Tag: washington post
Trump's Corrupt Deal With Big Oil Comes To Fruition

Trump's Corrupt Deal With Big Oil Comes To Fruition

Last May, The Washington Post published an exclusive story on a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in which Donald Trump promised to reverse then-President Joe Biden's actions on climate change as he asked Big Oil executives to fundraise $1 billion for his presidential campaign, assuring that they would be getting a “deal” due to the “taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.” Reportedly, oil and gas executives did make “significant contributions to the Trump campaign.”

Over a four-day period, MSNBC was the only major TV network to cover the story, which All In host Chris Hayes described as “a political quid pro quo.”

Now, two new stories emerged this week that give more context to the promised “deal” the oil and gas industry is getting under Trump’s second term. National TV networks should inform their audience about how Big Oil is benefitting under Trump.

Bloomberg reported on June 17 that the Senate version of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” now includes a tax break for the oil and gas industry “estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.”

The provision would allow energy companies subject to a 15% corporate alternative minimum tax to deduct certain drilling costs when calculating their taxable income. Companies including ConocoPhillips, Ovintiv Inc. and Civitas Resources, Inc. lobbied in favor of it.

The change was included in the legislation released Monday by Republicans on the Senate tax writing committee, which would slash tax credits for wind, solar, electric vehicles and hydrogen.

Other supporters of the measure, which wasn’t included in the House version of the bill, include the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, founded by oil billionaire and Trump donor Harold Hamm.

The same legislation would repeal tax credits for the clean power industry, which would threaten more than 800,000 jobs and raise energy prices for consumers.

In fact, clean energy technologies constituted 93 percent of new power generation capacity added to the grid last year alone, and the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act which Trump wants repealed, “have spurred the highest levels of factory construction in American history, with more than 400,000 new jobs announced across the country.”

Meanwhile, CNN reported on June 16 that “the Environmental Protection Agency has told staff overseeing the country’s industrialized Midwest — a region plagued by a legacy of pollution — to stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies.”

Four sources with knowledge of the situation at the EPA’s Region 5 office, which oversees six Midwestern states, told CNN that enforcement officials were informed that “there is a pause on oil and gas enforcement” at staff meetings.

“That is how our regional management is interpreting signals from the president,” the EPA enforcement staffer said.
Officers stopped being able to issue notices of violation or send information requests to fossil fuel companies suspected of polluting, the sources told CNN. A violation notice is a prerequisite for taking a company to court for alleged violations of environmental laws.

These instructions are on top of other administration efforts to radically reduce safeguards that protect Americans from fossil fuel-related pollution and open up more land for oil and gas drilling.

Earlier this month, for example, the EPA announced plans to eliminate Biden-era regulations limiting the amount of carbon emissions and other pollution released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-fired power plants. CBS reported the rule the EPA seeks to revoke “is projected to reduce 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere by 2047, as well as eliminate tens of thousands of tons of other harmful air pollutants that are dangerous to public health” — an amount of pollution “equivalent to driving more than 320 million gas-powered cars for a year, according to an EPA estimate.”

The new CNN report also notes:

An early snapshot of enforcement data from Trump’s start of his second term shows the overall number of EPA enforcement cases initiated or closed across sectors has dropped by 32% compared with the first three months of the Biden administration, according to publicly available EPA data analyzed for CNN by environmental watchdog Environmental Integrity Project. The same data shows nearly 60% fewer cases have been initiated or closed compared with the first three months of Trump’s first term.

Taken together, these reductions in taxes, regulations, and enforcement for the fossil fuel industry are essentially what Trump promised to deliver for Big Oil in exchange for backing his 2024 campaign.

At the time, The Atlantic’s David A. Graham described the proposition as “undeniably scandalous.” Now that these gifts to Big Oil are being delivered, TV networks should inform their audience about the dirty “deal” between Trump and Big Oil playing out at the expense of the booming clean energy industry, our health, and our climate.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Cartoonist Ann Telnaes, Who Quit Post Over Bezos Censorship, Wins Pulitzer

Cartoonist Ann Telnaes, Who Quit Post Over Bezos Censorship, Wins Pulitzer

Cartoonist Ann Telnaes won the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting and commentary on Monday, months after she resigned from The Washington Post over the paper reportedly censoring a cartoon critical of Post owner Jeff Bezos’ relationship with President Donald Trump.

The Pulitzer Prizes are considered the highest award in journalism. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee credited Telnaes for “delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity—and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.” Telnaes previously won the award in 2001.

“In a time when the free press is under attack by autocrats in their quest to silence dissent, editorial cartoons and satire are essential for a democracy to survive and thrive,” Telnaes said in a statement. “I’m honored to receive this award and encourage everyone to support their local cartoonist.”

Telnaes left the paper in January after a cartoon she drew was declined for publication by the Post’s editorial page. The sketch depicted Bezos, Mickey Mouse (Disney owns ABC), Meta head Mark Zuckerberg, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Sam Altman of OpenAI bowing to Trump and offering him money.

Days after the incident, Bezos was among those with front row seats to Trump’s inauguration—an event to which he reportedly donated funds..

Telnaes’ departure was part of a steady stream of figures leaving the paper at the end of 2024 and early this year. Staffers quit after Bezos spiked an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, and columnists Ruth Marcus and Jennifer Rubin.

Rubin also quit over the Post’s capitulations to Trump.

Bezos has not publicly opposed Trump’s policies like tariffs, even while arguing that the newspaper’s editorial line would openly support “free markets and personal liberties.”

Trump has expressed delight that Bezos is now in his corner. In a March interview, Trump hailed Bezos for “trying to do a real job” in changing the editorial tone at the paper.

As the Trump administration has made a concerted effort to warp press access at the White House in favor of outlets willing to regurgitate right-wing propaganda—or, in the case of the Post, not push back too hard against it—figures like Telnaes have continued to speak out.

Telnaes now operates a Substack for her cartoons, with over 98,000 subscribers. Thousands of people will still see the award-winning work that didn’t bow to Trump—they just won’t see it in The Washington Post anymore.

Jeff Bezos

The Big Lie Jeff Bezos Tells About The 'Free Market'

There is no one on the face of this earth who depends more on the largesse of the American taxpayer than zillionaire Jeff Bezos. The man who famously, or infamously, announced last month that Washington Post editorial policy will henceforth be “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” ships about 1.6 million Amazon packages a day using taxpayer-built roads and skies controlled by the taxpayer-built and financed FAA air control system.

The same goes for every other billionaire whose products move on the public highways and local road systems. There is not a mile of the interstate highway system that wasn’t built with public monies, usually 90 percent federal tax dollars with 10 percent provided by the states through which the ribbons of asphalt and concrete pass. Those roads are maintained and kept safe with gas taxes Americans pay when they put fuel their cars. You will note, Jeff, that the federal and state surcharges on gasoline aren’t donations freely contributed by happy drivers. They are the thing you libertarians say you hate so much: taxes that have made you very, very rich.

Without taxpayer dollars, all those trucks carrying Bezos’ profits would be bumping along dirt roads getting stuck in the mud and skidding into ditches. The pilots of the cargo planes carrying Amazon boxes would be arguing with each other about who gets to take off first and which plane gets to fly which azimuth at what altitude from Chicago to Reno or Kansas City to Fort Lauderdale. Two or three mid-air collisions later, and people would be left to line up at Walmart to buy their boxer shorts and bras from Vietnam and Bangladesh, shipped to the store on the same taxpayer-funded roads used by Bezos’ trucks.

The iron in the trucks’ diesel engines, the aluminum sides of the trailers and the shipping containers filled with washing machines and refrigerators? All of it trucked from steel and aluminum producers to factories and from there to Home Depot or Lowes or Best Buy, so the wealthy men who own those stores, -- and they’re all men – pull down their millions and billions courtesy of, you guessed it, the American taxpayer they are all so contemptuous of because they don’t have the crooked accountants and off-shore tax shelters enjoyed by Trump and Bezos and their golfing buddies.

I could go on with the tax breaks local governments give Bezos and Amazon to get them to build minimum-wage warehouses in their fading towns and counties, with a reminder that every tax break given a corporation or billionaire is paid for by higher taxes on real estate and residents of those towns and counties.

But you get the picture. Bezos is the recipient of an especially egregious free ride on the infrastructure and systems built over the last hundred years or so that have made this country such a wonderful place to accumulate wealth. Billionaires like Bezos act as if our highway system and air control system was put there just for their companies to exploit and provide them with profits. Not only that, their political party, the Republican Party, has constructed a political church out of the lie that it’s time to cut taxes and forget upkeep of old infrastructure and building new bridges and roads. We’ve got ours, so fuck the rest of you.

That’s the thing about money. You get enough of it, and you can turn ideology into profit and profit into pain for all those suckers running down warehouse corridors trying to fill package delivery quotas by pissing in Coke cans and water bottles. Add some cosmetic surgery, a few personal trainers, and a 417-foot yacht, and you’ve got the new American dream, man, abs and all.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.



Fed Up With Media's Double Standard Against Democrats? So Am I

Fed Up With Media's Double Standard Against Democrats? So Am I

The Washington Post devoted seven stories to the Biden pardon yesterday. Jeff Tiedrich, in his Substack-which-you-must-immediately-subscribe-to, pointed out that every story on the opening page of the New York Times website yesterday was about Biden’s pardon of his son, all six of them.

The New York Times, in its wisdom, found it necessary to publish the musings of Jeffrey Toobin: “Biden’s Pardon For His Son Dishonored the Office.” Toobin, you will recall, is the former New Yorker writer and CNN talking head who pulled down his tidie-whities for a quick winkie-wankie on a New Yorker/WNYC Radio zoom call.

Toobin was suspended as a CNN commentator for eight months, and then welcomed back into the club, because of course he was! Jeffrey apparently doesn’t think that Donald Trump dishonored the office with his pardons of every single flaming idiot who lied for him during his impeachments and lied their asses off to the FBI, prosecutors, grand juries, the mainstream media and everybody else. No, those were just regular old run of the mill pardons for Trump according to grin-and-yank-it Jeffrey.

Here is Jeff Tiedrich’s take on the morals of the mainstream media:

“here’s a fun double standard to which the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled press hold our political parties:

Democrats must walk a narrow ethical path, and never stray one inch from it. they’re expected to kowtow to every demand the media makes. Joe Biden is expected to run a letter-perfect presidency. Kamala Harris was expected to run a flawless campaign. the slightest deviation, and the media will blow it up into a weeks-long scandal.

Republicans, on the other hand, are given a free pass to do whatever the fuck they want. lie? no problem. cheat? go for it, homies. protect a sex-trafficking predator within their midst? hey, we wrote one strongly-worded editorial. what more can we do?

and then there’s that Very Special Boy himself, Little Donny Convict. he could literally tear the Constitution in pieces and use the shreds to wipe his ass, and the press would just shrug their shoulders. look, that’s just Donny being Donny. it’s just the way it is.”

Biden is supposed to toe some imaginary line drawn by liberal op-ed writers and frightened congress-critters and pearl-clutching newspaper editors, even as Trump promises to pardon insurrectionists convicted of attacking Capitol police, damaging the nation’s Capitol, and attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election.

That makes sense if your head is so far up your ass you can have a conversation with your own tonsils.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.


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