Thursday, June 18, 2020

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian...


It should have happened sooner. Behind the theatre, there is nothing innocent about Trump's flagrant deregulatory corruption and criminal mischief. The president is using the pandemic pretext to kill health and environmental regulations, even flout court orders, while ingratiating himself with supporters by funding church salaries, tormenting sexual minorities and reviving barbaric hunting practices.  

Every lever of government has been corruptly co-opted, and even alternative civil institutions of the Republican Party have been subverted: the Federalist Society has become a Trump tool rather than a vehicle for conservative legal sentiment. More here

Ransacking the republic has required the removal of inspectors general en masse. These "Stalinist" purges should be a national scandal; their purpose, other than revenge (the Intelligence IG who forwarded the Ukraine extortion whistleblower's account to congress) and punishment, is to forestall any investigations of the president, at least until after the election

The first high-level victim was the Office of Personnel Management chief; others followed, including Glenn Fine, the newly-named IG charged with oversight of disbursal of the corona virus appropriations, and the IGs for both Defence (also Glenn Fine) and the State Department

It's not just IGs being sacked, witness Rick Bright, an official who declined to recommend the dangerous anti-malarial drug Trump had been spruiking, along with other nostrums peddled by his mates

deVos: regulations to protect dodgy "educational" institutions 

For some of Trump's new placemen - who often have conflicts of interest - it's a prize: a mediocre Texas congressman, John Ratcliffe, was awarded Chief of Intelligence for obstructing Trump's impeachment

The president also believes in looking after grifters like himself. New regulations cobbled together by his odious Education Secretary Betsy deVos are designed to protect proprietors of unscrupulous "colleges" like Trump University from student actions and remedies. Congress overturned her regulations, but Trump vetoed the disallowance (more deVos skulduggery here).


READ THE REST HERE....


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