Trump Triumphant Part One

This article appeared in Ceylon Today on Thursday January 12 2017.

The inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States will take place on Friday, January 20, 2017, in Washington DC. The election result was immediately followed by street protests and legal attempts to challenge the result. A friend commented on one of my previous articles to the effect that these people should “accept ballot results like mature adults”. It is not immature to be alarmed at the prospect of the radical changes Trump is likely to make on the strength of a very meagre mandate.

Some people have coped with the result by saying Trump will not really make a difference or that he will not do half of the things he promised (threatened). Perhaps he will not follow the Sri Lankan example; perhaps he will not put his defeated opponent in jail. Now that we see who Trump will have in his cabinet, we have a better idea of what the future might be like. Trump’s cabinet choices are mostly recognised enemies of the departments they will be heading – foxes in charge of the henhouse.

 

Health

Tom Price, a Republican congressman from Georgia, is Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, which means he will lead the federal agency overseeing Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Price has long been a critic of Obamacare and in every Congress since the Act was passed he has put forward his own bills to replace it. The common theme of Price’s plans has been something that does more to benefit the young, healthy and rich to the disadvantage of the sick, old and poor. Price is a doctor and knowledgeable about the system. Doctors have always fought health reform because they usually see it, whatever high-flown reasons they express, as endangering their own financial interests. Remember Nye Bevan “stuffing their mouths with gold” to persuade them to allow the NHS to function. About 5.5 million of the victims of repealing the Affordable Care Act. would be Trump supporters.

Attorney General

The new Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, was junior Senator from Alabama. Jeff Sessions has a history of turning his personal bigotry into political reality. Senator Edward Kennedy, called him a “throw-back to a shameful era” and a “disgrace”. In 1984, as US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, he supported an investigation of black voter fraud in Alabama. On the basis of only 14 allegedly tampered ballots, Sessions prosecuted three African-American community organizers including Martin Luther King Jr’s former aide Albert Turner. The defendants, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted by a jury.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan nominated Sessions to be a judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. Sessions became only the second nominee to the federal judiciary in 48 years whose nomination was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee. At Sessions’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, four Department of Justice lawyers testified that he had made racially offensive remarks.

Sessions was elected Attorney General of Alabama in November 1994 and led the state’s defence of a schools funding model found unconstitutional because of disparities between rich, mostly white, and poor, mostly black, schools. As Attorney General of Alabama, Sessions argued that funding should not be provided to student groups that advocated unlawful behaviour, including the breaking of sodomy and sexual misconduct laws. As a Senator, he voted against the Matthew Shepard Act, which added acts of bias-motivated violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity to federal hate-crimes law.

Sessions voted against strengthening the ban on torture and against criminal-justice reform. He worked to block immigration reform. Sessions is against legalizing marijuana for either recreational or medicinal use – “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” Sessions believes “that sanctity of life begins at conception.” Sessions was one of 34 Senators to vote against the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007.

Sessions is sceptical of the scientific consensus on climate change. He has voted in favour of legislation that would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. He has voted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Labour

Andrew Puzder, Donald Trump’s choice as Secretary of Labor was the CEO of CKE Restaurants, parent company of fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. Puzder donated to Trump’s campaign and served as an adviser on job creation. Puzder has complained about regulations and overtime laws and opposed minimum wage increases. Puzder is even critical of the federal relief programs, such as food stamps, that subsidize the poverty wages that he pays his employees. He has talked openly about replacing workers with automated ordering kiosks. Puzder supports repealing the Affordable Care Act and has been critical of paid sick leave policies. He is a determined opponent of trade unions. Unlike the rest of the cabinet, he is in favour of immigration because it provides him with cheap labour.

Education

Betsy de Vos, who has been named as Education Secretary, is known for her advocacy of school choice, home schooling, voucher programmes, and her ties to the Reformed Christian community. She is the daughter-in-law of Richard De Vos, the founder of Amway (the pyramid -selling organisation that has been accused of fraud and cultism). Her brother, Erik Prince, is the founder of Blackwater Worldwide the private military contractor accused of killing civilians in Iraq.

The person charged with overseeing the education of 50 million American children has, since the early 1990s, been active in supporting the charter school movement. Stephen Henderson of the Detroit Free Press, wrote a searing indictment of the Detroit experiment supported by de Vos. “This deeply dysfunctional education landscape—where failure is rewarded with opportunities for expansion and ‘choice’ means the opposite for tens of thousands of children—is no accident. It was created by an ideological lobby that has zealously championed free-market education reform for decades, with little regard for the outcome.”

Environment

Trump placed Scott Pruitt in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, effectively outsourcing his environmental policy to the oil-and-gas companies who funded Pruitt’s campaigns in Oklahoma. After his election as Attorney General of Oklahoma, Pruitt established a “Federalism Unit” in the Attorney General’s office dedicated to fighting President Barack Obama’s regulatory agenda, suing the administration over its immigration policy, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Pruitt’s office has sued the EPA to block its Clean Power Plan and Waters of the United States rule. Pruitt has also sued the EPA on behalf of Oklahoma utilities unwilling to take on the burdens of additional regulation of their coal-fired plants, and criticized the agency in a congressional hearing. All of Pruitt’s anti-EPA suits to date have failed but now he can demolish it from within.

Secretary of State

The chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, will be Secretary of State. Like the tobacco companies, the oil companies have been adept at hiding the truth about their product. ExxonMobil in particular has a long history of peddling misinformation on climate change. Investigations by the LA Times and Inside Climate News showed that the company had conducted extensive scientific research that proved the reality of climate change but publicly stuck to the official line: “Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive”.

Tillerson, like his president, has no experience in politics. However, he has been the head of an organisation that has had its own foreign policy independent of the official government of the USA. Tillerson has favoured doing business in countries that offer political stability, even if this stability was achieved through dictatorships with no regard for human rights.

Like his president, Tillerson has forged a friendly relationship with Vladimir Putin. As Secretary of State, Tillerson would be in a position to benefit ExxonMobil by, for example, easing sanctions against Russia. He has also established close relations with Igor Sechin, the close Putin ally who runs Rosneft, one of Russia’s oil-and-gas giants. In 2011, Tillerson signed a joint-venture agreement with Putin under which ExxonMobil would partner with Rosneft to produce oil from the Arctic.

These people are out to destroy our world for their own profit. Should we just accept without complaint?