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Watchdog Aims to Track Army of 'Self-Enriching Grifters' Slated to Join Trump's Cabinet
"The man who once said he was going to drain the swamp is instead flooding it."
Nov 19, 2024
As U.S. President-elect Donald Trump continues to select Cabinet picks for his second administration—and at least one is facing headwinds to confirmation despite a Republican-controlled Senate—the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen Tuesday unveiled a new resource to keep tabs on potential conflicts of interest among Trump's appointees.
"Like the first Trump administration, this administration appears ready to staff critical government posts with as many corporate lackeys and self-enriching grifters as they can hire," said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen.
The group's other co-president, Robert Weissman, said that"Donald Trump may have run for office pretending he was going to advocate for regular people, but his appointments show in reality he’s planning to govern, again, on behalf of the corporate class."
"The man who once said he was going to drain the swamp is instead flooding it," Weissman added.
Trump has already chosen many of the individuals he would like to serve in his Cabinet and other senior positions. On Tuesday he picked Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician and TV personality known as Dr. Oz, to helm the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Other high profile picks include nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a once prominent environmental lawyer who has spread false claims about vaccines—to head the Department of Health and Human Services, and selecting prominent Trump donor and the world's richest man Elon Musk to oversee a yet-to-be-created government agency devoted to slashing government spending and federal regulation. Musk will oversee that agency, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.
Public Citizen's tracker so far details information for nine appointees, a list that "includes both Cabinet-level positions and other political appointments, many of which do not require Senate confirmation," according to a statement from the group. The tracker will be updated regularly and includes where the individual worked previously and former clients and/or business interests.
Sean Duffy, Trump's pick for transportation secretary, previously worked for the lobbying firm BGR Group, according to the tracker, where he lobbied on behalf coalition that included multiple airlines.
The group also details the past work of Susie Wiles, Trump's selection for chief of staff. Wiles has been a registered lobbyist on behalf of dozens of clients, including a tobacco company "that sought to block federal health restrictions on its candy-flavored cigars" and on behalf of a mining company "that wants to eliminate federal opposition to its plan to dig a massive mine in a pristine watershed," according to additional information on Wiles provided by Public Citizen that is linked in the tracker.
"As chief of staff, she'll be in a position to influence permits, approvals, and contracts that her former lobbying clients paid her to lobby for," according to the tracker.
The tracker notes that Musk's former clients and business interests include "himself" and the companies he owns, several of which are currently under federal probe. According to a longer briefing on Musk by Public Citizen, at least three of the entrepreneur's companies are currently under scrutiny for alleged misconduct by at least nine federal agencies. According to a pre-election breakdown by The New York Times, Musk's companies were "promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies." Both the probes and the contracts underscore Musk's exposure to a federal government that he is slated to play a key role in.
Musk has framed his quest to curb government regulation as existential. "Unless Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulations (that have nothing to do with safety!), humanity will never reach Mars," he wrote on X in early October.
After Trump's victory earlier this month, legendary consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who founded Public Citizen but hasn't been formally involved with the group for decades, warned of Musk's influence.
"Get ready this January for chaos, revenge, greed, rampant abuses of power, and the unbridled control of corrupt plutocrats and oligarchs," Nader wrote. "With Elon Musk in the lead."
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It's Not Too Late for Democrats to Ditch Cowardice
Harris has learned little from Hillary Clinton’s disastrous loss to Trump in 2016. Bernie Sanders has shown the party what it looks like to champion working-class politics over corporate interests and an imperial foreign policy.
Nov 02, 2024
Over the years, the Democratic Party’s blunders, arrogance and dependence on commercial campaign money and corporate-conflicted political/media consultants have put the two-party duopoly races for the Presidency, the Senate and the House next week into razor-thin elections.
The polls show Democrats in neck-and-neck races with the worst GOP since its creation in 1854. The GOP is led by a delusionary, daily lying, violence-inciting, bigoted, misogynist, serial election denier, convicted felon, and wannabe dictator, Donald Trump, who can’t process information but has openly boasted that he knows more than everybody.
The Party of the Donkey deteriorated years ago and opened the door to unnecessary close cliff-hanger elections. The Dems wrote off nearly half of the country (the red states) to the Republicans. This abandonment included the prairie states (North and South Dakota) and the mountain states that used to have many Democratic Senators. Now they have only three Senators from seven states.
The next Democratic party blunder was not to support the National Popular Vote drive to overcome the Electoral College. (See: nationalpopularvote.com). This is the anachronism that cost the Democrats two presidential losses — one in 2000 and one in 2016 — even though the Democratic presidential candidate handily won the national popular vote.
Third, the Democratic Party decided to robustly compete with the GOP and dial for the same business campaign cash in return for relenting from progressive policies.
Fourth, the Dems lost the gerrymandering drive in 2010 when they were caught napping against a vigorous GOP drive to control key state legislatures like Pennsylvania and get more GOP members in the House of Representatives.
What should the Dems do for the people in the next four days? Bernie Sanders is the most popular elected politician in the country. Why? Because Sanders, two-time presidential candidate, wants social safety net policies that are well received by working families where they live, work, and raise their families. He has urged Kamala Harris to authentically campaign to raise the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour for over 25 million workers, raise Social Security benefits, frozen for over 50 years for over 60 million elderly, and raise taxes on the undertaxed wealthy and big corporations (for a hike supported by 85% of the people.) These three measures also appeal to many self-described conservative voters.
So, what does Harris do? She does not campaign with the popular Bernie. She advertises heavily and campaigns instead with Liz Cheney who supported the war criminals Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush in their criminal invasion and sociocide of Iraq taking over one million innocent Iraqi lives and leaving that country in ruins. Liz Cheney, an avowed Republican opponent of Trump, is also a confirmed corporatist. Forgetting Sanders and heralding Cheney is not the way to turn out low-wage voters who make up a good portion of the expected 85 million eligible non-voters in next Tuesday’s election.
Unable to adjust, the Democratic Party keeps pouring billions of dollars into the same mediocre ads showing Trump to be unfit for office. These repetitive video spots by now have reached diminishing returns, as a vote-getter. Almost everyone has already made up their mind on Trump’s deficiencies.
The ads should shift quickly to overcoming an astonishing amnesia by a majority of voters who think they were better off economically under Trump’s term than under Biden’s. They have forgotten Trump’s closing down any efforts to secure full Medicare for All, enact higher minimum wages, and initiate enforcement efforts against corporate crooks squeezing money from the American people. All the while he was early mocking the oncoming Covid-19 pandemic and calling intense climate catastrophes “a hoax.” His deadly delays regarding Covid led to the preventable loss of some 300,000 American lives and worsened the associated recession. The Democratic Party ads have been largely AWOL on this abysmal record while focusing expensively on Trump personally.
Instead of aligning with worker unions and progressive civic groups working to benefit all people, Harris ogles up to big business bosses, thereby jettisoning media and video opportunities to be with pro-party groups with millions of members.
Harris has learned little from Hillary Clinton’s disastrous loss to Trump in 2016. She continues to be supportive of the U.S. Empire and, despite more dulcet tones, is aligned with Bibi-Biden’s massive weapons and diplomatic engagement with mega-terrorist Netanyahu’s genocide of the Palestinians and now the Lebanese.
She cannot even get herself to propose immediate peace negotiations over the Russian/Ukrainian war bogged down month after month with large casualties on both sides. These stands would separate her a little from Biden which would help identify her as her own person.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, running for the presidency in 1968, declined to break with President Johnson on the Vietnam War. Analysts believe that cost him in the tight race against Richard Nixon because many Democratic voters stayed home.
There is still time to highlight Bernie Sanders’ protections for the people. There is still time to recognize the millions of midnight shift workers who do not see a candidate and would welcome recognition by Democratic candidates – local, state, and national. (See: winningamerica.net/midnightcampaigning).
There is still time to pledge compliance with six federal laws being violated by unconditional weapons shipments to Israel’s war in Palestine. Backed by majority public opinion, she should strongly DEMAND an immediate ceasefire, entry of U.S. humanitarian aid trucks to the starving, dying innocent people of Gaza, and a cessation of the Palestinian Holocaust by the Israeli regime that has already taken at least 400,000 Palestinian lives, mostly children, women and elderly.
If Harris doesn’t advance these policies, she’ll be telling people that she will just be an extension of the Biden presidency. These actions may not be enough to bring out the stay-at-home voters who in the past had voted for the Democratic candidate, but they have a higher probability than just staying the cursed course.
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Biden Stands Aside as Netanyahu Incinerates Gaza, Now Lebanon
Having full U.S. government backing, including weapons and political cover to continue the carnage, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Oct 19, 2024
Biden’s bombs and missiles, dropped daily on Lebanon, a U.S. ally, by his puppet master Netanyahu, is wreaking havoc in this small defenseless country. The Israeli genocidal machine is waging an incinerating assault on fleeing civilians and critical facilities. The scorched-earth Israeli strategy is the same as what we have seen in Gaza. Attack in Lebanon anyone who moves or anything that stands—whether a hospital, a dense residential area, a café, a municipal building, a market, a school, or a Mosque—and allege there was a Hezbollah commander or a Hezbollah site here or there. Two recent New York Times headlines express some of the impact of this latest Israeli war: “In Just a Week, a Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced” and “Lebanon’s Hospitals Buckle Amid an Onslaught: ‘Indiscriminate’ Strikes Overwhelm Health System, U.N. Says.”
Historical note: Hezbollah, also a political party and social service organization, was created to defend impoverished Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon in 1982 right after the Israeli army once again invaded Lebanon and badly mistreated the residents during an 18-year-long military occupation.
No matter what or who the Israeli Air Force’s American F-16 fighter aircraft bomb, no matter the deaths and injuries to thousands of Lebanese families, many of them children and women, Biden keeps unconditionally and savagely shipping weapons of mass destruction. He is violating six federal laws requiring conditions be met—such as not violating human rights or not obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid. Netanyahu is violating these and other conditions and mocking his major benefactor, the United States government.
Israel has long had designs on a slice of Lebanon going up to and including the Litani River area. Water is valuable. Over the years, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese air space, executed incursions into Lebanon and has used forbidden cluster bombs and white phosphorous. According to Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, “It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law.”
The White House knows all this. It doesn’t care. Wherever Israel invades, bombs, assassinates, or boobytraps pagers and walkie-talkies, Bibi-Biden continues his servility to the Israeli terror regime and its genocidal leader Netanyahu, who is despised by three out of four Israelis for his domestic policies and is under indictment by Israeli prosecutors for corruption.
Despite reports that Biden steams in private against Netanyahu, and considers him a liar and a supporter of Trump’s re-election, Biden knows that that this foreign authoritarian has the big card: CONGRESS. Most of the legislators who attended his noxious address to a joint congressional session last June gave him a record-breaking 52 standing ovations. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”
Biden, who is known to conduct foreign and military policy without any authorization by Congress, doesn’t want to offend the powerful “Israel Government Can Do No Wrong” Lobby in the U.S.—to which he has been indentured for his entire 50-year political career. This includes Israel’s current destruction of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Americans are residing. The Washington Post reports that the Biden White House “has so far given full backing to Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, even amid a growing international outcry over the civilian toll … and Israeli clashes with United Nations peacekeepers,” who have been assigned there for decades.
Having full U.S. government backing, and now backed by U.S. warships, Marines and logistics, plus 100 U.S. soldiers arriving this week in Israel, Netanyahu knows he has a free hand to attack Iran and drag the U.S. into a regional war.
Both Netanyahu and Bibi-Biden have been briefed about the possibilities of “blowback” (the CIA’s term) against the U.S. These concerns come from U.S. intelligence agencies who study scenarios like future 9/11s or the recent inexpensive armed drones that can be constructed and deployed anywhere. Militarists and corporatists in the U.S. aren’t that concerned because whenever “blowback” occurs they can concentrate more power, with bigger military budgets and profits, in another “war on terror,” silencing dissent and subordinating or sidelining critical domestic priorities.
That is the lethal fix and fate that America has been subjected to by its cowardly, Constitution-violating politicians from both major parties. The power structure—the corporate state—or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once called in a 1938 message to Congress “fascism,” is telling the American people: “Heads we win, Tails you lose.”
Here is how bad Biden has gotten. Recently, two letters signed by 65 American doctors and health workers back from the horrors, the killing fields of Gaza, to President Joe Biden, have gone unanswered. (See, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza” by Feroze Sidhwa, New York Times on Sunday, October 13, 2024). Their letters plead for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid for the starving, dying people of Gaza. They request a meeting with President Biden, who has often met with the pro-Israeli lobby. Scranton Joe says no way.
These brave physicians and nurses also are requesting that Joe Biden demand that Netanyahu allow children in Gaza who are seriously burned or are amputees be air-lifted to America to be treated by compassionate specialists in ready American hospitals. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has no interest.
President George Washington warned his country about avoiding foreign entanglements in his farewell address. Were he possessed of more prescience; he would have added the word “surrenders.”
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