Trump’s Crony Cabinet May Look Strong, but They Are Scared | The Nation

From climate justice to the Fight for $15, movements had CEOs on the ropes—and we can still beat them.

By Naomi Klein Yesterday 1:29 pm

Greenpeace

protesters unfurl a banner that reads “Resist” at the construction site of the former Washington Post building, near the White House in Washington, Wednesday, January 25, 2017. (AP Photo / Andrew Harnik)

Let’s zoom out and recognize what is happening in Washington right now. The people who already possess an absolutely obscene share of the planet’s wealth, and whose share grows greater year after year—at last count, eight men own as much as half the world—are determined to grab still more. The key figures populating Donald Trump’s cabinet are not only ultra-rich—they are individuals who made their money knowingly causing harm to the most vulnerable people on this planet, and to the planet itself. It appears to be some sort of job requirement.

This article is adapted from several speeches given over Inauguration weekend.

There’s junk-banker Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, whose lawless “foreclosure machine” kicked tens of thousands of people out of their homes.

And from junk mortgages to junk food, there’s Trump’s pick for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder. As CEO of his fast-food empire, it wasn’t enough to pay workers an abusive, non-livable wage. Several lawsuits also accuse his company of stealing workers’ wages by failing to pay for their labor and overtime.

And moving from junk food to junk science, there is Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. As an executive and then CEO of Exxon, his company bankrolled and amplified garbage science and lobbied fiercely against meaningful international climate action behind the scenes. In no small part because of these efforts, the world lost decades when we should have been kicking our fossil-fuel habit, and instead vastly accelerated the climate crisis. Because of these choices, countless people on this planet are already losing their homes to storms and rising seas, already losing their lives in heat waves and droughts, and millions will ultimately see their homelands disappear beneath the waves. As usual, the people impacted worst and first are the poorest, overwhelmingly black and brown.

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Inequality Media

Inequality Media

Published on Nov 27, 2016

With the Trump takeover only weeks away, people are asking “what can I do?” Here’s one small step (and it’s tax-deductible).

Koch Machine

Inequality Media

Published on Jan 22, 2017

Al Gore: CDC Canceled Climate Conference Is Back On

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, the American Public Health Association (APHA), Climate Reality Project, Harvard Global Health Institute, University of Washington Center for Health and Global Environment, and Dr. Howard Frumkin, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Environmental Health, announced Thursday a Climate & Health Meeting that will take place on Feb. 16 at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Supported by the Turner Foundation and other organizations, the event will fill the gap left by the recently-canceled Climate & Health Summit originally to be hosted and sponsored by the CDC and others.

“They tried to cancel this conference but it is going forward anyway,” said former U.S. Vice President and Climate Reality Founder and Chairman Al Gore. “Today we face a challenging political climate, but climate shouldn’t be a political issue. Health professionals urgently need the very best science in order to protect the public and climate science has increasingly critical implications for their day-to-day work. With more and more hot days, which exacerbate the proliferation of the Zika virus and other public health threats, we cannot afford to waste any time.”

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Government Scientists at Climate Conference Terrified to Speak With the Press

By Sharon Lerner Jan. 26, 2017 06:22PM EST

While Donald Trump was reviving both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, muzzling federal employees, freezing EPA contracts and first telling the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to remove mentions of climate change from its website—and then reversing course—many of the scientists who work on climate change in federal agencies were meeting just a few miles from the White House to present and discuss their work.

The mood was understandably gloomy at the National Conference and Global Forum on Science, Policy, and the Environment. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. No one knows what’s going to happen,” one EPA staffer who works on climate issues told me on Tuesday, as she ate her lunch. She had spent much of her time in recent weeks trying to preserve and document the methane-related projects she’s been working on for years. But the prevailing sense was that, Trump’s claims about being an environmentalist notwithstanding, the president is moving forward with his plan to eviscerate environmental protections, particularly those related to climate change and the EPA itself.

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Ebell: Purge Necessary at EPA to Rid ‘Scientists Who Believe the Global Warming Alarmist Agenda’

In various interviews on Thursday, former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition chief Myron Ebell confirmed the Trump team would probably seek significant cuts to the agency’s workforce and budget, but would not provide details of specific policy recommendations he made to the president.

Ebell, who told the AP that the federal government has “been staffed with scientists who believe the global-warming alarmist agenda,” floated the idea of downsizing EPA from 15,000 to 5,000 employees as an “aspirational goal” but acknowledged that getting cuts that significant past Congress would be a challenge for the administration.

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Doomsday Clock Now Two and a Half Minutes to Midnight, Thanks to Trump

http://www.ecowatch.com/doomsday-clock-trump-2216983060.html

By Deirdre Fulton Jan. 26, 2017 06:53PM EST

The symbolic Doomsday Clock inched closer to midnight on Thursday and we have President Donald Trump largely to thank for the ominous development.

At the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Thursday morning, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board moved the hands of the iconic clock 30 seconds closer to “midnight” or the end of the world.

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China’s gamble for global supremacy in era of Trump – BBC News

At his inauguration last week President Trump reframed the American mission from leadership of a global rules-based system in the interests of all, to ‘America first’. Meanwhile the leader of Communist China rebranded his prickly protectionist power as the defender of globalisation and shared values. So after week one in this upside down new world, how stands China’s bid for global leadership?

‘Trump confirms socialism is the way’

A week is just a week, but when it comes to strategic focus, China is on course. It’s easier to look laser sharp when the competition is in disarray. Here the internal difficulties of the US and the European Union are helpful to China.

As Chinese Foreign Ministry official Zhang Jun put it in a discussion with foreign journalists: “If people want to say China has taken a position of leadership, it’s not because China suddenly thrust itself forward as a leader. It’s because the original front-runners suddenly fell back and pushed China to the front.”

• China goes big in Davos – and here’s why
• Can Xi Jinping be star of the show?

In the past week alone, a bitter row over the size of the crowd at the Trump inauguration, followed by street protests the next day, underlined the divisions of the world’s superpower even at the very moment which was supposed to heal.

For China’s citizens, brought up to see street protests as dangerous, this was another symptom of dysfunction in a political system they’ve been taught to distrust.

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The Bible doesn’t talk about climate change, right?

Global Weirding with Katharine Hayhoe

Published on Jan 4, 2017

Global Weirding is produced by KTTZ Texas Tech Public Media and distributed by PBS Digital Studios. New episodes every other Wednesday at 10 am central. Brought to you in part by: Bob and Linda Herscher, Freese and Nichols, Inc, and the Texas Tech Climate Science Center.

Mass Exodus From Trump Administration Begins – State Department

The Young Turks

Published on Jan 26, 2017

The State Department’s ENTIRE senior administrative team has resigned. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, the hosts of The Young Turks, tell you why they are stepping down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below. https://www.tytnetwork.com/go