Credentials

In the last week we’ve been introduced to the Trump cabinet nominees at their congressional hearings. Their credentials include enmity toward the department they will run and, with few exceptions, no government experience. So far, this is in keeping with Trump’s promise not to conduct business as usual.

But he can hardly be said to be busily draining the swamp. His team is thick with the sort of people you might meet doing deals on the back nine of a Trump resort, while writing off the day as a deductible expense. They may not be government bureaucrats, but they are the kind of people who donate to candidates and hire lobbyists to get what they want out of government.

Indeed, with only 28 of the top 690 jobs staffed by Inauguration day, Trump has barely begun to get his team in place. But Trent Lott reports many of the likely candidates in the wings are either being recommended to the administration by lobbyists or are themselves lobbyists.

And almost to a man the economics team has ties to Goldman Sachs or other Wall street behemoths, so Trump’s campaign rants against the money power and Hillary’s corruption by taking a speaking fee from Goldman look like so much theater. Now that he is in, it’s business as usual. Rarely have so many top jobs gone to the billionaire class, who are surely less likely to take care of the blue-collar Trump voters than themselves. Already several nominees have shown themselves to be unfit for their position and unlikely to be defenders of the common man.

Tom Price, the Health and Human Services nominee, has been found to have enriched himself by crafting legislation to benefit medical companies whose stock he owned. Steve Mnuchin, one of the Goldman alums, left the bank to profit by the crash of 2008. He bought a troubled predatory lender, then cleaned up its balance sheet by foreclosing on over 30,000 homeowners. Many were so-called “widows foreclosures.” They threw widows out of homes with reverse mortgages when their husbands died. In other cases a Scrooge-like inflexibility tossed people out who were in default by a day or wrote a cehck for pennies less than was owed. Mnuchin then flipped the bank and cleared billions. He tried to hide $100 million in Cayman Island tax-dodging accounts on the disclosure forms he filled out to become Treasury Secretary. No wonder Chuck Schumer has taken to calling this crowd the Swamp Cabinet.

Labor nominee Andy Puzder has been heard to say he might back out because the media is saying mean things about him and he doesn’t like having to disclose his finances. Possibly because the CEO of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardees junk-food chains made $4.5 million last year but opposes the minimum wage and overtime pay. Take that, Trump voters.

Rick Perry who once forgot he wanted to abolish the Energy Department took the job because he thought it would allow him to be a global ambassador for the oil and gas industry, which is more or less how he treated the governorship of Texas. Then he found out the energy Department is actually the outgrowth of the old Atomic Energy Commission. Its chief tasks are to keep our nuclear weapons second to none, produce nuclear power plants for navy ships, deal with nuclear waste disposal, conducts research into energy production and conservation

Past Energy secretaries have been a Nobel laureates in physics, a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, an Admiral and former chief of Naval Operations, a former Defense secretary and so on. As the Times snarkily noted Rick Perry has a bachelor’s degree in animal science and was a cheerleader. He is clearly going to be out of his depth.

Betsy DeVos is a member of a family of billionaires who espouse an extreme libertarian politics and embrace a religious sect that opposes abortion, feminism, homosexuality and science that is incompatible with the Bible. They are members of the Koch network of right-wing political donors to candidates and to propaganda outfits like the Heritage Foundation and pressure groups. The DeVos clan has contributed over $200 million to install anti-tax, anti-regulatory politicians. They failed to bribe Canadian pols in this way when they did business there and had to pay a $60 million fine for trying to defraud the government of taxes they owed.

Other Trump cabinet members with a Koch connection are Mike Pompeo, the CIA nominee, a man known as the Congressman from Koch. Also EPA nominee Scott Pruitt, a prominent climate change denier who opposes regulation of power plants. That figures since his political godfather was another Koch cabal member, Bakken Shale billionaire Harold Hamm. After Hamm helped Pruitt win the job of Oklahoma’s attorney general, he obligingly brought multiple suits against EPA that would have favored Hamm and Koch oil interests if they had succeeded. They didn’t, but as EPA head he will have another chance to make good.

DeVos has played a prominent role in opposing public school and teacher’s unions in Michigan and favors funneling taxpayer money to private schools, charter schools and parochial schools that would be free of federal regulation. Her ambition is to return all education responsibility to the states. Her testimony revealed a lack of knowledge about assessment methods in education, the legal requirements that govern schools, including those concerning equal access, children with disabilities, and firearms. Her testimony was so embarrassing that the committee chair ended her testimony after one round of questions to keep her from further self-shaming.

However, it was clear she met the Trump criteria of a department head, opposition to the mission of the department in question. As does Tom Price at HHS who has authored several bills aimed at abolishing and replacing Obamacare. He has been recommended as fit for the task because he was an orthopedic surgeon for 20 years, putting a doctor in charge of health policy is a bit like putting the drunk behind the bar.

Dr. Price’s interests as a doctor my not be identical with he patients he is supposed to serve at HHS. Indeed, the interests f the medical/pharmaceutical/hospital complex are often quite different from those of their patients or the funders of care. Patients want affordable care, the complex wants profitable care. His plan would rely on the usual Republican mix of tax credits, health savings accounts and other gimmicks that would reduce government costs by shifting expenses to individuals. This might possibly work for employed middle-class patients, but would be ruinous for poor or unemployed patients.

And then we have Dr. Ben Carson, brain surgeon and inspirational speaker, who earlier announced he wasn’t qualified to run a large bureaucracy but will now be in charge of HUD, apparently because he once lived in government housing. And Jeff Sessions, an Attorney General who figures to be antagonistic to the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. He also oppose a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants as well as legal immigration and is yet another climate change denier. He once said CO2 isn’t a pollutant but a plant food. So don’t look for Justice to go to the barricades for environment al protection or immigrant rights.

And there are still another 4,000 Trump appointees to come.What is Trump’s game in picking nominees at odds with their own department and at times with him?

Here are a couple theories. He is “looking for people who have been successful in some realm, so he takes that as proof of their abilities. But he’s also looking for people that will be in conflict with everyone in that department…it’s the same kind of sowing-conflict mode that he’s used throughout his career of setting people against each other so that they’re not going to be loyal to each other and they’re going to be loyal to him.”

Also, after “appointing people who…,have the exact opposite point of view from everyone in that department” he may just let them “thrash it all out, and he’s going to be listening to Jared and Ivanka and sailing ahead.”

And finally, “he’s not going to be that concerned with the actual competent administration of the government” but rather “if he seems to be gaining or losing in public esteem…Like a modern monarch. The figurehead who rallies people and gets credit for things.”‘

Those remarks come from a must-read, “He Has This Deep Fear That He Is Not a Legitimate President” by Michael Kruse, an interview with three Trump biographers in “Politico,” Jan. 18, 2017. If you were worried before, this will put you over the edge.

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