Trump’s cabinet

Richard Fulton

While it is difficult to keep up with the transition period of a new president, it is not difficult to see that Trump needs his billionaire friends around him.

In filling his cabinet he, as the saying goes, has placed the Foxes in charge of the Chicken Coops.

Too many cabinet positions are being filled with corporate heads who have been critics of the very administrative departments they will head, even to the point of calling for their dismantlement. They are corporate heads who dislike government oversight through regulation at the expense of the public welfare.

This is not accidental. Andy Puzder, CEO of Hardee’s fast food empire, will be Labor Secretary.This puts a man head of the agency charged with protecting American workers who hates all government protections of laboring people. He hates minimum wage legislation (he even opposes Trump’s $10 an hour minimum wage) and all regulations that limit free-wheeling operation of any business.

Note that his franchisees were found in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 60 percent of the complaints made against them. He found no reason for oversight evidently. Fox alert!

Exxon-Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson will be our Secretary of State. He knows leaders throughout the world, Trump says. Yes he does, but most of them are vial dictators who have miserable human rights records but have lots of oil reserves. This includes Russia that has given him one of its highest non-Russian award, The Order of Friendship.

Conflict of interest given his continuing huge income from Exxon-Mobile stock will pop up everywhere. Roneft, the virtual monopoly of Russian oil due to Putin manipulation through jailing its main competitor, found a great friend in Exxon-Mobile. They invested heavily in Roneft Arctic exploration that not so incidentally needs America to lift sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in order to cash in. Fox alert!

Tom Price at Health and Human Services has pledged to get rid of the Affordable Care Act which he will be in charge of seeing operate. He has no proposals for the 20 million Americans newly covered by health insurance. He also opposes abortion in most or all cases incidentally, 64 percent of Americans disagree with this stance. Fox alert!

Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development has raged against government help for the poor. He is a “boots strap” kind of guy. Yet Housing is one of the key ways that the federal government has tried to deal with people on marginal incomes (you know, minimum wages at $7.50 an hour). Now he will be in charge of these programs. Fox alert!

Betsy DeVos at Education wants to minimize federal government help for public education. Now she is in charge of those programs. She, as we have noted before, has never been in a public school as a student. How could that go wrong? Fox alert!

Governor Perry at the Energy Department has publicly called for the elimination of that department. He’s a Texas oil champion, of course. Alternate energy sources should not be encouraged by the government. Fox alert!

Anybody see a pattern here? How does someone become an effective administrator, of a large bureaucracy that they are charged with heading, if they don’t believe in what those agencies do?

Note that almost all of these departments are charged with helping people in low income jobs or in need of a decent a job. Yet, the very people who voted for Trump will be targets of Trump administration attempts to undermine the effectiveness of those agencies.

So welcome to Corporate America, where helping individuals is secondary at best; where CEOs make more an hour than their workers do in a year or more; and where limits to corporate operations to protect health and safety must be squashed.

And since most of the rest of the administration will be military generals, there will be little counterbalance to protect us civilians.

Of course, we could ask the Russians for help, I hear they are anxious to hack into our politics.