Bill Ayers

Step 21: Donald Trump nominated Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, a leading climate change “steelhead” denier, Big Oil lackey, and organizer of a secret confederacy of Republican AG’s and energy company executives to attack the Environmental Protection Agency and resist clean air and water standards, to head—you guessed it!—the EPA. He will assist in “tearing up” the Paris climate agreement (signed by 195 countries, including the US, the world’s top polluter) which is the farthest reaching international climate agreement ever ratified, and simultaneously inadequate to the task of avoiding climate catastrophe. Take ten giant steps backward.

Step 22: Linda McMahon, the billionaire former wresting-entertainment impresario who donated $6 million to his presidential campaign, was nominated by Donald Trump to head the Small Business Administration. Extra credit for anyone who can name all the other billionaires in the Trump junta.

Step 23: Ben Carson, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, demurred initially, pointing out that he’d never managed or directed any large organization or agency (BUT, he ran for president!) and had no experience in government or policy making. Carson will soon run a $48 billion agency that oversees public housing and ensures that low-income families have access to safe and affordable housing. He believes, however, that people can only escape poverty through hard work, and that any government assistance softens and weakens people. He argues that government regulations and assistance are forms of totalitarian socialist rule, and he opposes federal housing policy as a type of social engineering. On the positive side, he does live in a house!

Step 24: Donald Trump has picked Andrew Puzder to be Secretary of Labor. Puzder is a critic of worker protections including paid sick leave, and he opposes expanding eligibility for overtime pay or raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. He was charged with domestic violence by his ex-wife, and advertisements that Mr. Puzder’s companies run “frequently feature women wearing next to nothing while gesturing suggestively.” When asked about the ads, Mr. Puzder replied “I like our ads. I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American.”

Step 25: Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who bagged $516,025 from fossil fuel companies since 1999 and voted consistently in Congress to open up public lands—refuges, ancient forests, parks, and wilderness areas—to drilling, logging, and mining, was tapped by Donald Trump to be the next Interior Secretary. God help the planet!

Holy Shit!!! It’s a plague.
Now: 6 Down, 5 letters:
http://theweek.com/puzzles/665314

http://www.longisland.com/news/12-07-16/bill-ayers-john-perkins-interview-sounds-of-film.html

Step 16: Donald Trump has nominated retired Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis to be his Secretary of Defense. Originally known more accurately as the Department of War, it was rebranded as the euphemistic Department of Defense in1949. “Mad Dog” Mattis represents the rejection of civilian control of the military, and the move toward full command of the generals. Mattis declared that “It’s fun to shoot some people” in 2005, one year after he oversaw the flattening of Fallujah in Iraq, and the murder by US forces of 736 people, overwhelmingly women and children.

Step17: Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, sat in on a meeting between the Prime Minister of Japan and her dad while her clothing line was negotiating a licensing deal with a Japanese apparel giant whose largest shareholder is—wait for it!—a bank that is wholly owned by the government of Japan.

Step 18: Donald Trump continues to promote the idea—without a shred of evidence—that millions of votes were illegally cast in the recent national election, even as his own lawyers filed papers in federal court stating that “ all available evidence suggests the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.” Welcome to the fact-free, faith-based world of today.

Step 19: Hate crimes in New York directed against Muslims, Jews , and ethnic and racial minorities are spiking upward since the election—as much as 35% over the same period a year ago.

Step 20: Michael Flynn, tapped to be Trump’s national security adviser, makes things up and spreads fraud on Twitter. He claimed, for example, that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of  Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington. Edgar Welch, unhinged by the news, showed up at the restaurant with a rifle to investigate, fired a shot, and was arrested. One hopes Michael Flynn is called for the defense.

http://standwithstandingrock.net/standing-rock-sioux-tribes-statement-u-s-a

Step 11: Donald Trump—with the active active buttressing of his enablers in the comatose capitalist “press”—offers up tweet after bizarre tweet (If you burn the American flag, goddammit, you should face consequences—“perhaps loss of citizenship”) sending the media into a frenzy of elaborate reporting, “deep thinking” about the constitution and sober commentary about settled law, while behind the curtain he and his crew work tirelessly to steal everything they can get their hands on, and erase any semblance of the common good or the public square. But, what the heck, let’s just talk about the flag.

Step 12: Donald Trump nominated Representative Tom Price of Georgia—fierce advocate of privatizing Medicare and slashing Medicaid, repealing Obamacare and relying strictly on “free market principles” in all aspects of health care and wellness—to the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Step 13: In order to fulfill his promise to “drain the swamp,” Donald Trump is offering donors a dazzling menu of options: for a million dollars (or more) you can get four tickets to an “intimate dinner” with the vice-president elect and his wife, and eight tickets to a “ladies luncheon” with the “women of the first family,” among other perks; for half a million (or more) you can get four tickets to the “ladies luncheon” plus more.

Step 14: Steven Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s campaign finance chief and a former partner at Goldman Sachs, will become the newTreasury Secretary, further “draining the swamp.”

Step 15: “Draining the swamp” continues with the selection of Elaine L. Chao—Washington insider, Republican functionary, and the wife of the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell—was selected to be the new Transportation Secretary.