February, 20 2017, 01:00pm EDT
Trump's First 30 Days: A Wholesale Corporate Takeover of Government
A day-by-day review of the Trump administration's first month shows that virtually every day has been marked by a new, extraordinary grant of power to corporate interests and/or another development in Donald Trump's get-rich-quick-scheme known as the American presidency, a Public Citizen report shows.
WASHINGTON
A day-by-day review of the Trump administration's first month shows that virtually every day has been marked by a new, extraordinary grant of power to corporate interests and/or another development in Donald Trump's get-rich-quick-scheme known as the American presidency, a Public Citizen report shows.
Trump started his first full weekday in office with a breakfast meeting with CEOs of a dozen corporations including Arconic, Corning, Dell, Dow Chemical Company, Ford Motor Company, International Paper, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, UnderArmour and U.S. Steel.
Later in his first month, he met with auto company executives (environmental regulations are "out of control," Trump said); Big Pharma CEOs (75 to 80 percent of U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations should be cut, Trump said); his Wall Street-dominated Strategic and Policy Forum, made up of a dozen-and-a-half corporate executives; and airline CEOs (where Trump supports privatizing air traffic control).
"One month into the Trump administration, and it's clear that there has been a wholesale corporate takeover of the government," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. "America has never seen anything like this, and it's only the first month."
The Trump administration also has taken care of its dirty energy friends. By executive order, Trump overturned President Barack Obama's measures to block the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines.
The administration is taking care of its Wall Street friends too, the report shows. Trump has signed executive orders aimed at unraveling the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law - thereby destabilizing the financial system and making it more prone to another 2008-style meltdown - and repealing an Obama administration Labor Department rule requiring financial advisers to give advice based on their customers' best interests. The Labor Department rule would save consumers $17 billion a year in rip-off fees and bad advice.
And the administration has commenced a full-fledged assault on health, safety, environmental, worker, consumer, financial security, civil rights and other regulatory protections. Trump issued a reckless executive order that aims to block the issuance of any such safeguards by directing federal agencies to repeal two federal regulations for every new rule they issue. Public Citizen, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Communications Workers of America, has sued Trump and the administration to have this executive order overturned.
"It makes poetic sense that Trump has gleefully signed the repeal of an anti-corruption measure," Weissman said. "Accompanying Trump's gift-giving spree to corporate America has been an astounding series of actions making clear that his pervasive and consequential conflicts of interest will immerse the administration in a permanent miasma of corruption: the new $200,000 fee to join Mar-a-Lago, the Kellyanne Conway advertisement for Ivanka Trump products, the apparent plans to dramatically expand Trump hotels in the United States, and on and on."
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
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Amid Spying Fight, House Passes Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act
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While applauding the U.S. House of Representatives' bipartisan passage of a bill to ensure that "law enforcement and intelligence agencies can't do an end-run around the Constitution by buying information from data brokers" on Wednesday, privacy advocates highlighted that Congress is trying to extend and expand a long-abused government spying program.
The House voted 219-199 for Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (FANFSA), which won support from 96 Democrats and 123 Republicans, including the lead sponsor, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio). Named for the constitutional amendment that protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, H.R. 4639 would close what campaigners call the data broker loophole.
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Wednesday's vote followed the House sending the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act to the Senate. H.R. 7888 would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows for warrantless spying on noncitizens abroad but also sweeps up Americans' data.
The House notably included an amendment forcing a wide range of individuals and businesses to cooperate with government spying operations but rejected an amendment that would have added a warrant requirement to the bill, which the Senate could vote on as soon as Thursday.
Noting those decisions on the FISA reauthorization legislation, Ruddock stressed that "today's vote is a victory but follows a recent loss and ongoing threat as that Section 702 bill moves to the Senate this week too."
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Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Project on Surveillance Oversight, also praised the House's FANFSA passage on Wednesday.
"The passage of the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale underscores the extent to which reining in abusive warrantless surveillance is a bipartisan issue," Scott said. "We urge the Senate to take up this measure and close the data broker loophole."
Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at ACLU, similarly said Wednesday that "the bipartisan passage of this bill is a flashing warning sign to the government that if it wants our data, it must get a warrant."
Hamadanchy added that "we hope this vote puts a fire under the Senate to protect their constituents and rein in the government's warrantless surveillance of Americans, once and for all."
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While claiming that President Joe Biden backs "Palestinian aspirations for statehood," one of the cables asserts that "it remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward a political horizon for the Palestinian people is in the context of a normalization agreement between Israel and its neighbors."
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"We wanted the U.S. to provide a substantive alternative to U.N. recognition. They didn't," one unnamed Palestinian official toldAxios on Wednesday. "We believe full membership in the U.N. for Palestine is way overdue. We have waited more than 12 years since our initial request."
As The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein and Daniel Boguslaw noted:
Since 2011, the U.N. Security Council has rejected the Palestinian Authority's request for full member status. On April 2, the Palestinian Observer Mission to the U.N. requested that the council once again take up consideration of its membership application. According to the first State Department cable, U.N. meetings since the beginning of April suggest that Algeria, China, Guyana, Mozambique, Russia, Slovenia, Sierra Leone, and Malta support granting Palestine full membership to the U.N. It also says that France, Japan, and Korea are undecided, while the United Kingdom will likely abstain from a vote.
Along with the United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom are permanent members of the UNSC, so they also have veto power.
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Belgium—which is seeking economic sanctions against Israel in response to its genocidal war on Gaza—is expected to join Spain's push for Palestinian statehood after the country's European Union presidency expires in June.
Currently, 139 of the U.N.'s 193 member states recognize Palestine as an independent state.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has also claimed to support a so-called "two-state solution"—has alternately boasted about thwarting Palestinian statehood.
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PI calls it an "illicit network undermining democracy around the world."
"Today is a mask-off moment for the Reactionary International and the parties, politicians, judges, journalists, foundations, think tanks, tech platforms, NGOs, activists, financiers, and entrepreneurs that comprise it," PI said.
"After a year of preparation, we finally open the doors to our new research consortium, exposing the global network of reactionary forces that corrode our democracies, destroy our planet, and drive us closer to world war," the group added.
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Yanis Varoufakis, a PI member and secretary-general of the left-wing Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, called the database "a treasure chest of well-researched reports on how the reactionaries of the world unite."
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