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Uplifting, Heartbreaking, Enormous Crowds at Women’s Marches Around The World

by JaxonChong7701 Posted on January 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Dramatically larger than expected crowds showed up Saturday at women’s marches in Washington, DC, and more than 600 cities around the world. Mother Jones reporters have been on the scene all day, interviewing protesters and gathering photos and video. In this roundup we’ve collected some of what they saw, as well as highlights from across social media.

10:46 p.m. EST: And with that, we’re signing off for now.

9:00 p.m. EST: Safe travels home everyone!

7:40 p.m. EST: Another large crowd in San Francisco:

5:50 p.m. EST: President Trump, speaking at CIA headquarters in Langley, insisted (falsely) that his inauguration drew the largest crowd ever for such an event. “As you know, I have a running war with the media,” the president noted. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, followed up by warning that the press would be held “accountable.” Neither man mentioned the massive marches around the nation.

4:50 p.m. EST: From the march in Oakland, California:

4:09 p.m. EST:

3:55 p.m. EST: Here’s footage of women marching in five states where Donald Trump won:

3:45 p.m. EST: Even more signs (and chants!):

3:40 p.m. EST:

3:20 p.m. EST: Updates from New York City’s march:

3:16 p.m. EST: Lol.

3:07 p.m. EST: The Associated Press reports that city officials have said that because the planned route for the march in Washington, DC, “is filled with protesters, a formal march is no longer possible.” Marchers have been diverted along a different route.

2:34 p.m. EST: We’re hearing reports that attendance at marches nationwide has far surpassed predictions:

1:30 p.m. EST: Signs, signs, and more signs:

Hair made of Cheetos. Jeremy Schulman

1 p.m. EST: More than 500,000 marchers are now in Washington, DC, according to new estimates:

12:45 p.m. EST: Crowds swell at marches around the world:

12:25 p.m. EST: Well, this happened.

12:15 p.m. EST:

11:29 a.m. EST:

11:05 a.m. EST:

10:04 a.m. EST:

9:57 a.m. EST: The DC Metro is packed with attendees headed to the march.

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Uplifting, Heartbreaking, Enormous Crowds at Women’s Marches Around The World

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Trump’s First Move as President: Screwing Over Homeowners

by GalenMercer Posted on January 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Earlier this month, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive action requiring the Federal Housing Administration to decrease insurance premiums on FHA mortgages, a change that could have potentially saved low-income homeowners as much as $900 per year. In his first administrative order as president, President Donald Trump suspended this Obama order, which was slated to go into effect on January 27. In practice, this means that low-income homeowners will be stuck paying higher insurance premiums on their FHA-insured mortgages.

FHA loans enable homebuyers—often those with lower incomes and who have fewer assets or bad credit—to bypass conventional lenders who would likely deny them loans by taking out a mortgage that’s insured by the federal government. The borrowers have to pay FHA mortgage insurance, to protect the mortgage lender from a loss should the borrower default on their home loan. In his announcement of the change, Obama said the drop in premiums would help stabilize the housing market and spur growth in housing markets still recovering from the financial crisis.

At his confirmation hearing last week, Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the FHA, said he was concerned about the Obama administration’s last-minute implementation of this insurance premium drop and would reexamine it. “I, too, was surprised to see something of this nature done on the way out the door,” Carson told members of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committee. “Certainly, if confirmed, I’m going to work with the FHA administrator and other financial experts to really examine that policy.”

Presidential executive orders require no congressional approval to pass or overturn. Trump has vowed to eliminate all of Obama’s executive actions during his first days in office. This may be his first step toward fulfilling that promise.

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Trump’s First Move as President: Screwing Over Homeowners

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At His Inauguration, Trump Signals No Break From His Politics of Fear and Loathing

by KeeleyOQWkv Posted on January 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Today, as of noon, the president of the United States is a man who boasted of sexually assaulting women. The nation’s leader is a purveyor of fake news and conspiracy theories who led the racist birther campaign. The commander in chief in charge of the US nuclear arsenal is a fellow who was unfamiliar with the nuclear triad but who is obsessed with revenge. The head of the federal government is a businessman who vowed to “drain the swamp” but who has taken office loaded with troubling conflicts of interest and flouting multiple ethics norms. The defender of the Constitution is a record-setting prevaricator and fabulist who has repeatedly attacked journalists who challenge his false assertions. The guy who oversees national law enforcement is a dishonest developer who was sued for racially based housing discrimination and who lied about his mob ties. The person in charge of US national security is a foreign policy novice who has called for enhancing relations with a foreign power that covertly worked to subvert American democracy in order to benefit him and whose associates are under investigation by agencies he now oversees for possible contacts with that foreign power. The most powerful man in the world is a thin-skinned, arrogant, name-calling, bullying, narcissistic hotelier.

Thank you, America. Or, that is, the 46 percent of the electorate who voted for Donald Trump.

Their view of the nation and its current condition was diametrically opposed to the perspective of the majority, who voted for Hillary Clinton. Trump voters bought his spiel and his shtick. He portrayed the United States as a declining hellhole, a dystopia under siege by undocumented Latino immigrants, criminals, and ISIS, with Middle America workers played for rubes by uncaring, screw-you political, corporate, and media elites in league with international bankers. And Trump was the tough-guy white knight who would do whatever it took—disruption! chaos!—to restore the lives and dreams of hardworking folks and bring about the return of some mythical (whiter?) American greatness. (Details to come.)

And when he gave his first speech as president—his inaugural address on a dismal and gray day—Trump, no surprise, stuck with the simple and bumperstickerish themes that had brought him to this once improbable point: There is “carnage” across the land, the American people have been betrayed by a small group of elites, and it’s time for America First. Speaking to a sea of white people—who were being protected by a police force that is mostly black—Trump peddled the same big and bold promises he slung during the campaign: “America will start winning again, winning like never before. We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.” The crowd cheered wildly for the nation’s No. 1 salesman. And they hooted when Clinton appeared on the big screen, and many in the VIP section toward the front of the crowd jeered when Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the speakers before Trump, referred to gender identity equality.

Trump turned hate into a political tool. He’s not the first. But he effectively fueled and exploited long-established conservative hatred of Latinos, Obama, Clinton, the media, Muslims. He mocked a disabled reporter. He derided a federal judge who had ruled against him in the Trump University fraud suit as a “Mexican.” He described black communities as nothing but crime-infested and burned-out ghettoes. He encouraged voters to detest Washington and government. He made common cause with conspiracy nut Alex Jones. He won the support of the Ku Klux Klan and the alt-right (the fancy name for white nationalists). He encouraged violence at his rallies. He denounced his opponent as a treasonous criminal and called for her to be locked up. He obnoxiously insulted and openly feuded with, well…just about everyone: Miss Universe, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Carly Fiorina, Rosie. Spite was his meme.

Worse, Trump hitched hate to fear. He claimed that the nation was gripped by a crime spree (which didn’t exist), that ISIS was on the verge of invading the United States (not really), and that hundreds of millions of undocumented immigrants were poised to “pour” across the border (nope).

Most people who behave in such caddish and uncivil ways are dismissed as jerks—not embraced as the embodiment of the nation and its hopes and aspirations. In modern times, no candidate who campaigned so angrily has ever won the presidency. But early in the race, Trump’s team concluded that Trump was already widely known for his crass and abrasive public persona. (This was well before he was caught on video boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy.”) What was most important, one of his strategists told me this summer, was whether voters accepted Trump’s pitch that the country was in free fall (terrorism! no jobs! immigrants invading!) and were sufficiently freaked out to embrace a political novice who would promise extreme measures to deal with all this crap. Were the voters pissed off enough to accept a TV star businessman (forget the bankruptcies or mob ties—look at that jet) who didn’t give a damn about niceties and who would screw anyone who disagreed with him or got in his way? His only chance, his strategists knew, was if enough Americans wanted an asshole as president. As it turned out, a majority did not, but 63 million did—and that was enough for Trump to bag a win in the Electoral College.

After the election, Trump continued to act and tweet like Trump. As if the act had to continue. With inane tweets, he repeatedly dumped on Alec Baldwin and civil rights icon John Lewis. He referred to Americans who voted against him as the enemy. He compared the intelligence community—which concluded Vladimir Putin had meddled in the US elections to boost Trump—to Nazis and continued to make nice with Putin and to demonize Clinton. Having won the grand prize, Trump showed not a smidgeon of graciousness. He fibbed about matters large and small. (He claimed all the ball gowns were sold out in Washington because so many people would be celebrating his inauguration. High-end clothing outlets told reporters they had plenty of inventory.)

Trump demonstrated that his campaign trail populism was no more than an artifice. He appointed billionaires and Goldman Sachs vets to the Cabinet and did little to clean up the swamp he had denounced. His plan to deal with his own conflicts of interest was a sham. (He begins his presidency in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.) Trump empowered Republicans aiming to privatize Medicare and eviscerate Social Security—notions Trump opposed during the race. He vowed that his Obamacare replacement would entail “insurance for everybody”; then he backtracked. He demonstrated no core ideological convictions. He showed once again that he is 100 percent situational.

His approval rating plummeted to a record low for a president-elect. Yet congressional Republicans stood by him and waved a rubber stamp for his appointees. And it was unclear whether any of his missteps tainted him in the eyes of his die-hard supporters. At the inauguration, his supporters gasped with excitement when he gave the crowd a thumbs-up. Well-heeled folks in the big-donor section applauded his denouncement of the establishment and his vow to give government back to the people. Many went gaga when Melania Trump appeared on the television screens, wearing a fashionable blue coat.

During the campaign, one Trump aide told me that the Trump camp understood that many of his supporters were low-information voters. “They mainly just see the headlines,” he said. So if a headline said, “Trump Vows to Make America Great Again,” that was the message many of these people absorbed. By speaking in slogans and memes—”Lock her up!”—Trump was effectively communicating and connecting with a large group of voters. The specifics didn’t register—or matter.

This has continued during the transition period, with Trump issuing bold promises and boasting that his efforts have already saved American jobs. (The details, often more complicated, don’t reach many of his voters.) He did the same with his short inaugural address, which was light on compound sentences or sophisticated ideas. Consequently, there is no telling if his folks will sour on him, if he keeps insisting that he is doing one helluva job.

Trump now shifts from campaigning to governing. It’s unlikely he will change his tactics. He will continue to praise himself and his efforts and declare every step he takes a gargantuan win for America. He will continue to blame others, if anything falls short or goes wrong. He will keep on picking Twitter feuds and behaving in a juvenile and puerile manner—perhaps as a strategic distraction or perhaps because he simply cannot help himself. He certainly is not embarrassed by his behavior—and a man who cannot be embarrassed is a dangerous man.

So for the American majority who voted against Trump and his keep-it-simple politics of fear, hate, and insult, the nation begins the Trump era with no silver linings. A vain, vengeful, and erratic celebrity who has often acted in crude, bigoted, and ignorant fashion is in control. And, ultimately, he is not the problem. The real trouble is with the 63 million who voted for him. How long will they stand by him and buy his easy-answers, reality-defying pitch? In front of the Capitol, Trump told his supporters, “Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for years to come.” They have already made great progress on that path of hate and fear.

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At His Inauguration, Trump Signals No Break From His Politics of Fear and Loathing

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Investigators on the Trump-Russia Beat Should Talk to This Man

by dfdedtcf Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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Sergei Millian, left, pictured with Donald Trump and Jorge Perez. Millian’s Facebook page

Last week, the Senate intelligence committee announced it was commencing an investigation of Russian hacking during the 2016 campaign that would include an examination of connections between Russia and the Trump camp. And a veiled but pubic exchange between Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the committee, and FBI Director James Comey during a hearing on January 10 suggested the FBI has collected information on possible ties between Trump associates and Russians and may still be probing this matter. So with subpoena-wielding investigators on this beat, here’s a suggestion: the gumshoes ought to talk to an American from Belarus named Sergei Millian, who has boasted of close ties to Trump and who has worked with an outfit the FBI suspected of being a Russian intelligence front. If they haven’t already.

Millian, who is in his late 30s and won’t say when came to the United States or how he obtained US citizenship, is an intriguing and mysterious figure with a curious connection to Trump. He is president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA (RACC) and the owner of a translation service. The RACC, a nonprofit which Millian started in Atlanta in 2006 and which has survived on shoestring budgets, advocates for closer commercial ties between Russia and the United States and assists US firms looking to do business in Russia. In 2009, the group called for the US Congress “to foster necessary political changes to produce a healthier economic environment” and grant permanent normal trade relations status to Russia. Its website notes that it “facilitates cooperation for U.S. members with the Russian Government, Russian Regional Administrations, U.S. Consulates in Russia, Chambers of Commerce in Russia, and corporate leaders from CIS Commonwealth of Independent States countries.”

The Russian-American Chamber of Commerce’s 2011 tax return reported the group was based in an apartment in Astoria, Queens, where Millian lived—though the group’s letterhead that year listed a Wall Street address—and that year it brought in only $23,300 in contributions and grants and $14,748 in program revenue. The tax return noted that the chamber “successfully hosted four universities from Russia in New York City” and hosted a trade mission from Belarus. In 2015, Millian received a Russian award for fostering cooperation between US and Russian businesses.

On his LinkedIn page, Millian notes he is also the vice president of an outfit called the World Chinese Merchants Union Association, a group that has only a slight presence on the Internet and that seems to have an address in Beijing. According to a LinkedIn post published by Millian in April 2016, he met that month in Beijing with a Chinese official and the Russian ambassador to the Republic of San Marino to discuss industrial and commercial cooperation between China and Russia.

Millian’s online bio notes he graduated from the Minsk State Linguistic University with the equivalent of a masters degree in 2000. His bio says he is a real estate broker who works in residential and commercial properties in the United States and abroad. He used to go by the name Siarhei Kukuts—that’s how he’s listed on tax returns for the RACC—and it is unclear why he changed his name. Millian also has repeatedly claimed he had a significant business association with Trump.

In an April 2016 interview with RIA Novosti, a Russian media outlet, Millian described his history with Trump. He said he met the celebrity real estate developer in 2007 when Trump visited Moscow for a “Millionaire’s Fair,” where he was promoting Trump Vodka. Millian noted that Trump subsequently invited him to a horse race in Miami. “Later,” Millian said, “we met at his office in New York, where he introduced me to his right-hand man—Michael Cohen. He is Trump’s main lawyer, all contracts go through him. Subsequently, a contract was signed with me to promote one of their real estate projects in Russia and the CIS. You can say I was their exclusive broker.”

Millian said he had helped Trump “study the Moscow market” for potential real estate investments. In the April 2009 issue of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce newsletter, Millian reported that he was working with Russian investors looking to buy property in the United States, and he said, “We have signed formal agreements with the Richard Bowers and Co., the Trump Organization and The Related Group to jointly service the Russian clients’ commercial, residential and industrial real estate needs.” Millian’s claim did jibe with what Donald Trump Jr. said at a 2008 real-estate conference in New York. Trump’s son noted, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” He added, “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

In the 2016 interview, Millian asserted that Trump would be good for Russia if elected president. Trump, he noted would improve US relations with Russia and lift economic sanctions imposed by Washington on Russia. He said that Trump was interested in doing business in Russia: “I don’t want to reveal Trump’s position, but he is keeping Moscow in his sights and is waiting for an appropriate time.” Millian added, “In general Trump has a very positive attitude to Russians, because he sees them as clients for his business. Incidentally, he has done many projects with people from the Russian-language diaspora. For example, Trump SoHo in New York with billionaire Tamir Sapir.” (Sapir, who died in 2014, was an American billionaire real-estate developer from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.)

Millian apparently was proud of his association with Trump. In 2014, he posted on Facebook a photograph of him with Trump and Jorge Perez, the billionaire real-estate developer in Miami who owns the Related Group.

Millian seemed delighted to spin for Trump and push the impression he was a Trump insider. During the Republican convention, he told the Daily Beast that Trump was a “powerful, charismatic, and highly intelligent leader with a realistic approach toward Russia.” He added, “I, personally, wholeheartedly support his presidential aspirations. It’s been a great pleasure representing Mr. Trump’s projects in Russia.” But weeks later, as the Russia hacking controversy was heating up, Millian in another exchange with the Daily Beast, downplayed his connection to Trump. And the website reported that after its reporter spoke him, Millian removed mentions of his Trump association from an online biography. It also appears that references to the Trump Organization working with the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA were at some point scraped from its website.

Millian’s activities and ties to Trump have raised questions. In October, the Financial Times mounted an investigation of him and the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. It reported:

Most of the board members are obscure entities and nearly half of their telephone numbers went unanswered when called by the Financial Times. An FT reporter found no trace of the Chamber of Commerce at the Wall Street address listed on its website. At the same time, the chamber appears to have close official ties, arranging trips for visiting Russian regional governors to the US.

As part of its inquiry into Millian, the newspaper pointed to Millian’s connection to Rossotrudnichestvo, a Russian government organization that promotes Russian culture abroad. In 2013, Mother Jones reported that Rossotrudnichestvo was under investigation by the FBI for using junkets to recruit American assets for Russian intelligence. Through cultural exchanges, Rossotrudnichestvo, which operates under the jurisdiction of the Russian Foreign Ministry, was bringing young Americans—including political aides, nonprofit advocates, and business executives—on trips to Russia. The program was run by Yury Zaytsev, a Russian diplomat who headed the Russian Cultural Center in Washington, DC.

Americans who participated in the exchange trips who were later questioned by FBI agents told Mother Jones that the agents’ questions indicated the FBI suspected Zaytsev and Rossotrudnichestvo had been using the all-expenses-paid trips to Russia to cultivate Americans as intelligence assets. (An asset could be a person who directly works with an intelligence service to gather information, or merely a contact who provides information, opinions, or gossip, not realizing it is being collected by an intelligence officer.) After Mother Jones published a story on the FBI investigation, the Russian embassy in Washington issued a statement: “All such ‘scaring information’ very much resembles Cold War era. A blunt tentative is made to distort and to blacken activities of the Russian Cultural Center in DC, which are aimed at developing mutual trust and cooperation between our peoples and countries.” (A year later, in November 2014, Zaytsev spoke at a Moscow press conference and said, in reference to the upcoming US presidential elections, “it seems to me that the Russian ‘card’ will certainly be played out.” He added, “I think that this presidential election first of all will very clearly show a trend of further development” in US-Russia relations.)

Millian has collaborated with Rossotrudnichestvo. In 2011, he and the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce worked with Zaytsev and the Russian group to mount a 10-day exchange that brought 50 entrepreneurs to the first “Russian-American Business Forum” in Moscow and the Vladimir region, according to a letter Millian sent to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev after the initiative. In that letter, Millian praised Rossotrudnichestvo, and he added, “My entire staff, fellow participants, and I, here at the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA, very much look forward to assisting Rossotrudnichestvo with the preparations for next year’s trip.” (Millian now says, “We are not affiliated with Rossotrudnichestvo in any way.”)

Toward the end of the presidential campaign Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer, told the Financial Times that Millian’s claims of working with Trump were “nothing more than a weak attempt to align himself with Mr. Trump’s overwhelmingly successful brand.” But the newspaper reported that Cohen “did not respond to questions about whether he interacted with Mr. Millian or why Mr. Millian is one of only 100 people he follows on Twitter.” (Cohen no longer follows Millian on Twitter.) Hope Hicks, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, told the paper that Trump had “met and spoke” with Millian only “on one occasion almost a decade ago at a hotel opening.”

Cohen, Hicks, Sean Spicer, Trump’s designated White House press secretary, and the Trump presidential transition team did not respond to a request for information regarding Millian’s interactions with Trump and his associates.

Reached by telephone this week, Millian said he would not discuss his relationship with Trump and requested he be sent questions via email. Mother Jones subsequently sent him a list. Millian responded in an email with answers to a different set of questions, and he noted he would not answer any queries about his personal background or provide any details beyond what was in this reply. He said in the email, “I have a solid reputation with businesses around the world. It’s a common practice for immigrants to change name upon immigrating to the USA. I am US citizen and do not have and never had Russian citizenship. I live and work in NYC.”

In the email, Millian asserted, “I have never said that I worked personally for Trump. I said I was a broker for one of his many real estate projects. There are several brokers who work on such real estate projects. I never represented Mr Trump personally and I am not working with Mr Trump.” He added, “I have signed an official contract with talks of exclusivity that authorized me to represent Trump name project in Russia and CIS.” But he said he had never been paid by Trump for any work. He maintained that the last time he spoke to Trump was in 2008.

Millian insisted he had “never worked for Russian Government or Russian military as a translator or in any other capacity.” He said, “We never got any business with Rossotrudnichestvo.” And he made this point: “I’m a member of the Presidential Trust of NRC-GOP and supporter of Mr Trump who contributed to his campaign just the same way as many millions of Americans. I’m proud that Mr Trump became our president. I’m sure he will rebuild our great nation to the highest standards just as he did with his distinguished buildings. We desperately need better infrastructure, airports, railways in this country. Also, high time starting paying off national debts. I feel upset that press tries to distracts him from making our country great again by distributing fake news.” (A search of campaign finance records revealed no contribution from Millian to the Trump campaign or Republican National Committee; a contribution of $200 does not have to itemized.)

Millian’s response ignored several questions Mother Jones sent him. He would not say when he left Belarus or explain how he became an American citizen. He would not discuss the details of the deal he previously claimed to have struck with the Trump Organization. He would not say how many times he worked on projects or exchanges with Rossotrudnichestvo. (His response seemed to suggest he had nothing to do with the Russian organization, yet the 2011 letter he wrote indicated his Russian-American Chamber of Commerce had collaborated with Rossotrudnichestvo.) He did not explain why references to the Trump organization had been scraped from the RACC’s website and his bio. And he did not answer this question: “In the last year and a half, have you had any contacts with Donald Trump or any of his political or business associates?”

Various media outlets that have examined links between Trump and Russia have focused on Carter Page, a Moscow-connected foreign policy adviser for Trump ‘s presidential campaign (whom Trump spokesman Sean Spicer recently falsely claimed Trump did not know) and Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime presidential campaign manager who had business ties to Russians and Putin-allied Ukrainians. Any official investigators would likely be interested in these two men. They also should schedule a sit down with Millian.

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Investigators on the Trump-Russia Beat Should Talk to This Man

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Trump Is Ready to Bless Monsanto and Bayer’s Massive Merger

by FerdinaECS Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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Not even sworn in yet, President-elect Donald Trump is already negotiating the terms for green-lighting what Bloomberg News calls the globe’s “biggest-ever” merger of agribusiness companies—a move antitrust experts say is highly irregular.

US seed and pesticide giant Monsanto and its former German rival Bayer are in the midst of a $66 billion combination, one that immediately raised antitrust hackles because the resulting company would own around 29 percent of the global seed market, and 25 percent of the global pesticide market. Here in the United States, a combined Bayer-Monsanto would have nearly 60 percent of the US cottonseed market.

As I recently explained, such market power wielded by a single agribusiness company threatens to harm farmers and ultimately, consumers. The executive branch is required to vet massive combinations based on such concerns under the Sherman Act. But Trump’s talks with the CEOs of Monsanto and Bayer apparently had nothing to do with the deal’s impact on competition. On Tuesday, Fox Business News recently delivered Trump’s version of how the negotiation proceeded, quoting incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer from a press conference call:

After Trump’s meeting with Bayer and Monsanto CEOs, Bayer has committed to $8 billion in new U.S. research and development. Bayer will also keep 100% of Monsanto’s 9,000 plus U.S. workforce, and add 3,000 new U.S. high-tech jobs.

Bayer and Monsanto, for their part, on issued a joint statement describing their CEOs’ “very productive meeting last week with President-Elect Trump and his team.” They made no specific pledges on jobs, but did note that the “combined company expects to spend approximately $16 billion for R&D in agriculture over the next six years with at least half of this investment made in the United States,” an investment that “will create several thousand new high-tech, well-paying jobs after integration is complete.”

If Trump really does bless the merger based on a jobs pledge, dismissing antitrust concerns, it would “signal a fundamental disregard for the law and for due process,” Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute, told me. “Antitrust enforcers play the important role of referee in protecting competition and our market system,” she added. “If Trump lets this deal through without any review, it would be unusual and would raise significant concerns.”

According to Barry Lynn, director of the Open Markets at the New America and author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, a combined Bayer-Monsanto would likely “pay for those jobs by ripping off American farmers, hence American eaters,” by leveraging their market power to raise prices. If the jobs deal pans out, he added, “Trump’s team is selling out the long term interests of the United States.”

And then there’s the whole question of what exactly Monsanto and Bayer are promising to deliver. As CNBC’s Meg Tirrell notes, the companies had already announced plans, way back when they agreed to merge in September, to keep the combined company’s Seeds & Traits division, as well as its main North American headquarters, in Monsanto’s hometown, St. Louis.

In that same September announcement, the two companies noted that the combined entity would maintain an annual R&D budget of 2.5 billion Euros, equal to about $2.66 billion. That amounts to about $16 billion over six years—exactly what Monsanto and Bayer said to expect in its recent joint statement.

Then there’s those jobs. Recall that Trump spokesman Spicer said on the press call to that the combined company had committed to “keep 100% of Monsanto’s 9,000 plus U.S. workforce, and add 3,000 new U.S. high-tech jobs.” But the joint statement from Monsanto and Bayer promised no such thing, only offering a vague reference to “several thousand new high-tech, well-paying jobs after integration is complete.”

It also bears noting that in the joint statement following the merger plan in September, Bayer and Monsanto promised their shareholders “total synergies of approximately USD 1.5 billion after year three, plus additional synergies from integrated solutions in future years.” In corporate-merger speak, “synergy” means cost savings from from combining operations and eliminating overlapping jobs: one of the major motivations for merging in the first place.

I asked a Monsanto spokeswoman whether the Trump team’s depiction of Bayer-Monsanto’s jobs commitment was accurate. She pointed me back to the joint Monsanto-Bayer statement, and declined to comment further.

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Trump Is Ready to Bless Monsanto and Bayer’s Massive Merger

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Final Swamp Watch – 17 January 2017

by ScotHooten Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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Despite weeks of effort, Donald Trump was apparently unable to find a Hispanic to serve as Secretary of Agriculture. Was this because no Hispanics were willing to join his administration? Or was it because Trump just couldn’t build any kind of personal rapport with any of the Hispanics who came to Trump Tower to visit with him? We’ll never know.

Instead, our new Agriculture Secretary will be Sonny Perdue, the man who won election as governor of Georgia in 2003 by promising to let residents vote on a flag referendum that would allow them to return the Confederate battle cross to a central position in the state flag. In the end, the Democratic legislature refused to allow this, and instead compromised on a flag that ditched the rebel cross but included the Confederate Stars and Bars—something that most people don’t really recognize, but which kinda sorta appeased the racist Southern heritage faction of the Peach State.

I’m sure this appealed to Trump, and Perdue does have some agricultural experience—that is, assuming you count the fact that he runs a “global trading company that facilitates U.S. commerce focusing on the export of U.S. goods and services…such as blueberries, grains, onions, peanuts, pecans, soybeans, and spinach.” He’s probably done pretty well for himself in this business, allowing him to join his brother, Sen. David Perdue, in the rich man’s club.

Anyway, that’s it. Until and unless someone pulls out or is rejected by the Senate, Trump has now named his nominees for every cabinet-level position. As you can see, he tangled with the swamp, and the swamp won.

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Final Swamp Watch – 17 January 2017

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Foreclosure Victims Say They Were Mistreated by Trump’s Treasury Pick

by TimothyBrier45 Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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After Donald Trump nominated longtime Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin to be secretary of the treasury, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Democrats’ leading anti-Wall Street crusader, asked to include “victims of Mnuchin’s foreclosure machine” at his Senate confirmation hearing. According to Warren, Senate Republicans rebuffed her request. So on Wednesday, one day before Mnuchin goes before the Senate, Warren convened a panel of women who testified that OneWest Bank, under Mnuchin’s leadership, ruthlessly tried to take away their homes.

“If Steve Mnuchin become secretary of treasury, if he runs our country the way he ran OneWest Bank—cutthroat—this country is in trouble,” said Sylvia Oliver, a New Jersey woman whose home was scheduled to be foreclosed on by OneWest on Wednesday. According to Oliver, OneWest has refused to modify her mortgage, but she managed to stave off foreclosure with the assistance of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who was at Wednesday’s forum.

In early 2009, Mnuchin led a team of investors in purchasing failed home lender IndyMac from the federal government—after extracting a promise that the government would help pick up the tab for any losses—and took over as CEO of the bank, which changed its name to OneWest. During his tenure, which covered the time when the four women who testified ran into trouble with the bank, OneWest was known for its aggressive tactics in dealing with foreclosure. In 2015, Mnuchin sold OneWest to another California bank, CIT, for more than twice what he and his fellow investors had paid. Mnuchin, who had previously donated to Democratic candidates, joined Trump’s campaign fundraising team in May 2016, when Trump was still toxic to many Republicans, and he became one of Trump’s first announced Cabinet picks.

“The OneWest model was terrible for homeowners, but it was great for Mr. Mnuchin,” Warren said on Wednesday, claiming that Mnuchin pocketed more than $200 million from the sale to CIT. “At Thursday’s hearing, he will have the opportunity to explain why his years of grinding families into the dirt at OneWest Bank does not disqualify him from becoming the nation’s top economic official.” (A spokesman for Senate Finance Committee chairman Orrin Hatch did not respond to a request for confirmation that Warren had asked to include the foreclosure victims in Thursday’s hearing.)

Cristina Clifford, a California acupuncturist, told the panel that her business began to falter in 2009 and she struggled to make her mortgage payments to IndyMac. Clifford said the bank told her that she didn’t qualify for a mortgage adjustment because she had always made her payments on time. She said she stopped doing so, on the bank’s recommendation. But by the time she was approved for a mortgage modification and submitted the paperwork, the bank was under Mnuchin’s control. It cashed the check she sent with the paperwork, she said, but insisted it never received her application. This happened twice, Clifford said, and eventually the house was sold by the bank, even as she says her lawyer was attempting to work with OneWest to avoid a foreclosure.

“It was OneWest that saw a chance to make money,” Clifford told Mother Jones. “They could’ve kept me in the house and worked with me, or they could’ve sold the house and made a couple extra thousand dollars.”

Senate Democrats are expected to grill Mnuchin on OneWest’s business tactics tomorrow. The Hill obtained an advance copy of Mnuchin’s prepared statements and reported that he will defend OneWest as “an American success story.”

“My group had nothing to do with the creation of risky loans in the IndyMac loan portfolios,” Mnuchin reportedly plans to say. “We did this because we believed in our ability to rebuild and create a successful regional bank. We believed in recovery for the American economy.”

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Foreclosure Victims Say They Were Mistreated by Trump’s Treasury Pick

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Six Agencies Are Investigating Trump-Russia Ties

by Leesa78508779713 Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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McClatchy has the latest on the investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump team:

The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election….The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.

….One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers, the two sources said….A key mission of the six-agency group has been to examine who financed the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

….The working group is scrutinizing the activities of a few Americans who were affiliated with Trump’s campaign or his business empire and of multiple individuals from Russia and other former Soviet nations who had similar connections, the sources said.

….The BBC reported that the FBI had obtained a warrant on Oct. 15 from the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing investigators access to bank records and other documents about potential payments and money transfers related to Russia. One of McClatchy’s sources confirmed the report.

That’s an awful lot of agencies investigating an awful lot of allegations against an awful lot of people. And as the article says, you can’t get a warrant unless you can demonstrate at least some kind of plausible probable cause. That means these folks are working off a lot more than just the famous dossier produced by the ex-MI6 spy.

At this point, I flatly don’t know what I believe anymore. This is all crazy stuff, but a whole bunch of investigators don’t seem to be treating it as crazy. Either way, though, the guy at the center of all this is going to become president of the United States in two days.

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Six Agencies Are Investigating Trump-Russia Ties

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Get those Instagrams in now: Climate change is going to mess up good weather days.

by damioncio68 Posted on January 18, 2017

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

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Get those Instagrams in now: Climate change is going to mess up good weather days.

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"Why Obama Will Go Down as One of the Greatest Presidents of All Time"

by HarrisonSecombe Posted on January 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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As Barack Obama’s presidency winds down, I find myself wondering more and more how the history books will explain that we replaced him with Donald Trump. The indictments against the soon-to-be 45th president are well known and we’re about to spend the next four years prosecuting them so this week let’s take a moment to also focus on the often unheralded accomplishments of the 44th.

Each day this week I’m going to post highlights from a notable perspective on Obama’s legacy. Today we start with GQ editor-in-chief Jim Nelson, who earlier this year made a convincing case for Obama’s historic greatness:

Barack Obama will be inducted into the league of Great Presidents.

…

In so many ways, Obama was better than we imagined, better than the body politic deserved, and far, far better than his enemies will ever concede, but the great thing about being great is that the verdict of enemies doesn’t matter.

…

It may be hard to imagine now, but in the face of rising chaos, we’ll crave unity all the more, and in future years whoever can speak most convincingly of unity will rise to the top. (It’s also hard to imagine many beating Obama at the game.) This year’s carnival election, with Trump as a kind of debauched circus barker, only makes the distinction clearer. The absurdity and car-crash spectacle of it all have already lent Obama an out-of-time quality, as if he were a creature from another, loftier century. Whatever happens next, I feel this in my bones: We’ll look back at history, hopefully when we’re zooming down the Barack Obama Hyperloop Transport System, and think: That man was rare. And we were damn lucky to have him.

Go read the whole thing.

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"Why Obama Will Go Down as One of the Greatest Presidents of All Time"

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