Investigative reporter Tom Burgis has written a book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World. He was interviewed on the public radio program IA and also in the Daily Beast about his book. I have not as yet read Burgis’s book but I earlier reviewed another book on the same topic Moneyland: The inside story of the crooks and kleptocrats who rule the world by another investigative journalist Oliver Bullough.
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North Carolina is a state that Trump won in 2016 that this year is seen as a possible Democratic pickup so it was not surprising that Trump held a rally there last week.
As Seth Meyers, says, what was troubling though was that there was no sign of any precautions being taken to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
After he was exposed as publicly playing down the seriousness of the virus even though he knew it was highly contagious and dangerous, Trump said that he only did so so as not to create panic. That explanation has been blasted as dangerous by creating a false sense of complacency at a time when accurate information was essential so that steps could be taken to minimize the spread.
But it appears that even now his administration is trying to minimize the danger by pressuring the scientists who work for the Centers for Disease Control to change their reports to comport with his optimistic statements.
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When Trump ran for president in 2016, he touted the fact that he was a businessman and that this background would enable him to run the government more efficiently. The idea that being a businessman is good training for running a government is a dubious proposition at best because there are major differences between the two. With a business, you have to appease just the stockholders if it is a public company or nobody at all if you own a private company. But with government you have to deal with a huge number of different constituencies that have independent sources of power and are not beholden to you and finding ways to get things done takes a different skill set.
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Another day, another bunch of Trump lies revealed, as well the lies of those around him who are supposed to be public servants. Much attention has been paid to Bob Woodward’s latest book that says that Trump knew about the dangers posed by the coronavirus as far back as in February but downplayed the threat.
Donald Trump knew the extent of the deadly coronavirus threat in February but intentionally misled the public by deciding to “play it down”, according to interviews recorded by one of America’s most venerated investigative journalists.
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Jennifer Griffin stands by her story that confirmed the report in The Atlantic that Trump constantly denigrates members of the military as losers and suckers and has contempt for those who get injured or killed. She also says that treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was lying when he said that he did not hear Trump say such things at a meeting at which he was present.
Trump is of course furious that the network that he thinks, with considerable justification, should be cheerleaders for him had a reporter say unflattering things and has called for her to be fired.
Were you wondering what the nutty former Minnesota congresswoman and onetime contender for the Republican presidential nomination was up to these days? Me neither. After deciding not to seek re-election in 2018 where she faced a good chance of losing, she faded away. Or so I hoped. But there she is in the news again spouting one of her trademark nutty theories, and this one is a real doozy.
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The president gets to appoint his cabinet, subject to Senate approval, and so it is not a surprise when he picks people who favor his policies. But of all the cabinet positions, the attorney general is the one who is expected to be most independent of the president. This is reasonable, since the AG is responsible for the impartial application of the laws and the Department of Justice has immense power over individuals. Unfortunately, it is not unusual for AGs to seek to please the president at the expense of justice but the current AG Bill Barr has been extraordinarily brazen in his efforts to advance Trump’s agenda and to avoid criticizing him even when he advocates illegal actions, such as when Trump recently urged people to vote twice. Trump was supposedly suggesting this to expose the weaknesses of the election system, laying the groundwork for challenging his defeat in November.
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In the endless procession of Trump cronies indulging in illegalities, the latest is Louis DeJoy, his pick to be Postmaster General who immediately began trying to cripple the US Postal Service. The Republican attempts to hobble this venerable national institution have been long standing even though the framers of the US Constitution explicitly included it in the powers allocated to Congress in that founding document, as laid out in Article 1, Section 8 that reads in part: “To establish post offices and post roads.”
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