#"No American today can claim to be unaffected by undocumented immigration. The meatpacking industry relies on such workers, as does the service industry. Nearly half of the field workers on US farms are undocumented -- and that's a low estimate. Fifteen percent of construction workers are unauthorized. (Source: Laila Lalami, "Trump's Dirty Laundry," The Nation, January 7, 2019.)
#"For decades, the DOD's leaders and accountants have been perpetuating a gigantic unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead Congress and drive the department's budgets even higher, regardless of military necessity." "As a result of the Pentagon's accounting shenanigans, some $21 trillion -- yes, trillion -- worth of financial transactions cannot be accounted for."
"Among the laundering tactics that the Pentagon uses is moving 'one-year money' -- funds that Congress intends to be sent in a single year into a pool of 'five-year money', because unspent money in this pool doesn't have to be returned during the five-year allocation period." "Indeed, Congress appropriated a record amount -- $716 billion-- for the Department of Defense in fiscal year 2019. That was up $24 billion from FY 2018's $692 billion, which itself was up $6 billion from FY 2017's $686 billion." "Appendix C, page 27, reported that Congress had appropriated $122 billion for the US Army that year. But the appendix also appears to report that the Army had received a cash deposit from the US Treasury of $794.8 billion." (Source: Dave Lindorff, "Exposing the Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud," The Nation, January 7, 2019.)
#Acting attorney general Matt Whitaker wrote in "The Hill" that "hollow calls for independent prosecutors are just craven attempts to score cheap political points and serve the public in no measurable way." He has accused Mueller of crossing "red lines" in terms of the scope of the investigation, and recently penned an op-ed for CNN, entitled "Mueller investigation of Trump is going too far." Whitaker has suggested slashing Mueller's operating budget and undermining his investigative authority.
#Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says he has no idea of which former presidents Trump is claiming told him they wished they had built a border wall while in office. Either personally, or through their representatives, all four living ex-presidents have denied they discussed the issue with Trump. Trump had said: "Some of them have told me that we should have done it."
#President Trump has claimed at least 90 times that the Wall is already being built. He has promised at least 200 times that Mexico will pay for the Wall. As for the the USMCA, the slightly revised but not officially confirmed version of NAFTA, despite Trump's claim that the new agreement will pay for the Wall, there is no payment provision in it.
#[Amazon worker] "Geissler's co-workers are constantly working while sick, pushed by economic necessity, the desire to become a 'permanent' year-around Amazonian." "Sexual harassment is rampant: Male managers stand too close to Geissler, tell her to smile, and make suggestive comments." "All of this combines to create people without a sense of power or agency, so deeply affected by their work environment that they lose hope."
"The faceless immunity of Amazon leaves her [Geissler] with no one who might listen to her complaints; and after all, she thinks, she and her co-workers would be quickly replaced should they go off script, their action reduced to a 'single sentence on the company's website.' " (Source: Alex Press, "No Space to be Human," The Nation, January 14/21, 2019.)
#Shortly before the 2016 elections, President Trump set the tone by tweeting: "Law enforcement has been strongly notified to watch closely for any ILLEGAL VOTING which took place in Tuesday's Election (or early Voting). Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law!"
"In nearly every state where the G.O.P. has controlled the governorship and the legislature, it has tried to limit access to voting, most onerously by establishing such unnecessary requirements as having to produce a photo ID in order to register."
#"According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, Democrats won the overall popular vote in the four hundred and thirty-five races for the House of Representatives by about nine per cent..." This is a very significant margin, and would undoubtedly have produced more than a 40-seat gain for the Democrats where it not for GOP gerrymandering.
Jeffrey Toobin is worried that "since Trump has effectively outsourced his judicial appointments to the Federalist Society, the incubater of far-right thinking on the law, recourse to the federal courts on voting rights may be a fading notion." (Source: Jeffrey Toobin, "Winning Votes," The New Yorker, November 26, 2018.)
No comments:
Post a Comment