Rogue president naming dangerous cabinet members
The calamity continues, leaves the realm of nightmare, and begins to take on the form of reality.
Donald Trump’s picks so far indicate he will be surrounded by the richest cabinet ever. This is one of the early signs of what we knew all along, that Trump’s endless talk about “taking on the establishment” and populist pretense was so much hot air, just one more of his endless lies.
Unless what the Donald really meant by taking on the establishment was taking it on board his administration so they can run the country directly rather than through the standard, more roundabout route of buying policy through handing out campaign cash and financing fact-free right-wing “think tanks.”
What is decidedly worse is that Trump’s nominees are not the relatively benign billionaires with some degree of social conscience like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. Instead, he has picked people who evoke the despicable misers Dickens depicted in his nineteenth century novels and the bloated grotesques sculpted by Botero.
Almost every nominee is a disaster. Alvaro Fernandez has written a piece pointing out the problems with each. I want to focus on two that I think are the worse and have the most potential to do tremendous damage.
Start with the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Trump has tapped Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who has built a career as a shill for the fossil fuels industry, is a climate change denier, and a persistent enemy of the agency he would direct. This is beyond putting a fox to guard the henhouse. It’s putting a Siberian wolf to guard a flock of sheep.
Trump should keep the acronym but change the name to reflect the new reality: Environmental Pollution Agency. But it’s no joke. People will die if this guy takes over the EPA.
The people who drink water from the tap and who live in big cities or industrial areas drink safer water and breathe cleaner air than before the EPA was founded in 1970. Trump seems to want to bring back the good old days when rivers were so foul they sometimes caught on fire and you breathed the air in some parts of the country at your own risk.
Expect deaths and illness to rise, especially but not only from, respiratory ailments. After increasing steadily year after year, U.S. life expectancy dropped last year for the first time in a decade. Some scientists predict this will become a trend. More environmental pollution can only contribute to the disturbing turnaround in life expectancy trend.
Moreover, the choice of Pruitt will have global implications. The health of the planet, not just of Americans, will be put at greater risk. The United States is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases per capita. The Chinese spew more pollutants into the atmosphere but their population is more than four times as large.
There’s also Trump’s nominee for Attorney-General, Jeff Sessions, an unreconstructed reactionary bigot. Alternet has provided a short list of reasons Sessions should not become Attorney-General. Below is a selection of these reasons:
Racist Comments
Among a mountain of racist misdeeds, two stand out. Sessions once addressed a black lawyer in his office as boy and he accused a white civil rights attorney of being a “disgrace to his race.”
Attacks on Civil Rights Groups and Red-Baiting
Sessions has called civil rights groups like the ACLU and the NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired.”
Witch Hunt Against Civil Rights Workers
During his decade as a federal prosecutor in Alabama — a state with an dark history of racism and voter suppression — Sessions embarked on a witch hunt targeting civil rights workers who were registering elderly black voters and helping them get absentee ballots.
He unsuccessfully charged three organizers, including a former aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with so many counts of voter fraud that they would have served 100 year sentences if convicted. Focusing only on counties where black voting participation had surged following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Sessions interrogated dozens of older African American voters, yet only turned up 14 suspect ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in 1984. The “Marion Three” were acquitted.
Voting Rights Act Opposition
In his confirmation hearings, Sessions, nominated by President Ronald Reagan to be a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama., admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act a “piece of intrusive legislation.” What Sessions failed to say is that before such federal intrusion, black voters were generally being denied the right to vote.
Anti-Immigrant Extremism
Sessions wants to kick out undocumented immigrants and drastically reduce legal immigration, the ultimate goal of many racist anti-immigrant groups who want to keep the country white, Anglo-Saxon and English-Only.
Sessions has worked closely in his anti-immigration efforts with the network of immigration restrictionist groups tied to white nationalist John Tanton. If Sessions were to be installed at the head of the Department of Justice, these groups would likely have a direct line to administration decision-makers.
Open to Muslim Ban
When Trump proposed a blanket ban on all of the world’s Muslims from entering the United States, Sessions told Breitbart News that while Trump was “treading on dangerous ground,” it was “appropriate to begin to discuss” the issue. He added we’re in an age that’s very dangerous and we’re seeing more persons enter and a lot of them have done terrorist acts and a lot of them believe it’s commanded by their religion.
Doesn’t Want Judges to Have A ‘Secular Mindset’
Discussing the importance of the Supreme Court in the presidential election earlier this year, Sessions accused Justice Sonia Sotomayor of having “a postmodern, relativistic, secular mindset”.
LGBT Rights Opposition
Sessions said that a gay nominee to the Supreme Court “would be a big concern that the American people might feel— might feel uneasy about that.” In 2006, Sessions voted for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
Climate Change Denial
Sessions is a climate change skeptic, claiming that CO2 is “really not a pollutant” because it’s “plant food.”
Donald Trump was a rogue candidate, who violated every standard of civility, any conception of basic decency, honesty and fairness. He will be a rogue president. Who better to serve as his top aides but a rogue’s gallery of the worst and the dimmest, from a head of the EPA who doesn’t care a bit about the health of his fellow citizens or the Earth to an Attorney-General who has spent a career targeting the most vulnerable people in our society.
