Their fellow legislators have silently accepted his outrages in exchange for policies they’ve always wanted.
At his inauguration Mr. Trump said his presidency was about “transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people.” But he and his allies in Congress are transferring power to Wall Street, fossil fuel companies, the chemical industry and other special interests, and are stoking an anti-populist bonfire to incinerate protections for consumers and workers.
.. On Tuesday night the Senate, with a tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence, followed the House in voting to overturn a rule that would have allowed consumers to file class-action lawsuits against banks and other financial institutions, rather than be forced to take their disputes to arbitration.
.. Mr. Trump signed an executive order allowing insurers to sell skimpy health insurance plans that do not protect people with pre-existing conditions and that will destabilize the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces.
.. His administration shortened the open enrollment period when people can buy insurance policies for next year, and slashed spending on advertising and outreach efforts.
.. Congress overturned a rule restricting the ability of coal companies to dump their mining debris into streams and other waterways, threatening rural communities, forests and wildlife.
.. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, rejected a staff recommendation to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which has been linked to developmental problems in children, and started the process to overturn the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era proposal to reduce planet-warming emissions from power plants.
.. Congress repealed a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that sought to expose and limit corruption by requiring oil and mining companies to disclose payments to foreign governments.
Mohamed Bouazizi
Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi (Arabic: محمد البوعزيزي; 29 March 1984 – 4 January 2011) was a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, in response to the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation that he said was inflicted on him by a municipal official and her aides. This act became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution[2]and the wider Arab Spring, inciting demonstrations and riots throughout Tunisia in protest of social and political issues in the country. Simmering public anger and sporadic violence intensified following Bouazizi’s death, leading then-president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down on 14 January 2011, after 23 years in power.
.. He supported his mother, uncle, and younger siblings, including paying for one of his sisters to attend university, by earning approximately US$140 per month selling produce on the street in Sidi Bouzid
.. A close friend of Bouazizi said he “was a very well-known and popular man [who] would give free fruit and vegetables to very poor families”
.. According to friends and family, local police officers had allegedly targeted and mistreated Bouazizi for years, including during his childhood, regularly confiscating his small wheelbarrow of produce;[15] but Bouazizi had no other way to make a living, so he continued to work as a street vendor. Around 10 p.m. on 16 December 2010, he had contracted approximately US$200 in debt to buy the produce he was to sell the following day. On the morning of 17 December, he started his workday at 8 a.m.[11] Just after 10:30 a.m., the police began harassing him again, ostensibly because he did not have a vendor’s permit
.. Similarly, two of Bouazizi’s siblings accused authorities of attempting to extort money from their brother,[18] and during an interview with Reuters, one of his sisters stated, “What kind of repression do you imagine it takes for a young man to do this? A man who has to feed his family by buying goods on credit when they fine him…and take his goods. In Sidi Bouzid, those with no connections and no money for bribes are humiliated and insulted and not allowed to live.”[17]
.. Bouazizi’s family claims he was publicly humiliated, that a 45-year-old female municipal official, Faida Hamdi,[2][10][15] slapped him in the face, spat at him, confiscated his electronic weighing scales, and tossed aside his produce cart.[19] It was also stated that she made a slur against his deceased father.[17][19] Bouazizi’s family says her sex made his humiliation worse.
.. Faida Hamdi[2][10][15] and her brother claimed in interviews that she did not slap Bouazizi or otherwise mistreat him. An eyewitness referred to by Asharq Al-Awsat claimed not to have seen Hamdi slap Bouazizi
Both Bouazizi’s mother and the eyewitness who spoke with Asharq Al-Awsat stated that Hamdi’s aides had kicked and beaten him after confiscating his fruit cart.[23] Faida Hamdi states it might have happened[24] and Asharq Al-Awsat denies it did.
.. Bouazizi, angered by the confrontation,[25] went to the governor’s office to complain[19] and to ask for his scales back.[26] The governor refused to see or listen to him, even after Bouazizi was quoted as saying, “If you don’t see me, I’ll burn myself.”[19] Bouazizi then acquired a can of gasoline from a nearby gas station and returned to the governor’s office. While standing in the middle of traffic, he shouted, “How do you expect me to make a living?”[26] He then doused himself with the gasoline and set himself alight with a match at 11:30 a.m. local time, less than an hour after the altercation.[19]
.. Bouazizi was visited in the hospital by then-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.[30] According to Bouazizi’s mother, Ben Ali promised to send him to France for medical treatment,[15] but no such transfer was ever arranged. Bouazizi died at the Ben Arous Burn and Trauma Centre 18 days after the immolation, on 4 January 2011, at 5:30 p.m. local time.[31][32]
.. According to Bouazizi’s mother, Bouazizi chose to take this action because he had been humiliated, not because of the family’s poverty.[19]“It got to him deep inside, it hurt his pride,” she said, referring to the police harassment
One of Bouazizi’s sisters stated during an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat that their family intends to take legal action against all involved, “whether this is the municipal officers that slapped and insulted him, or the mayor [who] refused to meet him.”[23]
Not All Foreign-Influence Scandals Are Created Equal
a similar story — this one involving Communist China — that developed during Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. The Washington Post reported in 1998 that “evidence gathered in federal surveillance intercepts has indicated that the Chinese government planned to increase China’s influence in the U.S. political process in 1996.”
.. Many people still believe that a major cover-up of that scandal worked — in part because the media expressed skepticism and devoted only a fraction of resources they are spending on the Trump–Russia story. Network reporters expressed outright skepticism of the story, with many openly criticizing the late senator Fred Thompson, the chair of the Senate investigating committee, for wasting time and money.
.. congressional hearings on the China scandal in the summer of 1997 were dwarfed by reports on the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace and the death of Princess Diana.
.. The Chinese fundraising scandal involving DNC finance vice chairman John Huang first came to light in the final weeks of the 1996 presidential campaign. A former Commerce Department official, Huang was a top fundraiser who scooped up suspect foreign cash for Team Clinton.
.. The DNC was forced to give back more than $2.8 million in illegal or improper donations from foreign nationals.
.. Chung confessed that at least $35,000 of his donations to the Clinton campaign and the DNC had come from a Chinese aerospace executive — a lieutenant colonel in the Chinese military.
.. A total of 120 participants in the fundraising scandal either fled the country, asserted their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, or otherwise avoided questioning. The stonewalling worked — and probably encouraged Hillary Clinton in her own cover-up of her private e-mail server and her ties with the Clinton Foundation.
.. Indeed, much of the media basically gave the Clintons a pass on evidence that special-interest donors to the Clinton Foundation frequently managed to score favors from the State Department. Journalist Peter Schweitzer revealed in his book Clinton Cash that State had helped move along an infamous deal that granted the Russians control of more than 20 percent of the uranium production here in the United States.
.. The company involved in acquiring the American uranium was a very large donor to — you guessed it — the Clinton Foundation.
.. But a little humility and honesty on the part of the media would be appropriate. Much of the breathless and constant coverage of the Russia scandal is motivated by the media’s hatred of Donald Trump
.. When it came to the Clintons, the media tended to downplay or even trivialize many of their scandals. But, to be fair, a little bit of self-awareness is beginning to show up in the Russia coverage. Last Thursday, Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC noted that when it came to “opening the door” to lowering the standards of conduct by a modern president, Bill Clinton led the way with his lying and scandalous behavior.
Huge Manafort Payment Reflects Murky Ukraine Politics
Paul J. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, recently filed financial reports with the Justice Department showing that his lobbying firm earned nearly $17 million for two years of work for a Ukrainian political party with links to the Kremlin.
Curiously, that was more than the party itself reported spending in the same period for its entire operation — the national political organization’s expenses, salaries, printing outlays and other incidentals.
.. Mr. Yanukovych was driven from office in the Maidan Revolution of 2014, after having stolen, according to the current Ukrainian government, at least $1 billion. In the years before his fall, Mr. Manafort took lavish payments to burnish the image of Mr. Yanukovych and the Party of Regions in Washington, even as the party acknowledged only very modest spending.
.. In 2012, for example, the party reported annual expenses of about $11.1 million, based on the exchange rate at the time, excluding overhead. For the same year, Mr. Manafort reported income of $12.1 million from the party, the Justice Department filing shows.
.. Handwritten ledgers that surfaced last year indicated that the party had actually spent about $2 billion over the past decade or so, much or most of it illegally. Some outlays like payments to an election official possibly amounted to criminal bribery.
.. the party’s coffers were padded with donations from Ukraine’s ultrawealthy steel and natural gas tycoons, it tried to keep up a populist image and declared only a modest, even minuscule, annual budget.
.. “It means either Manafort is lying, or the Party of Regions was lying,” Serhiy Leshchenko, an investigative journalist and a member of Parliament who has been critical of Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine, said in an interview.
.. filing a false campaign finance report was considered an administrative offense akin to a parking ticket and punishable by no more than a fine of a few hundred dollars
.. Anticorruption officials in Ukraine assert that the payments were part of an illegal off-the-books system. Mr. Manafort, who resigned from his campaign post shortly after the article appeared, has denied receiving any cash