Maybe Trump will Hire Fox News to Guard the Hen House – Two respected federal watchdogs resigned this week, as the country continues its slide away from its democratic principles. Hui Chen, the Justice Department’s compliance counsel who works on corporate fraud,
resigned stating, “Trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome. To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair on the Titanic.” Also resigning this week was Walter Shaub Jr., director of the Office of Government Ethics; Shaub had been with the Office since 2006. Shaub, who had sparred with Trump administration the past few months, told NPR, “Even when we’re not talking strictly about violations, we’re talking about abandoning the norms and ethical traditions of the executive branch that have made our ethics program the gold standard in the world until now.”
This Terrible Sitcom Now Has a Theme Song – The First Baptist Dallas Choir composed and performed an ode to Dear Leader called “Make America Great Again.” Trump tweeted the theme out to everyone on the nation’s birthday and then used it again as the music for his high school reunion qualityslideshow of the G-20 Summit.
No Room at the Inn for the Anti-Christ – Trump’s elite team, who millions believed could solve all of America’s problems, failed to reserve hotel rooms for the U.S. delegation for the G-20. Trump had to crash at the Hamburg guesthouse, while his staff luckily found room at the U.S. Consulate on Airbnb.
How Many Bannons Does It Take to Screw America’s Image in Poland? – Prior to the G-20 Summit, Trump stopped in Warsaw. Rather than bringing the light of the Statue of Liberty with him, he brought the white nationalist darkness of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. Trump was the first president since 1989 to visit Warsaw without visiting the Warsaw Ghetto memorial. Then, taking a page out of the authoritarian handbook, the ruling right-wing party in Poland (personally, I think with team Trump’s encouragement) bused in people to cheer Trump on during his speech. A U.S. confederate flag was displayed prominently in the audience. The official U.S. government transcript of the event made sure to highlight that multiple times the audience chanted “Donald Trump”. Finally, Trump’s speech itself made little mention of fighting for democracy or freedom or universal human rights, but rather spoke of “our civilization” and the threats of outsiders trying to destroy “the West”. From The Atlantic, read Peter Beinart’s “The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech” and what it means to the image of the U.S. globally.
MO minimum money MO problems – The Republican-controlled legislature of Missouri is requiring the city of St. Louis to roll back its minimum wage from $10/hr to $7.70/hr. This is the latest example of Republican legislatures ignoring the core conservative belief in local control to punish Democrat-led cities.
DeVos for DeVry – Nineteen state attorney generals, all Democrats, are suing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. DeVos suspended new rules, which were to go in effect on July 1, that protect students from fraud by for-profit colleges, you know, for example, Trump University.
Capturas-22 – This week’s immigration enforcement injustice of the week is that U.S. immigration officials are trying to deport kids who are concurrently being evaluated by another branch of Department of Homeland Security to determine if the kids qualify for humanitarian protection and a green card.