“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Dean Baker: Donald Trump and the Republicans: The Art of the Steal
During the campaign Donald Trump boasted that he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t affect his standing among his supporters. Whether or not this is true, this appears to be the approach that Trump and his fellow Republicans are taking to their role in governing. The basic story is that they can rip off the public as much as they want, because ain’t no one going to stop them. They could be right.
The most immediate issue is Trump’s refusal to sell his assets and place the proceeds in a blind trust. This was a practice followed by every president in the last half century. The idea is that the president should be making decisions based on what they think is good for the country, not based on what they think will fatten their pocketbooks. [..]
When it comes to ethics in government, presidents usually start out setting high standards which they don’t always live up to. By refusing to put his holdings in a blind trust, Trump is starting in the sewer. It is likely to go down from there.
Eugene Robinson: Trump is the Old Faithful of fake news, and that can cause real damage
Fake news leads eventually to real tragedy. It almost got there Sunday when an idiot reportedly brought a loaded assault rifle into a Washington pizzeria, firing at least one shot, in an attempt to “self-investigate” a preposterous made-up conspiracy theory.
No one was hurt — this time. But the same kind of thing will happen again, thanks to the poison being dispensed by alt-right and white-supremacist propagandists. They concocted “news” stories out of whole cloth during the campaign in an attempt to destroy Hillary Clinton and those closest to her. Is anyone surprised that some people take these paranoid fantasies as gospel truth? I’m not.
President-elect Donald Trump makes matters worse by trumpeting “facts” that are non-factual. To the extent that he shapes the “post-truth” media landscape, he shares responsibility for the consequences.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Trump’s team of faux populists and real crony capitalists
“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy,” President-elect Donald Trump boasted last January. “But now I’d like to be greedy for the United States.”
It was a compelling story: the rapacious mogul turned Robin Hood, setting out to reform the rigged system that made him rich in the name of the common good. But that tale was always fiction, as Trump’s economic platform of corporate tax breaks and deregulation should have made obvious. Now, Trump’s transition has ended any remaining doubts that his promise to “drain the swamp” of corrupt government was a lie. Based on his post-election moves, it seems the Trump White House will be an experiment in crony capitalism on steroids.
After playing to the country’s populist mood as a candidate, Trump has surrounded himself almost exclusively with corporate elites. While the appointments of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) fired up his base, Trump has loaded up his transition and Cabinet-in-waiting with members of the establishment he claimed he would crush. Trump’s team, with few exceptions, is filled by the “swamp creatures” we’d expect in virtually any Republican administration
Robert Reich: Trump’s Trickle-Down Populism
Last Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump triumphantly celebrated Carrier’s decision to reverse its plan to close a furnace plant and move jobs to Mexico. Some 800 jobs will remain in Indianapolis.
“Corporate America is going to have to understand that we have to take care of our workers,” Trump told The New York Times. “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Vice President-elect Michael Pence added, as Trump interjected, “Every time, every time.”
So what’s the Trump alternative to the free market? Bribe giant corporations to keep jobs in America.
Carrier’s move to Mexico would have saved the company $65 million a year in wages. Trump promised bigger benefits. The state of Indiana will throw in $7 million, but that’s just the start.
Carrier’s parent company, United Technology, has military contracts that just last year generated $6.8 billion of its $57 billion in revenue – creating a yuge Trump card that makes $65 million look like peanuts. If Trump comes through with the military buildup he’s promising, United Technologies could reap a bonanza. You can bet that figured into the deal.
Amanda Marcotte: Donald Trump’s poisoned planet: The Bush-era EPA set back climate-change progress by decades — this could be worse
One thing that seems absolutely certain about President-elect Donald Trump is that he is an anti-environmentalist. During the Republican presidential debates, Trump lavishly promised to “get rid” of the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form.”
On the campaign trail, he repeatedly boasted that he would repeal as much environmental regulation as he could get his hands on. Over the weekend Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, assured Fox News viewers that Trump continues to be a climate-change conspiracy theorist, saying, “he has his default position,” which is that most climate science “is a bunch of bunk.”
But getting rid of the EPA and environmental regulation isn’t that simple. For one thing, a lot of it has been established by legislation such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and the president is legally bound, at least in theory, to enforce those laws. As researcher Sarah Anderson at The Conversation explained, getting rid of federal agencies is a lot harder than it looks, and Republicans who promise to do it generally don’t succeed. In addition, there are a number of court decisions, such as Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, that have upheld the constitutional requirement for federal agencies to do the jobs they were established to do.
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