TRUMP REGIME

Donald Trump’s transition team wants to dramatically shrink, consolidate or eliminate Washington’s top bank watchdogs. In recent interviews with potential regulatory-agency nominees, his advisers and Department of Government Efficiency officials have, for example, asked whether the FDIC could be abolished, people familiar with the matter said. Treasury could then absorb deposit insurance, according to some of the people. Any proposal to eliminate the FDIC or another agency would require congressional action.

New Republic - Donald Trump’s presidential transition team has recommended that the president-elect quash a crash reporting requirement for self-driving vehicles. In an internal document obtained by Reuters, the team described the safety reporting condition as a mandate for “excessive” data collection, advising that the president-elect abolish the requirement entirely.Doing so would radically alter the playing field for the burgeoning automated vehicle industry, decreasing transparency and making it more difficult for federal regulators to spark inquiries into dangerous practices. And Tesla would be the new policy’s biggest benefactor. 

Elon Musk’s six major conflicts of interest with the federal government

Axios -  A Wall Street Journal headline calls this "The Week CEOs Bent the Knee to Trump":

• Apple CEO Tim Cook dined at breezy Mar-a-Lago last night — a day after a pilgrimage to Trump's table on Thursday by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg flew in on Thanksgiving Eve. Jeff Bezos will sit down with Trump next week.
• Meta! Amazon! OpenAI! Rat-tat, each donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund. "President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement to Axios.
• Trump basked in literal Wall Street applause as he rang the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange, beneath a giant Platon cover portrait of himself as "Person of the Year" in his beloved TIME magazine.

Hartmann Report -  Elon Musk’s purchase of the government is already starting to pay returns. The largest part of the Muskrat’s fortune comes from Tesla, which he bought from its inventors years ago and was turned into a major enterprise by Barack Obama. (You may remember the headline from 2009: “The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it. It’s one of three loans totaling almost $8 billion that the Department of Energy awarded today to spur the development of fuel-efficient vehicles, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced today.”) And, since 40 of the 45 fatal crashes that have happend in cars with autopilot systems have involved Teslas, Musk has been on a crusade against the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which compiles and publishes those statistics. Now it appears that Musk’s $277 million investment in purchasing the White House for Donald Trump is about to pay off big, as Reuters reports: “The Trump transition team wants the incoming administration to drop a car-crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk’s Tesla, according to a document seen by Reuters, a move that could cripple the government’s ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated-driving systems.” This, of course, is only one of many early indicators that we’re about to experience the most corrupt administration in the history of America and, perhaps, the most corrupt administration in the history of all functional democracies (if you could still call the US that) anywhere in the world. 

MSN - Earlier this week, Trump nominated election denier and conspiracy theorist Kari Lake to become the new Director of the Voice of America.Given that VOA’s mission involves telling the truth about America and foreign powers, appointing someone who has actively tried to deny the truth about American politics for four years is a very bad idea. See Forbes, Here’s Why Kari Lake’s Nomination As Voice Of America Director Is Raising Alarms. 

MSNBC -  Polio survivor Mitch McConnell condemned vaccine skeptics after a new report exposed a top ally of RFK Jr for requesting the FDA revoke approval of the polio vaccine.  

Jen Paski, MSNBC -Several of Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks have courted quite a bit of controversy over the last few weeks. But surprisingly, his pick to become the next director of the FBI hasn’t experienced as much pushback as I expected.

Kash Patel’s book on the so-called deep state, “Government Gangsters,” included an appendix listing political figures he wants to target; he produced a song with the Jan. 6 prison choir; and he penned a Russiagate children’s book to educate kids about Trump’s first impeachment. Patel has openly advocated for shutting down the FBI’s D.C. headquarters, and even Bill Barr — Trump’s former attorney general — once responded to Trump floating Patel as deputy director of the FBI with “over my dead body.”

 

Yet, Patel’s path to confirmation has been remarkably smooth. “I’ll tell you, I put up some that I thought would be a little more controversial, and they turned out not to be necessarily the ones that are controversial,” Trump noted this week in a Time magazine interview.