CULT CORRUPT 2

1/18 see main

i think i am losing distinctions

see clarence alito acb gorsuch

this seems to be how pols cash in (why not connected to swamp things inside the wire (has more to do with campaign financing and lobbyists, not prsn wealth of pol?)

see inauguration

trump real estate money launder brings together int'l corruption and US cult of corrupt

see trump trans 2 rev door lobby swamp transactional musk bondi hamm burgum phelan

see insider trading stock act

see crony cap'lism

see FARA foreign agent

see COI

see bribe kickback

age of trump

see junkets (some trumpster had to resign? pruitt morocco?

see gift perk bribe clarence alito

see dereg, regulatory capture

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GGL 6 25

RV HMO EXEC

AI: Potential conflict of interest: At the time of the HMO case, Welters was CEO of AmeriChoice, an HMO later acquired by UnitedHealth.
Participation despite potential conflict: While Thomas reportedly recused himself from other cases involving UnitedHealth, he participated in this specific case.
Impact of the ruling: The 2004 ruling broadly benefited the health insurance industry by shielding employer-sponsored insurers from liability if they refused to cover certain services and patients were harmed.
Undisclosed loan: The loan from Welters was not disclosed publicly at the time of the ruling and was only revealed later by the New York Times in 2023.
Loan forgiveness: Investigations by Senate Democrats suggest that most, or even all, of the loan was ultimately forgiven by Welters, which could have implications for tax reporting and ethics disclosures.
Questions of impartiality: Critics argue that the circumstances surrounding the RV loan and the Justice's decision to participate in the HMO case raise serious questions about the impartiality of the Supreme Court.

In summary: The connection between Justice Thomas's RV loan from a health insurance executive and his participation in a case affecting the health insurance industry has generated controversy and led to calls for stricter ethics rules for Supreme Court justices.

[### Clarence Thomas's $267230 R.V. and the Friend Who ...

_The New York Times_

https://www.nytimes.com › 2023/08/05 › clarence-tho...](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/us/clarence-thomas-rv-anthony-welters.html)

Aug 5, 2023 — The vehicle is a key part of the justice's just-folks persona. It's also a luxury motor coach that was funded by someone else's money.

[### Clarence Thomas, a $267000 RV, and Why American ...

Rolling Stone

https://www.rollingstone.com › politics › politics-features](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/clarence-thomas-rv-loan-health-care-1235059440/)

Jul 13, 2024 — The scandal-plagued Supreme Court justice got an RV from a top health insurance executive. Then he protected the industry.

[### Clarence Thomas failed to fully repay $267000 loan for ...

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › oct › clarenc...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/25/clarence-thomas-anthony-welters-luxury-rv-loan-forgiven)

Oct 25, 2023 — Clarence Thomas failed to fully repay $267,000 loan for luxury RV, inquiry finds ... In the case of the luxury RV – a Prevost Marathon Le Mirage ...

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an 4 25

'Pay to play': Trump hammered for 'explicit' attempt to 'profit off the presidency'

Adam Lynch

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AN 4 25

An analysis released Monday in the wake of new Federal Election Commission filings shows that the Trump administration has dropped or paused federal enforcement cases against at least 17 corporations that donated to the president's inaugural fund, an indication that companies' attempts to buy favor with the White House are already paying off.

In the new analysis, the watchdog group Public Citizen cross-references FEC data released Sunday with its own Corporate Enforcement Tracker, which documents companies facing federal cases for alleged wrongdoing.

Public Citizen found that corporations facing federal investigations or enforcement lawsuits donated a combined $50 million to President Donald Trump's inaugural committee. Trump raised a record sum of $239 million for his second inauguration, the new FEC filings show.

"Corporations facing federal lawsuits and investigations aren't giving millions to Trump's inauguration out of the kindness of their hearts," said Public Citizen researcher Rick Claypool. "They are trying to buy good will. And when you're a corporation under investigation or facing prosecution, that means the government dropping enforcement actions against you. In some cases, it may even mean receiving pardons in cases in which guilty pleas have already been entered, or retractions of settlements already entered into."

Bank of America, Capital One, Coinbase, DuPont, and JPMorgan are among the corporations that donated to Trump's inauguration and subsequently had federal enforcement cases dismissed.

IFrame Content

Public Citizen noted that Google, which donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee, could benefit from the Trump Justice Department's decision during an ongoing antitrust case to scrap part of a "proposed breakup plan requiring Google to sell off AI businesses."

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google's parent company, was among a number of high-profile corporate executives who were given prominent spots at Trump's inauguration ceremony in January.

"They really never miss an opportunity for some good old-fashioned corporate bribery."

Other inauguration donors have benefited differently from the Trump administration's actions.

As former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich noted on social media late Monday, the Trump administration is poised to end the Internal Revenue Services' free Direct File program after the private tax prep giant Intuit donated $1 million to the president's inauguration.

"Apple donated $1M. Trump exempted most of Apple's imports from tariffs," Reich added. "Coinbase donated $1M. Trump's SEC dropped a major lawsuit against them. See how this works?"

The appearance of pay-to-play corruption has been stark during the opening months of Trump's second term, with critics accusing the president of effectively placing a "for sale" sign on the White House.

CBS Newsreported that much of the White House's Easter Egg Roll on Monday was "sponsored by corporations, a change from the traditional sponsorship by the American Egg Board."

Amazon, Google's YouTube, and Facebook parent company Meta sponsored "various stations at the event," according to CBS.

"Nothing says Happy Easter in Trump 2.0 like having corporate sponsors at the White House Egg Roll," Public Citizen said Monday. "They really never miss an opportunity for some good old-fashioned corporate bribery."

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an 4 25

'Could be an enormous scam': Insider trading suspicions grow after Trump tariff pause

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After defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race, President-elect Donald Trump didn't back down from his promise to impose stiff new tariffs. Trump, in fact, doubled down, vowing to charge 25 percent across-the-board tariffs on all goods coming into the United States from Canada and Mexico.

Many Trump critics have been warning that those tariffs, if implemented, will make inflation much worse. Some companies are already raising their prices.

According to The Guardian's Callum Jones, however, some companies that donated to Trump's 2016 campaign dodged tariffs during his first term as president.

"With Donald Trump threatening to impose steep tariffs upon his return to office this month," Jones explains in an article published on January 6. "U.S. firms are bracing for impact. But an analysis of Trump's last presidency identified one way to boost their chances of avoiding the levies: donating to the Republican Party."

Jones continues, "While the initial stage of the president-elect's tariff agenda is designed to hit America's largest trading partners — Canada, Mexico and China — it is U.S. firms that pick up the bill, paying duties imposed on the goods they buy from these markets. Such additional costs can prove devastating."

The Guardian reporter cites a study published on July 29, 2024. The study names some of the companies that dodged tariffs during Trump's first term.

"The federal government typically allows a carefully selected group of businesses from paying such levies," Jones notes. "Thousands of companies applied for exemptions, and permission to import items without paying a new tariff, during Trump's first presidency."

Jesus Salas, an associate finance professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, anticipates that the same thing will happen during Trump's second term and finds it "shocking" that companies that supported Democrats in 2016 were, according to the study, less likely to avoid tariffs.

Jones quotes Salas as saying, "(There are) many reasons to think some of this behavior is going to continue…. It's going to be the same staff, probably the same ideas, so we'd assume it's going to be the same behavior."

READ MORE:['Sickening!' Trump slammed over comments at mysterious Mar-a-Lago party

*Read The Guardian's full article at this link.

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an 11 24

Watchdog groups are warning that the Cabinet that President-elect Donald Trump is assembling is already showing signs of being a pay-for-play arrangement in which his biggest backers are rewarded with the ability to shape government policy in their favor.

According to a Tuesday report in the Guardian, the president-elect is raising red flags with several of his Cabinet picks, who are slated to oversee agencies regulating the industries in which they have a significant financial stake. In one example, Interior Secretary-designate Doug Burgum – the current Republican governor of North Dakota with close ties to fracking magnate Harold Hamm — will be in charge of issuing oil and gas drilling licenses.

Hamm himself donated roughly $4 million to Trump's election effort, while soliciting additional donations from others in the industry. The Guardian reported that the oil and gas industry put up approximately $75 million toward sending Trump back to the White House. Hamm was also at the Mar-a-Lago meeting in which Trump asked the oil industry to pony up $1 billion to his reelection bid in exchange for favorable policies.

Other Trump Cabinet appointees, like Department of Commerce secretary-designate Howard Lutnick and Department of Education secretary-designate Linda McMahon, also donated millions of dollars to Trump's bid for the presidency. According to the Guardian's calculations, they donated $6 million and $21 million to his campaign and allied super PACs, respectively. Both are also the co-chairs of his presidential transition.

Meanwhile, billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — who spent more than $200 million of his own money to get Trump elected — is chairing a so-called "government efficiency" advisory board in which he'll be recommending steep, draconian budget cuts to the agencies regulating his businesses.

"Trump has taken the cliche that ‘all politics is local’ and turned it into ‘all politics is about personal payback’," former Federal Election Commission general counsel Larry Noble told the Guardian. "The naked transactional nature and potentially dangerous conflicts of interests reflected in Trump’s ongoing paybacks are unprecedented in modern times."

The president-elect was particularly open in his promises of exchanging policy for campaign cash while he was running his third campaign for the White House. In October, the New York Times reported that Trump has flip-flopped on numerous issues after being faced with the prospect of bringing in additional donations from wealthy contributors. This includes cryptocurrency, tobacco, marijuana and TikTok, among others.

Saurav Ghosh of the Campaign Legal Center decried Trump's rewarding of political donors with Cabinet posts, saying his "transactional approach to governing epitomizes corruption and will sadly ensure that in his second term, big donors’ interests will continue to come before the needs of millions of Americans.

“Major donors have had a hand in shaping policy in every recent administration, but the unprecedented role that Musk and certain other donors, especially from the tech and finance industries, played in the campaign and are now playing in the transition means that their influence over the incoming administration’s agenda is likely to be unprecedented,” said Brennan Center for Justice director of elections and government Dan Weiner.

Click here to read the Guardian's report in its entirety.

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see wiles for anno

alternet-no lnx

Trump has placed 'For Sale' sign on White House with Chief of Staff Pick: watchdog

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with his senior advisor Susie Wiles as he speaks, following early results from the 2024 U.S. presidential election in Palm Beach County Convention Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Jake JohnsonandCommon DreamsNovember 15, 2024

A government watchdog group said Friday that President-elect Donald Trump has effectively signaled that the incoming administration is open for business by choosing longtime Republican strategist Susie Wiles—a former lobbyist for the tobacco industry and other sordid interests—as his White House chief of staff.

In a new report, Public Citizen shows that Wiles represented at least 42 clients as a registered federal government lobbyist between 2017 and 2024—corporate influence-peddling that continued even while she helped run Trump's 2024 presidential bid.

Among Wiles' clients, according to the watchdog group, were:

A waste management company that has resisted removing nuclear waste from its radioactive landfill;

A foreign copper and gold mining company that wants to eliminate federal opposition to its plan to dig a massive mine in a pristine watershed;

A tobacco company that sought to block federal health restrictions on its candy-flavored cigars, which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has found are attractive to kids;

A foreign news company whose owner has been indicted for money laundering; and

A foreign mining private equity firm seeking approval to develop an open-pit leach gold mine on federal public lands.

"By putting a corporate lobbyist in charge of his administration with his first act as president-elect, Trump is hanging a 'For Sale' sign on the front door of the White House," Jon Golinger, a democracy advocate at Public Citizen and author of the new report. "A lobbyist with this record of controversial representation and a minefield of potential conflicts of interest should not go near the Oval Office, much less be White House chief of staff."

White House chief of staff is a powerful position that does not require Senate approval. In the role, Wiles will control the flow of information and those who have access to the president as well as manage White House personnel.

Trump's selection of Wiles flies in the face of his previous pledge to "drain the swamp" and recent criticism of the disproportionate influence lobbyists wield in Washington, D.C.

"They're making a lot of money, absolutely," Trump acknowledged in an August appearance on the "This Past Weekend" podcast with comedian Theo Von. "One way you could stop it is to say if you're going to go into government, you can never be a lobbyist."

"You have to stop listening to lobbyists," Trump said. "You know, I was not a big person for lobbyists."

In fact, according toProPublica, the first Trump administration hired more than 280 lobbyists—one for every 14 political appointments.

The campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets reported in 2021 that Ballard Partners, Wiles' lobbying firm, "increased its revenue with each year of Trump’s presidency, peaking in 2020 with a $24.4 million haul."

"Wiles' lobbying client list is both extensive and littered with controversial clients who stand to benefit from having their former lobbyist running the White House."

Corporate influence inside the second Trump administration will likely be even stronger given the presence of Wiles and other figures such as Elon Musk, the world's richest man and a major beneficiary of government contracts. Earlier this week, Trump tapped Musk and biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead a commission tasked with recommending sweeping cuts to federal spending and regulations.

Public Citizen called Trump's decision to form such a commission and place Musk at its helm "the ultimate corporate corruption."

In its new report, the watchdog argued that a person with Wiles' lobbying history "should not be White House chief of staff."

But assuming she ultimately takes the position in January, Public Citizen called on Wiles to disclose details of her lobbying work, including "the names of the individuals she lobbied, what she asked those individuals to do or not to do, and what resulted from her lobbying"; recuse herself from "all decision-making involving her past lobbying clients and the federal agencies that are making decisions that affect her lobbying clients"; and agree not to lobby the federal government again after she leaves the White House.

"Wiles' lobbying client list is both extensive and littered with controversial clients who stand to benefit from having their former lobbyist running the White House," Public Citizen said Friday. "This report's findings raise serious questions about potential conflicts of interest that need to be answered before Inauguration Day."

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an 7 24

Two Senate Democrats have published a list of roughly three dozen lavish gifts Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas received from right-wing billionaires during his time on the Court.

On the eve of the Independence Day holiday, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Thomas for "possible violations of ethics and tax laws" in his "repeated and willful omissions" of gifts from wealthy benefactors.

"The scale of the potential ethics violations by Justice Thomas, and the willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws, exceeds the conduct of other government officials investigated by the Department of Justice for similar violations," Whitehouse and Wyden wrote. "The breadth of the omissions uncovered to date, and the serious possibility of additional tax fraud and false statement violations by Justice Thomas and his associates, warrant the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate this misconduct."

On page 14 of the PDF Whitehouse posted to his Senate website, there are two lists of gifts to Thomas. The first list describes gifts from far-right real estate magnate Harlan Crow, and the second list shows gifts from other wealthy sponsors, like entrepreneur Anthony Welters — who "loaned" Thomas a luxury RV and then later forgave the loan — and billionaire Wayne Huizenga.

The gifts from Crow date back to 2003, and list excursions like "Yacht trip to Russia and the Baltics" and Helicopter to Yusipov Palace, St. Petersburg." Out of the roughly two dozen gifts Crow gave to Thomas, four are private school tuition payments for his grand-nephew. Many of Crow's other gifts were private jet flights and yacht cruises, including one Sens. Whitehouse and Wyden described as "around Greek islands."

And out of the gifts on the second list, three were from Huizenga, two were from Welters, and five were from former Berkshire Hathaway board member David Sokol. Billionaire Warren Buffett, who owns Berkshire Hathaway, forced Sokol out in 2011 after he learned that Sokol bought a stake in a company he later convinced Buffett's company to buy. Buffett called Sokol's actions "inexplicable" and "inexcusable."

"No government official should be above the law. Supreme Court justices are properly expected to obey laws designed to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety and to comply with the federal tax code," the senators wrote. "We therefore request that you appoint a Special Counsel authorized to investigate potential criminal violations by Justice Thomas under the disclosure, false statement, and tax laws; pursue leads of related criminal violations by donors, lenders and intermediate corporate entities; and determine whether any such loans and gifts were provided pursuant to a coordinated enterprise or plan."

In 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Davide Cay Johnston commented that it was possible Thomas could face "criminal prosecution" by not paying taxes on the previously undisclosed gifts from Crow and others. He opined that any lower-level court judge would not be able to avoid the charges if they failed to pay taxes on gifts worth millions of dollars.

"What Clarence Thomas has done would result in not only any judges in America being removed from the bench, but there is a good chance it would result in criminal prosecution for income tax fraud and for false filings in his mandatory financial ethics disclosure statements," Johnston said in December.

Last month, anti-corruption watchdog group Fix the Court totaled Thomas' gifts and found that the conservative jurist had received approximately $4 million in gifts dating back to 2004 – far more than any other justice on the Supreme Court. And of the 193 gifts Thomas received, he only listed 27 on his required financial disclosure reports.

Click here to read Whitehouse and Wyden's full letter to Garland.

:{READ MORE:

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an 1 24 no lnx thom

Why Trump wants a country where everything is for sale

Thom Hartmann

January 09, 2024

Donald Trump and his fellow rightwing billionaires have a plan for America. They want to turn the United States from a prosperous, middle-class nation into a country of paupers, where bribery is common and the wealthy can get away with anything.

The latest example of this comes from the House Oversight Committee’s report last week documenting how Donald Trump took at least $7 million in bribes in exchange for changes to US foreign policy when he was president.

Most of the world already operates the way Republicans are pushing our country: no social safety net, corrupt regulatory and police agencies, politicians and legislation for sale, and absolute immunity for the morbidly rich.

It was 1980 when I first really discovered what it’s like doing business or just living life in countries that are the models for how this nation’s rightwing billionaires are trying to remake America.

I was a volunteer on behalf of an international relief organization out of Germany and had flown into Kenya, on my way to Uganda. Tanzania had recently evicted the murderous dictator Idi Amin (who was welcomed, along with his bevy of wives, by Saudi Arabia, where he lived like a king in his own palace to the day he died). Famine was creeping across the northern part of the country. (I wrote about this trip in The Prophet’s Wayand published that chapter on my website.)

Three days in a row I’d gone to the Ugandan embassy to try to get an entry visa into the country; each time I was told, after waiting a few hours and without explanation, to come back the next day.

I was staying at the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi, and they had an outdoor bar called the Thorn Tree Café, where Ernest Hemmingway used to stay and where he popularized the Swahili word “safari” and wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I’d gotten to know an old British expat who lived in the hotel and we shared a couple of gin-and-tonics every afternoon in the café. When I told him about my frustration, he said:

“When you go in tomorrow, slip a $20 bill into your passport when you hand it to the official. You’ll get your visa.”

There were a couple of other regulars sitting with us and they all agreed, so the next day, with some trepidation, I tried the bribe. It worked: the Ugandan diplomat lifted the bill out of my passport, it vanished into the top drawer of his desk, and I had the visa stamp in my passport in thirty seconds.

When I got to the airport and the Ugandan Airlines’ check-in desk, I was told that my plane reservation, which I’d booked and paid for over the phone, “Can’t be found.” The agent shrugged, like it was an everyday occurrence. I slid another twenty across the counter and he broke into a huge smile, scratched out a line on the flight manifest with his pencil, and said, “Give me your name again?” I did and he wrote it in and an hour later I was on the plane to Entebbe.

A few months later I was in Haiti, meeting with the government official in charge of licensing foreign charities to operate in the country. He was less subtle than the Ugandans; he told me right up-front that I’d have to give him a substantial cash down-payment (I’m remembering $5,000, but could be in error) and an annual smaller payment, all in cash and all handed over directly to him.

While I was successful in starting a program in Uganda that’s still running to this day (among others), when the level of bribery got as high and as naked as it was in Haiti, we chose to pull the plug on our plans to operate in that Caribbean country.

Later that year I was pulled over by a Mexican police officer while driving with a Vice President of Scientific Atlanta from the Acapulco airport to our hotel; the cop told me — even though I’d been traveling the same speed as every other car on the highway — that I’d have to stay in town for a week to show up in court unless I gave him $50 cash on the spot. He got his bribe, and, on reflection of some legal peril, I listed it as such on my expense report.

You may be shaking your head right now, thinking all of this bribery to do business or even travel in foreign countries is terrible. America would never tolerate such corruption, right?

Wrong.

We’re already there on one level; it’s just that there’s only one class of Americans who can legally bribe the system to get what they want, and they blow through every obstacle in front of them by simply paying people off.

That group is America’s rightwing billionaires. And they damn well want to keep things that way. As long as they can bribe their way into or out of things, they’re very happy with the status quo and will continue to fund efforts to keep things this way.

Look at, for example, how they spiffed Clarence Thomas to get him to agree to be the deciding vote in Citizens United, which legalized bribery of both American politicians and Supreme Court justices. Multiple rightwing billionaires spent literally millions of dollars buying Thomas’ and his wife’s loyalty and rewarding their behavior on the billionaires’ behalf.

The fossil fuel industry showers millions every year on Republican politicians, both in direct bribes campaign contributions and through the political cover they get from the rightwing media and think-tanks they underwrite. As a result, you won’t find a single Republican politician who’s willing to do anything whatsoever about climate change, and most won’t even acknowledge it exists so long has the money keeps flowing.

Ditto for Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Banks: all three routinely rip off Americans, and the Republican answer is to gut the regulatory agencies that might hold them to account.

While Uganda was in chaos in 1980 and the people I paid off were probably just freelancing because they weren’t even getting paid, when I was in Haiti I heard from other people operating in the country that part of the bribe money they’d paid was going all the way to the top: “Baby Doc” Jean-Claude Duvalier ran that country like his own personal corrupt little fiefdom until he was deposed in 1986.

Donald Trump aspires to Baby Doc (or even “Papa Doc”) status, and showed us — during the one-term presidency that Vladimir Putin helped him secure — how he and his billionaire buddies want to reshape our country in Duvalier’s image. This is how a country travels the path from functioning democracy to corrupt oligarchy.

Trump came into office echoing a widespread public freak-out about the 20 million or so jobs that had been offshored to China by Reaganomics. Trash-talking China worked really well on the campaign trail for Trump, but when he became president he began acting like that Mexican cop who’d pulled over me and my client.

— The Chinese embassy and one of the country’s largest banks (that helps North Korea evade US sanctions) shoveled $5.5 million into Trump’s corporate checking accounts; within months he hopped on a plane, flew to China, and told Chinese dictator Xi “my feeling toward you is an incredibly warm one.”

— Trump was trash-talking Qatar, calling them a “funder of terrorism,” so, as Mary Trump notes in her excellent newsletter:

“[I]n April of 2018, the Qatari Permanent Mission to the United Nations bought a fourth apartment at Trump World Tower for $6.5 million, and then in the SAME MONTH, Donald welcomed its monarch to the Oval Office and labeled Qatar as a partner in ‘stopping the funding of terrorism.’”

Not only that, Qatar went on to backstop a billion-dollar buyout of Jared Kushner’s terrible 666 Fifth Avenue building purchase.

— Trump was ignoring Kuwait’s desire to buy an air-force-worth of F18 Hornet fighter jets, so, like my sticking a $20 bill into my passport in Nairobi, they moved their Christmas Party to his DC hotel, putting hundreds of thousands of dollars in Trump’s pocket; he promptly approved the sale of the weapons systems.

— Saudi Arabia was reeling under international condemnation for murdering and dismembering Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, so they gave Trump well over a half-million dollars cash by renting entire floors in his properties; he immediately went against his own policy advisors’ advice and began selling them billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech weapons without congressional authorization.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, the little bit that Democrats on the House Oversight Committee were able to discover before Republicans took control of the House and put Trump toady James Comer in charge of the committee; Comer immediately ended the investigations into the Trump family and redirected their efforts to investigating Hunter Biden. (There’s a great summary of the House Democrat’s report, with a link to the report itself, here.)

This is the America that our country’s rightwing billionaires want. Where everything is for sale, but the price is usually so high that only the morbidly rich can afford it.

— Want $600 billion a year in fossil fuel subsidies that help destroy our children’s future? Give Republican politicians a few hundred million over the years.

— Want to own a private island and run an underage sex ring? Just buy off or blackmail enough politicians and a guy who ends up in Trump’s cabinet will, himself, arrange sweetheart deals for you to avoid prison or liability (until it all comes unraveled years later).

— Want such massive tax cuts that they will leave the nation $34 trillion in debt and siphon a full $50 trillion out of the homes and savings of working class people, reducing the middle class income from two-thirds of us to 43 percent? Just recycle a few billion of those trillions to fund a few hundred Republicans’ campaigns.

America has become a nation increasingly run by rightwing grifters and greedy corporations:

— Want to sell pesticides that are neurotoxic to children?

— Dump toxic waste from mining operations into our rivers where it will poison downstream water supplies?

— Gut workers’ rights?

— Sell off and ruin public parklands for pennies on the dollar?

— Steal from working people’s retirement plans without consequence?

Every one of those five things (and more) happened in the first months of Trump’s administration, and in every case there was big money paying off Trump and congressional Republicans for taking those actions.

We’re seeing a similar embrace of corruption in Republican-controlled states across the country. Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton, for example, has been facing securities fraud charges for eight years now; the trial is finally scheduled for next year, but don’t hold your breath. Meanwhile, he’s suing to prevent women with crisis pregnancies from getting life-saving abortions.

In Virginia, that state’s Republican Attorney General went after “good government” as soon as he took office. As Radley Balko notes in his Substack newsletter, The Watch:

“Jason Miyares made his priorities clear the moment he took office. Shortly after the Virginia Republican was sworn in as the state’s new attorney general in 2022, he abruptly fired everyone in the conviction integrity unit (CIU), the office charged with investigating and rectifying wrongful convictions. …

“Miyares fired 17 attorneys and 30 total employees, including many attorneys in the civil rights division, as well as the general counsel for the University of Virginia — who at the time had taken leave to serve as lead investigator for the special congressional committee investigating January 6th. Miyares insisted the attorney’s termination had nothing to do with his work on the attempted insurrection.”

And it’s not just American billionaires who are paying off Republican politicians (and apparently one Democrat in the Senate). A foreign billionaire who may be the richest man in the world controls a massive social media operation that can build up or tear down any Republican who doesn’t dance to his tune.

Vladimir Putin, a billionaire who makes his friends into billionaires, has invested heavily in social media troll farms, now that billionaires Zuckerberg and Musk have dialed back on content moderation, leaving Nazis, Russian agents, and their Republican fellow travelers to flourish on their platforms.

Putin’s social media operations have been so successful that he’s managed to bring a few dozen Republican politicians under his control, most notably Tommy Tuberville and Marjorie Taylor Greene. As the Byline Supplement Substack newsletter noted last week:

“Among Republican politicians, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has led the way in normalizing extremist pro-Russian propaganda, making a public appearance at a pro-Putin rally and floating Putin’s peace plan which cedes all occupied territory to Russia. Greene calls the defense of Ukraine a corrupt scheme, citing as her source a Russian propaganda outlet that was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department over alleged interference in the 2020 presidential elections.

“On the US Senate side, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama blames Democrats, claiming Democrats “created” the war in Ukraine — exactly parroting the Kremlin influence operation as reported by the declassified US intelligence assessment. Tuberville has gone so far as to green-light a Russian takeover of Ukraine, opining against all contrary evidence that he sees no risk of further Russian aggression once Ukraine is subdued. Tuberville is a close ally of Donald Trump, who claims he has a plan for an immediate end to the war.”

And, of course, Putin was able to buy Trump’s loyalty by running an online influence operation, outed by Robert Mueller’s investigation, that helped Trump win the electoral college and occupy the White House even though he lost to Hillary Clinton by about 3 million votes.

This is the America our rightwing billionaires have been working to create ever since the Reagan Revolution: a nation where everything’s for sale and everyone’s on the take.

After all, when everybody’s a criminal, nobody’s a criminal.

And it all really started in a big way when five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery by billionaires (1976) and corporations (1978), most recently overturning hundreds of good government laws nationwide with their bizarre Citizens United (2010) decision declaring that corporations are persons and money is “First Amendment-protected ‘free speech.’”

For two decades now, we’ve had Republican justices who’ve been put on the bench through millions of dollars from a handful of rightwing billionaires and the institutions they fund. They’re then groomed with first class and private jet travel, homes, travel trailers, speaking gigs, entrance to billionaire-only private events, and millions in “pay” opportunities for justices’ spouses.

They’re backstopped by billionaires who own media operations like Fox “News” and the CEOs of industries that want to continue making money while exploiting or even killing us and our children.

The simple reality is that today in America rightwing billionaires can buy just about anything, including tax breaks, new laws that protect them and their businesses, and immunity from prosecution for anything they say or do. They can even buy henchmen who will take down university presidents who offend them.

Widespread Republican victories this November will make the situation far worse, and, if Trump keeps his promises, will finish the job Reagan began of gutting the middle class and fully handing control of America over to the GOP’s billionaire overlords.

Then Ken Paxton, Clarence Thomas, and Ron DeSantis types of politicians will rule the nation, always bowing to the demands of their rich benefactors.

Democrats (Senator Menendez notwithstanding) have been fighting this corruption and promise to end the culture of bribery and impunity that Citizens United established. They tried with the For The People Act, but the GOP filibuster prevailed.

The choice has never been starker: do we want America to sink farther into the GOP‘s version of Uganda or Mexico? Or do we want to become a nation where we all have opportunity and prosperity, and all Americans are both bound and protected equally by the law?

What kind of country do we want to leave to our children? A functioning democracy or a corrupt kleptocracy run by the toadies of a handful of rightwing billionaires?

The stakes this November are huge. Pass it along.

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an 1 24

republican-aligned lobbyist Barry Bennett — an adviser to former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign — has admitted to violating a law pertaining to agents of foreign governments in a newly unveiled agreement with the Department of Justice.

According to Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney, Bennett and his associate Doug Watts entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ on Tuesday, agreeing to pay hefty fines and cease activity governed by the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for 18 months in exchange for avoiding a trial. Bennett will pay $100,000 for making false statements to federal authorities concerning his lobbying activities on behalf of foreign interests, and Watts — who worked on Ben Carson's 2016 presidential campaign — agreed to pay $25,000.

While the charging documents didn't state which country Bennett and Watts were assisting, the context of court documents suggests the violations relate to the lobbyists' work on behalf of the Qatari government in relation to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Bennett's firm, Avenue Strategies LLC — which he co-founded with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — was under investigation by the DOJ in 2021 for his work on behalf of Qatar. That work involved setting up an advocacy group dubbed Yemen Crisis Watch, which was aimed at shaming Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for their destabilization of Yemen that led to widespread hunger and poverty in the war-torn nation.

The Qatari embassy reportedly paid Bennett $250,000 for the campaign, and Bennett's failure to report the group as a project paid for by a foreign government was what first alerted federal investigators. The Hill additionally reported that Qatar paid Avenue Strategies Global in excess of $3 million for building inroads between the Middle Eastern nation and the Trump administration between 2017 and 2018. His firm brought in roughly $1 million in 2020, but his work tapered off after Trump lost his reelection bid that year.

Politico reported that in addition to his work with Yemen, Bennett's firm also worked with Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko, Veneuzuelan-owned oil company Citgo and the government of Zimbabwe. A Maryland judge froze his assets in 2021 after he was sued by Ying Ma — another Republican lobbyist — for refusing to pay finders' fees for new clients she helped bring in.

"Bennett has attempted to defend his illicit activities to federal authorities by, among other things, falsely accusing Ying Ma, a patriotic American citizen, of being an intelligence asset of the Chinese Communist government," read a 2021 filing Ma submitted. She added that his refusal to pay her was part of a "pattern of sleaziness and illegal behavior."

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an 12 23

a far-right Republican House lawmaker is alleging some members of Congress are compromised by “women, drugs, booze,” and suggested they are being blackmailed by Russia.

“This is how it works,” **U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett**(R-TN) told far-right podcast host Benny Johnson (video below). “You’re visiting, you’re out of the country, or out of town, or you’re in a motel or a bar in D.C., and some, whatever you’re, you’re into – women or men or whatever – comes up, and they’re very attractive, and they’re laughing at your jokes and, and they, and you’re buying them a drink, next thing you know you’re in the motel room with them naked.”

“And next thing you know, you know, you’re about to make a key vote and what happens?” Burchett continued. “Some well-dressed person comes up and whispers in your ear, ‘Hey, man, there’s tapes out on you,’ or, ‘Were you in a motel room, on, whatever with whoever?’ And then you’re like, ‘uh-oh,’ and [they] said, ‘You really ought not be voting for this thing.'”

Johnson described Burchett’s description as being “BLACKMAILED.”

“You got powerful people and they write the big checks,” Rep. Burchett said. “Let’s be honest and powerful people in this country, they write the big checks, and they, you know, they’re the ones out on the tarmac when the President comes and visits, and, whichever party they’re in, they’re always either out on the tarmac or in the private room. They’re the ones that write the big checks.”

“They don’t care who’s in, they hate this country, they hate what we’re about, but they love their portfolios and they love their money more than they do anything else,” Burchett continued. “And they protect it and they protect the people that do that and by doing so, you know, the old honeypot. The Russians do that. And I’m sure members of Congress have been caught up – why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like what we’ve been saying out of Congress?”

“If it’s women, drugs, booze, it’ll find you in D.C. and in most elected offices, and that’s what people in power influence do. And it’s just, and I’ve been in this game my whole life has been 16 years in the state legislature in Tennessee and eight years as county mayor, and now I’m in my fifth year of Congress, but it’s just it. The stakes are higher but the with the game is still the same.”

===

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an 12 23

in a September 2020 report, the House Transportation Committee found that Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) "played instrumental and causative roles" in two deadly plane crashes that, combined, killed 346 people altogether.

Before that, according to Daily Beast reporters Roger Sollenberger and Riley Rogerson, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-California) "sold up to $50,000 in" Boeing shares. That August 2020 sale, the journalists report in an article published on December 13, came "weeks before" the "damning results of" a congressional probe "into deadly crashes involving the company's 737 Max airliner" became public.

"But while other incumbent campaigns were dogged by blockbuster stock scandals that year," Sollenberger and Rogerson report, "the Garcia campaign never had to answer for this trade. That's because Garcia blew the mandated deadline to report the transaction, only filing the paperwork on November 23 — more than two months after the 45-day reporting window had closed."

The Beast reporters continue, "When he finally did disclose the sale, it was two weeks after the 2020 general election votes were cast, and three days after Garcia declared victory. He won by 333 votes."

In a once-red state that has become increasingly Democratic in recent decades, Garcia has defeated Democrat Christy Smith (who formerly served in the California State Assembly) three times — first in a special election in May 2020, then in the general elections of 2020 and 2022.

The Daily Beast interviewed some legal experts, who, according to Sollenberger and Rogerson, described the delay as an "egregious" ethics violation.

The Campaign Legal Center's Delaney Marsco told the Beast, "When members file late, this is the cost: It deprives voters of the information to assess it themselves."

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) Communications Director Jordan Libowitz told the Beast that Garcia failed to report the trade "at a time when people would have been asking questions about it" — adding, "There’s a chance he's in Congress today because he hid this. And it raises the question of whether he's looking out for his constituents or is he just trying to enrich himself."

*Read The Daily Beast's full report at this link (subscription required).

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an ah 12 23

Donald Trump was hardly the first U.S. president to issue controversial pardons.

A month after President Richard Nixon's resignation, President Gerald R. Ford granted him a full and unconditional pardonfor any Watergate-related crimes he might have committed — a move that Democratic strategists used against Ford in the 1976 election. The 140 pardons that President Bill Clinton issuedon January 20, 2021 during the final hours of his presidency received plenty of scrutiny.

But to Donald Trump's critics, the controversial pardons that he issued during his four years in the White House were uniquely troubling.

Trump pardoned a long list of MAGA Republicans and loyalists who were either convicted of serious crimes or pled guilty to them, including "War Room" host Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort (Trump's 2016 campaign manager), veteran GOP operative Roger Stone, and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

In a report published on December 2, Washington Post reporters Beth Reinhard, Manuel Roig-Franzia and Clara Ence Morse describe the prominent role that pardoned Trump loyalists are playing in his 2024 campaign.

The journalists report, "Donald Trump's clemency orders forgave more white-collar crimes than any other type of offense — tax scofflaws, health-care fraudsters, corrupt politicians and Ponzi schemers all benefited, The Post review found. Several had donated to Trump's campaigns or had the resources to do so in the future. The Post found 26 clemency recipients or their immediate family members have contributed to a Trump campaign account or a pro-Trump political committee. That means more than 1 out of 10 of the people who received pardons and commutations gave money either before they received clemency, afterward or in both periods, for a total of nearly $1.8 million."

According to Reinhard, Roig-Franzia and Morse, "Much of that tally comes from real estate developer Charles Kushner, the father of Trump's son-in-law, who pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns, witness tampering and lying to the Federal Election Commission and served time in prison in 2005 and 2006. He was pardoned in late 2020; he gave $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC this year."...

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just after pale reform

'Shady and corrupt': Barrett real estate deal added to list of Supreme Court ethics scandals - Alternet.org 11 23

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Florida 'Don’t Say Gay' lawmaker sentenced to prison in federal fraud case - Alternet.org

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no lnx 8 23

An entire branch of government is sinking into an irredeemable Trump-fueled muck of corruption

Thom Hartmann August 20, 2023

So now, as expected after decades of taking big bucks for her right-wing work on behalf of America's oligarchs, we learn that the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, was in Trump's January 6th "rally" up to her eyeballs.

Let's just say it right out loud: the US Supreme Court is corrupt. And Americans know it.

No other federal court in the nation would allow a defendant in a case before them to fly a judge on a private Gulfstream luxury jet to a luxury hunting retreat in Louisiana and then, a week later, watch as that judge rules in that defendant's favor.

But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did exactly that when Dick Cheney was sued for allegedly lying about his secret "energy group" that was planning the seizure and sale of Iraq's oil fields as he and Bush lied us into the war that opened those oil fields up to exploitation.

No other federal court would allow a judge to give a speech before a group that was funding a case before them and then rule in favor of that group's openly stated goal, but that's exactly what Neal Gorsuch did when he addressed the Fund for American Studies, itself funded by the Bradley Foundation that was helping fund the Janus v AFSCME case that gutted union protections for government workers.

No other federal court would allow a judge to swear revenge against a particular nonprofit corporation (in this case the Democratic Party), saying in his confirmation hearings that, "What goes around comes around," and then rule in cases directly affecting that organization (like voting rights) butBrett "Beerbong" Kavanaughdid just that.

No other federal court would allow a judge to rule on a case where he owned a half-million dollars worth of stock in the company presenting amicus arguments before the court—it's illegal in many states—but John Roberts did just that in the ABC v Aereo case. As did Roberts, Bryer and Alito in 25 of 37 other cases where they owned stock, according to the good-government group Fix The Court.

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No other federal court would allow a judge's wife to openly interact with and advocate for the interests of dozens of litigants before the court over decades, and take nearly a million dollars from a group regularly helping bring cases before his court but Clarence Thomas and his wife have done both, as recently revealed in a shocking New York Times profile.

And now the Court is gutting the EPA—the agency Justice Gorsuch's mother infamously ran into the ground before resigning in disgrace during the Reagan administration—using Gorsuch's own BS "textualist" rationale to go after the agency today.

In addition, these Republican appointees are openly shooting down Democratic efforts to fight gerrymanderedmaps while supporting GOP efforts to impose them on states.

Is there no way, to paraphrase Shakespeare, to rid ourselves of this Court's corrupt behavior? Turns out, Congress has that power—although they haven't used it since Ulysses Grant was president and reorganized the Court.

Article III of the Constitution establishes the federal court system, and gives to Congress itself the power to create the lower federal courts. It also says that Supreme Court judges may only serve on the court if they behave themselves:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour….

It also requires Congress to regulate the Supreme Court. Article III, Section 2 says:

[T]he Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

The issue of the Supreme Court needing regulation from the "first among equals" legislative branch (Congress), as specified by the Founders and Framers of the Constitution, has been with us for 101 years.

Most people remember William Howard Taft as the one-term progressive Republican president who followed Teddy Roosevelt into the White House in 1909 and was beaten for re-election by Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

But after his retirement from the presidency, Taft became the first former president to serve as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in 1921. He was our 27th president and 10th Chief Justice.

In 1921, it came to the attention of the nation and to Chief Justice Taft that US District Judge Kenesaw Landis was taking five times his annual salary as a judge from what was then called "Organized Baseball"—five years after ruling in their favor.

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The scandal provoked Congress to pass, in 1922, a law creating a body that would provide advice and oversight to the federal judiciary. It came to be known as the Judicial Conference of the United States.

The scandal also prompted Chief Justice Taft to accept the unpaid chairmanship of The American Bar Association's (ABA) newly formed commission to write ethics rules for federal judges.

Taft's commission wrote, in 1923, the first Canons of Judicial Ethics, which included 34 categories of judicial conflicts and misbehavior that would either disqualify a judge or require their recusal from cases before them. They included conflicts of interest, personal financial investments, and even behavior in the courtroom itself.

Taft, in delivering the Canons, made it clear they should apply to all federal courts, including his own Supreme Court. Within a decade, every state in the union had adopted the Canons for their own courts.

The Canons, however, had no enforcement mechanism,particularly when it came to the Supreme Court. After all, who would judge the highest court in the land? That opened the door for literally a century of the Supreme Court ignoring Taft's work.

The issue came to the fore again in 1969 when Republicans went nuts when it was revealed that Justice Abe Fortas—a very liberal (Republicans called him a communist) LBJ appointee—had taken $15,000 for a summer teaching post, was receiving time-delayed payments from a law former client, and, worse of all, was secretly advising President Johnson.

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Under massive incoming fire from Republicans and their friendly media, Fortas resigned from the Supreme Court on May 14, 1969. Over the next three years, the ABA put together a new commission to update Taft's original Canon on judicial ethics.

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That commission released their new Code of Judicial Conduct in 1972, and it was adopted by the Judicial Conference of the United States, in 1973. The Supreme Court, however, chose to ignore it, arguing that they were above such considerations.

By that time the Supreme Court had made itself, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the most powerful of the three branches of government, asserting the power to second-guess both Congress and the President.

Ironically, in his 2011 annual report about the state of the judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts made lengthy and effusive reference to former Chief Justice Taft and his work with the ABA's commission on judicial ethics. His report, however, conveniently omitted the fact that Taft had loudly and publicly asserted it should apply to the Supreme Court.

Instead, Roberts noted rhetorically, "Some observers have recently questioned whether the Judicial Conference's Code of Conduct for United States Judges should apply to the Supreme Court."

I'll spare you extended quotes from Roberts' report, which you can read here, but the bottom line is that in his opinion the Court can tell the 1923 ethics recommendations, and the subsequent ones from 1973, to go screw themselves. The Supreme Court, in his mind, is answerable to nobody but itself.

As Sam Alito said, "I'm not aware of problems on the Supreme Court itself…we would not sit back. We would take action that's appropriate."

Back when Roberts was a young lawyer working for Reagan and trying to come up with a way to overturn Brown v Board and Roe v Wade, he was fond of quoting Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution.

This gave Congress the power, Roberts wrote, to simply overturn both Brown and Roe by passing a law creating an "exception" that the Supreme Court couldn't rule on issues of race or abortion (his lengthy writings for Reagan are in my book on the Court).

But now that he, himself, is in charge of the Court there's nary a peep from Roberts—in his 2011 Report or anywhere else—about Congress' power to regulate the Court.

In recent years multiple laws have been proposed to pick up the slack Roberts left to his fellow justices. Louise Slaughter proposed legislation in the house in 2015 that would require the Court itself to come up with its own code of ethics.

It went nowhere, and, besides, it would violate the basic premise of law dating back to Publius Syrus in 50 BC, cited by John Locke in the 17th century, and finally quoted by Madison in Federalist 10 that "no man shall be the judge in his own case."

President Biden's commission on the Courts recently recommended that the Supreme Court adopt an "advisory" code of behavior, but Roberts didn't even bother to comment.

Most recently, Senator Chris Murphy introduced the Supreme Court Ethics Act that would seek to regulate the Court's out-of-control politicking and conflicts of interest. Predictably, it was blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

Public outrage is building: the Court's approval rating is now around 40 percent, a historic low. Congress needs to act, requiring them to adopt and conform to the federal code of judicial ethics at the very least, and expand the Court at best, before an entire branch of government sinks into an irredeemable partisan muck of corruption.

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no lnx

'Dead as fried chicken': Senate Republicans lash out after Supreme Court ethics bill clears committee

https://www.alternet.org/as-fried-chicken-senate/

Brandon GageJuly 20, 2023

The United States Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday in an 11-10 vote along party lines advanced The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act for a floor debate in the upper congressional chamber. According to its sponsor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), the bill "would require Supreme Court justices to adopt a code of conduct, create a mechanism to investigate alleged violations of the code of conduct and other laws, improve disclosure and transparency when a justice has a connection to a party or amicus before the Court, and require justices to explain their recusal decisions to the public."

But as Politico reports, the measure faces almost certain defeat in the House of Representatives, which just like in the Senate, Republicans view "as an erosion of separation of powers and an attack on the conservative court."

Thursday's hearing lasted more than three hours, Politico notes, wherein lawmakers "struck down more than a half dozen Republican amendments, on topics such as the size of the court, punishing leakers and further regulating stock trades by lawmakers. But GOP committee members never called up the vast majority of the more than 60 amendments they said they planned to offer."

READ MORE: Democrats 'don’t like democracy' claims Ted Cruz, who voted against certifying the 2020 election

According to Politico, "The Whitehouse proposal would give the court 180 days to adopt and publish a code of conduct and allow the public to submit ethics complaints that would be reviewed by a randomly selected panel of lower court judges. It also would establish more stringent rules for disclosure of gifts and travel. Justices would also be subject to clearer rules on recusing themselves from cases where they may have a conflict of interest, or an appearance of one."

Multiple jurists on the High Court — most notably Associate Justice Clarence Thomas — are under intense scrutiny for receiving gifts and having personal financial relationships with individuals who had stakes in the outcomes of cases that came before the Court. Nonetheless, Republicans were less than cordial about the legislation.

"You're going to fail miserably. This bill is going nowhere," said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), while Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) voiced similar, albeit more colorful criticism.

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"You don't have to be Oliver Wendell Scalia to figure out that this legislation is meant to be a court-killing machine," Kennedy quipped. "This thing's dead as fried chicken on the Senate floor and it's dead as fried chicken in the House."

READ MORE: Expand the Supreme Court? Activists livid Senate Democrats are holding out

Meanwhile, Whitehouse pushed back against the GOP's claims that Democrats are attempting to "pack" the Court:

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I would like to make a few points as we wrap this up. The first is I would react to the comments that some of my colleagues said Democrats wanna pack the court. My sense is the court has already been packed. It has been packed as the result of a very long and expensive effort run by a handful of secretive right-wing billionaires through a bunch of front groups.

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The tally of the cost of the operation has risen from the original $250 million estimate of The Washington Post to now $580 million spent on trying to make sure that those billionaires succeeded in what has been characterized in this room as the long effort to make this a conservative court.

Watch Whitehouse's statement below via The Recount or at this link.

READ MORE: How the Supreme Court pulled a right-wing doctrine 'out of thin air' to 'invalidate' Biden’s policies

Politico's analysis continues here.

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https://www.alternet.org/texas-2662296231/

Group supporting suspended TX AG Paxton gives $3 million to impeachment trial judge Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick

Patrick Svitek The Texas Tribune

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AOC big ginni clarence crits

https://www.alternet.org/rank-corruption-aoc-calls-for-clarence-thomas-impeachment-following-bombshell-report-on-megadonor-gifts/

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https://www.alternet.org/clarence-thomas-2659749180/

an 4 23

no lnx in orig?

'A flagrant violation': More legal, ethics experts slam Clarence Thomas over bombshell corruption allegations

David Badash andThe New Civil Rights Movement April 06, 2023

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is under fire after a bombshell ProPublica report detailed the expensive vacations he’s been given, gifts of a Republican megadonor, for more than two decades, without disclosing certain portions of them – which legal experts say he is required by federal law to do.

At issue are important questions of ethics and law.

The vacations, revealed in ProPublica’s extensive and detailed report Thursday, from a legal standpoint appear to be worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in total. From an ethical standpoint, some say, they have cost the institution of the Supreme Court further repetitional damage.

Justice Thomas at times was accompanied on these lavish trips by his wife Ginni Thomas, the far-right activist and lobbyist who worked behind the scenes to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

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Together or apart, one person who joined them on these all-expenses-paid trips to private resorts via private jets and private yachts was the gift-giver: billionaire Dallas real estate magnate and GOP mega donor Harlan Crow.

READ MORE: For Decades Clarence Thomas Has Accepted Luxury Vacations from a GOP Megadonor Without Disclosing Them

ProPublicarevealed the details of one of Thomas’ almost yearly trips.

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“In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef,” ProPublica reports.

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“If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.”

Justice Thomas “has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.”

Crow, who financially supports right wing causes, in 2011, according to Politico, contributed $500,000 to help Ginni Thomas start her consulting group, “Liberty Consulting, which boasts on its website using her ‘experience and connections’ to help clients with ‘governmental affairs efforts’ and political donation strategies.”

The ProPublica report includes an image of a painting that hangs at Crow’s private lakeside resort, Camp Topridge, in the Adirondacks that features shows Crow and Justice Thomas “smoking cigars at the resort. They are joined by lawyers Peter Rutledge, Leonard Leo and Mark Paoletta.”

READ MORE: Students Across the Country Walk Out of School to Protest Gun Violence After Nashville as TN House GOP Moves to Expel Dems

Leonard Leo is a vice president of The Federalist Society and sits on its board. The Federalist Society was the right-wing clearing house for most of Donald Trump’s federal court appointees, including his three Supreme Court nominees, and Leo is seen as the man behind those picks.

Meanwhile, legal experts are responding to the bombshell report, confirming ProPublica’s assertion that Thomas’ “failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.”

Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern, an attorney who writes about the courts and the law and wrote a book on the Roberts Supreme Court, calls Justice Thomas’ actions “corruption.”

Stern observes that “federal law DOES require justices to disclose most gifts of value.”

“It’s clear that Thomas brazenly violated this law many times. We should call this what it is: corruption,” he says.

“Just to be clear here,” Stern adds, “it was a flagrant violation of federal law for Thomas to accept this wildly expensive luxury vacation without reporting it as a gift—his conduct isn’t just unseemly, it’s illegal.”

READ MORE: ‘They Had an Insider on SCOTUS’: Legal Experts Stunned by Bombshell Clarence Thomas Was Seen as ‘Key’ by Trump Lawyers

The award-winning investigative reporter for The New Yorker, Jane Mayer, pointing to ProPublica’s report, says: “This is why public trust in the Supreme Court is cratering.”

Leah Litman, Assistant Professor of Law and The University of Michigan School of Law, says, “no one is doing a better job at making the case that the Supreme Court is broken than … the Court and its Justices.”

Top national security attorney Brad Moss offers this exercise: “Change the name of the Justice to Kagan or Sotomayor, and the name of the donor to Soros. Then think about how Fox would react.”

Imani Gandy, Editor-at-Large covering courts and the law for Rewire News Group, does not mince words.

“Clarence Thomas should be impeached,” she says. “He broke the law.”

Attorney and former Biden deputy cabinet secretary, Cristóbal Alex asks, “How do you impeach a Supreme Court Justice?

“Besides being married to someone who conspired to overthrow our government, Justice Thomas has accepted what appears to be millions of dollars in undisclosed gifts,” Alex notes.

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https://www.alternet.org/clarence-thomas-2659747910/

an 4 23

no lnx

in the wake of the latest bombshell report revealing incriminating details about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' luxurious lifestyle, legal experts are weighing in with critical remarks and concerns as calls for accountability increase.

According to the new report:

"For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has asalary of $285,000, he has vacationed on [Harlan] Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks."

READ MORE: Clarence Thomas opposes a 'landmark precedent' guaranteeing defendants the right to counsel: legal columnist

The report also emphasized: “The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Now, legal experts have taken to Twitter with ethical concerns as they've pointed out the many issues with Thomas' conflicts of interest.

"There’s been a lot of talk by MAGA Republicans this week about the judge in NYC," former Trump administration official Olivia Troye tweeted. "If you want to talk about a judge & their family let’s talk about Justice Clarence Thomas & his wife Ginni…"

"Our country is poisoned from within," tweeted former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.). "Ethics be damned. And with his wife, Ginni, being a major GOP influencer with multiple organizations that funnel and accept money in GOP circles—and certified Q quack—Clarence Thomas should not be allowed anywhere near a judicial decision.…"

READ MORE: How Clarence Thomas went from a 'fringe figure with extremist views' to the Court’s 'center of gravity': report

Calls have also increased for Thomas to be impeached from the Supreme Court or held accountable amid reports on the latest findings.

"Google 'Clarence Thomas RV' and you'll find endless puff pieces about him and Ginni being ascetics who spend their free time with the common folk," Max Kennerly tweeted. "Turns out their vacations were really on private planes and superyachts — trips they concealed in violation of federal law."

"What is the penalty for violating the disclosure law? Would the DOJ need to first file a criminal complaint?" Chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon also asked.

According to a new report from The Washington Post, Supreme Court disclosures will likely hold justices accountable going forward.

:{:{}:

"Supreme Court justices and all federal judges must provide a fuller public accounting of free trips, meals and other gifts they accept from corporations or other organizations, according to revised regulations quietly adopted this month," the report notes.

The latest controversy followsThomas' own remarks insisting that the Supreme Court was being "bullied" following the overturn of Roe v. Wade. At the time, Thomas also raised concerns about Americans disrespecting the government, a remark Truthout's Sharon Zhang described as a form of "glaring hypocrisy" given the Supreme Court justice's reputation.

The judicial system “can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want,” Thomas said, implying that the opposing views toward institutions “bode ill for a free society.” Per the report, Thomas also said, "Young people are especially guilty of disrespecting government institutions like courts."

Pushing back against the remarks, Zhang wrote:

Thomas’s comments sparked ire among abortion rights supporters, who pointed out the glaring hypocrisy of telling people to simply live with decisions made by 9 unelected judges with lifetime appointments who are not subject to any oversight. As political commentators pointed out, Republican attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election are a prime example of people not being able to live with an outcome they don’t like — but Thomas has yet to condemn the anti-democratic campaign and coup attempt, perhaps because of his wife Ginni Thomas’s involvement in those events.

READ MORE: Here Are 5 of Clarence Thomas’ Worst Decisions - And Proof Judge Brett Kavanaugh Is Cut from the Same Cloth

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---

ref badash 11/22

https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/11/they-had-an-insider-on-scotus-legal-experts-stunned-by-bombshell-clarence-thomas-was-seen-as-key-by-trump-lawyers/

Washington Post bombshell revealing Trump attorneys saw Justice Clarence Thomas as the key to getting the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election is leaving several legal experts stunned.

The Post reports eight emails “ordered released by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of California, include correspondence between Trump lawyers Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman and others discussing various legal strategies to convince Republican members of Congress to object to the official certification of electoral votes in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.”

In one email “from Chesebro to Eastman and several others sent on Dec. 31, 2020, Chesebro argued that [U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence] Thomas would ‘end up being key’ to asking the high court to overturn then-President-elect Joe Biden’s win in contested states.”

The Post states the email also says, “they should ‘frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt.'”

Politico’s Kyle Cheney sums up the scheme.

“Chesebro made the plan explicit: Get any remotely favorable ruling from a federal judge — not to win outright but to embolden GOP state legislatures, Congress or Pence to reverse the results.”

Politico‘s reporting includes copies of the redacted emails, and adds: “Chesebro contended that Thomas would be ‘our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress.'”

“I think I agree with this,” Eastman replied.

“Eastman,” Politico notes, “an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to subvert the 2020 election, once clerked for Thomas and had corresponded with his wife, Virginia, in the weeks before Jan. 6.”

“[I]f we can just get this case pending before the Supreme Court by Jan. 5,” Chesebro wrote in one email, “ideally with something positive written by a judge or justice, hopefully Thomas, I think it’s our best shot at holding up the count of a state in Congress.”

Richard Signorelli, a former Asst. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) blasted both the Supreme Court Justice and his far right wing activist wife, Ginni Thomas.

“They had a damn insider on SCOTUS who they thought would help them overthrow our democracy,” Signorelli tweeted. “He’s married to a deranged MAGA cult member. He won’t even recuse himself.”

Former Harvard Constitutional Law professor Laurence Tribe blasted Chesebro.

“We now learn that Ken Chesebro saw Justice Thomas as Trump’s ‘only chance’ to stop the 2020 election from being duly certified. Such abhorrent abuse of an attorney’s license to practice law should be strictly disciplined and perhaps criminally prosecuted,” he tweeted.

Attorney and writer Rachel Solar, pointing to the Politico article asks: “When is it enough???? His wife is an insurrectionist He refuses to recuse He’s the Trump election-denial go-to? Come on.”

Journalist Helen Kennedy goes one step further.

“Hey look! It wasn’t just critics of the Supreme Court who thought Clarence Thomas was corrupted – Trump’s lawyers said so too in secret emails just revealed.”

===}}:

---

U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva and committee member Rep. Katie Porter are investigating an alleged bribery scheme in which they believe a real estate developer donated to a super PAC aligned in support of former President Donald Trump in exchange for pardons for two other men.

The two Democrats wroteto Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Friday, calling on her department to release all documents related to the pardons of Dwight and Steven Hammond, who had been convicted in 2012 of setting fires on public lands they had leased after illegally killing deer on the land.The two men were sentenced to five years in prison with time served in 2015, sparking right-wing protests including a 40-day armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

Grijalva (Ariz.) and Porter (Calif.) believe real estate developer Mike Ingram—who was the subject of the Natural Resources Committee's first-ever criminal referral regarding another potential bribery case involving a clean water permit for one of his developments—secured the Hammonds' pardons in 2018 with a $10,000 donation to the America First Action, Inc. Super PAC.

According to the letter, Ingram's assistant emailed a Trump Interior Department official on May 25, 2018, attaching two articles arguing for the Hammonds to be pardoned. On July 1, a Republican lawmaker who supported the Hammonds tweeted that Trump was "seriously considering" pardoning them.

One day later, Ingram made his donation, and just over a week after that Trump announced he was pardoning the Hammonds.

"Mr. Ingram made only one other $10,000 donation during the 2017-2018 nonpresidential election cycle," wrote Grijalva and Porter. "That donation was the subject of the committee's criminal referral regarding the Villages at Vigneto development [in Arizona]. In that case, Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal or professional relationships with Ingram, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump Victory Fund and the Republican National Committeeon the same day or within just a few days that a major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram's favor."

"The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds' pardons raise significant concerns about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation," they added.

On social media, Porter noted that she and Grijalva uncovered the evidence of Ingram's alleged bribe "while investigating a possible $240,000 quid pro quo scheme between the Trump administration and a developer."

"We're requesting documents to help us get to the bottom of [the Ingram case]," Porter said. "I have zero tolerance for corruption."

ref 1 ltr

december 2, 2022 The Honorable Deb Haaland Secretary U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street NW Washington, D.C. 20240

Dear Secretary Haaland: On May 11, 2022, the House Committee on Natural Resources (Committee) presented evidence of likely bribery involving former U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary David Bernhardt and Villages at Vigneto developer Mike Ingram, in the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). 1 The Committee has now uncovered another potential incident of bribery involving Ingram and senior Trump administration officials through its review of documents obtained in that investigation. In 2012, ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond were convicted of arson on federal lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). 2

According to DOJ, the Hammonds informed BLM that a fire they had started on Hammond's private property to burn off invasive species had inadvertently spread to public lands. However, witnesses, including a relative, later came forward and testified that Steven Hammond had instructed companions to drop lit matches on the ground, with the effect of destroying evidence that a Hammond hunting party had illegally slaughtered deer on the BLM lands. By law, arson on federal lands carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.3 The district court in the Hammonds’ case ordered sentences far below this requirement, citing Eighth Amendment concerns, but a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the illegal sentences and ordered the district court to resentence the Hammonds in compliance with the law.4 The U.S. Supreme Court denied cert, 5 and on October 7, 2015, the district court imposed five-year prison terms on each of the Hammonds,...

credit for time already served.6

On July 10, 2018, President Trump signed Executive Grants of Clemency

(Full Pardons) for both Hammonds.7

Documents obtained in the Committee’s Vigneto investigation indicate that Mike Ingram used his unique

access to high-ranking Trump administration officials to advocate for these pardons. In an email dated

May 25, 2018, Mr. Ingram’s executive assistant sentBen Cassidy, DOI’s Senior Deputy Director for

External and Intergovernmental Affairs, two articles on the topic, including an op-ed arguing for pardons

for the Hammonds (see Attachment 1).

On Sunday, July 1, 2018, a vocal proponent for pardoning the Hammonds shared in a tweet that

“President Trump called me to say he is 'seriously considering' pardoning Dwight and Steven

Hammond.”9

This was the first public acknowledgement that a pardon was under consideration.10

On Monday, July 2, 2018, the next business day, the Federal Election Commission database shows that

Mr. Ingram made a $10,000 out-of-cycle donation to the America First Action, Inc. Super PAC.11 The

America First Action, Inc. Super PAC describes itself as “dedicated to supporting President Trump | We

are the only Official Pro-Trump Super PAC.”12 On Tuesday, July 10, 2018, President Trump signed

Executive Grants of Clemency (Full Pardons) for both Hammonds.13

Mr. Ingram made only one other $10,000 donation during the 2017–2018 non-presidential election

cycle.14 That donation was the subject of the Committee’s criminal referral regarding the Villages at

Vigneto development. In that case, Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal

or professional relationships with Ingram, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump

Victory Fund and the Republican National Committee on the same day or within just a few days that a

major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram’s favor.All other donations from Ingram

during this election cycle were $5,400 or less.

House Rule X(1)(m) provides the Committee with jurisdiction over the subject matters within DOI’s

authority. The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds’ pardons raise significant concerns

about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation.

---

notes

6 Department of Justice. (2015, October 7). Eastern Oregon Ranchers Convicted of Arson Resentenced to Five Years in Prison

[Press Release]. https://www.justice.gov/usao-or/pr/eastern-oregon-ranchers-convicted-arson-resentenced-five-years-prison

“Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Clemency for Dwight and Steven Hammond” Trump White House

Archives. July 10, 2018. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-regardingexecutive-clemency-dwight-steven-hammond/

8 Attachment 1 is also included as Attachment 59 in the Committee's referral to the Department of Justice regarding the Villages

at Vigneto incident, available here: https://naturalresources house.gov/media/press-releases/chair-grijalva-rep-porter-referformer-interior-secretary-bernhardt-villages-at-vigneto-developer-to-justice-department-alleging-criminal-bribery

9 Walden, G. [repgregwalden]. (2018, July 1) Late Saturday afternoon, President Trump called me to say he is ‘seriously

considering’ pardoning Dwight and Steven Hammond. [Tweet]. Retrieved from

https://twitter.com/repgregwalden/status/1013455435502964738.

10 The Congressional Research Service (CRS) completed a search on November 9, 2022 for news reports that indicated the White

House was seriously considering a pardon for the Hammonds before July 2, 2018. They found none.

11 United States. (2018) U.S. Federal Election Commission FEC. https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individualcontributions/?contributor name=Ingram%2C+Michael&contributor name=Mike+ingram&two year transaction period=2018

12 America First [AmericaFirstPAC]. (n.d.). Tweets [Twitter profile]. Twitter. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from

https://twitter.com/AmericaFirstPAC

13 “Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Clemency for Dwight and Steven Hammond” Trump White House

Archives. July 10, 2018. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-regardingexecutive-clemency-dwight-steven-hammond/

14 United States. (2018) U.S. Federal Election Commission FEC. https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individualcontributions/?contributor name=Ingram%2C+Michael&contributor name=Mike+ingram&two year transaction period=2018

---

To assist the Committee’s investigation of this issue, please provide the following documents and

information as soon as possible, but no later than December 15, 2022:

All documents and communications relating to Dwight or Steven Hammond between all

presidential appointees requiring the advice and consent of the Senate (PAS), presidential

appointees not requiring appointments (PA), noncareer Senior Executive Service (SES), or

Schedule C appointees at DOI or the Bureau of Land Management for any part of 2017 or 2018

and

a. Mike Ingram or Michael Ingram;

b. Any representative ofEl Dorado Holdings,including but not limited to ,

Michael (Mike) Reinbold, Jim Kenny, Dennis Krahn, Eric Hollensbe, Deb Bricker, Chris

Grogan, Linda Cheney, and June Prinz.

c. Any person representing the America First Action Inc. and America First Policies, Inc.

PACs, including but not limited to:

i. Brian O Walsh;

ii. Thomas O Hicks, Jr.;

iii. Roy W Bailey;

iv. Harold Hamm;

v. Jonathan T Proch;

vi. Joseph Ahearn;

vii. Erin Montgomery;

viii. Sean Spicer;

d. Any White House Office personnel;

e. Dwight Hammond;

f. Steven Hammond;

g. Anyone from Lawrence Matasar PC;

h. Anyone from Ransom & Blackman LLP; and

All documents relating to a pardon for Dwight or Steven Hammond.

Please contact the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee staff at (202) 225-6065 with any questions

about this request. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Raúl M. Grijalva Katie Porter

Chair Chair

Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and

Investigations

Committee on Natural Resources

---

ref 2

12.02.22

Chair Grijalva, Rep. Porter Seek Documents on Another Incident of Potential Bribery under the Trump Administration

Washington, D.C. – House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chair Katie Porter (D-Calif.) today sent a letter to U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Deb Haaland requesting documents regarding a second incident of potential bribery between senior officials in the Trump administration and real estate developer Mike Ingram. Previously, the lawmakers sent the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) alleging potential bribery regarding a Trump administration decision about Ingram’s proposed real estate development, the Villages at Vigneto in Benson, Arizona.

The full letter to DOI is available here.

In their letter, Chair Grijalva and Rep. Porter describe evidence that Ingram, a businessman with unique access to high-ranking Trump administration officials, may have unduly influenced former President Trump’s decision to pardon convicted public lands arsonists Dwight and Steven Hammond in exchange for a sizeable donation to a pro-Trump Super PAC.

The letter lays out the following timeline of events:

May 25, 2018 – Ingram’s executive assistant sends an email to Ben Cassidy, DOI’s Senior Deputy Director for External and Intergovernmental Affairs, with two articles arguing for pardons for the Hammonds, including anop-ed by Trump-era Bureau of Land Management Director William Perry Pendley.
July 1, 2018 – A proponent for pardoning the Hammonds tweets that President Trump is “seriously considering a pardon.
July 2, 2018 – Ingram makes a $10,000 out-of-cycle donation to the America First Action, Inc. Super PAC.
July 10, 2018 – President Trump pardons the Hammonds.

Ingram’s only other $10,000 donation during the 2017–2018 non-presidential election cycle was the donation that triggered the Committee’s investigation into—and subsequent criminal referral about—the Villages at Vigneto development. As the letter points out, “The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds’ pardons raise significant concerns about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration and warrant further investigation.”

Background on the Villages at Vigneto Criminal Referral

On May 11, 2022, after a years-long investigation, Chair Grijalva and Rep. Porter sent the Committee’s first-ever criminal referral to DOJ outlining evidence of potential bribery between Trump administration officials, including then-DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, and Ingram regarding the Villages at Vigneto (Vigneto) real estate development.

The Committee’s investigation began in April 2019 when the Arizona Daily Star reported that Steve Spangle, a now-retired Field Supervisor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) Arizona office, claimed he was directed by a “high level politico” to reverse the agency’s decision about Vigneto in late 2017. Later reporting revealed that then–DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt was the “politico.”

The investigation found that—shortly after holding asecret breakfast meeting with Dep. Secretary Bernhardt—Ingram and 12 other individuals, many of whom maintained personal or professional relationships with him, donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump Victory Fund and the Republican National Committee. All of the donations occurred on or near Oct. 6, 2017, the same day that a major federal action regarding Vigneto was made in Ingram’s favor.

Weeks later, on Oct. 26, 2017, Spangle officially reversed FWS’ decision on Vigneto, marking the final greenlight for the development.

Concurrent with standard practice, DOJ has not yet commented on whether they have pursued the investigation.

Press Contact

Media Contact: Lindsay Gressard

202-225-6065 | cell: 202-740-4715

---

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/kyrsten-sinema/

Senate Democrats passed a pared-backed reconciliation package on Sunday, but only after a pair of widely supported provisions that would have made it harder for Wall Street tycoons to reduce their tax bills were removed at the behest of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema—the right-wing Arizona Democrat who has taken more than $500,000 in campaign contributions from private equity executives during the current election cycle.

"Remember the days when taking half a million bucks from an industry, and then passing legislation that only benefits that industry, while passing the costs onto everyone else, would be called corruption?" Brown University political economist Mark Blyth asked on social media. "Today it's just lobbying as usual."

:{:{}:

Last week, Sinema agreed to back the Inflation Reduction Act as long as the so-called "carried interest loophole," which benefits hedge fund managers and private equity moguls by allowing their investment income to be taxed at the long-term capital gains rate of around 20% rather than the ordinary top income rate of 37%, was preserved.

Democrats, who needed Sinema's support to pass the filibuster-proof bill through the evenly split Senate, obliged, forgoing a modest reform that would have raised an estimated $14 billion in federal revenue over a decade by increasing the holding period for investments to qualify for preferential tax treatment from three to five years.

As the Financial Times noted Monday, the Arizona Democrat "is a beneficiary of significant contributions from the private equity industry—whose lobbying machine and political influence have grown increasingly powerful over the past two decades."

Citing Federal Election Commission filings, the newspaper reported:

Sinema has received more than half a million dollars in campaign donations from private equity group executives in this election cycle alone, representing about 10% of her fundraising from individual donors. This includes individual donations totalling $54,900 from executives at KKR, $35,000 from Carlyle, $27,300 from Apollo, $24,500 from Crow Holdings Capital and $23,300 from Riverside Partners.

The securities and investment sector as a whole has donated more than $2.2 million to Sinema since she was elected in 2017,according to OpenSecrets. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich quipped last week, amid reports of Sinema's plans to undermine her party's efforts to hike taxes on corporations and the wealthy, that Wall Street is "getting a huge return on their investment."

In addition to stripping the carried interest provision from the Inflation Reduction Act, Sinema protected private equity-owned corporations from a new 15% minimum tax on billion-dollar firms.

As The Washington Post reported Sunday:

As originally written, the provision would have required private equity firms to tally profits from their various holdings and pay the tax if the total exceeded the $1 billion threshold.

Sinema, who for over a year has blocked Democratic ambitions to raise taxes, raised objections on Saturday, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks. The senator argued that, without changes to the bill, small and medium-sized businesses that happen to be owned by private equity firms would be exposed to the tax, violating a Democratic pledge to hike taxes only on the largest firms. A Sinema spokeswoman said several Arizona small businesses, including a plant nursery, had raised concerns.

Steve Wamhoff, an analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive think tank, told the Post, "The idea that billion-dollar private equity funds must be protected to save small businesses is absolutely absurd."

:{:{}:

Nevertheless, the newspaper noted, "the last-minute changes mark a significant victory for the private equity industry and an estimated savings of $35 billion over the next decade."

Following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday, the progressive tax reform group Patriotic Millionaires ran a mobile billboard around the Capitol to thank Senate Democrats, with the exception of Sinema, who was denounced for being bought by private equity billionaires. The truck made stops at the offices of the American Investment Council and the Carlyle Group in Washington, D.C.

"Bravo to 49 of the 50 senators who voted today to end an era of rampant criminal tax abuse at the highest levels of American society and American business," Erica Payne, founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement. "In a journey of 1,000 miles, this is an impressive first step."

"Shame on Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming across the finish line, carrying water for her private equity overloads to the bitter end," Payne continued. "Thanks in large part to Sinema's obstruction, there's more work to be done, but the Inflation Reduction Act is a monumental step in the right direction."

---

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/house-republican-unique-financial-occurance/

---

Donald Trump drew a great deal of criticism from environmentalists and Democrats when he displayed his “Trump digs coal” signs during his 2016 presidential campaign, but one Democrat who never said anything negative about Trump’s pro-coal signs was Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The centrist Democrat has been a consistent defender of fossil fuels, and an article by New York Times reporters Christopher Flavelle and Julie Tate takes a look at how profitable coal has been for the 74-year-old senator over the years.

Manchin, Flavelle and Tate note, earned a fortune from a plant in Grant Town, West Virginia, which is 15 miles south of the Pennsylvania state line.

“Mr. Manchin’s ties to the Grant Town plant date to 1987, when he had just been elected to the West Virginia Senate, a part-time job with base pay of $6500,” the Times reporters explain. “His family’s carpet business was struggling. Opportunity arrived in the form of two developers who wanted to build a power plant in Grant Town, just outside Mr. Manchin’s district. Mr. Manchin, whose grandfather went to work in the mines at age nine and whose uncle died in a mining accident, helped the developers clear bureaucratic hurdles.”

According to Flavelle and Tate, Manchin “supplied a type of low-grade coal mixed with rock and clay known as ‘gob’ that is typically cast aside as junk by mining companies but can be burned to produce electricity.”

“In addition, he arranged to receive a slice of the revenue from electricity generated by the plant — electric bills paid by his constituents,” the Times reporters note. “The deal inked decades ago has made Mr. Manchin, now 74, a rich man…. At key moments over the years, Mr. Manchin used his political influence to benefit the plant.”

Manchin, according to Flavelle and Tate, has “blocked legislation that would speed the country’s transition to wind, solar and other clean energy and away from coal, oil and gas, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.”

“With the war in Ukraine and resulting calls to boycott Russian gas,” Flavelle and Tate observe, “Mr. Manchin has joined Republicans to press for more American gas and oil production to fill the gap on the world market. But as the Grant Town plant continues to burn coal and pay dividends to Mr. Manchin, it has harmed West Virginians economically, costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in excess electricity fees. That’s because gob is a less efficient power source than regular coal.”

Flavelle and Tate point out that although Manchin declined to be interviewed for their article, the Times “spoke with three dozen former business associates, current and former government officials, and industry experts” and went over “thousands of pages of documents from lawsuits, land records, state regulatory hearings, lobbying and financial disclosures, federal energy data and other records spanning more than three decades.”

“The documents and interviews show that at every level of Mr. Manchin’s political career, from state lawmaker to U.S. senator, his official actions have benefited his financial interest in the Grant Town plant, blurring the line between public business and private gain,” according to Flavelle and Tate.

---

an 12 21

deep red Oklahoma, one of the state’s top Republicans, along with his wife, is facing multiple felony charges and the possibility of up to ten years in prison if convicted, according to the Associated Press.

The Republican is Terry O’Donnell, who serves as speaker pro tempore of the Oklahoma House of Representatives. O’Donnell, AP reports, is accused of “misusing his power to change state law so his wife, Teresa, could become a tag agent.” But Mack Martin, O’Donnell’s attorney, told AP that O’Donnell denies breaking the law in any way.

---

an 1021

During the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren made fighting corruption her number one priority. It may not have seemed that way in the press, which tended to characterize the senior senator from Massachusetts as a female Sen. Bernie Sanders. Most coverage focused heavily on her bold economic ideas, such as a wealth tax. But when she was actually asked what her major focus in politics was, Warren never hesitated to say that fighting corruption should come first — because of her commitment to passing progressive economic policies.

"The rich and the powerful have been calling the shots in Washington forever and ever," Warren told Vox's Ezra Klein in 2019, explaining why she was intent on passing a massive anti-corruption bill meant to curtail the influence of lobbyists and influence of moneyed interests on Capitol Hill.

"Look closely, and you'll see — on issue after issue, widely popular policies are stymied because giant corporations and billionaireswho don't want to pay taxes or follow any rules use their money and influence to stand in the way of big, structural change," she wrote in her plan announcement.

Warren's view is, sadly and perhaps surprisingly, not popular. Republicans clearly don't view corruption as a bad thing these days — that's one more reason why they love Donald Trump. But even on the left, where everyone says they're against corruption and voters in particular always sign off on the idea that ending corruption is a good idea, there's a gulf between saying you're against it and actually working to eradicate it. If more agreed with Warren to make corruption a priority target, we might not be watching President Joe Biden's bold agenda slowly fall apart now.

When it comes to brass tacks, not enough people are willing to put in the effort required to make fighting corruption a real agenda item. Activists are more likely to put their time into causes like health care and climate change. Democratic politicians, when they get power, are also attracted to policy fights that offer tangible rewards, such as increased social spending, rather than the more abstract and far-flung discourse about lobbyists and corruption. And voters definitely reward politicians for these priorities, which is one reason why Warren lost handily in the primary to Sanders and Biden.

But as the current debacle playing out on Capitol Hill demonstrates, Warren was right all along. Democrats and their voters may want to pass progressive legislation that addresses wealth inequality, climate change and lack of health care. But corrupt business interests keep stopping them. It's like trying to make a dress when someone keeps stealing your sewing machine. You can have the pattern and the fabric and the vision, but if you don't have the means to put it all together, you will never get that dress made.

Biden and Sanders are learning this the hard way as their dual vision for the Build Back Better plan — an expansive set of bills meant to address climate change, reduce poverty, ensure child care, expand health care, and build up American infrastructure, among other things — teeters on the edge of collapse. After spending months carefully constructing a two-track plan where moderate Democrats would support the progressive agenda, in exchange for progressives supporting the moderate agenda, a handful of centrist Democrats in the House and Senate are about to blow the whole thing up by reneging on their end of the bargain. And while there are multiple reasons for this backstabbing behavior, it's hard not to notice that the undue influence of lobbyists.

The two biggest names in the Senate Betrayal Caucus are, of course, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are throwing their weight around, clearly trying to derail Biden's agenda while claiming to have no such intention. Instead, they come with an endless array of incoherent, even nonsensical, explanations as to why they can't just suck it up and vote for the two-bill track the Democratic caucus agreed to vote on. There's now an entire cottage industry built around psychoanalyzing these two: What do they want? What will get them to "yes"? Why won't they just tell us what they want, so we can give it to them? Why are they making so little sense?

Everyone has a favorite reason, but the likeliest is the boring one: They're being dodgy because they don't want to be honest about their real motives. Looking at their track records, it's hard not to notice that both deeply enjoy being wined and dined by some of the sleaziest lobbyists and fundraisers on Capitol Hill. Manchin, for instance, blew off fellow Democrats begging him to support voting rights in favor of going to a fundraiser held by oil and gas executives who have a financial interest in keeping working people from voting. Sinema is deep in cahoots with industry lobbyists who want to tank Biden's agenda, holding fundraisers with anti-Biden groups and taking money from the pharmacy industry, right before doing an about-face to block fair pricing drug policies she previously claimed to support.

It's not just those two. The price control policy for pharmaceuticals is one of the most wildly popular items in the Biden agenda — at least with voters. But a small group of Democrats in the House pulled that item out of the bill, and they're barely trying to pretend it's for any reason other than to appease pharmaceutical lobbyists. They likely know that politicians and voters may say they oppose corruption, but that actually doing something to stop it never becomes a priority.

Lobbyists have Sinema's ear, but her own party and voters do not. The Democratic party in Arizona is threatening a vote of no confidence against her, and her response was somewhere between a shrug and throwing them the finger. Activists are crowdfunding for a primary challenger against her. It is possible she is such an egomaniac that she thinks she's going to have a great re-election after teeing off her own voters, of course. But it's also hard not to wonder if she isn't influenced by the knowledge that she's all but guaranteed a well-heeled job in lobbying if she loses re-election. Notably, a lifetime ban on politicians becoming lobbyists is part of Warren's anti-corruption bill. If it was law, then Sinema might be making more pro-voter choices, rather than treating her constituents as an annoying inconvenience.

Corruption isn't a sexy issue, but focusing attention on it can pay huge dividends when it comes to advancing progressive causes. Take gun control, for instance. Decades of rational argumentation and emotional appeals did little to move the needle, policy-wise. Even in the face of children being murdered in schools repeatedly, Republican politicians have successfully blocked all bills, and Democrats didn't even bother making it a priority when they got power.Eventually, however, gun control advocates started to look away from the ideological arguments and toward the influence of the gun industry, through its main lobbying arm, the NRA.

Once they did that, real progress started to happen. Investigations revealed that the NRA was a thoroughly corrupt organization and that its leadership was on the take. Then the lawsuits started to fly. Now the organization is in very real danger of collapse — not because of its views, but because of its corruption. It might be too late, and Republicans may be too dug in on their gun mania to ever start to moderate. But without the NRA in their ear all the time, there could be a real chance to persuade even just a few Republicans to support common sense reforms that are backed by the majority of Americans. But only if the NRA is gone — and coming at them from a corruption angle was the path to this possibility.

It's admittedly a tough sell, even to Democrats. Most Democrats have been happy to back bills that tackle the issue in similar ways to what Warren proposes, and many seem to understand that they would benefit from a more level playing field, where wealthy interests have less influence over policy and politics. Still, as with most legislation that Democrats want to pass, anti-corruption bills have been torn apart on the shores of the filibuster. And the two people who are doing the most to make sure the filibuster remains and anti-corruption bills have no chance of passing? You guessed it: Manchin and Sinema. Corruption on Capitol Hill is a grotesque a house of mirrors, and until that changes, real progress will be an impossibly tall hill to climb.

---

exxon guy busted

https://www.channel4.com/news/revealed-exxonmobils-lobbying-war-on-climate-change-legislation

explosive footage was obtained byUnearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative platform,who posed as head-hunters to obtain the information from one of ExxonMobil’s most senior Washington lobbyists.

The recordings appear to reveal the secretive behind-the-scenes activities of a lobbyist for a company that claims in public to support action on climate change, while fighting against legislative attempts to tackle it.

ExxonMobil say they “have supported climate science for decades” and accuse Greenpeace of “waging a multi-decade campaign” against their company and industry.

They insist their “lobbying fully comply with all laws and are publicly disclosed on a quarterly basis.”

‘Shadow groups’

Keith McCoy is a senior ExxonMobil lobbyist on Capitol Hilland has represented the company in its liaison with the US Congress for the last eight years.

Greenpeace UK’s Unearthed platform posed as head-hunters looking to hire a Washington D.C. lobbyist for a major client. They approached Mr McCoy, who agreed to speak over Zoom.

During the covert recordings, which have been passed to Channel 4 News, Mr McCoy claims:

thecompany secretly fought against legislative action on climate change using third-party organisations
he lobbied key senators to remove and/or diminish climate change measures from President Biden’s US $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs bill as it proceeds through the legislative process
he regards trade bodies like theAmerican Petroleum Institute as “whipping boys” in order to avoid public scrutiny on Capitol Hill
BUFFER

During the virtual meeting held on 7 May, the investigators asked Mr McCoy questions about ExxonMobil’s current and historical lobbying on environmental issues.

In the excerpts from the footage to be broadcast on Channel 4 News tonight, Mr McCoy claims that ExxonMobil has aggressively fought science to deny climate change in order to maximise profit and shareholder return. He alleges that ExxonMobil joined “shadow groups” to pursue climate change denial.

Mr McCoy said: “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing illegal about that.

“We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”

ExxonMobil told Channel 4 News that they “have supported climate science for decades.”

‘It’s like fishing’

Mr McCoy likens the approach to lobbying congressmen to the way fishermen target fish, claiming that ExxonMobil puts out “bait” and then “reels in” congressmen on issues like carbon tax, electric vehicles, chemicals, taxation and infrastructure.

Mr McCoy said: “When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress, I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out. And they say: ‘Oh, you want to talk about infrastructure, yeah.’

“And then you start to reel them in and you start to have these conversations about federal leasing programmes, you start to have these conversations about a carbon tax. You know, it’s all these opportunities that you use and to use the fishing analogy again just to kind of reel them in.”

He added: “I make sure I get them the right information that they need so they look good. And then they help me out. They’re a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them.”

He says lobbyists aim to have a direct relationship with a member of congress, adding: “You want to be able to go to the chief… and say we need congressman so and so to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter. You name it, we’ve asked for everything.”

‘The Kingmaker’

Mr McCoy names 11 senators who he says are “crucial” to ExxonMobil: Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Senator Joe Manchin, Senator KyrstenSinema,Senator Jon Tester, Senator Maggie Hassan, Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Steve Daines, dem Senator Chris Coons, Senator Mark Kelly and Senator Marco Rubio

We gave all these senators a chance to respond. All the senators declined to comment. There is no suggestion of illegality.

Channel 4 News has established, through Federal Election Commission (FEC) data, that all except two of these senators (Senators Maggie Hassan and Mark Kelly) have received financial contributions from ExxonMobil.

ExxonMobil insists “our lobbying efforts fully comply with all laws and are publicly disclosed on a quarterly basis”.

Mr McCoy described Senator Joe Manchin as “the Kingmaker” in the Senate and he says he spoke to his office on a weekly basis.

The FEC data shows Senator Manchin has received at least $12,500 from the ExxonMobil Political Action Committee in declared disbursements since the beginning of the 2011-12 election cycle.

Mr McCoy described how a “big piece of [his] job is education and advocacy” and says that in his work on behalf of ExxonMobil he argues that US government programmes to roll outelectric vehicles are unrealistic. [INVENTED PRIUS AND BATT THEN BAILLED]

He said: “The research and development conversation has taken us a long way because of climate change. And there is a struggle to find solutions and to get the reductions that they’re looking for. And you’re not going to be able to just switch to battery operated vehicles or wind for your electricity. And just having that conversation around why that’s not possible in the next 10 years is critically important to the work that we do.”

‘Whipping boy’

Mr McCoy described a lobbying strategy in which he claims ExxonMobil uses third parties to mask its interests from public view and accountability.

He said: “We don’t want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing. It’s getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be for, the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of congress.”

He added: “There was something we were working on earlier this week where we, where our CEO was invited to a hearing from a member of congress who we know is just going to rip him to shreds when he goes there. So, we look at it and we say: well, why us?”

Mr McCoy claims that ExxonMobil lobbied Congress to dilute the climate provisions of President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill.

He said: “That’s a completely different conversation when you start to stick to roads and bridges.And instead of a $2 trillion bill, it’s an $800 billion dollar bill. If you lower that threshold, you stick to highways and bridges then a lot of the negative stuff starts to come out.”

“Why would you put in something on emissions reductions on climate change to oil refineries in a highway bill? So, people say yeah that doesn’t make any sense, so then you get to the germane of saying that shouldn’t be in this bill.”

ExxonMobil said: “Our discussion on the bill are not accurately portrayed. Our lobbying efforts are related to a tax burden that could disadvantage us businesses.”

Carbon tax

Mr McCoy appears to suggest that ExxonMobil’s public support for a carbon tax is underpinned by the conviction it will never happen, allowing the company to “support” it in order to appear green.

He said: “I will tell you there is not an appetite for a carbon tax. It is a non-starter. Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans. And the cynical side of me says yeah we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point. We can say well what is ExxonMobil for? Well we’re for a carbon tax.

“Carbon tax is not gonna happen. I have always said, and I’ve worked on climate change issues for twenty years. There’s a lot of talk around it and the bottom line is it’s going to take political courage, political will in order to get something done. And that just doesn’t exist in politics. It just doesn’t.

Purporting to speak on behalf of ExxonMobil, Mr McCoy also expressed a corporate view that, contrary to science,natural gas is a clean energy source.

He said: “On a clean electricity standard, we think natural gas will play a key role in anything. And not just as a bridge fuel. We think it is a low emission energy source and should be part of a clean electricity standard.”

ExxonMobil statement

A spokesperson for ExxonMobil told Channel 4 News: “Greenpeace has waged a multi-decade campaign against our company and industry, which has included false claims and unlawful actions at our facilities as well as those of other companies around the world.

“Our lobbying efforts are related to a tax burden that could disadvantage U.S. businesses, and we have made that position known publicly. ExxonMobil stands by our position thatincreased taxes on American businesses make the U.S. less competitive.

“We have been clear in supporting an efficient, economy-wide price on carbon as the best way to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.While there is not broad support for a tax, we are actively and publicly discussing other options, including lower-carbon fuels and other sector-based approaches that would place a uniform, predictable cost on carbon.

“We have supported climate science for decades.Greenpeace and others have distorted our position on climate science and our support for effective policy solutions.

”ExxonMobil transparently engages with a variety of trade associations, think tanks and coalitions in order to promote informed dialogue and sound public policy in areas pertinent to the Corporation’s interests.

“ExxonMobil exercises its right to engage in lobbying in the United States at both the Federal and State levels to advocate our positions on issues that affect our Corporation and the energy industry.

“We have a responsibility to our customers, employees, communities and shareholders to represent their interests in public policy discussions that impact our business.

“Our lobbying efforts fully comply with all laws and are publicly disclosed on a quarterly basis, including the issues we discuss.”

---

921

Newly unredacted records from a whistleblower complaint in the State Department have shed light on more allegations against former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and members of his former staff.

According to documents obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Pompeo and others were accused of misconduct.

The publication reports: "The alleged misconduct included false or misleading statements to the agency's legal department, misuse of government resources on personal and political activities potentially prohibited by the Hatch Act, verbal abuse of employees by Mike and Susan Pompeo and directives to staff not to communicate in writing in order to evade transparency laws."

The unredacted documents come two years after the redacted version of the whistleblower complaint was filed with the State Department Office of Inspector General (OIG). The OIG is said to have excluded many of the previous redactions in the version of the documents released to CREW.

"The complaint alleges “[s]everal senior career Foreign Service officials who held positions of responsibility within the Executive Secretariat” turned a blind eye to Pompeo’s “questionable activities” and, in some cases, “facilitat[ed]” them, according to CREW.

Employees in the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser "expressed concern that some of these activities may have violated [the] Hatch Act or other regulations," but the whistleblower was "unaware that any resolution was reached, potentially because senior officials in the Executive Secretariat repeatedly declined to seek clarification or guidance from [the Office of the Legal Adviser] despite requests from subordinates to do so."

The new documents also detail the aftermath of former Inspector Steve Linick's removal from his post, which was part of a larger Trump-led effort to oust inspectors. The report also indicated that staff members were "stunned" by the directive.

"[T]his is all so surreal three days later. I'm nervous about the future," the OIG employee wrote in a May 18, 2020 email. In a later email, the official added, "I just heard Trump say we needed to get rid of the 'Attorney Generals' as a whole…Oh dear."

CREW has also received other documentation as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit aimed at uncovering information about Pompeo’s attempts to hinder the investigation into the allegations of misconduct against him.

---

===

rev door mil logistic bd, hallib charged govt for meals never provided; did intial study bush 41 that said pvt cheaper but real # 2x more $

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/study-says-nearly-half-of-defense-spending-for-9-11-wars-went-to-private-contractors

Sep 13, 2021 5:58 PM EDT

Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since 9/11 went to for-profit defense contractors,a study released Monday found. While much of this money went to weapons suppliers, the research is the latest to point to the dependence on contractors for war-zone duties as contributing to mission failures in Afghanistan in particular.

In the post-9/11 wars, U.S. corporations contracted by the Defense Department not only handled war-zone logistics like running fuel convoys and staffing chow lines but performed mission-crucial work like [dyncorp]training and equipping Afghan security forces — security forces that collapsed last month as the Taliban swept the country.

Within weeks, and before the U.S. military had even completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban easily routed an Afghan government and military that Americans had spent 20 years and billions of dollars to stand up. President Joe Biden placed blame squarely on the Afghans themselves. “We gave them every chance,” he said last month. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight.”

But William Hartung, the author of Monday’s study by Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Center for International Policy,and others say it’s essential that Americans examine what role the reliance on private contractors played in the post-9/11 wars. In Afghanistan, that included contractors allegedly paying protection money to warlords and the Taliban themselves, and the Defense Department insisting on equipping the Afghan air force with complex Blackhawk helicopters and other aircraft that few but U.S. contractors knew how to maintain.

“If it were only the money, that would be outrageous enough,” Hartung, the director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy, said of instances where the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors backfired. “But the fact it undermined the mission and put troops at risk is even more outrageous.”

At the start of this year, before Biden began the final American withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were far more contractors in Afghanistan and also in Iraq than U.S. troops.

The U.S. saw about 7,000 military members die in all post-9/11 conflicts, and nearly 8,000 contractors, another Costs of War study estimates.[total pvt out# mil 150k?]

The Professional Services Council, an organization representing businesses contracting with the government, cited a lower figure from the U.S. Department of Labor saying nearly 4,000 federal contractors have been killed since 2001.

A spokeswoman pointed to a statement last month from the organization’s president, David J. Berteau: “For almost two decades, government contractors have provided broad and essential support for U.S. and allied forces, for the Afghan military and other elements of the Afghan government, and for humanitarian and economic development assistance.”

U.S. officials after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks embraced private contractors as an essential part of the U.S. military response.

It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, [nope bush 41 hallib study to pvtize]the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30 billion to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says. Cheney and defense contractors argued that relying on private contractors for work that service members did in previous wars would allow for a trimmer U.S. military, and be more efficient and cost effective.

By 2010, Pentagon spending had surged by more than one-third, as the U.S. fought dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a post-9/11 American, politicians vied to show support for the military in a country grown far more security conscious.

“Any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November,” the study notes Harry Stonecipher, then the vice president of Boeing, telling The Wall Street Journal the month after the attacks.[up 3-5% /yr soon to hill trillion; reconciliation 3.5 trill over 10 years so this is 2x?!]

And up to a third of the Pentagon contracts went to just five weapons suppliers. Last fiscal year, for example, the money Lockheed Martin alone got from Pentagon contracts was one and a half times the entire budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the study.

The Pentagon pumped out more contracts than it could oversee, lawmakers and government special investigators said.

For example, a Florida Republican Party official made millions on what lawmakers charged were excess profits when the U.S. granted a one-of-a-kind contract for fuel convoys from Jordan to Iraq, the study notes. The electrocution of at least 18 service members by bad wiring in bases in Iraq, some of it blamed on major contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, was another of many instances where government investigations pointed to shoddy logistics and reconstruction work.

The stunning Taliban victory last month in Afghanistan is drawing attention now to even graver consequences: the extent to which the U.S. reliance on contractors may have heightened the difficulties of the Afghan security forces.

Jodi Vittori, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and scholar of corruption and fragile states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was not involved in the study, points to the U.S. insistence that the Afghan air force use U.S.-made helicopters. Afghans preferred Russian helicopters, which were easier to fly, could be maintained by Afghans, and were suited to rugged Afghanistan.

When U.S. contractors pulled out with U.S. troops this spring and summer, taking their knowledge of how to maintain U.S.-provided aircraft with them, top Afghan leaders bitterly complained to the U.S. that it had deprived them of one essential advantage over the Taliban.

Hartung, like others, also points to the corruption engendered by the billions of loosely monitored dollars that the U.S. poured into Afghanistan as one central reason that Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government lost popular support, and Afghan fighters lost morale.

Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state under President Barack Obama, accused defense contractors at risk in war zones of resorting to payoffs to armed groups, making protection money one of the biggest sources of funding for the Taliban.

The United States also relied, in part, on defense contractors to carry out one of the tasks most central to its hopes of success in Afghanistan — helping to set up and train an Afghan military and other security forces that could stand up to extremist groups and to insurgents, including the Taliban.

Tellingly, Vittori said, it was Afghan commandos who had consistent training by U.S. special operations forces and others who did most of the fighting against the Taliban last month.

Relying less on private contractors, and more on the U.S. military as in past wars, might have given the U.S. better chances of victory in Afghanistan, Vittori noted. She said that would have meant U.S. presidents accepting the political risks of sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and getting more body bags of U.S. troops back.

“Using contractors allowed America to fight a war that a lot of Americans forgot we were fighting,” Vittori said.

no lnx

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-14-2021/

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/corporate-lobbying/

no lnx twt

'Democracy for sale': Analysis ties corporate consolidation to increased lobbying

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams August 26, 2021

An analysis published Wednesday about corporate consolidation and political lobbying in the United States found that large mergers—particularly in Big Tech, the pharmaceutical industry, and the oil and gas sector—has increased corporate control of American democracy.

The new research paper from the American Economic Liberties—entitled Project Democracy for Sale: Examining the Effects of Concentration on Lobbying in the United States (pdf)—was authored by Reed Showalter, an attorney and a fellow at the anti-monopoly group.

"Concentrated markets are bad for consumers, bad for workers, and bad for innovation. But this research suggests that the concentration crisis in America is even more than a purely economic problem—it's also a democracy problem," Showalter said in a statement.

"We urgently need to understand and contain the power that monopolies have over the rest of us," he asserted. "Lawmakers, enforcers, and leaders cannot afford to ignore the widespread harms from concentration any longer."

The report emphasizes that "the bigger companies get, the more powerful they become. A large majority of Americans distrust concentrated economic power, and criticism of the world's largest companies is a regular part of discourse within America's political parties and around the world. Research has borne out the power of money in politics."

"Corporate lobbying works," the paper continues. "A number of studies show that the amount spent on lobbying positively impacts a firm's equity returns and market share. Firms that engage in lobbying also appear to have lower effective tax rates than those that do not."

Given those conditions, Showalter examined the U.S. internet, pharmaceutical, and fossil fuel sectors. The paper notes that the first case study "primarily includes digital platform companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix" and "does not extend, for example, to internet providers and other internet infrastructure companies."

The researcher found "a noteworthy relationship" between consolidation and political activity. Though the data is a bit limited—which the paper acknowledges, urging some degree of caution—it shows that "in all three industries, concentration appears to predict elevated lobbying spending."

According to Showalter:

In the oil and gas industry as well as among internet companies, the more market power a corporation acquires, the more it lobbies. In the pharmaceutical industry, the data is even more compelling. When pharmaceutical companies gained market power, they lobbied more, and when they lost market power, they lobbied less. One tentative conclusion from this analysis is that monopolies seek to acquire political power, whereas competitive businesses focus on competing with each other instead of dominating public rule-making bodies.

"In short, the results of this report suggest that not only is big business good at lobbying, but that bigger business leads to more lobbying," the paper says. "That means monopoly is a threat to representative democracy—and that protecting our democracy requires effective antitrust."

The report also addresses the political implications of Showalter's findings—specifically, the suggestion that the negative impacts of industry concentration "cannot be understood merely through the consumer welfare lens" and using that standard to govern antitrust "allows practitioners in the field to ignore non-price effects" of companies consolidating.

The new research "casts doubt on pure regulatory solutions that do not reduce concentration, since more lobbying can mitigate regulatory action or even turn regulatory choices into mechanisms to protect entrenched incumbents," the paper says. "If concentration begets political influence, then even a hypothetically economically efficient monopoly offering low consumer prices can still be an undemocratic usurper of political power."

In other words, according to the report, "stronger antitrust premised on reducing corporate concentration should be understood not just as a mechanism to address market power problems, but as an anti-corruption measure in itself."

Concluding that "corporate concentration and antidemocratic political influence go hand in hand," Showalter urges U.S. policymakers to recognize the limits of the consumer welfare standard when creating and implementing new regulations for major industries.

"The antitrust laws were a response to rising economic concentration, and the laws' framers recognized that concentrated economic power can poison our democracy," he writes. "This article is a starting point but hopefully also a reminder that antitrust is equipped and designed to grapple with the political ramifications of economic concentration. Those crafting and enforcing the doctrine should feel empowered to step into the shoes they were meant to fill."

The New York Times' "DealBook" newsletter noted Showalter's ties to President Joe Biden:

Showalter's report begins with an interesting acknowledgment, thanking Tim Wu, a former Columbia law professor who is now a technology and competition policy adviser at the White House. What's more, Showalter works at the law firm founded by Jonathan Kanter, whom President Biden recently nominated to lead the Justice Department's antitrust division. Showalter said that Kanter did not discuss the report with him and that his work as a fellow was separate from his day job. But he acknowledged more generally that the expansive approach to antitrust that his report advocated appeared to be ascendant in the halls of power.

The report comes as Congress is considering a package of antitrust bills advanced by the House Judiciary Committee in late June.Demand Progress executive director David Segal pointed out at the time that "many members are reciting Big Tech's talking points and pushing their amendments. This is why it is necessary that Congress act to break these companies up and diminish their power of speech, the economy, and our government."

"No matter what does or doesn't emerge from Congress in the coming weeks or months, it is vital that the Biden administration use existing tools to rein in the power of these monopolies," he added, calling Lina Khan, the president's pick to chair the Federal Trade Commission, "a tremendous step in this direction" and urging more similar actions that prioritize the public interest.

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no lnx

Travis Gettys and Raw Story August 26, 2021

Newly revealed records show Donald Trump likely broke the law by issuing a campaign donation to the Florida attorney general investigating his fraudulent university.

The Trump Foundation issued a $25,000 check in 2013 personally signed by the real estate mogul and reality TV star to a political action committee associated with Pam Bondi's re-election campaign, and The Daily Beast obtained new records that dispute Trump Organization denials made when the donation became an issue during the 2016 campaign.

"It kind of blows up their whole story," said Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "The Trump Organization staffers knew they were making this political donation. There are no questions about it. There is no ambiguity."

Libowitiz, whose watchdog group filed the complaint that exposed the scandal, called the evidence "a smoking gun," and the records show Trump Organization employees were explicitly told the donation was made to a political group -- which goes against claims made by chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, campaign officials and Trump Foundation executives.

"I probably didn't know at that time that we probably shouldn't be using foundation funds for this type of thing," said Trump Organization accountant Jeff McConney during a 2017 interview with investigators from the New York attorney general's office. "We made a mistake."

But an email from Aug. 28, 2013, shows Bondi's campaign finance director Deborah Ramsey Aleksander provided the name and federal tax identification number for the "And Justice for All" PAC, which she described as an ECO, or "electioneering communications organization, to Trump's longtime executive assistant Rhona Graff.

"Again, it was a pleasure meeting you today!!! Thanks again for always being so responsive and wonderful to work with." Aleksander wrote to Graff. "Let Mr. Trump know that we are SO VERY thankful for his commitment of 25k and If he wants to make it 50k, that's perfectly acceptable. :) Seriously, thanks again for everything!!!"

Aleksander provided Graff with a copy of the PAC's W-9 form, which lists the group's "federal tax classification" as a "political organization," in a follow-up email on Sept. 11, 2013, and two days later Trump himself sent Bondi a check with a signed letter that misspelled her name and told her "you are the greatest!"

The signed check was issued from The Donald J. Trump Foundation, Inc., in likely violation of Section 501(c)(3) of U.S. tax code, which prohibits political donations by tax-exempt charities.

The Trump Foundation was eventually dissolved after the New York attorney general's office found a "shocking pattern of illegality" and the Trump Organization and Weisselberg were indicted this summer for criminal tax fraud, while Bondi, who reportedly tried to return the donation after it was revealed, never did investigate Trump University, which settled three fraud lawsuits for $25 million in November 2016.

Bondi joined Trump's impeachment defense team shortly after leaving office in 2019.

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omfg

msnbc? calls it romney exxon bill, not the bipart infra

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/senior-exxonmobil-lobbyist/

raw story

Channel 4 in the U.K. published a startling expose on ExxonMobil's lobbyists who revealed the top most important U.S. Senators who are the ones behind any legislation that might hurt the oil industry.

While many oil companies are diversifying with natural gas, it appears ExxonMobil is going all-in battling to keep "big oil" alive and well.

"Keith McCoy is a senior ExxonMobil lobbyist on Capitol Hill and has represented the company in its liaison with the U.S. Congress for the last eight years," explained the report.

"Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not," said McCoy on camera. "Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing, there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders."

McCoy compared his work with elected officials to fishing with ExxonMobil who supplies the "bait" before it "reels in" the official on issues like a carbon tax, electric cars, taxation and infrastructure.

"When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress, I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out. And they say: 'Oh, you want to talk about infrastructure, yeah,'" McCoy continued. "And then you start to reel them in and you start to have these conversations about federal leasing programs, you start to have these conversations about a carbon tax.You know, it's all these opportunities that you use and to use the fishing analogy again just to kind of reel them in."

"I make sure I get them the right information that they need so they look good. And then they help me out. They're a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them," McCoy also said.

He went on to explain that lobbyists aim to have close relationships with officials.

"You want to be able to go to the chief… and say we need congressman so and so to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter. You name it, we've asked for everything," he said.

But it was the shocking revelation that he has 11 U.S. Senators on the hook.

"Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Senator Joe Manchin, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Senator Jon Tester, Senator Maggie Hassan, Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Steve Daines, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Mark Kelly and Senator Marco Rubio," were all cited.

He went on to explain that the last thing they want is to appear in a public hearing before Congress where the American people can see.

"We don't want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing. It's getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be for, the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of congress," McCoy confessed.

"There was something we were working on earlier this week where we, where our CEO was invited to a hearing from a member of congress who we know is just going to rip him to shreds when he goes there. So, we look at it and we say: well, why us?" he asked.

See the video below and read the full story at Channel 4:

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-response/?rs=182

Now that we're all unmasking and the economy seems set to roar into the 2020s, what will we remember about how disastrously, how malignantly, the Trump administration behaved as the pandemic took hold? And will anyone be held to account for it?

The instinct to forget pandemics, as I've pointed out when it came to the 1918 "Spanish flu," has historically been strong indeed. In these years, the urge to forget official malfeasance and move on has, it turns out, been at least as strong. Washington's failure to investigate and bring to account those who led the nation and ultimately the world into the folly of the Iraq War may be the most egregious recent example of this.

In the end, that's why I wrote my new book Virus — to memorialize a clear and accessible historical record of the deliberate and deadly decision-making that swept us all into a kind of hell. I had the urge to try to stop what happened to us from being instantly buried in the next round of daily reporting or, as appears likely now, relegated to the occasional voluminous government or foundation report on how to do things better.

In the early months of 2020, as rumors of distant death morphed into announcements of an imminent pandemic, followed by a patchwork of state and local lockdowns, most Americans were too stunned by daily events to absorb the bigger picture. Memories of those days still click by like surreal snapshots: prepper shopping, toilet-paper hoarders, forklifts moving bodies into refrigerated trucks, and a capricious leader on TV night after endless night talking about quack cures, his own ratings, and how he "liked the numbers low." Meanwhile, he left desperate states to compete with each other for badly needed protective gear.

What looked like chaos or ad hoc decision-making by an improbably elected fraudster president was, in fact, deeply rooted in ideology; specifically, in the belief that the job of the government was neither to exercise leadership, nor activate government agencies to assist the American people. It was to promote private industry and its profits as the solution to anything and everything pandemic.

That ideology led to profiteering, politicized science, and mass death. Now, as the pandemic wanes (at least for the time being, though not necessarily for the unvaccinated) in this country, it deserves an investigation. Somewhere between almost 600,000 and more than 900,000 Americans have died so far from Covid-19, a significant number of those deaths unnecessary, as even the former administration's medical expert, Dr Deborah Birx, has said.

The virus arrived in America after the Trump administration — steered by right-wing Heritage Foundation policy wonks and their donor-class comrades — had already laid waste to key agencies like Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control. Their instant response to the pandemic was to similarly sideline government emergency-management experts, put inexperienced 20-something volunteers in charge of finding and distributing protective gear, and circulate lists of possible suppliers — one of whom, typically enough, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no medical contracting experience, snagged a cool $86-million contract from the state of New York for ventilators he would never deliver.[// kodak?]

While most of the country hunkered down in a state of stunned paralysis, a faction of Trumpworld recognized the pandemic not for what it took away — human lives and livelihoods — but for what it offered. The chaos of the moment allowed them to road-test their dream system, to prove once and for all that the forces of supply and demand, the instinct to make a buck, could do a better job managing a natural disaster than the government of the United States and its bureaucrats.

Is any of this likely to be investigated? Will anyone be held accountable for what appears to have been a response deliberately mismanaged by religious zealots and crony capitalists, crews equally cynical about expertise, science, and the government's ability to prevent or ameliorate disaster?

What We Don't Know About the Trump Pandemic Disaster

Here, as a start, is a rundown of where inquiries into that disaster now stand.

Buried in the alphabet soup of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act is the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), established in March 2020 to keep track of the federal money (by now $5.5 trillion) that was to be spent on the pandemic. It's a consortium of agency inspector generals, headed by Michael Horowitz, a career Department of Justice lawyer. His name will be familiar to anyone who followed the Trump-Russia investigations. He produced a report in 2019 that — to the dismay of Trump's supporters — failed to conclude that the FBI had begun investigating connections between Vladimir Putin's Russia and the Trump campaign without legal cause and as a political dirty trick.

PRAC is authorized to conduct oversight of pandemic-related emergency spending of any sort. Its inspector generals have already issued nearly 200 pandemic-related oversight reports and charged 474 people with trying to steal more than $569 million. (Details in its quarterly reports are available online.)

While PRAC has been genuinely nonpartisan in its acts, its focus so far has been on the small fry of the pandemic era, not the truly big fish. In its most recent semi-annual report, for example, it makes clear that 55% of its charges had to do with fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program and 40% were related to fraudulent unemployment assistance claims. Among the bigger PRAC successes: charging a Texas man in a $24-million Covid-relief fraudulent loan scheme last October and seven men in another fraud scheme in which they used their ill-gotten pandemic gains to buy, among other things, a Porsche and a Lamborghini.

The CARES Act also authorized the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to monitor the federal response to the pandemic. Its most recent semi-annual report included 16 recommendations in selected public-health areas like testing, vaccines, and therapeutics, only one of which has so far been implemented. A source at the GAO told me that a report on some contracting irregularities can be expected this summer.

So far, such government self-assessments have shown little appetite for dealing with the true cronyism, profiteering, and disastrous politicization of the federal pandemic response by Trump's minions. Among the schemes begging for a deeper look is Operation Airbridge. Led by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, it was an attempt to use federal funds to underwrite the air-shipping costs of private companies in an effort to speed the delivery of the kinds of personal protective equipment that were in such short supply last spring. That unorthodox effort included large no-bid contracts granted to a small group of private health-care companies without restrictions on pricing or even on where the desperately needed products were to be delivered.

In the spring of 2020, as hospital workers began popping up on social media and network news programs clad only in garbage bags and makeshift or reused face masks, sometimes in tears and pleading for help, the White House maintained its focus on private enterprise as the way out of the disaster. The administration called for volunteers to staff what would become another public/private bonanza, the White House Covid-19 Supply Chain Task Force, also helmed by Trump family fixer, Jared Kushner.

We don't know what, if anything, Kushner's group actually accomplished. The audacity of the former administration's disregard for federal rules and regulations coupled with the scale of the no-bid contracts they issued certainly attracted political pushback at the time. Democrats and civil-society groups in Washington filed requests for more information about how such contracts had eluded federal guidelines, and where the supplies actually went.

It's possible, however, that we may never know.

Ventilating Money

In April 2020, a group of Democratic senators led by Elizabeth Warren, citing the administration's secrecy, opened an investigation into the operation. They sent a letter to the six Operation Airbridge beneficiary health-care giants — Cardinal Health, Concordance, Henry Schein, McKesson, Medline, and Owens & Minor — requesting explanations for reports of "political favoritism, cronyism, and price-gouging" in the ongoing supply effort. "Taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars on this secretive project and they deserve to know whether it actually helped get critical supplies to the areas most in need," Warren said that June.

Three of the six suppliers did, in the end, give the senators copies of memorandums of agreement (MOAs) indicating that they "had complete discretion about how to distribute supplies across hotspot counties" and that "nothing in the MOAs appears to prevent a supplier from sending all of its supplies designated for hotspots to just a single customer in one of the hotspots." The government hadn't, in fact, put any kind of conditions on the cost for that protective equipment and the Trump Justice Department would insist that it was none of its business how suppliers arrived at the prices they charged for it.

Using taxpayer funds to grease private enrichment was, of course, a Trump family tradition, going back to the Eisenhower years when Donald's father, Fred, fleeced the government of millions of dollars in loans aimed at housing World War II veterans. Hauled down to Capitol Hill to explain himself, the New York builder was unrepentant, arguing that a loophole in the law allowed for his private gain and, under such circumstances, only a fool would have left all that money on the table.

What, from the outside, came to look like White House-inspired chaos — of which Operation Airbridge was just one example — should, in fact, be seen as a deliberate effort to disengage the federal government and leave the blame and the logistics problems to Covid-afflicted states, at the time mostly run by Democrats.

On March 24, 2020, for instance, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo begged the federal government to help get more ventilators for what was clearly going to be a surge of coronavirus patients. (New York City's health-care system was already overwhelmed by then.) At the time, hooking patients up to ventilators seemed like the best way to go, though doctors later realized that, for many patients, the tricky disease could be foiled earlier with anticlotting and steroid medication.

"How can you have New Yorkers possibly dying because they can't get a ventilator?" asked Cuomo. Three days later, Trump tweeted, "General Motors must… start making ventilators, now! Ford, get going on ventilators, fast!"

Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer for tech firms like Google, tweeted back at the president, "We can supply ICU ventilators, invasive and non-invasive." Within days, he turned up on a list vetted by Kushner's team of volunteers and, at their recommendation, officials in New York closed a deal with him.

The only problem: Oren-Pines had no ventilators and had never been in the medical supply business. When he failed to deliver on the $86 million deal, Wells Fargo froze his account and New York canceled the order, demanding the money back, though by summer 2020, it had yet to collect a final $10 million.

The Great Forgetting?

In addition to making various large or politically well-connected health-care companies far wealthier, the administration also lavished staggering billions on a small group of Big Pharma firms for Operation Warp Speed, the project it backed to develop vaccines and medicines to treat Covid-19. Those contracts, too, were written outside normal government channels and the companies themselves were chosen by a panel of industry insiders without any oversight. Many of them stood to (and did) profit from the soaring stock prices of those firms when the news about clinical trial successes was released.

In November 2020, to launch an investigation into that situation, Senator Warren teamed up with Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) to request copies of all federal contracts for Covid-19 therapeutics and vaccines. "The American people," they stated, "deserve to know that the federal government is using their tax dollars to develop Covid-19 medical products at the best possible price for the public — not to line the pockets of wealthy companies by cutting corners in consumer protection, pricing, and quality."

Warren raised questions about a Department of Health and Human Services deal with Gilead Sciences for the pandemic therapeutic remdesivir (part of the "cocktail" of drugs administered to Donald Trump and other Republican insiders like Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani when they got Covid). HHS had indeed acquired a large supply of remdesivir at an exorbitant cost to American taxpayers and Gilead itself would charge American hospitals $3,200 per treatment for it, $860 more than its price in other developed countries.

In addition to Warren, who sent a letter to the administration requesting information on HHS's pricing negotiations with Gilead for the drug, other people also stood up. Whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), for instance, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Dr. Robert Kadlec, a Trump HHS political appointee, had engaged in multiple schemes to funnel contracts to politically connected companies — and that this had begun even before the pandemic was even a reality. According to Bright, Kadlec then pushed him out of the government, despite the fact that federal law officially protects whistleblowers.

In his complaint, among other things, Bright alleged that in 2017, a Kadlec friend and Big Pharma consultant pressured the agency to maintain a contract with a company owned by a friend of Jared Kushner's, even after an independent review determined it should be cancelled. Bright testified before Congress, and the fate of his whistleblower suit remains to be litigated.

As for the rest of the inquiries, so far, money and power appear to have eluded the investigators. It's unclear whether Senator Warren's and Representative Porter's requests met with any response from the former administration, or even whether they've continued their inquiry into Big Pharma and no-bid contracting. They have made no further announcements and neither office replied to requests for updates.

You won't be surprised to learn, I'm sure, that the name "Jared Kushner" is so far not to be found in GAO or PRAC reports.

The best chance for public accountability — if not legal liability — might be the House of Representatives, especially its Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, launched in April 2020.The Trump administration blew off its subpoenas for former HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield to testify in December 2020, and blocked documents and witnesses related to politicized data, testing, and supply shortages, among other areas of inquiry. But the subcommittee did manage to expose emails from Trump political appointees, revealing efforts to skew CDC data. It is also investigating some whopping no-bid or sole-contractor deals that the former administration cut with preferred businesses. One was a $354-million four-year contract awarded on a non-competitive basis to PHLOW, which was incorporated in January 2020 to manufacture generic medicines to fight Covid. It's the largest contract ever awarded by BARDA and includes a 10-year option worth $812 million.

And the House has continued to seek transparency. According to a Brookings House Oversight Tracker, as of March 2021, 30% of congressional oversight letters and 40% of its hearings were related to the federal government's pandemic response. But there are signs that the Biden administration, while more cooperative, is not eager to force agencies to comply with requests the previous administration ignored.

My sense is that the emergency created by the insurrection at the Capitol last January and the desperate need of the new Biden administration to have palpable policy achievements in order to do well in election 2022 has taken the steam out of any inclination to dig deeper into the profiteering, cronyism, political scheming, and chaos with which the Trump administration met the Covid-19 virus. It went far deeper than an article like this can possibly indicate, leaving so many hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths in its wake.

Think of it as a memory hole, still brimming with schemes and money.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Nina Burleigh**, a TomDispatch regular, is a journalist of American politics and the author of six previous books. Her seventh, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic (just published by Seven Stories Press) is a real-life thriller that delves into the official malfeasance behind America's pandemic chaos and the triumph of science in an era of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/texas-agriculture-commissioner/ pot bribes

also Sos? tx

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/trump-jr/

lie under oath inaug $

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prev bribery story?

trump allies raking in tens of thousands of dollars from wealthy felons seeking pardons: NYT

Tom Boggioni Raw Story

January 17, 2021

According to a report from the New York Times, close associates of Donald Trump have been raking in tens of thousands of dollars from wealthy felons seeking a presidential pardon before the president steps down...

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gOP senator received more than $20,000 in campaign contributions from Big Pharma after co-sponsoring a bill on drug prices: report

Alex HendersonSeptember 17, 2020

In late 2019, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina co-sponsored a bill on prescription drug prices — and WBTV, the CBS affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina, is reporting that Tillis…

guk --> desmog 5/20

...fossil fuel companies have taken at least $50 million in taxpayer money they probably won’t have to pay back,according to a review of coronavirus aid meant for struggling small businesses by the investigative research group Documented and the Guardian.

A total of $28 million is going to three coal mining companies, all with ties to Trump officials, bolstering a dying American industry and a fuel that scientists insist world leaders must shift away from to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.

The other $22 million is being paid out to oil and gas services and equipment providers and other firms that work with drillers and coal miners.

Melinda Pierce, the legislative director for the Sierra Club, said: “The federal money Congress appropriated should be going to help small businesses and frontline workers struggling as a result of the pandemic, not the corporate polluters whose struggles are a result of failing business practices and existed long before COVID-19 entered the public lexicon.”

More than 40 Democratic lawmakers have argued that fossil fuel companies should not get any assistance under the coronavirus aid package.

Some Democrats have also warned the forgivable loans being made under Congress’ Paycheck Protection Program could be a transparency disaster.

Banks and lending institutions are distributing the money, so the government says it cannot track recipients in real time. The loans revealed have been made public only through news reports and securities filings by publicly traded companies, although the Federal Reserve has committed to issuing monthly reports.

So far, it’s clear the program is not working as intended. The funds are aimed at helping small businesses to keep paying their employees and covering other recurring expenses during the economic downturn. But they have been exploited by large companies forced to return the money amid a public outcry, including the Los Angeles Lakers, Shake Shack, and Ruth’s Chris Steak House.

The industry aid comes as the Trump administration is reportedly considering a broader bailout for oil and gas corporations, which were already under pressure before the coronavirus and have watched oil prices nosedive because of a global price war and low demand for gasoline. The U.S. government could make loans to oil and gas companies, essentially making taxpayers investors in the industry.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday also announced changes to its lending rules that could help indebted petroleum firms.

“The idea that oil workers are getting a paycheck is great,” said Jamie Henn, a spokesman for the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign who co-founded the environment group 350.org. “The worry is that the money’s going to the top and not going to filter down.”

The $50 million already paid to fossil fuel companies is a small fraction of the the $2.1 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the Cares Act. But the total assistance to the industry is likely much larger than can currently be tallied and will continue to grow.

Environmental advocates and oversight experts tracking the funds say it’s impossible to count how much of the money will assist fossil fuels, including because some firms provide services across multiple industries.

“All of this is voluntary disclosures by the companies,” said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher with Documented. “No matter what, it’s going to be an incomplete picture of what’s going on.”

Coleman said in many cases the fossil fuel companies getting aid have made bad investments and “now they’re going to come crawling hat in hand and say: look at what the coronavirus did to us.”

Among the coronavirus aid recipients is Hallador Coal, an Indiana-based coal mining company that hired Donald Trump’s former environment chief Scott Pruitt as a lobbyist. The company’s former government relations director now works at the energy department. Hallador is taking $10 million to fund two months of payroll and other expenses.

Coal mining company Rhino Resources, which was formerly run by Trump’s Mine Safety and Health Administration head, David Zatezalo, is receiving $10 million.

Coal firm Ramaco Resources, whose CEO, Randy Atkins, is on the energy department’s National Coal Council, is getting $8.4 million.

The U.S. coal industry has been in steep decline, driven out of the market by cheap natural gas and environmental concerns. Trump campaigned on putting coal miners back to work, and his agencies have unsuccessfully explored ways to bail out coal companies, which are seeing their lowest employment levels in modern history. The Trump administration has also rescinded nearly all of the environment and climate protections the fossil fuel industry has opposed.

Fossil fuel companies can also take advantage of tax benefits under the coronavirus legislation, including deferring payment of social security and medicare taxes.

The Missouri-based Peabody Energy coal company has said it will speed up collecting an alternative minimum tax refund of $24 million to 2020 and defer $18 million of owed taxes.

U.S. taxpayers already subsidize the fossil fuel industry at roughly $20 billion a year, according to conservative estimates.

The Center for International Environmental Law has accused the oil, gas, and plastics industries of “exploiting the crisis by aggressively lobbying for massive bailouts and special privileges in a desperate attempt to revive an oil and gas industry already in decline.”

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis argues that federal lending to the oil and gas sector would be “a complete waste of money,” because it wouldn’t fix the industry’s underlying financial problems.

Oil industry lobbyists have pushed for changes at the Federal Reserve to let companies with large amounts of debt use its Main Street Lending Program and borrow to pay off existing loans.

In an April 15 letter to the Federal Reserve, the oil trade group the Independent Petroleum Association of America asked for the new provisions, saying “oil and natural gas producers are not looking for a government handout; they are seeking a bridge to help survive this economic disruption.”

Environmental advocates say the move would disproportionately benefit small and mid-sized oil and gas companies, such as Occidental Petroleum, which has nearly $80 billion in liabilities on its balance sheet.

Graham Steele, who directs the corporations and society initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business, called the situation the “classic disaster scenario where an opportunistic administration and industry is taking advantage of a crisis.”

“And by the way, these are industries driving climate change. It’s both a bad financial proposition of the Fed and for taxpayers and a bad situation for the planet.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-campaign-chief-has-been-funneling-money-to-don-jrs-girlfriend-and-eric-trumps-wife-report

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Trump’s campaign chief has been funneling money to Don Jr’s girlfriend and Eric Trump’s wife: report

Written by Alex Henderson March 10, 2020

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign includes not only Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, but also, the women two of Trump’s sons have been romantically involved with. And according to the New York Times, the president’s campaign manager has been funneling money to Kimberly Guilfoyle (Trump Jr.’s girlfriend) and Eric Trump’s wife, Lara Trump.

The payments, the Times reported, were made through Parscale Strategy, a private, San Antonio, Texas-based company owned by the president’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale.

HuffPost’s Mary Papenfuss notes that the “family benefits” are “linked to a network of politically connected private companies — operating with the support and help of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner — that have charged roughly $75 million since 2017 to the Trump reelection campaign.”

Guilfoyle is a former Fox News pundit who left that right-wing cable news channel in 2018 and has been dating Trump Jr. for two years. In January, Trump’s campaign announced that Guilfoyle would be leading joint fundraising between Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC).

Long before she dated Trump Jr., Guilfoyle was married to Democrat Gavin Newsom — who was mayor of San Francisco at the time and went on to become governor of California.

According to the Associated Press (AP), Lara Trump was hired as a senior consultant in early 2017 by Giles-Parscale — another company owned by Parscale. In January, Lara Trump mocked former Vice President Joe Biden’s stuttering and said, “Joe, can you get it out? Can you get the words out, Joe?”

Adam Brewster

@adam_brew

The Trump Campaign is in Des Moines with the Women for Trump bus tour. @LaraLeaTrump, Senior Adviser @mercedesschlapp and Nat’l Press Sec @kayleighmcenany are speaking

Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330)

@JoeBiden

I’ve worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. And it’s my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same. It’s called empathy. Look it up. https://twitter.com/SarahHuckabee/status/1207863935426322432 …

an 220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/an-astonishing-rate-of-corruption-trump-has-amassed-3000-conflicts-of-interest-since-taking-office

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/relentless-corruption-and-sheer-madness-are-donald-trumps-super-powers/

see raw story, what fresh hell

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Here are 5 ways Trump has deepened and enlarged the ‘swamp’ he pledged to drain

Written by Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Blog February 12, 2020

It seems like forever ago when Donald Trump promised to “Drain the Swamp” if elected president. Well, it turns out this was one of the biggest whoppers in modern American politics.

Here are five ways he’s made the swamp even swampier.

1.He has packed his administration with former lobbyists and corporate executives. He has installed a former Boeing executive to run the Defense Department; a former pharmaceutical lobbyist to run the Department of Health and Human Services; a former coal lobbyist to run the Environmental Protection Agency, and a former oil lobbyist to run the Department of the Interior. In total, more than 300 lobbyists now work in the Trump administration – many in key positions overseeing the industries they used to lobby for.

He and his family are personally profiting from the presidency. Despite Trump’s promise he’d sever all ties with his existing businesses and place all assets in a “blind” trust to eliminate any conflicts of interest, documents show Trump remains the sole beneficiary of his trust and still retains the legal power to revoke the trust at any time. Meanwhile, foreign dignitaries have flooded Trump’s hotels, lining his pockets in clear violation of the Constitution. He even attempted to host the G-7 at his own luxury golf course until he was forced to back down.

He is catering to billionaires and corporations at the expense of the American people. In the fall of 2017, mega-donors shelled out more than $31 million in political contributions to Trump and Republicans. And in return, they got a massive $2 trillion tax cut. Not a bad return on investment. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.”

He is using taxpayer dollars to subsidize his luxurious lifestyle. Since taking office, Trump’s golf trips alone have cost taxpayers more than $110 million dollars. His children have also charged taxpayers for costs associated with business trips around the world that they’ve taken, including India and Uruguay. Taxpayers even footed the bill for Donald Trump Junior’s hunting trip to Canada.

The Trump administration has been riddled with scandals and ethics violations. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross held on to investments and never divested despite pledging to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has tried to arrange meetings with Chinese officials for her family business. Ethics officials have found Kellyanne Conway broke laws that prohibit government workers from engaging in political activities. The list goes on, and on. This has been the most corrupt administration in American history.

Trump is exploiting everything that’s vulnerable in our political system. But in order to truly stop the corruption of our democracy, we have to fix what’s broken. We must get big money out of politics, end the flow of lobbyists in and out of government, and strengthen ethics laws.

Trump has enlarged and deepened the swamp, but the swamp was there before he got to Washington. One of the first tasks of the next president must be to drain the swamp once and for all

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sotu

gov't school dog whistle to evang?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/betsy-devos-approval-rating-is-28-percent-as-voters-back-investigations-into-student-debt-scandal-poll/

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Associated Press examines how Jay Sekulow has used a complex web of charities and businesses to enrich himself and his family: “The records from 2008 to 2017, the most recent year available, show that more than $65 million in charitable funds were paid to Sekulow, his wife, his sons, his brother, his sister-in-law, his nephew and corporations they own.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/tea-party-governors-last-act-pardons-for-hundreds-including-killer-whose-family-raised-21500-for-re-election/

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Tea Party governor’s last act: Pardons for hundreds — including killer whose family raised $21,500 for re-election

Matt Bevin image via.”>Wikipedia.

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement December 12, 2019

Outgoing Tea Party Republican Governor Matt Bevin of Kentucky has now pardoned hundreds of convicts since he lost a close re-election race one month ago. Among those benefitting from his exit are five convicted killers and other violent felons. One of the men receiving a pardon just happens to have family members who hosted a high-dollar fundraiser for the governor’s re-election campaign this past summer.

Gov. Bevin issued 428 pardons in the month before leaving office this week under objection. Bevin wanted to challenge the election results but Kentucky does not have a law mandating it and he was unsuccessful.

41-year old Patrick Brian Baker received an unconditional pardon from his 19-year prison sentence this week after being convicted in 2017 “of reckless homicide, first-degree robbery, impersonating a peace officer and tampering with physical evidence,” The Times-Tribune reports. The victim’s wife and three children were in the home when the acts occurred.

Saying, “I’ve never seen a more compelling or complete case … the evidence was just overwhelming,” Judge David L. Williams had lamented at sentencing the convicted felon could be imprisoned for only 19 years.

“I believe it would be a miscarriage of justice to do any less,” Williams added. “It’s 19 years because that’s all I can give you…if I could give you more, I would.”

But as Newsweek reports, “Baker’s brother and sister in law, Eric and Kathryn Baker, hosted a fundraiser for Bevin at their home in Corbin, Kentucky, in July last year,” according to The Courier Journal. They raised a whopping $21,500. The pair added $4000 to the pot as well.

Baker’s co-defendants are not receiving pardons, despite the fact it was Baker who pulled the trigger.

Others receiving pardons “include one offender convicted of raping a child, another who hired a hit man to kill his business partner and a third who killed his parents.”

1119 am promise

Our feature article this week highlights a recent survey that found more than half of American voters believe corruption in the political system is the most serious problem facing the country, outranking any other issue. These are Americans with beliefs that span the political spectrum, but who all see how the current system isn’t representing them and how as democratic citizens we are called to change that reality.

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nyt

Opinion

The Revenge of the Bureaucrats

Honesty is the best foreign policy.

By Elizabeth Drew

Ms. Drew is a journalist based in Washington who covered Watergate.

Nov. 16, 2019, 2:30 p.m. ET

The opening hearings on the Ukraine scandal demonstrated that mundane government processes and seemingly colorless bureaucrats are what keep our country going. It was these sorts of unknown public servants who maintained the executive branch functioning during Watergate — and are doing so now while our distracted president and his acolytes try to circumvent the rules.

The witnesses in the first week of open hearings were three lifelong career diplomats — on Wednesday, William Taylor, currently the chargé d’affaires in Ukraine, and George Kent, the senior State Department official on Ukraine; and on Friday, Marie Yovanovitch, the career diplomat whom President Trump fired as ambassador to Ukraine because she got in the way of his private schemes.

While the three witnesses came across as unusually admirable, they’re not atypical of their breed. They will endure only so much abuse or see only so much scandal around them before rising up in some way. All three testified in defiance of the president.

Mr. Trump cannot fathom such people, because they’re not interested in big money or fame. The “bureaucracy” may seem sluggish, stubborn and unimaginative at times, but it also can stand as a bulwark against assaults on the laws and the Constitution by the passers-through who inhabit the administration of the moment. Mr. Trump made a big mistake by demeaning civil servants from the outset (his awkward, self-reverential speech to the C.I.A. on his first full day in office was an embarrassment and also an omen) and then setting about trying to make them irrelevant.

The problem for presidents who, in their frustration over the limits on their power, empower extragovernmental groups to carry out their extragovernmental policies, is that it usually comes a cropper. If Richard Nixon’s “plumbers” hadn’t been such stumblebums, botching every wayward project they took on, the Nixon presidency just might have survived its attempts to determine the opposition party’s candidate for the next election.

In the case of the current scandal, the “three amigos” — Kurt Volker, a foreign policy expert who signed on as a special envoy to Ukraine; Rick Perry, the departing energy secretary who has close ties to the energy industry; and Gordon Sondland, a hotel magnate whose donations to the Trump inaugural committee helped him secure his job as ambassador to the European Union — usurped Ukraine policy from normal State Department channels, setting Mr. Trump’s private whims against the stated policies of his government. Mr. Sondland appears to have known even less about Ukraine than he did about Europe before taking that job.

The three men seem to have reported to Rudolph Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a freelance provocateur. Mr. Giuliani, now under federal investigation in New York, has had his own business interests in Ukraine’s natural gas industry. Under arrest are a couple of his sidekicks, Soviet-born Americans known by their first names, Lev and Igor, with substantial Ukraine interests.

Mr. Giuliani and the three amigos were reportedly part of the president’s scheme to hold up $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine in order to wring from the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, a public announcement that he would order an investigation of Joe Biden and Mr. Biden’s surviving son, Hunter, who took an ill-advised membership on the board of one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies while his father was managing Ukraine policy for the Obama administration. (Numerous press investigations have turned up no actual misbehavior on the Bidens’ part.) The fragile Hunter, who lost his brother, to whom he was very close, to brain cancer and has struggled with addiction, remains a Republican political target.

Mr. Sondland inadvertently provided the only real news on the first day of the hearings, when Mr. Taylor testified that a member of his staff overheard the president talking to Mr. Sondland when the latter called him on his cellphone from a restaurant in Kiev. Mr. Trump volubly asked how things were going in getting President Zelensky to announce an investigation of the Bidens. This linked Mr. Trump directly to the pressure on Ukraine. Later, it was learned that a second person also overheard the call. Mr. Trump’s allies have also pushed Mr. Zelensky to look into the fantasy that the foreign interference in the 2016 election involved Ukraine, and not Russia.

But the hearings are less about big disclosures than about building the case, brick by brick, of why the president should be impeached. The Democrats have suggested various terms on which to charge him, and they’re not yet united on that. Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested on Thursday that the charge should be bribery, since that’s a constitutionally stated reason for impeachment, and it's a crime that people can understand. But this is a disheartening choice, because a more significant ground for impeachment is abuse of power, which isn’t in the statute books, and it would apply to Mr. Trump’s holding up the arms aid, among other offenses in this instance.

Yet, just a few days ago, Ms. Pelosi and others were talking abuses of power. A House Democrat advised me not to take too seriously the flurry of competing rationales: The Democrats haven’t actually met to decide on a unified position, he said; that may wait until the Judiciary Committee draws up the actual articles of impeachment.

The Republican strategy of the moment is apparently to seal off Mr. Trump from Mr. Giuliani and the amigos’ activities. Their attempts to engage in their specialty of disrupting hearings was swiftly shut down by the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who was firm but fair, leaving them little to dispute. They’ve found it awkward to defend Mr. Trump since they know that squeezing the Ukrainians for desperately needed military aid in their war against Russia for his own political purpose is indefensible. Moreover, Mr. Trump has complained about their focus on process issues, continuing to insist, ridiculously, that his infamous July 25 phone call to Mr. Zelensky was “perfect.” Regrettably, he may actually think it was....

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/selling-americas-ambassadorships/

no lnx

Selling America’s ambassadorships

Written by Washington Monthly November 8, 2019

A few years ago, I wrote an open letter to the executive producer of the popular day-time television drama The Bold and the Beautiful. I asked for a job as an actor. My acting credentials? Zero. Any show biz experience? Zilch. A soap opera fan? Nope. But I told Bradley Bell, whose wife was also a producer: “After reading about your wife Colleen being named by President Obama to be our next ambassador to Hungary, I thought, I too can realize one of my wildest dreams: become a soap opera matinée idol.” Colleen Bell had as many credentials to be an ambassador as I did of being an actor. Yet she got the position, instead, by donating more than $2 million to Obama’s campaigns.

The Bold and the Beautiful has turned out to be a veritable incubator of diplomatic talent. President Trump’s envoy to Denmark, Carla Sands, was an actress on B&B (her character slept with her girlfriend’s fiancé). What presaged her diplomatic posting? It was $350,000 in political contributions to Trump.

For all the political squalor inherent in Ukrainegate, there is one silver lining: the sterling reputations of the U.S. diplomats testifying before Congress—in defiance of White House orders—stand in stark contrast to Trump’s cynical and clownish political appointees. Take Gordon Sondland, for instance. He was a hotel chain owner, devoid of any diplomatic or government experience, who essentially purchased his position as U.S. ambassador to the European Union for a cold $1 million donation to the president’s inaugural committee.

There’s also George Glass, an Oregon real estate developer who donated more than $100,000 to Trump’s campaign. In return, he was named U.S. ambassador to Portugal. Glass is an avid propagator of the QAnon conspiracy line about a “Deep State” attempting to destroy Trump’s presidency and a cabal of Satan-worshiping Democrats who run a child sex cult. He speaks no Portuguese. Then there is former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Trump ousted. Yovanovitch is a three-time ambassador with 33 years in the Foreign Service and is multilingual.

In other words, our experienced diplomats are locked out of key policy jobs while whoever was willing to write a check is representing our nation overseas. In too many cases, they are unworthy of that privilege and responsibility. Trump’s ambassador to South Africa, Lana Marks, is a handbag designer and Mar-a-Lago member who faced more than a dozen lawsuits by former lawyers, landlords, and contractors alleging fraud. She and her husband, moreover, were fined $360,641 by the IRS for failing to pay back taxes. Had she been a regular job applicant, she would have been denied a security clearance.

Selling ambassadorships is a unique form of legal American corruption, practiced by presidents of both parties. In the 18th and 19th centuries, presidents similarly used to award military officer commissions to unqualified hacks as well—until the bloody cost of incompetent “political generals” during the Civil War led to a popular outcry and legislation to abolish the practice. Auctioning off diplomatic positions, however, has remained untouched.

Pre-Trump, the percentage of “political ambassadors” traditionally hovered around 30 percent, overwhelmingly to the most desirable posts, mainly in Europe. Now, that figure is at a historical record of 45 percent, according to the American Foreign Service Association. Before Trump, research shows thatcampaign donations between “$650,000 and $700,000 generated a 90 percent probability of appointment to a [wealthy developed country] for personal and bundled campaign contributorsrespectively.”

Trump-appointed ambassadors have averaged $96,927.98 in political contributions, exceeding the previous record of $60,721.83 set by George W. Bush’s ambassadors, according to research by Marquette University law professor Ryan M. Scoville, who also has found that Trump’s picks are “less qualified” than those of prior presidents.

But, as in the case of Sondland, donations can easily exceed a million dollars. New York Jets owner Robert Wood Johnson IV was awarded the coveted ambassadorship to the United Kingdom after donating nearly $1.5 million to Trump’s campaign and inaugural committee. A million bucks seems to have gotten financier Douglas Manchester a cushy if low ranking posting in the Bahamas.

The consequences for our national security can be dire. Handbag designers and hoteliers versus veteran trained diplomats in charge of foreign policy can potentially mean the difference between war and peace. Only six of 29 U.S. ambassadors to NATO countries are career diplomats.

All of Russia’s ambassadors to NATO member states, by contrast, are, in fact, career diplomats. My research of Russian versus American NATO ambassadors during the Obama administration revealed that Russia’s envoys possessed 960 years of diplomatic experience, averaging 34 years per incumbent, in contrast to America’s ambassadors having 331 cumulative years, averaging twelve years per individual. Those embarrassing figures are even more skewed now.

Putting ambassadorships on the political auction block need not be taken as a given. One presidential candidate has promised to end it. In her plan to “rebuild the State Department,” Elizabeth Warren pledges “to put America’s national interests ahead of campaign donations and end the corrupt practice of selling cushy diplomatic posts to wealthy donors?—?and I call on everyone running for President to do the same. I won’t give ambassadorial posts to wealthy donors or bundlers?—?period.”

While the Ukraine scandal may or may not end Trump’s corruption-ridden presidency, it should nonetheless bring about an end to the disgraceful peddling of the nation’s highest diplomatic offices to wealthy dilettantes, a practice that makes the United States a global laughing stock.

In the meantime, I’m taking acting lessons.

James Bruno is a writer and former U.S. diplomat. Read his blog, DIPLO DENIZEN, and follow him on Twitter @JamesLBruno. The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/a-shady-pro-trump-super-pac-at-the-heart-of-the-ukraine-scandal-has-been-raising-alarms/

no lnx

A shady pro-Trump super PAC at the heart of the Ukraine scandal has been raising alarms

Written by Mike Spies, Derek Willis / ProPublica October 18, 2019

ProPublica

Last year, a Department of Defense contractor quietly donated half a million dollars to a group supporting President Donald Trump’s reelection.

Once a watchdog organization noticed it, the contribution raised an alarm. Federal contractors are not allowed to donate to political entities. And groups are required by law to examine all donations for potential legal issues. If they discover that a contractor has made a contribution, the money has to be returned.

The other unusual aspect of the donation was the man behind it. Randy Perkins, the founder of DOD contractor AshBritt Environmental, had no history of six-figure contributions to federal political groups, although he has been a regular donor to Republicans for the past 15 years. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat in 2016.

The watchdog group pointed out that the money came in a day after AshBritt won a supplemental contract award worth $460,000 from the DOD for wildfire cleanup, bringing its contract total to about $1.7 million.

Asked about the donation, Perkins said he had meant to make a personal donation to express his support for specific Trump policies: “I actually think this administration cares deeply about children and mental health issues.” He said the contract extension had nothing to do with the contribution.

America First Action, the Trump super PAC that accepted the donation, adjusted its report on the source of the funds only after the watchdog group, the Campaign Legal Center, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Since America First’s creation in 2017, it has refunded just a fraction of 1% of all the funds it has raised.

If you’ve been hearing about America First recently, it’s likely because two associates of presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani were arrested on allegations that they illegally funneled money to the group.

But that case is not the only problem that has ensnared the PAC as its role in backing Republican candidates has grown.

In another instance, the American subsidiary of a Canadian company made three donations totaling $1.75 million to America First in 2018. In another complaint, the Campaign Legal Center questioned the source of the donation and alleged that Wheatland Tube LLC may have violated laws against foreign nationals contributing to federal campaigns. The company declined to comment on the matter.

Last year, Common Cause, the political reform group, asked the FEC to determine whether the Trump campaign had illegally coordinated with America First and America First Policies, a related group that can raise money without disclosing its donors. The complaint alleged that the president and his campaign were improperly soliciting contributions for the two entities.

The FEC has not acted on any of these complaints to date, and it currently lacks a quorum to vote on enforcement actions proposed by its staff.

“The number of complaints is pretty remarkable,” said Ann Ravel, a Democrat who served as chair of the FEC in 2015.

America First communications director Kelly Sadler told ProPublica that the group takes its obligations seriously and goes to great lengths to comply with the law.

The PAC has denied any wrongdoing in the criminal case against the Giuliani associates. Sadler said the contribution at the heart of the indictment has been placed in a segregated account and will remain there “until these matters are resolved and a court determines the proper disposition of the funds.”

As a super PAC, America First can take unlimited donations from corporations and individuals. In return, it is not supposed to coordinate with campaigns, which are restricted in the amount of donations they may accept.

America First has raised more money to support Trump’s reelection than any super PAC. It is currently chaired by Linda McMahon, and it has raised nearly $50 million over the last two years, including about $9 million in this election cycle to reelect Trump.

Its affiliated nonprofit group, America First Policies, was co-founded by Brad Parscale, now the president’s campaign manager.

McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive, until March was a member of the president’s cabinet, overseeing the Small Business Administration. She also donated $1 million to the PAC, whose public filings show 19 donations of at least $1 million.

The PAC’s top donors include casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and Geoffrey Palmer, a billionaire California developer. Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who run a shipping supplies company, donated half a million dollars each.

In the 2018 election, America First spent more than $29 million supporting Republican candidates in House and Senate races. Former Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, a powerful GOP leader, received heavy backing from the PAC — $3 million toward a contest he would go on to lose.

The $500,000 donation attributed to AshBritt was among a flood of big donations coming into the PAC in the spring of 2018. The company, based in Deerfield Beach, Florida, does disaster cleanup work.

The Campaign Legal Center’s complaint got little attention. Under FEC rules, a committee has 30 days to confirm the legality of a questionable donation or to refund it; nearly three months passed before the PAC amended its filing to show the donation as being made directly by Perkins.

Perkins said he tried to rectify the matter by providing “all paperwork to the FEC” and resubmitting forms to America First stating that the funds were in fact drawn from a corporate account that would later be taxed as personal income.

“When I wrote the check, I cleared it with America First,” Perkins told ProPublica.

Perkins acknowledges that the optics of his America First donation are less than ideal.

“The facts might be a problem,” he said. “But they are facts.”

A few weeks after Perkins’ donation, the PAC received $325,000 from Global Energy Partners, the Florida energy company that is now at the center of a presidential impeachment inquiry. The PAC was referred to as “Committee 1” in the federal indictment of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who pleaded not guilty on charges that they donated to try to advance their energy business in Ukraine in an arraignment this week.

The two men, according to the indictment, were key characters in a coercion campaign to recall the United States ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, which they believed would pave the way for an investigation into Trump’s Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.

The indictment also alleges that Fruman and Parnas promised to fundraise for Sessions. Around the same time, Sessions wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging Yovanovitch’s ouster.

Sessions, who is now running for Congress in a new district, did not respond to messages from ProPublica. In a statement issued on his behalf, he acknowledged meeting with the two Florida businessmen several times but said he took no action on their behalf.

Sessions denied that his letter to Pompeo was directly related to the meetings. He said he will donate the contributions Parnas and Fruman gave to his campaign to Texas charities.

The indictment also alleges that Fruman and Parnas promised to fundraise for Sessions. Around the same time, Sessions wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging Yovanovitch’s ouster.

Sessions denied that his letter to Pompeo was directly related to the meetings. He said he will donate the contributions Parnas and Fruman gave to his campaign to Texas charities.

Do you have information about America First Action? Contact Mike at michael.spies@propublica.org, Derek at derek.willis@propublica.org, or David at David.McSwane@propublica.org. Here are other ways to contact us securely.

paris extra day missed plane?

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/these-7-charts-show-how-legalized-political-corruption-is-so-much-bigger-than-trump

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919 different in kind not just degree/freq? trelated to post-truth?

trump inc pod

...we’ve done dozens of episodes over the past 18 months, detailing how predatory lenders are paying the president, how Trump has profited from his own inauguration and how Trump’s friends have sought to use their access in pursuit of profit.

We’ve noticed something along the way. It’s not just that the president has mixed his business and governing. It’s that the way Trump does business is spreading across the government.

Trump’s company isn’t like most big businesses. It is accountable to only one man, it has broken the rules, and those promoting it have long engaged in what Trump has dubbed, ahem, “truthful hyperbole.”...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/how-tumps-old-business-patterns-are-spreading-across-the-federal-government/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trumps-open-corruption-is-completing-debasing-the-federal-government-pence-is-just-the-latest-example/

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/01/perceptics-hack-license-plate-readers

lee fang contractor

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/the-gop-is-the-most-corrupt-party-in-living-memory-robert-reich/

The GOP is the most corrupt party in living memory: Robert Reich

written by Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Blog June 21, 2019

Trump has been ramping up his “Deep State” rhetoric again. He’s back to blaming a cabal of bureaucrats, FBI and CIA agents, Democrats, and “enemies of the people” in the mainstream media, for conspiring to remove him from office in order to allow the denizens of foreign shi*tholes to overrun America.

But with each passing day it’s becoming clearer that the real threat to America isn’t Trump’s Deep State. It’s Trump’s Corrupt State.

Not since Warren G. Harding’s sordid administration have as many grifters, crooks and cronies occupied high positions in Washington.

Trump has installed a Star Wars Cantina of former lobbyists and con artists, including several whose exploits have already forced them to resign, such as Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, Tom Price, and Michael Flynn. Many others remain.

When he was in Congress, the current White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from payday lenders, then proposed loosening regulations on them. Trump appointed Mulvaney acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, of all things.

When he was Trump’s special adviser on regulatory reform, Wall Street billionaire Carl Icahn sought to gut EPA’s rule on ethanol credits which was harming his oil refinery investments.

Last week it was reported that a real estate company partly owned by Trump son-in-law and foreign policy advisor, Jared Kushner, has raked in $90 million from foreign investors since Kushner entered the White House, through a secret tax haven run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands. Kushner’s stake is some $50 million.

All this takes conflict-of-interest to a new level of shamelessness.

What are Republicans doing about it? Participating in it.

Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, who also happens to be the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has approved $78 million in grants for her husband’s home state of Kentucky, including a highway-improvement project that had been twice rejected in the past. Chao has even appointed a special liaison to coordinate grants with McConnell’s office.

Oh, did I say, McConnell is up for reelection next year?

News that a Cabinet secretary is streamlining federal funding for her husband’s pet projects would be a giant scandal under normal circumstances. But in the age of Trump, ethics are out the window.

Congressman Greg Pence, who just happens to be the brother of Vice President Mike Pence, has spent more than $7,600 of his campaign funds on lodging at the Trump International Hotel in Washington since he was elected in November, although federal election law forbids politicians from using campaigns dollars to cover housing costs.

The Corrupt State starts with Trump himself, giving new meaning to the old adage about a fish rotting from the head down.

When foreign governments aren’t currying favor with Trump by staying at his Washington hotel, they’re using state-owned companies to finance projects that will line Trump’s pocket, like China’s $500 million entertainment complex in Indonesia that includes a Trump-branded hotel.

Trump claims the Deep State allows foreigners to take advantage of America. The reality is Trump’s Corrupt State allows Vladimir Putin and his goon squad to continue undermining American democracy.

“I’d take it” if Russia again offered campaign help, Trump crowed last week, adding that he wouldn’t necessarily tell the FBI about it. Just days before, Trump acknowledged “Russia helping me get elected” the first time.

Despite evidence that Russia is back hacking and trolling its way toward the 2020 election, Republican defenders of Trump’s Corrupt State won’t lift a finger.

Mitch McConnell refuses to consider any legislation on election security. He and Senate Republicans even killed a bill requiring campaigns to report offers of foreign assistance to the FBI and federal authorities.

The charitable interpretation is McConnell and his ilk don’t want to offend Trump by doing anything that might appear to question the legitimacy of his 2016 win.

The less charitable view is Republicans oppose more secure elections because they’d be less likely to win them.

Trump and his Republican enablers are playing magicians who distract us by shouting “look here!” at the paranoid fantasy of a Deep State, while creating a Corrupt State under our noses.

But it’s not a party trick. It’s the dirtiest trick of our time, enabled by the most corrupt party in living memory.

no lnx

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/03/amazon-defense-department-jedi-contract/

Amazon Offered Job to Pentagon Official Involved With $10 Billion Contract It Sought

Alex Emmons

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hmmn

• Nixon: 76 criminal indictments, 55 criminal convictions, 15 prison sentences

• Carter: 0 criminal indictments, 0 criminal convictions, 0 prison sentences

• Reagan: 26 criminal indictments, 16 criminal convictions, 8 prison sentences

• Bush: 16 criminal indictments, 16 criminal convictions, 9 prison sentences

• Clinton: 2 criminal indictments, 1 criminal conviction, 1 prison sentence

• Obama: 0 criminal indictments, 0 criminal convictions, 0 prison sentences

• Trump: 6 criminal indictments, 5 criminal conviction, multiple immunity deals, 3 prison sentence, and the games have just begun.

Score so far: Republicans 124, Democrats 2. Because yes, Republicans are corrupt POS.

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no lnx kos

it ’s rare when the findings on an environmental problem are this definitive. With shifting climate conditions and all the other aspects of human activity and how it impacts the biosphere, sharp population declines can take animals and plants to the brink of extinction and still leave scientists scratching their heads over what went wrong. That’s what makes the Interior Department analysis of the pesticides malathion and chlorpyrifos such a victory—and what happened next such a horror show.

The New York Times reports that the two pesticides were found to be such a threat that they “jeopardized the continued existence” of not just a few species, but over 1,200 species, ranging from tiny fish to colorful birds to kit foxes. The pesticides are a potent cocktail for disaster, and the Fish and Wildlife Service spent years putting together an airtight case that the two had to be banned to avoid massive ecological disaster.

The findings were set to become public at the end of 2017. But then … they didn’t. Instead, Donald Trump inserted industry lobbyist David Bernhardt as deputy secretary of the interior. Bernhardt blocked the release of the information, announced new rules narrowing the means by which Fish and Wildlife could evaluate the data, and sent the whole study back to square one—not just wiping out years of work, but putting hundreds of species and whole ecosystems at risk of collapse.

For his work in assisting the pesticide industry, Bernhardt is now on track for a promotion. He is Trump’s new nominee to be the next secretary of the interior, and his confirmation hearing is coming up on Thursday. Bernhardt would replace Ryan Zinke, who abruptly left his position after a series of scandals. It may not seem possible, but Bernhardt is worse. As the Natural Resources Defense Council explains, this isn’t Bernhardt’s first go-round in Washington. He’s a top predator in the lobbyist swamp, having spent more than 20 years on every aspect of ruining public lands from opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refugee to oil drilling, to putting snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park.

And it will come as absolutely no surprise that Dow, the company behind chlorpyrifos, donated $1 million to Trump’s shady inaugural committee.

Since Trump’s crew took over, Dow has been a regular visitor at both the EPA and the Interior Department. The changes in the way pesticides are being treated that Bernhardt put in place didn’t originate with Bernhardt. They are exactly what Dow requested.

Dow and other pesticide manufacturers were aware of the study when Trump came into office. They followed up their fat contributions with letters to Zinke at Interior, Scott Pruitt at EPA, and Wilbur Ross at Commerce, asking all of them to “set aside” the findings. Zinke was still interior secretary when the regulations were turned back, but it was Bernhardt who put his name to the policy changes and tossed a study that would have dealt with a massive ecological threat that will now continue for years.

Since taking office, Trump has made hundreds of vague and unsupported statements about how America’s water was “cleaner than ever” and how the country had “moved to the top of the charts” on the environment. Trump continues to produce these nonsensical statements, pulled from the so-so-clean streams of his nether regions, even as he lifts bans on pollution from fracking, allows mines to fill streams and rivers with waste, and leaves a rapidly ticking time bomb of pesticides in place.

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SITE: DOI

https://departmentofinfluence.org/

Maxine Waters explains why Deutsche Bank is now cooperating: ‘Democrats are in charge’ of investigation

First Amendment / Daily Kos

===

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OMFG

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/meet-the-new-un-ambassador-nominee-a-billionaire-gop-donor-and-science-denier-who-gave-trump-millions/

prez Donald Trump promised he’d always hire the “best people” during his presidential campaign, but not only has that turned out to be false, he’s had more turnover than any president in modern history, if not ever.

The president is fond of playing “whack-a-mole” with his personnel problems, by shuffling the players around instead of actually looking for, as he put it, the “best people.”

For example, Mick Mulvaney joined the Trump administration after serving as a U.S Republican Congressman. He served as Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, then added to his resume the title of Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney then became Trump’s Acting White House Chief of Staff, replacing embattled and disgraced John Kelly – while giving up his CFPB job but still retaining the role of Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Fast forward to Friday evening.

President Trump has just announced his latest nominee to become Ambassador to the United Nations, after his earlier nominee, who would have replaced Nikki Haley, was forced to withdraw her nomination after illegally hiring as a nanny an immigrant unauthorized to work in the U.S.

“I am pleased to announce that Kelly Knight Craft, our current Ambassador to Canada, is being nominated to be United States Ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump announced via tweet. No formal White House announcement has been made yet. “Kelly has done an outstanding job representing our Nation and I have no doubt that, under her leadership, our Country will be represented at the highest level. Congratulations to Kelly and her entire family!”

Trump neglected to mention that Knight Craft is Trump’s current Ambassador to Canada, so he’s just shuffling the players around again.

Knight Craft is perhaps best known for her science-denying remarks, saying she believes in “both sides” of climate change. (There are not two sides.

[vid]

Meanwhile, the President also neglected to mention Knight Craft, along with her billionaire coal baron husband, donated millions of dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign.

Ambassador to the United Nations is not the same as Ambassador to Canada. There are few national security issues America’s Ambassador to Canada would be relied upon to keep Americans safe.

But the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations holds a key national security role. They sit on the UN Security Council and represent the U.S. to the rest of the world.

There is no indication Knight Craft is qualified for the role.

Knight Craft does hail from Kentucky, where she has also been a major GOP donor, or, as one Canadian news publication described it, “Knight Craft is well known among Republicans, to whom she has donated piles of money.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, also of Kentucky, reportedly recommended her for the role of UN Ambassador.

McConnell is not the only member of his family greasing the wheels. This week Trump Transportation SecretaryElaine Chao, who happens to be married to the Senate Majority Leader, was embroiled in scandal.

Secretary Chao “has met at least 10 times with Kentucky business leaders or politicians after email requests made by her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY),” The Daily Beast reports.

“A cache of more than 800 emails—obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the watchdog group American Oversight—shows that some of thosemeetings led to McConnell’s associates being granted their wishes by the powerful Transportation Secretary—from infrastructure grants to highway project funding. In at least one example, the lobbyist had donated to McConnell’s re-election campaign.”

As a Republican U.S. House member from South Carolina, Mulvaney took over $62,000 from payday lenders. This week he gave a speech to the American Bankers Association and told them how his office operated.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” said Mulvaney. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Well, Mulvaney appears to have carried that policy, right into the nation’s most important consumer protection agency. In December 2017, Mulvaney abnegated his responsibility to protect consumers by deciding to indefinitely postpone the new payday lender rule.

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Departed Interior Sec. Zinke Under Investigation by DOJ

The Justice Department is looking into whether former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke lied to investigators at the Department of Interior, The Washington Post reports. Anonymous sources tell the Post that investigators at the Interior's inspector general's office raised the issue with the DOJ after suspecting Zinke may have lied during questioning over hisreal estate deals in Montana and his review of a Native American casino project in Connecticut.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-trump-devos-and-mulvaney-helped-banks-and-colleges-steal-students

Trump Administration hid a study documenting financial abuse of students by some banks working hands-in-glove with colleges, the latest example of how instead of “draining the swamp” Donald Trump is turning official Washington into a paradise for swamp monsters.

The suppressed fee gouging report was made by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB.

Students attending colleges which have marketing agreements with banks and other financial institutions paid much higher overdraft and account fees than students at schools with no such deals, the study found.

“Wells Fargo charged students the most of all those with college campus marketing agreements—an average of $46.99 per account per year, while banks without such deals charged students an average of $11.93 in fees,” Kate Berry of American Banker reported.

Some nonprofit credit unions also engaged in fee gouging. The University of Kentucky Federal Credit Union, for example, charged $37 per account annually, the study found.

One lender has charged $600 just to issue loan checks.

The Trump administration wants to kill the CFPB, as we have documented in nine previous DCReport articles. Lacking authority to do that, Team Trump has turned the bureau into a protection agency for the worst banking practices, damaging millions of consumers. Hiding findings of abusive practices and disloyalty to customers are key parts of this Trumpian strategy.

We know of the study only because it was mentioned last August in a scathing resignation letter by Seth Frotman, a CFPB assistant director and student loan ombudsman. Frotman accused Mick Mulvaney, who is Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget as well as acting director of the CFPB, of suppressing the report because it showed large banks knowingly ripped off students by charging high or inappropriate fees.

Frotman’s resignation letter charged that under Mulvaney the bureau was “shielding bad actors from scrutiny” while both undercutting enforcement of laws to protect consumers and undermining the bureau’s independence.

Referring to his extensive travels and especially his talks with military families who were conned by financial product sales agents,Frotman wrote that “American families need an independent consumer bureau to look out for them when lenders push products they know cannot be repaid, when banks and debt collectors conspire to abuse the courts and force families out of their homes and when students loan companies are allowed to drive millions of Americans to financial ruin with impunity.”

Mulvaney offered a cavalier response in a CNBC interview. Mulvaney said that he had never even heard of Frotman and had been told that while ombudsman Frotman never complained about the issues raised in his resignation letter. He avoided dealing with the substance of the issue—lender disloyalty to customers.

The study was pried loose by Allied Progress through the Freedom of Information Act, a nonprofit consumer watchdog created in 2015, during the Obama Administration, by Karl Frisch, a lifelong communications adviser for Democratic candidates and progressive organizations.

The fees in the study Mulvaney suppressed are modest compared to a test of student loan fees I made in 2008. The cost to a bank of sending a payment electronically is so minute that many banks charge nothing for the service.

After failing to get NelNet, a student loan servicer, to discuss its fees, I took out a Sallie Mae student loan for one of my children, an action I described in my 2012 book The Fine Print. NelNet divided the loan into two payments, one for each semester. It levied a $300 fee for the cost of issuing the first check. I repaid the loan immediately to avoid a second $300 charge.

Responsibility for protecting students from lenders falls to the CFPB under the law creating it. That law was sponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat whom Trump loathes. The duty to police colleges so they do not help banks abuse students falls to the federal Department of Education, where Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has repeatedly taken the side of bankers against the interests of students, as well as parents and grandparents who co-sign student loans. Some of her anti-student actions are detailed in It’s Even Worse Than You Think, my book about the Trump administration.

Hiding the study until it was flushed out using the 1966 Freedom of Information Act is just the latest example of how Trump has aggressively worked to do the opposite of what he promised in his inauguration speech:

“What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people… January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before. At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.”

A core finding of the suppressed report is that marketing deals between colleges and banks enrich the banks at the expense of students.

“The bureau and other government entities have expressed concern over the relationship between revenue sharing provisions in contracts and fees charged to student accountholders,” the report says. “These provisions raise questions about potential conflicts of interest, including whether revenue sharing encourages higher-fee financial products that crowd out competition from providers of accounts for which student accountholders” would pay less.

Bank representatives say the report is hooey.

The report found that 573 colleges had marketing agreements. About 1.3 million students paid $27.6 million in fees to 14 banks and credit unions in the 2016-17 academic year, the report states.

In a form of what is apparently a legal kickback, 116 colleges were paid $16.7 million by banks and credit unions to promote financial accounts in 2017, deals designed to capture young customers whose financial resources would be expected to grow over time. PNC Bank paid colleges $7.6 million, U.S. Bank paid $3.2 million and Wells Fargo paid $2.1 million.

Significantly, lower fees were paid by students at the 457 colleges which did not get kickbacks. The estimated 839,000 students at colleges without marketing agreements paid $11.93 on average in fees, compared with $36.52 for the 482,000 students who used accounts at colleges with marketing agreements.

These fees differences indicate there is no enforcement of a 2015 Obama era rule by the Education Department requiring colleges to exercise reasonable diligence to make sure that under marketing agreements with banks students pay fees “consistent with or below prevailing market rates.”

https://www.ecowatch.com/ryan-zinke-investigation-doj-2616779372.html

...These are the three investigations that might get Zinke in criminal trouble:

Grand Staircase Escalante: When Zinke redrew the boundaries of Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, he drew them around a piece of land belonging to a state lawmaker, prompting concerns that he was trading public lands for political favors.
Halliburton Deal: Zinke has met with Halliburton Chair David Lesar while in office and discussed a Montana real estate development owned by Lesar's son that might include a brewery that the Zinke's would run and could increase the value of land nearby owned by the Zinke's foundation. The DOI is involved with regulating Halliburton.
Connecticut Casino Controversy: Connecticut lawmakers asked for an investigation into Zinke's handling of a potential Native American casino project. He met with lobbyists opposed to the project, but refused to meet with proponents and may have given false information to the tribes involved.
...

aha related to dereg, sci suppress

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Thursday, Politico reported that Brock Long, President Donald Trump's administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), is under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General for potential improper use of government property.

Specifically, Long is accused of using government cars for personal weekend travel to his hometown of Hickory, North Carolina — which has drawn scrutiny from DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as well as the inspector general. Some sources say Nielsen even suggested Long resign, although others dispute this account.

Numerous Trump administration officials have been accused of improperly using taxpayer money and government resources for personal benefit. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned in disgrace amid reports he billed the government for personal travel aboard private and military planes, as did former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt after reports he used taxpayer resources to fly first class and chartered jets, hunt for rental properties, go to Disneyland and the Rose Bowl, vacation in Italy, and even try to get his wife a Chick-Fil-A franchise.

Also under scrutiny, but still in office, are Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who tried to purchase a $31,000 dining room set on a government account and lied about it, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who spent $139,000 upgrading doors in his office.

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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/24/exclusive-investigation-donald-trump-faces-foreign-donor-fundrai/

no links

Telegraph News

Exclusive investigation: Donald Trump faces foreign donor fundraising scandal

Investigations team

24 OCTOBER 2016• 8:10PM

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is facing a fundraising scandal after a Telegraph investigation exposed how key supporters were prepared to accept illicit donations from foreign backers.

Senior figures involved with the Great America PAC, one of the leading "independent" groups organising television advertisements and grassroots support for the Republican nominee, sought to channel $2 million from a Chinese donor into the campaign to elect the billionaire despite laws prohibiting donations from foreigners.

In return, undercover reporters purporting to represent the fictitious donor were assured that he would obtain “influence” if Mr Trump made it to the White House.

Last week Eric Beach, the PAC’s co-chairman, confirmed to the reporters at an event in Las Vegas that their client's support would be "remembered" if Mr Trump became president.

Eric Beach, co-chair of Great America PAC told undercover reporters that a fictitious Chinese donor would be "remembered" by Donald Trump CREDIT: THE TELEGRAPH

The disclosure raises questions about the origins of money being ploughed into supporting Mr Trump’s candidacy.

The PAC “consultant” who brokered the deal proposed using as a conduit a type of organisation he admitted is seen as being responsible for the “’dark money’ in politics”.

The revelations also highlight the apparent desperation of Mr Trump's supporters to finance the final weeks of his campaign amid a series of controversies and polls showing him losing in key states.

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Mr Trump once labelled Super PACs a “disaster” that have “total control of the candidates”, and has criticised Mrs Clinton for relying on outside groups.

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Undercover reporters posing as consultants acting for a Chinese benefactor approached specific pro-Trump and pro-Clinton fundraisers and groups after receiving information that individuals were involved in hiding foreign donations.

Sources also said PACs, “independent” organisations that can raise unlimited sums of money to lobby for or against particular candidates, were being used to circumvent rules.

The pro-Clinton organisations did not respond to initial approaches. But earlier this month an undercover reporter spoke by telephone to Eric Beach, co-chairman of the pro-Trump Great America PAC, which has the backing of Rudy Giuliani, one of Mr Trump’s most senior advisers, as well as the billionaire's son Eric.

Undercover reporters were invited to a Great America PAC event at Stoney's Rockin Country bar in Las Vegas

The reporter said a Chinese client wished to donate to the PAC to support Mr Trump's campaign.

Mr Beach appeared interested despite raising concerns about his nationality and saying he would need to know the donor’s identity.

He suggested the donation could be put through a social welfare organisation called a 501(c)(4) - or C4 - , which unlike a PAC is not subject to a blanket ban on receiving foreign money, and not required to name donors. He stressed in an email that "any path we recommend is legal".

The reporter then received an email from Jesse Benton, a senior figure at the PAC until being convicted in May in connection with buying a senator’s endorsement on a prior campaign. He said he was a “consultant” and that Mr Beach had not wanted a “paper trail” of contact. He and the PAC later denied that he had worked for it at all since May.

Mr Benton proposed channelling the donation through his own company to mask its origin. It would then be passed on to two C4s before being donated by them to the PAC, or simply used to fund projects the PAC had already planned.

Jesse Benton described himself as a "consultant" for Great America PAC CREDIT: THE TELEGRAPH

Mr Benton said the $2 million, for which he would submit an invoice for “appearances” would “definitely allow us to spend two million more dollars on digital and television advertising for Trump.” The Chinese benefactor's generosity would be “whispered into Mr Trump’s ear.” He said he had previously helped US donors conceal donations.

Mr Beach then said at the Vegas event last Wednesday: "Trump knows that you know, people have stuck with him … I’m not gonna twist your arm or anything, I just think that there’s no way that this group, and you guys have been participating indirectly or directly, won’t be remembered."

Eric Beach with Donald Trump in December 2015 CREDIT: FACEBOOK

Mr Benton denied any “unethical” behaviour. He claimed he spoke to the reporters after a “business referral” from Mr Beach and proposed a “public affairs contract” with his firm “having determined money could not go into a 501(c)4”.

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Dan Backer, counsel to the PAC, denied that Mr Beach asked Mr Benton to act for him and said Mr Benton “has not had a role with the PAC since May and does not speak for it”. The "professional referral" for "Mr Benton's own benefit" was so that "Mr Benton could explore legal options for your reporters' alleged client".

He continued: “Mr Benton has not solicited any contributions to the PAC that I am aware of, nor has he been asked to do so.”

He suggested Mr Benton had simply engaged in “puffery and self-promotion”, adding that “the conduct of the PAC and Mr. Beach’s conduct was appropriate, ethical and legal at all times.”

Mr Backer added that "The PAC has never ... solicited or accepted contributions from a foreign national or entity" and said Mr Beach had been suggesting how "a US company with a foreign parent company could potentially engage in legal political activity".

Asked if Mr Trump's campaign was aware of the scheme suggested by Mr Benton, his spokeswoman said: " We publicly disavowed this group back in April. This is public via Federal Election Commission filings.

How it unfolded: Pro-Trump fundraisers agree to accept illicit foreign donation

Taking to a podium in Colorado last week, Donald Trump resumed a line of attack he had long used against his opponent: “Her international donors control her every move”.

Yet fundraisers supporting his bid for the White House were in the process of finalising the details of a $2 million donation from a Chinese benefactor seeking unspecified future “influence” under a Trump presidency. Under US law it is illegal for a foreign national to make any contribution in connection with an election.

But when an undercover reporter telephoned Eric Beach, the co-chairman of the Great America PAC, one of the leading “independent” groups financing campaign work for Mr Trump, to convey his fictitious Chinese client’s desire to make such a donation, his approach did not appear unwelcome.

Eric Beach spoke to undercover reporters at a Great America PAC event in Las Vegas

In an initial call on October 4 the reporter explained that the benefactor wanted to donate to support Mr Trump’s campaign, “but he’s not a US national.”

Mr Beach agreed that making such a donation to the PAC could be difficult. But he did, however, have a suggestion involving a 501(c)(4) – a tax-exempt “social welfare organisation” – which he described as a “non-disclose entity” through which the client could make a contribution for a “specific purpose”.

You shouldn’t put any of this on paper

Jesse Benton

Mr Beach’s response, along with his later statements on the matter, appeared ambivalent for someone who was clearly aware of the ban on foreign nationals making donations in connection with US elections.

Despite warning about the need to know the origins of the money, he was already aware that the donor was a foreign national who would naturally be banned from donating for his stated purpose.

Political observers and campaign groups have raised concerns about 501(c)(4)s, labelling them “dark money” groups because, unlike PACs, they are not required to name donors.

A PAC with a “sister” 501(c)(4) could therefore encourage donors to give to that body. The 501(c)(4) could then contribute to the PAC, or simply spend the money on a project that the group would otherwise have funded.

That scheme was subsequently laid out to two reporters at a meeting in a New York hotel by Jesse Benton, a long-time Republican strategist, who emailed the reporter with the subject “From Eric Beach” and the opening line: “Eric Beach asked me to reach out”.

Great America PAC is a Donald Trump supporting super PAC CREDIT: REUTERS

Mr Benton was a senior figure at the PAC until he was convicted in May in connection with buying a senator’s endorsement for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2012.

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At the meeting on October 13, he explained that Mr Beach, 38, needed to maintain a “deliberate disengagement”.

Mr Benton's proposal was for the Chinese client to pay his $2 million, via the reporters’ Singapore-based communications consultancy, to Mr Benton’s own public affairs firm, Titan Strategies LLC, in order to mask the fact that the money was coming from abroad.

He set out the scheme in writing in an email on October 5 in which he said he had “checked with our attorney, and there is no prohibition on what I propose”, although “he is giving one final review for full legal vetting.”

At the meeting more than a week later, he explained how he would direct the funds evenly to two 501(c)(4)s which could donate the money to the Great America PAC in their name, or spend it on activities the PAC would otherwise have funded. One of the organisations was Vision for America, which is run by Mr Beach.

“I’ll send money from my company to both,” Mr Benton said.

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Undercover reporters met Eric Beach at a Great America PAC event held at Stoney's Rockin' Country bar in Las Vegas

Mr Benton said: “I don’t know if you ever hear journalists wring their hands about ‘dark money’ in politics - they’re talking about 501(c)(4)s.”

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He told the reporters: “There’s no prohibition against what we’re doing, but you could argue that the letter of the law says that it is originating from a foreign source and even though it can legally go into a 501(c)(4) then it shouldn’t be done”.

Discussing how the money would be spent on pro-Trump grassroots campaigning as well as television advertising, he warned: “You shouldn’t put any of this on paper.”

He suggested that the $2 million paid to his firm could be billed simply as “a large retainer” for consulting work. He then sent a $2 million invoice, for the sake of “appearances”, for his services providing “analysis of the American political and business landscape”.

In one of a series of telephone conversations over a two-week period, he explained that the work, which “doesn’t cost any money” apart from a “couple hours of my time” would be reports on the spending of the 501(c)(4)s and PAC.

“It would be one more way … for your client to have an assurance that quality work’s being done with his money. You know, it would give you a window into what the c4s and the super PAC are doing.”

Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump at the final debate in Las Vegas CREDIT: POOL

And the fictitious Chinese benefactor’s generosity would not go unrewarded should the donor a require a line of communication to Mr Trump if he became president.

“We can have that whispered into Mr Trump’s ear whenever your client feels it’s appropriate,” he said. After a telephone conversation with Mr Beach, Mr Benton said that the PAC wished to invite the reporters to a party the group was hosting in Vegas on October 19, the night of the final presidential debate.

He later passed on a briefing on the event prepared by Mr Beach. Mr Benton warned that he would have to stay away from Vegas because “everything that we’re doing is legal by the book but there’s perceptions and some grey areas.”

Jesse Benton speaking to undercover reporters in New York CREDIT: TELEGRAPH

Mr Beach also needed to be kept “deliberately ignorant” of the “exact arrangements”. But at the event the PAC's co-chairman clearly understood their client’s apparent request for an assurance that Mr Trump would remember his contribution.

“One thing he has to understand is, what you guys have to understand is: you can get credit, but don’t overdo it with the influence,” he said. The particular sticking point was the highly discreet method by which the client would be donating.

You’re going to get credit but your ‘non-disclosed’ [donation] is not disclosed. Not just for your benefit, but for everyone’s benefit.

Eric Beach, Great America PAC co-chair

“I would just manage your expectations, say: ‘you’re going to get credit but your ‘non-disclosed’ [donation] is not disclosed. Not just for your benefit, but for everyone’s benefit.’”

Then Mr Beach’s ambivalence, or possibly confusion, about the proposal appeared to return. “I would never let you guys give to the PAC, to give to the C4, because that’s illegal,” he added. “See the C4 is technically not illegal, but it’s not – it’s just not the best way to go.”

Lawrence Noble, who was general counsel at the US Federal Election Commission for 13 years and is now at the Campaign Legal Centre, a DC-based advocacy group, said: "If there is evidence that representatives of a super PAC were soliciting or knowingly accepting foreign national money and helping arrange for it to get into the super PAC through a 501(c)(4) organisation, then it should be investigated by the FEC and by the Department of Justice as a criminal violation."

Mr Benton denied any “unethical” behaviour and said he was not “an agent of Great America PAC”, while Dan Backer, counsel to the PAC said Mr Benton “has not had a role with the PAC since May and does not speak for it”. Mr Backer added that “the conduct of the PAC and Mr. Beach’s conduct was appropriate, ethical and legal at all times.”

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/all-presidents-men-major-newspapers-issue-stinging-condemnations-trumps-damning

With two of President Donald Trump's former aides — Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen — officially declared to be criminals in two separate courts in on Tuesday, the editorial boards at both the New York Times and the Washington Post offered devastating takes on the White House's greatly diminished moral and legal standing.

"Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a 'hoax' or 'scam' or 'rigged witch hunt,'" wrote the Times.

The Post declared: "For a president who had promised to hire only the best, the twin results represented a stunning rebuke."

It continued:

Throughout these prosecutions, Mr. Trump vacillated between distancing himself from Mr. Manafort (he worked for the president for only “a very short period of time”) and embracing him (he is “a very good person”). Similarly, Mr. Trump flipped from fury that Mr. Cohen’s offices were raided to claiming that he and Mr. Cohen were never all that close. This contradictory excuse-making should not distract from the fact that the president has staffed his campaign and administration with shady characters, fringe ideologues and other opportunistic hangers-on who would never have approached their high positions but for Mr. Trump’s lack of judgment.

The Times notes that Manafort's history, in particular, was deeply troubling at the time Trump hired him. He has worked for dictators and undemocratic leaders on the international stage. It notes that, in fact, Trump may have hired Manfort exactly for this experience, rather than despite this past.

The Post highlighted the fact that Cohen's indictment and guilty plea directly implicates the president. Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani has acknowledged that Cohen often made hush money payments on Trump's behalf to women, and Cohen has now said that on at least two instances, this violated campaign finance law. He has all that much more credibility because he said it under oath, and he will now face legal consequences for the admission.

But where does that leave us with Trump? On Wednesday, we'll all wake up, and he'll still be president, despite everything we've learned.

And yet the Times notes that Trump's attacks on the Russia investigation will ring particularly hollow: "For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say."

Meanwhile, the Postsays the ball is now in Congress' court, whether it likes it or not.

"Congress must open investigations into Mr. Trump’s role in the crime Mr. Cohen has admitted to," it writes. "It is far too soon to say where such inquiries would lead. But legislators cannot in good conscience ignore an alleged co-conspirator in the White House."

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/white-house-exempts-bill-shine-ethics-rules-so-he-can-keep-meeting-fox-news

Trump's lead lawyer claims it's in the "public interest" for communications director Bill Shine to be exempted from federal ethics rules, along with National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow.

The Daily Beast reports of Shine:

“The Administration has an interest in you interacting with Covered Organizations such as Fox News,” wrote White House counsel Don McGahn in a July 13 memo granting an ethics waivers to Shine, a former Fox executive. “[T]he need for your services outweighs the concern that a reasonable person may question the integrity of the White House Office’s programs and operations.”

The White House has granted a reported 20 waivers so far.

These waivers are part of a larger pattern that finds this White House emphasizing relationships with news media outlets that are friendly to Trump.

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no lnx/graphic/info

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/judicial-elections-citizens-united-karl-rove/

Is Your Judge for Sale?

Thanks to Karl Rove and Citizens United, judicial elections have been overtaken by secretive interest groups, nasty ads, and the constant hustle for campaign cash.

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ANDY KROLLNOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE

The 30-second TV spot is stark and brutal. First it shows the bespectacled face of candidate Louis Butler, then a grainy mug shot of an ex-con. “Louis Butler worked to put criminals on the street,” the narrator warns, “like Reuben Lee Mitchell, who raped an 11-year-old girl with learning disabilities.” After Mitchell’s release from prison, the narrator continues, he raped again. “Can Wisconsin families feel safe with Louis Butler?”

This attack ad wasn’t from a bitterly fought congressional race. It was from a 2008 campaign for state Supreme Court justice—a position that until recently was considered above the fray of partisan politics. Butler, the first African American Supreme Court justice in Wisconsin history,was defending his seat against a trial court judge whose campaign tactic recalled the GOP’s infamous Willie Horton hit job on Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. Long before ascending to his state’s highest court, Butler had been assigned as Reuben Lee Mitchell’s public defender—he wasn’t the judge in the case, as the nasty ad implied.

Butler’s opponent, Michael Gableman, had been showered with campaign donations from business leaders, who were keenly aware of Butler’s role in two decisions. One was a 4-3 ruling to strike down a $350,000 limit on so-called pain-and-suffering damages in malpractice suits. The other held that if an individual harmed by lead paint exposure couldn’t identify the producer, then multiple paint companies could be held liable under a legal theory known as “risk contribution.”

Read our graphical explainer on how dark money is taking over judicial elections.

While Butler’s and Gableman’s campaigns spent a combined total of $1.2 million on the race, outside groups aligned with the US Chamber of Commerce and the state’s labor unions spent $3.6 million, funding 89 percent of all the TV ads. Butler was the first sitting justice to get booted from the court in 40 years.

By 2011, with Wisconsin reeling from political battles over Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting agenda, the next Supreme Court race was equally ugly. This time it was conservative Justice David Prosserdefending his seat; a misleading ad from a partisan group backing his opponent claimed that Prosser, as a district attorney in 1978, had helped cover up sexual abuse of two young boys at the hands of a Catholic priest. (The abuse had only emerged years later; the victims called the ad “offensive, inaccurate, and out of context.”)

Although Prosser successfully defended his seat, he says that the election—which saw nearly$5 million in total campaign spending—poisoned relationships on the court. The tension boiled over weeks later, when Prosser and Ann Walsh Bradley, a liberal justice, engaged in an argument that got physical as four of their fellow justices looked on. Bradley claimed Prosser choked her, while Prosser said he raised his hands in self-defense as Bradley charged at him. In police interviews, two conservative justices sided with Prosser, and two liberal justices with Bradley. Investigations by the county sheriff, the local DA, and a special independent prosecutor all cleared Prosser of any wrongdoing, but the controversy still festers. When I spoke with Prosser in September, written in chalk on the sidewalk outside the state Capitol was an invitation to visit him for “free chokes.”

“They wanted to make sure we were punished for our decision and that other judges witnessed that,” says former Iowa Supreme Court Justice Marsha Ternus.

Bitter, costly judicial elections are by no means unique to Wisconsin. These days, as more candidates for the bench face rough contests—buffeted increasingly by outside money, thanks to the US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United—state judges around the country often raise six- and seven-figure sums, mount statewide campaigns, and fend off attack ads from groups that don’t disclose their donors. This trend has escalated over the last decade and a half as partisan groups realize that donating to judges can get them more influence, for less money, than bankrolling legislative campaigns.After all, the donors often end up with business before the very judges they are helping elect.

These are also the judges that most citizens who interact with the system have to face. Can Americans still trust in getting their fair day in court?

Court cases that make big news are usually in the federal system, where most judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Yet the vast majority of justice is done at the state level, where more than 100 million cases are filed annually (versus about 400,000 in federal courts). The nation’s approximately 30,000 state court judges vastly outnumber their federal counterparts, and 85 percent of them will stand in at least one election during their career.

No two states pick their judges exactly the same way. Some hold partisan judicial elections, others have nonpartisan elections, and still others use merit selection—that’s when legal experts select a short list of qualified candidates, the governor appoints one to the bench, and that judge later stands in a retention election.

The system has its roots in the Panic of 1837, a mini-depression fueled by rampant cronyism and massive overspending by corrupt governors and legislatures. Partisan elections replaced the tradition of elected officials appointing their friends to the bench, but for decades connections and loyalty still mattered most, with party bosses determining who won. Eventually states embraced nonpartisan elections and merit selection, and for most of the 20th century, judicial elections were a little-noticed corner of American politics.

Still, on occasion a contentious race attracted national attention. In 1977, Rose Birdbecame the first woman appointed to the California Supreme Court and its first female chief justice. An avowed foe of capital punishment, she voted to vacate all 61 death penalty verdicts that came before her, prompting Republican Gov. George Deukmejian to label her a “soft-on-crime liberal.” With Bird up for retention in 1986, oil and agribusiness companies, which generally saw Bird’s liberal views as a threat to their interests, poured more than $5.6 million into a campaign that would unseat her. It was an early glimpse of a reliable strategy for big business: Using the soft-on-crime theme to oust judges considered unfriendly to corporations.

Around that time, a political consultant by the name of Karl Rove was plotting his own assault on the Texas Supreme Court. Rove had helped launch the “tort wars” in response to what some Republicans saw as a court system too cozy with trial lawyers and too eager to slam corporations with hefty judgments that Rove had dubbed “junk lawsuits.”

Running on the slogan “Clean Slate ’88,” conservative candidates backed by Rove’s operation won five of the six open seats on the Texas Supreme Court. Not long after, Rove teamed up with the Business Council of Alabama to engineer a similar Republican takeover in that state.

Direct spending on supreme court races, 2000-14

Two years later, the US Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of an aggressive new president named Tom Donohue, picked up on Rove’s strategy. Pledging to “play hardball” against “frivolous” lawsuits, the Chamber spent $10 million on judicial races in 2000 alone. It pumped $4.4 million into Ohio’s Supreme Court election—the largest expenditure from a single source on a court race in US history. In the following years, the Chamber injected tens of millions into races in Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, and Wisconsin. Corporate America had grasped the potential to install friendly judges who could crack down on costly class actions and neutralize the efforts of consumer advocates. “We’re clearly engaged in hand-to-hand combat,” as Donohue put it, “and we’ve got to step it up if we’re going to survive.”

Unions spent millions on these races as well—particularly across the Upper Midwest, as labor leaders recognized they could get a great return on investment by backing justices sympathetic to workers’ rights. As an official with the Ohio AFL-CIO once said: “We figured out a long time ago that it’s easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.”

A major showdown came in 2004, in West Virginia’s Supreme Court election.Don Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy, donated $3 million to Republican candidate Brent Benjamin. Meanwhile, a nonprofit funded primarily by Massey Energy ran TV ads accusing incumbent Justice Warren McGraw of getting a child rapist out of prison and into a job at a high school. After Benjamin won, the investment paid off big time: He later cast the deciding vote to overturn a lower court’s $50 million verdict against Massey Energy. Two years later, the US Supreme Court ruled that Benjamin should have recused himself. It overturned the decision and sent the case back to West Virginia. (Massey Energy ultimately prevailed in state court.)

Corporate interests also reaped a huge return on investment in the 2004 Supreme Court election in Illinois. Five years earlier, a jury had handed down a $1.19 billion penalty to the insurance company State Farm for requiring millions of claimants to accept subpar replacement auto parts. State Farm and its employees—working through the US Chamber, the Illinois Republican Party, and an Illinois-based tort reform group—steered $4 million to elect a sympathetic judge named Lloyd Karmeier to the Supreme Court, which was considering State Farm’s appeal of the auto parts verdict. Karmeier, his opponent, and various outside groups spent a record $9.3 million on the race. Karmeier, who would later acknowledge that the sum was “obscene,” won easily. And the millions State Farm spent were a pittance compared with what it gained: The next year, Karmeier cast the deciding vote to overturn the more than $1 billion verdict against State Farm.

Up to this point, the big spenders were mostly targeting contested judicial elections—ones in which a candidate challenged a sitting justice. Then came the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Varnum v. Brien, in which the seven justices unanimously ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the state constitution. Social-conservative groups leapt into action, targeting three of the seven justices who were up for retention election—ones where voters only check “yes” or “no.” The National Organization for Marriage and its allies spent nearly $1 million and defeated all three. “They wanted to make sure we were punished for our decision and that other judges witnessed that so they wouldn’t do it either,” former Justice Marsha Ternus told me.

The strategy of turning sleepy retention elections into political showdowns has been spreading. In Florida’s 2012 retention elections, theKoch-backed Americans for Prosperityand the Republican Party of Florida spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to unseat three sitting justices. A group called Defend Justice From Politics spent $3.1 million on the justices’ behalf, helping them prevail. In Michigan in 2012, two anonymously funded nonprofits, the Judicial Crisis Network and Americans for Job Security, poured $2.1 million into attack ads against five judges on Michigan’s 6th Circuit Court, though the judges won out. And earlier this year,Tennessee’s lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, took it upon himself to spearhead an effort to unseat three sitting state Supreme Court justices—and, along with them, the attorney general, who is appointed by the court. Ramsey’s PAC pumped $425,000 into a group running negative ads that blasted the three justices as “liberal on crime”and for “helping advance Obamacare.”Funds were also contributed by Americans for Prosperity and the GOP’s State Government Leadership Foundation, which said it planned to spend an additional $5 million in 2014 on judicial races in North Carolina, Tennessee, and elsewhere.

Though the three Tennessee justices prevailed in the end, one of them, Connie Clark, told me she’s concerned about the precedent set by the fight. “As long as there are no limits on outside money,” she says, “then this will become the new normal.”

The transformation of judicial campaigns has alarmed another veteran of the court system. “Judicial elections pose a serious threat,” former US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told Mother Jones. “If judicial decisions are in fact not fair and impartial—or even if they are perceived as being biased—the basis of support for our courts crumbles.”

Initially, the 2011-12 election season—the first full cycle since Citizens United—saw a modest dip in overall reported spending on state judicial races, compared to four years earlier. But that is likely because much of the new spending does not have to be disclosed or tracked. This year, for example, Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee announced a “major new effort” to educate the public about the “liberal records” of the three justices—and not a penny of that spending was reported to the state. The outside spending on judicial races that we do know about rose to a record-high $24.9 million—a nearly sevenfold increase since 2000, and now accounting for 40 percent of the total spending on these campaigns.

Direct vs. outside judicial spending (in 2014 dollars)

Recent research suggests this flood of political money could be influencing judges’ decisions. Emory University analyzed 2,345 state supreme court decisions from all 50 states between 2010 and 2012 and concluded that the more campaign money justices received from business interests, the more likely they were to vote in favor of businesses appearing before them. (Interestingly, the study found a stronger tie between business donations and Democratic justices’ decisions. Republican justices, it speculated, were already more favorably inclined toward business interests, so the campaign money didn’t make as much of a difference.) Another analysis, by the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, suggested that as more money was spent on soft-on-crime attack ads in campaigns, justices were increasingly siding with the prosecution.

The public may be starting to catch on: A 2013 poll by Justice at Stake, a nonprofit group focused on reforming the system, found that 87 percent of Americans believe that campaign donations could influence court rulings. “You can’t expect judges to act like Huey Long on the campaign trail and expect them to be Solomon in the courtroom,” says Bert Brandenburg, the group’s executive director.

A case pending before the US Supreme Court could inject even more politics into judicial races. In Lanell Williams-Yulee v. the Florida Bar, a county-level judge wants the nation’s high court to strike down laws in 30 states blocking judges from personally asking donors for campaign cash. In those states, treasurers and fundraising consultants typically make the ask on behalf of a judicial candidate. Only nine states currently allow judges to solicit donations directly for their campaigns, but in those states, “the road to victory begins with the solicitation of money,” Wallace Jefferson, the former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, has written. “The ‘ask’ is undignified, and the ‘give’ is fairly compelled.” For those fighting to insulate judges from electoral politics, the elimination of the fundraising ban would be yet another step in the wrong direction.

Some researchers dispute the notion that rough-and-tumble judicial elections are a problem. One recent Michigan State University study of supreme court races concluded that attack ads did not hurt incumbents in partisan elections. Other studies found that nonpartisan elections are less likely to draw a challenger, are less competitive even when there is a challenger, and attract fewer voters than partisan elections do.

The debate boils down to a fundamental notion: whether the judicial branch of government is unique from the other two and should be insulated from politics. With court integrity hanging in the balance, should judges be chosen the same way we pick presidents and members of Congress?

Randy Shepard, who served as the chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court for 25 years, retired from the court in 2012 as the longest-serving state chief justice in American history. A lifelong Republican in a red state, Shepard has gone through the merit selection process and run in multiple elections. “What’s at stake in these big-money elections is the promise of due process and an impartial court,” he told me. “Do I as a citizen walk into that courtroom standing on a relatively level playing field?”

He offered up a hypothetical from a law review article he wrote that, he proudly noted, was cited by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy in the Massey Energy case—the one where the high court ruled that a judge who’d received massive campaign contributions connected to a company had to recuse himself from a case involving that company. “Say you’re going before a trial judge making a decision about the custody of your grandchildren, and your evil son-in-law or daughter-in-law had made a very large contribution to the judge. How would you feel about that? You wouldn’t feel very optimistic, would you?”

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inhofe rolls on pru

Chair of Senate Environment Panel to Call Scott Pruitt to Testify on Scandals

The Republican chairman of the Senate committee with oversight of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to call the agency's embattled chief Scott Pruitt to testify, specifically in response to multiple scandals and investigations surrounding the administrator.

Through a spokesperson, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., informed Reuters of his decision to compel Pruitt to come before the Environment and Public Works Committee to answer questions about his alleged abuse of his office.

...

wapo

Scott Pruitt last year had a top aide help contact Republican donors who might offer his wife a job, eventually securing her a position at a conservative political group that has backed him for years, according to multiple individuals familiar with the matter.

The job hunt included Pruitt’s approaching wealthy party supporters and conservative figures with ties to the Trump administration. The individuals said he enlisted Samantha Dravis, then serving as associate administrator for the EPA’s Office of Policy, to line up work for his wife.

And when one donor, Doug Deason, said he could not hire Marlyn Pruitt because of a conflict of interest, Pruitt continued to solicit his help in trying to find other possibilities.

A spokesman for the Judicial Crisis Network confirmed Tuesday that it employed the onetime school nurse “temporarily as an independent contractor,” but it did not disclose via email how long she worked there or what she was paid. The spokesman said the position came about after the group received her résumé from Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society. The two organizations have financial ties.

Leo is a prominent Pruitt backer and longtime friend who was involved in arrangements for the administrator’s visit to Italy last year. Taxpayers spent more than $100,000 on the trip, which included private tours of the Vatican and meals at some of Rome’s finest restaurants.

Marlyn Pruitt left the JCN earlier this year, the spokesman said, adding that the group was pleased with her work. But the search and hiring raises more ethics questions about Scott Pruitt’s use of EPA staff as well as his contacts with GOP contributors and outside allies for his personal benefit. Federal ethics rules prohibit public officials from using their posts for private gain or receiving free services or other gifts from their subordinates

...

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https://theconversation.com/epa-staff-say-the-trump-administration-is-changing-their-mission-from-protecting-human-health-and-the-environment-to-protecting-industry-96256

reg capture

Environmental Protection Agency made news recently for excluding reporters from a “summit” meeting on chemical contamination in drinking water. Episodes like this are symptoms of a larger problem: an ongoing, broad-scale takeover of the agency by industries it regulates.

We are social scientists with interests in environmental health, environmental justice and inequality and democracy. We recently published a study, conducted under the auspices of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative and based on interviews with 45 current and retired EPA employees, which concludes that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration have steered the agency to the verge of what scholars call “regulatory capture.”

By this we mean that they are aggressively reorganizing the EPA to promote interests of regulated industries, at the expense of its official mission to “protect human health and the environment.”

...

for a while seemed like he mcgahn had integrity, eg threat to quit when djt wanted to fire ppl, but: cult corrupt:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/superfund-task-force-led-lawyer-spills

AP) — A lawyer tapped to lead a task force at the Environmental Protection Agency overseeing cleanups at the nation’s most polluted places worked until recently for a top chemical and plastics manufacturer with a troubled legacy of creating some of those toxic sites.

Steven D. Cook has been named as the new chair of the Superfund Task Force, which EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt created last year to revamp how the agency oversees cleanups at the more than 1,300 toxic sites.

Before beginning work in February as deputy assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management, Cook served more than 20 years as in-house corporate counsel for LyondellBasell Industries — one of the world’s largest plastics, chemicals and refining companies.

EPA records show that LyondellBasell and its subsidiaries are listed as being potentially responsible for at least three dozen Superfund polluted sites.

An analysis by The Associated Press shows that nearly half the political appointees hired at EPA under President Donald Trump have industry ties. Of more than 60 EPA hires tracked by the AP over the last year, about one-third worked as registered lobbyists or lawyers for chemical manufacturers, fossil fuel producers or other EPA-regulated companies.

Trump promised as a presidential candidate to drain the swamp in Washington. An executive order signed two weeks after his inauguration bars former lobbyists and corporate lawyers from participating in any matter they worked on for private clients within two years of going to work for the government.

Following a request by AP, EPA provided a copy of an April 20 memo Cook signed recusing himself from participating in regulatory matters involving LyondellBasell. However, as stated in the letter, Cook can participate in matters affecting his former employer as long as his actions would also impact at least five similarly situated companies.

“All EPA employees receive ethics briefings when they start and continually work with our ethics office regarding any potential conflicts they may encounter while employed here,” said Lincoln Ferguson, an EPA spokesman. “Steven Cook is no different.”

It was not immediately clear whether Cook would be allowed to participate in decisions involving LyondellBasell, anyway. AP reported in March that White House counsel Don McGahn has issued at least 37 ethics waivers to key administration officials, including three working at EPA, that allow them to help regulate the very industries from which they previously collected paychecks even after signing recusals. It was not clear whether Cook was granted a waiver, and Ferguson did not respond to AP’s inquiries on the subject.

am 1st

another question from February, as shown in the above screenshot from one of the group's reports, respondents were reminded that large companies had given out employee bonuses before they were asked if they agreed with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's comment that worker bonuses were "crumbs" compared with corporate windfalls. The results were surprising: A plurality of voters agreed with Pelosi, despite the lopsided question. This would suggest that for Republicans, using the "crumbs" comment as an attack line against Democrats in 2018 campaigns, which Trump has suggested they do, may not be a good idea.

Over the past six months, CNBC monitored America First Policies' website and found hundreds of pages of polling and research paid for by donors whose names are permitted to be kept secret. Much of this polling has since been removed from the site, but a portion of the removed documents are still available online.

America First Policies is not the first nonprofit group created to advance a president's priorities, nor is it the first to conduct intensive polling. Two Obama-linked groups, Priorities USA and Organizing for Action, did the same thing. Priorities USA did not disclose its donors, but OFA did voluntarily, releasing quarterly donor lists.

But by hiring the Trump campaign's pollsters to conduct such a large and secretive Trump-focused data operation, and paying for it with dark money, America First Policies is going well beyond what previous outside nonprofit groups have done.

While a political committee such as the RNC is designed and expected to collect information that helps to win elections, a nonprofit group such as America First Policies — permitted to operate tax-free and accept unlimited donations from donors whose names can be kept secret — is not.

"So you have a situation where large donors are contributing to America First Policies with the understanding that their secret donations are going to be seen as valuable by the president, because this group appears to work so closely with the White House," said Campaign Legal Center's Fischer. "And because these donors are secret, the public and Congress will never know if the White House later took action to advance a donor's interests."

In addition to a slew of senior advisors with ties to Trump, America First Policies has three board members, all of whom are also close to the Trump White House. Its chairman, Tommy Hicks Jr., is the son of a billionaire and a good friend of Donald Trump Jr. He has also reportedly brokered White House introductions for companies seeking business with the Trump administration.

Another board member, Dallas financial executive Roy Bailey, serves as managing director and founding partner of Giuliani Partners LLC, along with former New York City mayor and longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. The newest board member is Harold Hamm, a shale oil billionaire who was Trump's top pick for energy secretary but reportedly turned down the job.

USA Today and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

During his first year in office, Trump and White House staff promoted the Trump brand on at least 35 different occasions.
At least 11 foreign governments paid Trump-owned companies and at least six foreign government officials visited Trump Organization properties.
Political groups spent more than $1.2 million at Trump properties (compared to less than $100,000 in any previous year), and Trump sold $35 million in real estate in 2017, mostly to secretive buyers.

Not only is Trump continuing to profit from his companies -- it’s almost certain that he’s using his position to further enrich himself and his family.

And now, Trump has been summoned to appear in court after Attorneys General for Maryland and Washington, D.C. sued him alleging violations of the Emoluments Clauses!

...Pruitt has recently come under fire for a number of scandals, including a decision to significantly raise the salaries of two close EPA political appointees. The salaries of Sarah Greenwalt and Millan Hupp — who had both come to Washington with Pruitt from Oklahoma — were raised from $107,435 to $164,200, and from $86,460 to $114,590, respectively, The Atlantic reported.

Pruitt denied knowledge of the raises in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, and said the appropriate person who had signed off on the raises would be dealt with.

The EPA head has also weathered a storm of controversy involving his living arrangements, as well as a number of questionable decisions he has made at the agency.

Last week, ABC News first reported that Pruitt rented a two-bedroom condo on Capitol Hill for $50 each night he slept there. Pruitt’s daughter also lived for a period of time in the condo, which was owned by the wife of a prominent energy lobbyist. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that the EPA considered leasing a private jet for Pruitt for $100,000 a month.

...

Pipeline Backed by Pruitt's Oil Lobbyist Landlord Approved While EPA Chief Was Receiving Sweetheart Rent

"This is what happens when you put an oil industry shill in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt answers reporters' questions during a briefing at the White House June 2, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

As EPA chief and reigning number one seed in the "worst Trump cabinet member" bracket Scott Pruitt attempts to beat back accusations that he violated ethics rules by renting a room from the wife of powerful energy lobbyist J. Steven Hart, the New York Times revealed late Monday that Pruitt approved a massive pipeline project supported by Hart's firm at the same time he had access to what critics argue was an unusually low-priced rental.

"A giant pipeline that rips up a vast swath of America and wrecks the climate in exchange for a cheap condo. Seems the perfect emblem of the Trump years."

—Bill McKibben, 350.org"A giant pipeline that rips up a vast swath of America and wrecks the climate in exchange for a cheap condo," 350.org founder Bill McKibben tweeted in response to the new report. "Seems the perfect emblem of the Trump years."

While EPA officials immediately pushed back against the notion that Pruitt approved the project as a favor in exchange for the cheap condo, government ethics experts argued that the pipeline approval at the very least gives off the appearance of a conflict of interest.

"Entering into this arrangement causes a reasonable person to question the integrity of the EPA decision," Don Fox, who served as general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, told the Times.

During an appearance on MSNBC on Monday, former White House ethics official and vice-chairman at Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) Richard Painter called Pruitt's room rental "disgusting" and argued it is a clear "violation of the gift rule."

Pruitt's decision to sign off on the project—an expansion of Enbridge's Alberta Clipper pipeline, which runs from Alberta, Canada to Wisconsin—came in March of last year, when his lease with the Washington, D.C. condo was still in effect.

"The signoff by the EPA came even though the agency, at the end of the Obama administration, had moved to fine Enbridge $61 million in connection with a 2010 pipeline episode that sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan and other waterways," the Times reported. "The fine was the second-largest in the history of the Clean Water Act, behind the penalty imposed after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico."

In response to the new revelations, government watchdogs immediately demanded a probe into the project's approval process.

The Times report comes as Pruitt is currently under investigation by the White House over what critics have denounced as a "sweetheart" living arrangement. Pruitt, like other members of President Donald Trump's cabinet, has also come under fire for his expensive first-class flying habits.

"This is what happens when you put an oil industry shill in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency."

—Josh Nelson, CREDO ActionAccording to a Politico report late Monday, White House chief of staff John Kelly has floated the possibility of firing Pruitt in the coming months.

One possible reason Kelly hasn't followed through, some White House officials and lobbyists told Politico, is because Pruitt has been extremely effective in carrying out Trump's aggressive anti-environment agenda.

"I think he's an A student....He's always working. He's always focused on the agenda. He's always trying to figure out ways to make the boss look good," energy lobbyist Mike McKenna said in an interview with Politico on Monday.

An example of Pruitt's dedication to dismantling even the most basic planetary protections came Monday afternoon, when the EPA chief officially announced that he is rolling back Obama-era fuel efficiency standards.

"This is what happens when you put an oil industry shill in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency," CREDO Action co-director Josh Nelson said in a statement on Monday. "No one should be surprised that Scott Pruitt, who literally rented his condo from an energy industry lobbyist, habitually puts corporate polluters ahead of the American people."

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frack api wrote rules

http://extras.denverpost.com/oil-gas-deaths/

Clling the vast oil and gas reserves in Colorado is a dangerous job. Oil and gas companies say they work hard to educate their employees about job hazards and promise to keep their workers safe.

“If there are areas where we need to improve, you can be damn sure we’re going to do it,” said Eric Wohlschlegel, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, a pro-industry trade organization.

“I’m pretty confident that the oil and gas industry probably does some of the best work on safety.”

But a year-long Denver Post investigation shows that there is little consequence when companies let that promise lapse.

A national legacy of encouraging oil and gas development — for energy security, for jobs, for the economy — has created a regulatory vacuum.There is an entire federal agency devoted to mining safety, for instance, but nothing comparable exists for oil and gas. While OSHA has created specific safety standards that companies in other industries must follow, oil and gas businesses successfully beat back such regulations for themselves.The standards — recommendations, really — that OSHA mostly uses to judge safety violations on oil and gas worksites were written by the American Petroleum Institute.

Debate about the industry in Colorado typically focuses on its environmental toll or its potential threat to public health.

Meanwhile, 1,333 workers died in the nation’s oil and gas fields between 2003 and 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The nationwide death toll in 2014 of 144 was the highest in more than a decade. By another measurement — the number of worker deaths per active drilling rig — 2014 was the second-most lethal year in Colorado in a decade, according to a Denver Post analysis. There was about one death per every 12 rigs that year.

Oil and gas worker fatalities by rig count

According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there were 51 deaths in Colorado related to the oil and gas industry from 2003 to 2014. Because of worker privacy issues, the BLS would not release years for all of those deaths. Nationally, 1,333 oil and gas workers were killed in the same 12-year time frame.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inside-trump-circus-corruption

“Trump, Inc.” wherever you get your podcasts.

Last month, the committee that ran President Donald Trump’s inaugural festivities released basic details about its revenues and spending. Trump raised $107 million, almost twice the previous record, and spent $104 million. The committee’s tax filing showed that $26 million of the spending went to an event planning firm started in December by a friend of the first lady.

It’s not clear how the firm spent that money, or how most of the money raised for the inauguration was used. The tax filing doesn’t show spending by subcontractors, nor is it required to do so.

In this week’s episode of “Trump, Inc.,” we dig into the inauguration. We’ve found that even experienced inaugural planners are baffled by the Trump committee’s massive fundraising and spending operation. We also noticed that two members of the inaugural committee have been convicted of financial crimes, and a third — the committee’s treasurer — was reportedly an unindicted co-conspirator in an accounting fraud.

https://www.alternet.org/drugs/drug-companies-are-funding-investigational-studies-influence-their-results

Remember how appalled we felt as a society when we discovered that, for so long, we had been mistakenly taking Big Tobacco’s word that cigarettes are harmless? Rinse and repeat with lobbyists for Big Alcohol fear-mongering about legal weed. And again and again with a panoply of consumer-level commodities and goods.

Nowadays we have all these familiar worries, but about our drugs and medications instead. It’s become so bad that there's now reason to believe Big Pharma is also colluding to poison the well of scientific inquiry.

The truth is, there are many examples of private industry paying for positive press from the scientific community. When you look closer at our spending priorities as a nation, it’s not entirely difficult to see why. As public funding for the sciences has fallen away, many scientists have had to pivot toward more consistent—and ethically fraught—sources of funding and stability as surely as politicians who, for want of public election funding, get buoyed by billionaires at $100,000-per-plate fundraising dinners.

We’ll take a look at case studies in a moment, but for right now, think about how important it is for us to be able to trust, at a minimum level, the products we invite into our bodies and our homes.

It’s become common knowledge that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt out there. This is a serious affront to justice that has gone on for far too long. The fight for consumer protections of all kinds can and must begin with health care, medicines, prescription drugs and medical devices. Here are the stakes.

The Erosion of Trust

In 2006, GlaxoSmithKline—the esoteric name for a ubiquitous diabetes treatment brand—took a victory lap after a lengthy report in the New England Journal of Medicine declared its Avandia medication to be the most effective of the three diabetes drugs tested.

Unfortunately for readers and patients, the extent of the report’s bias was not as attention-grabbing as the headline and ensuing celebratory press releases. In fact, with the help of the FDA and renowned heart specialist Steven Nissen, the Washington Post found that GlaxoSmithKline directly funded the research itself. All 11 of the paper's authors had received consultation fees, grants or another form of monetary compensation.

There may be no clearer example of conflicts of interest in the halls of science. Given the degree to which private money may have influenced the result of this scientific endeavor, we have little choice but to assume it did.

Even worse? The drug didn’t merely fail to help patients cope with their illnesses, it actually raised their risk of heart attack. Avandia effectively doesn’t exist anymore in the U.S., in part because GlaxoSmithKline was so busy trying to force two logical dots to connect that it didn’t even pick up on all the collateral damage.

This is outrageous. Consumers shouldn’t have to second-guess the medical professionals who are supposed to help us take care of ourselves.

The Fall of Accountable Science

Between 2011 and 2012, the New England Journal of Medicine published more than 70 “original studies” of newly FDA-approved and experimental drugs. Of these 70-plus reports:

Up until about the 1980s, the federal government was the primary financier of scientific research in the world of medicine. In the '60s and '70s, the federal government had a 70 percent share of scientific research. In 2013, that number finally dropped below the 50 percent mark.Sixty received direct pharmaceutical company funding.
Fifty were written or co-written by a current employee of a pharmaceutical company.
Thirty-seven had lead writers who had, at some point, received speaking fees or other compensation from the subject of the study.

As you may have guessed, there is at least token legal oversight available for clinical investigations of new drugs in the form of FDA regulation. In addition to protecting the personal information of trial participants (patients), the FDA also maintains that no drug may reach the investigation phase until its effects—and its lack of harm—have both been documented in a lab setting. As you can likely tell, these protections no longer appear adequate.

It has become an open secret that most of the drugs the FDA concerns itself with cannot be relied upon to greatly outperform placebos, or existing treatments, in a vast majority of cases. Moreover, the wholesale regulatory capture of the FDA has resulted in a situation where this vital public office serves as a glorified rubber patent stamp for protecting medicines as privately owned, profit-generating pieces of intellectual property.

The American People Are No Longer in Control of Their Scientific Destiny

A generation or so ago, the skill with which a nation pursued and made use of scientific knowledge was one of the chief metrics of its greatness.However, starting in the 1980s, the United States took a decided turn away from public sector expansion. Reagan-era policies aimed to privatize government services in the name of balancing local and state budgets.Since then, the world has watched as Americans have continued to vote accountable government and transparent scientific study nearly out of existence by proponents of “small government” and the shifting of fiscal, bureaucratic and legislative power from the public to the private sector.

When corporatists boast of the rate of innovation in the private sector, they generally fail to mention where the money came from that makes all that innovation possible—or what America used to do with it instead. In truth, privatization does not necessarily lead to less government, as its proponents would like to believe. In many cases of privatized innovation, the government still plays a significant role along the value chain of innovation.

The difference, though, is that instead of the government being involved for the sake of oversight and accountability, profit-seeking privatized enterprises can lobby for the expansion of public funding just the same as those in the public sector would. Those private companies can then skim off only the most successful ventures. It’s simply another example of how the government continues to turn a blind eye to unethical, profit-mongering business practices in the name of “trickle down economics,” which we know have not worked in the past.

However, the winds of change seem to be shifting. For all our present social and political turmoil, we’re more aware of the problem than ever before. But before we can fix it, we must remember science is, like any other endeavor, a human institution.

Like a passionate grade-school teacher who can’t do her best work due to a lack of school funding, scientists of all stripes are, after all, human beings with their own biases, internal monologues, ideas, agendas and needs. Science is one of the most vitally important institutions we have right now. Most Americans say it’s very nearly the only thing that matters in the face of global, anthropocentric climate change, but it’s currently perishing from neglect.

Here is the silver lining: Though junk science seems to have a stubborn place in the spotlight and in our shared vocabulary, scientists are actively trying to turn the tables. Inspired in part by the fallout from the 2016 election, American scientists are seeking political office at a brisk clip—and being vocal about it, too.

Additionally, it seems that we are finally collectively beginning to wake up to the enormous disservices that Big Pharma has done our society. Throwing our support behind scientist-politicians could be one aid to the problem, but we also need to address the bigger issues at hand with how our medical knowledge is funded and who we can trust to provide us with real answers to medical questions.

Government oversight and funding are important aspects of that, and improved transparency regarding where we’re getting our “science” is something people are finally starting to advocate for, and should continue to. With this two-part awakening in both the scientific and general community, we can only hope that we are, at last, reaching the end of the road for scientific illiteracy in the States.

Kate Harveston

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/top-10-signs-us-most-corrupt-nation-world-2018-edn

Those ratings that castigate Afghanistan and some other poor countries as hopelessly “corrupt” always imply that the United States is not corrupt. This year’s report from Transparency International puts the US on a par with Austria, which is ridiculous. All kinds of people from politicians to businessmen would go to jail in Austria today if they engaged in practices that are quite common in the US.

While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $18 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.

A sure sign of corruption is an electoral outcome like 2016. An addled nonentity like Donald Trump got filthy rich via tax loopholes a predatory behavior in his casinos and other businesses, and then was permitted to buy the presidency with his own money. He was given billions of dollars in free campaign time every evening on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other channels that should have been more even-handed, because they were in search of advertising dollars and Trump was a good draw. Then, too, the way the Supreme Court got rid of campaign finance reform and allowed open, unlimited secret buying of elections is the height of corruption. The permitting of massive black money in our elections was taken advantage of by the Russian Federation, which, having hopelessly corrupted its own presidential elections, managed to further corrupt the American ones, as well. Once ensconced in power, Trump Inc. has taken advantage of the power of White House to engage in a wide range of corrupt practices, including an attempt to sell visas to wealthy Chinese and the promotion of the Trump brand as part of diplomacy.

The rich are well placed to bribe our politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. The Koch brothers and other mega-rich troglodytes explicitly told Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in 2017 that if the Republican Party, controlling all three branches of government, could not lower taxes on its main sponsors, there would be no billionaire backing of the party in the 2018 midterms. This threat of an electoral firing squad made the hundreds of bribe-takers in Congress sit up and take notice, and they duly gave away to the billionaire class $1.5 trillion in government services (that’s what Federal taxes are, folks, services–roads, schools, health inspections, implementation of anti-pollution laws–things that everyone benefits from and which won’t be there any more. To the extent that the government will try to continue to provide those slashed services despite assessing no taxes on the people with the money to pay for them, it will run up an enormous budget deficit and weaken the dollar, which is a form of inflation in the imported goods sector. Inflation hits the poor the worst. As it stands, 3 American billionaires are worth, as much as the bottom 150 million Americans. That kind of wealth inequality hasn’t been seen in the US since the age of the robber barons in the nineteenth century. Both eras are marked by extreme corruption.

One sign of American corruption is the rapidity with which American society has become more unequal since the 1980s Reagan destruction of the progressive income tax. The wealthier the top 1 percent is, the more politicians it can buy to gather up even more of the country’s wealth. In my lifetime the top one percent has gone from holding 25% of the privately held wealth under Eisenhower to 38% today.

Instead of having short, publicly-funded political campaigns with limited and/or free advertising (as a number of Western European countries do), the US has long political campaigns in which candidates are dunned big bucks for advertising. They are therefore forced to spend much of their time fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes. All American politicians are basically on the take, though many are honorable people. They are forced into it by the system. The campaign season should be shortened to 3 months (did we really need 2 years to get an outcome in which a fool like Trump is president?), and Congress should pass a law that winners of primaries don’t have to pay for political ads on tv and radio.

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French police actually went into his private residence searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit campaign contributions from the L’Oreale heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush took millions from arms manufacturers and then ginned up a war for them, and the police haven’t been anywhere near his house.

American politicians don’t represent “the people.” With a few honorable exceptions, they represent the 1%. American democracy is being corrupted out of existence.

Money and corruption have seeped so far into our media system that people can with a straight face assert that scientists aren’t sure human carbon emissions are causing global warming. Fox Cable News is among the more corrupt institutions in American society, purveying outright lies for the benefit of the fossil fuels billionaire class. The US is so corrupt that it is resisting the obvious urgency to slash carbon production. Virtually the entire Republican Party resists the firm consensus of all respected scientists in the world and the firm consensus of everybody else in the world save for a few denialists in English-speaking countries. This resistance to an urgent and dangerous reality comes about because they are bribed to take this stance. Even Qatar, its economy based on natural gas, freely admits the challenge of human-induced climate change. American politicians like Jim Inhofe are openly ridiculed when they travel to Europe for their know-nothingism on climate.

That politicians can be bribed to reduce regulation of industries like banking (what is called “regulatory capture”) means that they will be so bribed. Scott Pruitt, a Manchurian candidate from Big Oil, has single-handedly demolished the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of polluting industry. This assault on the health of American citizens on behalf of vampirical corporations is the height of corruption.

The US military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next twelve major states. What isn’t usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside. Precisely because it is a cesspool of large-scale corruption, Trump’s budget will throw over $100 billion extra taxpayer dollars at it.

The US has a vast gulag of 2.2 million prisoners in jail and penitentiary. There is an increasing tendency for prisons to be privatized, and this tendency is corrupting the system. It is wrong for people to profit from putting and keeping human beings behind bars. This troubling trend is made all the more troubling by the move to give extra-long sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole and to imprison people for life for e,g, three small thefts.

The National Security Agency’s domestic spying was a form of corruption in itself, and lends itself to corruption. With some 4 million government employees and private contractors engaged in this surveillance, it is highly unlikely that various forms of insider trading and other corrupt practices are not being committed. If you knew who Warren Buffett and George Soros were calling every day, that alone could make you a killing. The American political class wouldn’t have defended this indefensible invasion of citizens’ privacy so vigorously if someone somewhere weren’t making money on it.

10. Asset forfeiture in the ‘drug war’ is corrupting police departments and the judiciary. Although some state legislatures are dialing this corrupt practice back, it is widespread and a danger to the constitution.9. As for insider trading, it turns out Congress undid much of the law it hastily passed forbidding members, rather belatedly, to engage in insider trading (buying and selling stock based on their privileged knowledge of future government policy). That this practice only became an issue recently is another sign of how corrupt the system is.

So don’t tell the global South how corrupt they are for taking a few petty bribes. Americans are not seen as corrupt because we only deal in the big denominations. Steal $2 trillion and you aren’t corrupt, you’re respectable.

Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and maintains the blog Informed Comment.

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Trump’s corruption is unparalleled in the history of the presidency.

Here are the facts, according to USA Today and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: During his first year in office, Trump and White House staff promoted the Trump brand on at least 35 different occasions. At least eleven foreign governments paid Trump-owned companies and at least six foreign government officials visited Trump Organization properties. Political groups spent more than $1.2 million at Trump properties (compared to less than $100,000 in any previous year). And Trump sold $35 million in real estate in 2017, mostly to secretive buyers.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trumps-inauguration-donations-are-still-missing-one-year-later-report

Almost one year after President Donald Trump took the oath of office, millions of dollars from his leftover inauguration funds have still not been donated to the charities they were promised to.

Trump's inauguration committee raised a record-breaking $107 million as his administration prepared to assume the White House last year, but very little has been disclosed about where the remaining money was allocated. Nearing the one-year anniversary of Trump's inauguration, a government watchdog group is questioning why the funds disappeared, and a congressman is proposing legislation to keep future administrations from obscuring their own inaugural donations.

The organizing committee led by billionaire investor Thomas Barrack doubled the funds raised by any previous U.S. president during Trump's transition period. The money raised eyebrows among political operatives because there was nothing about the celebration that indicated it would exceed a more traditional price tag, according to the liberal-leaning consumer rights advocacy group, Public Citizen.

For the group's government affairs lobbyist, Craig Holman, this has raised one key question that remains unanswered on the cusp of Trump's inaugural anniversary: where did the extra money go?

"It really raises a lot of suspicions that these funds were mismanaged and probably no longer even exist," Holman told NewsweekWednesday. "I strongly suspect that the funds have just been wasted away. I mean, there was no reason in the world the Trump Inaugural Committee needed to raise $107 million."

The inauguration tab is split between several groups: the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, the U.S. federal government, state and local governments, as well as the Presidential Inaugural Committee. The latter group traditionally collects funds from private donors to finance inaugural balls, a concert and private dinners where a hefty donation often secures a seat at the table.

After funding Trump's celebration, the committee said it was evaluating charities that would receive the remaining money. In late September, the committee announced that it had donated $3 million to multiple groups involved in hurricane relief efforts in the Gulf Coast, Florida and the Caribbean. An undetermined amount of funds were allocated to redecorating the White House and Vice President Mike Pence's home in Washington, rather than charitable efforts.

Barrack, chairman of the private Presidential Inaugural Committee, said details about the committee’s donations to charity would be released in November. Yet the deadline passed without further financial information being disclosed. A spokesman for Barrack declined to comment on the report's delay or allegations that the committee mismanaged funds under his leadership.

The President's Inaugural Committee is required to disclose total donations to the Federal Election Commission, but there is no mandate that the committee publicly disclose where the money is spent.

Representative Kurt Schrader, a Democrat from Oregon, intends to introduce legislation that would change that. He wants to require future inaugural committees to submit public disclosure reports on how the privately collected dollars are spent. He told Newsweek that it is "wildly unacceptable" that there are no laws to regulate how money raised under the president's name can or cannot be spent.

"There needs to be transparency and accountability for money raised or spent in the name of our elected offices," Schrader told Newsweek in a statement. "The American people expect and deserve more, and working on this should be an easy, bipartisan slam dunk that everyone can get behind.”

Such measures have never been necessary before, Holman said. Most committees for previous administrations raised only enough money to finance the presidential inaugural festivities. Former President Barack Obama's first inauguration committee in 2009 raised $55 million while his second committee raised $43 million in 2013. Before that, former President George W. Bush raised $42.3 million in 2005.

"We’ve never had an inaugural committee that just went hog wild and raised $107 million and had a huge surplus leftover," Holman told Newsweek."There are no rules set up for how this money should be spent. It may not be illegal, but it certainly reeks of gross mismanagement and possibly political opportunism."

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