Donald Trump’s Problem With the First Amendment

Donald Trump’s mission is to destroy America’s confidence in a free press and replace it with his own fabulist imaginings. He works to erode the credibility of
our core democratic institutions. Our criminal justice system is “a joke”, and “a laughing stock”. Our electoral system was “rigged” when it seemed he would lose, and we will hear that again this year if Democrats gain. He uses the language of Joseph Stalin to call the media “the enemy of the people”. Journalists are “very smart, they’re very cunning and they’re very dishonest”. His invective toward them is unending. “I gotta tell you, the media is [sic] among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met”.

John McCain said that attacking the legitimacy of the press is “how dictators get started”. So say two Harvard professors in a new book, “How Democracies Die”. In their global analysis of deteriorating democracies, Steven Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s say that attacks on the media are part of the autocrat’s instruction manual.

“Fake. One of the greatest terms of all I’ve come up with”, Trump said to Mike Huckabee of the adjective he uses constantly to delegitimize the media categorically. Incredibly, it works. As far back as January, Lamar Smith, a Republican representative from Texas said,

“Better to get your news directly from the president. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth”.

Trump’s base, of course, cheers him on. They may not be persuaded that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because 3 million illegals voted for her, nor that President Obama tapped his phones in Trump Tower, but for most of the 2,000-plus falsehoods or misleading claims he has uttered since he took office, his followers most likely know no better. They don’t read the extraordinary fight the major arms of the media are waging to refute Trump’s lies and post the truth.

Consider the newspaper, in print or Internet. It teems every day with information. Paging through a print edition gets that point across more clearly than the drill down layers of online. There before you every morning is the world for you to browse with your orange juice and coffee. Going along with Trump’s blanket claim that all of it is fake news — believing that editors and writers dream up torrents of falsehoods every day — tells us how dimwitted his Americans are for believing such nonsense. Just listen to the roar of the crowd when the demagogue says “FAKE NEWS!”

The major media no longer follow the creed of objectivity. The better outlets have not so much allowed bias to creep into their news columns as they have commingled opinionated articles alongside straight news by labeling “analysis” or such. Or they show bias in their selection of what they cover or what is featured and what is buried. They have to. It’s what readers and viewers want, and the straitened times for the news media means they must attend to reader preferences. But bias is not the same as false, and the media has been doing extraordinary work during the Trump years in ferreting out the truth to counter the lies, the corruption, the cover-ups.

That’s not to Trump’s liking. Truth is his enemy. “As you know I have a running war with the media”. At a podium in December, pointing: “You see? That’s the fake news back there. Fake news”. To Mike Huckabee in October, “Look, the media’s fake. We’re doing so well in so many ways and nobody talks about it”. Again pointing to reporters, “I like real news, not fake news. You’re fake news”. At a press conference,

“The press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control. The press — the public doesn’t believe you people anymore. Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you”.

Journalists are “sick people” who he believes “don’t like our country”, he told a crowd in Phoenix. He assaults them all.

contagion

This has reverberated around the world. Trump admires and envies despots such as Putin and Erdogan for having the power to shut down newspapers and jail journalists in their countries. With his “fake news” slander he has signaled that he is in league with them. McCain again:

“Trump continues his unrelenting attacks on the integrity of American journalists and news outlets. This has provided cover for repressive regimes to follow suit”.

There were 42 journalists killed last year doing their job; 262 were imprisoned; 21 of those were arrested on charges of false news. This is what Trump has spawned:

“You can forge anything these days. We are living in a fake news era” — Syria President Bashar al-Assad.

“But since you are a fake news outlet then I am not surprised that your articles are also fake” — Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte.

The media “spread lots of false versions, lots of lies. This is what we call ‘fake news’ today, isn’t it?” — Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro.

threats

Neither the president nor Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department has taken action against journalists. So far, that’s the opposite of Barack Obama’s record. The Obama administration brought more cases against leakers and reporters than all of the administrations that preceded it combined, often by using the draconian Espionage Act. We reported on that in “Obama v. the Press: A History Worse Than Nixon?”

But it’s only Mr. Trump’s first year. And there are more than hints of what might come. He told then-FBI Director James Comey that journalists who publish classified information should be jailed. That has never occurred. It is generally argued that the Espionage Act applies to leakers, not to publishers or journalists — so far.

The president’s personal attorney has sued Buzzfeed and four of its reporters over the release of the Christopher Steele dossier on Russian contacts with the complaint that Trump’s reputation was damaged.

Last summer, NBC reported that when shown a chart of the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons, Trump said he wanted a 10-fold increase to match the huge arsenal of the Kennedy years. For making this known the president threatened to have the network’s broadcast license revoked (not knowing that it is the local stations that are licensed, not the network). “It is, frankly, disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write”. The right-wing covers for him. DailyCaller.com said the liberal media had lost its “sense of humor” because this obviously was just a “moment of gleeful hyperbole”.

Trump had his attorneys send a cease and desist letter to publisher Henry Holt demanding that it not publish Michael Wolff’s book, “Fite and Fury”, a rather foolishly naïve maneuver given that the Supreme Court called “prior restraint” unconstitutional as far back as 1931. The publisher’s answer was to release the book early.

criticism not allowed

Trump would prefer to write laws that suit him; he has several times spoken of changing the laws covering libel. Early in his campaign he said:

One of the things I’m going to do if I win is I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money…. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post…writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money… We’re gonna open up those libel laws, folks, and we’re gonna have people sue you like you never got sued before.”

Fortunately, he can’t change libel laws. Libel is a state-level tort meaning that it is up to state legislatures to decide what is libel and for state courts to interpret. But in New York Times v. Sullivan the Supreme Court put a lid on how freely states can write and adjudicate their laws. That revered ruling set the threshold for libel of a public official as requiring “actual malice” and “knowing or reckless disregard for the truth”. Justice William Brennan wrote that there must be a

“profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open”, debate that “may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes sharp attacks on government and public officials”.

Of course, with hard right Supreme Court appointments, the court might simply overturn the precedent.

Nevertheless, President Trump lets nothing go, and he has exhibited little respect for established laws (see “Will the Rule of Law Survive Donald Trump?“. He was at it again not 10 days ago: “Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace,” Trump said before a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday. “We’re going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws.”

Of concern is whether Trump and Sessions will begin using the Espionage Act against journalists citing the catch-all “national security” label and then threaten reporters with jail time if they don’t reveal their sources. The leaks have been invaluable for revealing the inexplicable contacts with Russians by the Trump camp.

Trump has just issued his fake news awards. He had mostly chosen news outlets that had made mistakes. The fact checking operation at the Washington Post asked:

Does it really count if the news organization admits error? Everyone makes mistakes — and the point is not to play gotcha. News organizations operate in a competitive arena and mistakes are bound to be made. The key test is whether an error is acknowledged and corrected.

Their analysis:

At least seven of the 11 “Fake News” winners resulted in corrections. Of those, two reports prompted suspensions or resignations. Two of the “awards” were simply tweets that were quickly corrected. One was an opinion article in which the author later retracted his prediction. And the final award went to the Russia investigation, which is ongoing.

On the other hand, the Post has been tallying Trump’s lies and misleading statements since he took office. In his first 355 days the count nosed over the 2,000 mark; each instance can be retrieved here. Trump lies uncontrollably, never admits error, never apologies, yet faults the media.

Instead we have the alternate universe of Sarah Huckabee Sanders lecturing journalists about mistakes that were corrected:

“You cannot say that it’s an honest mistake when you’re purposefully putting out information that you know to be false, or when you’re taking information that hasn’t been validated, that hasn’t been offered any credibility, and that has been continually denied by a number of people, including people with direct knowledge of an instance.”

“Are you speaking about the president?” one reporter shot back, in view of Mr. Trump’s long history of inventing claims with no validation.

With Twitter, Trump was ingenious enough to hit upon the most up-to-date path to circumvent the media and talk directly to his 46.9 million followers, from which perch he can say, don’t believe any of them, believe only me. “It is a common thing in the authoritarian playbook to discredit the media so that they are the only source that can be trusted,” said Indira Lakshmanan, who holds the Newmark chair in journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt identify a short list of indicators of incipient autocracy, one of which being disregard for civil liberties and intolerance of the media. Save for Richard Nixon,” no major-party presidential candidate met even one of their criteria over the last century”, they say, “Donald Trump met them all”. The most important point they make is this:

“This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. …But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracy may die at the hands not of generals but elected leaders — presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power…The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy — gradually, subtlely, and even legally — to kill it.”

Jan 29 2018 | Posted in Media | Read More »

One Finger on the Button? Are We Crazy?

The question of Donald Trump’s fitness to be president again lit up the Internet and cable news when the two schoolyard bullies tweeted about who has the bigger
nuclear button. How humiliating that we the people find ourselves in such a state of impotence, with no alternative other than to wait to see what two volatile men of wobbly stability might do. We have left in place a law meant for another time and saner men that permits the current occupant of the White House to wake up cranky at 5:00 AM some morning, stewing over some juvenile insult, and decide to unleash a shower of nuclear missiles. That we have left in our generals’ hands an order to dumbly obey a mere law that would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions makes us as insane as Trump and Kim, were either of them to take that action.

Congress finally began to consider making changes to the law — the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 — that puts the sole control of nuclear launches in the president’s hands. But that was in November. This is a threat that exists beginning at dawn every day. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, sounded the alarm in the Senate at the time, saying the president

“is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear weapons strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national security interests.”

Yes indeed, senator, but what’s taking so long? Instead, the Congress was totally absorbed with tax cuts, which would become treasonous negligence were there a sudden nuclear exchange that could have been prevented by Congress having first changed a dangerously outmoded law.

In that hearing, a retired Air Force general who once headed the Strategic Command that oversees the nuclear arsenal, said the military could refuse to follow what it considers an unwarranted order. But the president could merely fire layers of generals in the stack until he arrives at “Dr. Strangelove”‘s Buck Turgeson who will snap to attention and say “Yes, Sir!”.

The current Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001 is restricted to persons or groups associated with the attacks of September 11, 2001. That is not North Korea. Any first strike would be an act of war for which the Constitution requires the president to seek congressional approval to initiate a use of force. But a law that calls for the military instantly to obey a president who decides to launch nuclear tipped missiles is a short circuit in the system, a contradiction that has not been dealt with.

no big deal?

What is most frightening is that we have a president who seems to view nuclear weapons as little different than other weapons. Trump doesn’t seem to grasp their scope of lethality, unlike Reagan who understood that they threaten the annihilation of civilization.

During the campaign, Trump said to “Hardball”‘s Chris Matthews, “Somebody hits us within ISIS, you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” When Matthews pushed back, Trump asked, “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”.

Joe Scarborough, co-host of “Morning Joe”, was told that at a foreign policy briefing Trump asked three times in an hour, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”.

Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Trump what he thought South Korea and Japan should do about North Korea. Trump’s response:

So, North Korea has nukes. Japan has a problem with that. I mean, they have a big problem with that. Maybe they would in fact be better off if they defend themselves from North Korea.”

Wallace asked, “With nukes?”. Trump answered, “Including with nukes, yes, including with nukes”. He urged South Korea to do the same. “Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons?”, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked. “Saudi Arabia, absolutely”, Trump replied, then reversed himself, but continued:

“It’s going to happen, anyway… you have so many countries already, China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia, you have so many countries right now that have them”.

What about using them in Europe, Fox News’ Eric Bolling asked. “I’m not going to take cards off the table. Europe is a big place”. On “Face the Nation” he said about nuclear weapon use, “You want to be unpredictable”. He has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea “with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.

Last summer, when shown a slide charting the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s, Trump was jealous of the huge arsenal of the Kennedy years and told those present, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, that he wanted a return to that size stockpile — a 10-fold increase. He did not want to be at the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve. It was after that meeting that Tillerson spoke of Trump as a “f-ing moron”.

what’s to be done?

Senators Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Representative Ted Lieu of California have come up with legislation to bar the president from launching a first nuclear strike without a declaration of war by Congress. This would still leave the president free to instantly launch nuclear missiles to counter an attack. That was the principal reason for the law during the Cold War — the need rapidly to launch a counter-strike from missile silos about to be destroyed by incoming. There are problems with the Markey-Lieu proposal, the most obvious being that leaving the decision for a pre-emptive strike to the sclerotic and leaky deliberations of Congress would tip our adversary that it had better be the one to act pre-emptively.

The better course might be to require approval of a president’s intent to use nuclear to a troika among four or five officials — the secretary of defense, the joint chiefs chairman, the head of national security, the secretary of state, say.

For now, all we’ve got is a pact that some of those secretaries and generals have supposedly sworn to, that one of their number will be in the United States at all times to talk the president down from whatever affront has provoked a towering rage.

But how will that work at 5:00 AM when none of them are at the White House and Trump wakes the military aide snoozing on the floor below demanding that he open the satchel he carries containing the nuclear codes? One can only hope that Trump will find the instructions what to do too complicated and go back to tweeting in bed.

How Entitled Are We?

The average Medicare recipient receives treatment totaling the full amount he or she has ever paid into the fund within the first two years after eligibility for coverage.

Taking Protection Out of Environmental Protection

Scott Pruitt has strong religious convictions, according to his pastor in home town Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where he was a deacon and taught Sunday school. In Washington he has been known to attend Bible study sessions with like-minded government officials.

How that explains his policies as Trump’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) comes clear when he talks about Biblical principles, as on a road trip in Iowa with a National Review writer taking notes:

“One side says we exist to serve creation. The other side says creation is there for us to use and manage to the benefit of mankind…If you are on the side that says we exist to serve creation, then you have no trouble putting up a fence and saying ‘Do Not Use’. Even though people may starve, may freeze…and I think that’s wrongheaded”.

It is not clear why Pruitt considers the Obama years’ regulations he is in the process of overturning as starving or freezing people, but he is referring to the Biblical question of stewardship or dominion — whether as the dominant species it is humanity’s responsibility to care for the planet and its creatures, or whether the resources of Earth have been put here by God for mankind to exploit. For Pruitt it’s the latter.

Repeal and replace

That would include reviving the extraction of coal from the earth by executing the president’s promise to coal miners to eradicate Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which called for the states to adopt emission controls that would threaten coal-fired power plants. “The Clean Power Plan would have forced states to scramble to alter their electric-power mix, shutting down coal plants long before the end of their useful life”, said the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the states had plenty of notice, and 51% of the U.S.’s electricity generating capacity was built before 1980, and with an average life of 40 years are at the edge of retirement, according to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

But Trump had vowed to “get rid” of Obama-era environmental regulations, calling the power plan “stupid” and “job killing,” and in a March executive order directed Pruitt to unwind the rule.

“The war on coal is over”

So announced Pruitt in October, appropriately in Hazard, Kentucky, the day before signing the repeal proposal. Before that, Trump told a crowd in Alabama, “Did you see what I did to that? Boom, gone.”

In fact, Clean Power never began. In 2015 the Supreme Court blocked the rule, wanting the courts to first work their way through the lawsuits challenging it from two dozen states before allowing it to take effect. In the meantime, overturning it is not as simple as a signature on an executive order. To be reversed, a completed regulation must go through an arduous process similar to that which led to its creation.

Pruitt may heed advice that replacing it with a reduced measure is the better course than outright repeal if lawsuits to retain the Clean Power Plan are to be avoided. They would have in their favor the “endangerment finding”, an EPA ruling in 2009 that found that six greenhouse gases (GHGs) — coal plant emitted carbon dioxide among them — are a threat to public health, a ruling that compels the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Get rid of that ruling and “the rest of the climate change regulations just sweep themselves away”, says JunkScience, a website that argues against climate change. “But if they don’t get rid of it, the environmentalists can sue…”. Pruitt would have a tough time getting rid of it; the ruling is strong, deriving from a 2007 Supreme Court decision that GHGs are a pollutant subject to regulation.

In any case, unraveling the Clean Power Plan will take years, and in the meantime market forces such as the replacement of coal with natural gas may do its bidding absent regulation.

unfixing

Acting on an executive order from Trump in February, Pruitt at the end of June formally proposed revoking Obama’s Clean Water Rule, also known as the Waters of the United States rule, or WOTUS. Angering industries of all stripes, it greatly expanded the government’s environmental jurisdiction over waterways to include even small streams and the land that feeds into them, whereas “navigable” waterways was the criterion under the original Clean Water Act. No longer could industry dump refuse into stream beds, given that they feed into creeks, then streams, then rivers and lakes, or sink into acquifers, and ultimately into drinking water.

When he visited Detroit, the president pledged a government review of the Obama administration fuel efficiency standards. In August the EPA together with the Transportation Department opened the public comment period as the first step to reduce the target of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The figure is a composite for sedans, SUVs, and pickups. For so high an efficiency average to be reached relies on a heavy percentage of those vehicles being electric and using no gallons at all. But the low price of gasoline has led to people buying less electric and more SUVs and pickups, a trend that if continued will make the target impossible to reach. Critics say the standards are self-defeating; the technology makes vehicles more expensive which encourages people to hang onto their gas guzzlers.

delay and derail

Where Pruitt is having a more immediate effect is in the many ways he is delaying actions and altering the staffing of the agency. The EPA has scientists who sit on review boards helping to develop policy based on research. By June, Pruitt had sent notices to dozens telling them their terms would not be renewed. (Ryan Zinke at the Interior Department has done the same, sending some 200 packing). He has gone on to cut the boards in half; part of Trump’s instruction was to cut back the main scientific branch 40%.

Pruitt has banned from the boards scientists who had been receiving grants from the EPA itself, evidently thinking the grants caused them to rubberstamp EPA’s progressive policies. “Our focus should be sound science, not political science”, he said. But he is expected to appoint representatives from industry to take their place, people “who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community”, said a spokesperson, and there’s been no mention of any restrictions to prevent them from promoting regulations that may benefit their businesses.

These steps fit with Pruitt’s mission at the outset. He had been an unfailing champion of oil and gas interests, benefiting from more than $300,000 in contributions to his elections from PACs or employees of the industry. He had filed 14 lawsuits against the EPA; co-parties in the suits had contributed to his campaigns. He had become notorious for transferring almost verbatim letters written by industry lobbyists onto the state letterhead and sending them to agencies and even President Obama arguing for regulation rollbacks.

climate change?

As for climate science, Pruitt is not convinced that carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of climate change. To assess the question of whether CO2 is a harmful pollutant subject to regulation, he would like to defer to Congress, where he is assured of finding so many who know nothing of the science. He calls the climate change debate “far from settled” and had some 1900 pages on climate change and related topics removed from the EPA website. He commissioned a company to ferret out who in the agency was e-mailing about climate change. He initiated a search to weed out all EPA grants to scientists that contain that “double-C word”.

His approach is to conduct blue team vs. red team debates, pitting scientists who are convinced by knowledge acquired over decades that humans contribute to global warming against those who disagree. This has the legions from the former camp in an uproar because it confers an implicit parity on the far smaller group of skeptics, as if to start the argument all over again.

Morale at the agency has plummeted. They have seen Pruitt nominate Andrew Wheeler, a lobbyist for the Appalachian coal company Murray Energy, to be the deputy administrator of EPA. He’s proposed Kathleen Hartnett White, former chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to be the chair of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality; she calls global warming “a kind of paganism”, calls carbon dioxide “the gas of life”, writes in favor of increasing the use of fossil fuels, is opposed by some 300 climate scientists. William Wehrum, someone with a “deep doctrinal dislike of clean air regulations” in the view of a New York Times editorial, was tapped to be Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation. Michael Dourson was nixed by the Senate, but Pruitt picked him, long a consultant to chemical companies where he maintained that exposure to compounds he was evaluating was safe at levels far more dangerous to public health than levels recommended by EPA.

Mr. Pruitt has drawn heavily from the staff of fellow Oklahoman and Senator James Inhofe, famous for declaring global warming a hoax. He has been bringing in an EPA leadership deliberately at odds with the career officials, scientists and employees and the mission expressed in the agency’s name. Some 700 have left.

That fits in nicely with Pruitt’s plans for the agency that Trump had vowed to eliminate “in almost every form”. The budget for 2018 slashes over $5.6 billion, a cut of 30%, and Pruitt’s goal is to cashier 20% of its staff of 15,000.

reverse gear

Under Pruitt, the agency is aggressively working counter to its mission by holding up Obama-era regulations largely without the input of the career employees at EPA, say senior staff members.

 Methane is a greenhouse gas some 30 times more potent in its entrapment of heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Just as in Oklahoma, where along with state attorneys general from other fossil fuel producing states Pruitt sued to block the EPA’s announced regulations to curtail methane emissions, so did he once at the agency seek to delay compliance with that rule, postponing it for two years. Pruitt ordered a stop even to the collection of data on methane gas emissions from oil and gas wells. He had been urged by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to take this step in a letter signed by 11 other state attorneys general. “I personally handed him the letter, and the next day the rule was personally withdrawn,” Mr. Paxton said in wonderment. The agency’s career scientists and legal experts were not consulted.

In May, the Senate voted 51 to 49 to retain the methane emission control rule — the only regulation that survived Trump’s executive orders that rescinded regulations put forth in Obama’s final days. In July a federal appeals court ruled the EPA must enforce implementation of the methane rule.

 Pruitt gave Pebble Limited Partnership the green light to file a new application for a permit for an open-pit mine that Obama had blocked. It will extract copper, gold and silver on Alaska’s Bristol Bay, which puts at risk one of the world’s most productive salmon fisheries, the primary home of the sockeye salmon. Local sentiment runs 80% against the mine, and 62% statewide oppose it.

 Pruitt fought it in Oklahoma, and now has delayed for 20 months an Obama administration regulation to make information about dangerous chemicals at plants more easily available to the public and first responders for their safety.

 He delayed the date by which companies must comply with a rule to prevent explosions and spills at chemical plants.

 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered EPA to update its standards for levels of lead in paint and dust, unchanged for 17 years despite new research on its hazards to children’s mental acuity. The Trump administration had requested six years to reconsider what levels of lead exposure are safe. The court gave the agency 90 days.

chemistry

Named for the New Jersey senator who had long fought for an overhaul of the loophole-ridden toxic substances laws, Congress passed the Lautenberg Chemical Safety For The 21st Century Act with a voice vote in the Senate and a 403 to 12 vote in the House. It’s a clear directive to the EPA to better protect the public.

 Yet Pruitt will indefinitely postpone bans on two toxic chemicals that have caused dozens of deaths — metyhylene chloride and trichloroethylene — and a third — methylpyrrolidone — used in paint strippers.

 Nancy Beck was brought in as a top deputy in EPA’s chemical unit, bringing on board the view of the American Chemistry Council, the industry’s principal trade association, where she had been an executive the previous five years. She has doctorate in environmental health, yet re-wrote a rule to make it harder to track the health consequences of perfluorooctanioic acid (PFOA). Used in stain resistant carpets and no-stick pans, it is associated with kidney cancer, birth defects, and immune system disorders. For such chemicals she came up with the phrase “phantom risks”.

 More conspicuously, days after taking office, Pruitt denied a 10-year-old petition from environmental groups that sought a complete ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos. Despite a court having previously admonished the agency for its “egregious” delay in acting on the petition, Pruitt said his agency has postponed a final determination until 2022.

Chlorpyrifos has been linked to neural damage, lower IQs, ADHD, and autism in children. But Mr. Pruitt said there “continue to be considerable areas of uncertainty” about the pesticide’s effects on infants. It has been banned from household use for 20 years, but is sprayed on 50 types of crops — berries, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, apples, and peaches among them. In the weeks before denying the petition, a FOIA request uncovered that Pruitt had promised farm executives it would be “a new day, a new future for a common sense approach to environmental protection”.

Chlorpyrifos manufacturer Dow Chemical says, “No pest control product has been more thoroughly evaluated, with more than 4,000 studies and reports examining chlorpyrifos in terms of health, safety and environment”. In stark contrast, the EPA could not find any safe level of exposure. Dow gave $1 million to Donald Trump’s campaign.

controversy

Insiders at EPA say that, especially at the beginning of his tenure, Pruitt met constantly with top corporate executives and lobbyists from industries that the agency regulates, but held virtually no meetings with environmental, consumer or public health advocates, attested to by a 320-page accounting of his daily schedule from February through May. Rather than work with the career professionals at EPA, fearful perhaps that they would only work against him, he outsources work to lawyers and lobbyists and to the Republican states’ attorneys general he had worked with when he was back in Oklahoma as its attorney general.

Apart from policy, Pruitt has raised eyebrows. Doors to his floor at EPA headquarters are frequently locked. Employees need an escort to gain access. He requisitioned a 10-person round-the-clock security detail. Those meeting with him are told to leave cell phones behind and are not permitted to take notes. For his own phone calls, he spent $25,000 of EPA money on a soundproof communications booth for his office, then tripled the cost by adding custom modifications that prevent any data leaks or eavesdropping.

There are the frequent, government-funded trips to Oklahoma for only perfunctory business meetings. The EPA’s inspector general has begun a probe into these trips for which Pruitt has at times used noncommercial and military aircraft. What’s the justification? Pruitt is not a Congress member, needful of connecting to the constituency he or she represents. He is a cabinet secretary running an agency of thousands of employees in Washington D.C. If industry needs to meet with him, they should make the trip to Washington, and on their dime.

The agency exhibits a siege mentality. When a Times reporter sent a detailed list of questions, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman came back with,

“No matter how much information we give you, you would never write a fair piece. The only thing inappropriate and biased is your continued fixation on writing elitist clickbait trying to attack qualified professionals committed to serving their country.”

All of which paranoia is not so untoward considering Mr. Pruitt is working against the ethos of the agency and the mindset of those who chose to work there.

in a hurry

Mr. Pruitt is a man with ambition. He is spoken of as secretly aiming at the governorship of Oklahoma. But just as this is written, with rumors swirling that Jeff Sessions will be pressed to resign, Politico says he has told friends of his interest in becoming the attorney general — of the U.S. this time. If he made that switch, President Trump would be hard put to find anyone so zealous about eviscerating EPA. Maybe Ryan Zinke?

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Trump says he signed the most pieces of legislation of any president in recent history. He’s actually signed the fewest bills since any president dating back to Eisenhower. But Mr. Trump has the strange and unwell compulsion of having to tell himself, to the point of internalizing the belief, that everything he does is more grand than anything that has gone before.

the whopper

But those examples are not what we mean as his biggest lie. It’s what he said about the tax plan in September:

“Tax reform will protect low income and middle income households, not the wealthy and well-connected…And it’s not good for me, believe me”.

That, of course, reeked of falsehood. He said this at a time when the House plan was to eliminate the estate tax altogether, do away with the alternative minimum tax entirely, and cut the tax on income from pass-through businesses from as much as 39.6% to 25%. Not good for the Trumps? It was a bonanza that we outlined in “A Bespoke Tax Plan for the Trump Family“.

He was still making the claim at the end of November before a crowd in St. Charles, Missouri:

“In all fairness, it’s going to cost me a fortune, this thing. Believe me. Belief…This is not good for me. Me, it’s not so…I have some very wealthy friends. Not so happy with me, but that’s OK”.

Except for a new limit on state, local, and property tax deductions that will expose more income to taxes in high tax states, the tax bill was designed for the wealthy. Denials by Republicans, contradicted so obviously by the math, hopes to hoodwink the public that the bill is about the middle class. As late as October, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was still saying, “The objective of the president is that rich people don’t get tax cuts”. How did that turn out? A family of four earning $1 million will pay $32,000 less in taxes. The windfall rises as income rises. A family earning $5 million would pay $136,000 less in taxes, almost twice the gross income of the median American family. If the tax plan did not intend major benefits for the wealthy, why was the top rate dropped from 39.6% to 37% and why does it not kick in until income rises above $600,000 instead of the current $470,700? Had they really meant for the rich not to get tax cuts, they would have just left the original bracket untouched.

At Mar-a-Lago over the Christmas weekend, Trump was overheard telling friends dining at his club, “you just got a lot richer”.

Paul Ryan energetically sold the theme that the tax cuts will rescue middle class Americans:

“For all those millions of Americans struggling paycheck to paycheck, help is on the way…More than half the people in this country are living paycheck to paycheck. Almost another half are people that are telling us that they’re about one paycheck away from living paycheck to paycheck.”

(Doesn’t that add up to almost everyone?) Not mentioned by him is that all of the reduced tax rates fizzle out beginning in 2025 and what remains by 2027 gives 82.8% of the gains to the top 1% of income earners, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Perversely, Republicans seek not only to add $1 trillion and quite possibly more to the national debt that is, apart from the tax cuts, already projected to rise to over $1.5 trillion in the single year of 2027, but in the process to drastically exacerbate income inequality in the United States, an inequality spread that is already the widest of the 35 OECD countries.

piling it on

Personal taxes are just part of the munificence granted to the richest among us. The value of an estate that can be inherited tax free is doubled once again, to $11.2 million, so that, explained Mr. Trump, “the farmers, the great farmers”, the near-mythical farmers, whose actual cases that fit the estate tax saga are so hard to find, “…who were forced to sell their businesses” won’t need to, and “…can keep their farms in the family”. Easily found examples that Trump could have used instead of farmers are his own family, who will save millions.

More immediate is what the enormous tax cuts for corporations will do for the wealthy. The 40% cut in the rate corporations will soon pay; the Republicans’ failure to gut loopholes that will now make the effective tax rate still lower than 20%; the elimination of the alternative minimum tax; and the one-time offer of repatriation of up to $2.6 trillion of foreign profits at as little as 7.5% (14.5% for cash), promises still higher stock prices, lavish stock buybacks, and dividends to the stock owning class, which, of course, is not Trump’s working class base, but the wealthiest Americans. The richest 10% hold 80% of the value of corporate stock. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation calculates that of the $1.5 trillion scheduled to vanish into many pockets, the middle class will see only 10% of it over the 10-year life of the bill.

#corkerkickback

“My accountant called me and said ‘you’re going to get killed in this bill'” didn’t become true, but some of the Trump family benefits did get trimmed in the final tax bill. The estate tax stayed on and so did the alternative minimum tax, the required parallel calculation that eliminates deductions and had cost Trump $38 million in taxes in 2005 instead of $5 million when his taxes were computed the standard way. But at the very last moment, rescue arrived that would revive the biggest lie.

Picking their way through the 1,097-page bill, International Business Times (IBT) reporters discovered that the conference committee — met to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions of the tax bill — had stealthily inserted changes to the section that governs tax rates for so-called “pass-through” businesses, a form where the business itself is not taxed but its proceeds flow through onto owners’ tax returns where they are taxed at personal rates. In the Senate bill, the more wages a pass-through business paid (“job creators”), the greater the tax cut. That shut out architects, doctors, accountants, etc., in small practices with few employees. It also shut out pass-throughs that hold real estate assets but have as few as no employees.

Republican Senator Bob Corker was the only Republican who voted against the Senate bill, ostensibly because of the $1.5 trillion it would add to the deficit. He had early on stated that he would not vote for any bill that added a penny to the national debt. But overnight he decided to vote for it. What changed?

Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah inserted into the bill text that permitted pass-throughs with few or no employees to partake of the tax cuts, too. They can take 20% of the flow-through income off the top and pay taxes only on the rest. Hatch had added his own law to what was in neither the House nor Senate bill.

IBT said the cut-out would benefit limited liability companies (LLCs) with “large amounts of depreciable property assets, namely buildings” and “rent generating apartment and office buildings”, namely, real estate businesses. The original plan to bestow the tax cut on businesses that gave people jobs, has been twisted around so that awards go to those who simply own a lot of property. There is no sense to this; it is flat out corruption.

IBT see only 10% of it over the 10-year life of the bill.

#corkerkickback

“My accountant called me and said ‘you’re going to get killed in this bill'” didn’t become true, but some of the Trump family benefits did get trimmed in the final tax bill. The estate tax stayed on and so did the alternative minimum tax, the required parallel calculation that eliminates deductions and had cost Trump $38 million in taxes in 2005 instead of $5 million when his taxes were computed the standard way. But at the very last moment, rescue arrived that would revive the biggest lie.

Picking their way through the 1,097-page bill, International Business Times (IBT) reporters discovered that the conference committee — met to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions of the tax bill — had stealthily inserted changes to the section that governs tax rates for so-called “pass-through” businesses, a form where the business itself is not taxed but its proceeds flow through onto owners’ tax returns where they are taxed at personal rates. In the Senate bill, the more wages a pass-through business paid (“job creators”), the greater the tax cut. That shut out architects, doctors, accountants, etc., in small practices with few employees. It also shut out pass-throughs that hold real estate assets but have as few as no employees.

Republican Senator Bob Corker was the only Republican who voted against the Senate bill, ostensibly because of the $1.5 trillion it would add to the deficit. He had early on stated that he would not vote for any bill that added a penny to the national debt. But overnight he decided to vote for it. What changed?

Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah inserted into the bill text that permitted pass-throughs with few or no employees to partake of the tax cuts, too. They can take 20% of the flow-through income off the top and pay taxes only on the rest. Hatch had added his own law to what was in neither the House nor Senate bill.

IBT said the cut-out would benefit limited liability companies (LLCs) with “large amounts of depreciable property assets, namely buildings” and “rent generating apartment and office buildings”, namely, real estate businesses. The original plan to bestow the tax cut on businesses that gave people jobs, has been twisted around so that awards go to those who simply own a lot of property. There is no sense to this; it is flat out corruption.

IBT looked at financial disclosures of 44 lawmakers involved with the tax bills and found that 13 of them have substantial real estate holdings. Bob Corker has the most, and for his sudden change of mind, the Hatch provision became the “Corker Kickback”. His entire Senate career may be remembered for nothing else.

The text slipped into the tax bill very specifically enriches the president of the United States and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump, because nearly all of some 500 businesses he recorded on his financial disclosure documents are pass-throughs. He will be spared up to $15 million a year in taxes as a result, says an analysis by the Center for American Progress think tank.

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Last Minute Tax Looting Revives Trump’s Biggest Lie

“It’s the largest tax cut in the history of our country”, President Trump is repeatedly telling us. In fact, Reagan’s in 1986 was bigger, as were five other cuts since, even Obama’s in 2013 when he extended and made permanent the Bush tax cuts. The president artfully chose not to use inflation-adjusted dollars.

Stealing from Obamacare

In order to force the bill through the Senate with only the simple majority of 51 votes, Senate rules required that it not at the end of its 10-year lifespan result in a continuing deficit. Congressional Republicans had given themselves a lavish allowance of $1.5 trillion to play with, but as one after another eliminated deduction was restored in whole or part, reducing revenue and overdrawing the allowance, the legislators looked about and found their solution in the Affordable Care Act. Cancelling the requirement to buy insurance or pay a penalty would result in fewer people buying insurance, and therefore fewer qualifying for the estimated $338 billion in subsidies helping them pay for insurance. Those assumed savings were appropriated into the tax bill as revenue, needed to hold the bill to its $1.5 trillion loss.

Between the young and healthy dropping out of the insurance pool, and others priced out by premium costs rising to cover the less healthy that remain, the CBO estimates that 13 million people will no longer have health insurance. Donald Trump exults that “with this bill… we have essentially repealed Obamacare”, crippling it in order to pay for the 40% drop in the corporate tax rate and the disproportionate benefits for the wealthy. But “we’ll come up with something that will be much better…something terrific”, like the two failed terrific attempts to repeal Obamacare earlier this year.

Trump Would Rather We Forget This Promise

“I would take carried interest out and I would let people that are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year pay tax, because right now they are paying very little tax and I think it’s outrageous”.

That was Donald Trump in 2015 when he hadn’t quite become a Republican.

Carried interest is a preferential tax treatment that approximately cuts in half the taxes those who run the likes of hedge funds and private equity partnerships must pay. It is a glaring iniquity favoring the donor class that rewards politicians for their inaction.

The name doesn’t fit the times. It dates from 16th Century Venice when ship captains transporting cargo had an interest in and took a 20% cut of whatever they carried. The gaping loophole today is that when managers take their 20% cut of the proceeds recorded by their funds, that income is taxed as a capital gain, the rate for which is as little as 23.8% instead of the standard personal income rate of as much as 39.6%. What’s wrong with that is that the manager has likely invested none of his or her own money, was never at risk, and has done nothing to deserve the special rate. Their payout is just compensation for doing a job.

“Hedge fund guys are getting away with murder”, Trump has said, but nothing was done to get rid of carried interest in the tax reform plan that was supposed to get rid of loopholes. “Why didn’t you change it when you were a senator”, Trump challenged Hillary Clinton in one of the debates. Her reply had him pegged:

“I’ll tell you what he’s going to do. His plan will give the wealthy and corporations the biggest tax cuts they’ve ever had, and this would be a massive gift”.

A fix for carried interest was never in either the House or Senate bills. Now that the president has signed a bill that gives his flow-through income a 20% haircut (see main story) almost matching the hedge fund discount, we doubt we’ll see him tweet about carried interest any further.

Drill, Baby, Drill the Wildlife Refuge

Unlike everywhere else in the U.S., every Alaskan gets a royalty for oil produced (the term for bringing it to the surface) from the state’s wells. Citizens needn’t do a thing, yet each has in the past received as much as a few thousand dollars annually.

Production has declined in recent years, so in early November, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a heroine for voting against Obamacare repeal and replacement, showed her other colors by introducing legislation that, for the first time, would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas drilling. Alaska has the highest unemployment in the nation, and Murkowski wants to create jobs — and then there are all those votes from the folks who will appreciate the royalties.

Murkowski successfully got her bill folded into the tax bill and the Refuge will be open for business.

The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 provides a path for a measure to evade filibuster and need only a simple majority for passage. But to qualify for so-called “reconciliation”, it must deal only with budgetary and fiscal matters. Republicans opted to go the reconciliation route to avoid a Democratic filibuster that would require an impossible 60 votes to surmount.

ANWR was included in the tax bill with the legions opposed shut out. It was done on the phony premise that allowing energy companies to defile this pristine wilderness — environmentalists have fought for years that this expanse free of humanity’s contamination be left alone — is somehow a fiscal matter is deeply cynical. What’s the claim? Republicans can raise money — a paltry amount compared to the tax bill’s cost — by selling leases. It was slipped in with no debate. Trump is tweeting about “Massive Alaska Drilling”. How many Americans even know this has happened?

One That Didn’t Make It, Amen

Yet another of President Trump’s promises to his base, not that it was requested, was to “totally destroy” the 1954 Johnson Amendment that forbids churches and other non-profits from promoting or opposing political candidates on penalty of losing their tax-exempt status.

The House pulled a fast one by obligingly putting repeal of the amendment in its tax bill, as if it by some twisted logic church sermons met the “reconciliation” rules explained above. Fortunately, there is the “Byrd rule”, added in 1990 to the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which disallows tacking on “extraneous” provisions that do not deal with fiscal policy. Repeal of the Johnson Amendment was struck from the final bill accordingly.

But Trump will be back. This is to be “my greatest contribution to Christianity”, he says. Except that Christianity hasn’t asked for it. Among evangelicals, 3 of 4 don’t want their religion to be profaned by politics. Trump has shown no religious leanings in his life, nor much zeal for the Constitution (see “Will the Rule of Law Survive Donald Trump?“). The principle of keeping government and religion separate for him seems to be a nuisance blocking his path. Of greater importance for him and his adopted party is to engage pastors in election campaigns. If they at some point succeed, we can expect to see unrestrained (even tax deductible!) contributions — not just local, but even from out of state — to evangelical pastors in return for their telling their congregations how to vote.