The Putinization Of America Continues Apace
With the outbreak of a Republican civil war, it is easy to lose sight of how Donald Trump’s Putinization of American government and civic institutions is continuing apace. Whether it is continuing attacks on the media, suppressing scientific analysis that conflicts with its political goals, neutering the judicial independence, or just the general corruption that rewards himself and his supporters, the Trump administration, in complicity with the Republican party, continues to subvert our democracy.
Under Scott Pruitt, the EPA is paying off his corporate benefactors at an alarming rate. Having installed an executive from the American Chemical Council, the main lobbying group for the chemical industry, as a senior deputy in the EPA’s toxic chemical unit, the agency is now relaxing regulations and oversight of dozens of potentially dangerous and hazardous chemicals, including those linked to kidney cancer, birth defects, immune system disorder, and other health issues.
At almost the same time, the EPA blocked agency scientists from addressing a conference on climate change in Rhode Island and discussing a report that they had helped prepare. “It’s definitely a blatant example of the scientific censorship we all suspected was going to start being enforced at E.P.A.” said John King, a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.
These actions follow the Treasury Department pulling down an earlier study that showed that most of the corporate savings from a cut in the corporate tax rate will get passed on to shareholders and would not go into higher worker wages, in direct contradiction of claims from Steve Mnuchin and other administration officials.
At the Interior Department, a financial review order by Trump has prevented a scientific study that would “examine a series of published scientific papers that outlined how residents living near mountaintop removal coal-mining operations faced increased risks of birth defects, cancer, other illnesses and premature death” from continuing. One of Trump’s first official acts was to remove the prohibition against mountaintop removal by executive order.
The Interior Department’s Ryan Zinke is also apparently a one man corruption machine. Besides charging the government for the unnecessary use of private jets to make a political speech for a large donor and hobnob with Koch-funded lobbyists while doing a few minutes of government work, Zinke has also seemingly managed to get a major contract for a close friend and donor to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s electric grid. Whitefish Energy Holdings, a two-year-old company with just two employees managed to get $300 million dollar contract to help restore and rebuild the territory’s high-voltage power lines. Whitefish Energy “is based in Zinke’s hometown and that its CEO, Andy Techmanski, is friendly with the Interior secretary, while the Daily Beast reported that Whitefish’s general partner maxed out donations to the Trump primary and general election campaigns, as well as a Trump super PAC, in 2016.” It should also be noted that this no-bid contract is over 200 times larger than any other contract the company has ever received.
In the same week that John Kelly refused to answer questions from reporters who did not know a Gold Star family and Sarah Sanders told reporters that a general should never be questioned, Liz Bowman, the spokesman for the EPA, responded to NY Times requests for information as the paper researched the above-mentioned chemicals story by saying, “No matter how much information we give you, you would never write a fair piece. The only thing inappropriate and biased is your continued fixation on writing elitist clickbait trying to attack qualified professionals committed to serving their country.”
And this is not the first time that Bowman has attacked reporters for doing their job. Responding to an accurate report from an AP reporter about flooded Superfund sites in Houston in August, Bowman wrote, “Yesterday, the Associated Press’ Michael Biesecker wrote an incredibly misleading story about toxic land sites that are under water. Despite reporting from the comfort of Washington, Biesecker had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. Not only is this inaccurate, but it creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders who are actually in the affected area…Unfortunately, the Associated Press’ Michael Biesecker has a history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story. Earlier this summer, he made-up a meeting that Administrator Pruitt had, and then deliberately discarded information that refuted his inaccurate story – ultimately prompting a nation-wide correction.” As you might suspect, Bowman’s additional charge about the “made-up” meeting that required a “nation-wide” correction is also completely bogus.
It’s not like Trump and his administration need much help in the defenestration of the media. Fox News has stopped even pretending to be anything other than a propaganda outfit for the Trump wing of the Republican party. And there are always reliable allies in other media outlets who can be the mouthpiece for that propaganda, as we see with John Solomon’s misleading recapitulation of the 2009 uranium deal which is now being used by House Committees to proactively provide a defense for Trump in the Russia investigation.
The actions in the House also indicate how much the cult of Trumpism has taken over the Republican party. With most of party in safely gerrymandered seats, the only thing they really have to fear is an attack from the Trump wing, creating the forced loyalty and hostage-like visuals that have become far too common. As Flake and Corker have illustrated, there is no room in the party for those who want to stand up against the dear leader.
On Monday, there was also a remarkable exchange between Representative Al Green and HUD Secretary Ben Carson. Green pressed Carson on the budget cuts on specific areas of the HUD budget, such as housing vouchers and community development grants. Besides saying that virtually half of the $6 billion cuts in the entire HUD budget would come out of public housing programs, Carson refused to answer Green’s questions and give specific numbers for specific programs. It was unclear whether the reason Carson would not answer was because he did not know or simply would not respond to Green’s questions. Carson response was “Let’s just move on and say that I don’t want to offer a number…because we’ve already talked about the total amount of the cuts…I don’t want to open the book and look at the numbers…I’m not going to go though the list this much, this much, and this much.”
Last, but not least, we also discovered in the last week that Jeff Sessions believes the DOJ is there to protect the President, rather than the rule of law and the Constitution. Beyond that, the President himself is interviewing the US Attorneys who would be responsible for investigating himself and his businesses.
Almost all these events happened in the last week and are indicative of the slow but steady Putinization of American politics – the suppression of information that does not align with government policies; blatant corruption on behalf of the regime and its supporters; attempts to intimidate the press and force self-censorship; the neutering of judicial independence; a supine and cowed legislature; and the outright rejection of oversight on no basis at all other than the prerogative of the executive. Vladimir Putin did not become the dictator he is overnight. It was a slow but steady erosion of the very limited democratic and institutional protections that had been erected after the fall of communism.
Thankfully, the democratic and institutional protections are far more robust here in the US, but they are being whittled away nonetheless. The question today is when and if they will break. Like Putin, Trump, with complicity from the Republican party, is steadily attacking and eroding those boundaries and the result is an increasing authoritarianism.
