Trump is a threat to global stability—only a new Left international can beat him.

Excerpt from:

“We Must Rise from the Ashes of Liberal Democracy”

BY Slavoj Žižek

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19918/slavoj-zizek-from-the-ashes-of-liberal-democracy

Even if Trump will appear successful, the results of his politics will be ambiguous at best for ordinary people, who will soon feel the pain of this success. 

The only way to defeat Trump— and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy—is to detach ourselves from liberal democracy’s corpse and establish a new Left. 

Elements of the program for this new Left are easy to imagine. 

Trump promises the cancellation of the big free trade agreements supported by Clinton, and the left alternative to both should be a project of new and different international agreements. 

Such agreements would establish public control of the banks, ecological standards, workers rights, universal healthcare, protections of sexual and ethnic minorities, etc. 

The big lesson of global capitalism is that nation states alone cannot do the job—only a new political international has a chance of bridling global capital.

Republicans Turn On Each Other After Trumpcare Fail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FBnNSBEt1s

Warren Flunks Trump: Report Card Details Broken Promise to 'Drain Swamp'

'Instead of turning away lobbyists and Washington insiders, he welcomed them into the White House with open arms'

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/07/20/warren-flunks-trump-report-card-details-broken-promise-drain-swamp

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a former law professor, just flunked President Donald Trump.

"This report makes it clear: Trump's army of lobbyists are more interested in lining the pockets of their long-time employers and corporate buddies than in making life better for working families."

—Sen. Elizabeth Warren"President Trump broke his promise to 'drain the swamp,'" said Warren who, along with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and in honor of the president's six months in office, released a report card on Thursday tracking 193 former lobbyists and corporate insiders who have worked for Donald Trump since the election.

"Instead of turning away lobbyists and Washington insiders, he welcomed them into the White House with open arms," Warren said on Facebook. "This report makes it clear: Trump's army of lobbyists are more interested in lining the pockets of their long-time employers and corporate buddies than in making life better for working families."

President Trump's Drain the Swamp Report Card follows a Public Citizen report released Wednesday that details how the president "has fully abandoned populism in favor of giveaways to industry," from automakers and bankers to Big Pharma and fossil fuel companies. Thursday's report concludes "President Trump's grade on his first Drain the Swamp Report Card is a big F."

The report card's four key findings were:

Trump picked dozens of former lobbyists to fill his transition team and administration: Since his election, at least 160 current and former lobbyists advised or worked for the president.

Trump has also filled his administration with dozens of corporate insiders: "This report highlights 37 of these swamp-dwellers who either advised the president during the transition period or were hired by or nominated by President Trump to staff his administration"—including the former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, who now runs the National Economic Council.

Trump has undermined key ethics rules: After taking office, Trump touted an executive order that he claimed would close "loopholes." However, his order actually weakened rules enacted by former President Barack Obama and enabled more than two dozen former lobbyists to advise or work at agencies they have lobbied within the past two years. The admininstration also uses waivers to work around Trump's executive order.

Trump's industry insiders have developed policies that harm ordinary Americans: The administration has already supported and enacted policies that favor corporate interests over those of the public. The report describes examples in the Education and Labor Departments and well as the president's Drug Pricing Working Group. It also examines financial policies harmful to retirees, frightening environmental policies, and "a big handout to Wall Street."

As Warren said on Twitter:

Follow

Elizabeth Warren

✔ @SenWarren

Replying to @SenWarren

Our report shows: @realDonaldTrump’s team cares more about lining their longtime employers & buddies’ pockets than helping working families.

12:56 PM - 20 Jul 2017

In a Facebook video on Thursday, Whitehouse compared Trump to a popular monster truck.

"If you know a little bit about monster trucks, you know that one of them is called 'Swamp Thing'—that's Trump," Whitehouse said. "He is the Swamp Thing, after all those phony promises about draining the swamp. Lobbyists for special interests swarm into Trump administration positions. Special interest billionaires advise the Trump administration in money-making ways and stock the Trump Cabinet....The swamp and its reptiles control the administration.”

How Toxic Waste Sites Run by the Pentagon Are Poisoning Americans

Posted on Jul 20, 2017

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/new_report_pentagon_oversight_toxic_waste_sites_america_20170720

A detailed new report by ProPublica reveals how the U.S. military continues to engage in unsafe methods to destroy hazardous waste at sites across the country, and how this practice is harming nearby communities. The story, which is “the first in a series examining the Pentagon’s oversight of thousands of toxic sites on American soil,” exposes how “outdoor burning and detonation is still the military’s leading method for dealing with munitions and the associated hazardous waste.”

Abrahm Lustgarten writes:

More than three decades ago, Congress banned American industries and localities from disposing of hazardous waste in these sorts of “open burns,” concluding that such uncontrolled processes created potentially unacceptable health and environmental hazards. Companies that had openly burned waste for generations were required to install incinerators with smokestacks and filters and to adhere to strict limits on what was released into the air. Lawmakers granted the Pentagon and its contractors a temporary reprieve from those rules to give engineers time to address the unique aspects of destroying explosive military waste.

That exemption has remained in place ever since, even as other Western countries have figured out how to destroy aging armaments without toxic emissions. While American officials are mired in a bitter debate about how much pollution from open burns is safe, those countries have pioneered new approaches. Germany, for example, destroyed hundreds of millions of pounds of aging weapons from the Cold War without relying on open burns to do it.

In the United States, outdoor burning and detonation is still the military’s leading method for dealing with munitions and the associated hazardous waste. It has remained so despite a U.S. Senate resolution a quarter of a century ago that ordered the Department of Defense to halt the practice “as soon as possible.” It has continued in the face of a growing consensus among Pentagon officials and scientists that similar burn pits at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan sickened soldiers.

Federal records identify nearly 200 sites that have been or are still being used to open-burn hazardous explosives across the country. Some blow up aging stockpile bombs in open fields. Others burn bullets, weapons parts and [...] raw explosives in bonfire-like piles. The facilities operate under special government permits that are supposed to keep the process safe, limiting the release of toxins to levels well below what the government thinks can make people sick. Yet officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, which governs the process under federal law, acknowledge that the permits provide scant protection.

ProPublica obtained internal EPA documents and interviewed numerous officials for this investigative report. Lustgarten writes that while the Pentagon defends its practices as “legal” and “safe,”  the “EPA’s system for determining how much chemical burning is safe amounts to little more than educated guesses.”

“ProPublica reviewed records for the 51 active burn sites and more than 145 others the Pentagon, its contractors, and other private companies operated in the past, and found they had violated their hazardous waste handling permits thousands of times over the past 37 years, often for improperly storing and disposing of toxic material, and sometimes for exceeding pollution thresholds,” Lustgarten reports. “Much of the information gathered has never before been released to the public, leaving the full extent of military-related pollution a secret.”

Read the full report here, and take a look at corresponding interactive maps here.

—Posted by Emma Niles