Trump Administration

Trump Wants To Privatize Air Traffic Control. What Could Go Wrong?

June 12, 2017 Shaun Richman, www.inthesetimes.com Educate! Airport, Donald Trump, New Economy, Trump Administration

By Shaun Richman for In These Times - Promising “cheaper, faster and safer travel,” the Trump administration announced a plan this week to privatize the nation’s air traffic control system. The announcement Monday marked the first day of the administration’s “infrastructure week,” a series of publicity events around one of the only areas of the president’s agenda that has intrigued some union leaders and Democratic legislators. What they had hoped for was an increase in public spending to create good jobs and repair our nation’s transportation systems. What Trump wants is to give public assets away to corporate interests, while reducing pay and benefit standards for workers. The official justification for privatizing air traffic control is to speed the conversion from a radar-based system to a more accurate GPS one. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been converting the system, but it does not anticipate finishing the job until 2020. An actual investment in infrastructure could give the FAA the resources it needs to do it faster, but if Republican politicians have any true religion, it is belief in the magic of the “free” market.

Exxon May Have Erased 7 Years of Tillerson’s ‘Wayne Tracker’ Emails

June 10, 2017 David Hasemyer, www.insideclimatenews.org Resist! Exxon, Trump Administration

By David Hasemyer for Inside Climate News - Up to seven years of emails that former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillersonwrote under the alias "Wayne Tracker" may have been erased, a company witness has told investigators for the New York attorney general. The gap is far longer than the three months Exxon initially reported. The disclosure came from Connie Feinstein, Exxon's information technology security and consulting manager, who was questioned about Tillerson's secret email alias, created in 2007 under the pseudonym "Wayne Tracker." During a daylong question-and-answer session related to the attorney general's investigation into whether Exxon mislead investors about climate change, Feinstein explained under oath both how a computer program allowed for the scrubbing of Tillerson's Wayne Tracker emails and the considerable effort the company put in trying to recover them. A 301-page transcript of the April interview became public last week as part of a batch of documents released by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office. He lodged them in a state court in support of his claim that Exxon's climate accounting was a "sham" under Tillerson, who is now the U.S. secretary of state.

Lawsuits Are Challenging Almost All Trump’s Environmental Offenses

June 7, 2017 Chelsea Harvey, www.fusion.net Resist! Environment, Lawsuit, Trump Administration

By Chelsea Harvey for Fusion - On Thursday, President Trump made international headlines by announcing his intent to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement—a landmark decision that was met with outrage and dismay from climate activists and environmentalists. But while the gesture carries great symbolic significance, signaling the president’s disinterest in international climate efforts, any hope of actually achieving our domestic climate goals pledged under the agreement had already long since vanished. Since January, the Trump administration has taken swift steps to dismantle numerous climate and environmental priorities established under the Obama administration, including the repeal of multiple environmental regulations. And environmentalists are fighting back—by way of the courts, that is. Just about every environment-related action the Trump administration has taken has been met with a legal challenge. Trump is no stranger to litigation—reports suggest he was sued thousands of times as part of his career in real estate before ever becoming president. But since assuming office, he’s also been met with record-setting numbers of legal challenges.

Resist The Duopoly – Because Judas’s Party Can’t Defeat Trump’s

June 7, 2017 Patrick Walker, www.nationofchange.org Strategize! Corporate duopoly, Trump Administration

By Patrick Walker for Nation of Change - As Henry David Thoreau quotably put it, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.” And if mainstream media is any guide, there are many thousands hacking at the branches of the evil Trump administration to none who are striking at its roots. But of course mainstream media, self-censored by the profit-making agendas of its ever-fewer corporate conglomerate owners, never goes to the roots of anything. Least of all does it go to the grassroots, where the only principled resistance to Trump – the only resistance not contaminated by corporate, Deep State, or partisan agendas – actually exists. As members of that grassroots resistance – the only group with a serious, pinpoint diagnosis of the Trump evil – we face a grievous communication problem. But no worse a problem than that faced by Occupy Wall Street when, in the wake of a global financial crisis triggered by a reckless and fraudulent financial system, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Considering we face the same corporate media hurdles, we should also consider the Occupy movement’s incontestable success in propagating its message of class warfare between “the 99% and the 1%” despite those hurdles.

Local Movements Demand Disclosure Of Police Technologies

June 7, 2017 Candice Bernd, www.truth-out.org Resist! Police, Surveillance, Trump Administration

By Candice Bernd for Truthout - President Trump issued a proclamation on May 15 dedicating last week to law enforcement officers, saying he would make it a "personal priority" to ensure police are "finally treated fairly." Meanwhile, around the country, a different set of priorities is taking shape: Cities, counties and even one state are working to push legislation that would force police agencies to disclose their acquisition and use of surveillance technologies to local lawmakers and communities. At least 19 cities have introduced ordinances that would force transparency in local police departments' acquisition and use of secretive surveillance technologies, which are disproportionately used to target communities of color. A statewide bill in Maine, sponsored by State Sen. Shenna Bellows, would take similar steps. The measures being introduced around the country mandate that the acquisition and/or use of local police surveillance tools like "Stingray" cellphone tracking equipment, automated license plate readers, facial recognition technology and closed-circuit television cameras, among other surveillance tools...

Enviros Disrupt Senate Energy Committee For Second Time Over FERC

June 7, 2017 John Zangas, www.dcmediagroup.us Resist! Environment, FERC, Protests, Senate, Trump Administration

By John Zangas for DC Media Group - A group of environmentalists disrupted the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources as it attempted to vote on two key Trump nominees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). It was the second time in two weeks the Senate Committee was disrupted by environmentalists. Three activists representing a coalition of 170 green groups were arrested early Tuesday after interrupting the Committee vote, delaying it for a brief time. Ted Glick and Sid Madison, environmental activists from New Jersey, and Jess Rechtschaffer, an activist from New York, were arrested and charged with incommoding and blocking an exit during a Senate hearing. Glick was also charged with resisting arrest and held overnight and will be arraigned Wednesday. Both Rechtschaffer and Madison paid a $50 post and forfeit fine and were released a short time later. By posting the fine, they admit guilt and avoid a court hearing. The Senate Energy Committee meeting ended after voting 20-3 to forward the nominees anyway. The approvals of Neil Chatterjee and Robert Powelson, who have worked as fossil energy insiders, will come to a full Senate vote.

How The Young Can Save Us

June 5, 2017 Sam Smith, www.samsmitharchives.wordpress.com Create! Trump Administration, Youth

By Sam Smith for Sam Smith Archives - Although Trump has caused a huge amount of trouble in just the few months he has been president, this doesn’t necessarily define the future. As the Review has noted from time to time, failing cultures often raise a lot of hell in their declining years, witness the Indian ghost dance cult or the segregationists fighting civil rights in the South. But history is not defined by noise but by change and the latter can often be inevitable despite the former. Thus, while there are reasons to believe that the Trump regime represents a move toward fascism, an alternative argument is that Trump, in his extraordinary combination of mental instability and incompetence, signifies the collapse of the powerful corporatist model of recent decades. What will determine how this comes out will be not just how well the Trump madness is handled by the rest of the country, but whether the young seize this time to redefine American politics as was done by the Populists in Reconstruction, the Progressives of the early 20th century, the New Deal/Great Society Democrats and the 1960s rebels. There is no doubt but that America’s initial acceptance of Trump was due in no small part to age.

Paris Is Burning

June 5, 2017 James P. Hare, www.rosalux-nyc.org Educate! Climate Change, Paris, Paris Agreement, Trump Administration

By James P. Hare for Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - With Trump’s decision to formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement, he has put an end to months of apparent indecision. This withdrawal does not dissolve the agreement, which still includes nearly every nation on the planet, but it is hard to imagine how an already weak agreement can be expected to slow—not to mention reverse—greenhouse gas emissions without the participation of the United States. Seeing this decision as anything other than a nail in the coffin of the global climate regime is nothing but wishful thinking. For an administration that has promoted a seemingly unending series of bad policies—from healthcare to immigration to militarism to the unceasing transfer of wealth from working people to the wealthy—this may be its worst. When future generations look back at the harm done by this president, they may remember this as his greatest crime. This is not to minimize the damage of his other policies or of the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny that drove his campaign and brought him into the White House, but climate change is the ultimate issue. It will affect everyone while exacerbating existing inequalities, and we only have one chance to get it right.

Trump Administration Suppresses CIA Torture Report

June 5, 2017 Andrew Emett, www.nationofchange.org Educate! Censorship, CIA, Torture, Trump Administration

By Andrew Emett for Nation of Change - In yet another reversal of former President Barack Obama’s decisions, the Trump administration has begun returning copies of the 6,700-page CIA torture report in accordance with Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr’s demands. Instead of upholding transparency, Trump has taken steps to erase the human rights violations committed by the Central Intelligence Agency from the annals of history. In December 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the executive summary on the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program. According to the summary, the CIA repeatedly lied to the Committee regarding prisoners’ deaths, the backgrounds of CIA interrogators, threats to detainees’ family members, and the effectiveness of torture. Under pseudonyms within the heavily redacted report, two retired Air Force psychologists, Dr. Bruce Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell, received contracts to develop the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. They decided to reverse-engineer the Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) counter-interrogation training by inflicting both physical and psychological torture upon detainees.

Corbynize This Trumped Up World

June 3, 2017 David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org Create! Trump Administration

By David Swanson for Let's Try Democracy - Making Jeremy Corbyn the Prime Minister of the U.K. would do more for the world and everyone in it than either of the two available outcomes of any recent U.S. election could have done. Here in the U.S. I always protest that I am not against elections, I think we should have one some day. Well, now we have one — only it’s across the pond. Corbyn’s record is no secret, and you don’t need me to tell you, but I have met him and spoken at events with him, and can assure you he’s legitimate. He’s been a dedicated leader of the peace movement right through his career. He had the decency last week to point out yet again that invading and bombing countries and overthrowing governments produces terrorism; it doesn’t somehow reduce it or eliminate it or “fight” it. Britain is the key co-conspirator in U.S. wars. One real-life Love Actually refusal to bow before Emperor Donald, and the facade of super-hero law enforcement will begin to crumble, revealing a rogue serial killer standing naked in his golden hotel suite. The world needs an actual popular elected response to U.S. aggression against the world’s poor and the earth’s climate. A ho-hum housebroken Frenchman who’s not a fascist isn’t the same thing.

Paris Accord Doesn’t Go Far Enough; Pullout Endangers Life

June 2, 2017 Dahr Jamail, www.truth-out.org Educate! Climate Change, Paris Agreement, Trump Administration

By Dahr Jamail for Truthout - A large number of climate experts believe the Paris Climate Accord does not go nearly far enough in addressing the crisis of abrupt anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD). Nevertheless, in what is clearly both a symbolic move and a nod to his fossil fuel backers, Donald Trump will be pulling the US out of the agreement, according to several reports today. The US, along with nearly 200 other countries, agreed to voluntarily reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in 2015. Interestingly, given the ongoing Russia scandal that is plaguing the White House on a daily basis now, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement will make the US and Russia the only industrialized countries that reject taking action to mitigate ACD. Trump has claimed that ACD is a "hoax," despite the fact that 97 percent of the global scientific community agrees that humans are the cause of our warming planet. The majority of the remaining 3 percent of the scientific community has been shown to be taking funding from the fossil fuel industry.

Tillerson Present For Major Exxon Deal With Saudi Arabia

June 1, 2017 Steve Horn, www.desmogblog.com Educate! Exxon, Rex Tillerson, Saudi Arabia, Trump Administration

By Steve Horn for Desmog - During his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump announced an array of economic agreements between the U.S.and the Middle Eastern kingdom, saying it would usher in “jobs, jobs, jobs” for both oil-producing powerhouses. While the $350 billion, 10-year arms deal garnered most headlines, a lesser-noticed agreement was also signed between ExxonMobil and the state-owned Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) to study a proposed co-owned natural gas refinery in the Gulf of Mexico. Under the deal, signed at the Saudi-U.S. CEO Forum, the two companies would “conduct a detailed study of the proposed Gulf Coast Growth Ventures project in Texas and begin planning for front-end engineering and design work” for the 1,300-acre, $10 billion plant set to be located near Corpus Christi, Texas, according to an ExxonMobil press release. In addition, ExxonMobil's press release for the agreement mentions that Darren Woods, the company's CEO, was in the room for the signing of the pact alongside ExxonMobil Saudi Arabia CEO Philippe Ducom and SABIC executives. Missing from that release: After the forum ended, Woods went to the Al-Yamamah Palace for an agreement-signing ceremony attended by both President Trump and recently retired ExxonMobil CEO and current U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson.

Veterans Are Training To “Re-Deploy” To Own Communities To Defend Against Trump’s Attacks

May 30, 2017 Staff, www.other98.com Resist! Trump Administration, Veterans

By Staff of Other 98 “Never have we seen so many veterans wanting to translate the skills to serve frontline communities fighting back against Trump’s destructive platform,” said Matt Howard, a Marine Corps veteran who deployed twice to Iraq. Howard is the Co-Director of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a grassroots organization of post-9/11 active duty service members and veterans. IVAW was originally formed in 2004 as a space for vets to speak out against, and rectify their involvement in, the unpopular and unjust wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the 13 years since IVAW formed, the group has covered a lot of ground, organizing around reparations for Iraq, health care for returning service members, and against the redeployment of vets living with PTSD. Increasingly, IVAW is expanding on what it means to be “anti-war,” by focusing on the root cause of war—militarism—and turning their sights to related symptoms of militarism, including militarized police, Islamophobia, and even climate change. Most recently, IVAW was making headlines for another “deployment:” heading to Standing Rock to support Indigenous water protectors facing violent police repression as they tried to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Thousands of vets showed up, “because we were called,” Howard notes.

6 Things FCC Chairman Doesn’t Want You To Know About Net Neutrality

May 30, 2017 Timothy Karr, www.billmoyers.com Educate! FCC, Net Neutrality, Trump Administration

By Timothy Karr for Bill & Moyers - Under its Trump-annointed chairman, Ajit Pai, the Federal Communications Commission decided last Thursday to revisit its net neutrality ruling. The agency has reopened a docket for public comments on Pai’s proposal to undermine the safeguards needed to protect people from having their internet service providers block, throttle or de-prioritize the online content they want to see. The last time the agency did this, in 2014 and 2015, it unleashed a torrent of public comments in support of the idea that the open internet should have basic protections under the law. Four million people voiced their concerns via the agency’s beleaguered website. The vast majority of these comments supported meaningful net neutrality protections. That’s just what the FCC put in place: It responded to the public outcry and reclassified ISPs like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The 2015 decision was a stunning victory for the public interest. Millions of net neutrality supporters faced down a mighty phone and cable lobby, which had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over a decade to dismantle the one principle that makes the internet a tremendous engine for equal opportunity, democratic access, free speech and economic innovation.

How Compassion Becomes Contempt

May 30, 2017 Sam Pizzigati, www.inequality.org Educate! Budgets, Trump Administration

By Sam Pizzigati for Inequality.org - The assembled scribes, noting the hundreds of billions in cuts for the poor and the vulnerable in the new budget plan, wanted to know if Mulvaney considered his budget compassionate. Mulvaney promptly set about defining “compassion” — in his own terms. We have too many people out there, he told reporters, “who don’t want to work.” “We don’t have enough money,” he then added, “to take care of people who don’t need help.” “We’re no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs,” Mulvaney rolled on, “but by the number of people we help get off of those programs.” And getting folks off “those programs,” the budget chief insisted, would be an act of true compassion. “That,” insisted the White House budget chief, “is how you can help people take charge of their own lives again.” No, countered Massachusetts congressman Jim McGovern, that would be “a lousy and rotten thing to do to poor people.”

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