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How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

by GabrielWithrow Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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In July 2014, as the largest Ebola outbreak in history was ravaging West Africa, Donald Trump took to Twitter to complain that two sick American health workers were being flown back to the United States for treatment. “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days—now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent,” wrote the future leader of free world. “KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” Over the months that followed, Trump would tweet about the outbreak more than 50 times.

Trump’s social-media outbursts were among the earliest shots fired in the political war over Ebola. The timing of the Ebola outbreak could not have been more propitious for Republicans, many of whom echoed Trump’s calls for a temporary travel ban. In the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, the specter of a lethal African virus being spread through the United States by migrants stoked fears not only among the GOP base, but also among many voters who leaned Democratic. By October, two-thirds of respondents to a Washington Post/ABC News poll said they favored restricting travel from Ebola-affected countries.

I thought about Trump’s Ebola tweets last year as I was completing a memoir about my work treating Ebola in rural Liberia at the height of the outbreak. By early 2016, the Republican presidential primaries were dominating the headlines, and Ebola had long since faded from the front page. But the two events seemed connected to me; it was clear the outbreak had taken its toll on public debate.

St. Martin’s Press

The naked and brutal nativism on display at right-wing political rallies obviously had much deeper roots than Ebola. But from my standpoint, the outbreak helped legitimize a kind of language previously relegated to the fringes of American politics. Looking back on the campaign, I firmly believe Ebola was one of the key events that made Trump’s candidacy possible.

Insofar as Trump expresses a coherent political philosophy, those expressions can be found not in policy papers or major addresses, but in his tweets. When examining Trump’s tweets on the Ebola outbreak, the main features of his approach are plainly evident. It’s all right there: The shallowness, willful ignorance, mean-spiritedness, and empty boasting infuse every 140-character burst. And Trump’s views on the issue received massive media attention. His tweets were written up everywhere from Breitbart to USA Today to Mother Jones. He elaborated on them in his regular Fox News appearances.

Trump’s very first tweet is as clear a display as one could imagine of the kind of arch-nativism that would animate his campaign and the first few months of his presidency. It came on July 31, in response to news that two American medical workers infected with Ebola were being airlifted out of West Africa to the United States for advanced care in the most secure conditions (so-called Biosafety Level 4 facilities). Right from the start, he highlighted the central animus of his foreign policy in an all-caps summary, even when, as in this case, THEM might be US citizens.

Health officials assured the public that Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol—the doctor and nurse who had braved the outbreak to serve at a hospital on the outskirts of Monrovia—posed little risk of spreading the disease in the United States. But Trump wasn’t satisfied. “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” he wrote on August 1. “People that go to far away places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences!” In other words, the Ebola fighters’ “greatness” didn’t override Trump’s desire to see them suffer because of their selfless actions.

By that time, it was clear that the outbreak was overwhelming the governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, and that without substantial international help, the virus would likely spread unchecked across borders. It could turn what was already a substantial regional problem into a profoundly more complicated (and expensive) international crisis. And it meant that resource-wealthy nations needed to provide help to contain the spread.

Trump certainly didn’t want to treat Ebola patients in the United States, but he did initially seem to agree that Americans should provide some sort of medical assistance to the affected countries. “A doctor on NBC Nightly News agreed with me—we should not bring Ebola into our country through two patients, but should bring docs to them,” he wrote on August 4. It was a bizarre statement for someone who just three days earlier had said that doctors who put themselves in harm’s way should be left to “suffer the consequences.” By September, he seemed to have changed his mind entirely about sending help. “Can you believe that the U.S. will be sending 3000 troops to Africa to help with Ebola,” he wrote. “They will come home infected? We have enough problems.”

Listen to Steven Hatch discuss the Ebola crisis on a recent episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast:

Trump wasn’t simply calling for patients infected with Ebola to be excluded from the country. In one August tweet, he wrote, “The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’ Act fast!” Two days later, he extended his proposed travel ban to all of West Africa. “The bigger problem with Ebola is all of the people coming into the U.S. from West Africa who may be infected with the disease,” he wrote. “STOP FLIGHTS!”

The Ebola panic in the United States reached new heights in early October, after an infected Liberian man named Thomas Eric Duncan entered the country. He was symptom-free at the time of his flight but became ill several days after arriving. He sought treatment at a Dallas hospital, which led to two nurses contracting the virus. Trump, who would spend much of the 2016 campaign portraying immigrants as rapists and murderers, used the opportunity to imply that Duncan came to the United States with sinister motives. “The Ebola patient who came into our country knew exactly what he was doing,” Trump tweeted. “Came into contact with over 100 people. Here we go—I told you so!”

The Duncan chapter was without any question the low point in the US Ebola story. Multiple mistakes occurred not only in Dallas, but in Liberia as well, as Duncan slipped through the screens designed to prevent people exposed to the virus from leaving the country. (He had accompanied the daughter of his landlord to a hospital in Monrovia, and she later died of the disease.) Nearly everything that could have gone wrong with Duncan did go wrong. Nevertheless, the only people who contracted the disease from him were the two nurses who cared for him. They, in turn, passed it along to no one. Duncan died, but both nurses made full recoveries.

An Ebola infection on US soil certainly isn’t a trivial matter, but it was by no means the calamity that Trump, along with tens of millions of his fellow Americans, assumed it was. Public health experts, including Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, repeatedly called for calm, arguing that the United States was well prepared to contain the virus and that closing down borders would simply make the outbreak harder to manage. President Barack Obama echoed these statements. Trump accused the CDC of lying about the threat posed by the disease. He portrayed Frieden’s and Obama’s leadership as feckless, even though Frieden’s assessment would prove to be considerably more accurate than Trump’s.

Trump’s tweets reached a fever pitch on October 23 and 24, when Craig Spencer, a returning doctor who had treated Ebola patients in Guinea, fell ill with the disease in New York City. According to Spencer’s account, the moment he became symptomatic he isolated himself and informed public health authorities. Before he became symptomatic, he was a threat to no one, and once he did, his isolation ensured that he was not a threat. If Duncan’s situation was a worst-case scenario, Spencer’s was exactly how the experts had hoped to deal with travelers from the affected countries.

This did not stop Trump from becoming unhinged, tweeting about the incident seven times in two days. He railed against what he regarded as the foolishness of US policy and accused Spencer of being “selfish” for having the temerity to eat at a restaurant prior to becoming ill. That a billionaire who has never made any appreciable personal sacrifices for others could have the chutzpah to make such charges is revealing. It also foreshadowed his temper tantrums against the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim US Army captain of Pakistani descent who died trying to thwart a car bombing in Iraq. Trump publicly attacked Khan’s parents last year after they criticized his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

But if Trump’s outbursts against Spencer reveal his weird personal accounting of what constitutes altruism, his final Ebola tweet was a clear portent of future policy. On November 10, just as the news of the West African outbreak was starting to recede, he repeated his dire warnings of the threat of Ebola on US soil by noting that an infected person can spread it to two others “at a minimum.” He then added, “STOP THE FLIGHTS! NO VISAS FROM EBOLA STRICKEN COUNTRIES!”

On the campaign trail, Trump infamously called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” ostensibly in an effort to prevent terrorism. Once in office, he issued executive orders suspending immigration by refugees and citizens of several majority-Muslim countries. Perhaps given enough time, new circumstances will allow him to revisit his 2014 threat and add sub-Saharan Africa to the list.

Trump’s Ebola tweets are useful not only for their ability to illuminate how subsequent events that shocked the political establishment came to be, but also because they provide a clear road map for how he will respond to the next biological crisis. Ebola may have been the most dramatic such crisis of the past generation, but others have also generated substantial alarm. The swine flu pandemic of 2009, the avian influenza outbreaks in East Asia, and the SARS epidemic are just a few of the cases that have required international cooperation.

How will Trump deal with these unforeseen hazards? Will his instinct to resort to border-closing as a first-line policy lead to more suffering? Will his penchant for denigrating people who choose to serve others intimidate health care workers who might otherwise volunteer in such moments? Will he continue to reject any form of scientific expertise?

We’re not even 100 days into the new administration, but the evidence so far is not reassuring. Whatever the next biological agent, Trump may well take a dangerous situation and make it worse—both abroad and at home.

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How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

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What Are Trump’s White House Aides Worth? Read Their Financial Disclosures

by ReyesSmartt Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

On Friday evening, the White House began releasing the financial disclosures of up to 180 top staffers. The forms provide a revealing though incomplete picture, showing an aide’s sources of income over the past year and his or her investments and debts, expressed in ranges not exact amounts. So far, these records show that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump could be worth as much as $740 million and are still benefiting from their vast business holdings, including Ivanka’s stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. And they indicate that chief White House strategist, whose assets are valued between $11.8 million and $53.8 million, earned a significant amount of his income last year from entities linked to Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the conservative megadonors. Below are the disclosures of more than 30 officials. We’ll post more as they become available.

Stephen Bannon, assistant to the president and chief strategist

Katie Walsh, deputy chief of staff for implementation. (Walsh recently departed the White House for a job with an outside group promoting Trump’s polices.)

Sean Spicer, press secretary

Reince Preibus, chief of staff

Donald McGahn II, White House counsel

Stephen Miller, senior adviser to the president for policy

Omarosa Manigault, director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison

Jared Kushner, assistant to the president and senior adviser to the president

Makan Delrahim, deputy White House counsel

Gerrit Lansing, chief digital officer

Joseph Lai, special assistant to the president

Jennifer Korn, deputy director, White House

Jeremy Katz, deputy director of the National Economic Council

Kenneth Juster, international economic affairs

Gregory Katsas, deputy counsel to the president

Boris Epshteyn, assistant director of communications. (Epshteyn is reportedly leaving his White House role.)

Hope Hicks, director of strategic communications

Andy Koenig, special assistant to the president

Shahira Knight, special assistant to the president

Timothy Pataki, special assistant to the president, Office of Legislative Affairs

David J. Gribbin, special assistant to the president

James Burnham, senior associate counsel

Bill McGinley, White House cabinet secretary

Joyce Meyer, deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of legislative affairs

Uttam Dhillon, special assistant to the president and senior associate counsel

Ann Donaldson, special counsel to the president and chief of staff to the White House counsel

Benjamin Howard, special assistant to the president and house special assistant

Ashley Marquis, chief of staff, National Economic Council

Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council

Michael Ellis, special assistant to the president and associate counsel

Julia Hahn, deputy policy strategist

John Eisenberg, deputy assistant to the president, National Security Council legal adviser, and deputy counsel to the president for national security

Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president

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What Are Trump’s White House Aides Worth? Read Their Financial Disclosures

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Trump Wants More Control Over Intel Agencies

by LashawnJudy Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

Here’s a tidbit from the AP about how President Trump might “seize the reins” of the intelligence community:

Officials have expressed an interest in having more raw intelligence sent to the president for his daily briefings instead of an analysis of information compiled by the agencies, according to current and former U.S. officials. The change would have given his White House advisers more control about the assessments given to him and sidelined some of the conclusions made by intelligence professionals.

Trump seems like the kind of guy who could do his own analysis of raw intelligence. They should give it a try. What could go wrong?

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Trump Wants More Control Over Intel Agencies

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Goldman Sachs Has Been Very Good to Trump’s Top Economic Adviser

by AnnabelCorrigan Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump the tycoon railed against big banks, claimed he cared passionately about the little guy, and vowed to make the economy work for struggling middle-class Americans. But after winning, he placed the American economy in the hands of Gary Cohn, the chief operating officer and president of Goldman Sachs. In January, Trump named Cohn chairman of the National Economic Council, the president’s top financial and economic whizzes. Cohn would be the highest authority on the economy within the White House. He quit his Goldman Sachs gig, but he left with an estimated $285 million severance package and agreed to sell a $16 million-stake in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

Cohn certainly lives in a different economic reality than most Americans, and thanks to financial disclosure forms released on Friday night by the White House—which cover 180 of its officials and staffers and detail their finances when they arrived at the White House—the public can see just how different.

In 2015 and 2016, according to the form for Cohn, he earned between $39 million and $45 million from Goldman Sachs. This includes salary ($1.8 million last year), annual $5.4 million cash bonuses, and tens of millions of dollars in stock options, dividends, and interest. This doesn’t count what he brought in via various Goldman Sachs-operated retirement accounts. Nor does it take into account the money he pocketed from his sprawling brokerage accounts, which included Goldman Sachs investment funds. Cohn also had millions invested in hedge funds, real estate properties around the country, and numerous companies, including that Chinese bank, a high-end cosmetic retailer, and multiple medical technology firms. All told, it appears Cohn earned as much as $75 million last year.

Cohn is not the only Goldman alum to join the Trump administration. Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary, worked at Goldman for years, and last month Trump hired another former Goldman Sachs top executive to be Mnuchin’s No. 2 at Treasury. The bank has been wildly successful over the last two decades, but it also has become a symbol of Wall Street’s excesses. It played a key role in the 2008 financial crash that led to a nationwide economic meltdown. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton was slammed repeatedly—by both her Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders and Trump—for giving paid speeches to Goldman executives. And before he wrapped up the GOP nomination, Trump attacked Republican rival Ted Cruz, pointing out that Cruz’s wife worked at Goldman Sachs and that he had received a loan from the firm.

Cohn’s full financial disclosure can be found below.

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Gary Cohn Financial Disclosure (PDF)

Gary Cohn Financial Disclosure (Text)

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Goldman Sachs Has Been Very Good to Trump’s Top Economic Adviser

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Why Trump’s Antitrust Pick Is Great News for Pesticide Companies

by NorbertoXPF Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Trump administration appears ready to bless a pair of megamergers that will dramatically reshape the markets for seeds and pesticides. First, before he even took office, the president met with the CEOs of German chemical giant Bayer and US seed titan Monsanto, and boasted of the flimsy jobs plan they promised if their proposed merger goes through. Trump has also had chummy relations with chemical giant Dow, in the middle of its pending merger with erstwhile rival DuPont. This week, Trump announced his choice to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust division: a lawyer/lobbyist who, for nearly three decades, has been shuffling through the revolving door between large corporations and the government agencies that shape and execute merger policy.

Makan Delrahim now serves as deputy counsel to Trump, helping shepherd the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch through the Senate. He moved to the White House from his perch as a partner at lobbying powerhouse Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. There, his recent clients include pharma giant Pfizer, the tobacco and real estate conglomerate Vector group, and casino player Caesars Entertainment. As International Business Times‘ David Sirota reported last week, Delrahim also recently lobbied on behalf of heath insurer Anthem as the company beseeched the Justice Department to approve its now-stalled proposal to merge with erstwhile rival Cigna. (If he’s confirmed, Delrahim will lead the very office he lobbied on retainer for Anthem—though he’ll likely have to recuse himself from any decision involving Anthem.)

Before his stint as a lobbyist, Delrahim served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division under President George W. Bush in the early 2000s, and of Bush’s Antitrust Modernization Commission until 2007.

Delrahim is by all accounts a devoted conservative who jumped on the Trump train relatively early. In a March 2016 New York Post, he noted that Trump was not his first choice for president, but urged voters to “coalesce” around Trump as he began to dominate the Republican primaries. “I’m willing to take my chances with The Donald,” he declared, citing the death of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the need for a like-minded replacement.

Like Scalia, Delrahim is widely viewed as friendly to mergers. In a memorandum to clients, the corporate law firm Davis Polk characterized him as “in line with previous Republican-appointed” DOJ antitrust enforcers, hewing to a “pragmatic, economically based approach to antitrust enforcement,” wary of “over-zealous enforcers and courts,” and attuned to the “need to promote and preserve efficiency-maximizing collaborations” among corporations. Such views mark a “significant shift from the view expressed” by President Barack Obama’s antitrust enforcers, who, the law firm noted, expressed skepticism about “proclaimed benefits and efficiencies” of mergers.

Over the next several months, the Trump DOJ will have to vet a slew of proposed corporate megamergers, including two that involve the agribusiness space: the planned marriage of two US chemical behemoths, and the German chemical giant Bayer’s takeover of US seed titan Monsanto.

The ag deals Delrahim will be charged with vetting—Dow-DuPont and Bayer-Monsanto—have been shrouded in regulatory uncertainty since they were first announced, because they would lead to an extraordinary concentration in seeds, genetically modified traits, and pesticides. If the deals go through, three companies—Dow-DuPont, Bayer-Monsanto, plus Syngenta (itself recently taken over by a Chinese chemical conglomerate)—would sell about 59 percent of the entire globe’s seeds and 64 percent of its pesticides. Here in the United States, the consolidation would be even more severe. Bayer-Monsanto alone would own nearly 60 percent of the US cottonseed market; between them, Bayer-Monsanto and Dow-DuPont would sell 75 percent of the corn seeds planted by US farmers and 64 percent of soybean seeds.

As I noted here, these companies are all hotly marketing “precision agriculture” services, where they crunch data picked up from farmers’ field equipment and provide them with advice on what seed varieties to plant and pesticides to apply. Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant laid out the strategy in a conference call with investors a few months before the Bayer deal. Monsanto, he said, is pursuing an “integrated solution strategy” that creates a one-stop shop for “seeds, traits, chemistry, and data science tools to farmers around the world.” Dow, DuPont, and Syngenta have all rolled out their own, similarly closed-loop precision-ag arms. These arrangements give the tiny field of players even incentive to create, say, crop varieties that work only with one of their own proprietary pesticides.

One possibility is that the Department of Justice could approve the deals, on condition that the companies sell off overlapping business segments. The European Union recently signed off on the Dow-DuPont merger, after the companies agreed to what Bloomberg called “hefty concessions, including the sale of large parts of DuPont’s global pesticide business.” But such divestitures don’t automatically reduce consolidation. German chemical titan BASF, itself a large player in pesticides, has “expressed interest in snapping up some of the companies’ divested assets,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, if Bayer and Monsanto are forced to sell off some business lines to push their deal through, both BASF and Syngenta are ready to pounce on those juicy morsels, Bloomberg reports.

Also, such sell-offs don’t address the fact if the deals go through, what had been four R&D programs will be reduced to two, giving “short shrift to innovation competition,” says Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute. Moss argues that such hyperconsolidation limits farmers’ choices in the seed and chemical markets, driving up prices. Eventually, higher costs for these vital farm inputs will be passed on to consumers.

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Why Trump’s Antitrust Pick Is Great News for Pesticide Companies

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New Yorker Cover Takes a Swing at Trump’s White House

by MarciaBrummitt Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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The New Yorker offered a preview of its newest cover Friday, which takes aim at President Donald Trump and the ongoing chaos within the White House. The cover illustration, which features an unflattering looking Trump using the White House as his personal golf course, comes amid mounting anger over the president’s frequent golf trips. Trump appears on track to outpace former President Barack Obama’s visits to the golf course—despite routinely complaining that his predecessor enjoyed golfing from time to time.

Illustrator Barry Blitt, the mastermind behind several other recent covers that appeared critical of the president, explained to the magazine:

“I see that the word ‘duffer’ is defined as ‘a person inexperienced at something, especially at playing golf,’” Barry Blitt says, about his cover for the upcoming issue. “That’s the word that comes to mind as I watch President Trump plowing one drive after another through the glass windows of American politics.”

Coincidentally, the Economist‘s upcoming issue also features an image of a golf course, with someone attempting to dig themselves out of a hole. The image is paired with the headline, “The Trump presidency so far.”

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New Yorker Cover Takes a Swing at Trump’s White House

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Investors Are Crazy Optimistic, But For No Apparent Reason

by WendiHeaton Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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Over at the Financial Times, Robin Wigglesworth has an interesting chart to show us. It’s a little hard to decipher, though, and takes some explaining. First, here’s the chart:

The pink line is “hard” economic data: employment rates, GDP growth, etc. The purple line represents “soft” data: things like consumer sentiment, purchasing manager optimism, etc. Roughly speaking, pink is how things are and purple is how people feel.

The fist thing to notice is that the hard data doesn’t bounce around very much. It mostly stays in a band between -0.5 and +0.5. (I have no idea what those numbers represent. Some kind of overall index, I imagine.) The animal spirits data, however, is like a kid’s yo-yo: it routinely shoots up and down from -1.5 to +2.0.

The second thing to notice is that these indexes mostly move in tandem. When the hard data goes up, the soft data goes way up. When the hard data goes down, the soft data goes way down. People react very strongly to even modest changes in the economy.

And then there’s 2016-17. After a modest slump, the hard data has been ambling along at zero for the past year. But starting around the election, the soft data suddenly went sky high. There’s nothing in the economic data to support this, but the Trump election seems to have filled the investor class with overwhelming optimism.

So what happens when reality sets in? There’s no special reason to think the economy is going to take off anytime soon, and Trump’s obvious bumbling will eventually sink in to everyone. At that point, the animal spirits are set to come crashing down.

What will that do to the actual economy? Maybe nothing. Maybe the actual economy really does respond solely to macro phenomena and animal spirits have nothing to do with it. That’s certainly been the case as animal spirits have skyrocketed. Then again, maybe the economy does react to animal spirits plummeting. This is not a real-life experiment I’m especially eager to see play out.

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Investors Are Crazy Optimistic, But For No Apparent Reason

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Why Were Three White House Officials Trawling Through Highly Classified Documents?

by OpheliaZpo Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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Now there are three people involved in revealing classified information to Rep. Devin Nunes:

One of those involved in procuring the documents cited by Nunes has close ties to former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The official, Ezra Cohen, survived a recent attempt to oust him from his White House job by appealing to Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, the officials said….After assembling reports that showed that Trump campaign officials were mentioned or inadvertently monitored by U.S. spy agencies targeting foreign individuals, Cohen took the matter to the top lawyer for the National Security Council, John Eisenberg.

The third White House official involved was identified as Michael Ellis, a lawyer who previously worked with Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee but joined the Trump administration as an attorney who reports to Eisenberg.

This is an amazingly far-reaching conspiracy considering that the documents don’t actually seem to have contained anything very interesting. You’d think that at some point one of these guys would have the common sense to call off this Keystone Cops affair.

And as long as we’ve mentioned Michael Flynn, here’s the latest on him:

Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, has offered to be interviewed by House and Senate investigators who are examining the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in exchange for immunity from prosecution, according to his lawyer and a congressional official.

I didn’t bother mentioning this yesterday because, frankly, I sort of figured that Flynn was hoping for immunity and then wouldn’t say anything very interesting. Last night Josh Marshall opined that “you only get immunity if you deliver someone else higher up the ladder,” but this morning he seems to have changed his mind:

Flynn’s lawyer states rather grandly that his client “has a story to tell and … very much wants to tell it.” But Alex Whiting of Harvard Law School argues pretty convincingly that what we learned last night likely means either that Flynn doesn’t have a story prosecutors are willing to barter for or isn’t yet willing to tell it.

So probably Flynn doesn’t have much to say after all. Which gets us back to the clowns in the White House. What were they doing trawling through highly classified reports anyway? Barton Gellman says this is the key unanswered question so far, and it’s related to the allegation that some of the names in the reports had been unmasked, something that happens only if a “customer” asks for it:

If Nunes saw reports that named Trump or his associates, as he said, the initiative for naming names did not come from the originating intelligence agency. That is not how the process works. The names could only have been unmasked if the customers—who seem in this case to have been Trump’s White House appointees—made that request themselves. If anyone breached the president’s privacy, the perpetrators were working down the hall from him. (Okay, probably in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.) It is of course hypocritical, even deceptive, for Nunes to lay that blame at the feet of intelligence officials, but that is not the central concern either.

If events took place as just described, then what exactly were Trump’s appointees doing? I am not talking only about the political chore of ginning up (ostensible) support for the president’s baseless claims about illegal surveillance by President Obama. I mean this: why would a White House lawyer and the top White House intelligence adviser be requesting copies of these surveillance reports in the first place? Why would they go on to ask that the names be unmasked? There is no chance that the FBI would brief them about the substance or progress of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to the Russian government. Were the president’s men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?

That reference at the end to “the president’s men” is no coincidence. This whole thing looks more Watergate-ish by the day. Maybe it’s time to start calling it Russiagate.

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Why Were Three White House Officials Trawling Through Highly Classified Documents?

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Who Moved My Teachers?

by MaximoSessions1 Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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Dale Stephanos

The school of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison never used to have trouble attracting applicants with dreams of becoming teachers. Its graduate program is ranked fourth in the country by U.S. News & World Report, and until recently, its undergraduate program in elementary education typically received between 300 and 400 applications for its 125 spots. Now, says Michael Apple, a professor in the program, it only gets about one applicant per opening.

What happened? Scott Walker became Wisconsin’s governor in 2011 and promptly enacted a wide-scale rollback of unionization rights for state employees. That law, Act 10, effectively wiped out the ability of teachers and other public-sector workers to bargain collectively over salary and benefits.

Walker’s assault on unions has had well-publicized effects, including an unsuccessful recall election against him, a sharp reduction in union membership, and a proliferation of anti-union legislation in other states. Unions’ diminished organizing power for Democrats helped Donald Trump become the first Republican presidential candidate to win Wisconsin in more than 30 years. But less visible consequences have colored nearly every facet of Wisconsin society. One is a sudden and drastic teacher shortage. “The attack on teacher unions has an echo that is often invisible,” Apple says. “That invisibility is many fewer teachers.”

Wisconsin teachers now earn less total compensation than they did seven years ago, thanks to cuts in benefits. They face larger classes and less job security, and in some districts they’ve been asked to teach extra sections. Fewer people are applying to teacher education programs. One Wisconsin education student, who asked not to be named to avoid hurting his job prospects, warns that “better conditions and job security will lead some of us elsewhere.”

The downturn for Wisconsin teachers is so bad that when a Minnesota public school district sent representatives to a job fair at UW-Madison’s education school last fall, they made a point of boasting about the benefits their state still offered. “I actually heard them promote having unions as a sales pitch, which I found interesting coming from administrators,” says the student.

That Wisconsin is the front of the war on unions is particularly poignant. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which represents public workers at all levels of government, began as an association of local workers in Madison in 1932. Twenty-seven years later, Wisconsin became the first state to recognize state government employee unions. But when Walker signed Act 10 on March 11, 2011, that long chapter of progressivism came to an end and the state became a radical experiment in the opposite direction.

The battle over the law was as dramatic as its effects: The entire 14-person Democratic caucus in the state Senate fled to Illinois in a bid to prevent it from passing, and about 100,000 union advocates demonstrated, with some camping in the hallways of the Capitol and singing union anthems. Teachers protested by calling in sick, and schools were forced to close.

In the end, it wasn’t enough. Act 10 prevailed and other conservative state governments soon followed with their own anti-union legislation. It attacked public-sector unions from a variety of angles. Wisconsin workers can no longer negotiate to improve their health or retirement benefits. Raises can’t exceed the rate of inflation. Job-security measures like tenure were tossed aside, and managers were given the freedom to fire employees at will. Dues are no longer deducted directly from paychecks, forcing public-sector unions to track down members individually to raise funds.

At the time, Walker sold Act 10 as a way to close a $3.6 billion budget gap. But there was never much question that the real motivation was to hobble liberal causes. A video later surfaced showing Walker hobnobbing with billionaire donor Diane Hendricks, founder and chairwoman of Wisconsin-based ABC Supply, two weeks after taking office. “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions and become a right-to-work?” she asked. (So-called right-to-work laws slash union revenue by prohibiting unions from compelling employees to pay dues, allowing employees to benefit from a union’s efforts without contributing their share.) Walker replied, “The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”

That strategy could soon become national policy. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump adviser, has pointed to Walker’s anti-union crusade as a model for how the new administration could target public-­sector unions at the federal level. Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, chaired a group called the American Federation for Children, which claims it has spent more than $4.2 million on Wisconsin races since 2010. The AFC tapped Walker as its keynote speaker at the group’s 2015 policy summit.

Six years after the passage of Act 10, a small band of retirees still gathers in the Capitol rotunda every weekday at noon for a pro-union Solidarity Sing-Along. But it barely draws the attention of passing school groups, let alone lawmakers. State labor organizations, struggling to maintain their membership rolls, have little time or money to press legislators for policy changes. One AFSCME council saw its budget drop from $5 million before Act 10 to $1.5 million in 2013.

Before Walker’s crusade, 14.2 percent of Wisconsin’s workforce belonged to a union. By 2015, that figure had dropped to 8.3 percent, significantly below the national average for the first time. That year, Walker and the Legislature passed a law that extended the right-to-work provisions to private-sector unions as well. That law’s central provision is still on hold pending legal challenges.

It’s no coincidence that 2016 was the first election in which the state voted Republican for president since Ronald Reagan. According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton won union households in the state by 10 percentage points. But 79 percent of voters didn’t belong to a union household, and they went in Trump’s favor by 8 points—enough to deliver him a surprise victory in Wisconsin. “Scott Walker just won the presidential race in 2016 by passing Act 10 five years ago,” anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist tweeted on election night.

Teachers’ unions have been hit hardest. Prior to the law, the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC)—the state’s largest association of local teachers’ unions and an affiliate of the National Education Association—counted about 98,000 members. Now it has fewer than 40,000. The WEAC spent $93,481 on lobbying in 2015, compared with more than $2.2 million in 2011. The union recently put its Madison headquarters up for sale to shore up its finances.

As unions have lost their sway, teaching has become a less attractive profession. School districts have struggled to hire and retain teachers. A study from the Milwaukee-based Public Policy Forum found that between the 2008-09 and 2013-14 school years, the number of people entering Wisconsin teacher-training programs declined by 28 percent and the number of teachers in the state dropped by 2.4 percent, even as the number of students remained nearly constant. In 2013, schools attracted an average of 4.9 applicants per open teaching position, according to data from the Wisconsin Education Career Access Network. By 2015, that average had dipped to 3.3 applicants. Last August, with the start of the school year weeks away, state Superintendent Tony Evers was forced to offer more emergency one-year teaching licenses in order to expand the pool of applicants.

Act 10 has thinned the ranks of both veteran teachers and younger ones. Thanks to the old collective bargaining agreements, Wisconsin teachers used to enjoy generous benefits that allowed people to retire at age 55 and receive a full pension, though many teachers continued teaching into their 60s. But Act 10 threatened to strip away those benefits once the agreements expired, leading many teachers who were eligible for retirement to make their exit years earlier than planned. “We lost a lot of people who developed the expertise over the years to reach kids at their various learning styles,” says John Matthews, who led Madison’s teachers’ union for 48 years. “Those people were leaving en masse.”

The teachers who remain, meanwhile, have been forced to take on extra work to make up for the shortage. The La Crosse school district, for example, tried to solve budget problems by saddling its newest high school teachers with an additional class, at the expense of time spent developing a curriculum and grading papers. John Havlicek, a Spanish teacher in his 21st year and a union representative, says he’s never seen so few teachers take on secondary roles as coaches—they simply don’t have the time for sports. “Within two years, you had teachers leaving because they just couldn’t keep up,” Havlicek says. “It doesn’t seem like it, but 30 more kids and one less period in which to help kids who come in for help was a double whammy.” (The school district is rolling back the change after pressure from teachers and parents.)

In 2011, Walker signed legislation that cut the state’s K-12 education funding by $792 million over two years. If districts want to increase taxes for school funding, they’re required to hold referendums. Last November, 67 such measures were on ballots across the state, with 55 passing. Schools are also getting crunched by state Republicans’ zeal for voucher programs that use public funds to send students to religious and other private schools. Walker has called vouchers a “moral imperative” and expanded their use in 2015, lifting income caps for families to qualify. That year, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction warned that school districts would receive less funding because of the voucher program. In the two years since, those schools have lost $41.4 million.

“The shortage of money is causing class sizes to be larger than they should be,” Matthews says. “It’s causing teachers not to have the resources like new textbooks, workbooks. Those resources just aren’t there. And there’s been a cutback in assistance work in the classrooms, a cutback in music, art, and phys-ed teachers. It’s hit the quality of education.”

With unions diminished at the state level, conservatives have shifted their attention to weakening them and their influence in liberal cities where they remain relatively strong. In the old manufacturing city of Kenosha, the school board continued to negotiate with the local teachers’ union, although it didn’t have to under Act 10. So in a 2014 election, Americans for Prosperity—­the main political arm of the Koch brothers—got involved in the school board race, in which two seats held by vocally pro-union members were up for grabs. The group set up phone banks and sent people campaigning door to door. The incumbents were replaced with anti-union candidates.

Act 10 requires annual recertification elections in which at least 51 percent of all eligible members—including those who don’t show up—must vote in favor of a union to keep the chapter alive. Bob Peterson, the head of the Milwaukee teachers’ union from 2011 to 2015, says these annual elections can cost thousands of dollars and force unions to run full-scale phone-banking operations. Last year, 11 WEAC affiliates lost recertification votes. In the small eastern Wisconsin town of New Holstein, all 42 teachers who voted backed recertification, but there were another 42 members who didn’t vote, so the local union disappeared.

Peterson has warned his peers in other states for years that Wisconsin could be the test case for the country. “I generally start out by saying, ‘I’m from Wisconsin,'” he explains. “‘I’m from your future. There’s some lessons to learn.’ I sort of thought I was exaggerating, but with the Trump election I don’t think I was. What has gone on in Wisconsin for the last five and a half years is what very well could happen nationwide.”

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Who Moved My Teachers?

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Ivanka Trump Will Become an Official Federal Employee

by TatianaXDFC Posted on March 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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Amid mounting ethical concerns about Ivanka Trump’s already central role in her father’s administration, the first daughter made this announcement today: She will become an official federal government employee, specifically a “special assistant” to President Donald Trump.

The New York Times reports the the decision to take the unpaid position stems from questions over her original role as an informal adviser. Critics contended the position allowed her to bypass ethics rules typically required of federal employees.

“I have heard the concerns some have with my advising the president in my personal capacity while voluntarily complying with all ethics rules, and I will instead serve as an unpaid employee in the White House office, subject to all of the same rules as other federal employees,” Ivanka Trump said in a statement.

The announcement comes just hours after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) penned a letter asking Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub to address the issue.

“Ms. Trump’s increasing, albeit unspecified, White House role, her potential conflicts of interest, and her commitment to voluntarily comply with relevant ethics and conflicts of interest laws have resulted in substantial confusion,” the letter read.

Here’s a newly-relevant New Yorker story detailing Ivanka Trump’s role in assisting her father’s shady Iranian hotel deal.

Read more – 

Ivanka Trump Will Become an Official Federal Employee

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