Drain the swamp!

[Admin]

Industry over kids welfare..

The United States threatened to hit Ecuador with retaliatory trade measures and to pull military aid over the South American country proposing an international resolution that encouraged breastfeeding. The US eventually agreed to the resolution — when Russia backed it. American officials surprised international delegates at the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly in May when they opposed a widely popular resolution to promote breastfeeding, according to a report from Andrew Jacobs at the New York Times on Sunday. Specifically, they pushed to remove language asking governments to “protect, promote, and support breast-feeding.” They also took issue with a passage that called for policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that may harm children. It appears the Trump administration sided with corporate interests — in this case, the $70-billion infant formula industry — over the health and well-being of kids around the globe. The baby food industry is primarily based in the US and Europe. The Americans were so ardent in their opposition they made serious threats to Ecuadorian delegates, who were going to introduce the resolution. According to the Times, the Americans said if Ecuador didn’t drop the proposal, “Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid.”

US opposition to breastfeeding resolution: America threatened Ecuador - Vox

A Guardian investigation with Save the Children earlier this year found that formula milk firms were using aggressive methods to skirt around the regulations in order to press mothers and healthcare professionals to choose powdered milk over breastfeeding. The measures were particularly intensively deployed in the poorest regions of the world, where most growth in the baby milk formula business is now concentrated. A plethora of studies have shown the stark health improvements brought about by breastfeeding in the US and around the world. A Harvard study in 2016 estimated that 3,340 premature deaths a year among both mothers and babies could be prevented in the US alone given adequate breastfeeding. The milk formula industry has been struggling against stagnating sales in recent years, but is still worth $70bn annually. The small number of giants that produce it are concentrated in the US and Europe. One of those giants, Abbott Nutrition, is part of the healthcare multinational Abbott Laboratories that contributed to Trump’s inauguration ceremonies in January 2017.

Trump administration's opposition to breastfeeding resolution sparks outrage | US news | The Guardian

When I was 27, having never run for office before, I decided to run for Congress. Why did I do it? The short answer is baby bottles. Really. I had this moment of outraged clarity standing in front of a vast array of baby bottles at the Babies-R-Us store, trying to pick the right one for my new baby. I realized that I had to be hyper-educated just to make sure that I didn’t buy the ones that had toxic BPA in it — a carcinogen that every other developed country had banned. But not us. Not us. Because some plastics lobby or baby gear maker paid off Congress. I had a flashback to that moment when I learned that our country had fought and bullied and scrapped to try to keep the World Health Organization from touting the health benefits of breastfeeding. In fact, a 2016 analysis in the medical journal, the Lancet, concluded that the deaths of 823,000 children and 20,000 mothers each year could be averted through universal breastfeeding, along with economic savings of $300 billion. There is no debate in the scientific community that if you are able, breast is best. Yet our nation apparently cared more about pleasing the formula and baby-food producers than protecting moms and kids.

Krystal Clear: Trump's war on breast-feeding | TheHill

[Admin]

The SEC is more swampy by the day..

The SEC always hated the whistleblower program that Congress imposed on it as part of Dodd Frank reforms. Congress was responding to the SEC’s grotesque institutional failure in ignoring Harry Markopolos’ repeated, detailed warnings about the Bernie Madoff fraud, a Ponzi scheme that reached $65 billion due to SEC inaction. But as we’ll describe, the SEC issued new guidance – on a Saturday night in the summer – that guts the whistleblower program by imposing new standards that look to be contrary to the intent of Congress by making it difficult to win awards for large-scale frauds, and then reducing the payouts on them. It looks like career-minded SEC officials who resented that whistleblower filings could force them to probe wrong-doings of prospective employers are making sure the agency will only hand out parking tickets.

SEC Knifes Its Whistleblower Program | naked capitalism

[Admin]

One of the richest members of Congress reportedly put the tax cut he helped pass to quick and extravagant use.
Florida Politics reports that, according to financial disclosures, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) reportedly spent between $1 million and $5 million on a yacht on November 16, 2017 — the same day he and fellow congressional Republicans voted to pass their tax bill.

Buchanan, worth at least $80 million, was a major beneficiary of the GOP tax billand stood to save over $2 million thanks to it. He wasn’t alone, either. Fifteen Republicans who helped write the tax cuts into law will see an average tax windfall of $314,000 from the legislation they helped craft. And despite Republicans’ promises, lower and middle-income families will get tax cuts that are far more meager.

Millionaire Republican reportedly bought a yacht the same day he voted to cut his taxes – ThinkProgress

[Admin]

Some more on the US assault on breastfeeding (see earlier in this thread)..

According to Trump himself, the account was just more “fake news” from the “failing” New York Times. 

[/url]

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

The failing NY Times Fake News story today about breast feeding must be called out. The U.S. strongly supports breast feeding but we don’t believe women should be denied access to formula. Many women need this option because of malnutrition and poverty.

But the World Health Assembly wasn’t trying to deny or even limit access to infant formula. Rather, the battle centered on a resolution stating that “mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or [url=https://changingmarkets.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Milking-it-Final-report-CM.pdf]misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes,” the Times reports. A broad scientific consensus backs those assertions. The World Health Organization states that “breastfeeding is so critical that it could save the lives of over 820,000 children under the age of 5 years each year.” The American Academy of Pediatrics cites “unequivocal evidence that breastfeeding protects against a variety of diseases and conditions in the infant.” The World Health Assembly’s concern about misleading promotion of infant formula is also grounded in fact. A recent reportfound more than 800 violations of the World Health Organization’s guidelines for marketing breast milk substitutes in 79 countries between 2014 and 2017. 

This Economist Reveals the Deadly Truth About the Trump Administration’s Assault on Breastfeeding – Mother Jones

Classic Trump:

• Twisting the facts
  
• Denying what was obvious
  
• Attacking the press
  
• Oblivious (or worse) of science based evidence
  

[Admin]

If nothing else, President Donald Trump seems to know how to relax. After yet another week of pissing off international allies, the New York Times reports that he’s spending the weekend at Trump Turnberry, his luxury resort in Scotland, which means that he’s now spent 169 days of his presidency, or about 30 percent of days, hanging out at his branded properties—all at a staggering cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Trump Has Already Spent 30 Percent of His Days as President at Trump Properties – Mother Jones

And remember how wild these right-wingers went when Obama played golf for a day? Trump is at it 10x more and doing PR for his properties along the way..

[Admin]

How has regulatory lobbying fared in the Trump era? In order to answer this question, I collected data on 12866 meetings held in Trump’s first year. For reference, I compared these data with meetings held in Obama’s first year. The first year of a president’s term is a useful point to study the presidency; in this timeframe, a new president lays out regulatory goals—possibly ambitious ones as Trump has done—and sets the tone for the remainder of their time in office. What I found is that regulatory lobbying in the Trump era departs from the patterns observed under Obama in important ways, although not necessarily ones that popular perceptions of the two administrations would predict. Below, I highlight four points about regulatory lobbying in Trump’s first year.

1. Regulatory lobbying continued to increase in Trump’s first year

2. A handful of agencies accounted for majority of meetings

3. Interest groups—not industry—drove the increase

4. OIRA’s approach to regulatory lobbying is unchanged

Regulatory lobbying has increased under the Trump administration, but the groups doing the lobbying may surprise you

See article for the details

[Admin]

On Monday, while most media were still digesting President Donald Trump’s extraordinary travels abroad, the White House quietly named a long-time pesticide executive as chief scientist for the US Department of Agriculture.  If approved by the Senate, Scott Hutchins will be the third major player from Dow Chemical’s pesticide/seed division to hold a high post in Trump’s USDA. If approved by the Senate, Scott Hutchins will be the third major player from Dow Chemical’s pesticide/seed division—now known as Corteva, after Dow’s 2017 merger with DuPont—to hold a high post in Trump’s USDA. Back in April, the administration tapped Ken Isley, a 30-year Dow Agroscience/Corteva veteran, to lead the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. In October 2017, another former Dow man, Ted Mckinney, was confirmed by the Senate as undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs. McKinney had served for 19 years on Dow Agroscience’s government affairs (read: lobbying) team.

Trump Just Nominated a Pesticide Exec to Oversee Science at the USDA – Mother Jones

Rule for business, by business.. Indeed:

Under the Obama administration, the government began reviewing the impacts of all pesticides on the nation’s approximately 2,300 endangered and threatened species. Two days before President Donald Trump took office, federal officials issued a preliminary report on three highly toxic and popular agricultural insecticides, concluding that they threaten the survival of nearly 1,800 species protected by the Endangered Species Act, including 18 types of salmon. Now, under the Trump administration, these reviews have ground to a halt. 

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has uncovered a close relationship between pesticide companies and federal agencies, mirroring a pattern the Trump administration has followed with many other regulated industries. The pesticide industry has spent years trying to fend off regulations designed to protect endangered species. Under Trump, it is succeeding. Among the findings, according to documents obtained and interviews conducted by Reveall

Thanks to Trump, Pesticide Companies Are Now Free to Kill All the Endangered Species They Want – Mother Jones

See article for the details.

[Admin]

On the eve of the Paul Manafort trial, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin casually announced that Donald Trump’s administration was considering a fresh $100 billion tax cut for the wealthy. The two events—the trial and the tax cut—should be considered plot points in the same narrative. Manafort had grown very rich by looting public monies, and Mnuchin was proposing an arguably legal version of the same. Unlike past Trump tax cuts, this proposed cut would be implemented by executive fiat, without a congressional vote—a highly unusual and highly undemocratic act of plunder that would redirect money from the state to further enrich the American elite, not to mention Mnuchin himself.

Paul Manafort's Trial Is About More Than Him or Mueller - The Atlantic

[Admin]

And another swamp creature, one who quoted the Bible for supporting separating children from their parents...

Though he was never called to the stand, detailed references to Sessions and key members of his staff thread their way through the record of the four-week trial, which concluded on July 20 when David Roberson, vice president of Drummond Coal, and Joel Gilbert, a partner in the Birmingham-based law firm Balch & Bingham, were found guilty of paying off an Alabama lawmaker to oppose a federal environmental cleanup effort that could have cost Drummond millions. (The judge dismissed the charges against a second Balch lawyer, Steve McKinney.) Sessions has long had close ties to Balch and Drummond—the companies respectively ranked as his second- and third-biggest contributors during his Senate career, collectively donating nearly a quarter of a million dollars to his campaigns. And as Mother Jones and the Project on Government Oversight have previously reported, then-Sen. Sessions directly intervened with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to block the cleanup at the center of the federal bribery case.

Bribery Trial Reveals Jeff Sessions’ Role in Blocking EPA Action Targeting One of His Biggest Donors – Mother Jones

[Admin]

Drain the swamp, hire only the best and the brightest, like Paul Manafort, Scott Pruitt and..

US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross has allegedly swindled associates out of more than $120 million, according to a new bombshell report from Forbes. The magazine interviewed 21 former colleagues, many of whom say he has a propensity to filch money for himself. The sum total of all the allegations against him come to $120 million, Forbes said.

Wilbur Ross $120 million grift allegations in bombshell Forbes report - Business Insider

Former Trump campaign aides Jason Osborne and Michael Rubino are setting up a new foreign lobbying firm. The firm will represent a Russian-backed Serbian nationalist party, according to Foreign Agent Registration Act records filed two weeks ago.  The filing, first reported by Mother Jones, shows that Osborne and Rubino's new shop, known as Twin Rocks Global LLC, is headquartered in former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski's Washington, D.C., townhouse.  Osborne and Rubino registered their other lobbying firm, Turnberry Solutions, at the same address earlier this year.

Former Trump campaign aides set up foreign lobbying firm | TheHill

Only the best and the brightest...:

You know what would be surprising? If Rick Gates and Paul Manafort had suddenly suspended their apparently deeply ingrained habits of fraudulence and thievery during the three months they ran the Donald Trump campaign. Other chapters of their recent history—the chapters bracketing the campaign—include alleged episodes of witness tampering, lying to federal prosecutors, bank and tax fraud, as well as the failure to register as agents of a foreign government. Therefore, given all that has emerged about their shared ethical framework, it’s hard to imagine that the public has received the exhaustive account of those months.

Paul Manafort Trial: Rick Gates Turns on Manafort - The Atlantic