Serious case of parasitism in executive branch

John Dean famously warned Richard Nixon of a "cancer on the presidency."

The diagnosis today would be that the presidency has a tapeworm.

That would seem to be assessment of Adam Serwer, senior editor of The Atlantic. He writes to empathize with those flustered as they attempt to connect the dots between the varied outrages and scandals associated with this president.

Russian collusion? Sexploits and hush money? Pay for play? Financial crimes and conflicts? Which thread merits our attention? All of them, writes Serwer.

"There are not many Trump scandals," Serwer writes. "There is one Trump scandal. Singular."

That singular scandal, he writes, is general corruption by many people -- individuals whose DNA compels them to use power "for personal and financial gain rather than for the welfare of the American people."

Spin the wheel of corruption. Team Trump hits on every stroke:

Budget director Mick Mulvaney admits that as congressman he met only with representatives of entities that contributed to his re-election.

Trump's choices for Cabinet have made like contestants on "Supermarket Sweep," their shopping carts stacked to the ceiling at taxpayers' expense.

The Trump children have picked up overseas favors like daisies in the spring.

Trump International Hotel has entertained foreign emissaries despite the clear conflict.

Trump's attorneys say it's legal, but a federal judge says attorneys general in Maryland and the District of Columbia can proceed with a lawsuit alleging that such conflicts violate the emoluments clause – prohibiting a sitting president from accepting payments from foreign governments.

So, in practical matters, which of these above might serve the function of removal?

Maybe none of the above.

Face it. If removal by impeachment is your pleasure, it takes two to tango – two houses of Congress, and a supermajority in one. Out of the question.

I've always said that the remedy for Trump (before 2020, that is) is not the political system (Congress) but the criminal justice system. Clearly, with how Trump has comported himself in business, and who's now investigating him, criminal indictments are hardly out of the question.

This notion didn't come from my small brain but from an enormous noggin – that of Steve Bannon. Of the Mueller probe, he told author Michael Wolff, "It's all about money laundering."

You don't say, Mr. Bannon.

Mueller has enlisted some of the nation's top investigators of financial crimes. Otherwise, Paul Manafort might not be a household name.

State attorneys in the New York and Washington regions are on the vine as well about these very matters.

An illuminating article by business writer Garrett Graff explains what this is about. Money laundering is the means of shuffling around illegal earnings and playing keep-away from the government when it comes to tax time.

A trademark of money laundering is massive in-cash transactions. Cash is hard to trace, hard to track, Graff writes in Wired.

For that reason, investigators would be highly interested in Citizen Trump's buying a $12.6 million Scottish estate and a $16.2 million Virginia winery – all in cash.

Similar activities have been attributed to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who, Graff quotes an expert in tracking the financing of terrorism, has shown a pattern of "atypical financial transactions."

Wait – did someone say "terrorism"?

No law enforcement entity is probing Team Trump for that – as of today.

The terror connection is this: Post-9/11 the Patriot Act gave investigators new tools to get a handle on financial activities that stretched across oceans.

Graff says such tools could come into play in determining if Russian money has helped and is helping keep the Trump empire afloat.

What an irony it would be if a GOP political cudgel in the "war on terror" became the device that ushered this president into civilian life -- and into the world of corrections.

            Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Blowing smoke about stewardship of our natural assets

It goes and goes and goes -- the stretching of credulity by the team of scoundrels Donald Trump has assembled to oversee our air, our forests, our waters.

We have Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt with his $3.5 million round-the-clock security detail and the $43,000 soundproof phone booth he had built in his own office.

We have Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke seeking to lease property for fracking in the pristine Sangre de Cristo Range, not a mile from the silent shifting of the Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado.

In either case, we have ironclad industry control of agencies formed to be honest brokers regarding public assets – our lands and our environment. Yes, the word is "our."

In the meantime, we have Republicans in control of Congress who are abiding by their partisan oath to cut taxes, thereby straining the fiscal resources we have to protect or maintain our wild assets.

There's that "we" and "our" again.

Facing a $12 billion backlog in maintaining national parks (and we wonder why . . .), I'm not sure what Zinke expected when his department proposed more than doubling the fees for entry to a host of national parks.

The idea was pelted with pine cones. Back to the drawing board. 

Now Republicans have proposed addressing those fiscal needs with something loftily called the National Park Restoration Act.

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., calls it a "long-term commitment to the parks" by his party. Forgive me, but as I read those words, all I can hear is, "Let's do this on the cheap. We have Big Energy to serve."

Which is exactly what the act would do.

The revenue Gardner and proponents envision would come from energy development on public lands, things like the fracking Zinke wants on Bureau of Land Management property near the Sand Dunes.

The act is nothing more than a justification for more energy development in those public lands. At the same time, it makes the well-being of national parks contingent on an unstable and unpredictable revenue source. And after all, that revenue would go somewhere else, so this is simply a shell game for what the general fund should do.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the natural world, Scott Pruitt has signed on a dramatic increase in the use of wood-burning power plants, declaring it a "carbon-neutral" means of providing energy.

Pruitt's argument is that if trees are cut for biomass operations and replanted, the new trees will cancel out the carbon lost from the logging and that released from incineration.

Not surprisingly, a whole lot of scientists call this bunk. Not surprisingly, Pruitt is ignoring the science.

For one thing, regrowth of natural forests takes a century or more, while the planet stews in its juices.

For another, biomass ranks with coal in emitting carbon dioxide and particulates.

And burning wood to generate electricity is hardly cost-effective, and in fact is costlier than utility-scale wind and solar.

What this is, not surprisingly, is a "giveaway to the forest-products industry," writes a trio of top environmental scholars in a New York Times commentary. Of course, like the National Park Restoration Act, it is framed as something that's good for us and our wild assets.

The team Trump has assembled to oversee these matters has only one set of assets in mind -- as do those in Congress in neglecting their role of serious natural stewardship. The assets that matter are those measured on corporate ledgers.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Dim foresight: Place seed corn in microwave, press ‘start’

The old farmer says, "Don't eat your seed corn. You need it for planting."

What would Steve Mnuchin say about that? Donald Trump's treasury secretary clearly would say, "It depends. Can it be sold on the futures market?"

We know what Trump's man heading the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, would say: "Seed corn makes great fritters. Fry 'em up."

Team Trump is all about immediate gratification -- aka the next meal -- or at least the next election: not so much as a glance down the road past that.

Trump and Republicans in Congress engineered a tax cut that will drive up the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next decade. For what? Principally, so that America's wealthiest will be wealthier.

Yes, most of us will pay less in taxes. That will mean mainly two things:  (1) more debt for your children and grandchildren; (2) strained public services for all.

Somebody in the tea party – for whom red ink was Satan's tonic -- explain that bargain.

Wait, say supporters of short-side (short-sighted) economics. Look at the economy.

No question, the economy looks good -- an upswing that was in gear before Trump took office. It's no surprise, though, that big tax cuts would help. The question is, "At what cost?"

Similar tax cuts preceded the Great Depression. So did tariffs. One could Google "Smoot-Hawley" to learn about this, but don't try schooling Donald Trump on history.

Now let's talk about the long-term economics of saving energy. Scott Pruitt doesn't get it.

Pruitt wants to roll back fuel standards that the Obama administration negotiated with automakers.

Not only did that agreement look to conserve finite petroleum sources, but fuel economy saves Americans money.

The concessions in those standards are slated to reduce fleet efficiency by a stunning 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

Imagine the oil saved by that. Now imagine the savings for Americans. The Union of Concerned Scientists finds that the average household could miss out on nearly $28,000 in fuel savings by 2030 should Pruitt get his way.

The same analysis found that the standards have already saved $58 billion in fuel costs since 2012.

We won't mention the greenhouse emissions averted by Obama's wise policy, something to which, again, automakers agreed in exchange for the federal bail-out during the Great Recession.

We won't mention that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere just reached their highest point in 800,000 years.

Let's not mention that the greenhouse effect is fact, not theory.

Let's observe instead that saving finite energy sources means we have more of them in the future (you know, like seed corn), that regardless of the CO2 issue, using less fossil fuel means less pollution in general – ozone, hydrocarbons, soot, mercury.

The fact is, everything about reducing fuel consumption is good -- unless one doesn't care at all about the environment, or the future.

By the way, the last time CO2 levels were this high was the mid-Pliocene era. At that time, global temperatures soared, the ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica melted, and ocean levels were 10 to 20 meters higher than today.

Don't worry about that future, say today's political leaders. We have an election coming up. Excessive heat? With melted butter, that's how seed corn becomes delicious popcorn.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.