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PREDICTIVE MKT
SCOTUS REFORM
WOUNDED KNEE MOH
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amanda a fan
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Ars Technica
Taylor Farms' connections to Trump admin spurs probe into
Aug 14, 2026Warren's letter noted other donations to Trump-aligned entities from Taylor Farms and said the contributions totaled into the millions.
As Americans cook their vegetables to at least 158°F to kill a diarrheal parasite that has sickened over 24,000 people and killed two this summer, one US Senator is turning up the heat on Health Secretary Robert F. Kenney Jr. over the government’s “calamitous response” to the record outbreak.
In a letter sent Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the federal response to the Cyclospora outbreak “botched” and “marred by missteps.” She pointedly questioned whether corruption and incompetence within the Trump administration and its clear ties to Taylor Farms—the mammoth produce distributer that sold Mexican-grown iceberg lettuce linked to the outbreak—played a role in the federal government’s failures.
“[P]olitical contributions and direct White House lobbying from Taylor Farms… raise urgent questions about the role this influence-peddling may have played in loosening federal food safety oversight and hampering the federal government’s response to the outbreak,” Warren wrote in the letter.
As Ars Technica has previously reported, Taylor Farms made a $1 million donation to a Trump-backing super PAC, MAGA, Inc, in March 2025. That donation came just days after the Food and Drug Administration announced it was delaying implementing a food traceability rule that would have made it easier to trace and respond to outbreaks, like the Cyclospora outbreak.
Warren’s letter noted other donations to Trump-aligned entities from Taylor Farms and said the contributions totaled into the millions. She further pointed out that Taylor Farms has hired former Trump White House official Trent Morse to lobby on behalf of the company. Morse reportedly brokered a direct call between Taylor Farms and the White House after the FDA had linked the company’s lettuce to the outbreak. In the call, Taylor Farms allegedly made an “urgent plea” to delay a recall of the tainted lettuce.
Clear delay
Warren also noted a significant lingering question about the federal government’s response. Local media outlets reported that Taco Bell restaurants in Michigan and nearby states began pulling iceberg lettuce from their menus as early as July 7. Notices at the restaurant said they were unable to sell the produce “due to a nationwide recall.” But at the time, no recall had been reported by federal agencies.
On July 14, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the outbreak as being from an “unknown source.” The CDC and the FDA did not identify lettuce at certain Taco Bell locations as a source until July 17. The same day, Taylor Farms issued a recall, and the FDA published the recall notice on July 18. The recall notice did not include details or clear information about how much lettuce was being recalled or where it had been shipped. An FDA report identified this week found that Taco Bell’s parent company received just 2.5 percent of the tainted lettuce, with the rest going elsewhere. Walmart received 46 percent of the recalled cases.
Warren’s letter also questioned confusion about the FDA reporting that Taylor Farms’ lettuce had tested positive for Cyclospora, only to retract the claim the next day, calling it a false positive. Taylor Farms then claimed the FDA had apologized to it, which the FDA quickly denied.
Warren posed a series of questions to Kennedy, including whether Taylor Farms or a Trump political appointee pressed the FDA to reevaluate the test result, leading to the retraction. She is also seeking transcripts, summaries, and notes from communications between federal agencies and Taylor Farms.
“[T]he specter of corruption—and quid pro quo politics—casts a darker shadow” over the outbreak response than simply dangerously bad food safety policies from the Trump administration, Warren wrote.
In a statement to The Hill, a Taylor Farms spokesperson said that the company “acts in the interest of science and consumer health, not politics. We categorically reject suggestions that we attempted to receive or received favorable regulatory treatment due to political contributions or other improper influence. Any such allegations are false.”
A Health Department spokesperson told the outlet that the federal government’s investigations into the outbreak “were not impacted by staffing changes or reductions in force. Political contributions or relationships have no bearing on FDA or CDC outbreak investigations.”
Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter
Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.
===
...The ‘court packing’ myth
Many pundits hailed Roberts for opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but in the Dobbs decision, he lost out to the five Republican appointees on ‘his’ court who are seemingly even further right than he is.
Many progressives weren’t buying the righteous, caring and politically aloof version of himself Roberts portrayed back then, and they say this latest reporting shows they were right.
“That's interesting how there's sort of this story out there that Roberts was like a moderate and mediator. And the [NYT] story would suggest that’s not really necessarily the case,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) told Raw Story after voting on the Senate floor this week.
While Republican rhetoric paints all elected Democrats — from the top of the party’s presidential ticket on down — as wanting to expand, or ‘pack,’ the court, only three Senate Democrats have formally endorsed a progressive measure to expand the size of the court, as Raw Story reported last month.
Smith and Massachusetts Democratic Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are the three who’ve publicly endorsed Markey’s measure to expand the size of the Supreme Court. That’s it.
Even with all the negative press, Smith says other Senate Democrats haven’t approached them about their measure to expand the size of the court.
“I haven't heard any,” Smith said.
That doesn’t mean her colleagues aren’t discussing the Roberts Court.
AN 4 26
In 2025, four major companies — Paramount, ABC, Meta (which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads), and the Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter — agreed to donate millions of dollars to fund Donald Trump's presidential library in Miami. Altogether, the donations totaled at least $63 million for the library, which according to President Trump, could double as a Trump-branded hotel.
Senate Democrats have been probing that $63 million, but according to The New Republic's Greg Sargent, a lot of questions remain unanswered.
"After the companies agreed to these shakedowns — sorry, settlements — the fund created to receive donations was dissolved last September," Sargent explains in an article published on April 20. "Since then, Senate Democrats have been asking: What happened to the money? Now, there's been an important new turn in this saga. The four companies have provided fresh information to Senate Democrats in written responses to their questions. For these Democrats, those responses — obtained by The New Republic — raise more questions than they answer."
Sargent, a former Washington Post columnist, adds, "In these formal replies, all four companies confirmed that they did pledge that money to Trump's library — itself a notable development. More importantly, however, the Democrats say the responses reveal that the money is still largely unaccounted for."
According to Sargent, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has "taken the lead in tracking this money."
"The companies all settled lawsuits with Trump after his 2024 victory — Paramount for $16 million over a claim of fraudulent editing by CBS; Meta for $25 million, and X for around $10 million over supposed censorship of Trump; and ABC for $15 million over alleged defamation," Sargent reports. "Experts criticized the lawsuits as weak and denounced the settlements as akin to extortion payments. Under those settlements, the companies donated virtually all that money to the library project, totaling at least $63 million. But then the fund where most of that money appeared to be directed — the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund — was dissolved by Florida officials amid the failure to file a required annual report."
Warren is demanding answers about the $63 million.
The liberal senator told Sargent, "Not one of these companies can say with any clarity where their multi-million-dollar donations to Donald Trump's library slush fund are, or where they will go…. Tens of millions of dollars are unaccounted for, and the American people are left completely in the dark."
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AN 3 26
After a series of suspiciously timed, highly lucrative bets, federal prosecutors have begun exploring whether insider trading laws are being broken via prediction markets. A handful of users have been making big money off the apps Polymarket and Kashi, and a growing number of critics warn that they must have received insider information pertaining to TV show finales, elections and President Donald Trump’s decisions regarding the war on Iran.
Prediction markets have exploded in popularity in recent years, allowing users to gamble on a vast range of yes-or-no questions. Sometimes the bets are on low-stakes matters like the outcome of a television series, but lately, a number of high payout bets tied to major geopolitical events have been in the news, such as a $400,000 win off a bet made just hours before Trump’s surprise raid and arrest of ex-Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, or several waves of bets linked to Trump’s statements regarding the war on Iran.
The timing of these bets has investigators looking into whether insider trading occurred, and whether such laws are applicable to prediction markets in the first place. Currently, it is largely up to prediction apps to police themselves — which different companies have done to different degrees with varying success — but some federal prosecutors are now saying these regulations should be formalized.
Democrats agree. Last week, over 40 House and Senate Democrats signed a letter to Trump Administration officials urging action on such insider trading.
“Given the exponential growth in prediction market trading, rising evidence suggesting possible governmental insider trading in prediction markets, and potential confusion surrounding existing law in this area,” the Democratic letter asked relevant agencies to “issue guidance reminding federal employees of their existing legal obligation to refrain from using their insider governmental information to profit from prediction market trades.”
So far, attempts to ban election-related betting have failed, which has led to an explosion of such gambling over the past two years. Now when it comes to addressing insider trading, some experts are skeptical that action will be taken.
“I think it will be difficult. You can’t criminally prosecute someone if the law is vague,” said Aitan Goelman, a criminal defense lawyer who previously served as the director of enforcement at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which theoretically oversees prediction markets. “Prosecutors would have to show not only that someone was trading in possession of material nonpublic information, but they were doing it in violation of some kind of fiduciary duty or duty of trust. But all this is untested.”
Then there is also the question of the Trump family’s involvement in prediction markets and their regulation. President Trump’s administration is notoriously anti-regulation and has already expressed a desire to expand prediction market access. At the same time, Donald Trump Jr. is on the advisory board at Polymarket, and the wider Trump organization has leaned into investing and profiting off such platforms.
This, warn critics, sets up a dynamic in which neither the fairness of prediction markets nor those tasked with regulating them can be trusted.
“It’s not fair for anyone, especially federal officials, to use inside information when betting on prediction markets,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “Donald Trump’s CFTC shouldn’t let public officials get away with rigging prediction markets against working people.”
an 3 26
President Donald Trump can usually rely on The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board to support his economic programs, but on Tuesday the venerable newspaper slammed the Republican Party leader for being too “progressive.”
“Republicans want to show voters they’re doing something to ease housing costs,” the Editorial Board observed. “The result, alas, is a pork-filled bill hitting the Senate floor this week that is a big win for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the political left.”
Describing the Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act as “a melange of some 40 bills,” the editorial board took issue with a provision that bans large investors from purchasing single-family homes to rent.
“President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say ‘people live in homes, not corporations,’” the Editorial Board observed. “But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.”
Arguing that Trump’s bill would bar most investors with 350 or more homes from purchasing new ones, while others would need to sell any properties they acquired under these exemptions within seven years, the Board argued that it is bad both for the investors and for renters.
“Smaller firms will likely exit the market because they couldn’t expand,” the Editorial Board argued. “If investors are forced to unload properties, where will their tenants go? Amherst estimates that roughly 85% of its tenants wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage because of credit constraints or other underwriting restrictions.”
In the name of achieving a political victory, the editorial board argued that “the White House is pressuring Senate Republicans to pass the bill and wants the House to accept it. But why do Republicans want to provide a down payment for Ms. Warren and fellow progressives to expand Washington control over housing in their states?”
This is not the first time the Journal has called out Trump’s economic programs. Earlier in March it pointed out that the February jobs report was “lousy,” adding that “the U.S. shed 92,000 jobs and revised down gains for January and December by a combined 69,000. The question is what to make of the declines.”
Other conservatives have also criticized Trump’s economic policies. Writing for the conservative-leaning publication The Bulwark, commentator Mona Charen denounced Trump’s tariffs and predicted they would cost the Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.
“Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs,” Charen said. “Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.”
Indeed, Trump’s tariffs are so controversial that six Republican lawmakers joined their Democratic counterparts to vote for a bill to repeal Trump’s tariffs against Canada. Those lawmakers include Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Kevin Kiley of California, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Jeff Hurd of Colorado.
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AN 11 25
Amid concerns over President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom, a pair of Democratic US lawmakers on Tuesday introduced legislation “to root out apparent bribery and corruption” involving the $300 million project.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) introduced the Stop Ballroom Bribery Act, described by Warren’s office as “the first piece of legislation addressing the ballroom that would impose donation restrictions.”
“Billionaires and giant corporations with business in front of this administration are lining up to dump millions into Trump’s new ballroom—and Trump is showing them where to sign on the dotted line,” Warren said in a statement. “Americans shouldn’t have to wonder whether President Trump is building a ballroom to facilitate a pay-to-play scheme for political favors. My new bill will put an end to what looks like bribery in plain sight.”
Garcia said: “Donald Trump is raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build himself a White House ballroom at a time when millions of American families can barely make ends meet. It’s outrageous that the White House won’t reveal who’s bankrolling Trump’s pet project, and that the people’s house could be funded by shady figures, corrupt money, and bad actors.”
“This bill will ban contributions from anyone with a conflict of interest, prevent bribery, and ensure we can hold any administration accountable for blatant corruption,” he added.
Noting that many of the “wealthy individuals, corporations, and organizations” funding the ballroom “need something from the Trump administration,” Warren’s office flagged “serious concerns of quid-pro-quo arrangements and possible bribery.”
“Ethics experts have argued that the apparent pay-to-play relationship between Trump and business leaders oversteps the norms of presidential behavior and could erode Americans’ trust in government,” the senator’s office added.
As Warren’s office noted:
Key ballroom donors currently have business interests in front of the Trump administration. For example, Google, which recently donated $22 million to settle President Trump’s censorship lawsuit against YouTube, will benefit if Trump’s [Department of Justice] decides not to appeal a recent judicial ruling in a relevant antitrust case. Meanwhile, Union Pacific Railroad is seeking federal approval of a lucrative merger and Palantir is working to get more federal contracts.The White House has refused to be fully transparent, publishing only a noncomprehensive donor list missing multiple key donors and offering donors anonymity. Donations for projects like the ballroom are often channeled through the National Park Service and philanthropic partners; nonprofits with formal ties to property used by the president and Vice President [JD Vance] raise unique conflict-of-interest risks when fundraising from individuals and corporations with interests in front of the federal government.
The Stop Ballroom Bribery Act would:
- Impose pre-donation restrictions, including banning contributions from entities and individuals that present a conflict of interest, make it clear that donations cannot be conditioned on receipt of benefits from the federal government, require congressional approval for foreign donations, and proscribe the president and other senior officials and their families from taking donations;
- Impose post-donation restrictions, including banning the display of donors’ names and logos, enact a two-year cooling-off period before a donor to a covered project can lobby the federal government, and prohibit conversion of leftover donated funds to anyone’s personal use or to benefit the president and other senior officials and their families;
- Require transparency, including the disclosure of any meetings with senior federal officials or their relatives within a year of the donation, and mandate National Park Service publication of all donations to covered projects and ban anonymous donations; and
- Enable enforcement, judicial review, and the pursuit of civil and criminal penalties for violators.
"President Trump's decision to unilaterally destroy the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom financed by wealthy individuals and corporations not only ignores our country's laws but raises serious ethical concerns—namely, whether individuals and corporations funded this project in the hopes of buying access and influence," said Debra Perlin, vice president for policy at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which supports the legislation.
Virginia Canter, chief counsel and director for ethics and anticorruption at Democracy Defenders Action—another backer of the bill—said that “over the past year, President Trump has raised millions of dollars for vanity projects at the White House—like paving over the Rose Garden and demolishing the beloved East Wing.”
“These funds have come from private donors without meaningful transparency or accountability,” Canter added. “The highest office in the land should never be for sale, nor should it ever appear to be.”
pp$
top watchdog out at FHFA
The agency's Office of the Inspector General website now reads that its top position “is currently vacant.”
By:
Cassandra Dumay
| 11/03/2025 06:06 PM EST
The Federal Housing Finance Agency no longer has a top internal watchdog, according to its inspector general website.
Reuters reported Monday that acting Inspector General Joe Allen was facing termination. The outlet previously reported that FHFA Director Bill Pulte had circumvented the inspector general’s office by making criminal referrals on alleged mortgage fraud against Trump adversaries Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The agency's Office of the Inspector General website now reads that its top position “is currently vacant.”
FHFA did not return request for comment.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement that Pulte “has some answering to do – what happened to the watchdog overseeing his agency?”
“What does Pulte have to hide as he continues to use his role to investigate President Trump’s perceived political enemies while failing to lower housing costs for the American people?” Warren added.
...
an comm dr? 6 25
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts, on Tuesday released a report chronicling over 100 examples of "unethical or potentially corrupt actions" that either benefit billionaire Elon Musk or one of his companies and which took place while Musk played a key role in the Trump administration.
According to the report, the past few months have been very profitable for Musk, who officially departed the White House last week. "Since Election Day, Musk's staggering net worth has increased by over $100 billion," the report states.
After spending some $290 million to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump and other Republicans last fall, Musk was tapped by Trump to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a body tasked with slashing government personnel and spending. DOGE's sweep of government has led, for example, to the hollowing out of the U.S. Agency for International Development and contract cuts at many other agencies.
Last week, Musk announced that he is departing the White House, just ahead of an official May 30 deadline for his departure as a special government employee. That designation allowed the world's richest man to play a key role in the Trump White House without facing Senate confirmation.
During that time, Musk "maintained extensive financial conflicts of interest through his ownership or stake" in several companies, including the electric vehicle company Tesla and his aerospace firm SpaceX, per the report, which was first written up by Rolling Stone.
According to the report, "not every action listed below represents a violation of federal law. In many cases, Musk has violated norms at an astonishing pace." However, "in other cases, Musk has engaged in action that may have violated the statutory prohibition regarding federal employees; participation in particular matters in which a government official has a financial interest, laws against bribery and gratuities, or the regulations prohibiting use of one's government position for private gain."
The report, titled Special Interests Over the Public Interest: Elon Musk's 130 Days in the Trump Administration, sorts the listed actions into 15 main categories, such as "official government time and resources [that] have been spent promoting Musk's businesses." In that first category, the report gives the example of the time that Trump turned the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom.
In a category titled "Musk's parochial interests over the public interest," the report highlights how Musk has appeared to influence Trump's actions toward South Africa, Musk's country of birth.
Musk has been critical of a law passed in South Africa earlier this year, which allows the government to seize land under set circumstances. The law is meant to help rectify the economic exclusion that Black South Africans faced during apartheid. In February, Trump issued an executive order freezing aid to South Africa over the law.
The report also details federal government contracts that Musk's various ventures have either secured or are being considered for. For example, in February, NASA chose SpaceX to provide launch services for a space telescope, a contract worth $100 million. SpaceX is also reportedly being considered to construct part of Trump's "Golden Dome" missile defense shield.
Warren's report also gives instances in which "largely guided by Musk's DOGE, the Trump administration has hamstrung the agencies overseeing Musk's companies, gutting their staff, throwing sand in the gears of their operations, and embedding DOGE staff loyal to Musk." The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in particular has been a target of DOGE.
RS raw 6 25
'Reign of corruption' revealed as Senate Dems share Musk 'dodgy dealings' list
Jennifer Bowers Bahney
:{June 3, 2025
:{Elon Musk is seen with a bruised eye that Musk claimed he received at the hands of his son, X Æ A-12, as he attends a press conference with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 30, 2025.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has issued a new report raising questions of "corruption, ethics, and conflicts of interest" perpetuated during Elon Musk's time heading up President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, according to a preview by Rolling Stone.
The report, titled “Special Interests Over the Public Interest: Elon Musk’s 130 Days in the Trump Administration,” features a list of 130 questionable actions by Musk, his companies, and family members that culminated in a "reign of corruption," according to senior writer Tim Dickinson.
Last week, Trump announced that Musk was leaving his post as "special government employee" to focus more on his businesses, which have taken a hit since he became involved in promoting Trump's MAGA agenda.
"The Warren report is focused on Elon’s use of political power to boost his businesses, or secure special benefits — from regulatory relief to rich new contracts — that favor his fortunes and his family," Dickinson wrote.
ALSO READ: FBI silent as far-right podcaster demands Trump execution and Kash Patel torture
“Not every action listed… represents a violation of federal law,” the report said, instead arguing that “Musk has violated norms at an astonishing pace” while taking actions that are “hurting the American public.”
Rolling Stone previewed the list's 15 categories that include blatant White House promotion of Musk's Tesla electric vehicles, lucrative contracts for SpaceX and Starlink, and a concerted effort by the Trump DOJ to drop up to $2.5 billion in federal penalties against Musk's companies.
The report also claimed that Musk perpetuated an "intimidation campaign" via his X social media business, as well as "weaponizing federal power" and "influence-peddling in Congress."
The report concluded that, far from displaying transparency, "Musk himself has hidden his norms-busting activities behind a veil of secrecy...failing to make public his vast financial holdings, or what if any waivers of federal ethics requirements he may have received."
Read the Rolling Stone article here.
no lnx
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AN 5 25
~ CRyPtO BILL, ~ SCHIFF BOOKER PADILLA
AN 5 25
Despite concerns that it does not address U.S. President Donald Trump's ties to the crypto industry, 16 Democrats in the Senate voted with most Republicans on Monday to advance a bill that creates a regulatory framework for stablecoins, digital assets whose value is tied to traditional currency, such as the U.S. dollar, or a commodity like gold.
The industry-backed Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act passed a cloture vote, with support from Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the original co-sponsor of the bill, Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Ben Ray Luján (N.M.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.). The bill is now teed up for Senate debate.
Back in February, a coalition of consumer groups and watchdogs warned that the bill would accelerate the "convergence of Big Tech and Big Finance" and is "a necessary prerequisite for future giveaways to the crypto industry."
In early May, the legislation faltered after several crypto-friendly Democrats raised concerns that it did not contain strong enough provisions around anti-money laundering, national security, and other issues.
Pro-crypto Democrats have said that the version of the bill that was considered on Monday contains a number of revisions that address those concerns, including more consumer protections and some limitations on Big Tech's ability to issue stablecoins.
However, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs—said on the Senate floor Monday that the bill's "basic flaws remain unaddressed," according to prepared remarks.
Warren is concerned, in particular, that the bill does not "rein in the president's crypto corruption."
" Trump and his family have already pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars from his crypto ventures and they stand to make hundreds of millions more from his stablecoin, USD1, if this bill passes," Warren said. "Passing this bill means that we can expect more anonymous buyers, big companies, and foreign governments to use the president's stablecoin as both a shadowy bank account shielded from government oversight and as a way to pay off the president personally."
USD1 is a stablecoin developed by the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. A few weeks ago, it was announced that USD1 would be used for a $2 billion deal between an investment firm established by the government of Abu Dhabi, MGX, and the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance.
Warren on Monday also expressed concern that the bill, even with revisions, creates a relatively weak regulatory framework, and still allows Big Tech to create private currencies, among other objections.
"Democrats correctly deride Republicans for abetting Trump's endless, daily, sulfurous corruption. But given the chance to stand up to his crypto grift—perhaps the most reeking corruption in presidential history—too many Democrats instead yielded to another depravity, namely unprecedented political spending by a handful of crypto corporations and billionaires," said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert on Monday, referencing election spending by the crypto industry.
In the last election cycle, crypto industry-supported super political action committees gave money to multiple senators who voted for cloture on Monday, including Slotkin and Gallego.
"No Democrats should be supporting Trump's self-enrichment," the grassroots progressive group Indivisible wrote on Tuesday on Bluesky.
NOW READ:Swing state Republicans headed for a 'wipeout' if candidates refuse to buck Trump
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an 525
Donald Trump has raised nearly a billion dollars from his various cryptocurrency schemes, says researcher Molly White. “He is really allowing for bribery and the types of corruption that we’ve never seen in the American presidency,” White says. She lays out how the Trump family profits from cryptocurrency while directly influencing policy and regulations, encouraging the transfer of wealth to the industry despite its “enormous risk of fraud and collapse.”democracynow.org
AMY GOODMAN: Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley are calling for a federal investigation into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, after a fund backed by Abu Dhabi announced it would make a $2 billion investment in crypto exchange Binance using a Trump-branded cryptocoin. The deal could generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family.
In their letter, Senators Warren and Merkley wrote, quote, “The deal, if completed, would represent a staggering conflict of interest, one that may violate the Constitution and open our government to a startling degree of foreign influence and the potential for a quid pro quo that could endanger national security,” unquote.
Senator Warren also released this video last week blasting the deal.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: The United States is getting ready to bless Donald Trump’s latest grift. A shady Abu Dhabi investment firm just announced it’s going to make a $2 billion business deal with a foreign crypto company called Binance. So, here’s the kicker: Binance and the foreign investment firm are going to use Donald Trump’s stablecoin to finance their transaction, essentially giving Trump a cut of that $2 billion deal. Boy, looks like corruption, smells like corruption. So, yeah, the Senate is going to put a stop to it, right? Wrong. Right now the Senate is getting ready to greenlight the grift by passing the so-called GENIUS Act next week. This is a bill that would make it even easier for the president and his family to profit off their own stablecoin and oversee their own financial company.
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump is headed to the Gulf next week.
In related news, last night, on Monday, President Trump spoke at a crypto and AI innovators’ dinner to raise money for a pro-Trump super PAC. Tickets were one-and-a-half million dollars a plate. The event was held at the president’s golf club in Virginia. The co-host of the dinner was David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar. Sacks is a South African-born tech investor who was part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, founding PayPal with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
On May 22nd, Trump is also hosting a private gala dinner for the top 220 investors in his meme coin. The dinner will also be held at the Trump National Golf Club. The promotion also offers an ultra-exclusive VIP reception with the president and a tour of the White House for the top 25 $TRUMP meme coin investors. The anti-corruption group CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the promotion, quote, “one of the most blatant and appalling instances of selling access to the presidency we’ve ever seen,” they said.
We’re joined now by Molly White, an independent cryptocurrency researcher who runs the Citation Needed newsletter. She recently wrote an article headlined “Trump’s newest grift: Building a cryptocurrency empire while destroying its regulators.”
Molly, welcome to Democracy Now! If you can start off, for folks who aren’t following cryptocurrency that carefully, explain what cryptocurrency is.
MOLLY WHITE: Cryptocurrency is a digital asset. So, it’s an entirely digital form of speculation, essentially, that allows people to speculate on the value of tokens that are, you know, things like bitcoin or Ethereum, and it’s entirely digital. There is no physical representation. There is no physical asset or service backing the tokens.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in your recent piece, Molly, you wrote that “The scope of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency conflicts illustrates a degree of corruption that makes the emoluments concerns of Trump’s first term seem quaint by comparison.” Could you explain?
MOLLY WHITE: Yeah. So, Trump’s crypto ventures are growing, seemingly by the week. It seems like every week something new is announced, whether it’s his World Liberty Financial crypto platform or his $TRUMP meme coin or rumors of a new crypto game that his backers are working on. And so, he is really allowing for bribery and the types of corruption that we’ve never seen in the American presidency. You know, he’s allowing people to send him money. He is profiting directly from the cryptocurrency industry, while he is simultaneous influencing policy, legislation, calling off regulators who previously oversaw the crypto industry, in ways that are benefiting him and his family very directly.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And given the fact that cryptocurrency has become sort of the favored money-laundering method of criminals, drug dealers, anybody who wants to hide their money, what is the impact of the growing size of the crypto industry in terms of the financial system?
MOLLY WHITE: Well, it’s definitely concerning. I mean, there is this major potential for criminal activity using cryptocurrencies. We’ve seen it dramatically increase for use in money laundering, as you mention, terrorist financing. Ransomware is primarily these days done with cryptocurrency. And there’s very little in the way of regulations or laws that crack down on that type of activity.
And under the Trump administration, we’ve actually seen what few regulations were in place be pared back. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which previously was, essentially, the primary regulator of the cryptocurrency industry, has been called off the beat. We’ve seen cases against cryptocurrency companies dismissed with prejudice, investigations of crypto companies dropped. We’ve seen the cryptocurrency investigations teams at the SEC and the Department of Justice dismantled. And so, under the Trump administration, I think we are seeing dramatic expansion of the potential for criminal activity within cryptocurrency, as well as the, you know, complete reduction in consumer protections that would allow those who choose to get involved with cryptocurrency to do so without the fear that they are going to be scammed or taken advantage of.
AMY GOODMAN: Molly, how exactly does Trump and his family profit from these crypto ventures? How much money are we talking about? And explain. Trump has a crypto coin. Melania has one. Explain how this works.
MOLLY WHITE: Well, Trump has multiple crypto ventures that are directly enriching him. So, you mentioned there’s the $TRUMP meme coin, which is the token that is themed after him, essentially, and is being currently used as a ticket to this private dinner at his golf course. Melania has a token of her own. And the Trumps make money off of those tokens, both in terms of the trading that’s happening, as well as facilitating the liquidity for those types of tokens.
Then there’s the World Liberty Financial platform, which is a yet-to-be-released crypto platform that is nevertheless selling these World Liberty Financial tokens to interested buyers. Trump makes 75% of the protocol revenues from that project, and he owns a 60% stake in the company. He and his family sort of maintained the illusion that there was an arm’s-length relationship between the project, despite it being entirely themed after Trump, prior to his election and inauguration, but after he was inaugurated, they sort of gave up that facade and obtained a majority stake in the company.
And then, Trump has sort of an endless list of additional crypto ventures. He has his NFT projects. He has sold crypto-themed sneakers. You know, there has been reporting that he is working on a crypto game. His Trump Media & Technology Group, which is the company that is behind the Truth Social platform that he controls, is also getting into crypto with a partnership with Crypto.com to launch crypto ETFs, exchange-traded funds. And there’s also reporting that they are considering launching their own token. So, the list really goes on.
And so far, I think he has raised close to a billion dollars, or he has profited in close to a billion dollars from his combined ventures. That number is only continuing to increase, as there are deals like this stablecoin being used by the United Arab Emirates Investment Fund, and as, you know, multiple new ventures are being launched as we go on.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, the Trump administration has claimed that all of Trump’s investments are in a blind trust, that basically his sons run the company, not him.
MOLLY WHITE: Right, that is the claim, although he’s made varying claims. He’s even claimed not to profit from crypto at all, which is plainly untrue. But I think that, you know, frankly, it is not fair to say that he is divested from crypto ventures when it is controlled by his sons. His sons are profiting, and ultimately he is profiting. You know, he should not be making policy decisions or influencing policy in ways that benefit his family quite, quite plainly. And I don’t think that the claims that he has divested are accurate whatsoever.
AMY GOODMAN: Molly White, can you talk about the latest push by the Senate Democrats? Tell us more about the legislation that they want to change on cryptocurrency pending in Congress. What did the so-called GENIUS Act, a bill backed by the crypto industry, call for?
MOLLY WHITE: So, the GENIUS Act is primarily intended to regulate stablecoins, which are a category of crypto assets that are intended to maintain a peg to some other form of asset. So, we often see dollar stablecoins, which are crypto tokens that are intended to be worth $1 a piece. Those are assets like USDC or Trump’s USD1 stablecoin, which was recently launched. And the GENIUS Act, you know, seeks to install some amount of legislation that would regulate those types of assets.
And this is something that we’ve seen the crypto industry pushing for for quite some time, even prior to the Trump administration. But Trump’s own crypto ventures, including launching his own stablecoin, have recently stalled that legislation, with a number of Senate Democrats speaking up to oppose this bill, as well as those in the House, signaling that, you know, the Trump family financial interests are a major concern for them. The crypto industry has also pushed for a number of changes to this bill that would benefit the industry. And we’re now starting to see Democrats in Congress saying that this bill does not go far enough to prevent national security concerns or even terrorist financing using these stablecoins, which have been used to transfer massive amounts of funds. They are sort of the bedrock of the crypto industry, almost like the poker chips at the casino. Stablecoins are a major venue through which value is transferred in the crypto world. And so, this type of legislation is extremely important to get right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Do we have any sense of who in the United States does this investing in crypto coins? How widespread is it? Or is there a profile of typical people who are buying the coins?
MOLLY WHITE: Well, there are everyday people who are involved in crypto speculation, but we also see major venture capital firms and investment firms getting involved in the crypto world, as well, including a number that have a significant presence in Washington. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, is one of the largest technology venture capital firms. They have significant investments in the cryptocurrency world, and a number of Andreessen Horowitz employees have been installed in various positions at the White House. Marc Andreessen himself was involved in selecting members of the Trump administration, and they were very heavily involved in political campaigning. Then there are figures like David Sacks, who is the AI and crypto czar at the White House. He runs an investment firm that also has crypto investments, some of which he’s not divested from.
So, there are multiple profiles of crypto investors, many of them institutional, but also everyday people who have bought the story that cryptocurrency is a way to get ahead financially, that crypto investments can potentially provide high returns and are worth the enormous risk and volatility that crypto brings with it, and, you know, now the enormous risk of fraud and collapse throughout the crypto industry, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Molly White, we want to thank you so much for being with us, software engineer, independent cryptocurrency researcher, running the Citation Needed newsletter. We’ll link to your recent piece, “Trump’s newest grift: Building a cryptocurrency empire while destroying its regulators.”
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Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was a major donor to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, and the president-elect has offered him a position in his second administration.
Trump has proposed a new agency that would be called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and he would like Musk to lead it along with MAGA businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), according to Washington Post reporter Michael Scherer, voiced her concerns about Musk, possible conflicts of interest and the incoming second Trump Administration in a letter sent to the president-elect on Monday, December 17 — and staffer Karoline Leavitt "responded by calling her 'Pocahontas.'"
READ MORE:['How long it’ll be until he sues an economist': Experts blast Trump's lawsuit against pollster
"Pocahontas" is an insult that Trump came up with for Warren in response to her claim to have some Native American ancestry. Trump repeatedly called her "Pocahontas" when she was running for in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
In her letter, Warren wrote, "Putting Mr. Musk in a position to influence billions of dollars of government contracts and regulatory enforcement without a stringent conflict of interest agreement in place is an invitation for corruption on a scale not seen in our lifetimes. As your Transition Team Ethics Plan makes clear, the role of government is not to line the pockets of the wealthiest Americans; a strong, enforceable ethics plan for the world’s richest man is a necessary first step for delivering on that promise."
Leavitt, according to Scherer, "did not address Musk’s ethics commitments in her response to the letter."
Leavitt, who Trump has chosen for White House press secretary, responded, "President Trump has assembled the most impressive and qualified team of innovators, entrepreneurs, and geniuses to advise and staff our government. Pocahontas can play political games and send toothless letters, but the Trump-Vance transition will continue to be held to the highest ethical and legal standards possible — a standard unfamiliar to a career politician whose societal impact is 1/1024th of Elon Musk's."
READ MORE:['Damning information mounts': Trump's 'worst' nominees could be in for a rude awakening
In her letter, Warren wanted to know if Musk plans to "recuse himself from matters affecting Tesla, Space X, X, or any other company he owns or in which he has a substantial investment."
The senator wrote, "Currently, the American public has no way of knowing whether the advice that he is whispering to you in secret is good for the country — or merely good for his own bottom line."
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12/03/2024
by
In the wake of former President Donald Trump's reelection, former Trump White House chief strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon spoke to the secretive Council for National Policy, a coalition of Christian nationalists and right-wing activists that was deeply engaged in the plot to keep Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election.
Bannon, fresh from his stint in prison for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, told the CNP audience that the Senate's role is simply to confirm whoever Trump nominates and celebrated that conservatives are on the verge of having a complete monopoly on the Supreme Court.
"Donald Trump took a bullet to the head, and then four months later won in a landslide," Bannon proclaimed. "He can pick anybody he wants to serve in his government and all I wanna hear is a cheery 'aye, aye' from the United States Senate."
"It's advice and consent," Bannon said. "We'll take your advice, but you're going to give us your consent."
The Senate serving as a mere rubber stamp for the president is, of course, not what the Constitution proscribes, but the fact that Bannon's bellicose pronouncement received raucous applause says a lot about the CNP's supposed reverence for the nation's founding document.
Bannon then hailed Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Matt Gaetz as "the Four Horsemen of the deep state apocalypse" and vowed that all four are "going to be confirmed." Since Bannon delivered his speech, Gaetz has already withdrawn his nomination and the other three are all plagued by controversy.
"We we have a unique time," Bannon continued. "We have the White House, we have the executive branch. We have the House and the Senate—small majorities, but we have them. We have the courts. And if we do our work and stop [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren—there are 47 court openings right now—if we stop her in the Senate between now and [January] 20th, we will actually redo the district court level. And then these corrupt appellate courts. And guess what? We're going to get two or three pickups in the Supreme Court. We're going to go for a 9-0 court of conservatives."
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:{alternet
US plutocrats $276 billion richer since Trump win—and the GOP wants to give them even more
Elon Musk attends the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 14, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Jake Johnson and Common Dreams November 22, 2024
An analysis released Wednesday showed that the United States' 815 billionaires have seen their combined wealth surge by roughly $280 billion since Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election earlier this month, a finding that came as Republicans continued to lay the groundwork for another massive tax giveaway for the rich.
Citing Forbes data, Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) noted that the collective net worth of the nation's billionaires jumped $276 billion between November 4—the day before Election Day—and November 12. Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest man and a Trump confidant, accounted for 20% of the total billionaire wealth surge, with his net worth growing by $57 billion in just a week.
ATF found that U.S. billionaire wealth is now at an all-time high of $6.7 trillion—a fact that hasn't deterred Republican lawmakers from pursuing additional tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which they want to pay for in part by slashing Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance.
"Among the tax handouts the GOP hopes to offer America's plutocrats is a weakening or elimination of the estate tax, the federal government's only curb on dynastic wealth," ATF noted. "As proof of the party's intent, the new Republican majority in the U.S. Senate has chosen as its next leader the chamber's main champion of estate-tax repeal, John Thune (R-S.D.)."
The group observed that scrapping the estate tax would save billionaire households an estimated $2.7 trillion while depriving "working Americans of the exact same amount of funding for vital public services like Medicare, childcare, education, and housing."
Since the highly regressive 2017 Trump-GOP tax cut that Republicans are looking to extend and expand, U.S. billionaire wealth has risen by $3.8 trillion—over 131%—according to ATF.
"Instead of addressing the nation's growing economic inequality and the growing shortfall in federal revenue, President Trump and congressional Republicans plan to make the situation even worse by enacting a new tax cut package that gives billionaires tax breaks on the backs of working people," the group said Wednesday. "This Republican tax plan will start with extending all the expiring provisions in the 2017 Trump law—which alone will balloon the federal debt by $5 trillion over the next decade—but will likely include new handouts to the very wealthy, such as elimination of the estate tax."
During a hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) voiced similar concerns about the Trump-GOP tax agenda, which also includes cutting the statutory corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%.
"President-elect Trump has proposed making every single 2017 tax cut for the wealthy permanent," Warren said during the Senate hearing. "In fact, he plans to go further by cutting the corporate tax rate even more, so that giant corporations making record profits off struggling Americans can shovel even more cash to their rich executives and shareholders."
"The tax fight is starting now, and every person in the United States, every person in the Senate, needs to show the American people what side we stand on," said Warren. "Will we sign our names to more giveaways to President-elect Trump's billionaire buddies, or will we fight for tax fairness for the American people?"
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Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen feigned surprise on Wednesday over President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of Wall Street CEO Howard Lutnick to lead the U.S. Department of Commerce.
"Oh look, another billionaire has made his way into Trump's Cabinet," said the group, noting Lutnick is also a promoter of cryptocurrency and a Trump megadonor. "The conflicts of interest are almost too many to count."
Among the conflicts are Lutnick's involvement in the crypto industry and federal and state cases against Cantor Fitzgerald.
In addition to running the Wall Street firm, Lutnick is a banker for the "stablecoin" company Tether; purchasers receive a Tether token for $1, with the proceeds invested in reserves and Treasury bonds managed by Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald.
As Public Citizennoted, New York Attorney General Letitia James found in 2021 that Tether and another crypto firm "recklessly and unlawfully covered up massive financial losses to keep their scheme going and protect their bottom lines."
The company is also reportedly under federal investigation over alleged criminal violations of anti-money laundering rules and sanctions.
Public Citizen also said that while co-chairing Trump's transition team, Lutnick "may also have helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong," who "helped steer a record amount of political spending from the crypto industry into the 2024 election."
Crypto firms poured over $119 million into directly influencing the 2024 federal elections, Public Citizenfound in August, making the industry's spending second only to that of fossil fuel companies.
As Politicoreported in October, even other members of Trump's inner circle have accused Lutnick of using his transition team co-chair position to take meetings on Capitol Hill and "talk about matters impacting his investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald—including high-stakes regulatory matters involving its cryptocurrency business."
Lutnick's nomination, said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, serves as a reminder that "Trump serves the oligarchy, not the people."
"Debris from crypto's political spending tsunami will jam up more halls in Washington than ever before if Lutnick is confirmed as secretary of commerce," said Bartlett Naylor, a financial policy advocate for Public Citizen. "The president-elect, who once correctly called bitcoin a scam, now surrounds himself with even more crypto enablers. Cryptocurrency won't return good jobs to the heartland or reduce food prices; it will only thin the wallets of those vulnerable to a now government-legitimized con."
Government watchdog Accountable.US pointed to more than $19 million in political donations Lutnick has made since 2009, nearly all of which went to GOP candidates and political action committees. He contributed $6 million to Trump's super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc., in 2024 alone.
"Howard Lutnick's questionable qualifications to lead the Department of Commerce begin and end with his loyalty to the president-elect," said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk.
Tether isn't the only Lutnick-linked company that's been investigated for wrongdoing. The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Cantor Fitzgerald $1.4 million in 2023, saying the company repeatedly failed "to identify and report customers who qualified as large traders." The company also agreed to pay $16 million in fines to the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2022 for using unauthorized communication channels.
Should Lutnick be confirmed as commerce secretary, Accountable.US said a "major regulatory conflict" could arise due to a dispute between the BGC Group, a spin-off brokerage of Cantor Fitzegerald, and futures and commodities exchange CME Group, over a competing trading platform BGC Group is launching.
"Lutnick's company's violations resulting in financial regulator fines and millions in right-wing political donations shows that political devotion takes precedence over actual experience to do the job in Trump's Cabinet," said Carrk.
Trump campaigned as a champion of working people as he railed against high grocery prices. As The New Republicreportedon Tuesday, Lutnick has showered Trump's plan for across-the-board tariffs with effusive praise—even as leading economists warn the plan to impose tariffs on foreign imports will pass higher costs onto consumers, not foreign countries.
"In September, Lutnick told CNBC that 'tariffs are an amazing tool for the president to use—we need to protect the American worker,'" wrote Edith Olmsted. "Lutnick also gushed about tariffs at Trump's fascistic rally in Madison Square Garden last month, claiming that America was better off 100 years ago, when it had 'no income tax and all we had was tariffs.' His high praise for tariffs came even as he admitted Americans would face higher prices as a direct result."
Lutnick's nomination, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), "is a win for the billionaire class at the expense of working people."
"The across-the-board tariff plan," she said, "is a distraction from the MAGA scam to extend tax giveaways for giant corporations and billionaires like Howard Lutnick."
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alternet NO LNX
From moderate to manipulator: Behind the unmasking of John Roberts
WASHINGTON — John Roberts may have a robe. Still, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has no clothes, according to Democrats who are outraged to bewildered by new reporting that paints the nation’s most potent jurist as a masterful MAGA manipulator.
Congressional Democrats are accusing Roberts of bending, twisting and contorting the Supreme Court — along with the Constitution he swore an oath to — to fit former President Donald Trump and the allegedly illegal actions he took that have kept him tied up in state and federal courts alike since he left the White House four years ago.
New illustrious, behind-the-scenes reporting from the New York Times reveals Roberts personally directed the court’s three historic Jan. 6, 2021 rulings, including the one granting presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for their “official acts.”
Democrats are now redoubling their efforts to make the high court a centerpiece of this year’s elections as they continue their uphill battle to pass meaningful ethics reforms to try and rein the high court in.
“Chief Justice Roberts exudes much more of an establishment aura about him, but he really has been a crucial force behind the degradation of constitutional jurisprudence on the Supreme Court,” Rep, Jamie Raskin (D-MD) — a Constitutional lawyer and law professor by trade — told Raw Story after digesting the illuminating new reporting.
According to the scoop-strewn NYT piece by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, Roberts authored a Feb. 22 memo to his eight colleagues “that radiated frustration and certainty” regarding the monumental cases winding through lower courts centered on efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
While revelatory, sadly, the new reporting on the Roberts Court isn’t surprising to Raskin.
ALSO READ: The simple yet powerful way Tim Walz just exposed Donald Trump
“It's what anybody can see in reading their decisions. We know what's going on there. They're not textualists — they completely ignored the text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” Raskin said. “They're not originalists — nobody even made an originalist argument about why the president of the United States should be immune from criminal prosecution for felonies he commits under the cloak of office. And, you know, they have really drifted a long way from any recognizable constitutional jurisprudence of interpretation.”
The carefully manicured image of Roberts as a moderate is now melting away. It’s left Democrats on Capitol Hill debating how to restore public confidence in a Supreme Court many in the party and the public have lost faith in.
“Very short-term thinking”
It’s more than just Chief Justice Roberts moving in the shadows to orchestrate this year’s three seemingly pro-Trump Jan. 6 rulings. Accusations of corruption are also in the air.
Coupled with the estimated $4.2 million in gifts Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly openly accepted from Republican megadonors over the years, as first reported by ProPublica, many Democrats now fear this Supreme Court has been weaponized by the far-right.
“His court's going to go down as the most corrupt in history and, honestly, the most political in history, too,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) — a former U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein — told Raw Story on the Capitol steps this week.
Then there’s the luxurious all-expense paid fishing trip Justice Samuel Alito accepted from billionaire Paul Singer, which he publicly defended in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal.
Not to mention the politicking. There’s the upside-down American flag that proudly flew outside the Alito’s Northern Virginia home in the wake of the 2021 attack on the Capitol and the “Appeal to Heaven” flag flapping in the ocean breeze outside the Alito’s New Jersey beach house, both of which the justice blames on his wife, Martha-Ann.
As for Thomas, he refused to recuse himself from the monumental J6 cases even after his wife Ginni — and the string of conspiratorial text messages she sent to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — was found to be central to Trump’s efforts to overturn the last presidential election.
“It might not be illegal, but it certainly should scare the hell out of every American that somebody with that kind of access and power and proximity to a Supreme Court justice can be pushing that type of nonsense," former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) — who served as a technical advisor to the select Jan. 6 committee — told Raw Story back in 2022. “The text messages validate that many elected officials believed it.”
Critics are left questioning where the high court ends and the RNC begins.
“I'm naive. I was raised to think that the justices were there to look at the Constitution and the law and work together to find the best decision for the American people. Now they're a function of the Republican Party, which the court never was before,” Don Beyer said. “Very short-term thinking. If we look at our 40-some-odd presidents, only one would it apply to.”
The five-term congressman says Supreme Court justices — especially the chief justice — need to open their eyes because, to him and an expanding chorus of critics, there’s nothing partisan about Democrat’s fears.
“There's no other Republican president I would have worried about,” Beyer said. “Not George Herbert Walker Bush or Ronald Reagan or Gerald Ford — certainly none of our Democratic presidents — but this one. It isn't like he's conferring an advantage on the next Democratic president who will do whatever he wants — no.”
The nakedly political and grossly unethical turn of the Roberts Court weighs on the 74-year-old.
“Incredibly discouraging. I've been discouraged by Justice Roberts for a long time,” Beyer said. “I know the judiciary’s independent — I don't ever want to interfere — but the fact that he could let the ethical abuses go on and on, no treatment whatsoever, which is, I mean, the greatest discouragement.”
Last year, after months of punishing press coverage, Roberts reversed himself and signed off on a new, if unenforced, Supreme Court Code of Conduct. It was unanimous.
These days, the signatures of all nine Supreme Court justices also make the document almost worthless, at least to many lawmakers across the street at the Capitol.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Throughout this session of Congress, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee in the Senate have relentlessly tried to impose mandatory and enforceable ethics rules on Supreme Court justices—basically, the same ones that apply to every other federal judge in the nation. Republicans have been united in blocking every such effort.
Senate Republicans have the back of the conservative majority on the Roberts Court, much like Roberts has advanced the agenda of congressional Republicans.
“If you go back and look at the most anti-democratic decisions of the Supreme Court — the immunity decision being one, but the little array of insurrection decisions, of which it was a part of in the threesome that's in this article — you see a lot of backstage maneuvering by the chief justice,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Raw Story as he walked through the basement of the Capitol. “It reminds me of the backstage maneuvering by the chief justice that brought us Citizens United.”
The former Rhode Island attorney general and U.S. attorney is the second highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he’s been pushing the SCERT — or Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency — Act, which would place a binding code of conduct and mandatory disclosure requirements on the justices.
Ethics reform is one thing. Unlimited corporate funding is another corrosive element of contemporary American politics altogether.
Democrats are still smarting from Citizens United and the floodgates of political spending it unleashed. The chief justice also deftly moved behind the scenes to manipulate that 2010 ruling, Whitehouse readily recalls.
“Remember, [Roberts] had to restructure the case. He changed the question presented. He set up the case so that there would be no record — actual record,” Whitehouse recalled. “He changed the standard.”
That was a bipartisan complaint in that Senate of a bygone, if recent, era. The ruling led then-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — who co-authored the McCain-Feingold law that Citizens United decimated — to publicly and personally call out Chief Justice Roberts.
"I am more disappointed in him than any of the other four that voted to overturn McCain-Feingold," McCain said back in 2012.
Republicans beg to differ
Roberts indeed has allies. Lots of them. Powerful ones. And they’re laughing in Democrat’s faces.
Republican Party leaders, like former Senate Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) — who’s running to replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — basically just avoid critics and critical reporting, like the New York Times just dropped, these days.
“I think I saw the headline — that's about all,” Cornyn told Raw Story while hopping a tram under the Capitol.
Before arriving in Washington in 2002, Cornyn served on the Texas Supreme Court. He says Roberts shouldn’t even entertain what his senatorial critics have to say.
“He's got lifetime tenure,” Cornyn said through a laugh. “I wouldn't be taking advice from members of Congress on how to do my job if I was him, either.”
Just as they have with Justices Thomas and Alito — no matter the latest eye-popping revelation — today’s Republicans have united around the Chief Justice, as if they are one.
“Even without having read it, I think extremely highly of him and believe him to be a person with the utmost integrity and dedicated to the independence of the courts,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told Raw Story as she walked through the Capitol Wednesday.
Collins must not have gotten the memo from her Democratic colleagues.
The ‘court packing’ myth
Many pundits hailed Roberts for opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but in the Dobbs decision, he lost out to the five Republican appointees on ‘his’ court who are seemingly even further right than he is.
Many progressives weren’t buying the righteous, caring and politically aloof version of himself Roberts portrayed back then, and they say this latest reporting shows they were right.
“That's interesting how there's sort of this story out there that Roberts was like a moderate and mediator. And the [NYT] story would suggest that’s not really necessarily the case,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) told Raw Story after voting on the Senate floor this week.
While Republican rhetoric paints all elected Democrats — from the top of the party’s presidential ticket on down — as wanting to expand, or ‘pack,’ the court, only three Senate Democrats have formally endorsed a progressive measure to expand the size of the court, as Raw Story reported last month.
Smith and Massachusetts Democratic Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are the three who’ve publicly endorsed Markey’s measure to expand the size of the Supreme Court. That’s it.
Even with all the negative press, Smith says other Senate Democrats haven’t approached them about their measure to expand the size of the court.
“I haven't heard any,” Smith said.
That doesn’t mean her colleagues aren’t discussing the Roberts Court.
“There's a lot of conversation about the court and challenges to the court,” Smith said. “Once we get through this election and we have a better understanding of what the landscape is, we'll talk more about it.”
Or maybe they won’t.
“We're not going to get expansion”
Some Democrats have already basically, shut the door on the conversation of expanding the court. Many just don’t see it as a practical solution.
“We're not going to get expansion,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) told Raw Story on his way to a vote in the Capitol Wednesday. “There's a lot of downside to expansion — we expand, they expand — and it politicizes it.”
As President Joe Biden proposed back in July, Welch and most congressional Democrats now support instituting an 18-year term limit for the nation’s justices.
“First of all, that's a very substantial term, and they're inside, so they have the benefit of protections,” Welch argued. “And then number two, every president is going to have an opportunity to appoint two members, so that means the American people get to weigh in indirectly by choosing the president. I think it would really take the extreme politics out of the court.”
As for Roberts, Welch is no fan of the jurist he’s predicting historians will frown upon.
“He’s very skillful and, unfortunately, a driving force, I think, in the radical redirection of the court,” Welch bemoaned to Raw Story. “The court has got an extreme radical majority. It's lost public respect.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-ftc-is-investigating-intuit-over-turbotax-practices/
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Yesterday was the last day for Americans to file their 2023 taxes on time. What is the biggest difference between Tax Day this year and Tax Day in 1980? Millionaires pay a lot less.
Between 1945 and 1980, American households that made $1 million or more paid an average of 50.1% of their income in federal taxes, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. This period following World War II was characterized by "substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity" with rapid income growth "at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder." Higher taxes for the wealthy funded "public investments that helped build a thriving economy for all: constructing the interstate highway system, improving public education, facilitating mass home ownership, expanding healthcare coverage."
According to the most recent IRS data, American households with more than $1 million in income now pay an effective tax rate of just 26%. Yes, because of inflation, $1 million has less purchasing power today than it did 44 years ago. But $1 million still exceeds the income of 99.5% of American households.
While millionaires have seen their tax rates halved, the tax rate for non-millionaires has been fairly consistent. Between 1945 and 1980, the average effective tax rate for non-millionaires was 12.6%. Today, it is 11.5%.
In 2001, the IRS started tracking the effective tax rate of American households that make $10 million or more. They have a slightly lower effective tax rate than other millionaires.
The gap in effective tax rates between those American households that make $10 million or more and those that make seven figures likely reflects how the tax code imposes higher taxes on work than wealth. Seven-figure earners typically earn much of their revenue through income from high-paying jobs, and the top marginal income tax rate has ranged between 35% and 39.6% over the last two decades. Those who earn $10 million or more commonly derive some or all of their income through investments, which have been taxed between a 15% and 23.8% rate over the same time period. That's why the top 0.0001% — the 1500 richest households in America that make $118 million or more — pay an effective rate of just 23%. That's less than the regular millionaires.
The reality is that today, the American tax code barely qualifies as progressive. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) produced a study this month that looked at taxes paid at all levels (federal, state, and local) by income. ITEP found that the wealthiest 1% of American households collected 20.1% of total income and paid 23.9% of total taxes. The poorest 20% of American households collected just 2.6% of total income but paid 1.5% of total taxes.
grph
While the federal tax code, despite the dramatic reduction in rates for millionaires over the last several decades, remains progressive, "state and local taxes in most states are regressive, meaning they take a larger share of income from the poor than from the rich." Many states and localities impose sales taxes and "low-income families have little choice but to spend all their income to cover basic needs." High-income families "can save and invest most of their income, avoiding sales taxes."
Using impoverished children as political pawns
In 2021, as the pandemic still raged, Congress instituted a historic expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC). The CTC was increased from $2,000 per child to $3,600 for each child aged five or younger and $3,000 for each child aged 6 through 17. (The credit phased out for couples making $150,000 or more and individuals making $75,000 or more.) The credit was also made fully refundable, which means even families with little or no income could benefit. It was paid out monthly so that families did not have to wait until Tax Day to see the benefit.
The policy was a smashing success. Child poverty plunged to 5.2%, a record low. But due to the opposition from corporate lobbyists, Republicans in Congress, and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), the CTC expansion expired at the end of 2022. Child poverty quickly increased, spiking to 12.4% in 2022 — that meant 5.28 million additional children living in poverty.
Since then, there has been bipartisan interest in reviving at least some of the CTC expansion. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) and House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO) struck a deal to make the credit refundable for more families. It is a modest and technical change, but it would help about 16 million low-income families with children, with an average benefit of about $630. To attract Republican support, the deal included some business tax cuts, passed in 2017, that had expired or were close to expiring.
The Wyden-Smith package cleared the House at the end of January by a vote of 357-70. But for months, the Senate has done nothing.
Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, claims to be "negotiating" the package, which was already the product of a bipartisan negotiation. Crapo reportedly wants more generous corporate tax cuts and fewer benefits for impoverished children. But efforts to tweak the proposal have not changed Crapo's opposition or the other Senate Republicans following his lead. Wyden's impression is that the proposal is not "something that Senate Republicans wanted to do."
Why? Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said he opposed the package because "passing a tax bill that makes the president look good… [and] means he could be re-elected." In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) said that expanding the CTC now means "all Republican leverage will be lost" on tax issues regardless of who wins the election. Defeating the Wyden-Smith package would "extend the bulk, if not all, of the Trump tax cuts" in the future. At the end of 2025, Trump's tax cuts for individuals would expire, raising the top income tax rate from 37% to 39.6%.
Crapo and other Senate Republicans, however, have not simply cut off negotiations because harming impoverished children for a chance to help corporations and the wealthy is not a good look politically. But the route they are taking has the same effect. They are killing a modest expansion of the CTC by running out the clock.
The lobbyists who want you to keep paying to file your taxes
Earlier this year, the IRS launched its first-ever free tax filing program, Direct File, in 12 different states. The program, which is funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, is still in its pilot stage.
At least 100,000 taxpayers used the program to file their federal income taxes this tax season, and so far, the results are fairly encouraging. It’s estimated that in five years, “Direct File would save the average user $160 in filing fees and hours of their time each year, which saves Americans a total of $11 billion annually between filing fees and time costs,” according to a study by the Economic Security Project.
Direct File also makes it easier to claim credits like the CTC. According to the Economic Security Project, the program would “deliver up to $12 billion each year in additional tax credits to low-income families currently missing out.” The group also calculated that the program would generate at least $300 million in savings for the IRS.
Despite its immense potential and early success, tax preparation companies “are continuing to blast Direct File as unpopular and unnecessary.” A lawyer for the American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights – a trade group that represents tax prep giants like TurboTax and H&R Block – told the Washington Post that there is “not a real demand” for the program. But this is misleading. More than70% of taxpayers said they would be interested in filing their taxes through a free, IRS-provided online tool, according to the IRS’ 2022 Taxpayer Experience Survey. Polls across different states also show that a “massive majority” of Americans, including both Democrats and Republicans, support a free IRS tax return system.
For years, tax prep companies have spent millions of dollars blocking efforts to make tax filing free and easy. In 2019, ProPublica reported that Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, spent 20 years blocking an IRS-provided e-file service – all while tricking low-income taxpayers into paying for services the company was federally obligated to provide to them for free. Last year, the company spent a record $3.8 million lobbying the federal government. “[M]any of Intuit’s disclosures say it lobbied on the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act,” Sludge and More Perfect Union reported.
So far, there has been some accountability. In 2022, Intuit agreed to pay a $141 million settlement to roughly 4.4 million Americans, most of whom were low-income. Most recently, in January, federal regulators ordered the company to “stop marketing its services as free, unless they are free to everyone or exceptions are clearly disclosed.”
Still, problems persist. This month, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, urging the agency to continue investigating the tax prep software. “Despite lawsuits and settlements stemming from Intuit’s deceptive ‘free’ advertising practices, the company continues to relentlessly upsell TurboTax users,” Warren wrote. “The TurboTax website attempts to divert taxpayers away from free filing options early in the process – and continues to do so throughout their federal and state tax filings.”
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data released by the Federal Reserve on Thursday shows the top 1% of Americans are the richest they've ever been.
The new data reveals that at the end of the fourth quarter last year they had a record $44.6 trillion in wealth. That's up from $30 trillion in 2020
The main driver of wealth gains last year was from the stock market hitting record highs. While wages are increasing for average Americans, the top 1% is gaining wealth at a much faster pace.
The wealth of U.S. billionaires is currently at $5.5 trillion, which is up 88% since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The nation's rich accruing so much wealth in recent years has renewed calls for a wealth tax.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and others are pushing to pass the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, which would put a 2-cent tax on every dollar of wealth over $50 million. Warren referred to U.S. President Joe Biden calling for higher taxes on billionaires during his State of the Union when the bill was reintroduced earlier this month.
"As President Biden says: No one thinks it's fair that Jeff Bezos gets enough tax loopholes that he pays at a lower rate than a public school teacher," said Warren. "All my bill is asking is that when you make it big, bigger than $50 million dollars, then on that next dollar, you pitch in 2 cents, so everyone else can have a chance."
As progressives fight to pass a wealth tax at the federal level, legislators in many states are pursuing their own wealth taxes.:
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'Polluters must pay': Senators urge Biden DOJ to sue Big Oil over decades of climate lies
Jake Johnson and Common Dreams July 31, 2023
"Thanks to the illegal lies of the fossil fuel industry, climate change is wreaking catastrophic damage upon the United States," four progressive U.S. senators write in a new letter.
A group of progressive U.S. senators on Monday urged President Joe Biden's Justice Department to take legal action against the fossil fuel industry over its deliberate efforts to "mislead consumers and discredit climate science in pursuit of massive profits."
"The actions of ExxonMobil, Shell, and potentially other fossil fuel companies represent a clear violation of federal racketeering laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer protection laws, and potentially other laws, and the department must act swiftly to hold them accountable for their unlawful actions," reads aletter that Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The senators pointed to recently unveiled records that show Shell knewas soon as the early 1970s that burning fossil fuels could cause climate change—knowledge that was not reflected in their public messaging and advertising. Exxon also knew about the link between fossil fuels and climate change in the 1970s but publicly cast doubt on such a link and funded groups peddling climate denial.
"Despite these companies' knowledge about climate change and the role their industry was playing in driving carbon emissions, they chose to participate in a decadeslong, carefully coordinated campaign of misinformation to obfuscate climate science and convince the public that fossil fuels are not the primary driver of climate change," the senators wrote in their letter to Garland.
"To coordinate their illegal misinformation campaign, the fossil fuel industry funded a multimillion-dollar plan through the American Petroleum Institute that sought to make climate change a 'non-issue,'" the senators continued. "According to this plan, 'victory will be achieved' when 'recognition of the uncertainties [in climate science] become part of the 'conventional wisdom.' Exxon, whose climate predictions from the 1970s have proved remarkably correct, was a primary contributor to this plan."
"Like with Big Tobacco, the fossil fuel industry's illegal, coordinated campaign of misinformation has proven tremendously profitable."
The oil and gas industry's efforts to mislead the public about climate change "bears a striking resemblance" to the tobacco industry's campaign of lies about the dangers of cigarettes, the senators argued. In 2006, major U.S. tobacco companies were found guilty of violating civil racketeering laws and making deceptive statements about their products.
"Both industries have used the same public relations firms and researchers since the 1950s," the senators wrote Monday. "Like with Big Tobacco, the fossil fuel industry's illegal, coordinated campaign of misinformation has proven tremendously profitable. From 1990 to 2019, the six largest private fossil fuel companies made $2.4 trillion in profits."
"Thanks to the illegal lies of the fossil fuel industry, climate change is wreaking catastrophic damage upon the United States," the senators added. "Floods, droughts, extreme weather disturbances, and wildfires are causing unprecedented damage. Deloitte estimates that unchecked climate change, driven by the fossil fuel industry, could cost the United States $14.5 trillion over the next 50 years... Polluters must pay."
Dozens of U.S. cities and states have sued the oil and gas industry in recent years, part of a growing global wave of climate lawsuits aimed at holding fossil fuel giants accountable in the face of worsening extreme weather and government inaction.
The Biden Justice Department recently filed a Supreme Court brief siding with local governments in Colorado in a climate lawsuit against oil companies, but the administration has yet to take legal action of its own.
In their letter on Monday, the senators implored the Justice Department to "join the fight and work with partners at the Federal Trade Commission and other law enforcement agencies to file suits against all those who participated in the fossil fuel industry's illegal conspiracy of lies and deception under federal racketeering laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer protection laws, and any other applicable federal law."
"The future of our planet depends on it," they wrote.
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https://www.alternet.org/janet-yellen-2661983964/
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In June, John R. Allen resigned from his position as president of the Brookings Institution following allegations that he had secretly lobbied on behalf of the government of Qatar. Journalist Michael Schaffer, in an article published by Politico on October 14, reports that there has been a considerable “uproar” following that controversy — including “a new wave of congressional scrutiny and proposed legislation” that has been “driven largely but not exclusively by conservatives” and “could ultimately complicate life at” think tanks.
But Schaffer stresses that right-wing think tanks could be among the ones that such legislation would affect. Schaffer cites Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa on the right and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on the left as two senators who have proposed bills that could affect how think tanks function. Warren’s bill, according to Schaffer, “would require think tanks to disclose donors — not just foreign ones — that pay for lobbying materials, among other things.”
“For all the joy that conservative pols have taken at Brookings’ latest turn in the barrel, conversations with people around the industry reveal an irony: Any potential new wave of government-mandated disclosure rules, especially those that go beyond foreign money, would actually represent a bigger cultural change at right-wing organizations, some of which historically have tended to see donations as a form of free speech,” Schaffer reports. “Establishmentarian center-left outfits like Brookings already share significant pieces of that information — thanks in part, it should be noted, to previous funding imbroglios, and their reliance on corporate dollars. The Heritage Foundation, by contrast, says less than two percent of its income comes from corporate sources.”
Heritage is one of the most famous right-wing think tanks in the United States. Another is the Cato Institute, which has much more of a libertarian outlook than the socially conservative Heritage. Meanwhile, the Claremont Institute is a right-wing think tank that has taken a very MAGA turn in recent years.
“It’s also notable that none of the proposals that have been publicized since the tumult at Brookings would have done much about Allen, whose allegedly fishy work for Qatar was done before he took over Brookings and would theoretically be covered by the Foreign Agent Registration Act,” Schaffer writes. “He’s denied improper behavior and hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing. What the scrutiny of Allen did do, though, was re-focus attention on the organization’s broader history with the emirate.”
Schaffer points out that different think tanks have different policies when it comes to who they will or won’t accept money from.
“Under the status quo,” Schaffer observes, “there are few rules about who a think tank may accept money from and who it has to tell. And there are probably as many internal policies as there are think tanks: The Heritage Foundation doesn’t take any money from governments of any sort, foreign or domestic. Brookings does take money from governments, but only democratic ones. The Center for American Progress also takes foreign money, but not for any specific project. It also discloses donors, unless those donors choose to remain anonymous, something deep-pocketed types occasionally do to avoid being hit up by others.”
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eliz w chem rx and data broker sell cell phone from ppl around clinics
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/gas-prices/
In the wake of new federal data showing that U.S. inflation rose again in May after decelerating slightly the previous month, progressive lawmakers, economists, and union leaders on Friday tried to hammer home their argument that corporate profiteering is a major driver of the price hikes that are eroding workers' modest wage gains and heightening economic pain nationwide.
"While families are feeling the sting of soaring energy costs, oil and gas companies are cheering the nearly $100 billion in profits they've already made this year off families' pain at the pump," said Dr. Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative.
"It's past time for Congress to pass an excess profits tax to stop the outrageous war profiteering by Big Oil," Mabud added, referring to the benefits the U.S. fossil fuel industry has reaped from Russia's assault on Ukraine.
The narrative that corporate greed is one of the key culprits behind inflation, which is now at a 40-year high, resonates greatly with the U.S. public, according to recent survey data. A poll conducted last month by Data for Progress showed that 71% of all U.S. voters blame corporate profit-seeking for rising inflation.
But despite the argument's popularity—and alignment with data showing that record-high corporate profits are a disproportionate contributor to inflation—the Biden administration has been increasingly hesitant to deploy it in recent months even as inflationary pressures persist and businesses' net incomes grow exponentially in some sectors.
During an event hosted by The New York Times on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen outright rejected the notion that corporate greed is to blame for inflation, saying, "Demand and supply is largely driving inflation."
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, meanwhile, has openly suggested that wage increases are part of the problem, telling reporters during a press conference last month that the country needs to "get wages down" in order to tackle inflation.
While progressive economists have acknowledged that a number of factors, from supply chain issues caused by the pandemic to the war in Ukraine, are pushing inflation to levels not seen in decades, they have nevertheless maintained that corporate profiteering is a significant culprit.
"Corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise their prices, hurting workers and consumers while they enjoy record profits," Robert Reich, the former secretary of the U.S. Labor Department, wrote last month. "Prices are surging—but let's be clear: corporations are not raising prices simply because of the increasing costs of supplies and labor. They could easily absorb these higher costs, but instead they are passing them on to consumers and even raising prices higher than those cost increases."
Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, echoed Reich on Friday.
"Make no mistake: the same corporations that are making record profits while busting workers' unions are raising prices on working families," Henry wrote on Twitter. "If our nation's leaders are serious about addressing inflation, they'll hold these big corporations accountable for their price gouging."
In recent weeks, as inflation numbers have remained stubbornly high and corporate executives have continued boasting about their profits, congressional Democrats have put forth several proposals aimed at combating price gouging and reining in excess profits via taxation.
Led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in the House and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a group of Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation in March that would hit large and highly profitable oil companies with "a per-barrel tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the pre-pandemic average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019."
While the White House has signaled it would be willing to support a windfall profits tax on Big Oil, Democrats' bill has not received a vote in the House or Senate.
Last month, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) along with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) unveiled a measure that would empower federal regulators to crack down on corporate price gouging. Warren has specifically called out the meat industry for its pricing practices throughout the pandemic.
"Giant corporations are using inflation as a cover story to jack up prices and pad profits," Warren tweeted Friday. "Let's pass my bill to crack down on corporate price gouging. And let's pass our windfall profits tax on Big Oil, which includes rebate checks for Americans struggling with gas prices."
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cALL IT META IF YOU LIKE, BUT FACEBOOK STILL LOUSY AT DEALING WITH CLIMATE DISINFORMATION
A study released Wednesday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that around half of the content from purveyors of climate science denial gets no warning labels or fact checking from Facebook moderators. Last May, Facebook vowed to attach “informational labels” to posts about the climate crisis and direct users to the social media platform’s “Climate Science Information Center.”
November, the CCDH published its Toxic Ten report, identifying just 10 publishers with articles that make up 69% of Facebook interactions with climate denial articles. Breitbart, the Federalist Papers, Daily Wire, and Russian state media were among the 10. What the researchers found was that 50.5% of the 184 most popular posts associated with articles promoting climate science denial carried no information label. Among them: A Breitbart article claiming global warming is not real and a “hoax”; a Washington Times article claiming that “COVID-19 and climate change are being used to steal our liberties”; a NewsBusters article referring to “alarmist climate propaganda”; a Daily Wire article claiming “the Left Is Spreading Global Warming Alarmism”; and a Breitbart article branding a leading climate scientist a “climate alarmist.” Of the other 49.5%, all had a label linking them to the climate science resource center, but just one was a fact check of bad information contained in the post.
Said CCDH’s Chief Executive Imran Ahmed, “By failing to do even the bare minimum to address the spread of climate denial information, Meta is exacerbating the climate crisis. Climate change denial—designed to fracture our resolve and impede meaningful action to mitigate climate change—flows unabated on Facebook and Instagram.” A spokesperson for Facebook claimed the CCDH report only covers the rollout of the warning system and not how effective it is now.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has pledged to initiate action against Facebook if it fails to do a better job at dealing with climate lies.....
Along with pouring money into activities that heat the planet, “Kravis and KKR have no qualms about pillaging companies or investing in unethical products in order to turn a profit,” the analysis adds, noting that “the firm helped oversee the notorious raid of Toys ‘R’ Us that devastated the company’s workers.”
Responding to the report, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs — tied its findings to criticism of the private equity industry’s broader practices.
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/inflation-2656762251/
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Bernie Sanders is right: 'Corporate greed' and 'price-gouging' are driving inflation
Alex Henderson February 21, 2022
Liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column, has been arguing that President Joe Biden needs to do a much better job selling the positive aspects of the U.S. economy — unemployment way down from what it was in 2020, millions of new jobs added — while speaking candidly and frankly about inflation. It’s no secret that prices for a variety of items have been soaring during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A key factor in the pandemic-era inflation problem, many economists have said, is the supply chain. Because of the pandemic, goods have a harder time getting from Point A to Point B. But TheNation’s John Nichols, in an article published on February 21, argues that a major factor with inflation — one that isn’t being discussed enough — is corporate greed and price-gouging.
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Liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, according to Nichols, “put the pieces together” when Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell appeared before the Senate Banking Committee in January.
“They’re raising prices because they can, and they’re not being competed down,” Warren told Powell during that hearing. “You know, market concentration has allowed giant corporations to hide behind claims of increased costs to fatten their profit margins. So, the consumer pays more both because the corporation faces higher costs and because, as you put it, because the corporation can increase prices. The reason I raise this is that higher prices have many causes, and we can’t overlook the role that concentrated corporate power has played in creating the conditions for price gouging.”
Warren, according to Nichols, “made the vital connection that all Democrats should be making as debates about the causes of inflation heat up.”
Nichols writes, “Instead of letting Wall Street apologists create the impression that inflation is simply the result of supply chain kinks and pent-up consumer demand after two years of pandemic lockdowns, and instead of letting Republicans suggest that federal and state investments in health care and housing are the problem, Democrats should be speaking like Warren — and like former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner.”
On February 17, Turner tweeted, “It’s not ‘inflation,’ it’s price-gouging. Exxon and other Big Oil corporations are price-gouging us at the gas pump. Grocery chains are making record profits price-gouging us at the register. Corporations are bleeding working people dry. Enough.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has also slammed corporations for “price gouging” and “corporate greed” during the pandemic.
Sanders and Warren have much in common but have their differences as well. While Sanders considers himself a “democratic socialist” along the lines of left-wing politicians in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Warren has described herself as a “capitalist to my bones” — and the Massachusetts Democrat has emphasized that while free market capitalism needs robust competition to be healthy, many corporations have done everything they can to avoid competition and become monopolies.
“There are still plenty of Democrats who are cautious about calling out corporate greed,” Nichols observes. “A failure to be blunt about profiteering leaves a void that will ill serve their party in 2022.”
Nichols continues, “History makes it clear that midterm elections are tough for the party that controls the White House and Congress. Voters take out their frustrations on those who are in positions of power. And that is doubly true in moments of economic turbulence, as Jimmy Carter and the Democrats learned in 1978, as Ronald Reagan and the Republicans learned in 1986, as Barack Obama and the Democrats learned in 2010.”
Nichols recalls that in the 1934 midterms, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s willingness to call out corporations served him well.
“Throughout 1934, FDR never let up when it came to calling out speculators, monopolists, and price gougers,” Nichols explains. “He promised that New Deal Democrats with increased congressional majorities would hold the bad actors to account. Voters approved. In November, they gave Democrats nine more seats in the House and nine more in the Senate, where the party achieved a rare supermajority.”
Nichols wraps up his article by emphasizing that Democrats should pay close attention to what Sanders has been saying about inflation.
The Vermont senator tweeted, “The problem is not that a low-income worker got a 50 cent raise two weeks ago and a $1400 check last year. The problem is that corporations are using ‘inflation’ as an excuse to jack up prices so that they can make record-breaking profits to enrich CEOs and wealthy shareholders.”
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White House is reportedly split on why American consumers are facing record inflation, with numerous officials apparently reticent to blame corporate greed despite remarks made by executives indicating that Corporate America is raising prices higher than it needs to.
According to The Washington Post, congressional testimony of asenior administration official was reportedly altered in recent weeks to omit claims linking inflation to monopoly power.The subtle move underscores the apparent tensions between officials in the White House around how to balance sound political messaging with what some see as hard economic realities.
"It's been the war of the 'track changes' inside the administration over how much the White House can lean in on the extent to which competition and greed are driving inflation," one official told the Post. ("Track changes" refers to a feature built into Microsoft Word that allows users to see who made what edits to a shareable document.)
In recent weeks, Democratic politicians and progressive groups have condemned Corporate America's role in driving inflation,which reached 7% by the end of 2021 – the largest 12-month increase since 1982.
"Giant corporations are making record profits by increasing prices, and CEOs are saying the quiet part out loud: they're happy to help drive inflation," Warren tweeted on Monday. "American families pay higher prices and corporate executives get fatter bonuses."
Warrenhighlighted remarks made by several executives at food and grocery companies like Kroger, Tyson, Procter & Gamble, who have openly crowed about inflation being good for business despite consumers feeling squeezed. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the prices ofmeat, poultry, fish and eggs collectively shot up by 12.5% throughout last year. Meanwhile, meatpackers' profit margins skyrocketed by 300% during the pandemic, according to Reuters.
In recent months, the White House has made commitments to cracking down on meat producers, particularly when it comes to price-fixing. Back in September, Biden announced a broad vowed to heighten enforcement of antitrust laws and improve transparency in labeling.
Still, the administration has come short of blaming Big Business as the chief culprit for inflation on the whole.
"I think they've tried to be honest about the economic situation, and I, for one, appreciate that," liberal economist Dean Baker told the Post. "They have to make a political call about whether that's the right decision, but I think it's best for them to be honest and I think they've done that."
Officials in the Council of Economic Advisers have reportedly advised that financial opportunism only accounts for one component of the recent price increase, the Post reported. But according to a joint missive penned by American Economic Liberties Project and the Groundwork Collaborative, corporate consolidation costs the average American household $5,000 annually.
"There is now overwhelming evidence that large corporations with significant market power are exploiting the broader supply chain crisis to raise prices," the letter stated, "even when no bottleneck or shortage seems to exist."
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/billionaire/
comm dr
over the next few decades, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, or more than four times the cost of the stalled Build Back Better package, according to a report released Wednesday.
The Americans for Tax Fairness report—entitled Dynasty Trusts: Giant Tax Loopholes that Supercharge Wealth Accumulation—urges Congress to fix the federal tax code to address dynastic wealth.
The new analysis details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the "ultrawealthy" and thereby accelerate the "accumulation of dynastic wealth."
"Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes," the report explains.
Some U.S. states, such as South Dakota, have even changed their laws on dynasty trusts to attract wealthy residents, as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy highlighted last year.
The new report notes that U.S. lawmakers aren't planning to address the issue, even if the Senate passes a version of a House-approved package:
The Build Back Better (BBB) legislation now before Congress—otherwise a vehicle for significant progressive tax reform—does nothing to directly reverse this toxic accumulation of dynastic wealth. Moreover, some dynasty trust reforms that were included in the bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee in September 2021 were stripped out before the House voted on the measure in November.
The BBB bill needs full support from Senate Democrats to pass. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—one of the primary reasons the legislation hasn't reached President Joe Biden's desk—said Tuesday that it is "dead."
However, Americans for Tax Fairnessstill uses the whittled-down BBB package to illustrate just how much money wealthy Americans can hoard for their families in the years ahead thanks to the U.S. tax system.
"The tax savings for the richest families could be about $8.4 trillion over the next 24 years or so if the current 40% estate tax rate remains in place," the report states. "That's the equivalent of more than four Build Back Better plans costing $1.75 trillion each over 10 years."
The report adds that "about half of the $8.4 trillion is equivalent to the cost of the expanded child tax credit, which was included in the House-passed BBB bill and is estimated to reduce childhood poverty by 40%, for 24 years at $160 billion a year." [twt]
"This hoarding of wealth is inexcusable," declared the report's principal author, Bob Lord, who practiced estate law for 30 years before joining Americans for Tax Fairness as tax counsel.
"The BBB legislation now before the U.S. Senate should be amended to close loopholes in the three components of America's wealth transfer tax system: the estate, gift, and generation-skipping tax," he asserted. "Effective reforms have already been developed—all that's needed is for Congress to recognize the urgency to act now."
The group's new analysis and call for action come after Americans for Tax Fairness estimated last month that the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States have become approximately $1 billion richer collectively every day of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Wednesday's report contains a warning about that group of ultra-billionaires, mentioning by name Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk of Telsa and SpaceX.
"As much as familiar fortunes have blossomed in the low-regulation, low-tax, wealth-worshiping environment of the previous 40 years," the report says, "the next 40 and beyond could see the rise of economic dynasties that will make the old money look small."
Along with closing dynasty-trust tax loopholes, Americans for Tax Fairness urges reforms that would "curb the year-to-year accumulation of wealth in existing trusts." Specifically, it calls for a new income-tax bracket "on undistributed trust income in excess of $250,000 that is five percentage points higher than the maximum income-tax bracket for individuals."
Noting a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the group also encourages U.S. lawmakers to "impose an annual 2% wealth tax on the portion of a dynasty trust's holdings that exceed $50 million, and an additional 1% on dynasty trust accumulations in excess of $1 billion."
"The choice is clear," according to the report. "We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system and stop the concentration of an ever-larger share of America's wealth inside enormous dynasty trusts, or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies."
"Fortunately, we know what needs to be done," the report concludes. "The sole remaining challenge is to summon the courage to stand up to the holders of dynastic wealth and their enablers."
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/elizabeth-warren-facebook/
no lnx tet
Elizabeth Warren was right about Facebook all along
Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 05, 2021
The timing couldn't have been more dramatic when Facebook and its other popular products, including WhatsApp and Instagram, went down for over five hours on Monday. The worldwide outage happened between Sunday's dramatic unveiling of whistleblower Frances Haugen on "60 Minutes" and Haugen's scheduled Senate testimony on Tuesday. The hearing is looking at the negative social impacts of Facebook and its other apps. The company attributed Monday's outage to technical problems. Still, the event functioned as a formidable reminder of how much power Facebook has over the lives of billions of people around the world.
"The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company's services have become to daily life," Raymond Zhong of the New York Times writes, adding that Facebook and its many apps "are critical platforms for doing business, arranging medical care, conducting virtual classes, carrying out political campaigns [and] responding to emergencies" around the entire planet.
The social media outage didn't just make it harder to peruse your high school sweetheart's Facebook wedding photos or linger overlong on some of the more embarrassing thirst traps you follow on Instagram. As people trying to shop online or use subscription services were reminded, a huge percentage of sites use Facebook as a login program. In some parts of the world, Facebook and WhatsApp stand in for phone service, thereby serving as the main way people communicate with family members, many social services and businesses. Some businesses, such as food vendors, do all of their sales through Facebook-owned platforms.
This illustration of Facebook's power was likely a coincidence, but it's still chilling in light of what the Washington Post reports as Facebook's changed P.R. approach, which comes in the face of Haugen dumping a ton of documents revealing that the company has been aware of how much social damage it causes, but doesn't care because it's profitable.
"Facebook is approaching its latest controversy over political polarization and the toxic effects of social media in a more aggressive and defiant way than it has previously," Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg write. Instead of the usual Facebook response to controversy, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg offers a hand-wringing apology and an empty promise to change, this time "the company has deployed a slate of executives to mount a public defense."
The lesson of Monday's outage is not that the world is too in the thrall of Facebook to do anything to fight back against its abuses, but the opposite. It's an illustration that Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as usual, is right: It's time to break up Big Tech.
Warren launched her war on Facebook in the spring of 2019, during her campaign to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. While her proposal to take on Silicon Valley addressed other behemoths like Amazon and Google, her campaign deliberately made Facebook the face of tech's monopoly problem by running ads on Facebook calling out the company's "vast power over our economy and our democracy." It was a smart move, betting that the company would react in an infantile manner. Sure enough, Facebook took down (and then swiftly restored) the ads, giving Warren an opportunity to draw attention to "their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power."
Warren's plan to break up Big Tech was complex, involving both legislative and executive action. The former has no more chance of getting through the obstinate filibuster defense of Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona than any other meaningful legislation to save democracy. But the latter plan, to unleash federal regulators who will aggressively enforce existing antitrust laws against Big Tech companies, has gained traction, and in a surprisingly bipartisan fashion. In December, the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in 48 states filed suit against Facebook, accusing the company of maintaining "its monopoly position by buying up companies that present competitive threats and by imposing restrictive policies that unjustifiably hinder actual or potential rivals that Facebook does not or cannot acquire."
Looking out at the international damage done by a mere five-hour shortage of Facebook's services proves the point of the lawsuit. As the New York Times reported, some people were literally unable to communicate with health care workers and some businesses lost total contact with customers because Facebook products have so completely monopolized communications in their communities. Warren accused Big Tech of using "their resources and control over the way we use the Internet to squash small businesses and innovation," but even she probably didn't imagine that the problem is so serious that an empanada seller in Colombia would lose a day of sales without WhatsApp.
Warren responded to the Facebook controversies and the outage on Monday with concision:
But TMZ, of all outlets, got a little more out of Warren, asking her about Haugen's "60 Minutes" appearance and testimony.
"She's trying to save our democracy," Warren told the TMZ reporter, with regards to Haugen. "And she recognizes the kind of threat that Facebook poses."
Tuesday's hearing featuring Haugen is focused on the rather narrow question of the dangers that Facebook presents to kids. Haugen is the source of internal documents published by the Wall Street Journal showing that Facebook is well aware that Instagram increases depression and anxiety among teenage girls, who often obsessively compare themselves to the impossible ideals of beauty promoted on the app.
Monday's outage can hopefully help beef up the FTC case against Facebook. The original case was thrown out in June by a federal judge who argued that it wasn't strong enough. Federal regulators didn't give up, though, and are putting together a more extensive case arguing that Facebook failed "to compete with new innovators" like Instagram and WhatsApp, so instead "bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat."
It's suddenly a lot harder to deny the negative impacts of such anti-competitive practices. There was, quite literally, an international communications breakdown across a number of apps on Monday simply because Facebook had an outage. The situation is made worse by the fact that all these different apps are governed by the irresponsible attitudes that Haugen is now detailing publicly.
More competition won't change the market forces that drive right-wingers to spread disinformation or cause teenage girls to worry about body image, but it could make it easier to pressure companies to do better by their customers. Right now, Facebook can afford this "f*** you!" stance because, for much of the world, they're the only game in town. Until that changes, there's no hope of making Facebook act more responsibly.
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-response/?rs=182
Now that we're all unmasking and the economy seems set to roar into the 2020s, what will we remember about how disastrously, how malignantly, the Trump administration behaved as the pandemic took hold? And will anyone be held to account for it?
The instinct to forget pandemics, as I've pointed out when it came to the 1918 "Spanish flu," has historically been strong indeed. In these years, the urge to forget official malfeasance and move on has, it turns out, been at least as strong. Washington's failure to investigate and bring to account those who led the nation and ultimately the world into the folly of the Iraq War may be the most egregious recent example of this.
In the end, that's why I wrote my new book *Virus* — to memorialize a clear and accessible historical record of the deliberate and deadly decision-making that swept us all into a kind of hell. I had the urge to try to stop what happened to us from being instantly buried in the next round of daily reporting or, as appears likely now, relegated to the occasional voluminous government or foundation report on how to do things better.
In the early months of 2020, as rumors of distant death morphed into announcements of an imminent pandemic, followed by a patchwork of state and local lockdowns, most Americans were too stunned by daily events to absorb the bigger picture. Memories of those days still click by like surreal snapshots: prepper shopping, toilet-paper hoarders, forklifts moving bodies into refrigerated trucks, and a capricious leader on TV night after endless night talking about quack cures, his own ratings, and how he "liked the numbers low." Meanwhile, he left desperate states to compete with each other for badly needed protective gear.
What looked like chaos or ad hoc decision-making by an improbably elected fraudster president was, in fact, deeply rooted in ideology; specifically, in the belief that the job of the government was neither to exercise leadership, nor activate government agencies to assist the American people. It was to promote private industry and its profits as the solution to anything and everything pandemic.
That ideology led to profiteering, politicized science, and mass death. Now, as the pandemic wanes (at least for the time being, though not necessarily for the unvaccinated) in this country, it deserves an investigation. Somewhere between almost 600,000 and more than 900,000 Americans have died so far from Covid-19, a significant number of those deaths unnecessary, as even the former administration's medical expert, Dr Deborah Birx, has said.
The virus arrived in America after the Trump administration — steered by right-wing Heritage Foundation policy wonks and their donor-class comrades — had already laid waste to key agencies like Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control. Their instant response to the pandemic was to similarly sideline government emergency-management experts, put inexperienced 20-something volunteers in charge of finding and distributing protective gear, and circulate lists of possible suppliers — one of whom, typically enough, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no medical contracting experience, snagged a cool $86-million contract from the state of New York for ventilators he would never deliver.[// kodak?]
While most of the country hunkered down in a state of stunned paralysis, a faction of Trumpworld recognized the pandemic not for what it took away — human lives and livelihoods — but for what it offered. The chaos of the moment allowed them to road-test their dream system, to prove once and for all that the forces of supply and demand, the instinct to make a buck, could do a better job managing a natural disaster than the government of the United States and its bureaucrats.
Is any of this likely to be investigated? Will anyone be held accountable for what appears to have been a response deliberately mismanaged by religious zealots and crony capitalists, crews equally cynical about expertise, science, and the government's ability to prevent or ameliorate disaster?
What We Don't Know About the Trump Pandemic Disaster
Here, as a start, is a rundown of where inquiries into that disaster now stand.
Buried in the alphabet soup of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act is the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), established in March 2020 to keep track of the federal money (by now $5.5 trillion) that was to be spent on the pandemic. It's a consortium of agency inspector generals, headed by Michael Horowitz, a career Department of Justice lawyer. His name will be familiar to anyone who followed the Trump-Russia investigations. He produced a report in 2019 that — to the dismay of Trump's supporters — failed to conclude that the FBI had begun investigating connections between Vladimir Putin's Russia and the Trump campaign without legal cause and as a political dirty trick.
PRAC is authorized to conduct oversight of pandemic-related emergency spending of any sort. Its inspector generals have already issued nearly 200 pandemic-related oversight reports and charged 474 people with trying to steal more than $569 million. (Details in its quarterly reports are available online.)
While PRAC has been genuinely nonpartisan in its acts, its focus so far has been on the small fry of the pandemic era, not the truly big fish. In its most recent semi-annual report, for example, it makes clear that 55% of its charges had to do with fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program and 40% were related to fraudulent unemployment assistance claims. Among the bigger PRAC successes: charging a Texas man in a $24-million Covid-relief fraudulent loan scheme last October and seven men in another fraud scheme in which they used their ill-gotten pandemic gains to buy, among other things, a Porsche and a Lamborghini.
The CARES Act also authorized the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to monitor the federal response to the pandemic. Its most recent semi-annual report included 16 recommendations in selected public-health areas like testing, vaccines, and therapeutics, only one of which has so far been implemented. A source at the GAO told me that a report on some contracting irregularities can be expected this summer.
So far, such government self-assessments have shown little appetite for dealing with the true cronyism, profiteering, and disastrous politicization of the federal pandemic response by Trump's minions. Among the schemes begging for a deeper look is Operation Airbridge. Led by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, it was an attempt to use federal funds to underwrite the air-shipping costs of private companies in an effort to speed the delivery of the kinds of personal protective equipment that were in such short supply last spring. That unorthodox effort included large no-bid contracts granted to a small group of private health-care companies without restrictions on pricing or even on where the desperately needed products were to be delivered.
In the spring of 2020, as hospital workers began popping up on social media and network news programs clad only in garbage bags and makeshift or reused face masks, sometimes in tears and pleading for help, the White House maintained its focus on private enterprise as the way out of the disaster. The administration called for volunteers to staff what would become another public/private bonanza, the White House Covid-19 Supply Chain Task Force, also helmed by Trump family fixer, Jared Kushner.
We don't know what, if anything, Kushner's group actually accomplished. The audacity of the former administration's disregard for federal rules and regulations coupled with the scale of the no-bid contracts they issued certainly attracted political pushback at the time. Democrats and civil-society groups in Washington filed requests for more information about how such contracts had eluded federal guidelines, and where the supplies actually went.
It's possible, however, that we may never know.
Ventilating Money
In April 2020, a group of Democratic senators led by Elizabeth Warren, citing the administration's secrecy, opened an investigation into the operation. They sent a letter to the six Operation Airbridge beneficiary health-care giants — Cardinal Health, Concordance, Henry Schein, McKesson, Medline, and Owens & Minor — requesting explanations for reports of "political favoritism, cronyism, and price-gouging" in the ongoing supply effort. "Taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars on this secretive project and they deserve to know whether it actually helped get critical supplies to the areas most in need," Warren said that June.
Three of the six suppliers did, in the end, give the senators copies of memorandums of agreement (MOAs) indicating that they "had complete discretion about how to distribute supplies across hotspot counties" and that "nothing in the MOAs appears to prevent a supplier from sending all of its supplies designated for hotspots to just a single customer in one of the hotspots." The government hadn't, in fact, put any kind of conditions on the cost for that protective equipment and the Trump Justice Department would insist that it was none of its business how suppliers arrived at the prices they charged for it.
Using taxpayer funds to grease private enrichment was, of course, a Trump family tradition, going back to the Eisenhower years when Donald's father, Fred, fleeced the government of millions of dollars in loans aimed at housing World War II veterans. Hauled down to Capitol Hill to explain himself, the New York builder was unrepentant, arguing that a loophole in the law allowed for his private gain and, under such circumstances, only a fool would have left all that money on the table.
What, from the outside, came to look like White House-inspired chaos — of which Operation Airbridge was just one example — should, in fact, be seen as a deliberate effort to disengage the federal government and leave the blame and the logistics problems to Covid-afflicted states, at the time mostly run by Democrats.
On March 24, 2020, for instance, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo begged the federal government to help get more ventilators for what was clearly going to be a surge of coronavirus patients. (New York City's health-care system was already overwhelmed by then.) At the time, hooking patients up to ventilators seemed like the best way to go, though doctors later realized that, for many patients, the tricky disease could be foiled earlier with anticlotting and steroid medication.
"How can you have New Yorkers possibly dying because they can't get a ventilator?" asked Cuomo. Three days later, Trump tweeted, "General Motors must… start making ventilators, now! Ford, get going on ventilators, fast!"
Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer for tech firms like Google, tweeted back at the president, "We can supply ICU ventilators, invasive and non-invasive." Within days, he turned up on a list vetted by Kushner's team of volunteers and, at their recommendation, officials in New York closed a deal with him.
The only problem: Oren-Pines had no ventilators and had never been in the medical supply business. When he failed to deliver on the $86 million deal, Wells Fargo froze his account and New York canceled the order, demanding the money back, though by summer 2020, it had yet to collect a final $10 million.
The Great Forgetting?
In addition to making various large or politically well-connected health-care companies far wealthier, the administration also lavished staggering billions on a small group of Big Pharma firms for Operation Warp Speed, the project it backed to develop vaccines and medicines to treat Covid-19. Those contracts, too, were written outside normal government channels and the companies themselves were chosen by a panel of industry insiders without any oversight. Many of them stood to (and did) profit from the soaring stock prices of those firms when the news about clinical trial successes was released.
In November 2020, to launch an investigation into that situation, Senator Warren teamed up with Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) to request copies of all federal contracts for Covid-19 therapeutics and vaccines. "The American people," they stated, "deserve to know that the federal government is using their tax dollars to develop Covid-19 medical products at the best possible price for the public — not to line the pockets of wealthy companies by cutting corners in consumer protection, pricing, and quality."
Warren raised questions about a Department of Health and Human Services deal with Gilead Sciences for the pandemic therapeutic remdesivir (part of the "cocktail" of drugs administered to Donald Trump and other Republican insiders like Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani when they got Covid). HHS had indeed acquired a large supply of remdesivir at an exorbitant cost to American taxpayers and Gilead itself would charge American hospitals $3,200 per treatment for it, $860 more than its price in other developed countries.
In addition to Warren, who sent a letter to the administration requesting information on HHS's pricing negotiations with Gilead for the drug, other people also stood up. Whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), for instance, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Dr. Robert Kadlec, a Trump HHS political appointee, had engaged in multiple schemes to funnel contracts to politically connected companies — and that this had begun even before the pandemic was even a reality. According to Bright, Kadlec then pushed him out of the government, despite the fact that federal law officially protects whistleblowers.
In his complaint, among other things, Bright alleged that in 2017, a Kadlec friend and Big Pharma consultant pressured the agency to maintain a contract with a company owned by a friend of Jared Kushner's, even after an independent review determined it should be cancelled. Bright testified before Congress, and the fate of his whistleblower suit remains to be litigated.
As for the rest of the inquiries, so far, money and power appear to have eluded the investigators. It's unclear whether Senator Warren's and Representative Porter's requests met with any response from the former administration, or even whether they've continued their inquiry into Big Pharma and no-bid contracting. They have made no further announcements and neither office replied to requests for updates.
You won't be surprised to learn, I'm sure, that the name "Jared Kushner" is so far not to be found in GAO or PRAC reports.
The best chance for public accountability — if not legal liability — might be the House of Representatives, especially its Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, launched in April 2020.The Trump administration blew off its subpoenas for former HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield to testify in December 2020, and blocked documents and witnesses related to politicized data, testing, and supply shortages, among other areas of inquiry. But the subcommittee did manage to expose emails from Trump political appointees, revealing efforts to skew CDC data. It is also investigating some whopping no-bid or sole-contractor deals that the former administration cut with preferred businesses. One was a $354-million four-year contract awarded on a non-competitive basis to PHLOW, which was incorporated in January 2020 to manufacture generic medicines to fight Covid. It's the largest contract ever awarded by BARDA and includes a 10-year option worth $812 million.
And the House has continued to seek transparency. According to a Brookings House Oversight Tracker, as of March 2021, 30% of congressional oversight letters and 40% of its hearings were related to the federal government's pandemic response. But there are signs that the Biden administration, while more cooperative, is not eager to force agencies to comply with requests the previous administration ignored.
My sense is that the emergency created by the insurrection at the Capitol last January and the desperate need of the new Biden administration to have palpable policy achievements in order to do well in election 2022 has taken the steam out of any inclination to dig deeper into the profiteering, cronyism, political scheming, and chaos with which the Trump administration met the Covid-19 virus. It went far deeper than an article like this can possibly indicate, leaving so many hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths in its wake.
Think of it as a memory hole, still brimming with schemes and money.
Copyright 2021 Nina Burleigh
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
**Nina Burleigh**, aTomDispatch regular, is a journalist of American politics and the author of six previous books. Her seventh, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic (just published by Seven Stories Press) is a real-life thriller that delves into the official malfeasance behind America's pandemic chaos and the triumph of science in an era of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts.
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warren rips Trump push to fill RBG Seat in fiery floor speech: ‘Last gasp of a right-wing, billionaire-fueled party’
Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 23, 2020
In a speech on the Senate floor honoring the legacy of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday condemned President Donald Trump and his Republican allies’…
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/elizabeth-warren-sounds-the-alarm-on-a-mounting-housing-crisis-and-the-profiteers-who-will-take-advantage/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/how-the-so-called-champion-of-american-business-fought-to-protect-profiteering-and-endangered-millions
As hospital intensive care units overflow again, and delays in COVID-19 testing reports reach record levels in many cities, a conversation I recently with Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, reminded me that I had forgotten something utterly critical: Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally disarm America in the face of the coronavirus invasion was urged upon him by an ostensible defender of American business: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
When the pandemic reached America, we weren’t ready — any more than we were ready when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. But Trump had the tools to do what the U.S. has often done: make up for lack of preparedness. The crucial gaps to fill in March were supplies for testing to limit the spread of the virus, and medical equipment to treat those who got sick — testing kits, swabs, reagents, masks, gowns and gloves — by the billions. Government health agencies estimated that if the pandemic took hold, the country would need, for example, 3.5 billion N95 medical masks. We had 12 million.
Presidents have available, and have routinely used, the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to overcome such critical supply shortages— not just in wartime, but also to ensure adequate relief supplies after natural disasters. DPA can be used to put emergency purchases at the head of a supply chain, but also to require factories to convert their output to provide needed equipment in adequate volumes. Members of Congress urged Trump to appoint a military official as DPA czar to coordinate production and distribution of essential pandemic-related medical supplies, as was done in the Korean War.
In March, Trump was leaning towards robust use of the DPA, fashioning himself as a wartime president and the battle against the coronavirus as America’s “big war.” He invoked the DPA to require General Motors to speed up its production of ventilators. But he quickly discovered that he had an enemy within — not the virus as such, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Within days of Trump’s announcement that he would mobilize as if for war and use the DPA, the Chamber of Commerce’s lobbying army swung into action. Among the Chamber’s arguments: DPA would impose “red tape on companies precisely when they need flexibility to deal with closed borders and shuttered factories.” Unstated: if the government took charge of the supply chain for tests, masks and gowns, it could also prevent bidding wars from competing hospitals and states that would, and did, drive prices — and profits — through the roof.
In response, labor unions representing nurses, hospital staff and other frontline workers who were unable to be tested, or to obtain masks or gowns, protested and urged the Chamber to join a national mobilization to defeat the coronavirus. The appeal was not answered. On March 23, Markey and his Massachusetts colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrote to the Chamber demanding an explanation. The Chamber’s response: Defense Production Act reliance was unnecessary, because “American companies will do whatever it takes to support America’s response to the pandemic and shore up the economy.”
But what the workers had feared — insufficient production, soaring prices and profits, chaotic delivery mechanisms — took over the health care market during the first wave of virus spikes in the Northeast. Some hospitals were paying 15 times the usual price for masks.
The Chamber continued its strenuous opposition to enabling the government to ensure an adequate supply of tests and PPE. Even Trump conceded that profiteering had taken over the market, and ultimately he did invoke the DPA to prevent it — but when it came to the export market.
Supplies increased, but often at exorbitant prices. Only when the shutdowns of most of the American economy brought the number of hospitalizations down sharply did supply and demand come into temporary balance. Americans believed that if there was a second wave later in the year, at least health care workers on the front lines would have the tools they needed.
Trump, denied by Chamber opposition of an easy pathway to acting like a heroic wartime president, seemingly lost interest. By June his focus had shifted from fighting the virus to reopening the economy and then reigniting the culture wars. Media headlines proclaiming his lack of interest didn’t even provoke “fake news” tweets from the East Wing of the White House.
The virus had a longer attention span. With major states like Florida, Texas and Arizona opening rapidly and prematurely, the holes in the jerry-built testing, tracing and quarantine systems each state had fashioned without federal guidance gave the virus its chance.
Cases — although not, initially, fatalities — began to soar. Suddenly, what any nationally coordinated effort would have been tracking and resolving all along — that the nation had stepped up production of tests, masks and gowns to meet the needs of an economy in shutdown, but had nowhere near the level of supplies for a massive second wave — came home to roost. By early July, new cases were flooding the hospital capacity of even some of the nation’s major health care centers, such as Houston.
In New Orleans, testing centers had to close eight minutes after they opened. In 100-degree heat in Phoenix, lines at testing centers were eight hours long. San Antonio and Austin were forced to limit testing to those with symptoms, leaving the system utterly unable to detect asymptomatic cases, when research suggests that to 40% of infections take place. Wait times for test results soared with caseloads, so that even those who got tested might not find out they were positive until they were well past the contagious stage.
Nurses were again forced to use one N95 mask for weeks at a time. Prices for what was actually available soared. States reported they could only fulfill 10% of their orders. Even now, in July, the U.S. has nothing like the 3.5 billion N95 masks that we knew in January we would need. Indeed, how could we? No manufacturer could have guessed in March how severe the crisis would be by fall. With no one managing the system, it was clearly foolish for any private company to produce, on speculation, several billion masks. Market signals cannot prepare America for the massive increase in possible scale required by such a pandemic. Nor can individual cities and states trigger the necessary ramp-up of supplies. Only a systematic national plan designed to ensure that we were ready for the worst-case scenario could have protected us.
Inevitably, the “market solutions” favored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have failed America not once but twice. In failing, they have taken the nation’s economy over the precipice into a deep, long, economic decline. That the loudest voice claiming to represent U.S. business chose to defend profiteering, embrace short-term thinking and risk the collapse of the American health care system and economy is both shameful and shocking.
And that most Americans, including me, had already forgotten this is scary. This is not the first time the Chamber has successfully pursued policies that put us enormously at risk — for years it has been one of the major forces preventing Washington from adopting even the most modest efforts to accelerate a transition off fossil fuels to save lives and protect the climate. But if the Chamber can get away once again with having caused massive economic damage while risking the health of millions, and with its public reputation unscathed, it’s unlikely to change its behavior.
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Warren holds Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s feet to the fire over bailouts: ‘You’re boosting your Wall Street buddies’
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday accused Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin of looking out for his friends on Wall Street instead of U.S. workers after the former Goldman Sachs banker repeatedly…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/anyone-but-elizabeth-a-powerful-group-reportedly-doesnt-want-warren-to-be-vice-president
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an 220
https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/elizabeth-warren-has-been-virtually-erased-from-mainstream-media-coverage-following-iowa-debacle-despite-outperforming-joe-biden-journalist/
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) released her plan to push back against disinformation that has seemingly taken over the internet in recent years. That same day, a CNBC headline suggested Warren had proposed “criminal penalties for spreading voting disinformation online.” The poor headline ultimately snowballed into a right-wing media smear accusing Warren of plotting to criminalize political beliefs with which she disagrees.
But Warren's plan only referred to criminal penalties for disinformation related specifically to how people vote: This would target known disinformation like "Vote by text" memes, for instance. It would also target campaigns that misinform about when election day is. These specifically were used to depress turnout in 2016.
Right-wing outlets, though, jumped on the CNBC headline to fearmonger that Warren had proposed criminalizing free speech. Soon, the lie was all over Fox News.
harper collins
https://www.mediamatters.org/peter-schweizer/fabricated-and-wildly-inaccurate-peter-schweizers-new-book-gets-bankruptcy-law
A preeminent bankruptcy law scholar who significantly disagrees with Warren on policy told Media Matters that the notion Warren supported pro-corporate bankruptcy laws is “baffling” and “ridiculous”
WRITTEN BY TIMOTHY JOHNSON
PUBLISHED 02/03/20 11:59 AM EST
In his new book, conservative author Peter Schweizer argued that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is responsible for federal bankruptcy laws that big businesses have used to their advantage. But Schweizer’s Warren criticism is based on a fabricated and wildly inaccurate history of bankruptcy law, and one expert in the field told Media Matters that Schweizer has a "fundamental misunderstanding of what bankruptcy is about.”
Schweizer, a Breitbart senior editor-at-large and president of the right-wing think tank Government Accountability Institute, is best-known for his 2015 book Clinton Cash, which was riddled with errors, fabrications, and distortions. Despite his sloppy work, Schweizer was aided in promoting his claims by a compliant mainstream press that failed to rigorously investigate his work or needlessly gave his allegations oxygen, as The Washington Post and The New York Times did when they made “exclusive agreements” with Schweizer to promote his work.
Now, as the 2020 presidential election approaches, Schweizer has released another book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, that levels corruption allegations against several Democrats running for president and other progressive politicians. In a chapter about Warren -- who before being elected a U.S. senator in 2012 was a professor at Harvard Law School specializing in bankruptcy legal issues -- Schweizer claims that during the 1990s, she was responsible for Congress’ adoption of pro-corporate bankruptcy laws. The claim, which is false, would be contrary to Warren’s presidential campaign platform. ...
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julian castro dropped out 1/20? endorse ew
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Wall Street Banks Court Moderate Democrats to Blunt Warren's Hostility (The New York Times*)*
Wall Street bank lobbyists are seeking moderate Democratic allies in Congress to deprive Elizabeth Warren of votes and curb policies they consider hostile to their interests.
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ocean plan blue ew 1219
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This Populist legacy is reflected in today's campaigns of Bernie Sanders andElizabeth Warren, with Sanders hanging a picture of the labor Populist and Socialist Eugene V. Debs on his office wall, and with Warren proposing post-office banking and similar proposals once sustained by the Populists and Socialists of her native Oklahoma.
1119 see am rising oppo
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/betsy-devos-held-in-contempt-and-gets-100000-fine-for-gauging-defrauded-students/
no lnx
Betsy DeVos held in contempt and gets $100,000 fine for gauging defrauded students
Written by Laura Clawson / Daily Kos October 25, 2019
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was held in contempt of court and slapped with a $100,000 fine (which the government will pay) for continuing to collect loan payments from students who were defrauded by the now-closed for-profit Corinthian Colleges. U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim had ordered the Education Department to stop collecting on loans owed by around 16,000 former Corinthian students, an order the Education Department mostly ignored.
In issuing the rebuke, Kim said that “the evidence shows only minimal efforts to comply with the preliminary injunction.” In some cases, the government even seized tax refunds or wages to collect the money that the former students were not supposed to have to pay.
When Sen. Elizabeth Warren confronted DeVos over this issue at a Senate hearing earlier this month, DeVos tweeted, “Loan servicers made an error on a small # of loans.”
Again, 16,000 borrowers are involved. Blaming loan servicers is the Education Department’s strategy for responding to the contempt citation, because, as usual, when rich people like Betsy DeVos get called out on their abuses, they scream that it’s unfair and demand to evade accountability, even as they insist that students who were literally defrauded by a for-profit college should get no relief.
The Education Department is refunding “at least 3,200” of the borrowers, but 3,200 is a long way from 16,000. The $100,000 fine will go to help some of the students. The judge is also requiring the Education Department to provide monthly updates on what it’s doing to make things right, and if the agency continues dragging its feet, she might “impose additional sanctions, including the appointment of a Special Master to ensure compliance with the preliminary injunction.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/enough-is-enough-study-reveals-the-mind-boggling-wealth-of-global-millionaires/
...according to Credit Suisse, the U.S. added 675,000 new millionaires over the past year, bringing the country’s total to 18.6 million.
Japan and China both added over 150,000 millionaires, while the U.K., France, Australia, and Italy were among the nations that saw a decline in millionaires.
Overall, the report shows the world’s millionaires now own a combined $158.3 trillion, or 43.9 percent of all global wealth
... new figures detailing vast inequities in wealth distribution globally and within individual nations come as two of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in the U.S., Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have released proposals designed to combat wealth inequality through taxation.
Warren’s “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” plan, unveiled in January, would impose a two percent tax on assets over $50 million and a three percent tax on assets over $1 billion.
Last month, Sanders released his “Tax on Extreme Wealth” proposal, which would would create a one percent tax on wealth between $32 and $50 million. The tax would progressively increase for richer Americans—those with over $10 billion in wealth would face an eight percent tax.
...
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/elizabeth-warren-has-decided-to-play-the-medias-game-and-the-results-could-be-politically-toxic/
no lnx
Elizabeth Warren has decided to play the media’s game — and the results could be politically toxic
CNN
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 21, 2019
71
Over the last few months, debate moderators have demonstrated their willingness to dumb down our politics and parrot Republican talking points by continually asking Elizabeth Warren if her support of Medicare for All would mean that taxes go up for people in the middle class. Her response has been to talk about the cost of health care, regardless of whether it is paid in premiums, deductibles, and co-pays or taxes. That hasn’t satisfied the moderators, who seem to think that it is important to differentiate who Americans pay for their health care rather than how much they pay.
The relentless pursuit of that question in the debates does, however, seem to be hurting Warren. Perhaps that is because she has been backing the Medicare for All plan put forward by Bernie Sanders, who has been clear on this question.
“At the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of people will save money on their health-care bills,” Sanders said at last week’s debate in Ohio. “But I do think it is appropriate to acknowledge that taxes will go up. They’re going to go up significantly for the wealthy. And for virtually everybody, the tax increase they pay will be substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expansions.”
Warren’s unwillingness to be that direct is beginning to tarnish her reputation as the plain-talker who tells the truth. That is probably why, on Sunday, she announced that her campaign will release a plan to pay for Medicare for All in the next few weeks. This is where the rubber meets the road and it is possible to begin asking some questions that are actually relevant, as opposed to the ones we’ve seen from debate moderators up to this point.
In order to determine if Warren can keep her promise that costs will go down for people in the middle class, she will need to address two questions that the Sanders proposal doesn’t.
How much will providers be paid?
In order to determine the overall cost of Medicare for All, Warren’s plan will need to begin by answering the question of how much providers will be paid. Under our current system, private insurers pay providers significantly more than Medicare. The most substantial form of cost control can be found in bringing those payments closer to Medicare rates. While Warren has consistently made insurers the villains of our health care system, she has not demonstrated a willingness to take on providers.
Contrary to what many people believe, the issue of how much to pay providers was a major contributor to the downfall of the public option during the debate over Obamacare, demonstrating that it can be politically toxic. But any plan to move forward with either a public option or single payer must address this issue in order to be viable.
How will it be paid for?
Bernie Sanders has released a set of options about how to pay for Medicare for All, but hasn’t put forward a specific plan. That makes it impossible to assess the effect on individual Americans. In order to determine whether Warren’s plan meets the goal of bringing down costs for middle class families, she will need to identify which taxes will be tapped to pay for the plan.
It is worth noting that, when Sanders talks about the tax increases that will be needed to pay for Medicare for All, he says that, other than the wealthy, “virtually everybody” else will pay substantially less for health care than they do now. Jonathan Cohn provides an example of someone who might fall outside that qualifier.
Imagine, for example, a 30-year-old who today buys a minimalist policy directly from an insurer ? say, one of the “bronze” plans with relatively skimpy benefits that barely meet the Affordable Care Act’s coverage standards. Because that plan covers so little and because 30-year-olds pay lower premiums than older people, that bronze plan is probably pretty cheap.
The bronze plan could easily cost less than the new taxes for Medicare for All and maybe a lot less, depending on how much money the 30-year-old makes and just how skimpy that plan is.
But perhaps even more significant are those middle class Americans whose employer pays for all or most of their health insurance premium. It is very likely that under Medicare for All, they would be taxed at a rate higher than they’re currently paying.
These are issues that advocates for single payer, including Bernie Sanders, have avoided addressing. It is true that Medicare for All would be a more efficient way to deliver health care and that overall, it would likely cost less than the current system. But major issues emerge when we begin to address the challenge of transitioning from the status quo to single payer.
Warren has been clear that she will only support a plan that reduces costs for middle class families (I would assume that also applies to middle class individuals). So the target has been established. When she releases her plan, we’ll analyze it in order to determine if she can address these two major questions and reach that goal.
main rev dr is congress to k street lobby?
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/10/congress-to-k-street-176-members
congress to K Street: 176 members left for influence gigs over last decade
Over the last decade, at least 176 members of Congress joined the influence industry. A majority of those former lawmakers took their talents to K Street lobbying firms or major law firms that engage in federal lobbying work. Read More
Over the last decade, at least 176 members of Congress joined the influence industry, according to a new report from OpenSecrets that focuses on “shadow lobbying” and the revolving door.
Leaving Congress for lobbying or consulting work is bipartisan. Since the 111th Congress, which ended in January 2011, 94 Republicans took a spin through the revolving door as did 81 Democrats.
A whopping 26 of the 29 members of last Congress to join the influence industry were Republicans — a lopsided number driven by a wave of Republican retirements ahead of House Democrats’ sweeping win in November. The reverse happened during the red wave in 2010, when 40 of the 56 members who went through the revolving door were Democrats.
A majority of the former members took their talents to K Street lobbying firms or major law firms that engage in federal lobbying work.
Powerhouse lobbying firms Squire Patton Boggs and Akin, Gump are the top collectors of congressional talent, taking in five former members each since the 111th Congress. To kick off 2019, Squire Patton Boggs hired former Reps. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), who retired at session’s end, and Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), the fourth-ranking Democrat who lost in a primary upset to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The firm also retains former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) as an unregistered adviser.
DLA Piper, Venable, Cannae Policy Group, Greenberg Traurig and King & Spalding each hired four members of Congress each over the same time period.
High-ranking members of Congress have no trouble finding high-paying jobs where they can leverage their extensive experience and connections.
Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) received a seven-figure job at financial firm Moelis & Company, which advises corporations on strategic decisions. Former House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) worked as an adviser for Gephardt Group after retiring from Congress in 2011. Former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), who read talking points from Saudi Arabia on the House floor, became policy director for Brownstein, Hyatt, which lobbies for the Middle Eastern country.
None of those three representatives registered as lobbyists for their new gigs. But OpenSecrets’ analysis found that representatives on average are more likely to register as lobbyists than senators. Forty percent of senators joining the influence industry registered to lobby compared to 55 percent of representatives.
The revolving door is nothing new, but an increasing number of lawmakers are trying to shut it through new policies, including Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Warren’s plan bans presidents, vice presidents, members of Congress, federal judges and cabinet secretaries from ever becoming lobbyists and limits other federal employees. It also attempts to expand the definition of a lobbyist to any individual paid to influence government.
This week, Sanders released his plan to stop Washington corruption, which includes a ban on lobbying from former members of Congress and their senior staffers.
“Congress cannot represent their constituents while special interest groups have the ability to influence decisions with corner offices and lucrative job offers,” Sanders said in a press release.
Lobbying experts say a ban on lobbying for former members — unlikely to pass Congress and survive the courts as it is — would actually encourage “shadow lobbying” if lobbying disclosure laws are not made more rigorous.
:{Click here:(style="box-sizing:inherit;max-height:1e+06px"):}: to explore a searchable list of revolving door members.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/mainstream-media-is-turning-on-elizabeth-warren/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/elizabeth-warren-calls-out-mark-zuckerberg-over-new-facebook-ad-policies-after-his-meeting-with-trump-the-public-deserves-to-know/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/wall-street-dems-threaten-to-support-trump-or-sit-out-2020-election-if-warren-is-nominated
...Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle — or even back President Donald Trump — if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party’s nomination.
In recent weeks, CNBC spoke to several high-dollar Democratic donors and fundraisers in the business community and found that this opinion was becoming widely shared as Warren, an outspoken critic of big banks and corporations, gains momentum against Joe Biden in the 2020 race.
“You’re in a box because you’re a Democrat and you’re thinking, ‘I want to help the party, but she’s going to hurt me, so I’m going to help President Trump,’” said a senior private equity executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity in fear of retribution by party leaders. The executive said this Wednesday, a day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would begin a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump.
...
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https://www.ecowatch.com/warren-climate-risk-disclosure-act-2640576122.html
The Green New Deal has been the focal point of the climate debate among the Democratic presidential candidates. Less publicized is the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, a proposal from Senator and presidential contender Elizabeth Warren, that seeks to frame climate change as a threat to the public markets.
The idea: force companies to publicly disclose how their valuation would fare should climate change continue versus how they would do should temperature rise be capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, the benchmark outlined in the Paris agreement.
"The Climate Risk Disclosure Act empowers investors to make smart decisions about where to invest their money by requiring that public companies be straight about how climate change and related policies will affect their bottom lines," said Sen. Warren in an exclusive statement sent to Cheddar. "Shareholders weighing this new information will compel big companies to speed up the transition to a clean energy economy, reducing the odds of an environmental and financial disaster without spending a dime of taxpayer money."
First proposed in 2018, and reintroduced with changes earlier this summer, Warren's bill would use the Securities and Exchange Commission to force publicly-traded companies to confront their own position within the climate crisis — and share that information with investors. The law, the Senator's office explains, would also have companies reveal their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, share the total fossil fuel assets they own or manage, and outline their climate change risk management strategies.
It's certainly not the only climate proposal from the Massachusetts senator, but the Climate Risk Disclosure Act does appear fundamentally Warren-esque in its hope to use regulatory agencies — in this case, the SEC — to push the free market toward a less environmentally-destructive future.
Notably, the legislation was co-sponsored by several other presidential hopefuls, including Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. It has also won the endorsement of sustainability advocacy organizations, including the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (Ceres) and the U.S. Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment (US SIF).
Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) introduced the bill in the House, where it just passed the House Financial Services Committee.
"Public corporations must take responsibility for the large financial risks posed by the impacts of climate change, while embracing the economic opportunity of being global leaders in developing a clean energy economy," said Casten in a statement to Cheddar. "Our bill utilizes market mechanisms to incentivize climate action by ensuring that corporations disclose the risks posed by climate action to the benefit of their shareholders and the public."
This is not the first time an idea like this has come up. As early as 2007, state officials, investor advocates, and climate groups — including Ceres, Friends of the Earth, and Environmental Defense — had begun pushing the SEC to issue guidance as to how companies should disclose risks related to climate change.
"Companies' financial condition increasingly depends upon their ability to avoid climate risk and to capitalize on new business opportunities by responding to the changing physical and regulatory environment," they wrote in a letter to the agency. For instance, the organizations argued the physical impact of climate change could impact a company's ability to operate or expose it to new legal proceedings.
Three years later, the agency commissioners — in [a party-line vote] — finally issued guidance suggesting how companies might go about disclosing the risks related to the impact of climate change. The guidance noted that climate change could impact how a business described itself, its legal proceedings, managements' discussion and analysis of operations, and risk factors facing the company.
"It did not change any of its rules. It just said our current rules mandate addressing the risks of climate change," explains Alan Palmiter, a business law professor at Wake Forest University.
Palmiter has written that, at first, the SEC's guidance drew a good amount of attention. He found that a "flurry" of law firms sent letters to their clients notifying them of the new guidance, with many noting that the SEC could take further action on the subject.
However, Palmiter found that some law firms were unsure how to follow the guidance. Some also questioned the capacity of companies to determine how climate change might affect them, and some doubted the existence of climate change altogether, he found.
But despite some initial fanfare, the guidance didn't seem to have much impact on how many — or how much — companies disclosed about their climate risks. Palmiter notes that "during the first years after the SEC guidance, fewer than three-fifths of companies in the S&P 500 mentioned climate change in their 10-K annual reports" and that most of these were simply "a short one-paragraph risk factor."
In 2014, Ceres argued the SEC had not prioritized "the financial risks and opportunities of climate change as an important disclosure issue."The non-profit noted that the agency comment letters related to the adequacy of climate change-related disclosures had dwindled from 38 in 2010 to none in 2013. Many companies had said nothing about climate change in their annual SEC filings, the organization found, and disclosures were highly variable, often revealing little detailed information.
Two years later, the SEC requested comment on a wide range of issues, including climate change, but there doesn't appear to have been any subsequent action under the Trump administration. Last year, the SEC also received a request for a petition for broader rulemaking governing "environmental, social, and governmental" disclosures.
When asked about its guidance for companies in regard to climate change, the SEC directed Cheddar to the 2010 guidance. The agency did not respond to follow-up questions as to whether further guidance had been issued since then and why enforcement appears to have slowed.
The Government Accountability Office's February 2018 review of the guidance found that the SEC was limited because it "primarily relies on information that companies provide," couldn't subpoena more information, and the information it did have wasn't standardized across companies. It also reported that industry associations said "they consider the current climate-related disclosure requirements adequate and no additional climate-related disclosures are needed," but that "some investor groups and asset management firms have highlighted the need for companies to disclose more climate-related information." Echoing the GAO, Jim Hempstead, a managing director at Moody's told Politico this June, "Climate disclosures that are coming out right now are all over the map," and implying that disclosures "comparable across companies" would be more helpful.
Warren re-introduced the legislation this summer, saying it would "give investors, and the American public, the power to hold corporations accountable for their role in the climate crisis."
The failure of the 2010 guidance has been at the foundation to push this bill ahead, with the leaders of both Ceres and US SIF, citing the SEC's "lax" enforcement in their support for Warren's 2019 Climate Risk Disclosure Act.
Whether the bill will be passed or not, like so much of a growing slate of bills meant to combat the climate crisis, may rest on the ability of Democrats to win back the Senate and the White House in the upcoming election.
And while it's not likely to be signed into law yet, Bryan McGannon, director of government relations at US SIF, notes: "It builds a track record."
This story originally appeared in Cheddar. It is republished here as part of EcoWatch's partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/a-new-endorsement-of-elizabeth-warren-over-bernie-sanders-exposes-a-growing-rift-among-progressives/
WFP
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i wonder if this is truly systemic, //GND or just simple answer about who wull pay
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/warren-climate-plan-would-repeal-tax-cuts-for-rich/
no lnx
Warren climate plan would repeal tax cuts for rich
Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 6, 2019
Declaring the climate emergency an “existential crisis” that requires bold and urgent action, Sen. Elizabeth Warren Tuesday night unveiled a proposal that calls for repealing President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and corporations to help fund a transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035.
Warren’s plan adopts and builds upon the clean energy blueprint introduced by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race last month after running a campaign that centered the climate crisis as the most dire issue facing the U.S. and the world.
“Jay didn’t merely sound the alarm or make vague promises. He provided bold, thoughtful, and detailed ideas for how to get us where we need to go,” Warren wrote in a Medium post. “One of the most important of these ideas is the urgent need to decarbonize key sectors of our economy. Today, I’m embracing that goal.”
Warren said she will “commit an additional $1 trillion over 10 years — fully paid for by reversing Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and giant corporations — to match Governor Inslee’s commitment, and to subsidize the economic transition to clean and renewable electricity, zero emission vehicles, and green products for commercial and residential buildings.”
The senator outlined the broad goals of her clean energy plan, which calls for $3 trillion in federal investment:
By 2028, 100 percent zero-carbon pollution for all new commercial and residential buildings;
By 2030, 100 percent zero emissions for all new light-duty passenger vehicles, medium-duty trucks, and all buses;
By 2035, 100 percent renewable and zero-emission energy in electricity generation, with an interim target of 100 percent carbon-neutral power by 2030.
“Nothing less than a national mobilization will be required to defeat climate change,” said Warren. “It will require every single one of us, and it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work — there is no time to waste.”
Warren’s clean energy plan was unveiled Tuesday as part of the Massachusetts senator’s overall climate platform, which is detailed on her website.
Warren, an original co-sponsor of the Senate Green New Deal resolution, said her platform would aim to ensure a just transition for fossil fuel industry workers, bolster protections for frontline communities, and create millions of well-paying union jobs while confronting the climate crisis.
“If we work together to make smart investments in our clean energy future, we will grow our economy, improve our health, and reduce structural inequalities embedded in our existing fossil fuel system,” Warren wrote. “The task before us is monumental, and it is urgent.”
The youth-led Sunrise Movement praised Warren’s platform, which was compiled ahead of a CNN climate crisis town hall on Wednesday that will be attended by 10 Democratic presidential candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), entrepreneur Andrew Yang, former Vice President Joe Biden, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
@sunrisemvmt
Ahead of tomorrow’s @cnn #ClimateTownHall, @ewarren has compiled all her plans so far for a #GreenNewDeal. They are as detailed as they are bold.
Thank you for your continued leadership. We hope this list keeps growing!
*Happy reading ?? ?? http://ewar.ren/climate-change*
Tackling the Climate Crisis Head On | Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth is committed to addressing climate change, because our planet depends on it.
elizabethwarren.com
In a statement on Tuesday, Mitch Jones, climate and energy program director at Food & Water Watch, applauded Warren’s clean energy plan as a “welcome” addition to her slate of climate proposals.
But Jones criticized Warren for neglecting to mention fracking, which is largely responsible for the planet-threatening boom in U.S. natural gas production.
“While Senator Warren came out early in support of previous plans to stop fossil fuel production on public lands, this latest proposal is silent on banning fracking everywhere,” said Jones. “Our new fossil fuel exporting economy is based on fracking, without banning it or exports of fossil fuels, we are condemning our children to decades of fossil fuel use.”
“We must move immediately to ban fracking, ban the export and import of fossil fuels, ban new fossil fuel infrastructure including pipelines, as well as banning production on public lands,” Jones added. “We don’t have time to wait. Acting now is both a political and moral imperative.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/elizabeth-warren-adopts-inslees-climate-plan-im-challenging-every-other-candidate-to-do-same/
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apology tour sioux city
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Elizabeth Warren has a plan to reform "Heirs' Property," which allows wealthy white property developers to steal Black family homes
Heirs' property is a relic of post-Reconstruction law, which allows white developers to exploit the diffuse ownership of Black family homes to steal them and kick out the people who live there. Read the rest
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elizabeth Warren asks why the Justice Department went easy on big banks
Kevin Wack, Jesse Eisinger / ProPublicaAugust 20, 2019
After an article by ProPublica and American Banker examining how the DOJ softened settlements with RBS and Barclays, the presidential candidate blasts settlements that let banks “evade accountability.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/why-elizabeth-warren-thinks-the-warning-lights-are-flashing-and-a-new-financial-crisis-is-looming/
[bunch of other art'l i ignored on predictor curve last few weeks' OTOH i have been tracking weaken dodd-f and cfpb for a while]
no lnx twt
Why Elizabeth Warren thinks the ‘warning lights are flashing’ and a new financial crisis is looming
Written by Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams July 23, 2019
“Warning lights are flashing,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote Monday, predicting an economic crisis within two years unless federal regulators and Congress take swift action.
The Democratic presidential contender outlined the reasons for her concerns and plans to address them in a Medium post entitled “The Coming Economic Crash—And How to Stop It.”
Team Warren
?
@TeamWarren
.@ewarren warned us about the 2008 crisis years before it hit. Now she's seeing serious warning signs again—and she's calling for action. Read, share, and join the fight: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/the-coming-economic-crash-and-how-to-stop-it-355703da148b …
The Coming Economic Crash?—?And How to Stop It - Team Warren - Medium
By Elizabeth Warren
medium.com
As she did in the years leading up to the 2008 economic crisis, Warren now sees “a lot to worry about again.” According to the Massachusetts Democrat, there are “a number of serious shocks on the horizon that could cause our economy’s shaky foundation to crumble.”
“The country’s economic foundation is fragile. A single shock could bring it all down,” she wrote. “And the Trump administration’s reckless behavior is increasing the odds of just such a shock.”
Among the potential triggers she laid out is thelevel of household debt.Warren referenced recent data showing that household debt is now $869 billion higher than the $12.68 trillion peak it hit in 2008.
To remedy that, she cued up several of her already-released plans, including raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling most student loan debts, offering free public higher education, and making child care affordable.
She also called on federal regulators to swiftly address the potential shock that lies in leveraged corporate lending.“Leveraged lending—lending to companies that are already seriously in debt—has jumped by 40 percent since Trump took office, spreading ‘systemic risk’ throughout our financial system,” wrote Warren.
Federal regulators, she wrote, should “enforce leveraged lending guidance that is intended to stop banks from issuing these risky loans in the first place.”
Warren also cited the current manufacturing recessions—a problem she said could be flipped by enacting her Green Manufacturing Plan.
Inoculating the economy from “potential shocks” also will happen by “strengthening critical American industries, instead of undercutting American companies” and eliminating the debt ceiling, she wrote.
A crisis could be averted, wrote Warren, “if we take bold action now to address the underlying problems in the economy.”
Warren’s new plan rollout came the same day as Democracy for America’s latest straw poll showed her closing in on Bernie Sanders’s lead among the progressive group. The Vermont senator notched just over 32 percent to Warren’s roughly 26 percent, both well ahead of third place Kamala Harris’s 12 percent. The group’s previous survey in April showed Sanders as the frontrunner and with a 30-point lead over Warren.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/elizabeth-warren-has-a-plan-that-is-already-making-vulture-capitalists-cry
Warren has a plan that is already making vulture capitalists cry
MSNBC
This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.
Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos July 18, 2019
Elizabeth Warren has turned her skills in economics and finance into a plan that stops private equity firms from using their power to raid companies and rip them apart for short-term profit. Equity firms often work in a way that sees them use a leveraged buyout to gain marginal control of a company. At that point, they sell off the company’s most valuable assets, load the remaining shell up with debt, including the debt from their buyout, and … walk away. It’s a process that turns a tidy profit for those invested in the equity fund, along with some paper losses that look good on taxes. And it generates an absolute disaster for the workers at the companies that funds dismember.
As The Washington Post reports,piratical equity funds were behind the collapse of companies as diverse as Friendly’s restaurants and HCR ManorCare nursing homes. And they were responsible for the destruction of iconic American brands, including Toys R Us. In each case, an equity firm moved on a company whose stock price was depressed following recent losses, used debt to grab a controlling interest, and proceeded to convert decades of work by thousands of workers into a quick payday.
Warren’s plan consists of a series of steps that would make it harder for equity firms to dice up troubled companies. It includes measures that would stop them from selling off real estate and manufacturing assets and generally limit the speed with which firms could raid companies for valuable patents, property, and cash. And it would prohibit equity firms from dumping the debt they accumulated in a leveraged buyout onto the company they bought.
As might be expected, investment firms are already screaming that they’re actually doing the world a favor by destroying “inefficient” firms, and that Warren represents the face of big government getting in the way of the market.In some cases they might even be right. There genuinely are instances where a poorly managed old firm still holds assets that could generate more jobs and drive more economic activity if they were cut loose. So maybe the fund managers have a point.
Or they would. Except Elizabeth Warren already has a plan for that, too.
The line “Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that” has already become a running joke. But it’s a good joke—good in the sense that it leaves people smiling because she probably does. In this case, it’s a plan that would stop the vultures from picking over the bones of a company in temporary trouble and promote investment by those who want to save the company rather than destroy it.
It’s not a surprise that the investment firms are complaining. It’s much, much simpler to simply sell off the assets of a company in trouble than it is to find a new business model or approach that brings that company back to health. Not just easier—but also far quicker. Saving a company can be an endeavor that takes years. Dissecting one can be done in weeks.
Even when the companies are protected by state or federal laws that would seem to safeguard against an immediate raid of bank accounts, the vultures have a way around it. For example, they can force a company to sell all its stores to the equity firm for a song, with the equity firm then charging the company a huge amount of rent for the stores it already occupies—creating a direct pipeline from the accounts of the purchased company into the pockets of the equity firm’s investors.
Right now, private equity firms have no reason to care about the companies they’ve purchased, and every reason to show disdain toward those companies and their workers. After all, a private equity investment can turn a huge profit while driving a company into quick bankruptcy. It’s one of the most perverse of perverse incentives.
Warren’s plan would end the ability of equity firms to drop their debt on the companies they purchase and would plug the holes they use to siphon off the value. It wouldn’t really stop investors from selling off assets or breaking up companies, but it would eliminate the incentive to do so in a way that values an immediate payday over long-term growth. Warren’s plan wouldn’t punish those who legitimately invested in a company because they saw value in it—even if that value was ultimately in breaking it into multiple assets. But it would stop those who roll from one company to the next, exploiting their weakness for profit.
Of course, private equity firms are probably sitting on other schemes they can use for a quick buck at society’s expense. But then … Warren has probably already planned for that.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/watch-elizabeth-warren-grills-trumps-defense-nominee-on-ties-to-major-defense-contractor/
kos
Elizabeth Warren is keeping up a grueling presidential campaign schedule, but she has not lost a step in her day job in the Senate, as Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Defense found out Tuesday. Mark Esper was a top lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon, but he’s not interested in resolving that conflict of interest by permanently recusing himself from decisions involving his former employer.
Warren zeroed in on that and on Esper’s ability to get a waiver from recusing himself while he’s still waiting for a final seven-figure payout from Raytheon, questioning Esper about why he’s not doing what former acting Secretary Pat Shanahan did when Shanahan permanently recused himself from decisions about Boeing, *his former employer. (See a pattern in who Trump is elevating?) Warren pressed hard for yes or no answers as Esper fought to filibuster and evade. He really did not want to commit to stepping back from decisions affecting his former employer—having some loopholes is very important to Esper.*
Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Jim Inhofe first stepped in to defend Esper from the questioning, then cut Warren off after Esper got up on a very wobbly high horse to make the case for why he should absolutely be allowed to mix million-dollar payouts from defense contractors with so-called public service. (Spoiler: Esper’s high horse involved his own past military service.) “This is outrageous,” Warren said as Inhofe dinged her on time after repeatedly creating space for Esper to filibuster.
But before that, Warren summed up the situation: “Let me get this straight. You’re still due to get at least a million-dollar payout from when you lobbied for Raytheon. You won’t commit to recuse yourself. You insist on being free to seek a waiver that would let you make decisions affecting Raytheon’s bottom line and your remaining financial interest. And you won’t rule out taking a trip right back through the revolving door on your way out of government service or even just delaying that trip for four years after you leave government.”[vid]
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political ops consultants
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-elizabeth-warren-is-putting-the-consultant-class-on-notice/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/warren-calls-for-immediate-resignation-of-trumps-former-fda-chief-after-he-quietly-joins-pfizer-board/
Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts who is also running for her party’s nomination for president in 2020, released a letter (pdf) Tuesday morning calling on Gottlieb to step down from the board in the name of government ethics.
"You will be on the board of a company that has billions of dollars at stake in the decisions made by the agency you used to head and the employees you used to lead,” states Warren’s letter.
It’s a profitable venture for Gottlieb.
“According to Pfizer,” Warren notes, “board members in 2018 were paid $142,500 in cash retainers, plus received $192,500 worth of Pfizer stock.”
00:0200:33
Appointed by Trump, Gottlieb was the head of the FDA from 2017 until he resigned on April 5 of this year. After leaving the government, he took a job with right-wing think tank The American Enterprise Institute. The move to Pfizer, however, came later and was only announced on June 27.
In Warren’s letter, which Common Dreams obtained exclusively and is reproduced below, the senator refers favorably to Gottlieb’s work with the FDA before hitting him on joining Pfizer and tying that move to the behavior of other officials in President Donald Trump’s White House who have left the administration for big money payouts.
“You are the second high-level Trump Administration official in less than two months to join the board of a corporation soon after leaving government service,” reads the letter. “In May 2019, former Trump Administration DHS Secretary and Chief of Staff John Kelly joined the board of Caliburn, Inc., the parent company of the Comprehensive Health Services, which runs the notorious Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Florida.”
“You should rectify your mistake and immediately resign from your position as a Pfizer board member,” Warren adds.
Warren’s letter cites her Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act as a possible solution to government officials behaving in this way in the future. As Common Dreamsreported in June, Warren and the legislation’s sponsor in the House, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), see the problem as systemic to Washington’s public-private revolving door. Rep. John Sabarnes (D-Md.) is co-sponsoring Jayapal’s version of the law.
Gottlieb’s move to Pfizer was also noticed by Public Citizen Health Research Group co-founder Sidney Wolfe.
“This is classic and it’s not surprising,” Wolfe told health news site Stat. “Philosophically, he’s returning to the ecosystem where he’s most comfortable. And he’ll get paid very well for it, too.”
Read Warren’s letter:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s… by on Scribd
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robt r joins and big tech breakup?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/effective-tax-policy-that-thwarts-plutocratic-power-building-hinges-upon-this-key-detail/
no lnx
Effective tax policy that thwarts plutocratic power-building hinges upon this key detail
written by Chuck Collins / YES! Magazine June 26, 2019
3
When we talk about the wealthy, who are we really referring to? Is it the billionaires on private jets? The neighbors up the street who seem to always have the flashiest new cars and exotic vacation photos?
This election season, a number of candidates have floated proposals to tax the wealthy to address extreme inequality and finance new spending programs. Often left unsaid is which segment of the wealthy they’re referring to and why taxing the very rich is necessary for everyone to prosper, both to raise revenue and put a brake on the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power. The truth is we need these taxes on the rich, now more than ever. To get there, we need a deeper understanding of who we mean by “the rich.”
A decade ago, journalist Robert Frank offered a helpful overview of the wealthy in his 2007 book, Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Book and the Lives of the New Rich. I’ve adapted Frank’s concept to present a road atlas to the villages of today’s Richistan, USA. These villages include: Affluentville, Lower Richistan, Middle Richistan, Upper Richistan, and Ultra-Wealthyville.
Affluentville is home to most of those in the top 10 percent of the wealth distribution. Residents of Affluentville have household incomes over $150,000 and personal wealth, defined as assets minus debts, ranging from $1 million up to about $3 million. Their ranks total about 10 million households.
Most residents of Affluentville draw their income from high-end salaries, so they will be more directly affected by tax increases on earned income—unlike those in upper Richistan, whose income comes from investments and capital gains.
They may drive nicer cars, but still sit in traffic on the way to work. They are very concerned that their kids don’t lose economic status. Thus, they invest heavily in tilting the scales in their favor—hoarding public K-12 education dollars into the wealthiest school districts, securing legacy admissions to top-tier universities and internships at their friends’ law firms.
Tax policies that are aimed at Upper Richistan but reduces the cost of higher education and health care could win allies in Affluentville. This includes U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ College for All and Medicare for All bills, as well as U.S. Sen. Cory Booker’s American Opportunity Accounts baby bond bill.
Lower Richistan includes approximately 3 million households with total wealth between $3 million and $10 million. According to our analysis of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finance, adjusted to 2015 figures, these are the 98th and 99th wealth percentiles.
Lower Richistanis populate upscale restaurants, country clubs, and luxury vacation destinations. They likely have second homes. They still fly on commercial airlines, but often sit in first class.
The income and wealth of this group comes from business ownership, high salaries, stock investments, and inheritances. Lower Richistanis are among the political influencers, a group that grows the higher up the income and wealth ladder you go.
If the objective of tax policy is to thwart plutocratic power-building, then we need to aim higher than Lower and Middle Richistan. If the goal is to maximize revenue, from say a luxury real estate transfer tax or broad-based income tax, then you want to include these folks.
Middle Richistan is inhabited by the almost 2 million households that represent most of the top 1 percent of wealth holders. The wealthiest 1 percent have assets over $10 million, and average $26 million.
Middle Richistan is where residents start to own their own jets, or at least fractional ownership of a private plane. They own multiple homes. Many have yachts.
The people in this group have been huge beneficiaries of four decades of tax cuts, neoliberal trade policies, and other public policies that benefit asset owners at the expense of wage earners.
Sen. Sanders’ progressive estate tax bill, “For the 99.8% Act,” would tax the estates of those who inherit more than $3.5 million with a sliding scale rate that rises to a 60 percent rate on wealth transfers over $1 billion.
Upper Richistan is home to roughly 160,000 households with wealth between $20 million and $100 million, the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Their incomes alone start at about $3 million annually. This group received more than 90 percent of the income and wealth gains in the decades after the 2008 economic meltdown.
Upper Richistanis must come up with creative strategies to hoard their wealth and influence. These includes using private charitable foundations that fund right-wing think tanks, co-opt academic institutions, and support campaigns on their favorite issues.
Raising the income tax rate to 70 percent on Upper Richistani income over $10 million, as proposed by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would raise an estimated $720 billion over a decade. Unfortunately, it would not touch income from capital gains and dividends that accounts for half the income of this group.
A potentially more effective way to tax this group would be to tax all adjusted gross income over $2 million with a 10-percent surtax. Because it would include capital gains income, it would raise $75 billion annually and over $850 billion over the next decade, even with a lower rate.
Ultra-Wealthyville is home to the 16,000 households in the richest 1 percent of the 1 percent (the 0.01%), including the roughly 540 billionaires in the U.S. They have wealth starting at $110 million and incomes starting at $11 million.
Some of them, but not all, own private jets, but they could if they wanted to. They collect houses around the globe, many of which function merely for “wealth storage,” parking their money in a place that’s safer than financial markets.
Their income comes almost entirely from capital gains, so they don’t mind increases in the income tax rate; just don’t touch investment income.
They’re known for dodging taxes. Research suggests that households in the top 0.01 percent with wealth over $40 million, evade 25 percent of personal income and wealth taxes. According to one estimate, this is roughly $7.6 trillion, or 10 percent of the world’s wealth. Thus, we need a much bigger investment in tax enforcement for this group.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed annual wealth tax would institute a higher 3 percent rate on assets over $1 billion. The total tax would generate an estimated $2.75 trillion in revenue over 10 years. No candidate has yet come forward with a luxury consumption tax, such as a tax on private jets, which would fall largely on this group’s largesse.
In the end, all residents of Richistan need to be called on to pay their fair share of taxes and to make meaningful contributions to the well-being of the country and the planet. This starts with understanding who these people are and how a serious restructuring of the rules can get us there.
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warming to warren?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/bernie-sanders-faces-aggressive-opposition-from-centrist-democrats-who-view-him-as-an-existential-threat/
no lnx twt
Sanders faces aggressive opposition from centrist Democrats who view him as an ‘existential threat’
Bernie Sanders faces aggressive opposition from centrist Democrats who view him as an ‘existential threat’ Royalty-free stock photo ID: 634157375 Topeka Kansas, February 25Th, 2017 Democratic Senator and past presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivers the keynote speech at the Kansas State Democratic convention
written by Alex Henderson June 21, 2019
70
While former Vice President Joe Biden remains the frontrunner in many polls on the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont can often be found in second place — and the Vermont senator and self-described “democratic socialist” raised an impressive $18 million during the first quarter of his campaign. If Sanders were to win the Democratic nomination and defeat President Donald Trump in the general election, he would be the most liberal/progressive president the U.S. has had since Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s. But some centrist Democrats fear that Sanders is unelectable, as a new report in the Guardian details with a review of the “anyone-but-Bernie” movement.
The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino reports that on June 18, the centrist think tank Third Way held an event in South Carolina — where about 250 people were in attendance and Third Way members expressed fears that Sanders would win the primary but lose to Trump in the general election.
ADVERTISING
Jon Cowan, president of Third Way, told the crowd, “I believe a gay midwestern mayor can beat Trump. I believe an African-American senator can beat Trump. I believe a western governor, a female senator, a member of Congress, a Latino Texan or a former vice-president can beat Trump. But I don’t believe a self-described democratic socialist can win.”
Cowan, in an interview with the Guardian, expressed his worries about Sanders’ influence on the Democratic Party, asserting, “He has made it his mission to either get the nomination or to remake the party in his image as a democratic socialist. That is an existential threat to the future of the Democratic Party for the next generation.”
Sanders was quick to respond to the June 18 event. The following day on Twitter, he denounced the anyone-but-Bernie movement as the work of “the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.”
Bernie Sanders
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@BernieSanders
The cat is out of the bag. The corporate wing of the Democratic Party is publicly "anybody but Bernie." They know our progressive agenda of Medicare for All, breaking up big banks, taking on drug companies and raising wages is the real threat to the billionaire class. https://twitter.com/politico/status/1141281982418247682 …
POLITICO
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@politico
Centrists are coming around to Elizabeth Warren as an alternative to Bernie Sandershttps://politi.co/2XlRlxE
The anyone-but-Bernie movement raises an interesting question: what about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate who shares many of Sanders’ liberal/progressive views and has been surging in recent polls? Why would Third Way be so hostile to Sanders but not to Warren? Arguably, it comes down to messaging.
Warren, unlike Sanders, has rejected the term “democratic socialist.” The Massachusetts senator has declared that she favors “markets” and is a “capitalist to my bones”; Warren has positioned herself as a blistering critic of crony capitalism but not of capitalism itself. If anything, Warren is — not unlike President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s — promoting herself as a savior of capitalism, not an opponent.
On Twitter, Sanders shared a June 19 Politico report on Warren’s relationship with Third Way, which was highly critical of her in the past but in 2019, likes the fact that she stresses her capitalist credentials. At the Third Way event in South Carolina, Matt Bennett (the group’s co-founder) compared Sanders and Warren and stressed, “One is a Democratic capitalist narrative. The other is a socialist narrative.”
Truth be told, Sanders is really a capitalist — and the “socialism” that he favors draws its inspiration from FDR’s New Deal, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and the modern-day governments of Sweden, Denmark and Norway rather than Che Guevara or Mao Tse Tung. But in a soundbite culture like the United States, some people can’t get past the fact that Sanders is using the word “socialist” at all. And Trump is certainly using the word to bash Democrats and terrorize voters, claiming that only Republicans can save the U.S. from the type of severe economic problems Venezuela has been suffering under President Nicolas Maduro.
Despite all the Sanders-bashing at the South Carolina event, Cowan also warned the crowd against Democrats promoting a message of “warmed-over 1990s centrism” —declaring, “Voters do not want mushy, bland, empty Democratic centrism.”
Whether the Democratic Party will ultimately nominate Biden or another centrist for the 2020 election or go with someone more liberal/progressive remains to be seen. Sanders might win the nomination regardless of what Third Way thinks. But as the primary moves along, the anyone-but-Bernie voices in the Democratic Party will be no doubt be railing against him — and urging fellow Democrats to please refrain from calling themselves “socialists.”
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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/06/07/curious-case-elizabeth-warren-and-charter-school-lobbyist-who-wasnt
ctt koch-ademic
The practice of individuals who are funded by special interests representing themselves as independent scholars has the potential to deceive lawmakers and other public officials. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) put forth legislation in the last Congress that would require disclosure of the sponsors of some research that is submitted as part of public comments.[[17]](https://www.citizen.org/article/koch-cog-rsc/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=ab4a011e-a30b-428d-805a-411de0805c8e#_ftn17) Proposals such as this might provide a guide to Congress, as well as state and local governments, for ways to unmask the special interests that lurk behind purported independent scholarship.
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Warren Introduces Relief Package to Help Storm-Ravaged Puerto Rico 'Recover With Dignity'
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NEW
Elizabeth Warren calls out Wall Street for trying to ‘squeeze out every last penny of profit’ from Puerto Rico
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-announces-plan-to-end-student-debt-and-provide-free-public-higher-education/
As a public advocate, as a senator, and now as a presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren’s primary focus has been leveling the playing field for all Americans. On Monday,she rolled out another visionary policy proposal to do just that: a comprehensive student debt cancellation and universal free public college plan.
Warren’s first step in dealing with what she calls a higher education crisis, “a huge student loan debt burden that’s crushing millions of families and acting as an anchor on our economy,” is a plan to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt owed by 42 million Americans, 95 percent of the nearly 45 million who hold debt. People with household income below $100,000 would be eligible for $50,000 in debt cancellation; Warren’s proposal creates a sliding scale for eligibility for people with up to $250,000 in annual income, with debt phased out at a rate of $1 for every $3 in income above $100,000, so that someone making $130,000 a year would get $40,000, and so on. It would be available for both public and private school debt, and the canceled debt would not be taxed as income.
“Once we’ve cleared out the debt that’s holding down an entire generation of Americans,” Warren writes, “we must ensure that we never have another student debt crisis again. […] We need to fundamentally change the broken system that created the crisis in the first place.” That means making free public education available to every Americans for primary and secondary school as well as for two- and four-year public college. The federal government and states would partner to split tuition and fees and would expand eligibility and funding for Pell grants to cover non-tuition costs, “to make sure lower-income and middle-class students have a better chance of graduating without debt.”
Warren’s plan focuses on “fixing our higher education system so it better serves lower-income families and communities of color.” That includes creating a $50 billion minimum fund for historically black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions to “ensure that spending per-student at those schools is comparable to colleges in the area.” It would provide addition federal funding to states that show “substantial improvement in enrollment and graduation rates for lower-income students and students of color.” It would end federal funding, including military benefits and federal student loans, going to for-profit colleges that have disproportionately preyed on people of color. It would require public colleges to complete an annual audit examining enrollment and graduation rates for lower-income students and students of color, and would ban public colleges from “considering citizenship status or criminal history in admissions decisions.”
The plan would carry a one-time cost to the government of $640 billion, and would cost roughly $1.25 trillion over 10 years, paid for by Warren’s Ultra-Millionaire Tax on the wealthiest 75,000 families with fortunes of $50 million or more. An economic analysis of her plan from Brandeis University finds that not only would it erase debt for millions, but it would also likely boost the economy through “consumer-driven economic stimulus, improved credit scores, greater home-buying rates and housing stability, higher college completion rates, and greater business formation.”
In a New York Times interview, Warren said “This touches people’s lives. […] This is a chance to talk about what’s broken and how we fix it. This is the American dream.” Asked about whether she could keep up her “frenzied pace” of comprehensive policy proposals, Warren laughed and said, “I love this.”
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calls for impeachment based on mueller rept
https://theintercept.com/2019/04/15/climate-change-military-elizabeth-warren/
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Warren's Bold New Tax Plan Would Raise Over $1 Trillion From 'Richest, Biggest' US Corporations
pod save: maduro a dict who stole elections
https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/here-are-6-of-elizabeth-warrens-bold-ideas-that-prove-shes-as-progressive-as-bernie-sanders/
Next to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the most progressive Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential race is arguably Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Warren is a details-obsessed policy wonk, outlining solution after solution for the United States. Yet her presidential campaign has been underperforming, especially in light of her strong track record. Warren, working with the Obama Administration, was instrumental in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011— and after taking on incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown in 2012 and defeating him by 7%, she was reelected by 24% when she went up against Republican nominee Geoff Diehl in the 2018 midterms.
But while Warren raised $6 millionduring 2019’s first quarter, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign had raised $18 million as of early April— and a Monmouth poll of Iowa voters, released April 11, found Warren enjoying 7% support compared to 16% for Sanders, 9% for South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and 27% for former Vice President Joe Biden (who hasn’t officially entered the race but will reportedly do so soon).
A variety of reasons have been offered for why Warren’s campaign hasn’t caught fire so far, ranging from sexism to President Donald Trump’s childish “Pocahontas” taunts to claims that while she is great at policy recommendations, Warren isn’t great at soundbites or reaching Americans with short attention spans. Regardless, Warren is a wealth of powerful and important ideas.
Here are six of the many areas in which the Massachusetts senator has excelled from a policy standpoint.
1. Warren realizes that gaping wealth inequality is terrible for free-market capitalism
Sanders and Warren part company when it comes to describing themselves. Sanders considers himself a “democratic socialist,” while Warren has said that she is a “capitalist to my bones.” But the New England senators agree that gaping wealth inequality is terrible for the U.S., and Warren—much like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s/early 1940s and President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s—realizes that capitalism is best served by a strong middle class. Warren recently told Bloomberg TV, “Washington is broken, and right now, it works great if you’re a billionaire. It works great if you are a giant multinational corporation. It works great for the wealthy and the well-connected, and it is not working for the rest of America.”
2. Warren understands that the U.S. tax system is rigged in favor of the 1%
The ultra-wealthy, Warren stressed to Bloomberg TV, have successfully rigged the U.S. tax system to their advantage—and the wealthiest Americans need to pay their fair share of taxes “so that we can make investments so that Washington works, government works to create opportunities for everybody else.” The U.S., Warren stressed, needs to “make democracy work better so that we make this economy work better. You were successful—God bless. But part of the deal is that you pay back so that the next kid gets a chance to be successful.”
3. Warren favors a wealth tax on the richest Americans
Like Sanders, Warren realizes that taxing the wealthiest Americans isn’t about punishing affluence (as the right often claims) but leveling the financial playing field. The Washington Post, on January 24, reported that Warren had been seeking advice on a wealth tax from liberal University of Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez—who proposed a 2% wealth tax on Americans with asserts above $50 million and a $3 wealth tax on Americans with assets above $1 billion.
4. Warren proposes breaking up the United States’ largest banks
The Great Recession was the worst financial crisis in the U.S. since the Great Depression, and Warren—not unlike Sanders—has stressed that in order to avoid another financial calamity, it is essential to break up the country’s largest banks into a bunch of smaller banks. Warren understands that competition is necessary to promote free-market capitalism rather than crony capitalism, and breaking up banks is one way to force competition. The Massachusetts senator has also proposed a 21st Century version of the Glass-Steagall Act, which mandated a separation of commercial and investment banking as part of FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s but was repealed in the 1990s.
5. Warren stresses that increasing the minimum wage is vital to having a strong middle class
When a federal minimum wage was first enacted as part of FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s, the idea wasn’t that a corporate CEO and an entry-level worker were supposed to earn the same amount of money, but that minimum wage workers should at least be able to stay afloat financially. But the United States’ stagnant minimum wage, last raised in 2009, hasn’t begun to keep up with inflation. In January, the 69-year-old Warren told reporters, “When I was a kid, a minimum wage job in America would support a family of three. It would pay a mortgage, keep the utilities on and put food on the table. Today, a minimum wage job in America will not keep a mama and a baby out of poverty.”
6. Warren views universal health care as essential to a healthy economy
Calling for universal health care is something that the centrist and liberal/progressive 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have in common, but how they hope to achieve it varies. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, one of the most centrist of the Democratic hopefuls, has said she favors expanding the Affordable Care Act of 2010, also known as Obamacare, and is open to creating a public insurance option for health care. But Klobuchar opposes a Medicare-for-all plan, unlike Sanders. Warren, meanwhile, recently told Bloomberg TV that she has “signed onto Medicare for All” as well as another plan “that gives an option for buying in to Medicaid.” The “key,” Warren has stressed, is to “always keep the center of the bullseye in mind, and that is affordable health care for every American.”
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/democratic-primary-candidates-targeted-by-sustained-and-ongoing-disinformation-campaign-report/
Wednesday, POLITICO reported that several politicians floated as challengers to President Donald Trump are being targeted by a “sustained and ongoing” propaganda campaign on social media designed to divide the Democratic Party — possibly of foreign origin.
The most aggressively targeted figures are Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), all of whom are running for president in 2020, as well as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), who is currently deciding between running for president and a second campaign for Senate. All of them are being targeted on Twitter and other platforms, with the apparent goal of damaging their reputations before the primary can begin:
The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.
Recent posts that have received widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and messaging involving Harris, O’Rourke and Warren. In Warren’s case, a false narrative surfaced alleging that a blackface doll appeared on a kitchen cabinet in the background of the senator’s New Year’s Eve Instagram livestream.
According to information analyzed by Guardians.ai on behalf of POLITICO,much of the activity around these candidates on Twitter is being driven by 200 accounts, both organic and likely automated — during a recent 30 day period, these accounts were responsible for 2 to 15 percent of all mentions of these four politicians on the site.
The most targeted politician seems to have been Harris, who is currently the tentative frontrunner in polls of declared candidates. She has been subject to a barrage of sexist attacks on her youthful relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. If this activity is part of a disinformation campaign by foreign state actors, it would not be the first time. There is strong evidence that Russia created several of the accounts in 2016 that were responsible for spreading rhetoric meant to divide supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who had very similar platforms but ended up in a toxic primary battle that left Clinton wounded ahead of the general election. Moreover, there is a consensus that the stolen Democratic emails distributed through WikiLeaks and propagandized out of context in the 2016 cycle originated with Russian hackers.
But that is not the whole story, because at least some of the energy to poison the primaries appears to be coming from fringe troll sites like 4chan and 8chan, where users have taken up explicit calls to attack Democratic candidates from the left (one user explicitly told fellow posters to spread information about how Warren was a Republican until 1996). It is unclear how many of these users are foreign state actors from places like Russia or Iran, versus organic right-wing activists in the United States, but data experts believe it is a mixture of the two.
It is clear that social media is still a place where toxic attacks and partisan propaganda can spread rapidly — and those who make it a part of their media diet should be on guard.
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