The Rampant Cynicism at the Heart of the GOP

As we near a potential constitutional crisis over the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, the Republicans are trying to shove through a tax bill that hurts the vast majority of Americans to help a chosen few. Together with earlier failed attempts at healthcare “reform,” their complicity in Trump’s attack on our environment and democracy and the shoving through of cabinet members clearly unqualified to run the agencies they now do, this latest bill lays bare the cynicism at the heart of the Republican party today, not only on the fringes but straight through to the mainstream and even more moderate members.

The bill cuts Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor children and adults, by over $1 trillion over the next 10 years (costing 15 million Americans their insurance). It cuts Medicare, which provides healthcare to the elderly, by $473 billion. And it includes huge cuts to education, nutrition programs, affordable housing and transportation (of approximately $200 billion). And why? To give tax cut to our wealthiest citizens and corporations still hording their record profits, rather than passing them on to their employees. Eighty percent of the cuts go to the top 1 percent of wage earners and a full 40 percent of that to the top 0.1 percent. This includes ending the alternative minimum tax, which will hand $400 billion in tax cuts to that group, and repealing the estate tax yet again (handing $240 billion to the the richest .02%). And it gives another huge handout to corporations (cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 20 percent, which translates to $2 trillion in lost revenue they then have to make up), many that pay little to no taxes to begin with. The middle class? They might actually see a tax rise.

Remember that healthcare bill that would have taken health insurance away from about 32 million Americans and only failed by a single vote? This bill is much worse. It is symptomatic of a party that has ceased to cultivate any new ideas or substantive policies beside lowering taxes on the rich, cutting services to the poor and serving the interests of corporate America, no matter at what cost to the environment, workers, our children or our collective future.

With each of the bills introduced by the Republicans since taking control of all levers of the federal government, there has been an attempt to release the bill’s details in relative secret, avoid the criticism of the media and their constituents by any means necessary and then slip it through, though those efforts have largely failed to date. As with the healthcare bill, which was even less popular, they appear to care little that only 25 percent of Americans support it or that they continue to push an agenda that is detrimental to the average (and majority) of Americans.

One could argue that the Republican party today, with an assist to politicians like the Clintons and other DLCers from the 90s, first cultivated the rampant cynicism that has spread across the country like a plague and are now attempting to capitalize on it to further hurt average Americans, in the process only further propagating that cynicism. This is accomplished through a number of avenues, but the most important might be the uber-partisanship that now reigns in Washington. When they are out of power, they simply block as much of the agenda as possible, and then speak to the fact that nothing is getting done. At the same time, they attack government in general, based on this “policy blockade,” further perpetuating the idea that government can’t solve any of our problems. And they simultaneously attack all of the other social institutional that could hold them accountable for their cynical actions, from the media and universities to our schools and unions.

As a final piece to the puzzle, they play on the fears and anxieties of average Americans, distracting them with fake news (aka propaganda) and conspiracy theories and then stoking the flame of their racism, sexist, homophobia and xenophobia, to avert attention from the real source of so many of the problems in this country – too much economic power in the hands of too few, the continued growth in power and size of our biggest multinational corporations and the dramatic and growing inequality in the country.

“Make America Great Again,” feel more and more like “corporate fascism rocks!”everytime a new policy agenda item comes to light.   

Trump and GOP to America: Democracy is Overrated!

You might have heard that Republicans voted to break 200 years of Senate tradition a couple of weeks ago and changed the rules that uphold our democratic process—simply because Trump’s right-wing Supreme Court Nomination Neil Gorsuch was unable to meet the 60-vote threshold necessary to confirm him. That same Neil Gorsuch, a friend of business and enemy of the vast majority of Americans, used his first act in his new position to allow Arkansas to go forward with an 11-day killing spree in a state that hasn’t executed anyone since 2005; against the advice of advocates across the political spectrum.

It was just the latest example of Republicans placing party over country and Trump over the American people. Apparently, Trump and the GOP are unmoved by the 7 in 10 Americans who opposed a rule change, the over one million citizens who signed petitions to block Gorsuch and the thousands of letters and calls poured into Republican offices (Vox). It didn't matter to them that their constituents took to the streets and passionately rallied in opposition to a Supreme Court nominee that is a threat to our rights.

The most damning example of the GOP’s aversion to the central tenets of democracy is a strategy they have employed since the 1990s, blocking as much of the Democratic agenda as possible when they are out of power, using that gridlock to then win midterm elections (where the GOP generally outperforms its returns in presidential-year elections) and then pushes through their agenda whenever they have the majority. This was true with much of what George Bush did after “winning” the 2000 election, aided by 9/11, and is starting to happen with Trump, though his general

Equally troubling to the future of the country is the advanced gerrymandering the GOP has engaged in for the past couple of decades, seeking to gain dramatic advantages in the electoral map while undermining the minority vote and, by extension, the general will of the people. This effort has only accelerated in recent years and even with some judicial setbacks, they continue to dominate state government and will use that power to skew the political map as much as possible. The simple reality is that Republicans can’t win in a lot of places unless they stack the decks to help them do so, and they are increasingly good at stacking those decks.

A third major area where our democracy is being challenged relates back to Thomas Jefferson and his contention that democracy fails if the populace is not both educated and informed. The “fake news” trend, while not new, has accelerated to the point that the entire Trump administration feels little compunction about lying as the major mode of communication. A new Salon article, in fact, argues they take great pleasure in their constant stream of lies to the media and have no plans to slow down. In an interview just last week, Trump again felt the inconvenient truths are best combatted with outright lies, delivered without even a scintilla of compunction. Of course, most troubling of all is the Russian story that just won’t go away, as hard as some conservative representatives try to quash it.  

Fourth is the continued efforts to undermine the minority vote, with Trump’s fallacious claims of millions of illegal votes tallied in the election emboldening Republicans across the country to institute new voter ID and other requirements that will suppress the democratic vote (as with Iowa  just last week). Republicans have known for some time that they can only win elections if they stop enough people from voting and that was again true this year, when the Democrats won more votes in the Senate, House of Representatives and, of course, Presidential races only to lose all three. Beyond the growing critiques of the Electoral College, which has allowed Republicans to win two races where they lost the popular vote in the past 16 years (and win the popular vote only once since 1988), and the gerrymandering discussed above, is the ways the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been undermined by recent Supreme Court decisions that appear to have < suppressed minority votes > beyond what the popular press reports. As to those claims of illegal voting, North Carolina might serve as a great example of how absurd the charges are, as the State Board of Elections did an extensive, objective audit of the 2016 Election. What did they find? Of the 4.8 million votes counted, exactly one would have been dismissed with the voter ID law State Republicans have been pushing for years (and only failed because it was overturned by a federal appeals court, who said it targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision.”).

And this leads to the final major way that Republicans have undermined popular sovereignty and the will of the people, very effectively utilizing the judiciary to push and solidify their agenda. The seeds of this strategy go back over a century, when the corporation first gained citizen rights. Yet is the 2010 Citizen United decision that has served them so well, their only loss since its inception being the 2012 victory for Obama. In every other election at the local, state and national level, they have made gains, including the victory of a jackass over a flawed, but much more capable alternative. Spending on elections has skyrocketed in the wake of that absurd decision and the super rich like the Koch brothers are not only starting grassroots movements like the Tea Party, but spending big in local races that all but guarantee victory. The record of the two Supreme Court Justices of George Bush and of Gorsuch indicate a turn toward corporate interests that is terrifying to the general public and includes consummate efforts to undermine democracy and labor power at every turn.

As Masha Green warned before Trump even took office, the seeds of autocracy are already present in the U.S. and, most clearly, in the movement Trump leads. The playbook we have seen in the past includes the following elements, which we see beginning to take shape in just the first 100 or so days of the Trump Administration: 1. Use racial/religious animus to cultivate a scapegoat mentality that defers responsibility from those causing economic decline (namely corporations and the one percent our president is an ardent member of), 2. Create a corporate state where the differentiation between government and corporate interests become almost indiscernible (see his cabinet selections so far), 3. Discredit the mainstream media, allowing propaganda to build a mythological reality that serves the leadership and that same corporate state (just check out Trump’s twitter account, or read the news on any given day), 4. Cultivate militarism as ideology, picking fights everywhere to build up a massive military and then use it whenever possible (see the hotspots that could very well lead to World War III under Trump’s watch), and 5. Build a government that serves your interests more than those of the people (too many to mention here, but here are two examples from just today: Emoluments and Gift to Kids).

The Trump presidency has been a disaster and sideshow of missteps and failures so far, but that neither means that he has not had some success in pushing his radical agenda   or that more will not follow. Dramatic tax reform could be on the way, Obamacare is still not safe, the environment is in real trouble at a time when we might be approaching the tipping point to global destruction, war seems more likely with each passing day, corporate interests are trumping the publics in multivariate ways and Trump and his family appear to be enriching themselves on our tab while doing little to keep the promises they made during the campaign (thank god, with many).

In considering the future of our democracy and the long, arduous task to save it from the iniquitous grasp of the GOP and corporate forces that would like to replace it, Green’s six points seem particularly important. To reiterate them here: 1. Believe the autocrat (a point the mainstream media has failed to do from the beginning of his political ascendancy), 2. Do not be taken in by small signs of normality (again, the mainstream media is guilty of this on several occasions since November already), 3. Institutions will not save you (see #1 and #2 above), 4. Be outraged (the good news in this story so far, as the people are making sure their voices are being heard and it’s having an effect), 5. Don’t make compromises (so far the rather craven Democratic Party has largely followed this advice, even as they fail to acknowledge the failings of their leadership and the DLC/Neoliberal model), and 6. Remember the future. We should be emboldened by the resistance so far, but must be vigilant for the entire four years of what one hopes is a one-term president. But we must be equally vigilant against a party who has abandoned any real dedication to the central tenets of democracy and their role in preserving both it and the will of the people. Democracy only works when people fight for it and the threat of its demise is currently staring us in the face.

An American Disgrace: 19 Days of Madness

What a mad, magically horrifying carpet ride it’s been so far. Trump might very well be insane, is certainly showing himself to ill-prepared to lead the country, more interested in watching TV and his own “ratings” than actually helping the people who got him elected and is in the process of installing the most right-wing government in the history of the nation. What more general conclusions can we glean from the first 19 days of Trump-in-Charge?

With the Senate confirmation of Jeff Sessions (The Hill), it appears Conservative America is even more racist than it was in the 1986 and the Republicans plan to capitalize on racial animus among the white working class, and maybe middle class, to levels not fully seen since the Reagan years, if not earlier.

With the confirmation of Betsy Devos yesterday (NYT), they appear to be replacing NCLB with MCLB (many children left behind) and accelerating the insinuation of business interests and market forces into every aspect of our lives.

With the seven-nation immigration ban (Doc Cloud), they are scrapping the very heart of what America stands for - the melting pot moving toward the clam chowder pot – and fulfilling a promise to make America whiter, more Christian and less free. 

With the constant lying and ceaseless attacks on media, judges and really anyone who challenges their newfound power, including protesters in Minnesota (WP, NYT, BBC, Daily Kos), they are condemning not only the first amendment but democracy itself to the dustbin of history. As David Frum argued in the new issue of The Atlantic, the pieces are falling into place for a future American autocracy led by a reality-star billionaire whose sole interests appear to be power, wealth and popularity.

With many of his other cabinet picks, we are being pushed even beyond the radical laissez-faire governance of libertarian-leaning Tea Party apparatchik to one that is only interested in serving the interests of corporations - a further step toward a Russian-style kleptocracy (Vanity Fair). We have the potential to have a labor secretary who hates labor, an EPA head who hates the environment, an Energy secretary who doesn’t believe his department should exist, a head of HUD who knows nothing about housing or urban development and a Secretary of State who has consistently chosen his corporate interests over those of the country, to name but a few.

With the nominations of two architects of the 2008 financial crisis and recent executive order to set the stage for dismantling the Dodd-Frank financial oversight bill (Fortune), they appear to be poised to reward those who got us into that mess and set us on a path toward another financial meltdown. As a reminder, during the campaign, Trump said "I'm not going to let Wall Street get away with murder." But now, he's working to gut the very rules that prevent that from happening and, even more offensively, Trump signed a presidential memorandum last Friday that instructs the Labor Department to delay implementing an Obama-era rule that requires financial professionals who charge commissions to put their clients' best interests first when giving advice on retirement investments. God forbid!

With the sum total of the racist, sexist, Islamophobic, heteronormative, fact-challenged rhetoric and rulings of Trump and the Republican Congress, they are essentially attempting to mainstream the alt-right as a new white-nationalist movement led by the white working class, who will not benefit under this administration's policies, but can express their rage openly and violently. They are attempting to instill fear and hate as the path away from democracy and toward a permanent corporate state.

But that's not it. The Republican-led Congress are poised to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission (Tech Crunch), the very commission charged with protecting voting machines from hacking, by say Russians ... or, I don't know,  the GOP itself. They have already made corporate and individual money easier to siphon to candidates through Citizens United and facilitated voter suppression by stripping the Voting Rights Act of most of its power. Now they are saying "hack us, I dare you." With Session in charge of the Justice Department, gerrymandering set to become even more pronounced with their majority control of state governance, voter suppression on the rise and a firm commitment to avoiding a repeat of the 2012 Presidential Election, where Obama won largely by getting out the minority vote, they can continue to repeat results like 2016 – where Democrats won the majority of votes for the presidency, the Senate and Congress, but lost all three.

These are dangerous times indeed and those who voted for Trump must now answer for the choice they made, and those who didn’t vote at all, for the choice they failed to make. Yet it must be remembered in these dark times, that it was less than one in four Americans who selected these men to lead us and that many more have taken to the streets, the air waves and other channels of dissent to again have their voices heard and their will enacted. The cornerstone of a representative democracy is that the representatives in fact represent the interests of those who have chosen them to rule, a tenet lost in the current, confused maelstrom in which we find ourselves.

P.S. A few other tidbits are worth at least touching on, as they provided further insight into our Commander-and-Thief. Trump broke his own promise of less than a month ago by tweeting an attack on Nordstrom for dropping his daughter's line (NYT), right after a defense briefing he might want to pay attention to after the debacle that was his failed offensive in Yemen (Yahoo). This was a day after he called his defense secretary, of all people, at 3 a.m. to ask an economics question (on a strong versus weak dollar) one assumed he would know, given he made the argument that China has been manipulating our currency for years a centerpiece of his campaign (The Atlantic). And, finally, in maybe the most bizarre of stories within the spectacle-infused, alternate-reality world we have inhabited for 19 days, the USDA quietly took down all of its online information on animal abuse, including puppy breeders that mistreat their dogs (WP). Yeah, why should those upstanding Americans be harassed by government officials … or future dog owners have any sense of where the animals they care for came from?

Despicable Thee: Trump’s Administration in a Nutshell

Trump ran as an outsider candidate who could shake things up in Washington DC. That is certainly turning out to be the case, though he will accomplish it with one of the most radically-right-wing administrations ever, even surpassing those of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Jr. The administration is packed with conspiracy theorists, right wingers, a few alt-righters, billionaires and more corporate lackeys than one might find at Davos most years.

Trump also continues to display the sort of erratic, half-cocked attitude that left so many worrying from the moment we started taking him seriously as a candidate (of course, for some, that was November 9 of last year). In recent weeks, Trump hinted at starting another nuclear arms race for no apparent reason (WP) a trade war with China, though apparently without thinking through even what percentage he wants on his tariff (TPM), and selecting the hardcore China Hawk Peter Navarro as head of the National Trade Council. He has ramped up twitter wars with the intelligence community (Daily Kos), the media (The Independent) and, most recently, Meryl Streep (Time).

Today, in his first news conference (NYT) since well before the election concluded, he finally admitted that Russia was behind the hacking, before claiming hacking isn’t so bad, that maybe others were involved and a host of other hedges. He then added some fun lies and claimed he is too careful to be caught on tape when hanging around hookers in other countries (hoping his constituents had forgotten this moment that should have cost him the office alone: You Tube). And he added that he will not be releasing his tax returns and that “no one cares,” even as 60 percent of Americans believe he, in fact, should make them available for public scrutiny (Politifact).

So while better relations with Russia might be in the offing (The New Yorker), even if they are forced to further stultify economic development to engage in another arms race post-Cold War, China is already feeling beleaguered before Trump even steps into the White House as Commander in Chief. Trump has antagonized a whole host of foreign leaders through twitter and even launched two recent tweets that could, in a worst-case scenario, cease life on this planet. We can only hope our worst fears go unrealized.

So as the confirmation hearings are pushed through by Republicans without the Ethics Office even having time to properly vet candidates and potential conflicts of interest, let’s take a look at some of the most troubling members of a truly horrifying future cabinet (The Hill).

Top Officials

Vice President
As I mentioned in a previous post, Pence is one of the most virulently anti-choice (see H. B. 1337), anti-gay (see Indiana Senate Bill 101), anti-media (he planned to start a state-run, taxpayer-funded news service that would run pro-administration news and mete it out to local papers) and anti-science (intelligent design proponent and global warming doubter) politicians in the country. He does, at least, have experience in government, unlike most of the names that will follow.

Chief Strategist
Breitbart founder and executive chair Steve Bannon is among the most radical voices in the entire administration (Forbes), and one that appears to be in a position to have huge influence over the administration. He has been making up the news for a long time at Breitbart, has a racist past littered with tacit support for the white supremacist oriented alt-right and doesn’t much care for Jews either. Not even close to a billionaire (his net worth is estimated at $10 million) but he does have a history of potentially beating his wife. Like most of the administration, he has no experience in government.

Senior Advisor
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a billionaire himself, is set to join the administration as Senior Advisor (WP). The chances of future conflicts of interest, alongside essentially skirting the nepotism laws of the country, are only the start for a man who was one of Trump’s biggest supporters, spreading lies and misinformation without a smidgeon of compunction. He is in midst of negotiating a big real estate deal with a shady Chinese conglomerate with close ties to the government, has been involved in West Bank settlements deemed illegal by the UN and has a father that had to abandon his post as the CEO of the company his son now runs. Along with his wife and Trump himself, the three create a triumvirate of potential corruption not seen since the Grant administrations.

Justice Department
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has been selected as his attorney general, a man deemed too racist by Republicans to become a federal judge in the 80s (with good cause!), who calls the NAACP and ACLU “un-American” and said he thought the KKK was “okay.” He is vehemently anti-immigrant, having opposed nearly every bill that has come before the Senate in the past 20 years offering amnesty to illegal immigrants seeking citizenship or work visas. He’s also a debt hawk, a military hawk and a climate change skeptic (The Guardian). He is one of the few others with government experience and has worked with Democrats in the past, but is considered one of the architects of Trump’s run and the choices of his administration.

Since Sessions is currently going through the confirmation process, let’s take a closer look at some of his most egregious lowlights:

• Sessions said he thought the Ku Klux Klan was OK until he found out some members smoked marijuana.
• He attacked the NAACP and the ACLU as “un-American” for “forcing civil rights down the throats of people.”
• He was one of the first supporters of Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the country.
• He’s opposed nearly every immigration bill put forward in the last two decades that’s included a path to citizenship.
• He opposes same-sex marriage as well as sexual relationships between same-sex partners.
• Confronted with Trump’s remarks about grabbing women by their genitals, Sessions said it would be a “stretch” to “characterize that as sexual assault.”
• He voted against the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
• He referred to a white attorney who took on voting-rights cases as a “traitor to his race,” and has faced allegations that he used the n-word to describe a Democratic official in Alabama.
• He’s repeatedly worked to block NSA privacy reforms, including the mild reforms put in place under the USA Freedom Act.
• He sided with the FBI in its effort to force Apple to break the iPhone’s encryption, and has pushed legislation that would force technology companies to turn over customers’ private information to law enforcement.
• He's an old friend of Breitbart News, the site that mainstreamed white nationalism and has promoted racism, misogyny and other forms of hate.
• In the 1986 confirmation hearing that led to the rejection of Sessions as a federal judge, witnesses testified that he referred to a black attorney as “boy,” and described the Voting Rights Act as “intrusive.”

CIA Director
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) will be the next CIA director. He ran the Benghazi Committee, authored a report excoriating Clinton, has close connections to the Koch brothers) and is a member of the Tea Party movement. He is also a firm believer in “spying on everyone” and would like to execute Edward Snowden. He wrote in a Wall Street Journal, “Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database.” (McClatchydc). He does have government experience, as a Representative of Kansas (since 2011), but is just the sort of anti-government conservative who has helped blocked Obama’s agenda for the past six years.

Secretary of State
Among the truly apoplectic-inducing appointees, also now in the midst of his confirmation hearing (NYT), is the selection of the Exxon-Mobil CEO as the next Secretary of State. The Rex Tillerson tilt appears to be a further sign that not only did Russia get the man they wanted but that he is going to repay them in spades with one of the friendliest figures to their economic interests in all of America. Tillerson has pretty consistently abrogated any responsibility to national interests while CEO of Exxon-Mobil, including in Africa and even Iran (The Guardian). He has shown little interest in protecting the interests of the average American, the environment or even the interests of America itself (MSNBC).

National Security Advisor
The fiery retired lieutenant general Michael T. Flynn will be Trump’s White House national security adviser. He, like Tillerson, has close ties to Russia (and has been paid to give speeches there), led “lock her up” cheers against Clinton during the campaign (and compared her to al-Qaeda combatants he faced in Afghanistan and Iraq), and has consistently made derogatory comments about Muslims (WP). He has extended the same “liar” tag he used for Clinton to Obama, called the U.S. Justice System “corrupt,” and, most troubling, has a history of spreading fake news, only surpassed by Bannon among future cabinet level officials (Politico). And he is but one of a coterie of ex-generals who will now line the corridors of power, with many only normalized by their relative distance from the radical Flynn.

Department Heads

EPA
Trump’s new head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is a global warming doubter and long ally to the oil and gas industry (NYT). Given comments from he and Trump’s advisors, we can expect more drilling, less reporting on global warming (if any), pro-corporate/anti-consumer decisions regarding air, water and land pollution, deregulation of coal, oil and gas and little effort to research or fund renewable energy sources. He does have experience in government, as a State Senator and then Attorney General of Oklahoma, but that’s about the only good thing anyone who cares about the environment can say.

Energy
New Energy secretary, Rick Perry, is another friend to the biggest polluters in the world and someone who doesn’t even believe the department should exist (The Union). It’s actually pretty extraordinary the list of flunkies that have made their way into this administration, including, of course, the President himself. Apparently losing elections or primaries appears to Trump as the best sort of advertisement for serving in his administration.

Department of Health and Human Services 
Tom Price is a strident opponent of Obamacare and wants to transform Medicaid to block grants for the states. Enacting these two reforms would be a boon to the insurance and medical industries, but substantially less so for consumers (USA Today). He is a friend to Big Pharma, private hospitals and really the entire for-profit health industry.

National Endowment of the Arts
Sylvester Stallone has already, supposedly, said no thank you to overtures from the Trump transition team to take over the NEA, but seriously? Everyone loves Rocky, but is an actor without a stellar career who recently retired really in a position to lead what is left of the NEA, constantly gutted by conservatives who would rather the public have no access to, you know, the truth (Breitbart).

Department of Labor
Andy Puzder is the CEO of Hardee’s/Carl’s Jr. and has been an enemy of labor for most of his career (NYT). He is paid more in a day than most of his workers in an entire year. He is against the minimum wage, against unions, against overtime, considers employees as nothing more than an “extra cost” and actually wants to replace them with robots in the future. Since he became CEO, his restaurants have been charged with 98 federal or city safety violations. Given the continued vibrancy of the $15 movement and the promises made by Trump, one can think of few choices less favorable for workers (besides maybe a Koch brother). And he doesn’t have any experience in government.

Housing and Urban Development
Ben Carson appears to be insane (Salon). That is not really an exaggeration. He also has a long history of finding the truth an inconvenience he would rather avoid whenever possible. As I’ve mentioned in the past, he questioned his own fitness for government service, has no experience with housing and/or urban development and has no experience in government.

Department of Education
Another billionaire, Betsy DeVos, is the next Education Secretary under Trump. DeVos is a strong advocate for vouchers and charter schools, like the Koch brothers a huge contributor to the GOP cause, at least tangentially connected to the Christian Reform movement and has little relevant experience to bring to the job (NEA). While she seems substantially less radical than some of Trump’s other picks, the real fear here is that she will march us further along the path toward privatizing public schooling in America

U.S. Ambassador to the UN
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations might be one of his saner choices (NYT), but she – like Trump, Pence, Bannon, Kushner and Reince Priebus – has no foreign policy experience at all. In an increasingly dangerous world and one that Trump did his best to alienate during the campaign, one hoped he might temper his temper with some seasoned veterans who could mend fences and ensure smooth diplomacy moving forward. Guess again on that one.


These are only some of the radicals and unqualified nominees Trump has selected and perfectly exemplify an administration that seems intent on serving corporate interests over those of the American public, of reversing anything good the Obama administration accomplished and of setting a perilous course for our collective future, with the captain at the helm the scariest of them all.