Dispatches

TOP DEMS URGE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT WATCHDOG TO PROBE AG.

Two top Democrats are urging the Justice Department’s internal watchdogs to investigate remarks made by Attorney General William Barr about the intelligence community official who sent Congress the whistleblower complaint regarding Donald Trump.

Appearing on Fox News (4/9), Barr said Trump had done “the right thing” when he fired former intelligence investigator general Michael Atkinson, suggesting that Atkinson had exceeded his mandate as IG by exploring “anything” and then reporting it back to Congress. But in a letter to two Justice Department officials, the Democratic chairs of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees said Barr had “blatantly mischaracterized” Atkinson’s conduct.

“Mr. Barr’s remarks followed the President’s admission on April 4 that he fired Mr. Atkinson in retaliation for Mr. Atkinson’s handling—in accordance with the law—of the whistleblower complaint,” Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler wrote. “Mr. Barr’s misleading remarks appear to have been aimed at justifying the President’s retaliatory decision to fire Mr. Atkinson.”

Barr claimed Atkinson had “ignored” Department of Justice (DOJ) guidance that he was “obliged to follow” regarding how to handle the whistleblower complaint, a total distortion intended to gaslight Americans about what transpired, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (4/20). In actuality, Atkinson had no legal or professional obligation to defer to the Justice Department, which had conveniently and perplexingly declined to investigate whether Trump broke any laws in his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

“To the contrary, Mr. Atkinson faithfully discharged his legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General in accordance with federal law,” Schiff and Nadler wrote to Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz.

Schiff and Nadler further said that Barr had not only misrepresented the matter, he also sought to obscure the fact that DOJ and the White House had improperly coordinated their efforts in order to “keep Congress in the dark about the existence of the complaint.” 

“The role of Attorney General Barr and other senior DOJ officials, in coordination with the White House, in attempting to prevent the whistleblower complaint from reaching Congress — as required by law — warrants your attention,” they wrote, referring to the complaint that sparked Trump’s impeachment trial.

GAO PROBES WHAT TRUMP IS DOING WITH COVID-19 MONEY. Impeached president Donald Trump has rampaged through the ranks of inspectors general attempting to provide some kind of check on his corruption. Thankfully for the nation, there’s one watchdog agency outside of his reach, and it’s already on the job of auditing what his administration is doing with the $2 trillion Congress handed it in the coronavirus emergency CARES Act, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (4/20).

The General Accountability Office (GAO) is an arm of Congress, and thus Trump can’t touch it. “We’re moving forward very quickly,” Angela Nicole Clowers, chief of the GAO’s healthcare unit, told Politico. “We’re an existing institution and have a lot of institutional knowledge about all these programs. It gives us sort of a leg up.” All these programs being those that have been given big chunks of money to spend. By the end of this month, senior investigators say, it will have opened at least 30 CARES Act investigations.

Audits and reviews will include the Trump administration’s “handling of coronavirus testing” and “distribution of medical equipment.” So that should prove interesting. It will also review the administration’s response to food supply problems, nursing home infections, and how the various emergency loans and cash distribution has been handled. Here’s the good part: “The office is required under the new law to brief Congress every month and issue a bimonthly public report on its findings.”

That’s not to say that Trump will try to obstruct the GAO, but it does come into this with an additional $20 million from the CARES Act to conduct its oversight of the administration. “Within GAO, we have everyone from policy analysts or public policy people like myself,” Clowers said, “we have nurses, we have scientists, we have engineers, we have lawyers. You sort of name an occupation, we have ‘em.”

It’s already begun, insuring into a tip that a coronavirus cash payment went to an account of someone who died in 2019. “Thankfully, that family was nice enough to return the fund,” Howard Arp, the office’s fraud unit chief said. “That then causes us to start asking questions. How could that happen? What control was missed? That is already starting.” That could happen because the IRS is sending checks to accounts of people who filed taxes in 2018 or 2019—it’s not going to automatically know who’s dead if the account hasn’t been closed out. More of those checks to dead people are going to happen, and it would likely take some kind of intervention from the Treasury department to force banks to act.

The main obstacle they see, Arp and Clowers said, is that the GAO won’t be able to be onsite to investigate. Normally, “we go observe, we touch, we feel, we see,” Clowers told Politico. “Right now, we’re not able to do that … but we’re leveraging technology to the extent we can.”

HUGE RESTAURANT CHAINS CROWDED OUT SMALL BUSINESSES FOR SMALL BIZ LOAN PROGRAM. The fast-food chain Shake Shack said it would return a $10 million forgivable loan it received through a federal program that was supposed to help small businesses hit hard by the coronavirus downturn, the Huffington Post reported (4/20). But the giant company did not receive the loan by mistake.

When Congress created the Paycheck Protection Program, a $350 billion anti-layoff initiative, as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, lawmakers made specific accommodations for the hospitality and food service industries.

The program was aimed to helped business with fewer than 500 employees, but that employee count was per location for businesses like hotels and restaurants. That meant individual restaurants that are part of large publicly owned companies and locally owned outlets with deep-pocketed franchisors qualified for loans.

Franchises of Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Potbelly and Taco Cabana and chains like Shake Shack got millions of dollars in loans. When the program ran out of money, more than 700,000 businesses were still awaiting review of their applications.

“It’s just bad public policy to allow these deep-pocketed franchise operations to get access to this money,” said Amanda Fischer, policy director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

As Republicans and Democrats negotiated over whether to attach new rules to a fresh round of funding that would add $310 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), one of its main architects, has been trying to explain what happened.

“Everyone agreed that we wanted to open this up to more than the traditional small business,” Rubio said (4/20) in a Twitter video, noting that independent contractors and nonprofits are also eligible. “And that’s why we expanded this to include restaurants and hotels who are part of chains,” he said.

Nevertheless, Rubio said, some of the companies that qualified for loans “were not what we intended.” He said that the program was put together in a matter of days and that he hoped things would work better with the second tranche of money Congress is contemplating.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) noted that businesses in Red states seemed to have better luck in getting loans. She tweeted: “I’m hard pressed not to think that this is political. Blue states like California got a pathetic number of loans issued. Nebraska got nearly 75% of loans requested. I smell a rat with orange hair.”

While Nebraska got 75% of loans funded and North Dakota got 71%, California and New York got less than a quarter of their share and D.C. only got 19%. “Yeah, that definitely smells like a rat,” Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (4/17)

The new round of funding would include $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for testing, which have been major Democratic demands, the Washington Post reported. Some $60 billion in the new funding for the Paycheck Protection Program would be targeted specifically for smaller financial institutions to ensure loans for minority and lower-served areas, said people familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republican senators Democratic demands for increases in food stamp money and funding for state and local governments won’t be added to the small business package, nor will hazard pay for frontline workers, CNN reported.

TRUMP BLOCKADES LIFESAVING EQUIPMENT FROM REACHING STATES. While Donald Trump is attacking governors for trying to save lives by keeping coronavirus shutdowns in place, he’s also actively working to endanger healthcare workers by taking hostage the equipment they need to do their jobs safely, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (4/20).

Dr. Andrew W. Artenstein, M.D., an executive with Baystate Health in Springfield, Mass., wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine (4/17) telling about the essentially black market maneuvers he had to undertake to locate, purchase, and actually obtain—at “more than five times the amount we would normally pay”—N95 respirator masks. The entire process was like a multimillion dollar contraband exchange, from dealing with shady brokers to setting up clandestine product for money transfer arrangements and payment by wire transfer, then meeting in an out of the way industrial warehouse with “two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles” to transport the goods. And at the last minute, “two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me.”

“After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks,” Artenstein writes. “But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure.”

He was trying to get face masks to protect his colleagues and the people they are caring for. McCarter noted. “That’s because the Trump administration—and whoever they are grifting with to make gazillions of dollars—have turned the nation’s healthcare system in the Hunger Games, with states and hospitals fighting each other to find critical materials. But then they have find a way to keep Trump’s people from hijacking those necessary supplies to send to people Trump likes better.

That’s on top of the Trump administration swooping in to bid against states trying to obtain the supplies their hospitals need after Trump has told them that they are entirely on their own in procurement. That’s driving prices up, and when the states manage to get that equipment at five or ten or whatever times the normal price, the g*ddamned Trump administration swoops in and poaches it.”

TRUMP TOPS 18,000 LIES. The coronavirus outbreak inspired Donald Trump to accelerate false claims from Jan. 19, the end of his third year as president, when he had 16,241 false or misleading claims on the record, to April 3, when the Washington Post Fact Checker tallied his 18,000th false or misleading claim (4/14).

The president’s most frequently repeated false claim was that he presided over the best economy in the history of the US, but statements about the coronavirus produced 350 false claims. “Much has changed in the world, with stay-at-home orders, massive economic disruption and topsy-turvy securities markets, but one thing has remained constant — the president’s prolific twisting of the truth,” Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly wrote in the Post.

Trump’s last 75 days of lies (the Post doesn’t use that word, but it fits) is an average of more than 23 false claims a day since Jan. 19. Before the pandemic forced the president to stop holding campaign rallies, he held seven rallies between Jan. 30 and March 2. bragging about job numbers and a soaring stock market while dismissing the coronavirus as a problem akin to the flu that would magically disappear in April.

Grounded at home, Trump replaced the campaign rallies with his near-daily briefings at the White House on the pandemic. These news conferences have also been a rich source of misinformation, the Fact Checkers noted. The president has over-promised (such as announcing a Google website that did not exist or millions of coronavirus tests), sought undue credit or tried to pin the blame for the crisis on others.

Trump’s top three most-repeated claims have remained the same. His most repeated claim — 291 times — is that the US economy is the best in the history of the world, although “by just about any important measure, the pre-coronavirus economy was not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton — or Ulysses S. Grant. Moreover, the economy already was beginning to hit the head winds caused by Trump’s trade wars, with the manufacturing sector in an apparent recession.”

His second-most-repeated claim — 257 times — is that his border wall is being built. Congress balked at funding the concrete barrier he envisioned, so the project evolved into the replacement of smaller, older barriers with steel bollard fencing that, it turns out, is easily breached, with smugglers sawing through it, despite Trump’s claims it is impossible to get past. Nevertheless, the project has diverted billions in military and counternarcotics funding to become one of the largest infrastructure projects in US history, seizing private land, cutting off wildlife corridors and disrupting Native American cultural sites. And Trump has again resumed falsely claiming the Mexico is paying for the border barrier.

Trump has falsely said 197 times that he passed the biggest tax cut in history. Even before his tax cut was crafted, he promised it would be the biggest in US history — bigger than President Ronald Reagan’s in 1981. Reagan’s tax cut amounted to 2.9% of the gross domestic product, and none of the proposals under consideration came close to that level. Trump’s tax cut was eventually crafted to be the equivalent of 0.9% of gross domestic product, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in 100 years. This continues to be an all-purpose applause line at the president’s rallies.

RUSH TO VOTE BY MAIL COULD PUT MORE BALLOTS AT RISK. Democrats are pushing to expand the right to vote by mail, particularly with the pandemic making it more difficult to staff polling places, but Greg Palast notes that there is much to fear, especially for minority and young voters, with a switch to all-mail voting—unless the absentee ballot system is fixed.

“Here’s what the “Go Postal” crowd doesn’t tell you: In 2016, 512,696 mail-in ballots —over half a million– were simply rejected, not counted. That’s official, from the federal Elections Assistance Commission (EAC),” Palast said in a column at Nation of Change (4/16).

“But that’s just the tip of the ballot-berg of uncounted mail-in votes. A study by MIT, Losing Votes by Mail, puts the total loss of mail-in votes at a breathtaking 22%. Move to 80% mail-in voting and 25 million will lose their vote.

“And not just anyone’s mail-in ballots are dumped in the electoral trashcan. Overwhelming, those junked are ballots mailed by poorer, younger, non-white Americans.

“Senator Amy Klobuchar’s proposed bill takes baby steps to expanding vote-by-mail protection but will barely bite into the 22% loss of votes, especially among minorities.

Eight states, including the swing states of Wisconsin, North Carolina and Minnesota, require mail-in voters to have the ballot signed by a witness. The required double-verification is a nightmare—it requires breaking the lock-down–and an invitation to challenges.

Three states, including swing state Missouri, require the ballot to be notarized. (Alabama requires a notary or two witnesses.)

All but six states “verify” your signature against your registration signature. Partisan officials decide if there is a “match.” No less than 141,000 ballots were rejected as “unmatched” in 2016.

Among Palast proposals to “fix” postal voting:

“The Klobuchar bill requires (and funds) states to provide postage-paid return envelopes for mail-in ballots.

“That’s not enough. States must be barred from requiring witness or notary signatures. And states, like Wisconsin, must end their requirement that some voters must mail in a copy of their ID to request a mail-in vote.

“Signatures should not be subject to challenge unless there is a report filed that the ballot has been stolen,” he wrote.

“Unless America radically changes the way we send, receive and count mail-in ballots, the massive switch to postal voting, and the mountain of uncounted minority votes it will generate, could lead to Trump’s re-election—no matter the will of the voters.”

See more Dispatches at www.populist.com.

MEDIA CAN’T RESIST COVERING PROTESTS THAT ARE AS SPONTANEOUS AS THE ROSE PARADE. Charles Pierce notes at Esquire (4/20), “To paraphrase the previous Republican Worst President of All Time, is our media learning? It’s hard to say. Some elements of it seem to be the walking embodiment of the old joke about getting the mule’s attention with the 2x4. On the vaguely positive side, it seems that the *Washington Post* is somewhat determined not to be fooled by the AstroTurfed protest groups protesting the stay-at-home orders—demonstrations that are approximately as spontaneous as the Rose Parade—the way that everyone pretended that the Tea Party demonstrations were grassroots enterprises back in 2010.”

The Post reported (4/19), *“Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine” was created on Wednesday by Ben Dorr. His brother Christopher is the creator of “Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine,” as well as “Ohioans Against Excessive Quarantine.” A third brother, Aaron, is the creator of “New Yorkers Against Excessive Quarantine.”

The online coordination offered additional clues about how the protest activity is spreading nationwide, capturing the imagination of the president and of Fox News even though it represents the views of a small minority of Americans. Trump himself tied the protests to gun rights — a primary cause for the Dorr brothers — in telling Virginians that the Second Amendment was “under siege” as he urged them to liberate the state.*

On the other hand, alas, there’s ABC News.

*Opposition to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders has continued to build from coast to coast, with at least five states the site of protests Sunday. Protesters sporting masks and signs took to their state capitols, while others honked their car horns during gridlock demonstrations calling on their governors to open up their states.*

Pierce noted, “These protests are tiny. Five states is not ‘coast to coast,’ even if small groups of bored loons flocked together in Florida and Washington state. Every scrap of polling data indicates that massive majorities support continuing the measures that seem to be working to flatten out the pandemic. To inflate these small gatherings of angry shut-ins as a national movement is profound journalistic malpractice.

“In another area, however, it seems that the elite political media is falling for the ol’ okey-doke once again, and that it’s doing so in violation of the blog’s First Rule of Economics: Fck The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money.” From the New York Times:

*“It hasn’t been a prominent topic of conversation, I think it is fair to say,” conceded Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania and a longtime fiscal conservative, about the potential hazards of compounding an already spiraling federal deficit in response to a crippling pandemic.

Like others who have long preached fiscal discipline, often to no avail, Mr. Toomey said he saw no alternative to the costly push by the federal government to try to mitigate the coronavirus outbreak. But he and like-minded fiscal watchdogs remain deeply worried about the inevitable consequences of the historic outpouring of cash from a government that was already deeply in the red.*

“Stop it. Just stop it,” Pierce pleaded. “Toomey led cheers for the massive stock-buyback scheme that was the unfunded Trump tax cut. This is now the fourth Republican administration in a row that has blown up The Deficit because of its devotion to supply-side snake-oil. In response, of course, the country elects a Democratic president, whom the Republicans proceed to hamstring by citing a deficit they created. (Some unfortunate Democrats contribute to this dynamic as well. In fact, when I see that Erskine Bowles is hosting fundraisers for Joe Biden, my soul turns to water.) This story in the Times follows a well-worn path.”

*The more than $1.5 trillion in tax cuts that Mr. Trump enacted with the help of congressional Republicans in 2017 were not paying for themselves as promised. And deals negotiated between congressional Republicans and Democrats that traded increases in military spending for added domestic dollars boosted the deficit as well. Republican concerns about deficit spending — once an animating force of the party — seemed to have evaporated when President Obama left the White House.*

Pierce notes, “That last sentence may be the funniest sentence ever to appear in the pages of the NYT. Those ‘concerns’ haven’t been an ‘animating force’ in the Republican Party since Reagan and, maybe, since Eisenhower. The only ‘animating force’ in Republican politics is to make life miserable for people who don’t vote for Republicans, and to shove as much of the country’s wealth upwards as possible. Starving The Beast and Owning The Libs are two sides of the same coin. It’s all they have left.”

BILLS PROPOSE MONTHLY STIMULUS CHECKS AND CANCELED RENT AND MORTGAGE PAYMENTS. Democrats have separate proposals to provide a lifeline for workers. One would provide every qualifying American over the age of 16 with $2,000 monthly for up to 12 months. Another would cancel rent and mortgage payments through the duration of the COVID-19 emergency.

Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Tim Ryan (D-OH) introduced the Emergency Money for the People Act, which would provide the checks to every American age 16 or over who makes less than $130,000 annually. Married couples making less than $260,000 would receive $4,000 peer month. Families would receive an additional $500 per child for up to three children.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act, which calls for a nationwide cancellation of rents and home mortgage payments through the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, or up to one year. The Department of Housing and Urban Development would cover the rental and mortgage payments, but they would be required to follow federal guidelines for fair lending and renting practices for five years.

Of course, Republicans won’t even consider putting up the money to keep the Postal Service operating past June.

ANALYSIS FINDS OIL SPILLS AND ACCIDENTS ON THE RISE 10 YEARS AFTER DEEPWATER HORIZON ACCIDENT. The devastating Deepwater Horizon accident happened 10 years ago (4/20), but despite calls for more safety, oil spills and worker accidents are on the rise, according to a recent analysis from the Center for American Progress.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began on April 20, 2010, prompted the Obama administration to enact a series of reforms to improve oil rig safety—reforms that the Trump administration has since rolled back. A CAP review of government data in March found that oil spills and injuries from offshore drilling are now on the rise, threatening to erase the progress made in the 10 years since the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

“Offshore drilling has become more dangerous since the Trump administration weakened safety regulations and cut back federal inspections and enforcement,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, a senior fellow at CAP and author of the column. “By cutting corners on offshore drilling safety, the Trump administration is making a dangerous and unacceptable gamble on the lives of American workers and the health of coastal communities.”

In 2018 and 2019, the two years after the Trump administration initiated its full-blown rollback of environmental and safety standards, the amount of oil spilled per barrel produced on the Outer Continental Shelf increased sixfold compared with the previous two years—2016 and 2017—according to CAP’s review.

Worker safety has also suffered. CAP’s review of data revealed that the number of injuries per hour worked on oil and gas facilities on the federal Outer Continental Shelf increased 21% in 2018 and 2019 compared with the previous two-year period of 2016 and 2017.

The Trump administration has also cut back on federal enforcement of offshore drilling safety standards. The CAP review found that federal inspectors from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement took 38% fewer enforcement actions against offshore oil and gas operators from 2017 to 2019 than they did from 2014 to 2016.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2020

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