Mayer writes: "Many of Trump's transition-team members are the corporate insiders he vowed to disempower."
President-elect Donald Trump and his vice president Mike Pence at the Republican National Convention. (photo: Reuters)
The Dark Money Cabinet
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
17 November 16
uring the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.
Trump campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington of corruption. But Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Elections Commission who has championed reform of political money, says that “the alligators are multiplying.”
Many of Trump’s transition-team members are the corporate insiders he vowed to disempower. On Friday, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, the new transition-team chair, announced that Marc Short, who until recently ran Freedom Partners, the Kochs’ political-donors group, would serve as a “senior adviser.” The influence of the Kochs and their allies is particularly clear in the areas of energy and the environment. The few remarks Trump made on these issues during the campaign reflected the fondest hopes of the oil, gas, and coal producers. He vowed to withdraw from the international climate treaty negotiated last year in Paris, remove regulations that curb carbon emissions, legalize oil drilling and mining on federal lands and in seas, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency.
For policy and personnel advice regarding the Department of Energy, Trump is relying on Michael McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies. McKenna’s clients include Koch Companies Public Sector, a division of Koch Industries. According to Politico, McKenna also has ties to the American Energy Alliance and its affiliate, the Institute for Energy Research. These nonprofit groups purport to be grassroots organizations, but they run ads advocating corporate-friendly energy policies, without disclosing their financial backers. In 2012, Freedom Partners gave $1.5 million to the American Energy Alliance.
Michael Catanzaro, a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN Group, is the head of Trump’s energy transition team, and has been mentioned as a possible energy czar. Among his clients are Koch Industries and Devon Energy Corporation, a gas-and-oil company that has made a fortune from vertical drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Another widely discussed candidate is Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the shale-oil company Continental Resources, who is a major contributor to the Kochs’ fund-raising network. Wenona Hauter, of Food and Water Watch, says that Hamm has “done all he can to subvert the existing rules and regulations.”
Myron Ebell, an outspoken climate-change skeptic, heads Trump’s transition team for the E.P.A. Ebell runs the energy-and-environmental program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulatory Washington think tank that hides its sources of financial support but has been funded by fossil-fuel companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries. David Schnare, a self-described “free-market environmentalist” who has accused the E.P.A. of having “blood on its hands,” is a member of the E.P.A. working group. Schnare is the director of the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Thomas Jefferson Institute, part of a nationwide consortium of anti-government, pro-industry think tanks. He is also the general counsel at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which has received funding from coal companies. In 2011, Schnare started hounding the climate scientist Michael Mann, who had been a professor at the University of Virginia, by filing public-records requests demanding to see his unpublished research and his private e-mails. The legal wrangling tied up Mann’s work until 2014, when the Virginia Supreme Court ordered Schnare to desist. The Union of Concerned Scientists has described these actions against climate scientists as “harassment.”
Norman Eisen, who devised strict conflict-of-interest rules while acting as Obama’s ethics czar, says, “If you have people on the transition team with deep financial ties to the industries to be regulated, it raises questions about whether they are serving the public interest or their own interests.” He ruled out Obama transition-team members who would have had a conflict of interest in their assigned areas, or even the appearance of one. “We weren’t perfect,” he said. “But we tried to level the playing field because, let’s face it, in the Beltway nexus of corporations and dark money, lobbyists are the delivery mechanism for special-interest influence. ”
Questions to Trump’s transition team about its conflict-of-interest rules went unanswered, as did questions to the lobbyists and industry heads involved. But the composition of the group runs counter to a set of anti-lobbyist proposals that Trump released in October, to be enacted in his first hundred days. It called for a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave public office, and a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying for a foreign government.
The tenth item on the list of proposals is the Clean Up Corruption in Washington Act, which would implement “new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.” Trevor Potter, who served as the commissioner of the F.E.C. under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and is now the president of the Campaign Legal Center, described Trump’s ethics proposals as “quite interesting, and quite helpful.” He was puzzled, though, by the vagueness of the “Drain the Swamp” act. “It’s a complete black box so far,” Potter said.
Potter wondered if Trump’s lack of specificity reflected internal divisions. He noted that Don McGahn, who served as the Trump campaign’s attorney, is an opponent of almost all campaign-finance restrictions. “Many on the transition team are registered lobbyists who are deeply invested in the system Trump says he wants to change,” Potter said. “It looks like the lobbyists and special interests are already taking over.”
FOCUS: How the Electoral College Rigged the Election for Donald Trump
Thursday, 17 November 2016 12:50
Cohen writes: "It has become painfully clear that one of the central claims of the Trump campaign is undoubtedly true: The election was indeed rigged. But it wasn't rigged in the direction Trump claimed - rather, it was rigged in Trump's and his party's favor."
Protesters took to the streets following Donald Trump's election victory. (photo: Mark Makela/Getty)
How the Electoral College Rigged the Election for Donald Trump
By David S. Cohen, Rolling Stone
17 November 16
don't agree with Donald Trump on much. We both like New York City. We both believe in the importance of oxygen for sustaining living beings. Beyond that, and especially in the political realm, we don't often see eye-to-eye.
However, it has become painfully clear that one of the central claims of the Trump campaign is undoubtedly true: The election was indeed rigged. But it wasn't rigged in the direction Trump claimed – rather, it was rigged in Trump's and his party's favor. This happened in a number of ways – felon disenfranchisement, voter suppression and Puerto Rico having no say whatsoever, for instance – but one huge one that was under-appreciated by many Americans before this week is the Electoral College system.
The facts are indisputable: Last Tuesday, there was an election for president. One candidate received more votes than the other. And that candidate lost.
Right now, Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by over a million votes. As all the absentee ballots from California, Washington and New York are counted, experts expect that number to climb to over two million, with a margin of victory around 1.5 percent. As has been noted in The New York Times, that would be a greater margin of victory in the popular vote than the ones with which John F. Kennedy won in 1960 and Richard Nixon won in 1968.
Of course, Trump won the election because he won the most electoral votes. The U.S. Constitution allots each state a number of electoral votes based on the combined number of members of Congress each state has. Therefore, Wyoming, with one representative in the House and two senators, has three electoral votes, while California, with 53 representatives and two senators, has 55 electoral votes. In all but Nebraska and Maine, all electoral votes go to the candidate who wins the state's popular vote. Thus, a candidate who wins by one vote in a state gets the same number of that state's electoral votes – all of them – as a candidate who wins by millions of votes.
So the election was rigged in the sense that the Founding Fathers created a system that, at this point in history, tilts the playing field in favor of candidates who appeal to low-population states and a small set of contested "swing" states, rather than those who appeal to big urban centers in population-rich states that are not contested.
First, the swing states: By giving all the electors in a swing state to the candidate who wins that state, even if only by a small number of votes, the system heavily favors the candidate who appeals to those few states. All the other states, where the candidates may win by much larger margins, become less relevant.
In this election, Clinton won some of the most populous states in the nation – New York and California – by substantial margins. Texas was the largest state Trump won, but he won that by a much smaller margin. Of course, Trump won the important swing states, but also by very narrow margins. Because of the winner-take-all system, Trump's narrow advantage in those few swing states mattered much more than Clinton's massive advantage in the unconstested states.
Second, basic math illustrates the point that all low-population states, not just swing states, are favored in this system. According to the last census (in 2010), Wyoming, the nation's lowest population state, has just over 560,000 people. Those people get three electoral votes, or one per 186,000 people. California, our most populous state, has more than 37 million people. Those Californians have 55 electoral votes, or one per 670,000 people. Comparatively, people in Wyoming have nearly four times the power in the Electoral College as people in California. Put another way, if California had the same proportion of electoral votes per person as Wyoming, it would have about 200 electoral votes.
If you look at a map generated by Slate showing this difference, the states with the greatest power in the Electoral College – those whose citizens' votes count the most – are mostly low-population, conservative states. Meanwhile, the states with the least power in the Electoral College are more of a mixed bag of conservative, swing and liberal states. Importantly, among the five least powerful (most populous) states are three that deliver overwhelming Democratic majorities every four years: California, New York and Illinois.
What this means is that America's electoral system is rigged to give these smaller, more conservative states more weight. In fact, that's one of the reasons the Constitution's framers created the system in the first place: to give those smaller states a say in the process (and to help slave states). To illustrate this, think about what a pure popular vote system would do to the election. The small states would be largely ignored, and the biggest states with the most populous cities would get the most attention.
The Framers thus chose a system that would give power to the small states over the big states, a system that now favors conservative Republicans over more liberal Democrats. It's no coincidence that the two presidential candidates in this century who have won the popular but lost the election were Democrats (the other being Al Gore, in 2000).
We have to call this system what it is: rigged.
Interestingly, Trump himself recognized the unfairness of the Electoral College in a series of tweets in 2012. He called the system "a disaster for a democracy," "a total sham and a travesty," and a "laughing stock." Of course, he tweeted this commentary when he mistakenly believed that Barack Obama had lost the popular vote against Mitt Romney. Trump also said, before learning Obama had in fact won both the popular and electoral votes, that there should be a "revolution in this country," that we should "fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice" and that we "can't let this happen" and "should march on Washington."
Funny how now Trump is saying something completely different. Since he won the election but lost the popular vote, he's tweeted about the "genius" of the Electoral College, saying "it brings all states, including smaller ones, into play." He also (rightly) pointed out that he would have campaigned differently if there were a pure popular vote. There's no reason to believe that the large liberal states would have turned out for Trump if only he had campaigned there. But there is every reason to believe Clinton's popular-vote margin would have been even greater had everyone in California and New York had an incentive to vote.
The root problem here is the Constitution's guarantee that every state has two senators, regardless of size. If Senate representation were proportional, so much about this country would be different. However, it isn't, and we have not only the lopsided Electoral College, but outsized influence in Congress for small, rural states – which, of course, tend to vote Republican.
So Donald Trump was right about the system being rigged. There are and always have been attempts to reform this system – un-rig it if you will – but those are likely to go nowhere in the near (nor possibly distant) future. Instead, we have to live with the reality that, with Trump winning the election while losing the popular vote, there’s no way to argue the system is anything but rigged in his favor.
I do know that the election last Tuesday made this Tuesday's demonstrations in support of Standing Rock even more important. We'll be gathering in nearly 200 cities worldwide to demand that the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Obama Administration, do their jobs and reject the Dakota Access Pipeline's final permit.
We don't know if we can make President Obama act—so far he's been noncommittal and vague. And we don't know if Trump would simply overturn his actions if he took them. But we do know that now more than ever we have to stand by our allies, and make our battles loud and public.
The ugly side of the American psyche that's propelled Trump to the presidency is nothing new to Indigenous people. It's nothing new to people of color, to immigrants, to the vulnerable and the marginalized. This is a time for drawing together the many threads of our resistance—to fossil fuels, yes, but also and just as importantly to widespread hatred.
Solidarity with Indigenous leadership—in Standing Rock and beyond—is more important today, not less. The original inhabitants of this continent have been pepper-sprayed and shot with rubber bullets, maced and attacked by guard dogs, all for peacefully standing up for their sovereign rights, and for the world around us. If we can't rally in support of them—well, that would be shameful.
I wish I had some magic words to make the gobsmacked feeling go away. But I can tell you from experience that taking action, joining with others to protest, heals some of the sting.
And throughout history, movements like ours have been the ones to create lasting change—not a single individual or president. That's the work we'll get back to, together.
So, what's next? Showing our solidarity with Standing Rock. Please join me and thousands of others across the world Nov. 15.
Is Angela Merkel the New Leader of the Free World?
Thursday, 17 November 2016 09:42
Neo writes: "The shock election of Donald Trump as US president has forced greater responsibility for defending Western values and interests onto German Chancellor Angela Merkel's shoulders, analysts say, with some even crowning her the new 'leader of the free world.'"
German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (photo: EPA)
Is Angela Merkel the New Leader of the Free World?
By Hui Min Neo, Agence France-Presse
17 November 16
he shock election of Donald Trump as US president has forced greater responsibility for defending Western values and interests onto German Chancellor Angela Merkel's shoulders, analysts say, with some even crowning her the new "leader of the free world".
While the last decade has been defined by Britain, France, Germany and the US showing a largely united front on issues ranging from NATO affairs to defence of basic freedoms, the coming four years may present a more fragmented picture.
During his campaign Trump signalled a protectionist and anti-immigration stance, while Britain is preoccupied with securing its future outside the European Union after June's stunning referendum vote to exit the bloc.
France's President Francois Hollande is grappling with record low ratings ahead of next May's election that could see far-right Marine Le Pen reaching the second round run-off vote.
Merkel, after 11 years at the helm, now looks increasingly like the only bulwark of stability and liberal freedom among Western allies.
"Merkel... has suddenly become the most important leader of the free, democratic and liberal world," said the left-leaning TAZ daily.
The historian and columnist Timothy Garton Ash agreed in an editorial for Britain's Guardian newspaper: "I'm tempted to say that the leader of the free world is now Angela Merkel."
Rather than visit Britain -- a natural stop for any US leader given the two countries' special relationship, US President Barack Obama is travelling Wednesday to Berlin on his last official trip to Europe, in what almost seems like the passing of a baton to Merkel.
Ahead of the visit, Obama said Merkel "has probably been my closest international partner these last eight years".
- Countering Putin or Erdogan -
Merkel's striking message to Trump after his victory was not lost on observers -- where her peers simply pledged close ties, she tied them to democratic values.
She said that any "close cooperation" must be on the basis of the "values of democracy, freedom, respect for the rule of law and human dignity, regardless of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political belief".
The remarks indicated the German leader is likely to accept -- perhaps grudgingly -- the mantle of "leader of the real, remaining West and remind Trump of values", said Die Welt daily.
"She is more than ever the woman who is countering men like Russian President Vladimir Putin or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan," said the TAZ.
Merkel, 62, does not have Obama's oratorical flourishes but her voice is increasingly forceful on the world stage.
She put her fluent Russian to good use in mediating in the Ukraine conflict with Putin.
When most European countries were busy shutting their doors to refugees fleeing war in predominantly Muslim countries, Merkel let in nearly 900,000 people last year -- a stance that Trump branded "insane".
- 'Can't do this alone' -
Trump, who pledged to deport millions of undocumented migrants from the US, made anti-immigrant policies a key plank of his campaign.
And few expect him to take take the lead in countering Putin, given his open praise for the Russian strongman.
If Trump makes good on his promises to rip up deals on free trade, climate change and Iran's nuclear programme, as well as reconsider protection for NATO allies that haven't paid their dues, it could spell the end of the United States' post-World War II role as the guarantor of world peace.
Stefani Weiss, an expert on European integration and foreign policies at the Bertelsmann Foundation, said the US had started to retreat as "world police" under Obama and cede more responsibility to Europe.
"This is a trend that will likely prevail and intensify with Trump's presidency," she said.
It remains to be seen how effectively Merkel can push her agenda on the global stage, if Trump, as leader of the world's biggest economy, adopts contrary policies on migration, climate change and sanctions targeting Russia.
Although it has economic weight, Germany's political influence remains limited and it is not even a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
While the US has the military might to lead a multi-nation coalition fighting the Islamic State organisation, Germany has participated on a far smaller scale.
Merkel is probably now the "strongest leader in the liberal world but she can't do this alone", said Daniela Schwarzer, director of the DGAP think-tank.
- Fourth term? -
Observers say Trump's White House win has made it imperative for her to declare her candidacy for a fourth term in elections next year and offer the West a beacon of stability.
"She has shown that she is very committed to keeping the European Union together... that task is even bigger now than it was before the American election and so I would think that she might feel that the job isn't quite done," said Schwarzer.
Trump's election has also given Merkel a popularity bounce.
Before November, only around two in five (44 percent) Germans wanted Merkel to stay on as anger mounted domestically over her liberal refugee policy.
Surveys over the past week show support at 60 percent.
Trump's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon Ran News Site That Promoted Anti-Semitic Conspiracies
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38775"><span class="small">Robert Mackey, The Intercept</span></a>
Thursday, 17 November 2016 09:33
Mackey writes: "Since Steve Bannon is going to be one of the president’s most senior aides, he and the website he runs, Breitbart News, deserve an unusual amount of scrutiny."
Steve Bannon, President-elect Trump's chief strategist and former executive chairman of Breibart News. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Trump's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon Ran News Site That Promoted Anti-Semitic Conspiracies
By Robert Mackey, The Intercept
17 November 16
ince Steven Bannon is going to be one of the president’s most senior aides, he and the website he runs, Breitbart News, deserve an unusual amount of scrutiny. But Breitbart, the site Bannon calls “the platform for the alt-right,” read ardently by white supremacists and anti-Semites, has launched a campaign to shut down critics who say that its longtime director is himself an anti-Jewish racist.
The Breitbart counter-offensive has come in a string of articles published this week in which Jewish writers and editors argue that Bannon cannot possibly be an anti-Semite, as his ex-wife told a court, since the site he ran until August strongly supports Israel and its far-right, nationalist government.
.@joelpollak: "I can say, without hesitation, that Steve is a friend of the Jewish people and a defender of Israel" https://t.co/yCMKLlWlnY
The testimony came from pro-Israel ideologues, who freely hurl accusations of anti-Semitism at rights activists and journalists for reporting, accurately, on abuses by the Israeli government. They are less willing, it seems, to pay much attention to the lengthy screeds posted beneath Breitbart articles by readers obsessed with the supposed plotting of Jewish bankers and financiers who fund progressive causes.
The first to write was David Horowitz, a key figure in funding Islamophobic “research” in the United States and Israel. Horowitz attempted to argue that critics of Bannon “have lost all connection to reality and are now hyping their most ludicrously paranoid fantasies,” a case he immediately undermined by repeating the conspiracy theory he’s helped to nourish, that “Obama and Hillary are supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
More testimony to Bannon’s pro-Israel leanings came from Pamela Geller, a polemical blogger whose efforts to stir up hatred of Muslims have been championed by Breitbart but got her added to a list of “extremists” barred from travel to Britain in 2013, on the grounds that her presence could “foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence.”
Geller’s prior contributions to American life include leading the protests in 2010 against a Muslim cultural center in Lower Manhattan she called “the Ground Zero Mosque,” and staging a cartoon contest for caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in 2015, which succeeded in provoking an attack by Islamist gunmen.
On Tuesday, two more staunch defenders of Israel, Alan Dershowitz and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, joined the pushback against critics like Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s chief executive, who have expressed alarm that Bannon’s appointment as Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist would embolden racists.
Another element of the campaign has been to point out that Breitbart News was, as its chief executive Larry Solov explained, originally conceived of by its founder, Andrew Breitbart, as a way to fight what he saw as “the anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media” and left-wing Jewish groups that oppose Israel’s open-ended military occupation of Palestinian land.
“They say that we are ‘anti-Semitic,'” Solov and Breitbart’s editor Alex Marlow wrote in August, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign first objected to Bannon taking charge of Trump’s campaign, “though our company was founded by Jews, is largely staffed by Jews, and has an entire section (Breitbart Jerusalem) dedicated to reporting on and defending the Jewish state of Israel.”
What Breitbart’s writers and editors seem unwilling or unable to acknowledge, however, is that under Bannon’s leadership, the site became wildly popular with anti-Semitic readers by aggressively marketing conspiracy theories about a “globalist” financial and media elite of “puppet masters” secretly running the world.
According to Dan Cassino, an associate professor of Political Science at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies the right-wing media, in the early days of the site, when it was led by Andrew Breitbart, much of the reporting and commentary was focused on “calling out the left, but especially American Jews who were insufficiently loyal to Israel.”
As Cassino explains it, Breitbart, who died in 2012, relentlessly pursued the argument that “the left is the enemy, but Jews on the left are worse because they are traitors” who are “selling out Israel.”
After Breitbart’s death, Cassino says, Bannon realized that the site was attracting a huge readership by “posting what amount to anti-Semitic headlines,” attacking American Jews deemed to be “not sufficiently pro-Israel.” Those pieces, Cassino notes, frequently went viral in part because they struck a chord with readers who came to them through links posted on message boards like 4chan. “By any website metric, if you’re getting that engagement,” Cassino says, editors are inclined to “do more of that.”
That Breitbart’s right-wing Jewish writers were willing to use anti-Semitic tropes to attack their left-wing Jewish enemies as “self-hating” enemies of Israel was mirrored by the tacit assent from Trump’s Jewish supporters, and son-in-law, to Bannon’s use of such tactics in the presidential campaign.
Trump’s campaign even ended with a television commercial in which the candidate complained about “those who control the levers of power in Washington,” and “global special interests,” who have “stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations,” while the villains displayed on screen were all prominent Jews: George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire who funds progressive causes, Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, and Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs.
Trump's final pitch to voters is a dramatic reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. https://t.co/Nl29D92fIu
It doesn’t take much effort to learn how Trump supporters and Breitbart readers respond to diatribes like that, delivered in print or at rallies.
Look, for instance, at the stream of ugly comments written beneath a recent Breitbart article attacking the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum as part of a “cabal” — “hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.” Or listen to the Trump supporter who screamed “Jew!S!A!” at reporters covering a rally in Phoenix last month, and then explained, with a shrug of the shoulders, “We’re run by the Jews, okay?”
For his part, Bannon has denied that the alt-right ideology he has promoted through Breitbart and Trump is racist. He prefers, he told Mother Jones, to call it a form of nationalism, similar to that promoted by ethnic-nationalist parties across Europe, which are also animated by a shared hatred for Muslims. “If you look at the identity movements over there in Europe,” Bannon said, their focus is “really ‘Polish identity’ or ‘German identity,’ not racial identity. It’s more identity toward a nation-state or their people as a nation.”
Many of those parties, including the French National Front and the Dutch Freedom Party, are also staunch supporters of Israel, seeing in the Jewish state’s nationalist ideology a mirror of their own quest to live in ethnically pure nation states, free to discriminate against or expel Muslims.
For that reason it is not surprising that Breitbart solicited a letter in support of Bannon from an Israeli politician, Yossi Dagan, who leads the Samaria Settler Council, a body representing Israeli settlements in the northern West Bank. Dagan, who is also a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote in an open letter to Bannon that he was “saddened” by “the uncalled for smear campaign against you,” but also “glad that after eight hard years we now have decent-minded people like yourself coming to power in Washington.”
As the Israeli journalist Dimi Reider pointed out last year, the settler council Dagan now leads produced a jaw-dropping political commercial on the eve of Israel’s most recent elections. Using anti-Semitic tropes borrowed from the Nazis, the ad attacked Israeli human rights activists for accepting European Union funds to document abuses in the occupied territories.
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uring the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.
don't agree with Donald Trump on much. We both like New York City. We both believe in the importance of oxygen for sustaining living beings. Beyond that, and especially in the political realm, we don't often see eye-to-eye.
o, the question everyone's asking me this week is: What now?
he shock election of Donald Trump as US president has forced greater responsibility for defending Western values and interests onto German Chancellor Angela Merkel's shoulders, analysts say, with some even crowning her the new "leader of the free world".
