dc report johnson

<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">neglected but the man does fine work</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/mitch-mcconnell-re-election/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/mitch-mcconnell-re-election/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">many maps tables</font></div><div><b>Busted? Why the numbers behind Mitch McConnell's re-election don't add up</b></div><div>Mitch McConnell slammed for repeatedly sabotaging stimulus negotiation efforts</div><div>Meaghan Ellis</div><div>DC Report December 19, 2020</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>On a Thursday in August in Louisville, months before the 2020 election, a parade of cars filled with Kentucky Teamster representatives and labor groups, showed their fury at Mitch McConnell's constant blocking of critical COVID aid. They drove by McConnell's office raucously honking and bearing signs saying "Mitch better have my money."</div><div>
</div><div>In 2017, a Public Policy Polling Survey asked Kentuckians, "Do you approve or disapprove of Senator Mitch McConnell's job performance?" Only 18% approved. He clawed his rating back up to 39% on the eve of the election.</div><div>
</div><div>McConnell, leader of Senate Republicans, rarely holds town hall meetings with Kentucky voters—not since a heated exchange with an angry constituent went viral.</div><div>
</div><div>1 out of 5 voters appear to have filled out their ballots with votes for both the female Democratic Amy McGrath and the Republican pussy-grabber Donald Trump.</div><div>So, what exactly drove these angry Kentuckians to reelect Mitch McConnell with a 19-point advantage over opponent Amy McGrath—57.8% to 38.2%?</div><div>
</div><div><b>Even as Republicans across the country still insist that the election was rife with fraudulent Democratic votes, no one's asking how McConnell managed one of the most lopsided landslides of the Nov. 3 election. They should. An investigation of Kentucky voting results by DCReport raises significant questions about the vote tallies in McConnell's state.</b></div><div>
</div><div><b>McConnell racked up huge vote leads in traditionally Democratic strongholds, including counties that he had never before carried.</b></div><div>There were wide, unexplained discrepancies between the vote counts for presidential candidates and down-ballot candidates.</div><div>Significant anomalies exist in the state's voter records. Forty percent of the state's counties carry more voters on their rolls than voting-age citizens.</div><div>Kentucky and many other states using vote tabulation machines made by&nbsp;<b>Election Systems & Software all reported down-ballot race results at significant odds with pre-election polls.</b></div><div>[caption id="attachment_21747" align="aligncenter" width="625"] The 2020 Kentucky U.S. Senate election results map[/caption]</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DCReport focused on the results in three counties in eastern Kentucky's Appalachian Mountains, two of which Democrats usually always win, but similar patterns emerge in other counties across the state. Even in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Democrats as recently as the 2019 gubernatorial election, there were a staggering number of Democrats voting Republican in 2020.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>In rural Breathitt County, for instance, there are 9,508 registered Democrats and just 1,599 registered Republicans. The county has a history of close contests, but Amy McGrath got only 1,652 votes versus 3,738 for McConnell, a 67% to 29% trouncing. McGrath's votes, if accurate, equaled only 17% of registered Democrats in Breathitt County.</b></div><div>
</div><div>Conventional political wisdom in McConnell-land holds that these days "ancestral Kentucky Democrats" vote Republican, and analysts shouldn't correlate party registration with voting patterns. But simply dismissing any anomalies based on anecdotal hearsay ignores the data and other possible explanations. McConnell won Breathitt County in 2020 with 1,308 more votes than he received in the county's much closer 2014 race, which he won by fewer than 400 votes. The 2019 governor's race was also a squeaker in Breathitt County, but Democrat Andy Beshear eked out a 69-vote victory. Beshear won the race statewide.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div><b>McConnell's results were even more out of whack in two other nearby Appalachian counties</b>. In his six previous Senate elections, Elliott and Wolfe counties had never voted for McConnell. Even up to last year, Elliott County remained reliably Democratic in non-presidential races, voting for the party's entire Democratic slate in both the 2015 and 2019 statewide elections. Yet in 2020, McConnell won 64% of the votes in Wolfe County and 66% of the votes in Elliott County. McGrath only got 21% of registered Democrats in Wolfe and 20% in Elliott.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Next, take the premise that there would be some basic logic in the voting patterns of those who did vote Democratic. One might expect a registered Democrat, who's going to vote Democratic, would walk into the booth and cast their vote for both Joe Biden and Amy McGrath. But the data tell another story. In 119 of 120 counties, Amy McGrath got more votes than Joe Biden. In some counties, the votes were close. But in counties like Breathitt and Elliott, 1 out of 5 voters appear to have filled out their ballots with votes for both the female Democratic Amy McGrath and the Republican pussy-grabber Donald Trump.</span></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Then there is the question of why a county like Breathitt has more registered voters than it has people of voting age? 2019 population data shows that Breathitt County had 12,630 people with approximately 23% below the voting age of 18. This means approximately 9,700 people are of voting age, yet there are 11,497 registered voters. Having 100% of the voting-age population registered would be astounding enough, but Breathitt County appears to have almost 120% more registered voters than age-eligible citizens. And looking further, it appears this is not limited to Breathitt.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>In November 2017, Judicial Watch, a right-wing non-partisan foundation promoting transparency, sued Kentucky over its "Dirty Voter Rolls" and its failure to maintain accurate voter registration lists.&nbsp;</b>The suit argued that 48 of the 120 Kentucky counties had more registered voters than citizens over the age of 18 and alleged that Kentucky was one of only three states with a statewide active registration rate greater than 100% of the age-eligible citizen population. Kentucky's inflated voter rolls, and lack of transparency, provide a perfect cover for malfeasant behavior regarding the election results</span>.</div><div>
</div><div>Turning an 18% approval into a 58% win may seem like a "turning water into wine"-style miracle, but a "smoke & mirrors" parlor trick seems more likely. To better understand how the data could have been manipulated, look no further than Trump's own legal filings. In an incompetent post-election lawsuit, the Trump team may have intended to accuse Democrats of election fraud, but in describing a possible plot, they attributed the cheating to Trump himself.</div><div>
</div><div>In a Dec. 4 filing in Georgia, Trump's legal team referred to a "machine-controlled algorithm deliberately run" by a voting machine vendor, Dominion Voting Systems. They allege this algorithm "generally took more than 2.5% of the votes from Mr. Biden and flipped them to Mr. Trump." So Trump's own legal team, instead of providing evidence of fraud by Biden's side, may have inadvertently revealed fraud benefiting Trump. In describing a deliberate, vendor installed, machine-controlled algorithm automatically taking a percentage of Biden's votes and giving them to Trump, they certainly are outlining how fraud could have been executed.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Trump's team claims Dominion was the machine vendor embedding algorithms to "flip" votes but is Trump pointing to one machine vendor to distract from another?</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In Kentucky, when looking at counties where the numbers leap out on behalf of Mitch McConnell, none used Dominion machines. Most used machines from Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a Dominion competitor. If you swap ES&S for Dominion in the alleged vote-flipping scheme, you may arrive at an alternate explanation for why Amy McGrath's numbers weren't lining up and correlating with Biden's.</span></div><div>
</div><div>To steal an election it may make sense to use different algorithms for each race on the ballot so results did not appear to be uniform. Knowing the McGrath-McConnell race faced more nationwide scrutiny, schemers might have had to miscount votes by different margins in the presidential and Senate races. Flipping more votes from Biden to Trump than McGrath votes to McConnell would explain her getting approximately 20% more votes than the Democratic presidential candidate.</div><div>
</div><div>Significantly, Trump and his post-election legal team have pointed at Dominion voting machines and implored courts to look into this automated vote-flipping premise—but only in states that he lost. So, let's test it in ES&S states like Kentucky where Trump won.</div><div>
</div><div><b>McConnell had his biggest percentage of registered Democrats voting Republican in counties using ES&S machines. But he wasn't the only senator to perform so well. Other Republican incumbents, whom polls indicated would have close races, had similar luck to their majority leader on election day.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Lindsey Graham's race in South Carolina was so tight that he infamously begged for money, yet he won with a comfortable 10% lead—tabulated on ES&S machines throughout the state. In Susan Collins's Maine, where she never had a lead in a poll after July 2, almost every ballot was fed through ES&S machines. Kentucky, South Carolina, Maine, Texas, Iowa and Florida are all states that use ES&S machines. Maybe the polls didn't actually get it wrong.</span></div><div>
</div><div>When Trump says "look over here" at Dominion voting machines, maybe we should look at ES&S machines instead. When Republicans spout unfounded claims that Democrats stole the election, maybe we should be looking at Republican vote totals instead. And when Trump calls this the most fraudulent election in our history, maybe he knows of what he speaks.</div><div>
</div><div>You can follow Alison Greene on Twitter @GrassrootsSpeak.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>John Oliver breaks down how Dems can bring the pain to Mitch ... ›</div><div>McConnell's re-election campaign slapped with FEC flag over ... ›</div><div>Mitch McConnell is leaving endangered Republican senators ... ›</div><div>McConnell advances another Trump judge as COVID relief bill remains unfinished: 'His top priority' - Alternet.org ›</div><div>'It isn't even really a stimulus': Economists lament paltry $600 checks to citizens - Alternet.org ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>Senator Mitch McConnell reelected to 7th term in Kentucky - CBS ... ›</div><div>Republican Mitch McConnell defeats Democrat Amy McGrath in ... ›</div><div>Mitch McConnell - Wikipedia ›</div><div>Why Amy McGrath could cost Republicans the U.S. Senate, even if ... ›</div><div>Mitch McConnell wins reelection in Kentucky, defeating Democrat ... ›</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among the many challenges Joe Biden's administration will have to confront after Donald Trump ends his temper tantrum is deciding what posture to take toward big business.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There will be a battle for the soul of the new president as corporate Democrats vie with progressives to influence policy in areas such as regulation and antitrust.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Initial signs are encouraging.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Biden transition just released a&nbsp;<a href="https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJwlkE2OwyAMhU9Tdo2AgaRZsJjNXCPix0mZJpCCaZXbjzOVLPH0LPvhz1uEJZfD7LkiaxXKFINRo7qpnjNSQdz0jcU6zQVgs3E1WBqwvbk1eosxp3Ng0FqN7G4G0HMYvHOcj8M898oNENzYkxDjoGZ2xky2hQjJg4EXlCMnYKu5I-718vV9kT9UrsU1OOsfDhChdD5v5OIdrlhsqvHMJcMutOa4FnhFeF8R7FbJZdFILrkQQkopRi070W2P13PD9OTr70XxbZFdba4iJZy7WTHBl5wf1CMBey7Y5bKcZ07U31qKeEyQrFshfAjgB9n_QXjsYBK86_r_3Y9JWE52QveaUVjIRC-ZEAuGuCxQKj1Q8Q-bEocD" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">list</a>&nbsp;of some 500 individuals who will be staffing the Agency Review Teams charged with preparing the way for a transfer of power in all parts of the executive branch.</font></p><blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">Most of the people are from academia, state government, law firms, non-profits, unions, think tanks and foundations.
</font></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Surveying the list of affiliations, I found only about 20 for large corporations. Most of the people are from academia, state government, law firms, non-profits, unions, think tanks and foundations.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is likely some of the law firms are there to represent specific corporate interests, but the numerous representatives from progressive public interest, environmental and labor groups should serve as an effective counterweight.</font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unions in Labor Department</font></h3><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the Labor Department list there are no law firms or corporations; in their place are representatives from five different unions along with people from the National Employment Law Project and other progressive groups.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What is particularly significant is the near absence of people affiliated with Wall Street banks.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Defense Department list has someone from JPMorgan Chase; Homeland Security has a representative from Capital One; and the International Development group includes someone from U.S. Bank. There is no one from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo or Morgan Stanley.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Treasury Department group is led by someone from Keybank, which is based in Cleveland and ranks about 29th among U.S. banks. Fortunately, the Treasury group also includes representatives from places such as the Center for American Progress, the American Economic Liberties Project and the AFL-CIO.</font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmentalists at EPA</font></h3><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other balancing acts include the list for the Environmental Protection Agency, which includes a representative from Dell Technologies but also from Earthjustice (the lead person) and The Sierra Club.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some of the corporations show up in surprising places. Walt Disney is represented on the Intelligence Community list. The cosmetics firm Estee Lauder has someone on the State Department list. Someone from Airbnb is in the National Security Council group.</font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tech Companies at OMB</font></h3><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Looking at current corporate villains, the one that stands out is Amazon.com. It shows up on two lists—the one for the State Department and the one for the Office of Management and Budget.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lyft and Airbnb are also on the OMB list, along with some academics, a consultant, state officials and someone from Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe-based non-profit that produces immersive art experiences.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Given that OMB oversees regulatory policy, the absence of public interest, union and environmental people raises a concern. Otherwise, it appears that the Biden team is limiting corporate influence in the emerging administration.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Let's hope it stays that way.</font></p><div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</font></div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><li class="from-your-siteitem"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/amp/trump-defeat-2648880103-2648880103" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Why Trump's downfall is a serious blow for the global right-wing ... ›</a></font></font></font></font></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/mike-pompeo-transition/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">World leaders urged to refuse to meet with Mike Pompeo after he ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/white-house-transition-staffer-refusing-to-sign-letter-that-begins-transfer-of-power-report/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">White House transition staffer refusing to sign letter that begins ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/white-house-quietly-working-by-the-book-for-biden-transition-but-it-could-go-sideways-if-trump-finds-out/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">White House quietly working 'by the book' for Biden transition — but&nbsp;</a></li></ul></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">an 1020 post hosp&nbsp;<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>"we will beat this together" bold</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That letter is the drugs talking. The powerful steroids Trump was given can make you rage with emotions and feel invincible for a time. I know because it happened to me a dozen years ago, a terrible side effect that afflicts some people given steroids for sound medical reasons.</span></font></div><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump draws crowds because the majority of Americans have real economic grievances, as I've written about for decades including</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dcreport.org/?s=income+rich+Table+1.4&search_button=Search" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">these recent DCReport pieces</a>. Indeed, Trump ran for office using many of the phrases he heard me say on television about how Washington policies hurt 90% of Americans.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While he pledged in his&nbsp;<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">inaugural address</a>&nbsp;that "the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer" his actions documented by DCReport show that he never gave them a thought.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.dcreport.org/?s=income+rich+Table+1.4&search_button=Search">https://www.dcreport.org/?s=income+rich+Table+1.4&search_button=Search</a></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">inequal tax cheat...</font></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/real-tax-reform-never-had-a-chance-under-trump-and-this-gop/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/real-tax-reform-never-had-a-chance-under-trump-and-this-gop/</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">the wake of the New York Times' revelation that Donald Trump paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years, some of his staunch supporters are saying, "Well, wasn't he just doing what our tax laws allow?"</span></font></div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We may never entirely know whether he followed or broke the law because Republicans in Congress have so thoroughly&nbsp;<a href="https://itep.org/gop-legacy-on-irs-administration-auditing-mississippi-not-microsoft/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">gutted</a>&nbsp;the IRS that the agency seems&nbsp;<a href="https://itep.org/congressional-budget-office-confirms-that-irs-budget-cuts-lose-money-and-benefit-the-rich/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">incapable</a>&nbsp;of catching up with wealthy investors like Trump.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Congress is certainly to blame both for providing a ridiculously lenient tax code for the super-wealthy and for preventing the IRS from enforcing even the existing weak limits in the law on tax avoidance.</font></p><blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">One person is primarily responsible for the farce that is Donald Trump's tax dodging, and that is Donald Trump.
</font></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But make no mistake, one person is primarily responsible for the farce that is Donald Trump's tax dodging, and that is Donald Trump. For years, he has actively and loudly supported special tax breaks and tax shelters, making him anything but a passive bystander to their creation.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Many tax experts look to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 as a model of loophole-closing, simplifying tax reform (even if it failed to raise needed revenue). But in 1991, Donald Trump&nbsp;<a href="https://itep.org/new-itep-report-explains-how-tax-reform-should-eliminate-breaks-for-real-estate-investors-like-trump/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">testified</a>&nbsp;before a congressional committee that "this tax act was just an absolute catastrophe for the country and for the real estate industry." He called it "the 1986 catastrophe of the Tax Reform Act."</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump criticized the very notion of simplifying the tax code by eliminating special breaks. "They thought the word tax shelter was a bad thing," he complained of congressional tax writers, "as opposed to saying it's an investment in real estate."</b></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">In 1993, Trump and the real estate industry convinced Congress to revive some of those breaks.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">So, it is no surprise that when Trump became president and led the first major rewrite of the tax code in decades, the result was the opposite of a simplified tax system free of special breaks and loopholes.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(With one exception—see a&nbsp;<a href="https://itep.org/a-2017-tax-provision-could-have-restrained-trumps-tax-dodging-but-congress-just-weakened-it" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">related blog post</a>&nbsp;on the one thing in the 2017 tax law that could have limited Trump's tax dodging and how Congress has already reversed it.)</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Here are some types of special breaks available to real estate investors, which we explained in an&nbsp;<a href="https://itep.org/how-true-tax-reform-would-eliminate-breaks-for-real-estate-investors-like-donald-trump/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">ITEP report</a>&nbsp;that the 2017 tax law did not touch.</font></p><h4 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, real estate investors can use losses more easily than other taxpayers to reduce their tax bills.</font></h4><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump regularly reports losses that likely exceed any investment of his own money into business ventures. Investors in other types of business are subject to stricter rules barring them from claiming losses that exceed what they really invested—what they have "at risk." But real estate is subject to looser rules to determine what constitutes "at risk" or a "passive loss."</font></p><h4 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Second, real estate investors can defer reporting capital gains and other income more easily than other taxpayers can.</font></h4><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Usually whenever an investor sells an asset at a profit, it is a capital gain subject to income tax. But real estate investors who can afford sophisticated tax planning can arrange to trade an appreciated property for another property and avoid reporting income to the IRS because, technically, no sale occurred. The Times&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/business/jared-kushner-taxes.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">reported</a>&nbsp;two years ago that Jared Kushner's family uses this tactic and the Trump Organization likely does as well.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These "like-kind" exchanges are just one of the methods that are available to major real estate investors to defer reporting profits. The 2017 tax law eliminated like-kind exchanges—except for real estate.</font></p><h4 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Third, real estate investors can more easily avoid reporting debt forgiveness as income.</font></h4><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In general, forgiveness of debt is considered income that is subject to income tax. Without such a rule, the income tax would be very easy to avoid. For example, workers could ask their employers to change their compensation to loans that are later forgiven, so that their compensation would not be subject to income tax.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But major real estate investors can achieve this result because the rules for debt forgiveness are less strict for them. The new Times revelations about Trump touch upon this, explaining that the "I.R.S. considers forgiven debt to be income, but Mr. Trump was able to avoid taxes on much of that money by reducing his ability to declare future business losses."</font></p><h4 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fourth, real estate investors benefit from depreciation deductions when the value of their property is climbing.</font></h4><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Owners of assets can claim deductions for depreciation, which is supposed to reflect the fact that assets wear out and lose their value over time. Investors in real estate can depreciate buildings they own even though they sometimes then sell them at a profit, reflecting the fact that their value increased rather than fell.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The benefit of this would be limited to a degree if the rules ensured that profits reflecting amounts already depreciated were taxed at "ordinary" income tax rates rather than a special, low capital gains tax rate, as is the case today.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Times report does point out that many of Trump's properties would be running at a loss even aside from depreciation deductions. On top of all the tax breaks for wealthy real estate investors, Trump is also just a terrible businessperson who does generate real losses on most ventures he is involved in.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But he also benefits from a tax code that has allowed him to live like a billionaire without paying any taxes in most years and he actively worked, both before and during his presidency, to ensure that the tax code continues to allow this. In hindsight, it obvious the real tax reform never had a chance under this president.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy is a non-profit, non-partisan tax policy organization that conducts rigorous analyses of tax and economic proposals and provides data-driven recommendations on how to shape equitable and sustainable tax systems. Steve Wamhoff is ITEP's director of federal tax policy.</font></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-30-2020/">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-30-2020/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>CCJ DCR</b> narco guy // djt, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">emials says 2nd civ war already started, get guns</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">this email for patriot only your donor t</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">profile says exclus <b>trump army</b>, ID w/ pres 1st line of defense when comes to fighting off the liberal mob camo hat</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-administration-keeps-hiring-companies-with-histories-of-ripping-off-our-government/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-administration-keeps-hiring-companies-with-histories-of-ripping-off-our-government/</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">phil m</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">you needed a plumber or a caterer, you would avoid a service provider who had in the past tried to bill you for work not performed or grossly overcharged for what was completed. The Trump Administration takes a different approach</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. In selecting contractors to provide the goods and services the federal government needs to deal with the pandemic, it has turned to dozens of corporations with a history of cheating Uncle Sam.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This finding emerges from a comparison of the&nbsp;<a href="https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJwlkEFrwzAMhX9NfUtIHCd1Dj6MjsJOgx12DU6spF4dO8hyS_79nBYEeugh9PRNmmAJuKstRGIpAg7WKNELKbqKZWVq2Upm4zAjwKqtU4QJ2JZGZydNNvhj4dy2omc31XBZ9SMXnRBza9oOOinnsWv6sWn7DiQ7zgw6GQt-AgUPwD14YE7diLZ4aj5O_JrLaNLlFB7WRLJrcik-NU23MuCS3Q3DgnrN6goGULviEjyhnigW1-QNmGLci8v379dnUffFDzgL88uJzCpe8arq6zOvuWzasi5zpL_VhRbRnUS1LryMaYykp3uOsDJUZsIQ7tnLAraAdOQ4EAzZX5O3tA_g9ejAvOnQG-frWdo3UB6e0QER4HuYkXEhatlxlm-ZkMF6ZSySscsCGHODSP-9t49K" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">recipients</a>&nbsp;of coronavirus-related contracts to the data in&nbsp;<a href="https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJwlUMuOgzAM_JrmtghCUuCQw172N1BIXJo2xMgxRfz9BipZ8mj8GHucZZiRDrNiZrFloDF4owbVq3stCvJNr3sR8vgggMWGaJg2EOs2xeAsB0znQKe1GsTTaO310PUge9V2nRtADv7Ctm6ld504ZUa7-QDJgYEP0IEJRDRP5jXf2t-b_Cux73s1I_oXTvkRKHOFNBf-EzBeoj9M1r2BRDCylnU9NJ1sZN_qqqmKxGuJqIniTdXLLKu8TZlLf-VwEWS8I8R3qRUAK9K1_XxpLPVlS4GPEZKdIvjvt_y15zqejxVMgj1HYC4HXGSxQCrV9HcpipbHYlQyPhD7MM9AuSTI_A8Zx38v" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Violation Tracker</a>. The analysis focuses on a list of about 175 larger corporations and non-profits that account for nearly half of the roughly $12 billion in contracts awarded so far for laboratory services, medical equipment and much more.</b></font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.7;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">These are not trivial matters. Twelve of the contractors paid total penalties of more than $100 million and the average per parent company was $27 million.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.7;"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.7;"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">among this group,<b> 69 contractors, or more than one-third of the total, have paid fines and settlements during the past decade for healthcare fraud and other violations relating to the federal False Claims Act or related laws. They have been involved in 189 individual cases with total penalty payments of $4.7 billion.</b></font></span></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These are not trivial matters. Twelve of the contractors paid total penalties of more than $100 million and the average per parent company was $27 million.</font></p><div class="alt_ad_block true_ad_free story-page-in-content-graph-4" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="alt_ad_msg" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 10px 0px; padding: 10px; background: rgb(234, 234, 234);"><div class="header" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 5px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;">AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER</div></div></div><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Overcharging Healthcare Programs</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The company with the largest penalty total is pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which received a $13 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services and whose separate COVID-19 vaccine effort is being touted by the Trump Administration. Over the past decade, Pfizer has been penalized in 15 contracting cases, paying out a total of $987 million, most of it stemming from a&nbsp;<a href="https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxNUEGOgzAMfE1zA5EQChxy2Mt-A4XE0HRDjBzTFfv6Tds9rGTJ1ozt0YyzDCvSaXbMLI4MNAVv9KgHfW1EmbwcukGEPC0EsNkQDdMBYj_mGJzlgOl50HedHsXNDNKq5up771utl260qpV-mOU4gmzV3IunzGQPHyA5MPAAOjGBiObGvOdL-3FRn6UeAePrOZN1X0D1iujvOOclUOYaaf2_VP1tFazal_ADVIXkKiWCUY1qmlH2Sqqh7WpZF_37FrEjihfdbKuq8zFnLve1w02Q8Y4QvwpXBtiRXmpPv1PhtyMFPidIdo7g31HwO7uXMz53MAm-cwRmoDdY8lFay-GqRNHyWFJMxgdiH9YVKJcGmX8BmGmJ8A" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">2016 lawsuit</a>&nbsp;in which its subsidiary Wyeth had been accused of overcharging federal healthcare programs by misrepresenting its financial relationships with hospitals.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Drug wholesaler McKesson,</b> which has been awarded contracts worth a total of $9 million, has paid penalties of $453 million to resolve&nbsp;<a href="https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxNUEGOwyAMfE25NUoI0PTAYS_7jSgBN6UlcWScrvL7dZs9rITMaMaM8YSBYULa_YqF1VaA-hS9uZrOuFoJik1nO5VKfyOAeUjZM22g1m3MKQyccHk_uFhrrurunYvOGTvcjDYhGqnNpe2EiSDFOvUe0w9bTLAE8PAC2nEBlf2deS2n9uukv-W8EuaPOdMQnkDVhBgfOJZbosIV0vS_6fzXJdx5FlCKcAFpRTr0WiWva13X1-aiG921tmoq-cljzmiJ8snU86Srso2FxakKOCvyMRDiUzQBIF6fue_Ne9HnbUm897AMY4Z4hMJHip8deV_BL_BTMjADHaQkpY1pOqeVzIooeS4-JuKYpgmoyAWFfwH4i423" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">allegations</a>&nbsp;such as reporting inflated pricing information for a large number of products, causing Medicaid to overpay for those drugs.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dispensing Unneeded Insulin Pens</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Walgreens pharmacy chain, which received a $72 million contract for COVID-19 testing services, has paid $367 million in contracting penalties, three-quarters of which stemmed from a&nbsp;<a href="https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxNkEuOwjAMhk9Ddq2a0EBZZMFmrlHl4ZZAGleOC-rtJ8AsRrJky6_f_rxlmJF2s2JhsRWgMQbTX_qhP3WiRkEOehCxjBMBLDYmw7SBWDeXorccMb8Hzlr3F3EzVoLWXp_s5LwEG6ZpCvZ8dIOy0g3BirfMaLcQIXsw8ATaMYNI5sa8lsPxelA_1Z4R02c5k_UPoHZGDHd0ZYpUuEWa_zc1f10117xsmuuluTQOkUtjU4q2ajUx-6YT0ahOdd1FnpVUw1G3sq0X3ZeEmigd-m6ZVVs2V7hubD0ugkzwhPiotRrAivTRfxMYa33ZcuR9hGxdgvCFw1-an195X8FkeJUEzEDfZCWm-l4OJyWqVsDKNZsQiUOcZ6BSHRT-BS5okrQ" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">2019 case</a>&nbsp;in which the company had been accused of billing federal healthcare programs for hundreds of thousands of insulin pens it knowingly dispensed to beneficiaries who did not need them and that it overcharged Medicaid by failing to disclose lower drug prices it offered the public through a discount program.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smaller but still significant penalties have been paid by the companies receiving the largest <b>COVID-19-related awards. The Dutch company Philips, recipient of $646 million in ventilator contracts, paid a penalty of&nbsp;<a href="https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxNUEGOwyAMfE25NQIakvTAYS_7jYiAk9ISHBmnq_x-abuHlSzZ8tgez3jHsCAddsPCYi9AYwy2vbZD20lRq6AGM4hYxpkAVheTZdpBbPuUonccMb8WemPaq7hZP8-6h6vsOyM7GXrvZqOV6_RkhotSk3jRjG4PEbIHC0-gAzOIZG_MWzldvk76u8YzYnofZ3L-AdQsiOGOU5kjFW6Qlv9D57-p2jsTlC0S5ujLOWYvotVSS3lVvVZ6uJhGNfWF-5rQEKVTK9dFN2WfCtcTjcdVkA2eEB8VqwVsSG_Cl-Sx4uueIx8jZDclCB83-GPfWxwfG9gMPyUBM9CnWS3SbauGTovKFbAamW2IxCEuC1CpCQr_Aui0i9w" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$34 million</a>&nbsp;through a subsidiary for giving illegal kickbacks </b>to suppliers that purchased sleep apnea masks that were sold to Medicare beneficiaries. AstraZeneca, the recipient of $436 million in contracts, has paid $170 million in penalties for False Claims Act and related violations.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Business as Usual</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The discovery that many COVID-19 federal contractors have a history of misconduct in their government business is consistent with the recent&nbsp;<a href="https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJwlUMuOhCAQ_JrhaBRR8cBhL_sbRqFxmEExTbPGv9-eMSFUpTr9qLIzwZrwMkfKJEoGnIIzalRa9bVg5hrdaRHy5BFgm0M0hAXEUZYY7Ewh7Z-GoevUKJ6mr5t2rG2vWu390C2NHfp21NoPrRsBuI_XTHNxAXYLBv4Ar7SDiOZJdORH-OQv_zO86zWlNwrLdkHzFQlXFnPgSAzOvBzicTMh3gryX7gcJ5_m_BIyNZsiQcGyhXrIhhZy7oem0E2Urdd1VR8zWuLqUOMD1Vvq6xyWTLN9l3ZtAk0zmJKb64xAZ75PeTjfuL6VvZA1wT7vERwdzB0J_n1SdcBZoczRyACvEVOSyrV6F4K3uUSZ7obF5BcWFfAzACZ_gGiCI5l" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">finding</a>&nbsp;by Good Jobs First that thousands of companies receiving CARES Act grants and loans have similar track records, including more than 200 healthcare providers that have paid $5 billion in False Claims Act penalties over the past decade.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some of those aid recipients are also COVID-19 contract recipients. Large companies such as Walgreens, Quest Diagnostics and Becton Dickinson are receiving money from the federal government through multiple channels despite having paid penalties in the past for contracting abuses.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The awarding of federal contracts to corporations with a history of misconduct dates back long before the pandemic or this administration, but maybe now is the time to begin doing something about this wrong-headed practice.</font></p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/analysis-of-irs-data-shows-trumps-presidency-has-been-very-good-for-the-richest-americans/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/analysis-of-irs-data-shows-trumps-presidency-has-been-very-good-for-the-richest-americans/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><div class="header-standard header-classic single-header" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 26px; padding: 0px; position: relative;"><div class="post-box-meta-single" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 6px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span class="author-post byline" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 6px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="author vcard" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">&nbsp;<span class="coauthors 210" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/david-cay-johnston/" title="Posts by David Cay Johnston" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 6px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; text-transform: capitalize;">David Cay Johnston</a>&nbsp;/&nbsp;<a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/dc-report/" title="Posts by DC Report" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 6px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; text-transform: capitalize;">DC Report If You Are In The 99% Here Is How Well You Are Faring Under Trump Policies Compared To The 1%: For Each Dollar Of Increased Income That You Earned In 2018, Each One-Percenter Got $88 More Income.</a></span></span></span></font><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Huge as that ratio is, it’s small change compared to the super-rich, the 0.01% of Americans with incomes of $10 million and up. That ratio is $1 for you and $2,215 for each super-rich American household.</span>&nbsp;Let’s call them the Platinum-Premiere-Point-Zero-One-Percenters</font></p><blockquote style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; border: none !important;"><p style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.7;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The slice of American income pie going to the poor shrank under Trump by the same amount that it grew for the super-rich.</font></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ponder that.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For each additional dollar you earned in 2018 compared to 2016, each of the Platinum-Premiere crowd got an additional $2,215.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the bottom line: with Trump as president it’s good to be rich.</font></span></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The average Platinum-Premiere American enjoyed is $7.1 million more income under Trump in 2018 than in 2016, the last year that Barack Obama was president. For the Ninety-Nine-Percenters, in contrast, average income rose just $3,360 with most of that gain among those making $200,000 to $500,000.</font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.3em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not Widely Reported</font></h3><div id="attachment_20255" class="wp-caption alignright" style="background: none; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 5px 0px 17px 30px; padding: 0px; float: right; border: none; max-width: 100%; text-align: center; position: relative; overflow: hidden;"><p id="caption-attachment-20255" class="wp-caption-text" style="margin: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 11px 10px; line-height: 1.4; font-style: italic; position: absolute; bottom: 0px; left: 0px; width: 20px; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5); transition: all 0.4s ease 0s;" /></div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You haven’t heard these numbers on the nightly news or read them in your morning newspaper because no one announced them. I distilled them from an official government report known as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-size-of-adjusted-gross-income" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">IRS Table 1.4</a>, a task I’ve repeated annually for a quarter-century.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">At DCReport we don’t attend press conferences,<b style="">&nbsp;we don’t rewrite press releases</b>&nbsp;and we don’t depend on access to officials because other journalists do that just fine. Instead, we scour the public record for news that oozes, news that no one announced.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week I reported&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dcreport.org/2020/09/05/the-ugly-numbers-are-finally-in-on-the-2017-trump-tax-rewrite/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">my preliminary analysis of Table 1.4</a>, showing that 57% of American households were better off under Obama. That contradicted Trump’s naked claim, repeated uncritically and often in news reports, that he created the best economy ever until the coronavirus pandemic.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This week’s focus is on the big changes in how the American income pie is being divvied up.</font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.3em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More for the Top</font></h3><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The rich and super-rich are enjoying a bigger slice of the American income pie.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On the other hand, this is a truly awful time to be poor. Trump policies are narrowing the pockets of the poor, the third of Americans make less than $25,000. In 2018 their average income was just $12,600, a dollar a day less than in 2016.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump & Co. has numerous plans afoot to reduce incomes of the poor even more and take away government benefits, as we have been&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dcreport.org/?s=poor&search_button=Search" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">documenting at DCReport</a>.</font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.3em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Less for the Bottom</font></h3><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The poor saw their slice of the national income pie shrink by 1 percentage point from 6.5% to 5.5%. In a mirror image of that change, the super-rich saw their share of income pie grow by the same 1 percentage point, from 4.5% to 5.7% of all income.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That means the richest 22,122 households now collectively enjoy more income than the poorest 50 million households.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What these huge disparities make clear is that the sum of all Trump policies not only makes the poor worse off, but their losses are transformed into the gains of the super-rich.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The economic growth that began in early 2010 when Obama was president continued under Trump, albeit at a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dcreport.org/2019/04/29/why-trump-gets-a-c-on-the-economy/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">slower pace as DCReport showed last year</a>. Pre-pandemic Trump underperformed Reagan, Clinton, Carter and the last six years of Obama, who inherited the worst economy in almost a century.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The continuing upward trajectory for the economy meant that overall Americans made more money in 2018 than in 2016 even after adjusting for inflation of 4.1% over two years. Total income grew by almost $1 trillion to $11.6 trillion.</font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.3em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Half-Trillion for the One-Percenters</font></h3><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Almost half of the increase went to the 1%. They enjoyed $487 billion more money. The rest of America, a group 99 times larger, divvied up $511 billion.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The big winners, though, were the super-rich, the $10 million-plus crowd. That group consists of just one in every 7,000 taxpayers yet they captured every sixth dollar of increased national income, a total gain of $157 billion.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So, if you are among the 152 million American taxpayers in the 99% ask yourself whether Trump administration policies are good for you. Do you want a government of the rich, by the rich and overwhelmingly for the rich? Or would you prefer a government that benefits all Americans?</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 17px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And see what you can do to make sure more Americans know about the big shifts in the way America’s income pie is being sliced up.</font></p></div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/radical-republicans-ramrodded-a-law-through-congress-and-you-guessed-it-the-rich-made-out-like-bandits/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/radical-republicans-ramrodded-a-law-through-congress-and-you-guessed-it-the-rich-made-out-like-bandits/</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the first data showing how all Americans are faring under Donald Trump reveals the poor and working classes sinking slightly, the middle-class treading water, the upper-middle-class growing, and the richest among us luxuriating in rising rivers of greenbacks.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">More than half of Americans had to make ends meet in 2018 on less money than in 2016, my analysis of new income and tax data shows.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The nearly 87 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 had to get by in 2018 on $307 less per household than in 2016, the year before Trump took office, my analysis shows.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That 57% of American households were better off under Obama contradicts Trump’s often-repeated claim that he had created the best economy ever until the pandemic.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; trump policies help the prosperous and rich including half a million rich people who are not even filing tax returns yet are not being pursued as tax cheats.</font></b></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The worsened economic situation for more than half of Americans contradicts Trump’s frequent&nbsp;<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">claims that he is the champion of the “forgotten man”</a>&nbsp;and his vow that “every decision” on taxes “will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These figures come from my annual analysis of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-size-of-adjusted-gross-income" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">IRS data known as Table 1.4</a>. The income figures are pre-tax money that must be reported on tax returns. &nbsp;I adjusted the 2016 data to reflect&nbsp;<a href="https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">inflation of 4.1%</a>&nbsp;between 2016 and 2018 (slightly more than 2% a year).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is the first data on the first full year when Trump was president. It also is the first year that the Radical Republican tax system overhaul, passed in December 2017, took effect. The Trump tax law, the most significant tax policy change since 1986, was passed without a single public hearing or a single Democratic vote.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">High Income Households Multiply</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump policies overwhelmingly favor the top 7% of Americans, my analysis shows. And, oh, do they benefit!</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump policies help the prosperous and rich, the data reveal, including half a million rich people who are not even filing tax returns yet are not being pursued as tax cheats, a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/202030015fr.pdf" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">separate report shows</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The number of households enjoying incomes of $200,000 or more soared by more than 20%.&nbsp;The number of taxpayers making $10 million or more soared 37% to a record 22,112 households.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who Saves on Taxes</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The Trump/Republican tax savings were highly concentrated up the income ladder with hardly any tax savings going to the working poor and only a smidgen to the middle class.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those making $50,000 to $100,000 for example, paid just three-fourths of one percentage point less of their incomes to our federal government. People making $2 million to $2.5 million saw their effective tax rate fall by about three times that much.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now let’s compare two groups, those making $50,000 to $100,000 and those declaring $500,000 to $1 million. The second group averaged nine times as much income as the first group in 2018.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under the Trump tax law, the first group’s annual income taxes declined on average by $143, while the second group’s tax reduction averaged $17,800.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Put another way, a group that made nine times as much money enjoyed about 125 times as much in income tax savings, thanks to Trump and Congressional Republicans.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This disparity helps explain Trump’s support among money-conscious high-income Americans. But given the tiny tax benefits for the vast majority of Americans, along with cuts in government services, its surprising that he enjoys significant support among people making less than $200,000—except that none of the biggest news organizations do the kind of analysis you are reading, at least not since I left The New York Times a dozen years ago. Instead, the major news organizations quote Trump’s claims and others’ challenges without citing details.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Understating Incomes</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The figures I cite here understate actual incomes at the top for two reasons. One is that loopholes and Congressional favors allow many rich and superrich Americans to report much less income than they actually enjoy. Often they get to defer for years or decades reporting income earned today.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Second, with Trump’s support Congress has cut IRS staffing so deeply that it cannot even pursue growing armies of rich people who have stopped filing tax returns. The&nbsp;<a href="https://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/549/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">sharp decline in IRS auditing</a>&nbsp;means tax cheating—always a low-risk crime—has become much less risky.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump Ignores Rich Tax Cheats</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">In the three years ending in 2016, the IRS identified 879,415 high-income Americans who did not even bother to file a tax return. These tax cheats owed an estimated $45.7 billion in taxes, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/202030015fr.pdf" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported May 29</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under Trump more than half a million cases of high-income Americans who didn’t file a tax return “will likely not be pursued,” the Inspector General wrote.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of the Koch brothers was under IRS criminal investigation until Trump assumed office and the service abruptly dropped the case.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dcreport.org/tag/koch-papers/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">DCReport’s five-part series</a>&nbsp;last year showed, from a thousand pages of documents, that William Ingraham Koch, who lives one door away from Mar-a-Lago, is collecting more than $100 million a year without paying income taxes.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Borrowing to Help the Rich</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump’s tax law will require at least $1.5 trillion in added federal debt because it falls far short of paying for itself through increased economic growth even without the pandemic.</b> Most of the tax savings were showered on rich Americans and the corporations they control. Most of the negative effects will fall on the middle class and poor Americans in the form of Trump’s efforts to reduce government services.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The 2017 income tax law caused only a slight decline in the share of adjusted gross income that Americans paid to Uncle Sam, known as the effective tax rate. Adjusted gross income is the last line on the front page of your tax return and is in the measure used in my analysis.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The overall effective tax rate slipped from 14.7% under Obama to 14.2% under Trump.</b></font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Curious Anomaly</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In what might seem at first blush a curious development, Americans making more than $10 million received a below-average cut in their effective tax rate. The effective tax rate for these 22,000 households declined by less than half of a percent.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The reason for that smaller-than-average decline is that these super-rich Americans depend less on paychecks and much more on capital gains and dividends that have long been taxed at lower rates than paycheck earnings.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My analysis of the new tax data also shows a sharp shift away from income from work and toward income from investments, a trend which bodes poorly for working people but very nicely for those who control businesses, invest in stocks, and have other sources of income from capital.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Overall the share of American income from wages and salaries fell significantly, from almost 71% in 2016 to less than 68% in 2018.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, if you look just at the slice of the American income pie derived from business ownership and investments, it expanded by nearly one-tenth in two years. Income from such investments is highly concentrated among the richest Americans.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Infuriating Fact</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There’s one more enlightening and perhaps infuriating detail I sussed from the IRS data.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The number of households making $1 million or more but paying no income taxes soared 41% under the new Trump tax law. Under Obama, there were just 394 such households. With Trump, this grew to 556 households making on average $3.5 million without contributing one cent to our government.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Again, Trump seems to have forgotten all about the Forgotten Man. But he’s busy doing all he can to help the rich, then stick you with their tax bills.</font></p></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trumps-justice-department-finds-yet-another-way-to-oppress-minorities/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trumps-justice-department-finds-yet-another-way-to-oppress-minorities/</font></a></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">david cay j: not enforce lend laws</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/we-now-know-the-horrible-truth-about-trumps-so-called-stimulus/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/we-now-know-the-horrible-truth-about-trumps-so-called-stimulus/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>We now know the horrible truth about Trump’s so-called ‘stimulus’</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Written by David Cay Johnston / DC Report, Raw Story April 15, 2020</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A gold-plated tax giveaway infected the coronavirus relief bill that Donald Trump signed into law on March 27, Congressional Democrats complained loudly last month.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Democrats got it wrong. The plating turns out to be pure platinum.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Almost 82% of the tax savings will go to the Trump-Kushner family and 43,000 of their fellow millionaire landlords.</b>&nbsp;This rich and officially favored slice of American society consists of&nbsp;<b>fewer than one in 3,550 taxpayers.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">These millionaires will be excused from paying $70.3 billion in taxes out of the $86 billion the law forgives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The savings go to real estate investors like the extended Trump-Kushner family. The provision removes limits on how much in tax benefits they can enjoy each year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The figures were issued Tuesday by Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. Two Democrats, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas, requested the analysis of who benefits based on income, known as a distribution table.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Using the official data, I calculate that on average each benefitting millionaire will be excused from paying $1.6 million of income taxes.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Think about how many years it takes you to earn enough to owe $1.6 million in taxes. Depending on your tax situation, you’d need an annual income of $4.3 million to $8 million. This is the level of income in need of the most pandemic relief, the actions of that Trump & Co. prove....</font></div></div></div><div><p style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" margin-top="margin-top" px="px" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">----</font></p><p style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" margin-top="margin-top" px="px" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">420 never waste crisis</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div class="mag-header" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 19px; padding: 0px; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h3 class="magcat-titlte entry-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 1px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/nlrb-suspends-unionizing-amid-covid-19-crisis/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">NLRB suspends unionizing amid COVID-19 crisis</font></a></h3><div class="grid-post-box-meta mag-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 7px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="author-italic author vcard" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/terry-schwadron/" title="Posts by Terry Schwadron" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Terry Schwadron</a>&nbsp;/&nbsp;<a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/dc-report/" title="Posts by DC Report" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">DC Report</a></font></span></div></div><div class="mag-excerpt entry-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just as delivery personnel, medical staffers and just about everyone who has to be out in first-responder roles is raising serious questions about lacking proper protections, the federal government has…</font></p></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: currentcolor none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; letter-spacing: 0px;">=</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: currentcolor none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; letter-spacing: 0px;">h</span><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/heres-how-trump-is-grifting-the-pandemic-to-give-the-rich-another-big-tax-cut/" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; letter-spacing: 0px;">ere’s how Trump is grifting the pandemic to give the rich another big tax cut</a></font></div><div class="header-list-style" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="grid-post-box-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="author-italic author vcard" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/davidcayjohnston/" title="Posts by David Cay Johnston" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">David Cay Johnston</a>&nbsp;/&nbsp;<a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/dc-report/" title="Posts by DC Report" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">DC Report</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/raw-story/" title="Posts by Raw Story" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Raw Story</a></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">March 12, 2020</span></font></div></div><div class="item-content entry-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 18px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Using the coronavirus as his excuse, Donald Trump is working to give the highest-paid American workers a valuable tax break, while tossing crumbs to the middle class and the working poor.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Here’s how Trump is grifting the pandemic to give the rich another big tax cut</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Written by David Cay Johnston / DC Report, Raw Story March 12, 2020</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Using the coronavirus as his excuse, Donald Trump is working to give the highest-paid American workers a valuable tax break, while tossing crumbs to the middle class and the working poor.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On the night when Congress was told that between 70 million and 150 million of the 330 million of us are likely to become infected Trump’s mind turned to tax cuts.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Testimony by Dr. Brian Monahan, the official Congressional and Supreme Court physician, implies that coronavirus will kill a huge number of people.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>
</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>If only 0.7% of those infected die it will mean the end for almost half a million Americans, assuming that only 70 million become infected. If 150 million get the disease and the death rate is the 3.4% estimated by the World Health Organization director-general then more than five million Americans will succumb to the virus</b>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">To put that in perspective, about 2.9 million Americans die annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means at best we can expect 3.4 million deaths in the next year and perhaps as many as 8 million deaths.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Trump’s tax cut proposal came just days after his ridiculous assertions that when America had only 15 confirmed coronavirus cases the umber would quickly fall and with warmer weather the pathogen would lose its deadly power.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Instead, in his Wednesday night address about the “foreign virus” COVID-19, Trump talked about tax cuts, commerce and a loophole-rich European travel ban that exempts the two European countries where he has properties.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>The Tax Cut Solution</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">While Trump gave no details, we can anticipate what Trump will propose—and Congressional Republicans will demand because of the payroll tax cut of 2011, which I analyzed extensively at the time.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>A suspension of the Social Security wage tax and the Medicare tax is planned,</b> Trump aides speaking on background told White House.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Crumbs for the Working Poor</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Here’s my analysis, based on the most detailed wage data for 2018 from an annual federal report on every penny of wages earned by American workers:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>A full-time worker making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would save $93 a month.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A worker paid $55,000 a year would save $350 a month. Only one in four workers earns that much or more.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Workers at the threshold of the top 5%, those paid $137,200, would each save more than $850 a month.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Most of the top 5% are two-income couples. That means many affluent households will save at least $1,700 a month. That’s more than the gross pay of a full-time minimum wage worker, who grosses just $1,220 a month.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Why ‘At Least’ Matters</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The phrase “at least” in the previous paragraph is important because of a major difference in which wages are levied by the twin payroll taxes for pensions and medical care for the old and disabled plus widows and orphans.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Social Security tax rate is 6.2% of wages. But it applies only to the first $137,200 of wages.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The&nbsp; 1.45% Medicare tax applies to all wages. In 2018 there were 8.5 million workers who made more than $140,000. The top 211 workers averaged $95.7 million that year.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">If the Medicare tax is suspended, the top 5% of workers will save close to $3 billion a month. Those 211 workers at the very top will each save $115,700 per month.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">What Happened Last Time</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">We’ve seen this game played before.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Barack Obama took office in 2009 as jobs were dying at the rate of 750,000 a month. The Democrats who controlled Congress approved Obama’s Making Work Pay Credit. It was limited to the bottom 97% of workers. It also applied to the disabled and retirees even if they had no wages.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Later research showed the tax credit was a smart move because people promptly spent it, helping increase the demand side of the economy which had collapsed in the Great Recession. Increasing demand stoked economic recovery.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But in 2011, when Republicans took control of Congress, they demanded that all workers benefit. They also cut the disabled and retired from the tax credit.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The switch from Obama’s Making Work Pay tax break to the Republican payroll tax reduction effectively raised taxes on 51 million households by an average of $134 each, the Tax Policy Center estimated at the time.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Highly Paid Workers Benefitted Most</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">At the same time, couples in well-paid jobs who had been denied Obama’s Make work Pay tax credit saved more than $8,000 over two years.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">So, watch closely for the contours of the&nbsp; Trump payroll tax cut so you know just how heavily it tilts to favor the best-off Americans. Keep in mind that cutting payroll taxes won’t do anything for those who lose their jobs because of the coronavirus.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Then ask yourself whether saving the most highly paid American workers nearly $3 billion a month is fair, needed or smart.</font></p></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/big-banks-ticking-time-bomb-could-cause-the-next-recession/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/big-banks-ticking-time-bomb-could-cause-the-next-recession/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Big banks’ ticking time bomb could cause the next recession</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Maureen Nevin Duffy / DC Report February 12, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The art of hiding multi-trillions of dollars of debt has found an eager accomplice, the businessman who once proudly proclaimed, “I love debt”: Donald J. Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The King of Debt is now in control of an obscure federal watchdog agency intended to prevent derivatives—complicate financial instruments that billionaire businessman Warren Buffett once described as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”—from causing the Great Recession of 2008. Intended is the keyword. The agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), was hog-tied by big money interests long before the first whiff of bank failure could drift from Wall Street’s canyons.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This December, Trump’s hand-picked CFTC members marked a decade of financial recovery by voting 3-2 in favor of leaving a giant hole in the regulatory framework known as Dodd-Frank. The vote leaves the Big Four—Too Big to Fail—U.S. banks free to slip the riskiest of their debt-deferring derivative trades through that defensive wall at will. And, this sleight of hand pushes an unsuspecting public onto the firing line of another possible multi-trillion-dollar U.S. taxpayer bailout.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As in the 2008 meltdown, the weapon of choice for manipulating and moving piles of bank-owned debt around the world is a type of derivative called a “swap.” A swap can be as simple as a contract between two parties or a contingency laden nightmare, such as a “naked” credit default swap (CDS) for trading unfunded payment obligations, some of which are used as “insurance” guarantees. That guarantee is what banks can continue now to switch on and off at will.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Usual Suspects</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Instead of home mortgages, this time consumer debt holds our fate. Outstanding balances keep ballooning for car and tuition loans and credit cards—greatly enlarged by exotic trading on the debt itself. During 2016, banks opened 110 million new credit card accounts about 50% more than in 2010. Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo reported a combined loss of $12.5 billion from credit card loans in 2017. In June that same year, the Federal Reserve valued outstanding credit card loans at $1.02 trillion. Yet banks continue to shower subprime borrowers with fresh lines of credit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Despite the efforts of a severely hobbled CFTC, the swaps markets continue to grow and without the depth of transparency promised. Consider that the four big U.S. bank holding company swaps dealers: Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America handle close to 90% of U.S. swaps trades, representing a combined notional value of $300 trillion, while consumers stagger under debt and defaults mount higher than pre-2008. The big picture reveals “a financial infrastructure that mimics the failed financial engineering created in the mortgage markets leading up to the 2008 financial crash,” says Professor Michael Greenberger, former deputy to the Clinton-era CFTC Chair Brooksley Born.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>‘Dark Swaps’</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Greenberger, a former director of the Division of Trading and Markets, and current law school professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, contends that “dealers have engineered a way to evade Dodd-Frank, by helping banks transfer trillions of dollars in liability in risky unfunded trading, by turning the regulations off at will.” The world’s debt burden is being “financialized,” he says, as were mortgages in 2007. The tool this time is “dark swaps”‘ sold by the banks’ foreign subsidiaries, into increasingly complex instruments. These are the very exposures from which the CFTC and Dodd-Frank were charged with protecting us.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The CFTC is totally controlled by Trump,” Greenberger tells DCReport.org. Until another administration takes office the only recourse may be a state by state solution. Greenberger means the state attorneys general, “since the president can’t fire them,” he says. Short of that, since a chain of attempts to plug the loophole have been tried, undermined or overturned, Greenberger’s last hope is the new administration, whose CFTC board could vote to close the loophole and spare the world another multi-trillion meltdown the U.S. taxpayer will suffer to pay.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;=</font></p></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/will-trumps-america-end-in-firing-squads-pulitzer-winner-david-cay-johnston-issues-a-dire-warning/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/will-trumps-america-end-in-firing-squads-pulitzer-winner-david-cay-johnston-issues-a-dire-warning/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Will Trump’s America end in ‘firing squads’? Pulitzer winner David Cay Johnston issues a dire warning</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon November 27, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Congressional hearings about Donald Trump’s attempts to extort&nbsp; Ukraine into helping him in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf have concluded, at least for now.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These weeks of public and private hearings on the Ukraine scandal have established that Donald Trump and senior members of his administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others, were involved in this plot. Documents released last Friday through a FOIA lawsuit provide further evidence of the scale of the Trump’s regime abuse of power and other high crimes and misdemeanors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These hearings have also shown that Trump used his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and other operatives to conduct shadow diplomacy as part of the Ukraine scandal. It seems clear they advanced Trump’s political interests (and likely their own financial interests as well) over the interests of the United States and the American people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Revelations about the Ukraine scandal continue. One of Giuliani’s partners in the extortion scheme, Russian-born businessman Lev Parnas, now claims that he has video and audio recordings of Giuliani, Trump and others.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to recent reports, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., one of Trump’s lead cultists and water carriers in Congress, actually participated in efforts to force the Ukrainian government to launch an investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden on invented corruption charges.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a senior member of Trump’s cult, is now granting the president’s aborted wish in Ukraine by initiating a congressional “investigation” of the Bidens for their alleged crimes in that country.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In defending Donald Trump’s Ukraine gambit, the Republican Party has become a willing and enthusiastic agent of Vladimir Putin’s psychological operations strategy against the United States. The goal is to provide cover for Russia’s ongoing interference in American politics and to manipulate another presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In total, the Ukraine scandal is more evidence that today’s Republican Party cares more about partisanship and power than they do loyalty to country and patriotism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Republicans’ only defense is “So what?” Unable to deny the facts of Trump’s corruption, apparent criminality and defiling of the presidency, the Republicans and their right-wing disinformation media and public default to a cult-like logic that Trump is something like an American king or emperor. As such, he is literally above the law while also simultaneously being the human embodiment of the law and the nation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>David Cay Johnston has been writing about and observing Donald Trump for more than 30 years. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter </b>and author of the bestselling book “The Making of Donald Trump.” His recent book is “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America.” Johnston is also the founder of the nonprofit news service DCReport.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In this wide-ranging conversation, Johnston explains why the Ukraine scandal should not be a surprise given Donald Trump’s many years of success as a white-collar criminal — skills he learned from his father as well as mentor Roy Cohn. Johnston also highlights how the testimony of Ambassador Gordon Sondland is key in exposing the tendrils of Trump’s and the Republican Party’s betrayal of America and the rule of law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Johnston also details what the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump should include and why the 2020 presidential election is so important if the American people want to protect their democracy and not be fully conquered by a fascist tyrant in the form of Donald Trump — or by a much more dangerous Republican successor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As usual, this transcript has been edited for length and clarity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You have been closely observing and writing about Donald Trump for more than three decades. With the Ukraine scandal and these weeks of congressional hearings none of this should really be a surprise. Given Trump’s public behavior and personal character, he has shown himself for many years to be corrupt and with no respect for the law. In many ways I am surprised that Trump’s house of cards hasn’t fallen apart sooner.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Absolutely. I thought Donald Trump would be in trouble much earlier. But he is very accomplished, thanks in large part to his father as well as his mentor Roy Cohn, at how to defeat law enforcement in all its forms</b>. It’s not just the grand juries he beat, but tax authorities he beat and the civil actions against him. Trump’s really masterful at it and that’s part of what we’ve seen with these hearings. The other thing we’ve seen is that the Republicans — many of whom spoke out against Trump before he took office — have turned into quislings or cowards, depending on what term you want to use to describe them, who are more concerned about being primaried than about their oath of office.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This is an extraordinarily disturbing turn of events. Since Ambassador Sondland has thrown Trump and everyone else under the bus there has not been one bit of change by the Republicans. Devin Nunes immediately goes back to the totally discredited Ukrainian conspiracy theory. <b>Ken Starr on Fox News </b>was trying to come up with ways to explain all this away: “Well, this looks serious, but…” Willful blindness is a serious problem with the Republicans.</span> I believe that if the Republicans do not open their eyes and face the reality in front of them, then the voters are going to do real damage to them. This will be the type of political damage the likes of which they’ve never seen before — or we’re going to discover that the United States is fully headed toward fascism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I think the latter is unlikely, given that most people are fundamentally decent and are not interested in playing games to benefit one man in Donald Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When investigative journalists start to follow the money with Trump, Ukraine, Russia and related matters, what do you think they will discover?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Bribing the Republican jury is what Trump is doing now</b>. There are promises of campaign money and the implicit message that if you don’t play ball with me and take my money, I will find somebody to run against you in a primary and destroy you. You don’t see it reported that way in the mainstream press or on TV. Because of that Trump benefits. Trump is also masterful in communicating in a way that reaches the average person who does not follow politics closely or make politics or being a responsible citizen central to their life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump is masterful in communicating on a basic level with simple thoughts. “Lock them up. They are murderers and rapists, but I’m sure there’s some fine people.” And focusing on the language of “quid pro quo” is very masterful too. That is just Latin for bribery and extortion. But instead the news media uses what is for many people just vague language.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The language of “quid pro quo” is too vague. The Democrats need to clearly describe Donald Trump as a wannabe Mafia boss and a shakedown artist. The Democrats should also speak directly about “extortion” and “bribery” and avoid saying “quid pro quo.” The news media should be doing the latter as well.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Democrats have finally started saying that. Remember that most journalism is focused on the accurate recounting of what sources said. That’s part of the problem with how you cover Trump. Trump is not a regular politician with extreme views. He’s not George Wallace, for example.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>He is a con artist. Donald Trump is the third-generation head of a white-collar crime family, and to cover him like he’s a politician is absurd.</b> Consider the Ukraine situation. There’s something very important that gets very little attention in the news. The Republicans keep saying there was a 55-day delay in giving military aid to the Ukrainians because Trump was concerned about corruption. Well first of all, it was a six-month delay. There was no provision in the law providing for that. The second problem is it was clear that Trump had no interest in corruption. What he wanted, according to Ambassador Sondland, was an announcement by the new president of Ukraine that he would be investigating the Biden.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sondland himself makes the point: Trump didn’t care about corruption. He cared about the announcement of an investigation. That is, Trump wanted to dirty up the Bidens. That’s an abuse of power. The Republicans keep saying that the Ukrainian president has never once said that he was being extorted, or bribed, or held up by Trump. That’s true. But if you ever walk into a bank where the bandits have guns at people’s heads and you ask them, “Are you OK?” They’re not going to say, “Oh my God, get this man with a gun to my head.” It’s absurd. I was in the Ukraine a year ago. The Russians are poised to take over Ukraine and put the Ukrainians under the boot of the Kremlin. The president of Ukraine has to put up with any humiliation necessary from the Trump Administration to keep his country from being completely invaded.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Donald Trump is the nucleus of a much larger criminal enterprise. What do the congressional hearings reveal about the people in Trump’s orbit?</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump’s key technique is to get people around him who don’t have a strong moral character. These are people who, in the case of his business, couldn’t make it anywhere else, or who have some flaw.</span> Trump would find people who wanted to be identified with him because they think he’s glamorous and wonderful. These people would just as happily go to work for the Kardashians. Then what he demands of these people is, “You have to do whatever I say without question.” When I was covering Trump in the casino business there were executives who were highly competent and who went on to fantastic, very lucrative careers with other Who did Trump promote to replace them? In one case someone who was literally, and I observed this, a falling-down drunk, but who did everything and anything for Trump. He was, “Yes, Mr. Trump. Of course, Mr. Trump. We’ll do that right away, Mr. Trump.” That is the type of person who Donald surrounds himself with. It’s a not-unusual human tendency, if you are inherently someone with no soul such as Donald Trump. Moreover, if you are someone who really believes that you are a superior human being — the result of what the Trumps call the “Horse Race Theory of Breeding” — and that you’re better than everybody else, then it is even easier to operate in such a manner. Someone with that temperament thinks that everything they think or say is right and everybody else better believe it. When you put that kind of thinking in the White House it is a&nbsp; prescription for disaster.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Is Rudy Giuliani a true believer or is he just working for Trump in the shadows because it is a way to make money?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I believe that Rudy Giuliani is one of the great frauds of all time. Giuliani’s father was a bandit who served time in Sing Sing prison. Giuliani surrounded himself with mobbed up people like Bernard Kerik, who he made first corrections commissioner, and then Police Commissioner. Of note: Giuliani did not try any of the mob cases ][during his time as U.S. attorney in New York.] He just took credit for them. The convictions were won by career prosecutors who did an excellent job.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>When he worked for the Reagan administration, Giuliani made it clear that he is a horrible racist as shown during the Haitian refugee crisis. Giuliani is an opportunist. He’s certainly looking out for his own pocket and his own welfare. Giuliani now has this lucrative gig with Donald Trump.</b> And Giuliani has made this claim that he’s not being paid by Donald Trump. In fact, lawyers know lots of ways to get paid. It will not surprise to me one bit if Giuliani’s alleged associates in the Ukraine scandal, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, eventually reveal that Giuliani had some side extortion scheme to make money.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What stood out to you about the impeachment hearings?&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gordon Sondland is very important. In a statement, he basically completely destroyed all the defenses the Republicans have put up. Now, why is he doing this? Sondland is likely going to prison for lying to Congress. Roger Stone was just convicted on all seven counts of lying to Congress. Sondland, clearly on the advice of his lawyer, tried to mitigate the damage that he faces, to minimize how many felony charges he’s going to be hit with, and how long he’s going to go to jail. Sondland is almost certainly going to be prosecuted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If Donald Trump has not done anything wrong — as he keeps telling us in his tweets — then produce the documents that are being asked for. If they exonerate him, why won’t Trump produce them? The IRS comes to audit you and says, “You took a deduction for this gift to a charity,” are you going to say to them, “Well, I’m not going to show you the canceled check.” This makes no sense. The reason Trump is not coming forward is he knows perfectly well that the evidence doesn’t help him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">What I worry about is this: Will the Democrats limit these public and future hearings to the Ukrainian matters? Is that really going to be their strategy, because I think it’s possible that millions of Americans will say, “I don’t care about Ukraine.</span>” Ukraine is terribly important to the national security of the United States and Europe and to containing Putin. Is that enough? Mitch McConnell is going to do everything he can to protect Donald Trump unless it becomes so untenable that all 100 U.S. senators to vote to remove him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Should the Democrats go big or go small in the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump? What do you think the articles of impeachment should be?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I think the articles of Impeachment should include the whole bribery extortion matter. Withholding of all this information is also obstruction of Congress. There’s the emoluments clause issues about the Trump Hotel&nbsp; in Washington, and other Trump properties. There are a host of other charges. One of the ways that prosecutors think — and I’m sure this is what Adam Schiff is thinking — is that you do not bring the kitchen-sink case, you bring the case you can win. I don’t believe that Nancy Pelosi, who is a five-star general of strategy, would have approved beginning the impeachment process if she did not know, given her cautious demeanor, that there was not more coming out about Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of the challenges with all this is going to be, of course, that the Trump people thumb their nose at the records laws. Trump has held meetings with Putin with no one in the room but Russians. He tears up notes. He yells at people if they take notes in meetings. Except in this case, it’s so sprawling with Ukraine that there are lots of other people and lots of records involved. As soon as some of those people realize that they are probably going to be indicted and go to prison, then they’re going to talk.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Part of Trumpism is an assault on the rule of law. In terms of Trump’s efforts to hide his tax records, how do you think the Supreme Court will eventually rule?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump has consistently been losing in the courts. He’s had a few successes, but overall, about nine to one are against him.</b> Trump is seeking here to avoid his accountants turning over records from before he was president. It has been the law in this country since Thomas Jefferson was president, that a president enjoys no privileges or immunities for any conduct prior to taking the oath of office. So, the Supreme Court, I expect, either will not hear the case, or if they do take the case, Chief Justice Roberts is going to use it as an opportunity to slap down this idea that Trump isn’t responsible for his actions before becoming president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump was taken to Walter Reed hospital several weeks ago, supposedly for a physical exam. The story on its face is absurd. It seems more likely than not that Trump had a health emergency, and of course will not admit it. What do you think really happened?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With Trump’s recent medical episode, if you pay attention closely, you will see that the video shows Donald Trump clutching a yellow folder tightly to his body. When is the last time you ever saw Donald Trump carrying anything? I’ve thought all the way back to 1988. I have never seen the man carry anything, nothing. In fact, I’ve never actually seen Donald open a door. Only other people opening doors for him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">What probably happened is this. There is a complete medical suite, a very sophisticated one, in the White House. The one thing it does not have is an MRI. If you had a stroke, or were suspected of having one — what physicians call an “ischemic event” — you’d want an MRI.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump goes to Walter Reed. There’s a protocol. When the president’s coming, everybody knows that they do various things to ensure his security. Trump appeared with no notice. By the way, <b>Trump didn’t get into “the Beast,” which is the presidential limousine that’s parked in a secure underground location and has to be brought around outside. Trump got into the back of a big black SUV</b>. Something happened that his physician, who got in the other side and sat next to him, said, “We have to go to the hospital right now.” The Trump administration is never going to admit the truth about what happened.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Trump did not go for a physical. Nobody goes for a “half physical.” This is absurd. It’s a good example of how Trump and the people around him believe if they lie, it’s OK. The people they care about, their base, will believe it. The real goal now should be to chip away at that base, to get people who like Trump for various reasons to open their eyes and recognize that here you have a man who is a criminal, a man who is deeply, deeply mentally ill. Even if Trump were too ill to remain president he would not resign. Donald really believes that he is a superior person and that we should all bow down to his greatness. It doesn’t matter that it’s obvious nonsense. Trump believes it. And it motivates him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I actually feel sorry for Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a man who has never known, and will never know, joy and contentment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He has no sense of love. Donald doesn’t love anyone. He doesn’t even really love himself. I feel sorry for him, but he also has no business holding any kind of public office. What we need to focus on I think at this point is ending his presidency, whether it’s through impeachment or voting him out overwhelmingly.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But what do we do about the tyrant next time? We need to start thinking about what happens when somebody comes along who has Donald’s charisma and his marketing savvy, his con artist savvy, but who also has a deep philosophy and the serious management skills that Donald doesn’t have. Donald Trump is an incompetent manager. We should also be very afraid of someone who is an aspiring tyrant and a hard worker by comparison. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Because Donald is lazy and look at the harm is causing.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Even the White House acknowledges that Trump comes down around 10 a.m. and goes back up around 4 p.m. What do we do when we get someone who works hard?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That is someone who will be able to take over the United States. Trump can’t take over because the military is not backing him. A successor to Trump who has the backing of the military could take our freedoms away. All our liberty and freedom in the United States depend, at the end of the day, on respect for a piece of paper. It also depends on respect for the principles and the idea of the United States of America, imperfect as it is. Donald Trump has no respect for that. What do we do when someone who’s everything Trump isn’t comes along and beguiles enough people to get into the White House?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The American people are on an emotional roller coaster. It is almost a manic state of being. It feels as though Donald Trump will never be derailed. He will be impeached. The Senate will not convict him regardless of his crimes against democracy and the law. What advice would you give about managing these hopes and disappointments?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>More than a million people died for this country, and many more, like my father in World War II, became disabled standing up for this country.</b> All we’re being asked to do as citizens is to pay attention and vote, contribute money and act. If the American people want to keep our democracy and our liberties and not go down the path that will inevitably lead to firing squads and a dictator, they must get and stay involved politically. If the American people want to maintain, they have got to be vigilant and they must endure.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Nov. 3 is coming. We have the power, it’s our country, we own it. We own our government. We should act like owners. What we’re seeing in Donald Trump, who is just the symptom of deeper problems, is the wages of 40 years of people renting out their interest in the government, saying, “Let somebody else take care of it. We’re going to behave like renters.” We can’t do that if we want to be a free people. The American people must be civically engaged.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Having to go vote and volunteer some time is nothing compared to all of those gravesites in the Philippines, in France and in Germany, of American soldiers who died for this country. All those Americans in the Union who died in the Civil War. To not be a citizen is to disrespect what they gave up their lives for. We need to take&nbsp; the responsibility of being a citizen seriously. Not just talk. Not just griping on the internet. Act like an owner. It’s important.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.</font></div></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><span class="mw-headline" id="Protecting_Factory_Farming_from_Regulation" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><span class="mw-headline" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/forest-service-weighs-plan-to-lay-waste-to-tens-of-thousands-of-acres-of-old-growth-trees/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/forest-service-weighs-plan-to-lay-waste-to-tens-of-thousands-of-acres-of-old-growth-trees/</font></a></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Forest Service weighs plan to lay waste to tens of thousands of acres of old-growth trees</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by&nbsp;<b>David Cay Johnston / DC Report<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b>August 15, 2019</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The evil genius of the people Donald Trump brought into our government so America could become a polluter’s paradise is really something to behold.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The latest Team Trump move would turn our national forests into polluter playgrounds. Companies that want to mow down old-growth trees so they can get at pockets of oil, coal or uranium are about to get pretty much everything they’ve always dreamed about. And roadless areas are marked for new roads extending miles into wilderness areas.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The way it’s being done is, in a perverse sort of way, admirably clever.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They call their plan to re-interpret how the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act applies to our national forests “streamlining” to make government more efficient. Their abuse of language is working, too. Many of the more than 29,000 people and organizations that have filed comments on the proposal embrace the Trumpian language.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Few of the comments I reviewed pushed back on “streamlining.” The proposal is better described as “steamrolling” the National Environmental Policy Act, the first federal law to require consideration of Earth and its bounty in governmental decisions.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Forestry, farming and other groups that favor the new policy refer to it as a plan to “<b>modernize how”</b>&nbsp;government complies with the law.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Powerful is the advantage of setting the agenda and with it the language of debate.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You, fellow citizens and owners of our government, now have until Aug. 26 to tell our hired help in the White House and the Forest Service what you think or forever suffer the consequences of idly standing by. Stand up for America’s natural resources.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Virtually No Public Review</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Trump administration, by its own estimate, wants to exempt 93% of forest service decisions from public review.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Currently, about 60% or perhaps 70% of these decisions are left to the discretion of agency professionals and managers without public comment for review. That’s entirely reasonable. A well-functioning government agency can’t be running off to get public input every time its managers want to put up a new sign for a parking lot, replace the toilets at a trailhead or change the color and fabric of ranger uniforms.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The issue is where to draw the line. Let’s look at the clear-cutting of forests, which has a devastating effect on birds, mammals and other wildlife, can cause severe soil erosion that may wipe out salmon runs and even bury houses in mudslides.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Using agency discretion should the Forest Service be allowed to let loggers clear cut a small hillside before pests ruin the wood? What about 500 acres? How about 7,300 acres?</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What the Trumpers want is freedom to clear up to 7,300 acres of our forest lands under rules that could hide the action from the public until the deed is done or at least well underway. That is 11.4 square miles or half the size of Manhattan.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s just one example of the mischief that would be allowed under the proposed new rules.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One-Day Notice</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There would still have to be notices published in the Forest Service’s quarterly Schedule of Proposed Action or SOPA reports.&nbsp; Under the proposed rules, however, officials could authorize logging the day after SOPA comes out, giving loggers three months to cut before anyone not in the forest or noticing an increase in logging trucks would be clued in.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SOPA reports have long been designed to help hide Forest Service plans, a subtle but valuable benefit of the timber industry. Team Trump wants to tilt the existing rules almost entirely to the benefit of its industrial allies.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Go to the SOPA web page and notice that it is not a single report you could breeze through, perhaps using a Control F search for a keyword.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Instead you must click one-by-one on each of 176 forests, grasslands, prairies or recreational areas. Then you must navigate your way through 10 quarterly SOPA reports since Trump took office, each of which may go on for page after page in dense bureaucratese.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just look at the SOPAs for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which lists numerous actions like those here.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rube Goldberg may be dead, but his progeny seem to have found plenty of related work helping make ridiculously complex what should be simple interactions between us and our government.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What happens to forests and the like matters because they provide us with a rich bounty of life and wealth. Natural forests have many kinds of trees and other plants providing food and shelter to a robust array of animals. Clear cut lands are deserts with little life. When Farmer McGregor levels a woodlot to grow carrots he’s not helping Peter Rabbit, he’s killing whole families of rabbits by destroying their natural food sources.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What of wetlands? They are nature’s filters, storm barriers and nurseries and crucial to some forests. Fill marshes and swamps in and the populations of birds, fish and amphibians decline. When there are not enough wetlands to harbor young life that grows up to move on to rivers, lakes and the ocean there are other consequences. Sharks, for example, finding too few fish to sustain their numbers start looking at beachgoers as their next dinner.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The proposed new Forest Service “regulations are designed to dramatically reduce public involvement in federal land management decisions,” Susan Jane Brown of the Western Environmental Law Center in Oregon wrote in a memo detailing the issues.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Logging and mining will likely increase, but “without the benefit of scientific input.”</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Team Trump justifies reducing disclosures and radically reducing when the American people can comment to increase efficiency. Since it’s our government – we own it – this is really a ploy to make government a power unto itself, part of the overall Trump desire to replace a government that derives its powers from the consent of the people to a power onto itself.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He has mused at least six times in public about being “president for life” and he often refers to how he wants to rule over what Trump calls “my people.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 19.2px; background-image: none;"><span class="mw-headline" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></span></p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/meet-the-prominent-conservative-lawyer-who-keeps-popping-up-in-the-russia-probes"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/meet-the-prominent-conservative-lawyer-who-keeps-popping-up-in-the-russia-probes</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Meet the prominent conservative lawyer who keeps popping up in the Russia probes</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">written by C Collins, David Cay Johnson / DC Report<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>June 19, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A prominent conservative lawyer keeps showing up in dramas central to the Trump administration and its battles with Congress — and it turns out he has intimate knowledge of Felix Sater’s intelligence work for the U.S. government while he was working with Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Moscow-born Sater is the financial criminal and violent felon who worked closely with Trump for years while simultaneously serving as a long-term informant for the FBI and other national security agencies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2015 and into mid-2016, Sater pushed for the development of a Trump Tower in Moscow with his old friend Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime fixer, while trying to enlist support from the Russian government for Trump’s campaign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The lawyer, William A. Burck, popped up in two just-unsealed court documents in Sater’s criminal docket. Burck had not been linked to Sater before now.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Burck has also been at the center of two highly charged dramas in Washington this past year: the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the Mueller investigation. Yet his roles have gone largely unnoticed by other news organizations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of Burck’s clients is Don McGahn, the former White House counsel who has been subpoenaed by the House and whose testimony Trump is now trying to block by claiming executive privilege.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the Mueller investigation, Burck’s other clients also include Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, and former advisor Steve Bannon, as well as McGahn, all of whom the House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Burck-Sater Connection</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Back in 2004, Burck was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.</b>&nbsp;He handled Sater’s case there while Sater was working with Trump and collecting intelligence for Washington about international organized crime. Now, Burck is the lawyer for McGahn, who spent 30 hours spilling the beans to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team about Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s efforts to obstruct its investigation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burck’s role in Sater’s case has been not publicly revealed before now. That role is especially important given the intimate knowledge Burck has of not only Sater’s activities with international crime organizations while he was working with Trump but also Sater’s relationship with the Trump Organization. That becomes evident in the letters that were just unsealed at the request of the lead reporter on this story.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These letters suggest that Burck has a deep and perhaps unique understanding of the nature of the relationship between Sater, Trump, the Trump Organization, the FBI, and Sater’s national security work. Indeed, Burck almost certainly knows what few others do about Sater’s criminal and intelligence activities and his relationship with Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The time periods involved also raise a tantalizing question: Are there mysteries from the era of President George W. Bush that relate to the Mueller investigation that Sater’s case touches upon? The unsealed letters date to Bush’s presidency, when the Department of Justice was shielding Sater’s confession to stock fraud from the public. His case in Brooklyn federal court was what is known as “double sealed.” It is common for a criminal case to have a docket number and for the record to be sealed. In Sater’s case, the docket itself was sealed—completely hidden—something that evidence suggests applies to fewer than 100 cases nationwide, the vast majority of them in Brooklyn, the home to many Russian-speaking criminal enterprises.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Sater was a “cooperating witness” through September 2009, the first year of President Barack Obama’s first term.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The unsealed letters relate to Sater and his work as an FBI intelligence operative.&nbsp;</b>They date from 2004 and 2005, when Burck was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. The Southern District encompasses Manhattan, where Trump Tower is located. Sater’s criminal case was on the docket in the Eastern District, which is in Brooklyn.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At that time, Sater and his firm were teaming with the Trump Organization on a number of real estate projects. His identity as an informant was a closely held secret.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Working with the FBI and Trump</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sater’s offices were in Trump Tower, just a floor or two from the Trump Organization.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sater worked with Trump on real estate projects in Colorado, Arizona, California, Florida and New York, only a few of which were actually constructed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sater was also involved in efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, a project that appeared to take on new life during the 2016 presidential campaign, despite Trump’s later insistence that he had no dealings with Russia.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A key question for House investigators should be whether any of Sater’s contacts in the security services knew about the project at the time—and if so, how that might relate to the genesis of the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump has tried to hide his connections to Sater. He testified under oath that he would not recognize Sater if they were in the same room, an obvious lie as Trump claims to have the world’s greatest memory.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In both letters to the court, Sater’s lawyer asks the judge overseeing Sater’s case to postpone his sentencing date, as Sater was in the middle of a “long-term investigation into major international criminal organizations.” The letters also mention his travel abroad with FBI agents for the investigation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burck is cc’d on both documents in his role as a federal prosecutor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sater’s lawyer spells Burck’s name as “Burke.” (Another U.S. attorney’s name is misspelled as well. Assistant U.S. attorney Eric Corngold, who handled Sater’s case at the Eastern District for several years, is rendered “Korngold.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FBI’s Point Man</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burck’s name on these letters indicate that from at least August 2004 to February 2005, Burck was the Southern District’s point man on Sater’s case, establishing that Burck was being kept up to speed on Sater’s highly sensitive national security work while Burck was at the Southern District, information to which few would have access.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">While Burck was at the Southern District, the U.S. attorney—the prosecutor in charge of the district—was Preet Bharara, whom Trump fired not long after taking office.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Felix Sater flipped in late 1998, when Bill Clinton was president. He pleaded guilty to a single count of racketeering after making millions in a mobbed-up brokerage in the 1990s. The “pump-and-dump” brokerage had made thousands of high-pressure cold calls to elderly customers, handled scam stock offerings, and laundered money. The scam involved Russian-speaking and Italian organized crime heavies, including Sater, an owner of the brokerage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sater’s work as a “cooperating witness”—legalese for an informant who must be available to testify at trial—spanned the Clinton and George W. Bush White House years and ended not long after Barack Obama took office, from late 1998 through 2009. Sater went to work at the real estate development firm Bayrock in Trump Tower soon after 9/11.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Loretta Lynch, who twice served as the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, described Sater’s undercover work during her 2015 confirmation hearings to become Obama’s second attorney general.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“For more than 10 years, [Sater] worked with prosecutors providing information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra,” she wrote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">An assistant federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, during a closed-door federal court proceeding, praised Sater’s “cooperation of an extraordinary depth and breadth, almost unseen, at least in this United States Attorney’s office.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>While most cooperators work on one case, “Sater’s cooperation runs a gamut that is seldom seen.</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It involves violent organizations such as Al Qaeda, it involves foreign governments, it involves Russian organized crime” and several New York mafia families, the prosecutor declared, a transcript that was later unsealed shows.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>It’s not at all clear that Sater actually achieved much as a cooperator. His lawyer, Robert Wolf, says, for example, that Sater intercepted Stinger missiles and got Osama bin Laden’s cell phone number, but those are mere claims on behalf of a known grifter.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Concealed Identity</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Justice Department and federal judges concealed Sater’s role as a top-level informant from public view while he was making business deals with Trump. His case docket was sealed and identity hidden, and even in the sealed court papers he was named as “John Doe.” Whether the double sealing was proper is being litigated in court cases by lawyer Fred Oberlander, who asserts that the handling of Sater’s case was corrupt.&nbsp; &nbsp;Oberlander has filed a civil RICO case against Sater and Bayrock, alleging the firm was a massive money-laundering operation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sater’s real estate developments with Trump came at a very difficult time for the Trump Organization. U.S. banks no longer extended him credit after a 1990 reorganization of his debts in a deal negotiated with approval of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission. Bankers lost well more than a billion dollars in the 1990 deal alone. Later the casino company Trump sold stock in endured a string of business bankruptcies—while paying Trump about $82 million—before going out of business.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By 2005, when the second of the newly unsealed documents is dated, Trump and Sater had worked on several projects together, in which Trump had licensed his name to buildings developed by Sater’s firm. Among these was a condominium tower in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which was never built and resulted in years of litigation alleging fraud.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump SoHo, the largest Trump-Sater project, was announced later, in 2006. Trump was due 18% of the profits from that project, in which bankers and investors lost money, but Trump and others evidently made profits which disappeared into FL Group, an Icelandic finance operation.&nbsp; Trump’s name has since been removed from the building. Oberlander has been trying to force courts to trace that money.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From Yale to the Southern District</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">William Burck’s world was far from boiler-room brokerages and caviar-and-blini restaurants favored by post-Soviet émigrés in Brighton Beach. After attending Yale for his undergraduate and legal degrees, Burck climbed quickly up the Justice Department ladder.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">After Burck left the Southern District of New York in 2005, he moved to Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, where he was counsel to the head of the criminal division. Burck then jumped to the White House of George W. Bush, where he served as deputy assistant to the president and then deputy staff secretary to Kavanaugh, now a Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burck and Kavanaugh are both are seen as fiercely partisan.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After Bush left office, Burck became a corporate lawyer, eventually at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, with offices from Washington to Paris to Australia.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burck’s clients include the scandal-plagued international soccer organization FIFA, many of whose international officials faced money laundering and racketeering charges from the Eastern District of New York in 2015. Burck worked behind the scenes to push FIFA members to cooperate with the government, according to an anonymously sourced article in The Wall Street Journal, to save the organization from collapsing under the weight of its own corruption.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of those informants was apparently the top U.S. FIFA official, the larger-than-life Chuck Blazer, who in 2011 chose to avoid charges by cooperating with the government, then secretly recorded conversations with FIFA officials from around the world, according to the New York Daily News. Blazer rented two $18,000-a-month residential apartments in Trump Tower and one $6,000-a-month unit reportedly solely for his cats. His offices took up the entire 17th floor of the building. (Blazer’s principal attorney? The former Eastern District prosecutor who had handled Sater’s criminal case for a number of years, Eric Corngold.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Cyprus Connection</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Another major client of Burck was the corrupt FBME bank in Cyprus, which worked closely with Deutsche Bank to move money for its Russian-speaking clients.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2014, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) charged that FBME Bank was purposely promoting a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” approach to money laundering regulation compliance “to attract illicit finance business from the darkest corners of the criminal underworld.” FinCen is our government’s anti-money laundering agency. It is staffed with IRS agents who specialize in tracing illicit money flows.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BuzzFeed described FBME “as a major conduit for funds linked to terrorism, organized crime, and chemical weapons, and revealed how blue-chip Western institutions enabled its activities.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the Mueller investigation was launched soon after Trump was sworn in, in 2017, McGahn hired Burck as he was trying to navigate the shoals between his obligations as White House counsel and the requests of Mueller’s investigators. This may have been especially important as one of the U.S. attorneys who signed Sater’s cooperation agreement in 1998 was Andrew Weissmann, a financial fraud expert who was also on Mueller’s team.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steering McGahn</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Burck “devised the legal strategy behind McGahn’s giving more than 30 hours of testimony to the special counsel,” according to The New York Times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">McGahn’s testimony “provided investigators with a road map for an obstruction case against the president,” according to the Times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the midst of the Mueller investigation, Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a move that surprised many conservatives because Kavanaugh was not on the list put forward by the Federalist Society, on which Trump had said he would rely.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>McGahn, as White House counsel, managed Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and Burck advised him in the process.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the Senate Judiciary Committee asked for documents related to Kavanaugh’s work in the Bush White House, Bush hired his former staffer Burck to review them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This “Bush-lawyer-approved” document review circumvented the normal process, which typically relied on the nonpartisan National Archives to go over documents before submitting them to the Senate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Instead, it was Burck who chose which documents of his friend and former superior in the Bush White House to turn over to the Judiciary Committee—just as he was advising McGahn on Kavanaugh’s confirmation process and also serving as McGahn’s attorney on the Mueller probe.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">‘Who Is Bill Burck?’</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democrats wondered aloud about Burck’s unprecedented role in the nomination process.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Who is Bill Burck? … This mysterious Bill Burck who is filtering these documents. … Who’s paying him?” Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the end, Burck withheld tens of thousands of documents from the committee. Many were thought to relate to Kavanaugh’s views on topics such as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the term the Bush administration used for torture, and holding people indefinitely at Guantanamo.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Why are Republicans covering up Brett Kavanaugh’s past?” a New York Times editorial asked, specifically mentioning Burck and his role in the “most secretive and incomplete confirmation process in modern history.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Burck turned down the chance to serve as one of Trump’s personal attorneys,</b>&nbsp;the Washington Post reported.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He did, however, recently agree to represent a Trump ally, Robert Kraft, an owner of the New England Patriots who is facing charges of paying for sex acts at a Florida massage parlor. The parlor was founded by a woman who has been selling access to Trump and his family at Mar-a-Lago to her Chinese clients.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is another interesting aspect of Burck’s and Sater’s roles and the Mueller report.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Andrew McCabe, the former acting FBI director whom Trump has repeatedly denounced after becoming president, first worked in the bureau’s New York organized crime section just around the time that Sater flipped. In 2004 and 2005, when the unsealed letters were written, McCabe headed the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force in New York, which worked with the New York Police Department. (“Eurasian” in this case means crime from the former Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Just like Burck, McCabe would have deep knowledge of what Sater was doing with Russian-speaking crime organization leaders in Russia and former Soviet satellites including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine—as well as Sater’s connection to Trump and the Trump Organization. McCabe’s role in New York in the 2000s may help explain Trump’s hostility to him, including bullying McCabe’s wife Jill.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was McCabe who authorized the counterintelligence investigation into candidate Trump. Trump fired McCabe one day before he became eligible for a full pension.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What Burck Knows</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As for Sater and Trump, it’s clear Burck knows much about who Sater is and what Sater’s work with the government entailed, and he has a much more precise understanding of the nature of Sater’s financial relationship with Trump that the U.S. public does.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sater’s court documents and identity as an FBI cooperator were never intended to be revealed. They have only slowly been unsealed over time in a long-running drama involving various lawsuits, most prominently in Oberlander’s racketeering lawsuit. It alleges that Sater’s projects were large-scale money laundering operations involving money coming from the former Soviet Union. That case was filed under the civil provisions of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), whose criminal provisions have been used to prosecute Mafia families in Brooklyn and Manhattan and beyond.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thus, Burck whose knowledge of Sater goes back at least 15 years, could be especially useful to both Team Bush—whose Department of Justice was responsible for Sater’s sanctioned work as an informant—and Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was the wealthy long-term informant Sater, after all, who wrote to his old friend Michael Cohen in 2015, “Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it … I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process” while he pushed for a Trump project in Moscow.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After all, there may be questions about how a highly protected informant worked to secure the Kremlin’s support for Trump’s election—and got away with it.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">==</font></div>