people. It’s not even certain that these ideas would significantly increase the profits of energy companies, as after all market forces remain the largest determining factor in that regard. But if they did, it would be to the benefit only of the executives and shareholders, at the risk of huge environmental damage and little return for the American people.
And more than one of those executives are now taking key positions in the federal government. Trump’s new Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is the former CEO of ExxonMobil. He immediately has a conflict of interest of his own, namely the decision on whether to continue with sanctions on Russia, sanctions which squandered a deal between his company and Russian state oil company Rosneft over Arctic exploration. If Trump decides to remove sanctions, as he has remained open to doing, ExxonMobil stands to make millions.
Wilbur Ross is another one of these wealthy businesspeople now at the heart of decision making. As Secretary of Commerce, Ross will oversee a federal department with wide-ranging responsibilities that overlap with a large part of Ross’s business interests. ProPublica wrote on how early into the Trump Administration, the Department of Commerce will be making decisions that have a direct impact on businesses that Ross is involved in. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel producer, is due to face a decision about unfair pricing practices relating to steel imports from European nations. Ross has sat on the board of ArcelorMittal for a number of years and until recently retained a stake in the company. The Secretary obviously does not make the decision himself, but he nonetheless could use his new position to impact its outcome.
Ross has mostly agreed to personally divest himself from over 80 companies and funds, yet in his expanded role as Commerce Secretary (Ross is expected to be key to Trump’s trade policy), it cannot be reasonably expected that he will do anything other than favor the companies and industries that he is closest to, as the policy papers he has published seem to indicate. Indeed, even by selling those assets Ross (as do other wealthy cabinet nominees) stands to make potentially hundreds of millions in so-called ‘certificates of divestiture’, which allow Cabinet nominees to avoid capital gains tax on the required divestment of assets.
While Wilbur Ross was forced to undergo divestment in order to get through confirmation, some appointees are luckier. Carl Icahn, also an investment magnate with significant interests in energy, has been chosen by Trump to be his ‘Special Adviser on Regulatory Reform’. As this is not an ‘official government position’ and is unpaid, there are no conflicts of interest standards applied to Icahn, who could simply advise Trump to cut regulations he feels impact the performance of his businesses. Icahn was floated during the campaign a potential Secretary of the Treasury nominee, a position that eventually went to Steven Mnuchin, who during his time at OneWest bank oversaw the foreclosure of 36,000 homes. Mnuchin conveniently forgot to mention on his Senate confirmation ethics forms that he is also the manager of a fund registered in the noted tax haven the Cayman Islands. Then there’s Tom Price, who as a Congressman engaged in insider trading by investing in healthcare companies before introducing legislation that would impact their stock price. He’s now nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Yet none of this compares to the potential conflicts of interest that surround the President himself. In spite of the disagreement of ethics experts, Trump insists that handing off the running of his sprawling business to his children is enough to deal with potential conflicts of interest. Importantly though, he has not actually sold the business, nor has he produced any actual evidence that his various stock holdings have been either divested or placed in a blind trust. At the press conference he held to announce his future financial arrangements, the folders of ‘documents’ that were brought out were actually just blank white sheets of paper.
Not only is there something uniquely dystopian about having the serving President’s name placed at the front of properties across America and the world, there is also an underlying ethical issue. Some believe that Trump’s ownership of these properties presents a violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which states that government officials may not “accept of any present, Emolument, Office or Title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince or foreign state”. Something as simple as a foreign delegation staying at one of his hotels, or a foreign company renting space at one of his properties could be enough to curry favor with this President.
Apparently, Trump has no qualms about these conflicts. Not long after getting elected, Trump was allegedly using his official phone calls with leaders in Argentina and Turkey to advocate for building projects that bear his name. The projects in Buenos Aires and Istanbul have since been approved for construction, although Trump and officials in those respective countries insist it’s nothing but coincidence.
Trump also seemingly has no qualms about cash-for-access schemes. By declaring that Mar-a-Lago would be his ‘winter White House’ while simultaneously doubling the initiation fee for his club there to $200,000, the implications are obvious. Nor does he have any issue advertising for people who donated to his campaign on his Twitter, even if those donations violate FEC rules.
Something that is fascinating to look at is Trump’s stock portfolio. As of his last FEC filing, Trump had wide ranging investments in numerous large and unethical corporations. These include big Wall Street banks such JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Big pharma companies, which have profited off of the opiate crisis sweeping rural America, also feature.
Trump also owns stock in multinational oil companies such as Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil. Trump’s stocks also include Phillips 66, which jointly owns the Dakota Access pipeline project and TransCanada, which owns the Keystone XL pipeline.
With Trump having made no real apparent effort to sell off these assets, it is clear that he personally has a financial stake in his administration’s pro-fossil fuels policies. The Keystone XL pipeline, which will profit a Canadian company, would also personally profit the President of the United States.
And perhaps the most obvious area where Trump the property developer may benefit from direct government decision making is housing policy. His nominee for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, has not only expressed his belief that public housing should not exist, but has explicitly refused to rule out the possibility that HUD decisions could go to benefit Trump or his friends in the real estate industry. One Trump investment that already receives HUD funds is Starrett City in Brooklyn, a 5581-unit low income housing development. It would not be unprecedented for HUD money to be used in this manner. The Reagan Administration was caught out rigging grants and using HUD federal assistance funds to reward supporters and allies. Upon refusing to rule out the potential for something like this happening again, Republican Senators merely praised Carson for his ‘honesty’.
All of this is compounded by two disastrous tax plan proposals from Trump and from Paul Ryan. Both are on the surface designed to ‘simplify’ the tax code, by reducing the number of tax brackets from 7 to 3. In reality, all this does is give a massive cut to the wealthiest earners, a 14% cut under the Trump plan. While Trump talked about income tax cuts for the middle class on the campaign trail, middle income earners would see a cut of just 2%, and lower income earners would see their tax rate rise. The result will be a large drop in federal budget revenue, which presumably will occur alongside large spending cuts. It’s the rich taking from the poor to give to the rich.
Corporate interests and political interests have always been ludicrously close in the United States, but never before have they reached such a level of proximity. As Trump settles into the Presidency, America stands at the precipice of a new era. Massive corruption disguised as ‘Making America Great Again’ will be a hallmark of the new administration. With a Congress seemingly unable or unwilling to act and a news media increasingly less interested in real research and more interested in partisanship and sensationalism, the important ethical questions about the administration remain unasked, let alone unanswered. As those in power now seek to more blatantly ransack the nation than ever before, the onus on everyone now is one of constant vigilance.
The definition of ransacking is ‘to go through a place stealing things and causing damage’. With Donald Trump now sitting in the Oval Office, it is has become increasingly clear that his Administration has every intent to pillage America for the benefit of its friends and allies.
While attention has been paid to Trump’s many wide ranging conflicts of interest, relatively little scrutiny has been paid to the disturbing policy agenda that is being set out by Trump’s allies and appointees. When coupled with the various ethical conflicts that the President and some of these appointees bring, it paints a far deeper and more dangerous underlying picture of the new government than most anticipated.
Commerce Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross stands with Donald Trump.
During the course of the campaign, Trump ran as the outsider to the establishment and railed against ‘Crooked’ Hillary Clinton for her Wall Street links and her supposed corruption. Why the Democratic Party let a tax avoiding, union busting billionaire from Manhattan get away without any real equivalent scrutiny will be a mystery that stands the test of time, but it helped contribute to his victory.
Trump’s platform was always heavy on rhetoric and light on detail. Nonetheless the details that have become available, as well as the nominations Trump has made during the transition, all indicate that the Trump presidency will be a massive coup for big business, particularly fossil fuels energy, Trump’s allies and potentially Trump himself. This is not in of itself a surprise, but the extent to which these forces now directly control the government was largely not anticipated and is potentially unprecedented.
Many of the policies proposed by Trump during the campaign are significantly different in detail to what was promoted, and/or are directly and solely beneficial to industries and people close to and involved in the new administration.
Much emphasis has been placed on Trump’s highly talked up trillion-dollar plan to restore America’s crumbling infrastructure. Democratic leaders have signaled a willingness to work with Trump on this issue. Indeed, it has been speculated that President Trump would find congressional Republicans more difficult to work with on this particular policy area. But there has been very little actual scrutiny of what the actual details of his plan might be, which is especially concerning since what has been uncovered is alarming.
In October Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, both now Trump appointees, published a paper detailing how Trump’s infrastructure proposal would work. The plan is radically different to what many envisaged it would be. In fact, it’s largely bunkum.
“The Trump infrastructure plan features a major private sector, revenue neutral option to help finance a significant share of the nation’s infrastructure needs. For infrastructure construction to be financeable privately, it needs a revenue stream from which to pay operating costs, the interest and the principal on the debt and the dividends on the equity.
To encourage investors to commit such large amounts and to reduce the cost of the financing, government would provide a tax credit equal to 82% of the equity amount. This would lower the cost of financing the project by 18 to 20%.
These tax credits offered by the government would be repaid from the incremental tax revenues that result project construction in a design that results in revenue neutrality. Two identifiable revenue streams for repayment are critical here. (1) the tax revenues from additional wage income, and (2) the tax revenues from additional contractor profits”
At heart, this is all bullshit. What is essentially being put forward is a massive tax credit for any private entity that invests in any sort of loosely defined ‘infrastructure’ work. Public-private partnerships in infrastructure development are an established concept in some nations, however the fundamental incentive of the private investment is the profitable rate of return, which is why these projects tend to be limited to public transportation, toll roads or other like-facilities which can be operated at a price to the consumer. If there isn’t a long term return on an investment, it’s simply not going to happen.
And this is where the Ross-Navarro plan is exposed. Not a single bridge will be restored, street paved or water pipe repaired under this proposal, because private capital is not going to find a way to make a return on funding that.
What this plan does do is make construction costs potentially significantly cheaper for the very people who designed it- for example an energy company could get a tax break on building an oil or gas pipeline. Who’s the kind of person who would stand to benefit from something like that? Wilbur Ross is one, as an investor in a number of energy companies.
The details of Trump’s policies on energy and the environment are better publicized, yet still poorly defined. He has consistently pledged to support fossil fuels and to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. The removal of any mention of climate change from the White House website is a potential sign of things to come. This rhetoric, from an environmental perspective, is deeply concerning in of itself. But what is truly terrifying is the extent to which Trump appears intent on dismantling the existing framework of environmental protections and climate regulations. The President has surrounded himself with climate deniers and people who would otherwise benefit from a lack of environmental regulation.
The man who oversaw his EPA transition, Myron Ebell, was not someone from any environmental background but was a climate skeptic who worked at a libertarian think tank funded by energy companies. News out of that period relating to environmental matters was concerning, with transition officials ominously asked the Energy Department for a list of employees who had worked on climate change issues, as well as reports that EPA scientists were desperately copying climate data in anticipation of its disappearance.
Given everything, it was no surprise then that Trump’s choice of Administrator of the EPA was not only a climate skeptic but also a fossil fuels goon. As Attorney-General of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt was one of the most stringent opponents of the Obama Administration’s environmental policies, suing the EPA in his capacity as Attorney-General 14 times. Nearly half of all donations to his Super PACs came from the energy industry, which is not necessarily surprising considering Oklahoma is a state reliant on oil and gas exploration. However, the relationship between Pruitt and the energy industry does not end there.
In 2014, the New York Times reported that Pruitt had helped form a secretive alliance between energy firms and Republican attorneys-general to oppose environmental regulations introduced by President Obama.
“But the attorneys general are also working collectively…never before have attorneys general joined on this scale with corporate interests to challenge Washington and file lawsuits in federal court.
Out of public view, corporate representatives and attorneys general are coordinating legal strategy and other efforts to fight federal regulations, according to a review of thousands of emails and court documents and dozens of interviews.”
Pruitt sent letters drafted by energy lobbyists to the EPA, Interior Department and other agencies and joined energy companies as plaintiffs in suits against the federal government. He essentially used the position of Attorney-General to become the courtroom lawyer of the energy industry, a true merging of corporate and political interests in the state of Oklahoma. Now with Trump appointing Pruitt as head of the body he for years fought against, the policy implications are as awful as might be suspected.
Trump’s plans to destroy environmental protections directly benefit the fossil fuels industry and in turn harm pretty much everyone else. During his confirmation hearing, Pruitt confirmed his intentions with regards to key policies. The Clean Power Plan, Obama’s initiative to limit carbon emissions will almost certainly be scrapped (Pruitt sued the federal government over this). Although directly contrary to statements made by Trump on the campaign trail, clean water regulations are also now expected to be rolled back. The so-called “Waters of the United States” rule introduced by the EPA in 2015 extended the application of the Clean Water Act 1977 to include streams that flow into navigable rivers and wetlands near said streams and rivers. Pruitt opposed the introduction of this rule at the time, as did a number of anti-environment activists, including Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who wrote that the rule was an “unprecedented power grab” and “twists the plain language of the Clean Water Act”. The Competitive Enterprise Institute was the same think tank that Myron Ebell worked at before joining Trump’s EPA transition.
Indeed, Scott Pruitt has a history of opposing federal clean water enforcement. After large amounts of chicken manure from corporate poultry farms began polluting the Illinois River, Pruitt’s main priority was adding Oklahoma to a lawsuit by several corporate agriculture lobby groups against the EPA over their enforcement of regulations against this.
Reducing clean water protections has no positive outcomes for residents, users of waterways or for the environment. It does benefit corporate farms, heavy industry, mining and oil and gas exploration. As does abolishing the Clean Power Plan and withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, further removing regulation on the ability of companies to pollute and damage the environment.
And the extent to which energy companies will be able to damage the environment will not only be aided by lax regulations, it will be accelerated by the policies of the Trump Administration. Trump proudly signaled his pro-fossil fuels exploration policies, establishing them as a key plank in his Make America Great Again platform. His policies vary in their amount of detail- the only substance to his vague promises to bring back coal is ending a moratorium on leasing federal coal reserves, a measure that might give a temporary reprieve to what is and what will remain a dying industry.
It is the oil and gas industries that will see the biggest boost under the new administration. Trump has already approved the construction of the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines. Presumably other such projects will be readily approved down the track, without serious regard for environmental safety or the safety of residents. He has promised to oversee an expansion of fracking (the kind of practice that would particularly benefit from weakened clean water rules).
Montana congressman Ryan Zinke, the President’s Secretary of the Interior nominee, has indicated his opposition to handing federal lands in the American West to the states, a stance Trump at one point agreed with on the campaign trail. However, Zinke has expressed full support for expansion of energy exploration activity in federal lands. Nonetheless, many congressional Republicans remain committed to the idea of handing off these lands and if Trump were to in the future see that such a move was in the best interests of his friends in fossil fuels, there’s no reason to necessarily believe he wouldn’t support it.
A huge amount of federal land- 90% according to one analysis by the Wilderness Society, is at least technically open to oil and gas leasing. The ways that the Trump Administration could attempt to expand exploration include smaller measures such as speeding up permit procedures and reducing regulations (and presumably reducing environmental protection in the process), or could involve opening up land that was previously not available for leasing.
One proposal in that vein was to privatize Indian reservations, opening them up to oil and gas exploration. One analysis suggests as much as a fifth of the United States’ oil and gas reserves could sit under reservations. This proposal, which has not been adopted as policy, would cause huge controversy among Native Americans, who would be rightfully concerned about its implications for sovereignty over their land. On the whole, Trump’s plans for energy are far from concrete. What is clear is that none of this will create a significant amount of jobs; energy is a high skilled industry that in reality employs relatively few people. It’s not even certain that these ideas would significantly increase the profits of energy companies, as after all market forces remain the largest determining factor in that regard. But if they did, it would be to the benefit only of the executives and shareholders, at the risk of huge environmental damage and little return for the American people.
And more than one of those executives are now taking key positions in the federal government. Trump’s new Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is the former CEO of ExxonMobil. He immediately has a conflict of interest of his own, namely the decision on whether to continue with sanctions on Russia, sanctions which squandered a deal between his company and Russian state oil company Rosneft over Arctic exploration. If Trump decides to remove sanctions, as he has remained open to doing, ExxonMobil stands to make millions.
Wilbur Ross is another one of these wealthy businesspeople now at the heart of decision making. As Secretary of Commerce, Ross will oversee a federal department with wide-ranging responsibilities that overlap with a large part of Ross’s business interests. ProPublica wrote on how early into the Trump Administration, the Department of Commerce will be making decisions that have a direct impact on businesses that Ross is involved in. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel producer, is due to face a decision about unfair pricing practices relating to steel imports from European nations. Ross has sat on the board of ArcelorMittal for a number of years and until recently retained a stake in the company. The Secretary obviously does not make the decision himself, but he nonetheless could use his new position to impact its outcome.
Ross has mostly agreed to personally divest himself from over 80 companies and funds, yet in his expanded role as Commerce Secretary (Ross is expected to be key to Trump’s trade policy), it cannot be reasonably expected that he will do anything other than favor the companies and industries that he is closest to, as the policy papers he has published seem to indicate. Indeed, even by selling those assets Ross (as do other wealthy cabinet nominees) stands to make potentially hundreds of millions in so-called ‘certificates of divestiture’, which allow Cabinet nominees to avoid capital gains tax on the required divestment of assets.
While Wilbur Ross was forced to undergo divestment in order to get through confirmation, some appointees are luckier. Carl Icahn, also an investment magnate with significant interests in energy, has been chosen by Trump to be his ‘Special Adviser on Regulatory Reform’. As this is not an ‘official government position’ and is unpaid, there are no conflicts of interest standards applied to Icahn, who could simply advise Trump to cut regulations he feels impact the performance of his businesses. Icahn was floated during the campaign a potential Secretary of the Treasury nominee, a position that eventually went to Steven Mnuchin, who during his time at OneWest bank oversaw the foreclosure of 36,000 homes. Mnuchin conveniently forgot to mention on his Senate confirmation ethics forms that he is also the manager of a fund registered in the noted tax haven the Cayman Islands. Then there’s Tom Price, who as a Congressman engaged in insider trading by investing in healthcare companies before introducing legislation that would impact their stock price. He’s now nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Yet none of this compares to the potential conflicts of interest that surround the President himself. In spite of the disagreement of ethics experts, Trump insists that handing off the running of his sprawling business to his children is enough to deal with potential conflicts of interest. Importantly though, he has not actually sold the business, nor has he produced any actual evidence that his various stock holdings have been either divested or placed in a blind trust. At the press conference he held to announce his future financial arrangements, the folders of ‘documents’ that were brought out were actually just blank white sheets of paper.
Not only is there something uniquely dystopian about having the serving President’s name placed at the front of properties across America and the world, there is also an underlying ethical issue. Some believe that Trump’s ownership of these properties presents a violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which states that government officials may not “accept of any present, Emolument, Office or Title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince or foreign state”. Something as simple as a foreign delegation staying at one of his hotels, or a foreign company renting space at one of his properties could be enough to curry favor with this President.
Apparently, Trump has no qualms about these conflicts. Not long after getting elected, Trump was allegedly using his official phone calls with leaders in Argentina and Turkey to advocate for building projects that bear his name. The projects in Buenos Aires and Istanbul have since been approved for construction, although Trump and officials in those respective countries insist it’s nothing but coincidence.
Trump also seemingly has no qualms about cash-for-access schemes. By declaring that Mar-a-Lago would be his ‘winter White House’ while simultaneously doubling the initiation fee for his club there to $200,000, the implications are obvious. Nor does he have any issue advertising for people who donated to his campaign on his Twitter, even if those donations violate FEC rules.
Something that is fascinating to look at is Trump’s stock portfolio. As of his last FEC filing, Trump had wide ranging investments in numerous large and unethical corporations. These include big Wall Street banks such JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Big pharma companies, which have profited off of the opiate crisis sweeping rural America, also feature.
Trump also owns stock in multinational oil companies such as Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil. Trump’s stocks also include Phillips 66, which jointly owns the Dakota Access pipeline project and TransCanada, which owns the Keystone XL pipeline.
With Trump having made no real apparent effort to sell off these assets, it is clear that he personally has a financial stake in his administration’s pro-fossil fuels policies. The Keystone XL pipeline, which will profit a Canadian company, would also personally profit the President of the United States.
And perhaps the most obvious area where Trump the property developer may benefit from direct government decision making is housing policy. His nominee for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, has not only expressed his belief that public housing should not exist, but has explicitly refused to rule out the possibility that HUD decisions could go to benefit Trump or his friends in the real estate industry. One Trump investment that already receives HUD funds is Starrett City in Brooklyn, a 5581-unit low income housing development. It would not be unprecedented for HUD money to be used in this manner. The Reagan Administration was caught out rigging grants and using HUD federal assistance funds to reward supporters and allies. Upon refusing to rule out the potential for something like this happening again, Republican Senators merely praised Carson for his ‘honesty’.
All of this is compounded by two disastrous tax plan proposals from Trump and from Paul Ryan. Both are on the surface designed to ‘simplify’ the tax code, by reducing the number of tax brackets from 7 to 3. In reality, all this does is give a massive cut to the wealthiest earners, a 14% cut under the Trump plan. While Trump talked about income tax cuts for the middle class on the campaign trail, middle income earners would see a cut of just 2%, and lower income earners would see their tax rate rise. The result will be a large drop in federal budget revenue, which presumably will occur alongside large spending cuts. It’s the rich taking from the poor to give to the rich.
Corporate interests and political interests have always been ludicrously close in the United States, but never before have they reached such a level of proximity. As Trump settles into the Presidency, America stands at the precipice of a new era. Massive corruption disguised as ‘Making America Great Again’ will be a hallmark of the new administration. With a Congress seemingly unable or unwilling to act and a news media increasingly less interested in real research and more interested in partisanship and sensationalism, the important ethical questions about the administration remain unasked, let alone unanswered. As those in power now seek to more blatantly ransack the nation than ever before, the onus on everyone now is one of constant vigilance.
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