President Trump's 2018 budget and executive orders could lead to some of the biggest land grabs since America’s Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s and Russia’s natural resource giveaways that created many oligarchs in the 1990s.
According to his budgets for the Energy and Interior departments—which oversee leases for oil, gas and mining and own interstate electric transmission lines—Trump would set the stage for a return of the robber barons.
The Teapot Dome, which historians say was America’s biggest scandal until Watergate, involved an insider deal over leasing Navy petroleum reserves for a pittance. Russian oligarchs, including investors in Trump buildings, grew super-rich after acquiring the former Soviet Union’s assets, especially its energy and mineral resources, similarly on the cheap. They privatized what were once public assets to make their fortunes.
Fast-forward to Trump, who, true to his background as a real estate developer, sees untapped equity in trillions of dollars in government-held energy and mineral resources as a way to pay down the federal debt and an opportunity to enrich private-sector friends—including America’s biggest corporations.
Trump Would Sell Off America's Energy Resources for a Pittance
Did anyone ever doubt that Trump was corrupt?
ReplyDeleteHow do they get away with it? They say that authoritarians have little empathy and they don't care about other people or the environment. Yet people vote them in. Theresa May says she doesn't do empathy. It's about business and arms deals. The British electorate have a choice between austerity and meanness, or something so much better, but they choose the horrible lot. Wired our what?
DeleteEven without a shadow of a doubt, he still beat Hillary.
ReplyDelete"Do not sell your birthright for a mess of pottage."
ReplyDeleteWhen will the Christian Right wake up?