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A Stray Email Exposes a Prison Company’s Rebranding Efforts

by BlytheDouglas Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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CoreCivic, the private prison company formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, has been working with a communications firm that boasts an “aggressive media strategy” for countering investigative journalists. CoreCivic apparently retained the Alexandria, Virginia-based firm to manage its reputation following the publication of a Mother Jones story in which I detailed my four months working as a corrections officer at a CoreCivic-operated prison in Louisiana.

The prison company’s connection to the PR firm came to light through a recent email sent by CoreCivic spokesperson Jonathan Burns to Hillenby chief operating officer Katie Lilley. Burns copied Texas Public Radio reporter Aaron Schrank on the email, presumably unintentionally. Schrank forwarded the email to me. The email suggests that Hillenby has been assisting CoreCivic in developing its public response to my reporting.

A two-page set of talking points, titled “Get the Facts on Mother Jonesâ&#128;¨,” were attached to the message. Burns said he wanted to have the talking points, which CoreCivic originally issued last summer, “handy” during a “Metro Commission meeting,” and asked Lilley if she could have it “CoreCivic-ified first,” referring to the company’s recent decision to change its name and logo. The meeting Burns mentioned may be a reference to a meeting in Nashville, where CoreCivic is based and where it has a contract to run the Metro-Davidson County Detention Facility.

The talking points label me as an “activist reporter” who sought to “force onto Mother Jones readers a rehashed and predetermined premise instead of a factual and informed story.” The document focuses largely on the fact that I sought employment as a prison guard rather than simply interviewing CoreCivic about their company. It accuses me of having “jeopardized the safety and security” of the prison and its employees by writing about the things I had witnessed and experienced there, rather than reporting them to my supervising officer. The memo also criticizes me for neglecting to speak “to a person supportive of our company and the solutions we provide.” CoreCivic declined multiple interview requests while I was reporting my article. I also sent the company more than 150 questions seeking responses and further information.

CoreCivic and Hillenby’s executives did not respond to requests to comment for this article.

It’s unclear what, if any, steps Hillenby has taken to help rebrand CoreCivic. On its website, Hillenby doesn’t name many of its clients and describes its campaigns in general terms. The firm claims it has successfully curtailed the publication of investigative reports “with every national television network, investigative cable news programs and several other print, digital and broadcast outlets, including hardline activist media.” For example, it claims that its “aggressive media strategy” succeeded in pushing an investigative report by an unnamed broadcast company to be “indefinitely delayed” and “likely dropped.” The firm says it helps companies “incorporate certain language” in their correspondence with investigative reporters to “introduce the concept of legal risk.”

The PR firm’s top executives, Rob Hoppin and Katie Lilley, previously worked at Edelman, one of the world’s largest PR firms. Edelman has used controversial strategies while performing corporate facelifts. In 2006, it created Working Families for Walmart, a supposedly grassroots group of Walmart supporters. Its blog posts turned out to have been written by Edelman employees. Edelman also helped organize “Wal-Marting Across America,” a blog written by a road-tripping couple who recorded their overwhelmingly positive interactions with Walmart employees. Edelman flew the couple to Las Vegas and furnished them with a mint-green RV adorned with the Working Families for Walmart logo. It’s unclear if Hoppin and Lilley worked on those campaigns, though both were on Edelman’s Walmart account at the time, according to their online bios.

A few weeks after I stopped working at the prison, in early 2015, CoreCivic notified the Louisiana Department of Corrections that it planned to terminate its contract to operate the facility, which had been set to expire in 2020. According to DOC documents, the state had asked CoreCivic to address numerous issues at the prison involving security, staffing levels, training, programming for inmates, and a bonus paid to Winn’s warden that “causes neglect of basic needs.” Shortly following the publication of my article last June, the Justice Department announced it would phase out its use of private prisons.

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A Stray Email Exposes a Prison Company’s Rebranding Efforts

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Can Trump Ever Be Convinced That Russia Is Behind Election Meddling?

by Adele4435kfd Posted on January 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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President-elect Donald Trump met on Friday with the heads of several US intelligence agencies for a personal briefing about the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 president election. But it’s still unclear whether Trump believes what he was apparently told—or what it would take to convince him to accept the government’s findings that Moscow hacked Democratic targets to help Trump win the election.

After the briefing, Trump issued a statement noting that “Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee.” But he did not say he accepts the US intelligence community’s conclusion that Moscow did so during the 2016 campaign and was behind the leaking of Democratic emails through WikiLeaks and other sites. Trump did insist that “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.” Given that Trump repeatedly cited the WikiLeaks material during the campaign, his claim that Russian hacking had no effect on the election is hard to prove.

The meeting comes a day after several top intelligence officials briefed a Senate committee on the matter. Hours after the Senate hearing, the Washington Post reported that US intelligence officials claim to have identified people who passed stolen Democratic emails and other materials to WikiLeaks and that intercepted communications between senior Russian government officials revealed Vladimir Putin’s regime had celebrated Trump’s victory. Several other media outlets later confirmed the Post‘s account.

Trump tweeted that reporters were given access to the materials because of “Politics!” and later questioned how the government could be confident in its conclusions, pointing to a report that the Democratic National Committee blocked or delayed access to its servers, according to the FBI. (The DNC and others noted that it was not necessary or customary for FBI investigators to access the servers in order to investigate the hack.) On Friday, Trump tweeted that he was “asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing.”

On Friday morning, before his briefing, Trump told the New York Times that the intense focus on Russian hacking is “a political witch hunt” led by people embarrassed that Trump won in November.

“Making this about the election and not the subversion of a foreign government is beyond disturbing,” a former CIA official tells Mother Jones. “This isn’t about politics; it’s about espionage. He needs to get his head wrapped around the fact that he will be the target the moment he steps into office as POTUS.”

The Trump transition team and Hope Hicks, his campaign spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment. Incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has complained this week that reporters have gone too far in declaring Russia the culprit.

But security researchers say there is plenty of information in the public domain to conclude that the Russian government was involved in the hacks. That involvement was first reported by the Washington Post in June and has since been bolstered by several formal government announcements. The most recent government report, issued jointly by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security on December 29, offered a basic outline of the US government’s conclusions and explained some of the technical evidence that led the US intelligence community to pin the blame on Russia.

“The evidence is airtight,” says Dave Aitel, a former NSA research scientist who now runs a security research firm. “I don’t know anyone in the industry that takes the doubts seriously. Within the industry, it’s not a question.”

Matt Tait, a security researcher and former information security specialist for the Government Communications Headquarters, the United Kingdom’s version of the National Security Agency, said the information that’s been presented so far by the US government and private security research firms who have investigated the hacks supports the case against the Russians.

“The public evidence for this hack is unusual in how compelling it is compared with almost all other breaches, and that to people who are motivated and technical enough to go through it properly, it provides a solid case even without access to the secret sources and methods used by the U.S. Intelligence Community,” Tait writes in an email to Mother Jones.

“There is additional information that the IC could provide,” he adds, “but frankly, for people who are not persuaded by the evidence that is currently public, I suspect there is no quantity of additional evidence that the IC could release that will be persuasive to those people.”

But Jeffrey Carr, a private information security researcher, believes there needs to be more independent vetting of the intelligence community’s conclusions. “I want to see a chain of verifiable evidence available for peer review that is internally consistent, that is not dependent solely upon technical evidence, and that brings us to reasonable certainty as defined by international law,” he wrote on Medium this month.

Still, it’s not clear that anything would convince Trump to accept Russia’s role in the hacks. “Based on the already overwhelming public evidence, what—short of a video of Putin himself at the keyboard—could change Trump’s mind?” former NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey tweeted Friday morning. Her next tweet: “Trump isn’t actually interested in being persuaded by evidence. His only question is whether he can maintain plausible deniability.”

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Can Trump Ever Be Convinced That Russia Is Behind Election Meddling?

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Why Are Democrats So Damn Timid About James Comey and the FBI?

by JodyLondon1 Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, is pissed:

The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump, and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it gets….I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials. Instead, messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.”

….Comparing the FBI’s massive response to the overblown email scandal with the seemingly lackadaisical response to the very real Russian plot to subvert a national election shows that something is deeply broken at the FBI.

FBI Director James Comey justified his handling of the email case by citing “intense public interest.” He felt so strongly that he broke long-established precedent and disregarded strong guidance from the Justice Department with his infamous letter just 11 days before the election. Yet he refused to join the rest of the intelligence community in a statement about the Russian cyberattack because he reportedly didn’t want to appear “political.” And both before and after the election, the FBI has refused to say whether it is investigating Trump’s ties to Russia.

I’m surprised that Democrats have been so muted about the FBI’s role in the election. If something like this had happened to Republicans, it would be flogged daily on Rush, Drudge, Fox News, Breitbart, the Wall Street Journal, and the Facebook pages of everyone from Sarah Palin to Alex Jones. But Democrats have been almost pathologically afraid to talk about it, apparently cowed by the possibility that Republicans will mock them for making excuses about their election loss.

That’s crazy. Here’s a quick review:

Goaded by rabid congressional Republicans, the FBI spent prodigious resources on Hillary Clinton’s email server, even though there was never a shred of evidence that national security had been compromised in any way.

In July, Comey broke precedent by calling a press conference and delivering a self-righteous speech about Clinton’s “carelessness.” Why did he do this, when FBI protocol is to decline comment on cases after investigations are finished? The answer is almost certainly that he wanted to insulate himself from Republican criticism for not recommending charges against Clinton.

Weeks later, Comey finally released the investigation’s interview notes. Only the most devoted reader of bureaucratic prose was likely to suss out their real meaning: there had never been much of a case in the first place, and contrary to Comey’s accusation, Clinton had never been careless with classified material. Like everyone else, she and her staff worked hard to exchange only unclassified material on unclassified networks (state.gov, gmail, private servers, etc.). There was a difference of opinion between State and CIA about what counted as classified, but this squabbling had been going on forever, and had driven previous Secretaries of State nuts too.

As Podesta notes, the FBI took a preposterously lackadaisical attitude toward Russia’s hacking of the DNC server. Outside of a badly-written novel, it’s hard to believe that any law enforcement organization would do as little as the FBI did against a major assault from a hostile foreign power aimed at one of America’s main political parties.

Even when plenty of evidence was amassed about Russia’s actions, Comey downplayed it in private briefings. This gave Republicans the cover they needed to insist that Obama not mention anything about it during the campaign.

Two weeks before Election Day, Comey authorized a search of Anthony Weiner’s laptop, even though there was no reason to think any of the emails it contained were new, or that any of them posed a threat to national security. Then he issued a public letter making sure that everyone knew about the new evidence, and carefully phrased the letter in the most damaging possible way.

Any one of these things could be just an accident. Put them all together, and you need to be pretty obtuse not to see the partisan pattern. In every single case, Comey and the FBI did what was best for Republicans and worst for Democrats. In. Every. Single. Case.

If you want to believe this is just a coincidence, go ahead. But nobody with a room temperature IQ credits that. The FBI has spent the entire past year doing everything it could to favor one party over the other in a presidential campaign. Democrats ought to be in a seething fury about this. Instead, they’re arguing about a few thousand white rural voters in Wisconsin and whether Hillary Clinton should have visited Michigan a few more times in October.

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Why Are Democrats So Damn Timid About James Comey and the FBI?

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The Price Is Wrong

by EduardoShultz Posted on December 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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The American Medical Association, the country’s largest professional group of doctors, wasted no time in throwing its support behind Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) after he was announced on November 29 as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be secretary of health and human services. “His service as a physician, state legislator and member of the U.S. Congress provides a depth of experience to lead HHS,” the AMA said in a press release that same day. “Dr. Price has been a leader in the development of health policies to advance patient choice and market-based solutions as well as reduce excessive regulatory burdens that diminish time devoted to patient care and increase costs.”

It’s not surprising that the organization, which has battled against various health care regulations, would be eager to see Price appointed. The former orthopedic surgeon has long complained that doctors face, as the AMA put it, “excessive regulatory burdens,” and his proposals would lead to increased pay for doctors. But they would also reverse reforms that have kept health care spending in check during Barack Obama’s presidency and could send costs skyrocketing once again.

For all of the controversy over health care under Obama, there has been general agreement on one area of success: Growth in health care spending has slowed. The Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, created new schemes for paying doctors and hospitals that helped sharply reduce the annual increase in national health care spending and keep it below pre-recession levels. Both Republicans and Democrats have supported these provisions, which have centered on charging for the overall quality of care rather than for each service performed. But now Price, a longtime booster of freeing doctors from government restrictions, appears eager and able to undo them.

David Cutler, a Harvard professor who served as Obama’s senior health adviser during the 2008 campaign and helped craft the ACA, is worried that the progress on slowing health spending would stall or reverse under Price. “Price has expressed skepticism about many of the payment changes that have been ongoing and have bipartisan support,” he says. “This is quite scary, as they are starting to pay off. He seems to want to go back to the days when price was based on the volume of services provided, not the value. I don’t know if it’s a product of being an orthopedic surgeon, where that is how one earned a lot of money. In any case, I don’t think it bodes well for the vast changes in the health care landscape that are taking place.”

Much of the attention paid to Price’s plans for dismantling the ACA has focused on his proposal to undo the expansion of health insurance coverage. In short, Price would wipe away the Medicaid expansion that has given millions of poor people access to health insurance. The effect, as Sarah Kliff explains in Vox, would be to make the individual market more expensive for people who have been sick.

But the ACA wasn’t just an effort to expand health insurance. Until the 2008 recession slowed it, the cost of health care was rising at an alarming rate, accounting for an increasing share of the country’s total spending, and the trend lines projected unsustainable spending levels in the future. The ACA introduced a host of reforms and pilot programs for different schemes to reward doctors based on health outcomes in order to keep spending under control. The exact mechanisms were complex, but the basic idea was simple: The fees charged by US doctors and medical facilities were far higher than worldwide norms, and the best way to slow the growth of health care spending was to keep those pay rates in check.

Despite the hoopla this fall over rising premiums in the ACA marketplaces, the growth in health care spending slowed immensely during the Obama years, before a recent uptick. That growth peaked in 2002, at an 9.6 percent annual rate. During the recession, the rate dropped sharply, to 4.5 percent in 2008. But even as the economy rebounded, health care spending growth continued to decline, dipping to 2.9 percent in 2013—the lowest growth rate in more than half a century. It inched back up again in 2014, and earlier this month the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced a 5.8 percent growth rate for health spending in 2015—still below pre-recession levels, even though the ACA expanded insurance coverage to 20 million more Americans. A study from the Urban Institute earlier this year found that the amount the United States spent on health care under the ACA was far lower than anticipated—$2.6 trillion lower over five years.

Price has never been shy about his advocacy on behalf on doctors. When he first ran for Congress in 2004, he complained that people who lacked a background in the medical field were setting regulations and policy. Health professionals are by far the largest group funding his congressional career, having donated $3.6 million to his campaigns. The insurance industry is second, with more than $800,000 in donations.

Easing the restrictions doctors face when accepting patients with government-funded health insurance has been a central part of his health care policy proposals. When he reintroduced his Obamacare replacement plan earlier this year, he described it as “one that empowers patients and ensures they and their doctor have the freedom to make health care decisions without bureaucratic interference or influence.”

One of his key pushes over his time in Congress has been “private contracting” that would give Medicare patients access to doctors who don’t normally accept Medicare because of the lower rates it pays. But there’s a catch: The patients must pay extra fees to the doctor, on top of the rate Medicare pays the doctor. That gives doctors a perverse incentive to abandon Medicare so that they receive more from those patients than they’d get under Medicare alone. The consequence would be a reduction in Medicare participation among doctors, which would in turn reduce the government’s bargaining power in negotiating prices.

Price’s background as an orthopedic surgeon might be part of the reason he’s disinclined to support payment reforms, says Len Nichols, director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason University. Nichols notes that specialists who see patients only for specific problems have different incentives from doctors who see patients repeatedly. “They are almost perfectly tailored for fee-for-service, episodic, fix your knee, they make sure it works, goodbye,” Nichols says. “Because of that, as a class they tend to be rather skeptical of all this bundling, payment reform, incentive stuff, because they look at it like: I have a price for your knee, I fix your knee, then I’m done with you, you’re done with me.”

Price has been harshly critical of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, an office created by the ACA to conduct experiments in new ways of compensating doctors that can, if successful, be expanded without congressional approval. Price spearheaded a letter from Republican members of Congress in September demanding that CMMI stop all of its mandatory payment reforms. “CMMI has overstepped its authority and there are real-life implications—both medical and constitutional,” Price said at the time. “That’s why we’re demanding CMMI cease all current and future mandatory models.”

Price did join the majority of both Democrats and Republicans in the House voting in favor of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, which will eventually require doctors to bill Medicare patients based on quality, rather than quantity, of care. But he’s since sounded a more skeptical note, objecting earlier this year to the Obama administration’s rulemaking language on the bill because it would move doctors away from a fee-for-service model.

“He was a founding member of the tea party caucus,” Nichols says. “Skepticism of government is in his veins. If you have a natural, professional distaste, disinclination, distrust of these payment reform things, and you couple that with they’re coming from government, then it’s a double whammy.”

Price has also proposed some more extreme health care reform ideas, such as privatizing Medicare and turning Medicaid into a block grant program—in effect reducing the amount of money spent on poor people’s health coverage over time. But these large-scale changes would require acts of Congress. Many of the programs for cost control experiments and pilot programs, by contrast, are at the direction of HHS—leaving the prospective secretary in broad control of the way doctors and hospitals are paid.

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The Price Is Wrong

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Trump’s Kids Will Always Get Insider Access, and Trump Doesn’t Care Who Knows It

by EmanuelEchevarri Posted on December 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two days after promising that he will be “leaving” his businesses, which will henceforth be run by Eric and Don Jr., Donald Trump held a “private” get-together with various leaders of Silicon Valley firms, presumably to discuss his plans as president. Neither the assembled CEOs nor Trump revealed what they had talked about, but there were a couple of outside business executives who got a detailed briefing: his children.

It’s just corruption all the way down and Trump doesn’t care who knows it. Most presidents would at least do stuff like this on the sly, via telephone calls or personal visits. But Trump invites his kids to meetings and then brings in the cameras to make sure everyone knows they’re there. He knows there’s nothing we can do about it, and nothing that Republicans in Congress will do about it, so he figures he can just thumb his nose at the entire country. I guess he’s right.

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Trump’s Kids Will Always Get Insider Access, and Trump Doesn’t Care Who Knows It

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How Putin Got His Pet Game Show Host Elected President

by DianFritzsche Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over lunch I read today’s big New York Times story about the Russian cyberattacks aimed at disrupting the US election. It was mesmerizing even though I already knew a lot of it, and it was also depressing as hell. By the time I finished, I was pretty close to thinking that the right response would be a couple dozen cruise missiles aimed straight at Putin’s lone remaining aircraft carrier. I guess we’re all lucky I’m not the president.

There are a dozen depressing things I could highlight, but somehow I found this the most depressing of all:

By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day — procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times….Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.

I know: news is news. Somehow, though, that doesn’t seem sufficient. I’m still not entirely sure what the right response is to leaks like this, but simply publishing everything no matter where it came from or what its motivation no longer seems tenable. There has to be something more to editorial judgment than that.

Anyway, Putin won this round. He didn’t do it all by himself—he had plenty of help from the FBI and the media—but in the end, he got his pet game show host elected president of the United States. I hope we all live through it.

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How Putin Got His Pet Game Show Host Elected President

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Trump Promised to Kill Billionaires’ Favorite Tax Loophole. Of Course His Economic Adviser Loves It.

by EthanRiggs Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an economic policy speech at the Detroit Economic Club in August 2016, Donald Trump repeated a promise he’d made many times on the campaign trail: “The rich will pay their fair share.” He went on to explain that his reform “will eliminate the carried interest deduction and other special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors, and for people like me, but unfair to American workers.”

Trump’s promises to reform taxes to aid regular Americans undoubtedly helped him win in November. But earlier this month, he announced the appointment of the members of his President’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a group of 16 business leaders who will advise him on government policy regarding economic growth and jobs. The head of that group is billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and CEO of the Blackstone investment juggernaut. In 2016, he was ranked the 113th richest person in the world, and Blackstone, in which he holds a roughly 20 percent stake, is one of the largest private equity management firms in America. He also happens to be one of the biggest proponents of the carried-interest deduction that helps create and enrich billionaires—the very loophole Trump vowed to close during his campaign.

The carried-interest deduction works like this: People who manage the investments of others—usually private equity bosses—are often paid with a cut of the investment profits. Under the loophole, they are taxed on those earnings as if they were capital gains, not personal income, which has a much higher rate. Sometimes referred to as the “billionaire’s loophole,” Alec MacGillis for The New Yorker wrote, it “has helped private equity become one of the most lucrative sectors of the financial industry.”

As a private equity heavyweight, Blackstone has been a main beneficiary of the carried-interest deduction. In March 2007, Blackstone earned $4 billion for its managers when it went public. The initial public offering caused a public uproar because it was largely based on the favorable tax treatment of carried interest. A few months later, Schwarzman placed a call to Leo Hindery, a fellow private equity fund manager, the night before Hindery was set to testify before Congress about closing the carried-interest tax loophole. According to Hindery, Schwarzman called him “a traitor.”

Schwarzman later solidified his stance as a staunch proponent of the tax deduction in July 2010, when he compared the Obama administration’s efforts to close the loophole—Obama’s 2010 budget proposal called for changing the carried-interest tax deduction—to the Third Reich. “It’s a war,” Schwarzman said at the board meeting of an unnamed charity. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Schwarzman was widely criticized for the comments, including by Vice President Joe Biden.

Then in August 2011, billionaire investor Warren Buffett wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he called for closing the carried-interest deduction, noting that thanks to the loophole, his tax rate that year had been lower than that of any of his office employees. Schwarzman went on CNBC to counter Buffett’s argument, saying he was paying a combined federal and state tax rate of 53 percent. “I’m not feeling undertaxed,” he said. (The Times pointed out that Schwarzman likely hadn’t received much carried-interest-eligible income that year, since many of the investments managed by his company were still recovering from the financial crisis.) In response to a question about Trump’s promise to close the carried-interest loophole last September, Schwarzman implied that he’d be okay with it—only as part of a general move toward a flat tax, a move that would also disproportionately benefit the uber-rich.

Schwarzman has also long been a generous Republican donor, donating more than $790,000 in the 2016 cycle to down-ballot races and PACs dedicated to maintaining a GOP legislative majority. (He did not donate to the Trump campaign.) But now, he and his compatriots will certainly have Trump’s ear: Their first meeting is set to happen at the White House in February—just weeks into the first term of President Trump.

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Trump Promised to Kill Billionaires’ Favorite Tax Loophole. Of Course His Economic Adviser Loves It.

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Just what our crumbling, aging infrastructure doesn’t need: Trump’s plan

by LHSCortez7612 Posted on December 9, 2016

Donald Trump has made rebuilding America’s decrepit infrastructure a centerpiece of his political pitch. And it seems many top Democrats are optimistic about it.

The problem is that what Trump has actually proposed isn’t what our infrastructure needs.

“If you want a plan that is going to be economically transformational and deal with the fact of climate change, this is not your plan,” says Nell Abernathy, vice president of research and policy at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank in New York City. “It’s good for corporations and private interests. It’s bad for the average American and long-term economic performance.”

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Many progressives who have examined Trump’s infrastructure scheme are appalled by it. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who made a big infrastructure spending proposal part of his presidential campaign platform, said he would work with Trump on policies that “improve the lives of working families.” After later looking at Trump’s infrastructure plan, Sanders described it as “a scam that gives massive tax breaks to large companies and billionaires on Wall Street.”

Our bridges, roads, and rails are in desperate shape. The gasoline tax hasn’t been raised since 1993, even to keep pace with inflation, so federal transportation investment has steadily fallen. As a result, the country has too many structurally deficient bridges at risk of collapse, roads pockmarked with potholes, and trains that move slower than they did a century ago because the tracks are so old. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. infrastructure a D+ on its report card and estimates that the country needs $3.6 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2020.

But as it’s laid out now, Trump’s $137 billion proposal would not address any of those needs. Here are the six main reasons why:

1. It’s a tax cut, not government spending for public investment. Trump’s plan would not direct money to fix roads, sewers, airports, and train lines. Instead, the government would grant tax credits to corporations and private equity firms that finance construction projects. It’s a much less efficient and less effective way of getting things done, but taxpayers still pick up the bill.

When government actually spends the money, it gets to decide what to spend it on. But when it subsidizes private investment, investors can pick the projects and keep a profit for themselves.

2. It will leave behind the most disadvantaged communities. Private investors’ chief concern is getting the best return on their investment, not what’s best for the public. Depend on them to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, and you’re sure to wind up with plenty of new toll roads in affluent suburbs, where people will pay for the privilege of avoiding traffic. Analysts say that Trump’s proposal suggests pipelines and other private projects would also get tax credits.

What about the investments we really need, like repairing inner-city cracked streets and sidewalks, creaky train tunnels, and decaying water pipes in impoverished inner-cities? They’re likely to get worse. Sure, there are long-term economic benefits for the country if the government ensures the children of Flint have clean drinking water. But there’s no easy way for an investor to turn a profit on it.

3. Trump’s proposal fails to address a key reason private investors often balk at big infrastructure projects: They often run way over budget.

Consider New York City’s the planned Long Island Rail Road terminal attached to Grand Central station. It’s expected to cost at least $10 billion, more than double the $4.3 billion that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority originally estimated. Projects that require digging tunnels through bedrock alongside to skyscraper foundations are almost guaranteed to encounter setbacks that lead to delays and cost overruns.

“There’s a lot of risk involved because mega-projects end up costing a lot more than initially projected,” says Deron Lovaas, a senior urban policy advisor at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These are risky projects, a lot of them fail. The private sector tends to be pretty picky about them.”

4. It gives tax breaks to projects that don’t need tax breaks. The tax credits don’t have to be used for new projects or ones that wouldn’t be financed without the subsidy, as Ron Klain, who oversaw the infrastructure investments of the American Recovery Act in the Obama White House, explains in The Washington Post. Its design could simply pad investors’ profit margins in existing or already planned projects.

5. It will not spend money efficiently. Trump is an expert at putting his name on flashy new developments. But what the country needs most, and what would bring the most benefit per dollar, is an overhaul of its existing infrastructure.

“What we need in transportation is money to take care of deferred maintenance to roads and rail,” says Lovaas.

A better plan would help pay for the adoption of new technologies. Installing automated monitoring systems on a bridge to scan for structural degradation could avert a collapse. Installing “smart traffic signals” that coordinate traffic lights with current conditions could save time and reduce air pollution.

“That’s not sexy but it’s the most cost-effective,” Lovaas says. “You get a lot more bang for the buck if you replace all the traffic signals nationwide with smart traffic signals than building a shiny new toll road.”

6. It ignores one of the biggest threats of all: the Chinese hoax known as climate change. A smart infrastructure program would favor projects that reduce carbon emissions over ones that increase them. That means favoring mass transit, sidewalks, and bike lanes instead of building new highways. It means improving the electrical grid instead of planning new fossil-fuel pipelines, and supporting projects that will hold up better in a future of higher temperatures and sea levels.

In short, Trump’s plan would suck up political energy, media attention, and tax revenue that would be better spent on a genuine effort to rebuild our crumbling, aging infrastructure. That’s worse than no plan at all.

Originally posted here: 

Just what our crumbling, aging infrastructure doesn’t need: Trump’s plan

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Republicans Need to Step Up and get Gen. Michael Flynn Out of the White House

by ChristeHeron Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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You’ve probably heard that a gunman entered the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC yesterday and started shooting. He didn’t hit anyone, though, and it’s not clear if he was even trying. So why was he there? He says he was trying to “self investigate” an allegation that Bill and Hillary Clinton ran a pedophilia ring out of the restaurant.

No, this is not me being smug and elitist again this morning. This is an honest-to-goodness conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, and it’s been making the rounds for a while. Why? Because the owner of Comet Ping Pong is both gay and a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party. And that’s not all!

It’s known, for instance that Bill Clinton and Donald Trump flew on the private plane of convicted child abuser Jeffery Epstein. Tony Podesta, the brother of the Clinton aide whose emails were hacked, was a friend of Dennis Hastert, a Republican politician who earlier this year was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and has admitted abusing boys. The Jimmy Savile scandal in the UK has featured in speculation as an example of a serial child abuser getting away with his crimes.

So far this has no connection to Donald Trump, and perhaps you’re thinking that’s another silver lining, aside from the fact that no one was hurt in the attack. But I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with only one silver lining today. You see, Gen. Michael Flynn, who will soon be Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, tweeted this a few days before the election:

And that’s not all. Here is Michael Flynn Jr., who is not just Flynn’s son. He is also Flynn’s chief of staff and closest aide. Here he is yesterday, after the shooting:

There’s much more in Flynn Jr’s Twitter feed following this, all pointing in the same direction: he is a complete crackpot. And he is one of the closest confidantes of his father, who is also a crackpot. And Flynn Sr. is the top national security aide to Donald Trump, who is well known to have a weakness for conspiracy theories already.

Obviously Democrats have no influence over Donald Trump’s White House. But presumably Republicans do. They need to figure out a way to get Flynn booted from the NSA position and as far away from Trump as possible. This isn’t an amusing joke, and it’s not just politics anymore. It’s a serious national security weakness.

UPDATE: It’s hard to keep up these days. In the tweet at the top of this post, Flynn Sr. isn’t referring to Pizzagate. He’s referring to a different pedophilia allegation involving Hillary Clinton. According to Truepundit.com, it linked “Clinton herself” and her “associates” to money laundering, child exploitation, sex crimes with children, perjury, obstruction of justice, and “other felony crimes.”

I even wrote about it back when it happened. It’s been a busy two weeks since then. Sigh.

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Republicans Need to Step Up and get Gen. Michael Flynn Out of the White House

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Darrell Issa is Suing His Defeated Opponent for Libel

by AngelikWakelin Posted on December 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Days after narrowly winning reelection to his House seat, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is celebrating his victory—by suing his opponent for libel and defamation. The unusual move follows the first time the Southern California Republican faced a serious campaign challenge: He beat Democrat Doug Applegate by just 1,982 votes. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported today that on the day before the election, Issa, known for his role in the Benghazi hearings and for being the richest member of Congress, filed a libel lawsuit against Applegate and his campaign, alleging that two campaign ads damaged his reputation. He is seeking $10 million in damages.

The specter of a wealthy politician pursuing his defeated rival in court recalls Donald Trump’s campaign promise to prosecute and imprison Hillary Clinton if he was elected. But Issa, a Trump supporter, may have a hard time prevailing. First of all, he is the very definition of a public figure, which means he faces a higher burden of proof in a libel case than a private citizen. And, as Peter Scheer, the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, observes, the Supreme Court has recognized many times that “First Amendment protections for speech are at their very, very, very highest during a political campaign.” Scheer doubts Issa can clear this bar. “This lawsuit doesn’t stand a chance. It’s a waste of the court’s time and it’s certainly a waste of his opponent’s time and money.”

So why bother? Issa may be seeking to set the record straight after an uncomfortably close race. Or, Scheer says, he may be seeking to punish Applegate “by causing him to have to retain counsel, and to spend a lot of money unnecessarily defending a frivolous lawsuit.”

The Union-Tribune noted that Issa’s lawsuit does not detail how exactly he may have suffered $10 million worth of damages as a result of Applegate’s ads. Issa says he’ll donate any damages he wins to charity.

One of the Applegate ads that Issa is suing over cited a 2011 New York Times article titled “A Businessman in Congress Helps His District and Himself.” But the ad also includes what Issa’s lawsuit calls a “fake, doctored headline” that said he had “gamed the system to line his own pockets.” That language wasn’t in the Times article. The article did report that Issa had “secured millions of dollars in Congressional earmarks for road work and public works projects that promise improved traffic and other benefits to the many commercial properties he owns.” (Issa later sold one of those properties at a loss, and the earmarked funds never made it to the road project.)

The second ad that Issa is suing over allegedly misrepresented his stance on funding 9/11 emergency workers. The ad stated that “tea party Republicans voted to deny healthcare to 9/11 first responders.” Issa did in fact vote against the legislation referenced in the ad, but, the lawsuit claims, it was not just tea partiers who voted it down.

Applegate hasn’t yet responded publicly to the lawsuit. On Tuesday, Applegate announced his intention to run again for Congress in 2018.

While Issa’s motivations for filing the suit remain unclear, perhaps he is upset that his own campaign ads didn’t pack the same punch as his opponent’s. As one Republican political operative who asked to remain anonymous told me during the campaign, “I don’t know if you’ve looked at Darrell Issa’s TV ads, but they are the worst fucking TV ads I’ve ever seen in my life.”

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Darrell Issa is Suing His Defeated Opponent for Libel

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