Perdue has set himself up as what Modern Farmer refers to as “among the many middlemen in the international commodity foods chain.” That’s rewarding for Perdue but it is not so good for working farmers or rural communities.
A New York Times assessment of Perdue was headlined “Ethical Lapses Trail President’s Nominee for Agriculture Department.” Ethical lapses are always concerning, but they are especially concerning when they are revealed in a nominee to serve as secretary of agriculture, a position that has so much direct authority over decisions regarding what interests are served by the department’s massive budget and its extensive regulatory apparatus.
Describing the Perdue selection as “a clear signal that [the Trump administration] plans to prioritize corporate interests over communities—in this case rural, agricultural communities,” Pesticide Action Network policy director Kristin Schafer complained that “as a politician in Georgia, Perdue consistently received significant donations from large agribusiness interests. We expect him to cater to giant industrial producers—even though they represent a small percentage of growers across the country that USDA should be serving. The well-being of small family farmers—particularly farmers of color, women farmers and the fast-growing segment of agriculture pursuing sustainable production—will undoubtedly continue to be overlooked.” The watchdogs at New York magazine blog Grub Street explained that Perdue “also took about $330,000 in contributions from Monsanto and other agribusinesses for his campaigns” and added that “the GMO lobby group Biotechnology Innovation Organization even named him its 2009 Governor of the Year.”
The Organic Consumers Association’s assessment of the Perdue record is damning: “He supports factory farms, pesticides and genetically engineered crops. In 2009, he signed a bill into law that blocked local communities in Georgia from regulating factory farms to address animal cruelty, pollution or any other hazard.” Under Trump and Perdue, the group suggests, the Department of Agriculture “will likely let companies like Monsanto dictate food, agriculture and environmental policy.”
Close ties to corporate agribusiness put Sonny Perdue on the wrong side of a host of food and farm issues when he was governor. He erred, invariably and aggressively, on the side of bigness, consolidation and the factory farming that diminishes our food system rather than diversity, competition and the family farming that realizes the mission of a Department of Agriculture that veteran food and farm writer Kelsey Gee reminds us was founded to “procure, propagate, and distribute” safe and healthy food for all Americans. “If you’re curious what’s in store for food & agriculture in President Trump’s America, interesting to watch Georgia’s evolution since 2003,” Gee wrote after Trump named his secretary of agriculture. When Perdue was elected governor of that state in 2002, it had 49,311 farm operations. The year after Perdue finished his tenure, it had 42,257 operations. “That’s a 17 percent drop in farm operations, compared to a nationwide downturn of just 1 percent,” noted Gee.
While sales were up, the measure of diversity and small-farm resilience declined in Perdue’s Georgia at a dramatically more rapid rate than it did nationally.
“There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan explained 120 years before Sonny Perdue was named as the nation’s thirty-first secretary of agriculture. “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them. You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”
What Bryan said remains true. The great cities still rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. And, in an age of climate change and automation, of ill-thought globalization and constant dislocation, the evolution of small farms and small towns matters more to the future than ever before. Unfortunately, in debates over rural life and rural development, Sonny Perdue has always favored the policies that make the well-to-do prosperous and barter the future off to Monsanto.
— 39 —
THE WEED WHACKER
Ajit Pai
Federal Communications Commission Chairman
Donald Trump, who has never been shy about demanding that the media do his bidding, now has the power to shape the rules that define the future of newspapers, broadcast media and the Internet. Trump’s appointees are already employing the regulatory-agency equivalent of executive orders to gut programs that would ensure net neutrality, expand broadband access, guard against consolidation of media ownership and enforce disclosure of sources of spending on political ads. “This is what government by billionaires and special interests looks like,” says Michael Copps, who served for eight years on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and completed his tenure as the FCC’s acting chairman.
Within days of assuming the presidency in January 2017, Trump named Ajit Pai as his FCC chair. A former associate general counsel for the Verizon telecommunications conglomerate, Pai was one of the FCC’s five commissioners during the Obama era. In that role, he often dissented against consumer-friendly regulations, robust market competition and diversification of media ownership. Now, as FCC chair, Pai has moved rapidly to undo Obama’s FCC legacy, reversing or weakening measures that had begun to restore the commission’s commitment to regulating on behalf of the public, rather than the corporate, interest.
Pai speaks Trump’s language, promising to “fire up the weed whacker” to shred regulations that media corporations and the right-wing media echo chamber have long opposed. He also mimics Trump’s disdain for democratic processes and procedures. Pai and his aides have employed “delegated authority”—a claim of power to act without public input, hearings or votes by the full commission—to advance their agenda. In one case, they killed the FCC’s guidance to broadcasters on “shared service” agreements, an initiative to guard against media companies operating two or more stations in markets where there is supposed to be competition. In a second case, Pai pulled the FCC’s set-top-box proceeding, which would have brought competition to the cable market by enabling independent manufacturers to sell the set-top boxes that otherwise are provided by cable companies.
Pai also undermined a program to protect prisoners from profiteering off their calls home and scrapped a plan to expand broadband access for low-income families. “Rather than working to close the digital divide,” Mignon Clyburn, a Democratic commissioner who remained on the FCC after Trump assumed the presidency, said of the latter move, “this action widens the gap.” Pai rejected a report from the FCC’s Homeland Security Bureau on cybersecurity risk reduction, prompting FCC watchdog Dana Floberg of Free Press to accuse him of “willfully ignoring reports and analyses that don’t bolster his preferred agenda of scaling back the FCC’s congressionally granted power.” Pai also withdrew a requirement that noncommercial stations file data that helped the FCC monitor the diversity of media ownership, and he set aside orders that made it easier for the FCC to sanction broadcasters that violate the agency’s political advertising disclosure rules.
Pai has been an outspoken foe of net neutrality, the first amendment of the Internet that guarantees the free flow of information without censorship or corporate favoritism. With Trump’s backing, and that of a Congress whose Republican leaders rarely say no to telecom giants, the new FCC chair moved before the finish of the new president’s first one hundred days to throttle digital democracy, outlining what the New York Times described as “a sweeping plan to loosen the government’s oversight of high-speed internet providers, a rebuke of a landmark policy approved two years ago to ensure that all online content is treated the same by the companies that deliver broadband s
ervice to Americans.” Former FCC commissioner Copps warned that “by reopening the FCC’s historic 2015 Open Internet Order, the FCC is jeopardizing core protections for online free speech and competition. Chairman Pai appears more interested in currying favor with cable and telecom industry lobbyists than in serving the millions of Americans who wrote and called to urge the commission, during the original rule-making, to provide strong protections against online blocking, throttling, or censorship.”
“Chairman Pai is kissing the ring of the Big Money lobbyists who too often call the shots in the Trump Administration,” declared Copps, who now works with Common Cause and other groups seeking to defend an open Internet. “Ending net neutrality would be a body blow to the open dialogue upon which successful self-government depends. It would be a red light for democracy and a green light for cable and telecom giants to control where we go and what we do on the internet.”
The assault on net neutrality was not the only body blow to the democratic discourse proposed by the Trump administration. Through formal actions by what will be a Republican-controlled FCC for as long as Trump is president, and by the granting of waivers that allow corporations to get around cross-ownership and joint-sales rules that were designed to maintain competition in local television markets, the FCC could end up facilitating media mergers and monopolies at the national and local levels that diminish competition and narrow the debate. It’s not just the Trump’s FCC that is out to downsize the discourse. In addition to zeroing out funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Trump team’s initial budget blueprint called for cutting all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). At present, the CPB funnels roughly $445 million a year of federal money to the nearly fifteen hundred public radio and television stations of the NPR and PBS networks, as well as to community stations around the country. A tiny portion of the federal budget, this $445 million makes a life-and-death difference for rural and small-town radio and TV stations that are indispensable sources of news and intelligent programming.
That’s the point, of course. Trump ally and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has long attacked public and community broadcasters that provide an alternative to the dust storm of alternative facts that has blown across America since the Gingrich-backed Telecommunications Act of 1996. That measure, a classic example of what goes wrong when corporations and self-serving politicians of both parties write the rules to serve campaign donors rather than citizens, unleashed a wave of ownership consolidation that shuttered radio newsrooms, silenced local talk and welcomed the big-media syndication frenzy that made Rush Limbaugh ubiquitous and coverage of state capitols and school boards scarce.
At a time when the United States should be supercharging public and community media to prevent development of news deserts where the only “information” comes from partisan corporate outlets, Trump and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon are dusting off the playbooks of the 1990s. Schemes to weaken competition and diversity, to create one-size-fits-all “newsrooms,” to set-up digital fast lanes for subsidized content and slow lanes for democratic discourse—all were proposed back then. But they were beaten back by popular movements that built remarkable left-right coalitions and forged innovative legal strategies that surprised their wealthy and powerful opponents. When the George W. Bush administration advanced a media-consolidation agenda, the outcry from 3 million Americans who contacted the FCC played a critical role in preventing it, according to then-commissioner Copps. When the FCC asked for public comment on a controversial net neutrality proposal in late 2014, they received nearly 4 million responses, almost all supporting stronger federal regulation. The voice of the people was heard and, in February 2015, the FCC voted in favor of robust net neutrality, and the robust democracy that might eventually extend from it.
Now, everything that the people accomplished could be undone by an FCC chairman who once represented telecommunications conglomerates as a lawyer and who now represents them as a regulator. “They’re coming for all of it,” Free Press president Craig Aaron says of the Trump administration’s agenda. “They’re coming for net neutrality. They’re coming for every protection for citizens and consumers.”
— 40 —
THE FORECLOSURE KING
Steven Mnuchin
Secretary of the Treasury
The secretary of the treasury is not a bookkeeper. There is no requirement that the head of the department created by Alexander Hamilton keep tabs on the nation’s finances wearing a green eyeshade, with one hand hovering over a calculator at all times. But there is some general expectation that the secretary of the treasury should have a facility with numbers.
So it was a little troubling when Steven Mnuchin, the man Donald Trump tapped to serve as the seventy-seventh secretary of the treasury, forgot to disclose $95 million of his own assets on Senate Finance Committee disclosure documents, and also neglected to mention that he was a director of a tax-avoiding investment fund located in the Cayman Islands. And another one in Anguilla.
“I think as you all can appreciate, filling out these government forms is quite complicated,” explained Mnuchin.
So complicated that Mnuchin never discovered errors involving an amount of money comparable with the entire budgets of several Pacific Island nations. “This was not self-corrected,” noted Oregon senator Ron Wyden, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Finance Committee, where Mnuchin appeared to say “my bad” on the day before Trump was inaugurated. “The only reason it came to light was my staff found it and told you that it had to be corrected,” explained an exasperated Wyden.
“Any oversight was unintentional,” said Mnuchin, who marveled about “the amount of paperwork” that was required to snag a cabinet post.
Well, gosh, yes, filling our government forms and keeping track of large sums of money can get kind of complicated. But there’s also kind of an expectation in that regard for the man or woman who is entrusted with responsibility for a Department of the Treasury where the secretary is expected to serve as “the principal economic advisor to the President” and to play “a critical role in policy-making by bringing an economic and government financial policy perspective to issues facing the government.”
“The Secretary,” the agency explains, “is responsible for formulating and recommending domestic and international financial, economic, and tax policy, participating in the formulation of broad fiscal policies that have general significance for the economy, and managing the public debt. The Secretary oversees the activities of the Department in carrying out its major law enforcement responsibilities; in serving as the financial agent for the United States Government; and in manufacturing coins and currency. The Chief Financial Officer of the government, the Secretary serves as Chairman Pro Tempore of the President’s Economic Policy Council, Chairman of the Boards and Managing Trustee of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, and as U.S. Governor of the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.”
That’s bound to involve government forms.
Lots of paperwork. Quite complicated.
Mnuchin’s inability to master the basics should have raised red flags for the Senate, which has a duty to make sure that nominees are up to the tasks they are given. But Utah senator Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which has the largest jurisdiction of any committee in either House of Congress, overseeing more than 50 percent of the federal budget, was unconcerned.
“Objectively speaking, I don’t believe anyone can reasonably argue that Mr. Mnuchin is unqualified for the position,” chirped Hatch. “If the confirmation process focused mainly on the question of a nominee’s qualifications, there would be little, if any, opposition to Mr. Mnuchin’s nomination.”
Hatch and the Republicans suspended the rules to dis
miss opposition objections and approved Mnuchin’s nomination 14–0 on February 1. Within two weeks, the full Senate had approved Mnuchin on a 53–47 vote, and the guy who we are assured is a whiz with numbers, as long as the forms aren’t too complicated, was secretary of the treasury.
The only thing is that, despite what Hatch said, there was a powerful sense on the part of serious observers of financial issues, and of existential threats to the republic, that Mnuchin was not just unqualified. He was uniquely unqualified.
Yes, Trump’s pick was a second-generation Goldman Sachs executive who had parlayed his good fortune into a career in high finance and low entertainment (a Mnuchin “side business,” RatPac-Dune Entertainment, financed films like Storks and Get Hard and The Conjuring 2). He lived large: the twenty-one-thousand-square-foot Mnuchin mansion in Bel Air was valued at $26.5 million. And he was worth a lot of money: $400 million—oops, strike that, $495 million. He had also, as someone who had once been identified mainly with Democrats, served ably as the national finance chairman of his friend Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
But Steve Mnuchin really isn’t a swamp-draining kind of guy. Wyden called him “greedy” and “unethical.” Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth objected that “whether illegally foreclosing on thousands of families, skirting the law with offshore tax havens or helping design tactics that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, Steve Mnuchin made a career—and millions of dollars—pioneering increasingly deceptive and predatory ways to rob hardworking Americans of their savings and homes.” New Jersey senator Robert Menendez said: “He was part of the cadre of corporate raiders that brought our economy to its knees.”
Tough crowd.
Unfortunately, the critics were right. Mnuchin, the Goldman Sachs kingpin who in the 2000s branched out into hedge fund management, hit the big time when he led an investment group that bought the California-based residential lender IndyMac, which had been placed in receivership by the FDIC and owned $23.5 billion in commercial loans, mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, for a deep discount. They renamed it OneWest Bank. And then Steven Mnuchin’s bank did some very bad things.