The man who said in 2016 that he would “drain the swamp” in Washington likes to do things in reverse. Let’s explain how he so very easily got the title of Hypocrite-in-Chief.
Our largest state, which has only one Member of the U S House of Representatives, is very rich in natural resources, and it also has many thousands of disadvantaged Native Americans.
Donald Trump has very few women of color in his so-called Administration, but one of them is Tara Sweeney, an Inupiaq (Eskimo) member of the Native Village of Itqiagvik (Barrow), way up there north of the Arctic Circle. Itqiagvik is the northernmost city in the United States. No streets there are paved because of the permafrost.
A Republican, Sweeney has vigorously advocated for the opening up, for exploratory drilling, of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and that puts her in the crosshairs of every American who believes in protecting unspoiled lands.
Within Trump’s Interior Department is lodged the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA was established in 1824, when James Monroe was President. Sweeney is Trump’s Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs.
For almost twenty years before taking her job running the BIA, Sweeney worked for Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC), whose revenues in 2015 amounted to the paltry sum of two billion five hundred thousand dollars. The initial shareholders were the 13,000 Inupial Eskimos listed in the 1970 Census.
ASRC is a for-profit corporation under the Alaska Native Claims Act; but Trump’s CARES Act, with respect to Native Americans, was clearly intended to send money, not to for-profit corporations, but to tribal governments.
By steering money away from tribal governments, to her former for-profit employer (ASRC), Sweeney broke the law (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/16/trump-indian-affiars-funds-191622).
See, that’s how Trump’s been clearing the swamp.
Meanwhile, we here at AP have maintained for many decades that the CEO of the NYSE is Sydney Williams III, the most prominent resident of Essex, Connecticut, only to learn today that it’s Jeffrey Sprecher, the husband of Georgia Republican senator Kelly Loeffler.
Loeffler and Sprecher are in hot water because, during the brief time that she’s been in office, since January, they unloaded very valuable stock, before the stock market crashed becasue of the coronavirus; so when the criticisms of her unethical actions started going viral, how did she defend herslef?
Why, of course, she blamed “socialism” (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/politics/kelly-loeffler-stock-coronavirus/index.html.