Cont: The Trump Presidency Part III

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SezMe said:
Coburn is an ob/gyn. He's got as much credibility as the bum by the railroad tracks to opine of psychology. Remember, he's the one who brought a snowball onto the Senate floor as part of his claim that global warming is a hoax.
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But he's a Republican and they're never wrong.
 
A deal reached between the government and a small Montana energy company located in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's hometown prohibits the government from reviewing labor costs or profits related to the company's relief efforts in Puerto Rico, according to a leaked copy of the contract.

A copy of the deal obtained by reporter Ken Klippenstein reveals that the government isn't allowed to "audit or review the cost and profit elements" under the agreement, allowing the company greater discretion and secrecy for how it spends the $300 million to restore power to the island. Puerto Rico is rebuilding after two major hurricanes wiped out most of the island's aging electrical grid.

Whitefish signed the deal with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), which also prohibits the government from making "any claim against Contractor related to delayed completion of work."
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http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...y-contract-bars-government-from-auditing-deal

Am i supposed to assume that such contract clauses are normal and customary in the US?
 
Arcade22 said:
http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...y-contract-bars-government-from-auditing-deal

Am i supposed to assume that such contract clauses are normal and customary in the US?
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This just keeps sounding worse and worse. Ramos (head of PREPA) is defending the contract. Some info on that here. Says part of the reason for going with Whitefish is that they didn't demand major upfront money. Says mutual aid wasn't a good option because other states had their own hurricane damage to contend with and cited money issues again. Not the worst explanation on its face, but it doesn't justify the no-audit provisions. I'd like to see a really thorough investigation of this mess. As far as I can tell, though, Trump has strangely clean hands on this.
 
dudalb said:
I jusr saw this is a Washington Post comments section,in a discussion of Dubya and clearly states why I feel that making opposition to Trump a Partisan/Liberal vs Conservative issue is a huge mistake:



I have no doubt I am going to get blasted by some people here who are hardline ideogues of the "All Republican/Conservatives are evil" school of thought, IMHO they are part of the problem, not the solution, and ,in power, would become a mirror ,Bizarro version of the GOP.
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You can count me among your number in principle. However, I don't agree that Trump is an existential threat to our democracy.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
US President Donald Trump has declared the nation's painkiller-addiction crisis a public health emergency.

The president has previously promised to declare a national emergency, which would have triggered federal funding to help states combat the drug scourge.

The move instead redirects grant money to be used in dealing with the crisis.

Mr Trump is signing a presidential memorandum directing his acting health secretary to declare a nationwide public health emergency and ordering all federal agencies to take measures to reduce the number of opioid deaths.

The order will also ease some regulations to allow states more latitude in how they use federal funds to tackle the problem.

But the White House plans to fund the effort through the Public Health Emergency Fund, which reportedly only contains $57,000 (£43,000).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41756705
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I bet he is getting advice from the Vice-President on this, because if anyone knows about the drug crisis, it's Mike Pence, having contributed to the problem when he was governor.
 
theprestige said:
You can count me among your number in principle. However, I don't agree that Trump is an existential threat to our democracy.
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Which is where you are totally wrong.
IMOH the GOP are playing with dynamite by thinking they can use an authoritarian bigot to get their agenda passed, and then somehow "control" him.
The GOP needs to remember what Happen to German Conservatives when they tried that strategy in 1933.
And if the GOP embraces out and out bigotry as a political weapon,on the grounds that "it worked for Trump" the the GOP itself has become a threat to democracy.
 
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quadraginta said:
I think Trump is a symptom of an existential threat to our democracy.
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I think we need a discussion about whether democracy can survive the digital age. I don't mean to sound like a Luddite, but I think the digital revolution does pose sever problems to demoracy in that it seems to greatly increase the amount of fragmentation and tribalism in our society.
 
dudalb said:
I think we need a discussion about whether democracy can survive the digital age. I don't mean to sound like a Luddite, but I think the digital revolution does pose sever problems to demoracy in that it seems to greatly increase the amount of fragmentation and tribalism in our society.
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Parliamentary democracies have been dealing with this problem since long before the digital age without the same problems America has. American republicanism is a terrible system of government that is easily exploited but a gentlemen's agreement had prevented that from happening for a long time. America doesn't even export it's style of republicanism when it goes nation building like in Iraq.
 
Stacko said:
Parliamentary democracies have been dealing with this problem since long before the digital age without the same problems America has. American republicanism is a terrible system of government that is easily exploited but a gentlemen's agreement had prevented that from happening for a long time.
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Just wondering what systems you think are better? The Westminster system? That's about the only possible contender, seeing that America has been going since 1788 (as opposed to 1949 for Germany, 1958 for France, 1978 for Spain, etc).

And the Westminster system has it's own significant issues, I'd hardly rush to say that it is superior to the US constitutional system.
 
Giz said:
Just wondering what systems you think are better? The Westminster system? That's about the only possible contender, seeing that America has been going since 1788 (as opposed to 1949 for Germany, 1958 for France, 1978 for Spain, etc).

And the Westminster system has it's own significant issues, I'd hardly rush to say that it is superior to the US constitutional system.
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I personally think that a modification of the Westminster system has the potential to be an improvement on either the US or UK systems, but at least the US doesn't have an appointed Upper House, which I think is probably worse than when it was hereditary.
 
It's a workers party now.

President Donald Trump on Thursday named former Ernst & Young LLP executive David Kautter to serve as the interim head of the Internal Revenue Service after the current chief,*John Koskinen, finishes his term on November 12.

During his three decades of work at Ernst & Young, Kautter served as the director of national tax practices at a time when his firm was engaged in a massive effort to assist wealthy clients with tax avoidance schemes.
Kautter’s position meant that he managed the “strategic direction, day-to-day operations, and quality of technical advice” for E&Y’s firmwide tax practices.

Between 1999 and 2004, E&Y developed a team called Viper to devise strategies for clients making more than $10 million from having to pay U.S. taxes. The effort allowed some 200 wealthy clients to avoid taxes worth about $2 billion. Kautter took on the director-level role in 2000, a period that coincided with the Viper deals.

In 2010, four of the individuals involved in the illegal tax shelter scheme were sentenced to serve between 20 and 36 months in prison, though two of the sentences were later overturned. In 2013, E&Y paid the IRS a $123 million settlement relating to the scheme.

Kautter managed to escape charges or a prison sentence, but he would not seem like an obvious choice to run the agency his company defrauded. Yet Democrats will have little ability to make that case publicly, because when he was nominated to be assistant treasury secretary for tax policy, the party rolled over. In a bizarre Finance Committee hearing that took place in a small, private room just off the Senate floor, Democrats joined Republicans to approve him by a 26-0 vote.
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