Donald Trump is a well-known, self-described germaphobe. Unfortunately, he is not concerned about other Americans' exposure to germs and disease. With leading infectious disease scientists from the Centers for Disease Control to the University of Minnesota warning about a global influenza pandemic ("not if, when"), Trump's warmongering madman, John Bolton, has closed down a seasoned two-man global health security team.

The Washington Post reported last week about "the abrupt departure of Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, a respected scientist from the National Security Council," who was "the top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic."

At the time of Admiral Ziemer's expulsion, a new Ebola outbreak in the Congo had just been reported.

Trump's flagrant disregard for the safety of the American people has been punctuated by the proposed elimination of the budget reserved for containing an Ebola epidemic. Earlier this year, Trump pushed through Congress an additional $84 billion for the bloated, unauditable military budget-more than the Pentagon had requested.

Callous Donald is determined to enable and even abet companies that are spewing dangerous toxics into our air, water, and food-growing areas. Many of these companies have contributed to his campaign. This serial failed gambling czar's coldblooded personality is anti-law. President Trump and his agency chiefs are violating federal statutory mandates to protect the health and safety of Americans.

Trump's drive to take the federal cops off the corporate crime beats started early and recklessly. On the day he took office, Trump ordered an "immediate regulatory freeze" on the entire federal government. This stopped federal lifesavers in their rescues of endangered American workers, patients, travelers, vulnerable children, and frail, impoverished elderly.

He went from recklessness to ignorant idiocy by ordering all regulatory agencies to repeal two regulations for every one they were going to issue in the future. Business lobbyists were so delighted that they rushed to celebrate at Trump's hotel just a few blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, spending money to make Trump richer-sometimes huddling with Trump's regulators.

Wholesale shutting down of law enforcement, putting corporate operatives from the companies being investigated or overseen in charge of closing overdue government safety initiatives, and demanding huge budget cuts in agencies such as the EPA and FAA exceeds the broad "prosecutorial discretion" allowed by the federal courts.

Trump's marauders are raging through one agency after another, revoking, freezing, or suspending lifesaving health/safety protections. Weaker job safety, auto safety, air and water pollution standards, and pesticide protections spell death, sickness, and illnesses with their attendant family anguish and costs, including to taxpayers.

The Trumpsters are destroying federal protections from the corporate fraudsters who have been caught cheating, lying, and stealing from savers, investors, patients, student loan borrowers, travelers, and insurance policy-holders. Renegade public criminals such as EPA boss, Scott Pruitt, and head of both the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Mick Mulvaney, are openly brazen and contemptuous of the agencies they run, despite their oath of office to uphold the law.

Pruitt, the subject of 12 ongoing federal investigations for spending tax money on himself, is probably on his way out. But Mulvaney, who recently bragged before 1500 bankers that, as a Congressman from South Carolina, he wouldn't talk to lobbyists unless they had given him campaign money. He is one massive wrecking Goliath driven to leave consumers defenseless.

Mulvaney is bullying civil and criminal investigators fighting the corporate crime wave, from culpable Wall Streeters to payday loan sharks, and literally shutting down one enforcement action after another. Mulvaney even grotesquely restated the CFPB's mission to include "the protection of Wall Street."

You may remember news reports in early 2017 about Mulvaney wanting to save tax dollars by cutting the Meals on Wheels program, The Children's Health Insurance Program, and by slashing the small law enforcement budgets of the health and safety agencies. What you may not know is that Mulvaney is a coward, running away from going after the vastly larger documented waste, fraud, and abuse in military contracting, and corporate welfare giveaways. He has not said a word about the $60 billion yearly fraud on Medicare committed by commercial crooks. He is a corporate crime aider and abettor.

Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is pushing the same dissolution of law enforcement actions against the crimes and frauds of for-profit universities against unaware students, especially veterans. She too is placing people associated with these scams in charge of these despicable companies.

Trump wants to take America back to the days of "caveat emptor," "let the buyer beware," to the days of horrifying influenza epidemics, to the days of giving corporate crooks- that liberals and conservative Americans want prosecuted and jailed - a "get-out-of-jail-free" card.

Public interest lawyers alert! In the Supreme Court opinion of Heckler v. Chaney, shielding the agency's enforcement policies from court challenge, it added a warning where the agency has "consciously and expressly adopted a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities."

Are Senators or Representatives, who surely should have standing, ready to take the rampaging Pruitt, Mulvaney, or DeVos to federal court?
(c) 2018 Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is Unstoppable, and "Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us" (a novel).

ON BLOODY MONDAY this week, when the number of Palestinian killed and wounded was rising by the hour, I asked myself: what would I have done if I had been a youngster of 15 in the Gaza Strip?

My answer was, without hesitation: I would have stood near the border fence and demonstrated, risking my life and limbs every minute.

How am I so sure?

Simple: I did the same when I was 15.

I was a member of the National Military Organization (the "Irgun"), an armed underground group labeled "terrorist".

Palestine was at the time under British occupation (called "mandate"). In May 1939, the British enacted a law limiting the right of Jews to acquire land. I received an order to be at a certain time at a certain spot near the sea shore of Tel Aviv in order to take part in a demonstration. I was to wait for a trumpet signal.

The trumpet sounded and we started the march down Allenby Road, then the city's main street. Near the main synagogue, somebody climbed the stairs and delivered an inflammatory speech. Then we marched on, to the end of the street, where the offices of the British administration were located. There we sang the national anthem, "Hatikvah", while some adult members set fire to the offices.

Suddenly several lorries carrying British soldiers screeched to a halt, and a salvo of shots rang out. The British fired over our heads, and we ran away.

Remembering this event 79 years later, it crossed my mind that the boys of Gaza are greater heroes then we were then. They did not run away. They stood their ground for hours, while the death toll rose to 61 and the number of those wounded by live ammunition to some 1500, in addition to 1000 affected by gas.

ON THAT day, most TV stations in Israel and abroad split their screen. On the right, the events in Gaza. On the left, the inauguration of the US Embassy in Jerusalem.

In the 136th year of the Zionist-Palestinian war, that split screen is the picture of reality: the celebration in Jerusalem and the bloodbath in Gaza. Not on two different planets, not in two different continents, but hardly an hour's drive apart.

The celebration in Jerusalem started as a silly event. A bunch of suited males, inflated with self-importance, celebrating - what, exactly? The symbolic movement of an office from one town to another.

Jerusalem is a major bone of contention. Everybody knows that there will be no peace, not now, not ever, without a compromise there. For every Palestinian, every Arab, every Muslim throughout the world, it is unthinkable to give up Jerusalem. It is from there, according to Muslim tradition, that the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven, after tying his horse to the rock that is now the center of the holy places. After Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem is the third holiest place of Islam.

For the Jews, of course, Jerusalem means the place where, some 2000 years ago, there stood the temple built by King Herod, a cruel half-Jew. A remnant of an outer wall still stands there and is revered as the "Western Wall". It used to be called the "Wailing Wall", and is the holiest place of the Jews.

Statesmen have tried to square the circle and find a solution. The 1947 United Nations committee that decreed the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state - a solution enthusiastically endorsed by the Jewish leadership - suggested separating Jerusalem from both states and constituting it as a separate unit within what was supposed to be in fact a kind of confederation.

The war of 1948 resulted in a divided city, the Eastern part was occupied by the Arab side (the Kingdom of Jordan) and the Western part became the capital of Israel. (My modest part was to fight in the battle for the road.)

No one liked the division of the city. So my friends and I devised a third solution, which by now has become a world consensus: keep the city united on the municipal level and divide it politically: the West as capital of the State of Israel, the East as capital of the State of Palestine. The leader of the local Palestinians, Faisal al-Husseini, the scion of a most distinguished local Palestinian family and the son of a national hero who was killed not far from my position in the same battle, endorsed this formula publicly. Yasser Arafat gave me his tacit consent.

If President Donald Trump had declared West Jerusalem the capital of Israel and moved his embassy there, almost nobody would have got excited. By omitting the word "West", Trump ignited a fire. Perhaps without realizing what he was doing, and probably not giving a damn.

For me, the moving of the US embassy means nothing. It is a symbolic act that does not change reality. If and when peace does come, no one will care about some stupid act of a half-forgotten US president. Inshallah.

SO THERE they were, this bunch of self-important nobodies, Israelis, Americans and those in-between, having their little festival, while rivers of blood were flowing in Gaza. Human beings were killed by the dozen and wounded by the thousand. The ceremony started as a cynical meeting, which quickly became grotesque, and ended in being sinister. Nero fiddling while Rome was burning.

When the last hug was exchanged and the last compliment paid (especially to the graceful Ivanka), Gaza remained what it was - a huge concentration camp with severely overcrowded hospitals, lacking medicines and food, drinkable water and electricity.

A ridiculous world-wide propaganda campaign was let loose to counter the world-wide condemnation. For example: the story that the terrorist Hamas had compelled the Gazans to go and demonstrate - as if anyone could be compelled to risk their life in a demonstration.

Or: the story that Hamas paid every demonstrator 50 dollars. Would you risk your life for 50 dollars? Would anybody?

Or: The soldiers had no choice but to kill them, because they were storming the border fence. Actually, no one did so - the huge concentration of Israeli army brigades would have easily prevented it without shooting.

Almost forgotten was a small news item from the days before: Hamas had discreetly offered a Hudna for ten years. A Hudna is a sacred armistice, never to be broken. The Crusaders, our remote predecessors, had many Hudnas with their Arab enemies during their 200-year stay here.

Israeli leaders immediately rejected the offer.

SO WHY were the soldiers ordered to kill? It is the same logic that has animated countless occupation regimes throughout history: make the "natives" so afraid that they will give up. Alas, the results have almost always been the very opposite: the oppressed have become more hardened, more resolute. This is happening now.

Bloody Monday may well be seen in future as the day when the Palestinians regained their national pride, their will to stand up and fight for their independence.

Strangely, the next day - the main day of the planned protest, Naqba Day - only two demonstrators were killed. Israeli diplomats abroad, facing world-wide indignation, had probably sent home SOS messages. Clearly the Israeli army had changed its orders. Non-lethal means were used and sufficed.

MY CONSCIENCE does not allow me to conclude this without some self-criticism.

I would have expected that all of Israel's renowned writers would publish a thundering joint condemnation while the shooting was still going on. It did not happen.

The political "opposition" was contemptible. No word from the Labor party. No word from Ya'ir Lapid. The new leader of the Meretz party, Esther Sandberg, did at least boycott the Jerusalem celebration. Labor and Lapid did not even do that.

I would have expected that the dozens of our brave peace organizations would unite in a dramatic act of condemnation, an act that would arouse the world. It did not happen. Perhaps they were in a state of shock.

The next day, the excellent boys and girls of the peace groups demonstrated opposite the Likud office in Tel Aviv. Some 500 took part. Far, far from the hundreds of thousands who demonstrated some years ago against the price of cottage cheese.

In short: we did not do our duty. I accuse myself as much as I accuse everybody else.

We must prepare at once for the next atrocity. We must organize for mass action now!

BUT WHAT topped everything was the huge machine of brain-washing that was set in motion. For many years I have not experienced anything like it.

Almost all the so-called "military correspondents" acted like army propaganda agents. Day by day they helped the army to spread lies and falsifications. The public had no alternative but to believe every word. Nobody told them otherwise.

The same is true for almost all other means of communication, program presenters, announcers and correspondents. They willingly became government liars. Probably many of them were ordered to do so by their bosses. Not a glorious chapter.

After the day of blood, when the army was faced with world condemnation and had to stop shooting ("only" killing two unarmed demonstrators) all Israeli media were united in declaring this a great Israeli victory.

Israel had to open the crossings and send food and medicines to Gaza. Egypt had to open its Gaza crossing and accept many hundreds of wounded for operations and other treatment.

The bigger the Congressional Black Caucus gets, the more it betrays its constituents. Last Wednesday, three out of every four members of the Black Caucus in the U.S. House voted to make assaults on police officers a federal hate crime. The Protect and Serve Act of 2018 is totally superfluous, since cops are already the most protected "class" in the nation. Nearly a million sworn officers inhabit a legal dominion of their own, where immunity from prosecution for even the most heinous crimes is the norm. As People for the American Way point out: "All fifty states have laws that enhance penalties for people who commit offenses against law enforcement officers, including for homicide and assault," and federal laws already "impose a life sentence or death penalty on persons convicted of first-degree murder of federal employees or officers, killing state and local law enforcement officers or other employees assisting with federal investigations, and killing officers of the U.S. courts." However, like the Israel lobby, the cop lobby demands abject, groveling obeisance from the people's representatives -- lest there be any doubt as to who rules in either of the world's white settler states.

The Protect and Serve Act, which sailed through the U.S. House on a vote of 382 to 35, is a "Blue Lives Matter" bill that serves no other purpose than to give a giant middle finger to the Black Lives Matter movement. When the cops demanded to know, Which side are you on? three-quarters of the Congressional Black Caucus kissed the feet of the Blue Beast: "Your side, Boss!"

The Ugly

Twenty-nine CBC members paid homage to the world's largest police state.

Alma Adams (NC); Joyce Beatty (OH); Sanford Bishop (GA); Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE); G.K. Butterfield (NC); Andre Carson (IN); Emanuel Cleaver (MO); James Clyburn (SC); Elijah Cummings (MD); Danny Davis (IL); Val Butler Demings (FL); Keith Ellison (MN); Dwight Evans (PA); Marcia Fudge (OH); Al Green (TX); Sheila Jackson Lee (TX); Hakeem Jeffries (NY); Hank Johnson (GA); Robin Kelly (IL); Brenda Lawrence (FL); Al Lawson (FL); John Lewis (GA); Donald McEachin (VA); Gregory Meeks (NY); Bobby Rush (IL); David Scott (GA); Terri Sewell (AL); Bennie Thompson (MS); Marc Veasey (TX)

The Worthless

Three Black Caucus members did not bother to vote, which was the same as casting a "Yea" for the Act.

Anthony Brown (MD); Cedric Richmond (LA); Frederica Wilson (FL)

The Few That Did Not "Comply"

Below are the 11 members that stood up the police lobby, voting "Nay."

Karen Bass (CA); Yvette Clarke (NY); Wm. Lacy Clay (MO); Alcee Hastings (FL); Johnson, E. B.(TX); Barbara Lee (CA); Gwen Moore (WI); Donald Payne (NJ); Bobby Scott (VA); Maxine Waters (CA); Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ)

A Slap in the Face

Donald Trump and three-quarters* of the Black Caucus are on the same side, despite all the Democratic rhetoric seeking to distinguish between the two parties. When it comes to the Mass Black Incarceration State, Black Democrats are First Responders, ever ready to buttress the power, prestige and immunities of the cops and jailers.

As People for the American Way, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights put it: "Rather than focusing on policies that address issues of police excessive force, biased policing, and other police practices that have failed these communities, the Protect and Serve Act's aim is to further criminalize. This bill will be received as yet another attack on these communities and threatens to exacerbate what is already a discriminatory system of mass incarceration in this country."

Worse than Misleaders, the CBC is the Enemy

The advent of the Black Lives Matter movement has wrought virtually no change at all in the political behavior of the Congressional Black Caucus; collectively, they are just as treacherous as in the pre-Ferguson days. Back in June of 2014, two months before Mike Brown's murder sparked a national movement, four-fifths of the Black Caucus voted down an amendment to halt the Pentagon's infamous 1033 program that has funneled billions of dollars in military weapons and gear to local police departments. Twenty-seven members voted to continue the militarization of local police forces, five abstained from voting, which amounted to an endorsement of the status quo, and only eight members - one out of five -- supported the Grayson Amendment. We at BAR called the Black Caucus super-majority "The Treasonous 32." Below is the breakdown of the vote from that day of shame:

The Ugly

Karen Bass (CA); Joyce Beatty (OH); Sanford Bishop (GA); Corrine Brown (FL); G.K. Butterfield (NC); Andre Carson (IN); Yvette Clarke (NY); Wm Lacy Clay (MO); Emanuel Cleaver (MO); James Clyburn (SC); Elijah Cummings (MD); Danny Davis (IL); Chaka Fattah (PA); Al Green (TX); Alcee Hastings (FL); Steven Horsford (NV); Sheila Jackson Lee (TX); Hakeem Jeffries (NY); E. B. Johnson (TX); Robin Kelly (IL); Gregory Meeks (NY); Gwen Moore (WI); Donald Payne (NJ); David Scott (GA); Terri Sewell (AL); Marc Veasey (TX); Frederica Wilson (FL)

The Worthless

The abstainers of 2014, as four years later, effectively endorsed the status quo: militarization of the police.

Marcia Fudge (OH); Charles Rangel (NY); Cedric Richmond (LA); Bobby Rush (IL); Bennie Thompson (MS)

The Few for Demilitarization

John Conyers (MI); Donna Edwards (MD); Keith Ellison (MN); Hank Johnson (GA); Barbara Lee (CA); John Lewis (GA); Bobby Scott (VA); Maxine Waters (CA)

Are Black People Represented in the Congress?

When 80 percent of Black Democrats in the U.S. House vote for continued militarization of local police forces, and then four years later 75 percent of these same Black Democrats give "protected class" status to cops, then we must conclude that the intervening period of "Black Lives Matter" agitation had no effect on Black Democratic Party politics -- and further, that the Caucus is wholly and brazenly unaccountable to its constituents.

Friday afternoon, I was walking across my West Village neighborhood running some errands. Here and there my path crossed with college students in graduation gowns from NYU, Columbia and The New School.

It's that time of year, and as I watched the graduates and their proud, happy friends and families, I thought of the eight young men and women and two teachers at Santa Fe High School in Texas who just hours before had lost their lives to a 17-year-old armed with a shotgun and a .38 caliber handgun. Those kids would never see a college commencement or even their own high school graduation, which was scheduled for June 1. What a despicable tragedy.

No matter what the gun rights advocates say, all these deaths are about a country with far too many guns, plain and simple, full stop. Las Vegas, Parkland, Newtown, Orlando, Aurora, Santa Fe and Sutherland Springs, Texas and so many more: It's not about guns for duck hunting or target practice or protecting the home or shooting varmints in the cornfield. It's not about the Second Amendment giving us the right to bear arms when the British are coming.

Nor is it, as incoming NRA president Oliver North would tell you, about young boys "on Ritalin," who are "steeped in a culture of violence." Or, as Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick claimed, first, that Texas schools have "too many entrances and too many exits" and then, to George Stephanopoulos at ABC on Sunday that the Santa Fe deaths weren't because of guns but because, "We have devalued life, whether it's through abortion, whether it's the breakup of families, through violent movies, and particularly violent video games, which now outsell movies and music."

To which Fred Guttenberg, who lost a daughter in Parkland, Florida, three months ago, had the most appropriate response: "I think those are the most idiotic comments I've ever heard regarding gun safety," he said. "Let me be clear. He should be removed from office for his failure to want to protect the citizens of Texas."

Dan Patrick said, "It's not about the guns; it's about us." We can talk about that, Dan, but it is about guns - 88 of them for every hundred Americans, more than 300 million guns, with a mass-shooting rate eleven times higher than any other developed country.

No contortion of argument - twisting and turning to make the problem about anything other than guns - is going to change that. You sound like that clown Mo Brooks, Republican congressman from Alabama, who said last week that rising oceans aren't about climate change. No, he suggested, "Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up."

You can't make this stuff up. Stop throwing rocks in the ocean, people; you're drowning our coastal cities.

Seriously, it's about keeping guns out of the hands of those who are dangerous when they have weapons in their possession. It's about banning assault rifles and other instruments of destruction that should never be allowed off a military base or a battlefield or placed anywhere near where civilians can get their hot little hands on them. (Philip Bump in Friday's Washington Postnoted "a stunning statistic: More people have been killed at schools this year than have been killed while [deployed] in the military."

Yet Dan Patrick, Ollie North - an arms dealer of long experience- and all the other extreme gun advocates insist that the proliferation of weapons in this country isn't the problem. And here's where I can agree that it's not just about guns - it's also about our current political climate. From the top down in this administration and among too many of its supporters, it's always about pointing the finger at someone or something else other than the real problem, whether guns or graft or collusion. As said here before, it's the world according to Bart Simpson: Whatever it is, I didn't do it, unless it's something good, in which case I did do it, even if I didn't.

Except that Bart has some semblance of a moral compass. And he's a cartoon character. Whatever happened to responsibility, that basic premise of legitimate conservative thought? Whatever happened to accountability? Instead, the president and his cronies blame everyone but themselves for their problems and wrongdoings.

Donald Trump and his administration are the Wal-Mart of corruption - one-stop shopping for graft and influence peddling (and while we're at it, fiercely anti-union). When it comes to fessing up, forget about it. They shout and obfuscate and lie.

Barack Obama's a perpetual target of the pointed finger going all the way back to Trump's birtherism. High crime, not enough jobs - blame undocumented immigrants. And as the scheduled summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un seems to be crumbling, count on Trump to accuse everyone and everything but his own thoughtless impetuosity, prematurely polishing the Nobel Prize for peace while ignoring any semblance of knowledgeable diplomacy.

Many of the leaks that characterize this administration are nothing more than attempts at the finger point, aides working mightily to shift blame, to single out a fall guy. And of course, witness the current fiasco as Republicans and the White House work like thieves to wreck the legitimacy of Robert Mueller's investigation.

When Trump doesn't get the result he wants, when the truth comes out, he will, as ever, yell foul and WITCH HUNT! and cover-up and fake news and deep state and cast aspersions on everyone but the truly guilty party - himself.