Dispatches

TRUMP SHIFTED CAMPAIGN-DONOR MONEY INTO HIS BUSINESS AFTER LOSING ELECTION.

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, which never received a cent from the former president, moved an estimated $2.8 million of donor money into the Trump Organization—including at least $81,000 since Trump lost the election, Dan Alexander reported at Forbes.com (2/4).

In addition, one of the campaign’s joint-fundraising committees, which collects money in partnership with the Republican Party, shifted about $4.3 million of donor money into Trump’s business from January 20, 2017, to Dec. 31, 2020—at least $331,000 of which came after the election.

The money covered the cost of rent, airfare, lodging and other expenses. All the payments are laid out in filings the campaign submitted to the Federal Election Commission.

Trump’s political operation raised more than $200 million from Election Day to Dec. 1, using a blizzard of misleading appeals about the election to shatter fundraising records set during the campaign, according to people with knowledge of the contributions, the BBC reported (12/4).

The influx of political donations is one reason that Trump and some allies were inclined to continue a legal onslaught and public relations blitz focused on baseless claims of election fraud, even as their attempts have repeatedly failed in court and as key states continue to certify wins for President-elect Joe Biden, the Washington Post reported (12/1).

Much of the money raised since the election is likely to go into an account for the president to use on political activities after he leaves office, while some of the contributions will go toward what is left of the legal fight.

The surge of contributions has come largely from small-dollar donors, campaign officials say, tapping into the president’s base of loyal and fervent financial supporters, who tend to contribute the most when they feel the president is under siege or facing unfair political attacks. The campaign has sent nearly 500 post-election fundraising pitches to donors, often with hyperbolic language about voter fraud and the like.

“I need you now more than ever,” says one recent email that claims to be from the president. “The Recount Results were BOGUS,” another email subject line reads.

The donations were purportedly solicited for the Official Election Defense Fund, whose name is featured prominently atop the Trump campaign’s website, the Post reported.

There is no such account, however. The fundraising requests were made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising effort of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. As of Nov. 18, that committee also shares its funds with Save America, a new leadership PAC that Trump set up in early November and that he can use to fund his activities after the presidency.

The money raised since Nov. 3 is a massive haul for such a short period, especially after the election, when losing campaigns typically ramp down their fundraising operations. By comparison, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee raised $125 million in the second quarter of 2020, according to federal records. The campaign account’s best single month was September, when it raised $81 million, according to available data.

The contributions, from thousands of grass-roots donors across the country, are split into several accounts, including the leadership PAC, an entity that is loosely regulated and could be used to personally benefit the president after he leaves the White House.

Brendan Fischer, the director of the federal reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, told AZCentral.com (12/8), “Trump could potentially use his new leadership PAC to not only preserve his influence within the Republican party after he leaves the White House, but also to potentially to benefit him and his family financially.

JARED AND IVANKA MAY HAVE MADE $640M WHILE IN THE WHITE HOUSE. When Jared Kushner wasn’t solving the crisis in the Middle East, or saving us from the COVID-19 pandemic, or telling Black Americans that they needed to “want to be successful” in order to live the American dream, he was making money. In fact, he was making a lot of money and digging himself out of a ton of debt. His wife, Ivanka Trump, when she was not hazily working on White House policies and plans with unclear results, was also making lots of money. Just how much money is also nebulous. According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), a government watchdog that has tracked the Trump administration’s many conflicts of interest over the past four years, Trump and Kushner made somewhere between $172 and $640 million in “outside income while working in the White House.” Financial disclosures allow for the reporting of income “in broad ranges,” and the Trump family crest is one broad scam, Walter Einenkel noted at DailyKos (4/8).

As CREW points out, the Trump/Kushner line of propaganda that these two would selflessly forgo their potential government salaries while working for our country was an obvious bit of conman slight of hand, as any salary the two could have pulled in for actual public service would have amounted to a percentage of a percentile of what they were able to make thanks to their powerful White House positions. While in their amorphous high positions of power, Ivanka and Jared used the George Orwellian doublespeak misinformation the Republican Party has become known for. On one hand, they told the world that it isn’t “appropriate” that they be asked about the president; at the same time, they defended the president by supporting his lies in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So where and how did Ivanka and Jared use and abuse their government positions of power? It’s hard to say where they didn’t. 

CREW points out Ivanka’s ownership stake in Trump’s Washington, D.C.. hotel, the one that overcharged and housed every pay-to-play player over the past four years. But here the finances begin to get very muddy. Ivanka and Jared’s financial disclosures combine for somewhere between $23 million and $120 million in outside income for the 2020-2021 year. They include the amazing move by Ivanka to cut the value of her previous years’ stake in the D.C. hotel from “between $5 and $25 million as reported in her previous disclosures to $100,001 to $250,000.” This coincided with the final year in office and … an emerging pandemic.

Stroke of luck, I guess?

Jared on the other hand, kept his ethically bankrupt interests in Cadre, the real estate technology company that benefited the most from his and Ivanka’s stay at the White House. This was the company that had Jared seemingly in the hole for around $1 billion when his daddy-in-law Donald took office. This is the same company debt that Kushner conveniently left off his financial disclosure forms. Subsequently, Ivanka began getting trademark deals from Russia and China, and Cadre got lots of secret funding from foreign investors. Then, Ivanka won the Chinese trademark lottery—34 Ivanka trademarks!—coinciding with her father publicly vowing to save China telecom giant ZTE.

Meanwhile, Jared reportedly created a shell company that was used to pay out Trump family members to the tune of more than half a billion dollars from the Trump campaign war chest. To top it off, whatever money deals Jared and Ivanka have been making behind the scenes with foreign bagmen, none of it has translated into anything resembling benefits for America or Americans. In fact, we are in a global pandemic where the logistics of vaccines and vaccine rollouts have been in large part delayed and spotty due to the greed and incompetence of Jared Kushner and his cronies. How much Jared and Ivanka made off of Trump’s campaign war chest or by self-dealing Trump’s inaugural committee funds is still under numerous investigations.

CBO SEES MIXED IMPACT OF $15 MINIMUM WAGE, BUT BERNIE SANDERS SAYS THAT QUALIFIES IT FOR BUDGET BILL. The Congressional Budget Office reported (2/8) that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would add $54 billion to the deficit over the next decade, but to Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that means the hourly pay increase would have a direct impact on federal revenue and spending—and thus complies with the rules of budget reconciliation.

While casting doubt on the accuracy of the CBO’s finding—just two years ago, Sanders noted, the same agency estimated a $15 minimum wage would increase the deficit by less than $1 million over 10 years—the Vermont senator and budget committee chairman nevertheless argued that the CBO’s analysis bolsters the progressive case for passing the pay raise for 32 million US workers through the expedited reconciliation process, where Democrats can pass it with a simple majority, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (4/8).

“The good news,” Sanders said in a statement, “is that from a Byrd rule perspective, the CBO has demonstrated that increasing the minimum wage would have a direct and substantial impact on the federal budget. What that means is that we can clearly raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour under the rules of reconciliation.”

“I look forward to working with my colleagues in the House and the Senate to end the crisis of starvation wages in America and raise the minimum wage to a living wage of at least $15 an hour,” Sanders added.

The CBO’s analysis came days after University of California, Berkeley economist Michael Reich published a paper estimating that raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would actually have a positive federal budget impact of $65.4 billion per year through a combination of increased tax revenue and decreased spending on social programs that low-wage workers are often forced to rely on to make ends meet.

“The benefits of a $15 minimum wage are clear,” Reich wrote in an op-ed for Morning Consult (2/4). “The raise is long overdue. And with my research showing an increase would have a positive effect of more than $65 billion on the federal budget, $15 an hour might soon be reality for tens of millions of workers who so desperately need a raise.”

On top of its analysis of the potential deficit impact of the proposed pay hike, the CBO also estimated that gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 over the next four years would lift nearly a million people in the US out of poverty and result in around 1.4 million lost jobs by 2025. Additionally, the CBO projected that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 would produce a cumulative pay increase of $333 billion for affected workers over the next decade.

USPS HEAD READIES ANOTHER ASSAULT ON POSTAL SERVICE. With Postmaster General Louis DeJoy reportedly preparing to start another round of service cuts, President Biden is facing growing calls from lawmakers, mail carriers and others to take urgent steps to protect the US Postal Service from further damage, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (2/8).

The Washington Post reported (2/6) that DeJoy—a Republican megadonor to former President Donald Trump—intends to “outline a new vision for the agency, one that includes more service cuts, higher and region-specific pricing, and lower delivery expectations.”

Meanwhile, the Post noted, “congressional Democrats are pressing President Biden to install new board members, creating a majority bloc that could oust DeJoy, a Trump loyalist whose aggressive cost-cutting over the summer has been singled out for much of the performance decline.”

Appointed unanimously by the Trump-appointee-dominated Postal Service Board of Governors in May despite his lack of experience with the Postal Service, DeJoy wasted no time imposing sweeping operational changes at the mail agency that resulted in precipitous drops in performance in the weeks ahead of, during, and after the November presidential election—prompting accusations of politically motivated sabotage of the nation’s most popular government institution.

While DeJoy was forced to temporarily suspend some of his operational changes last year in the face of a nationwide uproar and numerous court injunctions, the postmaster general now appears intent on moving forward with his plan to cripple the agency—a plan that has Democratic lawmakers and postal workers clamoring for action from the Biden administration.

Because Biden cannot fire DeJoy directly, congressional Democrats are urging the president to terminate every sitting postal governor—including those who publicly cheered on the postmaster general’s changes as they produced major package backlogs nationwide and slowed delivery of prescription medicines and mail-in ballots—and replace them with officials willing to remove the postmaster general and protect the agency.

“My solution starts at the top: firing the whole board who presided over Trump and DeJoy’s wrecking of USPS. Clean house,” Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.) tweeted (4/7).

In January, Pascrell became the first congressional Democrat to call on Biden to remove the sitting members of the Board of Governors, which currently consists of four Republicans and one Democrat—all appointed by Trump. Under federal law, the president has the authority to remove postal governors “for cause.”

“The board members’ refusal to oppose the worst destruction ever inflicted on the Postal Service was a betrayal of their duties and unquestionably constitutes good cause for their removal,” argued Pascrell.

Days later, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio.) echoed Pascrell’s demand, accusing the board members of complicity in “unprecedented sabotage” of the mail service.

Short of terminating the sitting governors, Biden could fill the three remaining vacancies on the postal board — a step that would give Democrats a majority that could oust DeJoy. Nominees to the postal board must be confirmed by the Senate.

In the interest of protecting USPS from DeJoy and strengthening the mail agency as a public service, American Postal Workers Union (APWU) president Mark Dimondstein is urging Biden to make “bold appointments” to the Board of Governors.

“We want a Board of Governors that understands fundamentally this is not called the United States Postal Business,” Dimondstein told the Associated Press (4/7). “It’s not a profit-making business. It’s here to serve the people.”

Democratic lawmakers and the APWU are also demanding swift passage of the USPS Fairness Act, legislation that would scrap the onerous mandate requiring the Postal Service to prefund retiree benefits decades in advance. The House passed the bill last year but then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to allow a vote on the measure in the upper chamber.

MEAGER JANUARY JOB GAINS POINT TO SLOW RECOVERY. The job market showed a small improvement in January, according to the monthly report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (4/5). The bureau calculated a seasonally adjusted gain in the nonfarm employment level of just 49,000, with 6,000 in the private sector and 43,000 in the public sector. That still leaves more than 9 million Americans out of work who were employed before the pandemic struck. Some haven’t drawn a paycheck since mid-March 2020.

Most troubling, Meteor Blades noted at DailyKos (2/5), is that the paltry gains occurred as 406,000 people left the workforce. This is why the headline unemployment rate fell 0.4 points to 6.3%, not because the job market actually improved. Compared with January 2020, there were 4.3 million fewer Americans in the workforce in January 2021. A BLS measure that gauges both unemployment and underemployment fell 0.6 to 11.1%.

The leisure and hospitality sector of the economy, which showed the biggest drop in December, revised to a loss of 536,000 from the previous calculation, also took the biggest hit in January, shedding another 61,000 jobs. The biggest gains for the month were in temporary help services at 80,900. As usual, BLS revised its job count for the previous two months, and that was not good news. For December the tally fell from a loss of 140,000 to a loss of 227,000, and in November from a gain of 336,000 to 264,000. In addition, regular benchmark adjustments revised nonfarm employment for March 2020 downward by 250,000.

None of these statistics show how bad the situation really is. As of December, as Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute pointed out, the number of workers being hurt by the limping labor market was 26.8 million workers—15.8% of the workforce—either completely jobless or employed but experiencing a drop in hours and pay. January’s gains did little to change that.

Because of coronavirus vaccinations, many analysts say they believe the broad economy might be back to normal by late summer, with gross domestic product reaching as much as 4.6% for the entire year. But recovery in the job market will be slower. Much slower, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office (4/1) that predicts that “the number of people employed returns to its pre-pandemic level in 2024.”

BIDEN GIVES THE BACK OF HIS HAND TO DEFICIT TROLLS.The morning that Vice President Kamala Harris was providing the final vote for the $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package, Politico, in its “Playbook,” was publishing a story about how Larry Summers’ op-ed in the Washington Post the previous day (4/4) “puts down on paper what many liberal wonks have been whispering about for weeks,” the idea that Biden’s “stimulus bill may be too big.”

Joan McCarter of DailyKos noted (4/5), “You might remember Summers as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and as a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, who led the charge to make the 2009 stimulus way too small. That’s Playbook’s lead story for the morning, suggesting that all the White House is talking about this. Which is pretty much bunk. Just look at what current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Thursday: ‘We need to act big … We need to make sure that we provide a bridge so that people aren’t scarred indefinitely by this crisis.’”

The White House certainly seems to be listening more closely to Yellen, and to the more than 200 Obama administration alumni in an open letter arguing that Summers and his cohorts prolonged the Great Recession by forcing a too-small stimulus, McCarter noted. “The resistance we faced from deficit fearmongers seeking to water it down ate up valuable time and diluted the amount of aid that reached struggling families and small businesses,” the former Obama officials wrote. “We know from history that they are wrong and sabotaging the ability of our nation to fully and equitably recover.”

That’s a lesson Biden definitely learned. Here’s what he told House Democratic leadership in an Oval Office meeting Friday, responding to the jobs report. It will take “10 years before we get to full employment. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact,” he said. “We can’t do too much here. We can do too little. We can do too little and sputter.” He’s the one who matters the most. So take that, Politico Playbook and Larry Summers.

There could still be a Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema attention-getting feint using Summers as their justification to try to limit other elements, McCarter noted, but they’re unlikely to prevail at this point and can pretty much be ignored. “Because the key elements—extend unemployment assistance, food assistance, an increased child tax credit, rental assistance, billions to schools to help them reopen, and billions for direct COVID-19 testing, tracing, and vaccinations—none of that can be sacrificed. No single Democrat is going to want to slow that train down.

“That train, by the way, has to reach the station in early March in order for unemployment benefits to continue uninterrupted. The parting gift from the Republican majority in the $900 billion package passed at the end of December was a March 14 time bomb for unemployment. Those cliffs should be a thing of the past with Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden driving the process now.”

FEDS CHARGE ‘PROUD BOYS’ WITH CONSPIRACY TO OBSTRUCT ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTE COUNT. A fresh batch of Proud Boys are discovering they’ve been left on the hook as the Department of Justice reels them in, as two prominent affiliates face conspiracy charges related to the US Capitol riot, and another was arrested as the Justice Department laid out a planning and funding effort within the far-right extremist group in a major court development, CNN reported (4/4).

The Justice Department unveiled the new conspiracy charge in a federal grand jury indictment of Nicholas Ochs and Nicholas DeCarlo, which alleges the two conspired to block Congress’ certification of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Prosecutors say they planned and raised funds for the effort, then came to Washington, D.C., and stormed past police and into the Capitol building as part of the violent crowd.

Also, the so-called sergeant at arms of the Proud Boys in Seattle, Ethan Nordean, a.k.a. “Rufio Panman,” was arrested (4/3), then appeared in federal court for his role in the riot. Federal prosecutors wrote they believed Nordean asked on social media for help to buy “protective gear” and “communications equipment,” with the intention of organizing people before the Jan. 6 siege, his charging document said. He is charged with three counts related to entering the Capitol, and the allegations he faces name several other Proud Boys affiliates among the crowd.

Specifically, Ochs and DeCarlo are accused of breaking into the Capitol and scrawling the words “Murder the Media” on a memorial doorway.

The two men are part of a live streaming collective also called Murder The Media. Ochs, a University of Hawaii graduate, has said he was at the Capitol as a journalist even though he did not have the proper credentials.

Another insurrectionist is also learning his social media notoriety can come back to bite him, PvtJarHead noted at DailyKos (4/4)

The Seattle Times reported that Ethan Nordean, a 30-year-old bodybuilder known in right-wing circles by his alias, Rufio Panman, faces four federal criminal counts in the District of Columbia, including obstructing an official proceeding, aiding and abetting injury to government property, disorderly conduct and knowingly and violently entering a restricted building, according to a criminal complaint.

In the days leading up to the insurrection, authorities contend Nordean also wrote a post under his alias on Parler, the social-media platform widely used by Trump supporters and right-leaning groups, that indicated “he and other Proud Boys members were planning in advance to organize a group that would attempt to overwhelm police barricades and enter the United States Capitol building.”

On Jan. 4, Nordean also allegedly posted a link to his video podcast, “Rebel Talk with Rufio,” that included a variety of incriminating statements, as well as a video captioned, “Let them remember the day they decided to make war with us,” the affidavit alleges.

The Internet remembers.

PRO-TRUMP EXTREMISTS INCREASINGLY MIDDLE-CLASS, OLDER. For people who have been monitoring the growth and spread of right-wing extremism inside the mainstream Republican Party—manifested in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol—the arrests that came in the aftermath of that event provided some revealing numbers. Of particular interest is the fact that the average age of the arrestees was 40 years old, David Niewert noted at DailyKos (4/3). That’s a surprisingly high number, particularly considering that most of the pro-Trump activists involved in violent protests of the past four years (especially the Proud Boys) have been younger men between 20 and 40 years old.

Two University of Chicago researchers, Robert Pape and Keven Ruby, led a deeper dive into the statistics arising from the arrests for The Atlantic, and confirmed the implications of that number: Namely, that the resistance to Trump’s election loss represents “a new kind of violent mass movement in which more ‘normal’ Trump supporters—middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right—joined with extremists in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.”

The team of over 20 researchers primarily examined the information on the demographics, socioeconomic traits, and militant-group affiliations of the 193 people who have been charged so far with being inside the Capitol building or with breaking through barriers to enter the Capitol grounds. It made four primary findings:

• The siege was not merely an exercise in vandalism or a disorderly protest that spiraled out of control. Rather, it was “unmistakably an act of political violence.” The people who were arrested, according to court documents that cited this motive repeatedly, did so because they “were following Trump’s orders to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the presidential-election winner.”

• The vast majority of these suspects are not connected to any existing right-wing extremist organizations, including vigilante militias groups and white-nationalist street gangs such as the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys. Only one-tenth of the people arrested so far (20 of them) could be found to have such connections. The researchers found that 89% of the people arrested have no known affiliations to them.

• Compared to far-right extremists who have been arrested for their involvement in previous acts of political violence (such as the 2017 Charlottesville riots), many of the people arrested for their roles in the Capitol siege have a great deal to lose. Whereas previous extremists, the majority of whom were under 35, were frequently unemployed and none worked in white-collar occupations, 40% of the Capitol arrestees are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Their occupations include CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants—and notably, only 9% are unemployed. Two-thirds of them are 35 or older.

• More than half of the insurrectionists hail from areas in which Trump supporters are in the minority; one-sixth are from counties won by Trump with less than 60 percent of the vote.

The report concluded:

“What’s clear is that the Capitol riot revealed a new force in American politics—not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority.”

FLA. GOVERNOR REBRANDS BILL TO SILENCE BLACK LIVES MATTER AS RESPONSE TO CAPITOL RIOT. When local Black Lives Matter activists started marching through the small, coastal town of New Port Richey, Fla., last summer — shouting slogans and demanding racial justice — it took only a few days for the Proud Boys and other counterprotesters to show up and confront them, Tim Craig reported at the Washington Post (4/4).

Burly groups of mostly White men encircled the demonstrators. They revved motorcycles while yelling threats, obscenities and support for the police and President Donald Trump, at times using their own bullhorns.

Amid fears that the confrontations could lead to clashes or shootings, police started enforcing the town’s rarely used noise ordinance, which essentially forbids disturbances louder than a close conversation between two people. But only the Black Lives Matter protesters were cited.

“We were harassed [by the counterprotesters],” Christina Boneta, a Black mother, told the Post. “We had a few guns brandished on us. … One guy even came up to me and flashed a White Power gesture in my face, but they didn’t get any noise violation. We are the ones who got the noise violations when, all summer long, we never threatened anybody, looted anything or burned anything.”

Although the Post reported that the fine and charges against Boneta and six other Black Lives Matter protesters were dropped last month, Lauren Floyd noted at DailyKos (4/4), Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing legislation on “disruptive protests” that could lead to more arrests and more accusations of racial profiling. The proposed legislation could put protesters in jail for up to 15 years if police determine at least nine people took part in a riot. And the scary part is Florida isn’t even included in a list of 15 states that have since November 2016 enacted legislation to peel back the rights of protesters and target them with harsher legal penalties.

Those states are Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin, according to a tracker from the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. At least 28 states considered passing harsher protest laws last year alone, the tracker showed.

DeSantis and other Florida Republicans say their measure is a response to the riot Jan. 6 at the US Capitol, but it is really a rebranded version of a bill the governor announced in September in response to protests calling for justice after the death of George Floyd, who was unarmed when a White Minneapolis police officer was shown in viral video kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. The tragedy sparked protests throughout the nation.

DeSantis targeted those protesters with the Combatting Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act. It threatened to not only hand down more severe penalties for protesting but also allow people to be detained without bond and strip state funding from counties that reallocate police budgets, a central goal of the defund the police movement, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida said in a news release.

The attempted legislation would have allowed the very terrorists GOP legislators now claim to want to stop to instead escape liability for injuring or killing demonstrators. Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, called the governor’s proposal “undemocratic and hostile to Americans’ shared values.”

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2021

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