Scott Pruitt Is Carrying Out His E.P.A. Agenda in Secret, Critics Say - The New York Times Together with a small group of political appointees, many with backgrounds, like his, in Oklahoma politics, and with advice from industry lobbyists, Mr. Pruitt has taken aim at an agency whose policies have been developed and enforced by thousands of the E.P.A.’s career scientists and policy experts, many of whom work in the same building. “There’s a feeling of paranoia in the agency — employees feel like there’s been a hostile takeover and the guy in charge is treating them like enemies,” said Christopher Sellers, an expert in environmental history at Stony Brook University, who this spring conducted an interview survey with about 40 E.P.A. employees. Such tensions are not unusual in federal agencies when an election leads to a change in the party in control of the White House. Video Allies of Mr. “E.P.A. is legendary for being stocked with leftists,” said Steven J. Mr. William D. “Reforming the regulatory system would be a good thing if there were an honest, open process,” he said. Mr.
Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House On the morning after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S. Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They had cleared 30 desks and freed up 30 parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and every other federal agency. By afternoon the silence was deafening. “Teams were going around, ‘Have you heard from them?’ “The election happened,” remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the D.O.E. Trump’s people “mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. Even in normal times the people who take over the United States government can be surprisingly ignorant about it. That had proved to be a huge undertaking. WATCH: Meet the People Enabling Donald Trump The Trump administration had no clearer idea what she did with her day than her mother. This was a loss. The First Risk
The Ideologues Who Want to Destroy Democracy to Save Capitalism The Ideologues Who Want to Destroy [...] James Buchanan flashes a smile at a news conference in 1986 at George Mason University after it was announced that he is the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic science. (Photo by Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images) Last week we presented you with historian Nancy MacLean’s fascinating story of James McGill Buchanan — the father of “public choice economics” whose writing was influential to a number of ideologues on the far right. George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, has more on the history of Buchanan and his twisted ideas: He aimed, in short, to save capitalism from democracy.In 1980, he was able to put the program into action. Read more from Monbiot in The Guardian and read an excerpt from Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains.
alec-meeting-denver-conservatives?akid=15891.2675170 Photo Credit: Ken Durden / Shutterstock.com This post originally appeared at Exposed by CMD. Denver’s massive Blue Bear will be peering in the windows as US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos headlines the 44th American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Annual Meeting being held at the Colorado Convention Center’s Hyatt Regency Hotel July 19-21. Other big names speaking at the event include Trump defender-in-chief Newt Gingrich, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, Republican pollster Frank Luntz and local megadonor and light beer magnate Peter Coors, who chairs the right-wing Coors Foundation. The Center for Media and Democracy reported that there will be a debate on the ALEC draft model bill to repeal the 17th Amendment, but many other controversial issues will be on the ALEC agenda as the meeting gets underway tomorrow. College Sexual Assault Takes Center Stage Sexual harassment and sexual assault have been a crisis on US college campuses for decades.
The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America Charles Koch, 79, in his office at Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas, on July 29, 2015. (Photo by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Author Nancy MacLean has unearthed a stealth ideologue of the American right. Her book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, tells the story of one James McGill Buchanan, a Southern political scientist and father of “public choice economics.” MacLean details how this little-known figure has had a massive impact on the ideology of the far right. None other than Charles Koch looked to MacLean’s theories for inspiration. Kristin Miller talked with Nancy MacLean about her books and the influence of James McGill Buchanan on our politics both overt and covert. Kristin Miller: Did you know anything about Buchanan before you started your research? Nancy MacLean: I did not. KM: Just what is his theory of “public choice economics”? — Nancy MacLean NM: He was setting to work in Virginia in the late 1950s.
It Looks Like the Kochs' Dream of a Right-Wing Constitutional Convention Has Been Roadblocked Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey / Flickr Creative Commons This year's legislative season saw a strong push in the states from right-wing groups, bankrolled by the Koch brothers and other ultra-conservative billionaires, hoping to convene a national constitutional convention in order to inject rigid fiscal constraints into our country's founding document. Advocates of a federal "balanced budget amendment" (BBA) picked up two more states, Wyoming and Arizona, in their drive to win the 34 resolutions needed to bypass Congress and convene a convention to propose changes to the U.S. Constitution. That momentum, however, was blunted by surprisingly successful campaigns to rescind convention calls in three states, New Mexico, Maryland, and Nevada. As a result, BBA proponents now claim 27 states in their column, down from 28 at the beginning of the year. Two steps forward and three steps back…from the brink of a political experiment untried since 1787. BBA momentum stalls
In the Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Koch Brothers’ Campaign Becomes Overt If there was any lingering doubt that a tiny clique of fossil-fuel barons has captured America’s energy and environmental policies, it was dispelled last week, when the Trump Administration withdrew from the Paris climate accord. Surveys showed that a majority of Americans in literally every state wanted to remain within the agreement, and news reports established that the heads of many of the country’s most successful and iconic Fortune 100 companies, from Disney to General Electric, did, too. Voters and big business were arrayed against leaving the climate agreement. How this happened is no longer a secret. As the climate scientist Michael Mann put it to me in my book “Dark Money,” when attempting to explain why the Republican Party has moved in the opposite direction from virtually the rest of the world, “We are talking about a direct challenge to the most powerful industry that has ever existed on the face of the Earth.
Secretive Foundation’s Blueprint for Spreading Right-Wing Ideology Documents Reveal a Powerful, Secretive [...] North Carolina millionaire and political operative Art Pope, who received $1.5 million from the Bradley Foundation for two conservative groups he founded. (Photo by Ted Richardson/For The Washington Post via Getty Images) This post originally appeared at AlterNet. The billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch get a lot of press coverage about their vast, conservative political spending network that helps elect right-wing officials at the federal, state and local levels and advocates for policies that increase the profits of their fossil fuel and manufacturing conglomerate, Koch Industries. The Bradley Foundation, which has historically supported taxpayer-funded “school choice” initiatives and work requirements for welfare recipients, is named after Lynde and Harry Bradley, two brothers who founded the profitable factory automation manufacturer Allen Bradley Co.
Guess Who’s Backing Scott Pruitt To Head The EPA? The Koch Brothers. - BillMoyers.com Oklahoma Attorney General and President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, meets with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), on Capitol Hill January 6, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) This post originally appeared at The Huffington Post. The two dozen nonprofit groups and Senate committee members defending Scott Pruitt, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, have at least two things in common. Like Pruitt, they’re climate science deniers. That funding helps explain why they all consistently misrepresent the scientific consensus on climate change. The Kochs didn’t endorse Trump for president, but there’s no doubt they would consider a guy like Pruitt heading the EPA a dream come true. Koch Denial Network is Alive and Well But I digress. American Encore is no fan of environmental protections. Koch-Funded Senators Fawn Over Pruitt Drain the Swamp?
It's Official: How the Koch Brothers Killed Trump’s Job Plan It’s Official: How the Koch [...] This post originally appeared at Alternet. As the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s embattled presidency approaches, it’s official: the self-proclaimed champion of America’s forgotten workers has no jobs plan. In announcing his new tax plan, President Trump quietly abandoned his biggest legislative initiative aimed at creating American jobs, and postponed again his ambitious but vague trillion-dollar infrastructure jobs program. Trump’s problem is translating his rhetoric into reality. While most news organizations are focusing on Trump’s proposed tax cuts, the bigger story may be Trump’s disappearing jobs agenda. Trump’s problem is translating his rhetoric into reality. “I certainly support a form of tax on the border,” the president told Reuters. Trump also hinted he would send Congress legislation enacting a trillion-dollar infrastructure jobs program. Another right-wing rebellion on Capitol Hill suffocated his plans. Eight weeks ago, I asked, “Who Wins?
Koch Dark-Money Operative Is Trump's Liaison to Congress - BillMoyers.com Activists hold a protest near the Manhattan apartment of billionaire and Republican financier David Koch on June 5, 2014 in New York City. The demonstrators were protesting against the campaign contributions by the billionaire Koch brothers who are owners of Koch Industries Inc. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) This post originally appeared at PRwatch.org. When the history of Donald Trump’s administration is written, people may point to the appointment of a Koch Brothers operative to a little-known White House position as a turning point in Trump’s evolution from unorthodox Republican candidate to doctrinaire corporate politician. Meet Trump Legislative Director Marc Short Think of it as a merger, or an acquisition. His administration hires suggest that Trump, who ran a heterodox and intermittently populist (if consistently bigoted) campaign, has been joining forces with the more established corporate extremism of the Republican Party establishment. Short isn’t really a policy wonk.
Koch Brothers’ Operatives Fill Top White House Positions, Ethics Forms Reveal If the billionaire Koch brothers turn to the White House for favors, they will see many familiar faces. Newly disclosed ethics forms reveal that a significant number of senior Trump staffers were previously employed by the sprawling network of hard-right and libertarian advocacy groups financed and controlled by Charles and David Koch, the conservative duo hyper-focused on entrenching Republican power, eliminating taxes, and slashing environmental and labor regulations. Some of the relationships were well-known. But the ethics forms, made available to the public on Friday evening, reveal a number of previously undisclosed financial ties between the Koch network and Trump’s inner circle of political aides. Donald McGahn, Trump’s campaign attorney turned White House counsel, provided legal services to a range of outside Koch groups working to influence the election. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP But those rules are rarely enforced.